Robert Evans and Daniel dissect Andrew Schaefer's "Hope Never Dies," a satirical mystery portraying Joe Biden as a bitter, lonely figure and Barack Obama as a Batman-esque vigilante solving an Amtrak murder. They critique the novel's erotic thriller framing, which depicts a sexual relationship between the two men amidst themes of opioid epidemics and fentanyl busts. Ultimately, the hosts reject the book's poor quality and offensive portrayal of political figures, deciding to return it after finding its "slash fic" premise and suggestive plot points utterly unbearable. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money Control with Tiffany00:02:21
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Okay.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they hit a BOGO.
Well, then you done.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
How much away, Wanda?
Right now, about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and What It Really Means to Be Ladylike.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the matchup with Aaliyah, and listen now.
Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network.
Biden's Rectal Polyp Joke00:15:48
Rectal Polyps.
Oh, wait.
Nope.
That's not an introduction to a podcast.
I guess there's no going back now.
So that's the, that's, we've started the podcast.
This is Behind the Bastard.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is happening.
Yeah, this is happening.
Daniel, what do you, what do you think about rectal polyps?
How is your, how's your, how's your, how's your feelings on my feeling on that?
I mean, I hope you can get them treated or I hope one could get them, you know, treated.
So you'd say you're broadly, that sounds like you're saying you're broadly anti-rectal polyp if you think they need to be treated.
I'm, you know, I'm empty.
If it's causing you discomfort, let me tell you something.
Some people have friends.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know, I have this, you know, weird tumor on my right arm that's about the size of a bowling ball, but that's just Jim.
And Jim and I are chilling.
And some people are like, you should see a doctor.
But like, that's Jim.
So if your rectal polyps are part of your, you know, your life, if it's just, you know, your buddies, if that's, you know, Samantha and John and whomever, then that's fine.
That's how I feel about rectal polyps.
That's good.
So, Daniel, you know, that really shows the difference between a normal person, a normie, as we call you, and a journalist like myself.
Because as a responsible journalist, I have no opinion on rectal polyps.
You know, just like I have no opinion on cancer, it's my job to just say, here are things that exist.
Yeah.
Very good, Robert.
Very good.
You know, and that's the kind of journalism that we need in the world right now.
Not all of this bias.
Not all of this, you know, so-and-so is evil, so-and-so.
None of that.
We need the people who are willing to say, hey, I have no opinion on cancer.
That's bold, Robert, and I appreciate you.
Well, Daniel, I appreciate you too.
And as a result of my appreciation for you, I would like to read a book with you today over the internet.
Do you like books, Daniel?
Are you literate?
Can you legally read?
I am literate.
Do you have your reading license?
Yes, I can totally read.
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
But like, if I told you I liked books, I feel like that would be more or less, not a fabrication, but just like an over statement of the truth.
I read.
I can read.
But like, last time I read a full book was a few years ago.
I need to change that.
We'll change that today.
Also, this is Behind the Bastards.
Did I say that yet?
Did I announce the podcast that this is?
No, I just said record right in.
This is Behind the Bastards.
BBB Behind the Bastards.
It is a show where we normally talk about the worst people in all of history.
I liked Daniel's intro better.
I'm really sorry.
Thank you.
Well, look, this is a shit show.
Simply an addition.
This is a shit show.
There's no getting around it.
We are normally a show that gives very deeply researched episodes about the worst people in all of history.
But we're scrambling for content at the moment because I have made a mild career change in which I get repeatedly shot at by federal agents almost every night.
And so I need some buffer episodes.
I watch on live stream and cry.
Yeah, it's a good time.
It's a good time.
It's a terrible time.
You don't drink enough water.
I know it.
I drink a lot of water.
You put it in your eyeballs.
That's different.
We've had this conversation.
The eyes are the mouth of the top of the head, Sophie.
Everyone knows that.
So in order to fucking... I can't even like...
There's an...
Woo!
God love you.
I'm praying for this.
God love you.
I realized the other night that my team and I have been going out and one of us since the beginning of this, just through pure happenstance, is a teenager.
And we didn't like think to get his contact info for like his people until like night 57.
We were like, oh, yeah, that's probably something you should do, whether or not they're a legal adult.
You should probably have contacted.
Anyway, it's been quite an uprising.
But all right, enough uprising talk.
So we're going to read a book today, Daniel.
Let's do it.
And the book that I've picked, you know, the book that Cody and Katie and I are reading piece by piece, making our way through, is Ben Shapiro's True Allegiance, which is just one of the worst things ever written.
And obviously, that's sort of a right-wing fantasy of societal collapse written by an incompetent grifter.
And I wanted to do some balance, right?
You know, as a journalist, I'm all about balance.
So I wanted to find something Utterly shameful and left-wing.
And the thing that I've chosen, and we'll see if this winds up being a good choice or a bad choice, is Hope Never Dies, the first Obama Biden mystery novel by Andrew Schaefer.
Yeah.
Yes.
It's a New York Times bestseller, apparently, which is a real problem.
Get it.
And the quote that is up on the Amazon page for the review of this book by Alexandra Alter of the New York Times is: quote, Hope Never Dies is an escapist fantasy that will likely appeal to liberals pining for the previous administration, longing for the Obama-Biden team to emerge from political retirement as action heroes, which is the saddest thing I can imagine someone wanting.
Like in this, like looking out at this world, like seeing.
Have you seen Joe Biden's promo videos that he puts online?
That's the description of them.
Yeah, no, it is.
That's made of what he does.
A bummer.
He is a bummer.
It's him and Obama just like, yeah, bro.
Like, remember the good old days?
This guy.
That's the summary.
It's the kind of thing where it's like, I can't imagine, I can't get into the head of someone who looks at where we are right now with all of the horrific violence, particularly against people of color, you know, carried out by police, the increasing occupation of liberal cities by federal agents, the horrific virus tearing through our communities and upending life as we know it, the complete economic collapse,
the children in cages on the border, all of the horrible things that this administration has done.
And you realize, and I can't imagine seeing that and going, you know, the guys whose eight years in power immediately preceded and directly led to this nightmare and enabled it in a variety of ways.
What if we went back to that?
Like, it's just, it's baffling to me.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the grass is always greener.
Yeah.
Et cetera, et cetera.
We're rehumanizing George Bush.
Like, it's all, look, everybody is all hands off when it comes to the good old days.
Everybody's drunk on memberberries.
And, you know, that's how it goes.
Drunk on member berries.
Yeah.
So I'm going to read you the summary of this book from Amazon before we get into the 305 pages of gut-churning content.
Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama team up in this high-stakes thriller that combines a mystery worth of Watson and worthy of Watson and Holmes with the laugh-out-loud bromantic chemistry of lethal weapons Murtaugh and Riggs.
You just did your Brett voice.
I just, I feel ill when they compare it to lethal weapon for a variety of reasons.
Oh, Lord.
Vice President Joe Biden is fresh out of the Obama White House and feeling adrift when his favorite railroad conductor dies in a suspicious accident.
His favorite railroad conductor.
See, this is good right here.
That's pretty funny, actually.
Oh, wow.
They're really making the center of this the fact that Joe Biden wrote an Amtrak for quite a while.
That's a choice.
Yeah.
Okay.
So apparently they uncover the sinister forces advancing America's opioid epidemic.
What could those forces be but Purdue Pharmaceutical?
It's not a mystery.
That's easy.
We know who it is.
I may have the answer for you guys.
Yeah.
I love it.
I love it.
That's fantastic.
My God.
Good old big pharma.
Wow.
Okay.
Tell me more, Robert.
Yeah.
So, all right, I guess we should just get into this.
Bro.
Hop right on in.
Yeah, let's dive in to the start of this beautiful book.
So the cover of this is like Joe Biden and Barack Obama in Joe Biden's Mustang.
Joe's behind the wheel, and Barack Obama is standing very awkwardly in the Mustang, pointing forward.
There's something about their face that's just off enough to be deeply unsettling to me.
I recommend looking it up because like they're just not quite right.
Biden looks like he's melting a little bit and Barack Obama looks like they took 10 years off the top of his head but left the bottom of his head unchanged.
It's very unsettling.
So let's get into Andrew Schaefer's book.
First off, it's dedicated for Uncle Joe.
So that's good.
Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe who sniffs your hair.
The opening quote that sets this up is, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness by W.L. Watkinson, which is like, I guess Andrew's saying, like, I'm lighting a candle for the besieged American people by writing a mystery novel about a fake relationship between the president and vice president.
Thank you for this candle, Andrew.
This is what America needed.
God bless.
Oh, and then the acknowledgements after that quote is thanks, Obama.
So almost the sarcastically toned thanks, Obama.
Yeah, that's how I usually mean it.
Yeah.
Amen.
Oh, lordy.
Okay.
All right.
There are 53 chapters in this mother.
Well, we better get started.
That's not good.
So I think chapter one starts in Joe Biden's voice.
The night this all started, I was in a black Irish mood, and that was before I learned my friend was dead.
I was sitting at my computer, and I think we know that Joe Biden cannot use a computer, if anything has been made clear.
No way.
No way.
That man cannot Google.
He is not doing his Googles himself, undoubtedly.
Yeah.
No, sir.
But he's sitting at his computer watching one of those so-called paparazzi videos, which is apparently a wide shot of Cape Town's Table Mountain and a parasailer sailing along.
Oh, okay.
He's watching a video of Barack Obama parasailing.
I guess, yeah, unencumbered by his deadweight loser vice president.
44 was on the vacation to end all vacations.
Windsurfing on Richard Branson's private aisle.
Oh, I remember this.
When Barack Obama went on vacation while the fascists moved into the White House, and that was good.
Kayaking with Justin Trudeau.
Base jumping in Hong Kong with Bradley Cooper.
Barack wasn't simply tempting the fates.
He was daring them.
And why not?
If he could survive eight long years as the first black U.S. president, he could survive anything.
Not that I was worried about him.
I was done getting all worked up over Barack Obama.
Is he pissed off?
I think he's kind of angry at Barack at the start of this.
I was going to say, he's definitely like a Joe.
Maybe he's like, no, Joe didn't get enough shine.
Yeah.
He kept him in the dark, man.
Like, he's bummed out.
Joe is that shine.
I thought this relationship was about more than just being the president and vice president.
Wild.
So I forced myself to look away from the computer.
I turned to face the dartboard on the back of my office.
It was an old Christmas gift from my daughter.
I'd kept it in storage for many years, but now I finally had some free time on my hands.
Maybe too much.
Yeah, like you were getting up to a lot of work as the vice president, Joe.
Come on, man.
Maybe too much free time.
One call, I said to my faithful companion, Champ.
Is that too much to ask?
The dog glanced up with indifference.
He'd heard it all before.
So this is Joe Biden sitting alone in his room, drinking, watching videos of Barack Obama on vacation, and becoming increasingly bitter that he was not invited to go party with the former president.
Poor Joe.
Yeah.
Just like staring out the window, like that mastering commander gif when Russell Crowe is just like looking out the window in the rain.
It's just like, yes.
What's going on out there?
Yeah, he throws a dart at a magazine with Bradley Cooper and Barack Obama on the front and hits Bradley Cooper right between the eyes.
So he is.
Joe's in a dark place when this starts.
And a dartsman, apparently.
This is interesting.
Barack even had the gall to tell People magazine that we still went golfing together on occasion.
To save face, I repeated the lie.
The truth was there hadn't been any golf outings.
No late-night texting.
Not even a friendly poke on Facebook.
I watched the skies for smoke signals.
I read the New York Times dissecting headlines, looking for clues he might have left me.
Nothing.
Sometimes late at night, after Jill was sound asleep, I scrolled through the old text messages Barack and I had exchanged a lifetime ago.
What is happening here?
Oh my God.
This is so weird.
Yeah, this is unsettling.
So yeah, Joe is like a spurned ex at the start of this.
Sounds like it.
So he hears a prowler outside, and he opens up his wall safe.
There were two things inside, my Medal of Freedom and my Sig Sauer pistol.
The beam shooter was a gift I'd bought for myself in spite of Jill's objections.
Aren't your shotguns enough? She'd asked.
What on earth could you need a handgun for for times like this, Jill?
I'm getting some Joe Biden shit here.
So he slips the pistol into the waistband of his shirt.
Where's your secret service detail, Joe?
I'm going to guess we're in a non-secret service existing world with this if Joe Biden's taking care of his own security with a Sig Sauer shoved into his pants.
Bro, literally, I want to win the lottery simply to pay Joe Biden to act out the first page or the first 10 pairs, whatever you have just read.
I want to pay him enough money to actually act this out and get Joe Biden in it.
Yeah, I have a feeling that come November, he'll have a lot of free time.
So you might be able to make that happen.
Yes.
I mean, bro, we're making it happen.
We're making it happen.
I've also planned to win the lottery around then.
No, that's a good plan.
This is a good time to suddenly get millions of dollars.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
So Joe goes out into the streets to see who's here.
He smells Marlboro Reds.
Jeez.
Oh, good Lord in heaven.
So he goes out to check who's going around.
And as he's searching around, he smells Marborough Reds and he thinks, don't get your hopes up.
Hope is just a four-letter word.
Wow, they're really making him sound like a spurned lover.
Trump as a Spurned Lover00:05:14
I'm guessing that it's Barack Obama sneaking around the outside of his house.
This has to end in sweaty sex or this book is for nothing.
Yeah.
That's all I'm saying.
My own security detail had been dismissed several weeks earlier.
Vice presidents were granted six months of protection following their time in office and not a day more unless they were extenuating Sergei.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think that's true at all.
Are you telling me Dick Chady doesn't still have Secret Service cards?
That doesn't seem accurate.
He probably does.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Doesn't seem right to me.
Oh, nope.
There they were.
Secret Service has been dismissed, but then immediately afterwards, he nods to his Secret Service guys.
I don't know.
I guess this is just a bad book.
But they are here.
So he goes off into the woods and the smell of burning tobacco gets stronger.
I guess he's being led like a siren into the arms of Barack Obama, who's hiding in the woods outside of his former vice president's house.
Oh my god.
Yeah, I swiveled around there to my left by the big oak, 10 paces away.
A man crouched low, scratching champ behind his dog, behind the ears.
German shepherds don't take this to strangers, but this man was no stranger.
He rose to his feet, a slim figure in his black hand-tailored suit.
His white dress shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.
He took a long drag off his cigarette and exhaled smoke with leisure.
Barack Obama was never in a hurry.
There we go.
Oh my gosh.
There we go.
Never in a hurry.
No.
I love it.
Yeah, so that's interesting.
Yeah, so they meet and they have a little conversation that I'm sure is meant to be very satisfying to a certain type of liberal, where they talk about Barack Obama's time parasailing and how there's a moment where Joe's like, I thought you quit smoking.
He took another long drag off his cigarette.
I did.
Which is like, I guess would work more if there was like, you know, if they were actually hard-boiled cops or something, right?
Like, that's a moment that would work.
But it's like the multi-millionaire former president who lives in a gigantic mansion and was just parasailing with celebrities and whose job is over and who doesn't actually have to do anything ever again.
But anyway, I don't know.
Do you know?
But by the way, sorry to interrupt again.
Do you know how old this author is?
Like when they wrote this book, how old they were?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I want to look up Andrew Schaefer, a thing that a real journalist would have done immediately.
Is it 16?
It might be 16.
Andrew Schaefer is an American.
Okay, let's here's his Wikipedia.
He's born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Under the pin name Fannie Merkin, he authored the 50 Shades of Gray parody, 50 Shames of Earl Gray.
What the fuck?
His other books include this man already.
You went over that 55 shames of Earl Gray.
Yeah, he wrote a 50 Shades of Gray parody.
So this guy is, I mean, clearly like someone who looks out for an opportunity to write to shit out a novel quickly that will cash in on a grift or cash in new predictions.
A thing.
14?
14 years old?
You know, doesn't that say?
That's a great question.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of questions.
So, okay, let's look.
I'm just looking at this guy's Wikipedia.
His other books include Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, Literary Rogues, A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors.
And he's the founder and creative director of Order of St. Nick, a greeting card company.
Oh, he lives in fucking Portland, Oregon.
What the fuck?
What?
Yo, so I can't actually beat the shit out of this guy.
All right.
Okay.
I may have to do that as a journalist.
Oh, my God.
So he's a columnist for the Huffington Post.
No, come out to the protests tonight.
Hey, Andrew, can I interview you?
You know, the fists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's got a greeting card company that's been on the Colbert Report and NPR and Fox News.
He also wrote a book about Shark NATO.
So he's really like, yeah, it seems like one of these guys who just kind of waits for something he can write a terrible book about.
Can I just say, haven't seen what he looks like?
Not fuckable.
Not fuckable.
All right, Andrew Schaefer.
I might run into him at the protests, in which case I will let him know that he's unfuckable.
I'll make sure to do that, Sophie.
He also wrote The Day of the Donald, subtitled Trump Trumps America, a satirical work of fiction.
The book imagines Donald Trump winning the.
Oh, no.
I think he wrote this before.
Wait, when did this get published?
Yep, it was published in June 2016.
So in June of 2016, he wrote a satirical book imagining Donald Trump winning the election to become the 45th president.
Dude, no.
Yeah.
No.
What is happening?
Okay.
No.
So the book focuses on protagonist Jimmy Burnwood, a down-on-his-luck former tabloid reporter and his attempts to ghostwrite President Trump's memoir and his investigation into a murder.
Why are these all murder mysteries?
Like, what is going on with Andrew Schaefer?
I don't like this person.
I think I know what's going on.
What's that?
I said, and Sophie, you were right, by the way.
Extremely unfuckable.
Oh, you gooeed him?
I haven't gooed him.
I don't want to see the face of this.
You know who is fuckable.
Most Fuckable Podcast Sponsors00:03:28
Our sponsors.
Our sponsors are incredibly fuckable.
The most fuckable sponsors in podcasting.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Loud.
This progress.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
Search the Ceno Show.
And listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Amtrak Conductor Murder Theory00:15:27
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the president?
You think it was the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
La Vois proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at like.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It's a better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and we're just thinking about the thrusting girdlesome might of our sponsors.
And we're also thinking about Andrew Schaefer, who it seems like his whole life is about kind of just keeping an eye out for something to be real viral and then shooting out a very quickly written book to cash in on it and generally doing it from kind of a milquetoast liberal perspective.
So that seems like this guy's whole life and career, which is good, I guess.
A good thing to do.
Yeah, you know what?
Go for it, fam.
Yeah.
Go off.
Yeah.
So here we go.
We're back.
Joe Biden and Barack are meeting up again for the first time in a long time.
And Barack Obama, the former president, without his Secret Service detail in tow, infiltrates Joe Biden's home, I guess, his compound, to tell him that an Amtrak conductor, Finn Donnelly, that Joe Biden knew, has been hit by a train and killed.
That's Barack Obama's business at the Biden household.
Okay.
Yeah.
Also, Biden immediately recognizes the name of this conductor because he's the finest one I know.
So that's interesting.
The finest one.
The finest.
Only the finest conductors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Someone has killed the very best Amtrak conductor.
Which is a shame.
So Barack Obama felt like this was important enough.
I had a hunch you knew him.
I wanted to tell you myself before you heard from somewhere else.
So Barack didn't even know that Joe knew this guy.
He just heard an Amtrak conductor died.
And he was like, I have to infiltrate, break into Joe Biden's property to let him know in the off chance that he knew this guy as well.
And of course he did.
Yeah, of course he did.
Of course.
So that's fun.
Of course.
So they go on talking about how this Amtrak conductor died.
Yada yada yada.
They also have a heartfelt conversation, it seems like, about the fact that Barack Obama hasn't called Joe in a while.
Really making Joe out to be kind of a spurned lover in this, which I guess is an editorial choice.
Like, I'll say this for the book.
It's better written than Ben Shapiro's True Allegiance.
Like, it's a functionally written novel.
Like, Andrew Schaefer knows how to write in the same way that, like, you know, somebody can know how to drive.
He doesn't crash the car, right?
Sure.
That's a thing I'll say for Andrew Schaefer.
Sure.
Yeah.
Some baffling choices.
So they finish their conversation and Barack Obama disappears into the shadows like Batman.
So I think we're making Barack out to be basically Batman here, which is, again, really a fascinating series of choices.
And I think it might just be that Andrew Schaefer doesn't really know how to write anything besides mystery novels.
And so that's just kind of what he goes for.
Right.
All right.
So our next chapter, it's the good God.
There's a lot of this.
He might also know how to write romance novels.
So I'm going to read you the start of chapter three.
Yes.
Didn't hear you come to bed last night, Jill said.
I stumbled into the kitchen around half past nine, weary from a night of bad sleep.
My mind had been on fire with questions about Finn Donnelly.
Every time I finally started to drift off, some little noise outside would startle me awake.
Several times, I wondered if I hadn't dreamed my entire counter with Barack Obama.
The lingering scent of tobacco in my hair said otherwise.
Oh my gosh.
The horny levels are off the charts.
This is a very horny novel between the vice presidents.
So horny.
I maintain if this isn't ending in hot sweaty sex, it is for nothing.
Yeah, I don't know that Andrew Schaefer realizes how horny he's being.
I mean, because he's not the cool.
It is satire, but his history of novels makes me think that he has never for a second understood what satire is.
It's also impossible to do post-2016, so I don't know.
I shouldn't be too hard on him, I guess.
Joe Biden goes from like noticing that her husband is having an affair with the former president to asking if he's thought more about getting a CPAP machine.
And then we have a couple paragraphs about Joe Biden's sleep apnea.
Why is this?
Why are you putting this in?
Great.
I mean, great.
Get after it.
That's very funny.
Yeah.
So Joe reads that the Amtrak conductor.
This is a really big story, I guess, that an Amtrak conductor has been killed.
It's all over the news now, and it's all that Joe Biden can think about.
Okay.
As again, a fascist takes over the instruments of state.
It's weird also that they're making the focus of this novel the murder of an Amtrak conductor and I guess Oviates, where it's like, I mean, if you're going to go with this premise, there's other things happening, right?
Like, right?
To be honest with you, this feels like the kind of thing where like he wrote it because he knew that Joe Biden, after hearing an Amtrak conductor was murdered, would say something and be like, well, such a noble profession.
Yeah.
We can't let our Amtrak drivers be murdered.
And he would read that book from cover to cover.
Yeah, I think he might.
That's what I'm thinking.
It's weird because it's clearly like, I don't understand seeing this as a fantasy, right?
Like, I don't understand who could get into this book and be comforted by like, ah, yes, I remember when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were presidents were in charge.
And I enjoy imagining that they had a weird quasi-sexual relationship and solved murder mysteries when Amtrak conductors were killed.
Like, I can't get my head into that person's, that person's brain.
No, no.
Yeah.
But you know what?
I'm here for the ride.
Let me tell you what.
I'm not really here for the ride, Daniel.
Like, it's not for me per se, but I mean, I'm hoping I'm here for the ride is one of the closing lines of the book.
Daniel just wants this book to become wildly fuckable.
I'm not sure.
I'm not shipping it.
Look, I'm just saying.
I'm just saying.
If you want to get a ribbing novel here between these two, they better be fucking.
That's where I'm at.
All right, Daniel.
Wait, Daniel, Texas.
Are you Team Edward?
That's Autumn Tanya.
Are you Team Edward or are you Team Jacob?
I have no opinion.
I have no opinion.
None of that.
I truly have no opinion.
I'm Team Obid.
I don't need to bring that back.
O-Biden, Obama, Biden, Obama.
You know, I'm here for the ride.
Are you team dry scabs or wet scabs?
Wet scabs.
We're all team wet scabs now.
So fucking Biden meets up with his contact in the police department who tells him that they found heroin in the pockets of the Amtrak conductor.
And Joe Biden is incensed by this because he knows he knows this Amtrak conductor and he knows that this Amtrak conductor is a teetotaler.
Same as me.
Something wasn't right.
Martin Luther King Jr. said the moral arc of the universe was long and bent towards the sides of justice.
By the time the universe got to writing the wrongs in Wilmington, however, I feared that it would be too late, not just for Finn or the city, but for us all.
Like, what the how is how is how would this ever be your priority, Joe?
I don't know.
So, this is like the most important thing in the world to Joe Biden right now.
And it, like, it is apparently.
It's very much kind of in line with this specific type of kind of liberal person that they, when they imagine a thing for their fantasy Joe Biden and Barack Obama to solve, like, they don't even consider going into the very real problems that are happening as a result of these fascists kind of taking over office.
They don't deal with any of these actual massive issues.
They decide, like, okay, well, let's make up the murder of an Amtrak conductor and awkwardly tie it to opiates.
Boom.
Boom.
And let's frame it as if it's like a massive issue of national importance, even though it's definitely not.
Again, definitely not.
There's kids in cages.
But okay, we'll worry about the Amtrak conductor.
Exactly.
Truly.
Yeah, so the next chapter is Joe meeting Finn's wife, who's got a stroke, who has a stroke and is disabled.
He really knows a lot about this Amtrak conductor.
Joe clearly spent an enormous amount of time talking to the conductor of his Amtrak train.
That's really funny.
Yeah.
I love that world.
Joe's just down at the train station with his little hat on, blowing that little wooden whistle.
You're like, you guys heard this one?
Joe, we heard that one a million times.
I love you.
You heard this one?
Joe down at the station.
Channel might be the most precious human on earth.
Okay, all right, Carl.
So precious.
You honor me so much.
Can you make the train noise again?
So Joe goes to this guy's funeral in chapter six.
God, I, this is not my favorite book ever.
Yeah, he goes to the Amtrak dude's funeral.
He takes a seat in the back row because this isn't about former Vice President Joe Biden.
It's about Finn, the dead man.
His name is Finn.
Yeah.
All right.
Great.
God, just a big, lot of time spent discussing the funeral of this Amtrak conductor.
Is Obama like a football field away, smoking a cigarette, leaning on a tree, dressed for the funeral, but wearing sunglasses, leaning on it, and then Joe Biden comes up later and is like, what are you doing here?
Yeah.
Something along those lines?
I don't know.
I haven't seen Obama yet.
Like, he hasn't come back into the story.
What?
How is he not there, a football field away, leaning on a tree, dressed for the funeral, smoking a cigarette?
There's a lot of Joe Biden and other political figures talking to the family members of this deceased Amtrak conductor.
They're really leaning hard on a dead Amtrak conductor as the cheat.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
That's an interesting authorial choice by Andrew Schaefer here.
Good lord.
Okay.
Yep.
Joe Biden.
Next chapter, he's just doing more.
This is just really a detective novel.
This is just a detective novel with a weird erotic relationship between Barack Obama and Joe Biden that seems to be barely getting any play at this point, to be honest.
That's unsettling.
So Joe Biden winds up out in the streets, like doing some gumshoe detectiving, trying to figure out this murder.
I crouched low and ducked back through the hole in the fence, bracing for the backstrain again.
Instead, there was a sharp pop in my left knee.
So we're doing a lot of Joe Biden's also an old man.
My leg buckled out from under me and I went down hard, landing on my side.
The train zipped past with a high-pitched whine.
The ground rumbled for two seconds, jostling every molecule in my body right down to the silver fillings in my molars.
And then all was still again.
I rolled onto my back and clutched my knee.
In high school, I'd been a standout football player.
I didn't have the arm strength to be quarterback or the long fingers to be a wide receiver, but I had the getaway sticks.
I could tuck the ball and run.
Senior year, I was the leading scorer.
Senior year, I'd also banged up my left knee.
Since then, it had been known to act up on occasion.
And I'd always been able to grip my teeth and bear it.
This was the first time it had completely given up on me.
If you can't trust your own body, who can you trust?
I didn't know what I was doing out here, crawling around a crime scene.
As head of the executive branch, Barack held the top law enforcement position in the country.
I'd been his right-hand man.
That didn't amount to a hill of beans when it came to actual police work.
It was like asking the Santa Claus.
It was like asking Santa Claus to make you a toy train.
It was a job best suited for his elves.
The fat man in the red suit didn't know the first thing about sanding down wooden toys for good little girls and boys.
I had no business here.
That's a weird set of thoughts to have.
What is, yeah, how has that all happened at Louise?
And it's like, yes, this is like, yes, Andrew Schaefer, the central conceit of your knowledge that Joe Biden and Barack Obama are solving the mystery of a murder of a train conductor is pretty absurd on its face.
But okay.
Yes.
What would Barack say if he saw me out here rolling around like a turtle on my back?
We hadn't talked since his visit two nights ago.
As far as I was concerned, nothing between us had changed.
Yes, he'd kept his word and put the scare into the police department.
The lurid details, as they were, hadn't hit the papers.
For that, I was grateful, but there was still too much unspoken between us.
I wasn't about to send another errant text through the airwaves and see if I'd get a response.
I was through being made to be the fool.
This is so far my favorite part of the novel, like the clearly jilted lover plotline going on here.
Yeah, seriously.
Like the fact that Joe is deeply incensed that Barack Obama doesn't call, which is probably true about the real Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Because it took Barack a long time to say that people should vote for Joe.
I mean, you know, yeah.
An appropriately long time.
Is Bernie going to pull it out amount of time?
Oh, boy.
Next chapter.
Wilmington Station's official name is the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station, although nobody uses it.
Everyone still calls it the Wilmington station.
Trains.
There's so much.
Yeah, this is all about trains so far.
Every chapter is deeply train-focused.
It's like three things about Joe Biden.
That's it.
And one of them is trains, and the second thing is also trains.
And the third thing is Brock.
Yeah, I think he scanned Joe Biden's Wikipedia page, and he was like, okay, he rode the Amtrak a lot.
Let's make this entire book focused on the Amtrak.
I mean, yeah, dude.
Trains, baby.
Trains, baby.
Oh, boy.
We do get a little bit of a talk about an aquatic center, which is interesting given the, what was his name?
Trains and Race Relations00:04:13
Jesus.
A million years ago, when Joe Biden told a story about the black man he got into a fight with at the swimming.
Oh, corn pop.
Corn pop.
God, remember corn pop?
Remember when that happened?
Boy, do I.
I love being able to think about corn pop without having to think about literally everything else at the same time.
Yeah, remember a thousand years ago when corn pop happened.
In the before times.
In the before times.
Yeah, in the before times.
In the long, long ago.
In the long, long ago.
There we go.
Thing is, it isn't the only place in town bearing my name.
The city also renamed a public pool after me, the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Aquatic Center down at the corner of East 23rd and North Locust.
It's a pretty poor neighborhood.
I'd worked as a lifeguard at the pool while putting myself through college.
The other lifeguards would ask me questions about race relations because I was the only white guy many of them knew.
We learned a lot from one another.
One black lifeguard asked if I had a gasoline can he could borrow.
He wanted to see his grandmom in North Carolina.
We can't stop at most gas stations down there, he'd said.
Wow.
Yeah, the pool was where my commitment to civil rights began.
Oh, boy.
I would have felt better if they'd renamed the pool after Martin Luther King Jr. or a local black politician, but the neighborhood appreciated that I'd never turned my back on them.
I'd never turned my back on anyone.
It just wasn't something a Biden did.
God.
Hell yeah, dog.
Yeah, I can imagine all those black lifeguards asking young Joe Biden about race relations.
That's totally a thing that occurred.
100%.
Classic Joe.
Yeah.
He knows it all.
Yeah.
He is the streets, you know?
Joe is the streets.
Yeah, that's what I'm getting from this book.
Well, he's the streets if they're around a train station.
Correct.
Because Joe Biden is mentally incapable of thinking about anything that isn't a train station or his unrequited lust for Barack Obama.
Yes.
Shipping, processing, Joe Biden.
Yes.
Love it.
Oh, good God.
Love it.
Boy, howdy, we still aren't getting back into Barack Obama being.
Oh, no, here we go.
Okay, the end of this chapter, we get back to Barack Obama.
So Joe Biden, after doing some more gumshoeing, calls an Uber, and a black Cadillac Escalade pulls up to pick him up.
And, oh, God, okay.
A black Cadillac Escalade pulled up to the curb in front of me.
The truck-sized SUV sat there, idling.
Was my ride early?
Yes.
If there was an Uber sign on the dash, I had no way of knowing.
I couldn't see anything through the heavily tinted windows.
Suppose this wasn't my ride.
Suppose it was some enemy of the state, some deranged lunatic fixated on a former vice president.
Suppose Finn wasn't the one who'd left the printout of my address behind on the train.
My heart rate began to ratchet up.
I had no secret service protection anymore, no private security.
I didn't even have my pistol, because who brings a gun to a funeral?
The vehicle just sat there, towering over me.
There was nothing stopping a passenger from rolling down one of the windows and poking me full of holes.
It was a sitting duck with no wings to carry me away.
I inhaled sharply and squeezed the bouquet tight.
Water dripped out of the bottom onto the cement.
The tinted black window lowered.
Need a lift? Barack Obama asked.
Woo!
Wow.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
The escalate eased into traffic.
Next chapter now.
The escalate eased into traffic.
I stared at the flowers in my hand, which I think were for Jill.
They look like regular white flowers.
They had some red roses, but they were three times the price.
Barack made a little finger gun and pointed it at me.
That's why they're more romantic.
I sighed.
Barack was right.
He was always right.
Anyway, I was headed home.
He was always right.
Oh, God.
Anyway, Joe says, I was headed home and he patted me on my knee.
The good one.
We'll drop you off, he said.
The good one.
The good one.
I love it.
I love it.
Yeah.
I'm just, I'm so, I'm elated right now.
This is, this is good.
This is great.
Yeah.
This is top shelf.
Top top shelf.
I want this to be optioned into a movie.
Into an erotic thriller.
Yes.
Someone pay them enough money that they want to do this.
Erotic Thriller Ad Breaks00:04:33
And then we'll advertise that movie on our show like we advertise the sponsors that Robert's about to shout out right now because it's time for guess what?
An ad break.
An ad break?
Yeah.
Yes.
You know what?
Will fuck Barack Obama.
I mean, you know what?
Sexually is product.
Wow.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
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Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the president?
You think it was the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Leslo Pruzette.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish.
Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Mr. Schaefer's Gun Point00:08:55
We're back.
And boy howdy, we are just powerfully aroused at the pulsating escalations of romantic tension between Barack Obama and Joseph Robinette Biden, which I, for one, don't find shameful and awkward at all.
Jesus Christ.
I leaned back in the seat.
Barack stared at me for a bit.
You look like you've been playing football, he said.
My shoes were shined, but the rest of my suit was filthy.
I tripped.
It's nothing, really.
Hmm, Barack said.
The president was always saying stuff like that to me.
Hmph and Herm.
Occasionally a hurrumph.
Even after working together for eight years, I hadn't decoded the meaning behind them.
Barack was at times a fortress.
At other times, a glass case of emotion, as Will Farrell would say.
What the fuck?
Andrew, god damn it.
I love it.
I love it.
Just make references to pop culture in the middle of your story.
Yeah.
Do it.
Add nothing.
That's the best part.
That's the best part.
Yeah.
When you talk about Anchorman.
So they talk about Barack Obama's special escalade, which for some baffling reason, he'd had imported from Afghanistan.
Like he had an armored escalade imported from Afghanistan, even though they're not made in Afghanistan.
They're shipped there.
But like, whatever.
Yeah.
That's a weird call.
Cool.
Yeah.
But they have their own armored escalade.
That's great.
Very cool.
I love that even with everything we know about how much money we spend on the military, everything that's supposed to be like fancy in tech has to come from somewhere else.
It's like shipped him from Russia, shipped him from Saudi Arabia.
It's like, it's obviously made by DARPA right here with some crazy other stuff on it.
It's just like, it's right there in Wisconsin.
You don't need to go all the way out there.
And there's a weird attempt to like make Barack seem less rich than he is because it's like when his wife, Biden notes like when his wife saw how much the armored escalated costs, like she told him he better have another book idea or two.
And it's like, they've got hundreds of millions of dollars.
An armored escalate is like maybe a million bucks or so, right?
Maybe like two if we assume he's getting one of the really good ones.
Like it's fucking pennies for a guy like Barack Obama.
Like he can have as many armored escalades as he wants to have.
He can buy tanks.
Especially the Obama, Barack Obama in this story.
Everything is pennies for the Barack Obama in this story.
Yes.
Yes.
Undoubtedly.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I don't know.
This seems like it's going to be a pretty standard mystery adventure that focuses weirdly on an Amtrak train.
I don't know what to say about that.
Daniel, do you have anything you want us to search for in this as we kind of like it's very clear what this is, right?
Like this is a like a, I mean, like, you look.
Yeah.
Robert, you know what I'm looking for.
Is it fucking search sex?
No, no, no, no, Yeah.
Because if Mr. Schaefer here is anything like he's saying, the word sex might not even come up.
Yeah, there's only one use of the word sex.
Yeah.
Oh, there you go.
So it's going to be something along the lines of just like, like the word touch, sweat.
Oh, yeah.
I'm thinking something like, something like strength or like caress, or like.
I just know.
I just know that there's some, that there's some, there's something in here or, or if, or if the phrase I'm along for the ride comes back up again yeah, that's awesome.
So you know one thing, that I'm coming as I look for sweat.
So there's there's a lot of weird talk about Joe Biden's guns.
Um, like it makes a big point about the fact like Joe Biden did one of the things he did when he and Brock were running.
Is he like to try to like make a ploy for getting the um, the kind of liberal gun owner vote behind him?
Is he like post he like made a big fact of the point of the fact that he owned a couple of shotguns for like, skeet shooting and stuff right which uh, I don't know like it does, I don't think, got them a single vote, because anyone who's actually like into gun ownership just doesn't just own a double-barreled shotgun or whatever like.
That's just kind of like the thing Democrats do when they're trying to seem um, briefly relatable to um uh, rural folk.
But this book makes a big point of the fact that Joe Biden is a uh, is a gun owner and also has a sig Sour.
So this is from like 30 of the way through the book.
Uh, Barack and Joe are are, are getting into a tough scrape of a situation.
They're parking in like a garage and going in to like investigate some some uh unsettling people.
And uh here, here's the uh here.
I'm just gonna start reading from the end of the chapter.
Brock stared at me.
Did you tell Jill you were going out with me?
It's none of her business who I go out with.
I'm in the seventh decade of my life.
I can do whatever I want.
No one's the boss of me.
I used to be your boss.
The American people were our boss, I told him.
But things have changed.
He shook his head and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow.
Did you bring that heater you were packing?
The other night, talking about Joe's handgun, I felt a twinge of embarrassment.
Of course Barack knew I was a gun owner.
I talked about my shotguns enough that he could probably tell you the make and model, but he wasn't talking about my shotguns.
They've been.
There have been reports of prowlers.
I said you can't be too careful.
You're right about that.
A lot going on in this world, even when it comes to the friendly faces, it's hard to tell who to trust these days.
He paused, so you're bringing it, i'm not bringing it.
He looked me steady in the eye as if he was trying to assess whether I was lying or not.
Finally satisfy okay, so Barack Obama doesn't want Joe bringing bringing the gun on their investigation?
Um, that's weird okay whatever um yeah, I don't know.
This is a weird book, Danel.
Uh I, I don't.
It seemed, I mean, it seems weird, and unfortunately it doesn't seem like it ends with what the clear ending should be, at least in my eyes.
But is it fucking or parasailing?
I mean both.
No, but the the, the fucking.
We'll just go.
We'll go straight with the fucking.
No, I mean, and and I don't, I don't blame him, you know this isn't a, a slash fic, as it were it's.
You know, this is a, you know, and it's not advertised as a romance novel like I get it.
So you know, maybe my, my hopes were too high and if I really want that, I know several websites I can go find that at.
So you know, that's how it goes, I suppose.
Oh, really cool cool, cool.
Thanks, Dan.
Okay, so last chapter, chapter 50, fucking three.
Wait what 53?
Yeah, 53 chapters in this fucking monstrosity.
Very, very unfortunate.
So it ends with, can we just do some like word searches just for like few years?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you, anyone has a word search thing, but like the end of this, it ends with, so it seems like what I'm gathering from last chapter is that it wound up being that like this Finn guy was blew the whistle on a drug smuggling operation from some gang called the Marauders.
I don't know.
There was apparently an undercover DEA agent that comes into this at some point.
So they solve the mystery and stopped the smuggling of a bunch of opiates into the country.
And nobody finds out that Barack Obama or Joe Biden were involved.
At some point, Joe Biden destroys his knee because the last chapter opens with him talking about how they'd had to reconstruct his shattered knee and gave him a prescription for ibuprofen since he can't take opiates at the end of this because it seems like that's the thing they're fighting here.
So this whole book is about a $1.4 million fentanyl bust, which is like nothing.
Which is like nothing.
Would you even notice it if somebody, if there was like, oh, there was a million-dollar fentanyl bust?
It's like, fuck, fuck that.
Like, nobody cares about a million-dollar fentanyl bust in 2020.
Like, that's also not that much fentanyl, I feel like.
I don't know.
It's not a whole lot of fentanyl these days, but it just doesn't feel like a whole lot.
If you've got fentanyl, this isn't much fentanyl.
Yeah.
No, it's not.
But I mean, I'm proud of them regardless, but it's not.
That's not a lot, fam.
That's not a lot of fam.
Yeah, that's not a lot of fentanyl.
Okay, so she's back on the Amtrak.
Yada, yada, yada.
Barack had once told me that at the end of the day, every one of us is just part of a long-running story.
All we can try to do is get our paragraph right.
Whether I would make another run at the highest office in the land was still up in the air.
I learned long ago never to say never.
Fate is a strange way of intervening.
All I knew for sure is that I wasn't done writing my paragraph yet.
That's great, Joe.
Amazing.
Okay, well, this seems like a pretty lame book.
I'm going to be honest with you, Daniel.
Well, that's okay.
You know what?
We learned a little bit about Mr. Schaefer.
Small Child Twitter Follow00:12:27
Oh, also, I took the liberty of going to his bio on his website on AndrewSchaefer.com.
Oh, yeah.
Just to pull a couple quick quotes that he has listed here about his own work.
Just because, like, you know, my favorite one here, and I think it kind of gives us a little bit of a taste of the kind of author Mr. Schaefer is if you haven't read his entire book.
This is from the Hollywood Reporter on his 50 Shames of Earl Gray. Quote, the literary equivalent of a good Saturday Night Live skit.
So that's, that's, that's good.
Also, Entertainment Weekly on How to Survive a Sharknado says, every bit as amusing and straight-faced as the film franchise that spawned it.
Oh, great.
Also, very telling.
Wow.
And then, and then, of course, at the bottom, Stephen Colbert, just un-American.
Which, you know, he's clearly accepting the dig himself and being like, ha ha.
Oh, wait.
Oh, wait, I forgot my favorite one.
My favorite one.
My favorite one.
Okay, you ready?
Yeah.
Quote: Funny.
Everyone should follow this guy on Twitter from Nicholas Sparks.
That's one of his quotes, man.
Funny.
Everyone should follow this guy on Twitter, said Nicholas Sparks.
Fantastic.
Oh, my God.
Okay.
Well, that's just.
Can you search how many times the word train is in the book?
Yes, I will do that.
I want to first, though, read.
So we have at the end here, we get like a real emotional conversation between Joe and Barack.
And I'm guessing this is emotionally what everything's building for.
Well, actually, there's a lot interesting here.
I grinned.
Barack was the most competitive person I'd ever known.
It drove him up a wall when somebody suggested playing a game just for fun.
They're playing cards.
If there wasn't a clear winner and loser, he tended to lose interest.
He lived for elections.
He withered in office.
I handed him the deck.
You shuffle this time.
The most important people in my life have always been women, Barack said, dealing the cards.
My grandmother, my mother, Michelle, my daughters.
Not saying I haven't had male friends because I have guys I play ball with, guys I have beers with.
But with you, it's different.
Once we figured each other out, it was like our friendship was on autopilot.
It was so easy for so long that once we left office, I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know how to just text another guy without inviting him over to shoot hoops.
I didn't know how to call you just to talk, even though that's why what I wanted to do.
I didn't know.
And I'm sorry, Joe.
I looked at the cards he dealt me.
It was a crap hand.
I'm sorry, too, I said.
You didn't do anything.
Jealousy is an ugly sin.
You're allowed to have other friends.
I drew a new card.
As long as I'm your best friend.
Aren't we too old to have best friends?
Maybe he was right.
Maybe I was being silly.
I'm too old to be jumping out of airplanes.
I guess they must have jumped out of an airplane at some point in the book.
I told him, I think it'd be nice to just go golfing sometimes.
You said something just a minute ago, Barack remarked.
You called us brothers again.
I didn't mean anything by it, I said.
Barack wasn't having any of it.
Don't be bashful, Joe.
As far as I'm concerned, we never stopped being brothers, he said, holding out a fist.
I punched him with too much force, but it was the best fist bump we'd ever had.
Watch the knuckles there, Joe, he said, shaking out his hat.
Wow.
Barack Obama, watch the knuckles there, Joe.
Watch the knuckles, Joe.
Oh, no.
This gets very clearly sexual.
Say, I've got another light bulb that needs to be changed in the upstairs bathroom.
I'm in no shape to stand on a chair right now, and you're putting me to work, he asked.
You're taller.
You've got longer arms.
I'll do it, he said, rising from the couch.
Thanks, I said.
Bulbs on the counter.
Barack mounted the stairs.
A few seconds later, he called out to me, Hey, Joe.
Yeah, I shouted.
Why does your dartboard have Bradley Cooper's pictures on it?
It's not important, I said.
Not anymore.
God damn it, that's weird.
What?
That's so weird.
Wait, what did you say?
I also forgot about the word mount.
That was a bit exciting.
In the beginning of the book, Joe Biden was jealous that Bradley Cooper was hanging out with Barack Obama and Barack wasn't calling him.
So he had like pictures of Bradley Cooper from a magazine that he was throwing darts at because this book is profoundly horny and strange.
This is so weird.
It's like he had just seen a stars born and was like, I'm going to add some Bradley Cooper to this for no reason.
Sophie, there are 103 matches for the word train.
This book is very train-focused.
Okay, what about railroad?
Like, I'm just, how many train-adjacent words are there?
Just 12 uses of the word railroad, but let's see Amtrak.
35 uses of Amtrak.
So.
Jesus Christ.
Oh, wow.
And a lot of us of Amtrak Joe.
Amtrak Joe.
Yeah.
That's tight.
Because, again, all Andrew Schaefer knew about Biden is that he rode the train and presumably had a bad knee.
How many times is there verbiage like woman or she or girl or lady or any of that nature?
Or is it just a moment?
Well, this is about the lust between two men, Sophie.
So I don't think we need to be getting, you know, getting the ladies involved here.
Only five uses of the word women.
Jill Biden does appear to be an after effect who is willing to let her husband one use of the word lady.
I think Jill in this is pretty understanding of the fact that her husband just needs to fly free and eventually fuck Barack Obama.
Is Michelle mentioned?
11 times.
That's fucked up.
Wow.
Michelle.
This is about the manly love.
You're totally right.
It's also about trains.
It's about the manly love between a president and his vice president and also trains.
I mean, you know.
Can you make that train sound effect again, Daniel?
That was my favorite part of the episode.
Thanks.
I miss those things.
I'm just going to throw that out there.
I want a wood block train thing.
I miss those.
I have to go down to my local railroad and tell them that I am a small child.
And they shall say, but sir, you have a beard and are of height.
I say, but I am still a small child.
Give me a whoo-hoo machine.
And they'll say, we don't know what that is.
Can I order one on the internet?
Robert, where do I get a train?
Okay, let's see here.
Wooden train, not set, whistle.
Boom.
Wow.
Oh, baby.
I can get them on discountmugs.com.
There you go.
Well, I am returning this book because it's horrible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Get that shit out of here.
Sorry, Andrew Schaefer.
I put quality issues as the reason.
Quality issues.
Yes.
So, Daniel, I don't know that we learned much today.
No, I didn't learn.
No, we didn't.
We didn't.
But we read pieces of a really shamefully bad book.
And that's as good as learning something.
I think we learned a thing or two.
We learned that Andrew Schaefer is as funny as a good SNL skit.
Yeah, which is, by the way, just for reference, a good SNL skit is so bad as to be completely unwatchable and toxic to the human soul.
The good SNL skits died out years ago.
Years ago.
Daniel, is there anything that you would like to plug, Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, you can follow me on Twitter at DJ underscore Daniel, D-A-N-L.
I stream on Twitch at the same thing, twitch.tv slash DJ underscore D-A-N-L.
I work on a bunch of shows.
I work on one show with these two lovely people called Worst Year Ever.
Please download it and listen right here on the iHeartRadio Network.
I work on Fake Doctor's Real Friends, which is the Scrubs Rewatch podcast with Zach Raff and Donald Faison.
Listen to it.
It's a lot of fun and very funny.
And sometimes I get to speak on that and talk about video games.
I work on the Daily Zeitgeist.
Listen to the Daily Zeitgeist, the daily news show here on this very network.
And I work on All's Fair, a podcast about the evolution of disillusion starring Laura Wasser and produced by Johnny Reigns.
And Robert, Sophie, thank you both so much for having me.
Robert, I'm glad to see you're well.
Oh, I love you both.
Thank you, Daniel, for helping me earfuck this book about Barack Obama and Joe Biden's lust and also lust for trains.
Oh my gosh.
This book is baffling to me.
It is pretty bad.
I mean, I just can't believe that the person who wrote it was over the age of 16.
But I mean, that's how it goes.
That's how it goes.
That's just the way it goes.
Some things will never change.
Amen to that.
That's what I'm saying.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama getting fucked by each other, I guess.
You didn't get that reference that I just did.
Weird.
I got you.
You can follow Robert at iWriteOK on Twitter.
You can follow this podcast on Twitter and Instagram.
Shut up, Robert.
Your live streams are.
Follow Robert.
Watch his live streams.
The work he's doing is really important and terrifying.
Pay attention to what's happening in Portland.
It's fine.
It's nothing, Terry.
Sometimes federal agents shoot at people.
That's no train mystery.
Come on, guys.
Focus on what matters.
As your pseudo-mom, it's terrifying to watch you get hurt and not drink enough water.
You can follow this podcast at BastardsPod on Twitter and Instagram.
We have a TeaPublic store with really cool merch.
And that's the way it goes.
That's the cookie, and it's crumbled.
That's the way the Raytheon knife missile strikes a vehicle driven by a suspected insurgent leader.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Well done.
Bye.
Bye.
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Hey.
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Oh, they had a BOGO.
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We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like, wild, wild back to your way.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Co Triistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.