The Daily Beast Podcast - How the Pentagon Changed the Plot of ‘Top Gun’

Episode Date: October 22, 2023

 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Hickey explains how movies and TV affect everything from our biology to our beliefs and what happens when governments get involved. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of The New Abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Hickey. We'll tell us all about his new book, You Are What You Watch, how movies and TV affect everything? But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clips. Yeah. Don't think I didn't listen to that episode while I was away last week.

Oh, do you listen to the show? Did someone ride us out? Yeah, well, that did happen too. We have a leak. We have some tips. We have a mole. So as we know, one of the former president, Donald J. Trump's latter rungs of fame was when he put his name on a book called The Art of the Deal. Well, y'all, he's proposed us a deal.

and I think we're going to like it. I am willing to go to jail if that's what it takes for our country to win and become a democracy again. Oh, wait, can I get that on it? Yeah, like, I'm, this was the best clip. Is he selling that on a T-shirt? I am willing to go to jail because I'll buy that one. The only problem is he's lying. Yeah, yeah.

You think? I love this. I know, this one I like. believe for the first time ever, Donald Trump is telling the truth. He is willing to go to jail because he knows he's going to potentially go to jail. So please, Donald, put that on a shirt. Let me rock it. It does fit in with his lifelong record of selfless service and putting country over self and party. I mean, I don't know how you better describe Donald Trump than that. I will say, as I I've been torturing myself and watching a little bit more of his speeches lately because I've been so interested in his mental decline and seeing if it's just on the clips.

But his brain really has just turned to a wheel of fortune of dumb things to say at all times more than usual. And I'm really glad that we landed on this one because this is like the bankrupt one on Wheel of Fortune. And I feel like I like that one for a few. All right. Well, it's going to get a little worse from here. Oh, of course. I often think about how we have the Turing test to see whether a robot has reached a certain intelligence and sentience level. And some people say, you know, that that would be marked by when it became aware of its existence.

But I often think about how often we watch our politicians fail the self-awareness test with no grace. And here we have one governor, Meatball, Ron DeSantis, who's going to demonstrate exactly what I mean. Yeah, you think about it. Illegal aliens come across our southern border. federal government will fly them all over the country for free. Hmm. Wait, what? Well, he's complaining about the federal government flying legal immigrants all over the

country for free. Because he wants to be the only person doing that? That's why I'm like, wait, what? Didn't he send a whole plane full of human beings to Martha's Vineyard? Yeah. Isn't he being sued for that? Sure is. Yeah.

He busts people to D.C., I think. And like, you know, his Android talking ass should not be calling anybody an alien because have he, has he listened to himself laugh? Like, has he listened to himself try and talk to children? My God, the projection. I've said it before and I'll say it again. All so fucking stupid. Mm-mm-mm. You remember when we used to hypothesize that this was just that they were talking to their base and their base will never know the fact checking?

I think we've moved on to a new level past that, like where it really is that they've just gotten so lazy with this shit that they're just like, I'm not going to even study for this one. Yes, yes. I think that that is it. It's just like it is the Scantron and I'm just coloring in C. Something's bound to land, you know?

Like what I did on the Iowa test at eighth grade, when I wanted to go to sleep, yes. Yeah. Well, but like you said, like their constituents have consistently given them A's. Yeah. So it's like after a while, it's like, why would I, why would you study if you can just say any old thing and get an A? And also tape it to your shirt. So there's that.

Where's that? Yeah, yeah. It was a whole week ago that she did that. Sadly, we don't have her this week, even though she was becoming a regular character. But we do have one of our not very beloved characters up next. We now come to the undisputed queen of having no self-awareness, some of which was film. doing this video with her face nearly eating the camera. But one Marjorie Taylor Green has some thoughts on how the rhetoric needs to calm down.

You want to know what's dangerous? They have called President Trump Hitler and called him Nazi. They've called me Nazi. Someone drove by their bicycle today outside the courtroom and called me a fascist. They call us names all the time. Why isn't their speech being gagged? Why isn't their speech being censored? Why isn't their speech being weighed in the public court?

of opinion and weighed in courtrooms as being disparaging and inflammatory and inciting violence against people. Just quickly, no one else is on trial with four indictments and 91 charges. So no one else's rhetoric is going to be brought up in a fucking courtroom because no one else, just to say it again, is on trial with poor fucking indictments. Are you dumb? I was going to say because the truth is an absolute defense. So I think between the two of us, we covered it.

To take this back to the self-awareness thing, though, I live in a house where my partner works for a congressman. And occasionally when she works from home, she has a phone line into the house. And I often will overhear with these. Her nice followers have to say to my girlfriend on the other end of the call. And I will tell you, it's a lot more mean than Nazi and fascist. Yeah, I'm sure. Just, I mean, little idea. Yeah.

Just look at what DA Willis got. and aired out in the mail that she gets. So. Yeah. The other thing that gets me is like, you know, if you're online enough, there are a lot of these, you know, people on the right who just straight up say that they, they just admit it. They just say, yes, I'm an authoritarian. That's the leader I want.

And they suck and they are, you know, fascists and authoritarian. But they sort of own it at least. I don't understand why, like, Roger Tela Green, that's what you are. Like, own it. I don't understand. Why are you getting upset when someone calls you a fascist? Like, that's what you. are. You take pride in your beliefs, but you don't want to be called the name of someone who has those

beliefs. Like that's weird. You know, I think about it. Like when we were talking about how they often don't try hard, she actually seems to, at least somebody at her team seems to study that playbook very hard to figure out the things to say to do to incite those fascist things. So if anything, I mean, girl, take pride in your work, put a little pocket roll. Yeah. Fascist of the week, like employee of the week. Come on. And by playbook, do you think it's like those old? old sticker books with like a scratch and smell. Different type of playbook. I think it's a scratch.

I think it's a scratch and sniff. So just saying. It's a playbook called My Struggle. With a picture of her and Rosa Parks. I love it. Yeah. All right. One last one.

Continuing with today's theme of lack of situational awareness. Here's a woman who will do anything to rise in power. no matter how much she debases herself, going to bat for Jim Jordan to be Speaker of the House. It's Elise Stefanik. Jim Jordan will be we the people's speaker for such a time as this. Our friend and colleague, Jim Jordan, is a patriot. He is an America First warrior who wins the toughest of fights, going after corruption and delivering accountability at the highest levels of government

on behalf of we, the people. Jim is the voice of the American people who have felt voiceless for far too long. Whether as judiciary chair, conservative leader or representative for his constituents in West Central Ohio, whether on the wrestling mat or in the committee room, Jim Jordan is strategic, scrappy, tough, and principled, he is a mentor, a worker, and above all, he is a fighter. And the American people know, we know that Jim Jordan is a, winner on behalf of the American people.

Wow. What that's light on is examples. You know what I'm saying? What it was light on for me were the examples of things he has won while being a warrior. Does anybody else have the score there? What he won? The fact that everyone laughs at him on the judiciary committee about how, bad, he runs that committee each day and how they just mess up every single hearing they have

and it leads to them failing at their goals. Truly, I'm tired of winning if that's winning. Yeah. Exhausted. Also, maybe don't give a speech with the words accountability and wrestling anywhere in the same vicinity if you're talking about Jim Jordan. I loved, by the way, you could hear in the background the Democrats kind of hootin and hollering when she mentioned wrestling.

Mm-mm-mm. Everything she claimed he was is the opposite of what he did when he was at Ohio State. I mean, A for effort, though, you know, again, put it on a shirt and wear it. A for effort for making up an entire character that is not Jim Jordan, a warrior, a winner, and a man with integrity on the wrestling mat. Way to go. Let's make her a plaque. Movies and television and books and music have incontrovertible effects on people,

and those effects are complex, fascinating, and often rather good. So writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walt Hickey in his new book, You Are What You Watch, out Tuesday. He's the deputy editor for Data and Analysis at Insider News and publishes his own newsletter called Numlock News, and he joins me now. Walt, thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. This is a real treat.

I was telling you before, Eric, this book was just a really fun read and super interesting. And I want to sort of start the way you do. So before we get into how popular. entertainment can lead to societal changes. Talk to me about the scientific studies that have shown that, say, simply watching a movie can cause and does cause physiological changes in people. Yeah, this was such an interesting place to kind of start. The book starts small. It starts inside your body with physiology and psychology. And then it ramps it up. You know, it gets to, you know, how people form their identities, how societies can change, how economies can change, how

geopolitics can change. But like you mentioned, it's going to start small. The thing that really struck me when I first started researching this book and following through on some of the leads that I had understood about how pop culture affects people was that there are physical manifestations of films on your body. You know, I think that we tend to think about movies as a visual experience or as an audio experience, but these are doing things to you, right? So there's a few examples rather early on, one of which is it looks at essentially volatile organic compounds, which is a fancy word for stuff that is exhaled by animals and plants. And these are the results of chemical reactions that take place inside of animals of plants. The researcher who did this story spends a lot of

time in the Amazon rainforests because they want to find out basically how the physiology of a jungle actually works and what is being put into the atmosphere by the Amazon and sucked out of it by the Amazon. And this guy and his team at the Netherlands did this really exciting study where they looked at essentially what happens to the organic compounds that humans exhale that are the result of the chemicals going on within our body, chemical reactions going on in our body, you should say. And what happens to them when you watch a film? And they've basically put these devices that measured the air quality and air content and measured these levels of these chemicals in a couple movie theaters that were playing a number of different movies. And the thing that they

found that was really so compelling to me was that they saw spikes of the same chemicals at the same time. And a good example of this is isoprene. If you lift a weight, if you do some sort of physical exertion, if you flex some muscle, the chemical reaction that facilitates you flexing that muscle, a byproduct of that is isoprene. And the way that isoprene is removed from the body is through your breath. And so you will be able to detect isoprene on your breath after you do some physical exertion. And what they find, you know, over the course of a number of different films is that people are exhaling isoprene at the exact same times. And those are the times when they tense up, when they get very, very, like, you know, like their muscles tense in the entire room, you know, you can cut it

with a knife. And they find that this is repeatable across movies, which is so interesting to me, that these aren't just visual and audio experiences, they're physical experiences that are happening, that are doing things to your physical body over the course of watching it. The other one that I always come back to from that beginning of that book is the part about blood-curdling movies. There was this group of researchers that effectively, it's a European research group, and they study strokes and thrombosis and clotting,

basically is their medical doctors. They were doing a retreat and as, you know, is somewhat the case in Europe more so than the States, they had a lot of people who spoke a lot of different languages and they all realized that most of these languages have the phrase blood curdling, as in your blood gets more viscous when you get scared. And they were like, well, we should look into that as doctors who study this. And so they effectively showed people either a movie that was very relaxing and just a documentary, I believe it was about Champaign, or they showed them a horror movie with a lot of jump scares. And what they effectively found is that the body prepares itself to be injured when watching the horror film. The body cranks up the production of a chemical that

effectively makes it so that your body is preparing itself to clot. So it's worried that it's going to get injured. Now, are you sitting in the cinema worried that you are going to get hurt? Almost certainly not. That would be a little bit presumptuous. That's not really how we experience movies. But your subconscious is. And so what I just was so thrilled when I, did some of the early stuff on the book when it came to the physiology was like, this stuff is really making a physical dent on you. It's doing stuff to your body that you don't appreciate. And as a result, it kind of flows pretty quickly then to like, well, what else are these films doing that we're not necessarily appreciating? Yeah, it's so fascinating to me,

especially as someone who loves horror movies, it was amazing to find out that apparently I like to make my body feel like it's in danger. I'm not sure what that says about me. And I don't want to really find out. So let's talk about something we hear about all the time, how violent movies, etc., violent media relate to real-world violence. You point out, and this was interesting to me, that there's sort of a double-edged sword at work on this issue, because in poll after poll, Americans are convinced that violent crime is up in whatever year the poll is taken. Generally, this is actually not true. Violent crime is not up in most years. And you point out that violent popular culture is at least in part responsible for this false perception that violent crime has gone up,

But in real life, it's also at least partly responsible for the fact that violent crime has gone down. Yeah. So there's a lot going on here. The perception of crime, I think, is just a fascinating issue for me. I mean, like, you know, a little background about me. I'm a data journalist basically by trade. Pop culture has been what I've been studying for the past many years at this point. The data around the polling of crime is always just a bit nonsensical to me because people always think it's the bad old days and they always think it's worse than it was last year.

Whereas realistically, crime has only gone up year over year, maybe like five. six, seven times in the past 30 years. It's been on balance good. You know, on one hand, I kind of think that's because, you know, the 7 o'clock news has 30 minutes to fill every night, regardless of how bad it is out there. Right. But you definitely, there is this idea that violent films and violent television

and violent video games are linked to violent acts. And there is a little bit of grounding for that. The reason is that in a laboratory, if I show you violence, if I make you play a video game that is violent, if I basically prime you with violence or visuals of violence, you're more likely to act aggressively after that. in a laboratory setting. And so the question has always been, well, you know, we don't live in a laboratory setting.

We know that, you know, people can get more agitated after watching a, after watching a violent film. But does that actually correspond to long-term crime? And does that make people do violent things? And so there were these two economists that they had a very clever design of how they were going to basically try to figure this out, which is that, you know, movies are released every week. Violent movies are released all year round.

But they don't release the same weekend of every week. in fact, released, you know, different weekends in every given year. And so what they were able to do, Stefano Delavigna and Gordon Dahl, was they were able to basically look at on the weekends when lots of people, millions of people, mind you, were in a movie theater watching violent movies, how much were they primed to do violent stuff afterwards? Because, you know, if you're, if you're priming hundreds of thousands of people across the country with violent actions, you would expect to see in the aggregate over the course of how many, you know, how many movies are released over a 10 year, period, you would expect to see that the nights where violent films are exposed to hundreds of

thousands of people, that there would be an uptick in violent behavior. That's, you know, essentially what we're testing here. And they found the opposite. They found that the nights that violent films were released, not only was it in the early hours of the evening safer out there, not only was it later in the evening much safer out there. Effectively, they found that this is kind of a self-sequestration thing. Like, if you really think about how you want to rein in violent actions, you know, the kind of assaults and violent acts that we tend to think of when we think of violent crime. You're really kind of talking about a demographic that is 16 to 24 years old and male and oftentimes drinking. And those are the risk factors. Typically, you know, young man,

drinking. Older guys, they have their stuff under control. They understand what testosterone is and they know what to do with it. They can hold their liquor better, potentially all that kind of stuff. But realistically, if you want to talk about the risk factors for doing an assault, that's what we're talking. And so what they essentially are. you. And it's super persuasive when they really get into the details of it is that the act of going to a movie theater to watch a violent film for, you know, two to three hours, right? You've got to get in there early. You got to get your popcorn. You got to walk home. You got to do all that kind of stuff. That just doing that instead of whatever else you were planning to do that night is safer for the

community as a whole and for that individual. And more importantly, the knock on effects are even better because the alternative is often like, you know, people who were going to go see like a very violent film, we're not going to volunteer at the church that night instead. Oftentimes, the thing that they were going to do instead was Taiwan off at a bar. And so the simple difference in BAC between two fellows, one of whom saw a three-hour film and one of whom spent three hours pounding whiskey sodas is substantial. Basically, the argument goes that by reducing the amount of time that they're doing things that actually are risk factors for violent crime, that there's a public health gain to be actually observed by these violent films that have people self-sequester for Friday or Saturday night. So it sounds like what we need to do is

take like 16 to 24 year old males and subject them sort of constantly for those years to Stanley Kubrick's or the Clockwork Orange Lerico technique and just force them to watch acts of violence over and over and over again. And that will cure everything. I don't know about that, but I do think that like the Hell and Lovejoy, pearl clutching ideas of violent stuff is bad and we ought not exhibit it is actually counterintuitive is actually hurting us. No, absolutely. Yeah. Do I think that taxpayer dollars should subsidize violent films? I don't know, man. Maybe you catch me on an interest. day sometimes. I make the joke in the book that, like, you can make an argument that Joker is a better crime fighter than Batman in that regard. So, yeah. Right. Yeah. Talk about the sort of Hollywood Pentagon industrial complex and how big it's gotten over the decades.

I mean, I'm obsessed with this topic. It is one of my favorites in the book. Yeah, it's great. Because I think that when you talk about how movies impact people, so often you want to find that smoking gun of somebody saying, like, oh, we'd know for a fact that it impacts people. And that's why we spend all this money. doing it. And that is genuinely the situation with the American Pentagon, as well as other organizations like the FBI and to a more recent extent, the CIA. There's been a lot of really excellent scholarship about this that if people are interested in this topic, like not only do I cover a bunch of it in the book, but I have a really aggressive work cited in there and you can really read a ton of very, very cool people writing about this. And I'm happy to plug them later. But effectively, you know, the relationship between the military and Hollywood starts very early on. You're talking in 1927, the Academy Award winner wings, that was made with Army Air Support, right?

Because who had all the airplanes? Right. Over the course of the next couple decades, World War II is a hugely instrumental moment where, you know, they're not nationalized, but the Walt Disney company goes from cranking out Pinocchio to making like government films about, you know, how to successfully care for your weapons. Donald Dutt is a protagonist of World War II. Right.

And after the war, you know, you still kind of see this relationship between, again, a lot of these folks who ran studios at the times were rather conservative. You obviously had the Red Scare at the time, and they were allied with a lot of government interests that wanted to get things going. And so you saw repeatedly over the course of the mid-century people trying to integrate these two. The issue came with a film called The Longest Day, which dramatized the D-Day landings. And the issue was that the Army got in a little bit over their skis. They kind of got taken for a ride. They contributed a lot of resources to the film.

They didn't really like the film that came out at the end of it. It didn't necessarily glorify their efforts to the extent that they wanted. Congress got involved and was wondering why the hell they were spending so much money on a movie that was filming rather than the Berlin airlift. It was a whole thing. And so that kind of shuts things down for a while. And there isn't a lot of motivation on the Hollywood side either because then you get into the Vietnam era. And at that point, anybody who's making a film in Hollywood does not necessarily want to align themselves with the interest of the D.FD. So it's kind of a cold time between the Pentagon and Hollywood until a little picture called Top Gun comes around. And Top Gun was based off of an article.

and it was based off an article basically profiling the school. And the producers of this film realized that this would be a considerably better film if they had access to military resources. And if the military was willing to lend them at cost, obviously, access to any of these aircraft carriers, these aircraft, these bases, the extras running in the background. And when they pitched the Pentagon on this, the Pentagon was like, we're going to look really good at the end of Top Gun. And the Navy was very, very keen on how it made Navy pilots look.

Now, they had some caveats and they were like, listen, we want to make a few adjustments. And so they made some adjustments. For instance, the Kelly McGinnis character, the character who has a romantic entanglement with Tom Cruise is not in the Navy, right? She is a contractor. So as a result, you know, it had been like within the service relationship, but that's a big no-no in the military. And still to this day, they really don't like, and will not support any film that shows that. So she's made into a contractor. The other big thing, and this is one of my favorite things that I learned over the course of reporting this book is that off the top of your head,

Do you recall the bad guy, the enemy nation and top gun? Oh, there is none. Exactly. Because originally in the script, it was North Korea. And then the North Korea desk at the Pentagon was like, hey, we would not like you to do North Korea. Might we suggest doing Libya or something? It's a little tense on the peninsula these days. And then in pencil written on top of that memo, it's like, hi, Libya desk here.

We don't want to give Gaddafi any ideas. Please just make it a country that has no name. So as a result, it's just the enemy. And they're just flying enemy fighters. And as a result, you have this movie that does phenomenal things. for the perception of the military. It makes it look like an admirable career. It makes it look like it's full of admirable men. It makes it kind of a counterpoint to a lot of the New Hollywood conversation around Vietnam. And the military gets this idea of just being like,

well, this really was worth every resource that we lent them. Now, they did charge Paramount for it, but they didn't charge them a lot, to be clear. Like, they gave it to them at cost, effectively. And from the military's perspective, they probably, you know, if you ask me, I bet that the military spent resources on this kind of stuff. But from An accounting perspective, you know, Paramount paid them what they had to pay and they paid the cost and everybody wins. And since then, that has just kind of become the defining relationship. They had a liaison between the Pentagon and Hollywood that would basically negotiate over these resources. And over the course of the following, you know, four decades, if you made a movie and you wanted to have a tank in it, if you wanted to shoot on an airbase, if you wanted to have an aircraft carrier, if you wanted Optimus Prime to shake hands with the troops, you hit up the military and you sent them the scripts.

And they were like, well, take out the part where this guy has PTSD. or take out the part where this person has a relationship with a woman near the base or take out the part where, you know, there's this person contemplates suicide or there's an allusion to sexual assault. And then we'll give you what you need. And so it's a mechanism in which the Pentagon's able to actually exert power over what gets filmed. And it's an incentive for people to produce films that can garner that support because

the difference between being able to shoot on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and having to shoot on a back lot and pretending it's the Lincoln aircraft carrier. That's a lot of money, my man. so that can make or break a film. No, absolutely. So I want to skip to something that I took from the book. You know, a lot of people talk these days about how representation matters. And we hear that a lot from people maybe more on the left.

And then there's, it feels like, well, not it feels like there's a lot of sort of pushback on this from people on the right. But you use examples in the book. And for example, I don't know, someone who went into a career in science because they watch Jurassic Park. Even there are things in the book that you talk about where after the Hunger Games movies, the number of girls who picked up archery soared. And it seems pretty clear that all this is telling us that absolutely representation in movies

and stuff like that does matter and does change things. Yes. And I keep on coming back to that Hunger Games one in particular, just because, again, it's tough. Like, nobody planned that at USA Archery, right? And, like, nobody intended that. That was just a book that came out completely unrelated. And, you know, traditionally the feeder system for competitive archery and professional

Artuary and Olympic Archery has been people who came up bow hunting and then went into the craft. But then after films like Brave and Princess Merida showed, you know, young girls that archery was cool after Katness Everdean from the Hunger Games, even after Hawkeye for some of the young guys. USA Archery found that they were getting an influx of talent from this. And it's, you know, it's far from just that. Like the example that I love too is like when they re-released 101 Dalmatians in the early 90s, overnight, Dalmatians became the eighth most popular dog in America up from like the low 50s.

And as a result, like, you're talking 40,000 ads. animals getting adopted, like over the course of that, that would not have been otherwise adopted had the trend held. People, when they talk about representation, I think that they can talk themselves into circles of being like, well, you know, we're losing something, we're taking a job from someone else and giving it to someone else. But I think that that's a bit naive when you think about it, because really the power of this stuff is just exposing people to new combinations and new ways of doing business and ways of doing life. I mean, you mentioned Jurassic Park. The effect that that had on paleontology is irrevocable. It's just there's a spike in funding immediately after.

The interest in dinosaurs that provokes means that museums all of a sudden can have new resources to buy more bones and to hire more docents and to facilitate an entire job renaissance on that. That there's more funding in the field out there because one of these paleontologists that I spoke to basically described as like, listen, like what we do is mostly camping trips that occasionally involves in science. It's pretty cheap to fund. And so a ton of digs were funded and a ton of papers were written about it. And you can just kind of change a lot about how we see our world by putting it on a film and putting into mass media. And you've read the book. And so, you know, I just kind of, I just touch on some of the politics stuff because I'll be straightforward.

That's the least interesting part of this to me, that like, if somebody watches conservative media 24-7 or liberal media or 24-7, of course, that's going to impact their views. But I want to know about how it impacts them, right? I want to know about how it impacts their goals in life, how they see their society, what countries they want to visit after seeing the Lord of the Rings or watching a Miyazaki movie. Like, I think that that's just such a powerful force that we haven't really kind of touched on. No, absolutely.

And I've only been able to scratch the surface of it in this interview. but the book is just filled with fascinating example after fascinating example of ways in which movies in particular do exactly what you're describing and how they literally change people. It's you are what you watch. It's out Tuesday. Walt Hickey, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure talking to you. I'm a big fan.

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I had a ton of fun writing this book and I'm really glad that you enjoyed it. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation. going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded

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