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TV is a one way medium. It's a passive medium.
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It's perfect for brainwashing people.
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Your brain actually goes into a different Delta or theta or whatever state.
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And you're just like, and you certainly are not engaged despite the people yelling at the TV, et cetera.
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Um, and that's why I prefer forums like the, uh, podcast, like Twitter, like things that are interactive, but all of a sudden, like the network shows were all ....
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Just the same with the less laugh tracks. Yeah.
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And you know, it's just like, oh man, this is just commercials. Yeah. I mean advertising. Yeah.
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It was just horrible, really horrible.
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And so my wife and I, essentially, when we moved, uh, into our first house, we didn't buy a TV.
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because we were just like, fuck that.
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I mean, it's just gotten so bad.
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
0:57
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
1:02
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
1:09
The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
1:26
We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
1:56
Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
2:02
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
2:33
It's Jim O’Shaughnessy with another episode of Infinite Loops, and you might be saying, "Wait a minute, Jim.
2:39
I heard you already introduce these guys.
2:42
You talked about how incredibly great both of them are."
2:45
Of course, I'm talking about Trung Phan and Rob Henderson, both of whom I've had on the podcast before, but this one basically got started from a tweet.
2:55
I think it was yours, Trung, right, about ... or actually, no.
2:59
Rob, you had done something on The Shield.
3:02
Trung was like, "Hey, let's all jump on a podcast and talk about TV," and so that's what we're going to do today.
3:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: However, listeners and viewers, as you probably know, we talk a lot before we actually hit record, and Trung I learned what really Rob should consider like a deep, dark secret that he should not speak, utter, in any format, and Trung, I'm going to toss it to you and let you tell the people what it was.
3:32
Trung Phan: Well, I'll say what the situation was.
3:34
We just found out that Rob Henderson, who consumes more television than anybody else I know and writes about it brilliantly, has never seen the movie Apocalypse Now, which is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam war movie.
3:49
I don't want to throw Rob under the bus here, so what I want to say is this.
3:53
Rob, are there any other movies of this ilk that you have not seen?
3:57
Is it more of like you're not ...
3:57
Rob Henderson: No, nothing against the genre or anything.
4:02
I mean, I've heard good things about this movie.
4:05
It's just one of those things that it's never ... it's funny.
4:07
I just literally saw The Godfather, the first Godfather movie, I think maybe five months ago when it was released in the theaters, in the cinema here, as they say.
4:18
Trung Phan: The 50th anniversary.
4:19
Rob Henderson: The 50th anniversary. I put this on Twitter.
4:21
I said, "Hey, I just saw the first Godfather movie.
4:23
It was as good as people say."
4:24
I got all these comments saying, "What the hell's wrong with you?
4:26
You just now saw The Godfather?
4:28
That movie's been out forever.
4:30
You watched The Sopranos and you've never seen The Godfather? How's this possible?"
4:33
Because in the first season of Sopranos, it's like every other episode they make a reference to The Godfather, and yeah, just never got around to it.
4:40
I'm like, "Oh, I'm glad I watched that."
4:41
I think this is just one of those things where this movie came out before my time and somehow I just haven't got around to it, but you guys are convincing me.
4:49
When was this movie released, Apocalypse Now? Trung Phan: 1979.
4:52
It was the fourth movie in a seven-year run that Francis Ford Coppola had.
4:57
It's the greatest run in film history.
4:59
He made Godfather in 1972, The Conversation and Godfather II in 1974, and then Apocalypse Now in 1979, which I'll bring up this point.
5:08
Jim mentioned it, but there's a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now.
5:11
It's called Hearts of Darkness.
5:13
Jim, why is it called Hearts of Darkness, and what does that documentary tell you about the filmmaking experience?
5:18
Because it is one of the craziest stories in Hollywood history.
5:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It really is.
5:22
I got it from Jed McKenna, who I've read everything he's written. I love his work.
5:27
Literally, in one of his books he has the complete deconstruction not only of Apocalypse Now, but he said the superior documentary about the making of it, Hearts of Darkness, obviously called that because Apocalypse Now is based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is an excellent book.
5:47
If you haven't read it, I would definitely pick it up and read it.
5:50
Basically what happened to Coppola was he almost ...
5:50
he contemplated suicide daily at the end.
5:58
Everybody abandoned him, all of his financing.
6:01
The government that swore that they would work with him ...
6:04
Trung Phan: Manila, the Filipino government, the Marcos regime.
6:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, and literally he willed this movie into existence, and he spent his own money.
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His wife continued to support him, but it put him through a hell.
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This is why Jed McKenna's interested about it. He says essentially ...
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McKenna's all about the death and rebirth of enlightenment and all that sort of thing.
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He said basically that's what happened to him.
6:30
We were talking about The Godfather as well.
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He's like, "Yeah, The Godfather is good.
6:35
I mean, it's really good, but it's like kind of standard programming, you know, a classic gangster story.
6:42
Whereas Apocalypse Now, man, it's like ...
6:42
" well, we'll have to you back on after you watch it, Rob, because ... Trung Phan: Yes.
6:51
That would be an incredible thing.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: We could do two hours just on that movie and the documentary, because it was one of those seminal works, kind of back to when moviemaking was still in its highest art form.
7:05
We're going to be talking more today about TV and the golden age of TV that happened.
7:12
I strike it at The Wire, but many, many strike it at The Sopranos.
7:16
Trung Phan: Sopranos, '99. Yeah. Rob Henderson: Okay.
7:19
When you say strike it, you mean The Wire is the high point? Trung Phan: The start.
7:21
Rob Henderson: Or the beginning?
7:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, no, no. The beginning, Rob.
7:24
Again, this is where somebody my age has relevance here, because what you saw was network TV.
7:33
They call it TV programming for a reason.
7:36
I'm always on my high horse about, listen, TV is a one-way medium. It's a passive medium.
7:43
It's perfect for brainwashing people.
7:45
Your brain actually goes into a different delta or theta or whatever state, and you're just like ...
7:53
you certainly are not engaged, despite the people yelling at the TV, et cetera.
7:58
That's why I prefer forums like podcasts, like Twitter, things that are interactive.
8:05
All of a sudden, the network shows were all just the same, with the laugh tracks.
8:09
It's just like, oh, man, this is just so predictable.
8:13
Rob Henderson: Commercials. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I mean ...
8:15
Rob Henderson: Advertising. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
8:18
It was just horrible, really horrible.
8:21
My wife and I, essentially when we moved into our first house, we didn't buy a TV, because we were just like, fuck that.
8:28
I mean, it's just gotten so bad.
8:31
Then my brother, thinking he was doing us this wonderful favor, bought us a TV, like three years later.
8:39
I started watching Seinfeld, reruns by that time.
8:44
I was like, "Whoa, wait a minute. This is really good."
8:48
Of course, you can't paint with a broad brush.
8:51
All in the Family was an amazing show that essentially brought the whole class conflict in America into a humorous viewpoint, and lots of other great network shows, but then they just started to go like this.
9:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Then all of a sudden, the pay services come on like HBO, kind of the king at this time, and The Wire.
9:16
When you first watch The Wire, it's like it is so multidimensional, contextually rich, that it's ...
9:25
and in the making of the show, they assume that the people who are going to be watching it are smart enough to keep all of these different thread lines together.
9:39
You haven't seen The Wire, yeah, Rob?
9:41
Rob Henderson: I've seen The Wire, yeah.
9:43
I saw The Wire about 10 or 11 years ago, so 2010, 2011, that era.
9:51
That was the peak of the torrenting period, where it was so easy to go to The Pirate Bay or BitTorrent, or they also had these weird ones. They had a mega ...
10:00
I don't know, like MegaTorrent, these kind of things.
10:05
I torrented all of the HBO shows. I watched The Wire.
10:11
I think I might not have been mature enough or sophisticated enough to truly understand the greatness of what I was seeing at that point, and I need to revisit it, but I do remember the main characters in the cast and how unique the show was in that, yeah, it didn't treat you like you were an idiot, and they didn't do flashbacks.
10:28
They didn't speak in ways to remind you of who the characters were.
10:32
Rob Henderson: A lot of the basic cable dramas and stuff, they'll say the name of the characters in ways that you wouldn't say.
10:39
I wouldn't say, "Hey, Jim," every time I spoke to you, to remind the audience that your name is Jim.
10:44
We don't do that in more high-level, prestige dramas, where people speak in a more natural way.
10:50
Yeah, then the dealers and the Barksdale crew and all those guys, they spoke the way that drug dealers speak in narcotics trafficking, and they're just like, "Yeah, you don't understand any of this, viewer at home, but you're just going to have to deal with it, because that's how life is on the street." Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. How about you, Trung?
11:07
Are you a fan, or are we going to move on?
11:09
Trung Phan: Actually, no, I'm a huge fan of The Wire, massive.
11:12
I started watching it right when it came out.
11:14
I'll tell you why I got into The Wire, actually, my favorite show in the '90s.
11:18
I've read Rob's stuff about how, Rob, you used television to teach yourself about society and class, just based on your background.
11:24
We exchanged some messages, and I was the same because my parents were Vietnamese refugees to Canada and they didn't really understand Western society, so they kind of just popped me in front of TVs.
11:34
My after-school standard was always, between three and four when I got home from school, I watched back-to-back for about five years or a decade, it was The Simpsons and Fresh Prince.
11:45
That was the combination I did every single day after school.
11:47
Listen, today, I'm hoity-toity with my kid.
11:49
I'm like, "Oh, I'd never let my kids do that," even though I give my kid like an hour of YouTube a day.
11:55
Anytime my kid pipes up, it's YouTube, right, but my parents are a different situation.
11:57
Trung Phan: The reason I bring all this up, because I've read so much of Rob's stuff about television.
12:01
As you were speaking, Rob, you said you'd gotten to The Wire a little bit later.
12:04
I know you've written a lot about The Sopranos and a lot about Mad Men.
12:07
What that made me realize, actually is there's two ways to look at prestige TV.
12:11
There's breadth and there's depth.
12:12
This is a video I saw from The Arena, which was brilliant, but what are two of the biggest shows in the last 20 years that are broad and wide?
12:19
It would be Game of Thrones and The Wire.
12:21
You're building worlds, right?
12:22
Trung Phan: Whereas a lot of your writing is about the depth.
12:26
It's about the character and you're drilling into these characters, right, because you are a psychology guy.
12:30
You're interested in human psychology.
12:31
It's right in your Twitter bio.
12:33
It's like Tony Soprano as a character study, The Shield is a character study about Mackey, and Mad Men is a character study.
12:40
Actually, Mad Men's interesting because that kind of binds both, because it's building the world of the '60s and the advertising world with the individual character study.
12:49
I noticed it with a lot of your writing. Does that make sense? Rob Henderson: Yeah. Yeah, it does.
12:54
I mean, I guess I'm drawn to those kinds of prestige dramas where it focuses on a handful of specific characters, goes into backstory, goes into their hidden motives and what shapes their decisions to do the things that they do that you see on the show, I suppose. Yeah.
13:12
I mean, The Shield was interesting in that I guess in a way, it never really achieved the same heights as some of these other prestige dramas.
13:20
It never achieved the heights of Sopranos or The Wire, even though I think it is in the same category as them.
13:25
Perhaps one of the reasons is because it doesn't maybe necessarily align with either one of those, breadth or depth.
13:29
Rob Henderson: You never really see the Vic Mackey character, the detective in The Shield.
13:33
You never really learn about his backstory.
13:35
There's one episode in particular where he meets his former supervisor, this senior detective who's played by Carl Weathers, Apollo Creed, who plays the senior detective who trained Vic Mackey back in the 1980s when he was a young, rookie cop.
13:49
You see this guy is basically just as corrupt as Vic is.
13:53
I guess the viewer is supposed to infer that, oh, Vic learned to cut corners and to partner with criminals and so forth from the Carl Weathers character.
14:03
Rob Henderson: Generally, yeah, the world itself is East Los Angeles, this poor, run-down part of the city, whereas these other shows, it really delves deep into it and uses different methods to do it.
14:14
I mean, famously, I think Tony Soprano with his therapy.
14:17
That was just such a groundbreaking plot device, to show the mind of a mafia boss and a mobster who's also a family man at home, and he has all these complaints and quibbles with his underlings, and to just air all of his grievances out in this therapist's office while the audience gets to watch was really, I think, just an incredible way to peek into his mind. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
14:38
This is going to be, I think, like corralling cats, which I love, but what I'd like to start with is kind of that very notion.
14:45
Then hopefully we can take the conversation into these great TV shows, why they're great, what we learned from them, but then broaden it to think about what I've been thinking a lot about recently, which is what's the future of media.
15:00
What's the future of these various entertainment shows?
15:04
Because I personally have a very pretty straightforward view about it, but I'm going to be interested to hear yours.
15:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What I'd like to start with, though, Trung referred to it, and it's your New York Times op-ed, Rob, about everything you know about elite America, you learned by watching TV.
15:23
I think that this is really interesting.
15:27
Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
15:28
The two that you specifically mentioned, Fresh Prince, which I've never seen, and West Wing, which I adored.
15:35
Rob Henderson: I mean, Jim, you've never seen The Fresh Prince?
15:38
Trung Phan: That's as bad as Apocalypse Now.
15:39
Rob Henderson: That's at least as egregious as not seeing Apocalypse Now, is seeing this four-season sitcom from the '90s. I mean, yeah. Yeah, okay.
15:48
Yeah, that piece, that was interesting.
15:50
I mean, that started in a different way.
15:53
I actually submitted this op-ed to my contact at The New York Times.
15:56
I had this piece about the fair admissions Harvard affair, with this group of Asian American students that was suing Harvard.
16:04
I just wanted to weigh in and give my two cents on it.
16:05
I wrote 800 words about it, and I had two sentences in there about class and TV.
16:10
They were just throwaway lines.
16:11
The editor was like, "All this other stuff, everyone else is talking about it, but these two sentences here, could you build an op-ed around that?"
16:16
Rob Henderson: I was like, "Uh."
16:17
You know, this is just how the sausage is made with these kinds of things.
16:20
I'm like, "All right, I guess."
16:21
I really started thinking about it and reflecting, and I realized like, wow, 60% or 70% of my childhood, I feel like, was spent just consuming TV shows.
16:32
The Fresh Prince in particular was a big one.
16:33
I mean, I watched some others too. I watched Roseanne.
16:37
I mean, Power Rangers and those kinds of shows too, the kid shows.
16:40
Rob Henderson: The things that stood out from the sitcoms of that period were like, anytime there were teenage characters in high school, there's always this special episode where these kids are like, "Oh, I'm applying to college," and there's a boyfriend and girlfriend that are like, "What are we going to do when we go away to college?"
16:57
I'm watching this and I'm eight years old, and I'm like, "Okay, so people go away to college."
17:03
Then I'm looking around me at the 18-year-old burnouts who go to my local high school and I'm like, "They're not going away to anywhere, so what's going on?"
17:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They're going to jail, right? Rob Henderson: Yeah. Some of them, yeah.
17:14
Some of them are going to jail and going away to others, yeah, but none of them are going off to college to some leafy, green campus the way that people in these shows were.
17:24
In Fresh Prince, you see Will, Will Smith, the Will Smith character, and Carlton, going back and forth about whether Carlton's going to go off to Princeton or whether he's going to go to UCLA or whatever, and like okay, but Carlton's already rich.
17:37
The Banks family, Uncle Phil, Aunt Viv, they live in this massive house.
17:41
Will's always cracking jokes about how he's going to take Uncle Phil's Lambo out for a spin.
17:47
Rob Henderson: I'm like, "Okay, so these guys are super rich." They have a butler.
17:50
Uncle Phil's got a Lambo and a Ferrari, and Carlton is stressing out about going to Princeton.
17:56
I'm like, "Why does he want to go to Princeton? They're already rich. They have money.
18:00
They're already well off."
18:01
I watched shows like that.
18:02
Later I watched this show, The O. C.
18:04
It was another one about this rich family.
18:08
The teenage characters are all stressing about, "Oh, am I going to go to Berkeley or Brown," or whatever.
18:14
Again these are rich people, and I started to realize, "Okay, so college is really this important thing.
18:20
Even if you're from a well-to-do family, even if you have a butler, there's still all this pressure and expectations from your family that you should go to college."
18:26
Rob Henderson: It impressed upon me the importance of education.
18:29
I mean, yeah, it didn't really have as strong of an effect as my actual environment, because I didn't end up going to college right after high school.
18:35
I barely graduated, and joined the military.
18:38
Then even when I was in the military, I was watching TV shows.
18:40
I watched The West Wing, which I talk about in that New York Times piece.
18:44
That was an interesting show for me because that show underscored the differences in the category of higher education, the institutions within higher education.
18:57
Rob Henderson: There's a scene where C. J.
18:57
Cregg, who's the White House communications ...
18:59
anyway, she's in the administration.
19:03
She talks to the president, President Bartlett, and says, "Mr.
19:03
President, you got into Harvard and Yale and Williams, but you chose to go to Notre Dame. Why would you go there?"
19:13
He said something about how he wanted to train to be a Catholic priest and that was the best way to go, or something like that.
19:18
Rob Henderson: I was watching this, thinking like, "Okay.
19:21
He's the President of the United States, the hardest, most prestigious job in the world.
19:27
One of his underlings is like, `You got into Harvard and Yale and all these other fancy places.
19:32
Why didn't you go to them?'
19:33
He clearly did okay in his life, he's the President, and still they're interrogating him about his choice of college."
19:39
That was, I guess, an inkling for me of, okay, so the college where you choose to go is also important, and people, at least within this social strata, judge you based on your choice of where you choose to go.
19:51
Rob Henderson: Then within the shows that I was watching, I was also picking up on these implicit cues about the ways that people spoke and the stress that people felt about being found out.
20:02
A simple example was in The Sopranos where Tony, he lives in this upper-middle-class neighborhood full of doctors and lawyers, but he's the boss of a crime organization, so he clearly didn't make his money the same way as then.
20:16
Rob Henderson: The Cusamanos, his next-door neighbor who's his family physician, Dr.
20:18
Cusamano invites Tony to go golfing with him and his doctor and lawyer friends.
20:23
The entire time, they're cracking jokes about, hey, something about sleeping with the fishes or, "Hey, have you ever heard about So-and-so and John Gotti," and making all of these sly remarks, and Tony's clearly uncomfortable because he's used to being around a bunch of other thugs, talking about ripping someone off or beating someone up or whatever.
20:45
Rob Henderson: I'm watching this, and I can see.
20:47
I can sense Tony's discomfort. He didn't go to college.
20:49
He has no idea what these guys are talking about with the stock market and so forth.
20:53
I pick up all these kinds of things, and slowly reflect on my own class background and where I wanted to go in my own life. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
21:03
The thing about that scene in Sopranos, which I've loved and I've watched more than once, was the fascination of the upper classes with that type of character.
21:13
If you know American history, it's shot full of this type of veneration.
21:18
Al Capone, for example, gave press conferences, and everybody knew what he did, everybody.
21:27
He was this huge celebrity and hero to the people.
21:31
Same way with the Old Western motifs.
21:33
Everyone was rooting for the bad guys.
21:35
Bonnie and Clyde, same kind of thing.
21:38
I kind of think that that's part of the American experience, so to speak, in terms of no limits and people fantasizing about wouldn't it be cool, for just one day, to have ...
21:45
and back to Tony Soprano.
21:55
One of the most effective scenes, at least for me, was when Dr.
21:55
Melfi, his psychiatrist, got raped, and she knew that she could have her rapist killed.
22:08
Trung Phan: She had the power.
22:10
She saw where he worked, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
22:12
Trung Phan: That was amazing.
22:13
I remember that scene, the power she had.
22:15
She's like, "I could kill this guy.
22:16
I could have this guy killed."
22:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm remembering, because I haven't watched it for a while, but it really made a huge impression on me, that show, the entire show.
22:24
The scene was so artistically and beautifully shot.
22:28
Again, this is kind of this golden era, because it's true of Mad Men, it's true of The Sopranos, it's true of Breaking Bad.
22:38
It's true of a lot of these shows, where the people making the show are making huge assumptions about the intelligence of their audience.
22:49
I think that that's really interesting.
22:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: My wife and I are watching Better Call Saul, which is the prequel to Breaking Bad.
22:57
We watched the ninth episode last night, and there's a scene between Saul and his wife in a garage.
23:05
I turn to my wife, and just by looking at the way he's filming it and the body language and everything, I look at my wife and I said, "She's going to leave him."
23:14
Then instead of that, she comes and kisses him quite passionately.
23:17
I go, "Ah, I guess I was wrong."
23:20
Cut to the next scene, she's leaving him.
23:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: This visual vocabulary that has been developed, and I think will get continually developed, there's a great book on it called Unflattening on how we're merging the ability to visually make statements that are really incredibly profound.
23:43
I thought immediately, thinking about the podcast today, about that Melfi scene, where it's just her face and then kind of like the end that everybody hated, it just kind of went to black.
23:55
But you saw in her expression, "No, I will not fall.
24:00
I will not join the violence, as much as I want to."
24:06
So, Trung, I know you're a Sopranos fan as well, so all three of us are.
24:12
What are your major takeaways?
24:15
If I said, "Hey man, what did you learn from this?"
24:18
What would you say to me?
24:19
Trung Phan: Like moral lessons, or my actual enjoyment from watching it?
24:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, no, no, no, no. The real lessons.
24:25
This is a bullshit free zone podcast.
24:28
Trung Phan: So I've watched it ...
24:28
Actually, my experience of watching it was not very intellectual.
24:34
I watched it with my college buddies in the early 2000s.
24:37
It was like our thing to do.
24:39
It's like every Friday we just sit down, get hammered, and watch the Sopranos.
24:42
It's just extremely entertaining.
24:44
But I get- Rob Henderson: Isn't that part of the brilliance of the show, is that you can watch it on those two levels? Trung Phan: Yes.
24:49
Rob Henderson: I did the same thing.
24:50
10 years ago, I watched the Sopranos.
24:51
I got drunk with my military buddies.
24:52
We'd drink Keystone and Milwaukee's Best, and just go through a case of beer, and watched the Sopranos.
24:58
I watched it over the lockdown in my sort of academic lens, when I'm writing about it, and tweeting about it, and stuff.
25:05
Suddenly, I've become this sophisticated, "Oh, look, what does this scene mean?
25:08
What's the subtext here?"
25:09
But you can enjoy it in both levels, that's the brilliance of these shows.
25:12
Trung Phan: You know what?
25:13
I bet a lot of listeners on this call will have a similar experience where they watched a show like The Wire, Breaking Bad, or Sopranos before they had their current partner or spouse, and then they made their partner or spouse watch it.
25:25
So I got a chance to rewatch The Wire and Sopranos with my wife.
25:29
But as we will talk about later, because we need to pin this here, one of the rules about watching something with someone, you can't just race ahead.
25:36
But when I started rewatching with my wife, and she's like, "this is too good."
25:39
She'd rip off like 10 episodes a day, and then I never got a chance to do the intellectual rewatch.
25:44
Trung Phan: But you're right, the brilliance is, you watch it for pure enjoyment.
25:48
But as you mentioned in some of your writing too, which I really enjoyed, is you love reading recaps, right? I'm the same.
25:54
I love reading show recaps, and I guess that was the intellectual part.
25:58
I watch it for pure enjoyment, and then the recap, I would just steal the moral lessons from the writers, and pawn them off as my own.
26:05
Like, "Oh yeah, when Tony did this, he was indicating that he was a family man. That's my take."
26:10
Rob Henderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So you're faking it until you're making it, right?
26:14
Trung Phan: Yeah, [inaudible].
26:15
Rob Henderson: You’ll enjoy, I mean- Trung Phan: Pure enjoyment- Rob Henderson: Well, so there is the moral lesson, like one was what Jim said about Melfi saying, "No."
26:22
The first time I saw that, I think I had the same response as all the guys I was watching with too, we were like, "What? Are you ...?"
26:26
We all were like, "Yeah, Tony's going to kill this motherfucker."
26:29
Then, at the end we were like, "What? Are you kidding?"
26:32
Then, I rewatch it this time, and suddenly I realize through, I guess sort maturation, taking a more intellectual lens, and then reading all the recaps, and understanding there's a different way to watch television.
26:42
I realized that if Melfi had gotten entangled with the mafia, she herself might not have survived the series. You know what I mean?
26:50
Once she is indebted to Tony and his crew, who knows what direction that show could have taken.
26:56
But by saying, "No," she actually potentially saved her life and her family's life. You know what I mean?
27:00
That was a moral decision.
27:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which fascinates me from a number of different levels because, first off, it is entertaining.
27:10
So let's make sure of that.
27:12
One of my big things is, everybody's in the entertainment business, whether they know it or not.
27:18
If you are not entertaining in some way, honestly, it just doesn't matter, you're not going to break through, even to the target group that you hope to break through to.
27:27
So being entertaining is kind of table stakes, but then, when you start looking at the lessons of a Sopranos or a Wire, it just keeps going back, man.
27:39
It gets back to Greek myth about making deals with the bad demons, or the Devil in Christianity, and all of these things, which have been in our DNA.
27:52
The stories just keep getting told, but they're the same story, basically.
27:57
I mean, it's like Campbell's Hero's Journey.
27:59
All of the most popular movies, guess what, are Hero's Journeys because it's in our base code.
28:05
It's our way of learning, and people don't naturally think about this.
28:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Then you start thinking about the fact that it's on a conscious level, but it's also on a very deep unconscious level.
28:19
I read this quote from another guy who, I think, was way ahead of his time, Robert Anton Wilson.
28:25
He's saying this many, many years ago, and here's what he said, he's like, "If all of the TV shows about the police," 20 a week when he wrote this, "Went off the air, and instead were replaced with an equal number of shows about landlords, how would this change the average American's reality tunnel?" What you got for me?
28:48
Either guy, I'll go with you, Rob.
28:50
Rob Henderson: So, all the TV shows about cops are replaced with landlords. I don't know. Well, I don't know.
28:56
Maybe today we'd be talking about defunding the landlords, but I don't know it's ...
28:56
Well, actually, I think there is this sort of a hostility that people have towards landlords, in general, but I think probably for a period ...
29:06
I mean, this is my very first impression here, is that people would be more divided on it, where a lot of people would have more sympathy for landlords, I mean, especially ...
29:16
You could probably do an entertaining show about a landlord who has the family, who's trying to get by, maybe he's been screwed over a few times by his tenants, and you feel sympathy for him.
29:29
There's a way you can make that show interesting, and get people to sort of identify with that profession. Yeah, I don't know.
29:37
But then I could also imagine this sort of a backlash to it where members of the intelligentsia would write stories about how we're too sympathetic to the landlords, these TV shows are brainwashing us, we're not realizing how much they're screwing over their tenants, and ...
29:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But here's what I think.
29:51
I think that what he's making is a much deeper ...
29:51
He had a really good sense of humor, and so I think the point he's making is a little more profound.
30:02
It is, whether we realize it, or acknowledge it, or not, we are bombarded every day, every single day, by the societal influence that, in some ways, it is open and honest, but in most ways ...
30:22
By the way, not a conspiracy, this is just the way things work, right?
30:27
Where the Overton window opens, and then closes.
30:31
When it's open on something, everyone's like, "Yeah, that was great."
30:33
When it's closed, then no one talks about it.
30:36
So the way I look at it is, when you get that, when you understand that, you've got to try to unlearn a lot of messages that you don't like, that you kind of might be thinking are your messages.
30:53
Many times they're not yours.
30:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I did something over the weekend that ...
30:54
My wife is always long-suffering because she's just like, "Man, why are you doing this?"
31:01
It was because I was interested.
31:05
Anyway, I played nothing but 1950's swooning crooner songs on these bad boys, and I watched TV shows from the '50s.
31:15
I emerged terrified because that world, man, from our viewpoint today, that was a simulacrum ...
31:26
I don’t know how to say that word, simulacrum, that the powers that be, were totally controlling. Trung Phan: Totally.
31:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: There is a Diana, whatever ...
31:33
I can't remember her last name, song that's like, "You're okay. It's all right. You feel fine.
31:43
It's a good day to pay your bills."
31:44
I'm listening to this, I'm like, "What? What?"
31:48
Rob Henderson: It's a good day to pay your taxes. Fine.
31:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's a good day to be a good American, and good Americans do this, this, and this.
31:56
Then you watch the TV shows, same thing.
32:00
I just couldn't help but thinking about The Truman Show, for example.
32:06
She was like, "Okay, so what did you learn, smart guy?"
32:10
I'm like, "What I learned is I'm really happy that I'm alive today, and not back then."
32:15
Because my guess is that that was normal to them.
32:18
Then, of course, I always tried to put a time travel spin on it because I love sci-fi.
32:21
If you didn't do that, if you didn't prepare to go back to a period that many people think of as just a little while ago, the 1950s?
32:32
Of course, Back to the Future, famous.
32:35
They made some pretty good observations there, but your fellow humans, you wouldn't get it.
32:42
You'd be going, "What are you doing to this poor woman?
32:46
Keeping her in an apron, in the kitchen, what the fuck is going on?"
32:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, I think, that with the ability and the tools that we have right now today, that are only going to expand, we're going to just start seeing a lot of really incredibly creative stuff, including shows.
33:10
Trung, you're working on one. What do you guys think?
33:14
Do you think that the shows we're talking about, and we're pretty much heavily staying on the Sopranos here.
33:20
I want to maybe switch gears to a Mad Men because it's a completely different idea, but are those still ...?
33:25
Because the other thing I learned when I was doing my deep '50s dive, and I'm like, "Ugh," was back then, it was so much easier to program society.
33:37
There were two newspapers that mattered, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, that was it.
33:43
There were three networks, and that was it, man, and they decided ...
33:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Monty Python has a bit about it, and Saturday Night Live, I think, had a bit about it, about the nefarious doings of the network people, "Let's get them to believe this."
33:59
For example, the war on drugs, what a fucking pile of horseshit that was.
34:07
If you only looked at empirical evidence from drug trials, and you had no name on what the drug was, and you were just looking at the numbers, alcohol would be illegal, psychedelics would be legal.
34:22
Back then, though, Nixon was terrified because he was not in a good place ...
34:22
By the way, he is my vote, and this includes Trump, he is my vote for craziest motherfucker to ever occupy the White House.
34:35
Trung Phan: Well, he was drunk half the time, right? Trump was a teetotal. There's that part.
34:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
34:41
He was smashed and hammered all the time, and he- Trung Phan: They have tapes!
34:47
They have tapes of him hammered!
34:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I know!
34:51
I'm kind of like, "Why aren't people listening to this?
34:52
Why isn't somebody making a movie about this?"
34:55
My friend, Ron Howard, made Frost / Nixon, which I thought was really good, by the way.
34:59
But, anyway, do you see this as ...
34:59
The final point I wanted to make was, back then, you could control society, pretty much stem to stern.
35:11
Like, I Love Lucy had 68 million viewers every week.
35:17
The most recent show that had any number above 15 million, was Game of Thrones finale, which had 18 million viewers.
35:29
So this atomizing of the various uniform culture into these subgroups ...
35:29
A lot of people go on about the tribal nature, and that's true when you're talking about big tribes, like political tribes, or religious tribes, or anything like that.
35:44
But, I think, it's kind of interesting what we might be seeing coming out of the next 10 to 20 years. Thoughts?
35:51
Trung, I'm going to start with you, man.
35:52
Trung Phan: I think Rob's chomping on the bit here. Rob, go nuts. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. Okay. Go, Rob, go.
35:58
Rob Henderson: Well, I mean, so it's interesting what you said earlier about immersing yourself in the 1950s, and the sitcoms, and how they were programming people to think in certain ways, to be happy, and to pay their bills, and so forth.
36:12
There was an interesting substack, recently, by this guy, Erik Hoel.
36:14
I think he's a neuroscientist by training.
36:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, Hoel. Rob Henderson: Yeah.
36:18
I mean, he's an interesting writer.
36:20
He recently shared this post about how culture, pop culture specifically, seems to be coming gradually more dark over time.
36:29
He suggests that, of course in the 1950s, these shows were portraying people as happier than people probably really were.
36:37
Maybe part of the programming was like, "Hey, everything's cool. Be happy. Be cheerful."
36:41
But Erik also suggests that the TV shows today, seem to be going in the opposite direction where they show this sort of bleak and cynical outlook that the TV show characters have, and probably people aren't quite that self-interested and that cynical in real life either.
36:55
We've almost swung in the other direction now, where you see a Walter White or Tony Soprano, and you see their completely self-interested and dark motives, and that's not really how everyday people are either, right?
37:07
Rob Henderson: We're not quite at that level of ambition, and avarice, and brutality.
37:12
So I find this interesting too, where the culture tends to go.
37:15
I think, probably in the 1950s, the aim was to probably get people to be happy, to be cheerful, to think in certain ways.
37:25
Is that the aim now, though, with TV?
37:27
When we watch these sort of dark, prestige dramas on HBO, or Netflix, or something, is the aim to also get people to be more cynical, to second guess people's motives, and so forth?
37:37
So that was just something that had come to mind too, is the programming motive still present in TV?
37:42
Trung Phan: That's an interesting question.
37:44
I'd love to tackle that because I was just thinking about what you're talking about, Jim, how fracturing of attention and inability to control, or as Chomsky says, "Manufacture consent."
37:56
I think that is, actually, super interesting.
37:57
It's a little bit sad though, and I'll tell you why it's sad for me.
38:00
We talked about it earlier, about drinking with your friends for Sopranos.
38:03
Obviously, I can't do that anymore, and Netflix did this whole thing where you drop whole seasons.
38:08
That experience is actually not that satisfying.
38:11
It's so much more satisfying when they ...
38:11
Well, that's not that true, it is satisfying, but it doesn't have lasting effect.
38:16
So, in the last five years, what I've really enjoyed is Succession because it's once a week.
38:23
I know everybody, I think, quits watching it.
38:25
Those are so much more rare, and those memorable moments ...
38:25
That's why Game of Thrones was such a smash, and so culturally important. Those are going away.
38:35
Trung Phan: The way Netflix just drops things, it takes away that tension, and the build up week by week.
38:39
I understand how they do it.
38:40
I think they're potentially going to have to change a model now, especially as they're moving to advertising, but my whole thought was it is ...
38:43
Obviously, Jim, to your side, in the 1950s, where you get programmed, or you have Walter Cronkite basically convincing America that the Vietnam War's bad after he went to see the Tet Offensive.
38:56
After the Tet Offensive in 1969, he came back from a visit, and just basically went on TV, CBS said, "Yep, we can't win this war."
39:05
Basically, Lyndon Johnson went to his staff, and was like, "We just lost middle America."
39:08
Then a couple months later, he said, "I'm not running for reelection."
39:11
This was the power you had, in the '50s and '60s, for a singular entity because of the way the three networks kind of ran media.
39:17
Trung Phan: Obviously, that's not necessarily a good thing.
39:20
But we've atomized so hard.
39:23
The last show that maybe was able to sway public opinion with real tangible effect ...
39:23
I just listened to an amazing podcast, Malcolm Gladwell, talked about Will and Grace.
39:31
Will and Grace ran, I think, from '99 to 2009, but materially changed middle America's opinion about gays and gay marriage.
39:39
Even though the show itself never talked about AIDS, not a single episode.
39:44
Sometimes you have to ...
39:44
This kind of moderating influence, which is what the networks were, they're like ...
39:48
We joked about how everything in the '90s was kind of bad because they toned everything down, or watered everything down.
39:54
But to have this cultural effect, and have everybody actually appeal to it, I think, that's valuable.
40:01
Trung Phan: I don't know what the middle is now, but we've actually gone so far the other way, where there's so few shows now where I watch the people.
40:08
I know you mentioned in our group chat, Rob, Severance.
40:10
I've seen a lot of people talk about Severance.
40:13
It's so far down my queue right now, and then the people ...
40:13
It's so hard to get those shows that, just from the entertainment side, how do we get everybody excited about it, and then also culturally relevant, and maybe even change people's actual opinions? That to me [inaudible].
40:28
Rob Henderson: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
40:30
I mean, I think I'd never considered ...
40:30
So what you said about how releasing one episode a week, the way that Succession and Game of Thrones, the HBO model versus the Netflix model of dropping it all at once.
40:41
I mean, has there been a single Netflix show that's really had the cultural impact of any of the HBO shows, or the AMC shows, Breaking Bad or Mad Men?
40:49
I mean, I guess House of Cards was kind of big for a while.
40:52
I can't think of anything on Netflix.
40:54
I guess, people talk about Stranger Things, but they don't really have the same kind of cache as Succession, for example.
40:58
Trung Phan: Exactly, right? I think it matters. I think it matters.
41:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think I agree with that.
41:04
I have actually thought about that a little bit.
41:06
But then again, you also got to get back to scenes, and why is Succession so appealing to people?
41:14
Well, basically, because it's King Lear.
41:16
If you're a Shakespeare fan, and by the way, let's talk about the king of psychology and understanding human OS, Mr. Bill Shakespeare.
41:26
If you read all of his works, man, I'll defer to you on this one, Rob.
41:31
But if that's the way you want to figure out how human OS actually works, as opposed to how it's supposed to work, read Shakespeare, man, because King Lear is Succession. That's what it is.
41:44
It is based on exactly- Rob Henderson: There's a literary critic, Harold Bloom, the late Harold Bloom. He recently passed. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I've read his books.
41:50
Rob Henderson: But he had this line where he said, "A lot of people want to do Freudian readings of Shakespeare ..."
41:52
You do this sort of psychoanalytic readings of fictional text, but he said, "If you really want to understand human nature, you should do a Shakespearean reading of Freud." Right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
42:04
Rob Henderson: Shakespeare got there before Freud, and he is basically the original sort of psychoanalyst, psychologist.
42:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally.
42:10
Trung Phan: Wait, Jim, sorry, I didn't want to jump back, so I'm just going to ...
42:12
Is the point you're making that Succession is culturally relevant just because it's a good show?
42:18
Is that kind of the point?
42:19
Is that it's such a good show- Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, no, no, no.
42:21
Actually, the point is because the theme is such a consistent theme in the recycling of human lives.
42:29
So, essentially, I've also been reading a lot of Will Storr who, he and Rob convinced me that seeking status is a thing.
42:40
I thought that that was not true.
42:43
After reading, Rob, after reading all of Will's books, I now find it to be true, which I had to update my mental views of- Trung Phan: Your OS?
42:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, my OS.
42:53
I try to update this bad boy as much as I can.
42:56
But these are just recurring themes, and that's why The Hero's Journey works because all of those themes seem to be essential human base code.
43:10
It's like, "What do I need to learn about?
43:13
What do I need to avoid?"
43:15
So Lear and Succession is all based on the powerful patriarch, who fucking makes the worst decisions in the world because he doesn't know who his true allies are.
43:31
He is lost up here in a land that, "I am so great.
43:35
I don't need anyone else's input," that he's totally not only lost touch with himself, but with everyone who surrounds him.
43:46
The scene that I'd always kind thought ...
43:46
By the way, obviously, I love Succession, but I'd always thought when I saw that scene after Kendall kills the kid in the Kennedy-esque- Rob Henderson: Season one finale.
43:59
Trung Phan: Spoiler alert, spoiler alert. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. Trung Phan: After. Afterwards. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. Rob Henderson: Yeah.
44:06
Was that based on a Ted Kennedy thing, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. Chappaquiddick.
44:10
Rob Henderson: Chappaquiddick, yeah.
44:11
Trung Phan: Chappaquiddick.
44:12
Rob Henderson: [inaudible] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah.
44:14
But the beauty of it was in that final scene, where the dad comes in, and demonstrates to his son.
44:17
Rob Henderson: Yeah, Logan.
44:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, Logan comes in, and the scene between Logan and Kendall.
44:23
I watched it four times just because I thought it was so brilliant.
44:28
It's like, "You poor little dumb shit.
44:31
You just have no idea about the way the world really works."
44:35
In that regard, Logan's right, Kendall was a dip-shit.
44:42
He just kind of naturally assumed that he was the heir apparent, and all of this stuff.
44:46
But that's when I looked back, and actually went and reread King Lear.
44:53
Lear banishes the only daughter who truly loves him, and keeps the daughters who hate his guts and want to destabilize his regime at every particular moment.
45:06
So my point, Trung, is more that the shows that seem to grab us, as we talk about this, are shows that human beings have been facing these questions and these challenges for all of history.
45:23
First, the reason stories are so powerful is because that's how we told our next generation about things until we learned writing.
45:33
So the Iliad, the Odyssey, all of these things, were just baked into our DNA.
45:40
I think that that's why if you're looking...
45:43
I put up a tweet, it's like, why does Hollywood just keep making the same fucking movies over and over and over and over and over and over again? Why?
45:52
Because just a financial consideration and man, there are infinite stories that are awesome.
45:58
There are infinite stories out of copyright that are awesome.
46:03
Dan Brown did it with the Da Vinci Code. I'm a huge history nerd.
46:09
And when I first was reading the book, I'm like, "Wait a minute, I've read about this."
46:15
And so, yeah, he just went and he ransacked history and he made it entertaining.
46:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the point is, the reason these things resonate with us is because these are the economy of eternal things that we humans have to deal with.
46:31
And we have to try to figure out, which way do I go here?
46:37
And so, I think that the brilliant mix of being entertaining, like both of you guys, watching with your buddies, watching in a very different frame of mind and then coming back to and watching a little more closely to see what it's all about is, I just think that, that's going to be interesting.
46:57
I don't know, to Trung's point though, I don't know if it's going to be enough to move the needle for us as a society.
47:07
Whichever one of you guys want to jump in on that. Go ahead.
47:10
Trung Phan: I would love to hear Rob's, put his lens of the signaling of Succession just based on everything Jim said.
47:16
Well, you know how you put this lens about what Fresh Prince told you to think about what was important?
47:21
Have you watched Succession and thought about these characters are telling you what's important?
47:26
Rob Henderson: I love Succession, too.
47:28
I recently watched it, the first three seasons, and yeah, I thought it was brilliant.
47:33
So it's so funny that Jim, you brought up King Lear.
47:35
I just saw King Lear here.
47:36
So they're doing the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival.
47:38
So they do these outdoor Shakespearean plays here at the Cambridge colleges.
47:43
And I was watching it with Succession in mind this time.
47:46
And I thought to myself, with Succession, an interesting direction to take it would be, so spoiler alert for a 400 year old story with King Lear, but basically the two evil daughters throw King Lear out of his own kingdom.
47:59
Once he divides the kingdom between Goneril and Regan, the two evil daughters, they basically treat him like shit. They throw him out.
48:06
They say, "Get out of here old man, you and your a hundred servants can go somewhere else."
48:09
Rob Henderson: And he's stripped of all of his power.
48:11
And I wonder if Succession will, maybe in the final season, some Kendall or the other kids will take over Waystar Royco, throw Logan out, and will he have to basically be this blinded king who is paying for his sins of treating his kids so poorly that naturally, eventually he was going to be stripped of his power and his kids were going to betray him.
48:33
I think that would be an interesting direction for the show, though.
48:34
But yeah, so I do watch, one of the things I paid close attention to with Succession is Logan Roy's own background.
48:39
So, there's a couple of scenes where they go to Scotland and Logan is a self-made man.
48:44
So Logan grew up in some rural backwater of Scotland.
48:49
The show, this doesn't even apply just basically straight up says that Logan was abused as a kid.
48:54
Rob Henderson: There's a scene in the very first season where Logan gets out of, he's swimming and he exits the water and you see these scars on his back, like he was whipped and he mentions this briefly to someone, but basically we're meant to believe that, that Logan, as a kid, was horribly mistreated, grew up in poverty in Scotland and built this company out of nothing.
49:16
And then all of his kids, who have been given basically every single advantage you can imagine.
49:21
There's a scene early on where Kendall and I think Stewy, joke about how they both went to, I can't remember the name of the private...
49:29
Yeah, there's so many private schools.
49:30
I don't remember all their names.
49:31
But they went to a private school.
49:32
Then they went to Harvard.
49:33
And Kendall has his buddies who work at the Lampoon and they had everything handed to them and Logan, Logan and Kendall have a very tense interaction where Kendall says something along the lines of you gave your kids so much, and now you despise us for it, that we had all these advantages that you never had.
49:51
Rob Henderson: And I think Logan is a horrible man and a horrible person, but I understood Kendall when he said that to him.
49:59
I understood Logan's perspective.
50:01
And this is why all of the characters, there's no good person on Succession.
50:05
They have their good sides of their bad sides.
50:07
But on some level I got where Logan was coming from and why he might somehow envy his own children.
50:15
But yeah, there are other class elements, as well here.
50:19
So I think it was Kendall who brought some girl to one of the parties.
50:23
I don't remember which party it was, but Kendall brought some girl over and he introduced her to Logan and she kept just saying, "This is awesome. Everything's awesome. This party's awesome."
50:32
And Logan glares at her, like this person has no brain in their head.
50:38
Why is my son dating this dumb person?
50:41
Rob Henderson: And within that environment, within that community, you have to be on your game. You have to be educated.
50:48
You have to be socially adept and know how to communicate with people at that level.
50:55
That was one of several other scenes, I think, where they underscore the class component here.
51:00
One thing that I've been waiting to see though, is, technically all of the Roy kids in Succession are first generation college students.
51:09
So I wonder, I guess there was that scene where they were about to, I think they were about to purchase another media company where the families interacted with the Pierce.
51:19
Do you remember the Pierce family?
51:20
I think they meant to represent...
51:21
Trung Phan: They were like the Times, right? The Times? Jim O'Shaughnessy: No.
51:24
Rob Henderson: Yeah, yeah.
51:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Actually, they're just like the family that owned the Wall Street Journal and sold it.
51:29
Rob Henderson: Before Rupert Murdoch.
51:30
Trung Phan: Rupert Murdoch. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And sold it to Murdoch.
51:33
Rob Henderson: Yeah, that's right.
51:34
And they're this waspy old money family.
51:36
I read this New Yorker article about Succession and they talked about how Logan Roy and his kids show up and they're wearing, I can't remember, it was this sleek business professional, they're attire, black button down, black ball cap, like business.
51:51
They're all about business.
51:52
And they get to the Pierce family and the New Yorker, the writer of the New Yorker article say they were wearing shabby chic. The shirts were frayed.
52:01
They come from such generational wealth that they no longer have to care.
52:07
And I find that to be this clash between old money and new money.
52:09
I really like that episode, too.
52:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I personally experienced that, actually, because my grandfather was one of the richest people in the United States, who I'm very proud to say gave away 95% of his money during his own lifetime.
52:24
So, he was 50 years ahead of Gates and Buffet.
52:27
But it was really weird because I certainly was born on third base.
52:31
I'd even say I was born sliding into home plate. But not...
52:34
Trung Phan: I've never heard that sliding home into home base, before.
52:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But certainly, I got dealt a really great hand.
52:39
And one of the things that I've found is that...
52:43
So I had that background, the old money, and the whole thing that was drilled into me when I was a kid was, where much is given, much is required.
52:53
It was the old school values of America. Noblesse oblige.
52:58
Where much is given, much is required.
52:59
You have to set an example. It has to be good.
53:03
All of these things, these rules. And then to be an...
53:08
I actually went broke because I spent money building the house I'm in right now for my wife, when I moved here. I didn't have any money.
53:16
And it was the first time in my life that, that had occurred.
53:21
And then I was very lucky and fortunate in some of the companies that I started.
53:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But then you get into the debate.
53:28
So how much of that is the social milieu that you're born into?
53:32
How much of that is just genes?
53:36
If you look at my cousins and they're all entrepreneurs and they're all doing very, I mean, we're all doing things very much like our grandfather did.
53:46
And so, you get to that question too.
53:49
And the old money versus new money, honestly, when the first Forbes 400 or whatever it was came out, it was almost all inherited money.
53:58
And the money that was there that was not inherited was due to things.
54:03
Steel, real estate, oil...
54:06
Rob Henderson: Railroads.
54:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Railroads. All that kind of stuff.
54:11
And one of the reasons why I am so bullish on keeping things as open and free as possible for people to be entrepreneurs, for people to do new things, is look at the list now, man.
54:24
It's all entrepreneurs, pretty much. And it is not people...
54:29
In the old days the government could go after AT&T because everybody hated the fucking phone company.
54:36
They could go after the power companies because everybody fucking hated them.
54:40
I think that they would have a really hard time going against Bezos because everybody fucking loves Amazon.
54:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so the idea, though, is that we, obviously I'm doing a series on it, so I've been thinking nothing but about this, we are moving into a world where government and the journalists that we were talking about earlier, do you know why they're so mad?
55:06
They're so mad because they don't have Walter Cronkite's influence.
55:11
You are absolutely right in that assessment.
55:15
Cronkite goes negative on something, middle America totally goes with him.
55:20
And now you see all of these histrionics, like the New York Times.
55:24
Again, do I still take the Times? Yes.
55:27
It's not a habit, but the New York Times is Pravda and they're willing to...
55:35
But they did that for financial reasons.
55:37
I get the business model.
55:39
Trung Phan: Yeah, it's a good business model.
55:40
Appeal to rich Northeasterners who want to be told what they like to be told. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
55:45
If I was the editor or the owner of the New York Times, I'd very likely might have to, no, I would never be able to do that. That's the problem.
55:52
But from a business point of view, it made sense.
55:56
And the Journal went the other way and they're kind of libertarian, not so conservative, but everybody is just pandering now.
56:06
Rob Henderson: Which is why Substack took off, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bang.
56:10
And that is why I am so bullish.
56:13
I believe that 10 years from now, I won't have a single news service.
56:21
I will have my own newspaper put together with a...
56:25
Now I happen to see things from people I disagree with because I think you really always have to challenge your priors and I've changed my mind on a lot of stuff and you got to let them build a steel man, not a straw man, in my opinion.
56:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, my newspaper might look very different than anyone else's, but my guess is, it's going to be mostly Substacks and people are going to be able to make a really good living from it. And that's the key.
56:54
Everyone's wringing their hands.
56:56
And we used to be able to do all of these things during the great compression after World War II, when we were getting our, Gini quotient was getting a little out of hand, of course now it's totally out of control.
57:09
And yet, that's the Matthew effect, that's amplification, that's the Pareto 80/20.
57:14
Rob Henderson: I think, yeah, it's correcting itself to some degree.
57:21
I'd written a few op-eds in the past and I enjoyed it.
57:24
And I think, perhaps in another life or another timeline, I would've sought that profession, being a columnist somewhere.
57:31
But I signed this deal with Substack and I see people, like Trung and others, who are just putting out this amazing content and I'm grateful for it.
57:39
I'm actually glad that we're outside of the institutions where you don't have an editor over your shoulder and you're just able to speak what's on your mind and express your personality.
57:50
I hardly ever read the op-ed pages of any major newspaper because Substack is so interesting.
57:54
Trung Phan: That's a great point.
57:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bingo. Trung Phan: Yeah.
57:57
I stopped reading the op-ed pages.
57:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So did I. And look at this.
57:59
We are three reasonably intelligent people.
58:02
And what has happened is that Substack is superior because you are out there with your Substack, both of you guys, I subscribe to both of you guys, but you're out there with...
58:17
Why are people reading you?
58:18
Because what you're writing about is really interesting.
58:22
And so, this whole idea of the gatekeeper, this whole idea of all of those, what I call the Vogon Core here, if you're not familiar with Vogons, they were the most bureaucratic species in Doug Adams' the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
58:42
So, the Vogons were the worst possible species around and they did everything by the book and they had...
58:49
So they're HR, in essence.
58:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And essentially, we have this fatted calf of administrators that are about, they have no idea what's going to happen to them.
59:00
And we also have this group in America that has no idea.
59:05
If you watch Office Space, what would you say you do here?
59:09
Who wants to go back to the office?
59:12
People who want to go back to the office, they don't do anything.
59:15
And so it's all about having meetings and busy and this confusion with, "Oh, I'm so busy.
59:22
I got a lot of work done today." Yeah.
59:24
You circle jerked with five other people from your same company and essentially patted each other on the back.
59:32
"Oh Jim, you're doing such a great job." "Thanks Chris.
59:34
Hey, what do you think Patrick?"
59:36
"Oh yeah, we're really doing it."
59:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's fucked up, man.
59:40
If you really want to run a company, you don't do any of that shit.
59:45
You make meetings virtually illegal and people who want to have them should be thrown into the darkness to gnash and wail and gnash their teeth.
59:55
But what's happening is that's happening.
59:57
And I'm convinced that, given the tools that we have now, it's not going to change just information.
59:59
It's going to change a bunch of things.
1:00:00
And the first time I thought about it was when they tried to do the hit job on George Bush, who I was not a supporter of, by the way, let's get that out there.
1:00:15
I thought I was, by the way, until I went back to an old journal and I realized, I thought, "Yeah, I was in favor of..."
1:00:21
[inaudible] Trung Phan: Not vote for this guy.
1:00:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah.
1:00:25
It's like I was in favor of the first...
1:00:25
[inaudible] Trung Phan: Rangers fan was not happy with his administration after the Rangers.
1:00:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But anyway, the first inkling I got of what was coming was when they, I can't remember, probably the New York Times, tried to do a hit job on Bush that showed a letter that was supposedly written in 19, whatever, 60, blank.
1:00:51
And within two hours of this massive hit piece, some crazy dude on the internet, whose passion and hobby was fonts, had published a piece saying, that font on that letter did not exist in 1968.
1:01:11
It was not invented until 1980, whatever.
1:01:15
Whole thing immediately turns around and the focus gets put on the Times.
1:01:21
And same thing happened to Dan Rather. He got outted.
1:01:24
Trung Phan: Was that with the National Guard, whether he fulfilled his service for the National Guard? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. Yes.
1:01:30
And so, I'm reading this and I'm like, "Oh my God."
1:01:34
All of the attempts of the elites who want to cling to their elite status are going to just start falling because there's always going to be that guy who loves that crazy sub-genre of something like fonts or whatever, who's going to be able to put actual evidence in place that says...
1:01:53
Rob Henderson: Something like this is going on right now with the Wall Street Journal with Elon Musk and... Who's the guy's name? Trung Phan: Sergey Brin.
1:02:02
Rob Henderson: Sergey Brin. Oh, right.
1:02:04
So they post this article and then Elon Musk just tweets, "I just had dinner with Sergey Brin last night and never whatever.
1:02:11
I've never been alone with his wife. What's going on here?"
1:02:14
And I read that piece in the Wall Street, I tweeted it.
1:02:16
And then I deleted the tweet once I saw Elon Musk, because now I don't know what's true anymore.
1:02:20
I never would've guessed.
1:02:21
I trust the Wall Street Journal.
1:02:22
I don't know if I trust them anymore.
1:02:25
But that was a very weird exchange that I saw.
1:02:27
Trung Phan: I reread the article. It was a whole...
1:02:30
The worst term in journalism is, people familiar with the matter.
1:02:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: [inaudible] Oh no. Yeah. Sources say.
1:02:36
Trung Phan: That's why I read the article again because after he said that, cause that's the thing.
1:02:40
Rob, I'm echoing your point.
1:02:42
I had this perception of the Times.
1:02:43
I know the New York Times has jumped the shark, but the Wall Street Journal? The Wall Street Journal.
1:02:47
[inaudible] Rob Henderson: I was like, "They haven't gone that far." Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:02:51
And then I read it and I'm like..
1:02:54
Okay, well first listen, I'm not saying...
1:02:58
Has Elon said things that turned out not to be true, is his title. Yes, of course. How am I reading this? I reread the article.
1:03:04
First of all this is the Wall Street Journal.
1:03:06
People are reading the Wall Street Journal for business news, for financial news. What is going on here?
1:03:12
And I reread it and, per person familiar with the matter.
1:03:16
And I'm like, "This is crazy."
1:03:17
On the second reread, "This is actually crazy."
1:03:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's nuts. Rob Henderson: Yeah.
1:03:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: My wife graduated summa cum laude in journalism, and we were joking about that one time.
1:03:26
And I asked her, "So am I right when I assume that, when it says, 'person familiar with the matter,' the journalist is referring to themselves?" And she goes, "Oh yeah. 100%."
1:03:37
Trung Phan: Cause it's technically not a lie.
1:03:39
Rob Henderson: So you can just make shit up?
1:03:43
I'm going to write a Substack, the source is familiar with the matter.
1:03:46
And then just write a hit piece on whoever I don't like that day.
1:03:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that would be so funny. That would be so funny.
1:03:53
The whole Discordian religion got started as a prank.
1:03:57
It was a prank of these guys in the seventies.
1:03:59
They're like, "What's the craziest, batshit craziest, out there shit that we could do?"
1:04:05
They came up with Discordian, who actually was a real God back during the times of the Greek.
1:04:11
Eris, the God of mischief and chaos.
1:04:13
Anyway, so they start this thing and it happened.
1:04:16
And then they did another thing about Project Ultra, which was apparently the CIA using LSD on people to do unspeakable things. But then it was true. And so that came out.
1:04:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: All right.
1:04:29
I want to get us back to TV because people are going to be listening and be like, "What the fuck are these guys talking about?"
1:04:36
Let's go back to TV and let's talk about an observation that you made, Rob, earlier in the conversation.
1:04:43
And that is the zeitgeist right now, seems to be pretty cynical.
1:04:49
It seems to be pretty, "Oh my God. I can't..."
1:04:53
So I think you're right, by the way.
1:04:55
I saw that happen back in the late seventies.
1:05:00
You guys weren't even born yet.
1:05:02
So, the seventies were one of the worst decades for America, ever.
1:05:08
And by the way, with a lot of the same problems.
1:05:13
Stagflation, the oil embargo, everyone thought that Japan was just going to take over the entire world and that we were done. America was done.
1:05:25
Rob Henderson: In the years, we had just withdrawn from a very unpopular war.
1:05:28
Similar with Vietnam, Afghanistan.
1:05:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. We lost a war.
1:05:34
In the minds of Americans, America had never lost a war.
1:05:38
We lost the War of 1812, but people don't remember that.
1:05:41
And besides, it was against the British, our cousins. Trung Phan: Plus Canada.
1:05:46
Before Canada was a country.
1:05:48
Canada wasn't a country, but...
1:05:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's right, that's right.
1:05:52
And I bring it up because all of the movies at that time were like that.
1:05:57
In a traditional hero's journey, he goes through all of the trials and tribulations, or she, but emerges successful, and here's the lesson that you can learn from it.
1:06:10
Back then, I'll try to put together a list of these movies and send them to you guys because they're kind of unwatchable, to be really honest, but you could flash forward to the end because in the end, the plane crashes and everyone dies.
1:06:25
And these endings are just such bummers and it was just like, "Oh my God."
1:06:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, of course, there were great movies, like Apocalypse Now, being released at the same time, but the bulk of the conversations, the bulk of TV shows, the bulk of movies, was in this just funk.
1:06:46
And that the country would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be able to turn the corner again.
1:06:50
And of course, we all know what happened.
1:06:52
Ronald Reagan gets elected, it's morning in America.
1:06:57
Say what you will about that guy, he was a master at setting a scene and setting a mood.
1:07:05
And even people who hated Reagan, loved him.
1:07:09
And I remember this thing where, and by the way, there was much more community and getting along back then.
1:07:16
Tip O'Neill, who was the Speaker of the House back then and a fiery Democrat, and Reagan, a conservative Republican.
1:07:22
They would shout at each other all day and O'Neil would say, he's a monster and blah, blah, and Reagan never, by the way, that was another thing he never did.
1:07:30
He never went negative, ever.
1:07:33
He was always, "Well, I think that my esteemed colleague is wrong," but here's the key right?
1:07:40
At the end of the day, guess who had drinks together and had great yucks and laughs? O'Neill and Reagan.
1:07:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But my point is we're back into one of those what I see as a spiral, but we have all of these new tools, all of these new leverage points that young people especially can take advantage of, that in my era, it took me six months to set up the first company I founded in 1986 or seven.
1:08:09
Now I can push a button, boom, everything. It's right there.
1:08:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I think A, I'm very bullish on what's coming.
1:08:17
I think that it's going to butt a lot of people out, especially the Vogon layer, but I definitely think that the gatekeepers are losing.
1:08:26
The former elite journalists are spitting and just incredibly mad because the trade-off that they used to always make was okay, we're not going to get paid a lot, but we matter.
1:08:38
We're the fourth estate, creating status for money, and now that status is gone and I get it.
1:08:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What kind of TV shows do you guys think, and here's the speculative part about going forward ...
1:08:51
First, you Trung and then you, Rob.
1:08:59
If we were looking back and speculating and of course we'll be wrong, so let me just get that out there right now, but it's fun to think about it.
1:09:06
What kind of shows do you think, if we were time traveling 10 years into the future, Trung, what do you got?
1:09:14
What do you think's going to have been?
1:09:15
Trung Phan: If I wanted to guess.
1:09:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The big shows?
1:09:19
Trung Phan: It's going to be depressing and I'll tell you why.
1:09:21
I agree with you that it's a dark time and let's talk about one of the most popular shows amongst Gen Z.
1:09:27
Euphoria on HBO, extremely, extremely dark.
1:09:31
So to your question of what does the next decade look like for television, the algos are going to run it.
1:09:37
The studios are going to run it.
1:09:40
The culture is centralizing.
1:09:41
We're just going to be bombarded with these remakes.
1:09:44
Marvel, Star Wars, spinoff after spinoff after spinoff.
1:09:47
Those will have the muscle and the algos behind them to break through consciously.
1:09:51
Trung Phan: I think we'll probably have one or two incredible shows that will be of the ilk of a Breaking Bad or Succession, but I think it's not going to be great to be honest in the sense of there will be a lot of good stuff, but the thing I talked about earlier about what will actually be something I could talk to my neighbor about, or I know what 10 of my friends have seen, it's the same with the film industry, right?
1:10:11
Trung Phan: It's like the only movie from the last decade that I know I could talk to anybody about, it's like End Game, Avengers End Game, because I know they've seen it, right?
1:10:18
Or there's a few of those.
1:10:19
There's a handful of those, but I'm actually pretty cynical on what the next decade looks like, especially because streaming's getting clapped so hard.
1:10:27
Trung Phan: I'll tell you a really bad thing about Netflix and algos running entertainment in general, because I had an opportunity to interview music historian, Ted Gioia.
1:10:36
He's like, if you actually look at, go on Netflix, you don't have a movie between, before basically the year 2000.
1:10:43
They don't have that catalog anymore, so if you want to watch a good movie from the 60's, 70's or 80's, it's not going to likely not going to be on Netflix.
1:10:51
Trung Phan: Spotify, the most popular songs, are old songs.
1:10:54
People are latching onto older music, spending more time old music.
1:10:58
The new stuff that breaks through has no lasting power.
1:11:01
So I'm actually pretty cynical for the next decade.
1:11:03
I think there's going to be a lot of cookie-cutter, franchise-type stuff.
1:11:06
Similar with the film industry.
1:11:07
Things will break through, but the thing that makes me sad is not having that shared kind of communal thing where you can watch something together, know that other people have seen it.
1:11:17
That's my take, pretty dark. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:11:19
That's an interest interesting point.
1:11:20
Before I go to you Rob, I will just say I can't talk a lot about it, but I am setting up companies for 2023, when I am retired from asset management, that are going to be actively betting against everything you just said. Trung Phan: Okay.
1:11:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So we'll see who wins. Trung Phan: Yeah. Well I want you to win.
1:11:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Hey listen man, I have no delusions.
1:11:45
I always go into things keeping in mind that I'll probably fuck something up in some way. I always do.
1:11:52
So anyway, Rob, what do you think? Rob Henderson: Yeah.
1:11:55
Well Jim, you and I talked about that though.
1:11:57
If my book does well, I mentioned, I think that this would be a good movie or miniseries and yeah, I think at least from what you've told me about your plans, I'm optimistic that people are doing things like that.
1:12:10
I think I'm generally slightly more optimistic than Trung about the future of movies in general.
1:12:14
Rob Henderson: So I'd mentioned Erik Hoel's post earlier.
1:12:19
He, in his Substack post about how TV and pop cultures becoming more bleak, he has the meme, this meme you guys might have seen of there's three panels, and one panel looks like this little kid in 1986 watching the Michael Keaton Batman.
1:12:33
He's like, "Oh finally, a dark and gritty Batman," and then fast forward to 2005 and it's the Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, and he's, "Finally a dark and gritty Batman, and then it fast forward to 2022 with the Robert Patterson, the one that just came out.
1:12:45
It's, "Finally, a dark and gritty Batman."
1:12:48
Rob Henderson: I remember thinking at some point, are they just going to keep doing this?
1:12:53
Every eight and a half years they're going to come out with another dark and gritty Batman or are they going to finally ...
1:12:57
I know that there's this, at least with the Michael Keaton Batman, there was this backlash against the Adam West 1960s, campy batman, but I almost wonder if they could bring that back somehow.
1:13:10
Surely there's got to be a point where things start to swing back around.
1:13:12
Rob Henderson: I mean, I just saw Top Gun Maverick with my girlfriend a couple weeks ago, and that movie is insanely popular.
1:13:21
I don't know, it's like 800 plus million dollars around the world.
1:13:24
It's got 90 plus percent of Rotten Tomatoes from the critics and the audience, which is really rare nowadays to get high ratings from both of those categories.
1:13:32
Rob Henderson: How can Maverick, I watched it and it almost felt like anachronistic, this movie of just a straightforward, good guy trying to do the right thing.
1:13:44
There's not even any villains.
1:13:45
There is a villain, but you don't even know who it is.
1:13:47
It's all about good people trying to do the right thing and no focus on the complexities of the adversaries.
1:13:52
Rob Henderson: Yeah, I guess I could see going the other way where people will become so sick of just the relentless darkness of TV and movies.
1:14:01
But then again, I haven't seen Euphoria and I didn't realize how popular it was, so maybe things are just becoming so atomized and the markets are becoming so niche where everyone's just watching their own thing, that I'm just not aware of what's going on anymore.
1:14:11
Rob Henderson: But my feeling from speaking with young people, speaking here with undergrads at the university, is that they want upbeat and happy things.
1:14:20
They're watching old sitcoms and TV shows from the nineties, and they're trying to find something, even shows from their childhood, cartoons, where they're just not relentlessly exposed to cynicism and darkness, but I hope that that's what will happen anyway.
1:14:38
Trung Phan: Well actually I want to add something to Rob's point about talking the atomization.
1:14:42
I think that's really important though.
1:14:43
If you look at the next 10 years, the problem is that there's so much backlog of content, where if you're 12, 13, 14, 15 years old growing up 2020s and 2030s, you're going to want to watch The Office, right?
1:14:56
The Office is, I think I saw a crazy chart about the staying power of The Office. It's actually insane.
1:15:02
It's really, you've probably seen this, right?
1:15:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It really has.
1:15:06
Trung Phan: I mean will it become, what I talked about with Spotify, are we just going to be retreading the old stuff?
1:15:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is interesting.
1:15:13
Trung Phan: The point that I left out with Ted Gioia was like, that actually is a massive sign of cultural stagnation when creativity, the creative industries are unable to create new stuff, because that's their job, to be creative.
1:15:27
If the creative industry can't be creative, how is any other industry in the economy going to be creative?
1:15:33
Trung Phan: It's cultural rot, right?
1:15:35
It's a whole America's at the end of Rome.
1:15:39
But that is part of it, it's like you keep going to the past, like my kid's going to one day discover the Beatles, spent two years listening to it and watch The Office and not even care what is out in the Year 2033.
1:15:50
Trung Phan: So what does that say about society?
1:15:52
I think that's probably even bigger than this, the franchising of all content is the fact that there's no good stuff.
1:15:59
Everybody just keeps going the past, and I don't know what that says about society, but I feel like there's something wrong with it.
1:16:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So- Rob Henderson: Would it be better if the studios announced that they're going to do a remake of The Office or will that be the final nail in the coffin?
1:16:11
If we're remaking the Office that's its, that's over.
1:16:13
Trung Phan: It sounds like a middle ground though, where they remake it for the slack generation, but I could see [crosstalk] Rob Henderson: Something of the 2020s. Yeah. That would be cool. Maybe. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:16:25
Rob Henderson: For the work-from-home generation. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:16:27
So I am betting, and not insignificant amount, on the fact that pessimists sound smart and optimists make money.
1:16:38
So if you wanted me to, man, I could go, without notes, I could talk for two hours about why we're fucked and I could be very, very compelling and everyone would walk away like the character from Arrested Development, the kid walking home, and I don't think we are.
1:16:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that it's not going to be like the fifties.
1:17:03
I don't think that we're going to, at least probably not in my lifetime and unless something radically changes, I don't think we're ever going to go back to that fifties where the common view of the average ...
1:17:16
Your idea, Trung, about talking to somebody about a movie that everyone had seen.
1:17:22
I don't think we're going to go back to that.
1:17:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that we are going to have these sub genres.
1:17:30
We're going to have a group of people who are super interested in whatever X is and that they will be voracious in their appetite for taking that type of stuff in.
1:17:45
I don't know how that gets translated to the broader culture, but it will poke.
1:17:51
Some things will go viral.
1:17:52
Trung Phan: Some things will break through. Absolutely.
1:17:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Some things will break through and then the major film companies will say, "Hey, wait a minute.
1:18:01
How is this new company over here making money, making these feel-good movies?
1:18:08
Maybe we better go into that," because that's another one of my maxims.
1:18:13
If I think that I've got the new, new thing and I bring it to market and 18 months later, I don't have any competitors, I'm wrong.
1:18:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I don't have the new, new thing because say what you want about free markets, they are ruthlessly efficient and just look at how, and they don't like it, but just look at how quickly Hollywood and big business and everything co-opted every movement.
1:18:43
Even the anti-Hollywood, anti-big business, they just co-opted.
1:18:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I mean, they're like the board, man.
1:18:49
They can just come in and do it. So inception time, guys.
1:18:56
I asked you both this question previously, so maybe you'll have something different for me this time.
1:19:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We're going to make you the emperor of the world and you get to incept an ear worm in everyone in the population.
1:19:09
They're going to wake up the next day, and they're going to think that they thought of this great idea, and they're going to start doing, thinking or learning X. Trung, go for it man.
1:19:20
Trung Phan: Everybody watch Apocalypse Now at least once in your life.
1:19:26
No, I'll do, I'll say something related.
1:19:29
In finding a piece of content that you have on your list that you've been planning to do that's a little bit challenging, and I actually start, because I personally have a few myself.
1:19:36
Trung Phan: I've started Infinite Jest probably a hundred times, never finished it.
1:19:40
I started the movie 2000, 100 times.
1:19:41
Never finished it and I owe it to myself to try to read or do one of those works that's a little bit challenging, even though I could just be on Twitter, doing memes all day and having people laugh.
1:19:51
So I would say that, "Challenge yourself with art."
1:19:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that one. Rob Henderson: Oh man.
1:19:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And by the way, both of those are 2001, man.
1:20:00
You got to remember that he didn't have special effects.
1:20:03
So when you get to the scene where he is jogging on the gyroscope, he built that fucker in a [crosstalk] Trung Phan: That's how he staked the moon landing for us, right?
1:20:12
Sat on, Cooper's faked the moon landing.
1:20:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. All Rob, you're up. Rob Henderson: Okay. So first, yeah.
1:20:19
I forgot you asked these questions, Jim.
1:20:20
I listen to your podcast and then I go on and I forget that you asked this, oh yeah, challenge your audience, your guests.
1:20:28
So one thing that had come to mind that I wanted to bring up really, but I guess I could sort of shoehorn it in here, which would be to also broaden your content horizons, and also watch movies and TV from outside of Hollywood.
1:20:39
Rob Henderson: I've noticed I started watching action and suspense and dramas and so forth from Hong Kong dramas or Korean cinema.
1:20:47
I watched Parasite back when it was still, it was literally right before the pandemic kicked off, I saw Parasite in the theaters with my girlfriend and then I just started watching all of these other Korean dramas.
1:20:57
Rob Henderson: I was like, these are really good and I'm realizing that I think what's going on is the writers there, and I've listened to some screenwriters who have taught people in other countries, screenwriters in other countries, like Hollywood screenwriters will sell their classes.
1:21:08
Rob Henderson: So they'll basically just give them the straightforward Hollywood script, the hero's journey type of script and people in other cultures will just run with it.
1:21:15
They don't feel this pressure to impress critics the way that American Hollywood filmmakers do, where you have to subvert or disrupt the audience expectation.
1:21:24
Oh, the good guy was actually the bad guy all along, or try to play with audience expectations like that.
1:21:29
Rob Henderson: They're very comfortable just showing a straightforward, conventional film, and I like those.
1:21:34
I don't always have to have some subversion of my expectations, and I like watching movies that played straight in that way.
1:21:42
So I guess that would be mine is to start watching or start considering to watch movies and TV from outside of the American context.
1:21:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that's a great one, and it echoes what Trung and I were talking about on our first podcast together, the importance of travel and the ability to open your mind to things that you just don't, literally, have never experienced.
1:22:03
So I think that's a beautiful one.
1:22:05
Just sometimes I will read only newspapers from outside of the United States and it's really interesting because the perspective's changed.