Daniel and Jack sit down across from each other in brown leather armchairs and ruthlessly interrogate each other about their many crimes. We also continue our election year series on movies about (or at least mentioning) US Presidents by talking over the deeply mid 2008 Ron Howard movie Frost/Nixon, an almost entirely fictional account of some TV interviews in which a chat show host helped a mass murdering crook present himself to the world as a thoughtful and moral person, to enormous acclaim. Full episode exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Wanted. Ambitious individual for leadership position.
Be prepared for difficult application process and stressful work environment.
Challenges? Many.
Rewards? Numerous.
Failure? Possible.
Your employer? The American people.
The few chosen have been...
The Presidents.
It is now clear that Richard Nixon and close aides conspired to sabotage peace talks to get him elected in 1968.
Oh They massively, directly, and covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation, the most sensitive, not only going on at the time, but probably one of the most important negotiations in American diplomatic history.
In 1968, Richard Nixon is the Republican nominee for president.
Hubert Humphrey is the Democratic vice president and eventual nominee.
And Nixon realizes that Johnson, President Johnson's efforts to bring North Vietnam to the peace table and to begin an end to the Vietnam conflict Nixon realizes that these efforts are going to be bad for his bid for the presidency.
And so he makes a secret overture to South Vietnam to discourage them from going to the peace talks and instead to wait until he has secured the presidency.
And it's another I Don't Speak German bonus episode.
And it's the latest installment in our ongoing, because the election is still ongoing, at least at the time of recording.
And it seems like it will just be ongoing forever.
Our ongoing series of movies about, sort of, about the American presidency.
And Daniel is here also.
I hope if he's not, then we're in trouble.
Daniel, are you there? I am here.
I am here. Okay, and that's good.
So we're recording this on the night, well, night from my point of view, of the Vance Waltz debate, aren't we, on CBS? Oh, is that happening?
I guess that's happening tonight, yeah.
So we won't know anything about that.
I was going to ask you, are you pumped?
But clearly you're just oblivious.
I will, I will, I will.
Well, I was just way too invested in Frost-Dixon to be following, you know, like real-world politics or anything like that, so...
Yeah, no, I always just catch it the day after.
So it's like, oh, it's in the news.
Oh, let's watch the debate or watch bits of the debate or whatever.
So I never watch these things in real time.
At least not in a while.
Not in a while. I mean, it will be exciting.
It will honestly be exciting to see.
I mean, I think Wall's...
I don't know. It's just hard not to like the guy.
And so he's just going to smear Vance into a tiny little pustule of nothing.
Well, one hopes.
Because Waltz is honestly, he seems to me to be as good as American politicians can possibly be.
Yeah. And Vance is pretty close to...
I mean, Trump obviously changes the calculus on this.
But Vance seems like, you know, in the absence of Trump, you would say Vance looks to be about as bad as they can be.
So it really is a meeting of antipodes, this one.
It's going to be interesting how the thing I'm mainly interested in really is to see how they both handle each other because they're very, very different.
And yeah, I mean, anyway, we will maybe talk about that on another show, but it is going to be interesting just on a technical level to see how those two personalities interact with each other.
Yeah, no, hey, we could do another bonus episode.
We could just watch the debate and discuss it in a couple of days.
That's fine with me. Yeah, yeah, let's just completely degenerate into, you know, lowest common denominator political podcasting, which is just another way of saying every fucking political podcast.
Yeah, I bet we could get Nate Silver on.
Let's get Nate Silver. Oh, I expect so.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, welcome to Jack and Daniel's new venture.
We just watch stuff and talk about it.
The podcast. Yeah, that's how it goes.
And that's really what these bonus episodes are, people, which is why you pay for them.
So yeah, speaking of an amazing political meeting of different personalities, you know, and conversations crackling with political controversy and the cut and thrust of interrogation and stuff like that, what we're going to be talking about in this bonus episode, as I say, it's another in our series of chats about movies about the American presidency, or connected very tangent, or movies with a president in, I suppose we have to call this since we did Independence Day.
And it is the movie Frost-Nixon.
Frost slash Nixon.
Which, honestly, that would...
I mean, Frost slash Nixon?
That would have been a better film.
Like, at some point, just Frost lunges forward, pulls a box cutter out of his jacket, and just slashes Nixon right across the face.
If we could have gone full inglorious bastards with it, I think that would have been better.
Daniel, what do you think? Like, full Dexter mode.
He just goes, like, full serial killer mode.
Yeah, no, I could see that.
It's a slasher movie, where it's like David Frost working his way through Nixon's AIDS until he gets to the big guy.
Yeah, or just a series of movies about David Frost, the slasher-stroke-political-avenger.
You've got Frost-Nixon as the original one, and then in subsequent movies, David Frost, with his box cutter, goes after other political figures who are guilty of some malfeasance, you know?
And every time directed by Ron Howard, because he's the only person who has the real subtlety in order to handle these kinds of concepts.
Anyway, yeah, so...
Ron Howard.
You know, one of the things I was going to do in this episode is I was going to start with a thing about, like...
I'm probably going to be quite...
I mean, spoilers, everybody.
I don't like this movie. I think this movie is shit.
So I was going to start with a thing like, I think this movie is terrible, and I think it's badly directed, and I think Ron Howard is basically the epitome of everything that's wrong with Hollywood filmmaking.
But, even so, no disrespect to the man's memory, to the people that loved him, etc., Because I got it into my head somehow that Ron Howard was dead.
And I have no idea how I got that idea.
It was just in there, in my brain, Ron Howard's dead.
And I just thought, I'd better check that, actually.
Like, five minutes before we started recording.
And he's not. No, no.
He's still alive. He's certainly not dead.
He is 70 years old, so he's not even, like, that aggressively old.
Yeah. No, no, he's not even president age.
Yeah, he can't be president until you're 70 now.
That's how it goes. Yeah, no, I hear you.
That's right, yeah. Okay, so yeah, Frost Nixon.
It's not very old, is it?
It's 2008 or something?
2008, yeah. So, I mean, which is still like 16 years ago.
So, yeah. To me, that's a recent film.
Yeah. Directed by Ron Howard, and it's based on a stage play.
And I'm afraid that's all you're getting of that, at least for the time being.
If you want to hear the rest of it, you'll have to give myself or Daniel as little as $1 a month on Patreon.
When you do, you'll have access to this episode and all our previous bonus episodes, the entire back catalogue.
