Idiocracy

[music]

0:00:03.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.3 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres. I’d like to officially propose changing the title of this show from Pop & Locke to We Made Natalie Watch, [chuckle] because it is truly my favorite part of the entire endeavor. This week, we dove into the 2006 satire swept under the rug, Idiocracy. Here to discuss the decline of civilization, eugenics and most importantly, electrolytes, our comedian and host of the podcasts, Alienating the Audience and the Political Orphanage, Andrew Heaton.

0:00:36.7 Andrew Heaton: Hello.

0:00:37.4 Landry Ayres: And comedian and improviser, Andrew Young.

0:00:40.4 Andrew Young: How you doing?

0:00:41.5 Andrew Heaton: Young, they reached out to me ’cause they wanted a eugenicist and an idiot, and we fit that bill, but I won’t say who’s who. I won’t say which one of us is dumb and which one of us is eugenicist.

0:00:52.9 Landry Ayres: That’s the mystery of this episode.

0:00:55.1 Andrew Young: I appreciate that Heaton, but just for the record, I don’t think that you should be allowed to survive.

[laughter]

0:01:00.0 Andrew Heaton: Okay, great.

0:01:01.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Alright, so we’re gonna get to the movie. There’s a debate now, since this movie’s over a decade old, that Idiocracy is not satire anymore. There was something online that we saw that said it’s actually a documentary and we wanted to unpack that. So how accurate is the politics in the movie as entertainment, and how close are we getting to a one-​to-​one match? What’s your spin? Is it closer to satire or is it closer to a documentary now?

0:01:34.8 Andrew Heaton: I think you’ve got to determine what field we’re discussing. If we’re discussing politics, yes, I think it is a documentary, or kind of a funny Black Mirror episode. If you’re discussing lots of other things though, we’re way smarter. So I don’t think I know a single person to this point in my life who’s not either writing a book or hosting a podcast. Every single person I know is doing one of those two things, so it’s this weird deal where there are these…

0:02:00.0 Natalie Dowzicky: But doesn’t that mean you’re smart? None of us is smart. [chuckle]

0:02:01.1 Andrew Heaton: No, but it does at least belie like an attention span, right?

0:02:05.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Fair.

0:02:06.5 Andrew Young: If you believe that your voice is worth hearing, you must be smart.

0:02:09.9 Andrew Heaton: Yes, exactly. Yes, that is… The whole edifice of media is predicated on that. My voice sounds resonant, so I must have a Master’s degree. So it’s weird where I think there’s two phenomenon happening. I’m very much on the Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker side of things, that the world’s getting much better and that by any metric that you want to look at things, the short-​term might be dark, but the long-​term’s almost always better. We’re less racist, we’re less stupid, we’re more educated, we’re more literate. All those things are the long arc. I think that’s happening on a big societal level.

0:02:40.2 Andrew Heaton: When you get into politics specifically though, I think we have lots of incentives and mechanisms that reward people for being loud, and reward them for being tribalistic, and reward them for being stupid, and so we end up basically… Imagine if in the film Idiocracy, everybody was really smart, but you were given a subsidy and a free ticket to that Thunderdome thing, as long as you took your shirt off and you drank some whiskey. I feel like that’s where we are in terms of the political system.

0:03:07.8 Andrew Young: I think I pretty much agree with that on the curve of suffering overall, maybe not on an individual level, like when looking at maybe countries that don’t have it as well as we do, but even then when graded on a curve, I think generally speaking, we’ve improved, and yeah, I think you just have to look at recent events to get a sense of whether or not the politics feel accurate. I think as we get more disconnected as a people, which you’d think we’d be more connected because we have more things like this, like Zoom, like Zencastr specifically [chuckle] that we can connect with, even still, I feel people self-​isolate a lot more. And so the idea of communal concern and communal ownership starts to disappear in people’s brains, and so they just put it on something… They put politics on someone that gets the most attention rather than someone that they… I feel like social consideration as a people has declined.

0:04:10.1 Andrew Heaton: The other thing I’ll add to that, Young, is that people are smarter and more educated now than they were 100 years ago. When you look at IQs and things, IQs have been on the rise, so no worries about the specifically mentioned IQ chart in Idiocracy. What I do think has happened is weirdly, uninformed and stupid people feel very liberated to shout their opinions at this time in a way [chuckle] that I don’t feel is appropriate. So if I came on… I don’t know… A hydraulic engineering podcast, and I just had really, really strong feelings on Artesian wells, and they’re like, “Do you know what an Artesian well is?” and I’m like, “I don’t, but my God I have feelings, and I’ll tell you this much. I hate these people that don’t like Artesian wells, and I want you to reward me and give me likes on Twitter!”

0:04:55.6 Andrew Heaton: We don’t do that in any field, but for some reason, economics… Economics, you’re totally allowed to do that. I’m like, “Have you ever read a book on economics?” “No, I’ve never read a book on… But I have lots of thoughts.” So there is this weird, inverted bell curve kind of thing where I don’t know… And I interview a bunch of experts. You know who doesn’t get freaked out about things? Experts. They don’t get flipped out. But you talk to a stupid person, they flip out ’cause politics largely exists, and economics largely exist as excuses for stupid people to get loud.

0:05:21.2 Natalie Dowzicky: That’s a fair point. [chuckle] I guess the biggest thing that sticks out in this movie is this whole idea of, obviously, we’re no longer gonna be intelligent beings and the world’s overpopulated, we’re gonna be drowning in our own trash, whatever… Our garbage avalanche is gonna take out half our population. [chuckle] And this might have been more prevalent of an issue in early 2000s when this movie came out, is the idea of overpopulation is coming after us, that there’s no space for anyone, and that… Well, now we’re reproducing like crazy, and it’s only these dumb people that are doing that, but I think there’s this sentiment…

0:06:01.0 Natalie Dowzicky: In this genre in general, that it’s all negative, the future is negative and we’re heading towards the end or we’re heading towards humanity’s decline, and I just don’t think that’s the case. And there’s been a lot of work done about are we actually overpopulating the Earth and that kind of stuff that’s just false at this point. We’re actually… By mid-​century of this year, we’re not gonna be replacing the amount of people that are going to be passing away, so this myth of overpopulation is very prevalent in this movie, and I guess is that a marker of the time, or do you think people still have that real fear?

0:06:44.9 Andrew Heaton: I think that’s innate. I think that goes all the way back to Malthus. Thomas Malthus had this idea that human beings are basically deer, and if you give a bunch of deer a field, what are those deer gonna do? They’re gonna mate and eat that grass and they’re just gonna keep eating grass and cranking out whatever baby deer are called. Foals maybe?

0:07:02.6 Andrew Young: Fawns.

0:07:03.0 Andrew Heaton: Colts? Young fawns? Thanks.

0:07:04.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Does.

0:07:05.2 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, does. No, that’s a female deer.

0:07:06.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh. No, does are female deer. [chuckle]

0:07:09.1 Andrew Young: Good answer. They’re females and we’re against female deer specifically.

0:07:13.6 Andrew Heaton: They’re gonna keep cranking out those foals and they’ll keep eating the grass and the only thing that’s gonna stop the process from happening is either the deer are gonna starve to death or they’re gonna go to war, as deer are want to do. And so there’s this assumption that we’re gonna do this. I think it’s oftentimes rooted in this kind of anti-​humanist philosophy of: “People suck and we’re so stupid.” And it turns out no, as you point out, we are about to reach peak fecundity, which will happen presumably in my lifetime.

0:07:41.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Did you make that word up? [chuckle] I’ve never heard that word.

0:07:42.9 Andrew Heaton: No, I use it, I read it one time and I said it in a lecture and everybody laughed and I went, “Oh wow, this is a smart people funny word,” and so I went ahead and took it. Fecundity means horny, except in terms of output I think. A horny output I think is a good translation for fecundity. But what tends to happen is when you’ve got poor agricultural societies, you need to crank out kids because you need literal farm hands to keep from starving to death. And then when you get up to the next level where you don’t have that anymore, now you know that it makes sense to have fewer kids because if you have 15 kids, you’re not gonna be able to provide for them as well as if you had six or less. And then when you get to the first world, you’re like, “Oh, we could have one kid and go on vacation to Italy,” or “We could have two kids and not go on vacation, and we really like them vacations to Italy.” So basically, there’s an inverted corollary with economic progress, where the more economically advanced a society gets, the lower the fecundity rate gets. I suppose people are equally horny, but they use birth [chuckle] control more, or the rotations of the moon or whatever people do for birth control.

0:08:50.0 Andrew Young: So as represented in Idiocracy, it’s not that it’s not the right time to have a kid, it’s that we’d rather go to Sorrento.

0:08:56.0 Andrew Heaton: Yes, that’s right. That couple totally would have thought that, though. If they already had a kid and they were like, “You wanna have another kid?” They’re like, “I don’t know, but we’re putting so much money in our 401k, and once the kid’s out of high school, we think we can probably just buy a boat.” Yeah, that’s absolutely what’s happening.

[music]

0:09:14.8 Landry Ayres: Do you think that there is… So there was this call that it is not satire but documentary, but it’s also been called, I think in retrospect especially, particularly cruel in its outlook and philosophy and that it has been called elitist porn. That it is an opportunity for elitist people of I think both very progressive and very conservative mindsets, to mock the poor or the uneducated and say that we lay the ills of society at their feet. Do you think that this movie is kind of cruel in its disposition in that way? I know Heaton, you’ve talked about this before on another Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org podcast, Free Thoughts, that comedy isn’t necessarily about the punching metaphor, whether it’s punching up or punching down. But I think it’s hard to ignore that there is a bite to this in certain directions, but would you agree that with that take?

0:10:20.0 Andrew Young: I feel like if this movie was made today, we wouldn’t be looking at necessarily lower class idiots. What we’d be looking at is influencer idiots. Incredibly rich, “I have too many boats and I’m driving a Hummer and I live on Hollywood Boulevard, my neighbors hate me” idiots. I feel like this movie is not attacking class necessarily, I think it’s attacking willful stupidity. People who have specifically made a choice to not educate or not even try to increase their experience level in any kind of way. So I don’t know, and also the movie didn’t arouse me, so I don’t think it fits the porn category.

[laughter]

0:11:07.9 Andrew Heaton: It’s a great question, Landry, and it’s something that I thought about, not necessarily about the morality of it or the trajectory of where the humor is aimed, but just the mechanics of the film. So rather controversial opinion, I don’t find the movie very funny. Now, I’m not offended by it. It’s not a situation where I watch it and I’m like, “Oh, this is horrible.” I just don’t think it’s that good. Now, I don’t think it’s awful either. I didn’t… It wasn’t like a spit-​it-​out-​of-​my-​mouth level bad, it was just I’m gonna give it a C+, B-. And I think the reason for that is mechanical and that is… And Young, I’d love for you to weigh in on this because I know that you are very invested in improv, to keep humor rolling long-​term, it doesn’t really work very well to make fun of somebody that’s stupid or drunk. So if Young and I once a year we do an improv team where we do historical improv. When we’re doing that, we know that it just… Not in a morality sense, not in a this is mean or not mean sense, but just in a does this work kind of way, if I come into a scene and I’m drunk and falling down and that kind of stuff, it’s funny for the first time and then after that, you really can’t go anywhere with it.

0:12:14.0 Andrew Heaton: And stupidity works much the same way, so when they’re all stupid, it could work where if you had a stupid character and so there’s a contrast, there’s juxtaposition and things like that. It would work okay. I just I didn’t think it worked that well, the gawking element. There were one or two moments where I was caught off-​guard and the surprise made me laugh, but when it was just like, “Yeah, these people are really stupid,” I just, I never found it that funny.

0:12:35.0 Andrew Young: I re-​watched it this week just to refresh myself since I hadn’t seen it since it came out…

0:12:41.8 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, me too.

0:12:42.5 Andrew Young: And I kind of agree. There were definitely moments where I got a little chuckle out of something then I’m like, “Oh, that’s a funny way to say that, or a funny way to show that.” There’s a lot of cool visual gags in the movie…

0:12:53.4 Andrew Heaton: Right. Yeah.

0:12:56.2 Andrew Young: But yeah, when you have a whole bunch of people that are just blanket stupid, don’t seem to have any agency, so it’s almost not like they’re making choices, it’s just they’re running on a robotic default of like, “I don’t know.” Moreover, Luke Wilson’s character is not particularly smart either, so it’s not like you have a very extreme contrast. You have people at a four and then someone at a six, so yeah, the satire to me didn’t hold up as well as I thought it would when I saw it as a… How old was I? Too young.

[chuckle]

0:13:38.6 Andrew Heaton: So that said, and in answer to your other part about it being elitist, I think it has elements of that. I don’t think it’s… It’s not… I don’t think it’s super elitist. I think that, like I really… For real, I love Mike Judge. I think he’s a brilliant comedian and a brilliant humorist. I think he’s a genius. So I really like him. And I loved King of the Hill.

0:13:52.7 Landry Ayres: Agreed. Yeah.

0:13:54.7 Andrew Heaton: I didn’t get the impression that it was sneering at poor people or working class people. I didn’t get that sneering element that you sometimes get. There’s some of it there, but I think it was more of just… It was more of like bro-​ey humor, making fun of poor people. So this is not the New Yorker making fun of hillbillies, this is bros, people who like prank videos, making fun of poor dumb people, so it’s kind of… There’s a different element to it. It’s a little bit more lateral. That said, though, it exists quite a lot in our culture, and a lot of the time, it’s this weird sleeper thing where like when I was in New York, I rarely get offended by comedy, but I was in a couple of scenes where the joke was that somebody with an accent like this is saying smart things.

0:14:41.6 Andrew Heaton: And I’m like, “So all of my relatives are just stupid and it’s hilarious to you that if you’ve got an accent, you could be smart? I’m offended by this. My uncle Dan’s a very smart man, but he kinda sounds like that.” So I think this does tend to happen, but it tends to be very socio-​economic, and it also tends to be more regional, whereas this didn’t have any regional element whatsoever. They do have the White House at one point, but there’s no element where Luke Wilson’s character’s from, I don’t know, California, but all these yokels live in Alabama. And a lot of the time humor like that tends to take on that pretension, where Appalachia, the South, anything like that, there’s a classist element to it that is abrogated because, “Well, we’re making fun of white people, so it doesn’t count.”

0:15:22.4 Landry Ayres: Right. And there’s this weird kind of almost multicultural angle that is present throughout the film where you have this very dense urban network of people. You’ve got a lot of linguistic mixing, where there’s this like…

0:15:35.1 Andrew Heaton: There’s a kind of like a Cholo element to it. It’s like… And the white people are all Florida panhandle white trash. It’s this very specific… There’s not really any southern Alabama characters, there’s not any Virginia, it’s all people who own jet skis, which by the way, that was a really funny visual when they cut to Washington DC and the Lincoln reflecting pool just has a bunch of jet skiers in it. That was really funny. That did make me laugh out loud.

0:16:03.6 Landry Ayres: The sight gags I think are the strongest part of the movie, I think by far, ’cause it builds the world, but it doesn’t really… It’s just there for effect.

0:16:10.4 Natalie Dowzicky: That’s like… I mean, that’s the whole reason the whole Costco thing is there [chuckle] because I think the visuals like the Costco, the Starbucks obsession, and I hope we get into the healthcare system, [chuckle] but going back to what Young was saying, I don’t necessarily think it… Had this been released today, for example, I’m not sure it would… I’m sure it would turn a lot of heads and be like, “This is not cool,” but I don’t think it would be… The way I viewed it, I don’t think it would be as funny. I think it would’ve been funnier for me to watch it back in 2006 than it was for me to watch it today.

0:16:54.7 Andrew Heaton: I think it would also be, it would be irresistible for people making the film to not highly politicize it, or that is to say, to not militize the stuff so that the stupid people are very clearly gonna have a political orientation and the smart people, and they really didn’t have that in this one. You could maybe guess and stuff, but it really wasn’t very clear, you never got the impression that that was really built into it, which might be owed to Mike Judge. Mike Judge, I don’t know what Mike Judge’s politics are, but his like… Are you all familiar with Arnold Kling, by chance?

0:17:29.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:17:29.9 Andrew Heaton: Great. I am a big fan of Arnold Kling.

0:17:31.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Three Languages of Politics. That’s our book.

0:17:32.0 Landry Ayres: Three Languages of Politics.

0:17:33.1 Andrew Heaton: Three Languages of Politics. I am a Kling acolyte. A Klingon, as we say in the community. And…

[chuckle]

0:17:38.6 Andrew Young: I don’t know who this is. [chuckle]

0:17:41.5 Andrew Heaton: Young, may I fill you in?

0:17:42.8 Andrew Young: Yeah. We need to know.

0:17:46.3 Andrew Heaton: Great. So, Arnold Kling wrote the Three Languages of Politics, as noted by our friends here and his premise is that progressives tend to understand things in terms of victim versus oppressor, libertarians tend to understand things in terms of voluntary versus coercive, and conservatives tend to understand things in terms of civilization versus entropy or civilization versus barbarism, but basically civilization versus bad, right? Well, what is Idiocracy? It’s a tale about civilization declining. It’s actually a conservative narrative in a vague way, but I would say that it’s more conservative than say like… Like notice that there was no evil business villain in this film. There wasn’t like… If this had been made by somebody else, you would have the Lego Lord business Mitt Romney looking guy, and he’d be bad because he’s like… Like the CEO and it’s like the guy from the Gatorade equivalent, he’s never in there.

0:18:42.0 Andrew Heaton: In King of the Hill, which is by Mike Judge as well, I would argue is conservative humor. It’s a very good example of very funny, conservative humor as opposed to progressive humor, of which there’s much. But for that reason, my guess is that he’s not quite as… Quite thinking about it, plus 2005 was also just less political, which was a nice thing about [chuckle] 2005.

0:19:01.2 Andrew Young: Also, to your point, Office Space is about the rise of the greatness of construction workers, so…

0:19:08.2 Natalie Dowzicky: I just watched that movie for the first time, two nights ago.

0:19:10.5 Landry Ayres: What? And we haven’t talked about it?

[chuckle]

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0:19:18.6 Landry Ayres: Well, that made me think specifically about what this sort of… The genre of the slacker film, which is definitely in that office space genre that Mike Judge worked in, but then you’ve also got clerks and slacker and things like that, which is… Oddly enough, there’s a lot of Texas-​based movies there. You’ve got a lot of people in that film scene that are all making that types of genre. What does that… Why do we not see that as much anymore in movies? Have we gotten over identifying with that kind of person? Is it like that thing in the shockingly funny, I think, 22 Jump Street, where when they go to the high school, and instead of being cool and all the kids being slackers who wear their backpack with one strap, to be cool is to be very involved and committed to sustainability, and that caring and earnestness is what is the thing to be these days.

0:20:18.5 Andrew Young: I’m not sure we have gotten away from that. I just think that instead of films, we’ve moved to YouTube and Instagram and TikTok.

0:20:26.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Fair.

0:20:26.5 Landry Ayres: Sure.

0:20:29.0 Andrew Young: Just to harken back to what I was saying earlier, it’s like some of these YouTube channels where the whole thing is, “Look, we’re all in a pool together, and I’m gonna pull my friends pants down,” is the… You have millions of views on stuff like that. So maybe that’s the… I don’t know, maybe that’s natural transition from where we used to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos, but I think that’s just that movies… What we used to see in movies, which is a well-​written idea… Look at something like The Big Lebowski, which I think is the best slacker movie, in my opinion…

0:21:02.7 Landry Ayres: Sure.

0:21:02.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:21:03.9 Andrew Young: And that kind of… It’s like if you’re gonna… If all you have to do to represent a slacker is just sit in your yard, [chuckle] why write a movie?

0:21:14.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:21:14.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:21:15.7 Andrew Heaton: I think the tropes have also changed. So when I was in high school, the idea of people that live at the mall was very much a trope in popular culture. A mall was a cultural institution, which no longer… They might…

0:21:25.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh yeah.

0:21:27.0 Andrew Young: Yeah. Mall rats.

0:21:28.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. Malls might still exist, but I would… Yeah, the mall rat trope, I think, is gone. And I think the other trope that’s kinda gone is the… Who’s the pothead in Ridgemont High? Sean Penn?

0:21:39.8 Andrew Young: Sean Penn’s character?

0:21:42.6 Andrew Heaton: That kind… Yeah, that high school pothead character, I don’t really see anymore. Maybe it’s ’cause I don’t watch high school comedies anymore, but I feel like that’s declined. The trope that I think could come up that I don’t know that we’re making fun of that much is, I think of the massive amount of people that dedicate so much of their time and energy to tweeting stuff, and then if you talk to them and you’re like, “Do you volunteer anywhere?” And they’re like, “Well, no, I’m very busy.” “Okay. Do you donate to charity?” “No, I’m saving up money ’cause I really wanna go to Canada this year.” And it’s like, “So you just tweet? That’s all you do. You shout into the ether and say… You think… You say nothing loudly to people who don’t care, who are actively on the toilet. That’s your contribution to mankind. Thank you for that.” But for whatever reason, we’re not making fun of them that much. We still don’t think we are.

0:22:30.0 Andrew Young: You know what it might be? It might be that in the 2000s, the idea of the slacker, and I’m also now remembering that Pineapple Express is like 2008 or 2009, the idea of the slacker as a hero, as someone that says, “I’m not gonna play in your system, everyone’s telling me I have to do things this way, and I’m not gonna do it.” The idea of that as like a hero character, I think, is gone now. You can’t… Because A, there are so many people who are just living the slacker life, and B, I think now we’re at a point where demonstrative activism is more important, meaning, I have to show that to… I have to show that I care very, very hard. Not activism as in “I have to show that I’m actually… ”

0:23:22.3 Andrew Heaton: Performative activism.

0:23:24.0 Andrew Young: Or just at least performative emotion is very important right now.

0:23:27.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. Which is tough for those of us that are stoic. We get in trouble. I wonder if there’s a generational element too, in that the… Like Baby boomers always viewed themselves as the hip, cool kids. That was the baby boomer identity, they’re the hip people, which is why aging’s been very difficult for them, because they’re having… They have been cursed with being old. And they liked making fun of Gen X, and that was their thing. And then when millennials came around, and we’re now kind of the old people… Whenever anybody talks about like, “Oh, these millennials!” And I’m like, “No, I’m sorry, millennials are now middle managers.”

0:24:05.0 Andrew Heaton: Millennials aren’t the people in college. That’s a different generation. That passed. So word to the wise, anybody that’s 37 that’s like, “Yeah, we’re the new guys!” Sorry, you’re not. We’re now what Gen Xers were. But I also… Because millennials came of age when like, “Hey, we all wanted to go get jobs and stuff but we couldn’t, because there was a recession.” And so we don’t find the whole slack… We don’t find it as funny from older people making fun of us for being lazy, because we’re like, “Way to screw up the system so that we can’t get enfranchised. We actually wanna go work and we can’t.” So I don’t know that this is amusing to us.

0:24:37.9 Andrew Young: I would agree with that. Yeah. I would agree with that. Yeah, the generation prior to us was the person that celebrated not fitting into the culture of going to a job for 40 hours a week and providing for a family and stuff like that. That was… Started to be an anathema to people who were like, “Oh, this is this… ” ‘Cause you’re always making movies that are attacking the system that’s currently in place. It doesn’t really make sense to attack a system that fell out of place 10 years ago.

0:25:05.5 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. That said, though, it’s still… I don’t know. When I watch British comedies, British comedies love making fun of religious people, and I’m like, “Who on your island still believes in God? Who are you making fun of here? You’re all atheists.” I was in Scotland one time and I saw an Orangemen parade, which is a Protestant parade, and I went up to one of the guys and I was like, “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you, but I have not met anybody here that goes to church. Why are you worried about Catholics?” And he went, “Oh, well. They don’t believe in the Catholic God, we don’t believe in the Protestant God.” Everybody was an atheist in the equation, but like, well, but some of the old… Their grandparents were Catholics and our grandparents were Protestants. We all don’t think there’s a God, but we still hate each other and fight and get drunk. But they’ll make fun of it, but I think it’s an easy target for them.

0:25:48.1 Andrew Young: Yeah, but is it funny?

0:25:50.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, sure. I think the equivalent of that would be under our current system, I think there’s maybe two things you could make fun of if you were gonna buck the system. You could make fun of the economic system, and you could make fun of the social system. Now the economic system would be, probably you’d have a vanlife comedy where the vanlife protagonist is the one changing it, or you’d do another Office Space…

0:26:11.9 Andrew Young: Van’s the shoes?

0:26:13.6 Andrew Heaton: Yes, exactly, yes. They’re very popular shoes. So you could do that. You could still rebel against the 40-​hour work week and that kind of thing, the materialism. If you’re gonna make fun of the social stuff, though… I think that I have to be careful with my words here… It’s not that the aims of political correctness are funny or deserving to be targets. I don’t think that anybody should be making fun of transgender people or anything like that, but the sanctimony and… Yeah, the sanctimony that surrounds a lot of the people that promote that culture, that is a wide target that really isn’t being hit by Hollywood.

0:26:46.4 Andrew Young: It would be like the equivalent of… What was that movie? Religulous? No.

0:26:51.7 Andrew Heaton: Oh, Dogma.

0:26:52.0 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:26:53.0 Andrew Young: Well, Dogma is making fun of a different thing, but I think Religulous, if I’m remembering the movie correctly…

0:27:00.7 Landry Ayres: Is that Bill Maher, I think, is Religulous?

0:27:01.6 Andrew Young: Oh no, I’m thinking of another one. What was the one with Macaulay Culkin and…

0:27:07.4 Andrew Young: Home Alone. That’s Home Alone.

0:27:08.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Home Alone. [chuckle]

0:27:09.6 Andrew Young: Yeah, Home Alone.

0:27:10.9 Andrew Heaton: Was Joe Pesci trying to break into his house? Was that the plot?

0:27:14.3 Andrew Young: No, I think Joe Pesci was a priest.

0:27:17.3 Andrew Heaton: Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s Religulous.

0:27:19.2 Andrew Young: Now, there was some movie that was… I guess it was Macaulay Culkin and, I don’t know, maybe Mandy Moore or someone was in it.

0:27:25.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it was Saved.

0:27:27.8 Andrew Young: Saved, yeah. Which the idea was, in that situation, they’re very much making fun of the person who thinks that they’re holier than thou, and I feel like that’s an equivalent to what we’re looking at now. It’s like if you’re gonna make a movie that’s gonna make fun of a social activist, you’re not gonna make fun of what they’re active for, you’re gonna make fun of the fact that they’re making sure to present themselves as the most active, the most pure version of that self.

0:27:57.5 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, in the same way that you could make like a ’90s film where you’re making fun of like, say a Baptist church camp, you’re not necessarily making fun of the doctrine, but you are making fun of the camp counselor that’s holier than thou but is also having sex with multiple people at night and doing drugs and things. You’re making… Again the hypocrisy and sanctimony are always good targets for comedy, and should be.

[music]

0:28:20.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Was anyone else surprised that there was still a White House? Like of all things to keep, why did they keep the White House? [chuckle]

0:28:27.3 Andrew Young: I would have expected them to change the color…

0:28:29.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:28:30.8 Andrew Heaton: To camouflage or gold.

0:28:32.9 Natalie Dowzicky: That was a missed opportunity.

0:28:33.7 Andrew Young: Yeah, hot pink. Well, I think it might have something to do with you still… Even if you’re gonna change the state of the world, you still have to have touchstones for the audience to be like, “Well, okay, this is… I recognize this, but it’s different.” So showing the White House with an above ground pool and a broken swing set in the front, it was like, “Okay, I understand that this is now the White Trash House, right.”

0:29:00.2 Andrew Heaton: Also, Young, you would know this better, but did they just blatantly take the soundtrack from Planet of the Apes? ‘Cause I feel like they were using the Planet of the Apes soundtrack, which I think was probably intentional.

0:29:09.2 Andrew Young: Oh, it wouldn’t surprise me. Were there a lot of… I don’t remember it specifically. Were there are a lot of like drums?

0:29:14.2 Andrew Heaton: Minor key piano riffs. There were a lot of da-​dum-​da-​da-​da-​dum. Yeah. Anyway… I’m out of my expertise there.

0:29:23.4 Andrew Young: The composer, I think was Theodore Shapiro, and that wouldn’t surprise me if he was making reference to things specifically, especially because it’s like Planet of the Apes, it’s the same narrative, more or less. It’s a guy…

0:29:37.4 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s the same movie.

0:29:38.4 Andrew Young: Yeah, it’s the same movie. The difference is, yeah, we have [chuckle] people who stack TVs on top of each other or apes. So…

[chuckle]

0:29:46.0 Andrew Heaton: It’s just rather than being an emergent shift where the apes have supplanted the humans, it’s a downward shift where the humans have become apes.

0:29:53.0 Andrew Young: And there probably aren’t any apes left in this world, except for the ones they’re testing the erectile dysfunction pills on.

0:29:58.9 Andrew Heaton: Right. Or alternately, there’s probably a state in the union that has a chimpanzee for governor, like that kind of thing, where they only occupy very high or very low positions within this world.

0:30:10.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Hey, don’t joke. Harambe got a decent amount of votes in 2016.

0:30:13.8 Andrew Heaton: That’s true. Harambe did pretty well.

0:30:14.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Like 10,000. [laughter]

0:30:16.1 Landry Ayres: RIP.

0:30:16.2 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, he would have been a great president. It’s a real shame.

0:30:19.9 Andrew Young: I’m voting for him in 2024. One thing, you had mentioned the training system for becoming like the… Well, two things, the healthcare system, and the fact that that guy becomes a lawyer…

0:30:32.2 Natalie Dowzicky: From Costco.

0:30:33.1 Andrew Young: Costco… Yeah. He didn’t say university. He just says he got his degree here, so I am wondering what is the civic set up of Costco? Was it its own city?

[chuckle]

0:30:45.4 Landry Ayres: That’s what it seemed like to me is that it sort of… It just became urban sprawl at that point, but it was just Costco sprawl, and these Blade Runneresque towers of scaffolding have risen into the sky and extended to infinity.

0:31:01.0 Andrew Young: I guess it could happen. I just wonder who… There are police in Costco. Are those Costco police? Are they… And is that the natural evolution of the standard Costco security team is they become their own police force? Also, the train, I didn’t notice people using any tickets. Is it a ticketed train system or is it free public transport at Costco?

0:31:23.5 Landry Ayres: Well, I have so many questions about the rules of the world that they have set up because it is simultaneously like mega corporations, like Verizon, Costco, Carl’s Jr and whatever have taken over everything from phone systems to the FDA, but they haven’t taken over the White House and such, and they have built up all of this technology to automate tons of these processes, and then at some point there is a drop-​off where everyone just says, “Alright, they will work, they will be semifunctional in perpetuity, as long as we have someone to press a picture button that tells someone where to go in the hospital.”

0:32:08.1 Landry Ayres: It’s interesting because they talk about it being this gradual decline of falling into this dystopia, but it seems that there was a tipping point where we had built up all of this innovation and infrastructure, and then nobody knew what to do with it, but they were far enough ahead that they knew to make it simple enough that dumb people could use it. So it’s this weird thing of at what point did they cross the line and then how rapidly did the smart people just become extinct.

0:32:42.2 Andrew Young: Well, and again ’cause it seems like the movie is setting up the narrative that it’s just, there were more dumb people, but it seems to me like to some extent, the fact that they had created an automated system to just keep the world going is partially responsible for that continued decline because the minute that you don’t have to have any kind of discreet knowledge or even a desire to learn how a system operates, in theory, your brain is less challenged and you become dumber and dumber and dumber. I don’t know, I’m not an educator and I don’t wanna be but… [chuckle]

0:33:20.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I hear they sell degrees at Costco now.

0:33:21.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:33:23.7 Andrew Heaton: We can all become doctors. Yeah.

0:33:24.0 Andrew Young: I can probably borrow grandmother’s membership.

0:33:27.1 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, that does happen though, that kind of… I think it’s in Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, where he talks about how you have to have a certain amount of… You have to have a big enough population to have specialization for certain technologies to exist. You can’t lose them. So a good example of this is Tasmania, people that got to Tasmania absolutely arrived there by boat. But once they got to Tasmania, their population declined. And there weren’t enough people to have boat makers be among the population. So when English people started arriving or the Dutch, I don’t know who made contact, by that point, they would just take a log out to sea and to sort of use the log for a little bit till it got waterlogged and it would drop, but they’d lost that technology, but then conversely, you can even just lose it regardless of population, like when the Roman Empire fell, people weren’t building infrastructure after that for a while, you didn’t have the same level of sophisticated aqueducts, and the quality of gladiatorial games really declined.

0:34:26.1 Andrew Young: Oh and roads everyone talks about the roads!

[laughter]

0:34:31.0 Andrew Heaton: Right. That’s the one thing the Romans really were truly gifted at was building them roads, and.

0:34:38.4 Landry Ayres: No, don’t. We’re on the… We work for lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. We’re not allowed to mention roads.

0:34:40.2 Andrew Heaton: Oh right. Yes!

0:34:41.9 Landry Ayres: It’s not allowed.

0:34:42.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Roads are a sensitive topic.

0:34:43.6 Landry Ayres: That is strictly off-​limits.

0:34:43.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:34:44.3 Andrew Young: Well, you know. I’m sure they had some toll roads in ancient Rome.

0:34:50.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, and there was probably a private sector thing going and you wonder if it hadn’t been for the decline of the Roman Empire, we never would have got Elon Musk, there’s a direct correlation between the two. You needed to have that to have the private sector. The Romans were absolute garbage at putting people in rockets in my opinion, I’ll say it.

0:35:05.6 Landry Ayres: Controversial statement. You know.

0:35:07.7 Andrew Heaton: You know what? To jump, to jump complete genres here. I think the Star Wars universe is in a dark age. I’ve read some good theories and I’m in agreement with this, that the galaxy itself. When you look at it why would you need a protocol translator droid? They have all these weird redundant technologies where, for example, Jabba the Hutt has a torture room for robots, why don’t you just reprogram the robots? They’re robots. But they don’t have that. They have a torture room to put them in line. When Luke and uncle Owen are purchasing a protocol droid, they need it to translate for the other droids they can’t just give them software updates? So it seems like there was some predecessor civilization that was much more sophisticated, that has lost its capacity, and they’re able to build stuff, but they’re mostly able to just rebuild or duplicate things, but they can’t construct new things that serve roles, and so there’s sort of a peg or two down from whatever the apex was.

0:36:02.6 Andrew Young: Other than giant planet destroying orbs?

0:36:06.1 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, they’re really good. That’s the problem is they’re very good at that.

0:36:08.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Or Star Wars is just in the galaxy of the universe that Idiocracy is in. [chuckle] There’s potential crossover way in the future…

0:36:21.2 Andrew Heaton: No, I have to put my foot down here I’m sorry, I must put my foot down. It is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. There was even an asterix that says, not the same galaxy as Idiocracy. Yeah.

0:36:32.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay but you don’t know that for sure.

0:36:34.6 Landry Ayres: Yes we do it’s essentially at the beginning of every one of those movies.

0:36:34.8 Andrew Heaton: I will fight you Natalie, I don’t have a religion anymore. All I have is Star Wars and Star Trek.

0:36:38.7 Andrew Young: I’ll join Natalie on this one.

0:36:39.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Well… Fine. Thank you.

0:36:41.7 Landry Ayres: Natalie wasn’t on our Star Wars episode for a reason so.

0:36:45.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m not a Star Wars fan. [laughter]

0:36:46.9 Andrew Young: Okay, alright.

0:36:47.5 Natalie Dowzicky: I was kicked off my own podcast.

0:36:49.6 Andrew Heaton: Wow!

0:36:49.9 Landry Ayres: You volunteered to leave! The drama is coming out.

0:36:55.7 Andrew Young: Star Trek and Star Wars both at this point have… Star Wars is at least starting to play in this, and I know Star Trek has done that, they’ve created so many multi-​universe nonsense that I’m sure that Idiocracy crosses over at some point, and at some point they’ll make an episode of Star Wars where Doctor Strange shows up and shows us how it all connects into one giant universe that crosses time and space.

0:37:21.0 Andrew Heaton: Number one, we’re going to beam down to the Spider-​man planet to meet Spider-​man.

0:37:25.9 Landry Ayres: Well, it’s to what the Tommy Westfall’s theory from St. Elsewhere that all these worlds are connected by the snow globe, that the kid holds were all those TV crossovers and anything that crosses over with those… I do believe that that’s entirely… That’s possible.

0:37:39.0 Andrew Young: See Natalie is right.

0:37:40.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Thank you. Always.

0:37:40.5 Andrew Heaton: Okay. Yes, I am wrong.

0:37:42.9 Landry Ayres: You convinced me. You got me.

0:37:45.0 Andrew Heaton: You play the St. Elsewhere card. Yep, I digress.

[music]

0:37:51.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Something else we haven’t touched on yet is I guess they make fun of presidential pardons, [chuckle] like they’re given out like they’re candy, which that part made me chuckle a little bit because this whole discussion that happened when Trump was leaving office and everyone was like, “Who’s he gonna pardon? Is he gonna pardon his whole family? Is he gonna pre-​pardon them? What? Who is it legal for him to pardon?” And it was just this long conversation about pardoning. And then in this movie, when they were… When they were discussing how he was gonna get his pardon and go back in time, back into the time machine, that wasn’t a time machine [chuckle] was like I thought that part was funny in today’s context, but probably wasn’t funny at the time. Presidential pardons have been… We’ve only gotten more and more of them as time has gone on, but.

0:38:44.3 Andrew Young: And yet they make perfect sense and there’s no flaws in the system.

0:38:48.7 Natalie Dowzicky: See, that’s why it’s funny because this is the documentary element, I think I should have mentioned earlier, that the presidential pardon depiction in this movie is exactly what happens in real life.

0:38:57.9 Andrew Heaton: You know what? Okay.

0:39:00.1 Landry Ayres: Yeah, but he didn’t have to seek a blanket one for any reason.

0:39:02.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, you’re right.

0:39:03.1 Andrew Heaton: I’ve decided my new goal is to alienate as many of your listeners as I can, so I’m just gonna pick every unpopular position that I can. I actually, I am a fan of presidential pardons, I think they should be there. For this reason, I’m sure that Trump pardoned a bunch of corrupt political hacks, I think Paul Manafort probably got a pardon. I don’t remember who all got but a bunch of people got pardoned. It happens every time.

0:39:24.9 Natalie Dowzicky: You can’t remember exactly. Sounds right.

0:39:25.7 Andrew Heaton: Whenever a president’s leaving, the last thing they do is they free a bunch of their buddies from tax evasion.

0:39:31.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Well yeah it’s Oprah style, “You get a pardon, you get a pardon.”

0:39:34.2 Andrew Heaton: Yeah you get a pardon but prior to that who also did he pardon? He pardoned a bunch of drug offenders that either had their… I know that Obama commuted a bunch of sentences. Trump pardoned several people that had been there for non-​violent drug offense, and I think you can make… It’s like an extension to the judicial system of we would rather have five guilty people not be prosecuted, than have… Than accidentally prosecute innocent people, and I think the pardon works the same way. Unfortunately, it’s just, it’s gonna result in graft, it’s gonna result in corruption, but I’d like that to be there in the hopes that other innocent people can benefit from it. I think it’s a net positive.

0:40:10.9 Andrew Young: I think there’s a simple fix that you can do that, which is just anyone who has a direct connection to the President can’t be pardoned.

0:40:18.8 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. Or alternately, you could maybe even have some sort of check and balance on it, where there’s a Pardon Council, they can override them, so that if they do something truly heinous… ‘Cause if it’s like, “Yeah he pardoned this…

0:40:29.2 Natalie Dowzicky: I heard Costco does that…

0:40:30.6 Andrew Young: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:40:31.2 Andrew Heaton: He pardoned this 52-​year-​old that was in jail for meth and is now a really nice lady, noticeably different than like, “Well, my son stole a head out of the Smithsonian and keeps it on his desk.” Like, “Yeah okay. One is egregious. The other one’s understandable.”

0:40:47.9 Andrew Young: Should we add Monday night rehabilitation though into our [chuckle] judicial system? Or our penal system?

0:40:57.4 Andrew Heaton: So first of all, of course. Second, can I ask? Okay, wait, hold on! Can I keep trying to alienate people?

0:41:02.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Go ahead.

0:41:03.1 Landry Ayres: Go for it.

0:41:03.6 Natalie Dowzicky: You’re on it you’re on good.

0:41:04.6 Andrew Heaton: I think we should have… I think we should have corporal punishment as part of the judicial system. Hear me out on this. I think that there should be an either or option you can do, where the judge says, “We’re gonna send you to prison for non-​violent crimes for things like tax evasion, things like that, we’re either gonna send you to prison for six years or you get caned. You can do either one of that.” ‘Cause I would pick caned. I would… I don’t wanna go to prison for six years. I actually think it would be more humane to give people… I wouldn’t make it… I would never make the violence obligatory, I would never, ever, ever do that because that’s sick and twisted, but I would actually leave it as an option available to people if they didn’t wanna do the time, ’cause I would… I don’t know. A punishment served, and that means all the people that view the prison system as punitive or they get their kicks out of it, but also we don’t have to spend tax dollars on them.

0:41:51.1 Andrew Young: And you’d offer caning as your choice?

[laughter]

0:41:54.2 Natalie Dowzicky: That’s was the violence of choice.

0:41:57.1 Landry Ayres: Of all the things that you choose.

0:41:58.8 Andrew Heaton: I would probably do spankings, I think is what I would do, but I guess you’d just have a really brutally… I don’t know, I haven’t thought about this entirely but actually.

0:42:04.9 Landry Ayres: You’d also have a lot of people itching to do crimes at that point, I’m sure it would… You’d get a very interesting new not prison population, but people getting charged.

0:42:13.6 Andrew Heaton: Wait, so follow up question, are monster truck rallies still a thing? ‘Cause I remember them being the thing when I was a kid, if I just become such a spiraling elitist that I haven’t seen the advertising for them for 20 years? Is that what’s going on?

0:42:26.1 Andrew Young: Yeah they still have monster truck rallies. They still have NASCAR. They still have that.

0:42:31.2 Andrew Heaton: I knew that one. Yeah.

0:42:33.6 Andrew Young: What are other things that you would have ignored as you progressed into the Tweet universe?

0:42:40.1 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, that’s right. Yes I’ve gotten deep, deeper, deeper into the Twittersphere.

0:42:41.1 Landry Ayres: The Twitter-​verse.

0:42:44.6 Andrew Young: Do you jog in the tweed Heaton?

0:42:46.4 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, yeah, well, I put on my tweed jogging suit like any respectable college graduate.

0:42:50.8 Natalie Dowzicky: They’re separate. Those are two separate things.

0:42:51.2 Landry Ayres: Yeah, he’s got separates. [chuckle]

0:42:52.6 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. It breathes.

0:42:54.3 Andrew Young: It’s got patches on each cheek.

0:42:57.6 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. It’s got butt patches, elbow patches, and back of the knee patches, all of my joints are very sensitive because I am a smart elitist.

0:43:04.3 Andrew Young: Back of the knee patches the most worn and exposed part of the knee.

[laughter]

0:43:12.6 Landry Ayres: Well, also your idea about corporal punishment makes me just wonder that in theory, that does sound great, but of course we would just find a way to turn that into a plea deal scenario where we would just like, “We’re gonna incentivize.”

0:43:24.6 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. Or the other thing we could do is the legislature could go, “Okay, for this particular crime, it’s either six canings which will probably debilitate you forever or 500 years in prison. Which one do you want?”

0:43:39.1 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:43:39.4 Andrew Heaton: Okay you know I actually, I retract my shooting from the hip proposal, I am now…

0:43:44.7 Natalie Dowzicky: There’s no way that would enacted right.

0:43:44.9 Andrew Heaton: I am now against the thing I said I was in favor of, because I could evolve over time.

0:43:52.4 Natalie Dowzicky: But you became smarter, not dumber.

0:43:54.8 Andrew Heaton: Yes, yes. In my case, it’s always a one-​way trajectory, I become more virile and more intelligent with each passing day.

0:44:01.6 Andrew Young: We’re gonna have to add this to the catalog of Heaton’s two-​minute complete change of mind.

0:44:06.4 Andrew Heaton: Or 180 it’s a complete 180. Yeah, you’re right, I now, I’m completely against that thing.

[music]

0:44:15.9 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home, this is Locked in. Heaton, Andrew, what else have you been enjoying during your time at home, locked in? Anything, you know, movies, TV shows, music, games, anything else you’ve been doing with your time? What has been filling the void for you?

0:44:39.3 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, I guess we’re coming to the close of this period. So I’ve read a bunch of books. I just finished a book called I, Claudius by Robert Graves, which is a great… I love historical novels. This one’s about a Roman Emperor, which is delightful. And then conversely, I read a science fiction book that I enjoyed called, We Are Legion We are Bob, about von Neumann probes and cryonics. Very good thing. And in terms of the… The only media rabbit hole I went down during the pandemic is a friend of mine and I attempted to watch every… To watch a zombie film from every country that has produced a zombie film.

[chuckle]

0:45:22.2 Andrew Heaton: We tried to get a global world view. ‘Cause it’s not every country, right? But we got a lot of them. I’ve now seen a Cuban, French, Quebecois, generally Canadian, American, British, and I think… What else, a Spanish and African. But the African one… And I know that Africa is not a country, but I also kind of… There’s an asterisk there, ’cause they build themselves as an African one, but there were a bunch of English people in Africa. So… Right, you know, still… Anyway, that was a fun thing. And I gotta say Ravenous, which is a Quebecois zombie film is one of the finest I’ve seen, well done. I used to really resent Quebec for just refusing to get on board with the program. Come on you guys, you got conquered like 300 years ago, learn English. But the film Ravenous was actually really good. And I think, I’m… Now, I’m pro-​Quebec, I’ve done the 180. [chuckle] I’ve come around.

[chuckle]

0:46:11.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, so those are the things I’ve been enjoying.

0:46:12.5 Landry Ayres: That classic Heaton turn.

0:46:14.5 Natalie Dowzicky: So when we do a zombie episode, we know who to call.

0:46:17.5 Andrew Heaton: Oh yeah, I could be great. You know what? Me and my friend Jennings would be great for that.

0:46:21.3 Andrew Young: From my end, let’s see, I recently watched a… I guess recent is all relative, but about six or… Five or six months ago, started watching the new TV show, For All Mankind, which is fantastic, especially, if you are an alternate history fan, which I am. And I know Heaton is as well. They just do a really good job of showing America losing but in a hopeful way, [chuckle] which is pretty cool. It has a… It does this excellent job of what would actually happen if we lost the race to the moon? And just showing what kind of a… What it does to the American psyche and then how we have to rise up to regain our place against the Soviets. So I highly recommend that one. It’s the same showrunner and creator that did that Battlestar Galactica if you’re a Battlestar fan or one of the supervising…

0:47:26.4 Andrew Heaton: Joe Pesci?

0:47:27.0 Andrew Young: What? Joe Pesci, yeah.

0:47:28.6 Andrew Heaton: Joe Pesci. Yeah.

0:47:30.1 Andrew Young: Yeah, Joe Pesci. [chuckle] And he’s also the… He was also the supervising producer on Star Trek TNG, and Star Trek Deep Space Nine, so high marks for that…

0:47:39.6 Andrew Heaton: Ron Moore?

0:47:40.6 Andrew Young: Yeah, Ronald D. Moore also known as Joe Pesci.

0:47:42.7 Andrew Heaton: Yes! Yeah, that’s right. Well, a lot of people don’t know that Ron Moore and Joe Pesci, one of them is just a stage name.

0:47:48.6 Andrew Young: Same person.

0:47:49.0 Andrew Heaton: In a mask. Mm-​hmm. Very talented man, very talented man.

0:47:53.0 Andrew Young: The other thing that I recently read, which I really enjoyed was The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson’s biography on Churchill, which was fantastic. Churchill was just an interesting dude. And it does a good job of showing…

0:48:09.1 Andrew Heaton: I’m gonna have to look into that fellow.

0:48:10.6 Andrew Young: Yeah, you should check him out, he’s…

0:48:12.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Churchill.

0:48:13.7 Andrew Young: He’s older. Meaning…

[chuckle]

0:48:16.9 Andrew Young: Meaning in the past not of age. [chuckle]

0:48:20.5 Andrew Heaton: Okay, alright.

0:48:22.0 Andrew Young: So you know…

0:48:22.5 Natalie Dowzicky: He was never young actually.

0:48:23.8 Andrew Young: No, he was never…

0:48:25.5 Natalie Dowzicky: He was always old.

0:48:26.0 Andrew Young: He was never a youth.

0:48:26.1 Andrew Heaton: But a great… But a great president, and he is owed our respect for that on Mount Rushmore.

0:48:30.5 Andrew Young: Yeah, responsible for adding the East Wing to the White House. A lot of people don’t know that.

0:48:36.0 Andrew Young: A lot people don’t know that. Yeah.

0:48:37.2 Andrew Heaton: Yeah.

0:48:39.8 Landry Ayres: We should start another show called, A Lot of People Don’t Know That.

0:48:42.3 Andrew Young: Where we just lie.

0:48:43.3 Andrew Heaton: That is…

0:48:43.7 Landry Ayres: You know it’s just lies. [chuckle]

0:48:46.5 Andrew Heaton: Young in my retirement strategy is just to enter senility full steam with complete confidence and continue podcasting.

[chuckle]

0:49:00.1 Andrew Young: I think that’s mostly it. I don’t… I’ve been reading some other stuff, but it’s all crap. [chuckle] So I don’t know that I’d pitch any of it.

0:49:09.7 Natalie Dowzicky: For me, I started reading 2034, which is… It’s a book. So it’s supposed to be set in the future, but using the present… Our present foreign policy, lack of debate to inform how our foreign policy is going to look in the future. So it is fiction, but it’s written by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James something or other…

0:49:37.0 Andrew Young: It’s about a world war, right? Or something like that.

0:49:39.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, so it’s about World War III. It’s with China, I mean, shocker. But…

0:49:46.7 Andrew Young: People keep…

0:49:47.3 Andrew Heaton: So not Germany! Whoa! I didn’t see that coming!

0:49:49.9 Andrew Young: People keep saying that…

0:49:50.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, so…

0:49:51.5 Andrew Young: I actually feel like we’re… To harken back in, I think we’re due for a world war with Tasmania.

0:49:56.6 Andrew Heaton: Yeah. They’ve… Yep, I’m in favor of it.

0:50:00.3 Andrew Young: Now that they’ve… Now that they’ve gotten back to making…

0:50:00.9 Andrew Heaton: They’re gettin smug down there.

0:50:01.6 Andrew Young: Now that they’ve gotten back to making boats again.

0:50:03.8 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, boats.

0:50:06.4 Natalie Dowzicky: They’re no longer waterlogged, so now they’re a threat to America.

0:50:10.7 Andrew Heaton: It’s hot during Christmas down there. That’s not right. That’s perverted.

0:50:15.8 Natalie Dowzicky: For other stuff I’ve done, I… Oh, I meant to start watching Home Economics, which is a new ABC show. I’ve heard mixed reviews. We’ll see, it’s from the same creators of Black-​ish and…

0:50:31.9 Andrew Young: Mixed-​ish, is that the other one?

0:50:33.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I forget what else they did. Mixed-​ish…

0:50:34.9 Andrew Heaton: Yeah.

0:50:35.3 Natalie Dowzicky: ‘Cause the joke they made about the Home Economics was they were gonna call it… It was gonna be another ish show. I think they were doing Home-​ish. And then the commercial was like, “We can’t have another ish show. Too many people won’t watch… ” [chuckle] But yeah. So I’m gonna start that.

0:50:51.9 Andrew Young: I would have called it domestic-​ish.

0:50:53.4 Natalie Dowzicky: You should pitch that to them, trademark it.

0:50:53.5 Andrew Heaton: He was a great, great roman emperor. Domestic issues are funny.

0:50:57.8 Andrew Young: Yeah. I have a friend who writes on Mixed-​ish.

0:51:00.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Wow really? Cool.

0:51:02.2 Andrew Young: I’ll send him a message and just say, “Hey, listen, they should change the name of the show now that it’s already aired.

0:51:09.8 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, that’s goes well, yeah.

0:51:11.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, and a show that’s not very good that I watch is Manifest, [chuckle] which is one of those classic plain TV shows, [chuckle] where…

0:51:20.7 Landry Ayres: You did not say that it was bad the last time we talked on this show before you…

0:51:24.6 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s not good anymore.

0:51:25.4 Andrew Young: That happens!

0:51:25.8 Natalie Dowzicky: They ruined it.

0:51:26.3 Andrew Young: That happens a lot.

0:51:27.3 Landry Ayres: You did the Heaton turn.

0:51:28.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, this is my 180-​degree Heaton turn. It’s not good anymore.

0:51:31.9 Andrew Heaton: This is good. If we can figure out a way to positively brand flip-​flopping to where it’s like a sign of strength and leadership when I do it and then associate my name with it. That would be great. I would love for that to be a thing. The Heaton Turn.

0:51:43.8 Landry Ayres: Moral flexibility.

0:51:45.4 Andrew Young: And then you can rehabilitate John Kerry.

[laughter]

0:51:49.5 Landry Ayres: I also, an Erik Larson book, I finally got on board and read, Devil In The White City.

0:51:56.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh! That’s good one.

0:51:56.6 Landry Ayres: It’s about the World’s Fair and some…

0:52:00.8 Andrew Young: HH Holmes?

0:52:00.9 Landry Ayres: HH Holmes, the seedy goings on there. Very, very interesting stuff. Had been recommended to me so many times and I finally got around to blazing through that. I also… Music-​wise, the musical artist, Sammy Ray, if you like funk, jazz kind of stuff. Like, Lake Street Drive or Hiatus Coyote, just really, really amazing voice, a top notch production, big band, new jazz stuff. I highly recommend the song, The Feeling or Kick It To Me. Those are really, really great. And I’m still playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption two, because I’m just living out my fantasy of being a cowboy and being much, much tougher and grizzled than I ever will be and…

0:52:56.9 Andrew Heaton: Wait, is it a western zombie game?

0:53:00.2 Landry Ayres: There is… One of the ones before it, they did do a zombie game. They did a zombie version of it, but this one is just straight western simulator.

0:53:07.7 Andrew Heaton: I don’t wanna be shooting Native Americans, if it’s like a western Cowboy game. That sounds bad, but I’m okay with zombies.

0:53:13.2 Landry Ayres: There are clan members in the game, funny enough, that…

0:53:16.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Can you shoot them or no?

0:53:17.7 Landry Ayres: Well, you can. You can shoot everyone. It’s not…

0:53:19.9 Andrew Young: As it should be.

0:53:22.2 Andrew Heaton: That’s how guns work.

0:53:22.8 Landry Ayres: But it will either give you bonus points or deduct points from your Honor rating, but if you kill members of the clan, you do not lose points to your Honor rating.

0:53:36.6 Andrew Young: Oh, I was also gonna recommend, if you’re getting on the Erik Larson train, In the Garden Of Beasts, is fantastic. It’s all written from the perspective of the American Ambassador in Berlin in the lead up to World War II and it’s real cool.

0:53:51.8 Landry Ayres: I like that. I liked his writing a lot. I hadn’t read any other Erik Larson before this. So I really enjoyed it.

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0:54:00.9 Andrew Heaton: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke related content and to connect with us, is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s pop, the letter N, locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, as a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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