The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 350: Rob Long—The Age of Blunder

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

The writer and executive producer of Cheers discusses how American culture is being held hostage to squeaky wheels, how quickly-acquired generational wealth is changing American business, and how every great showbusiness success wouldn't be without a great blunder.  

Mike Roe here with another episode of, say it Chuck. The way I heard it. See? And you say we never do anything together anymore. How are you, everyone? You probably haven't missed me because we haven't missed an episode of the podcast because Chuck is such a diligent producer. But the truth is, I've been away for the last couple of weeks.

There was a family reunion in Baltimore. And then there was a trip to Italy for a buddy's birthday. And so we were kind of ahead of the curve for a bit. So this is the first time. in a couple of weeks, I find myself sitting here. Looking at your hair, which is growing like a weed, a gray weed, albeit, but nevertheless, man, I like it. Well, thanks. I'm going to see how long I can go before it just totally irritates me.

You know, I have a friend named Rob, well, let's just say Rob. Anyway, and Rob had long, long hair way down to his side. And one day I saw him, he walked into this place where I was, and he was completely bald, absolutely. like shaved, his head was shaved, and it was so unusual, because he's like a rock star guy kind of guy. I say to Rob, I go, Rob, what happened to your hair? And he goes, you know, I was driving the car with the window down, and I just kept doing this. And that was it. That was his reason. He had to spit it. You know, his hair was getting in his mouth, and he just got irritated. And so he shaved it all off. And he says, and now that I've done it, and I see how bad my head looks, I'll never do it

again. But that's the way so many things happen, you know, like marriage is end. because somebody left the cap off the toothpaste, right? And, like, suddenly you're having this terrible fight, and obviously, of course, it's not that. But, you know, I doubt that your friend Rob just suddenly, you know, hey, dude, there's hair in my mouth. That's it. I'll go bald.

It had been up his butt for years. And he just couldn't take anymore, you know? I can't speak for the hair up his butt, but, uh, yeah. It's not so literal. I don't know. This thing's gone off the rails. What is happening here? Well, no man buns.

Welcome back. And by, thank you. No man buns? Yeah, that's where I would draw the line. If you start braiding it or doing any of that stuff, just stay pure Sam Elliott, let it be long and gray and just, you know, channel your inner dude. That's my advice. Amen.

Yeah. Very good. Anyhow, yeah. Sorry for that. But I miss you, man, and it's nice to catch up. I had a great catch up. I don't know if I can call it a catch up because this is the first time I've talked to our guest today. His name's Rob Long.

He's a writer. in every sense of the word. The guy spent his whole life writing, got his break back when he was 24 on a little show called Cheers. And he's been in demand ever since. He does a great podcast, I can recommend, called Martini Shot, which we talk about a bit.

You know what? We also talk about the writer's strike and strikes in general and the state of television and some of the bosses I've had and used to have in the industry. I don't know if you're following it, but the writers went on.

strike and that's been sort of resolved and now the actors are still on strike and that's not resolved and it might feel a little inside to some of you but this is a conversation that affects everybody and anybody who's ever had a show that they loved or owned a television HD or otherwise and it's just wondering quite frankly what the next thing is you're going to have to buy, right? It's another streamer, it's another skinny bundle. Is it another this is another password? I mean, really, Chuck, when are people going to say enough? It's got to happen soon. We've got to be close to it.

And really, you know, if I'm ruler of the planet one day, which I hope to be. With hair like that? Right? You get rid of all these passwords. Just make it an a la carte world. It's like if I want to buy cheers, I'll buy cheers. Just make it reasonably priced and available everywhere. I'm so sick of typing.

When someone tells me about a new show, have you seen this show? And I go, where is it? I don't remember. Okay, where can I watch such and such show? And it's like, oh, do I have that one? You know, it's like spinning a giant roulette wheel. It's shigda-dick-dick-dick-dick-dick. Oh, Paramount Plus, I don't have that one.

Damn it, I got to get that one now. Too many bills. Unless it's dirty jobs, in which case you can find it pretty much anywhere all the time. But look, this is not about me. What? Are you sure? This is about Rob Long. The episode is called The Age of Blunder, by the way.

Love that. which I just, I wish I could take credit for it, but that's one of the many memorable things you'll hear from our guest. And this is a reference, of course, to how blunders sometimes turn into mistakes and catastrophes, but sometimes turn into hit shows and a variety of other nice things we'd all like to have more of in our life. Rob Long, everybody, the age of blunder, right after this. Do do do do do do do do do dumb Well, are you sick of it yet?

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and again, it's free at netseweet.com slash mike. That's netsuite.com. Rob, long as I live and breathe. That's me. How are you? Good to see it. Look what I just read. Oh, there you go. That's my commentary piece from a while ago. I loved it. How I became a union man.

That's from the pre-strike time when I was convinced the thing would only last a month if it lasted at all. It's easy to be optimistic. The salad days. Full disclosure. I'm a fan. I was a fan when I read slightly before when I read this. I knew who you were. I'd seen you be very funny on Gutfeld show. And I've heard your name whispered around various hallways with something not quite approaching reverence. Oh, that's good. No, it was more a kind of bemusement. Well, that counts as reverence in my book. Listen, when people whisper your name, it's got to be, as long as it isn't, I'm ashamed to mention it, then you're a guy. it's a positive. How many writers do you know who actually use the absence of shame as some sort of benchmark?

Well, I mean, it's a terrible, it's not where you want to be if you're a comedy writer. Comedy writer is 100% shame. So, like, the less shame you have, the less success you have. So most of them try to, like, if they don't have it, they try to gin it up because it's, like, a really, really great, endless reservoir of material. You know, like, well-adjusted, happy comedy writers. What are they going to write a show about the village of the happy people? I don't think it's going to work. No.

Regarding your bona fides and your long and storied resume and all that stuff, I was going to mention a few other things. I'll do it in the preamble. I just listened to Nick Gillespie fawn all over you, and frankly, it was a little embarrassing. It is embarrassing, isn't it? I think Nick and I better get a room. Well, Nick and I were just in a room. I was at this thing called Freedom Fest. Oh, right, right, right.

In Memphis, maybe two months ago. And I sat down with Nick, for those of you who don't know, Nick Gillespie, he's the muck-de-muck over at Reason magazine. And I've talked to Nick a couple times over the years. But he's getting better at what he does. I always thought he was really good at it. But isn't it weird, man, how people will suddenly occupy a chunk of real estate in this weird sort of world that we're in now and stick a flag in the ground and own it the way he has? You know, and I mean, look, Nick's extremely talented and very smart, very funny, and a very good friend of mine, I've known it forever. The part of it is that he represents a thing that, you know, that it's a great model for citizenship, right?

He's interested in everything. He listens to every argument. He doesn't seem to have an axe to grind. You know, it helps that his crackpot political philosophy libertarianism is going nowhere. So, like, he doesn't have any hopes for power. I mean, Nick in Lesby, he's never going to wear one of those White House ID tags around his nests. neck. My God, we'd all be in big trouble. So that frees him as an intellectual to be, you know, smart and thoughtful and not be a snob. And that is actually, there used to be a lot of Nicholasby's around.

Yeah. And now there's really, I think there's only one, and that's Nick, which makes him much more valuable. As I hear you describe his positive traits, curiosity is near the top, right? I think that's always important. But I'm going to go back to what's fast becoming my word of the day, which is bemusement. Nick, you know, he's certainly skeptical, but he's not cynical. And he's got kind of a world-weary default position that hovers somewhere between, I'm curious about that, and I'm bemused by your take on it. But I don't want to be rude. In other words, he still has some vestige of manners.

And that's got to count for something. I also think it counts something just socially. Like, anybody on the left or the right, if you ask them how things are going, They're terrible. You know, this country's a mess. You know, Donald Trump's entire political career is based on the idea that everything really sucks and we are declined as a nation. It's all falling apart.

And, you know, you watch MSNBC and it's the same thing. We're all going to die in a giant flood or a fire or a fascist military takeover. And if you ask Nick, he's going to say, well, you know, I've got to be honest, things have been much, much worse. And, of course, that counts as optimism right now, right? But it's also true. You know, I say to people, they, oh, my God, everything's just, can you believe it? The country is just in chaos. Really? I mean, I live right behind me, behind this wall. There was a house that was blown up in 1972 or three or four or something like that by the weather underground. Because that happened all the time. We had domestic terrorist bombings and we had SLA and we had Patty Hurst kidnappings. We had serial killers up and down the California coast. We had so many serial killers. They're still discovering them from the 70s. Now. That's how many we had. And then, of course, we had the Jim Joe. We had the cults. It was crazy. And yeah, now it's like, that's a bad, you know. I think what we have here in Rob Long is what you call a chaos denier.

This is a man who's pretending to be an optimist. But deep down, I think we all know he simply can't accept the grim realities. He's unwilling to accept the pain of the world in which we live, which is a total shit. show. Yeah, I guess. You know, I don't know. Like you go into the store, there's 9,000 kinds of ice cream. Right. How bad could it be?

9,000 kinds of ice cream. You can go to Chipotle. You can mix and match those ingredients about 9,000 different. Any bowl you want. Everything's fine. Any bowl you want. Any bowl you want. You've got like a little thing, like you have some kind of infection.

There's a million different antibiotics. They're all great. And if you don't want to use one, you can apparently, you can use honey. So, like, everything's fantastic. This stuff, like, we had a vaccine. I mean, I know the vaccine. I'm supposed to talk about it. And I know it didn't do everything that people said it did.

But they had it in 10 freaking months. That's pretty good. I mean, part of the reason why it was 10 months is because the Chinese had been of the virus. We already know that. So they were like a little bit ahead. But still, I mean, pretty good, right? I'm only half kidding about the chaos denier thing.

But people get angry if you want to remind them that the world really hasn't gone to hell in a hand card. and somebody asked me on, I don't know where I was, some Q&A and some speech, but they're like, if you could live in any time, anywhere, you know, what would it be? And I was like, right here, right now. Yeah, totally. Right here, right now. And you go down the list of antibiotics and you go down all of the choices that you mentioned and so forth and so on.

And for a minute, like you can see them wrestling with the basic truth of the statement. but trying to cut through the cognitive dissonance that it creates when so much of their identity, to your point, has been rooted in this contrary, miserable, fundamentally pessimistic, divisive thing. That wasn't on my imaginary list of things to talk about, but we should because it- It's that damn Gillespie. He brings it all out of me, yeah.

That guy. So, having said that, why did you write how I became a union man? And if you can stand it, if you can stand to go here, because I didn't want to ask you about the strike, but then I heard you on your most excellent podcast, Martini Shot, say something along the lines of, if we run into each other at a party,

and you ask me about the strike, or if you ask me about the unions, pull up a chair and get comfortable because six hours from now, I'm still going to be talking. Yeah, well, it's over. That's the good news, at least for the writers. I have the distinction, which I don't think it was the distinction, or whatever it is. I'm a member of all three main trade unions, so I'm in DGA, SAG and WGA.

The SAG is kind of a joke. I was a guest on the old Dennis Miller show on CNBC a million, billion years ago, and some moron at CNBC, and I really do mean it moron because this was a huge mistake. Check the wrong box when they were doing the show and making deals for the show that it was after our show, that was the old TV radio. Sure. Which meant that everybody who appeared on it had to join after, which we all did, which meant they had to pay us a lot of money.

Like, they weren't, you know, when I show up on Gutfeld, they give me the worst cup of coffee and they'll pay for the car there and home. That's about it. Maybe. Maybe home. Maybe home, right? If I find it, right? So then I'd be the grandfathered into SAC.

So I'm in SAC. And we're still out on strike. The reason I wrote it was because I had long been, I have a complicated relationship with the Writers' Guild. It's a very strange trade union. Everyone in it is at a different level and makes different money. And the strike isn't going to even that out. So it's as if both the president and the vice president and the guy running the shop at General Motors are all in the same union, pretending to have solidarity against one guy, the chairman, I guess. So it's complicated.

And it's complicated to explain because there's a whole bunch of – we're really just talking about minimums, right? the minimum, what you get even if you aren't good, if you're just hired what you get. If you don't have an agent, this is what you're going to get, which is relevant for very few people. And then there's always this kind of anger with members of these trade unions because most of them aren't working. And there's a huge amount of uncertainty. And so usually what happens when they're arguing with their contract is a lot of those insecurities spill out. So they're like, well, how could I live in Los Angeles on what we're making? And, well, I don't know, but if the Writers Guild got every single thing it wanted, you still wouldn't have an answer to that question.

And I always tell people like, everything you hated about show business and thought was shitty before the strike, you're still going to hate and it's still going to be shitty after the strike. So the strike is about a small number of things. But the reason I was sort of mostly in favor of what WGA was asking for was because it felt to me like the studios and streamers wanted this strike. they actually kind of needed it because they had made a bunch of commitments and they had really behaved very stupidly and they had kind of run their business into the ground and become very close to it. What they needed more than anything was a break and they need to be able to force measure some stuff and cancel some stuff and clear off some decks and reduce the amount of promises they had made and deals they had outstanding and regroup and rethink in a no expense quarter, two no expense quarters, what exactly it is they're going to do in the future.

in the past, I mean, the past relationships have always been the same, which is like, you know, writers are passionate and artistic and creative and kind of dumb about how the business works, which is not interested in it, you know. And the mean grownups are greedy and mean and they're twirling their mustache in the, you know, Mr. Burns and the tower and try and figure out a way to exploit the artists. And that was more or less true. But the mean grownups kind of ran it and they kind of ran a good business, right? They ran it, and if you did well, you got rich. Now, if you did well, you didn't get as rich as you thought you should, but most of the arguments before that were based on, like, hey, I wrote a hit TV show. Where am I?

I want more residuals or something like that. This was fundamentally different from that. This was the mean grown-ups running show business are fools, and they have made ridiculous, idiotic errors. They have been encouraged by a zero-interest rate environment to spend money on stupid stuff. to get in businesses they should have no business in getting into. And in spending a lot of money that they've been encouraged to spend by equally stupid people on Wall Street who've never once understood show business and ever will.

And they've tried to apply the economies and the business of scale and industrial production to a business that is utterly, joyfully, fantastically chaotic and ungovernable and unpredictable. If we could, because look, I could talk about this for hours too. Chuck and I are in the same unions you are, and we've had very, very similar existential reckoning, right? And so forth. But as you explain what this thing means, how should the civilian process it? Right. I mean, we talk a lot about unions on this show. And I think in people's minds, yeah, there's a line between a public sector and a private sector. Yeah, that's fair. And there are other lines, I think, maybe between textile workers and iron workers. Yeah. Classic trade unions versus these creative unions and so forth. And so, I mean, I can't speak for anybody but me. And I can barely do that.

But I do suspect that millions of people who enjoy cheers, which you worked on and is still living out there and residuals. Still living. Go find it. Watch it. Immediately. Yeah. I mean, so many people are such fans of the. the work, but I think they feel like maybe they've been lectured one too many times by...

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, right? I mean, somebody in one of these unions getting their award and using their opportunity to talk to the world to grind some acts and so forth. Yeah, right. So I'm not sure how much sympathy exists for this outside of our little bubble. Doesn't mean we can't talk about it. It just means how do you make it germane to somebody's got no dog in the fight? Trying to make it germane is a mistake I think the Writers Guild made.

in their negotiations, or at least their public-facing negotiations, which nobody really cares, nobody really should care. This is a private kind of, you know, labor wrangle, contractual wrangle, between people who have elected to be in this unusual and chaotic business and stay in it even if all systems are bred. I mean, there are people who sold a script 20 years ago who were raising their fist and marching on the picket line and saying, how dare you treat us this way? You know, they would love to be treated that way, you know.

It means they're working, right? So there's that. But there's also, I think what I think customers, when that's what they are, the viewers, which I think the dog they have in this fight is, surely everybody I know watches TV or has a TV says roughly the same thing, which is, I don't know what's on. I don't know how to find what's on. I don't like the fact that I have to watch nine episodes of something before any of it makes sense to me. I don't like the fact that everybody wants $20 a month for me. And I still don't get what I want. I don't know. know how to watch the Baltimore Ravens game. Where do I go for that? I don't like that. I don't like that everybody in show business decided that I'm supposed to do more work. Like every one of us remembers, I mean, I certainly do, flopping on the sofa with a beer if you were lucky after work and just flipping through and seeing what was on. I mean, I could do that for an hour. That would be watching TV for me just until unless you hit like one of the Godfather movies or something and you're like,

I got to watch this. I got to finish watch this, right? Shawshank Redemption. Right, exactly. Something like that where you stop. All right, fine. Or payback, that Mel Gibson movie,

which is great. Oh, payback is fun. You got to watch that one, right? Jaws, just the other night. Jals. Jolice, yeah. Because I got 80% of the script memorized, but whatever. Yeah, exactly.

That's a great script, right? Carl Gottlieb, you know, great and venerable member of this were WGA. So all those, like, the customers should be mad about that because that's going to have to change because they're not going to keep paying. They aren't paying.

They aren't paying. They are leaving. They don't like the all you can eat price. They don't like that. They want to pay for what they watch. Al-a-car. Yeah. And the people running these companies have been just idiotically thoughtless to the point

of being almost rude to their customer. I mean, imagine any business saying our opening hours change every minute. You have to have a password to get in. You may have to re-input that password to go to the CVS or go to the Walmart. And we don't have it. everything that we say we have, and some of it's not at Walmart. What company would do that? Well, I'll tell you, Warner Brothers. Warner Bros. Discovery. Watch. We dare you. All right. Well, look, man, you went there. I've known David Zazlov for 15 years. Technically, I guess he's still my boss.

And I mean, at least, well, we'll see how this podcast goes. But I was at Discovery when he took over. I guess it was 13 years ago. I got nothing bad to say about the guy, but what I've noticed is that, and maybe again, this is because I'm too much on the inside, but why do so many people know who Bob Eiger is? Why do so many people know who David Zaslov is? Like, when did the people who are essentially these brilliant managers of public trade corporations? Right. How did they become household words and how did they become so, well, so fabulously wealthy? I mean, I imagine part of the strike certainly was asking that question, but there seems like something else is going on as well to transfer not just that amount of wealth, but that amount of celebrity and cachet. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical.

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at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Yeah, those are two problems that have larger implications. The second one is the money part in that we are in a new world. In old days, the CEO of a publicly held corporation was going to get paid a lot of money, he's going to be rich. And he's have a nice house and maybe a summer house and maybe a boat. And he and his family are going European vacation.

and they would eat out and the kids would go to fancy private schools and fancy colleges and, you know, the bills would get paid. And then he would play golf when he retired. Maybe if he was a big company, they would like pay for his country club membership or he would get to go to Augusta, you know, at a moment. You know, wear the green or whatever. And that was about it, right? Now, if you're the CEO of a public health corporation, you're not just rich. You are legacy family office rich. Family office, right.

You are rich rich. You could get to a billion dollars in stock options alone. Now, partly that's because the market's stupid, and partly it's because we were, but for 20 years, we've been in a zero interest rate environment, so money's free. So partly there's that gigantic asset inflation that they're all, you know, beneficiaries of. But there's something weird. Bob Eiger sits at the head of the board of Disney or David Zasloff, and he technically works for the board, but do you think he feels like he does?

No way. He's like, who are you little people? You work for me. If you didn't work for me, how come I have 400 million? million dollars that you just gave me. That is a very weird thing that is new in America. To be super rich in America, you used to have to make something, build something, invent the zipper or the bottle cap or evaporated milk. You know, you had to do something. Like the great fortunes of America, they always have like these names that sound really familiar because their family invented

some patent medicine, you know, they invented Plato. You know, NyQuil or something. I don't know what, right? Yeah. And now it's just, well, I was just CEO of a publicly traded company for 10 years. And I now have a billion dollars of my great grandchildren are now doomed. They're going to be heroin addicts. Probably my grandchildren. That's how that works, right? So that's one problem, the money. But it comes to another problem, which is that we think that if you're rich in this country that you're smart, where if you went to a certain school, that you're smart. And so we have this thing I've been talking to Nick about, Gillespie about 20 years, or for the past year, but I should

have taken this 20-year thing. We have this 20-year, almost 23-year, unbroken age of blunder, of smart people making enormous mistakes. Whatever you think about the invasion of Iraq, and I wasn't crazy about it, but it was a mistake. Afghanistan, you can worry about Iraq, a mistake. Donald Rumsfeld's a smart guy. I mean, these are very smart people. They're not dumb. Whatever you think about the collapse of the financial system in 2008, the guy's running Lehman Brothers or AIG or Bear Stern, they're not dumb, but they made these gigantic mistake, by the way, that we all paid for. Same thing with the rat. Whatever you think about, like, COVID, and I full disclosure, I happen to believe that it's like John Stewart, it's a lab leak,

obviously. But it was, these are smart people who were acting. They weren't trying to hurt anybody. They were trying to save us from a future virus that they then created to try to save us from the virus, which makes sense if you're really smart. If you're dumb, it makes no sense at all. But if you're smart, you're like, well, we could obviously contain the virus in the lab, Wuhan. No one is going to be late for dinner with his in-laws and is going to run out with, and that's never going to happen. You know what I mean? That's like, so only smart people do that.

Vladimir Putin's one of the smartest guys around, right? He's a smart guy. He's not dumb. He idiotically invaded a country. He cannot subdue because his armed forces are a joke. So how do we get so dumb? And I think the only way to get this dumb is first you have to believe that you are. We're really smart because dumb people don't make mistakes like this.

Some people are like, oh, I don't know about that. I don't know. Only smart people go, we got it, you know, I got this one. Hubris, arrogance, laziness, certainly some non-virtuous word. And as you ponder what that word should be, let me just say that I just love the way, and I guess writers do this instinctively, but you didn't come out of the gate with a mistake. You came out of the gate with a blunder. Oh, he made a blunder.

Kind of like, you know, I mean, it's a very George Carlin kind of way to look at things like, oopsie, Daisy. Oops. Yeah. Oops. Oh, I'm sorry. But when I pulled the trigger, as it turns out, yeah, I had it on automatic and I hit a couple of people I want to name it at. Oops. Price is doing business, yeah.

A blunder. Like, when does a blunder become a mistake and when does a mistake become malfeasance and when does that all become tragic? and when does that become treasonous, and then when the consequences, four blunders eventually come around to rear their sometimes ugly heads? Well, I mean, I don't know about that. I think that our cultural move in general to try to put somebody behind bars for stuff is a mistake. It suggests that the only way you can ever make a big mistake is to break the law,

that if you follow the law, all mistakes will disappear. That's sort of a, you know, a 1950s, 60s progressive attitude, which is that we can pass enough laws so that there are no more bad people and no more mistakes, which is just not the case. My argument about the financial collapse in its aftermath was not that people didn't go to jail. People always say, oh, nobody went to prison. Why should they go into prison? They didn't break any laws.

They should have gone broke. They should have been selling apples in the street. That's what happens when you risk everything and you lose everything. They shouldn't be in their summer homes. They should have no money left. They should be putting baggies on their hands and making our subway sandwiches. That's what happens. That's capitalism. Nothing wrong with that.

That's consequences. That's consequences. That's what I'm talking about. Nothing wrong with that. If the taxpayers have to bail you out, obviously the taxpayer is going to pay that whopping giant bill because it's in our interest to keep the system running. But that doesn't mean you should contribute zero. That means you should contribute 99.99% of your liquidated net worth. And even if that only totals two or three percent of the damages that the taxpayers have to cover,

that is good enough. Because you know what? If enough people were selling enough apples on enough streets, we wouldn't need an FEC. We wouldn't need any of that stuff. We wouldn't need any of that. I mean, SEC, sorry, we wouldn't need any of that stuff. Because, like, you know, when you know that the danger isn't that there's going to be an investigator of swarming into your office and collecting all your books and taking your hard drives, the danger is going to be, you've got to sit down with your kids and say, guess what? You're not going to chote this year.

You're going to, you know, Millard Fillmore Public High School. Yeah, right. Yeah, been there. That's America. That's perfectly the way it's supposed to be. So I'm not sure that it's malfeasance. And I think the argument about malfeasance presupposes the problem, which is that you should have known, that any normal person would have known.

That's what happens now, I think, some of my conservative friends, which are the problem with the government, isn't that it's doing too much. The problem is that we're not in it. We're not running it. And if we ran it and it did all those things, we'd be able to fix it, which is not the case. I mean, they're always going to be, and I would just say just, I mean, I know I'm going on too long.

to just interrupt, but like the show business aspect of this is this business is constantly disrupting itself. It's constantly chaotic. No one is famous, William Goldman's famous dictum, no one knows anything. And that's what makes it great. And if you want to kill it or wreck it or go broke, just try to ignore that one rule. You do not know where the hits are coming from. Right. I mean, boy meets girl wound up in syndication with respect to who's ever. responsible for that. The landscape is full of successes that I can't savvy and full of failures that seem fundamentally unjust. But it's the fundamental unjustness that you, I think, we're kind of talking about in a general way. It's not just that a guy who created all kinds of

financial blunders while he was entrusted with the future of fill in the blank, financial institution isn't that it's outrageous that that's happening it's outrageous that that guy got away with it but it's the same feeling of injustice that i think a lot of people have when they see hundreds of masked individuals bum rush a Nordstrom's and leave with tens of thousands of dollars of goods and see no consequence to that either i'm not saying that prison is the logical consequence, but there is no consequence. Yeah, right. I mean, it has been for two thousand years. That's what it's been, except, you know, maybe cutting off your hands in some places has been for theft.

It does seem to work as a deterrent. That's one of a great blunders, right? That we can figure out a better way to keep bad people from doing bad things rather than the old-fashioned way, which is just simply to be really vigilant about these small transgressions. And the more vigilant you are with the small stuff, you don't have to sweat the big stuff so much. And that... Broken windows. Broken windows, exactly right.

That's a lesson that everybody learned, but, you know, we've convinced ourselves that through slight of hand and through a lot of sophistry that that's not true. But everybody knows it is true. The only thing I'm worried about in the culture is that I may disagree with the great optimist Gillespie on this is that we are getting used to being hostage to stuff. We're used to going into the CVS and everything's under plastic. We're used to, like, sitting at the coffee place and there's no bathroom, but there is a bathroom. But you can't use it.

Here's why you can't use it because crazy people go in there. And the people working there are like, I can't handle the crazy people. You know, if you're a Republican candidate for president, you are hostage to somebody who is mercurial is the nicest way to put it. If you are a Democrat, you are hostage to someone who is in decline mentally, without a doubt, right? We can we use the word all we want. I mean, we have the two leading candidates for president. One is mentally in decline, and the other, I believe, is mentally and emotionally unstable. And we're hostage to that.

We don't even can do anything. We're just frozen. There's just like the crazy guy in the coffee shop or the crazy guy in the subway. The crazy person on the subway car owns that subway car. Everyone else is hostage. The crazy people screaming about, you know, your transphobia own the meeting. they own it because like I don't want to get into it you know so bring it back to where we started then or if we're living in the best time there's ever been yeah whoops okay maybe we're not though let me think about this again no but I mean I think it kind of lines up right if this is truly the greatest time in the history of the world to be alive and we also truly feel ourselves held hostage in the way you've just described which I think many many many people would agree with then maybe we ought to find other instances in the past or maybe the recent past where we could say the same thing.

Who wrote Network? Pad Chayevsky. Okay. Right. Talk about sitting down with a beer and flicking around and stumbling across a gem. Yeah, you got to watch that. Yeah. So I watched it maybe a month and a half ago.

I was just struck. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take anymore. Great. That line, he screams it. And he screams it again. and then it becomes like a Cohen, and then the windows are opening all over the city, and people are, it's unbelievable,

and it's both old and prescient and new, all at the same time. And that's, I feel like the country has channeled part of the kid in the emperor's new clothes, and others are just the townspeople, and others are people in network, and some are mad as hell, and some are saying, what do you mean?

He's naked, and others are going, no, no, no, you're a chaos denier. There's nothing to see here. Nothing to see here, right? Make that all better for me, if you would. Here's my little gutless distinction I will make that's ridiculous for me even to say it. It was different back then. I mean, first of all, that was 78. Interest rates were 10 percent. Inflation had already gone through the roof for a lot worse than we have now. Crime was through the roof a lot worse than it is now. I mean, remember, crime, the murder rate in New York. York hit its high point or low point, but now you look at it in 1990, so everything's getting worse. Three or four major assassinations in 15 years.

You always knew that at any minute there's going to be violence on the street, riots, burnings, cities on fire, not just the 2020 style, but like constantly, it seemed like constantly. So you're talking about cults and terrorists and, I mean, all sorts of things. So it did feel like if you were, I think his name is Howard Beale. if you were, you know, in your 50s or 60s in 1978, that you had gone to a war and you would come back and you would live to kind of a post-war world and then suddenly everything fell apart because everybody was rich and lazy and smart and everybody went to college and they were all like professors of this or that. And we believed in science and everything became science in the 50s. Like the scientific way to like run your city, the scientific way to take care of juvenile linguets, all that stuff. So I kind of understand why he's mad as hell. The historical thing for us now today, to me the most historical analogy, I think. As I get older, I tend to like get a little bit more interested in faith as an Episcopalian. So I'm like a little bit more like reading stuff that I just never bothered to read like the New Testament. Like, what's that? Like, okay, well, I'll read it. Pretty good actually. I don't know. Give it a read. So wow, that guy. That guy was a hippie. I hear there's going to be a sequel. Yeah, in Hebrew Bible in Exodus.

You know, Moses frees them all. They all escape indentured servitude under the Pharaoh. And he leads them on this like, fantastic escape that they made movies about it. Charlton Heston, part of the Red Sea. It was amazing. They walked through the Red Sea. And they get into the desert and they're there about a week and they start bitching about it's hot here in the desert. Why did you bring us here? This sucks.

What are we going to eat? You should have just left us back there. That's what they say to Moses who freed them. We should leave them back there. We were better off. Everybody talks about the Old Testament, the Hebrew. Bible God is being really mean and unforgiving. And where I, the Hebrew Bible God at that moment, I'd say, fine. You guys want it? I blink

you back there. But instead, he gives them food, which is, I would never do. I would never encourage that kind of like moaning and bitching. But that is kind of where we are now, I think. I think we're just, we've escaped so many things. There's so much abundance. There's super abundance coming. It's extraordinary how much brain and computing and thought power and how much better your life is and how much better your life expectancy is your health is, how much better everything is now. And all we do is sort of bitch and moan in the desert. Like, well, you know, I want to be back in the 50s. Like, really? You want to die of sepsis? So I think some of the best conversations ever are among disgruntled flyers, you know, at 37,000 feet with whatever the issue is, the first

thing we have to do in order to feel righteously put off by the absence of Coke Zero. in first class, right? The first thing we have to do is forget about the absolute series of miracles that occurred to allow us to hurdle through space in an aluminum tube. In an iron bird. At 700 miles an hour. Yeah. Are you kidding me?

A magic iron bird. I was on a plane on Sunday. I was in Savannah for the weekend, which is a beautiful town, and I'm flying back upon JetBlue. And so the guy comes, he goes, you know, the drinks cars, is what would you like? He's like, can have a Diet Coke? And he goes, and he looks at me. He's scared. And he says, is Diet Pepsi?

okay. He's like, yeah, that's fine. No, I'm going to go to another flight and get myself a Diet Coke, damn. I'm leaving this flight right now. I'm getting on Ryanair. Screw this. I've Diet Coke. All we have is Coke zero.

Oh, well, that's ridiculous. You people. Like, I think that probably people are upset. And I have to confess that I didn't enjoy it as well. I like my Diet Coke. I mean, I have one right of rear. I like my Diet Coke. I don't really like Diet Pepsi, but I get it.

I wasn't happy about it. It wasn't like I am this great Zen character who's like, you know, whatever, man. I can include all of this to my world. No, I was like, well, you know, next time bring some Diet Coke on board. But, okay, to this, like, strike one. But I can see myself on JetBlue, like, twice, like ordering the Diet Coke and the type of you. You guys got to get your act together. I can see that.

I am probably, you know, maybe six months from being on TikTok and not for good reasons. Are there any good reasons to be on TikTok? You know what I mean, you know. Oh, you mean as a result of a video, you didn't create yourself, but rather start in. Right. Hashtag male Karen, angry about radishes at Whole Foods. And it's going to be me. I love stories like this.

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Free meat for life, 40 bucks off your first order. Good ranchers.com. American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. Hey-ha. But look, Rob, to your point, you said this a half hour ago, you know, we're living in a time where there's 90 flavors of ice cream, which is true. And so what do we do? We inculcate ourselves with that level of choice, and we celebrate it.

But a couple minutes later, we all agree that somewhere between Peacock Plus, Hulu, Fubo, Vidgo, To Be, Max, Max, Plus. is real, by the way. D minus. Just as Jeffrey. And so, right. You see what I did, Chuck. All right.

So what you did. It was great. What a weird dichotomy. Like 90 choices is great with ice cream. The same relevant number of choices with entertainment is suffocating. Right. On the plane, would it kill you to get a Diet Coke? I mean, my God, half the country wants it.

Just give me the choice. So I don't know. with the Pepsi people. This flight brought to you by? This is the other problem I have. You're not supposed to do this in show business, but also part of the problem is just the incredibly lazy, entitled audience. You don't like what you see.

Turn it off. And don't turn it off. Don't pay for it. The audience in America has never had more power. Never. They've never had more power over what they watch than before and over the companies that produce it. Never.

You just don't have to pay them. It isn't just you turn it off and hope that somehow the ripple effect. of one fewer viewer has some effect on it. You keep your money. That's powerful. And yet instead they want to, oh, you want to protest and we want to do this and we want to do that. No, just quit.

Just quit. Be surprised. I actually believe that these companies are starting to understand the precariousness of their position. And part of it is because they insisted because smart people are smart. And if I'm smart, I'm smart about everything. Elon Musk smart. I can take us to Mars.

And I also know how to run a giant advertising supported social network, right? I'm smart. I'm just a brilliant person all around. And they believe that if I'm smart and like if that's David Zazlov's great mistake, his great blunder, he's a great programmer. He understood how to build a specific singular brand. But now he's decided that he could run a company that's vertically integrated that's going to produce and sell content and make its money on doing just that. That has literally never happened in the history of showbans. In 100 years of show business, no company has ever done that. They've always had to be. had some other buyer and some other supplier and somebody to take a little bit of the risk over here and somebody taking a little risk over there. They split the money with the theater owners. They split the money with the network television. They split the money with the local broadcasters.

They were always kind of making deals. They were never taking the full brunt of the risk. Now these guys think, well, I'm so smart. I could take all the risk. And misunderstanding risk is what destroyed, which I believe is part of the age of blunder, right? That's what Iraq was. That's what the financial collapse was. That's what Putin did.

That's what COVID did. COVID was like, well, there's no risk in like building this virus and this little would laugh. And that's what the showbiz people do. Obviously, these are different. We're all going to do great. If two thirds of the film and television studios go broke and collapse, we'll all be fine, by the way. We'll be able to get up tomorrow. Yeah.

Yes, but I think you're probably right. But the incredible intricacies and complexities of our financial system trickle in both directions. And somewhere there's a fund manager, a money manager. And somewhere that person is buying on behalf of a pension. And all kinds of companies are going into all kinds of pensions. And suddenly some of the companies you're talking about might become so large. You can't afford not to buy them if you're in charge of delivering a return that, ironically, might ensure the retirement for a bunch of iron workers somewhere who have a union that actually

does move the needle in a lot of meeting toys, right? I just don't know how you unwind all of that. But Chuck, I saw you writing a second ago. Did you write the age of blunder just like I did? Yes, that's exactly what I wrote. I'm trying to create that. I want that to be my Malcolm Gladwell legacy people like will say like, well, yes, you know, they have to say 10,000 hours.

I want that to be, well, Rob Long. age of blunder, you know, then I can die happy. Unless you say something more interesting in the next 20 or 25 minutes, that will be the title of this episode. Okay, but hey, Hope Springs Eternal, you certainly are a writer. And even though you don't have a crystal ball, pretend you do. Like in a world, in a world, where the consumer can simply not pay for stuff that displeases them in that content world, right?

What's going to happen with the streamers? what's going to happen with the skinny bundles and the fat bundles and all of this choice? What's going to happen to the 90 choices of ice cream that we now have vis-a-vis our password-protected apps? Well, I mean, I'm fundamentally sort of temperamentally conservative. And so I fundamentally, temperamentally believe that, yeah, yeah, yeah, nothing new. It's going to go back to a version of what it was. Because what it was grew organically. So I think what's going to happen is all these big companies are going to become,

10 little companies. And they're all going to be making deals with each other left and right and screwing each other over left and right. And show business is still going to be a business filled with lawyers and agents. They're going to come together for projects and then break apart for projects. And they're going to be very complicated financing, which is fine. That's easy to fix. Places like Netflix aren't going to be studios where they show Netflix shows. They're going to be a service that you pay for.

And you can watch Hulu on Netflix. You can watch Paramount shows on Netflix. It'll just be like a network. Like you can watch ABC and CBS and NBC or whatever those things become on your service. And they will be freed from the need to produce, write, direct, and develop hits. They will be in the best position you can be in show business, which is you sit in a room and all these people come with their passion projects and their belief, all these people who will work for free and have been working for free in a project for years.

And they will pitch their hearts out to you on your sofa for the price of, of a little bottle of water and some idiotic, anxious small talk. And you choose. And you say yes or no. And the other guys say yes or no. And what keeps you honest is that if they don't like it, that doesn't work for you, then they're going to go down to Amazon, which is the other big network. Or they're going to go to Apple Plus, which is the other big network.

And they're going to pitch their stuff there. And then there are going to be companies that say, the idea that there's a Paramount Plus is a market mistake. There's no reason for that. That's just stupid. But Paramount is a great studio, and they should be selling to everybody. Like, the biggest tip the Paramount Plus ever came up with was Yellowstone, and it was not on Paramount Plus. First of all, there was no Paramount Plus. But it was on Peacock first.

There should be no Peacock. It was on Peacock. It was stupid. But sticking with Paramount, not a bad call on Robert Evans' part, right, hiring Lou Rudd or Al Ruddy and getting Godfather off the ground. Yeah. You know, ironically, Robert Evans owned the home that David Zaslov now lives in. I love that, but did you see the offer? Surely you must have.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. So that's kind of what I want to ask you about. Because the time you just described was a time when a studio head could bet on a producer like Al Ruddy who actually produced, like in every sense of that word. Right. And that whole series is just a bunch of executives making bets on people. Right. Right.

Are you saying that that fundamental shift is the thing the consumer is now dealing with and the thing the consumer is ultimately unhappy by? Well, I think a couple things. The consumer is unhappy with the mechanics of how to watch TV, that it went from something very easy to something very difficult. for something that was like kind of you didn't have to think about it. Does something you now have to plan and commit to? And like people say things like, oh, oh, the first three episodes are really slow,

but you have to watch them to understand the fourth episode. Like, my God, if I'm hit by a bus, does that mean that I gave you three hours of my life? It's crazy, right? So I think I'm mad about that and how much people are charging. It's crazy, right? And I think some people are mad about the fact that all of those shows seem to have, you know, seem to come from the same kind of morally instructive playbook that it's not, that amongst the priorities are to entertain you or to delight you or to

amuse you or to frighten you or to like whatever, you know, you know, thrill you. That's up there. But it's not necessarily higher than teach you how to be a better modern person. That seems to be often the primary goal of people in show business like, well, it doesn't have to be funny, but I do want to teach people a lesson about, you know, the very important, you know, need for climate change legislation or how it affects trans people. And I think people are like, yeah, man, no, I know, I don't want that. I just kind of want to come home and watch a guy kill another guy for a good reason, right? Which is basically the equalized.

A bad guy. Yeah, right. Who has it good? That's right. Which is fine, right? So I think those are two things that are there. I mean, the other thing I would just say about, because you mentioned Bob Evans in that era, is that entertainment was a small business. And it wasn't a big business.

It was small business. Like, nobody was investing in those companies. Paramount was near bankruptcy all the time. These are not big companies. The ROI on a share of Paramount Studios was like nothing. You were better off investing in something like paper clips. Only people who should be investing money in show business are people who really love it because they don't care if they lose. Traditionally, what you do, like every studio has been the same way forever, is you try to find somebody who wants to, who could be convinced that if they invest in a movie studio or a movie, that they will get to me.

a pretty movie star. And I'm not even kidding. That is how it works. It's advertising too. Yeah, you get the guy in from some pension fund sometimes, but often just to have, often private equity.

And when I was just starting out, it was a lot of Japanese people walking through, and you bring them to the set, and they meet Scarlet Johansson. And they think, I think I got a shot with Scarlet Johansson. That's how it worked. And you invite him to the premiere,

and they stand, and they do the step and repeat, And they walk and like they just feel like, okay, the entire Disney corporation was rescued, essentially, financially rescued from bankruptcy by something called Silver Screen Partners, which is a series of bond issues. And what they did is they found a lot of like dentists and they sold them like $10,000. Shares in movies in exchange for your name that goes by in a nanosecond at the end of the movie. I think it's some.

Someone was just Silver Screen Partners, seven, you know, and you'd have to point to all your friends. That's me, by the way. And they get invited to the premiere, to the premiere screening closest to them. And they were just, that was like, I don't care if I'd never get any money back. I spent $50,000 and I got to go to a movie premiere. And which was good because they don't think they ever got any money. You never get your money back. This is what happened with what's happening now with crowdfunding, you know, with the chosen and Veronica Mars got made, the movie, you know, the same way.

Sound of Freedom. Yeah. Sound of Freedom is a really good example because, and I'm very close to the writer of Sound of Sound freedom, the co-writer, Rod Barb. Yeah. Tim Ballard was just on this podcast. Oh, yeah, okay, great. Two weeks ago.

Rod tells the story about how the movie came about. And, you know, it's a $14 million movie that's going to make $200 million domestically. And Rod's like, I, you know, he and I are on the board of a homeless youth agency in Hollywood together called My Friend's Place. So he's already been into this issue of child sex trafficking because that does happen. It happens in Los Angeles. It happens among the clients of My Friends Place.

And he's like, I, you know, so we decided to. kind of dramatize it, we took a lot of Tim Ballard's life. We kind of, you know, obviously we had to fix it up, make it a movie, we made a movie, but it's a rescue the princess movie. It's not, I mean, and I say this, and I said this to Rod, so I mean, I'm not really trying to, no disrespect, but it's not like he invented a huge genre. This is like a little bit taken, a little bit the equalizer, a little bit, I don't know what else, like a little bit a Rambo, it's a little bit of that. And the reason why Disney then owned it, because they It was 20th and then Disney won't 20th.

The reason Disney owned it and then let it go was because they didn't know how to market it. Not because they thought it was like politically untouchable, but because this is a movie that isn't a sequel. It's not a superhero movie and it's not, this is a one-off. How do I sell a one-off to you? It's like it's like it's almost not worth it. And when you think about movies like that which don't get made, except the Equalizer, they're making number four.

And the Equalizer makes scads of money and nobody ever talks about it. Or just like every summer. It's like summer. it's like summer's over. 2023 is over. Every single year that I can remember, except for the past few, around September,

two things happen. One, there's kind of an adult, dirty comedy out, and there's an adult drama out for the wards. But that caps off a summer where there have been at least two or three or four, loud, noisy comedies that everybody watches, like, Anchorman, you know,

all the Will Ferrell movies, the Ben Stiller movies, Zoolander, Austin Power, all those movies. Every Adam Sandler movie, they're all in the summer, right? They make tons of money. They're not out anymore.

Like, you don't think that if you made Anchorman today, people wouldn't, I mean, Anchorman's a funny movie. If Anchorman's on, I'm stopping, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry? Why are they not making them anymore? Because you can't, there are a roll of the dice. They're risky.

And if you have to smooth out your earnings every quarter and you don't know and you can't control it, and it may offend people because it's comedy, comedy's very dangerous, comedy's not funny. Comedy is not funny. Comedy's not funny. Now, you can't do it. So the studios are hostage to this like, oh, shit, I can't. I can only have superheroes saving the world.

Oh, my God. I mean, just, I get it. Money, money, money. But I just never got it, man. I don't get the Marvel universe. I don't get the DC universe. I don't understand. I mean, I got it when I was 12, but I don't understand how it can be so popular.

I mean, no, judgments. Yeah, yeah. They're all the same. Except Guardians of the Galaxy. That was kind of... Yeah, it was great, because it was funny. That was a great movie. It was funny, and it took the hiss out of the very things we're talking about now.

Yeah, right. Deadpool is different than all of the things that lampooned. Deadpool was in on the joke, and the other guys just weren't. Did you ever see Zoolander? Sure. There's this weird scene in Zoolander that's hilarious when the models are like filling up the Jeep and they decide to have a gasoline fight with each other. and they're laughing and spraying gasoline in each other.

And it's like the weirdest, most hilarious thing. It doesn't make any sense at all. Of course, they all die. But it's hilarious. Or like an anchorman, that weird middle part of the anchor man where they have this gang fight with the other anchor teams. With the other station. It's terrific.

It doesn't make any sense, right? But it's great. Like there's nothing that way. They just wouldn't, that's just too uncontrolled. It's too chaotic. It's too risky. If you don't want to be in the risk business, then you shouldn't be in show business. So will the pendulum swing back?

I mean, will we see another blazing saddles in our life? No. I mean, but if not, why not? And by the way, what if Disney was fundamentally wrong? Obviously, they were wrong about the success of Sound of Freedom, the project. But what if they're wrong about the sequel? I think of, what is it called? To Catch a Predator.

Are you kidding me? Honey, get in here. They're going to catch a predator. They're going to catch another one. But guess what? They do. They do. And for years now, people have been watching as these creeps get busted.

Why in the world wouldn't people be interested? I mean, not to in any way insoling this into its dramatic arcs and its narratives and so forth, but the idea of real people going into the world to rescue an eight-year-old boy who's been trafficked? Why in the world wouldn't that be a very special episode every single Thursday at 9 o'clock that would become a de facto choice for millions of people who are looking for some kind of justice, for God's sakes? Absolutely. And these are not new ideas. They're not new genres. Rod always says that he says, I don't understand the weird controversy for the right or the left on Sound of Freedom. It's a Rescue the Princess movie, basically. It's grounded in a current issue,

which is what kind of gives it a lot more gravity and a lot more lasting power, I think. But they would make these movies once a year. I mean, people would make these issue movies that were good movies. They'd make once a year. And, you know, somebody would get an Oscar nom for it. I mean, they're not going to get it for this,

but somebody would get it in a traditional movie. Just in Disney's defense, I don't think it was they thought, oh, child traffic is not an issue, no one's going to want to see it. I think they just thought, we can't, we don't know, we don't have a pipeline for this. and what that means is that there's an opportunity

because we are in America there are two ways to react when big companies make mistakes one is you go oh my god that big companies make mistakes how do we help them how do we save them they should change blunders and then there's the other way blunders right and then the other way is to say great let's tear into them with a claw like hook

let's eat their lunch while they're busy doing dumb shit let's put on more movies that people like That takes risk, but it's never been easier. I mean, my God, it's never been easier to make a movie. Yeah, right. Right. You're probably sick of talking about it. But you said something earlier that really makes me want to ask you about cheers if you can bear it

because I know you did your time there. First thing is, what did you say? Oh, the first three hours are kind of slow. But then, right? It's like more than anything else, the business. the business of writing in a structure for a sitcom, especially back in those days, early 90s, I guess, you had, what, 22 minutes to tell a story? Yeah, but we started with 26 minutes, and then we ended.

They had taken about two and a half minutes away. Now it's, I think it's like 1930. I really do. I think it's what it is. Come on. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's not a lot. Wow.

So the TRT, folks, is a thing they call the total running time. Right. The TRT of Dirty Jobs was four. 44 minutes and 15 seconds leaving 15 minutes and 45 seconds for a word from your sponsor. Right, right, right. What I'm getting at here isn't just so much the economics of the business model, but when you don't have the freedom to wander outside the lines, when you don't have the freedom to lay three hours worth of expository pipe,

you've got to get to the whole thing, get three breaks, and you have a little more than 20 minutes to do it. Was that ultimately freeing for you as a writer, or was it constrictive? The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a low. local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of

skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades, they're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode, join the skilled trades movement, support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town, or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved.

Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills. U.S. Skills. U.S.S.S. Most rules are freeing because you don't have to read about the wheel each time. And as long as you have characters that people love and think are funny and want to see and want to spend time with and who feel real to you, it's a joy. You actually need those. You need some kind of guardrails.

The pacing issues that have kind of built up over time, they're not new. I mean, they do fit into a broadcast TV kind of a model. where you need to take a break to sell people, digel or whatever. Di gel. You know what? Is that still around? I don't know.

I don't even know if that is like Aniston. I don't know. Anison. Aniston's still around, right? It was always stuff like that, you know. Digil. What was like, I mean? What was the thing?

Antacid or something? Di gel. Oh, if you eat too well, demand die gel. Wow. Okay. If you eat too well, demand die gel. Yeah. Wow.

Well, that's not my generation, man. Good for you. So you need to take breaks, right? But I think if you look at the act structure of a Shakespeare comedy, it's about, you know, 16 minutes an act, maybe 20 minutes an act. You know, that's kind of what people want. And they're standing up, too, when they watch this. So you only have so much, the human legs and ass are the same. And you can only sit for so long, and then you've got to get up and go to the bathroom, get a snack or move around a little bit.

And to keep you coming back, there's always been a little bit of a cliffhanger. So the act break, you know, has a moment where you're like, oh, no, I got to come back. So none of this stuff was, like, imposed from some weird, inorganic source. It all seemed like, well, that's how you get people to stick around. That's how you entertain people. If I know the characters, I don't really need a lot of runway to get this story going. You already know. We found out with, like, with George Wendt, who played Norm, that we'd have these, we shot it from a live audience.

So we'd have, you know, people would do these setups, like, you know, they mentioned. beer or something. And the audience, live audience, start to laugh because they would all turn and look at George. And they knew that he was going to say something. And so they'd start laughing. And so he would sort of wait for the laugh to die down and then he'd say the line.

And then that line would get a laugh. But we had to reshoot it. We always used a second take of that because they didn't want to tip the joke. It was weird people laughing on the setup. But they knew the character so well that they knew he was going to say something funny. So that was the only time we kind of moved to laugh around every now.

We'd shift it. If we couldn't fix it, we'd just shift it. And sometimes if you're watching the show, and he says a thing about beer and he gets a laugh. Technically, that laugh came two seconds earlier on the setup. That's the one thing we did. But it's just all organic. It wasn't as if somebody first figured out how to make money and then figured out how to put a story around it. Was that your break?

Like when you look back, is that the thing you sort of hang your hat on retroactively? Yeah, it's getting all in the tooth, by the way. But yeah, I mean, that was my first job. You're like you still dining out on Cheers, are we? Oh, yeah. You're kidding me? Yeah. Listen, I'm available.

Well, when it was over, people would say, when it's on, people say, oh, my God, it's my favorite show. It was over the go. Oh, my God, I miss it was my favorite show. And then, like, 10 years ago, I remember watching that with my parents. And there's, oh, I still watch the reruns every night. And, oh, you know, I was too young to watch the early episodes, but I watched later ones and now I've gone back and I watched them all. It's great.

It was my parents' favorite show. And now it's my grandparents, my grandparents never missed that show. I'm like, oh, okay, well, I'll just, just set me outside at night on the ice flow and give me a push. But it was my first job, really, my first job in life, I was 24. And it was like this incredible education. It was like, just like graduate school. You learn how to do a show that people like. Did you feel as a writer, just to start to close the loop on all this, that things were, I mean, I hate the F,

but fair, more fair than today? Well, I don't know about fair. I mean, without coming off as a squish, which I often do, it's nice that there's an interest in broader programming and shows about more things. We got it half right in that trying to include more people in the business is a good thing. It's actually good for the business. It's good for storytelling. It's just good.

You've got to refresh the storytelling engines. That's great. And so that half is right. The second half we got horribly wrong, which is they all have to say the same thing. And we can't actually have diversity of opinion or experience. And we've segmented the audience in a way that people are proud about. They talk about it in their quarterly reports, but sounds a lot like segregation. So it says a lot like, okay, this is a black show.

Okay, this is a Hispanic show. And the truth is that ethnic shows, broadly speaking, are usually hilarious. The Jefferson's was the number one comedy for like three or four years ago. Oh, my God. I mean, that effort and son just loved it. Yeah. And we don't, and by the way, everybody knows every single person who's not a weirdo where some kind of academic eunuch knows that ethnic humor is the funniest humor.

There is very little funnier than making fun. of your people and my people. There isn't. And nobody does a better job of it, ironically, than the people themselves, right? I mean, nobody does ethnic humor like that ethnicity. They nail it. And we don't have it on TV. It's not on TV. This thing that everyone does and everyone talks about, it's not on TV. You go to comedy clubs are experiencing a renaissance now because it's the only place in America you can go and actually watch people be funny about real stuff and say stuff that's hilarious. And TikTok and Instagram, I know everybody hates it, but that's really the only place you're seeing people making funny jokes that you're like, well, I can't, you couldn't say that on TV,

even though everyone's laughing. We don't do that anymore. So like they've got to given that part up, but it didn't used to be that way. Are you kidding me? I mean, can you imagine like in 1971 or 72 turning on the TV and it's all in the family and Archie Bunker is talking about what he's talking about? And now that would not be allowed, even though It's hilarious, and everybody knows it's hilarious. Sanford is. The roast of Sammy Davis Jr. Oh, my.

Oh, man. Well, that's too far. Well, that's not going. That's right, right, right. I mean, I saw that maybe a year ago on YouTube, and I was like, wow, that is something. Well, the roast themselves, the Jeffrey Ross roast that are now are pretty rough. I mean, you watch them, you think, holy, that's pretty amazing stuff. But that used to be, I mean, that was the bread and butter of modern comedy.

How do you not do that? you don't do, then you just don't do comedy. And comedy is all about some weird, quirky office workplace where everybody's kind of being quirky and not funny. There's two kinds of funny. There's funny and there's NPR funny. The difference is that NPR funny is not funny. I think you mean NPR funny is not funny.

It's not trying to be funny here. Here's why I think you should be fabulously wealthy if you're not. I don't know. Let me in my pen. Well, I'm just looking at the art behind you, and clearly you've done well. I'm done okay. The reason you should... I'm running out of string here, so, Mike, so I don't want your listeners to think that I'm not available.

There's only so much gas in the tank, right? I like to go out to dinner. I don't like to work that hard. This is not a good... I am not a good American. What you've done that's valuable is a hard thing to pick it for, and it's a hard thing to protest. and it's truly lightning in a bottle. But because you worked on a project

that my parents watched and my grandparents watched and now my children watch and now their friends watch, right? Because you had your hands on shaping a thing that had this weird, evergreen, that's one of the things.

It's an evergreen quality. Never political. Never political. Never mean but so consistently funny, like taxi, right? Taxi came out of that same uvre, milieu. That's right. That's why I'm sympathetic with the writers and the actors.

That's the thing that I want to reward more than anything else. Yeah, I agree. But it's also the thing, to your earlier point, and this I think will make us sound terribly smart for people who listen twice. This is why we need great executives, making great decisions and great bets and great producers. And I hate the whole business of hate stay in your lane. But it's part of that.

When everybody is really good at the thing they're supposed to do, then you get Ted Danson and Shelley Long and you get Jim Burroughs and you get Rob Long and you get people on the network side taking bets. And then you get a thing that parents and grandparents and cousins, and everybody can stand around to talk about. So that's why you should be rich. I agree that I should be rich. That's the nice way to put it.

The other way to put it is, which I think is equally nice, actually, when you think about it, is that every single success in show business, every success, every single thing, everything that works that goes on to become a hit is a mistake.

Somebody made a mistake, a blunder. Somebody let it through. The system is designed to crush that, to stop that. And then something slips through. And a success is the result of a lot of choices that people made. They were either good or bad or they made them. I mean, remember, a bunch of people tested for the roles of Sam and Diane on Cheers.

So it could have been, you know, it could have been Bill Devane and Julia Duffy, right, very easily. But it wasn't. And it wasn't for a lot of reasons. Intuition, the guys who created it, Glenn and Les Charles and Jim Burroughs, Gene. people who taught me everything. Their intuition was right. But there is no way to remove that from show business. There's no way to do it.

You just need to kind of like let a bunch of those people go and let them try stuff. And it's the venture business and hope that it works. That's why you don't need six companies. You need 26 companies. And you need all the people fighting and scrapling and trying to get stuff going. And every time that show business gets big and sclerotic, like every other business, it smothers itself. And they need to like, I used to say like the problem when show is running,

is everybody's stepping on the hose. Take your foot off the hose, let it go. And let's see what happens. It isn't so much to ever should stay in their lane is that the great producers and great executives are great at choosing or seeing potential or recognizing. I mean, the reason that Cheers was on after the first, Cheers was like the number 99 show the first year.

I mean, it would have been canceled. The reason that they gave it a second season was because the network was broke at the time. They had no other shows. They couldn't replace it. Well, they put on, like, nothing. They just didn't have anything to put on. And they didn't start making money until Cosby, which is a couple of years later. So, like, it's all kind of this crazy crapshoot.

The way you win at craps or any game is you have enough chips on the felt. You don't pile all of them on one number or three numbers. You kind of spread them around and see what happens. That is what show business needs to do. And that's what it's not doing now. And that is probably where it's either going to go or it's going to die. Do you think in some weird alternative universe, if Bill Devane had been cast as Sam Malone, that Ted Danson would be selling gold now on Fox? What's in your portfolio?

You know, I did a – I shot a pilot with Bill Devane. Are you safe? I shot a pilot him years ago. He's a lovely guy, really. And, man, he was so funny. and we were talking before one of the shows we shot it twice

and I was sitting around and talking and he says and we didn't mention this because yeah you know I tested it for that role on cheers

and we're like really Bill I didn't know that wow he was yeah I would have killed that show

that would have lasted a year maybe two or he's like oh no no you would have been great no

no no that wasn't me that wasn't my part no way he's great man he was great He was great. That's a...

Missiles in October. Was that the one you did? Right. Yeah. And in payback, to bring it all full circle. And payback. Look at that. Now, that's how we land the plane.

Absolutely. Finally, Rob, I got to circle back to martini shot because talking about cheers in its short attention span format, you know, that's how this podcast started. Short stories. Yeah. Right. Never want to do anything longer than eight minutes. And it's just so much easier. just to talk with a dude for an hour and 20.

But I love your takes and tell me if I'm wrong, but you're basically chunking out a column, right? Like you have a weekly column to write. Right. You're not, but you're not just reading it. You're presenting it and giving yourself permission along the way to zig or zag. But what comes out is like a 10 or 12 minute rumination on some sort of justice or injustice that might be unfolding.

in this bullion base, this miasma of an industry we have. And, dude, it's terrific. I literally, I was in Italy last week, as one does from time to time, just walking around, and that's what I listen to. And you can plug whatever you want now, but I'm telling people, if they want a fun look into the dysfunction of our industry, you're doing a really great thing in the podcast space. It's part of ricochet, right?

It is part of Rickashay. It's also part of the Ancler, which is a show business information news site and substack place you can go to pretty deep dive stuff. But thank you. That really, that's very meaningful. Thank you. Rob, why is it called the martini shot and tell people what the martini shot means? Because I don't know that everybody knows. The martini shot is the last shot of the day. So like, yeah, that's usually when you're going to, first AD, the first assistant director or the second assistant director will call up. All right, this is the martini. They'll say to everybody. And everybody knows. This is the last. shot after this you get your martini. Of course there's some personnel who already had their martini but that's a separate problem. And so the shot right before the martini shot right before that is called the Abby Singer and Abby Singer was famously a first AD on a lot of MTM shows who once called the martini shot

one shot too soon. And you know it's one thing you call a martini shot that everybody's like already like they're like they're ready to go and then you go, oh wait I made a mistake and then you're the most loath person on the set because you basically got everybody excited with nothing yeah and everybody want you know that's like you know there's a healthy happy set when everybody kind of wants to go home like they feel like they did their job and now i really'd like to go home or go have a drink with their colleagues i did a show for a long time with bob newhart who was just incredibly just a genius i'm really really an american genius like unbelievably which show uh it was called george and leo we did it was one of his last one of his last one

Oh, right, right. And if you ask any stand-up, any stand-up, it doesn't matter who was. Dave Chappelle, anybody would say, what do you think about Bob Newark? They're like, oh, my God, that guy. If I met him, I would know what to say. He's just that level. Just that level. But he would do the last scene.

He said, this is it, right? You'd look at us like, this is this one, this is Martin. That's Martin. And he would do the last scene with his car keys in his hand. Sometimes you can see it if you really look closely because he wanted to go home. Because he, you know, he's got a nice house and he loves his wife, and he doesn't want to be here any longer if he has to. did a good day's work and everybody's happy and it's fine like this is it i'm see ya i'll be here

tomorrow for the next episode that was like working with a professional like that was like oh my god that that's what you aspire to is it's all going to get done we're going to do a good job but we're not getting each other's faces about it and we're not going to turn into a big drama and uh we're going to go home and live our lives full disclosure you told that story on one of your podcasts I remember it. I'm walking through some horrible, horribly sad landscape. There's a blight right now that's killed over 20 million olive trees. Some bacteria from South America has come up.

And so they have to burn them when they get the blight. And so certain stretches, you don't see this in the brochure, but it looks like Mordor, right? I mean, it looks just like Dresden. And it's like, oh, God, so I'm, I was walking through the salescape, listening to your podcast, screaming to the burnt trunks of dead olive trees, which comedian? Which comedian? Yeah. Because you didn't say it was Bob Newhart. Yeah.

And it made me think of my name drop friend, Tim Allen, who hired me to play his younger brother, who, by the way, that dude runs a tight ship. I don't know how they did it on Cheers, but, oh, yeah. shot those things Friday nights, 8 o'clock starts, 9 o'clock, everybody's home. Get out. Yeah, yeah. Get out. Not like friends. Was there until 2 in the morning?

Yeah, yeah. He's famous for that. And also famous for being like one of those guys who went from struggle, struggle, struggle, no money, no money. And then it feels like the next morning he wakes up and he's the biggest thing in TV. He's a giant star. He's got a number one show. He's tough. I know he's tough, which is you got to be because he's been.

successful three times. I mean, three giant hit shows, three giant payouts. This guy is earned that money, right? But I could just tell you, I was once at the Apple store, the first Apple store in Southern California in Glendale, the Glendale Galleria, buying a MacBook, the first MacBook, the big stainless steel one, the fancy one. And I was there with my Godson, who was four, maybe five at the time. And I'm waiting for them to bring out my MacBook. And they're seated outside in the mall is Tim Allen. And my Godson has no Tim Allen is, but he knows who Buzz Lightyear is.

And I say, you know who that is? That guy, it's Buzz Light Year. He goes, what? It's Buzz Light Year. So I'm like, oh, I shouldn't have said that. And I got to go up to us. So I go up to us, hey, he's who I am. I'm not doing this dumb thing.

We're like, I'm in the business, too, so it's not like you're being assaulted here. My Godson here is a huge fan of Buzz. and he turns to little Jackson and says, you're a very short man and I pity you, just like Buzz Light here. And look at this kid's face with some of this amazing thing. And he was like, it was like he's,

and I just said, thank you to him. I sort of mouth, thank you. And he's like, ah, no, they're fine. And then we walked away and was like, that's like, that guy, some people are just that way. They're just nice. He knows, dude. Tim understands intuitively that it takes about this

much. And if you're listening and not watching, I'm holding my thumb and forefinger very, very close together. It takes this much to change somebody's life. And Tim knows, and we've had this conversation, both on this podcast and between takes, he knows that ultimately he doesn't work for the network. He doesn't work for the studio. He doesn't work for the production company. He works for the people who watch. He works for your godson, right? And he just knows it. Absolutely. Hey, we're way over, man.

I'm sorry. Anything else you want to plug, aside from your incredible martini shot podcast and your versioning podcast platform called Rickache and your columns, a national review? Yeah, I'm trying to think of as anything else they need to sell.

No, that just, you know, a general announcement that I'm available. Just need to make sure everybody knows that. And you're on Instagram. What's your Instagram handle? Instagram and Twitter are the same. C-B-L. Just three letters.

R-C-S-N-T-C-S-N-B-E-L-L. What's the C-B part, Stamph? What's my middle names? I'm a fancy name, yeah. Well, give me the whole thing, man. Robert Caldwell, Blackwood, Long. Oh, my goodness. Robert Caldwell, Blackwell, Long?

Caldwell, Blackwood. But you don't have to use all of the mic. You can just call me, Rob. I like to feel I'm, I like to think that I'm just a regular Joe. Four names. Robert Caldwell Black. Have you met Charles C.W. Cook? I have. I work with Charles. Yes.

Tell him, hello. He was a great guest, and I really enjoy his stuff. He's doing a giant podcast series for us on the Second Amendment, which is going to be really fun. About eight episodes, deep dive in Second Amendment, but it could be fun, and the working title, which I'm insisting he call it, is called Charlie Bies a Canon. We're going to have it buy a Canon.

Because you can buy a canon. I'd have gone with Just Shoot Me, but, you know, that's actually better. All right. I might have to change it, call it my own idea. Don't hang up. We have to make sure all your wisdom is properly uploaded, but accept my sincere thanks for going above and beyond and writing great words and doing a great podcast.

If I could never return the favor. I had fun. Thank you. I'm happy too. Good. This is goodbye. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't.

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