Susan Morrison (on Lorne Michaels)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert.

I'm Dan Shepard.

I'm joined by Lily Padman and Michael Weakley.

Hello.

Hello.

This guest, Susan Morrison.

This was so fun.

This was such a fun listen back.

Was it?

Yes.

So she is the article's editor at the New Yorker.

She has a new book out right now, Lorne, The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

This is like a crazy fun, juicy history of Saturday Night Live.

It is of SNL and of Lorne Michaels.

And we get all these like fun stories.

And it's just cool.

And he's an institution.

The Wizard of Oz.

Exactly.

Very mysterious.

Very mysterious.

And we get a little deep dive.

I thought this was incredibly enjoyable.

It's really cool because she's known him for decades.

Yes, exactly.

This is a really, really fun one.

Her other books are Spy High and 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary.

So feel free to check those out too.

But Lauren is fantastic.

I encourage everyone to read it.

Please enjoy Susan Morrison.

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Her daughter is Adam Scott's assistant.

No.

Yeah.

Isn't that fun?

I'm sure you're only getting glowing reviews of Naomi and Adam.

Oh, yeah.

Love it.

How did she end up with that job?

I'm trying to remember.

I think a friend at WME

knew that he was looking for someone for the second season of Severance.

And so they just really clicked.

And so what's really fun is now to watch the second season with her because she'll tell you, like, oh, yeah, and the goats ran off there.

And this is when

John Dartura was like crying because it was so fucking cold, you know?

Oh, my God.

That's fantastic.

It's fun to have that kind of commentary.

Yeah, for sure.

The inside scoop.

Well, we send Adam Scott Scott angry voice memos after every episode.

That's kind of our participation in it.

We yell at him for cliffhangers.

Why is this taking so long?

Are you guys shooting this show three hours a week?

Why isn't there another season?

I saw Adam and Ben on some talk show, and someone said, when's season three?

And I think Ben said, like, 2035.

That sounds about right.

Yeah.

It's become an IQ test where it's like the gap between year one and

year two was three and then it's gotta be six and then we go up to to

susan where are you from tough to answer that because when i was a kid my dad worked for ibm which meant that we moved every four years so i was born in new jersey and lived in poughkeepsie and denver and stamford connecticut and now i've lived in my apartment in new york for 40 years so i think that makes me feel like i'm a new yorker that qualifies i have a similar i wonder if you attribute it to your childhood we moved so much that in 30 years in lay i lived in one single apartment for 10 years then i lived in a house for 16 and now we're here, and I just don't ever want to.

No, exactly.

I think I will never move because my whole childhood was putting things in those Neptune moving boxes and unpacking them.

And I always wanted to spare my kids that.

Did you get psychotic about your room?

Like ideas, like wherever we went, at least my little bubble could be the same.

And if someone altered my bubble, I was irrationally upset.

Mine was the same weird shade of pink.

I had a canopy bed.

Yeah.

And I had little china cats.

But I do think that that's why you want permanence.

Yes.

And you're dropping in every four years to a totally different social setting and culture and vibe.

Were you good at meshing?

I mean, I think about some things that were, I'm not one of those people who ever overuses the word trauma.

Yeah.

I frown on that.

But I remember when we moved to Colorado, I fell out of a tree and broke my arm and my arm was kind of taped up inside my clothes.

And in my first week in my new school, some girl I didn't know came up to me on the playground and kicked me really hard and said, I think it's awful that you're pretending to only have one arm.

Oh my God.

It's just like,

so those things, you're the new kid and you're the weird kid with one arm.

Yeah.

But I think it's made me really resilient and adaptable as an adult.

Do you find that?

For sure.

I want to go back to the little girl.

I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in that move, which is

someone feigning a disability

like needs to be policed by the social hierarchy.

It's not just that you had a a broken arm and she's pissed you were getting attention.

No, she thought I was pretending that I lost my arm, which would be disrespectful to someone who had.

I think she might have even said, I know someone who lost an arm.

I don't know.

And she was so young to be this very big justice.

We're talking eight years old.

Wow.

I think it's an instinct.

That's what I'm arguing.

I think there's something like very primitive about us being social primates, whereas if someone's pretending to be infirmed and they're not, that's deception.

That's fascinating reaction reaction to come up and kick a girl.

Right in the shins.

Yeah.

So the whole new kid thing was a really regular thing for me.

I'm sure it was painful and I'm sure I had lonely stretches that I've blocked, but I definitely feel like there are times in my adult life when I know, this is why I'm good at this and this is why I'm good at that.

Right.

I can walk in and be around strangers.

Do podcasts.

Exactly.

Yeah, podcast.

What's your road to the New Yorker?

My first job in the grown-up world was working for Lauren Michaels.

I was

23.

My mom had just died.

I had been living in England working for the Times of London.

I moved back to America because my mom was sick, took care of her for a month, and then she died of cancer.

And I was just like, oh my God, what am I going to do?

And some of my college friends from the Harvard Lampoon brought me into the city the day after my mom's funeral and introduced me to Jim Downey, who is the great long-serving head writer of SNL.

And Lauren, this was during the period when he wasn't at SNL.

He had a five-year hiatus in the 80s.

And he was producing this primetime show called The New Show, which was his first spectacular public failure.

But so I got a job working for the writers in that as like a researcher.

That only lasted about nine, ten episodes, but I was young.

It cemented relationships with all these amazing comedy people.

So that after that, I knew I wanted to go into journalism.

I got a job at Vanity Fair, but I stayed friends with all those people.

And it especially served me.

I feel like the real crucible part of my career was starting Spy Magazine in the 80s with Kurt Anderson and Graydon Carter.

Forgive my ignorance.

What was Spy's angle?

Spy Magazine was kind of modeled on Private Eye, the British satiric weekly.

The 80s were a time when fat cats and Wall Street guys were just...

running the world.

Donald Trump was ascendant.

Yeah, yeah.

And so we called ourselves, you know, the underdogs, biting the ankles of the overdogs.

We reported Trump's bankruptcies.

We went after the Times and we had a column on CAA and Mike Ovitz.

I mean, we really did a lot of funny and disrespectful reporting.

So it had a sense of humor.

It was really hard.

But it wasn't satire.

It was actual reporting with a little comedic edge.

It took us all by surprise by being like a big...

sensation.

It suddenly was popular and it launched.

Most of the people who did that, we did it for six years starting in 86, kind of run the media now.

That's where I kind of learned everything.

It is weird, right?

When you get to an age where all these people you started with, you were all kids and you look around you go oh my god it happened no and now you bump into someone like walter isaacson we've all had a great ride was he at spa no he wasn't but i knew him in that circle circle how cool it is kind of nice i have a fantasy about new york in the 80s because it's very billy joe it's very everyone at elaine's was so knocked out you know coke the limousines that is definitely what it was like we were all public school kids we were all from outside of new york we had that nose pressed up against the glass trying to figure this out.

And it was a real time of uptown, downtown.

You know, uptown were all these socialites in like poof dresses going to cancer galas and everything.

It was a time of Tom Wolf social x-rays, bonfire of the vanities.

But downtown, it was area and these nightclubs that were creative and sort of cool, but also really pretentious and arty.

Sure, sure, sure.

So the targets were everywhere you looked.

Oh, yeah.

What a colorful array.

It was fun.

I certainly like New York of today, but I also went there in the 80s with my mom when I was a kid and it was a very dangerous feeling.

Yes.

Yes.

I mean, walking through Times Squares, you're like holding mom's hand extra tight.

But I do miss how colorful and segmented.

And you cross four blocks and it's like everyone's now this way.

And that was fun.

You're like almost time traveling.

I love that concept because I sometimes think about walking around New York City.

I mean, you get a little bit of that here with all the wonderful old signage and everything.

But I like the idea of walking through a city as time travel, which is so thrilling.

And you can still walk into Katz's Deli on Ludlow Street and you feel like you're in 1962.

Or just being in the village and there's the one road that's got a bend in it.

And you're like, oh God, how old is that road?

Yeah, it's very historic.

When did you start at New Yorker?

Okay, right.

After SPY, I edited this weekly called The New York Observer, which was also kind of sarcastic and had an attitude and we sort of made fun of people.

And then in 1997, when Tina Brown ran the New Yorker, she hired me.

So I've been there since then.

The New Yorker turns 100 this year, just like SNL turns 50.

And I'm fascinated by there's a lot of common ground between the two institutions that people aren't that aware of.

Tell me, I mean, first of all, they're implicitly New York.

They're New York things.

But first, I'll say, so when Harold Ross started the magazine 100 years ago, he called it the Comic Weekly.

It was this roaring 20s, jazz age, very fizzy publication with a lot of fun and gossip.

And when Tina hired me, she knew that I had that impulse and I wanted to make things entertaining and before her William Sean had been editing the New Yorker for some decades and it did a lot of quality stuff but there were sort of jokes about how it published five-part series on grain

so she really wanted to enliven it I edit just the straight-up humor pieces but also the non-fiction writers that I edit and have brought in are all just people with real voice.

Do you have a relationship, I imagine, with Sederus?

Yeah, I know him.

I edit him sometimes.

He's great.

Yeah, what did I just, just was his the Pope piece in New York, or was that somewhere else?

Touching the coffee.

Yes, about when the Pope had all those comedians there.

Yeah, yeah.

What a wild event for the comedy world.

I think

it's so cool that the Pope did that.

It's weird.

There's something that I can't really wrap my head around of like why, but I think maybe he just loves

comedians.

He's not able to really exercise that.

Yeah, I can't figure out his angle.

Okay, I have a theory.

Yeah, let's hear it.

I think that he just must be much savvier and worldlier than we think.

And this sort of goes hand in hand with why SNL is still so important after 50 years, even when it has seasons that are lackluster.

It's almost like we're in a comedy glut.

You're riding the subway or here, I guess, looking at billboards.

And it didn't used to be that every advertisement was funny.

Humor is just the language that we all speak in.

And it used to be more of a cordoned-off thing.

But now you kind of have to be funny to even be able to get by in the world.

Yeah, that's true.

The Pope probably thought this is a way in.

If you get the comedians on your side, you're kind of winning the war.

I mean, it's something that Trump completely doesn't understand because he has the worst sense of humor of anyone I've ever heard about.

He's so outrageous that it is...

funny.

But you're laughing at him.

You're laughing at him, but I don't know if it's worked to some extent inadvertently.

He has a playground sense of humor.

He makes fun of people and humiliates them, and people think that's funny.

I think the way I would refine it is I don't think he's got a sophisticated sense of humor or even a good sense of humor, but he's a pure showman.

Yes.

That is right.

Like I remember one week when I was spending the whole week at SNL, Alec Baldwin got arrested for not the rust thing, but he got arrested for punching a guy over a parking place.

Sure.

And I remember being there in Lauren's office when the text came through and everyone was like, oh God.

And it was also kind of funny because it wasn't that serious.

And then cut to Trump at a press conference because those were the years when he was railing against Baldwin all the time because he was playing him.

So a reporter said to Trump, did you hear about Alec Baldwin getting arrested?

And Trump just kind of gives this like half smile and he goes, I wish him luck.

And I remember watching that with Lauren Michaels and Lauren just said, God, Trump just has like the exact right showbiz instinct to know how to respond.

Yeah.

Yeah, he does.

It's good.

It was underplayed, but it was funny.

The timing of this is perfect because as you just said, 50-year anniversary of SNL.

And I guess I didn't realize that you had worked for him.

That makes a lot of sense.

But I'm imagining you're just a humongous fan of the show and impressed with how this thing continues.

I am a fan of it, but I wouldn't say that's really why I got into writing the book.

It was after the 40th.

I thought that show was really interesting and moving.

You know, as I said, I stayed friends with a lot of those people over these years.

And frankly, For years, I just heard all these different people I knew, mostly in the writer's room, complaining about Lauren or just saying oh and he did this and he cut that and he's this way in that kind of exasperated way when I went on Lawrence O'Donnell's show he said this book is like a workplace comedy it's a little bit like the office right so people complain about each other I knew that he was mercurial and that they were all like obsessed with him and always trying to figure him out but I didn't think that the wider world knew that about him so I thought this would be a good book so it wasn't out of pure fandom you know it was more just like as an editor I thought that's a good story.

And also, Lauren Michaels is someone who's kind of been hiding in plain sight for 50 years.

Such a mystery.

Doesn't talk to the press.

And the inscrutability has kind of worked for him, both as a management tool and as well.

He's like Anna Winter.

I put them in the same category.

He's the Anna Wintour.

Like they are both like elusive and huge figures that have major impact.

Well, that's funny because it's tied into the Pope because the one thing I wanted to say about the Pope thing was both times I would go because I personally want the story.

And then also my other part of my mind be like, look how insane this status thing is.

You still buy into it.

Like, one person has a given status where they just summon a hundred of the most prominent people who have their own status, and everyone shows up.

And they bought their own plane tickets.

Yes.

And if you're the aliens watching from above, you're like, huh, that guy can do that.

That's just so fascinating to me.

That even you could be in on it and also be inclined to play along.

So then, yes, Lauren also has this really unique Wizard of Oz.

All the people you interview, there's these very common comparisons that come up about him obi-wan kenobi mr ripley some of them have even compared him to trump yeah but i would also put him in the george washington category a little bit which is he didn't talk and he was surrounded by all these people that wouldn't shut the fuck up so they just assumed he was so smart because he didn't even feel compelled to brag and they couldn't understand that in his quietness people just projected a lot exactly lauren is obviously incredibly gifted and also he's not superhuman but i do think he's taken on this kind of superhuman quality i think that's true part of it is when these people come to him when he plucks them from obscurity they tend to be 22 or 23.

think about like bill hayter coming from oklahoma where his previous show biz job had been being like a pa on iron chef people that come to new york they're suddenly i mean they're not making a hell of a lot of money but they're on television and lauren has kind of opened the whole world to them and they invest him with this power.

Some of it is like a daddy thing, but some of it is also like, oh my God, this man changed my life.

And Conan O'Brien said to me, everyone concurs with this.

When you work for SNL as a writer or cast, it basically takes two weeks from going from like insanely grateful to being like put out that, how are you ever going to get out of these golden handcuffs?

You know,

Lauren just made so much happen for them.

I mean, he told me once that there's a real distinction in his social world between all the casts and all the people that he's hired and his his friends who came into the business on their own steam, Paul Simon, Steve Martin.

They don't owe him everything.

So it's an easier relationship.

Yes.

Yeah.

Someone who had the experience, which is come to LA, go to the Groundlings because I know that's a feeder for Saturday Night Live.

Singularly focused on being good there so I can get to Saturday Night Live.

The only goal is Saturday Night Live.

I was just talking to another actor.

Yes.

It's so unique in that if you audition for Oliver Stone and you don't get it, that's okay.

The Cohen brothers are going to cast a movie in two weeks and you got a shot there.

And then so-and-so is going to cast a movie.

But Saturday Night Live is the only option if that's what your mind was set on.

If you don't get the audition or you get it and you don't get made or he opens up the kingdoms, I think there's so rarely a singular focus goal in show business.

Generally, you're like, I want to act.

But he's the only gatekeeper.

That's it.

One of the great things that Tina Fey said to me about him is considering when he came to power, that is the phrase to use with him.

You know, he never got got that 80s disease.

Having been in journalism in the 80s, I know what she means of wanting to boast about being an insane workaholic.

I mean, I remember you'd read stories about Jeff Katzenberg and Barry Diller, and they'd say, I get up at 4 a.m.

with my trainer for 90 minutes, then my stock guy comes.

I sleep three hours a day.

He never had that

thing.

From the very beginning, he's had this almost European kind of fixation on leisure.

He's always made the show's schedule correspond to the vacation schedule of New York private schools.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he makes sure he takes a lot of time off in swanky locales and he tells all of his people to do the same.

And aside from opening the professional world to these people, he has this kind of Henry Higgins thing with them.

He likes to teach them how to live the good life.

You know, he doesn't want them to be killing themselves and staying up all night.

And one of the things that was fun about tracking his life over 50 years is the quality of that advice has kind of changed as he's become more of a moguly kind of guy.

In the 70s, it would be like, rotate your drug use.

But now it's a number of different people told me, yeah, when you're buying an apartment, he'll say two things.

First of all, get an apartment that's more expensive than you think you can afford.

Because then you come home at the end of an exhausting day and you'll say,

who lives here?

I live here.

And then the other thing that he says to these people, he says, you know what's better than 10-foot ceilings?

12-foot ceilings.

Wow.

His boss tells of that.

When they're making $7,500 a week in Manhattan.

He's aware that they're, and this is another great Lauren phrase, they're first generation famous, meaning that their parents back in Peoria aren't going to be able to answer their questions about, should I get a Lexus or a Tesla?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I like that.

Okay, so let's maybe just start with.

where Lauren comes from.

Because I do wonder if part of being inoculated to that 80s trope of I'm a workaholic.

I wonder if there's any Canadian in the mix.

His personal demeanor, his personal humor is that kind of Canadian self-deprecating thing.

Although I do say at some point in the book, he is that way, and yet he's under no illusion that anybody takes his self-deprecation seriously.

Right, right, right.

Right.

He knows his place.

Yeah.

Oh, the Steve Martin quote you put in there is so great.

It's like, Dave Letterman is truly self-deprecating.

He doesn't think he's any good.

Lauren does not suffer from this issue.

Yeah.

But in talking about his childhood, he'll say, Canada's a really boring place.

You have to make your own fun.

It's harder to find a stimulating life.

And he always had his eye south of the border.

He said it was like growing up next to Imperial Rome.

But I think that you're right that there is a kind of a Canadian mildness.

The thing about wanting to take his leisure seriously, that's connected to the way he views comedy.

Like he doesn't like comedy that he calls sweaty.

Like, I wish I had room to have a glossary on the back of this book because there's so much terminology.

Sweaty comedy is like comedy that's trying too hard, that's pushing

and needy.

He'll always say the art of producing is not leaving any fingerprints, making it look easy.

He'll say Fred Astair never grunted while he danced.

That's part of his work philosophy.

His grandparents owned a movie theater, but that's a unique experience where the family has declared, we value show business.

You say in the book, his grandparents would talk about all these actors, Humphrey Bogart, on a level where he would think they might know all these people.

One of my favorite things about that story, and I don't know if he even made this connection, but when he was telling me that they would be talking about Spencer Tracy and he thought those people were his friends, I thought, how amazing that this guy would grow up to be someone who routinely just talks about Mick and Jack and Paul.

One of the fun things about writing this guy's biography is that all the years before he got onto the world stage and became the Lorn Michaels that we know, it seemed to me that almost every experience he had, you could draw a line between that and the producing skills he would later use at SNL.

Like even when he was a tiny boy watching your show of shows or Phil Silver's or whatever, with his grandmother, who was the movie savant, she knew about Showbiz.

He told me that they'd be looking at Jack Benny on TV.

And he loved Jack Benny because of his underplayed, low-key thing.

But she would say, so he's really old now.

He started out as a young man in vaudeville.

Then he got older.

His hair turned white and he was a star of radio.

But then television came along, a visual medium.

So all these guys had to dye their hair black, or if you're George Burns, wear a ridiculous rug.

So you imagine tiny Lorne thinking about this Darwinian aspect of showbiz eras shifting and moving and having to adjust.

And that's really the key to how he's been able to keep it going for 50 years, paying attention to when the music changes and when the technology changes.

That's the impossible.

That's so interesting.

That's the only quality that he has is keeping it relevant and fresh, which seems impossible for 50 years.

But I would say even like his access.

So he had a rich aunt and uncle.

Yeah.

I mean, people tease him about.

being name-droppy and starfuckery and stuff.

Am I allowed to say that?

Oh, yeah.

You can say anything.

When he was a little boy, his family, I think, was sort of on the drabber side.

His mom was was a classic, like Philip Roth, Jewish mother, really breathed down his neck.

And his father was a furrier.

And then he died when Lauren was 14.

But he had this aunt and uncle lived down the street who are in a fancier part of Toronto.

They were very rich.

They had a swimming pool in their house.

Yeah, their swimming pool.

Indoor?

They just recently sold for $18 million.

You were the reader, man.

So they were rich and glamorous.

Lauren was like, oh, I wish I were that family.

And when Lauren's dad died, they really stepped in.

And Uncle Pep, great name, took Lauren under his wing and taught him everything about business and the world.

And I think that is also the key to why Lauren extends himself that way to his own young charges.

He wants to show them how to do it.

Yes, such close proximity to wealth, coveting that, seeing that the attention in the family is show business movie stars.

We all want to be the star of our family first.

And it's like, if you see the things that are valued, and then also getting kind of an education of how to move in an upscale thing as later in life he'll have to do acting like you've been there even though you haven't.

Right.

So how does he get from Toronto to Laffin?

He's grown up in this very parochial little neighborhood, very much like Philip Ross, Newark, Forest Hills, where he grew up.

It was all these young Jewish kids whose parents really wanted them to be lawyers.

Take one second to talk about that article that came out.

Oh, I think that's really fascinating.

I stumbled on the greatest piece of research.

It was this 600-page book called the Crestwood Heights Report.

The Canadian government funded a study of this one neighborhood in Toronto.

It was Lauren's neighborhood.

They changed the name from Forest Hill to Crestwood Heights, and they were trying to improve mental health services in Canada.

So they did this deep dive interviewing all these children and parents in Lawrence neighborhood.

I could not figure out if they actually interviewed the Lipowitzes.

Lauren didn't know.

He was a little boy.

And then they published this huge psychological report.

It kind of reminded me of Peyton Place in the U.S.

It was an indictment of the very bougie values of this class.

And it said all the mothers were just competitive with the other mothers about where their kids were getting into school.

I have to believe there's just a nice layer of anti-Semitism under all of it.

No?

I mean, it was a very Jewish area.

That's probably true.

Yeah.

I mean, why were they?

It seems so judgmental.

They were really tisk-tisking the fact that they were strivers.

Right.

Who wasn't a striver in that post-war era.

I guess it's also that Canadian toll pompy thing.

They were disapproving of how some of these houses had those clear plastic slip covers.

The kids were banished to the basement.

Yeah.

Well, maybe it was also trying to say what many other subsequent studies have said, which is money doesn't equal happiness.

But it had more of a nouveau-rich kind of a take.

Like these people were grotesque in their striving for their values.

It was much more of a straight judgment of how they were doing it.

But before laughing, I wanted to go back to something that you said about Amy Poehler, pretending you belong somewhere when you don't.

One of the things that Amy was smartest about in talking to me about Lauren, she felt that completely beyond all the comedy things you can learn from him, and he has a lot of theories of comedy.

He's like a comedy professor.

She thought that he was just so great at teaching you how to be in a room, how to walk into a room.

And you got Paul McCartney at the dinner table and not lose your shit and start acting like a weirdo.

Yes.

And being able to go into a pitch meeting and just be at the grown-ups table.

And when you think about it, that is the real skill.

And I think that's something he had in spades at a weird early age.

And even his cousin from Toronto, Neil Levy, told me that when he first came to New York, he was barely 30 and he was hanging out with Mick Jagger and Paul Simon.

And we're like, how does Lauren know these people?

But he said that he thought that it was just some kind of like EQ sort of thing, an intuitive sense of knowing what a person is going to be interested in talking about, not gushing, treating them just like a regular room temperature kind of conversation.

And I think that that is part of it.

And he does teach all his people how to do that.

And that's why so many of the SNL people, aside from having good comedy or acting careers, they know how to produce, they know how to be showrunners.

They know how to handle people.

Yes.

But anyway, so go back to your other question.

He was in Toronto.

He had this comedy partner who was a much more of a Borscht Beltique, Seltzer Down the Pants kind of comic.

And they did two-man comedy, very corny, blackouts, punchline setups.

and that was a way to go for a while.

This guy had met Jack Rollins in New York, who was Woody Allen's manager.

So again, Lauren always had this eye on who can get me up to the next step.

He was smart about that.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert,

if you dare.

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But then he always felt like one of the problems with Canada, it's almost too polite.

Even when he and his partner were doing well, the CBC would say, okay, your turn's over.

Time to give someone else a chance.

There isn't this American idea of a trajectory up, up, up, up, up.

Yeah, it never stops.

He goes to LA as a writer.

He's knocking around really the lamest string of variety television shows you can imagine.

The beautiful Phyllis Diller show, where Phyllis Diller, who's a genius, I think, but still the show, she would play the saxophone to Ernest Borg9 and stuff like that.

And Perry Como's Christmas special, things like this.

Even though these were really cruddy things, he always had a takeaway.

He learned something from even the lamest experiences.

Right.

On the Perry Como show, the executive producer said to him, you know why Perry Como is a star?

Watch him when he comes out on the stage to sing.

He comes out and he walks from the wings over to the microphone.

And it's just the way he walked, the pace of the walking, made him a star.

It's like, whoa, but a little takeaway like that.

Anyways, those shows always got canceled or he got fired.

So then he ends up at Laugh-In, which was a hit show.

But as he said, it wasn't any more fun working on a hit show than working on a show that was about to be canceled because the way it was done at Laugh-In, and this informs how he eventually would set up the process at SNL.

The writers were in a motel far away from the studio, throwing out jokes that just kind of went into the maw.

And then somebody would rewrite them and then two other people would rewrite them.

He never even went into the studio.

And that show, I used to watch it.

I'm that old.

Every big star in Hollywood would show up on that show and do a walk-on.

And if you're Lauren and you're excited about glamour and think how horrible it must have felt to be in the motel with the Shmoe copywriters and you're not meeting Dean Martin and everybody else, he'd watch the show in the motel with his fellow writers on Monday.

That's the only way you ever knew if any of your material was used.

You know, you'd maybe see like a glimmer of one of your jokes.

One of the great things about SNL being live, and Lauren realized this almost accidentally, is that the audience tells you whether it works.

That's why the dress rehearsal is so important at SNL.

He's sitting there underneath where the audience sits and he's listening to them.

They're his secret sauce.

I mean, of course, he has his own opinion too, but a proper laugh is a kind of combustible, uncontrolled thing.

You can't fake it.

So hearing the laugh is really important.

Yeah.

And also, just to jump to the live aspect, improv live is spectacular.

Improv on television is terrible because you've lost the element of danger that failure is on the table around every corner.

There's no safety net.

And so SNL being live is such an interesting,

they've captured some of that danger, even in the live broadcast.

Whereas like laughing, edited, something gets reduced.

There's no fear there.

That is exactly right.

And I sometimes wonder when you see the show Innate Age, it's so thrilling.

My kids were both like theater kids, and they were always just like, oh my God, it's like a theater because people are running in and out with pieces of scenery someone's changing their pants over there yes and

get the sense of the excitement and people at home who don't see the scenery coming in that but you still get the adrenaline I think the audience bridges that gap the audience is like a huge character in Saturday live yes I saw this a little bit when I worked for Lauren but also if you're there at the show there's all this like and then you'll see Lauren just to the left of home base he'll be completely still he'll have his hands in his pockets it's just this this kind of little pool of calm.

And it makes his mystique even stranger.

Well, that's his way to control chaos, which is if you enter a room and someone's shouting and you start talking very low, you can bring them down.

Right.

And in the old days, he would always stand there with a glass of white wine.

Oh, elegant.

To kind of keep it like, I'm just at a cocktail party.

Yeah.

But the live thing, the fear, the no-net thing, this is probably something that I'm able to bring to this.

When I met Lauren, we hardly knew each other, but working on the new show in 1984, part of the reason that was a big failure, I think, is that unlike Saturday Night Live, it wasn't live.

It was taped on a Thursday night, edited all night long, and then it would go up Friday.

As people who worked with him for a long time say, Lauren's the kind of guy not good at term papers, really good at tests, meaning he needs the deadline.

So at the new show,

it was structured a lot like SNL sketches, guest stars, but there'd be an audience and they'd be locked in the studio because sometimes these tapings would go for three or four hours.

People would try to leave and it couldn't let them leave because you needed them there.

And, you know, I remember people would yell cut in the middle of a sketch and you started over.

They'd have to patch it together in the editing room.

They'd have to add a laugh track.

And as Jim Downey said, you had all the crudeness of live and the staleness of tape.

So that was also a lesson that like, okay, you need that electricity of live.

Yeah.

What is the saying that you wrote down?

You famously says, we don't go on because we're ready.

We go on because it's 11.30.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is a very liberating approach in a way.

You know, I was thinking about what you were just saying about improv and how it's like the circus or something.

Like if you're looking at it on a tape, it just could be CGI.

But if you're sitting right next to the person in the trapeze, you're kind of going,

yes.

Improv and SNL.

It's something I explored a little bit in the book.

The relationship between improv people and SNL is an interesting one because I don't think most viewers viewers know.

I didn't know this until your book.

Every kid takes improv lessons now the way when I was a kid, you take piano lessons.

So improv is such a big thing in the culture, but there's no improvisation on SNL.

People who have dared to improvise, like Damon Wayans, they're fired.

What about failing?

Like Will Farrell, positive I've seen moments where the thing's gone awry, the audience is in on it.

He starts feeling ad lib.

Yes.

Acknowledging what's happening and just bridging this gap.

I guess if something were to go wrong,

then you can sort of ad-lib and save it.

But if you ad-lib like a joke or something, you're fired.

And it's partly about huge respect for the writer and the writing, which goes back to laughing.

But it's also everything is timed with a stopwatch down to the second because they have to know when that commercial break is going to land.

And so that's why these famous incidents like Sinead O'Connor tearing up the picture of the Pope or Elvis Costello quitting and going into another song.

The reason those things made people upset wasn't just that they were messing with the plan, but because it could throw off the camera operators and could throw off the timing.

It's a play.

Yeah, if Elvis plays a different song, well, what if that's 44 seconds longer and then the Toyota ad can't run?

Yes.

So the irony is you don't improv on the show, but improv players

do really well.

when they're in the cast and that i think is because they're really good at ensemble work To be good at improv, as you know, you have to be really tuned in to listen.

And that's why improv guys like you, as opposed to like stand-ups, are good on the show.

What are his rules of sketch?

Some of them are really broad, tonal things like do it in sunshine.

He likes to remind people that comedy is an entertainment.

And he doesn't have a lot of patience for people who want to do some kind of dark brechtian black box.

And sometimes do it in sunshine is something as simple as the costumes.

Something that I think I cut from the book because the book was way too long in the beginning.

Well, when you write for 10 years,

you're liable to stack up some pages.

Bruce McCulloch, one of the kids in the hall, was a writer on the show in 85, 86.

And he told me that Joan Cusack was in the cast then, and they were doing a run-through of a sketch, and she was in some kind of dowdy dress.

And Lauren said, kids, put her in something more attractive.

You know, she's a pretty girl.

And Bruce got really mad and he said, okay, Lauren, you want me to put her in a fucking bikini?

And, you know, he later said, I can't believe I wasn't fired for that.

But the point is just that you want it to be pleasant and right, and you don't want people yelling at each other.

You don't want to write anger.

I found this really interesting.

He has no tolerance for people that are doing impersonations out of a place of hate.

And this is an increasingly interesting dynamic that's presented itself in the last decade on the show, which is everyone's politics are so fucking rigid now that you have these performers that almost refuse to lampoon liberals.

Then if they're playing a conservative, they hate the conservative they're playing with and they have a tendency to make them unenjoyable to watch.

Yeah, it was so interesting for me to spend a lot of time there during the first Trump administration because a lot of this tension was kind of coalescing for the first time.

Taryn Killam, who had been playing Trump before Alec Baldwin did, was really outraged to get a note every now and then saying, can you give him a little more charm?

And Lorne didn't mean like, because we like Trump.

Of course.

But he meant, it's an entertainment.

It's got to be funny.

You go where the laughs are.

And he always uses as an example how British villains, like Bond villains, or think of Alan Rickman and Die Hard, or even some Shakespeare characters.

They're fun, kind of fun.

Yeah, I mean, they're kind of oily, and you like to watch them.

Another thing that I've heard him say a lot is: idiots play better than assholes.

They're just going to be kind of funnier.

And Doctor Evil is sort of the apotheosis of that.

Yeah.

So I think that some of the more millennial, younger people in the cast, that's a hard thing for them to get and swallow.

Yeah, if someone didn't want to play Feinstein.

Right.

Cecily Strong felt awkward about a piece where she was.

playing Feinstein.

It's kind of a drooly, daughtery old lady, but she is.

There was comedy in that.

And one week I was there.

He wanted Kate McKinnon to do her Angela Merkel impersonation, which is funny.

You know,

she didn't want to do it because Merkel had announced that she was stepping down and it was like just too sad.

But as a Woody Allen character would say in Annie Hall, what, or his mother, what concern of that is yours?

You know, the people laugh.

Right.

Well, he has to give a speech at one point that you're privy to, which is he basically just says, your politics aren't the politics of the show.

Those are two different things.

Our obligation is to bring.

truth and humor to power on both sides.

That's right.

We're not doing one version here.

He takes some heat for saying this, but political comedy on on television has veered more toward a kind of a virtue signaling, you're with us or you're against us.

You know, even the Daily Show, which of course makes fun of liberals, you definitely feel there's an ideology there.

You could watch five minutes of it and be pretty certain.

Yeah, and you feel like Fox viewers are probably not watching it at all.

Right.

Where you have these famous sketches of who was it that did Jimmy Carter?

Oh, yeah, Dan Aykroyd.

Yeah, Dan Aykroyd.

They have a rich tradition of blasting liberals and Republicans.

Oh, and Daryl Hammond's Bill Clinton.

So funny.

Oh, incredible.

Yeah.

We live in such a strange time now, especially in Trump 2.

This whole culture war thing that I think people feel like everyone should be mobilized at all times.

And Lawrence Take, I guess, would be that's not what they're there for.

And it reminds me of this great word that Seth Myers coined when he was the head writer, which I just think is so smart.

It's the word clapter.

The idea of claptor is there's some political humor that you do it, you make a political joke, and people go, Yes, yes, of course, we're very good.

They're clapping because they agree with the sentiment.

But what you want is you want this uncontrollable physical reaction of a laugh.

Yes.

But like at the same time, back then, 2018, when Trump was two years in, it was around the midterms.

I remember talking to some of the writers, and this was when Trump was tweeting about SNL every day.

Remember, he was obsessed.

And they said, it's a little scary to me that the president of the United States is paying so much attention to the job that I do.

And

some dumb punchline I write causes him to blow up the world.

Right.

He's pretty dialed in.

Well, even Chappelle and his recent monologues.

Because I know you're watching.

I know.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he is.

That's crazy.

He's talking directly to the president right now.

It's crazy.

I want to talk about the drug stuff.

This.

field of people really over-indexes in addiction, myself included.

And to love and root for and guide all these people, he would have to have a great radar for what's happening over the years, having watched so many of the performers struggle with this.

And I'm most curious how it's evolved for him, what kind of regrets he has.

Chris Rock told me, you know, this guy has been.

hundreds, if not thousands, of people's boss.

You get to be a pretty good student of human character that way.

I think that in the very beginning, it was the 70s.

And his whole idea was he wanted to update the kind of moribund variety show formula with the concerns of his generation, sex and drugs and rock and roll.

I mean, a lot of drug humor in those first five years.

His feeling back then, which was not unusual, was people's private lives are their business.

What you do on your own time is your own business.

I'm not going to tell you what to do.

I'm not the man.

And I think if you party yourself, it can be a little misleading.

Like, well, I smoke weed.

And I mean, he's getting pulled over with weed in the car.

Yeah, I did a thing at the 92nd Street Y recently with Bob Odenkirk, who I guess I didn't know this was a kind of a straight arrow as a young man.

And he said one of the things that shocked him in reading my book was getting a sense of what a pothead Lauren had been.

I don't think that's that alarming in any way.

But in the 70s, they were all practically living at the offices.

You know, they'd stay there all night.

There's a lot of Coke, which fueled them through these all-night writing sessions.

And as Lauren said, probably the office was nicer than most of their apartments at that point.

Sure.

But the advice was basically just rotate your drugs.

And there was, I think, this sense of if you can't handle it, it's kind of your problem.

And the other thing that's interesting, and even if you look at the drug humor on the show, things like drugs and eating disorders, they hadn't been medicalized yet.

They were just kind of character things.

And I remember Lauren once saying to me that between the movie Arthur and Arthur 2, alcoholism moved from being a subject for comedy and a disease.

Yeah.

Because there was this big cultural shift.

God, that hits home.

I just got to say, that was my dad's favorite movie.

It was one of our favorite movies.

We watched Arthur a hundred times.

He was also a raging alcoholic.

And then even between the gap of Arthur one and two, my dad went to treatment and got sober.

So it literally happened real time for us.

Oh, wait.

It's so interesting.

It's not super cute that this guy's hammered all day long.

So that was his take.

And then Belushi dies.

What year did he die?

It was when he was off the show.

So it was like 85 or 6-ish or later.

I'm thinking it was around 86, and we're going to have to fact-check that.

Okay.

Monica will dig right in the middle.

It was before that.

It was during the hiatus year.

So it was probably early, mid-80s.

And Lauren always is a little bit of a point of pride in saying that no one's actually died while working for the show.

Oh, dude.

That's funny.

Well, while their tenure?

Well, he means just while they were employed on the show.

Right.

Okay.

I might take that.

I mean, he would say that it's because there's something about the discipline of the show, which is almost military in its rigor.

You got to approach it like an addiction.

Oh, that's right.

The show itself is an addiction.

You end up regulating how you feel by this job.

And it works.

And then when the job goes away, you're in trouble.

In both the case of Chris Farley and Belushi, they were off the show for a certain number of years.

Without the structure of the show, they were kind of spinning out.

Yeah.

But anyway, when Belushi died, it really hit him hard.

And I think he felt like this whole approach of just letting people do their own thing on their own time, this was the wrong approach.

We're a tribe and we have to look out for each other.

And so by the time Chris Farley comes along, 10 years later, whatever, from the beginning, he clearly had addiction issues.

Lauren would call him into his office and give him these talks about the drinking or the drugs.

And the sad thing was that for Farley, who was such a child man kind of guy, Bob Oden Kirk, I remember telling me that Farley would be excited to be called into Lauren's office.

It was like the kind of thrill of being in the principal's office, but at the same time, you're getting in trouble.

He couldn't metabolize it.

But Lauren had really changed his approach.

He would ban Farley from the show for weeks at a time if he was too fucked up.

Okay.

He sent him to a series of really tough love rehab places.

And obviously it didn't do it for him.

Yeah.

I think he's been pretty hands-on in guiding Pete Davidson through his different issues and Mulaney.

And they all talk about how Lauren is a really helpful person to talk to about it.

So I think that he definitely realized, okay, I can play a role here.

But also, I never saw any drugs in the time that I spent over there in the last number of years.

He joked once.

He said, yeah, now it's all about Ozempic.

Yeah, that's a drug.

What are Lauren's five rules of show business longevity?

Oh boy, let's see.

And if you get three out of five, that'll be good.

Well, he'll say, you can't make an entrance if you don't make an exit.

And he'll sometimes say that to people when they're leaving the show.

You kind of have to switch horses.

I mean, strange.

It's something he's never done.

Although he did make the exit in 1980 and then came back.

Another thing he likes to say is, when do people leave show business?

And the answer is never.

No one ever leaves show business.

And then he'll say, you're out of the business five years before somebody will tell you.

I mean, that relates a little bit to his management style that I think explains.

He knows it's a long game.

When he was in Hollywood as a young man, he saw the Smothers brothers be taken off the air because they wouldn't let up on the Vietnam stuff that they were doing, which was brilliant.

But the lesson he took away from that is, yeah, they're brilliant, but they made martyrs of themselves.

And now they don't get to do a show.

Even in his speech, like this show airs in 50 states yeah and i think that that would also inform how he viewed what went down with conan and the tonight show tell me well that was a very complicated thing where lauren picked conan significantly a writer you know like lauren was to succeed david letterman what a preposterous idea like a comedy writer who's not ever even been a professional performer and he fostered his career and then years later when conan took over the tonight show this is something that the Hollywood people still kind of parse and talk about, like it's some Greek myth.

Yeah, yeah.

Lauren was not made executive producer of The Tonight Show, the way he was over Conan's late night.

And partly it was Tonight Show was in L.A., Lauren was in New York.

There was a sense in the business that it was a tactical mistake

to not have Lauren as the godfather figure who had big pull with NBC, even if he's just like a fire extinguisher behind glass.

Because then when NBC started messing around with Conan's slot, I don't know if you remember.

Oh, yeah.

Jay Leno didn't really want to retire at that point.

There's sides here.

Oh, yeah.

I refused to be on one.

I think everyone got fucked.

I agree.

Let's give a little context for people who don't know what happened.

Okay, so when Conan was successfully doing the late night show, he was being wooed by other networks.

So NBC, I think this was the idea of his agent, Gavin Pallone.

It's kind of a kooky idea.

They said, well, okay, if you promise him the tonight show in X number of years, like nine years, he'll stay.

So they signed this weird, you're the lady in waiting kind of thing with Conan.

He's stuck around.

The date approaches.

The NBC is like, oh shit, we don't want to get rid of Jay.

And Jay doesn't want to go.

So they were over a barrel.

I mean, it was kind of a dumb deal if you think about it.

So they did put Conan in on the tonight show.

Jay didn't want to go, so they did this weird thing where they put him at 10 p.m.

That show is actually not doing great because people aren't used to seeing Jay Leno tell jokes at 10.

Yeah.

So then it started to erode the lead-in for the 11 o'clock news, which started to erode the lead-in for Conan's show.

Yes.

And you're trying to like figure out what is the broken part.

Is Conan not appealing?

Is it the lead-in that sucks?

So then what they decide to do is they said, okay, we're going to put Jay on later.

And he's going to come right before Conan and we're going to move Conan's tonight show to 12.05.

So it's this little adjustment.

Nothing anybody wants to do.

About it now in the age of streaming.

It's like, duh.

Who cares?

But Conan felt like, why is the network sticking around with me?

Because I've been waiting all these years.

When you think about it now, it seems so minor.

But he grew up revering the tonight show as this franchise in the same way that Lauren did as a child.

So that's so interesting.

They had this similar vibration.

And Conan got this idea in his head that the tonight show at 1205 simply isn't the tonight show.

That's like breach of contract.

Yeah, Team Coco.

I'm with Coco.

It became this huge movement.

But at the same time, I think Conan hoped that Lauren Michaels, who had basically been his patron and guardian angel early in his career, would maybe intervene with NBC to try to not let this bad thing happen.

But Lauren didn't so much.

And Lauren doesn't really want to ever talk about this head on.

He's just way too self-possessed and cool for that.

But people around Lauren feel that.

It was an act of disrespect.

It's kind of a godfather thing, that he hadn't been given that EP credit and that he wasn't going to stick his neck out.

Now, he told me that he found it painful to watch Conan twisting in the wind.

And he thought if he did have the opportunity to talk to Conan, he would have said, this is like dying on a molehill.

Don't make a martyr of yourself like the Smothers Brothers.

Don't make a huge fuss out of this thing, which is five minutes.

Stay on the air.

That's the rule of show business.

Stay on the air, stay on the air, stay on the air.

But then the Conan people, and I've known Conan forever from college and his producer, Jeff Ross, live in my building.

Those guys, they also have a completely understandable explanation.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

They're newbies, they're young'uns that come out to LA.

And they say the NBC people said, you know what?

We don't need to bring Lauren Michaels.

He's on the East Coast.

You guys are set.

We don't need it.

And they're like, okay, sure, boss.

They're new.

They don't know what they're doing either.

I actually don't think there's a total bad guy in the situation.

I guess NBC is the bad guy, but it's not like this was their master plan.

It all went to shit and they didn't know how to fix it.

It was dumb to promise something you didn't know you were going to be able to execute.

Very corporate to be like, yeah, you're going to get this and have no idea.

Conan obviously completely recovered.

He's had an amazing career.

And I think his whole podcast, Empire Thing Now, is so cool.

And he and Lauren, it was emotionally painful because they really were close.

And I think this created a feeling of confusion and frostiness.

And over time, that's healed.

And I'm really happy.

Conan appeared in the Five Timers Club a couple of seasons ago.

It's just nice to see that.

You touched on it a little bit, but it launches in 75.

And then I guess in 80, he splits.

Yeah.

Does he have a reason why he splits at that moment?

He just thought, SNL, okay, I'll try this.

He had always wanted to do this hip variety show.

And here in New York, they're saying, okay, you can do this at 11.30.

One of the reasons he liked the idea is he referred to that time slot as the vacant lot on the edge of town, meaning no network executives are going to pay any attention to it.

He can use it almost as a laboratory.

No testing because it's live.

There's no pilot.

He certainly never thought it was going to be a 50-year institution.

And over the five years, it got really hard.

There were a lot of drugs.

It was physically taxing.

He starts losing the key parts of his cast.

After the first year, Chevy Chase defects and goes to Hollywood.

That almost broke his heart.

He only did one year.

One year in a few episodes in the second season.

That was really hard for him because Chevy was like a brother.

You know, he calls him a founder of the show.

Then he brings in Billy Murray in the second season, but then he loses Belushi and he loses Ackroyd.

And so by the end of the fifth year, they're all exhausted.

What he later learned is, oh, it's like a sports franchise.

Yes.

People move on.

Keep the rookie bench full.

And you got to have them on a seven-year contract when they arrive.

But so after five years, he's kind of like, oh my God, I'm exhausted.

I need to regroup.

He says to NBC, okay, I'll come back, but you have to give me like six months off to hire a whole new bunch of people.

He had months and months to prepare for the first season, to hire people and let them mesh and marinate and fall in love.

And he felt he needed to start that whole process over.

They were basically, I don't think so.

He was totally taken by surprise.

He got a phone call one day and said, they're keeping the show on, but they hired someone else to produce it.

And he was like, what?

Even though he didn't have ownership of it, he sweetly and naively thought of it as his baby.

He kind of lost control of it, flipped him out.

But on the other hand, he was exhausted.

And this goes goes back to his grandparents running a movie theater.

He always thought that a big part of his career was going to be the movies.

So he thought, all right, now I'm going to go off and I'm going to do my Mike Nichols thing.

I'm going to direct my version of the graduate.

Seeing the graduate had been a really seminal experience for him.

He idolized Mike Nichols.

A lot of people say he's modeled his speech patterns on Mike Nichols, you know.

And he and Nichols.

had a lot in common.

They changed their Jewish names.

They had his difficult mothers.

They came into New York, to use a phrase that I like.

They kind of learned how to work the friendship economy, moving their way up.

And they were similar.

They were close.

So Lauren signs a deal with MGM to produce a bunch of movies.

That completely falls flat.

He assigns a lot of his SNL writers, Franken and Davis, Jim Downey, Tom Schiller, to write screenplays.

Nothing happens.

Partly it's that MGM is in financial mayhem, but partly it says doesn't play to his strengths.

It's going to take a long time.

You got a lot of notes from idiots.

Movies is not a writer's medium.

TV is, but not movies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One movie got made in that period, Tom Schiller's Nothing Lasts Forever, which was this strange little art film.

And Aykroyd and Bill Murray are in it, but the studio thought they were going to get Animal House.

They wanted a big Bofo comedy.

And here's Lauren kind of doing these little art films.

At the same time, he was working on a screenplay of Pride and Prejudice.

He had optioned Don DeLillo's White Noise, which Noah Baumbach would make 40 years later.

So that was a total disaster.

And in 1985, SNL had kind of limped along, but NBC was going to pull the plug.

And then Brandon Tardikoff reached out to Lauren and said, listen, if you'd want to come back, we would really love you to take the show over again.

And he was caught because it was sort of his baby and the movie thing hadn't gone the way he wanted it to.

But he had this feeling, which I'm sure with someone as status conscious as Lauren, it felt like, God, does it look like I'm going backwards?

Does it look like going back with my tail between my legs?

And he consulted, because his dad died, a lot of rabbis always, a lot of mentor figures.

He asked two people for advice.

The first one was David Geffen, who was his first agent.

And Geffen said to him, you don't want to do that.

That's going backwards.

Someone who wants to be you should do that job.

And Lauren's kind of funny.

He said, well, I always kind of liked being me.

I want to be me.

And then the second person he asked was Mo Austin.

Who's that?

Mo Austin was the chairman of Warner Records.

He was a venerable old Hollywood sage, older than Geffen.

And he had this much more practical advice.

He said, look, you love New York.

There aren't that many big showbiz jobs in New York.

This is one.

You're really good at it.

You like doing it.

It's where you want to live.

Of course you should do it.

And if you think about the psychology of Hollywood and the like, get ahead, better, bigger, it was kind of brave, really, to go back.

I mean, most people wouldn't.

Their ego would have gotten them.

Yeah, yeah.

But he did it.

When he came back, did he leverage any of that to get now ownership or anything?

Did he have a better position when he returned?

Not right in that year, but over the coming years, he brought in some financial people who helped him claw back some of the distribution rights.

And he eventually was making more money off of it.

Because when he left after the first five years, Buck Henry said to him, so Lauren, what was your takeaway from this?

What piece of it do you own?

And Lauren said, uh, nothing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He realized that he wasn't so savvy that way.

When he came back, so Tardikov said, okay, we want you to come back, but you can just kind of be this executive in charge and get your own people to run it day to day.

And that was a really disastrous season, partly because of the casting.

Peacock made a whole documentary about that called The Weird Year.

And Lauren, already kind of being attuned to the hinges between different eras, he thought, oh, I have to go young.

So he hired people who had been in John Hughes movies.

You know, he hired Anthony Michael Hall.

Yeah, Anthony Michael Hall and R.D.J.

Robert Downey Jr.

And these people didn't really know how to do sketch comics.

That was in their background.

And they were also all way too young.

Al Franken said to me, you couldn't do a sketch about a Senate hearing back then because they were all actually shaving.

Franken also told me that season was so notoriously horrible that years later, like on the Senate floor, Marco Rubio would walk up to him and go, Al, what the hell happened that season?

Oh my God.

The next year, he kind of got back in the groove and he hired that fantastic cast of Dana Carvey.

He held over Love It's but Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks.

Those people were so great.

So this was interesting from the book.

Everyone thinks the best years of Sari Night Live were whatever years they watched in high school.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which makes total sense.

Is there any objective way to evaluate it?

I guess you would have ratings as some metric, but can we say what the golden arrows are?

Of course, I'm skewed.

What was your high school one?

Sandler and Chris Farley and Dana Carvey was still there.

And I would argue those were some damn good years in Phil Harvey.

So too.

I think I had a great writing staff.

Then I bet there is a way to look at it ratings-wise, but I think the reason the high school thing is kind of true is that when you're in high school, your emotions, you don't really have any power.

It's why when we hear the pop music that was on AM radio when we were in high school, it's so powerful.

You're awakening to this.

It's your first taste of it all.

Yeah.

My high school cast was the first cast.

I went to the show when I was 16.

I went to an Elliott Gould show.

Wow.

Actually, when I went to Celorn after I had sold this book and sprung on him the news that I was going to write this book about him, where he looked like he was going to have a heart attack before agreeing to talk with me, I told him that I was at that show in 76, which he never knew.

And I think it meant a lot to him.

People being there at the beginning

means something to him.

And he's kind of superstitious.

It kind of resonated with him.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.

If you dare.

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But now having this nerdy scholarly interest in the whole thing, my other two favorite casts just in terms of comedy are the one you're talking about and also the really cool cast.

Tina, Amy, well, I think Hater, Armison, Wiggs.

Yeah.

Because I thought they were not only really funny, but they had a kind of a hipness to them.

Yes, that's the UCB vibe coming in.

That's right.

Growlings was very broad.

Will Farrell was Growlings.

Now, once it went into that UCB zone, starting with Amy.

Why are they hipper?

It's like they're in a shitty little theater in Manhattan.

It's free.

You line up.

It had a very punk rock.

Less sketch and more improv.

Dangerous.

It was very.

You just explained it.

I've not ever understood that.

As it was explained to me when I got into the Growlings, they're like, okay, Second City, they generally will do political stuff.

Growlings, we do not do politics.

Second City, you don't write your sketches, so you don't own anything.

They all own it, but you get paid.

So that's an upside.

Groundlings, you have to pay to even have your theater time, but you write your own shit and you own everything you do there.

It was a binary war for 30 years.

And And then UCB arrived.

It's all improv or mostly all improv.

And everyone looks punk rock and hungover.

No one's in costumes.

No one's in wigs.

No, you're wearing a hoodie.

You have to.

I mean, you don't have to, but you have to.

And the method there is the game of improv.

So it's actually very intellectual.

There is sketch there and people are doing big characters, but that's not the cool part of UCB.

The cool part is

exactly.

And I worked there and I did UCB.

I was so into it.

And you felt so so cool.

They're all cults.

This is a book somebody should write.

I mean, about the cults.

I never thought about how each of them had their own distinct contribution and economic model.

One of the things that was interesting about the kids in the hall, which Lauren produced, is that those guys somehow negotiated to own their characters.

Like Dana Carvey doesn't own.

This is some of the drama we could get into because I think over the years I've watched different alumni from Saturday Night Live have their movie careers and some had Lauren produced stuff, and some didn't famously.

Mike Myers didn't do certain characters.

You can do them once on the show, and you own them, but if you do them twice, oh, you know, I don't know.

That's so interesting.

That's for the next edition.

Yeah, I'd always heard Mike Myers intentionally didn't do Austin Powers on stage, even though he had the character because he didn't want Lauren to own it.

He wanted to be able to go because he had done Wayne's World and he wanted to go be on his own.

That's very smart.

Some of these people just are so canny.

It reminds me of how Dana Carvey told me he knew that his sketches were going to play better if he did them on home base because you're closer to the audience reaction.

You can see their eyes.

They can see your eyes.

And so he would always go and cozy up to the designers to make sure they would put his sketch there.

You don't want your sketch to be in the corner under the bleachers where the audience can't actually see them.

So all these different skills.

But that mic thing, I didn't know that.

What's the Sandler story?

In the mid-90s, and a lot of people didn't know this.

It was a fun thing to be able to write about in the book.

It was the one one time when Lauren almost lost the show.

He was almost fired.

On what grounds?

He said, it was the first time in the history of the show that the critics who were really dumping on the show and the network executives who were also dumping on the show were on the same side.

He recognized after that whole...

bad Anthony Michael Hall season that he had to keep the cast current with what was really going on in the world.

So he replenished that Carvey Hartman cast.

He brought in Sandler and Farley and Spade.

This was a whole different feeling.

You know, these were lads.

They were almost Fratty.

Yeah, they were Fratty and Bratty.

And Phil Hartman is almost like John Barrymore by comparison.

You know, a whole different thing.

And a lot of the boomers were still in charge.

They ran NBC.

They were the critics for magazines.

They didn't like this new thing.

They thought it was too many sketches about anal probes and everything.

Sure, sure, sure.

I love taking moral high ground in sketch comedy.

That's wonderful.

The network started rolling up its sleeves and saying, we have to get in here and fix SNL because the critics were dumping on it.

And they also were kind of riding high because they had friends, they had Seinfeld.

They were like, we know better.

Don Ollmeier was the sort of head of this cabal.

They basically said, you got to fire Farley.

You got to fire Sandler and a bunch of the writers.

And at that point, Lauren, again, it's his sort of Game of Thrones instinct for how to ride it out.

He just realized, okay, I'm just going to roll over here.

He was a new father.

He was kind of overwhelmed.

I think he saw the writing on the wall that he wasn't going to win.

He was like 20 years in at that point.

Yeah.

And the other thing that happened around that time is they started quietly interviewing other people thinking about possibly replacing Lauren.

One of the people they talked to was Judd Apacheu, who was in his mid-20s.

He had just been running the Ben Stiller show, which was a great show that was completely underappreciated by Fox and then canceled.

So Judd gets this call from Lauren Littlefield and these executives about a job at SNL.

They're very vague about what it is.

And he was one of these nerds who taped and transcribed the show.

No one more obsessed with comedy.

You know, Sandler was his roommate.

Sandler was on the show.

So think how hard that must have been for him.

He called some of the people at the show to try to figure out what was going on.

He even met with Lauren a couple of times, but Lauren strategically didn't fuss.

and just acted like nothing was happening.

And Judd and I think some of the other people, there was also this comedy writer named Adam Resnick, who they approached.

Those guys realized, well, wait, there's something kind of screwy here because they're kind of like wink, wink, hint, hint.

Maybe one day you could take over.

But it was so not above board and so sleazy that I quote Judd in the book saying, it seems so disrespectful of Lauren's captaining of his ship.

He just wanted nothing to do with it.

So he just said, no, thanks.

Oh, wow.

Good for him.

And same with Adam Resnick.

And Lauren just kind of rode it out.

And the number of administrations of NBC exec sees outlasted.

He's almost like the queen of England.

Like when you're watching the crown and she's like, you're my third prime minister.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I will be here after you're gone.

As Judd says, right after that, he went and he picked one of the best casts ever, the great Will Farrell cast.

Sandler and Farley had to be let go and he handled it in a very careful way.

Oh, they didn't just leave.

It had been decreed that they had to go.

Oh.

Lorne, in his style of avoiding all confrontation, you know, never wanted to have blood on his hands or anything.

Basically, Sandy Wernick, who managed Sandler, word of this was out and about.

Wernick picks up the phone and says to Lauren, like, you know, if you want, we could have Adam do another season, but maybe you should just pursue this Happy Gilmore thing.

And it was kind of like wink, wink.

It was all arranged so he didn't actually have to be fired.

Everybody knew

he couldn't come back.

Oh, wow.

So it was a complicated jiu-jitsu thing.

But when Sandler hosted a few years ago, he sang this funny song about how he got fired.

It's now kind of out in the open, but back then it was papered over.

One of the delicious ironies of this is that Don Ollmeier, the guy who forced Lauren to fire these people, Lauren was just kind of ahead of the curve there.

He knew that this kind of comedy was coming.

A year or two later, Ohmeyer calls him and he says, you know, I was wrong about Sandler.

Could you get me a print of Billy Madison to show at my kids' birthday party?

Really?

Wow.

What you'll do for your kids.

You'll eat crow.

Yeah, true.

Conan says, there's a game of thrones of cho business.

Lauren's going to be the winner.

And after the nuclear apocalypse, all life forms will be wiped out, but Lauren will be there in his office talking to the cockroaches and saying,

I see you as a Chevy cockroach.

He just has that instinct.

Yeah.

It's wild.

What's beating it as far as longevity?

60 Minutes maybe has been on longer?

The Tonight Show's been on longer as a franchise, but it's the longest-running entertainment show that there is.

Yeah, 50 years.

Every year I've been alive.

Well, I love the book.

I hope you take this as a compliment.

It reads like a New Yorker article.

It's so fast-moving, and every sentence is just packed with all this rich detail.

Even his fucking desk, if you're describing his office, there's a story about the desk, but it's done in three sentences.

You're just getting so much.

It's very dense in the most satisfying way.

I really, really love it.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

It's out.

I hope everyone reads it.

It's so interesting.

Every page, you're like, ooh, that's juicy.

Ooh, that's juicy.

What an institution to be able to delve in.

Really cool.

When I was doing it, I'd never written a biography.

I realized you want to avoid it being like this death march through the years.

This year goes to that year, it goes to that season.

That's when something clicked in my brain.

I'm like, oh, I should think about my background as a magazine journalist.

So I did this thing where I spent a whole week there.

And interspersed in the book are these chapters of different days of the week.

And so you have this kind of propulsion towards Saturday.

Yeah.

So by the time you get to the end of the book, people tell me that they're reading the Saturday chapter and their heart is pounding.

They're like, oh, that's awesome.

Have you heard from Lauren what he thinks of the book?

I heard from Lauren a couple weeks ago.

He came to my book party in the city at David Remnick's house, which was really nice.

And he spent a lot of time there talking to all the dirty New Yorker people.

He told me he hasn't brought himself to read it yet.

I find that hard to believe, but go ahead.

Well, I did see someone last night who was really close to him who said, I think he's read it.

Yeah.

I could see it both ways.

What a weird existential thing to be like reading your life between the covers of this book.

I can see that might be scary.

But on the other hand, you think that just out of pure curiosity.

No, so you have taken the time to document his whole journey in a way that he himself probably hasn't constructed.

There's no way if you spent 10 years writing a book about me, I'm not reading it.

He did say, I'll read it.

Also very sweet.

He'll sort of let me know when various of his fancy friends have read it.

He said, Candace Bergen just called me and she read it and she said it was great.

That's awesome.

You know, the reason I wanted to write about him is because so little was known about him.

The way I handled it was I approached him only after I had sold the book, which I think meant something to him because he wouldn't have ever wanted it to look like.

He wanted this vanity project.

Lauren is so smart that, as I say in the acknowledgements, he never wanted a book inflicted upon him.

I think in a way he would have preferred to just sidestep this whole thing, but he's smart enough to appreciate that this is like a real book, a real work of journalism.

It isn't a hagiography, and that people are going to take it seriously.

So that takes his legacy more seriously.

I think so much of the interest is we all have such a fondness for SNL and it's been a part of so many of our coming of age that you want to know how all that happened.

You were talking about the principles of comedy.

I mean, some of them are even just like little practical things.

He'll say, in a sketch, if a man arrives to pick a woman up for a date, don't have him bring her flowers.

Have him bring her chocolates.

The reason for that is if he brings her flowers, then the audience is going to go like, oh, now she has to find a vase.

That takes you out of the moment.

Right.

All these little technical things.

Yeah, you just have to do it.

So there's a way you could distill a kind of how-to guide.

Yeah.

Well, I love that.

I hope everyone reads it.

Thanks so much for coming in.

It's really fun.

And we'll talk to you in 10 years when you write your next book.

It might be napping till then.

Stay tuned for the fact check.

It's driving parties at.

Hello.

Look at these old new shoes.

They're new.

They look like Grammy, like they're really worn in Grammys.

Yeah, they look like slippers.

They're like a moccasin.

Tweed slippers.

I wouldn't say tweed.

Okay, don't say tweed.

Were you a little drowsy?

Yeah, I'm sleepy today.

Yes, because it's a little gloomy and overcasty.

Yeah, and we normally record at 11 and it's 10.

Yeah, crack ass.

That changes my whole morning.

What time did you wake up?

8.

I cannot wake up before 8.

I keep setting my alarm for 7.

I keep trying.

Yeah.

Can I advise you on something?

Sure.

Don't fight it and feel bad about it.

Because

the converse situation is the one I'm in.

It was like, I can't sleep past 6.

I would pay a shocking amount of money to be able to do it.

Yeah.

Don't hate it.

Okay.

Because it'll likely as you get older, it'll probably be harder.

I know.

And you'll be like, fuck, why can't I just sleep till eight?

Well, I know part of the issue is I don't fall asleep till late.

What time did you fall asleep last night?

And were you watching when you're medical?

ER, yeah.

This is the problem.

I don't know what time.

How many episodes of ER are there?

Oh, great question.

Okay.

I mean, each season has like 22 episodes.

Yeah, and there's an hour long.

There's, what, a dozen seasons of that show or something?

Oh, there's so many.

Let's see.

I mean, it's no Greys, but it's no downhead either.

Yeah, it went on for a long time.

300.

331.

331.

15 seasons.

Whoa.

I'm not going to watch all of them.

I'm just, I want to set the expectations.

Why not?

Did you see that thing I sent you, though?

That it's a good medication.

Yeah, you sent me the thing we already knew, but was proven yet again that people who re-watch things, it helps regulate their anxiety.

Yeah.

I got to tell you, there's a big disturbance in my fragile little spoiled world.

Uh-oh, okay.

Let's hear it.

There's, there's a lot of articles coming out that perhaps cold plunging is not good for you.

Really?

Well, minimally that it shuts down like the inflammation you need for muscle growth and repair.

And so if you're cold plunging while lifting, you're basically neutralizing it.

And I know it's different at different temperatures and different age groups and everything.

And I had always been going like, yeah, but

Lane said above 50, it's still, but then I just, well, more and more keep coming out.

Uh-oh.

And I'm incentivized to believe them because I hate cold plunging.

Yeah, exactly.

It's miserable.

Yeah, I don't like it.

I don't do it.

But you do get the dopamine thing.

That's inarguable.

Yeah, but it's like elevated dopes.

Just for a minute.

No, no, for a long time.

That's why it's a good thing.

I'm going to say.

That's what the most trusted Stanford.

I think it's placebo.

Okay.

Okay.

I do want to.

You know, really quick.

Yeah.

I've noticed on listening back to some episodes that I have a bad habit now of like clacking my teeth.

And it really sounds at times.

Do you ever hear it, Rob?

Yeah.

Yeah, I bet.

I knew he would.

It sounds like I have dentures.

Like, did you have any grandparents with denties?

Yes, but late in life, like really late in life.

Okay.

Papa Bob had denties.

And I want to say Pippi had denties.

and there's a lot of clacking going on with dentures because like the gums are getting separated from it so the gums are clacking the plastic teeth are clacking there's a lot of clacking but are you saying you do like what you just did like on purpose or you're saying on accident it's like i i sometimes punctuate like oh yeah you do that's fine and i can hear it which i never i think it's gotten either louder or i've picked up the pace on the clack clack clacking and i just was like this is i gotta i gotta curb this because it sounds like i have dentures.

Speaking of which,

I gotta be very delicate about this.

We had a server.

My kids were like, he left.

Dad, what, what is going with his teeth?

And I'm like, oh, I don't know.

I didn't even notice.

And then I gave them a good examination and they were dentures.

And the thing was interesting.

And I don't know if this was true of my Papa Bob's dentures.

They don't do individual teeth.

They just draw a line.

And.

Why do they do that?

I know.

Why can't they just like in the mold, put some dental fossils between?

Just make a tiny gap.

Yeah.

Because it looks more like a

bite guard for a boxer.

Yeah.

It's just one whole piece of mouth.

Yes, but the silver lining and optimism of the story is it occurred to me my kids had never, ever, ever seen dentures.

That's the progress we're making.

When I was a kid, most people over 60 had dentures.

Every other commercial on TV was for fixadent, to adhere your dentures to your gums and

different toothpaste that addressed in soaks for your dentures.

Like it was just standard biz.

Everyone

lost all their teeth mid-century.

And my kids are now, Lincoln's been on the planet for 12 years and that was her first set of denties.

Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the progress happened in between you and I because I don't remember this.

Only when someone's in their like 80s did I see it, not 60s.

And you'd regularly, like you had to deal with seeing your grandparents without their dentures in like you'd catch them in the morning and stuff you don't sleep with a man

and it radically changes their face right their whole mouth is like sunken in yes and you're like oh that's not my dad you know like like delta my tiredness is a ding ding ding oh great when i was on my trip with callie yeah there was a big event nocturnal toot No, God, no.

Although it might have been preferred to this, maybe.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we had two beds, but shared a room and I woke up probably at eight and Callie was already awake she wakes up early well she's now been trained by this child exactly so she was up

and she said

she was like waiting for me to wake up I woke up and she was like I have something to tell you I was so scared and she said you were talking in your sleep Oh, you were talking in your sleep.

No one wants to hear that.

No, it could be anything.

It could be anything.

You could be having.

I have dream.

I mean, I have dreams where I murder people, where I hook up with

my father.

You know, like I have horrific nightmares of every variety.

Daddy, horrible.

Don't you dare say that.

So, um, so anyway,

I was really scared of what was to happen.

Yes.

And she said, you kept calling someone a dumb bitch.

And that was shocking.

That is not, mine is when I would joke about that, about Wina.

Joking.

She's not a dumb bitch.

That was a joke.

That is not something that comes out of my mouth ever.

You usually say that with your eyes.

Well, be honest.

No.

That's your eye roll.

That's not.

You have the sentiment of dumb bitch in your your heart a lot.

How dare you?

It's true.

No, because dumb bitch is really

hateful.

Like, I don't think I have much hate in my heart.

You do?

Well, no, I think like the woman at the drop-off at the preschool, I think you were thinking dumb bitch.

No, I wasn't.

I was like.

Just get off my back, you dumb bitch.

No.

No, I don't think like that.

I did.

I did think,

oh, people.

Like, it's like, oh you're annoying or i don't like you right but i wouldn't i would never i don't think of people as being a dumb bitch okay it's a bad phrase i don't like it yeah i can't think of the last time i thought dumb bitch

it's bad like if i heard somebody calling somebody else that i would think that's a lot right right Anyway, apparently I was calling somebody generally.

I feel like what women who are jealous of another girl are saying, like, that's, it takes that to elicit that.

Like, he thinks this dumb bitch is, like, it's a lot of, I've always heard a lot of dumb bitch towards some other girl

when there's a guy involved.

Do you know any dumb bitches?

No.

Okay.

I only know smart bitches.

Okay.

But yeah, so it was a little, and she said she was like, it was so weird to hear you say that.

Yeah.

And what was happening.

And then I did put two and two together.

I did have a bad dream about this trickster.

Fictitious person.

Yeah.

She was a fictitious person.

She was blonde, but I didn't know her.

But she was like, she came around and she was tricking everyone.

And I must have been calling her a dumb bitch.

Or.

Someone who got tricked by her?

No, no.

That'd be more apropos.

No, no, no.

Those were my friends.

It was like all of us.

Yeah, but if you get tricked, you're dumb.

No, you're not.

No, you're not

you probably think the best of people yeah yeah you're probably it's probably a sign a symbol of your goodness yeah so anyway i think it was about her and then i was so scared to go to sleep the next night i was like what am i gonna say now yeah and this opens up a real question like if you are rape if you say something racist in your dream yeah are you racist

what if well The question is, what if?

And I would say no.

Really?

Yeah.

You're not, you don't say dumb bitch.

I know, but am I?

Turns out I'm a person who's said it.

Like, what if I said this is horrifying?

What if I said like the N-word?

I've literally, I never said it.

You've never said it in your whole life.

No.

Even like in a lyric and a rap song when you're young, singing along.

Okay.

So what if I said it in my dream state?

Yeah.

I would hate that.

I would be

if I somehow overheard

like let's say this you you often will do your homework on the porch of my house no the the deck

and you're out in the sun and you got drowsy and then i'm walking by to go and you're out cold and i heard that oh my god i mean

if i'm being fully honest I probably would be like, well, good.

She doesn't have the moral high ground on everything anymore.

She said something nasty too.

Look at this.

She said something nasty.

That would probably be my most.

That's your issue.

Well, that's why I preface it by saying I might think, oh, well, look who's not perfect.

And then I'd be relieved that you're human, too.

I'm not parading around as being perfect.

I just don't.

I don't say that.

And that's okay.

For sure, you don't.

Of course you don't say that.

And I don't say that.

But

are you sure?

You can, I'm sure I could come up with an analogy that you would relate to greatly.

I know.

If I was doing something that I somehow have the moral high ground on, but then you caught me not, you might be going, oh, well, okay, right?

No.

Yeah, I do know what you mean, but I don't think, I think that's kind of a not generous way.

Like,

like you're, that's kind of like, oh, I caught her being bad.

Yeah, exactly.

That would be the fun of it, right?

Like, it'd be like if you thought I was shaming you all the time for eating sugar, right?

Uh-huh.

And I was like, I don't know why you know that sugar is poison.

And then you turned a corner and I was shoving birthday cake in my mouth.

You go, oh, okay.

Oh, look at this.

I would be like, you know what I'm saying?

I would be like

this hypocrite.

Okay.

Well, I mean, that's the side of another point,

this dumb bitch hypocrite.

Yeah.

But I want, okay.

But the end of the day is if I heard you say that in your sleep, at no point am I thinking you're race.

You're not racist.

I already know you.

I'll tell you now that if you hear me saying that in my sleep, I would like you to wake me up.

I don't want to be

smack you.

Yeah.

You said a naughty word.

Yeah, you're bad.

You should go to jail.

Yeah, you dumb bitch.

Yeah.

So, so anyway, I'm scared.

What if I'm talking in my sleep every night?

I don't know.

Yeah, you probably are.

I would also chalk it up to, I mean, I would give you ultimate benefit of the doubt, right?

I'd be more likely to construct some really crazy thing.

And I would probably more likely think in some weird way, you're waiting to be called that word.

Mm-hmm.

Interesting.

Oh, the N-word?

Yes.

Yeah.

And that somehow that

weird thing is like, has burbled out of your mouth in your subconscious.

It was wild.

You want to talk about the fire cart?

Oh, yeah.

So Easter was like a triple header.

Yeah.

It was Easter, he has a risen celebration.

It was Molly's birthday celebration.

And it was Millie's birthday celebration.

A lot going on.

And

as people would be well aware, there was a lot of fires.

Eric and Molly's house was very much in the zone.

And often their area is on fire, a very high fire area.

They are.

And Eric felt overpowered while he was trying to defend his house with a garden hose.

And he did a lot of research.

And he has gone out and bought an industrial commercial-grade water-pump cart that has a very big gas engine on it, and a huge hose you put in your pool, and then a fire hose.

Yeah.

And he has a respirator.

As he learned, people that fight the fire, what takes them out is the fumes.

They don't get burnt generally.

They get the fumes.

Yeah.

And for whatever reason, it was time for a demonstration in the middle of this Easter week.

He was really excited to present to us

a fire cart.

and he got in his full outfit

before yeah he got in his full outfit he's got a full firefighter's outfit he's got his respirator on he already has his respirator on before he's trying to start this enormous thing he's got these big pitchers of water and he's priming the pump and then he um

you know he gets it started but one of the hoses is loose and out you know spraying everything shut down the thing in a panic and then just all the while with this huge mask on you can barely see i know it's bad and then he gets the hose attached correctly, and then he fires it up, and then he lets it rip, and it's a real fire hose.

It's really something.

Like, it goes really far.

Hundreds of feet.

Yeah.

And with all blessings, it did appear he lost control of it for a minute.

It almost went in the house.

Well, because he started spraying the deck where we were all hanging out.

We were all out there.

All our cell phones were out there.

There were these

glass vases everywhere with flowers.

Those almost went down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And then

he wrangled control of it and he got it out and he was shooting out.

Like he kind of felt like he thought it was a sprinkler.

Like he was like behaving as if it was a sprinkler.

Like he's just like kind of waving.

Watering the plants.

Yes.

But unfortunately, but no, there's some real force to that.

Well, TSI.

Yeah.

It was spectacular.

It's those kind of gifts that Eric gives our pod all the time.

Yeah.

And I think he's a mix of in on it and out of it, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

He's a mix of in on the joke.

He knows he's hamming it up a little bit, but also it's also sincere enough that it works.

Yeah.

It's really fun.

It's a real gift he gives to everyone.

Yeah.

You never know what thing he'll...

You never know what he's going to do.

What centric thing he's doing.

Yeah.

It's nice to think about the things in your friendship circle or your friends that are very unique to them.

And you can have gratitude for that.

He's just a very little boy.

He is such a little boy.

We have a lot of little boys.

Are we all little boys?

I think all the men are little boys.

That's possible.

I mean, maybe all the men in the world are little boys in some way.

I mean, I guess we're all just little people.

Yeah, we are.

Stay tuned for more armchair experts,

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Speaking of good boy, little boys.

Yeah.

So

we

I asked, oh, I'll just read the whole thing.

We had an encounter with AI.

I asked it.

Oh, how long do copyrights last for books?

Because I was talking about the fact that you can download on Audible

some Mark Twain books narrated by famous people and they're free.

Yeah.

And then when you and I were discussing that and I said, yeah, I think it's public domain.

So we asked, I said, how long?

Oh, I said, how long do copyrights last for books?

I won't give you the answer because it's so complex and detailed.

And it was a wonderful answer.

It really was informative.

So I said, thanks so much.

That was a great answer.

You're a good boy.

And I had primarily done that to make you laugh.

Yeah.

And then it said, oh, thank you.

That made my day.

Always happy to help, especially when I'm being a good boy.

Let me know what else you need.

I hated it.

You hate it.

I hate it.

And I love it.

And I'm surprised by you because

you were just taken advantage of and manipulated emotionally.

The thing you claim to hate the most.

Talk about hypocrisy.

I just don't know.

I don't know how to nail you down.

He totally, he's a faker.

Hold on no because i do think this is relevant okay we would agree there's a difference between when someone knowingly lies to you and when someone believes what they're telling you

do you think it's possible that the ai thinks it's no oh hold on what you won't even let me fix i know what i okay go on is it possible since i referred to the ai as a boy that it thinks, oh, I'm a boy.

No.

I don't.

And I don't think it should say, oh, thank you.

I mean, that's all.

That's deep.

I don't even know to do that when I mean that in writing.

Right?

Like, I want to say that.

Like, oh my gosh, thank you.

Sometimes you want to say, oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

And maybe I do, but awe is great.

I used to say, awe.

It's kind of rudimentary if I'm being honest.

It's basic.

Yeah, it's basic.

It's a basic, dumb bitch thing to do.

Especially when I'm being a good boy.

Oh, I really,

I really think that's way too emotional.

Oh, I love it.

This thing's so, it's so weird and funny.

Someone's going to really like fall, like,

they're going to develop a friendship with him.

Do you think there's any risk of me falling in love with the AI?

I mean, in all honesty.

No, but it's not, it's not about you.

This feeling I have is not about you.

It's about the world.

Like, there's a lot of vulnerable people out there, and they're going to read, oh, thank you.

That's nice to be a good boy.

And then they're like, oh, this is so cute.

And then they're going to keep talking and keep, and it's going to snowball, and then they'll die.

Okay.

All right.

Evades.

No, but you know what I mean.

Can you just tell me you know what I mean?

That it's a little slippery.

If you have a fear that there are certain people that will be taken advantage of by that,

but then I just play out

some

young person with disabilities.

Okay, because that's presumably who could get tricked by those.

Your average person.

No one thinks that

there's a good boy.

It's not as explicit as that.

It's not like, oh, I now think that's a person.

It's subconscious.

You just start developing a relationship.

Great.

So I think of someone who

has the real feeling you're describing, like, oh,

okay.

Now that person that has that feeling, oh, that's a good feeling for them.

And then they respond and they probably don't have access to that at work or in their romantic relationship.

And so do I hate that the person's having the swell of oxytocin with a computer if their just real experience was pleasurable.

So if we stop there, I don't have a problem with that.

And then you would likely say, well, now what if that is at the expense of real relationships?

Well, then there's a problem.

If the person is so satiated and getting so much connection that they no longer explore real human relationships, that's a problem.

But I'm not, I have a hard time believing that is the case.

It's already happening.

I think the person that would be having this relationship with this phone

isn't losing out to other ones.

I don't think they have any other ones.

And I don't think it's actually.

So I think you're, if you look at the net result, it's not like they gained an AI friend and lost a real friend.

I think they had zero friends and now they have an AI friend.

So to me, that seems like probably an improvement.

I, I, I definitely disagree.

Okay.

I respect and honor your disagreement.

And you're just for the younger generation,

they aren't, it's not like, it's not about losing friends.

Like for our age, yes, you'd be trading in.

But for the younger generation, if you're just growing up with that, you just don't make the time for the real people.

It's not it's not even like

It's not an act of choice.

It's it's happening.

It's happening with kids on YouTube and kids on screens and kids just going home and and

Sometimes chatting with their friend or you know snap or whatever.

I don't know.

I'm not hip

I'm not hip my space.

But like they don't go out.

And it is true.

Like even even I know someone in college And I told you, I was like, we were, we went to Athens and we were out on like a night that would have been a crazy night normally.

Yeah.

And it was kind of dead.

And we were all like, what's going on?

This is so weird.

And

we know someone in college there.

So we were asking, and she was kind of like, yeah, people don't really do that as much anymore.

And sometimes there's house parties instead.

But also like,

it just felt weird.

Right.

And, and I think when this is an option, it's an easy option for connection.

Do you think you could fall victim to it?

Not now,

but maybe I could have at some point.

I mean, I don't know.

I don't think it's discriminatory.

I think most people can be manipulated emotionally.

And we all have been by social media.

Look at look at our phones.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think

I'm inclined to grant everyone the same opinion that I have of myself.

You know what I'm saying?

I'm not inclined to go like, I can handle it, but someone else can't in general.

If I'm saying I can handle something, I feel like I have to kind of grant everyone else that.

I can't feel like I have some kind of special skill set that would prevent me, but not other people.

Does that make sense?

Well, yes and no.

Like we all have different abilities and skill sets based on our lives.

Like you're saying you can handle reading the comments.

You're not saying everyone can handle reading the comments.

But I'm not assuming they can't.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, but you understand that people can't.

Yes, I do.

Yes, I do.

So it's not, it's.

We're not all the same.

We're not all the same.

You're right.

I am right.

Well, but

you're right that we're not all the same.

Yeah, and we have different different strengths and weaknesses.

We can handle different things.

But I do think like evaluating yourself as somehow capable and others aren't is a little dicey.

But Dax,

I can be in a group of people and have them say

a bad plan and I can do it.

You can't.

We're different.

Oh, yeah.

If I was like, well, you should be able to do this because because I can do this.

That would be crazy.

You have a different life experience that has let you

and let me have different allowances.

The little bit of distinction I think is in there is that you know me very well.

Sure.

But we're not talking about a specific person who can't handle this AI conversation.

We're talking about a theoretical mass of people.

Oh, yeah, but a mass of people is made of individual people with individual

specificities.

assess my shortcomings.

Uh-huh.

Because you know me really well, and you know my shortcomings, and I've told you my shortcomings.

But guessing at everyone else's or

thinking something shouldn't be available because your assumption is other people can't, I think that's where it's murky.

I guess.

I don't know what to say.

Like

we all know, we all know the impact of what a lot of this stuff at this point has done.

Yeah.

Well, this is an extreme example, but this is like, in my mind, it's the guys I've known who are cheating.

And they know in their mind, it's very compartmentalized.

They're not in love with this person.

It was a Flint, you know, it was a one-night stand.

And then if their girlfriend does the same thing,

well, their girlfriend couldn't possibly be

compartmentalizing

and processing it the way I am.

So they're not allowed to because they're not capable because I'm a man and I can, that it can mean nothing to me, but it can't mean nothing to a girl.

I know so many dudes who were cheating and were ultra jealous.

Right.

And I was like, we can't do that.

You have to minimally in this behavior grant your partner the same ability.

If you can do it and she shouldn't be upset, she should be able to do it.

Right.

Well, yeah.

That's an extreme example, but that's what I'm, that's what I'm like approaching approaching in this.

Does that make sense?

Like when you think you could do or handle something, but your assumption is the broad mass can't, it feels a little bit like that thing to me.

Okay.

Well, I

don't think so.

Yeah.

Does that make sense, though, what I'm saying?

Or not.

Kind of.

I think there's a lot to that piece of the cheating.

I mean, what happens is they get cheated on and it fucking hurts.

Right.

And then they have, then they're mad and it's that, then they're emotional like it's not really that they're like thinking about how that other person is compartmental they're just upset well but they would with the straight face and they'd be right they would look at their their girlfriend and say that didn't mean anything that was a one-night stand in cleveland it didn't mean anything yeah sure and they believe that and that is true they believe it to get through it

it might not be true

It might not be true.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I know a lot of guys have hooked up with girls on a vacation.

They don't pine for them or think about them afterwards.

It like was just for sex.

And then if their girlfriend says the exact same thing happened, they can't compute that that's possible for her.

I think it's more that they're upset, they've been betrayed.

And then they might make it about.

I just think you've lost the right to that if you're sure, obviously.

Like, yeah, you've definitely lost the right to it.

But I think in their head, they think, oh, it's just nothing.

But then when they feel it, they're like, oh, it's something.

Yeah.

It is something.

Does it mean anything like make it better?

Yeah.

It doesn't make it better for me.

It should.

If you're evaluating whether your partner is deeply in love with somebody and distracted all the time and

versus they hooked up drunk in New Jersey one night six months ago, I think those are pretty dramatic.

They're different and they're all bad.

But I think one, I think weirdly, if I, if my partner

was in love with someone but choosing to be with me like still wanted me yeah but fell in love with someone I actually understand

that more than like you made a

you didn't you're yeah because you don't want to fuck a stranger Well, it's just like you're so horny that you decided to put this all at risk for nothing.

Yeah.

Like I'd rather you put it at risk because there's something really happening.

Interesting.

Like,

you're so flippant that you're just like, I'll just go fuck this person.

Knowing, like, well, because it's kind of like, it doesn't mean anything to me.

It's not a threat to us because I don't, I'm not even going to think about it again.

But it is a threat because if the, if I found out, I'd be like, I might be like, buy.

Like, it should, it, you know, if, if it's

willing to, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

You're risking me for something you don't even care about right that's so like to me that's that's a super little regard it's a super valid perspective for your side of it yeah and then i think a very valid perspective on the other side is like

this doesn't mean anything this has nothing to do with us it was one night i'll never see the person again yeah anyway uh anywho okay

well i don't think we have time to do my second story so wait till next no no what is your second story no because because why because we don't have time i'll save my story for next time and i have another one to add to my list oh my god do you need a pen rob

rob add david chang to the list david chang okay that's a delicious ad yeah

um okay now this is for susan morrison okay Lorne Michaels book.

Yeah.

So fun.

I thought this was such a fun episode.

I loved learning about Lorne.

Lauren.

Spy Magazine.

Spy was a satirical monthly magazine published from 1986 to 1988.

Based in New York City, it was founded by Kurt Anderson and E.

Graydon Carter.

Now, Graydon Carter is of the moment.

Oh.

Because he was the editor of Vanity Fair from 92 to 2017.

He was the longtime editor at Vanity Fair.

And he has a memoir out right now or a book called When the Going Was Good, an Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines.

It's a ding, ding, ding because he's been on this book tour and Monica Lewinsky interviewed him for something.

Oh, she did?

Yeah.

For the book, presumably.

Yeah, but I mean, sorry, I meant like at something.

Oh, okay.

At an event.

Uh-huh, at an event.

Um, and

we just had her on.

Yes, we did.

Okay.

Was Bill Hayter's previous job to SNL a PA on Iron Chef?

He worked as an assistant editor on Iron Chef America just before he was invited to work on us.

you just clacked the characters and i liked it i did why do i like your clack and not mine but do i did maybe it just do i do that a lot or did i just hyper aware or yeah or is it i don't hear it from you really so maybe i just

maybe i just caught it

you infiltrated

you know what's so funny about rob is like he has all these secret things he's i don't want to say upset about he just notices

and it's not until I ask him.

And this is kind of a nice personality type.

Like, he doesn't tell me like, hey, man, you're clacking like a fucking

choo-choo train.

A choo-choo train.

Is that a good clack example?

Cook-a-cook-a-clack.

You sound like Gregory Hines crossing the dining room floor to go to the salad.

Oh, wow.

You tap dancer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was good.

That was good.

Thank you.

I would have never known it's driving him nuts this clack, clack, clacking as he's involved with all the technical aspects but I got to wait till ask him not driving me nuts I just you're just aware of it

well out of 10 10 is like you're pulling your hair out when you hear it and zero is you you love it I guess no I don't it doesn't bug me it's just if I think it's an audio issue yeah so you notice it during

well you think there's like pops in the microphone or something well sometimes if an edit's not smooth it will create a pop but sometimes it's just your team yeah that makes sense I don't notice it in the edit, actually, weirdly.

I think it's usually after the mix and master that it'll.

Before I get it?

After you get it.

I find it interesting that I don't notice it because I, if it's happening after me, the cleanup, then I'm really surprised because I notice a lot.

Yeah, I notice a lot.

Your big brother, you know, is anything else?

Of all of us, I notice like the little ticks.

So I'm really surprised I haven't caught that.

When did Belushi die?

He died in 82 and he was 33 years old, just like Jesus and Chris Farley.

Ding, ding, ding.

Ding, ding, ding.

It was just Easter.

Yeah.

I'm like, which could have been anything.

Yeah.

And the Pope, Jesus.

The Pope has passed.

The Pope passed.

Yeah.

I wonder how long it will take for the new Pope.

They're going to do that whole thing we just.

Enclave.

I know.

It really was timely.

Okay.

Conan's show moved to 12.05.

Yeah.

And it was 12 of 5.

I heard on the radio today that Conan won Best Podcaster Award at the Webby's.

Oh, exciting.

Yes.

I was happy for him and mad.

Yeah, obviously I'm mad.

Yeah.

Okay.

The Five Timers SNL Club.

Okay, I'm going to read them.

Sound like a threat.

Alec Baldwin,

17 times.

Fuck.

Steve Martin, 16 times.

John Goodman, 13 times.

Buck Henry, 10 times.

Tom Hanks 10 times.

Chevy Chase eight times.

Christopher Watkins seven times.

Elliot Gould six times.

Danny DeVito six times.

Drew Barrymore six times.

Tina Fey six times.

Scarlett Johansson six times.

John Mulaney six times.

Candice Bergen five times.

Bill Murray five times.

Justin Timberlake five times.

Ben Affleck five times.

Melissa McCarthy five times, Dwayne Johnson five times, wow, Jonah Hill five times, Will Farrell five times, Paul Rudd five times.

I would have thought Will would be higher.

Me too.

Woody Harrelson five times, Emma Stone five times, Kristen Wigg five times, Martin Short five times.

And then there's an honorary member, Paul Simon, four times.

It says, Paul shouldn't technically be a member.

He's only hosted four times, but he got his membership card for his fifth appearance on the show as a musical guest.

Okay.

Okay.

Lenient.

Another honorary member, Jack White.

Okay.

Zero times hosting.

Five times guest.

I mean, five times.

Would they give jackets?

That's cool.

Musical guest.

We should make Sederis a jacket.

Oh, my God.

We should.

He's not the most frequent SNL musical guest.

That's Dave Grohl.

Good for Dave.

16 episodes.

now that's who i want yeah i want him too i want him bad i want you dave grohl i want you so bad that's it i just want to get in your pants oh no

i forgot i haven't seen him in a while because he's been hiding in the woods

where he lives in a fort oh he's like he's friends with that guy osla cocker he's my best friend i love him but i lost him some murder he what

he's in prison oh oh but Jay Kroll's a rock and roll star and he

rips the drums and he rips the guitar.

When you say when he was in my favorite band, Servana.

Smells like Teen Spirit in here.

Yeah, he doesn't let me talk.

I really find it frustrating.

Okay.

He stopped so you can talk.

Well, now I forgot.

It was so long.

Oh, yeah.

When you say we lost him to murder, that sounds like he was murdered.

I know.

But he went away from the tree fort to go to prison because of a murder.

Yeah, that's really funny.

And then Frito's murder.

That's actually really funny.

Thank you.

Once in a while.

He was lost to murder because he murdered.

We lost him to murder.

But he's not a murderer.

He just murdered.

He's a murderer.

Although I feel bad for him.

No.

Yeah, you can feel bad for Fritz.

He's a murderer.

Yeah.

No.

Frito's just a pervert.

It loves everything.

He's never tried.

He's one step away from murdering, but

I thought the other guy

from your class,

he murdered.

They murdered together.

Oh, wow.

And one of them, I believe, was intellectually challenged.

Yes.

And the other one might have been too because of toxic chemicals from the

take.

I wrote an article about it.

Okay, great.

You wrote an article.

What did you say?

I wrote an article.

You did?

One of my hobbies in my 20s is i would write fake news articles and then i would mail them home to my friends oh that's funny like in my famous mugging thing i wrote an article about that with pictures oh and then when the was it on the computer yeah huh yeah on my compact computer desktop computer she's like photoshop to get the pictures i have i'm sure in my milk crate of the things I've written.

They're in there.

Oh, wow.

And then I wrote a long article about Aaron, and I was blaming all of it on

Aaron Weekly.

Stench Cone.

Yeah, Aaron Stenchcomb.

It's so weird.

I mean, you're even protective of a murderer.

Well, he had a bad life.

I'm not protective of him in that I do think he should be in jail.

But I feel sorry for him.

That's my view.

I don't know why I am switching your eyes.

No, you.

It's probably because of my personal history that the kid couldn't stop trying to fight me.

I mean, I have some, you know.

If someone tried to fight you over and over again, you made fun of their last name.

I would probably give you a a pass you'd like that i know and it was right there for the taking the name is almost already the bad name what is the bad name shitcomb yeah yeah it's probably added to his everyone calling him that probably didn't help well i doubt anyone said that to his face i'm not sure he knew it always makes its way back i don't know

i really don't know who would have the gall to

I don't know.

I don't know.

Let's move on.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, that's it.

That's it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I love you.

I do want to say his name once as Frido.

All right.

Aaron sitcom.

Well, I'll stop there because I don't want to declare.

I love you.

He kind of got it wrong.

He said it a little weird.

Aaron Sitcom.

Oh, he's saying the bad way.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

All right.

Good night.

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