EP.240 - DAVID LETTERMAN

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton.

I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how you doing podcasts?

It's Adam Buxton here.

Now look, for those of you who don't want to hear the rest of this entertaining and informative introduction to this week's guest, if you skip forward roughly seven minutes from this point, then the two-way waffle will begin.

Hope you enjoy it.

For the rest of you, hey!

Good to see you.

I hope you've been doing all right.

Now look, first things first,

Rosie my best dog friend is at home today.

She's fine she's very well in fact but the bird scaring guns have been back in the fields around where we live out here in the Norfolk countryside where I am currently taking a lovely walk and Doglegs

finds them very distraughtening.

One went off right next to her on a walk yesterday.

She didn't like it.

She's also worried about Trump

and just the general atmosphere of global instability, uncertainty, which I think is fair enough.

Anyway, she's back in the kitchen on the sofa where it's warm and things make sense.

But yeah, as I said, she's doing well.

Otherwise, I've been doing fine.

Thank you very much.

My big news is that I have finished my book.

Finally!

It's going to be out at the end of May, but there's a link in the description to pre-order.

No extra tariffs on it currently, I'm happy to say.

I was also on celebrity bake-off for Stand Up to Cancer.

Actually, I recorded that last year, but it's finally going out on Sunday, the 6th of April, at 7.40 p.m.

on Channel 4.

But listen, I'll tell you more about that and the book at the end.

Right now, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 240, which features a rambling conversation with American talk show legend David Letterman.

As John Cooper Clark would say, what the huh?

David was born in the Midwestern American city of Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1947.

His father was a florist, and his mother was a secretary at a local Presbyterian church.

After studying media at college, where he was also involved in student radio, Letterman got a job at a local TV station where he endeared himself to viewers with his sometimes idiosyncratic weather reports.

Going through a very crunchy patch here.

Here's some crunch for the ASMR game.

Little teeny weeny dried up husks that have fallen down here from what kind of tree?

No idea, because I'm so stupid and ignorant, even though I've lived in the country for over 15 years.

Where were we?

Oh, yes, the idiosyncratic.

Whoa!

Limey, that gave me a shock.

That was a secret partridge there.

Huh.

Okay, come on, focus buckles.

Yes, the idiosyncratic weather reports.

Encouraged by his first wife and friends to pursue a career in comedy, David moved to California in 1975, where he hoped to make a living as a writer.

He tried his jokes out at open mic nights, including one at the famous comedy store in May 1975, where in front of important comedy folks, he smashed it.

Thereafter, David impressed audiences with his off-beat presence so consistently that just three years later, he was asked to guest host for another talk show legend, Johnny Carson, on NBC's The Late Show.

By 1982, Letterman was hosting his own nighttime talk show, Late Night with David Letterman, where his first guest in February that year was Bill Murray, still a close friend today, as you will hear.

That show ran for 23 seasons, during which Letterman hosted well over 4,000 episodes, delivering sardonic monologues at his desk against a twinkling nighttime New York City background, and bantering with band leader Paul Schaefer between chats with an eclectic mix of celebrity guests and oddbods.

Letterman also took part in stunts and comedy bits and introduced performances by an array of music legends and up-and-comers.

He wrote the playbook for the modern late-night talk show that that others have followed ever since.

In 2015, he called it quits, but returned to the interviewer's chair, albeit on a less grueling and relentless basis, in 2018, when he began hosting a new show for Netflix, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, a series of long-form interview profiles with guests that have included Barack Obama, Kanye West, before full meltdown, Will Smith, before Oscar's meltdown, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Dreyfus, Tina Faye, Billy Eilish, Tiffany Haddish, and John Mulaney.

Seamus Murphy Mitchell, who regular listeners will know provides invaluable production support on this podcast, is an executive producer on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.

And that is the reason that I got the exciting opportunity to talk to David, an opportunity I used as an excuse to get myself out to New York City in January of this year, 2025, so that we could record face to face in a small podcast studio with slightly loud air conditioning in Canal Street.

We began by talking for a while about a couple of British friends of the podcast that it turns out Dave is a fan of too.

Then, amongst other things, I asked David about hanging out with comedy legends in the 1970s in Los Angeles, why Bob Dylan wound him up in 1992, the brilliance of the comedian Norm MacDonald, the challenges of parenthood, and why he hates photographs.

I also was curious to ask Dave about the episode of The Late Show that he did in October 2009 when he told his audience that he had been sent a letter by a man who said that unless he was paid $2 million,

he would go public with a book and a screenplay he was writing in which he detailed several sexual affairs Letterman had had with female members of staff at the show.

His blackmailer, who was an Emmy Award-winning TV news producer, was arrested and ended up serving four months of a six-month sentence at Rikers Island Jail for grand larceny.

But we started our conversation by exchanging notes on the sadness of having to make dietary concessions to the remorseless march of age.

Back at the end for a bit more book and bake-off waffle, but right now with David Letterman, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat.

La

la

la la la la la la la la la

You guys want to just

talk amongst each other?

Hi.

Hello.

What did you have for breakfast, Dave?

I had a protein shake.

Two varieties of powder and

like a half a glass of almond milk.

Yum.

That was breakfast.

The almond milk is where the joy comes from, presumably.

Or is the shake nice?

Well, the shake is actually tasty.

It would be even better if you had a couple of scoops of ice cream and some chocolate syrup.

Yeah.

But I've had this fight with my wife, and that hasn't so far manifested.

Is that because you need to follow a strict diet regime?

Yes, that's exactly right.

Because of

managing glucose levels.

Yeah, join the club.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

It's been a fairly recent change that I've had to make.

Same with me.

And I'm adjusting to it and trying to figure out, like, what corners can I cut?

what treats can I include, what treats have you been able to sneak in?

Well not many.

What I like is in the beginning when this alarming news is given to you and then they offer, oh, well, don't worry, there are plenty of things that you'll be able to eat that are just as much fun as what you used to eat.

And so you think, great, let's try them.

And they're all a combination of fiberboard and dust and things found by the quarter-round mold at the floor.

And they're completely tasteless and something that you would buy unseen, untested, and regret having eaten.

It's just god-awful.

So then you have to take it more seriously and just realize, oh, in terms of something fun to eat, I'll just be miserable the rest of my life.

And once you've made that deal, the door closes snugly behind you.

That's rough.

Where does the fun come from?

I mean, do you miss those sensual pleasures a great deal?

Do you think about them?

Yeah, well in dining, my sensual pleasures are limited to three meals a day.

And now it's down to a shake and maybe one meal a day.

And what I miss is huge loads of carbohydrates.

I really didn't realize how much my diet was anchored that way and because I just loved it.

You know?

Were you ever a smoker?

Yeah.

Smoked from the time I was a kid, as we all did back in those days.

I think I started smoking when I was like 11 or 12.

Seriously?

Yeah, just you know with sneak cigarettes.

My father smoked.

We always had cigarettes around the house and continued smoking from early on,

early in grade school through I was 24 when I finally quit.

And it was the most difficult thing I've ever done as people will tell you.

You?

Yeah, I smoked.

I was never a heavy smoker.

And I only really stopped quite recently, a couple of years ago.

But I was very dilettante-ish, so I sort of fooled myself that I didn't really have anything to give up really.

But I did, of course, and I was gradually smoking and smoking.

Well, I came back to, after I gave up cigarettes, and then later, 20 years later, I came to cigars.

Oh, yeah.

And I really began to enjoy cigars.

Really enjoyed them.

And then realized, well, I'm right back at this.

So then I had to give those up too.

But you're not inhaling cigars.

I was, yeah, that was the thing because the more of the nicotine you get and the bigger the delivery, I would always cherish that moment when your lips began to vibrate and your hearing was diminished.

I just thought, this is where I want to be for the rest of the month.

And when that happened, I realized, oh, it's the same problem as cigarettes.

Yeah.

Hey, it's so nice to meet you.

Thank you so much for a pleasure to meet you.

We have mutual friends, right?

I hope.

Yes, I hope they're friends.

You're an acquaintance of Richard Iowade.

Yes, only an acquaintance.

And I met the man.

Well, I didn't meet him.

I found him via YouTube and happily researched everything I could find video-wise that he was part of and just fell in love with the guy, unique to me, to my experience, and I think to the world, and found him to be a delightful performer, writer, director.

everything else, comedian, and also I'm very fond of him just as a guy.

Now, I've only spent time with him once but I cherish that and am constantly trying to find ways to manipulate myself into his life and I had a pretty good shot.

Bill Murray was doing a movie in Berlin with Wes Anderson and I knew that Richard was going to be in that movie because he was looking forward to working with Bill Murray.

So I called Bill Murray and I said, Bill, and I explained this ruse to him, you're going to Berlin and he said, yeah, I says, but my friend, Richard Iawati, and I don't really have right to introduce myself as his friend, but Bill doesn't know.

And I said, this is a guy you should meet also.

So now I get Bill in on this scheme.

And I said, would you talk to Wes Anderson?

I would like to be in this movie.

So how pathetic is my life that I'm randomly calling friends, inviting myself into films?

I mean, that's not the way it works.

So Bill says, well, let me call Wes.

And I thought, okay.

So this is out of my hands now.

A month later, Bill Murray calls back and he says, Wes Anderson, when I told him about your idea, he couldn't stop smiling.

So to me, that's enough of a commitment.

So now I think, oh, this is great.

It'll be me, it'll be Bill Murray, and it'll be Richard Iawati in Berlin.

I mean, let's go.

Let's make that movie.

And then one thing led to another, and there was some trouble in my home.

My wife was stricken with something called Mignier's disease,

which is just god-awful.

Anyway, so I was unable to go to Berlin.

Is that a long story with a bad ending?

No.

Because I got a million of those.

Surely, though, we can make it happen in some other way.

There's got to be another project.

I keep thinking that there might be.

Would that be your first acting role for quite a while?

Yes, but to be clear, I didn't want to act.

I just wanted to be...

See where that guy is is sitting over there?

That's Wolf, our producer.

Yes.

You and I would be the central characters.

This is where the focus would be.

I would be over there.

You'd be hanging around.

Just right there doing whatever he's doing.

Would you be on camera audio?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Probably lost in editing.

But for the purposes of the production, I'm right there.

Cameo as guy with beard in background.

That's right.

And once we were done for the day, it would be a delightful evening with me, Richard, and Bill Murray.

Well, in Berlin.

I mean, you hear that the Wes Anderson set is a very convivial place.

I know nothing about that.

They have big suppers, all the cast together.

Yeah, you're breaking my heart.

It's got to happen.

Well, listen, if you get out there, could you find me some kind of role as well?

No.

Oh, please.

No, I'm not going to do that.

First of all, it hasn't worked yet for me.

Yeah.

Let me just make sure.

I'm not saying immediately, just after a few days.

All right, fine.

Let me just make sure there's some viability here.

All right, good.

And have you encountered Richard Ayawadi's latest literary project, the unfinished Harold Hughes?

See, the thing about, one of the many things about Richard, it's like reading a good book.

Chapter to chapter, you may be surprised.

And this accomplishment was a complete surprise to me.

Not just the biography, but the whole collection of books that predated the biography.

I had no idea.

I mean, there must be six installments of Richard.

Richard Hughes.

Harold Hughes.

Harold Hughes, yeah.

I think it's sort of loosely based on Harold Pinter.

Well he Richard sent me the whole collection before the holidays and I was thrilled and delighted but quite a lot of reading ahead of me.

But there again I thought I knew pretty much all one knew about Richard and surprised.

This represents a lot of work for God's sake.

I mean what a madman.

Yeah.

You've spent time, you've worked with him, haven't you?

I have, yeah.

It doesn't surprise me that he did that.

But at the same time, I just thought, whoa,

how do you find

the time?

He's got children.

Yes.

How is he regarded at home?

Is he

a man of letters, certainly, a Renaissance man,

a genius, an intellect?

He's a polymath.

I mean, he really is a very unique figure.

He can turn up on panel shows and be very funny.

And he sort of, you know, plays the aesthete and maybe will turn up in a tuxedo or something and play up to his educated roots.

But then he can also be very silly and juvenile.

And churlish.

Churlish.

Which I can't get enough of.

Yeah, he can do that.

He's a good guitarist.

Yeah.

He, you know, he's written several books, and now this latest one started out as just this kind of fictionalized story of him as an alter ego making a documentary about this fictional Harold Pinter type personality.

And then he releases three more books to go with it, which are the complete works of that fictional personality, Harold Hughes.

Yes.

And yeah, I don't know anyone else.

When these are published in whatever increment, are they well received and eagerly awaited?

Oh boy, the new Richard Iawati work is out.

In my circles, yes.

I couldn't speak to how many records records they're breaking in the wider world.

Yeah, because it is a big ask, isn't it?

There's a huge books.

Yeah, but the success or the measurement, irrespective, because the accomplishment is the achievement, for heaven's sake.

It's an art piece.

That's the thing.

I like people, and I think it's probably true of you as well, that you like people who are sort of on the art spectrum.

And some of what they're doing blurs the boundaries between perhaps comedy and performance art and weirdness.

And, you know, you used to have have a lot of those people on your show.

Right.

Well,

I can't exactly identify why I'm so eager to know more of the guy and I'm attracted to the guy.

But I think it's what you're saying there.

I've never quite thought exactly what it might be, but he's,

I've not seen anyone like him.

But that's true of everyone.

Everyone is unique.

It's just something about him I find wildly appealing.

Did you ever see Garth Marengi's Dark Marshall?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And what a head scratcher that is.

Because, first of all, how did that get made, for God's sakes?

You don't see things like that.

And then I've watched it twice because the first time through, I was just puzzled.

And I thought, this warrants a second viewing.

And I looked at it the second time, and then it was more than delightful.

And Richard with cigars and machine guns, well, you can't imagine that, but there he was.

And they're brilliant, all those people that put that together, Matt Holness, and the rest of them, Alice Lowe, and Matt Berry.

But they as well, there's a real art dimension to it, the obsessiveness with which they did that.

Yeah.

They would sort of dub on footsteps

that were inappropriate.

That's right.

Every single detail.

Yeah, and out of sync by a frame and a half or something.

It was delightful.

Yeah.

The other person that you know, that I know is Jessica Knappett.

Yeah.

Is that right?

How do you know Jessica Knappett?

Well, again, via Richard, and she was on the Travel Man show.

And they went to, I forget where they went to.

Oh, yeah, they went to Abiza.

That's right.

That's right.

And she, from beginning to end, is purposefully, and you can tell, calculatedly, annoying.

And after having seen that one two or three times, I think for the purpose of nudging Richard, just to see what this behavior might result in from him.

And I loved that.

I loved her.

I loved Richard.

I loved Abitha, although I won't be going.

So that's how I knew her.

And then later, years later, I run into her just in a bang Zoom.

We go to a play in London, and I'm there with a friend of ours that we were working with, Morgan Neville, and he knew her husband.

So I didn't know any of this was happening.

So I'm there with my associate, Mary, and we sit down and in walks Jessica Nappett.

And I sat there just dumbfounded, like,

wait a minute.

And

things were rolling around.

And finally, I answered the self-question, I do know this woman.

How do I know her and who is she?

And bang, bang, bang, I realized this is Jessica Nappett from Ibiza.

But yeah, through Richard, I've been able to routinely make a fool of myself.

Good.

Well, I look forward to seeing you.

Anyway, she was delightful.

Yeah, she's great.

And then it's through Richard that I know of you as well from that same series.

Yeah, you guys were in, I think, in

Portugal.

Yeah, that was great.

Have you ever been to Lisbon?

Yes, I have been to Lisbon.

Beautiful part of the world.

Yes, all of Portugal, to my experience, was delightful.

If you could snap your fingers and be anywhere in the world right now, where would that be?

Probably the state of Montana.

Where you live for part of the year?

Well, I wouldn't say live.

We have some places to go there, and we go out in the summer, but it's one of those places, and there are many of these around the world.

Like we were in Greenland last year.

Who knew?

And I guess you're well traveled.

It's just the best idea to get out of the house is travel.

Right.

So Greenland is lovely, is it?

Stunning.

That's why Trump wants it.

I think there are military logistical reasons that not only Trump but others find it desirable.

I

would hate to see any greater interference in what goes on up there than has already taken place.

Maybe he went there, he thought, this is great, but it needs more subways,

as in sandwich shops.

Well, I see, I know you're mistaken there because you suggested that he thought.

And I know that's not part of his profile.

Anyway, it's fascinating.

It's a huge island.

You know all about it, right?

Yeah.

Huge island, less than 50,000 residents.

Most relatives are descendants of the Inuit people.

It's a difficult life because there's really no summer to speak of.

They have a very short growing season.

They live off things that they can hunt and catch.

And I can't believe anything would improve for them by a Trump incursion.

What's the experience of going there as a tourist then?

Like how long do you spend there?

We were there a week and a half or so and

very nicely toured along the western coast.

The eastern coast and northeastern coast are enormously remote.

I mean frighteningly remote.

But you see the mountains and you see the glaciers and you see these villages where the people of Greenland live and it's a fascinating combination of stunningly beautiful wonders.

and subsistence life.

But what is true about life is it goes on and to compare how we go on with our life everybody in this room to how they go on with their life is stunning so everything about it was stunning how does a place like that compare to Montana well

Montana also blessed with beautiful physical loveliness stunning landscape and such the standard of living is better than it is in Greenland they have figured out the economics and how they can protect their country and also make money from it.

All ag business, all agriculture and raising animals and raising crops and such.

So the standard of living is much higher, of course.

Is it true that you do a bit of that yourself and you have herds of bison out there?

Yes.

Not herds.

I mean, I'm not an

that suggests madman.

Just everywhere I go, traveling with a herd of bison.

Yeah, yeah, we have a small bison operation.

And yeah, it's been a fantastic experience.

It's one of those things, and I think this is true of almost any part of the world or experience to which you're not a native.

You learn everything each time you go out again and new stuff again.

And, you know, I'm expressing that badly, but it's a great learning experience.

Oh, I'd love to go.

I actually went when I was young.

My dad was a travel writer when he was alive.

And Montana was one of his favorite places.

Really?

Where did you go in Montana?

I was young.

We went to a dude ranch.

I was very young.

I loved it.

But I wasn't really aware of exactly where I was geographically.

Yeah.

But

horseback, on horseback?

Horseback, and it was back in the old days.

There was a certain amount of fishing, and it was pre-health and safety concerns.

We were just bouncing along on these horses, galloping across the plains and the sage brush.

Would that be?

Could be, sure, depending on where you are.

Yeah.

And spending the night out and kind of using Native American techniques for making bedding from fir trees or whatever it was.

And it was incredibly romantic, even as a young, jaded nine or ten-year-old who just wanted to be watching.

Your father, being a travel writer, published where then after he would.

Well, he was a journalist.

He wrote for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

He was the travel editor in the UK for that.

Was that a big paper?

Yeah, yeah, it was.

He did that for years and years.

So we had the privilege of being very well travelled when we were young and going to all these places.

But he particularly loved America and he particularly loved the West.

He loved Alaska and he loved Wyoming and Montana and places like that.

We never went to Canada, actually, come to think of it.

But beautiful places in England as well.

Yeah, sure.

But I mean, on a different scale.

But yes, you're right.

And actually, only recently have I explored a bit more with my family and realized how many amazing things there were on our doorstep?

Well, we sound stupid because that's the thing.

I'm from Indiana, and I know there's a series of travel videos about Indiana, of places a dozen, two dozen, three dozen places I never knew existed in my home state that are stunningly beautiful.

And I think that's possible with everybody everywhere, except most people probably know more than I knew about my home place.

But anywhere you go, you find great things.

And you just feel ignorant when you, it's like somebody taps you on the shoulder and explains, yeah, if you leave the house once or twice, get ready.

And to me that's every reason to leave the house.

Would you do a travel show?

No.

Why not?

Too much work.

Yeah, yeah.

I've done a little of that on a minor scale where you're in a van all day and you hop out and the camera crew and the sound crew and okay that was great, let's do it again.

And you've done it now eight times and okay here's lunch.

Well I'm not hungry with the hard-boiled eggs.

No, I don't want any of that.

Okay, back in the van and you do that for a couple of years and you think all right that's just fine that's plenty I heard on the radio this morning that for the first time in eight years in Mongolia they were going to restore springtime horse racing and I thought okay

fine you know they have something that they enjoy I don't know why it was banned for eight years but they've lifted the ban now and it's coming back speaking of reasons to travel, springtime horse racing in Mongolia.

Well, get your tickets now.

And then they explain why it had been banned.

Horse racing with child jockeys.

So to me, I'm thinking, whoa, that's a twist on horse racing.

I mean, child jockeys.

I mean, right there, your brain just stops, doesn't it?

Okay, we're going to have horse racing.

Yeah, the Kentucky Derby.

But guess what?

Little children will be riding the horses.

And of course, you're not going to believe this.

No protective gear.

They're little kid outfits.

They come right from school, hop on the horses, and race.

And they were being knocked off the horses and injured.

And I'm sure the mortality rate was giving child horse racing a bad name.

Well, don't worry, it's back.

Still with children, though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But now the kids will need to be wearing protective goggles.

Okay, yeah.

So I wouldn't worry anymore about that, Adam.

Jesus.

These days, though, you are doing more sort of long-form chats.

You get to take it easy a little bit more.

Do you feel that it's less intense, the pace of the kind of shows that you're doing, than those

nightly shows where everything is so fast-paced?

Well, the nightly show, I look at that experience and wonder, how the heck did I do that?

How did I have the energy to do that night after night after night?

And it takes a bit of an adjustment.

But now, having the chance to sit down and talk to people, I am enjoying, I think, much more.

I don't want to suggest I didn't enjoy what I was doing, but like you and I sitting here,

I don't know to what extent there was preparation for this.

But if I had my choice, I would just sit down with whomever,

not even, somebody could say, this is whomever they were in the new Marvel movie.

Okay, great, thanks.

And then we just go and talk.

But that would probably be deadly dull, but that would be my preference.

And then there would be two or three teams of people in editing till Labor Day trying to piece that together.

But that would be my preference, because as you may have noticed, I can't stop talking.

And I like talking mostly about myself.

So there's pathology there.

And you're going to be up all night editing this nonsense, and I'm sorry.

I mean, as a podcaster, you're the dream guest, obviously, on many levels.

But someone who likes talking and enjoys talking and is good at talking,

that's all you're dreaming about.

Sometimes people angle to come on the podcast, and then they get all uptight.

Well, we used to go through that.

People in show business come out and sit down, and this is show business, and they don't seem to, it doesn't translate.

But

a few years ago, the idea of a podcast, everybody was thinking, oh, do a podcast, and maybe we'll do a podcast.

And so then a friend of ours, Seamus.

Seamus, my producer?

Yes.

Said, well, here, I'll send you some of Adam's podcasts.

And before that, I didn't realize you had done a podcast.

So I listened to,

the first one I listened to was you and Tom Hanks.

Oh,

that's not a good place to start.

No, you're kidding.

Well, that's a good example of an opportunity.

I felt it was a missed missed opportunity because I think that he'd been badly briefed.

And I think he was expecting it to be one thing.

And it wasn't.

Badly briefed.

I love that.

No,

again, that's misapplied.

It's Tom Hanks.

Was he in person or was this on?

No, it was on Zoom.

On Zoom.

I think he was expecting a kind of more

literary review type conversation.

He had written a, was it a book of poetry?

He's written his first novel.

His first novel.

Yeah, yeah.

So he was in, let's talk about my novel mode.

Yeah.

And I think was less up for being sort of chatty and practicing.

Well, let me tell you something.

I can't wait for the Brad Pitt novel.

That's when I'm going to start reading.

Or the Matt Damon book of poetry.

So anyway.

whatever your perception of it was, and I understand that your perception of it and the finished product can be 180 degrees.

I used to do that all the time.

And I'll do it here.

I love the show.

Oh, good.

And I thought, holy crap, crap, I said, if this is a podcast, I'm not going to be able to do shows like this.

And that's when I quit being interested in podcasts.

So thank you.

I think you did me a favor.

And it was a good example to prove to others.

Oh, yeah, he can't do a show that well.

Well, I hope you're not being serious.

Obviously, you would be great at podcasting.

No, no, no, no, no.

I would rather come on and ruin yours than ruin mine.

But yours is wildly successful.

And as we know, there's an infinite number of podcasts.

Yes.

So to succeed in in this neighborhood is like succeeding on the internet.

The numbers are stacked against you.

So nice going.

Thank you very much.

When you're doing the shows now for Netflix, do you feel like you have to be careful of what you say?

Do you ever sort of censor yourself or are you just having freewheeling conversations and thinking, let's leave it to the edit to make the decisions about what's okay and what's not?

Yeah, well, I mean, that is the fine line because we like to do them with an audience.

And so because of we're all adults, you you need to be careful of what an adult might say or think.

So that's I don't I'm not sure how to answer that, but there is caution, yeah.

It's like this, I I dunno, I don't I don't feel that pressure.

But it's a uh a program, it's a big money operation for a big money outlet and it's got to look a certain way and it's got to feel a certain way.

So there is pressure, yeah.

But in terms of editorial matters, I always find out later that I've said something stupid or something inappropriate or, yeah.

And then it's like, well, what do we do?

Geez, I don't know.

What do we do?

Yeah, I don't, yeah.

But you never put your foot in it badly

on the late show, did you?

Did you ever say anything?

Well,

I was doing it at a time when there was no such thing as putting your foot in your mouth or putting it in a puddle of mud because there was nobody breathing down your neck.

But now, you know, I don't need to tell you.

I'm sure people have have winced occasionally when you've said things, and then you have to apologize.

The worst it got for us was I would offend guests, and we had a, I think, a producer or a talent coordinator who thought the way to make amends with these people who had flown in from California to New York and then I had inadvertently or on purpose mistreated them was to send them citrus fruit trees.

So there for a while that became the marker.

All right, send them a lemon tree.

And I think we had a deal with an orchard somewhere where we were constantly air freighting lemon trees to Beverly Hills.

Do you ever watch your old interview pieces?

Do you ever have an opportunity to do that?

No.

No.

No.

Well, I have the opportunity.

I choose not to.

Okay.

I mean, it's not that big a deal.

It's just like, I was there, I lived through it.

I don't, most of it I don't feel like reliving.

You know, I don't like looking at pictures.

I don't like looking at old video, and I just think that's part of the human mechanism.

It's just another sign of, oh, yeah, that happened, time keeps moving, and we don't need to go back.

Yeah.

Did you have, in those days, rituals for preparing for a show, like getting yourself in the zone?

The ritual was preparing.

That's what got you.

I look back on it, and one of the biggest problems when I left that was I left the ritual behind.

I knew what time I would have breakfast, I knew what I was going to have for breakfast, I knew what time I'd go to a meeting.

It was always the same, day after day after day.

6,000 or more repetitions of that.

So that was the preparation for the show.

And it came right down to the moment when I was introduced.

I would do A, and then I would do B, and then I would do C, and it just went, it was a checklist.

And you didn't have to check anything because it was the lifeblood of the organism, you know.

It's 2:30, I pick out a tie.

It's 2.20, I put on the tie.

You know, it just was all like that, but all second nature.

I think for anybody who does a job, the routine of it is the preparation, or at least it was for me.

But everybody has a routine.

Did you like that routine?

Oh, yeah, I loved it.

But the problem is, I never had to do any, I still to this day don't know how to make phone calls.

It's maddening to me that I don't, I hate this, but I can't, I couldn't call you.

Give me your number and just wait for me to call.

You know, it's not going to happen.

Somebody will call eventually for me and then put me on the phone.

I can't answer a phone.

When I was a kid, the phone was plugged into the wall.

It would ring.

You would pick up the big, heavy,

what's the thing that preceded plastic, some anyway.

Make a light.

That's right.

And then you would say hello.

I can't answer a phone now.

My wife calls me.

I start typing.

I don't know how to get a voice out of the phone.

So it's pathetic.

Are you claiming that you were infantilized by the job?

Yes.

Yes.

Honestly, I didn't have to do anything.

Shoes?

No, I didn't buy shoes for 30 years.

They were always, oh, put these shoes on.

Fine.

I'll put them on.

Socks?

I've never bought socks.

I know this is embarrassing, and I'm not bragging.

It's desperate.

Yeah.

Don't worry.

You're not missing anything.

Can I ask you, tell me if these are questions you don't want to talk about.

But, you know, I've been watching a lot of your bits and pieces and knowing that I was going to talk to you.

And one thing that I thought was fascinating out of the bits that often come up when people talk about the late show was that blackmail in 2009.

And I was interested by the way you handled it and the decision you made to talk about it on the show.

And how you arrived at that decision.

Um

It seemed like I didn't, there wasn't a decision to be made, it seemed like the only thing to do.

Because

it happened and I had to announce that it happened.

I couldn't pretend it had not happened and I just felt like, okay,

I would talk about virtually anything else that had happened and I felt like

this is what a responsible, well, forget the word responsible.

This is what a person should do

with various aspects of their life that are good and bad, but in this case, bad.

So I just felt the response, again, responsibility is not the word.

Nothing responsible about my behavior, but I just felt like, yeah, you know, what am I going to do other than say, here's what happened.

Well, I suppose what you could have done is pay off the guy to keep the story out of the press.

Yeah.

I could have.

But that didn't cross your mind.

No.

In that situation, then, do you sit down with your producer on the show and talk it through?

And is it a fairly short conversation?

Or were they saying...

It was a fairly short conversation.

It was a gathering before the show, and I explained to them what was going on.

And I think the following day it was going to be announced by,

I don't know what justice officer it was.

Anyway, it was going to be made public the next day.

And I said, here's what's happened, and this is what I'm going to do.

And then that's what I did.

The thing I can remember

sort of on the lighter edge of this sort of thing,

the first guest after this announcement and discussion on my part was Woody Harrelson.

And

he just, you could tell he didn't really want to come out.

He just thought, ah, I may be on the wrong show.

How do I fall in that?

And I remember running into him years and years later and having the same kind of conversation with him about it, which was like, yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry you had to walk into that.

Were the audience primed at all?

Because it sounded like they didn't know how to respond.

They thought that you were doing a bit almost.

I guess.

I mean, how do you respond?

But did you not think like, well, we have to say to the audience beforehand,

Okay, this is going to be serious.

Dave's going to talk about something serious, and just can you go along with it?

And it's not a bit.

No.

There was no preparation of the audience.

Guess what, folks?

You're here on a good night.

Dave's gotten himself into some trouble and he's going to talk about it so get ready to have fun.

No,

other than telling the staff what was going to happen, I just went out and did it.

Yeah.

And the other thing

that I was looking for was the monologue you did after 9-11.

And that's not there anymore.

I mean, you can find it, but it's not easily available on YouTube.

But it's something that I'd read about so many times, and it's something that meant a great deal to people.

And I was wondering why it's not part of your

World Wide Pants archive on YouTube.

I don't know.

Right.

Yeah, I have no answer.

I mean, I'm sure there is an answer.

I don't know if it was just, I don't know.

We'll have to ask somebody.

I was wondering if it was because you were so complimentary about Giuliani.

Oh, no.

But I mean, isn't that the A and the B of it?

Because not only for myself, but for the entire country, this is the man who lit the flame of hope

and beyond.

And I can remember dreading this whole experience and listening to his

explanation of what was required.

We had to go forward.

We were strong.

And so I felt like, well, this is a message not just to everyone, it's a message to me as well.

I do a nightly show there.

I got to go back.

I don't know.

You tell me what misfired there.

I don't know.

Yeah.

But it was tremendously inspiring.

I mean, there's so many people that I came across writing online about how important it was to them for you to be there.

And it was very moving.

I was visiting, you know, I haven't been to New York for a few years, and I'm staying down in Wall Street, where I've never really visited before.

Yeah, it's a great area.

Yeah.

Tremendous area.

And I was just down in that very area a week ago looking around at what is there now versus 20 years ago, 25 years ago.

Right.

It's remarkable.

And I was just walking around, rather than take the subway, I've just been walking everywhere, and found myself randomly at World Trade Center.

Yeah.

and suddenly confronted by the memorial and what's there now and was completely you know polaxed emotionally and

it was really heavy just to be there and look at the names around the memorial.

My wife and I went down there, I think, two weeks after the attack.

And

you could go down there and sort of

visit is the wrong word, but

experience it.

And I just remember a tower of rubble,

hugely

tall and round and a mound.

And the only way to describe the size, there was a caterpillar, like a, I think, a bulldozer, and it was up on the side of this mound of debris

and so dwarfed by the mound that it looked like a child's toy.

And here's the thing, you couldn't get in this room, it's so big.

wedged, seated in place on top of the debris consisting of God knows what.

And then considering that to what they have done now, remarkable.

And a true testament to the

resourcefulness and resilience of the human spirit.

And

everybody who lives in this area should,

especially everybody who was here when it happened, should go down there and

have those two

influences.

Yeah, it's very moving.

But yeah, you know, not to belabor the point, but I thought, I think it would be good if you put that clip back.

It's nice to be reminded that actually what people like you do is

communicate and

make connections with people, and that's an important thing, that's a valuable thing, especially in those moments, you know, when.

I will look into this as soon as possible.

Okay, thanks.

If I could have some action on that within the week, I'd be

pleased.

No.

No, thank you.

No.

No.

One of the clips that I enjoyed watching on YouTube, Letterman-wise, was Bob Dylan on some of his appearances on your show.

He was your last musical guest in 2015, right?

Yeah.

Not bad.

And he first appeared in 1984.

Very good performance, like sort of weirdly, totally anomalous as far as what he was like around the time.

And just generally, like he really pulled it out.

He had this sort of young Tex-Mex punk band or something with him as his backing band.

And he's brilliant.

Yes, I know little about that.

I know Bob Dylan, and I remember when he was first on the show, we were thrilled because Bob Dylan was not on TV.

Yeah.

And it was great for us, and he was nice enough to be on the show many, many times.

And

I just watched the Bob Dylan biopic, Out of the Blue, or Welcome Back, or I Know Where I'm Going.

What's the name of it?

A Complete Unknown.

A Complete Unknown.

Yeah.

I would have gotten it later today.

And I loved it.

I just loved it.

And to have been a small part of his life,

to me, that was...

A great compliment for him to be on the show.

It's a good film, isn't it?

It's really good.

Oh, it's a great film, yeah.

And, you know, yeah, I found nothing wrong with it.

I loved it.

Chalamay's brilliant.

The fact that he sings all those songs.

It's crazy.

The woman who plays Joan Bias is amazing.

Yeah, I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

But I also saw a clip where you were at Radio City Music Hall.

10th anniversary of the late show.

Yeah.

And he's your musical guest.

And you've got this giant, amazing band with Paul Schaefer, but you've also got like Emmy Lou Harris and Michelle Shocked and this massive great horn section and backing singers singers and everything.

Do you know the story of this?

Do you know the whole story of this?

Bob Dunlan at that point had been on the show, I don't know, four times, a half a dozen times.

And he agreed to be on this anniversary show at Radio City Music.

1992.

92.

And the story goes that Bob was under the impression that he would be performing by himself or maybe with just Paul and the band.

He did not realize, as the story goes, that there would be other well-known musicians in the...

This is the day of the super band.

You know, you just had to have,

anyway.

So, Bob rehearses the night before with Paul, and that goes pretty well.

Paul's pleased, and Bob's pleased, and Paul is playing the keyboard, and Bob is guitar and singing, and so now Bob is comfortable.

And then he shows up for rehearsal in the Radio City Music Hall, and there are the people, some of whom you mentioned.

Now, Bob apparently feels that he's been had by his manager, by our show, by whomever might want to play a trick on Bob.

Anyway, a misunderstanding.

And the story goes that his performance of Like a Rolling Stone

is,

we should have had someone out there signing because you couldn't really understand what he was saying.

So after the show, we're all

puzzled.

And then people kept saying, yeah, but you know, the truth of it is, that's what you get these days with Bob Dylan.

Well, it turns out, no, that's not what you got in those days with Bob.

Maybe on and off night, but this seemed to have been deliberate.

And the idea was Bob so miffed that he was the front singer for this super band, irritated him, so he thought, I'm just going to give the kids a little something to talk about.

And it kind of hurt my feelings.

And then as the years went by, I realized, I love that about Bob Dylan.

If that's true, thank God we were a part of it.

Geez, that's tremendous.

Sure, he won a Nobel Prize, but look at this for heaven's sake.

And right there, the big stage, yes, it's Bob Dylan.

And you can't understand a word, not a word.

Even if you memorize the song, you don't know what he's singing.

So I find that to be just delightful, heroic on his part, and I'm just so proud of that moment.

It was amazing.

Was that your impression that you couldn't understand?

And did you think that was regular Bob Dylan or something?

I thought it was a chance it was regular Bobbles, but at the same time, it was very extreme.

It was just sounds.

The thing is that Elton John has become a little bit like that, not as extreme.

But Elton John mainly just does the vowels of the songs now and sort of makes the vague sound.

And good for him.

I mean, honestly.

And that's Rocket Man.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah.

And as you say, it's fine when it's Bob.

And I do think, though, now that you mention it, he is smirking as well.

Treasuring the performance?

Yeah.

Every now and again.

I'll look at it again.

I saw there's a kid, the guy who does a show on YouTube called Professor of Rock.

And he provides music profiles of the artists, of the music, of

my generation and beyond earlier and later.

And he devoted a whole show to Like a Rolling Stone.

And

what inspiration caused the song, what it meant to not only Bob, to everybody, to every musician since, and how it was iconic, it was anthemic, and it was this, and it was that.

And I thought, Wow,

the build-up of the song was heroic.

And I thought, I'm going to go take a look at that thing at Radio City Music Hall.

And so I loaded it up and I watched it.

I just couldn't stop laughing because everything he described of that song, completely non-existent in that performance.

It was like, Bob, have you had too much to drink?

It was just, I mean, the comparison was delightful.

I didn't realize he worked quite closely, or at least he had some contact with the director of A Complete Unknown.

So he was involved with it.

It wasn't one of those things that happened kind of despite him.

Yeah, I heard that as well.

And people were saying, should he have actually been allowed to get in there?

And he, I guess, introduced a possible scene that had not appeared in the original script?

This is just stuff I've heard.

I don't know if it's accurate.

I don't care.

I loved every dang minute of it.

It was like somebody had recorded a part of my life.

that it was great to see replayed like that again.

Yeah.

What were you doing?

You were a little bit young for that, weren't you?

No.

I was right there.

I think Bob and I are the same age.

He may be a year or two older than I am.

Okay.

So what were you doing in those days then?

Well, I was lucky enough early enough when I was

smoking, sure.

I was working in a TV station when I was 20, so I was lucky enough to be doing what I wanted to do the rest of my life early in my life.

Was that when you were a news reporter?

Did the weather on a TV station in Indianapolis, Indiana.

That was the first TV job you got?

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah, right out of I was hired when I was in college to be their summer announcer.

And from there, after two years of that, worked there another three or four years full-time.

For me, a big deal.

Did you know a great deal about meteorology?

Nothing.

I knew you had a cold front, you had a warm front, and you have the occluded front.

That's all I know.

But you were just good at talking.

Well, I mean, it's

what does Martha Stewart really know about Cobbler?

Does that make sense?

I don't know.

So you got that gig, and then

what was the thing that made you want to be a stand-up?

Well, I didn't want to be a stand-up, but I knew I couldn't continue in local TV, so I quit the TV station.

And a kid came to Indianapolis and bought a radio station, and he said, Will you work for us?

And I said, Yeah, I'll work here for a year and then I'm going to California.

So I gave myself that deadline to get to California and

that's what I did and it worked out.

Thinking that in California that's where you'd be able to pursue your show business.

Yeah, in those days it was pretty easy.

You just go to a place called the Comedy Store and from there you get to be on the tonight show and from there you get to be wonderfully famous.

And that's...

I mean that's sort of the way you did it.

It was the way everybody did it, yeah.

I don't know how people do it now.

I guess they do it by recording shows in their bedrooms.

Yeah, I guess so.

Who was there then in the comedy store when you got out to Los Angeles?

Mid-70s?

1975, yeah, exactly.

Mid-70s.

Freddie Prince was huge.

I guess people don't know these names now.

David Brenner was huge.

The guy from Welcome Back Cotter.

Gabe Kaplan

was huge.

Joan Rivers was getting really big.

And then in my class, it got to be Jay Leno, got to be Robin Williams, got to be Elaine Boozler.

Oh, Richard Pryor was there previously.

So it was a pretty muscular gathering of comics.

And were you all carousing together?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was delightful.

It was a great bit of fun.

I'm sure you had your own experience of this sort of thing.

It's you and your buddies, and everybody's funny.

I was thrilled because I had to explain to myself: here's what I get to do: I get to go to this place when it's dark and spend two or three hours and everybody I'm with are really funny, really funny, and they are funny and they make me laugh and I try to make them laugh and I get to do it again the next night.

And I thought, I've never had a job like this where anybody was funny.

I mean, you associate your job with nobody being funny.

So this was an upside-down world for me.

And whenever I talk to my friends about it, everybody has the same fond impression of those days.

I mean I stand-up was never my background really and I do the odd show now and go on charity mixed bills and things like that and nowadays comedy green rooms are fairly sterile places as far as I can tell.

Everyone's got their 8x10s and they're working out their stats and they're booking their shows and they're very, there's kind of a serious atmosphere.

But presumably that's not what it was like.

Not what it was then.

It's a huge business now, which at first I wasn't aware of.

And then I realized it's an enormous industry.

And back then, the goal was simple.

Somebody comes into the tonight show from a guy named Merv Griffin had a talk show.

And the tonight show was the pinnacle with Johnny Carson.

Your next best opportunity was Merv Griffin.

So you put together material to get on the Merv Griffin show.

And with that, maybe under your belt, you'd get to the tonight show.

It's not like that anymore.

Now it's, I need a multiple show deal with Netflix at several million dollars a show.

And it's serious stuff.

Somebody was telling me about John Mulaney, who is currently working on his next Netflix special.

And he thought that the whole thing would take more than two years, and maybe it was even three years.

That's a lot of work for a lot of money.

When we were doing it, you have a good five minutes on the tonight show and you'll be on a situation comedy.

And that was it.

You know, that's what Freddie Prince had done.

That's what Gabe Kaplan had done.

That's what David Brenner had done.

Richard Pryor was the outlier in that,

you know, he's a big powerhouse concert comedy guy in those days.

Right.

And were you, or were you sort of aware nowadays, you know, rightly, the conversation is much more about people's mental health and how they are doing and whether they're struggling and behavior that needs to be looked at.

Were you guys having those conversations?

No, no.

No, no.

It was

a lot of cocaine and a lot of,

excuse the expression, romantic conversations,

a lot of being on the road.

What kind of romantic conversations?

I just, you know, in show business, you have men, you have women.

And then you have romance.

Okay, okay, yes, yes.

I mean,

I was thinking

about people talk about it.

Yeah, I was imagining you and Robin Williams sort of sitting there and talking about poetry or something.

Oh, I see.

A different form of romance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Robin Williams was a very literate fellow.

He could have had that conversation.

What was a typical...

What was like, do you have a memory of a fun

day in Los Angeles back then where you just thought, this is fucking great?

Yeah, I would get up in the, whenever I got up and go to a park in North Hollywood and play basketball in the park.

and then come home and maybe try to write jokes, very bad at writing jokes, and then you shower up, you get ready, and you go to the comedy store.

And that's when the fun began.

That's what it was.

And then you go out afterwards.

People like to go out and stay up all night because this was kind of

the profile, the pattern set by

real show business people.

You do your show, you stay out all night.

I couldn't do that, didn't really want to do that.

I did it a couple of times enough to realize, I think I'll just go home and go to bed.

Okay, so you weren't bumping into the Hollywood vampires, Alice Cooper and John Lennon.

No,

I think we were after

that period.

Little Bell period.

And we were,

yeah, we had our own little group that we marauded with.

When did you first encounter Norm MacDonald?

I believe it would have been on the show, on the show I did.

I think he was a guest on the show.

I think he was a guest many times.

And

you don't realize how delightful the guy was until he drops dead.

And then you realize, holy shit,

this was,

whoa,

where are these guys?

And the fact that he's still celebrated is great, but it's, you know, he'd still be great alive.

We'd rather have the alive version, but what an impression he left on the world of comedy.

I mean, that's another clip.

I've watched it so many times, his last appearance on your show.

Even just mentioning it starts bringing up the emotion of it because it's such a roller coaster.

He's really funny on it.

And then he gets choked up and it's

devastating.

The stuff that I enjoy watching, and I didn't see it at the time because I was out working at the time, is when he would do the weekend update on Saturday Night Live.

And Norm just defied you with these jokes.

Here, here's something I think is funny.

I don't care whether you think it's funny or not.

And he would just sit there and gun people with this stuff.

And the intent and the satisfaction that he achieved that way, remarkably delightful.

Just great.

Good.

Norm good.

And he allegedly had, we heard this, and I guess all comedians might have had this.

If the audience is shitty, they don't worry about their good set.

They'll go to the shitty audience set and give these people something really to be shitty about.

And Norm apparently was the master of that art.

Oh, you're shitty tonight.

Well, guess what?

You're going to get the shitty material.

Were you ever shocked by him?

Like, because he could be so sort of sweet and silly.

That was such a big part of him.

But then also he was just sort of gleefully able to push these big buttons, race buttons, gender buttons, in the jokes, that is.

And it was shocking sometimes.

And obviously

he was delighted by the fact that people were shocked.

What did you make of it?

Well, you know, as,

yeah, I probably in those days probably was just, oh, what happens there?

But, you know, the confidence of the man, so you just, okay, this is what he is.

You sort of have to trust him, I suppose.

You sort of have a level of trust in him as a person.

Well,

it's more practical than that.

Okay, if you think you can defend yourself against this material, go ahead.

You know, you can make jokes about anything if you're willing to live with the aftermath.

And Norm seemed to relish whatever aftermath there might be.

He seemed not to give a shit.

Yes.

And I think, yeah, and I, as far as I knew, that was genuine.

But it's so delightful.

And I was just the opposite.

I felt like, ooh, if I don't get a laugh, I'll be under the house.

Yeah.

And yet he used to talk to you on your show about times when he bombed.

And it was interesting because I thought,

I wonder if he does care.

Like, on some level, he seems to be aware when he hasn't done well and he would prefer that he did yeah but at the same time he just it seems to glide off him I think he was like to me I'm a bit of a worm I have a very low threshold of embarrassment Norm doesn't seem to be capable of embarrassment at all and I admire that because I've embarrassed myself pitifully here today nine or ten times and it's gonna i won't be leaving the house uh But Norm, I mean, he was a gladiator.

God bless him.

And the idea that the people at Saturday Night Live, Lauren Michaels gets a call from Don Olmeyer, who was running the network at the time, and told Lauren, tell Norm he's got to fly out here for a meeting in Los Angeles with me, the head of NBC.

Norm gets on the plane, probably has not really an idea what's going on.

And Don Olmeyer says, You're fired.

And I just think, well, that

does.

Why does that happen?

You know, stop doing O.J.

Simpson jokes.

That apparently was the root of.

Don Olmeyer was a friend of O.J.'s, was he?

Apparently, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and Norm was just relentlessly going after this O.J.

as a murderer thing before the verdict had come out.

But

I don't know.

I mean, I recognize that NBC is a publicly traded company and they can choose and pick whatever they want on their air.

But the idea of make Norm get on a plane and fly him out here.

So

Don Omeyer, Mr.

Cufflinks, the man who invented the starched shirt and the cufflinks are going to fire Norm.

I just thought, good for Norm.

You know, that's just, that's delightful.

The stupidity of that is hilarious.

I loved when he did Bob Sagett's Roast.

Have you seen that clip?

So this is a thing that we don't really have so much of in the UK is the roast culture.

Everyone takes turns to say the worst things they can possibly think of about a certain person.

And the comedians just go for it and say appalling things that are obviously they genuinely feel some of the time, it seems fairly obvious, about

this comedian.

But

the whole tradition of the event is that you just have to suck it up and laugh it off, right?

Anyway, Bob Saggett, who how would you describe Bob Saggett to people who didn't know?

Well,

to me, well, you see him on the Full House show, and he was America's father.

That was a self-attained nickname.

I don't know.

Happy, nice, kids, family show, very popular among families, and presentable.

He looked like it might be a Sunday school teacher or a youth minister or something.

But his material was just

god-awful.

How do you describe it?

Just biologic, just sexual, just

any ugly turn on any human behavior.

That was Bob.

And foul language and couldn't get enough of it.

Right.

And then, you know, off stage, nice set, Bob.

Oh, good, great.

You want to get a sandwich?

You know, he was just back to normal, but

his material was that of a man possessed.

So Norm turns up at the roast of Bob Saggett, and everyone, all these other comedians are going up and saying terrible things about Bob Saggett.

And Norm,

I wrote down something there.

So he's supposed to go out there and be absolutely appalling to Bob Saggett.

And he just makes this string of tame, sweet jokes and says, Bob, you have a lot of well-wishers here tonight, and a lot of them would like to throw you down one.

A well.

They want to murder you in a well.

No, but Bob has a beautiful face, like a flower.

Yeah, a cauliflower.

No offense, but your face looks like a cauliflower.

See, so stop right there.

What has Norm done there?

You know, they're not funny, but yet they're funny.

Yeah.

You know, they're stupid, and they're not insulting, but they are.

I mean,

how do you construct that?

It's wizardry, isn't it?

Yeah, it really is.

And at the same time, to sort of

defang the whole event and to kind of reveal it as kind of pompous in its own way and self-serving, all these comedians trying to outdo each other for who can be more horrible.

And he goes out and just makes a joke like, you've got a face like a cauliflower.

Yeah.

And I would guess, not having seen the effort, but I would guess that he's what people talked about after the fact.

Yeah, oh, yeah, definitely.

What are the rewards of getting older?

Wow, rewards.

Well, you get to see family members living a life you've already come to know and live.

And that's rewarding, if not troubling,

because whatever, and I'm speaking of my son, whatever my son is happy or troubled about, I have been happy and troubled about the same thing.

As a parent, this is universal, right?

And that's rewarding to see them respond to something great in a way

we as younger people would have responded to.

So that's a real connection, not just between a father and a son, but of life.

The thing about growing older, I find I have more time to actually,

you know, question,

I don't know what's going on, and I can't stop thinking about it.

And I wonder why when I was younger, this didn't occur to me.

Stuff just doesn't make any sense.

But yet,

it seems like,

I mean here we are,

on the other hand we're still shooting and killing people,

but yet here we are and you look around in the solar system and you have planets and they're all burned out and dead.

And does that mean at one point they were all alive and green like Earth?

I don't know.

And then they put the James Webb

telescope up and everything that we thought had nailed down answerable seems to now be in question because of new evidence.

A lot to think about.

Yeah, I was just looking for some snack recommendations

for your diet regimen.

Now, I heard you talking about the fact that you yourself were shy when you were a kid.

Yes.

And your son was shy.

I don't know if he still is.

He's shy around me.

I've seen him around his friends, and

you know, he's Mr.

Chamber of Commerce around his friends.

But around me,

can you wait in the car?

No, please, just wait in the car.

A lot like that.

And it's hard.

I don't know if your kids were like that, but it's hard not to be offended by that.

And my wife and I would, oh no, he likes you.

Really?

Did you didn't see him?

So, yeah, that's something to deal with.

Yeah.

But I remember you saying that seeing him shy, certainly when he was younger, made you worry that you had done something wrong, even though you yourself were shy and you got through it fine.

But it is true, isn't it, that you see those things in your children and you're, well, I suppose not for everybody, but for perhaps people like us, your first response is to think, ah, I fucked it up.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm so glad to hear you say that.

Because even as a man who's motivated solely by guilt, only by guilt, the only true motivating factor in life, beyond measurement, I assume that with every breath the kid takes.

So thank you for that.

I'm assuming because you have that experience identical to mine that likely it's not founded.

Thank you.

I would hope not.

And also,

unless you're a total monster as a parent, what you do doesn't make that much difference to how they turn out.

I think that, you know, obviously within certain parameters, and you can influence this a little bit, and you can be a great parent, but fundamentally, they will be who they are.

And you can't change that much about it.

Don't all parents worry about this?

And that's confounding.

And then the other thing, it's not just your wife and you, it's recombinant DNA.

It's dozens and hundreds of genetic influences that are distilled in that kid.

I'm also in full agreement with you about photographs.

which

you express something that I don't hear very often, which is how

dangerous they are.

How looking back through family photos and snaps from 10 years ago or even just five years ago is painful.

It's violence.

Photos are violence.

Do you feel this way?

Does your wife feel this way?

I don't, yes, I think she does actually.

And I think she felt it before I did because I'm the archivist of the family.

I take photographs all the time.

And I would compile family albums every Christmas and love doing it.

But I never understood why my wife wasn't as enthusiastic about it as me and I think it's because she arrived there before I did.

Yeah I can't do it.

I admire the fact that you put these things together.

I can't do it.

I can't.

I turned down photos all through the house now when the kid was six months, three months, four months, eight years, ten years.

I just can't look at them.

I can't look at pictures of myself.

I can't watch old shows.

I don't know.

And I don't care.

Believe me, that's not my biggest problem.

You have a smartphone.

yeah, I can see you have a smartphone.

I have one right here, buddy.

And do you get sent so-called memories by Apple?

Yeah, every now and then they'll come up Holiday Fun 2012.

And I think, who the fuck put holiday fun on here?

I'm not paying for this.

And sure enough, there is holiday fun from 2012.

I don't know how it happens.

But again, that's not my biggest problem.

Have you ever had one of getting memories?

Because the algorithm is so good now that they can very accurately identify each member of your family and

agglomerate them into memory bombs.

And I got one that was all about my mum who died in 2020.

And fairly soon after she died, I got one that included her a few days before she died.

Presley.

Yeah.

And she was in hospital.

I didn't, I took a, I mean, in a way, I'm to blame for taking too many photographs.

It's all your fault, isn't it?

It is.

Do you know any tech bros?

Ah, yeah, I guess.

It's just, again,

it's a part of town I never go into.

I just don't want to go over there.

I don't want to know people from that part of town.

Elon hasn't been to stay in Montana.

We were trying to get Elon Musk years ago to do a thing at Lincoln Center.

It would be a night with Elon Musk, and I would chat with him.

And so, and Elon Musk had been on the show

a couple of times, maybe once.

I at that point owned two Teslas,

the Sportster and the sedan and stuff.

So I called him and I said, would you like to be a part of this night with Elon Musk at Lincoln Center?

It'll be a lovely evening and we'll chat.

And I said, this would be great.

And he said,

yeah,

I only do things like that for people who have done things for me.

I said, okay.

Okay, thanks.

And I was angry at myself because I didn't say, hey, you motherfucker, I own two of your goddamn cars, and when you released the new sedan, you were on my show.

Isn't that enough to do for you?

And maybe that's what he was waiting for.

But I was so cowardly that I just thanked him.

Oh, okay, you know, I got it.

We'll send this to him.

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Continue.

Thanks so much, Dave.

That was brilliant.

That seems to be Sheamus' word.

Oh, no, that was brilliant.

Everyone walked out.

No, no, it was brilliant.

Hey, welcome back podcasts.

That was Dave Letterman talking to me there.

I call him Dave.

And I'm extremely grateful to Dave for making the time to talk to me.

It was great to meet him.

I loved every second.

He was a dream podcast guest.

And I am so

thankful to him, but also to his team.

He's got lots of people helping him out and organized.

He's a busy guy.

So thanks to to them, but thanks most of all to Seamus Murphy Mitchell who, as I said at the top, works with Dave

and was really instrumental in making the whole thing happen.

I really appreciate it, Seamus, and I hope you don't get fired as a result.

There's a few links in the description of today's podcast of clips that I particularly enjoyed watching when I was preparing to meet Dave, some of which I was familiar with already, others which were new to me, lots of compilations of great moments.

I mean it was an amazingly groundbreaking show, which was so influential on a whole generation of American comedians who went on to work on The Simpsons and shows like that.

Anyway, you've got links there to some great moments.

I think I also managed to find a clip, albeit a very low-quality clip, of him doing his 9-11 monologue.

That's on Daily Motion.

There's Norm MacDonald, that wonderful clip which I've posted before of him on the last ever late show episode, as well as a compilation of some of his other appearances with Letterman.

And there's one or two other links to some of the things we spoke about in the description as well, including a link to Richard Iowadi's book, The Unfinished Harold Hughes, at least the first book in that quadrilogy.

But there's even more Richard Iowedi coming your way in a couple of weeks he's going to be a guest on the podcast and that was a conversation we recorded recently although it will also include one or two bits from the live show that we did last year as part of the podcast tour

so yes I was on Bake Off for Stand Up to Cancer we taped it last summer in fact And I blabbed about it a few times in shows around that time before I was asked by the production team for Bakoff to stop blabbing about it because they prefer to keep it a surprise until just before the show.

But now I'm allowed to talk about it.

It's going out, I think, next weekend as I speak, Sunday the 6th of April at 7.40 p.m.

on Channel 4.

I was on there with comedian and friend of the podcast, Tommy Tiernan.

and with Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self-Esteem, the music artist.

And I was on there with writer, actor, and comedian Mira Sayal who I'd never actually met in real life before it was very nice to meet her

and I won't do any spoilers for how it went suffice to say that I took it quite seriously maybe too seriously and you will see how it turned out

on Sunday the 6th of April

but it would be amazing if you were also able to make a donation to support Stand Up to Cancer.

The money from donations will accelerate life-saving cancer research.

You know, that's an area where you can really appreciate a change that has happened in the way that cancer is treated over the last few decades.

All thanks to research that has been done, much of it with donations from charities like Stand Up to Cancer.

So, anyway, if you are in a position to do so, it would be great if you could make a donation.

The details are in the description.

It takes a couple of seconds.

You just text to a number.

And that's it.

Thanks.

I do actually write about my experience of going on Bake Off in the introduction to my book, I Love You Buy.

My book is called, Cornballs suggested the title.

And I was writing about Bakoff as an illustration of why it's taken me so long to write the book.

I was just explaining that these kind of things kept coming along every now and again when I was supposed to be writing.

And

I couldn't say no to Bakoff.

But the book is finally done.

I think it's two years late, something like that.

I'm fairly sure my publishers will be relieved that they no longer have to badger me.

When the book is finally published at the end of May this year, 2025, there is a link in the description of the podcast for you to pre-order copies, which I would be very grateful if you did.

If lots of people do it, it makes me seem important, and I think that's good.

And of course, you can also pre-order the audiobook.

I haven't actually recorded the audiobook yet, I'm going to be doing that next month, and I'm very excited about it.

There's going to be a lot of bonus material in that audio book: little clips and bits of music, and new jingles, and things like that.

There's also a whole bonus chapter in there about Zay Vid in the mid-90s and my relationship with his music at that point and fandom in general and how difficult it is sometimes for a fan to let their heroes cha-cha-cha-cha change.

That's a deep level reference there for you Bowie fans.

And also in the audiobook there's going to be a bonus

bit of waffle with Joe, Cornish.

So he will have an opportunity to respond to some of the things that I have written about about him in there because there's a lot of Adam and Joe stuff.

Well look this is the text that I've just written for the flap like the inside flap of the hardback so I'll try it out on you.

I only just sent it off to the publisher this morning.

It says hey how you doing casual browser Adam Buxton here because I'm imagining someone picking it up in an airport or something and looking at it.

Are you ready for some hot hyperbole about this book?

Here we go.

In I Love You Buy, the highly anticipated follow-up to the best-selling Ramble book, I reminisce with hilarious and heartwarming candor about the highs and lows of working with Joe Cornish and revolutionizing the worlds of DIY TV and podcasting in the process.

You'll hear about my crazy times hanging out with notorious rock and roll hellraisers like Travis and Radiohead.

I write with humor and heartbreaking poignancy about the challenges of parenting, losing my mother, to death, that is, we didn't get separated in a shop, and the drug hell that led me to nearly dying in the arms of a comedy legend.

There's also a bit about arguing with my wife, getting instructions on edginess from Louis Theroux, going on bake-off, and much more that you didn't ask for but definitely need.

There's the bird scare up.

Anyway, there you go.

So that's a kind of

hyperbolic overview of what you can expect from I Love You Bye.

Link in the description.

All right, I think that's enough.

Back next week and roughly every week thereafter for a couple of months.

Thank you very much once again to David Letterman and especially Seamus Murphy Mitchell for

getting it all together and his production support.

Thanks to Wolf for engineering the session.

Thanks to Helen Green.

She does the artwork for this podcast and she has been working unbelievably hard on my book and it's looking great.

Her stuff is so wonderful and I'm so

pleased that I get to work with someone that talented and also that nice and kind and patient.

I feel very lucky.

Thanks to everyone at ACAST who continues to help keep the show on the road, liaising with sponsors, etc.

But thanks most of all, more more than any of all those other ones, to you because

you came back.

I hope you enjoyed it.

And I hope you won't think it appalling if I lean in for a hug.

Would that be all right?

Come here.

Oh, it's good to see you.

All right, go carefully out there.

It's nuts.

And until next time, we share the same owl space

for what it's worth.

I love you.

Bye

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