Sex, Lies, and Longevity with TV Legend Maury Povich

Okay, so it's December 26th, day after Christmas.

You've been surrounded by family, hopefully.

Hope that was good for you.

If it wasn't, and you find yourself like wondering, am I really related to these people?

Fair question.

And I have an episode for you today because I sometimes get concerned that the episodes we make three times a week, relentlessly, forever, don't get consumed by everybody on the planet.

Also, just in our own feed on our YouTube channel,

because

there's some real good shit, man.

Every episode is kind of like my kid to continue this theme of paternity.

This one, I want you to meet.

I have a feeling that some people missed it, but this is a visit from

the man who I would say is the face of genetic testing.

Okay.

Also the longest running daytime host in American television history.

He is a legend, an icon.

None of these things are exaggerations.

He also made me as happy as I've been in the year 2023 because of this episode.

So, without further ado, welcome to the stage, Mr.

Moripovich.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

You want to own up and tell everybody what you are deathly afraid of?

Aluminum foil.

Is it the noise?

It's the look.

The look.

And And the noise is what.

And the noise.

Yeah.

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Maury Povich, it's a thrill.

It's just a thrill to hear you laugh

across this table from me.

Well, it's nice to be with you.

I've watched you a lot.

Oh, well, I believe that I win that competition.

Who has seen more of the other?

And it's not close.

Yeah, well,

when you appear with that miscreant Kornheiser,

I tune in.

Kornheiser says, the only reason I have Pablo on is he's smarter than I am.

Yeah,

he likes to self-deprecate in a way that is always so flattering to me and makes me suspicious.

It's a little too kind, that man, when it comes to this stuff.

There are many reasons why I am legitimately like sort of deliriously happy that you're here.

One of them is that it's like I climbed into my television.

There are only a few people who made me feel that way.

You are one of them.

But the second reason is that you have

the blood of

truly like sports writing, sports writing greatness inside of you.

So for people who don't understand your lineage,

explain who your father is.

Okay.

So my father's name, Shirley Povich.

He was a kid in Bar Harbor, Maine, growing up as a towny kid that didn't come from a wealthy family or any, but the

millionaires who summered in Bar Harbor, Maine, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, all these people, built their own golf course called Kibo Valley.

And my father was a caddy at the course, and he was thrown together one time with a man when he was about 15 years old.

And he caddied so well for this man that this man

said my carriage, because

there weren't any cars on Mount Desert Island at the time.

And so he picked my father up in his carriage every day in the summer for three straight years, went to my grandmother and said, I want to take your son with me.

I own my own golf course in Washington, D.C.,

and he'll be my caddy.

And I also own a newspaper called the Washington Post, and I will give him a job.

And my father arrived in Washington in 1922.

My father died in 1998, 75 plus years later, working for the Washington Post as the sports writer, sports editor, the youngest sports editor in the country at the age of 21.

One of the greatest columnists as well of all time.

Shirley Povich is, I mean, the name in

the world that me and the aforementioned Miscreant Tony Kornheiser inhabit.

This is, we are dealing with royalty i just wanted to make clear too that the reason i had your phone number in the first place is because of kornheiser right and you guys he gave it out huh he he's he's i should not have betrayed him in this way but i but i in the sake of uh for the sake of journalistic transparency i make clear that um you guys you and tony are actually you know each other because of this way forever i mean my father was very instrumental in hiring not only tony but michael wilbon You know, it's very interesting.

When Tony was first hired,

Tony, as everyone knows, has a great sense of humor and he used to write humorously a lot.

And my father went to George Solomon, and then the sports editor of the Post and said, I don't know if this is going to work out.

I don't know if he's that funny.

And then he came back about a year later and said to Solomon, you know, I have to admit, I was wrong.

He's terrific.

And so from then on, they've been, have been best buds.

He has, Tony has that way of

winning you over despite maybe your skepticisms.

And I, of course, say this in the context of knowing that you and Tony were also business partners.

Yeah, well, that's another reason why I'm...

a little leery of him.

He, you know,

I have

invested in some, you know, glorious businesses like the clothing business.

Eh, never worked out.

I started a newspaper in the middle of when newspapers were going down in the great state of Montana, which I still have.

Not a great idea.

And then Kornheiser tries to convince me to invest in his goddamn restaurant in Washington.

Chatter.

Yeah, Chatter.

And that was another failing adventure of mine.

But all of that stands in contrast to a remarkable bit of longevity, which is that, and you own this title, and this is an incredible title.

You were the longest-running daytime host in television history.

Right.

Yeah.

I never expected it.

You never expected it?

No, no.

I mean, first of all, I always thought when I was growing up, in this business, doing news, sports, talk shows, that if I, this is what I said said to myself:

if I could make $50,000 a year the rest of my career, I would be so excited and so happy.

And secondly, if I could still stay in this business at the age of 50,

I would consider that a victory.

Well,

I think I set the bar too low.

Yeah, yeah, I would have taken the over on that one.

Okay, so you should know that there is an alternate universe, a miserable alternate universe, where Maury Povich is not this Maury Povich.

Now, age 84.

Because for the first 25 years or so of Maury's professional life, he worked in local news.

He did some sports, he did a lot of hard news, he hosted a talk show, he anchored the evening news.

He mostly hopped from job to job to job, all across the country.

But then this insane Australian guy named Rupert Murdoch summoned Maury to New York to host a new tabloid style news show called A Current Affair.

And this was 1986.

And A Current Affair went on to take so many viewers from its direct competitor, Entertainment Tonight, that the company that owned Entertainment Tonight went out and hired Maury to launch his own daytime talk show, the Maury Povich Show, which was just one entrant among many in the super crowded field of daytime TV in 1991.

So what you're saying is that your entry into daytime television, which again, when I was growing up, I was born in 85, right?

80s and 90s.

Daytime television.

Huge.

And not just an economic machine, but a golden age institution that shaped American life.

There were at least 10 of us on the air.

And when I say that, I mean there was Phil Donahue and there was Oprah and there was Geraldo Rivera and there was me and there was Sally Jesse Raphael and Joan Rivers and Jenny Jones and Montell Williams.

I mean, I could go.

Jerry Springer.

Jerry Springer.

And so

it was so funny one time because for their 25th anniversary, NBC gave Phil Donahue a prime time show and he asked all of his competitors to be in a skit on the show.

And we all showed up at the green room.

All of us, all eight or nine of us.

Avengers of daytime television.

We were all in the green room, talk show hosts in the green room.

Not one of us would talk to each other.

I mean, so our egos were so big that we couldn't even converse with each other.

But it was like that, though.

It was.

It was, it was doggy dog.

Right, right.

That reminds me a bit of just the competitiveness of sports.

Same thing.

Keeping track of what the other person's stat line might be.

Exactly.

Or clickbait now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The metrics, the numbers,

the race to be great, the greatest.

I'm genuinely curious.

This is a show about finding out stuff.

And I say that now and smile because your show, of course, is the ultimate show about finding out stuff.

Yeah.

Maury Povich Finds Out is a good alternate title for your shows.

But how good is your memory?

of your show over decades upon decades upon decades upon decades?

Well, I mean,

it's difficult because there are two great themes for the last 24 years, and it was, of course, paternity tests and lie detector tests.

So those things kind of merge.

Uh-oh, my golly.

I'm getting silly phone calls.

Oh, it's all good.

Not only that, it was spam.

How's that?

I was hoping for Connie's chunk.

No.

Oh, God, almighty.

Let me get this off house.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's all good.

I'll call her, though, if you want me to.

Well, we might need to.

She's not writing her memoirs.

I was going to say, she's not writing her memoirs.

Allow me to be the millionth Asian-American young person to just use you as a way to get into your.

Do you know when Connie saw you on pardon the interruption, she immediately looked you up to find out?

Oh, Maury.

Oh, Maury.

This is,

oh,

oh.

That's, that's, that is, uh, I'm serious.

Put it on, put it on the epitaph stuff.

Just like Connie Connie Chung wanted to know, where is this kid from?

Is all I, I mean, now we're in the gravy phase of the proceedings today.

That makes my, oh, no, it's true.

That makes a month, a year for me.

Yeah.

So

what happened was

the first seven years when I worked at Paramount for the show, it was like, I mean, it was like Oprah and Donahue.

It was just an

we, for instance, we went to Waco, Texas for the Branch Davidians.

We would go to Nashville to do a country music week.

We would, I mean, it's the same

kind of motif that the Today Show had or Oprah had or Phil had.

And then after seven years, I left, became a free agent, and then I went to NBC Universal for the last 24 years.

And that first couple of years were the same thing.

And then my producers came to me and said, we have this idea.

Okay, what's the idea?

We want to do paternity tests.

You know, we see on the soap operas all these themes

about

who's the father of these children, and it takes about six months to play out the theme on soap operas.

We think we can do it in about 12 minutes.

And I went, oh boy,

this is going to be good.

And, you know, obviously, just the way particularly daytime television is or tabloid television.

You just want to push the envelope as far as you can.

Right.

Again,

you're in competition.

Right, exactly.

So

we come down to the first show, and I think this was a crucial moment for everything.

And I'm getting debriefed about the story, and I've read up on the story and read up on the characters involved.

And the producer says, and so, Mari, the result, I said, you know, I don't want to know the result.

I don't want to know the result of a paternity test.

I don't know the, I want to know the result of a lie detector.

I don't want to know, I don't want to know anything my guest doesn't know.

The reason why I have those signature lines of you are the father, you are not the father, is because I didn't know.

You are authentically finding out

that very moment with us, the audience.

Because to me,

The only way in daytime talk,

you have to connect.

The way you connect is you're part of them.

You're part of the audience.

You're the extension of the audience.

And the way I questioned was the same questions the audience would ask if they had a chance.

Yes.

And so that's the way it went down.

Oh, you were an avatar for our curiosity.

Right.

You were, and I just want to, there are so many, I'm sure you get this all of the time now.

Just people being like, you remember that time?

Right.

I am going to do a self-indulgent thing.

Right.

I I want to watch a couple of things from your show with you.

Can we do that?

Sure.

I'm curious, Maury, if you remember this one.

What happens if this is your child?

Then I'll step up and take care of her.

You will?

Yes, I will.

For free?

Yes, absolutely.

You won't charge.

Nope.

You won't be charging if it's yours.

No.

Okay.

Well, let's find out then.

All right.

Oh, boy.

When it comes to one-year-old Ashland, Jeremy, you are not.

So for people who aren't watching along on YouTube at the DraftKings Network, that dude just backflipped, Maury.

Yeah.

And a white dude, too.

A white dude backflipping with incredible alacrity.

But you remember that backflip?

That's not lost.

I mean, absolutely.

You're not numb to the backflip.

You don't think it was the only backflip I ever saw?

Wait, there are more?

Of course.

Are you kidding?

I have backflips from the Rainbow Coalition, every color in the world, you can imagine.

Let me pause you for a second there.

I can tell you,

I can't tell you the number of NFL players who have said to me,

we're in the locker room before, before the...

before practice, and the coaches are asking us to come out, and we're not coming out until we find out who the father is.

And I'm telling you, this is from stars.

Oh, I believe this.

Oh, no, because I was that way when I was like, you know, sick at home from school.

Sure.

And were you really sick?

I mean, sometimes, sometimes

you had to stay home.

You had to gin it up because you might see this.

When it comes to four-month-old Daniel, Andrew, you are not the father.

child!

Sabrina, hey, hey, you'll help me find a bunch of.

I'd be glad to help you.

You know that gentleman.

I mean, he's like maybe the most iconic of all, yes?

Would you rank him number one in terms of just the most

viral, most

yeah?

I mean,

there were

several different

clips that

millions on YouTube.

Still today.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

I mean, it's that guy dancing and essentially just becoming the host of your show as you go to console

the would-be mother of his child who was not.

Yeah.

It is an incredible contrast in just like untrammeled delirium,

utter delight.

And you, you have the bedside manner.

I mean, that's the thing in these clips that people need to appreciate.

You were maybe the best hand holder.

And I mean that figurative and literal when it came to just people on your show.

I think, I think that's one of the reasons for the success was that the connection you make with the audience.

And the, and the connection is that

they thought of me as part of their family.

And

I don't think a host can ask for anything more than that.

I mean, you know, it's very, it's very interesting.

When I first started, I had some negatives in the queue ratings and things like that.

So Paramount hired a guy I had known years and years before named Roger Ailes,

who at that time, this is before Fox News, was a research consultant.

And so Roger gets to me and says, We have to show you as a vulnerable person.

We have to show you as one of those people who the audience would welcome into their homes.

And the early promotional announcements for me was I went on and said, it's a classic Oprah showing vulnerability.

I've been fired.

I'm divorced.

I've messed.

I've worked a lot of places.

Some management liked me.

Some people didn't like me.

And so I had to show all of this vulnerability.

Right.

Because

as a talk show host, you have to be vulnerable.

Yes.

You need to show that you also can hurt.

Right.

Yeah.

That

whatever sympathies, whatever emotions you display are real.

What you're saying, though, in this sort of like familial metaphor here of like, you're part of the audience, they welcome you in as if as if you, Maury, were the father all along.

Yeah.

Well, I think a lot of people, the reason they come on the show is because they've always always felt that

they could unburden themselves in my presence.

Absolutely.

Rather than doing it at home in a rather

difficult atmosphere at home.

And they could feel safe.

I mean, can you imagine that?

Well, that's what I cannot imagine, but now I'm beginning to make sense of is the idea that in that coliseum, right, in Connecticut, right, in that studio in Connecticut, what felt insanely hostile from afar to them, which by the way, the audience, the live audience, talk about, you know, the, the, the, the, the Romans and the Christians here.

Win the crowd, win your freedom, that daunting aspect of like the arena.

Right.

Because of you, they felt it was a safe space.

Exactly.

Which is incredibly funny because my favorite genre, sub-genre of your show,

as much as I love the paternity stuff and the lie detectors, it was the phobias.

Oh, my God.

Do you know, still today

they garner the largest population on YouTube?

Oh, I am in that population.

I mean, I want to play for you

my favorite one, one of my favorites, and it's and it's this one.

You want to own up and tell everybody what you are deathly afraid of?

Aluminum foil.

Oh boy, I can't wait.

The noise.

The look.

The look of the noise.

and the noise.

Yeah.

Haggie, I'm telling you by the...

You got away from me!

You're away from me!

You better get away from me!

You better get her away from me!

I want to hit her!

I want to hit her.

Oh, boy.

I mean,

yeah.

And at times,

we unfortunately

would take the poor intern.

I was going to say, who did you task with the...

The interns had to bring out the barrel of pickles.

Or at one time, there was a woman who was scared of cotton balls.

Well, Maury,

I have good news for you.

This intern is an all-American.

She's afraid of cotton.

Cotton absolutely makes me 100% terrified.

The way it feels and what happens when I think about it.

It gets to the point where I feel like I'm having a panic attack.

Okay, you know you've got to confront your phobia now.

This is the famous Mari show

Cotton Ball Man.

I think that's the greatest thing in television history.

That poor intern.

So

take me behind the scenes as to how the cotton man came to be.

Well, you know,

once the phobia shows became popular, we used to get all these requests.

And we would take, I mean, what are we going to do?

Put somebody on who has a phobia against snakes?

I mean, we all have that.

Right.

But cotton, aluminum, pickles, mustard, mustard.

I mean, it's unreal.

And so

the poor intern.

You would visually describe for people again who are just listening to us giggle over, again, the greatest moment intelligent history.

Explain what happened there.

who what what what did we see what we did on the phobia shows whoever had a phobia in order to overcome it

according to our expert who in the back works on them for a couple of hours and then we come back and right show how they've overcome this in order to uh overcome this you have to confront it

And I mean, I got a little squeamish because, I mean, I hate to see these people, you know, and they're, and they're just catatonic.

I mean, they're just.

oh, you become vicariously afraid because they are running.

They're always, Maury, they're always running backstage.

They run backstage

in the audience, they run everywhere.

And by the way, at times we run after them.

Oh, yeah.

Oftentimes, you get the camera, the shaky handheld, following them around the back maze of your studio.

And so, in this clip,

it was something I'd never seen before, but I never forgot it.

A person full of cotton balls coming out like, you know, like those horror, like one of those old-time class C horror movies.

Yes, a creature from the Black Lagoon.

If the lagoon was just cotton balls, exactly.

And so

it,

I mean, it was

an intern as an intern.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I wonder what job that guy got next.

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What part of the,

of all of the things we've watched and beyond, what part surprised you the most?

How often were you genuinely like because you, I imagine you see enough things?

There were, there was

it happened twice on the show, and I was at a loss.

And

a woman comes on and accuses a fellow of being the father of her twins.

And

okay.

And so, since I've told you before, I don't know the result.

I open up the envelope, and the guy is the father of one, but not the other.

In the case of two-year-old Nikolai, Eric,

you are not the father.

In the case of two-year-old Darian, Eric,

you are the father.

One out of two ways, bang.

One out of two ways, bang.

I have never had that on my show.

And the first time it happened, I'm looking around.

Yeah, yeah.

And

how does that happen?

Fraternal twins.

Lady could be quite active over a small period of time.

Yes.

You know, separate eggs.

This is a thing that happens.

Happened.

Million to one shot.

According to scientists, it came on twice on my show.

Twice.

And

the woman was disbelieving.

I said, look, I was disbelieving until 30 seconds ago, but I know that

our

DNA testing is correct.

And so therefore, you're looking for another father.

Right.

Oh, my God.

I didn't, that is a, that, this is a show full of revelations.

Well, I thought you would know that coming from the family you come from.

I know.

My parents are doctors.

Maury, of course, has seen enough PTI to know that I get made fun of for not knowing anything about science or medicine.

And so, no, Maury, I did not know that a woman could f ⁇ two different dudes and have them both be the father of their daughter.

Your father's a urologist.

Is that correct?

That's right.

And your mother's a what, dermatologist?

How do you know this?

Well, I do my research.

I feel like I'm about to watch you take an envelope out, and inside of it is going to be a card that says, you are the disappointment to your parents.

And by the way, I always thought these women were very brave and very courageous because they would come time after time.

And first it was three and then four different guys and then six and then eight and nine, maybe even ten.

Yeah.

And they would be ridiculed by the audience.

But also they knew what they were in for.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not like...

And they didn't care.

They just wanted to have their child.

You know, and that's why I've always justified that theme because, I mean, Lord knows I've had plenty of criticism over the years.

Of course.

Not only from media critics, but

a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah.

Who are saying this is destructive to the American ideal.

And I'm saying, look, I know this.

A child has a better chance at life if they have two parents in their life instead of one.

I just know that.

I know that.

So if I can get a significant amount of men who are proved to be the fathers of these kids into these kids' lives.

And fortunately, the show lasted so long, I used to bring back these families when they were adults.

That's right.

And so I would see this father not only got into the life of that child, but they had other children.

The child in question ends up in college, is off

on her or his own.

And it's, I don't know, it's gratifying.

The idea,

the idea, I mean, first off, like, if you have ever seen a second of your show,

you know what you're in for, what you're signing up for.

You're consenting to this in all of the ways.

So to me, I am unscandalized by that dynamic.

But I am fascinated as to, again, let's bring it full circle here with the parental through line of our conversation.

What did your dad think of what you were doing?

Well, it was very interesting.

There's a Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic named Tom Shales.

Of course.

At the Washington Post.

At the Washington Post.

And Shales

writes this scathing article about me, uses every S-word there is, smarmy,

sordid, salacious, salacious, every S-word in the world.

So I called up my father and I said, Dad, don't read Tom Shales today.

You really don't really want to read Tom Shales.

And please do not show mom the article.

No, don't worry about it, son.

Just go about your business.

And that was his attitude.

Just go about your business.

You do fine.

He says, I'll tell you this, son.

I had a role in hiring Tom Shales here.

And good writers are hard to find.

Did he ever pull you aside, tug you at your sleeve, and say, look, the paternity stuff, the phobia stuff, the interned rest in cotton.

He never did.

He really didn't.

He always worried about me.

And it wasn't,

he worried about me because

for a long time I didn't have much money and whatever money I had was gone.

And he says, you know,

it really bothers me that

money just burns a hole in your pocket and you never have any money.

And so when I got to be successful and the money started coming in, and now he's in his 90s,

and

he always went back to his boyhood home in Maine every summer.

And so I sent a plane for him and my mother to Washington to pick us up in New York and go on to Maine.

And I walked in the plane and there he is, all his newspapers spread out on a table like this.

And he says,

I'm not going to worry about you anymore.

I will say this to everyone, you know,

it makes sure your parents know you're okay before they go.

That was a huge part.

No, Maury, that was a huge part.

I'm just seeing very eerie, um, you know, small parallels in my life because, of course, when my parents saw me on ESPN, they were like, Okay, this whole thing where you decided not to go to law school, even though we took the LSAT twice, where we sent you, we paid out of our noses, came to America to pay out of our noses, sent you to Harvard.

Like, we're okay because it seems like this is you have something going here.

Right.

And that mattered.

And I'm going to tell you something.

All these years later, it's been 25 years since my father died.

I was so happy to be able to show that to him before while he was alive.

And I just say that to everybody.

If you can, please make sure they know you're okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We mentioned, of course, your better half, Connie Chung, before.

And it's just remarkable how surrounded you are, how infused your life is with

objective journalism, like capital, the most capital J journalism.

Connie Chung embodies that, truly embodies that.

This is the CBS Evening News

with Dan Rather and Connie Chung.

Good evening.

Nine days after the explosion in Oklahoma City, the danger there is far from over.

She pointed out in some interview that, you know, Maury Povich reads books.

He likes, he knows stuff about history and war and politics, all of this stuff.

Has she ever tried to nudge you towards, hey, I know you as the brilliant son of a brilliant man who traffics in the highbrow.

Yeah.

And yet you're doing this stuff.

And I, and I say to her all the time, and she appreciates it, I said, look, as long as you know, I'm fine.

And that's it.

I mean, I don't, I mean, it's kind of my secret.

I mean, people, most people don't know my past.

I mean,

I did newsy talk shows and I reported on the air and I was there.

I was there at John Kennedy's assassination looking at Jackie Kennedy coming off that plane in that bloodied suit.

And I covered Martin Luther King's March on Washington.

And and I covered the riots in Washington after the death of Martin Luther King

and I covered all of Watergate and

you know I

had my fix.

I was always kind of ill at ease with the way

news and storytelling went because there was never enough time when you were covering news.

It was always a minute 30.

If you were anchoring, it was always a a 30-second intro.

There was always all these constraints.

And so, when the talk show gave me the ability

to be a long-form storyteller, and I don't care whether it's tabloided or not, but it's a long-form storytelling position.

And

I felt free.

I felt the bridle was off.

And

that's the way I've kind of looked at it ever since.

What are you most proud of when you take the sweep of all of this, right?

You've traced an arc that's, again, without exaggeration, singular in the history of media.

What are you proudest of when you look back now?

Two things.

The one thing that Shales said to me years, I mean, wrote years before he excoriated me on a current affair,

and he liked my talk show.

And he said,

You're a Renaissance man.

You know, you got a little knowledge about a lot of things.

And I think that, plus the longevity,

I'll take it.

I mean, that's fine with me.

And

there are some funny things.

I just saw something on Instagram

that was so

funny, but true.

A

black comic named Josh Johnson

is doing his stand-up and he's got it in a club and he says,

you know,

I think the black community owes a lot to Maury Povich.

I don't think Mori gets enough credit.

I really don't.

Mori is such an ally to the black community.

He really is.

In all the years he's been on the show Maury has never fed up a black name name.

Maury would say, Dantavius,

full-chested.

I'm going, I wouldn't name my baby Dontavius.

And then I saw the most amazing thing when I saw the name of the baby underneath the picture and there was a two.

They'll put the baby on the screen and I'll see the screen below the name and I'll be like, is that a two in that nigga's name?

and then Maury without even missing a beat will like when it comes to the case of six-month-old Tawane I'm like wow

when it comes to baby Tawane

I I could I just couldn't I couldn't take it in my talk show

every single Every single name on my talk show, I say to the producers, how does, how do they print?

Well, I don't know.

Well, I'm going to go, where is that person before the show?

I'm going to go find out.

And I did that for 30 years.

I had never thought about that ingredient and why.

Everybody deserves the respect of the correct pronunciation of their name.

Yes.

And it also provides that ballast of we on some level, despite the absurdity of the proceedings you're about to undergo, we're going to take you seriously in a way

that is fundamental to who you are.

If I can pronounce your name, you know that you can be sure that you have a space here.

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Do you consider yourself?

I'm not thinking about this in the context again of of the episodes you did.

Do you consider yourself an optimist about human nature?

Yeah, I do.

I mean, I do.

I think.

You've seen it all and you emerge an optimist.

Yeah,

because

of the successes I've seen.

I've seen people go from,

I am not the father of that child, and

that woman would never ever

to, I'll be there.

I'll be there for that child.

And some are

obviously never going to be there.

Oh, no.

Backflip guy is gone.

Yeah.

I mean, but

he's backflipping still today.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But there are others who really take it seriously.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, do you, Maury, have regrets?

Do you have a regret, whether it's in the realm of work or life or the intersection between them?

Are you a guy who

has that thought?

No.

There was a time in my life when I left Washington because I wanted to find out.

I always wanted to be the next Walter Cronkite.

And so

in a seven-year period between 1977 and 1983, I worked in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and then back to Washington.

Five cities in seven years.

Management didn't like me in some.

I got fired one time.

I didn't like management in another.

I got thrown around here.

I did that.

I'm in this.

In fact, there was a great New York Times columnist who wrote for Esquire named Richard Reeves.

And he was a friend of mine.

And he wrote his entire Esquire column in the back page of Esquire.

And it said,

My friend, the anchor man, Mari Povich, I have seen him anchor the news on four successive St.

Patty's days in four different cities.

The man is trying to go nationwide, city by city.

Yeah, in NBA parlance, you're a journeyman.

There's an alternate life in which you are actually a nomad.

Absolutely.

And so,

I mean, but

I mean,

look, I can almost tell you that the reason why my life settled down and then became in the ascent in 1984 is because this woman who I had dated for seven and a half years finally agreed to marry me.

And that marriage in 1984 really changed everything for me.

And by the way, not because I thought I was going to be anything, because at the time I wasn't.

In fact, we had a marriage for the first two years.

She lived in New York working then at NDC.

I was in Washington doing local news and we would commute and I would come up and there was a

a doorman at her apartment and

he would say, and who are you here to see?

I said, my name is Mari Povich.

I'm here to see my wife, Connie Connie Chung.

And he would call up and say, Mr.

Chung is downstairs.

One of us, Maury.

Yeah, so I have

Mr.

Chung.

I have gladly

been known as Mr.

Chung for the rest of my life.

That would be fine with me.

How it ever came about that I was decoupled into being Maury Povich is beyond me.

Unconsciously uncoupled, as it were.

Yes.

Wait.

So

what are Mr.

and Mrs.

Chung like in retirement?

Well, it's interesting.

I am sitting on the sidelines watching my wife complete about a three or four year effort to write her memoirs.

And

this is

some task, and it's going to be a very, very big book because

many publishers wanted to publish it.

No doubt.

And

she has just turned in her first draft.

It's probably going to be out a year from now.

And

there are a lot of personages who should be taking notice of this in the newspaper.

They might find out some stuff.

Because

I don't know if there's going to be a filter or not.

Oh, I hope there isn't.

So anyway,

I think She would agree that she is so happy not to be in the business these days.

And you feel the same way?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you were in the business for as long as literally

humanly.

Everybody says my show was canceled.

I tried to leave my show four years before it ended.

And then I tried to leave it two years before it ended.

And NBC just came.

No, no, no, Mario, it's still going on.

I've seen the YouTube traffic

is unrelenting.

And my repeats, 3,500 of them, I mean, are on the same stations.

And I look at, believe it or not, I'm still a creature of the goddamn business.

I'm still looking at the ratings.

How is the ghost of Laurie Povich ratings?

They're really good.

Yeah, yeah, I bet.

Kids will be playing hooky from school

decades into the future.

Can you imagine that I'm still looking at the ratings?

I love that.

84 years old.

You're still trying to box out

Sally Jesse Raphael.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And not

even though he's gone,

Jerry's in repeat still.

And I'm looking at his ratings versus my ratings.

We are such TV creatures.

Ridiculous.

I love that.

I love that.

You've described a number of things, and I know you love golf and you play golf, and Kornheiser can't stop talking about how good a golfer you are.

So there's that.

I mean, we should just say that for the rest of the day.

All I can say is Kornheiser is better than Wilbon.

I think.

But

indulge the existentialism here at the end, though, because

I'm honored that you sat down and walked me through an unparalleled life and career.

How do you want people, the kids, generations from now, to remember what you did here on this planet?

You know, I've never really thought about that.

I mean, you know, I...

I grew up in the Jewish religion, and they had one thing in the Jewish religion that

I really find that I can admire, and that is, we don't know whether there's an afterlife or not in the Jewish religion.

There might be, there might not be,

we don't know.

But

our journey is to be written into the book of life.

And you have to lead your life in such a way where you can be written into the book of life.

And so, therefore, I mean,

that's how I look upon myself.

I mean, and

I think I've done a good job at that.

I mean,

there were a lot of hiccups along the way, but I think I've lived my life in a way that I could be penciled in.

Maury Povich, this was a genuine, genuine honor.

Thank you.

It's my pleasure, Pablo.

I mean, I've watched you for a long time.

I know of your background and

just make sure that everything is okay with Lebertard because he asked me on the show before you did, and I rejected him.

You know, a journalist never stops going after the scoop.

Exactly.

You can tell him that.

I scooped it.

I scooped you.

That's right.

Dan, yeah.

Try that one on.

Yeah, exactly.

Wear that one, you sweaty bastard.

So today is just going to be one of those episodes that'll always have a special place in my heart.

And I don't know if you watched as much Maury as I did in the 90s.

I don't know if you thought that it was a stain upon American morality, as certainly some critics out there have said over the years.

I get it.

And for what it's worth, Maury himself does not even necessarily count on there being an afterlife, as I found out today.

But what I personally like to imagine

is our creator standing there in front of whatever heaven that might exist.

Let's call it a metaphysical television studio

with an an envelope in his hand.

And

no, Maury Povich does not know the result ahead of time.

He never does, as he said.

But inside this envelope,

as the tension is rising, I strongly suspect is the good news that Moripovich

has been waiting for.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.