Jordan, Jesse, GO! - Ep. 711: Lyrics Jeans with John Dickerson

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

John Dickerson (Slate Political Gabfest pod, CBS News chief political analyst!) joins Jordan and Jesse to talk about the epic high school story that Jordan closed the loop on during his class reunion, the various personas that John tried on in high school, and the time Jesse lost an election to Jesse Frankenstein.  

Give a little time for the child within you. Don't be afraid to be young and free. Undo the locks and throw away the keys and take off your shoes and socks and run you. It's Jordan, Jesse Goh. I'm Jesse Thorne, America's radio sweetheart. Jordan Morris, the false god of Capistrano Valley. Okay. I think this is one of those... So we don't necessarily talk about what we're going to talk about on the show ahead of time we like to keep it fresh right and and not prepare and um jordan yeah that's more that's more the issue yeah we say it's for we we say it's for you know like philosophical reasons

or aesthetic reasons but yeah um i shit to do you know i think there are times when we use our nicknames to introduce a topic for the beginning of the show. But I presume this is just one of those times when we just are supposed to breeze right past it. And I'll just talk about getting my tires rotated. Yeah. No, there's a gas leak in my house. So I'm just saying stuff. I'm just saying stuff. You're just having that kind of migraine where you just mid-sentence start saying random words. Yeah, exactly.

I'm going to get some pictures framed. The devil lives in my shoes. Yeah, pretty much. Who cares, right? Yeah, but we know that you... Now, Capistrano Valley, is that what you just said? Yeah, yeah. The false god of the Capistrano Valley. So who is the...

Okay, so my first question, maybe this is too obvious. Who's the true god of the Capistrano Valley? Well, well. Okay, yes. I know this. Uh-huh. Here's, I'll, let me set this up a little bit. As regular listeners to the show know,

Jordan, Jesse go is a kind of constant reshuffling of five or six different anecdotes that we kind of tell a little bit differently at different times. Right. So like the time that the guy punched me for having the same jacket as him. Right. Yeah. I was,

I was in a commercial for the local weather with NBC fours, Fritz Coleman. Yeah. I was in a commercial for the local weather with NBC4's Fritz Coleman Yeah, I was in a local commercial for Expressions College of Art and Design Two of the five stories are about local commercials Yeah Anyway Jordan, other things happen on our show We say words related to things we half remember from our childhood Like Firestorm the Nuclear Man

Right The Devil Lives in My Shoes. Anyway, I have an update to one of Jordan Jesse Goh's long-running stories. Oh, wow. I have a new piece to the puzzle. Holy cow. I have a loop to close.

And people love that. That's why they love true crime podcasts. Yes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt will soon be here to shoot me with a blunderbuss and collect his gold bars because there's a loop to close. I went to my 20th high school reunion a few weeks ago and got a piece of closure for one of the Jordan, Jesse, Go! five stories. Before we tell it, we have a pretty great guest sitting on the line who I think has some thoughts about this general topic. Let's say we introduce our guest, get to know them a little bit, and then, time permitting, I will close this loop and then become Bruce Willis, I think.

I don't really remember that movie. You know, Jordan, this is a very exciting episode for us. Every year, we apply for a Peabody. And every year, we have to choose an episode to send in to the Peabody committee, which is, of course, Peabody and Mr. Sherman. Right. Yeah. We just toss the application right in the way back machine. Yeah.

We have not won the Peabody. We have won the Dudley Do-Right Award several years running. Yeah. And in the past, we've been forced to simply submit the highest prestige guest who's been on the show that year. So generally speaking, that would just be Blaine Kapach because he used to write for MADtv. but this this episode is not only going to get us a peabody jordan i think this is going to get us a polk award and i think this might be our ticket to a macarthur genius grant which we would be the first ever duo with one genius grant you'll get it monday wednesday friday i'll get tuesday thursday saturday and then alternate sundays we'll have to account for if there's a leap year anyway suck it blaine yeah suck it kapach our guest on the program uh where might you have seen him uh let's try

60 minutes okay let's try cbs this morning all right let's let's talk about let's talk about in the pages of slate let's talk about let's talk about in uh uh time magazine some years ago let's talk about uh just around just on the street some like at a cafe or something like that. You know, he probably lives in New York. I'm not sure, I'm not certain, but probably at a cafe in New York, but not a Starbucks. Like a nice one. You know? Like a coffee bean. Yeah, like a coffee bean and tea leaf is an example.

He's probably, of course, best known for his Instagram feed. Please welcome to the program, John Dickerson. Hi, John. Hey, Jesse. Hey, Jordan. It's great to be here. Oh, it's a thrill to have you. It is.

Not just our most august guest, Jordan, but almost certainly our most handsome. He'll tell you that himself. Tied with Steve Agee. It's John and Steve Agee. Yeah. John, I am a huge fan of the Slate Political Gab Fest. That is a, like, day it comes out, listen for me. And something that I like about that show, you know, is that, like, you know, it's this great kind of, like, dive into some, like, political stuff that I probably wouldn't get unless you

guys explained it to me. But like occasionally once in a while in the middle of this, like very smart, interesting political discussion with like, you know, three pretty brilliant, you know, writers and thinkers.

Dickerson will just drop a reference to Zaphod Beeblebrox. Well, your knowledge of that kind of like classic nerd stuff always delights me. I always love it. And it irritates the hell out of my co-host, David Plotz, who thinks I've basically only read, and he's not wrong about this, like two things. And so, you know, by the third time I say it hung in the air the way bricks don't, he'll call me out and say that I have such a narrow lane, but I don't care. And the most important thing to know about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that when you have kids, oh my God, listening to that with them

and watching them uncork the laughter that it brings forward and the randomness and the just beauty of it, like you get this second bite at that apple. And that's really where it's hit me in its most recent incarnation. Although now that the kids are teenagers, I have to just listen to it quietly by myself on a Saturday. I 100% had The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on six cassettes in one plastic clamshell that you ordered from the wireless catalog.

Just no question. Listened to it seven times, read all the books. And I was just sort of perusing it in my memory. You know how he's like, there's something that you maybe enjoyed in your adolescence and you go back and revisit your memories of it to check in with whether it's still good. And when I looked at it in my memory palace, it has its whole own wing of my memory palace. But when I went into my memory palace and took a look at it, I was like, you know what I bet is still definitely good? Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I bet that should, if I read that right now, I would think it was super funny.

I think it has been for me. And also I get to come up with new, whole new things of it that I didn't get the first time around. And which is also nice that it both rewards the past and also is still open to new interpretation in the future. And in fact, when we're done here today,

I'm going to go listen to it on the drive back and my wife will be unhappy with me, but that's okay. In the future. And in fact, when we're done here today, I'm going to go listen to it on the drive back. And my wife will be unhappy with me, but that's OK. John, it's interesting you saying that like that your kids were into it when you when you introduced them to it. What like of that kind of classic like nerd stuff, what what has hit and what has missed in terms of like showing it to your kids? Such an excellent question. So I used to have a hierarchy. Let me see if I can reattach to it. So you start with Dr. Seuss. And so any and all of the Dr. Seuss is one fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish is a particular. I mean, and those played when they went to bed, those played on a loop for years.

Yeah. So you start with that and then you have Roald Dahl. So Charlie and Chocolate Factory, Eric Idle, I believe, reads them. So you get both Roald Dahl and then you get the introduction to Monty Python. So you're going up, Hitchhiker's Guide comes in there, Calvin and Hobbes, which is not an audio book reading experience, but it's an entire worldview. My daughter in particular took Yukon Ho as her kind of mantra for her adventuresomeness when she was a younger girl.

Oh, come on. That's great. Let's not run past that. That's fucking adorable. Yeah. I mean, Yukon Ho is so good. It's so good. I wrote an entire essay once about taking her and dropping her off at camp

and then going to pick her up. It was the same camp I'd gone to, Camp Mishawaka in Minnesota. And the entire piece was basically driving towards the yukon ho moment because um uh it was it was just like so captured her personality she was calvin um and uh and so i think i think oh and then of course lord of the rings um what happened with lord of the rings though was that my daughter in particular can now basically recite it from memory. And so for her, it has become both a foundation upon which she can build her whole view of the world. But then it is a high tower from which she can repeatedly dunk on her father because, you know, I think I know what I'm talking about. And she knows it in

intimate detail. I mean, and it's just embarrassing. So I can no longer talk about the book because I'll get some crucial thing wrong. And anyway, so that's really what you want to do is both introduce them to great art and then give them a cudgel with which to separate themselves from you. John, I have to say, I mean, you've made an interesting list there. I have not gotten to Lord of the Rings yet because my oldest is 10. I'll probably get there. But on that list, there's a couple that i have to say all of those are things i loved as a kid a couple of those are things that i did not love as an adult i've dr seuss

as an adult immediately transformed into like a nightmarish torture those books are so long are you coming at this anti-seuss i'm not look whoa we've had some hot takes on this show but i might have to distance myself from you different things for different people and i still liked the butter battle book a lot but like those dr seuss books as a person who has to read them loud they are so long and nothing happens in them like it's just a list of made-up words like there are exceptions the guy tries the ham at the end it's an arc it's that he tries the ham but like particularly like fox and socks and stuff it's just him making up words and he does a good job. I'm not, look, but what I'm saying is reading them out loud, you feel like you've been doing it forever. Like you feel like your throat is hoarse and you're going to pass out from exertion and you look down and you realize you're a third of the way through a Dr. Seuss book. There's so many. Shall I, can I, fart a toot?

Shall I, can I, spum dee doop? You know? Well, you know, it's an interesting point. I don't think we read the doc. I think we had the Dr. Seuss. We listened to them together on audiobook. There are plenty of books that I would read. And what was important about the reading was whether I would fall asleep before I got to the end because there was, my wife would come home and it'd be like the scene in Vacation where Chevy Chase is driving and everybody in the car is asleep,

but they're going 60 miles an hour. That was, she would walk in the room and I would be sound asleep and the kids would be careening off the corners of the walls, taking advantage of my being asleep. I couldn't even get through George and the Purple Crayon without crashing. But Dr. Seuss, because the voices were so great. So I'll have to rethink that, but I'm still- Scoobdy doobdy. Okay, now it's topic number two of the list, Roald Dahl. So obviously now we know that Roald Dahl was a hateful person in real life.

That is now in the public record that he was a hateful monster. Definitely 100% was my favorite as a kid. Like 1000%. Matilda was my favorite of all of them but i read every one of them and loved almost all of them i read them out loud again with my oldest when she was younger and um all of them the premise is that all adults are hateful monsters basically just the inciting incident of every single one of those books is like the child is being raised by uh by like two mass murderers who eat babies. And you know what I mean? That's like what pops off. And instead of like dinner, the kid gets kicked in the stomach.

Exactly. Yeah, the evil Roald Dahl adult is like such a, such a like distinct character type. Not a subtle or nuanced perspective. But look at how good you then as a parent look, you know? So you figure if... Shit, maybe that's it. Exactly.

Set expectations low, and then you can come sailing over them. Yeah, my kids are like, you feed me every day. I sleep in a bed and not an old china hutch. Yeah. day yeah i sleep in a bed and not a old china hutch yeah but that really did like the like plainness of the power fantasy of roald dahl like just the simplicity of it in every one um didn't work for me and also he's maybe not the most elegant writer of the great geniuses of children's literature but um but mostly it's that thing where just every protagonist in every one of those stories is becomes their protagonist because they're being nightmarishly abused um and then they become all

because then they become powerful and uh just destroy the previous generation. Which some generations these days might want to do, given what they're being left behind by their elders. Sure. Okay, boomer is what I like to say. Did you just make that up? Yeah, I just made that up. I just created that.

I wrote it down on a piece of paper and mailed it to myself, and now I own it. I want to do this high school reunion story, but I do want to ask both John and Jesse. Jesse, I don't think I know this about you. If you've been to any of your high school reunions, or do you regularly interact with anybody from high school, either of you? Well, my high school class was about 100 total. So one of whom was my wife, obviously, or not obviously. Do you two interact? Only as necessary. I'm like, hey, lady, give me the remote, okay? Once in a while, I'm like, hey, I got to go out for Siggy's.

I need some new brewskis for the man cave. Yeah. So my wife and I were the same class in high school. And we have, I mean, we definitely still interact with friends of ours from high school. One of Teresa's best buddies, Emily, is still good friends of ours and is sometimes Max Fund's publicist. There's a few people like thathomie in the uh you know in the on the facebook you know what i mean um i got to see some people when uh a friend of mine who went to high school with us who was my friend since uh uh preschool uh passed away a year or two

ago and got to see some people you know at his service and stuff so we have some interaction but the we went to our 10th uh high school reunion um like you jordan i mean you're you're older than you so we we would have just had our 20th but we went to our 10th in san francisco and it was at a cafe on ocean avenue uh a coffee bean it was it aspired to coffee bean them so far they had only ice there they've only gotten the tea leaf and they were still working on the bean yeah um just a a pretty anonymous and somewhat run-own cafe four o'clock in the afternoon ocean avenue one of the cold parts of san francisco just they're sort of like always gray parts of san francisco and i'm gonna i'm gonna say the turnout was our principal and 14 of our classmates is how i i mr b was there of course mr bronch fog shout out to mr b yeah uh mr mr rosenblatt our principal aka mr frozen rat not to brag but

that's a little gag we came up with back back our high school days jesse that's mean breathe you know come on he died he died mr rosenblatt mr rosenblatt died and he was like uh uh he was like a five foot two inch new yorker who you would like picture uh you know like in a basically in like a little wooden office in a small New York garment factory yelling into the phone and sweating. Yeah. And he was really wonderful, really wonderful guy. Really, I always really liked him. And he came to our reunion, was really sweet. And when he passed away, I looked at his, his obituary and he had traveled to 55 countries okay like i had no idea that this man had this other life where every year he went to two countries besides the current

country he was in but anyway it was like it was very um it was a very lonely event where people just got like the kind of iced coffee where they just take the carafe out of the Mr. Coffee and pour it on some ice. And we just kind of talked for an hour and left. And it was fine. Like I would have been, I wasn't upset that I went or anything, but there was no like, there was no high school, there was no Romy and Michelle action.

There was no classic, just like we never had homecoming or whatever. Nobody got hit by a limo. Yeah. But John, I feel like I picture you having gone to an all-American high school. My wife went to the all-American high school in Knoxville, Tennessee. I went to a small private school in Washington, D.C. And so that would not be the all-American place. However, it's interesting.

I wonder whether you guys have – I think the world is split into people who have intense high school friendships or they had their intense friendships that are a part of their life after they left high school. I'm still deeply good friends. In fact, my best friends in life are several of the people I went to high school with, and then we all – Moose. Got married. Right, exactly. Moose. Jughead. best friends in life are several of the people I went to high school with. And then we all got married, right? Exactly. Moose. Yeah,

exactly. Flipper. Joey two phase. Billy. Let's not forget the gooch. Right. Oh man. The fucking gooch. Oh man man. The fucking Gooch.

Oh, man. Actually, that's interesting. We are, except for me, and I don't think I even had this nickname in high school, we are totally without nicknames in this whole group, which is, I think it probably says something. says something. Anyway, we've had robust, there were about 110 people in my senior class co-ed, robust reunions that continue to be robust. I was not at the last one. I've been a participant in all the previous ones. And what I found was that I guess might have been at our first big one, let's say the 10th one. I'm older than you guys, so I'm coming up on my 35th. And I picked up a conversation with a woman, Robin Weigert, who's an actress.

She was in Deadwood. She played Calamity Jane for those who watched that. Whoa, really? Yeah, yeah. Dang. And so we, for the next couple of reunions, would have these super intense conversations about art and drama and life and creativity and who knows, you know, every other thing under the sun. She is so, she was so it's the reunions had this really interesting quality,

which was having intense and interesting conversations with people I actually didn't know that well, even though I have these long standing friendships. And then I also had one of those teachers who maybe every writer has one of these, but I had an English teacher who passed away a few years ago, and I wrote about his effect on my career and life. And he was one of these, but I had an English teacher who passed away a few years ago and I wrote about his effect on my career and life. Um, and he was one of those sort of dead poet society type, uh, English teachers. Um, his name is Neil Tonkin. And, um, when he passed away, I had a massive reunion experience with a friend of mine who also was in a class with him where we reconnected after, I don't know, 25 years or something. Um, and, um, so I've had these very intense high school, uh, experiences, but I think this is all a bad way of setting you up, Jordan, for telling us what happened at your

reunion. Uh, yeah. So the story that I, that I have told on this podcast probably, we've been doing this show 13 years, so I think I've told it probably 26 times, was that I went to high school in Orange County, California, and my senior year won Homecoming King. And so, you know, and it will shock you to know that i was kind of a non-traditional homecoming king uh i was a drama kid capes to school uh i don't think i need to say anything else super yoked huh yeah super yoked yeah underneath the cape you couldn't see because of the cape that I was wearing. But yes, very jacked, you know, mid-Ska revival.

So I was wearing a bowling shirt with someone else's name on it. Right. You know. So, you know, so the fact that I won, you know, it's like, hey, this is a, you know, and the other nominees were very traditional, like student government and or sporto types. So, you know, it's like, hey, this, this, our student, we have a, we have a broad definition of cool, like this, you know, this kind of kooky, you know, affected weirdo can win. And, you know, we're all friends. Years and years later,

I connected with an old high school friend on my space. And he said, Hey, you know how you won homecoming King? Guess what? I was working in the office and we changed the votes. So you would win. It wasn't even close.

Wow. So you had a little certified this election. You had a little Cook County illegal vote rigging right inside your homecoming king. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Did you do anything? No one stopped once you got into office. No one stopped.

Did you Blagojevich it at all? Did you make any money off this crooked once you got into office? No one stopped the steal. Did you Blagojevich it at all? Did you make any money off this thing once you became king? I should have, man. I should have Blagojevich. You should have sold that homecoming senatorship. Yeah. The crown, by the way, was a Tupperware bucket with felt stapled on it.

Oh, that's nice. So, yeah. So, I've been walking around with this information um i've like talked about it on the podcast but like you know um but that's it nowhere like anybody would have heard it so um so you know so this 20th reunion is coming up and the organizer i you know i think kind of vaguely knew that i worked in entertainment and asked me if i would do a bit at the reunion i think she called it like do a stand up would you do a stand up and um in that kind of way that like someone who is not part of the entertainment industry gets it kind of wrong you're like and i'm in the industry i'm a comedian in comedy doing a stand-up is when you poop without a toilet right yeah

it's like when someone says you should do a skit on Saturday Night Live you know um so I said yes I would do it without thinking about what I would do and then it kind of struck me I'm like oh now's the chance I should confess I should confess wow this thing that's bold. Now that you're entering this, you're pursuing an art form you've never done before in your life in front of everyone you knew in high school. Yeah. Now is the time to go out on a limb, you thought to yourself. Right. So, yeah. So I'm like, okay, this is the thing.

So I wrote a little bit. So I'm like, okay, this is the thing. So I wrote a little bit and definitely like when, and the idea was that I would let everybody who got nominated, who was there, come up and make an acceptance speech. And then we would like, by a kind of raise your hand if situation, find the actual coolest person in the room and then make them homecoming king. So Jordan, I'm sorry to interrupt you again here. No, that's okay. So I'm just following your line of thinking uh-huh so first of all that one of the organizers uh-huh asked you to do a

stand-up do a stand-up yes one stand-up one unit of stand-up comedy a cubit of stand-up comedy unless you count those three times that uh that we we did a show that al madrigal was too busy to do at the ice house in pasadena and the comedy contest that you were in at the san jose improv when we were in college. You, to my understanding, have essentially never done stand-up. Functionally speaking. Yeah, a little bit. I did a little bit when I first moved to LA. Did some open mics and stuff like that. But not... It's been

years and years and years. So your first thought is, when they ask you to do a stand-up, you say yes. Yep. Because everyone you know from high school is going to be there so what could go wrong sure yeah a couple free drink tickets too man yeah it's just a good value i mean you're also getting paid an exposure right exactly um who knows what ska bands the people that you went to high school with might be in right yeah maybe yeah someone

could be the new singer of smash mouth hell somebody might be in hell somebody might be in fishbone by now you know what i mean they might have gotten to the the top of the top yeah um it's best case scenario so first of all that second of all your idea so your bit yeah was to start by saying that you had won a rigged election yeah to get everybody on your side uh-huh and then conduct a by hands selection of who's coolest person in the room okay i mean what i like about this plan jordan is that it's bold yeah and this entire strategy thing was your hectare of stand-up or was there also going to be a unit of stand-up, just like catch jokes about online dating or something. Exactly.

Exactly. But anyway. Have you ever been in one of these Ubers? You got an Uber yet? No. No. So like this is my, this is the whole thing.

And I'm just reading off a paper too, by the way. Yeah. So yeah. That's how Janine Garofalo did it in high school. Exactly. Yeah.

It's kind of a, kind of a kind of like early 90s alternative comedy throwback about like hey this i'm taking away some of the artifice and yeah this is a little more real went to high school with beth littlefield or something yeah littleford anyway who can do littleford thank you no problem um yeah so i like i get up and i do the bit of kind of like hey i won and this is why it was a big deal to me. And like, here's why I was a non-traditional choice. Uh,

and then I, and people weren't really listening to me. That's so is this, is the context for this, what I'm imagining is like, um, a high school dance in a gym with paper streamers. And I'm basically imagining something out of like the Wonder Years or Back to the Future or something like that.

That's the only reference point I have for normal high school. Yeah, I did show Marvin, Chuck Berry's cousin, how to play rock and roll. Got it. Good. Good old Marvin. Great guy. So, no, this is like on the patio at this place called the Ocean institute in uh like orange county was a place like we went on field trips where you like about tide pools it makes sense if we called todd glass

right now stand-up comedian todd glass famous for his strong preferences about the features of stand-up comedy venues uh we said todd what do you think would be the best place to do stand up for the first time in many years in front of everyone you knew in high school? And you're trying to find out who's coolest among them. And you're starting by telling them that you won a false election. Todd would probably say, I want this thing outdoors and I want otters there. Yeah. I want to be able to touch a stingray. Surprisingly slimy.

Yeah. So like when I confess, people fucking gasped and started listening. Wow. And then I like everybody who, only a couple people were there who got nominated, but they came up and I let them all make a speech. And then... Jordan, sorry to interrupt. John, just so you know, this whole thing is off the record.

So do not bring this to 60 Minutes. I'm texting my producer as Jordan unfurls this tale. Do not, do not, John, do not tell Gail. If you breathe one word of this to Gail, John. God, if Gail finds out, I'll be mortified. Gail makes a lot of trips to the West Coast, and she's famous for her in-person interviews in which she basically allows people to unburden themselves of their

deepest, darkest secrets. So I think so far, what I'm getting from this Emperor Has No Clothes moment is that Jordan really has something in the deep shale that he could make a good six or seven minute interview. I've always said we should frack Jordan more. Yeah. I'll sit down with Gail or Anderson Cooper. That's it. Nobody else. Nobody else gets to this natural gas. So I confessed. We did the show of hands.

I was like, okay, put up your hands. Put down your hands if you ever bought anything at Hot Topic. Put down your hands if you still have a Disneyland pass. And we found the one woman who hadn't done any of this stuff. She became the homecoming king. And then afterwards. Disneyland pass and we found like the one woman who hadn't done any of this stuff right she became the homecoming king and um and then afterwards so the should we give her a shout out what's her name Jessica something shout out to Jessica I knew it was gonna be fucking Jessica I knew okay go ahead so and then Brian said he thought it was gonna be Carol but I was like Jessica Jessica Jessica no way I was gonna win that yeah um I think. No way Carol's going to win that. Yeah.

I think she came in our group to the Renaissance Fair one year. Oh, well, she probably shouldn't have won. She's like, I win, and she lifts her giant turkey leg. Stein of mead. Hagar, the horrible cartoons in her house. Yeah. So then afterwards, so the guy who told me he had rigged it wasn't there.

But this woman came up to me afterwards who I talked to a couple of times and I was pretty sure had showed up drunk. Uh-huh. And then she had only gotten drunker. This is Carol? Yeah, this is Carol. The movie Carol. Uh-huh. Carol.

Yeah, this is Carol. The movie Carol. And then, so she came up to me and she's like, she's like, I heard what you said. I was saying it into a microphone. I heard what you said. And I was there that night when they changed the votes. And I was like, oh my God.

So who won? So she told me who actually won. It was, it's a guy who was there who i talked to um and so like i know i didn't tell him i'm still kind of wondering whether or not i should like send him a facebook message say hey you really won um and then i asked her i'm like so why did you guys do like why did you do it why did you change the votes and she's looked at me and she's like because we could oh shit never stop to think if they should no just in the name of chaos i don't know if you've ever seen that movie the strangers why did why are you doing this because you were home home anyway yeah you've struck you've struck john john tickerson is in his zoom window processing this it is moving through the filters of his heart and it may stop that that organs beating

would you would you do you guys think i should tell the guy who actually won travis pastrana yes motocross legend trarana. Yeah, would you like want to know? Or is that like a weird embarrassment unto itself, you know? Wow, that's tough. When I was in high school, I was, I mean, like this is going to come off as braggy, but I was in the junior state of America. And I went to... Junior deep state of America.

and I went to... A junior deep state of America. Well, let's get into the junior deep state of America, because the president of our region, I think it was, was a guy named, and I'm just going to use his full name. I imagine he's probably a very successful political communications consultant or something like that. I'm sure he's doing very well for himself. His name was Jesse Frankenstein,

which obviously there's no way I'm going to forget that name. Right. And I think Jesse Frankenstein- Your name plus a monster. Yeah, would understand why I had to use his full name in this story. And Jesse Frankenstein ran the region with an iron fist. Right. And I would imagine, like, obviously, he ran a tight ship.

He didn't run out of some kind of mash. Yeah, exactly. mash yeah exactly so uh it was um i immediately pictured him making his decisions with one of those little folder things that uh tells you what uh where you're gonna live and a cootie catcher about a cootie catcher um might be a regional name for it, though. Yeah. I think there's a variety. It has a variety of names. It goes by many names. A cootie catcher. A hoagie on the East Coast.

So I would imagine that Jesse Frankenstein was doing a great job of running the Junior State of california chapter or whatever and as with all activities extracurricular activities that were not arts performances i will say that my chapter of the junior state of america at school of the arts high school maybe was not committed to good management and governance, or in fact, anything other than going, getting to stay overnight in a hotel and making out a lot. Right. And like, I don't mean to suggest that we weren't the dorkest of the School of the Arts community, but our expression of being in Junior State of America was like, isn't it funny that we're going to junior state of America?

It was the equivalent of your, your bowling shirt. Sure. And so what we would do is we would not sign up for anything or anything. We would just go up and, you know, volunteer to speak. There was a part where you volunteered to speak and just try and win the medal or whatever by making outrageous claims or something. And I ran, I with no premeditation ran for president of the region because no one was running and you got to make a speech. So I went and made a speech and I, you know, mocked my opponent and made absurd promises and, you know, whatever.

I just goofed around. And then there was an election and Jesse Frankenstein won as, and I want to be clear, as it should have been, because there's no doubt that if I had won, I would have served for the balance of the day, then abdicated my throne to Jesse Frankenstein. But I lost. And when they were announcing it, I was a little disappointed because I wanted at least to have my day as president. And this woman came over to me, girl, we were teens. She came over to me and she said, you know, I was backstage when we were counting votes. And I was like, really? And she said, yeah. And she said, you know why Jesse Frankenstein won? He was there too. And I was

like, what do you mean? How mean how could he have won there's he goes she goes uh he said anyone who votes for jesse counts for him i mean that's that's devious wow that was the difference i'm like check the signatures against the records yeah because wow john again do not take this to 60 minutes this is yeah scandalous and what did they find Yeah. Because. Wow. John, again, do not take this to 60 Minutes. This is. Yeah, scandalous. And what did they find in the ninja audit of the vote counts? Yeah, we brought in the cyber ninjas.

Right. Jesus Christ. That's fucking real. John, what was your shit in high school? Were you a newspaper kid? Were you a speech and debate? We can say, you don't have to say a small private high school in Washington, D.C. You went to high school at the National Portrait Gallery. Exactly.

Everybody carried around oil paints. Uh-huh. Exactly. Everybody carried around oil paints. Um, the, um, uh, I was, I was, when I graduated, we had, there were fake superlatives that somebody who had the paper did. And I wrote a lot of poetry in high school. And the, what they wrote about me was that I would try to be a poet as an adult, but, um, would fail because I wasn't tortured enough. Now, which is a good joke, except it was it failed because it lacked the kernel of truth. Because of course, I have all the torture, but none of the skill. So it was Yeah, it was. But But anyway, it was a good joke. But no, I wrote a lot of poetry and listened to a lot of Bob Dylan.

I played sports, but I wasn't. I played football and baseball. I was fine, but not anything that anybody particularly remembers. And as much as I bring it up at those reunions again. And that was it. I wasn't on the newspaper. I didn't debate. school is is particular and like the geography is different culturally but like i feel like the biggest difference is that jordan went to a high school that was big enough to have classic high

school things like you know burnouts and nerds and theater nerds and clubs and sports teams and like at my high school, where it was 100 kids in a class, like there essentially were no clubs that weren't a joke. There was student government. There was no newspaper, no sports teams, just because there weren't enough people to get to do it. That's true. Well, mine had not enough people to do it,

but all the kids were very strivery so there were there was a proliferation a mushrooming of clubs because everybody wanted to get into colleges and if you had to go to college you needed to be in the club so there was like a victorian poetry club and then a victorian prose club i mean it was and they hated each other exactly fucking hated each other the violence oh man violence between the only way i'm getting her getting in a room with you is if we're planning to fuck up the edwardians that's right so wait no yeah the first fucking teddy boys so hearing hearing hearing poetry hearing bob dylan enthusiasm i gotta ask clove cigarettes oh my god yes so much what um crate cratex no what no

what were they called uh cray that's a brand of tampon keep going keep going no no i swear that was the name anyway yeah um uh but not you know like everyone with the clove cigarette story um there's the time you experimented and then that was it because they were i mean it was it was like go into grandma's chest and get the potpourri roll that up into something and then smoke it that's what a clove cigarette yeah yes it yes they do have a grandma's bathroom odor and flavor to them but i remember people fighting their way through them like i feel like i feel like the people that i knew who smoked clove cigarettes mostly goths um i remember them smoking them and like it seemed like they were trying they they were working, they were really

working their way through to the end. Like it was, they really had to keep, you know, keep their legs moving to make it to the end of the clove cigarette. White knuckling their way all the way through it. Um, and, uh, but I mean, I, you know, I smoked on, on weekends and, and did part of the time I was in college. So that was my, yeah. You pegged me perfectly, Jordan. And anybody who's listening, all of those other awful things you're imagining, the person who fits that description, I probably also did that too. Like I wrote tendentious, long, um,

lyrics on my jeans and did stuff like that. Um, yeah, no, I know. Whiteout maybe whiteout. What'd you write them with? No, I get, I think with a pen. Um, okay. I mean, definitely there are many things that you could do if you could go back in time, you know, you could stop, for example, the pandemic of 1918. You could, um, you could, uh, you know, you could stop, for example, the pandemic of 1918. You could, um, you could, uh, you know, tell, um, Archduke Ferdinand to duck. You could do many different things. Um, but I mean, on my way to doing Chuck Berry, invent rock and roll. On my way to do something noble and good for mankind, I would probably stop by Wisconsin Avenue where I was in school during the day and just punch myself in the face and then move on.

Just because it was, you're like good news for you, baby Hitler. You know, the Joan Didion has this great line about, I've already lost track of several, several earlier versions of myself. And, um, and I definitely, you know, if high school is identity formation period, I definitely, you know, cycle through some, I mean, it was one identity, but,

but I've cycled, I hopefully through most of it. Um, although those deep friendships still attest to something that remains, I guess. Do you have a pair of lyrics jeans still in the closet somewhere? No, I don't. But it's funny. My daughter has an incredibly cool, she's an artist and her jean jacket is this wonderful technicolor experience. And it does have some actual lyrics on it. But I mean, if I knew somebody who wore that in school, I would just follow them around. Mine was, mine was not, it was neither artistic

nor, I can't remember which songs I would have, I mean, they would have been Bob Dylan songs, but it would have, you know,

there was really nothing to recommend this behavior. I don't want to brag, but I can still fit into my high school lyrics. I still write Bob Dylan lyrics on my blue jeans. I wrote out all of must be Santa. I don't even think he wrote out must be Santa.

Seasonal. I have some traveling Wilburys jorts. Guys, I gotta have a clove. You wanna take a break and then do some calls? Let's take a break. We'll be back in just a second on Jordan, Jesse, go. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, work supported by members. So first and foremost, thanks to the members of MaximumFun.org. This week, also supported by Magic Spoon. Jordan, a lot of people know Magic Spoon primarily by the name that my child Frankie calls it, Magic Poon. Yeah, that is what most people call it.

Most people call it that, but you can also refer to it by what they call its government name. The LLC is registered as Magic Spoon, even though most people call it Magic Poon. If you're searching for it, make sure you search for Magic Spoon. Yeah. If you're going to Google it or what have for magic spoon yeah i mean if you're gonna google it or what have you yeah right yeah like let's say we're gonna give you we're gonna give you listen you're not gonna have to we're gonna give you a specific url it's magic spoon.com slash jj go but for some reason you forget magic spoon.com slash jj go maybe make sure to just

search for magic spoon even though you know a lot of people are calling it Magic Poon. Yeah. And look, if it's morning time, you're hungry, you're looking for 13 to 14 grams of protein, but in a delicious flavor that reminds you of the treat cereals that you got as a kid, don't just Google Magic Poon because it will get you to the wrong place. Go to magicspoon.com slash jjgo instead so you can check out some of those great flavors. Cookies and cream, maple waffle, cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter.

That's my favorite. Cinnamon, which is a spice that actually inspired the airport bun restaurant. Ooh, that's a fun fact. That is a fun fact. And hey, another fun fact. Magic Spoon, great for a midnight snack, too. Jesse, you mentioned breakfast.

Obviously, it's great for breakfast, but if you need a little treat before bed that is a little better for you, Magic Spoon, that's the stuff. And you mentioned cookies and cream and maple waffle. Jesse, those were limited edition flavors that Magic Spoon has now made part of the permanent collection because they were so popular. People demanded it. When you're getting your Magic Spoon, people demanded it.

They answered. They love their fans. Magicspoon.com slash JJGO. You get a custom bundle of cereal and try it today. And make sure to use our promo code JJGO. You'll save $5 at checkout. And Magic Spoon is so confident in their product. It's back with 100% happiness guarantee.

So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked. That's magicspoon.com slash JJGO and use use the code jj go to save five dollars off our thanks to magic spoon for sponsoring this episode we're also supported this week by the good folks at smalls now jordan you're a cat owner i'm a cat owner um but i like to think of us more as roommates not that i like own her but she's you, you know. Yeah. Thank you very much. She doesn't pay her half of the rent, though. That's a big problem.

Yeah. But I mean, she what she does is she makes up for it in hugs. Oh. So what I do is I take I take care of the rent and then she gives me all the hugs I can handle. And you also feed her. Yeah, that's true. Like she doesn't have to buy her can handle. And you also feed her. Yeah, that's true. She doesn't have to buy her own food. No, that's true.

Included in the hugs. Right. There's lodging. Right. Internet, of course. Yeah, sure, for browsing. And also food, which these days has been provided by the good folks at Smalls. Here's what it is, Jesse.

It's fresh human-grade food for cats delivered right to your doorstep. All cats are obligate carnivores who need fresh protein-packed meals. Jesse, they need them. I can only provide so many hugs. There's also other needs that she has. Conventional cat food made using low-quality meat byproducts, grains, starches. They coat it all in artificial flavors.

It's garbage. Give your cat something worth eating. We're talking about human-grade food. That means this food is as good as the sweet flesh of a human man. That's true. Here's what they did at Smalls. They enlisted cat nutritionists to develop balanced recipes for all stages. Smalls recipes are gently cooked to lock in protein, vitamins, minerals, and moisture.

Very important. Cats need moisture. Better ingredients mean a better, and moisture. Very important. Cats need moisture. Better ingredients mean a better, healthier life for your cat. And I can attest to this. Cats experience improved digestion and a less smelly litter box. Take a short quiz on Smalls.com slash JJGo to customize your sampler and use code JJ Go for a total of 30% off your first order. That's Smalls dot com slash JJ Go, code JJ Go. Let's get back to the show. Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, Oh, doing comedy in your closet? Is that what we're talking about? It's a comedian who does comedy in the closet, only about material related to closets,

but nobody knows about it, so that he's in the closet. So you see, it's all three of those. Have you guys heard about these moth traps? They got pheromones now. I mean, they call it a walk-in closet. There are like reporter stand-up comedy contests, right? There are.

Didn't Allison, I think Allison Rosen won one of those at some point. Our friend Allison Rosen from Allison Rosen's Your New Best Friend. There is something like Washington's funniest celebrity or something, which is like Florida's tallest mountain. And I participated in one of those. The first year I went back to Washington, I grew up there, and then I was in New York, and then I went back to Washington in 1995. And I participated in one of those early in my Washington career. And it did not, despite my best efforts, end my Washington career. Although, upon reflection, the jokes that I told, which I thought were winners at the time, I think were just awful. And as listeners have already said that- You know what you should have done?

Just bring all the presidential candidates on stage and then do a show of hands election to find out who should have won. Yeah. See who's coolest. Who's still at their Disneyland club card. Weirdly, the coolest person in the room, Dennis Kucinich. Yeah, who's got one of those annual pass bumper stickers on the back of their car and uh and jeb bush just lowers his hand it's jab exclamation mark um i i support that john i think look next time you enter one jordan's a professional comedy writer

he'll write you some of his his famous who was coolest in high school yeah i'll help you do a stand-up john you need to do a stand-up how many stand-ups you need to do right i will do one parsec of stand-up john if you ever if you ever enter a contest to find out who among Washington's celebrities is the best at writing episodes of primetime soap operas, Brian Fernandez can help you with that. Sure. So these are two great resources for you to use. They could be a part of my toolkit. Exactly.

My comedy, Washington comedy toolkit. Yeah. Unfortunately, Washington's best public radio host is not something I can help you with. There's no way. There's no way. Of the identities you were trying on, did truth-telling stand-up comic

ever kind of come into your purview? I wish I, I, I know some who tell real truth. No, cause I was too, too frightened too much of a kind of, I mean,

the only thing I did in high school, I do remember, I wrote some essays about the things. Um, it was basically hot takes before the internet. So it was, you know, I wrote a couple of those,

but I was, I'm, uh, uh, I didn't, I didn't have the, the guts yet. My, I mean, my, the first time I ever had to go interview somebody on the street, it took me 45 minutes to, to work up the courage to stop somebody on the street. And all I was doing was, was interviewing them about holiday shopping patterns in 1993. Um, but I mean, if you had been watching me, but

with a drone, you would have thought that I was like casing it was on Fifth Avenue in front of the Saks Fifth Avenue, you would have thought I was casing the joint to try to, you know, knock it stage a robbery or something, because I kept walking up to people and then like, you know, like, doing something with my hair and walking by because I lost the courage to stop them and interview them. I can't ask if they found Power Rangers anywhere. Exactly. Was that the item? Was that the item that year?

I don't know what it was. I feel like I wanted to say it was Elmo, but every year is Elmo, I feel after. But no, I was just literally I was asking them, like, are you spending more? And and do you feel like you have more money in your pocket? It was an it was an economic story about whether anybody was spending more money coming out of the recession. And I just was, and of course, at the beginning, like if they had the tiniest fibrillation of an eyebrow, I would be like, Oh, no, I'm sorry to interrupt you. I didn't mean to stop your day. I mean, I was so no, I was not a tooth teller. I can't publish anything from an eyebrow fibulator. I'm I that is terrible. I mean, that is like genuinely terrifying, though, John, like you're you're saying that you don't like Jordan and I are professional. We do live Jordan Jesse goes, I'm not worried about doing that. If you asked me to go up to somebody with a microphone and bother them on

the street, I would go back behind the shed and throw up. Yeah, it was, it took a long time. And then basically, and then I, then I started to be as a political reporter. Then that was like my thing. It was like, how many people can I go interview? Um, which has its own downsides too, because you can, you can think that the whole world is made up of the people that you interviewed. But that's a topic for Jordan, Jesse Goh's journalism roundtable. Yeah. From now on, we're only doing this show at diners in New Hampshire. Exactly. But yeah, it took a while to get over it. But then you couldn't stop. And then I was stopping people. And I still stop people on the street, even if I don't have a story. When I was like brand new in broadcasting, when I was, I guess I was just coming out of,

it was between my junior and senior year of college or just after my senior year of college. I had this internship at XM, before it was Sirius XM. And I worked on this channel that was like the young people talk channel. And one of those guys that I worked with, this guy named Evan Roberts, is now a big sports talk star in New York City. He's on WFAN, I think, like the biggest sports talk station in the country. Very nice guy. But like, I remember sitting with the producers and there were two producers for 12 hours of programming. So it was two producers and three hosts making 12 hours a day of content.

And I remember sitting with one of those producers and there was something in the news, something tragic in the news. Someone had, you know, and it affected teens and young adults somehow. And the producer said to like, pointed out this story to me, someone had been affected by tragedy. You know, their parents had been shot in a drive by or something like that. And they said, find this person's phone number, call them and see if you can get them to come on the show and i was like what i'm not gonna bother people i'm not prepared to bother people who haven't endured tragedy i was like this is journalism'm out. It's nonsense about Wario from now on.

Oh, somebody come over to the wire. Wario was tragically killed in a drive-by. Oh, no. Now I have to talk to Mrs. Wario? Okay, when something momentous happens to you, like John Dickerson comes up to you on the street and asks you about shopping patterns, 206-984-4FUN is the number to call or send us a voicemail about it at jjgoe at maximumfun.org.

And it might become part of our famous segment, Momentous Occasions. Just like this person's call did, Brian. Hello, Jordan, Jesse, and guests. I'm going to say essayist Olivia Lang. I'm Andy from Brooklyn. I have a momentous occasion. I live in apartment A1 in my apartment building, so we get a lot of people buzzing thinking we're the super or just buzzing

because we're the top of the plate. And somebody buzzed the other day. I was having a real rough day. I really didn't want to talk to anybody. And somebody buzzed, and I went on the other day. I was having a real rough day. I really didn't want to talk to anybody. Somebody buzzed and I went on the intercom. I said, do you have a delivery for A1? They said, yes, we have a delivery for A1. I said, okay. I buzzed them in and they came to my door. I opened it and it was a pizza. I hadn't ordered a pizza.

I said, A1? The pizza delivery guy said, yeah, A1, 1. Is that different? Is that A11? It was. This guy didn't know about the 10's place. Right. That was the problem.

Oh, God. I'd love to have a pizza right now. That's my take home from this. Yeah, pizza would be nice. I bet that guy has similar problems when somebody in the building gets a steak sauce delivery. Yeah, very similar issues. Got some A1 for A2. Or people just show up with their steaks, assuming he has it.

People said this was the building to come to. That's right. I mean, this porterhouse is getting cold. Man, you know, my dad used to eat A1 once in a while, but he would also, he would cook a steak and then just take some Worcestershire sauce and just fucking dump that Worcestershire sauce on there, man. Just go ape shit with that Worcestershire sauce. These are like, these are generational things that are about my dad being from the Midwest in 1950 that are like just one half a step above eating steak with ketchup. Like just a tiny hair.

Him putting like white sugar on a salad or whatever. I don't think he did that. But, you know, butter on everything. Ketchup on a steak. That's the bottom of that pile. Boy, they really made sure sure at least for me growing up they really made sure in school that you knew how to spell worcestershire we i think that's another orange county that's like the checkered boar vans and the right the

rainbow the rainbow flip-flops i think that's uh the lifted pickup trucks yeah i feel like there's like two things i remember from like that era of school. It's how to spell Worcestershire and that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Fucking nothing else. Something about the Island of the Blue Dolphin, maybe. But yeah. Yeah. Man, can I tell you what?

As long as I'm running down Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss, sure. I also relatively recently read Island of the Blue Dolphin. That shit rules. That shit is really great. Okay, all right. Not quite as good as Hatchet, which is like 10 out of 10 exceptionally great. But Island of the Blue Dolphin, super good.

No complaints. I just want to throw that in for balance. I will. I will, if we're, I'll match your heel turn, Jesse, and maybe get John to just fucking close his laptop and leave. Yeah. And I have said this on the show before, but I, every family member shoved Lord of the Rings in my hand as a kid,

and I never liked it. It, to me, was so dense and dense and weird and i'm like why is there soran and soramon this is hard to follow um you do make a very good point the soran soramon thing never made any sense to me he's got this entire field of names and things and all of it and though he picks these two that are almost identical yeah i think I powered my way through The Hobbit when I was pretty young, like third or fourth grade or something, you know? I like powered my way through The Hobbit and then heard that The Lord of the Rings was like that, but a little less accessible. And I was like, hmm, well, I guess it's Dragonlance novels for me then.

And I was like, hmm, well, I guess it's Dragonlance novels for me then. And I did do a like watch of all the movies when they got dumped on a streaming service over, you know, the height of COVID quarantining and like fucking loved them and totally. Oh, I fucking love the movies. The movies fucking owned. They're great. the movies the movies fucking owned they're great um so yeah i i could see a world where maybe i i do a do a lord of the rings audiobook and kind of like oh okay this is what i was missing as a you know maybe like hyperactive kid who who's you know attention span got a little bit ruined by video games so um anyway well the if you really want to read something and have it, when I read The Cimmerillion or tried to read The Cimmerillion,

which is a collection of mythic stories that Tolkien wrote. I knew we were going to get to The Cimmerillion at some point in this. That was your hope. That was really, that's the garden path you've been leading me down. This is all. We did it. This was really all to reach. The balloons dropped from the ceiling.

The mother load of the Cimmerillion. But the thing is, the only thing I know about the Cimmerillion at this point is the name. Because when my brain engaged with the words, the two were not, it was not possible to connect. And so I just couldn't follow. And so I just couldn't follow. When I was like 10, my mom to make rent used to have ESL students stay in our house that were like, you know, 24 year olds that my mom would like feed. They'd stay in our house. They'd be there for four months of learning to speak English fluently.

And they were like, they were almost all Swiss bankers. This is like the demographic was Swiss bankers. And it was, it was perfectly nice. All the Swiss bankers, the 23 year old Swiss bankers were all very nice. And we had this one Swiss guy and named Michael Siegenthaler. And he stayed at our house for extra long. And then his, his fiance came and stayed with him at our house for a while. Um, and his parents became friendly with my mom, uh, because their child was living at our house for so long and eventually, and his dad was an actual Swiss banker, like a very highly placed. I remember he had a car phone and that was a really big deal at the time. And, um, he was, he would call us, he would call America from Switzerland on the car phone, which was, I'm sure a hundred dollars a minute. And, uh, they invited me to go to Switzerland. And my mom was like, we can't afford to send this child to

Switzerland. Like, no, our child has lived at your house. Your child can come stay with us. So they flew me to Switzerland and I was in Switzerland for 10 days or something like that. It was wonderful. Really lovely thing. I flew solo to Switzerland when I was 10 to stay there. And the thing that I remember most about Switzerland from when I was 10 is that there was an English language video store and an English language bookstore. And Michael Siegenthaler's father, Werner, was still working at the time. And I think his mother maybe was working as well. So it was sort of like I had to fill my days.

So they offered to get me something from the English language bookstore and the English language video store. And from the English language video store, we got Back to School. Good choice. Starring Rodney D'Angelo from Dangerfield. And then from the bookstore, we got The Simulacrum. Yeah. And I remember just like. It's pronounced Worcestershire.

Yes, but can you spell it? Yeah. And I remember just like, staring at the first page of that book for like an hour, trying to pull the words apart into something that meant anything to me and just failing completely and being like, well, I guess I'm just going to have to watch Back to School again. John, for you, you're a first-time guest. Here's something we like to do on the show. We have a lot of segments that we planned in advance. We say that. It's not true. People sometimes call us with their segment ideas, and then we pretend that they are ours like a hermit crab moving into a can.

Yeah. We should also mention, John, just as long as we're explaining stuff about the show, we are hermit crabs. Yeah. We live in cans we found. Brian is not a hermit crab. Brian is a snail. He's worried about hermit crabs right

um and we threaten him we threaten to steal his shell certainly but we live in cans so we don't even need shells anyway go ahead jordan i just wanted to feel called. Someone has called. Brian has the call. And we're going to listen to it now. Hello, Jordan, Jesse, Sunny D, and guests. I am assuming Travell Anderson. It's Celeste, they, them, calling. I'm calling from Ottawa, Ontario, for your well-established and much-anticipated segment, How Did They Describe That Tumor? Yeah. established and much anticipated segment how did they describe that tumor yeah my mom a few months ago had huge ovarian tumors removed weighing in at around 14 pounds holy fuck jesus she's doing

okay now which is absolutely brilliant given covid and her immunocompromised state, I could not be there when she was in the hospital. But she called me when she was able to after her surgery. When I asked how things went, she immediately noted that the doctor took pictures of the tumors and described them as such. Beautiful, gorgeous, they look like the sun, they look like the fireball emoji. Assuming she was just hopped up on drugs, I didn't think too much of it, but even to this day, no longer on drugs, she continues to describe these tumors as gorgeous, like the sun, and like the fireball emoji. My mother is a relentlessly positive person, so I struggle to fathom how her first reaction to things that could have killed her was to use these positive terms. But honestly, I saw the pictures and they do kind of look like the sun.

They are wildly bright. Okay, bye. I love you. We love you too, Celeste. P.S. My mom knows I'm calling you and said I can share a photo of the fireball emoji tumor if anyone cares to take a look. Yeah, I don't want to look at that. I'm just going to look directly at the sun.

I'll just assume that's what the... So this is the part of this that struck me. Jordan and John, you can tell me what struck you about this. But as I'm hearing this story about their mom and these enormous... I mean, I'm going to be frank. When I heard they were big, I assumed they might be three pounders 14 holy mackerel um that's even bigger than a big beefy baby so i'm glad their mom's okay um but uh blah blah blah blah all those things sort of fit together made sense to me. Even, I could even accept the tumors being as beautiful as, as glistening suns. I've never seen a 14 pound ovarian tumor, so I don't know what they look like. Um, but you know,

I'll accept that premise that they look like beautiful suns. The part that caught me was the idea that when you see something beautiful you think how can i describe this what emoji does this look like which which is it the the tram man i look like the tram emoji rash on my nuts look like those dancing twins. The Ghanaian flag. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Yeah, hopefully my future medical diagnoses my doctor can describe it in terms that me, a young person can understand.

Yeah. Emojis. From now on, I'm just gonna compare every beautiful thing I've ever seen to the pupusa emoji. Right. I just learned that there's a pupusa emoji really excited about expressing my lifestyle through the medium of emojis. Right. Now, how can the pupusa become filthy?

Like how the eggplant is no longer an eggplant? Yeah. That's an interesting question yeah yeah i think you might to make it properly filthy you probably need a curtido emoji right the pickled lettuce that comes with pupusas sure yeah get on that world emoji council i said lettuce i meant cabbage don't write me letters you fucking assholes here come sorry here come the letters fucking curtito assholes yeah you know what if you're listening to this show right now and you like roll doll or you like dr seuss here comes the rants or you think curtito's made out of cabbage. Go fuck yourself. I wrote an essay about it.

Here's a copy I ran off on the mimeograph at the National Portrait Gallery. God, that felt good to get that off my chest, Jordan. Yeah, I can tell. You've been unburdened. It's like someone's removed a 14-pound tumor from your ovary my doctor does a lot of memes so he'll have the distracted boyfriend looking at looking away from fried foods and looking at taking fish oil i have been looking i have been looking everywhere for a dank general practitioner. Do you have one?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Dr. David Aladagian. Dude's dank. It's crazy to think my GP can literally write prescriptions and he still hasn't been red-pilled. Blue-pilled? Right. What's the pill that you take on the internet and then you can see why Joe Rogan is good?

The red pill, I believe. Okay. Okay. That's it. Okay. 206-984- 4FUN is our telephone number. Or just record a voice memo and send it to us like Celeste did. Celeste might have called in. I don't know.

I wasn't paying attention. JJGo at MaximumFun.org is where you can email that. And remember, at the end of the day, the message of this show is simple and clear. Go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. We'll be back in just a second on Jordan, Jesse, go. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Hey, kid. we'll be back in just a second on Jordan, Jesse go.

Hey kid, your dad tell you about the time he broke Stephen Dorf's nose at the kids choice awards in dead pilot society scripts that were developed by studios and networks, but were never produced are given the table reads they deserve. When I was a kid, I had to spend my Christmas break filming a PSA about angel dust. So yeah, being a kid sucks sometimes.

Presented by Andrew Reich and Ben Blacker. Dead Pilots Society, twice a month on MaximumFun.org. You know, the show you like, that hobo with the scarf who lives in a magic dumpster. Doctor Who? Yeah!

Hi, it's me, Dave Hill, from before. Here to tell you about my brand new show on Maximum Fun, the Dave Hill Good Time Hour, which combines my old Maximum Fun show, Dave Hill's podcasting incident, with my old Maximum Fun show, Dave Hill's Podcasting Incident, with my old radio show, the goddamn Dave Hill Show, into one new futuristic program from the future. If you like delightful conversation

with incredible guests, technical difficulties, and actual phone calls from real-life listeners, you've just hit a street called easy. I'm also joined by my incredible co-host, the boy criminal,ris gersbeck say hi chris hey dave it's really great that's enough chris and new jersey chicken rancher des say hi des hey dave dave hill good time hour brand new episodes every friday on maximum fun plus the show's not even an hour it's 90 minutes take that stupid rules we nailed it

Take that, stupid rules. We nailed it. It's Jordan, Jesse Go. I'm Jesse Thorne, America's radio sweetheart. Jordan Morris, boy detective. John Dickerson, closet comedian. There you go. John, I just got a really incredible fax.

It says you're fired forever from being a journalist uh apparently someone heard this show and they decided you're no longer fit to talk to presidents and shit well it was it was worth it yeah now you can lean into this stand up comedy thing get out of the closet john John Right, exactly, I can burst forth But remember, the important thing in the closet comedian Is not just that no one knows because he's in the closet But he also must do the comedic routine in the closet And only about closets About, yeah

Wooden hangers versus plastic ones, huh? No more wire hangers What's the best? I kind of more wire hangers. What's the best? I kind of like wire hangers. Call me crazy. What's the best thing and worst thing you ever said

to a president, John? Ooh. The worst thing? I don't know that I... Did you ever call a pencil a pen in front of a president or something no i mean i did one of my first interviews i interviewed a tycoon of wall street this was in the early 90s and i had this whole like song and dance question that i asked i'm sure it was too long and um and he basically said that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard

so that was bad and it was really early in the really early in but i mean that wasn't as bad as my burnt seventh seventh grade teacher mr schiff i think his name was uh once i tried gamely to answer something in math class and i said i gave the answer and he said that answer is like if i asked you what color the blackboard was and you said fast. Whoa, fucking savage. I know. And also, by the way, I didn't- Holy shit. I didn't point this out at the time, but the blackboard was actually green.

So I wasn't the one with the epistemological hiccup in their logic. Well, John, I got good news for you buddy shift listens to the show and he just got burned that's right that may not even been his name too you didn't know that you didn't know that guy's on the peabody committee he is he's vice chair dude uh john i mentioned this at the top of the show but I just love the Slate political gap fest it's such a great show and yeah huge huge huge Bazelon head to over here please send my

regards to Bazelon and you know if people out there are listening to audio books a lot of people out there like to listen to audio books you don't have to listen to an audio book of the fucking Silmarillion why not why not listen to an audiobook of the fucking Silmarillion why not why not listen to the audiobook

of John Dickerson's book The Hardest Job in the World, The American Presidency look at this currently on hold at the LA Public Library now we're fucking talking you shouldn't be listening to audiobooks while we're recording the show Jordan

but besides that I I love it. I love everything about it. Salem's Lot is ready. I'm going to go ahead and borrow Salem's Lot. Oh, great. My book is almost as scary. Well, you guys, I'm an enormous fan of yours. I used to listen to you when I went running, but I had to stop because I would be doubled over.

It's very hard to run while laughing like that. It becomes dangerous. You're violently allergic to Wario is what would happen. You would start vomiting uncontrollably. Thank you, John. Very nice. Thank you. That means a lot.

It means a lot. It's very nice. It's very nice. Great John Dickerson. You can see him on television all across CBS News these days. nice thank you so that that means a lot it means a lot i've very nice it's very nice well great john dickerson you can see him on television all across cbs news these days often on cbs sunday morning with that uh which is the the cbs news program that most resembles the sun emoji i would say true um but you know you can see him on face the nation sometimes you can see him on Face the Nation sometimes. You can see him on 60 Minutes sometimes. You can see him analyzing the political scene from time to time. You know, look, here's my proposal to you, America. Turn on your televisions. Tune it into CBS. If it's not Sheldon, it's Dickerson. Well, John Dickerson, it's been a delight to have you on the program.

We wish you the best of luck in your new career as a closet-themed stand-up comedian. And we apologize for stealing the food out of your children's mouths by ruining your actual journalism career. But thank you very much for making the time for us. We're very, very grateful to have you here. It means a lot to us. Thank you, Jordan and Jesse. It was fun.

Thanks for having me on. I'll come back someday for my new job. Yeah, now we're talking. Brian Sonny D. Fernandez is our producer. Our theme music, Love You by The Free Design, courtesy of The Free Design

and Light in the Attic Records. Our thanks to them. You can find us on Reddit, maximumfun.reddit.com. You can find us on Twitter at Jordan underscore Morris at Jesse Thorne. You can find us on Twitter at Jordan underscore Morris at Jesse Thorne. You can find us on Instagram at Jordan, David Morris, you at put dot this dot on the only thing you

really need to follow on Instagram is the great John Dickerson, of course. Um, and, uh, I think that's enough shit. Uh, we'll talk to you next time on Jordan, Jessica.