#343. Dudes Chatting: The Episode
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With Mike sidelined this week, Sonny and JVL turn in a loose, review-free "dudes chatting" episode that spends its whole runtime on shaggy-dog banter and family-movie mishaps rather than a single verdict. They open with Sonny's saga of his daughter's cotillion and the competitive-mom sociology of the after-party, his admission that he groggily brushed his teeth with a tube of Icy Hot, and JVL's exhausting battle against a 20-inch snowstorm after every plow guy in town ghosted him. JVL then previews a pet novel pitch about vampires as inevitable real-estate tycoons thanks to centuries of compound interest, which spirals into a long riff with Sonny about AI eventually gaining legal personhood, running untouchable insider-trading hedge funds, and Anthropic's real-life Claude vending-machine experiment run amok, plus some shared eye-rolling at Sam Altman's messianic self-regard. After a grim detour through Richard Rushfield's doom-laden Hollywood newsletter, the two dig into the episode's real subject: JVL's crushing discovery that his kids were bored stiff by Raiders of the Lost Ark despite loving Jurassic Park, Cool Runnings, and Much Ado About Nothing, prompting a debate over whether "old" period settings, rather than genre trappings, are what turn kids off. Sonny counters with his own triumph showing his daughter Men in Black, which he argues still plays because it feels contemporary, and the pair trade notes on when kids are ready for Casablanca, The Godfather, Jaws, and The Dark Knight. They close by marveling at Tracy Morgan's chaotic comic genius -- Sonny recalling a real college stand-up show where Morgan heckled a father out of the room with his kids in tow -- as JVL's older children fall in love with 30 Rock's Tracy Jordan.
From the show notes
Mike's out this week so Sonny and JVL just chatted like dudes for an hour. From a terrible toothpaste to AI vampires to our kids not appreciating great cinema to the manic comic genius of Tracy Morgan, this episode has everything!
Full transcript
Sonny00:00:00Well, I guess we don't have Mike here to do the the intro.
JVL00:00:13Oh, that's right. One of us has to drive. Do you want to drive or do you want me to drive?
Sonny00:00:18I can drive. OK, why don't you drive?
JVL00:00:21Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Sub-Beacon. I'm JVL here with Sonny Bunch, and we don't have Mike this week. No, Mike. And that is really not even his fault. There was no way to do the show this week with all three of us. And since I took last week off, we figured Mike should have this week off.
Sonny00:00:46Yeah. So I'm going to have to I'm going to have to take a week off in a couple of weeks.
JVL00:00:49So we're just rotating. Yeah. Rotating through, you know, just one of those things. So, you know, hit like hit subscribe. What do we say? What do we tell you? Go to subscribe to the Sub-Beacon, whatever.
Sonny00:01:02OK. Sub-Beacon dot com. Sub-Beacon dot com.
JVL00:01:07Sonny, how are you, buddy? What's going on? We haven't talked since.
Sonny00:01:11It's been two weeks, probably. It's been two weeks. It's been two weeks. Things are fine. So to two things that have happened to me this week that are that are not really related, but maybe kind of related. I don't know. So my daughter is 10. We're gonna be talking about we're gonna be talking about our children and introducing them to various things this week. My daughter is 10 and in fifth grade and as a 10 year old in fifth grade, she did what many children in Texas and in the South did. She partook in cotillion. You know what cotillion is, JBL? Do they have that in New York City? I assume it's in
JVL00:01:53in South Jersey. We had coming out balls. Same basic. Well, same. We did them senior
Sonny00:02:01year in high school. We did. Yeah, no, it's it's a little it's a little different than that. It's kind of like. I don't I don't even know. It's like etiquette class. It's like
JVL00:02:11etiquette class is what it's like. So it's like a fork. Kind of. But it's like the kids
Sonny00:02:17all. So the kids in the class, they all go to these. They go to these courses and they learn how to do various dances and they they, you know, learn about how to, you know, be polite and, you know, talk, talk to people, look them in the eye and stuff, whatever. It's like it's I don't know. It's like a fun little it's basically they get to hang out and they dance a little bit and then, you know, they they have they have fun. But the this all culminates in a in a thing that the parents all go to where we we they they perform they they we show we see their dances and they do the dances and then and then the parent of the opposite gender dances with their child. So if your son is there and dance mom, oh, daddy daughter dance and we have daddy daughter dances, but it's not it's not like a daddy daughter dance. I've been to those. This is different. This is it's but it's it's not it's not unlike that anyway. So this this thing is it's kind of interesting. As just a sociological matter, because, you know, the the the the thing where we're at the ballroom and everybody's kind of dancing, it's like pleasingly dorky really is what it is. It's like it's like sweet and pleasingly dorky and like kind of fun. And then after that, the the everybody there goes to a second location where there's like a party, like there's food and dinner and, you know, there's a cash bar and there's it's actually the KC Club. It's the can't the Knights of Columbus. That's a Columbus bar pool club. And this is where things get interesting because, you know, it's it's like any school. There are cliques and the parents in the school, some of them have lived here for generations. Oh, JBL. There's there are generations of of parents from my were there back when J. R. Ewing was just a young pup. Well, really. But they're all Dallas. No, but they're all younger than that, though. They're all like it's you know, they're they're you know, and they're they're younger than I am. Right. They're like, you know, most of them are kind of in their in their 30s. Like, you know, people people have kids a little younger down here. It's interesting. But the but there's like there's like a clique of the popular kids and are in the popular moms. Really, it's the moms. It's the moms. It's the moms.
JVL00:04:52Yeah. And is this a milk manifested? What's that? Is this a milf discussion? No. Is that where this is heading? No, not not precisely. Not precisely. But it's basically that like
Sonny00:05:06they're all trying to out milf each other. There's definitely there's certainly an element of competitive grooming going on, I would say, amongst amongst the moms. But the but this manifests itself in weird ways with the kids where, like, for instance, the whole the talent show every year is a fucking nightmare power struggle where there's this one mom who's like Queen Bee and like is always putting her kid and her friend or kids friends and like the front of the performance area. And they they all go to the same dance studio. You know, it's. And so they do pageants. I don't know. No, not pageants. Pageants are pageants are very out. It's like dance teams. You know, it's like that. That sort of thing. So so this this again, this once again, you know, kind of manifests itself not at the at the like, again, kind of dorky event that is run by an organization like there's an organization that runs it and like they they teach the kids and they. But at the after party that was organized by by the moms where there's a DJ and the DJ is playing the songs that these girls all know from their dance routines and they go out there and they do their dances together and everybody like just kind of stands around and looks at them like, OK, I guess this is what we're doing now. And it was it was it's again, it's just very interesting thing where I like I was like having, you know, a fine enough time at the first thing again, not really my cup of tea, but pleasing and and nerdy and kind of dorky. And we get to this other thing and it's just like, what? What are you fucking people doing? I just like it's at that point that I just sat down and started drinking because because I didn't want to have to. I did. I just couldn't I couldn't deal with the nonsense. But it is it is fairly it's this weird representative thing that is hard to describe, but comes up in unexpected situations. Just put it that
JVL00:07:16way. Yeah. And it's so this is a birth parody thing. Yeah, I think because I when my two oldest were quite young, I saw all of these social dynamics playing out around parent groups. But now I'm the old parent because, you know, I know G money is still like a little kid. He's in fourth grade. Right, right. And so now if I am in a room with a bunch of parents of fourth graders. For the kids who's like, that's their oldest. I might as well be a grandparent. Yeah, look at me like, oh, that guy is so old. It's hideous. What is he doing? And they're still like then you'll see the the mom's doing competitive grooming and stuff like that. But once your belt, once you're in the back half of your kids, you just like everybody just too burnt out to care. Yeah, it's also none of the parents care anymore
Sonny00:08:19by kid three and four. I think that's definitely there's definitely some of that at play. It's also just like it depends on what group of friends that your your your kids like. I have a son as well, right? My son is in first grade and he is he is his boy. So it's different just off the bat. It's it's different. But he also has like a good core group of friends who he plays all the sports with and like that's what they do. They like, you know, some of them are better than others and like it. It's neither here nor there. It's just, you know, it's just for fun. But but there is not that same. I assume that there is somebody in the first grade who was doing this sort of thing. But we are like totally it's totally invisible to us because it's all happening on the girl's side. Yeah, it's it's all happening on the girl's side. It's all happening on the girl's side. So anyway, so it is one of these things where like I this may come and maybe this all sounds like sour grapes like I wish I was. But I certainly do not wish I was part of any of that at all. It's just very funny to watch sociologically. But then a thing happened to me that made me realize I don't deserve to be in this group at all, even if I wanted to be in the popular group because I came walked up and said, has anybody
JVL00:09:34here seen the movie? The lockdown, what is it? Not the last days of disco. What is your Whit Stillman movie that you insisted was the greatest metropolitan? Has anybody here seen Metropolitan recently? Hey, we all
Sonny00:09:49watch Metropolitan over Christmas break, right? What did you guys think of? Yeah, no, that no, I didn't do that. No, it was it was after it was it was it wasn't even the same. It was a different different day, but it was my wife has been out of town. So like I'm kind of out of sorts. I'm, you know, shuffling through the day, getting the kids to all the events. I'm exhausted by the end of it. Went to bed last night. Or maybe maybe it was two nights ago and went to go brush my teeth and I'm brushing my teeth and I'm like, oh, that's a weird minty. Flavor and realized very quickly that I was brushing my teeth with Icy Hot. Oh, no, I had, you know, the Icy Hot tube looks exactly like my toothpaste tubes. It looks all I have. I have three tubes up there. Two of them are toothpaste tubes. One of them is the Icy
JVL00:10:38Hot tube. And I'm like, what do you do to neutralize that before it starts destroying your mouth? Like, did you put milk? Did you start gargling with milk? Immediately spit it out. Immediately threw away my toothbrush head. Sure. But even water isn't going to get
Sonny00:10:53because it's all oily. So I immediately start. I brushed it again with water. Did you wipe
JVL00:11:00it? Because I was wiping with like a wet, damp washcloth might have a lot of spit, a
Sonny00:11:06lot of a lot of a lot of swore, you know, gurgling and spitting. Use the mouthwash girl and spat that. And then I went to the milk and just poured myself several glasses of milk. And and washed out my it mostly I'll be honest. It was not as bad as I imagined it could have been. I would say I this is a fear. This has been a constant fear of mine ever since I got a thing of Icy Hot that looks like a tooth toothpaste tube and it just stands there on my car. And I'm like, one of these days I'm going to do this. One of these days I'm going to accidentally because I've almost done it in the past. I've almost done it in the past. And I finally did it. I finally did it this week. Wasn't enough to scare you straight. And I, you know, in the first couple of times that I accidentally reached for the Icy Hot and I like I took it and put it under the counter. I was like, I got to put this I got to keep this under the counter because I'm going to make a mistake here one of these days. Sure enough. Sure enough, I did. So anyway, that's why I'm not in the cool kids club is because I wash I use Icy Hot as toothpaste. One of the saddest things I've ever heard. It's it's a it was I'll say again, I thought it would be much worse than it was. My my mouth was a little bit numb. My tongue was was a little bit numb, but it didn't burn the way I thought it would. Well, that's good. I wouldn't recommend it. No, wouldn't wouldn't recommend doing this path precisely. But it was it could have been much worse. Could have been much worse. JBL, how are you? How was you? You live in the the the wastes of the
JVL00:12:39north. There's snow. We got a lot of snow. And I I just reconciled myself that this was that this was finally this was too much snow to to do ourselves. We got 20 inches overnight. And so with the the last big snow we got, which was 16 inches, it came during the day. So what we were able to do was we just like every hour or so we go out and take off a couple inches. Right. And so we were able to keep it manageable. Right. This was you just you went to bed. It had just started sleeting and you woke up and everything was anyway. So I was just like, you know, we're going to break down. I'm going to call somebody to come plow us out. And I spent all day calling around to plow guys and they ghosted me one
Sonny00:13:34after another. Were you able to actually get them on the phone and agree to come do your yes driveway and then they just never came. Yes. Multiple times this happened.
JVL00:13:46Yes. Oh my God. And, uh, and so I didn't get on the phone. I got them on text. I finally called, uh, a commercial snow removal service at like 9:00 PM Monday night. And I said, Hey, I look, I understand you guys are commercial. You don't do residential. And the guy's like, yeah, we don't. I said, do you know anybody who does residential? And this guy, like he, he, I could feel him over the phone, shaking his head slowly. And he says, you know, I tried to get somebody to do my aunt. The last storm we had guy never even showed up. It's impossible to get these residential guys to ever show up. It's a known problem. It is a known problem. And so I wound up out there. I know these people are out there. I know they exist. I see them driving around in their Ford F one fifties with plows hitched to the front. Uh, but, uh, so I, we went and did it ourselves and it was horrible. I can imagine
Sonny00:14:53it was horrible. I can almost, that's not what does, what does 20 inches of snow across your entire driveway way? Would you say, would you say you moved more than one ton of snow?
JVL00:15:05We were trying to work this out. Uh, and flash did some back of the envelope, uh, volume calculations. And so he, so he was saying, okay, the driveway is, let's say the driveway is 200 feet long. Uh, it's about 11 feet across on average. And then, so that's like the, this is like an SAT problem. It's like 220 square feet. So 200 square, 20 square feet for the drive part. But then when you get up to the top of the driveway, you have a square area. That's probably like 40 feet by 40 feet. So, uh, so now we're at another 1600, 1600. So the first one is, is 2,200, I think. Right. 200 feet by 11. No, maybe
Sonny00:16:06not. Maybe, maybe it's yeah. 200 feet. You said 20 feet. Is it 200 feet or 20 feet? It's like 200 feet. Oh yeah. No, that's, that's, uh, 200 feet by 11 feet is a 2,200. Right. So let's just say 5,000 square feet, 5,000 square
JVL00:16:22by, and we're just, we're just going to shorten it to a foot and a half of snow. We're going to take off a couple of like, this is a lot of cubic feet of snow is the answer. So that
Sonny00:16:33would be 7,500 cubic feet of snow. Something like that. Okay. Not fun. Uh, so I want to,
JVL00:16:42I want to, but I want to do something different because we don't have Mike here to worry about boring him. I would like to preview something with you that I'm writing for tomorrow. Ooh. Uh, and it is about AI. Ooh. And vampires. Ooh. And it is bringing together a long time obsession of mine about vampires. I have always wanted to write a vampire novel. Okay. In which the vamp, which is really about real estate. Sure. Because my, my big idea about a vampire is that if you, if vampires were real, they would wind up basically as the richest people in the world, because since they are immortal and their investment timeline is essentially infinite. Yes. Uh, they can simply amass capital and the compound interest nature of these. Things over the course of centuries would make them rich in ways that no humans could ever approach. Yes. And so like the real estate holdings of count Dracula, right? This is what he should be spending all of his time on. Sure. It's simply accumulating real estate and then leveraging that into banking concerns, et cetera, et cetera.
Sonny00:18:05Well, this is what his, uh, this is what his helper would have to be doing. He'd have to get like a, you know, his, his, uh, his Igor or whatever would have to be. In addition to, in addition to like tracking down new bio virgins to suck the blood of would also have to be a CPA and a real estate agent.
JVL00:18:22Well, I mean, again, I just feel like you could, you could finesse all that by working nights. Okay. I'm saying that if I was a vampire, I would be much more concerned with becoming rich as fuck. And I feel like I could do that. Okay. Uh, and so this is, again, it's something I've thought a lot about over the course of decades. And uh, one of my many fears about AI is what happens when AIs are granted certain legal rights. For instance, at some point, some governing body somewhere, maybe it'll be the government of Macedonia, right? Maybe it'll be Macau or something like that. We'll pass a law allowing AIs to own property. And execute contracts. Okay. So they can run businesses, basically a, a corporation that is the AI, the AI is the corporation. And because they are like vampires immortal, they will eventually own everything because their investment time horizons are so long. Yes. And uh, even if they're not smart, you don't have the point is the immortality means you don't even have to be good at it. Sure. You can just do average returns on investment and, but because you have hundreds of years to compound that at your, your advantage is enormous. And uh, but they do have, so what I would like to do, what I would like is a sci-fi novel in which what AIs turn out to do is they turn out to be to own businesses and to be tremendously good at insider trading because an AI can't be prosecuted.
Sonny00:20:12For insider trading. And so well, if an AI can execute a contract, can't an AI be prosecuted
JVL00:20:19for various crimes? Well, that is interesting. The notion of crime requires intent and nobody knows how AI works, even the people who build AI. Right. And so you need an entire new set of laws of criminal law, right? Because so administrative law can come to conclusions about the guilt of something. Of so of somebody for, for breaking something, because it doesn't involve questions of intent. Criminal law necessarily involves intent. And so you'd have to prove what they were doing, but also unlike, unlike a vampire who could be subject to criminal law, because you could say you could lock a vampire up for 20 years. Sure. Right. You, you could say, sorry, Mr. Dracula, you have to, we've convicted you of insider trading or real estate fraud. You have to go to the AI. You can't do that. Like, it's just out there. Doesn't live anywhere. Can all I'm saying is I think you could get a super nerdy Matt Levine like column, but at novel length version in which the AIs don't even have to be all powerful. They could just be like good at insider trading and they, you know, they're able to get to a 4% return on stuff. You know, they run a hedge fund. Like the Renaissance capital people, their AI that does all their flash trading becomes its own incorporated entity and it's able to grind out 4% returns year over year, decade after decade. And by diversifying its portfolio, it becomes the richest single entity on earth with a net value approaching like the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Sonny00:22:06I do think on the vampire portion of this, I do think that. This has been, I want to say either true blood or maybe it was the Anne Rice books dealt with this in certain in certain ways, like the classic, the classic thing is for a vampire to own a property and to want to come to come back to it and live in it again, often after going away for a certain amount of time living somewhere else. And they say they're the sun and they show like photos or they say they're the grandson. You know, I'm the great grandson of whoever. And they, you know, through through various legal machinations, you just turn
JVL00:22:50that into a rental. You don't ever sell it. You turn it into a rental. That's how that's
Sonny00:22:55the secret, right? The secret sauce here. Yeah. Yeah, I think that the AI, the AI question is kind of interesting, just because I do. I do wonder. I mean, the idea of the idea of an AI kind of being its own corporate entity and performing functions on its own is interesting. But there is the question is the question is, I don't know, severability, right? Like so like somebody has to create the AI and but does the AI like sue for emancipation? Can it say I could do this better?
JVL00:23:35So this is so I have to think that at some point what will happen is somebody will endow the AI with it, right? And the idea will be to endow the AI as if it were its own corporation with and it becomes its own board of governors, et cetera, et cetera. It won't happen in America, but out there like it's a big fucking world. It's weird. It is, right? And uh, some, some municipality somewhere will allow. And once that happens, well, I don't know who's to say that, uh, Jamie diamonds, chase, you know, JP Morgan, whatever the Jamie diamonds, somebody, a different bank, you know, Goldman Sachs can't execute trades against them. Sure. Right. They're outselling they're selling shares that they own of, uh, Nvidia chips. Well, can't Goldman buy shares from them? You know, it's, it all gets really weird, really fast. I was thinking a lot about this from, um, did you read the big New Yorker piece about Claude the anthropologist? The anthropic AI? No. So, uh, one of the most interesting things about it, uh, is that the anthropic people have done an experiment with this, with their, uh, company, the vending
Sonny00:24:56machine in the company dining room. And so I did see this, but yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
JVL00:25:02Yeah. So they put, they put Claude in charge of it, the business of the vending machine
Sonny00:25:07and the results have been hilariously funny.
JVL00:25:09Um, in part because the people who work there are a bunch of psychopaths. And so they tried to get Claude, uh, source methamphetamines and like illegal things. And, but also funny because Claude winds up hallucinating things. And so Claude says, uh, you know, I had a phone conversation with this person and this person's like, that's not true. And you know, but anyway, uh, and it's funny because of how silly it is, but also it's not hard to see how at some point AI will be sophisticated enough to just like run a small business of some sort or, but more importantly, to run a financial portfolio. Sure. This is because that's essentially what Renaissance capital is. It's just AI. You know, we don't call it AI. It's an algorithm. It's algorithmic flash trading, but it's the same thing. The algorithms they have built are seeing signals in the data that the people who program them don't understand themselves. And that's, you know, we don't call the Renaissance stuff AI, but that's what it is. And why couldn't it just be its own thing?
Sonny00:26:25Weren't the, weren't the Claude vending machines being filled with like the worst food imaginable to like, wasn't there, there was some weird, like the things that did end up going in there were either terrible or like too good or something.
JVL00:26:38Well, so it, but it was being responsive to requests. So it was wired into the anthropic corporate slack. Mm-hmm and it's a lot of this was because people were just fucking with it. And so people would say, oh, I really like you to get a medieval flail, right? But I'd like you to stock weapons. I was saying no. And then somebody was like, I would like a bag of russet, a 20 pound bag of russet potatoes. And so Claude was like, okay, I'll source that. And, but they would, these were not genuine requests. These were requests being made in order to sort of have fun with the AI. And I have to think that'll come back to haunt
Sonny00:27:18these people. Once Skynet becomes self-aware when, when Skynet remembers about the, the russet russet russet potato prank. Um, the, uh, I know the, the thing I was most taken by this week was Sam Altman, uh, uh, being like, Oh, the matrix, you know, you know what takes a lot of time and energy to program. You know, you talk about these data centers. Have you ever fed a, a bag of meat and bones for 20 years until it was self-sufficient? Like you fucking psycho. You, you like the problem with these guys is that they do, they do genuinely believe that they are profits of a kind. They believe they are on the absolute bleeding edge of the, the coming singularity. They've all read too much fucking Kurtzweil like I, I read Ray Kurtzweil when I was a freshman in college too, and it blew my mind and then I got over it. And like these guys never got over it. And, um, the, uh, the extent to which they are all messianic figures in their own minds is the most troubling thing about them is like the thing that I actually worry. I worry about that much more than I worry about the AIs themselves. Do you remember what?
JVL00:28:37Altman's initial pitch for the business case for open AI was no. So when he was first going around with a pitching open AI, uh, and the, the obvious question was, and so how do you make money? Right. Right. And his answer was, well, we'll build super intelligence and then
Sonny00:29:03we'll ask it how to make money and then we'll ask it to make money. That's right. Yeah.
JVL00:29:07Yeah. That was his, his genuine no fooling answer was, yeah, yeah. So we'll build God and then we'll ask God how to make money and he'll know. Cause that's what God wants to
Sonny00:29:18do. That's my, that was actually my takeaway from the Bible is that if you, if you, if God exists, he's mostly interested in making a humanity wealthy and happy. Well, this is
JVL00:29:32so, but this is why I've talked about inside trading. So do you read Matt Levine, the
Sonny00:29:37Bloomberg columnist? I don't. I mean, I read them when you send us the emails, but I don't
JVL00:29:41subscribe to them. So, so he, he had a very funny column about open AI at one point. And he's like, you know, the funniest thing in the world, he said, was the idea that we're going to invent super intelligence. And then the way we're going to monetize it is by selling monthly subscriptions to access it for 1999. It's like, cause that's the craziest fucking thing anybody's ever come up with, which is currently what open AI is doing. But he said, you know, at the same time, you could see the world in which Sam Altman has the power to create giant movement in the markets. So he sits down at that conference in India and in the same interview, he says something like, yeah, it's gonna be massively disrupting to anybody who does software as a service. And the next day, the stock prices of, uh, IBM and 15 other big, big ticket corporations drops by 10%. Right. If you were a self-aware chat GPT or something that was your own company and you had the power to move markets like that, you could just buy a bunch of put options and then the next day say like, Hey, I think we're close to getting blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Watch all those stocks. You just do market manipulation over and over and over and you would be because all day long. Yes. It is a perfect insider trading machine. Yeah. And I anyway, I would find that funny. Nobody
Sonny00:31:12else maybe cares about this stuff, but I care. I care. Moving on. I want to get rid of all
JVL00:31:18of it. Yeah. Throw it in the trash. When I say I did not look up any box office. I don't even know if there are movies and movie theaters anymore. No movies anymore. I read Richard Rutschfeld's state of state of Hollywood newsletter that last night. Bad.
Sonny00:31:35That was depressing. Yikes. That was depressing. Richard's been in a bad place. You know, sometimes JBL goes to the dark place. Richard's been in his dark place for like six months now. It's been there for years. Well, yeah, but it was always kind of like a. And he's right. It was always it was always a happy warrior dark place. Yeah. With Richard. And now I think it's a. Oh, everything's coming to an end. Dark.
JVL00:32:05Place. He was right. This is the thing. Richard really has been Cassandra. He saw where streaming would inevitably lead. And he saw me. He saw this 10 years ago. Yeah. And was right about it. Yeah. Hey, but we're going to talk about children in classics because I had something happen to me that I wanted to talk to Sonny about because it's you were scarred by the core. You were scarred me to my very core. Please tell. Please tell people what happened. As it was snowing. I was casting about for a awesome, awesome fun movie to show my family something that none of the kids had ever seen, something that would touch all of them from ages nine to 17. And I realized by Jiminy, I've never shown them Raiders of the Lost Ark because I was never at a place where it's age appropriate for all of them. And nine is still close.
Sonny00:33:04Nine is still a close run thing for the, the face melting scene.
JVL00:33:09Right, right. But I was like, gee, money can handle it. Like he's gotten good. And, uh, so I'm gonna put that. I was like, guys, prepare to have your minds blown. Absolute classic. I put it on and my kids were practically, I mean, they weren't literally staring at their watches the entire time, but they might as well have been. And it left every one of totally mystified as to why this movie was regarded as a classic. They were not entertained by it. They were not tickled by it. They did not like anything about it. None of them laughed at any of the, that's not true. G money laughed when he shoots the swordsman in the, in the, the,
Sonny00:34:00the, the,
JVL00:34:01the, in the bazaar, right? He laughed at that. If the storm doesn't, you know, Harrison Ford just pulls out. It's got nonchalant and pops him, but everything else there. And it isn't the case that my children don't like. It isn't the case that like they need fast movies or because I'm going to tell you three other movies that my children have watched with me within the last month. And that they all loved Jurassic Park. Okay. Cool Runnings and the Kenneth Branagh Much Ado About Nothing. These are all. These are three wildly different movies. Wildly different. Yeah. They are none of them like super. I mean, Jurassic Park is fast paced, but it's not, you know, it's not like kinetic cutting. It is still a master class in direction of what my kids loved. All all three of those. They thought they were happy to like, hey, well, we got to watch. Cool Runnings again. That thing was great. But what have I done something wrong? Is there a is there a problem that. Raiders is so foundational to modern movie making that my children saw it and saw it as the imitation. And all of the other echoes of it that they've seen throughout their lives and other mediums, they they just. Do you those things as the real thing? Sonny, help me make sense of this.
Sonny00:35:38So this is like the joke about Casablanca, right? Is a guy sits down, watch Casablanca for the first time, says that's fucking hack, man. All the it's got all these cliches in it. You know, yes. You know, here's looking at you, kid. Come on. What are we what are we doing here? Wait.
JVL00:35:57I thought about Rick is just a rip off of Han Solo.
Sonny00:36:00I've thought about this, thought about this a lot, JBL. And it's not the case. It's not the case that they don't like they like Star Wars, right? They like the original Star Wars.
JVL00:36:13G money does. The others do not care for Star Wars.
Sonny00:36:18Interesting, because I do think there's a similar thing at work here, which is. Raiders of the Lost Ark, kind of like Star Wars, is itself both of these things. Are an homage to an older type of thing, right? They're they're both homages to the serials of the 1950s. Star Wars, of course, sci fi adventure, you know, Flash Gordon, whatever. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the you know, the the adventure serials. And that means that baked into their DNA is a slowness compared to what we watch today, right? Like they they are they are certainly they're certainly slower movies in, as you say, the rhythm of the cutting and the the. The way the story unfolds. And Raiders in particular is interesting because it is just a series of set pieces that is kind of stitched together by a nonsense plot, right? Like this is I'm reading this. I interviewed this. This guy, Paul Fisher, who has a new book out about Copeland and Spielberg and Lucas. And there's there's just a bit at the end where they're talking about actually writing Raiders of the Lost Ark. And what happened was they Lucas and Spielberg went to Lawrence Kasdan and were like, here are the things we want in this movie.
JVL00:37:52And it was just like a giant stone ball.
Sonny00:37:56No, like literally like a hero gets chased by ball in, you know, cave. Or like Nazis open Ark of Covenant and kill everybody. You know, that sort of thing. Marion drink drinking in bar like that. That that is. So that's like they had these ideas and they needed something to stitch the plot together. And so if you are a person who watches a movie for plot. It is not it may not be a successful thing. Now, my problem, my problem when you told me this. I was also horrified because I do think Raiders of the Lost Ark is pretty much a perfect movie. It is not the best movie ever made. It's not even the best movie made by these. Filmmakers, these these creators of filmed entertainments. But it is a perfect movie in that it it I just talked about how slow it is. It's not slow. It's fast. It goes from scene to scene to scene. It goes from it like the thing glides on rails. There are no wasted moments. The amount of plot that it is. That is in it is the precise minimum that you need to keep the story flowing. The MacGuffin is a great MacGuffin. Like, I'm sorry. Like the idea of like greatest MacGuffin of all time. Some would say the Nazis. The Nazis are searching for the Jewish source of power to destroy the world. It's it's perfect. It's the perfect MacGuffin. And of course, there's the Harrison Ford of it all. And this led me to my. Most horrifying realization, which is that Harrison Ford does not work for them.
JVL00:39:40So you might think that, but my older two, when they watched The Fugitive, loved Harrison Ford and The Fugitive.
Sonny00:39:52Interesting.
JVL00:39:53G Money loves Han Solo. G Money particularly loves New Hope Han Solo. G. G Money regards even Empire Strikes Back Han Solo as like, oh, what happened to him? He looks so old.
Sonny00:40:11Kind of a lovelorn sissy? Just old. Oh.
JVL00:40:15You know, he's like, they, my children get very disconcerted seeing movie, movie actors at different ages. And they're always like, what happened? I'm like, what happened to him? 20 years went by. That's what happened to him. He lived.
?00:40:29He lived.
JVL00:40:30He lived.
Sonny00:40:31Okay. All right. Another. Another possible.
JVL00:40:34What do you think you're going to look like in 20 years? G Money.
Sonny00:40:37You little shit. All right. Another possible idea that I had, and I don't know how to square this with much ado about nothing, but it's that the movie is simply set too long ago is that it is. It is. It is set in the 1940s or I guess 1930s, right? Like it's it is set in a period of time. That is so long ago. It might as well be a million years ago, but it's not stylized. It's not like Shakespeare where it's timeless, right?
JVL00:41:14Right. So I think this may be part of it and that, you know, my kids are acclimated to like, oh, Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Jane Austen is Jane Austen. Oscar Wilde is Oscar Wilde. You know, they love importance of being here. G Money laughed harder at the importance. Of being earnest than any movie, even any Adam Sandler movie. We've ever watched together. He just was on the floor throughout the whole thing. Bum burying.
Sonny00:41:46OK, all right. Well, that's weird. I'm going to I'm going to be honest with you that that's unusual. Not that he doesn't love Adam Sandler.
JVL00:41:53He thinks the water boy is close. Second to funniest movie ever made.
Sonny00:41:57Look, everybody loves the water boy. It's a medulla oblongata. Come on.
JVL00:42:03But. Those things are specific genres where something that's like old timey is different. It's just. Yeah. Right. And old. Equals bad to kid. Right. Do not like old. Like to the extent that Jungle Cruise that they were lukewarm on Jungle Cruise. Was because it was like World War. One. Yeah. And so.
Sonny00:42:35Did you show them Jungle Cruise?
JVL00:42:36We did Jungle Cruise recently within the last two months. And they're like, yeah, it's fine. It's fine. But I could tell if Jungle Cruise had been. Set in present day. It would have killed.
Sonny00:42:50Here's here's a test for you.
JVL00:42:52Yeah. Go ahead.
Sonny00:42:53The mummy. The Brendan Fraser.
JVL00:42:56So we've never done the mummy.
Sonny00:42:57Yeah. The Brendan Fraser. Rachel Weisz. Yeah. Try that. Try it. See what they see what they make. Of that, because I feel like this. This is a real good test because it is like the English patients. Show them saving Private Ryan. The thin red line. Show them. Show them. Oh, God. What's show them the new world. Show them. Run through the whole Malik. Show them a hidden life.
JVL00:43:28You want to watch Heaven's Gate and tell me what you think.
Sonny00:43:33Son, you can even go earlier. You can go deer hunter. Watch the deer hunter. These kids, these guys are going to get married for the first hour of this movie. Get sit down and watch it.
JVL00:43:44So I have another possible explanation. Okay. Maybe I oversold it because I did not. When we sat down to watch Cool Runnings, say this movie is about to change your life. Fair. I was like, yeah, it's a funny movie about the Olympics, you know? So they loved it. This I did hype it a little bit, but I've also had Jurassic Park to the moon. They all thought Jurassic Park was just a perfect movie.
Sonny00:44:13Have they watched E.T.?
JVL00:44:15No.
Sonny00:44:17No. Well, I know you don't like E.T.
JVL00:44:19And I promise you my kids would hate it.
Sonny00:44:22Possible. Possible. I can just tell. I can tell. E.T.'s a banger, man. E.T. E.T. E.T. plays with my daughter. Daughter loves E.T. So it's it's so interesting. One of the reasons we're doing this is because I I had like a diametric opposite experience with my my daughter this last weekend.
JVL00:44:44So what did you show her?
Sonny00:44:45So we had we had an evening. Yes. Last Days of Disco. She was real excited about it. The Coke orgy scene. The. No, we were we had we had an evening in and I was trying I was going through my I was I was going through my DVD and Blu-ray shelf trying to find something to show her. Tough.
JVL00:45:08That's a tough. You don't have a lot.
Sonny00:45:11I don't have a lot.
JVL00:45:12I don't have a lot of great appropriate.
Sonny00:45:16It's not it's not my ballywick. For instance, this this week, my wife's been out of town and I watched the last picture show for the first time. I'd never seen it before. The Bogdanovich last picture show. Let me tell you, Sybil Shepard, not appropriate for fifth graders.
JVL00:45:3318 in that movie, even.
Sonny00:45:35Let's say she let's let's just let's assume she is.
JVL00:45:38Let's just one of those things where I was always like when they were filming that, was she 18? Maybe she was 18 when it was released.
Sonny00:45:45It's not like Night Moves with I think it's Melanie Griffith. Do you remember Night Moves, the Gene Hackman movie? I'm pretty sure Melanie Griffith is like 16 when that movie has come out and she's like swimming nude and stuff. It was a it's one of these things that every once in a while it pops up in. Film Twitter and they get very mad all over again at the deceased Arthur Patton. Motherfucker. Anyway, I assume he's dead. He must be dead. He was 60 then. We. So what did you pick out for her? What's that?
JVL00:46:19So what did you pick out for her?
Sonny00:46:21So, again, I'm going through my shelves and we watched we watched The NeverEnding Story less than a year ago. You know, and I thought she might be too old for The NeverEnding Story. I thought she may have like already kind of aged out. But she liked it. It was OK. Part of me wants to show her time bandits. But I like I actually I worry about her having the exact same reaction that your kids had to to. So I'm just I will just never show her that probably. But what I settled on was I was like, oh, yeah, let's see. Let's see if it's streaming. And it wasn't. So I was like, I actually own this on DVD. And that movie was Men in Black. Men in Black. The original 1990. Seven Men in Black.
JVL00:47:04Vincent D'Onofrio is the bug man.
Sonny00:47:05Vincent D'Onofrio is the bug man. Will Smith at like. Rip Torn. Not quite. Rip Torn. Tommy Lee Jones. Oh, yeah. Rip Torn is Z. I think he's the he's like the head of Men in Black.
JVL00:47:17Yeah.
Sonny00:47:18Yeah. But it's it. But it's it's Will Smith, not quite at the height of his powers, but very close to it. Like this was this is him at his like. Apex of charming young action star.
JVL00:47:33Yeah.
Sonny00:47:33And so I showed it to her and I was like, I think you'll like this. And if you don't, it's only 98 minutes or something. It's, you know, it's not the it's not the end of the world. And she loved it. She loved it. And she she was laughing at all the right places and she was rolling. And and I I was very happy about this because I still really like that movie. It's again, it's like it's not it's not high art or anything, but it is pretty close to being a perfect movie in terms of like moving scene to scene. It does all the things it's supposed to do, and it's successful. But the things it wants to do, which is like a very it's like a key factor. You know, it hits all the right comic beats. The effects still hold up very well because there's a lot of practical work in there. And even the CG stuff is pretty well done. Like at the end of the movie, when the when Vincent D'Onofrio goes full cockroach man, it it works. It still works mostly. Now, granted, I was watching it on I was watching it on a 25 year old DVD. Like a 480p disc that was upscaled to maybe maybe like 680. Not even it. It did not. It did not get all the way up to to Blu-ray quality. But it was a it holds up pretty well. Linda Fiorentino is.
JVL00:48:49Oh, I forgot she's in that.
Sonny00:48:51It's very funny and very attractive. And like doing like weird sex innuendo things that my daughter didn't pick up on at all. Like she didn't, you know, she didn't catch any of that. But I caught it. I got it worked for work.
JVL00:49:02For which is would my wife catch it? If I were to show this with my kids, would Shannon disapprovingly shake her head at me with like, I can't believe you said it was OK to show this to them.
Sonny00:49:15I think it's I think it's fine. I think you're fine. I think you're fine. Anyway. Good movie. And she really liked it. And I was happy. And I and I and again, I was thinking about this in context in the context of your misadventure with Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I started thinking like, well, I guess I. I can't show her Raiders of the Lost Ark. That makes me sad because I really want her to like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Maybe I will still try and do it, but I'm worried. I am worried. And I was trying to figure out, OK, so why does why does Men in Black work? I bet Men in Black would work for your kids, too. I bet they would love it. I think that because it's still very funny. Like, again, it moves. But it's modern. It is modern. Even if you you know, there are cell phones. There are there are people just kind of running around doing things. In a in a city that we recognize as a modern metropolis, right? Like it's a it's it is a it's a it's a recognizably it's not like New York today, but it's more New York today than the New York of the 1970s or the New York of the 1940s. Certainly like it is it is it's it is it is a movie that could plausibly be set. Tomorrow or yesterday, and I think that goes a long way with kids, I do think they have I think. I think I think there's a switch that gets flipped in their head where it's like, oh, old.
JVL00:50:39Yeah, and if it's genre like Pirates of the Caribbean, you're like, oh, it's a pirate movie. OK, I can live with that. I understand that. But a movie that's not genre. That just happens to be like set and I understand Raiders is genre of a type.
Sonny00:50:54Yeah, yeah.
JVL00:50:54And but again, my I don't know, my older two never caught on to Star Wars. And so maybe there's something like my older three, the three. Older kids never really into Star Wars. I don't know. Maybe it's Spielberg. Maybe maybe Jurassic Park is actually the exception that proves the rule. And my kids just don't like Spielberg for some reason.
Sonny00:51:14I don't know. Maybe you show them. What else could you have you shown them Jaws?
JVL00:51:21So this is a huge bone of contention because G Money asks me every single day. Hey, Dad, can we watch Jaws tonight? Every day. I'm not kidding. Hand to God. He's obsessed with it. Before we came down to tape, I was tucking him into bed and he was reading a National Geographic, which for some reason has a cover on Jaws. Maybe it's like a 50th anniversary or something anniversary. And he was like, hey, Dad, look at this. Look at this. And he pulls in as a pull quote from one of the stories. And the author is like, I saw Jaws in the theaters of 1975 when I was nine years old. And I loved it. I loved it. It's like, see, this guy saw it when he was nine.
Sonny00:52:08You should you should pull the rope a dope on him and show him Jaws three. She's like, here you go. You've wanted this.
JVL00:52:18Why is me like, Dad, why is Alfred there?
Sonny00:52:21It's Michael Caine in this movie. I don't understand. He's not Roy Scheider. What's happening?
JVL00:52:27Yeah. So this summer I will finally relent. I will finally be on your head. So are there other are there other classics that I like? I really do think I don't want to show my kids Casablanca. Like, this is one of the things that shook me from this.
Sonny00:52:48Like, oh, I do think I think Casablanca is a tough one, though, because I do think that that is a movie that. I would not have appreciated if I saw it when I was nine. I didn't see that movie till I was probably maybe 17.
JVL00:53:00I mean, you know, the older kids.
Sonny00:53:02Yeah, I mean, maybe your older kids could could watch it. I think I mean, again, I that's that's a movie I did not see until I was in my 20s and would probably not have appreciated if I had seen it much earlier than that. I do think there are movies like there are movies like that. They're great movies like I wouldn't I didn't love The Godfather the first time I saw it. But again, I saw it when I was probably like 15 on, you know, TBS or whatever, you know, Turner Turner Classic Movies or AMC. Or whatever. And so, like, I watched whatever is pretty good, I guess. It wasn't until I like really wasn't until I was probably in my early 20s, early mid 20s. And I sat down and like properly watch. I was like, oh, this is, in fact, the greatest motion picture in American cinema history. OK, I get it. I get it now.
JVL00:53:52Yeah. All right. Well, there we go. That's a show.
Sonny00:53:56Is there anything else you want to talk about?
JVL00:53:59Any other things you're afraid to show your children for? Fear that they will hate it.
Sonny00:54:04And let me tell you about this movie called Sucker Punch. If I showed if I showed my children Sucker Punch, I mean, first of all, they would they would. I don't think I don't know. Actually, Sucker Punch actually might might actually work because it is kind of frenetic. And like it's it takes place in all these fantasy worlds. Maybe I could show my six year old son Sucker Punch. Be like, this is I mean, it's. It's not crazy. This is the world women live in, son. You have to you have to see it from their perspective. It's a it's a terrible place for dragons and monsters. I don't know. I you had mentioned not wanting to show your kids the Dark Knight.
JVL00:54:48Yeah. Yeah. And I like I'm finally over that for the older kids like in Flash loved it. And I'm dying to show the Dark Knight trilogy to favorite. Who is deeply resentful. And and little E has no interest in any of this stuff. But but with G money, we did the first and third. So with G money, we did Batman Begins and Dark Knight Rises. He but not the dark loved skip Dark Knight because I think the Joker is still a little too intense. But he preferred Batman Begins to Dark Knight Rises, which I think actually makes some sense because Batman Begins is more of a standard superhero movie.
Sonny00:55:32Yeah.
JVL00:55:33Um. Yeah. Anyway. All right.
Sonny00:55:37It's because he hates Glenn Powell.
JVL00:55:42That's all the time we're given to this show. See you next week. Good. I tell you what, what I'm watching with my older two is we are making our way through 30 Rock and. My older two children are now convinced that Tracy Morgan is the greatest comic genius of their time. And they might not be wrong entirely.
Sonny00:56:12They're not. They're not necessarily wrong. They're not.
JVL00:56:17Do you understand Tracy Jordan's comic genius? Because I don't. But it's undeniable. Like, I couldn't explain it to you.
Sonny00:56:27Did I ever die? I must I must have told you about this at some point, but he played he played at the University of Virginia when I was at school. He did like he told me he did. He did stand up set there. And this there was a there was a very funny one to punch of Tracy Morgan came and it must have been 2002 or 2003. And then the year after that, Bob Saget came.
JVL00:56:54Oh, was he working blue?
Sonny00:56:56So so Tracy Jordan comes and. 30 minutes into his set, a man with two small children gets up and like starts to leave. And he's right in the middle of this poor man has like dead center, like 12 rows from the stage with his two children who were like. Nine to 11. God only knows what he was doing there. Stand up show brought brought him to a Tracy Tracy Morgan stand up show. They they go to leave, they go they they he stand. He takes about 30 minutes in the show and Tracy Morgan heckles him the entire way out of the room with his kids in tow. It was one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life. Oh, the next year. So the next year, Bob Saget is is coming to town and on all of the posters advertising the Bob Saget show.
JVL00:57:57Do not bring your kids.
Sonny00:57:59A giant disclaimer that says this is not. An all ages show on 18 and up, please. This is a lewd. There will be blue material like a disclaimer longer than anything else on the poster, longer than the, you know, start time or anything like that. And that that has stuck with me for a long time. His specific genius is that he just says things and that is what the character captures, right? That is what the that is what the Tracy Jordan character is. And it is it's just like he just says things. He just he just says he has no filter. He has no there is no. And, you know, we well, I don't know if we can. I don't know. We know people who have been around him in nonprofessional settings and they say he's exactly like Tracy Jordan. Like it's not it's not.
JVL00:58:54I'm going to impregnate that cheerleader with my mind.
Sonny00:58:57Yeah, that's what that's just his his comic genius is. That he's an insane person. Yeah, but it's a very amusing form of insanity.
JVL00:59:06I think that's I think that's exactly right. Unless. It's all craft. Because here's the thing I don't know. What if he was on a scripted television show? Yes. For many years. What if that entire thing? Is just a bit. And like he lives the bit. And there's there's actually thought process behind it.
Sonny00:59:34Just something to consider.
JVL00:59:35It's it's entirely the greatest performance piece of all time.
Sonny00:59:39It is. But I mean, again, when you hear people talk about his time on SNL, the two skits that everybody goes back to are Brian Fellow Safari Planet, right, which is a guy who just like gets in fights with animals because he thinks that he thinks they're he thinks they're taunting him and Spaceman Jones, which the most famous the most famous, you know, one of the part of that is like it was the Britney Spears hosted episode. And like it's it's this entire setup. It's like, you know, they're doing a song and it's like a and it and then Britney Spears shows up and he's just like, mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Uh huh. Give me that fat ass or whatever. And it was like it's like that's like the it just he says the thing and it's like, oh, that because that's exactly what Tracy Jordan or Tracy Morgan would be thinking in this moment. And I think that I do think that that is the. I think that's I. If it's a bit, it's a very well done one.
JVL01:00:35Yeah. I'm sure it's fine.
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