John Wayne embodied white conservative masculinity, leveraging his 1968 RNC address and Pentagon-backed film The Green Berets to recruit Vietnam soldiers while ignoring My Lai atrocities. Motivated by WWII shame, he promoted a racist worldview, evidenced by his 1971 Playboy interview and violent reaction to Sashine Littlefeather's Oscar protest. His legacy of toxic masculinity contrasts sharply with modern heroes like Pedro Pascal, effectively ending with Lil Nas X's Old Town Road, which subverted the cowboy archetype through an openly gay protagonist. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:31
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
John Wayne's Dark Legacy00:15:47
What's Johnning my Wayne?
Okay.
What's destroying?
Yeah, shattering my pelvis, my 13-pound baby.
Genghising my Khan.
Yeah, what's irradiating my racist movie about Genghis Khan starring a white man as Genghis Khan?
That is the funniest thing in terms of like ways John Wayne could have died, nuked while playing Genghis Khan in a movie is pretty funny.
That's pretty good.
How are we doing?
Francesca, Francisco Fiorentini, our guest returning for part three of three.
I have to find out how this ends.
You know what I mean?
Well, I mean, it's, I feel like he becomes even more bastardly towards the end of his life, but I'm excited.
Yes, actually, he becomes Chris Catan.
Real curveball for the story.
That makes as much sense as anything else.
Chris Catan, great career.
Not over.
Is it not?
Are we still doing Chris Catan?
I don't have anything against Chris Catan in particular, but are we?
I mean, there could be a Night of the Roxbury reboot.
Oh, there could be.
Or we could even do like a, like it, like an Avengers endgame where Knight at the Roxbury meets the Blues Brothers.
And it's another one of those Lorne Michaels movies.
Superstar?
I don't know.
Superstar.
Sure, throw that in there.
You know, throw in the David Cross one where he plays a hillbilly.
Make it all happen.
But everyone's jacked.
It's basically everybody kumailing on jobs themselves.
Yeah, exactly.
Get everybody like on it, pumped with HGH, destroy their hearts, get them just like David Cross has like 16-inch biceps.
Hell yeah.
And then nuke them on set.
And then we nuke them.
And then we nuke them on set.
That's right.
Finally, that's how we end Lorne Michaels' career with that film.
Shouldn't have brought battened Knight at the Roxbury.
So, yeah, he's like the center of this idea of white conservative masculinity and has been for decades at this point.
By the time we hit like the mid to late 1960s, all of these people who are like 18, 19, 20, and old enough to start going over to Vietnam have never known a world in which John Wayne wasn't like the biggest action star in there.
Like he's, you know, there's not really anyone to compare him to now.
I guess your closest would be someone like The Rock.
But even then, like, we don't really have the media is so much bigger now.
So like you have like a million different kinds of action stars for everyone.
In this period of time, John Wayne is like it.
Yeah.
So though not publicly a man of particular religious vigor, he embodied what muscular Christianity enthusiasts respected while also speaking to the more secular arch capitalist right-wingers who sought a more muscular U.S. willing to throw down for the free market.
All of this swirled together to make him an irresistible front man for Republican politicians.
Christine Cobbs-Dumez writes, In 1968, he gave a rousing patriotic address at the Republican National Convention.
When Nixon wanted to explain his own views on law and order, he pointed to Wayne's Chisholm, which is one of his movies, as a model, a bloody tale of frontier justice in which Wayne achieved order and revenge through violence.
So in 68, like at the RNC, Nixon is specifically pointing to John Wayne movies as like, this is how law and order is supposed to be.
This cowboy movie by a draft dodger.
You know who could take care of these dirty hippies who want to stop seeing their friends slaughtered?
The Duke, John Wayne.
Uh-huh.
These hippies.
Why can't it be more like that?
Remember when the good guys were good guys and the bad guys were the brown people?
Let's do that.
Let's do that again.
It is also very funny.
He spends so much time shitting on anti-war protesters, a lot of whom are veterans who didn't dodge the draft like he did, but whatever.
So Wayne himself was flabbergasted at the resistance among many Americans towards continuing to escalate the war in Vietnam.
Iman's biography tells a particularly lurid story about Wayne seeing a one-armed veteran walking across a campus during a protest.
And this group of protesters like approaches this veteran and they're heckling this brave man who lost his arm in combat.
And John Wayne has to like walk up and say, now, don't you, like, you can speak your peace, but you're not going to yell at this man and you don't get to say this to a hero and yada, yada, yada.
It sounds like a lot of people.
Sounds like he lassoed them all together.
Yeah, exactly.
And then everyone clapped.
Yeah.
There's no evidence this ever happened.
There's a lot of fake stories about stuff like soldiers getting spit on from this period.
And John Wayne, being a liar, I don't have any trouble believing made this up.
Oh, yeah.
He needed one for himself.
The spit soldier story was getting way too much play.
He was like, let me invent one.
He needed a John Wayne version one.
Now, I don't think that particular story is true, Francesca.
But we do have audio of John Wayne addressing a group of students.
I think they're like ROTC kids, cadets at like a military academy or something.
What matters most is that he's obviously fucking hammered.
It's so funny.
He is housed.
He is just completely fucking stupid.
Still drinking after all these years.
It's so funny.
Here's how he says hello to these kids.
My name is William Wayne.
Wait, First of all, it's Marion.
It is Marion.
Suddenly, you're watching.
My name's William Wayne.
William Wayne.
William.
John is short for William.
What am I saying?
It's so funny.
This is unimportant.
What?
Wait.
Oh, my God.
It does not get wildly more coherent from there, but the audience is very much on board.
And honestly, if I had been a college student and a drunk movie star had come to give my commitments, like that would have been super funny.
I would have been all, I think most kids would, right?
Oh, yeah.
The audience, I mean, this is also a more right-wing militant audience.
So they're on board here.
Now, I'm going to play another clip.
And for context, here he's talking about how different things were when he's talking about like protests in college and how different things were when he was in college.
Remember, this is a period where students are taking over faculty buildings and whatnot.
They're trashing the offices of certain professors.
Like there's all these protests against the war by students.
We talk about some of this in the Kissinger episodes.
So John Wayne is talking about how different things were when he was in college.
Let me explain something to you.
When I went there, I went there when there was a fella in control of the college.
I mean, I mean, the boss man had walked into his office.
All good one.
Got the office.
Torned down the patriarch and did excrement in his power through, buddy.
You got it.
Stick the landing.
That's what it is.
Or had written lewd words on his pictures of his family.
We, as members of the college, would have kicked the goddamn hell out of this organization.
It's very funny.
He's so drunk.
Does he nod off?
Because that's where it feels like.
I kind of feel like he might have.
Like he was sort of graying out there for a little while.
Having a little brownout, drifting off into the land of vodka and fantasies.
Classroom, right?
The classroom.
That's what a classroom.
I never stepped foot in a classroom.
Just a drunk old man heckling teens.
So from this point, he continues to his main argument, which is that he thinks these kids he's talking to should beat the hell out of left-wing protesters who dissent from the view that war is good and the U.S. can do no wrong.
Well, a lot of the speech is very funny.
It's mostly very funny.
The last bit does kind of get a little terrifying because in it, John Wayne calls for the establishment of the sort of violent right-wing street organizations that we are currently swimming in as a nation.
For you guys, you better start thinking.
It's getting to be goddamn dickulous.
If you guys don't start thinking as men, we're going to have a lousy country.
Jesus, I.
I have had the chance to be with guys who are with things and against things.
And you know, Christ try as a...
Because I try as a human being to listen to both sides of everything.
But there's no both sides anymore.
They're just trying to wreck our goddamn country.
It's time for you younger guys to take over.
I don't know what the hell to do.
Awesome.
That was brilliant.
And you know what?
It very much is a speech that fits into the year 2022.
It does.
It does.
That's a Giuliani speech right there.
That's a.
Right down to the drunkenness.
Right down to the barely being able to stand.
Yes, exactly.
He was so ahead of his time.
But it's so, he's, he's also, it's funny because he is also, while the hero of every single film, just kind of like interpersonally and incredibly like he's lazy and drunk half the time.
Like, and his only work ethic, like the hardest thing he did was, I think, well, I don't know.
Did he learn to lasso or was the hardest thing just like bringing a figures a girl from Mexico?
You know, like he, he's, most people will note, and I think this alters a little bit at the end of his career, but he's like, he's generally, most people will agree, pretty good on set.
He's good at like what he does.
He's got this kind of background and props.
So he's, he's, he knows how things should look.
He's an active member of like the, of the crew beyond just sort of like standing and hitting his lines.
That's generally agreed upon.
But you do hear, you hear really different stories.
So you hear all these stories about, you know, John Wayne seeing something a director is doing and realizing that won't look good on camera and like fixing the scene and being like very much a team player.
And then you hear these stories about like, well, they couldn't shoot the film before noon because that's when he woke up and they had to wait for him to take a giant shit first.
So they couldn't start until he finished.
That I respect.
That I definitely respect.
So I don't know.
Like you do hear like a lot of rumors on both sides.
It's probably fair to say he would not have gotten as far as he did if he was not really good at certain aspects of being a movie star.
So I'll give him credit for that.
But it's also like, John Wayne, you were never willing to like go do anything for your country overseas.
Why are you now saying that groups of teenagers should beat the shit out of people protesting a war that you can't even like?
You have no he's.
There's no elucidation there in that speech or in the other ones he gives about like, why they should be willing to do violence on behalf of this war.
Right, because that's not what's important.
What's important is something vague about America, and that's the thing that seems most familiar, where it's like well, you're not really elucidating anything that they should be fighting for other than the vague idea of America and that's, that's really enough to rile people up for violence.
I mean again, it's just super fitting.
It's like America isn't a country that protests the bludgeoning and killing of civilians and the death of like, young men uh, coming home in body bags to their parents.
America is the country that does those things.
We do those things.
Not a sound without.
Why would you?
Why would you make a sound?
That's just got to be loud.
You know you're going to wake up John Wayne and he's going to be hung over absolutely before noon.
Yeah, without the poo.
Yeah, So kids these days.
It's very much just a kids these days speech.
It is.
And then at the end, it's fun because instead of him being like, and that's why I'm going to start a blah, blah, blah or whatever, or I'm going to start a militia, which glad he didn't.
But instead of that, it's just like, anyway, you figure it out.
Yeah, you could swear it out.
I don't know what to do.
Drunk ass John Wayne.
Very funny, except for, you know.
The fact that he holds this position in our cultural memory that makes the fact that he was a drunken warmonger much more influential.
But let's continue.
So we should talk again about these kind of rumors about the Duke that you'll hear because you get this, like Iman very much presents this picture of him as this incredibly diligent with quotes from people who worked with him, including guys like Ford, that he was this, he had really, he was really sharp.
He was always willing to put in the extra effort.
He'd do multiple jobs, even though he was supposed to be the star just to make sure the film got made.
And then you'll hear these stories about like his scenes needed to be finished shooting before noon every day because he was going to be too drunk after that.
But he couldn't film in the morning until he'd taken his first hungover shit.
So he's got like half an hour.
He's got like a good hour in there.
That's why those can't be true comprehensively.
Like they may have been true on certain films or in certain times, right?
I'm sure there were times when people were like, well, you can't shoot.
You can't, you gotta, if you shoot too late in the day, he's gotta be drunk because we know he got drunk and it impacted shooting at times.
But he made way too many movies for them to have been, for things to have been that ridiculous.
You can't shoot a movie with an hour a day from the star, right?
No.
But who knows how the radiation impacted his gastrointestinal can have been good.
I'm sure the older he got too, the more it was like, you know, his lifestyle took a toll on him and that took altered the way he was on set.
Like drinking, I mean, obviously that's like the sign of an alcoholic, but like being like a young kid, like on set and like drinking and then waking up the next day and hell yeah.
Like obviously we all remember what it was like to be 19.
Bless that moment.
But like great.
Hangovers in your 50s.
Come on.
Hangovers in your 50s as a guy who has been just basically inhaling cigarettes and nothing else since he was like 12.
Like that's, I mean, I do want to note, like, I'm sure aspects of this were true.
And I'm also sure aspects of what Iman reports in terms of his like diligence on set were really true.
It's worth noting that two of his very best performances in his career were filmed really late in it when he's an old guy.
Hollywood Stoicism and War00:10:20
The shootest and true grit.
True grit being maybe the most, the one that's most famous today, probably that he was in, you know, Rooster Cockburn.
Great film, really good performance.
He was not a bad actor.
There were some moments, I forget which film it was, but like because most of his early roles, he had not had to act.
He's in a movie that John Ford sees and Ford is like, oh, hell, if I'd have known he could act, I would have done some stuff differently.
But he is in some better performances.
The shootist, which is his very last film, is a really good movie in a lot of ways.
That's interesting, too, because it's, we'll talk about the shootist a little at the end.
It's kind of, it's kind of a strange one for him.
But I don't think either of those movies.
Honestly, it's very, like, it's a little bit of his character, like True Grit.
Yeah.
A drunken, hard-nosed U.S. Marshal and Texas Ranger helps a stubborn teenager track down her father's murderer.
There you go.
Like, drunkest.
Hard-nosed.
US Marshall.
He's drunken and hard-nosed.
Yeah.
Never served his country, so that's the one you got to, you know, fake it a little bit.
So it's interesting because it's one of those things.
I don't think he's as these anti-John Wayne anecdotes about how drunk he was.
I don't think he was as unfunctional as those anecdotes imply.
But we might have been better off if he had been, because another movie John Wayne cared a lot about making and put a lot of work into later in his career was The Green Berets.
And this is a film that would go on to have pretty disastrous consequences for a number of members of a generation.
So you're not necessarily a bastard as an action movie star if your films like reinforce attitudes about violence and masculinity that lead young men to make some like dumb decisions, such as joining the army.
But John Wayne knew that his films could do that and actively sought to use them to convince people to go and fight in Vietnam, right?
He understood that he had influenced a generation's idea of manhood, and he decided to use that influence to try to get more young men to volunteer to go fight in Southeast Asia.
Now, before we get into that a little more, I want to read a quote from this write-up I found in salon.com that gives a good overview on the broad strokes of kind of what it meant in 1968 to be what some people called a John Wayne man.
John Wayne John Wayne stands simply as the most persuasive and overwhelming embodiment of our ambivalence about American manhood.
His persona gathers in one place the allure of violence, the call away from the frontier, the tortured ambivalence toward women and the home, the dark pleasure of sourd romanticism, all those things that reside unspoken at the center of our sense of what it means to be a man in America.
Dark ambivalence towards the home.
Just say domestic abusers.
Just say if it's women?
Like, yeah, the man who strikes his wife.
Well, it's this thing that you have, because you know, early in his career, they're like, we want him to look like a guy who doesn't have a lot of experience with women because he spends all of his time in the frontier.
So he kind of is uncomfortable around women.
And that's kind of part of, I think, why that expands to even more of a thing than a Hollywood is you have this mix of the male lead, number one, has to be very clearly not gay.
So you've got to show a woman as being interested in him, right?
Which not necessarily a sign that they're not gay.
For sure.
But, you know, we're talking 1960s Hollywood logic.
Sure, sure.
You got to show him with a woman, but also like sex and stuff.
That's that's going to get you in trouble.
So you don't, you don't ever want him to get too close to him necessarily.
And so you wind up with a lot of these heroes who are like magnetic to women, but also kind of pushing them away.
These sort of like, yeah, it's all, and also just like these ideas about masculinity.
You don't want to have a guy who's like vulnerable with a woman.
It's the kind of James Bond thing, right?
Where he's going to, you know, he'll sleep with a woman, but he doesn't have relationships or whatever.
I think that's what he's doing.
Or he'll show up in the shower unannounced and they'll just start having sex and you're like, I guess that was consent.
John Wayne won't even do that, right?
Because James Bond is more advanced in his attitudes towards female liberation than John Wayne characters tend to be, you know?
She can carry a gun.
That's yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that is really it explains so much.
And also to recruit, use your film to recruit young American men into a war, which is already going to give them PTSD and then come home and like the manly thing to do, don't talk about it.
Don't address it.
Bottle it up.
Stoicism.
Like I think there's a stoicism that John Wayne really instilled about American masculinity.
Yes.
And it's like, it's also kind of, I think, an impotent stoicism.
It's not the kind of, there's a good stoicism where you're not, you know, letting yourself get beaten down by the world.
You're not like showing, you know, your weakness in situations where that's bad.
But John Wayne's stoicism is like, don't show vulnerability in situations where that might make you stronger.
But anyway, that's we're getting into a little bit of a deeper topic.
So, you know, Vietnam 1968 has become like a thing, you know.
It's clear that it's a real problem.
And Americans really don't seem to be liking this thing that we're doing.
And so John Wayne decides I got to do whatever I can to convince more young boys to throw themselves into this meat grinder.
And he decides the best way to do this is by making a movie about the special forces.
Now, at this point, that's a pretty new concept.
The very first kind of modern special forces teams were in World War II.
Some people will say that, like, the German Folkschrum Jäger, some of the, which were like their paratroopers, they had some units that were kind of the first modern spec ops units.
And you have, you know, some British and some American units that are kind of experimenting with some of this shit.
Vietnam is really where the modern special forces kind of comes together as a distinct thing for the first time in a modern way.
It's where we get the first Green Beret teams, right?
That's kind of the first popular concept of special forces comes from these teams, which are initially called A teams, which is why the A team was called the A team that President Kennedy sends into Vietnam in 1961.
And they gradually, like, that's what becomes the idea of Green Berets: these A teams become the Green Berets.
When's the Mr. T episode, huh?
Mr. T's never done anything wrong, so we're not going to be doing that episode.
Look, he gave up his chains after Hurricane Katrina, okay?
What?
Yeah, Mr. T gave up because he went to help in the relief efforts and he was horrified by the privation and poverty he saw and decided it would be obscene for him to continue wearing gold.
Damn, this is a story where we, yeah, Mr. T's.
I got nothing to say bad about Mr. T.
Yeah, and the cereal was good.
What?
He's also super vocal about like vaccinations.
He thinks it's good to be vaccinated.
Yes.
God damn it.
We need strongmen like Mr. T.
I pity the fool who cannot appreciate Mr. T. Legitimately pity the fool.
So this idea of like specially trained super soldiers that you drop behind enemy lines and they fight under incredible odds.
This is like Hollywood fodder.
Like as soon as we start having these special forces guys in Vietnam, Hollywood's like, oh shit, this is all we're going to make movies about for forever, right?
Like this is the only thing we want to turn into a movie.
Now, enter Robin Moore.
Robin Moore is a World War II veteran and a journalist who, because of his connections to, I think it was Ted Kennedy, got to go through special forces school as a civilian.
He's, I don't know if he's the only, but he's the first civilian to ever do this.
And he embeds with the Green Berets in Vietnam.
And he's technically a journalist, but he's also like fighting alongside them, which is ethically kind of blurring the lines of journalism.
He's a real interesting character to study, Robin Moore.
Even being embedded is like a little sus.
You're always like, yeah, it compromises objectivity anytime you're embedded.
Sure.
But shooting people is a real violation of any kind of burned a few huts.
He may have burned some HUTs.
A little bit of HUT burning.
And he's fun because he'll get conned by a dude named Jacodema during the war in Afghanistan.
But that's a lot later when he's an old man.
So he writes that he's in the he spends a bunch of time with these Green Berets.
He writes this book, The Green Berets, which is like, it's like on the bestseller list for more than a year.
It's a huge hit.
People will fucking, and he has to, he has to.
During the height of the war, like in 68 and 69.
It's like 65 or 6, I think, that it was published.
Yeah, it's like something, I think it must have been like 65.
So pretty early on.
And he publishes this book as a fiction book because he has to do that in order to pretend he's not giving away operational secrets.
The government considers prosecuting him because he's writing about a bunch of shit he shouldn't be writing about.
It's a weird call to just let this guy hang out with your special forces, but then he writes a book that pisses them off a lot.
And the reason, one of the reasons, apparently that they don't go through prosecuting him is that John Wayne buys the film rights from Robin Moore in order to make a movie.
And so, yeah, hey, well, now that Wayne is attached.
Well, what happens is he sends a letter to President Lyndon Baines Johnson to try to get his cooperation because he basically says, I want to make the first pro-war movie about the Vietnam War to try and build public support for this thing.
He writes, We want to show such scenes as the little village that has erected its own statue of liberty to the American people.
We want to bring out that if we abandon these people, there will be a bloodbath of over 2 million souls.
We want to show the professional soldier carrying out his duty of death, but also his extracurricular activities, helping small communities, giving them medical supplies, toys for their children, and little things like soap.
So that's the movie.
Like, John Wayne sends this letter.
Soap, aka napalm.
Napalm cleans things.
You know, eventually.
There's no bacteria in the wake of a napalm strike.
From Addiction to Acceleration00:05:03
Absolutely.
It's all been.
You want to get rid of Giardi napalm.
Knocks it right out.
A write-up from HistoryNet continues: quote, John Wayne took his first step towards production of the picture in 1965, buying the film rights from the author Moore.
The path was cleared in early 1966 when President Johnson's advisor, Jack Valenti, convinced LBJ to give Wayne permission to make the film.
Valenti observed, Wayne's politics are wrong, but insofar as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right.
If he made the picture, he would be saying the things we once said.
So, I mean, he's doing, he's offering it for free.
I mean, this is before the U.S. military would bankroll things like Black Hog Down or like fucking even Transformers.
They put money behind Transformers and shit.
It's fun you say that because this is how that starts.
Oh, cute, cute, cute, cute.
Oh my God.
Origin story.
But you know what else is starting right now, Francesca?
What?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Their ads are starting right now.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
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He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
The Lie of American Sniper00:16:12
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
Well, I don't know about you, Francesca, but those ads convinced me to become a Green Beret.
Wow.
I'm going to go fight in Vietnam.
Was it a zip recruiter ad?
It was.
And it has convinced me to take up the fight.
I keep calling the recruiters and they keep saying there's no war in Vietnam.
You can't just travel to Vietnam and start fighting people.
Like you'll go to prison forever.
But I'm going to do it.
I'm going to give it a shot.
Like, we need a social media manager.
You're like, Green Beret.
Green Beret.
That's what I'm going to do.
Oh my God.
So really?
Foreshadowing of the U.S. military funding this?
Uh-huh.
Well, not funding it.
It's not quite there yet.
But this is this.
We'll get into it.
So John Wayne makes his son Michael the film's producer because nepotism.
And in February of 1966, he hires James Lee Barrett, who's a former Marine and a screenwriter, to draft a screen play.
And the screenplay has very little to do with Robin Moore's book.
That's again, some people will allege part of the agreement he made with the government where like, I'll adapt this into a movie, but I won't include anything from the book really because the book is full of a bunch of secrets you didn't want getting out.
And that's part of why the LBJ administration is like, well, this can help us kind of launder away some of the shit we didn't want people to know that's in that book.
So the two Waynes and Barrett visit the Defense Department and Fort Bragg in order to like, so they get like approval from the government to see where special forces train and to do research and whatnot.
And the production receives, and this is one of the first times this has happened, a substantial amount of help from the armed forces.
They did pay fees to use DOD property and for some of the equipment leased to them.
But a lot of stuff was made free for them as props, which did substantially defray costs.
Some biographers like Jinson dispute this, and John Wayne would go on to claim that they paid for everything.
This does not seem to have been entirely accurate.
It does seem like they got a good amount of stuff at least subsidized that would have cost more or just not been available if the DOD hadn't played ball.
And evidence for this can be seen in the fact that the studio allowed the Pentagon to retain script control, right?
Wow.
So you had in like 48, you had some kind of like partnerships with Hollywood or not in 48, in the 40s for like World War II, you had some partnerships with Hollywood and the DOD.
This is the first time, though, you have like an independent movie that a studio is making on its own that they kind of make a deal with the government in exchange for stuff to give the Pentagon script control, right?
And the DOD does request extensive rewrites and detailed changes to the plot and dialogue, and those changes are made.
This is the first modern movie co-written by the Pentagon in exchange for access to gear and military infrastructure.
It is not to the same extent that it will later be, right?
They're not getting nearly as much shit free.
They are paying for more shit, but this is the start of that process.
Yeah.
I just think it's incredible that at this time you could turn on the television and just watch, yeah, kids coming home in body bags, children with napalm burns on them.
Like the Milai massacre was very much publicized.
Shout out to that event.
Don't worry.
But just, and you're like, well, but this one movie, this is going to do it.
Silver bullet level.
We're going to turn it around, baby.
I mean, arguably, right?
That was the lesson of Vietnam was like, oh, just do the propaganda movies.
Don't show what's actually happening on the ground.
Well, and it is this, you can never do it for everybody, but with the right movies at the right time, you can change what happens in a war for a select population.
Like the movie American Sniper for a certain chunk of Americans has changed the thing they prime, like because of how big that movie was in certain chunks of the population, a lot of people, when they think of the Iraq war, don't think about that we the government lied a shitload to get us in there, that our primary, many of our goals were not achieved, that there were not weapons of mass destruction, that the Iraqi people suffered tremendously, that the rebuilding process was corrupt and inefficient.
They think big, strong guy, sniper, he shoot people good.
Look at him.
He's American sniper.
I got him on a hat.
I'm going to wear it.
That's Bradley Cooper, right?
Yeah, it's Bradley Cooper.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why when the hurt locker, I'm like, man.
Like, I support women directors, but why does it got to be Catherine Bigelow doing the hurt locker?
Like, really?
That's the story that she gets on stage and thanks the firefighters.
I'm sorry.
I'm showing my prejudice against the propaganda.
You can't actually have a movie about the Iraq war because it would be, I mean, there's issues with the movie Vice, but that's an actual movie about the Iraq war to an extent where it's about like the people and kind of the venal and corrupt attitudes that lead us in there.
You can't have a movie about what the Iraq war is actually about, but you can make a bunch of movies about likable dudes in the Iraq war that will make people feel more fondly towards the military and the military-industrial complex, as opposed to just be like, all of these wars are disasters and clearly the people running our defense department are incompetent because look at how these get handled every time.
Look at how badly these wars were prosecuted.
Yep.
That's not like you're not going to be able to do it.
From the perspective of an Iraqi either.
I mean, every now and then, I will say this: the movie Mosul, which was directed by Carnahan, but it was produced by the Russo brothers.
That is a really good movie that does it.
There's not like an American in that movie, really.
It's all like Iraqis, all of the characters.
Okay.
I think they're pretty much a good, a buddy of mine, Sengar, was actually like the local consultant on the cultural consultant on the film.
And it does, as someone who was there in Mosul, it does a really good job.
I know some of the dudes it was based on here.
So you do actually get some really good, like, it doesn't not happen, right?
Like stuff like this, but most people probably haven't seen Mosul, and everybody knows about the movie American Sniper.
And this doesn't have Bradley.
This doesn't have Bradley.
Yeah.
And again, like, just this is happening in Vietnam, too.
The Green Berets becomes the only, I think, definitely the first and I think the only pro-Vietnam movie about Vietnam that comes out during the war.
What's his name?
Makes Platoon, specifically because he hates the Green Berets so much.
Like the movie Platoon is a reaction to what a piece of propaganda that Green Berets is.
Is that Oliver Stone or am I?
I think it's Stone.
I think it's Stone.
Yeah, Stone.
And he gets pissed off by what a piece of bullshit this film becomes.
I've never, I need to see Green Berets because I never, like, I've never seen a positive spin on the Vietnam movie.
It's pretty fun.
I watched it as a kid.
My parents wanted me to see it.
They thought it was a great movie.
One of my uncles was a Green Beret.
So like, oh, shit.
And it's, what did your uncle think of it?
I mean, he abandoned.
Anyway, we don't need to get into my uncle.
Okay, okay.
We leave our uncle in the middle.
We don't need to talk about that uncle in particular.
I never knew him super well, but like his service was a regular topic of discussion.
I think that's part of why my mom wanted me to see to the Green Berets is to know what my uncle Jim had done in the Green Berets.
But I don't think this is a particularly accurate movie about what the Green Berets did.
And it's certainly like it's filmed in Fort Bragg.
It's very obviously not Vietnam.
It's like pine tree forests all over.
It could not look less like Vietnam.
So this film, though, would start to prove to be kind of the start of what is to date a decades-long collaboration between Hollywood and the DOD.
You know, it's a proof of concept.
The film is utterly panned by reviewers, and it actually sparked anti-war protests in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities that because they protest, it makes conservatives love the film even more, right?
Like, you hear there's this movie about our brave soldiers and they're protesting it in LA.
Like, that's not going to do anything but make you love it more.
Absolutely.
Suddenly, it's become a martyr of the right.
Yeah.
They love that stuff.
Roger Ebert called it cowboy and Indian idiotic.
Renata Adler of the New York Times called it vile and insane.
None of this stopped it from being a huge commercial success, earning $12 million, which is all of the money in the world in 1968 dollars, and giving John Wayne an excuse to call the bad reviews, quote, ridiculously one-sided, blind, stupid criticism of our picture that made real people more conscious of just how honest we were.
Anti-American.
I do say so myself.
They tried to cancel us, but you can't cancel America.
This is like what the Daily Wire is going to try to remake.
They're going to remake the Green Berets, and Shapiro is going to fund it.
Now, here's the thing: John Wayne was talented.
So we are.
I am a little less worried about Ben Shapiro.
Because John Wayne had things he was good at.
There's the other Quiggly sister.
It's like Margaret Quigley and then there's the you've got James Woods.
James Woods.
Yeah, there's one other washed up right-wing celebrity and you've got like Kirk Cameron.
Get them all together.
Get your A team together.
Do a new A team reboot with just like disgraced conservative actors.
Oh my God.
Oh man.
I need to see that.
Have your like Bosley be Kelsey Grammar.
Yeah.
Introducing Kyle Rittenhouse.
Turns out that cry was fake.
Kyle Rittenhouse and James Woods in a fucking action shoot-em-up.
Ah, yeah.
Do it.
Do it.
We dare you.
We want to see this.
But yeah, so it's interesting.
I do legitimately want to see that movie.
It'll happen.
It will happen.
Something like that will happen.
Kyle Rittenhouse will get cast in an action movie within the next couple of years for sure.
God.
It is just interesting that, like, even though he was a good actor, like, this sucked.
And it was like 68, 69, like 69 it came out.
Well, I think it sucked.
I think you would probably think it sucked.
Most reviewers think it sucked.
A lot of people don't.
A lot of people, like, and they're not like, when I say it's successful, they're not like just blindly buying it to own the libs.
They enjoy it.
It's a movie that's got some cool action sequences and shit.
Like, it's not a good movie about the Vietnam War, but as a movie, it succeeds in making the audience happy.
Got it.
So, you know, like.
So it, it, like, mission accomplished.
Yeah, probably.
Absolutely accomplished.
And, and Wayne makes a big deal in like the ads for this or in the PR campaign for this movie, the fact that he visited Vietnam and like spent time with soldiers on his own without handlers.
He was like adjacent to combat.
He's on like chunks of the line where there is shooting.
And he gets really popular with a lot of soldiers he meets there because they're like, oh, hey, this guy who I saw in movies as a kid who like influenced my conception of manhood is like here standing on the line.
That's great.
So, you know, some of them think this is cool.
There's obviously a lot of Vietnam veterans, perhaps even significantly more Vietnam veterans who have been in combat and see this movie and are like, well, this is just rank gross propaganda.
But it's not like one-sided.
There are a lot of Vietnam veterans who like the fact that he does this.
But it also must have been like the death of a hero for a lot of the kids.
When they realize, well, yeah.
Who were actually there and saw their friends die and got injured and maimed and for what?
Like it's kind of that moment where you're like your hero, you realize is like a vicious right-winger.
It's this moment a lot of people have in a lot of British kids have in World War I when they realize that all of these poems they had been told read about like the glory of war and all of these lurid paintings of colonial victories are like, no, here's what it's really like to get shot at by a machine gun.
There's nothing glorious or manly about it.
And there are a bunch of people who have that and a bunch of kids who like had joined and volunteered for Vietnam in part because of the things that John Wayne had led them to believe about masculinity.
In Jesus and John Wayne, Dumez writes, as one working class Vietnam veteran later recalled, he went to Vietnam to kill a commie for Jesus Christ and John Wayne.
It was Sands of Iwo Jima that inspired Ron Kovic to volunteer for the Marines during the Vietnam War, a war that would cost him the use of his legs and lead to a disenchantment with war that he chronicled in his memoir, Born on the 4th of July.
Off-screen too, Wayne worked to recruit young men to the war effort, ridiculing as soft those who didn't enlist.
One critic labeled Wayne the most important man in America, given the role his films played in driving American engagement in Vietnam.
Kovacs would later say on his previously John and Wayne-inspired ideas about war and manhood.
I gave my dead dick for John Wayne.
Oh my God.
And he made a necklace out of them.
Just a bunch of dead American kids.
John Wayne, just a bunch of kids' dicks on his neck.
Kids' dicks adorning him like a headdress.
Like this is...
He does get a bracelet from the Montagnards, but yeah.
This is still his unfulfilled World War II, like whatever fantasy or shame, really.
That he's like, well, I'm going to send other people to die now.
That is what a lot of people who knew him suggest, is that he never got over his shame for failing to serve in World War II.
So he decided, like, this is how I'm going to overcome it, is by getting all these kids to serve in my place in this other war.
You know, I didn't come through then, but I'm going to come through now for America by getting all these kids to die in a jungle for nothing.
I mean, what's crazy is that today you would see John Wayne and this career path and be like, oh, he's an op.
Like he was created by the CIA.
Like he's been a DOD like op from the beginning and he's not.
Like he just did this stuff.
They bid him voluntarily.
Sure, but he's motivated by his own shame because he realizes that being the guy he is, he should have fucking done something in World War II.
Yeah.
And he did not.
What I mean is he just seems like he was created in a lab of like all of America's lies just like sewn together in some evil scarecrow.
He's all of our lies sewn together in a package that unfortunately is really good at a specific kind of acting and it allows him to, yeah, just like stand in front of men and get them to sign up to go fight in Vietnam and ridicule people as soft for refusing to do it.
If John Wayne slapped someone at the Oscars.
Well, we're building to that, Francesca.
So the ballad or the Green Berets launched six months after the Tet Offensive put a lie to the idea that the U.S. was particularly close to a victory in Vietnam.
Within months of its release, the first rumors of the My Lai Massacre had begun to percolate out into the culture.
So right after this movie, we find out that American soldiers have killed hundreds of civilians brutally in the sacking of this village.
So the Green Berets had shown U.S. soldiers spending most of their time helping adorable kids and like building up villages and infrastructure projects.
Douglas MacArthur's Reality Check00:13:04
The reality was that very often, U.S. troops killed those same kids and blew those villages to bits.
John Wayne portrayed war crimes as purely the purview of the Viet Cong.
While reality proved him wrong over and over again, large numbers of conservatives tucked their heads into the comforting lie he had offered them.
John Wayne referred to the Milai massacre as the so-called Milai Massacre and redirected any questions about it to lurid claims about atrocities committed against our people by the Viet Cong.
It's again, this like, what about ism, where it's like, yeah, it's a war.
You can always find bad things that every side has done in a war.
But he's pretending that like, oh, Americans are just there handing out clean water and these mean old Viet Cong are killing them for some reason.
For no reason at all.
Yeah.
So much was.
So-called Milai.
There's not even a village.
He would be like, look, there's so much going on in Vietnam that there's no good reason, quote, one little incident in the United States Army should make a fuss.
The reality, the sad reality.
I mean, the sad reality is I feel like there are way more Milai's that we just don't know about.
There's a number we do know about.
There were quite a few times shit like that happened.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Remember this one, but there were many, many, many others we don't have at the tip of our tongue, the images of which were not particularly even, you know, they weren't captured.
The journalist wasn't there on the ground at the right moment at the right time.
Or, I mean, the thing, the reason Meli becomes what it is is because one of the officers who sees it like threatens to machine gun everybody if they don't stop and then reports it.
Like, landed his helicopter in between civilians and was like, fucking stop.
A cool dude.
Way, a way cooler dude than John Wayne.
Indeed.
Yeah.
So other far-right figures rushed in to assure John Wayne that he was right on the money.
And he is, you know, still to this day popular with a segment of Vietnam veterans who want to believe that they were there for a reason or that their kids were there for a reason, fighting a fight that needed to be fought.
No less a fascist luminary than Douglas MacArthur told John Wayne that he represented, quote, the American serviceman better than the American serviceman himself.
There it is.
Here's what's funny about that.
General Douglas MacArthur fired from his job prosecuting the Korean War for number one, not being great at it and number two, wanting, asking for permission to nuke China and Russia repeatedly.
Douglas Mac.
Please, please, please, please, Douglas MacArthur, famous for his command of U.S. forces in the Philippines.
Also, the dude, like he's saying that John Wayne represents the American serviceman better than the American serviceman.
During the bonus army marches, which is when a bunch of U.S. World War I veterans were like marching during the Great Depression to get the money that they were promised by the government, Douglas MacArthur led the forces that gunned them down with tanks and machine guns as they marched out DC.
So I really want to hear who Douglas MacArthur thinks represents the American serviceman best.
He seems like a good source on that.
Douglas MacArthur would never do the American servicemen wrong by say killing many of them for protesting because they're not getting paid.
I love you, like fucking Douglas MacArthur.
The amount of times I was told that piece of shit was a hero as a kid makes me want to light some things on fucking fire.
And by the way, Patton was there with him.
So fuck them all.
Damn.
Well, that is, I mean, sadly, this is the American military and it always has been, right?
We like the myth better than the actual soldier.
Fuck the soldier.
Fuck the soldier.
We want them.
We want the John Wayne.
I mean, it's the same thing.
Soldiers are inconvenient as hell.
A lot of them have experiences that are really hard to monetize.
I know.
They're never posing.
They don't know what to do with the props ever.
Some of them are sad.
Ugh.
They're always just attached to home life.
Anyway, but it is you.
This sounds like the crassness, and I hate to bring it to to now because I'm just like, fuck, we've always been this way.
But you hear that crassness.
You know, I'm not going to defend John McCain, but saying that like he was like a loser because he was captured.
You hear you have, and then you've got like fucking Trump leaning over, you know, World War I and two soldiers being like, what was this?
Why did they die?
Losers.
Only losers die.
That is within the context of this episode, at least McCain, as like a rich kid who didn't have to, went and got fucked up.
I have a lot more respect for John Kerry because he wasn't bombing people and also got fucked up.
But, you know, at least both of them, unlike John Wayne, put skin in the game, you know?
Right.
John Wayne didn't even have like that.
I guess it's one of those things.
I guess it's morally better to advocate for an unjust war and serve in it than it is to advocate for an unjust war and refuse to serve in it.
I think that's fair to say.
I feel like that does sound weird, but at least it's evident.
It's like with fucking, what's his name?
The star who like testified, who like went against his studio to go like talk at the fucking, to name names and shit.
At least he was putting his skin in the game, I guess.
Right.
It's not, I don't know, better and worse are useless terms for this, but at least like it points to the fact that, well, this person did believe in the shitty thing they were doing.
He's not a hypocrite.
You're not just a total fucking empty hypocrite, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's weird.
I don't want to be like trying to mark any of this down as moral lessons because it's bad to bomb people, John McCain.
Don't mark things down, kids.
I just, like, I don't know.
I'm more, there's something more unsettling about a person who like is so empty that all of these things are just posturing for them.
And I don't know how much that is true for, because some of it may be that John Wayne really did believe he should have served in World War II and kind of hated himself, and that's what's driving him to do this.
I don't know.
There's a lot of complicated shit going on that has a lot to say about masculinity.
This podcast isn't going to say all of it, but it's definitely stuff I think about a bunch.
Yeah.
I don't like emotionally unavailable men.
That's like your first boyfriend.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
But then you move on and you're like.
I mean, I've been that boyfriend for a lot of people, but yeah.
Wasn't going to say anything, Robert, but you know, you just learn, got to learn to open up.
So, you know, he's pretty happy after the Green Berets.
This really cements him in the right wing as this kind of like militant archon of masculinity.
It wipes away this sort of shame of his failure to serve in World War II.
It gets him, you know, it kind of helps him settle into his new role as an elder conservative icon.
Ronald Reagan actually reaches out to him and is like, hey, bro, you know what you ought to do is become governor of California.
Like, we could put your ass in the White House one day.
And thank God he says no.
He's not in great health.
You know?
Thank God he loses.
Because he would have won.
For sure would have won.
He definitely would have won.
Oh, with our history.
I can't imagine a few.
I can't imagine a series of events in which John Wayne runs for governor of California and loses.
I can't conceive of it.
No, we are trash here in this state.
I mean, look at how many times we're going to be able to do it.
Arnold won, and he's a way better person than John Wayne.
Yeah, no, it's very true.
Not a good person, but better.
Yeah, dude, what does Arnold do for American masculinity?
I honestly, I think he was probably a better, I think, as I think as the fucking Terminator, he was a healthier symbol of American masculinity than John Wayne.
Because a big thing the Terminator stands for is like putting yourself before or putting your child a kid before yourself and like making the success and happiness of that child the entire like motive force of your life, right?
Like there's actually some nice things in that movie, nice dad stuff in that movie about a killer cyborg.
He's going to be back.
He actually will be back.
He's not like John Wayne who's going to go start another fucking family.
No, he's going to be back in some increasingly hard to follow sequels that we don't need to talk about.
Whatever.
Broadly speaking, the cyborg killer bot from the future is a better symbol of emotionally available manhood than any John Wayne character.
Yes.
That is very funny.
I like that.
So, yeah, John Wayne chose not to get into politics in an electoral capacity, but he did spend the rest of his life bloviating about politics readily, as this passage from the book Jesus and John Wayne makes clear.
In a 1971 interview in Playboy, Wayne was particularly harsh in his assessment of the blacks or colored or whatever they might want to call themselves.
They certainly aren't Caucasian.
With a lot of blacks, there's quite a lot of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightly so, possibly rightly so.
But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.
I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.
I don't believe in giving authority in positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.
As far as African-American representation in his own films, Wayne asserted that he'd given the blacks their proper position.
He had a black slave in the Alamo, and he had a correct number of blacks in the green berets.
His views on Native Americans were no more enlightened.
I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Native Americans.
Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival.
People needed land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
Outstanding shit, John Wayne.
Incredibly boomer.
Buddy, keep telling yourself that and finish the bottle.
That is, I just, it's sometimes kind of, I feel like I'm looking at racism in a terrarium.
Like it's so crystallized and perfect.
It is, it's, I don't hate them.
They're just, you know, second-class citizens and they're not responsible and they're idiots.
And it's, it's a very specific kind of racist in that I don't think today John Wayne would have, if he was around today, he would never call himself a white supremacist in an interview.
Not to say he wouldn't have believed the same things.
Admit back then, if you admit, said you were you believed in white supremacy, you know, until they're educated or whatever.
That's not controversial.
That's not a fringe right-wing thing.
That does not identify you as part of a dangerous political sect in 1971.
And part of the evidence for that is that like the only people who get angry when he says this are like black publication.
There's like no impact on the mainstream because John Wayne says that the liberals are like, no, he's got a point.
Yeah.
The leaders are crazy.
Or they're more just like, oh, well, you know, that's just John Wayne.
You know, that's just how certain people think.
Sure.
And like, it's, it's not, it's not the same as calling yourself a white supremacist in 2022 would be.
Like he's not identifying himself with a fringe of the political spectrum here.
It sort of reminds me of, oh, God, I hate doing the show and bringing up like present day examples, but it reminds me of Joe Arpaio going in front of that like fringe CPAC group.
Yes.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Whatever it was.
Yeah, and he's like, some people say I'm a racist.
And everyone's like, cheering.
And he's like, well, wait, I was supposed to.
The point was that I'm not.
Why are you cheering?
It's not a good thing.
And they're like, no, we've changed.
We love racists.
Yeah, I could see John Wayne getting like tricked by something like that.
And he probably would have like backpedaled.
Again, not because he's not racist, but because he would not be the kind of guy who would want to like look bad.
Like he doesn't, John Wayne would not have wanted to completely alienate himself from like his liberal friends or from like the academy and shit.
He was not, it was not, he was not that kind of political figure, you know?
Sure, Hollywood number one.
Yeah, yeah.
So he would have, I think he would have, he would have choosed, he would have said the same thing in different words if he was interviewed today, you know?
Yeah.
Slightly more careful words.
Unless he was really drunk, then he would have said the same thing and it would have been a problem for him.
But not that big a problem.
He would have been okay.
Yeah.
But still, even without white supremacy in there, which is, yeah, jarring, it is a perfect distillation of a lot of white American thinking.
Yes.
At the time, and sometimes currently.
Again, he's not like fringe in any way.
Careful Words or Drunken Truths00:04:16
This is all very mainstream stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, you know what else is mainstream?
What?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Like racism, they're all deeply woven into the fabric of American society.
How's that, Sophie?
Is that good?
I think you crushed it, my friend.
Is that good?
That's gonna make him happy?
All right.
Loved it.
Beautiful.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, woo, woo, woo.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come.
Look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
Marlon Brando and Cancer00:15:05
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're doing great, folks.
We're back.
We're happy.
Everybody's smiling.
Everybody's laughing.
This has a Hollywood ending, right?
It does have an ending.
And that ending occurs probably in Hollywood.
So John Wayne, while I think he probably would have been more careful today than he was in 1971, I should note that he also blew his cover as a giant racist on several occasions.
And one of those would have been the 1973 Oscars.
This is the most recent reason John Wayne went viral in the wake of Will Smith lightly slapping a dude.
And let's say moderately slapping a dude.
I was waiting for the Evans take on this.
I'm like, it's Roberts.
That wasn't.
No, I think it was a really good film slap, right?
Like it read on camera really well.
But yeah, so people brought up...
I'm frustrated.
It's weeks later and there's still think pieces coming out about this.
One of the things people said.
I've got a forthcoming one.
Oh, good.
Oh, good.
There was this fucking stuff about like, you know, Will Smith getting canceled and like, but nothing happened to John Wayne when, and then they would talk about this story that we're about to talk about.
So the gist of.
1973, and you're like, yeah, okay.
This is a good one.
So Marlon Brando, right?
Famously not a problematic dude, star of the Isle of Dr. Moreau and probably a couple of other movies, got nominated for best actor for his role in The Godfather, which is not nearly as good a movie as The Isle of Dr. Moreau, but whatever.
So Brando had struck up what seems to be a really legitimate and honest friendship with an indigenous American activist named Sashine Littlefeather.
She was of Apache and Yaqui descent and was angry at Hollywood for a wide variety of understandable reasons.
And Brando agreed with her about the things she was angry about.
So he decides he's going to turn down the Oscar if he wins it.
So she's hanging out with him the night that he's supposed to like go to the Oscars, and he's typing out this eight-page speech in case he wins.
And this speech, he wanted to use his podium to protest the wrongs being done that had been done to Native Americans by Hollywood, right?
So the unjust and racist portrayal of Indigenous people in decades of cowboy movies, including a bunch of John Wayne movies.
And he's also specifically, he and Littlefeather are specifically angry about Wounded Knee.
So this is a battle, which is a bunch of just a horrible, horrible battle.
And at this moment in 73, it's the site of a standoff between Native activists and the feds over the murder of a Lakota man, right?
So that's going on while the Oscars are about to happen.
And so Brando decides he's going to turn, if he wins, the best actor, he's going to turn that into a place to talk about them.
So Littlefeather helps him put together this speech.
And then kind of at the last moment, he's like, well, what if you deliver it, right?
I shouldn't deliver it.
Like, why don't you go, don't touch, don't even touch the Oscar.
Don't take it.
Just deliver this speech in my stead, right?
If you want to.
And she wants to.
So he gives her the speech he's written.
But when she arrives, the presenters, number one, see that like, oh shit, Brando's sent this person here.
She wants to give a speech.
You can't have more than 60 seconds.
You can't read that eight-page thing that Marlon Brando gave you.
So she has to come up with something kind of on the fly, and here's what she comes up with.
Hello, my name is Sashine Littlefeather.
I'm Apache, and I'm president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee.
I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening, and he has asked me to tell you in a very long speech, which I cannot share with you presently because of time, but I will be glad to share with the press afterwards that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award.
And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.
Excuse me.
And on television, in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.
I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening and that we will, in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity.
Thank you on behalf of Marlon Brando.
So that's lovely.
Yeah.
It's like so much more cordial than any account.
Extremely polite.
Yes, that any account you will read of what happened and how it happened, she is like insanely soft-spoken, but firm and like apologetic.
I hope I didn't ruin your night.
We're so appreciative of the award, but we just can't take it because of like, yeah, she's very, very mild.
And it's incredible that Hollywood stopped with any kind of racist portrayals of Native Americans from that point.
Never again happened.
Never again happened.
I'm going to Google Johnny Depp real quick.
No reason.
Absolutely no reason why I am doing this.
Just typing it into Google.
So, yeah, she gets a lot of support that night.
You hear a lot of clapping, a lot of cheers.
You do hear some booze, though, not an insignificant amount.
Now, I think we both are in agreement.
You would have to be a crazy asshole to take any offense at that whatsoever.
It's a pretty polite and very, very mild statement of conviction.
That is not how John Wayne takes it.
And I'm going to read another quote from The Guardian here.
And this starts with Little Feather talking.
She's interviewed for this piece.
During my presentation, he was coming towards me to forcibly take me off the stage, and he had to be restrained by six security men to prevent him from doing so.
Presenting Best Pictures Soon After, also for The Godfather, Clint Eastwood quipped, I don't know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot and all the John Ford Westerns over the years.
When Little Feather got backstage, she says, there were people making stereotypical Native American war cries at her and miming chopping with a tomahawk.
After talking to the press, she went straight back to Brando's house where they sat together and watched the reactions to the event on television.
Was John Wayne just there like, get my movies out your fucking mouth?
Yeah, he would have hit her probably if he could have.
He was ready to.
Six men.
Get he's a big guy.
Six men, and she's like tiny.
Doesn't look like a big person, no.
Of course, sandwiched by, oh God, just John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
They're still, like, Clint Eastwood's still mad about that.
I would have, what would have been amazing is if Brando had done it and the security guards hadn't been there and we'd gotten to see a fistfight between fat, aging Marlon Brando and fat, aging, drunken John Wayne at the Oscars.
That would have been amazing.
That would have been incredible.
Oh my God, what a moment that would have been.
I do feel like that.
I mean, look, the ratings were good this last Oscars, and I do think that we should have old drunk, washed-up actors like wrestling each other on stage.
I want to see Brando bottle John Wayne with some fucking wine, just like nail him in the skull.
I mean, you know, Orson Welles also has like one of the most memorable on-screen drunk moments where he's trying to do the ad for that wine.
Yeah.
Ah, the French.
Like, throw Orson up there.
Yeah, have them all fight.
Fuck it.
So, Sashine is the primary source we have on this, but I don't have any particular trouble believing it.
John Wayne had a history of hitting women sometimes in public.
And to reinforce that, we should talk a bit here about how his marriage to his second wife, Chata, ended.
How's that going?
Yeah, well, this actually happens back in 1946.
I'm sorry for jumping around.
This just seemed like the natural place to put this.
It was so soon.
Here's, yeah, it's right.
They are not together long.
Here's BuzzFeed summing up the details.
The problem was that the current Latin American wife wasn't fulfilling her domestic duties, which is why they were divorcing and why Chata, infuriated and bitter, was alleging horrible things about the Duke in court, that he'd blackened her eye, pulled her from bed and beat her, given her multiple bruises, called her obscene names, and was manhandling her in front of guests.
He went someplace where there were strip teasers, call girls, prostitutes, or whatever you want to call them, she testified.
He came home the next morning very drunk and with a big black bite on his neck.
This was a human being bite.
Wayne's lawyer countered that Chata was a drunk who stayed out all night and returned with grass stains on her clothes, and during their estrangement entertained a male guest at their residence while Wayne was on set.
The divorce drama threatened to become a huge scandal, but Wayne forked over a substantial amount of alimony.
The two settled and his image remained unscathed, in part because allegations of domestic abuse weren't yet taken seriously, but also because Wayne's alleged actions were not out of line with his on-screen image, which had him regularly verbally abusing women and, if not giving them black eyes, then manhandling, throwing them over shoulders, and generally putting them in their place when necessary.
So, you know, Johnny Wayne.
I really, I just was so invested in this one.
I felt like, you know.
Who was going to be the one?
This is going to be alleging horrible things about the Duke.
All right.
All right, Marion.
The Duke married his third wife in 1954.
The Duke.
The two did eventually divorce.
They stayed in each other's lives to some extent.
She's interviewed after his death and still speaks very highly of him.
So, again, these are not, to the extent that he was abusive, everyone he was with in the past doesn't speak negatively of him.
His kids all seem to speak positively of him.
They claim publicly he was a good father.
He was in general a charming man and a good friend to a number of people.
More than that, he seems to have just been kind of a magnetically charismatic person, and it's easy to forgive certain things of people like that.
We do it as a society pretty much constantly.
Also tall.
Can we tall privilege?
Does not hurt.
In 1977, when he turned 70, an article in the right-wing journal Human Events tried to explain Wayne's allure as the fact that he represented a basic American breed, the tall Celt of pioneer Scots, Irish, and English descent.
The book Jesus and John Wayne continues.
All of Wayne's greatest hits involved valiant white men battling and usually subduing non-white populations, the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans.
Like Teddy Roosevelt, Wayne's rugged masculinity was realized through violence, and it was a distinctly white male ideal.
Yep.
I feel like groups today, like those sort of, yeah, just like neo-Nazi groups full of, you know, sort of virgins.
Like they probably all get together and watch old John Wayne movies and are like, aha!
Like unironically, some of them love that stuff.
It's more they just put his face on things because modern action movies are a lot better at keeping your attention.
And if you were to watch his latest movie, like what's funny, the last movie he does, the shootist, like the basic plot of the shootist is there's this old gunfighter who's dying of cancer, like Wayne was kind of at the time.
And he wants to engineer a last gunfight to kill himself.
So he wants to like set up a situation whereby he can have a last gunfight and die because otherwise cancer's going to get him.
And instead he gets shot in the back and killed.
Which is like a weirdly show, like suggests a weird amount of self-knowledge for John Wayne that like that's how that's the movie he goes out in this movie about this like manly archon of like badassness in his aging years who's trying to get in like who's trying to set up one last fight so he can die with dignity and get shot in the back instead.
It's interesting that he that's the last thing he does.
Yeah.
Right, because cancer, you know, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't care how manly you are.
It's not a great way to go out.
No, it's a pretty shitty way to go out.
So yeah, in his declining years, when he filmed, again, some of his best movies, Wayne upped the ante on his conservative rhetoric, screeching at cowards who spit in the faces of the police and judicial sob sisters.
Human Events wrote that, as a man, he is loathed and demeaned by sanctimonious liberals and a whole mess of bug out on America hypocrites.
But Wayne was top shelf with freedom fans who thrilled to the big guy's charge.
John Wayne.
Judicial system.
What is that in reference to?
People who are angry that the criminal justice system imprisons and murders innocent people.
Oh, sisters.
Yeah.
Those pumpkin lilies?
Yeah, pumpkin lilies.
That's right.
Judicial pumpkin lily.
So, John Wayne dies on June 11th, 1979, of ass cancer.
He never lived to see the entirety of the world he built come to fruition, but by 1979, the electoral power of the left had been solidly broken.
Not long after his death, Ronald Reagan, his old buddy, would be elected president.
He would be followed by George H.W. Bush, and then the next liberal president to follow would be considerably further right than most Democrats had been in John Wayne's day.
There are numerous reasons for these shifts, which we've discussed in many podcasts, but the seductive, intoxicating vision of manhood, which stuck in the heads of millions of men who are still alive and voting today, played a strong role.
As Kristen Cobbs-Dumez writes, John Wayne became an icon of rugged American manhood for generations of conservatives.
Pat Buchanan parroted Wayne in his presidential bid.
Newt Gingrich called Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima the formative movie of my life.
And Oliver North echoed slogans from that film in his 1994 Senate campaign.
In time, Wayne would also emerge as an icon of Christian masculinity.
Evangelicals admired and still admire him for his toughness and his swagger.
Dig Up John Wayne's Bones00:11:39
He protected the weak, and he wouldn't let anything get in the way of his pursuit of justice and order.
Wayne was not an evangelical Christian, despite rumors to this effect regularly circulated by evangelicals themselves.
He did not live a moral life by the standards of traditional Christian virtue.
Yet for many evangelicals, Wayne would come to symbolize a different set of virtues, a nostalgic yearning for a mythical Christian America, a return to traditional gender roles, and the reassertion of white patriarchal authority.
Yes.
So, just back on the ranch.
None of these just sissy jobs.
Punk and lily.
Sissy jobs.
Punk and lily content creators.
TikTok dancers.
Casting pods in their basements.
Fucking weak shit.
When can we conquer some shit?
Let's deconquer so we can reconquer the West.
That's what I say.
Decolonize to recolonize.
Who's with me?
Decolonize America, recolonize England.
I just, we need like, this is why the show that I don't watch, Westworld, but that's why like that made sense.
Because you're like, you need a simulation for men who feel inferior to get their rocks off in a safe place.
Obviously, then the robots are sentient.
That's bad.
They don't want them to share.
Yeah, I only watched the first season of that, which I did like, but I'm not, I understand it goes someplaces.
Apparently, you know, it's fine.
But yeah, like, you need Disneyland for adults.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that John Wayne is a big, a big help.
He does a lot of work to create this cultural Disneyland, this like mental vacation space we have for white men to imagine that there was a time in which if I'd only been born then, I would have been a real big man on the range.
You know, I would have been carving out a new America and I would have had a woman who loved me and didn't have a career of her own and everything would have been perfect.
Absolutely.
And then, but it was just a few more years before like, you know, grunge came around.
Thank God.
Yeah, that did wonders for angsty white men.
Hell yeah.
And then, you know, suddenly, well, that's not cool anymore.
Nope.
Now masculinity is just, it's all willy-nilly, and we've got, you know, Disney groomers or whatever we're doing.
Yeah, everything's gotten dumber since.
I, yeah, I, it's, I'm fascinated by that because I don't like, I don't respond.
I'm trying to think of like action heroes that like I respond to, like where I get like ting, where like spidey, like, oh, hell yeah, I want to be that.
I don't have that.
Like, was that Jean-Claude for you?
Was it Stallone?
Is it Schwarzenegger?
Like, who's the...
For me, it was Bruce Willis and Diehard, right?
That was the movie I saw as a kid that was like, well, and actually, honestly, like, much more than that, it was Indiana Jones, right?
I think for a lot of men in mind, like, that was the Harrison Ford at his peak.
That's a leading man right there.
Totally.
And he's, but he's kind of funny, right?
He's got a little, he's got a little sense of humor.
Yeah, he's, he's very, he's incredibly charming.
Cheeky.
That's why he keeps getting out of jail every time he crashes a plane into a golf course.
Nobody can get angry.
Nobody can stay angry at Harrison Ford.
No, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That makes sense.
Ford makes sense.
Also old, also kind of older.
Yeah, for a lot of his movies, he's got, I mean, you know, he's pretty young and swole in them Indiana Jones movies, but not the later, not the most recent one.
He was for the, it's very funny because if you watch the behind the scenes for the second Indiana Jones movie, there's a ton about like how intense his workout schedule was to get him that jacked.
And he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like the guy you would cast as like a skinny office worker in a modern movie.
Yeah.
We didn't know how to get people jacked back then.
We weren't as good at it.
Modern jacked technology just didn't exist.
Nope.
That HGH just wasn't for me.
We didn't have as much HGH as we were going to have.
I wonder what Bruce, what are we talking about?
John Wayne.
John Wayne would think about that.
Bruce Wayne.
Oh, Lord.
I mean, but you also did have this period because Indiana Jones is kind of like right before you start to have this, like all of these super jacked action stars.
That's when like Arnold and Stallone and Van Dam, and then they all give way to Bruce Willis and Die Hard, where it's like, now we're going to have like the everyman badass.
And then 9-11 happens.
Right.
Now we have the soldier badass.
And now they're super jacked again.
Yeah.
Who got people through the 80s?
That was like the Stallones and the Schwartz names.
Yeah.
But later.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Late 70s?
Late 70s?
Yeah, late 70s.
You've got your Indiana Jones and you've got Dirty Harry, right?
You got Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, where he's kind of like a skinny, wiry dude, right?
Clint.
Clint Eastwood.
Can't clan out Clint Eastwood.
Yeah.
Nope.
There's plenty of chairs that need a stern talking to.
Look, masculinity is complex.
Is it?
No.
Not really.
Honestly, not very much at all.
That's why it's so easy for Hollywood to market to.
Now, Robert, when you watch John Wayne movies, is there part of you that's like, I get it.
You know, you're like, I could see how this would be appealing.
I think some of his movies are really good.
Like fucking True Grit's a solid, solid film in a lot of ways.
I do really like actually the remake with the dude in it.
But, you know, yeah, like as a kid, I watched a bunch of John Wayne movies.
Like, they're really well shot.
I've always preferred more about the old Westerns, the way they're shot, the way the music is directed, kind of like the sense of rather than any of the specific dialogue or characters, is like the kind of tone that they have.
Vibe.
Yeah.
There's vibes that are very appealing in those movies, in part because just a lot of really talented people were making some very beautifully shot Westerns.
Beautifully shot propaganda, but hey, but still.
Sure, all art is propaganda, as Orwell would tell us.
Now, did he have 50 pounds of meat in his intestine upon death?
I don't know.
Probably.
I don't think there's any evidence of that.
But maybe.
You know?
Maybe.
Let the meat in John the body.
Let the meat stuck in John Wayne's corpse be the Santa Claus of your beliefs about karma.
I don't really know what the message would be if there is a lot of meat.
Be the gerbil in Richard Gere's asshole.
Yeah, be the gerbil in Richard Gere's asshole.
That's all.
I think that's a good line to end on, everyone.
Go out there, be the gerbil you want to see in Richard Gere's asshole, you know?
God, that's an old Hollywood rumor.
Like four people are going to remember that.
Such an old rumor.
I think the lesson is what is the you don't need to subjugate people of color or Japanese or Native Americans in order to feel masculine and strong and powerful.
You might need to serve your country.
That might help.
I don't know if it's the one war where that's a good idea.
If it's the one war where it's good.
Yeah.
And yeah, and also, like, I feel like this all ended in Brokeback Mountain.
Like, Brokeback Mountain really just, that was it.
was like, oh yeah, we can't be stoic anymore because Ennis.
I don't know.
I think that's very stoic.
That's a stoic-ass movie.
It is a stoic-ass movie, but I'm saying like the sort of the idea that you're like that bottled up emotionally.
You're like, man, I think maybe, you know, maybe there's more going on here.
Maybe you're not fishing by the river.
This is why I'm so excited about Pedro Pascal as a male lead.
A lot of exciting new visions of manhood that Pedro Pascal is.
It is neat.
I think actually there is something to be said about the fact that, and you can say this probably maybe does start with some of James Cameron's early stuff where you're kind of idolizing a slightly more nurturing attitude towards a male action star.
I think that's one of the things that's interesting about The Mandalorian, which has been a big hit, is there is like that is a big emphasis.
You've got this like badass gunslinger, but who's also defined in large part due to his like desire to nurture a child, which is not a negative, not a negative change.
Total daddy.
No, and yeah, there's an emotional journey, and that is a Space Western.
So right here.
It's a pretty fun space.
I enjoy that series quite a lot.
I guess when I'd really think John Wayne's legacy died is probably Lil Nas X, Old Town Road, assless chaps, openly gay, proud as hell, and crushing it.
Hell yeah.
Well, yeah.
So until next time, dig up the corpse of John Wayne and mail his bones to Lil Nas X. That's, I love this.
This is a good project.
Get on.
And I, again, Lil Nas X loves a trigger of the right.
So I bet he will remake one of these films.
Yeah.
Dressed in the bones of John Wayne, wearing his rib cage like a corset.
So you have any plugs for us at the end here after that?
That's amazing.
Oh my God, everyone check out the Abituation Room podcast.
It's a weekly podcast with comedians and myself and activist experts.
It's a good time.
And yeah, listen.
Yeah.
All right.
Again, go defile the grave of John Wayne.
Where is that grave?
Oh, that's a great question.
Where is John Wayne's grave?
I want the address.
Pacific View Memorial Park in Newport Beach.
Oh, that's on brand.
That is on brand.
Yeah, it's a pretty.
I was about to say, of course it's Newport Beach.
It's definitely Newport Beach.
Hell yeah.
A little slice of red over in this Southern California blue, I guess.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, I'm sure we are not the only ones to have located where he is buried.
No, in order to steal his bones and give them to Lil Nas X so he can turn them into a corset.
Yes.
I like that he's dead.
Good riddance.
May we never have someone who plagues the American consciousness so horribly to the point where we're still, we're just waiting for the John Wayne generations to die off.
Yeah.
Thank God.
Well.
Thank you.
This is great.
Mystery in New York Politics00:02:27
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.