The Adam and Dr. Drew Show - Motel Hello, Neil de Grasse Tyson and My Dad Was a Coward (The Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics)

Episode Date: September 30, 2023

On this episode of The Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics, Dr. Drew breaks the news that his son is making a documentary and it stirred up a lot of financially sad memories for Adam, Neil de Grasse Tyson stopped by to talk about everything from science to politics and Adam talks about his father's sad childhood!

Greetings, salutations, and all that good stuff. Welcome to another edition of the Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics. I am your host, Big Brother Jake, and we got a 35-minute audio joyride for your listening pleasure right now. So, let's not delay. Episode 464, titled Motel Hello Hello that aired on November 24, 2016, Dr. Drew breaks the news that his son is putting together a documentary. And Adam gets dark.

Very dark. Take a listen. What's going on with you, Drew? What are you working on? I'm working on a confidential email. Somebody needs some information on my tootsuite, but I'm not going to do it. No, I just mean in general. We've got projects, TV shows, radio.

I know you're doing radio. I'm doing radio still on KBC. I did host the Hollywood Today Live thing for a couple weeks. I'm going to do a little more of that. That show with Ross Matthews. Yeah, from The Tonight Show? Used to be, yeah. He's done a bunch of other stuff since. Well, yeah. I mean, we know, from The Tonight Show. Used to be, yeah. He's done a bunch of other stuff since.

Well, yeah. I mean, we know him from The Tonight Show. You got to know him back in the day on radio, didn't you? A little bit. Nice guy. Super nice guy. They don't make him like that. Gay.

That anymore. You know what I mean? He's like really effusively a certain way. It's a lot of fun to be around, actually. And what else am I doing? I'm working on some writing, actually. I had a couple documentaries, too. Yeah, yes.

What kind of documentaries? I really don't want to say these things. Let's just say my son had a great idea for one, and I told him, let's do this. Let's go do it. He's had some great success writing music for a film. He's actually a composer now. Wait, which one?

Douglas. Douglas. He's music directing musicals and stuff. He does all kinds of crazy sort of composing stuff. Okay. That's good. And his idea was, I'll make a doc and I'll do the music for it. I'm like, great.

Let's go do this. But you don't want to give the topic or the subject of the documentary. It's homelessness. I hope it's something peppy and upbeat. Like finger popping time. Think more like Shameless. Shameless the TV show.

I don't know Shameless the TV show. It's really good. It's about a bunch of drug addicts. Yeah, I get everyone's a mess. Yeah. But I've never seen it. I like it. It makes me a little uncomfortable because it is quite accurate.

And it's a lot of people I dealt with were like that. So how are you doing this documentary? How? Mm-hmm. With friends of his. I'm just helping him do a little stuff. You're asking what I'm doing. I'm just helping him with that little stuff. You're asking what I'm doing. I'm just helping him with that.

Oh. Well, hold on. It's still on the drawing board. Don't want. Don't make me talk about the details of who's doing it. Well, let me explain how this is working. Yeah. Hey, Dad.

Can I have some money? Yeah. Some of that. That's how you help someone make a documentary. I need money. Yeah. I don't know. They're not cheap. someone make a documentary. I need money. Yeah, I don't know. They're not cheap. You can do them cheaply.

Yeah. I think mine average about 400 grand a flip. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I know. I got to fix that. It's expensive.

What costs so much? Hmm. Let's see. There's clearances. Some of it is clearing things. Video. Buying footage and stuff like that. If you want to do stuff and you want footage from Le Mans, you got to get the hold of the company that shot the footage from Le Mans.

You got to pay them per second sort of thing. So there's that stuff. Yeah. from Le Mans, you got to pay them per second sort of thing. So there's that stuff. Some of it is, well, we got to go to Italy and get a crew and deal with Piero Ferrari or whomever. We got to talk to Ferrari's son. Your translator.

There's a lot of that stuff. A lot of it is just kind of nutsy and bolty, like just a lot of man hours a lot of it is is just kind of nutsy and bolsy like just a lot of man hours over at the other shop of guys sitting in and doing transcribing everybody gets interviewed everybody gets transcribed you know transcribing everyone you know you sit down with everyone for two hours or an hour you end up with you know two minutes and it's you got transcribed the whole thing you know and then there's like a lot of post stuff and a lot of there's a lot of technical stuff you don't really even think of like like you go like um well how much can that cost it's like it's got to work on this format it's got to work on that format it's got to work on an airplane they have

a different format you know it's got to be formatted for that. That costs whatever. There's a lot of that, art, pictures, boxes, covers, posters, trailers. It's kind of this thing where it's like it's the hose that shoots out rolls of quarters that never get shut off for 18 months. And it's not like, oh, it's a gusher. It's just like it's always going. It's just always ringing. And there's nothing coming the other direction. It's just, oh, it's a hose that just leaks out into the driveway of life.

Rolls of quarters come out of it, and you never shut it. It just keeps... Faster and slower. A little faster, a little slower, and weekends and holidays and whatever. And it's like every time you go to the other shop, there's five guys sitting around in there and I'm paying all of them.

That's their job, that full-time job. Well, where's it coming the other direction? So now after months and months and months, you then turn the hose around and it starts pointing at the right direction. That's where we're at now. Then pennies start flowing. Then pennies start being carried by pigeons

and dropped sporadically throughout my driveway. That's the way it works. I have a couple of good reality shows I'm working on. Let me show you this one. What reality shows? Yeah, I've got this woman that is a pathologist or pathology tech. And she has one of the most interesting Instagrams on Instagram, if I can get it turned up here. And she just puts up path specimens, just all these crazy autopsy specimens.

Does that pathology just mean all autopsy? Pathology just means looking at tissue, really. And she's kind of an interesting person. Yeah, boy, she's interesting. Her husband's an interesting person, and her friends are interesting, and so there's a lot there. Well, I do miss dr bowden dr bowden dr bowden or bodden he was a guy he used to run that uh autopsy show that would be

on like hbo they do like a three-part series like once every few years and he'd be like um uh professor periwinkle uh took uh his young student under his wing uh she spent many an afternoon going to um going to his home while he played uh the violin and they talked uh politics and history and then one day, she didn't show up in class. Several months later, they found her corpse perfectly embalmed with a vaginal tunnel sewn in and perfectly preserved in a wedding dress on his bed. By the way, the thing is, like, the announcer never hiccups when he's talking about the vaginal tunnel that had been manufactured and made of silk and inserted. Like, he's saying it like you're talking about a hummingbird feeder or something. You know, it's like, the funny thing is, like, they never go, oh, the vaginal channel. Like, they just go.

And then. Is this murder porn stuff, essentially? It's like, yeah. essentially it's like yeah and then uh the authorities came in and they took her and they buried her and they sent him to prison and uh eight years later when he was let out of prison he went to the grave site and exhumed her again and you know it's like these great oh it's great it's it's autopsy so it's about necrophilia essentially or at least this particular one was just the good ones okay uh dr michael bowden you've or at least this particular one was. Just the good ones. Okay. Dr. Michael Bowden.

You ever heard of this guy? No. And he's the pathologist? He would do the autopsies? Yeah. He'd be the guy who found the microfibers and slivers and all the stuff. And a lot of stuff. A lot of the really interesting stuff they do, which is interesting.

It's like forensic files. Yeah, it's HBO's autopsy, although I don't believe it's run in many years. I haven't seen new episodes in a while. Well, they'll show up on HBO soon enough. Yeah. No, what they do, which I like, is they do things like, you know, the prostitute's body was left in the woods, and then they discovered it, but how's body was left in the woods and then they discovered it. But how long had it been in the woods? Welcome back to the Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics.

Up next, episode 1038, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Man, that guy is a genius. Neil deGrasse Tyson man that guy is a genius he joined the fellas on March 25th of 2019 and he broke down everything from science to politics check it out

Neil deGrasse Tyson is joining us via Skype there's an event coming up Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmic Collisions it's at the Long Beach Terrace Theater. That is Monday, tonight as you hear this, Monday, March 25th. And dates coming up all over San Jose and Sacramento as well.

I'll tell you more about that in a second. Neil, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. I feel like an old friend. I've been on a couple of times, and it's always good to just hang with you. To use his terms, it's to be in your orbit, Adam. Elliptical orbit. As long as it's a non-collisional orbit, we're fine. You have a book that I'm intrigued by here called Accessory to War, The Unspoken Alliance Between

Astrophysics and the Military. Can you shed a little light on that? Yeah, it's a pretty fat book. In fact, I have a co-author, Avis Lang, because I calculated it would take me about a thousand years to have finished writing that book. So I have a longtime collaborator and researcher, Avis Lang. And it's an exploration of the centuries and millennia that astronomers and astrophysicists, just we folk who only care about the universe, actually made fundamental contributions to military hegemony. And normally you think of us as pretty passive, which we are. We wait for the photons of light to reach us,

gather them in a detector, and take them home and contemplate the universe. But it turns out we have a lot of resonant interests with military interest. We care about precision timing. We care about multispectral imaging. We care about the movement of fast-moving objects in the sky and the mathematics, the physics, the engineering that we do and that the military does. When you park the curtains, there's a resonance between the two that has not really previously been explored and has done to great lengths in this book. Yeah, well, look no further than Fat fat boy fat little boy and fat man i'm trying to think of the atomic bombs but uh yeah yeah the two atomic bombs the manhattan experiment i mean it's great

also it's crazy i just saw some world war ii in color kind of thing yeah yeah it is insane in the mid-1940s everything was, and they're doing all these calculations with slide rulers and steno pads and stuff, and everything is huge. Everything is massive. But the idea that everything – well, not everything, but that it worked is an insane undertaking. Yeah, if you put enough smart people in a room, scientists with clever and talented engineers, they can make almost anything happen. And I'll give you one other fast example relevant to the nuclear era. Astrophysicists were hired by Los Alamos. By the way, Los Alamos is the keeper of the nation's nuclear arsenal. And they've been that ever since they were conceived. Well, why would they hire us? Well, we care about how stars

make energy. This is thermonuclear fusion in the center of a star tamped down by the gravitational weight of the star itself. Well, on the other side of the wall where the astrophysicists are doing their calculation, sharing the same computer are people calculating the yields on nuclear fusion weapons that, of course, replaced the simple tiny atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hydrogen bomb, it is the way stars make energy. And it is the foundation of the Cold War arsenal that kept this world hostage for 50 years.

You mentioned that smart people can make anything happen. Adam and I were having a conversation about global warming to that very end, trying to figure out what we could do, what are we likely to do to solve that problem, and how's that going to work? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. Hi. Let me give a fun, sort of admittedly naive but hopeful thought that we figure out how to just scrub the CO2 from the atmosphere, use solar panels, get the energy, and then we could actually tune the future climate of the planet to our liking. By the way, we already know how to redirect rivers. We create dams. Los Angeles has this huge LA river basin to prevent floods. Engineers have been messing with Earth's natural way ever since we've had engineers.

So the next level would be geoengineering on a scale where maybe, you know, okay, too much CO2, take some out. Make that adjustment. Make the measurement. Okay, we're good for another 10 years. I don't, you know, that's how I see it. Solutions hardly ever come from people changing their behavior. They come from a clever person coming up with a solution to the problem, and then we move on to the next. This is what we were saying, right?

Well, we're talking about nuclear, and I've spoken to a few scientists and a few people who seem to know this world. And they say that nuclear is good, but it's got a lot of negative stigma attached to it and thus it's not going to fly it from a more of a popularity standpoint than a effectiveness standpoint that's completely accurate that is completely accurate it's safer than people's sentiment would have you think it is by By several orders of magnitude, right? Yes, yes, in fact, yes. And so it's the, you know, it's one of the two banned N-words in our society. Well, what would, here's what, here's my thing, and I realize it's political,

but my argument is it doesn't have to be political. I was literally saying to my wife the other day, she's like, you know, when you get all bossy and it sounds like you're judging and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, sometimes I'm just saying rinse the coffee mug and it just means rinse the coffee mug. It's not a put down. You know, you're taking it as you're politicizing rinse the coffee mug. I'm literally want a coffee mug that doesn't have a ring around it in two days. So I'm saying it. Why must it be politicized? And I would say the same thing about nuclear.

Like, what if some sort of right thinking person said, look, I want to get rid of the coal fire generators and I don't want to dam up any more rivers because the trout are trying to hatch. But nuclear, I know someone said no nukes in 1974 and we all got a bad taste in our mouth. But the technology has come a long way. We're all we're all going the same direction. We want clean fuel. Sure. Wind, solar, that's on the horizon, but we're not there yet. How about it?

Yeah. Sure, wind, solar, that's on the horizon, but we're not there yet. How about it? Yeah, so interesting. University of Oxford has a new professorship, new in the last decade or so, a professorship of the public understanding of risk. That's the name of a professorship. How tolerant we have been of the health and life disasters that mining coal has brought upon civilization in the last 150 years. You know, tens of thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of deaths in the process of digging for coal, mining coal, the lung deaths, the breathing deaths that have come about from it. We somehow accept that. deaths, the breathing deaths that have come about from it, we somehow accept that. And you get intermittent nuclear accidents with a death toll far less than that, and then people react and want to ban all nuclear. The point is, if we understood risk more rationally, we'd be making very different decisions in

our lives. Well, this is the general problem. Humans have a horrible assessment. No one has an ability to assess probability i i agree like i talk to people all the time what about nuclear what about fukushima and i was like a tsunami hit and nobody died or two people died i don't know what do you think everything is just all the all the pipelines all the underground drilling all the shale although you think it's You think it's all just nobody ever injured? No one in an offshore oil derrick has ever

been injured? Whole movies have been about that. Oh my God, Armageddon, the best movie ever made. Had the whole first... I know you didn't just say best movie ever made. Top five. But either way,

Bruce Willis, he was a leatherneck out there. It was great. Yeah. All right. So I'm so – see, Neil, I'm glad to hear you say this because I think Drew and I felt the same way, which is, look, we would like to solve this CO2 problem ourselves. Thus, nuclear is on the table. Let's not freak out. Let's go solve the problem.

By the way, a quick one I think you'd appreciate. you ever hear about the the risk of the manure catastrophe do you ever read about that no so in in manhattan in new york city a hundred and some you know 10 years ago 110 years ago or so uh the city was getting busier and busier and there were all these sort of horse drawn delivery carts and horse drawn taxis cab, they were called. And so horses would poop, right? And the poop would be all over the street. And so someone would come clean it up. There's only so much of that you could sell as fertilizer when you live in the middle of a major metropolitan area. So they started hauling it over to a side street and then slowly would take it out of town. By the way, this would breed flies and it was nasty. And so they did the

calculation. They said, if this keeps up, we will reach a manure catastrophe where the horses that bring in the carts to remove the manure leave as much manure behind them as they take out. And so you reach a catastrophic tipping point. And so how do you do? Do you give horses food that makes them poop less do you not feed them hay and this what solved the problem was the car right period the car and we switched from horses which we've been using for thousands of years to cars in about 10 years i think we better just sit around and wring our hands and maybe get the vice president in there to talk about how this is the end this This is it. Everyone just prepare. Well, the part that is discouraging to this podcaster is I get that there's folks like

my mom who say no nukes, but the politicians are elected to make the kind of decisions, not win a popularity contest, but to do what is best for the constituency. And it drives me insane that they want no part of this. Neil. But in all fairness, it's always been a popularity contest. Right. Right. We want to not believe that. Yeah.

But it's odd that, you know, when you hire a CEO or anybody important in a company, there's a resume that gets debated, it gets talked about. Whereas to put someone in power to run an entire country and to be the head of the free world, it's a popularity contest. It's been that way from the beginning. So we know that. We'll be right back with more of the Adam and Dr. Drew Show classics. more of the Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics. Thank you for joining us on the Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics. Up next, the very last segment,

episode 1034 titled, My Dad Was a Coward, which aired on March 17, 2019. Adam talks to Dr. Drew about how scared his dad was, and it bothered him. He learned about his dad's upbringing. So listen to how Dr. Drew and Adam break down his father's childhood. My dad, I should chime in that much, a fair bit of today's discussion was him being fearful. A bit of today's discussion was him being fearful. He's very fearful.

Interesting. Very scared. Huh. Was always scared. Because what I was seeing, I've never really spent time with him, but what I thought I was seeing in all those photographs you did, say, in the stand-up, not talk about material, was him being, he looked confused to me. He looked kind of confused and addled at anything that was going on around him. Well, he's very fearful. He always was very fearful.

Not in a, oh my goodness, I'm going to voice it kind of way. So he was telling me today that he just grew up in fear. He grew up on the south side of Philly, and he's basically said there was a black side of town and there's an Italian side of town. And you had to sort of be in an Italian gang if you're Italian for protection and probably vice versa. And he didn't want any part of it. And he was just scared. I mean, the black kids would just beat your ass if you were just sort of out on your own. So you had to sort of gang up and travel in groups and blah, blah, blah.

Did he get in fights? No. No. I think my dad is one of – I would say one of the least physically capable people I've ever met in my life. And I include the handicap. His fear is justified. It's appropriate fear. It's appropriate. He should be fearful.

He could not do anything physical. And he had immense fear about having to do something physical. So he literally just sort of ran to school. Like he was telling me today, he would sort of go from car to car to car, like down this one street, like literally hiding, you know, ducking behind. And then there'd be the 50 yard sprint to the back door of the school. And that was it. So he was very fearful and has no physical prowess at all.

Is that why he left the area, came out here, like get away as far as I can kind of thing? I don't think so. He. Did you area, came out here, like get away as far as I can kind of thing? I don't think so. Did you meet your mom out here? Yes, I believe. He toured. He was basically scared to death, is essentially physically unable to defend himself or to do wood shop or metal shop or whatever. He was basically considered an imbecile and sent to trade school. But because he had no physical ability to weld or put wood together or whatever,

he ended up playing the trumpet in trade school when playing the trumpet was a job. You know, you could get in a band and tour and go from town to town. Studio musician. Yeah, but back then, I think it was much more like get in this bus and go tour. So he said he did not take any academic classes. He essentially failed the fourth take any academic classes. He essentially failed the fourth grade a few times. At some point, somebody sort of got hold of him and went, hey, you're not cutting it.

You should go to. Same thing. Maybe it's the same stuff you were dealing with. I don't think I have dyslexia. I actually got tested for dyslexia. I don't have dyslexia. Well, I wonder what it was he was contending with. It's interesting because

he was contending with something. He grew up in South Philly in like super poor Italian kind of neighborhood. I don't think his parents you know, his parents were from Italy or whatever they didn't know anything. No one's read to him or anything.

And he showed up. He got to school. I don't know that he and I share a comparable or a common genetic thing. I do know we were – he had a scholastic uh his his relationship with school was my relationship with school and he essentially he essentially was oh he was the guy with the alcoholic dad who married the alcoholic or became the alcoholic dad and abused his kid like it wasn't i don't know if i don't know how much is genetic or how much is just oh that you just did what you just did to me right like that's what you did right i think there's more of that where he he got to school he didn't

know how to do anything and they were like you're an imbecile and you got to go learn to play the trumpet let me make sure i'm clear on what you're saying so in other words because his parents didn't say hey take some math take some reading learn how in other words, because his parents didn't say, hey, take some math, take some reading, learn how to read, didn't do anything. He didn't do anything. I think, yes, I think as a child, he didn't learn his way around studying. And then he became this sort of adult. It's kind of weird.

He explained to me his fear. I had it too. It's weird being illiterate and sort of living in modern day society. You live in a little bit of fear that the game of Scrabble is going to break out. When did he learn to read? I would probably learn like I did, like along the way. I would have fear about playing charades. Yeah, yeah.

They actually just write down a profession. I couldn't read it off the little piece of paper at a kid's party or something. So he was that way too. It's a funny story with his school records. I'll tell you in a second. First, I'll tell you about Teeter hanging upside down. Great for the back. We use it here. I brought it home. Hanging upside down, great for the back.

We use it here. I brought it home. I used it. It's wonderful, man. I had Lynette Natalia on that thing the other day. Your own body weight decompresses your spine. Teeter, inversion table, just takes a few minutes to maintain a healthy spine, active lifestyle without pain. Over 3 million people put their trust in Teeter. Since 1981, thousands of reviews, 4.9 star Amazon rating, special limited time offer, 70 bucks off, plus 100 bucks worth of bonus accessories when you go to teeter.com slash ADS, plus free shipping, free returns, 60-day money-back guarantee, no risk. Remember, $70 off a Teeter inversion table, plus free bonus accessories.

I can tell you, for those who like hang on the chin-up bar, this is not that. Right. You kind of think, oh, I'll just hang off this chin-up bar and stretch out my spine. Oh, no. This is different. This is a completely different experience and much greater. Teeter.com slash A-D-S-T-E-E-T-E-R. And they've got it sort of ergonomically right finally.

Yeah. It doesn't take up much room. It works real well. And you can go all the way up, all the way upside down. Yeah. I'm just worried Natalia's going to flip the whole thing over so she starts screaming when i spin her over it's funny so my dad was in a coward okay and physically probably should have been and then couldn't do anything and then scholastically ended up just kind of putzing around school

and playing the trumpet. He never did take the science classes and the English classes and blah, blah, blah. Ostensibly he couldn't read or write or anything, and then he got out of high school and just went on tour with a big band. He was playing one-night stands, staying in motels. Crazy. So at a certain point he ended up in like santa monica after got off the bus like when they're on tour and just said like i'm staying here in

santa monica and um said uh some some neighbor somebody or somebody said like i'll get you signed up for some classes over at uh santa monica junior, and I'll send for your records. And he's like, no, don't do that. And he's like, I'll do it. And the guy sent for his records, and all the records, I said, like, you know, history and English, like, check, check, check. Because back then, somebody just went like, look, I don't know, this guy's an imbecile. I don't want to get into trouble.

Just check the boxes. And say he went to class. We're in the business of sort of, you know, we're like a puppy mill. It's just get him up, get him out, get him up, get him out. You know what I mean? He's not going to be a doctor. It's not our fault. You know what I mean?

So we don't want to get into trouble. So just check all those boxes, say he went everywhere, and then just that's what his record said so the guy was like well look at you you did pretty good you know wow i'll sign you up he told me handed in a paper once at junior college and the guy said i liked your paper um what is your first language? Oh my god, that's hysterical. What prompted this sharing? You know, he just knows he's going to die pretty soon and I think

he just kind of went like, I don't know. Get the record straight? Yeah, just get a little stuff off my chest, get a little talk in. You know, he's not a bad guy. Did you share anything back yeah i i uh we we talk about things i i was just mostly listening and i was kind of

thinking about um what a sort of how insane it was that he found my mom and that I thought they should be married, like the two least competent people on the planet. You know what I mean? Did you question that at all? I just can't believe. The notion, look, being a kid of my mom is pretty bad. I can't imagine being married to her.

I just couldn't imagine. But as you said, she kind of held it together through her 20s. And then you said it was like a Bugs Bunny cartoon where all of a sudden one hair goes, and the whole thing falls apart. Well, that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Adam and Dr. Drew Show Classics. Remember to check back each week for new episodes. And while you're at it, don't forget to like, subscribe, and rate us five stars wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm your host, Big Brother Jake. Thanks for tuning in. Deuces!