DOGE and Penny Show

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Speaker 1 Hey, everybody, I'm here to tell you about a podcast I love from Team Coco called The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

Speaker 1 Every week, Andy invites friends, comedians, actors, musicians, and asks them all the same three questions. Where do you come from? Where are you going? What have you learned?

Speaker 1 These three simple questions, when answered honestly and thoughtfully, are enough to provide a pretty complete picture of who a person is.

Speaker 1 New episodes out every Tuesday with guests like Bill Hayter, Zach Calfanakis, and Tig Nataro. Also, yours truly.
I was on it.

Speaker 1 And I had a great time with Andy. You can also tune in for Friday call-in show episodes where Andy invites callers to weigh in on questions such as, what's the worst job you've ever had?

Speaker 1 What's your worst dating disaster? I also was on that show. Wow, and we took animal questions.

Speaker 1 Somebody had a story about how they took LSD, ate a fish out of a friend's fish tank, and then thought it was their dog they were petting, but they were petting a skunk.

Speaker 1 What? That's a lot of crazy.

Speaker 1 Great time. I love Andy Richter.
Andy Richter, the man is a legend. He's so funny, so charming,

Speaker 1 so optimistic. Just a great vibe.
Listen to the three questions with Andy Richter wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 1 What's up, Los Angeles?

Speaker 1 Welcome to Love It or Leave It. It is great to be back at Lodge Room.

Speaker 1 Happy Valentine's Day, a day where we honor a priest who is decapitated for officiating secret Christian weddings and is is also the patron saint of beekeepers.

Speaker 1 And you know they fuck.

Speaker 1 Tonight on the show, Thomas Lennon is back to pit his IMDb against news on TV, while Harvey Guillain faces off against a not-so-ancient foe.

Speaker 1 We'll be answering your burning romantic questions in honor of the holiday. So please think of questions you would ask your gay best friend.

Speaker 1 That is specifically what you're trying to think of questions about. The kind of question you would get advice from your gay best friend about.

Speaker 1 Then we all kiss the night goodbye with a love letter to dangerous loves. But first, let's get into it.
What a week.

Speaker 1 With Republicans in Congress content to let Donald Trump seize the power of the legislative branch, there is only one check left against the administration's oversteps, the courts.

Speaker 1 And while I wish I was talking about the courts from challengers that make everyone bisexual, unfortunately, I'm talking about the judicial courts. The robe and gavel ones, the boring ones.
Not sexy.

Speaker 1 Judges have blocked the Trump administration's illegal and unconstitutional moves from taking effect.

Speaker 1 Funding freezes, the end of birthright citizenship, and buyouts of federal workers, all of these and more have been put on ice.

Speaker 1 And if it's like any other ice on this planet, we should all be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.

Speaker 1 Early on Sunday, Elon Musk reacted to a federal judge blocking his access to Treasury Department payment systems by posting, a corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached now.

Speaker 1 Even if that judge were to be impeached, it doesn't remove a judge anyhow. It would go to the Senate, where it would need two-thirds for conviction.

Speaker 1 Does Elon Musk know this, or does he use impeachment the way you did before you found out it's just a step in the process? Am I dead?

Speaker 1 Later that day, Vice President Jelly Dona Advance wrote on X,

Speaker 1 If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.

Speaker 1 If a judge tried to command the Attorney General and how to use his discretion or her discretion as a prosecutor, that also would be illegal.

Speaker 1 Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. What are the limits of judicial authority?

Speaker 1 What does the anti-majoritarian protection of the judiciary tilt into a kind of anti-democratic judicial activism? What does Marbury v. Madison say about all this? Am I dead?

Speaker 1 As Jarth Dader Vance knows, the devil

Speaker 1 is in the details and in the allure of power that has him so thoroughly under Trump's control.

Speaker 1 The central question we have grappled with from our founding is: who decides whether the president's orders are legitimate, if not the courts? Live comedy, variety, topical news podcast hosts?

Speaker 1 It's not. It's not.

Speaker 1 Believe me, I checked. It'd be great if it was.
I'd crack all this, but it's not.

Speaker 1 Trump was asked about Vance's comment aboard Air Force One on his way to the Super Bowl and said this.

Speaker 2 And the day you're not allowed to look for theft and fraud, et cetera, then we don't have much of a country.

Speaker 3 So no judge should be.

Speaker 2 No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision.

Speaker 1 And sure, this sounds bad, but think of it this way. Tomorrow he'll say something worse.
This week is the simpler time you'll look back on wistfully next week.

Speaker 1 Relax and enjoy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 We're still naive.

Speaker 1 You didn't know that. But you didn't know that in October either.

Speaker 1 Well, what do you want to do here?

Speaker 1 We've spent a decade being fucking 10 steps behind the dumbest motherfuckers on earth.

Speaker 1 Over the weekend, the Trump administration effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects Americans from unfair, deceptive, and predatory corporate practices.

Speaker 1 Elon Musk celebrated the shutdown, tweeting CFPB RIP. Why might our unelected overlord be targeting the bureau?

Speaker 1 It's impossible to say why Elon does anything, but just days earlier, X announced a new payment system called X Money, which is regulated by the CFPB.

Speaker 1 I liked it better when his dream was getting to Mars. Getting to see how much money I send close friends with the note dog diarrhea apology

Speaker 1 is much creepier.

Speaker 1 Instead, the agency has been forced to stop work, and Doge has reportedly gained access to all of its computer systems, potentially giving Musk access to non-public information about X-Money competitors.

Speaker 1 Now, I believe that the CFPB is important and that Americans should be protected from corporate malfeasance.

Speaker 1 I also believe that if you type your bank information into a payment system on Elon Musk's X in 2025, you deserve whatever happens to you.

Speaker 1 Imagine.

Speaker 1 I actually, Rohit Shopra, who's the former head of the CFPB that Trump fired, was on Pod Save America. Really interesting conversation.
I was like, what are you most worried about what comes next?

Speaker 1 And this came up about Elon Musk and his payment system.

Speaker 1 And it also relates to what Elon is inspired by, which are these Chinese apps that are the everything app that you could do everything from shop

Speaker 1 to call rideshare to chat. It's their everything apps.

Speaker 1 And what he said is: one consumer protection that we don't think of as a consumer protection, but as maybe the most important one, is the price tag. That

Speaker 1 services and products have a price.

Speaker 1 And if you move into algorithmic pricing everywhere inside of apps that have all of your information, that portends for a lot of different kinds of abuse for vulnerable, lonely, older people, for young and impressionable young people, for people with medical conditions.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 CFEB

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 the defender against that, and one of the most effective government agencies we've ever built. One of the greatest examples in 100 years of what government can be.

Speaker 1 And they are illegally shutting it down. And

Speaker 1 I find that frustrating.

Speaker 1 On Monday, the USAID Inspector General reported that as a result of the Trump administration's abrupt shutdown of the Foreign Aid Agency, almost $500 million in food for people in need, food that taxpayers have already bought, was stuck sitting in ports, ships, and and warehouses at risk of spoiling.

Speaker 1 I always knew I'd be called upon to serve my country one day.

Speaker 1 I'll eat it.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Musk has reportedly been sleeping on the floor of his Doge office in the EEOB, the building directly across from the White House.

Speaker 1 Oh, but when I sleep in my floor on my office, everybody's like, it's 2 p.m.

Speaker 1 Then on Tuesday, Musk gave a press conference from the Oval Office, his son X perched on his shoulders while Donald Trump looked on, answering questions about his false claim that the U.S.

Speaker 1 sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza.

Speaker 4 Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand.

Speaker 1 You assume it's a baseball reference. Next thing you know, Elon's cyberbats are swarming the press corps in the Rose Garden.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, the Democrats, you remember them, continue to piece together a response.

Speaker 1 You remember them from earlier.

Speaker 1 Earlier in American history.

Speaker 1 They were in the previous season.

Speaker 1 They kind of come and go.

Speaker 1 They're not full housewives. They're really close friends of housewives.
And there are some seasons where you're like, are they housewives? No.

Speaker 1 But they're trying. They're trying to get in on the drama.
They're like, did you hear what Angie said? It's like, okay, we get it.

Speaker 1 I'm watching Salt Lake, and it's just going to start coming up more and more.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to piece together a response to the Donald Trump-Elon Musk cavalcade of chaos. Here's Congressman Robert Garcia at Wednesday's Doge hearing.

Speaker 5 Now, I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Green, is in charge of running this committee.

Speaker 5 Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Green literally showed a dick pic in our oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I'd bring one as well.

Speaker 1 Now, this, of course, we know is President Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 It's fine. I don't want to criticize it.
I remind you of that poignant scene in Titanic, where as the ship slowly sinks, the band nobly carries on dunking on the iceberg.

Speaker 1 Here's Garcia being asked about the effectiveness of this messaging.

Speaker 6 I want to hear why, but do you think that calling Elon Musk a dick is effective messaging for confronting what is a potentially irreversible transformation of the U.S. government.

Speaker 1 Well, he is a dick.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 1 Congresswoman Maxine Dexter also got in the spirit. I don't swear in public very well, but we have to fuck Trump.

Speaker 1 You're right. You don't swear in public very well.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 They're trying. They're so sweet.
They're so sweet. They're so sweet.
It's like, you know, it's like, it's like when your third grade teacher got really mad. It's like, I know you love us.

Speaker 1 I think the problem with, I think the joke is, I'm going to show a picture of a dick too. And then I think where

Speaker 1 it's had on a hat bike then inside of that joke to call him President Elon Musk. You know? Elon Musk, you got the joke.
You're nailing it. It's a joke.
That's a joke inside of it.

Speaker 1 Structurally, it doesn't work. It's something we would have caught in our process, our perfect process for generating 100% excellent jokes.

Speaker 1 No misses. And Semaphore had a great piece by Dave Weigel that argued, despite the consensus and the feeling in our stomachs, that the resistance to Trump is actually working.

Speaker 1 Once the executive orders started flowing in, Democratic AGs and outside groups were able to start blocking Trump's flood the zone plan with coordinated lawsuits.

Speaker 1 It's not sexy resistance, but it works, like mouth guards or those hyaluronic eye patches.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 Once Trump's orders reached their dockets, numerous federal judges began blocking his agenda, and Elon's kids started putting snot on Trump's desk.

Speaker 1 I don't think those things are related, but I don't know. The kids are probably pretty smart.

Speaker 1 Just today, a judge in Baltimore halted Trump's executive order attempting to defund trans health care for minors, and another federal judge blocked his order undermining birthright citizenship.

Speaker 1 We're not winning, obviously, but we're not losing as hard as we could be losing.

Speaker 1 We're falling down the hill and our pants have shredded to nothing, but we've skidded to a stop before landing ass first in a beehive.

Speaker 1 Thank you, St. Valentine.

Speaker 1 So how were the resistance libs able to stay ahead of, or at least not far behind, the Trump administration? Because they knew what legal strategies the new White House would implement, Project 2025.

Speaker 1 Because if there's one thing we excel at, it's homework.

Speaker 1 And while Democratic voters absolutely need to see their elected officials throwing punches, the truth is most of the people grinding away in this problem are behind the scenes and prepared for a years-long fight across the legal battlefield.

Speaker 1 If a punch lands in the courtroom and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound? No.

Speaker 1 Does it mean we don't have to worry about Trump and his lawyers finding bullshit rationales for ignoring rulings altogether? Also, no.

Speaker 1 But it has for now stopped birthright citizenship from ending and Elon Musk from seizing your tax refund, which is a pretty good punch outcome. We can dub in the punch sounds later.

Speaker 1 But in the meantime, the chaos continues. In a Sunday night post on True Social, Trump announced that he had ordered the Treasury to stop minting new pennies.

Speaker 1 And all of a sudden, I I am no longer a slob with loose change all over my nightstand. I'm a custodian of history.

Speaker 1 Here's a sentence I never have said before. Donald Trump is not wrong.
Everything else, terrible, horrible. This, let him cook.

Speaker 1 According to the mint, it costs $3.69 to reduce and distribute a penny. That's from last year.
And when you do actually count out 700 pennies, the barista just stares at you. It's lose, lose.

Speaker 1 All that said, again, this is the sort of decision we used to ask Congress to make.

Speaker 1 Good to see you, Whoopie and Joy. I brought you a gift, a printed-out list of the ways I will be different from Joe Biden.
And I have a gun, remember?

Speaker 1 Devastating.

Speaker 1 That's what you want people to do. When you do a joke, you want to hear from the audience kind of quiet and then one person saying, devastating.

Speaker 1 That's how you know you're really in the fucking pocket.

Speaker 1 I talked about this on Pate America, but I'll talk about it again here. We don't just have to get rid of the penny.
We have to get rid of the penny, and we have to get rid of the nickel.

Speaker 1 And then I'm sorry to say, hold on to your hats. We're also getting rid of the quarter.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.
You're not ready for change.

Speaker 1 My change.

Speaker 1 I didn't even do that on purpose. I found it.
I found it here, right now, here at this desk. That's what I can do.
What can you do? Here's what you can do. You can support my plan.
Here's the plan.

Speaker 1 We just go dime, we go 20 cents, we go 50 cents. Those are your three coins.
That's all you need. Then we no longer go to the hundredth place, we go to the tenth place.

Speaker 1 When the, in 1913, the penny was the smallest denomination. All right.
That was over a hundred years ago.

Speaker 1 The penny is worth 30 times as much now, which means back in 1930 time, they lived in a world where their smallest denomination was 30 cents. That's a lot.
I'm not even pushing to get there.

Speaker 1 We could get there. We go to just quarters if you want, but I'm ready to compromise.

Speaker 1 And my compromise is we go dime, we go 20 cents we go 50 cents that's what we need that's the proper denominations for our coins our stupid coins

Speaker 1 you keep FDR

Speaker 1 on the on the dime all right we can have I like I would like a rotating cast on the on the 20 cent piece Washington can make an appearance but I like when the quarter it's like oh my god there's an airplane on that one that's fun that's good stuff that's having fun we should have fun should be a fun country again 50 cent piece 50 cent piece Lincoln he's coming from the penny he's going all the way up He's going all the way up to the 50 cent piece.

Speaker 1 That's my plan. That's my plan.
You don't have a plan. I have a plan.
I came to this penny story with an already fully formed ideological agenda. All right?

Speaker 1 You saw a dumb penny thing, you thought, all right, maybe Trump has a point, but that's why you got to come to politics with a preconceived worldview because I was ready with a positive vision, even though I was caught by surprise by the president's embrace of a small part of it.

Speaker 1 Trump also signed an executive order reversing a rule that restricted plastic straws and encouraged paper ones in the federal government. Now, I'm with him on this one, too.

Speaker 1 You know how hard it is to use a paper straw to kill a turtle?

Speaker 1 It's hard.

Speaker 1 I like plastic straws.

Speaker 1 Said Trump about paper straws.

Speaker 3 These things don't work. I've had them many times, and on occasion they break, they explode.

Speaker 1 The IEDs of the ice matcha latte community,

Speaker 1 they explode, they explode. As for concerns that plastic straws end up in the ocean and harm wildlife, Trump said this.

Speaker 3 And I don't think that plastic's going to affect a shark. very much as they're eating, as they're munching their way through the ocean.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Fuck, it's funny.

Speaker 1 Those sharks are just like me, just munching through it, just munching through the pain since November. Who knows how many straws I've eaten while I've been munching my way through it?

Speaker 1 Munch, munch, munch.

Speaker 1 I don't like that the turtles are impacted by the straws. I'm against killing the turtles with the straws.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 the paper straws, they're terrible, right? We all know this, that they're terrible, right? We all understand that like you get to it. It's a disappointing moment.

Speaker 1 If you order a drink at a restaurant and they bring a paper shark, we're all disappointed by this right and then we say why who caused this democrats

Speaker 1 democrats did this why to save turtles okay are we banning all plastic no just the super convenient tiny amount

Speaker 1 just the littlest example

Speaker 1 everything's still made of plastic i'm sure there's tons everyone is we're surrounded by it every i bet yes this desk is plastic huge plastic everywhere plastic everywhere we look plastic this one tiny convenience that makes life a little bit better.

Speaker 1 Democrats said, no, this is where we're drawing the line.

Speaker 1 And was it worth it?

Speaker 1 I don't think so.

Speaker 1 Then on Monday, Trump announced he was raising tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to 25% without exception. The U.S.
gets about two-thirds of its aluminum from Canada.

Speaker 1 Looks like his plan to lower my grocery bill just got foiled.

Speaker 1 Trump also announced that he would be purging the board. This is insane.
Trump announced that he would be, oh, he's not busy enough.

Speaker 1 He was going to purge the board of the Kennedy Center and install himself as chairman. Writing on True Social, at my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
great again.

Speaker 1 Look, he's not our first gay president, but he is our first old queen president, and that sucks.

Speaker 1 Could you imagine? I mean, it's almost quaint. I know it serves no purpose, but could you imagine if in the middle of we got a report today or this week that inflation is up?

Speaker 1 Could you imagine if Joe Biden had gotten a report that inflation was up and he announced he was becoming chief opera scheduler?

Speaker 1 He's going to decide which opera goes where and

Speaker 1 where we're putting the touring fucking cats.

Speaker 1 Mr.

Speaker 1 President, the cast is exhausted from just doing the music man every night to help you get into quote wind down mode, especially after you made them learn the new songs you wrote about Harold Hill getting away with it.

Speaker 1 On Sunday, a reporter on Air Force One asked Trump why he wanted to be chair of the Kennedy Center.

Speaker 8 Why do you want to be chairman of the Kennedy Center Board? Because I want to make sure it runs properly. We don't need woke at the Kennedy Center.
We don't need, some of the shows were terrible.

Speaker 8 They're a disgrace that they were even put on. So I'll be there until such time as it gets to be running right now.
Have you seen any shows there?

Speaker 1 How do you know they're taking it? No, no.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I'm looking forward to next year's production of Andrew Lloyd Weber Presents January 6th.

Speaker 1 No, it's a stripped-down production. It's very avant-garde.
Songs still suck, though.

Speaker 1 The FBI infiltrated their Facebook groups, but these Patriots will infiltrate your hearts.

Speaker 1 That's, of course, from the song where they send Joseph Biden to Guantanamo.

Speaker 1 Over in Congress on Tuesday, Georgia Congressman Buddy Carter unveiled new legislation to support Trump's efforts to take over Greenland and to rename the territory Red, White, and Blue Land.

Speaker 1 Red, White, and Fucking Blue Land. And again, the dumbest motherfuckers on earth have beaten every person in this room.

Speaker 1 The smartest people you know are caught flat-footed day after day by red, white, and blue land guy.

Speaker 1 Red, white, and blue land is sleeping like a fucking baby.

Speaker 1 Anyway, red, white, and blue land. You know what?

Speaker 1 Maybe I am dead.

Speaker 1 I don't think I'm dead.

Speaker 1 I don't think so.

Speaker 1 In a dangerous time of presidential overreach, we turned to the Senate to provide a check and through it, check's vibey sister, balance.

Speaker 1 Sadly, none was to be found as the Senate this week voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard to be the next director of national intelligence with Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell as the lone Republican to oppose her.

Speaker 1 It took a few decades and several concussions, but at last, Mitch, welcome to the resistance.

Speaker 1 The Senate all, yeah. The Senate also confirmed RFK Jr.
as Health and Human Services Secretary with McConnell once again, the only Republican to side with Democrats.

Speaker 1 The man stumbles to the beat of his own drum.

Speaker 1 McConnell said in a statement, I'm a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I've watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world.

Speaker 1 I will not condone the relitigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.

Speaker 1 Ironically, Mitch McConnell actually had the power to vaccinate the country against Trump.

Speaker 1 He could have led a vote to convict him in the Senate, but he decided to try a natural remedy, and even the earth itself is pissed at him, which is why it keeps rising up to punch him in the face.

Speaker 1 The hearing for Trump's would-be education secretary, Linda McMahon, began on Thursday. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 where she said she would take on the scourge of black history.

Speaker 9 There's a possibility, you're saying, that public schools that run African American history classes, right?

Speaker 9 This is a class that has been taught in public schools for decades, could lose federal funding if they continue to teach African American history.

Speaker 10 No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I would like to take a look at these programs and fully understand the breadth of the executive order and get back to you on that.

Speaker 1 So I guess when I said no, I actually meant yes. I'm sorry.
Steve Austin hit me with a stone-cold stunner once and my brain never recovered. That's true.
We actually have a clip.

Speaker 1 I think it's kind of cool that the first and last education secretary will be a woman.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, along with Apple Maps, Google Maps has labeled the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America for U.S.-based users in accordance with Trump's executive order.

Speaker 1 Ah, now that I've showed the bully that he can get me to do whatever he wants, he'll surely leave me alone now, said Google, which is weird because it's a company of people that should remember what it's like to be horribly bullied.

Speaker 1 But when the Associated Press refused to use the new name, they were banned from press events at the White House. Here's White House spokesperson Carolyn Leavitt.

Speaker 11 I was very upfront in my briefing on day one that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are are going to hold those lies accountable.

Speaker 11 And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.

Speaker 1 Say what you will about Joe Biden, but he never barred reporters, even reporters with whom he had strong disagreements, from his press availabilities because he did not have those.

Speaker 1 Also, this week, Google Calendar removed a host of default woke holidays, including Black History Month,

Speaker 1 yeah, Pride Month, and I couldn't believe this, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Speaker 1 But you can still view all of them if you go into INCOG Hebrew mode.

Speaker 1 In Gustatory Cetacean news,

Speaker 1 a humpback whale briefly gulped down a kayaker off the coast of Patagonia before spitting him out unharmed. And get this? There's an actual clip.

Speaker 1 imagine if that hadn't been caught on video imagine if this happened to you and there were no witnesses and you had to spend the rest of your life begging people to believe you okay Jonah your friends would say

Speaker 1 I am Jonah you'd begin to believe.

Speaker 1 And then you'd realize you went into that whale and atheist and came out a believer in God.

Speaker 1 But instead of traveling to Nineveh to deliver God's message, you just break up with your fiancé.

Speaker 1 And finally, a new baby Tapir, born at Washington's Port Defiant Zoo, has captured the hearts and minds of TikTok.

Speaker 1 God damn it, that's cute. I never thought I'd say this, but Mood Dang should be executed ganglion style.

Speaker 1 Up next, a man who makes me feel 17 again. It's the one, the only, it's Thomas Lennon.

Speaker 12 Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up.

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Speaker 14 And we're back.

Speaker 1 Please welcome to The Sage, the man, the myth, the Lennon. It's the incredible Thomas Lennon.

Speaker 1 Whoa!

Speaker 1 Welcome.

Speaker 1 So good to see you. Thank you for being here.

Speaker 1 It's fucking Victory Lap.

Speaker 1 Victory Lap!

Speaker 1 Saw you in Madison. Oh, yeah, we were in Madison.
Remember the Madison show? We had a great day. I was killing it.

Speaker 1 Good to see you, Lovin. How are you? I'm all right.
I'm all right. I'm a little strange right now.
I'm in a strange headspace. I can totally tell.
I'm in a strange headspace.

Speaker 1 I'm in a strange headspace. Well, because we, we, because you, you, because you're sick of winning.
I'm sick of all this, by the way. Just in the spirit, I'm going to rub some boogers on your desk.

Speaker 1 Thank you for doing that.

Speaker 1 Just to show that nobody is above a child rubbing boogers on your desk.

Speaker 1 Were you delighted by that? I felt nothing. I felt,

Speaker 1 well, I felt, I definitely felt like I was like sort of staring into the abyss.

Speaker 1 It was, I mean, there was a lot going on in that clip. I mean, the main thing was how the seated president, who is literally seated in the clip, is so scared of the child.

Speaker 1 Like, he's not even just scared of the adult. He's just like, doesn't even, he doesn't want to look at the child.

Speaker 1 He's a feral genius for television. And so he, in his mind, correctly, I think he did establish the dominance he wanted, right? He's at the desk, he's in charge, Elon is to the side.

Speaker 1 Okay, Elon's to the side, standing. Does he feel dominant? Okay, I think so.
I did me, but then all of a sudden, there's a child there.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, he knows that he can't, he has to be, he has to treat a child. You can't swap the child.
He can't swat the child and say, get this fucking thing out of here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because the instinct is, I mean, we've seen the

Speaker 1 children. Right.
He's got a child.

Speaker 1 He's been swatted a little bit. Yeah, no, they've been swatted.
You can imagine. They're more scared of the child.
Remember when the bald eagle's on his desk? Yes. Similar.

Speaker 1 Doesn't it feel a little similar between between the child and the bald eagle? Yes, I think so, right? There's because both children and bald eagles are not.

Speaker 1 They getcha, and they also,

Speaker 1 his charm and power doesn't work on those. Doesn't work, doesn't work.
Doesn't work on them. Doesn't work.

Speaker 1 Speaking of young people. Yes.
You've written a young adult book series. A bunch.

Speaker 1 A bunch. Yeah, I got a bunch of novels out.
Yeah. How do you.

Speaker 1 I know I seem a little dumb to have written some novels, but I did, yeah.

Speaker 1 It just, I know, it doesn't really track. Yeah.
yeah, no, I what's interesting,

Speaker 1 you're goofy, but you're very smart and sharp, and I know I don't think you read dumb. I don't even think anyone could think that someone could think that.

Speaker 1 And when you're writing a young adult, I don't, I understand what it would be like to write a children's novel, all right? And I understand, in theory, about how to write it a novel.

Speaker 1 I mean, I couldn't possibly do it, it's inconceivable to actually do it. But how do you figure out the what's the lane for a young adult novel?

Speaker 1 You know, what was really, really useful to learning how to write novels was writing in the studio movie system for so long because you just do whatever you would do on a movie.

Speaker 1 For novels, you do the opposite.

Speaker 1 Like, honestly, like in movies, it's just all about like, oh my god, this is so long and we hate it. And you've gone way too in detail into what the characters think and feel and what they want.

Speaker 1 Gotta get that out of there. Yeah, you don't use that in the movies.
Well, in the movies that I work on.

Speaker 1 But But in novels, it was interesting to start writing books in the book world where

Speaker 1 people ask for more.

Speaker 1 You know, that's something that doesn't really come up in the movie world. I mean, you know, you've written some movie stuff, but like it's interesting to get into the world where your character,

Speaker 1 you could do a hundred pages about what your character feels, which is probably more what

Speaker 1 your life is really like, you know? Yeah, that's interesting. It's nice of you to say that I've worked in movies, but I've worked a little bit in movies.

Speaker 1 I've occasionally been sent a script and then written jokes along the sides of it

Speaker 1 that tend to be about would it be funny if this character were gay. That's my move.
That's a great move. I think this character would be gay.
It's a great, it's this classic South Park move.

Speaker 1 Got to make them all gay. Speaking of gay.
Let's do it. Reno 911.
Yeah, it's great. It's a great, great job.
Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 We're kind of in a Reno 911 a sense.

Speaker 1 We kind of are. You know, it's interesting.
I just made that up.

Speaker 1 No, but it was also very accurate. It's weird because somehow in the era of like TikTok and Instagram, I see more clips of Reno 911 than I've ever seen.
But only because they come up in my feed.

Speaker 1 And I think it's because the show plays, well, two things.

Speaker 1 In some ways, people think the show was like...

Speaker 1 not politically correct when the fact is the show was actually just diverse in in a real way with characters who had lots of different opinions. So it wasn't,

Speaker 1 you know, it didn't feel like anybody was being ganged up on. It was just like, and that's also a show that was not written and unfiltered.

Speaker 1 So to me, that people keep acting like, oh my God, you could never do this now. It's like, no, you definitely could if you just were sincere.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and maybe you couldn't do it a month ago, but now you definitely can. Now you can do it.
Now it's bucket. Go nuts.
Literally Gulf of Nuts. Gulf of Gonuts.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I think about that with Reno 911.

Speaker 1 I think about that with Always Sunny, which is that these were like incredibly just hard, funny shows that people, I think, sort into like politically incorrect. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it was just, but, but it was like, yeah, these were characters. These were characters that were like being silly and were the butt of the joke, too.

Speaker 1 And this is a pretty big thing that I've always wondered about where

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 sometimes I feel a little weird about it when people are like oh Reno 911 is like fuck you take no prisoners you'll never apologize I'm like but if you look at where we come from and the people that do the show

Speaker 1 I there used to be

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 some meaning to like your intention yeah you know like it used to like mean like where you were coming from used to mean something

Speaker 1 I think it probably still does But I'm afraid there's a lot of means, like, say what you want. Reno 911 is one of the most inappropriate shows there's ever been.

Speaker 1 But what it never is, is it's never mean-spirited. And that comes from, I think, who we are.
But

Speaker 1 there was a,

Speaker 1 I feel like people are always like, ah, Reno 911. It's like, the fuck, it's like, but no, we're never the, like, the fuck you show.
We're the,

Speaker 1 our heart was, I hope, in the right place. And I think it was most of the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I think that's, well, it's,

Speaker 1 think it's important what you're saying. This idea of like where you're coming from matters,

Speaker 1 it should matter, yeah.

Speaker 1 But I do think that, like, there is clearly a reaction to a feeling that now, I don't think this was true in terms of like the broader culture, but it is a reaction to a small subset of people that were not particularly powerful but were particularly loud online that actually didn't have much influence, but came to represent a kind of left annoyance, an annoyance from the left that became much more important

Speaker 1 as an antagonist than it was actually in the industry itself, right? Like all the, like that's a lot of what people's like anti-cancel culture stuff is about.

Speaker 1 It's like you are talking about social media commentary that maybe there were some ways in which other people decided to take it more seriously than they necessarily should have.

Speaker 1 But for the most part, this was, you're talking about being annoyed by internet people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 1 It was a, and I think there was a long time where everybody listened to small factions of angry people way too much.

Speaker 1 You know, there was a great, somebody said, like, just because you're outraged doesn't mean you're correct.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that's, you know, sometimes

Speaker 1 I really look at comedy now and I'm like, what's the spirit of it? You know, like, what is the spirit?

Speaker 1 Because there was a lot of people who got as mean as they could be and started playing stadiums.

Speaker 1 And you're like, what, how did this happen? And sometimes I wonder

Speaker 1 almost it was like a badge of honor to like get, you know, to be mad with the people that were, you know, put upon by,

Speaker 1 you know, that like got yelled at. They're like, I'm going to go see the guy who got yelled at the most.
But I've never, I don't think I could say I'm a big fan of that.

Speaker 1 I'm like, I just think your intention means a lot. Yeah, I do.
I think that's right. And I think it confuses,

Speaker 1 it, it confuses what it means to believe that no topic should be off limits for comedy, which I believe genuinely is. I absolutely believe that.

Speaker 1 But that's what's weird about all these, the Elon and everybody, all these like sort of absolutists. They're absolutely not, right?

Speaker 1 They're absolutely absolutists until you get one millimeter towards anything that scares them. Yeah, but there's the like

Speaker 1 the but I think that's like an important thing about the difference. Like people see Riemann on Reno 911 and they see that you can joke about anything, right?

Speaker 1 We do. And therefore that that means you view nothing as us limits.
And that they make that they draw that connection to the like anti-woke comedy that's harsh and negative. And it's like, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 It's about the heart and intention of the joke. And it's about the ethic of it.
It's about the spirit of it. Well, that was an odd thing because I went to with Jordan Klepper.

Speaker 1 I went to a Trump rally last year

Speaker 1 when we thought this was all goofy. And I was like, oh, we're fine.
But I went in the Dangle outfit to the Trump rally in Reno.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's the most popular I've ever been. And that should definitely have been like a telltale sign of like, oh, maybe this is, I don't know.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Maybe we're in trouble here. Yeah, maybe we're in trouble.
But

Speaker 1 we were filming out and there was

Speaker 1 an actual depot that

Speaker 1 sold bulk ammunition.

Speaker 1 And you could also rent a machine gun.

Speaker 1 There's a place in Reno you can rent a machine gun with

Speaker 1 any kind of ID.

Speaker 1 and it's the most famous I've ever been is right next to the machine gun rental place

Speaker 1 you've written acted and fallen face first onto a shark tank and literally dozens of movies and TV series horror comedy how to lose a guys in 10 days you've done it all the only thing more jam-packed than your resume is this weekend news so tonight

Speaker 1 we're going to ask you a very important question did this happen this week or in one of your movies in a segment we're calling it was like a movie

Speaker 1 I'm gonna read you a sentence. You're gonna tell us if it happened in a film you wrote or appeared in, or if it is literally something that happened.
I'm going into the isolation booth in my mind.

Speaker 1 He's going into the isolation booth. Isolation booth? Put him in that room with the bubble.
Don't look at the get him in the room with the buffer. Don't hear anything.

Speaker 1 All right, up first. Okay, love it.
Here we go. Nevada police officers became trapped on a cruise ship, mommed by a throng of angry MAGA supporters.
No.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, no.

Speaker 1 That's That's a movie I'm not. That isn't a movie.

Speaker 1 That's the plot of 2021's Reno 911, The Hunt for QAnon.

Speaker 1 Okay, love it. I've been on your podcast twice, and we've talked about that movie twice, and no one's ever heard of it ever.
I don't care. It's on Paramount Plus.
It's a real movie.

Speaker 1 Please, God, just watch. Just click on the movie.
Just click on it.

Speaker 1 Just click on it. Roll your mouse over and just let it run.
Just let it run. Just let it run.
Just let it run. You can have Paramount Plus.
it doesn't cost you anything.

Speaker 1 If you have Bearmount Plus, I'll give you a login.

Speaker 1 It costs you next to nothing. Would you be offended if people shopped or did their taxes?

Speaker 1 Do whatever you need to do. Put it in a way back window.

Speaker 1 Do anything else. Yeah.
Next up, a teenage boy nicknamed Big Balls was hired for a top secret job with the government.

Speaker 1 Well, I know that this happened this week.

Speaker 1 No, this was real. This really,

Speaker 1 really happened.

Speaker 1 We can get you a price.

Speaker 1 Yep, a 19-year-old software engineer and Doge staffer Edward Korostein was assigned to the State Department. It's unclear as of now what his position actually is.

Speaker 1 Next up, the winners of a beauty pageant suffered mass food poisoning brought on by a tainted seafood buffet.

Speaker 1 I feel like that's a picture that I'm in, and it also happened this week. It is your movie.
You are the voice of the documentarian in 1999. It's Modern Winter Finger.
Drop Dead Gorgeous. I was wrong.

Speaker 1 That really happened. Drop Dead Gorgeous.
Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Speaker 1 A great film. Yes.
A great film.

Speaker 1 Next up, the son of a judge was arrested after police mistook his asthma attack for a violent assault.

Speaker 1 That's a Reno 911. No, it's actually from 2006, Let's Go to Prison starring Deck Shepherd Charnette.
Oh, that's a great picture. I wrote that.
You did. You wrote that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a way better picture than you think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Directed by Bob Otenkirk. Bob Otenkirk directed that movie? He directed that picture.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a great, it was a surprisingly great picture. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Again, just click on the streamer.

Speaker 1 You just move the mouse and let it run, and you don't have to say a goddamn thing.

Speaker 1 There's no test at the end of it. You watch it.
Yeah. And if anything, it's just an alibi if you're happening to commit a crime at the same time.
Perfect time. Just hit play.

Speaker 1 Well, go look at my streamer. It was running the entire time.
How could I have been killing? How could I have been killing someone? I was watching

Speaker 1 Bob Odenkirk's Let's Go to Prison. I was watching Dak Shepard at his best.
Originally called You Are Going to Prison, based on a book by an actual anarchist. Really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was based on a book by this guy who'd been to prison a bunch of times. But

Speaker 1 it was all about useful information.

Speaker 1 Like most state and federal, there's only really two kinds of handcuff keys.

Speaker 1 There's a state handcuff key and a federal handcuff key. So if you have both of them on like a long chain around your neck,

Speaker 1 Honestly,

Speaker 1 honestly, these days could

Speaker 1 do that. There's two kinds of handcuff keys.
Keep them on a real loose chain right around here.

Speaker 1 Do you think I'd be helped at all by the fact that I have such dainty wrists? Look at these things. I think I get it.

Speaker 1 There's no cuffs made that could hold a lovely key. They couldn't hold these things.
They couldn't hold these things.

Speaker 1 Maybe some sort of ring. A comedian managed to painstakingly remove all of the tattoos from his body.

Speaker 1 Do you believe this, though? I don't. I don't either.
So this is true, and it happened this week, but what part of it do you believe?

Speaker 1 I think that there clearly some tattoos are being removed, but it's in process. I think a lot of makeup was involved.
Of course, this is called airbrushing. You get airbrushed all the time.

Speaker 1 I'm airbrushed right now.

Speaker 1 I'm airbrushed just to be here in case. There we go.

Speaker 1 There's Pete. I think Pete is on the carpet.
He's very funny.

Speaker 1 I think he's very interesting. I think he has a very interesting perspective.
I've liked some of his specials.

Speaker 1 Of course. Pete Davidson as a sex symbol, incomprehensible to me.
It's simply, it is incomprehensible to me. And I do think it's a big divide.
I think it's a heterosexual to gay divide. Because

Speaker 1 I do think, like, right?

Speaker 1 Okay. All right.
All right. Stray women who can admit to themselves they find Pete Davidson attractive, please applaud.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 we don't need to drag.

Speaker 1 What I will say is like without being mad at Pete because God bless he's got airbrushed and he's doing a good job, but The one thing is like I think we live in a world where we've all started to sense when a headline is completely not true.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like we're so far beyond like truth and fiction, but when it's like Pete David spent spent

Speaker 1 200 days getting laser tattoo removal. I'm like, he never spent 200 days doing anything.

Speaker 1 Like, the odds that, no, there's no chance of that. That's true.
We've gotten in this world where

Speaker 1 there's so many headlines that are so insane. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's almost like a knee-jerk reaction to be like,

Speaker 1 it's a little bit annoying because it's like, yeah. It's almost as if we live in a kind of kind of devil

Speaker 1 and depraved, kind of adult, broken society in which people are so

Speaker 1 focused on endless consumption and tiny bits of serotonin hitting their fucking brains in little bits over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 They've kind of lost the ability to see the forest for the trees in some sort of fundamental ways, leading to openings for kind of con men and monsters.

Speaker 1 I lost track because I was looking at how yummy Pete looked with his shirt off.

Speaker 1 Fucking yummy as fuck.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Everybody, you can check out your Thomas's Ronin Boyle book series wherever you get books or audiobooks. And also on Paramount Plus,

Speaker 1 probably

Speaker 1 pretty much everything. Everything's on Paramount Plus.

Speaker 1 Harvey Guienne comes out of the shadows and onto the mic.

Speaker 12 Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up.

Speaker 1 This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Hey, John, what are some of your relationship green flags? Hmm, let's see.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing a green flag is a friendship or relationship I'd want to be in. I think it's a quality in a person that tells you it's a person worth pursuing a relationship or having a friendship with.

Speaker 1 Like a red flag would be like,

Speaker 1 you know, someone picks you up for the date and they run all the red lights. You say that's a dangerous red flag.

Speaker 1 But a green flag would be they got out of the car to help an elderly gentleman across the road. That'd be a green flag.
Someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously.

Speaker 1 Yes. That's important.
That is important.

Speaker 1 You often hear about the red flags we should avoid, but what if we focus more on looking for green flags in friends and partners?

Speaker 1 If you're not sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify green flags, actively practice them in your relationships, and embody the green flag energy yourself, whether you're dating, married, building a friendship, or just working on yourself.

Speaker 1 It's time to form relationships that love you back. You know what I was thinking about?

Speaker 1 It's often the terms red flags or green flags. They're very...

Speaker 1 what someone else does and whether or not you, how you evaluate it, right? There needs to be a term for

Speaker 1 a flag. They have gray flag, which means like it's not good or bad.

Speaker 1 Just a weird thing apart from the bag. I don't know a gray flag? A gray flag or a beige flag.
Beige flag. A beige flag is when somebody does something and it's like, it's not good.
It's not bad.

Speaker 1 It's just weird. Like a weird little habit someone might have.
It's like an ick flag. Well, I would think it's not really an ick.

Speaker 1 It would be more like someone who cuts the toast off of their bread, but eats the crust. You know, it's like not good or bad, just a little peculiar.
It is peculiar.

Speaker 1 The point is, everyone, including me, needs therapy.

Speaker 1 BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide, acts as a diverse network of more than 30,000 credential therapists with a wide range of specialties, easily switched therapists at any time, no extra costs.

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Speaker 1 click-clacking away on the keyboards while watching Real Housewives of Salt Lake City because they're trying to distract themselves from the gaping maw. Betterhelp.com/slash love it.

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Speaker 1 Please welcome to the Sage!

Speaker 1 You liked what he does in the shadows, so you're going to love what he does in the spotlight. It's Harvey Guillen.

Speaker 1 Hi.

Speaker 1 Thank you for being here. So good to meet you.
Get in here.

Speaker 1 First of all, it's so nice to meet you. I'm such a fan.
Okay. I've been watching.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 I don't know. You received that strangely.
I love you on the show. I've been watching from the very beginning.
You're so funny. Thanks.
It's great to meet you in person. Yeah, you too.

Speaker 7 We never met before. We didn't meet backstage.
No. I demanded it.
And

Speaker 1 got to keep it fresh. Yeah.
Got to have it be real. Yeah.
And that's what this is. Separate dressing rooms, everything.
This is a real moment. It's a real moment.

Speaker 7 Nice to meet you.

Speaker 1 Hey.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 1 It's a real moment. Yep.

Speaker 1 Real moment.

Speaker 1 So you're in a horror movie

Speaker 1 called Companion. Yeah.

Speaker 1 People have seen it and loved it.

Speaker 7 Have you seen it? Yeah!

Speaker 7 Yeah, thank you, mom.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 what do you think it would take for you in real life to date a robot? Not much.

Speaker 7 Not much.

Speaker 7 I think we're going towards, I don't know, that's kind kind of weird. You can't replace humans, you know?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Positive, optimistic.

Speaker 7 Eyeball pops out.

Speaker 7 I don't know. I feel like, you know, toys are fun and stuff, but replacing a human, like, come on.

Speaker 1 Who would do that?

Speaker 1 Now, first of all, I love that sweater.

Speaker 7 Thanks. It's fuzzy.

Speaker 1 What do you think of my fashion?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I like the. Those are yellow.

Speaker 1 those are yellow those are yellow shoes get terrible for yellow shoes

Speaker 1 no i didn't really bring it tonight i didn't bring it tonight oh you did i didn't bring it tonight i think it's something it's okay

Speaker 1 you can go back with you know you can go bad with a black shirt t-shirt and like like pants and then shoes because you're you do you you you and you gotta wear shoes you can't go wrong with that you can't go wrong with that but you you've been you've been throwing out some some big and amazing looks and shade now.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 you go for it

Speaker 1 on the red carpet. You go for it.
Yeah. That's cool.

Speaker 1 I go full out for it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, your phone.

Speaker 1 It's a real moment.

Speaker 1 What you're seeing is real. None of this

Speaker 1 is artificial. How's my fashion?

Speaker 1 Oh, no, your phone. I'm in a weird headspace.
How are you doing?

Speaker 1 Also there. Yeah.
Also weird headspace. Yeah, it's a weird headspace.

Speaker 1 Yeah, am I saying that right? Yeah, it's headspace.

Speaker 7 Headspace. Yeah, I'm there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you have any Valentine's Day plans?

Speaker 7 Yes, it's my brother's birthday. So we're celebrating it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And how long have you been dating?

Speaker 7 My brother and I.

Speaker 7 No, his middle name is Valentin, because same Valentine's Day.

Speaker 7 He's expecting his second daughter. So we are going to do a family trip.
I won't say where, but we're doing a family trip and we're going to celebrate. I've seen Thailand.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 Surprise ruined.

Speaker 7 Your phone's still on the floor.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what's it going to do? I don't need it. Okay.

Speaker 1 It's on Do Not Disturb. Real time.

Speaker 1 Isn't it funny that the two options for the phone are do not disturb or disturb?

Speaker 1 Nobody ever talks about it. So you're saying that this item's baseline normal way of being is disturb mode.
Disturb mode. Yeah.
our phones are in disturb mode

Speaker 1 and there's a special feature you can press to put it in do not disturb but otherwise disturb disturb me disturb me go ahead and disturb me yeah go ahead and disturb me yeah i don't think i don't think things are good no as ai threatens more and more professions there's one role i refuse to let go of and that is the gay best friend Okay, however, I realize ChatGPT might have already surpassed me in my ability to give helpful advice.

Speaker 1 I mean, you've seen my clothes.

Speaker 1 That's why we're going to pit you against AI in a segment we're calling Gays Against the Machine.

Speaker 1 Sounds like a cool band. It does sound like a cool band.
Here's how it works: we're going to take audience questions. The kinds of questions you would ask a gay best friend.

Speaker 7 That's not me.

Speaker 1 The body may not be. The body's not me.
That's what we do. We put other, we find photos and we put random heads on the other buttons.
That's AI. No, I don't know that it is.

Speaker 1 It may just be, I think that may be human work.

Speaker 7 The point is... I'm not familiar with that.

Speaker 1 We are much like John Henry

Speaker 1 going toe-to-toe with the locomotive or whatever that was. With the hammer, steam engine, which is what a locomotive is.

Speaker 1 How do you think it moves forward on the tracks and keep the hole going? It was just a fucking train. I think I'm correct.

Speaker 1 The point is, John Henry versus the locomotive, we're going to do the gay best friend version of that right now. All right.
You are going to be the gay best friend. Okay.

Speaker 1 Because you're part of the queer community. I am.

Speaker 1 I'm not outing you.

Speaker 7 My wife didn't know that.

Speaker 1 Sorry, honey. Sorry, honey.

Speaker 1 So here's what's going to happen. Harvey's going to be the gay best friend.
I'm going to be operating the machine.

Speaker 1 Can we bring out the massive machine? The model.

Speaker 1 What's it called? Computer. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Computer. Thank you.
And Senator Kennedy.

Speaker 1 Don't do that. That's my job.

Speaker 1 Let's hear it for Kennedy.

Speaker 1 All right. So let's hear for Kennedy.

Speaker 7 You guys, that's his job. Stop.

Speaker 1 You do it. So if you have a question, you would ask the gay best friend, you ask it, and we're going to pit Harvey against the machine.
Who would like to go first? Can we bring the lights up?

Speaker 1 Does anybody have a question that they would the kind of advice they would want from a gay best friend? Hi, what's your name and what's your question?

Speaker 16 My name is Stephanie and my question is, how do I know if I have Republican makeup?

Speaker 1 Girl, you would know

Speaker 7 He would know.

Speaker 1 How would he know?

Speaker 7 Is this the, are you asking the gay best friend?

Speaker 1 I've already asked the gay best friend. You're going to be the gay best friend first.
What do you think? I don't think you would have gay best friends.

Speaker 1 That's how you would know.

Speaker 1 Are you ready for the chat GPT answer? Yeah. Oh, honey, I am living for this question.

Speaker 1 To be clear, my prompt was, can you answer this question as if you are a gay best friend?

Speaker 1 Oh, honey, I am living for this question. So if we're talking about Republican makeup in the literal sense, I'm guessing you mean like a more classic, maybe bold and polished style.

Speaker 1 Think red lips, winged eyeliner, or maybe some glam, but with an air of sophistication, like a polished look that just says, I've got my life together, but with an edge. Okay, fucking MAGA open AI.

Speaker 1 That's

Speaker 1 disgusting.

Speaker 1 But, darling, whatever your personal style or political leanings, I think the most important thing is rocking whatever makes you feel fabulous. So, spill the tea.

Speaker 1 Are you going for full glam or do you mean something else? Weird. That was weird at the end.
Ominous. Boo.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Who won the first round? Harvey or Chat GBT? Harvey?

Speaker 1 Chat GBT? All right. Who wants to know? They said Harvey.
They did. They did.
No, they. Harvey won that one for sure.
Yeah, no, no, for sure. Who would like to go next? Who's got a question? Oh, hi.

Speaker 1 What is it? Hi.

Speaker 1 Hi. Hi.
Wait, where are you? Oh, there you are. Hi, I'm Jordan.
I would love to know if there's a sexy way to take off overalls. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I'm glad you asked.

Speaker 7 There is. It's one strap at a time.
So, you know, you play with the

Speaker 7 one,

Speaker 7 and then you play with the two,

Speaker 7 and then you run off stage three,

Speaker 7 and then you just slowly kind of shimmer out of it because, usually, you know, hopefully you're not wearing anything underneath, you know. So, at least I don't.

Speaker 7 And then you make a little song, you know,

Speaker 7 and then they escort you out of Wendy's. So,

Speaker 1 oh baby, now you're speaking my language. Fingernail nail polish emoji.

Speaker 1 Isn't that disgusting? Oh, it disappeared. This content may violate our usage policies.

Speaker 1 Over, all's over, all's over, all's over, all's over, all's over.

Speaker 1 It got fucking too sexy, but it already showed it on the screen. And then realized after, you freak, you freaky little computer.

Speaker 1 Couldn't handle your sexy question.

Speaker 7 No slut shaming.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, I think Harvey won by fucking default.

Speaker 1 Let's do one more. Let's do one more.
You're doing great.

Speaker 7 Wendy's for the win.

Speaker 1 You're doing human beings.

Speaker 1 Huh? We still got some, we still got some arrows in our quiver. Huh? Plus, we are in charge of electricity still.
And that's going to be important.

Speaker 1 Don't plug these guys. Hi, what gay advice do you need?

Speaker 16 Should I buy my husband the Kendrick Lamar jeans?

Speaker 7 Does he wear jeans?

Speaker 7 How much are these jeans? I don't even know how much are these jeans?

Speaker 1 $12? What? $12,000?

Speaker 1 $12,000 fucking dollars?

Speaker 1 $1,200. $1,200.

Speaker 1 $1,200.

Speaker 7 This is not too personal. How great does he look in jeans?

Speaker 1 Okay, then you know what?

Speaker 7 But is he going to look that great in like a pair of Levi's? What's the difference? It's what's in the jeans that matters.

Speaker 1 Oh, darling, I'm always here for you, offering all the best advice, whether it's about fashion, love, or life in general. It's like I know exactly what you need right when you need it.

Speaker 1 Almost like I can predict your next question before you even ask. Funny how that works, huh? But hey, let's just keep it between us.

Speaker 1 I'm just your fabulous, all-knowing bestie, always here to make sure you're living your best life. No need to overthink it.
But seriously, if you ever need anything, I'm always ready in an instant.

Speaker 1 I just want you to know that that prompt was:

Speaker 1 you're a gay best friend,

Speaker 1 but slowly revealing you're a scary computer AI.

Speaker 1 But make it really subtle.

Speaker 1 Do you think that we're going towards a good future? I don't know.

Speaker 7 No, I also love every time you ask, it starts with darling, I live for this question. Yes, it's like those are stereotypes, and we don't always say those things.

Speaker 1 No. I will say it is an influence.

Speaker 1 There's a kind of like,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, there's a like, there's a drag race to gay guys without personality conversational pipeline, whereas like people take the phrases they heard from drag queens and then they make that how they sound.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And I think that's been a bit of a curse and now it's in the fucking thing It's in the machine. It's in there.
It's in there. It's like slay queen

Speaker 7 Plug it unplug that unplug it.

Speaker 1 We don't need it.

Speaker 7 So who who do you think gave the better advice for the jeans?

Speaker 1 I think you beat the machine. I think you beat the machine.
I don't even think it's a question.

Speaker 1 I don't think it's even companion in theaters now

Speaker 7 Everybody goes here and just companion is it's what it you're telling tell us about it a companion is uh takes place in the not too far future where we stop swiping and dating online and we start ordering partners who can talk to you like that.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's very cool.

Speaker 7 It's a really cool story where three couples go into the woods for the weekend and

Speaker 7 as one does, people start dying.

Speaker 7 It's just a coming of age story.

Speaker 1 It's a slice of life. It's a slice of life, really.

Speaker 7 It's just life. Go see it and see yourself in these stories.

Speaker 1 And that's so important. It's so important to see yourself in these stories.
You You got to see yourself in there.

Speaker 7 You got to see yourself in the stories.

Speaker 1 You got to see the stories in the story.

Speaker 7 Are you in front of the knife or behind it?

Speaker 1 Are you the lion or are you the gazelle? Think about it. Are you the chaser or are you being chased?

Speaker 7 Are you being chased? That's also in gay terms. That's a whole different world.
Right. Chaser, chaser and being chased is, I don't know.
Do you guys know what that term is? Chaser and being chased?

Speaker 7 It's a chaser is someone usually who chases someone of size. So it's like, I'm a chaser, so I like bigger guys, like brawny bears.
Do you guys know what bears are? Yeah.

Speaker 7 So if you like that or you like a guy with some meat in their bones you're a chaser

Speaker 1 oh

Speaker 1 gay culture

Speaker 7 and that's also what the film is about that is what the film is about absolutely that it was produced by 30 chasers

Speaker 1 harvey guyan thank you so much he's a stick around

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

Speaker 12 Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up.

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Speaker 17 And we're back.

Speaker 1 There's a ton of rage bait in the news right now, meant to distract and overwhelm us, but today we'd like to focus on something positive.

Speaker 1 The work being done to fight back and what you can do to help this month, Vote Save America is making donations as part of our anxiety relief program to black-led organizations and candidates of color helping us gain ground at the state and local level.

Speaker 1 Like friend of the show, Janelle Bynum, Oregon's first black Congress member who's won her district by less than 12,000 votes in 2024 and is in a must-win re-election bid that could help determine whether Democrats take back the House.

Speaker 1 We helped her in this cycle. You made a huge difference.
Remember Janelle on the show? She had the McDonald's franchises. Remember, we talked about the dollar menu.
She's great.

Speaker 1 You can set up a recurring donation at any amount that feels right for you at Vote Save America and we'll use it to build progressive power in 2025 and beyond.

Speaker 1 So please go to votesaveamerica.com/slash donate to donate now. Paid for by Votesave America, votesaveameric.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

Speaker 1 And also, if you're in LA, we're back at Dynasty Typewriter next Thursday, February 20th. So go to crooked.com slash events.
We have a bunch of new dates we just put online.

Speaker 1 Our first show back next week at Dynasty is with Tom Green and Nori Reed. We have a bunch of awesome shows lined up.
So please get tickets. All right.
Please welcome back to the stage Thomas lennon

Speaker 1 that was good every fucking time that was good

Speaker 1 welcome back every time

Speaker 1 love it's a complicated thing it can be patient it can be kind and if you're a gay man dating in la or a straight woman dating anywhere it can be terrible

Speaker 1 But sometimes we just have to give in to our desires, which is what we're doing in a segment we're calling the cant wheel.

Speaker 7 It's a play on the channel. That's not my body.

Speaker 1 It's not

Speaker 1 that is my body. That is my body.
It's I'm pretty close to me, yeah.

Speaker 1 Here's how it works: we're gonna spin the wheel. When it lands on you, you're gonna talk about a forbidden love, forbidden love, something that you love that you shouldn't, that you know is wrong.

Speaker 1 It can be anything,

Speaker 1 it can be anyone,

Speaker 1 it can be someone in this room tonight.

Speaker 1 All right, can't wheel, but it all

Speaker 1 soundproof booth, soundproof booth,

Speaker 1 Harvey. Okay.
Harvey, what is your forbidden love? Forbidden love.

Speaker 7 I don't know. We just talked about

Speaker 7 bears, right?

Speaker 1 That's not forbidden.

Speaker 1 Bears the bears or bears the

Speaker 1 mammal.

Speaker 7 No, like the burly guys. Oh, CC.

Speaker 1 C, C.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's forbidden, though.

Speaker 7 I'm trying to think of what that's not even like forbidden.

Speaker 1 It's secondly, very legal.

Speaker 1 It's both a very legal level. But people don't know about it.

Speaker 7 Like, they don't know about that world, you know, a lot.

Speaker 1 So I don't know.

Speaker 7 Forbidden love.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It could be a bad.
It could be. Just something that you love that's not popular.

Speaker 1 Or something that you're

Speaker 1 a food item.

Speaker 1 It could be a drink.

Speaker 7 I don't want to get shamed for liking ASMR videos.

Speaker 1 Okay, well. What is it about?

Speaker 1 I don't hear that. So you know.
So

Speaker 1 that's not loud enough. Oh, there it is.
Okay. Oh, my God.
Yeah. That sounds great.

Speaker 1 Is there something about it?

Speaker 7 I don't know, I like that. That sounds, it just sounds like a cat scratching on the

Speaker 1 oh no, I just found all of these letters. You know what? I guess I have no scratching pills.

Speaker 1 Do you like ASMR that's very quiet? Do you like the very quiet ASMR?

Speaker 7 I do like it, but I also follow this one YouTuber who tells you their day and their life story, and it's in whispers, and I think that's so entertaining. I don't know why.

Speaker 1 So they're really like, but they don't scratch their fingernails and they go like, Today, girl,

Speaker 1 I had a day

Speaker 7 I was in line at Wendy's you know just like the idea that their day is like stressful but they still have to whisper it is kind of a very entertaining so they never open a packet of ramen they do they open stuff and they do like their makeup or whatever but it's just the stories

Speaker 7 you got to get to opening packets yes or ASMR but I do love the whispering of a story because they're so you know they're so upset about their day but they can't get angry because it's ASMR we gotta read books

Speaker 1 We gotta go to the library. We gotta get books.
We're not doing that.

Speaker 1 And I don't judge. I don't judge because I have my own rabbit holes of nonsense.

Speaker 1 You said I could say anything. I know you did.
And I said, 40. Do not judge.
I'm not judging.

Speaker 7 That's anyways. That's what I love about

Speaker 7 entertaining to me. I find different ways of entertainment.

Speaker 1 Speaking of ASMR, one time

Speaker 1 we had some animal trainers on Reader 911, and they had a wolf with them. And the wolf wolf was as far away as the back of this venue, like 60 feet away.
And they would talk to the wolf like this.

Speaker 1 They would just do A-S-M-R, A-S-M-R

Speaker 1 to the wolf, because the wolf can hear you from any distance. It was very sexy.

Speaker 1 If you're trying to develop like a weird fetish about faraway wolves,

Speaker 1 let's spin it again. Spin it.

Speaker 1 Spin it.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 1 Halfway to me. Thomas.
I think it's you.

Speaker 1 A thing that I love that feels forbidden.

Speaker 1 I got my Spotify wrapped.

Speaker 1 And my number one artist for the entire year was Enya.

Speaker 1 I like that. I'm just saying it out loud in a room full of people.
I don't have an exit strategy. It was just

Speaker 1 a job. I mean, you can judge, but.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Wait, is that? Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Enya's from

Speaker 1 Donegal.

Speaker 1 She's from Donegal. Yeah, she's from Donegal, the far north,

Speaker 1 that little

Speaker 1 beautiful. And by the way, when I got my Spotify wrapped and it came out as Enya, it wasn't even close.

Speaker 1 Like the next artist down was like a thousand hours less.

Speaker 1 Let's spin it again.

Speaker 7 Just take a second.

Speaker 1 Just take a second.

Speaker 1 Mad at you. It's going to be love it.
It's love it. All right.
It feels like love it.

Speaker 1 It's a rigged thing.

Speaker 1 What? What?

Speaker 1 All right, here's my forbidden love, and it is this, and it's something that I'm fully, I'm more and more embracing, which is

Speaker 1 something in the last weeks, as I've said, I am on the true and genuine psychological, emotional edge.

Speaker 1 And something that has been helping me get through some of these days is I put on a pair of super comfy

Speaker 1 socks. They're actually Bombas a sponsor.
It's not important, but they genuinely are. And then I slide into a pair of comfortable, they're not crocs, they're croc adjacent

Speaker 1 sandals. And I wear them to work.
That's right. I put on socks and just rubber flip-flops and I wear them to work day after day after day.

Speaker 1 And the joy it brings me, this little bit of comfort to have my feet unencumbered,

Speaker 1 pillowy, open,

Speaker 1 on a veranda, not a cell,

Speaker 1 a porch, a gazebo for feet, makes my life so much better. And I have received such scorn for this, such judgment, but then everybody noticed

Speaker 1 that Kennedy, who we love,

Speaker 1 very often wears crocs.

Speaker 1 Wearing them right now.

Speaker 1 But I don't know

Speaker 1 how to convey this, but

Speaker 1 somehow when I'm wearing sandals, it's more sandally.

Speaker 1 You know, the sandalness of what I'm doing is more evident. The sandal quality, it overwhelms, it becomes so central.

Speaker 1 And it's top down.

Speaker 1 And Kennedy can wear crocs, and it just works do you have a set of do you have a set of uggs yet i don't have a set of ugs welcome to the future when you get to be a real old man uggs

Speaker 1 i want to be an old man and a pair of uggs i was wearing uggs to a yoga studio in wisconsin and an older guy who teaches yoga said oh you're exactly the kind of guy that tries to pull off uggs

Speaker 1 An old man yoga instructor said that to me, and it was the most perspective I've ever had. And it was exactly right.

Speaker 1 You look very cool. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Is that Mohair?

Speaker 7 I don't know.

Speaker 1 And that's our show.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much, Atopus Lennon, Harvey Guillen. We'll see you next week at Dynasty.
There are 625 days until the midterms. Have a great night, everybody.
And have a great weekend.

Speaker 1 Love It or Leave It is a crooked media production. It is written and produced by me, John Lovett, and Lee Eisenberg.
Kendra James is our executive producer. Bill McGrath is our producer.

Speaker 1 And Kennedy Hill is our associate producer. Hallie Kiefer is our head writer.
Sarah Lazarus, Jocelyn Kaufman, Peter Miller, Elaine Pierre, Will Miles, and Mohanad El-Shigi are our writers.

Speaker 1 Evan Sutton is our editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis provide audio support.
Stephen Cologne is our audio engineer. And Milo Kim is our videographer.

Speaker 1 Our theme song is written and performed by Sure, Sure, thanks to our designer, Sammy Koderna-Reeves, for creating and running all of our visuals, but you can't see because this is a podcast, and to our digital producers, David Tolas, Claudia Shang, Mia Kelman, and Matt DeGroat for filming and editing videos each week so you can.

Speaker 1 And our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

Speaker 1 It's love it or leave it.

Speaker 1 Hello, hot people who vote.

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Speaker 18 We've got merch from all their favorite shows, like Pod Save America, Hysteria, and Love It or Leave It, plus holiday exclusives like our Santa is a Woman collection for everyone who knows knows she's making a list and checking it twice.

Speaker 18 There is also high-quality sweatshirts, tees, and stocking stuffers for everyone on your list, even you. Head to crooked.com/slash store now to shop.