Veep

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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 have been telling Natalie since this show began that there is one show that would be perfect for us to cover, and I finally got her to watch it. And this time she actually enjoyed my suggestion, I think.

0:00:23.4 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s rare. It’s rare. [chuckle]

0:00:25.2 Landry Ayres: It’s true. Today, we are talking Veep. Here to discuss this eerily and infuriatingly accurate depiction of modern beltway high jinks are federal policy analyst for the Tax Foundation, Alex Muresianu.

0:00:42.0 Alex Muresianu: Hello.

0:00:42.8 Landry Ayres: And senior producer at Reason, Zach Weissmueller.

0:00:46.7 Zach Weissmueller: Hi.

0:00:47.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Alright. So we’re all slightly ingrained in the DC life, and some of us are more ingrained than we want to be honestly, but [chuckle] watching this show, it was kind of nice just to see different ways we could be interpreting our every day lives here in DC. How is Veep about the hypocrisy of politics?

0:01:12.1 Alex Muresianu: It’s almost like the entire show, I mean, it’s almost like it doesn’t… No one instance sticks out of somebody being a hypocrite because that’s just the ambient level the show is, just sort of constantly ash. But yeah, it’s just a default level of, say one thing, do the other is just probably a premise behind 80% of episodes in some way or another.

0:01:43.3 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it’s almost hard to even call it hypocrisy because it’s more like there’s no hard and fast principles. Some of the characters have beliefs, but really they’re just motivated by their political self-​interest, and that’s kind of the brilliance of the show to me is that it’s not really about anyone trying to achieve any particular policy or ideological agenda. It’s just about the psychology and the incentives that politicians face in DC.

0:02:18.4 Landry Ayres: I would be very curious then particularly knowing where the show ends up. Spoiler alert, [chuckle] as always, if you’ve seen Veep, stop listening, go and watch it. It’s better than this podcast. [laughter] I’ll say that right now. I’m not afraid of doing that to our own show, particularly with the character of Richard Splett, one of my favorites who ends up becoming president of the United States [laughter] despite the hesitation of some political fixers early on in the series. For a show that is as cynical as it is to end on such a sort of optimistic note, somewhat every show, regardless of their intent puts forth some sort of belief about truth in the world it is… That is embedded in how it operates. What does Veep believe in? What does it portray as the truth about politics or whether it’s Washington, DC or simply American government? What is the truth it believes in?

0:03:27.1 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, I made a video for Reason on this topic a few years ago ’cause I was a huge fan of the show. I’m actually not in DC. I’m in LA, but that’s why it was particularly interesting to me because I am immersed in the world of politics and I know lots of people in DC, but I’ve worked a little bit in the entertainment industry, my wife works in the industry. So I’m always really interested in how Hollywood portrays DC. And in my piece, I compared it to a couple of other attempts, The West Wing being one of the more famous ones and then House of Cards was also popular at the time that Veep was. And my take on it was that The West Wing romanticized the president in particular and politics in general as this kind of noble statesmen who can kind of rise above the fray, and then inversely, House of Cards has a kind of dark romantic vision of politicians as these ingenious Machiavellians who will literally just murder people to move up in the ranks.

0:04:44.3 Zach Weissmueller: And I think that there’s some Machiavellianism in Veep as well, but it’s weirdly more grounded even though the show has a level of absurdism to it. And so my ultimate take on Veep is that its world view is basically overlapping with the Nobel Prize-​winning economist, James Buchanan, who was one of the creators of what’s known as Public Choice Theory, which can kinda be summarized as politics without romance. So politicians are just like any of the rest of us. They’re motivated by a combination of self-​interests and self-​image and kinda what they can get away with given the incentives that are facing them. So for that reason, I always thought Veep out of at least those three and possibly any Hollywood portrayal of Washington, DC is among the top in terms of getting it right.

0:05:45.8 Alex Muresianu: Yeah, I would agree a lot with what Zach said. I would say that the… I guess the thing about Richard Splett becoming president at the end of the show that I think is actually an appropriate sort of offset to the cynicism of the show in that like, I think the show’s closing message is that some level of sort of cosmic justice or whatnot that like Selina is so ruthless in her pursuit of power that she ultimately ends up with nothing. And I do love the gag which I’d forgotten they do a joke in the first episode about getting pushed out of the news cycle because Tom Hanks dies. I had forgotten that that was a joke in the first episode when I watched the show again. But you know, I thought that [laughter] ultimately and then Richard Splett, he is sort of a West… I mean, The West Wing is a bit of because he has a comic character, but like that he is somebody who was in politics for the right reasons or for the right reasons and sort of public service minded individual.

0:06:56.4 Alex Muresianu: And I feel like he oddly sort of reminds me I guess of like Chester Arthur, [laughter] who is in my opinion, a very underrated president because he is just like a guy who was brought up through the spoil system of Gilded Age politics and ended up Vice President and then, you know, Garfield gets shot and Arthur takes over and Arthur ends up being the one who does civil service reform, which was Garfield’s big promise and ends up taking on the machine. So I guess that is a sort of an odd, I guess, the closest thing to like, a historical parallel I could think of, but that that sort of thing does happen too.

0:07:37.0 Landry Ayres: I think that’s the first ever Garfield and Chester Arthur drops that we’ve ever had on the show.

0:07:42.8 Natalie Dowzicky: You win. [laughter]

0:07:43.5 Landry Ayres: And I hope it’s not the last. I hope it’s not the last.

0:07:47.2 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. I think there’s something to that, and it’s telling Splett kind of accidentally falls into it. I think that that’s consistent with Veep’s worldview in that if you’re going to get somebody who is kind of civic minded and very intelligent though very socially awkward at the same time, it’s going to sort of happen by accident because the way that the political system incentivizes certain behaviors and certain personalities, someone like Splett isn’t necessarily going to rise up through the conventional route. He’s going to kind of accidentally fall into the Oval Office.

0:08:32.0 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it’s sort of a political Mr. Magoo situation.

0:08:35.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Right. [chuckle]

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0:08:39.3 Landry Ayres: It’s interesting that you brought up House of Cards and West Wing. And I think in preparation, Alex had written something about Parks and Rec, I believe, at one point, that if you… I was thinking of those political campuses with the two axes, but if you were to do it about their like depiction of government, whether they are benevolent or malevolent, and whether they are effectual versus ineffective, these shows, while they’re not all about national politics, they do kind of fit into these four quadrants, where you have House of Cards that’s really malevolent and selfish and self-​serving and are highly effective and Machiavellian, like second set, and then you have Parks and Rec, which is very noble and public service oriented but they really can’t get anything done except for very minor things.

0:09:31.3 Landry Ayres: And then, West Wing is noble and very effective and rouses the public and there’s big… It’s coded as very successful and uniting by the big sweeping scores and the big… Very Sorkin. That’s kind of his bread and butter. And then there’s Veep, where there’s a bunch of malevolent selfish people, but they are all too foolish to get anything actually done that other than maybe a few of times they went office, they are never really successful. They are always still the fools in the show, which is definitely one thing that I think Iannucci when he started Veep and the the sort of shows it was based on the in the loop and the thick of it. Over in the UK, that is definitely an aim that I see there.

0:10:24.3 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. I thought that’s why it was brilliant to set it in the VP office as well because it just makes it a little lower stakes. When they start off as President, you can’t necessarily have like a kind of bumbling climber like there is a sort of gravitas that immediately you have to embrace whereas they could really dig into just the pure politics and political incentives with that, sort of. I’m not gonna say entirely useless, but at least the way it’s portrayed in the show fairly useless.

0:10:58.4 Landry Ayres: Go there.

0:11:00.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Well I think their choices…

0:11:00.9 Landry Ayres: Do it. Go there. Let’s dig deep. [laughter]

0:11:04.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I think their choice of like, for instance, setting this in like the VP office versus like the President also helps them with dry humor, right? So because there’s like an underlying understanding that’s like you made us a VP. That’s like, a great accomplishment, but what do they actually do? So there’s almost an inherent joke just in that setting. And I think the show does a really good job of that dry humor that we’ve kind of been hinting at. And another thing that I think Alex had written down in his notes beforehand, but this is another show about politics that doesn’t necessarily tell you flat out who’s on what side. We get glimpses of like they support certain issues or they denounce others, but they never come out and straight up say what party they’re affiliated with and there’s tension between Selina and the President. And there’s a lot of back and forth but I think that almost plays to their advantage because it makes both sides funny. Had it been like, you’re like Hollywood Elise attacking the right or being a criticism of the left, I don’t think it would be as funny just because it kind of wanted to make everyone look ridiculous so that you didn’t think deeper of like, “Oh, is this person or is this politician supposed to be a republican or are they supposed to be a democrat? And I think that enhanced the show? What do you guys think?

0:12:30.3 Zach Weissmueller: I think that Selina is a Democrat, and also, interestingly Frank Underwood from House of Cards is also a Democrat. And I think that those were both smart choices because you have these Hollywood people who are Democrats writing about Democrats, so it sort of creates a neutral canvas, whereas if it’s Hollywood Liberals writing about Republicans, it suddenly becomes a commentary on how dumb Conservatives are or whatever.

0:13:02.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:13:02.4 Zach Weissmueller: So I thought that was a smart move but to your point, she’s a Democrat, but she’s not really tied to any specific issue. She’s so malleable. I know we all watched the abortion episode, which would be interesting to talk about because she expresses that she does have some political convictions in that episode, but it ultimately doesn’t really matter. It’s about… They literally chart out what number on the week chart, what trimester can we settle on to calibrate between all of the different interest groups that are surrounding us and come up on this exact number. So that’s a perfect episode because it shows that kind of balancing act. She literally has Gary kind of shepherd away one of the Planned Parenthood people, so she doesn’t encounter a pro-​life cardinal [laughter] come into her office.

0:14:04.4 Alex Muresianu: I think particularly in the abortion episode, the politics of… This political alignment in Veep is sort of, I guess, probably most accurate to the 1970s in terms of where the two coalitions are. [laughter] The Democrats will have… I agreed that Selina is probably a Democrat on the whole. She follows more… She’s got… The Families First Bill and the Clean Jobs Initiative and stuff. So I think on the whole, it seems like that there’s the Democratic Party, but at the end of the show, famously, she appeals to the conservative wing, the staunch social conservative wing of her party to ban gay marriage. And I think that is… I think part of how Veep sort of cheats for the audience that it creates political incentives for politicians on the show to compromise with high emotion stakes issues that don’t actually exist in reality.

0:15:02.8 Alex Muresianu: If you are a Democrat and you are running for president, you are pro-​choice. If you are a Republican and you’re running for president, you are pro-​life. There is no… The political incentives align with having a very clear, staunchly defined position, whereas Veep by messing with the coalitions, you can allow people to waffle on these very high, high stakes issues, which I do think probably reflects thought processes on other things that just tend to not be as particularly sort of general politics consumption-​oriented. It’s something marginal like the specifics of how, I don’t know, the H-1B visa program works or whatever, something that is sort of very specific. It’s not [laughter] like a big headline screaming news.

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0:15:53.6 Landry Ayres: Natalie, gonna flip the script here.

0:15:56.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay, hit it.

0:15:57.7 Landry Ayres: As the only [chuckle] woman on this episode, how do you feel about the depiction of women in politics on the show, [laughter] whether it’s Selina or it’s Amy or it’s…

0:16:08.8 Alex Muresianu: Selina wouldn’t like being asked that as a woman.

0:16:11.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, exactly. [laughter]

0:16:13.2 Landry Ayres: But I only do this because Natalie wrote it down in our notes.

0:16:16.8 Natalie Dowzicky: I did, I did.

0:16:17.5 Landry Ayres: So she told me to do it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be like… Speak for all women, Natalie.

0:16:21.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [laughter] I’m not gonna start my diatribe by saying, “As a woman, I feel.” [laughter].. But…

0:16:29.6 Landry Ayres: I can’t as a woman… [laughter]

0:16:34.7 Natalie Dowzicky: I guess this is two-​fold, and this comes kind of to head in the abortion episode where they sit Selina down and they tell her, “Okay, you need to come out with a statement, and it should start with the ‘as a woman.’ ” You should really lean into your woman-​ness in this statement so that people believe what you’re saying basically.” And I found it troubling that she said… I think she’s like, “I can’t identify as a woman. People can’t know that I’m a woman,” for which I was like, “Well, wait a second, you’re the VP. Do they not know this by now?” But taking that aside and looking more into it, I think in a way that Selina’s character and obviously she’s the leading woman in the show is like, she’s angry, she’s aggressive, she’s dysfunctional. She can’t get much done, which is funny because usually how women are portrayed for… In politics is more like they’re cut throat or they’re too emotional, not in an angry way, but she is almost portrayed to me as having the personality of a male politician in her cut-​throat nature, which I thought was interesting, and then I did some more research into this. Why did they choose to have the VP be a woman? Because at the time that the show was made, we obviously didn’t have a VP as a woman yet.

0:18:01.1 Natalie Dowzicky: And they weren’t necessarily all that concerned about it being Selina, her actress specifically, but they didn’t want anyone… The show creators didn’t want anyone to think they were trying to portray a VP that already existed. So they didn’t think that it would… They didn’t want you to think that Selina was Dick Cheney, for example. They basically chose it so that you didn’t think that they were trying to portray former Vice President Biden or… Dick Cheney or what have you. But I do think she is portrayed more like a male politician than most people perceived female politicians now. Like the stereotypes I was talking about them, being emotional or not cut out to lead and that kind of stuff. None of that is evoked in the show. But I also think she is not willing to embrace her womanhood in order to, for example, went over voters. She doesn’t want people to know she’s a woman.

0:19:03.4 Natalie Dowzicky: She’s acutely aware that that’s going to deter her ability to be a politician or to gain support, but it’s also… Amy is also… There’s the… During the testimony episode, they’re asking Amy a bunch of questions on the data breach, and the email to the bereaved parents, [chuckle] and they asked her a question about… I forget exactly how it was raised. A question about money, and she responds, and she’s like, “Are you only asking me this because I’m the woman on the panel and I don’t have any expertise in this area?” [chuckle] And I just thought there’s like… There’s a few times in there where it’s like there are very poignant parts that women are depicted as they’re moreso embracing what a male politician would than what our stereotypes of female politicians are. Not that the stereotypes are correct, but they don’t lean into those female politician stereotypes.

0:20:08.3 Landry Ayres: Right, ’cause we’re seeing everything from behind the scenes too…

0:20:11.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:20:11.3 Landry Ayres: Which is interesting, whereas if we were seeing everything like from the opposite end, I think we would see more of what you’re talking about.

0:20:17.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, yeah.

0:20:18.9 Landry Ayres: I would love to see Julia Louis-​Dreyfus as Spiro Agnew, though. [laughter] That would be a really, really interesting.

0:20:24.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [laughter]

0:20:25.5 Landry Ayres: This Christmas.

0:20:28.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I have never seen the show before as Landry already hinted that, and so I binge-​watched for the last three weeks, the whole show. And because I watched it after Trump had been President, some of the things I witnessed, I was like, “Man, they really… They predicted the future.” [laughter] So I researched into it, and they said the show creators were talking about how sometimes they’d sit around in there and they’re trying to come up with different ideas for episodes and they’d sit down and be like, “What’s the dumbest thing that could happen in politics?” And then this show creator goes, “They’re doing stuff… ” As in the Trump administration and others, and politicians during the show are doing stuff they couldn’t even think about to invent for the show.

0:21:20.5 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:21:20.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And I’m kind of wondering, how many times have you thought of Veep after something ridiculous has happened in the last, let’s say, five years? How many times did you think it was like this, “I’m living a real life Veep episode”?

0:21:32.7 Landry Ayres: The big one is Nevada. [laughter]

0:21:36.3 Zach Weissmueller: The 2020 election, of course.

0:21:36.6 Natalie Dowzicky: The recount?

0:21:37.5 Alex Muresianu: I mean, I think the Eagle is basically Rudy Giuliani. [chuckle] ‘Cause basically, I think what’s happening, I think they predicted that.

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0:21:46.5 Zach Weissmueller: Also, the best… I think the most Veep moment, especially… I guess this would be kind of the end stinger scenes or whatever, very much. Actually no, I think this would be in a whole episode, is Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

0:22:01.7 Landry Ayres: I think that is the most sort of…

0:22:05.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh yeah. [laughter]

0:22:08.7 Alex Muresianu: Oh, yes. [laughter]

0:22:08.8 Zach Weissmueller: It’s just… Yeah, roll credits as Giuliani is starting the press conference.

0:22:12.6 Landry Ayres: Yes, absolutely. The whole episode is building up to a big tell-​all press conference, and then the climax is we got the wrong Four Seasons and all these people show up. Credits roll. Absolutely. [laughter] Or I can also see Selina stares into the eclipse and has to wear eclipse sunglasses for a…

0:22:37.1 Natalie Dowzicky: For like an eye patch. [laughter]

0:22:39.2 Landry Ayres: Like she does when she gets her eye exam done, and she has all the bruises, and she has to wear the sunglasses when she goes to visit the naval ship on Thanksgiving. It could be something like that, where she just has to wear big sunglasses ’cause she stared into the sun. [chuckle]

0:22:55.5 Alex Muresianu: Yeah. Another Giuliani moment is him doing that press conference and just sweating his makeup off out the front of his face.

0:23:02.3 Landry Ayres: Oh, yeah. [chuckle]

0:23:02.4 Alex Muresianu: And so that’ll be a good Veep moment.

0:23:04.9 Landry Ayres: It would be Mike McLintock sweating his red moustache dye off.

0:23:09.1 Alex Muresianu: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:23:09.5 Natalie Dowzicky: It would be red dye. [laughter]

0:23:11.0 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. And I mean, it is interesting, I was watching this contemporaneously as the Trump moment was unfolding, and they really… Everyone else were caught off guard by that. So there was… I think it was maybe in its second to last season when Trump started to rise, and I remember watching that season and I thought it was just the weakest season because it was so out of step with what was going on. I think Selina was out of power and just trying to get her presidential library in order and stuff, and it was just kind of weak. And then they had a chance to come back, and I thought they brought it all back together. Another behind the scenes aspect was that Armando Iannucci, the creator, had stepped away to do other projects. So they probably had to reorganize the writing staff and so forth, but I did think they pulled it together for the last season, and they were able to start tapping into that weird populist energy that was happening. Jonah starts to become a potential candidate, running on math is bad because it was created by Muslims, and stuff like that, and Selina goes… They pull out all the stops, and she just becomes as depraved as possible and throws all her friends under the bus. But yeah, I thought the final season really… It was remarkable that they were able to kind of respond and rise to the occasion.

0:24:52.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, I’d also read something, that after Trump was elected, they had a serious sit-​down with the writing team trying to decide if people still thought politics was funny in terms of them continuing the sitcom nature of the show, and if it was almost too real that their jokes weren’t gonna land anymore, which I thought was certainly not something they probably predicted when they first started the show. And they probably had to have a much more careful eye to a lot of their dry humor in the last two seasons partially just because as we were watching Trump’s presidency unfold and them not being able to predict what Trump was gonna do after they’ve already recorded and filmed these episodes, they wanted to make sure that nothing was all that controversial in the sense that it… Would it be funny? I also read that they took out a few jokes after… Post-​filming some and I guess, in post-​production stages of episodes, that were coming out as like Trump was making certain remarks. So I read this article that there was like some joke that was made about a golden shower…

0:26:11.9 Landry Ayres: Oh, gosh.

0:26:13.4 Natalie Dowzicky: In one of the Veep episodes, and it was like, right before. It was like the episode was supposed to come out right around the time that this whole “locker room talk scandal” with Trump came out, and they were like, “Okay, this is not funny, no longer, something that we should keep in.” So I thought that certainly the show writers had a bit of a challenge in the later seasons to still stick like a landing with the show and keep it relevant but not lose… The audience that they gained through all of this was for a sitcom audience and was for comedy. It wasn’t for the seriousness of politics. No one was watching the show as like a drama. It was entertainment. It was comedy. [chuckle]

0:27:01.6 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it would have been “two on the nose,” I think, for them to even include that joke, even if they weren’t like, “Oh, it just wouldn’t be as funny.” And I think that arrives at that moment, that Zach was talking about, which is I think that sixth season, where she’s out of power. It’s just there was… That was when Trump was happening. So I think people retired. They didn’t wanna think about politics. She was also… There was that low in the writing staff, and they are really lucky that they pulled it out for the seventh season as well, as they did ’cause it could have easily ended so, so poorly at that moment after the sixth season. But I think at that point, they were like, “We can invest in the seventh.” Yeah.

0:27:44.8 Zach Weissmueller: The way they made it work, I think, is that they didn’t just make Selina into Trump or even create a Trump-​like character. They just sort of did what they are so good at, which is to show you the incentives that these politicians face, and in this case, why is there… Why are there incentives for populism? Well, it’s because, partly in our media environment, saying these things that get a big rise out of a crowd, just that electrifying moment… Even in the earlier season, she accidentally goes, hard line anti-​immigration [chuckle] because she forgets what her motto is, and so she… She has the three Rs.

0:28:34.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay. [laughter]

0:28:34.1 Zach Weissmueller: And she forgets the last R, and the last R is “repel.” She just comes up with “repel” and she’s like, “We gotta repel all the immigrants out of here,” and then she gets a big reaction. And, I mean, that’s like, very Trumpy in a way. It’s like he just would throw stuff out there, and if something got a reaction, kinda like go with it. And so, we were seeing the nature of presidential politics, especially changing, as the show was going on, and it’s partly because I think, the nature of how media is changing for some reason, lends itself to populism. Yeah.

0:29:16.7 Landry Ayres: That moment where if it was… You’re talking about how politics was changing in that type of, what could have been a gaffe or a something that would have gone wrong can instead be something that people glom on to. It’s people being like, “I like Trump because he talks like a normal person,” as opposed to some very slick politician, whereas a few years before, you had Rick Perry do that exact thing in the presidential debate with the three agencies of government, and he forgets the last one.

0:29:48.8 Alex Muresianu: That’s probably what they’re parodying. Yeah.

0:29:50.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:29:50.6 Landry Ayres: Oh, yeah. And especially because, the way he did it was a perfect comedic gag. In the Rule of Three, he sets up one agency of government. He’s like, “I’m gonna get rid of these three. There’s this one, there’s the second one,” and he establishes a pattern, and then the third thing, he forgets. So it’s like a punch line to a joke, where they pull the rug out from under you. And he does that three times in the debate. [laughter] So he establishes a pattern within the pattern. And on the third time, he just gives up early, so it was this perfect comedic moment that they were able to play off of. But in today’s sort of political environment, they were right on the cusp, where they could see that… ‘Cause they could have very easily made that moment, something that everyone laughed at Selina for, and her campaign falls off and does terribly. But they were like, “Wait a minute.” And I think, this is one way that they were ahead of the curve and sort of seeing the signs of what was happening in politics as they were like, “Wait, someone could glom onto that, and be like, ‘I like the way she did that. I’m gonna… We’re actually gonna make that.’ ” And the twist of the episode is that, it works for her in the same way that something that Donald Trump might say, people would be like, “Oh, he messed up in the normal political sense, but we like that about him.”

0:31:16.7 Zach Weissmueller: I mean, yeah. The way they really run with that in the final season is with Jonah because he just becomes… He’s really like the Trumpiest character in the final season.

0:31:28.7 Natalie Dowzicky: I hate Jonah through the whole show.

0:31:30.1 Zach Weissmueller: He’s just… I mean, his big…

0:31:30.9 Landry Ayres: I love him because he’s the worst.

0:31:32.7 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, exactly.

0:31:34.1 Landry Ayres: Which makes sense. That’s exactly what we want him as a character to be, if he is the Trumpiest like Saxon.

0:31:40.6 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. Like his signature issue at the beginning, is abolishing Daylight Savings Time, which is like…

0:31:46.6 Landry Ayres: Saving time.

0:31:46.7 Zach Weissmueller: Everyone loves it. It’s so simple. And then, what you said about people want, would always talk about how Trump talked like a normal person or… I mean, not a normal person, but I guess, he didn’t speak in political lingo necessarily.

0:32:06.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:32:07.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:32:07.1 Zach Weissmueller: And that was Jonah ‘s appeal to the people of New Hampshire where he was from was he would just say the things people were thinking. And, yeah, so they really were able to adapt and kind of tap into the moment in an interesting way.

0:32:27.8 Alex Muresianu: Yeah, I think the strongest parallel with Trump and Jonah is his slogan, I believe, is the Outsiders’ Insider, which is very much like Trump’s pitch about being like, “I know all these people. I have donated to all of them.” That is very sort of similar. I will say also on the subject of like Veep in real life moments, another one has to be Rick Perry becoming director or becoming like…

0:33:01.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Yes, yes absolutely.

0:33:03.1 Alex Muresianu: In that note. [laughter]

0:33:05.7 Landry Ayres: Oh, my god.

0:33:05.9 Zach Weissmueller: I forgot. I forgot that he that was his job. I’m from Texas. He was my governor and I forgot.

0:33:14.0 Landry Ayres: I think I just blocked it out. It was too traumatic for me.

0:33:17.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Elandra mentioned this, the Nevada episode.

0:33:20.0 Landry Ayres: Nevada.

0:33:20.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Nevada. [chuckle] I sit there and I was like, oh, man, this is like teetering on the edge of PTSD from the last two months of 2020, which, you know, 2020 had a great year. We all had a fantastic year at home.

0:33:36.1 Landry Ayres: Nothing wrong with that.

0:33:37.7 Natalie Dowzicky: But I was sitting there and like there… I could just picture like ’cause she’s like video conferencing back and forth with Amy and was like, “Did you count the votes?” And then I’m thinking of like, they’re arguing over whether or not they voted for Selina and whether or not to count which vote and I’m thinking of like the hanging chads in 2000. And I’m like, oh, they really killed this one. Also, because it was Nevada because like Nevada was a state that was in contention in 2020 and they had to do a recount for. So I was like, I feel like the newscasters from 2020 probably could have, you know, contributed to the real life seriousness of this episode.

0:34:19.2 Landry Ayres: And then they have the… There was the stop every vote, stop counting of votes, count every vote switch, which was happening simultaneously in different states during 2020. You’ve got like Philadelphia, where they’re like, “Stop counting. We’re done.” And then there’s Nevada where they’re like, “We need to count all the votes, go.” So these like conflicting messages are happening in different parts of the country, whereas on Veep, they just happen to be happening right next to each other and then swapping. [chuckle]

0:34:48.8 Zach Weissmueller: Well, I think that was also true about the national conversation because on the Wednesday after the election, a bunch of the Trump people who I follow were like, “Look, you can’t drag us out. You can’t, I mean, you can’t just keep it going. You can’t have recounts forever. I mean, you know, and then like, the next day, they were like, “Well, you can’t stop like.” I could see that like immediate switch for for a lot of people.

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0:35:16.5 Landry Ayres: As people who are tangentially related to beltway goings on, at the very least, who do you identify with as a part of the show? Even if you’re not on a campaign or working in an office, who’s someone that if you were in their shoes, you’d be like, “That’s probably the kind of person that I would be”? Flaws and all. Really read yourself to filth here. [laughter] I’m gonna say Natalie is our Sue because if we didn’t have Natalie on our team, we just collapse underneath the weight of it all. She’s the recordkeeper. And it’s if anything goes wrong, we call Natalie. And we’re like, “What’s on the schedule?” And she’s like, “It’s this.” [laughter]

0:36:03.3 Natalie Dowzicky: I would say I’m probably Sue, Sue or occasionally Amy. Yeah.

0:36:09.5 Landry Ayres: Yes. If you need someone to like, you know, be like, “I need you to go yell at this person and make sure that this gets done like you would send Amy or something.

0:36:19.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Right. Yeah.

0:36:19.4 Landry Ayres: I’d be like Natalie, can you make a phone call for us?

0:36:21.6 Natalie Dowzicky: But I do want to give a little shoutout to Gary just because, you know, he is the best character. [laughter] I don’t have much to stand on why I think that way. I just think it’s so funny like that he always is like the butt of every joke or he always gets thrown under the bus. Also, his job is relatively pointless. You can’t… Selina says herself that he is literally useless, which he’s obviously not. But I just wanted to like give some love for Gary. I’m definitely not Gary and never will be Gary.

0:36:58.5 Landry Ayres: I think I’m a little Gary.

0:36:58.8 Natalie Dowzicky: You think so?

0:37:00.5 Landry Ayres: I think there’s a little part of me that’s… Just a little part of me that’s Gary. There’s also a little part of me that’s Jonah.

0:37:05.8 Zach Weissmueller: Gary and Splett are really the like only good-​hearted characters in the show. Gary is just… He’s just a total loyalist. He believes in Selina for some reason.

0:37:19.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:37:19.7 Zach Weissmueller: He might be like in love with her, but in some very strange, non-​sexual way. And he just will do anything for her and ultimately, like he does take the ultimate fall for her. So he’s like the martyr of the show. Yeah.

0:37:39.1 Alex Muresianu: I always liked Kent or awkward king. He is just so dry, and I don’t even… I would view comparing myself to Ken as aspirational. I would like to be that good with numbers of being like, you know, I always wished I was a little bit better at math than I am. But I just… His sort of general demeanor and like disinterest in, I guess, because he’s constantly pulling everything. He’s obsessed with what is politically relevant, but he has no like steak. He’s just a guy who’s like, “I just did the numbers and I just tell you what they say.” And they’re just so many good moments where he is taking something, just taking everything literally and not reading the subtext that everybody else in the room is. But I do like… One of my favorite Kent moments is that like Ben, it’s in the mother episode that we all watched that like when Den says something to Selina to console her and then Ken just sort of stares and goes, “Hmmm”. I recall you said those same words to me when my cat Fibonacci died. I found them very soothing. [laughter] I don’t know. I just love…

0:38:51.3 Landry Ayres: Those were written in a card to me. I agree with that. I also love that he’s a part of a biker gang, e-​fighter at one point an exclusively Spanish-​speaking biker gang too.

0:39:06.3 Zach Weissmueller: The one that I probably relate to the most, just being a part of the media is there’s the journalist who’s always trailing Selina’s campaign and interacting with Mike. And they have this contentious relationship where he’s always trying to get what’s really going on and Mike is just badly spinning him. I enjoy those little relationships that they portray in that they need each other. And Mike is obviously terrible at his job and constantly spills secrets that he is not supposed to, but yeah, I enjoy that little interaction just because of the dance between the PR person and the journalist where they’re just constantly trying to put things in the rosiest light possible. Even when it’s clear, everything’s falling apart.

0:40:08.5 Landry Ayres: I take it all back. I am 100% Mike McLintock now that I remember Mike, just a fool, trying to keep it all together and make it seem like he has got so much under control and is so wise, but it’s just… The scenes of him over time when he talks about adopting the child from China and they are gonna get it, so he’s redoing the basement and then they aren’t gonna get it, so he turns it into a media room, and then they end up getting the child. So they have to move the bedroom into that tiny room, and he’s like, “Oh, I gotta check for his best ’cause I haven’t done that yet.” [laughter] All of those things, I was like, that would be me if I was in that scenario.

0:40:52.7 Zach Weissmueller: I feel like Mike is also kind of an underrated as… I wouldn’t say he’s as good-​hearted as a Richard Splett, but he isn’t like nefarious. He is not particularly like scheming.

0:41:07.2 Alex Muresianu: He’s just a fool.

0:41:09.1 Zach Weissmueller: And he’s just like a guy who is bad at his job, which I guess is like a continuum, I guess, of competence. I guess to Landry’s point at the beginning about the contrasting and sort of high competence and high malevolent versus benevolence that on the show, I think there’s a pretty strong correlation with semi-​competence and nefarious intent that Mike is too clueless to be a schemer so like that’s.

0:41:43.1 Landry Ayres: He just wants to work in the NHL.

0:41:46.9 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, yeah.

0:41:49.1 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. So Alex, Zack, anything?

0:42:00.9 Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. This is… It feels like a lot of people are reading this book right now, but The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri is a really interesting book that is also does a lot to explain our moment. He’s a former CIA analyst who studied the way that media created various revolutions around the world, the Arab Spring, and contributed to the rise of Trump, and just the way that with the fall of the traditional gatekeepers, that there’s an inability to keep information locked down and highly relevant in the era of COVID as well, when experts have put out guidance that’s not always been 100% and the public sniffs it out right away, and it just creates this cycle of distrust. So really interesting book and I recommend it to anyone who wants a better understanding of what’s going on right now ’cause I feel like it gave me some clarity.

0:43:17.9 Alex Muresianu: Yeah. I’m trying to think of movies that I’ve watched recently that I’d like to go through. I guess with the Oscars last night or two nights ago, how I hadn’t seen any of them and evidently not a lot of other people did just give that as the lowest watch. And I’ve read a lot of takes about how movies are increasingly stratified between like you have your mega super hero, Star Wars, Blockbuster and weird indie movie, which I find unfortunate because I think I like very much middle band types and movies like buddy cop movies and stuff like that. So I guess movies that I like that are in that middle range that people might not have… Might have heard of and not seen or if you were like a movie buff, you’ve probably seen them, but a big fan of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was Robert Downey Junior’s comeback movie in 2005. It’s him and Val Kilmer and it’s like a newer LA comedy. It’s sort of like if you like the nice guys, it’s the same director as the nice guys. If you like the nice guys, you will also like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It’s great. He’s like… Robert Downey, Junior plays like a thief who bumbles into an audition for some cop movie, and so he gets assigned to work with a detective to learn to prepare for part and then they get caught up in you know, crime and high jinks.

0:44:46.1 Alex Muresianu: Yeah, what else? Oh, I’m a big fan of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Last Stand, which came out in 2013 which was supposed to be his like I think big comeback movie after he was governor. Did not do particularly well. But basically, it’s like a modern Western almost. He plays like a small town sheriff in Arizona and there’s like some drug lord is like escaped and is heading towards the border and Arnold Schwarzenegger towns the last town between the god fugitive and the border. And it’s like he… It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger doing a Clint Eastwood impression…

0:45:23.6 Landry Ayres: Oh my.

0:45:24.7 Alex Muresianu: Which is should it just as a concept be fantastic and I think it is. It’s just like very over the top and ridiculous, especially the second half of the movie but I have a very good time watching it. I’ve seen it like a bazillion times. It’s just so fun.

0:45:40.4 Natalie Dowzicky: So it’s very Arnold Schwarzenegger if it’s very over the top, that’s just…

0:45:44.3 Alex Muresianu: Yes, yes.

0:45:44.9 Natalie Dowzicky: That’s his style.

0:45:46.6 Landry Ayres: Excuse you, Natalie. Put some respect on his name.

0:45:49.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Alright.

0:45:50.0 Landry Ayres: He is the actor known for the film, Kindergarten Cop.

0:45:54.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Actually, his favorite performance to me is Jingle All the Way.

0:46:00.2 Alex Muresianu: Jingle All the Way… Love it. Yep. Yep.

0:46:04.8 Natalie Dowzicky: For me, the other stuff I’ve been doing, I started a new book this week called The Things We Do For Love. It is not World War II fiction. So I’m taking a World War II fiction break, but have no fear, the next one that I read…

0:46:17.0 Landry Ayres: Wow it’s a big moment.

0:46:17.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Will be World War II fiction. I already… The problem was like I didn’t reserve it at the library in time and there was like a kerfuffle and the schedule was off. Anyway, I also, you know, I spent the last three weeks watching Veep. I haven’t watched much else. But I am hoping with after seeing some of the Oscars stuff, I didn’t actually watch the Oscars. I just watched people talk about the Oscars like on Twitter. I do want to get… I do want to see The Father with Anthony Hopkins. I’ve heard good things. And I do want to get to watch Menari. Those two are high on my list. So hopefully by our next recording, I’ll have feedback for both of those.

0:47:01.7 Landry Ayres: I finished Red Dead Redemption 2 for the PlayStation four. It was phenomenal story. I loved it, had a great time. I think it’s an amazing game if you’re at all interested in cowboys or anything like that. I think you should play Red Dead Redemption 2. And I needed another game to play after that so I just started The Last of Us, which is, you know, comes highly recommended. They’re going to make it. I believe it’s an HBO series with Pedro Pascal in the lead role. Great story so far, harder than I thought it was going to be. I had to switch to easy mode, which I do not do.

0:47:41.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Wow.

0:47:42.0 Landry Ayres: I do not do proudly but I thought I could do normal. I couldn’t. I think I’d been playing too much like cowboy games. I thought I could just run the gun through it. But no, you have to be sneaky. And I also started reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which is a really, really great book. I think Julian Sanchez actually recommended it on a previous episode of Pop & Locke so go back and find that one because I wouldn’t be able to summarize what’s going on in it for you so far ’cause I still don’t really know, but I think he did. So maybe go back and listen to that if you’re curious about what the book’s about, but it is very well written. And I also am going to start Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, a classic sort of Western epic novel that I’m very, very excited to read.

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0:48:33.3 Landry Ayres: 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, lock 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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