Spencer and Patrick dissect the 1976 film Network, linking its assembly-line production of shows like Lady Cops to modern social media metrics and Howard Beale's "I'm mad as hell" monologue to today's viral outrage culture. They analyze the "Mao Tse Tung Hour" segment as a precursor to reality TV's "if it bleeds, it leads" sensationalism while unpacking Ned Beatty's speech listing IBM, ITT, and Exxon as true nations. The discussion connects this corporate sovereignty to modern tech giants like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, arguing that lobbying and capital movement now override democratic processes, leaving public opinion fragmented in an age of on-demand media. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Spencer's Three Thoughts00:07:22
you And we're back with Truth Unrestricted,
the podcast that is examining pieces of media today to see how they relate to and to give us some fresh aspect of an idea on what's really happening in our unreality now.
That's not much of a tagline.
That one's probably not going to work.
This is the workshop where I go through those, and that one's a little clunky, so we'll probably never use that one again.
Yeah.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I'm here today again with Patrick.
How are you doing, Patrick?
Good, Spencer.
How are you doing?
Good.
Aside from the tagline that I screwed up, everything's going fine.
Well, you know, you want to stay organic.
Well, that's me on the inside of me past this veneer.
I am organic.
I am a real human, not a robot.
I'm not a series of circuits like an AI of any kind.
That's not what's happening here.
Yeah.
Yeah, and we're going to talk about a movie that is really a solid gold movie called Network.
So you just watched it today for the first time.
That's right.
Yeah.
What's your first general thoughts on what this movie?
Well, I should mention everyone, we're going to spoil this movie.
It's 50 years old.
Yeah.
We're going to spoil it.
We're going to spoil every moment of it.
It's fine.
Yeah.
So what's your thoughts?
Yeah, I don't know.
Kenya, I don't know if a person can say that something holds up if they didn't see it back in the day, because sometimes people say, oh, yeah, it held up well, but it just seems like it would hold up well.
It's such a relevant message in this movie that, I mean, you could modernize it and all you would do is change the set and the decor, but all the things that people are saying and talking about in the show would be virtually identical, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't remember the names of any of the people that wrote it or directed it or whatever.
They were famous people.
I think the person who directed it was a guy named Sidney Lumet, and he's famous for many things.
It was late in his career when he did this one already.
He was already around for a very long time.
And then the man who wrote it, I can't remember his name, Paddy Chayefsky, I think, something like that.
He was mostly big time famous for this, but he was.
Had written many things before this, but had never written one that was as big as this one once this one came out.
This one was a big deal at the Oscars in the year it came out.
And when they asked the writer about it, the writer of the screenplay about it, about how he like, because this is remarked upon as a movie that predicted many things in the future.
And they asked him about that, about the idea of it predicting things in the future.
And he said, I was just writing a script about things that were happening right then, which is interesting.
I don't know if I totally believe him or not.
I don't know.
I mean, I know him, so I can't, you know, I don't know how much is he likely to lie to people who are asking him about this.
But there are certainly aspects of it that were very present at that very moment.
1976, this came out.
1975 was when it was made.
And at the rate where they were making movies then, they weren't taking like a two to three year sort of development time.
It was he wrote it, and within a month, it was already being.
Made right, and he was sort of making adjustments as they went, but um, nowadays it would take longer, right?
So there's sort of a more longer lead time between the ideas you'd put in to the where you'd make it.
And if you had something that was uh very, very recent, it would have been shoved in at the last minute in the movie.
But um, as as is you know, anyone who watches this goes, it has real events mentioned in this movie, very particularly the.
Symbionese Liberation Army was a real group that really did rob banks and they really did kidnap Patty Hearst and she really did participate in the robberies that occurred.
It was a real thing that happened.
And I'd have to check the timeline here, but that sort of fell out and came to be big news like 1974 to 75 ish.
So like it was like fresh in his mind when he's writing all this stuff.
And of course, in this movie, he puts in an additional ecumenical liberation army that's a direct take on the Symbionese liberation army, and then has them even mentioned in the same conversation sometimes, and how confusing it is for people to try to keep track of all these liberation armies that are just prop cropping out of everywhere.
It reminded me of Life of Brian when the top of the audience or whatever.
All these.
Yeah, the people's front of whatever.
Someone gets the order wrong.
Oh, no.
No, that's a different group entirely.
Yeah.
The People's Front of Right.
The People's Liberation Front.
Yeah.
Fuck off, PLF.
Yeah.
I was like, oh, isn't that interesting that that scene?
I wonder if that was maybe a direct takeoff by Monty Python to incorporate that.
Could be.
I'd have to check when they, I think it was late 70s when they wrote Life of Brian, if I'm remembering right.
Yeah.
All three of their big movies, I think, were in the 70s.
Late 70s, maybe early 80s.
And one of them, I think, The Meaning of Life was the third.
I think that might have been 82 or something, 81.
But yeah, it's possible.
That's 1979.
79, Life of Brooklyn.
Okay, well, it fits, right?
Not necessarily that they took it from this, but there was a lot of activity like this in the States, especially.
And I mean, that culture would have.
Bled over into many other English, especially English speaking countries, which Britain would have had that effect of formerly influencing the US and then getting influenced by this country that it used to influence more.
Popularity Numbers Explained00:05:17
But yeah, we have these weird moments in time where we get this movie and it's talking about its time, but it has its.
So on point that it's speaking about all the, I mean, 50 years on and all the technology that's come in.
And by the way, it's not predicting any technology, it's just predicting things about people and media.
I didn't bother to grab a clip of it because I don't know, I just didn't bother.
But the very opening moments of this movie, there's a narrator and he's discussing one of the characters, Howard Beale, which is the.
The news anchor that goes crazy.
And everything that he discusses about him is related to his popularity numbers.
That his popularity can be exactly measured by the share, which I think is a percentage share, if I understand share properly.
And it's to me, you know.
They weren't.
They weren't predicting the internet and they weren't predicting social media.
But in an age where social media sort of makes all of us some level of of uh, you know sideline entertainer in our own media show and the value of which is directly related to the numbers we get, the attention the, the likes, the number of likes, the impressions, the follows, the right right, all that stuff That directly fits into this,
that it's saying something about the news media and this gets directly amplified.
And we're seeing it again in social media terms, where now, if you were to describe the life and times of a social media person who rose and fell, you would directly relate it to their numbers as they rose and fell for the audience to get a feel for where they fit in the larger world.
It's all related to their popularity numbers.
Yeah, that's exactly the same as what it is today.
In a sense, yeah.
It's, uh, I mean, like the old TV viewership though, with that idea of market share, was just like you know, that there's a total of news viewers, and the leading networks are expected to get, you know, like, uh, have their loyalty who tune in within a certain, yeah.
And it's as a thing that tracks over time.
I mean, you kind of understand why they might use share as a thing because the way that The FCC was arranging everything for everyone, all the news networks, as they got their ability to broadcast and they were told to broadcast news at certain times, dedicate a certain amount of time to news, and they were generally putting their news in the same time slots, everything.
So everyone's news was directly in the, you know, there was no way to record it really in a home.
If you wanted to catch the news, you had to tune in at that time and then.
So, but over time, more and more people would get televisions and more people were watching it.
So, if you were attempting to compare one timeframe versus another, like across a year, like and across a year, you might get more people who watch in the winter versus the summer, right?
I mean, based on how much indoor time they have.
And it might also change in regions, right?
So, you know, which across a nation as large as the US with weather and everything else geographically changing as much as it was.
Uh, you don't have to worry about uh comparing numbers to numbers, right?
It was 8 million in this time and it was 10 million at this time, but as a percentage share, that might be the same percentage because of the way that this works.
You don't have to worry about all those cycles, it's just an easy number to say, okay, well, directly compared to everyone else, we're still getting 22 percent of the news based on their rating sample, yeah, yeah, of the total number of people that are watching, we're still getting 22 percent of those people, and if If we want to do a little better, if we're doing a little better, we get maybe 24%, or it might go up to, might drop down to 19%, or something, right?
And you compare those numbers directly, and this gives you an indication of, you know, what was going on when you were getting 22% versus 19%, and what were the other guys doing that got them their share, right?
Yeah, well, with all of their revenue as well, tied to advertising, that's another thing that they would use and go to the people and say, Campbell's Soup, if you want to have your soup commercial show.
22 million viewers, you Yeah, you're going to do this.
We're going to charge this based on the fact that we get this much.
Yeah, right, right.
And if you want to pay more, you'll get the other guys.
They have a 28 share, you know, but you're going to pay more for that.
HBO Takes Streaming Chances00:14:36
Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
But I have a few clips here that I thought were interesting.
This is a very clippable movie.
It has a lot of sound bites.
This, certainly in our lifetimes, people much younger than us might have missed a lot of this.
And if they caught it, they wouldn't have gotten the reference.
I mean, you would have, I think when you watched it, you probably saw moments that you had seen in other movies, referenced maybe as a parody or whatever.
Well, certain audio sound bites, one audio sound bite in particular, just seems to have permeated to every corner, like everybody's heard it, right?
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
And of course, it sort of has a drop off with time.
Newer generations, it doesn't, this exact sound bite doesn't hit as hard.
But it certainly has moments that come off as sound bites.
So, in that way, it was very, very simple to just grab several of them and say, okay.
Great.
But then what are we going to, you know, what commentary are we going to have about those?
So we'll go through them.
We'll set this up.
And all right.
So here we go.
These are those four outlines submitted by Universal for an hour series.
You needn't bother to read them.
I'll tell them to you.
The first one is set in a large Eastern law school, presumably Harvard.
The series is irresistibly entitled The New Lawyers.
The running characters are a crusty but benign ex Supreme Court Justice, presumably Oliver Wendell Holmes by way of Dr. Zorba.
There is a beautiful girl graduate student and the local district attorney who is brilliant and sometimes cuts corners.
Next one.
The second one's called the Amazon Squad.
Lady Cops.
The running characters include a crusty but benign police lieutenant who's always getting heat from the commissioner, a hard nosed, hard drinking detective who thinks women belong in the kitchen, and a brilliant and beautiful young girl cop who's fighting the feminist battle on the floor.
Where are Terriers and Lady Cops?
The next is another one of those investigative reporter shows.
A crusty but benign managing editor who's always getting.
So, so funny.
They really lean on the crusty, uh, well, archetype, right?
Right.
Well, they this to me when I first watched it years ago, and uh, even now, obviously, it just tells me something about the way it's often been said and talked about how it all TV just sounds like every other bit of TV, and certainly there was a time when this was true.
There were TV shows in the 80s when I was a kid that I liked, but I got that they were a lot like a lot of the other TV shows, right?
Like the exact difference between family ties and growing pains, you know, fell entirely on how much you liked Michael J. Fox versus how much you liked any of the guys on growing pains, right?
Like, like that Kirk Cameron.
Yeah, Kirk Cameron was a guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, but, uh, uh, other than that, it was not that much real difference.
Maybe the age of the siblings, maybe the, You know, the exact job that the parents had or whatever, but they were so similar in almost every other respect that you kind of, you know, but watching this, it's sort of a peek behind the curtain.
And I mean, we mentioned last in last week's episode, we were talking about how when you're making in an assembly line, in a factory, when you're making many of a thing, when you're stretching that out and you're making instead of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of a thing.
The price of each individual thing tends to drop because the process that you're using tends to just make it easier to just, you know, to reduce the cost, right?
And that's essentially what we're seeing here.
They're attempting to make the creation of television programs more like a process, more like an assembly line, so that the creation of them, each individual one, is much cheaper and that hits the bottom line.
And then it matters less what share you get.
Versus how cheap it is to make the show.
So that's why all those TV shows when we were kids were very much alike because they were just being created in a TV show factory.
Where they rely on the characters.
Yeah.
They're not very original with many of the things that they're showing there or here.
And that's why, and they're exaggerated here, that's why the crispy but benign older gentleman in a role, right?
He's a, Yeah, he's a police detective in this one, or he's a professor in that one, right?
And it's just well, it sets up all the clashes too, right?
Because one of them is crusty and old, one of them is new, one of them is like, yeah, it makes it very easy to misogynist, yeah, one of them is a feminist, you know.
So it's interesting because it's not about what the show is about, it's kind of like, well, let's plug in all these character traits and then just have the infinite generator put them in all these conflict situations.
It almost makes us question, why do they need a setting at all?
Yeah, you know, dress it up.
You gotta know, why does it need to be in a Harvard College situation?
Why does it need to be in a police station?
Why does it need to be anywhere, right?
If this is all it is, so I thought this one was an interesting one to just kind of touch on to think about.
Um, and of course, this moment has nothing to do with the plot at all.
This was just a moment where uh, the screenwriter is attempting to show.
The banal nature of the creation of television, how it's not about art.
It's not about artists.
It's not about having anyone create anything new.
In fact, doing it this way squeezes out any originality that there might ever be.
So, why do you think our what we might call TV entertainment, even though we're not taking it in as a TV thing, it's all streaming now.
But why do you think our television shows aren't really like this now as much as they were then?
Well, I mean, besides streaming, like streaming has kind of.
Okay, it's affected it, but it's changed.
Like streaming has given a new edge to continuity, whereas the old sitcoms and things, which is kind of what all of those seemed like sitcom situationals.
Or like old cop shows, right?
Yeah.
Like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere and all those old cop shows, they were all like that, right?
I guess I okay, so I mean, that that adds an element of depth that, um, because I was thinking more like the ones that would have like live audiences and have that type of like, yeah, those ones would have been right.
Also, we don't have that anymore, but it doesn't feel as much like they're all on an assembly line, is sort of ish, but not as much.
Um, I credit HBO.
For breaking this in a big way.
And I mean, it found itself in a situation where it could play by other rules.
And then it leaned into that.
It made shows, it made TV shows that no one else would ever make.
Right?
That's a very good way of putting that.
Yeah.
Because, in part because it could play by cable rules as they were and was sort of a little bit outside of the regular FCC rules of what could show on like regular TV.
Well, because it was never network.
Yeah, it was never.
Yeah.
It was a direct subscription only.
That was the only way to get HBO.
But it didn't lean into that and try to make all the same shows.
It made shows like Oz and Scared Straight and those sorts of things, right, that you'd never see anywhere else.
And then eventually made, like, if you want to look back at the shows that were, like, even on HBO in the 90s, these are shows that would never appear anywhere else.
And I would argue that once streaming came around, You got to a place where you, the streaming was able to do the same thing.
But I would also say that HBO did this without being desperate.
So there's another little network that made TV shows that did it well in sort of an HBO fashion.
So because it was a network, it was in this other weird category.
It didn't do it in the exact same way.
HBO did.
HBO always leaned on its ability to like show sexual content mostly, right?
But there was a little network called AMC, which you might have heard of.
It used to just play.
They aired Walking Dead, I think.
It used to just play old movies and whatnot.
Right.
Yeah.
I think it might even stand for like American Movie Channel or something.
It just played old movies for a very, very long time.
And this was dropping off and it was losing its ability to keep its share.
So it started taking chances on making TV shows.
So it started with a little show called Mad Men.
Okay.
And it, it, uh, it just did exactly what HBO did, which is just find a creator, give them some money, and then put on the air what they made.
Yeah.
Which is exactly what HBO did with, I mean, uh, um, The Wire was an HBO show, and uh, uh, uh, Sopranos was an HBO show.
They just found a guy named David Chase who hadn't made a lot of big shows, but had made a couple.
And they said, yeah, we liked the shows you made.
is there a show that you'd like to make and he said oh i kind of like to do some kind of a some kind of a uh uh you know mobster thing and i think he'd made a show he'd made a show that only had like one season that was like on a regular network it's about teen drama in a high school thing i can't remember what it's called People talked about it, but it was at an era when I didn't watch any TV.
And then they just said, okay, well, oh, you want to make a mobster thing, David Chase, who never made a mobster thing before.
Okay, well, you know, I don't need to hear a lot about it.
Here's some money.
Go make a pilot for us and come back and we'll see what it looks like.
And it was Sopranos, right?
And they said, oh, we really like that.
Here's some more money.
Go make, you know, nine more of these.
We'll call it season one and then we'll, you know.
And that's what HBO did.
That was the HBO model.
Find people who are going to make art like that.
Give them the money, have them make the art, come back and say, okay, good, great.
Let's roll with that.
And then places like AMC started doing pretty much the same thing, Mad Men.
And then they also made Breaking Bad.
And then they also made The Walking Dead.
They weren't all hits that AMC had.
They had a couple of duds.
They had a couple of shows that didn't even quite make it out of the first season.
But like with, like you can look back at a list like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead.
That's pretty good, yeah.
Like, you're you know, I haven't looked recently at what they have done recently or whether they're going to make it now.
That all started like uh, you know, 17 ish years ago, right?
Right, and then of course, you have it was TV, right?
It was still TV, but right around that time was kind of the time when Netflix was kind of starting too, right?
And then Netflix started with uh, they started doing their own programming as well, and they started doing the same thing essentially, the same thing.
Where they were like, they weren't desperate like AMC was, but they were just like, Yeah, okay, you know, we have all this money because we had no idea we were killing Blockbuster and now we're it.
So, yeah, we have you know millions of subscribers paying you know $12 a month for this and we don't know what to do with all this money.
Let's go make some TV shows.
And they, yeah, they made uh, what was the name of that show that uh, Kevin Spacey was in?
House of Cards.
House of Cards, yeah, they're right, it was a big deal, right?
And then they started making other things.
And like, you would look at a lot of the shows they made, and again, it was shows that you'd never seen.
See on network television, like Stranger Things is a show that would never get made on a network anywhere.
It's just too weird, right?
It's not weird in like a bad way, it's just outside the box.
And like, you know, everyone would be like, Oh, I don't know, pass on that show.
Like, that's, you know, like the network shows that, like, what these people are doing is they're looking for something safe.
They're looking for something reliable that you can, you know, make money with and just will hold their share.
They're more worried about losing their share than they are about increasing their share.
And that's what locks all of the networks into this sort of game of just, you know, producing all the same things.
If the other network has a vampire show, then guess what?
You got to put out some kind of vampire show, right?
Stranger Things Prediction00:04:19
Yeah.
They get a zombie show, you got to have a zombie show, right?
And then it's like, if any one of the pivots, all the others got to follow.
Yeah.
And that last clip you played, you know, that was also kind of demonstrates her frustration with just how generic and run of the mill these ideas are.
We already have an idea like that.
We're up to our armpits and lady cops or whatever she says.
Right.
Yeah.
So to me, this is a prediction, sort of.
I mean, this was of his time, right?
He's not, he says he wasn't predicting the future.
This was a, You know, and definitely in the 70s, this would have been a thing that was happening, right?
Well, that's the birth of it, right?
We've seen the death of it, right?
There's no more sitcoms like Seinfeld or Friends or any of that stuff coming out.
There was already formulaic as well, right?
There would have already been a history of this with a lot of the shows that I saw in syndication, shows that only feel unique.
They don't that only feel unique sort of.
Well, I mean, things like if you compare like the Beverly Hillbillies to Gilligan's Island to what are some of the shows from the late 60s, early 70s that would have been things that he would have watched when he was making this to.
I don't know.
I mean, just pick those two.
It's a set cast of characters.
They're all in a situation with that they're not prepared for.
They're all.
Okay, leave it to Beaver, add it in there.
They're all arranged like a family.
The Beverly Hill Billies is a family.
Even though the setting is different and there's aspects of their premise that are somewhat different, they do kind of have a similar feel because they're all the same time frame.
They're all got the same rhythm.
They all have to have.
At least one hot girl.
They all have to have an elderly gentleman who's wise in some way.
They all have to have one character that's a severe oddball.
They all have to have one character that's really dumb, right?
I mean, they all have to have that.
I think that's what emerges out of that time, though, because all of those stories were the first ones to kind of bring it together.
Yeah, when they were making those, they didn't know how to do it and they were starting their sort of TV show assembly line.
Yeah, but then they define the formula, and from those networks comes out, they're really commenting hard on those.
They're really getting into, yeah, this is great.
We don't give a what this feels like to the audience, we just care that it's cheap as hell to make.
Yeah, so yeah, and that's why TV sucks, kids.
Let's go to the next clip.
Do I need to set these up at all?
I don't think I feel like no, no, no, okay.
This is this is okay.
All right, pull it up.
Here we go.
Next clip.
Just get up from your chairs right now.
Go to the window.
I want to see if anybody's yelling.
Open it and stick your head out and yell and keep yelling.
I'm mad as hell.
How am I going to take this anymore?
I'm mad as hell.
I'm not gonna take it anymore!
I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT!
Yeah, spoiler.
Spoiler.
Viral Moment Outrage00:09:31
So, spoiler alert, they continued to take it after, you know, but for a little while.
So, this, I mean, he, you know, the writer of this had no way of predicting that the internet would ever become a thing.
But this is a viral moment.
Yeah.
Right?
This is a viral moment where you have this direct feedback mechanism from the, the, Artist being Howard Beale to the audience, and then the audience feeding that back not just to him but to each other.
That's right, so they all get this sense that they're all in it together on this audience experience and creating this.
And yeah, I don't know.
Um, the sense that you get to be a part of the The outrage that fights back against the thing that is very seductive.
I think it's a it's what a lot of people like.
Which is why I think you get some weird effects in life.
I get you.
I think you get some weird effects.
You get some things where people don't want to.
Some people don't want to vote for a party that's not going to win, for example, which is super weird to me.
Because if that party is the best choice, then they should win.
Like, why do you have to try to see the way everyone else is likely to vote before you vote?
It's super weird a thing.
Like, no one's going to see how you vote.
You can vote any way you like and just claim you voted that way.
Like, why is it that you have to feel like you're casting your lot in with everyone else on this vote thing?
You're voting like we vote in a private booth, like for a reason.
But a lot of people like to think that their vote matters.
And it only matters if they voted for the winner somehow.
And that doesn't make a lot of sense.
But in the same way, you get these viral moments where people want to find the viral moment and then become a part of it and add the weight to that viral moment and get to feel like they're a part of this big thing that happened, right?
Because most people, the vanishing, you know, a vanishingly small number of us ever get to be the spark for that viral moment.
The closest we're ever going to get to it is being part of the crowd that's a part of the viral moment, right?
Being one of the people who sticks their head out the window and screams, I'm mad as hell, I'm not going to take it anymore, right?
What do you think of that idea?
How's that grab you?
This social aspect to it that some people feel like they just want to be a part of the bigger moments that happen.
I think that's very, very, very much like human behavior, right?
The tendency to gravitate towards crowds because that comes with an element of safety.
And for some people, that element of social safety is possibly more compelling than that.
Go against the grain sense of being authentic.
That, you know, like you'd think a normal person who just approaches voting as this is my voice being carried forward should just be voting for the candidate they want to win.
And a lot of people do that, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But some people, yeah, exactly.
And they're, like you said, they're reading the crowd.
And then you get people wasting their vote on someone they didn't support.
Because they're actually against someone that they think that candidate had a better chance of beating than their own candidate.
You're trying to read the meta.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But how many people did that then?
And what did your real candidates' chances, their real chances decreased because, you know, of these weird games that get played, you know, things like strategic voting?
Also, there's an aspect of when we get grifters who are.
Outrage generators like and, and some would could easily uh uh, see an aspect of them in the Howard Beale character in this movie.
Right um, Howard Beale is a person who's uh uh suffering a breakdown and instead of uh of uh um trying to get him some kind of help, the tv producers around him just put more cameras in his face and film it for Clicks, for attention for an audience, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He has to use it for commentary against the mainstream to empower the mainstream.
And then there's people who get to feel like they're part of this counterculture thing, even though it becomes super popular and it's not counterculture, it's the culture now.
Yeah.
And that creates a weird sense where you have people who try to say that they're.
Against the system, or they're against, there's people now, they're against the deep state, or they're against the.
And this is where, I mean, this is the Alex Jones, right?
He's in this space.
He's against the evil enemy that's got their hands on the reins and they're driving the cart into the ditch or whatever.
And that he would say that Trump is part of this, but Trump is in charge now.
That only works when you're the underdog trying to get to be the popular one.
Once you are in charge, you have to deal with the real things, right?
You can't just say it's all outrage anymore.
And that's the inherent problem with doing that as a way to get power, is that once you use it to get power, all the problems become your problems now.
And you can't just always blame it on someone else who's screwing it up.
Yeah.
which is Trump's problem, right?
This is always the problem with the populist who tries to ride an outrage wave to get to the top spot because the outrage wave doesn't go away.
It doesn't settle down.
It's still angry and wants some actual thing to change now.
It works okay for a TV guy that's going to get to the top of the ratings on a TV show because he doesn't get to do anything.
He doesn't have any power.
He can get to a wider audience.
He gets to have more people who listen to the show and say that they're mad as hell and don't get to take it anymore or don't want to take it anymore.
But he just gets to pound his fist against a desk and say, Yes, this is all bad and terrible.
Don't you think it's bad and terrible too?
Oh, it's bad and terrible.
So bad and terrible.
He is the Tucker Carlson of his world, right?
More than anyone else.
Everything's so terrible.
Why are you doing this?
You're you're making this, you're doing it so poorly and and uh yeah um, and of course, throughout the movie we see where that ends up for him, because he he, he does something, he hits a nerve that makes an, that threatens to make an actual change, but we're gonna I have a clip for that.
We're gonna see some of that later.
But uh yeah, what do you think of this this?
Uh, Tucker Carlson as Howard Beale.
Do you think Taco Carlson's seen this movie and maybe really likes the character Howard Beale?
Yeah, maybe.
I would definitely see himself seeing himself in that same role.
Yeah.
You know, because he has attempted to be counterculture at times, but using the weight of his popularity, right?
Yeah.
Which is, yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
Tucker Carlson just, I never take much that he says seriously, right?
Like he is just an outrage farmer.
Yeah.
He's clickbait.
He's walking clickbait as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so would Howard Beale have been if he lived in our time, right?
Well, Howard Beale at his time.
Yeah, if he lived in our time, exactly.
Yeah, right.
In ancient age, he would have been new.
He's novel.
Yeah.
The idea of a network man going off the rails, going rogue, declaring he wants to blow his brains out on the air.
Yeah.
And then that catapults him into a level of popularity, right?
Because he's speaking truth to power.
How is he doing it with power?
Yeah, I don't know.
You don't like it.
It's kind of a ticklish situation.
Fighting Distribution Charges00:04:37
So let's get to the next clip because this.
I should set this up a little bit.
This is the.
Faye Dunaway won an Oscar for this performance, by the way.
Oh, did she?
Okay.
Yes.
She is tremendous in this movie.
She's this character, her.
TV producer character.
She's everything relates to producing television and getting bigger numbers and what the share is and all the things, even like while she's having sex.
Like, it's I know, right?
Yeah.
It's just so over the top.
Like, it's so incredible.
But she has found a way to, she's found a way to make contact with one of these.
Terrorist organizations that is robbing banks and doing these sorts of things, like the Symbionese Liberation Army did, in an effort to try to make a TV show based on them.
And they're calling it the Mao Zedong Hour.
So here we go.
The Mao Tse Tung Hour went on the air March 14th.
It received a 47 share.
The network promptly committed to 15 shows with an option for 10 more.
There were the usual contractual difficulties.
Equal to 20% 2-0, except with such percentages, I'll be 30% 3-0 for 90-minute or longer television programs.
Have we settled that sub-licensing thing?
No, no.
We want a clear definition here.
Gross proceeds should consist of all funds the sub-licensee receives, not merely the net amount permitted after payment to the sub-licensee or distributor.
We're not sitting still for overhead charges as a cost prior to distribution.
Dog, fuck with my distribution costs.
I'm making a lousy $2.15 per segment.
I'm already deficiting $25,000 a week with Metro.
I'm paying William Mars 10% off the top.
And I'm giving this turkey $10,000 per segment and another $5,000 for this fruitcake.
And Helen, don't start no shit with me about a piece again.
I'm paying Metro 20% for all foreign and Canadian distribution.
And that's after recoupment.
The Communist Party's not going to see a nickel out of this goddamn show until we go into syndication.
Oh, come on, Loreen.
The party's in for $7,500 a week production.
I'm not giving this pseudo insurrectionary sectarian a piece of my show.
I'm not giving him script approval, and I sure as shit ain't cutting him into my distribution charges.
You fucking fascist!
Did you see the film we made in the San Reno jail breakout demonstrating the rising up of the Seminole prisoner class infrastructure?
You can blow the Seminole prisoner class infrastructure out your ass!
I'm not knocking down my goddamn distribution charges!
Man, give her the fucking overhead clause.
Oh, fuck.
And it's negotiation there.
It's just that moment.
Like, to me, that's the best moment in the movie.
And among a movie that had a lot of great moments, it had the, you know, I'm mad as hell, I'm not going to take it anymore moment.
And it has the moment that I have a clip for next, which is also a great moment.
But to me, this moment where they have this team of lawyers and TV producers.
Stuck in this house with these insurrectionists and revolutionaries, and they got all their guns and they're throwing around their rhetoric.
It's all techno jargon to me, really.
I mean, even the stuff about the charges and who has to pay for what and when and the distribution charges.
And oh, God.
And it's wrapped up with their own political.
I just, it's so good.
I just, I fucking die all the time.
Don't fuck with my distribution charges.
It's just, yeah.
And it comes down to money, right?
And it's kind of a foreshadow, right?
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
And when a lot of people like, I'm not the only person who talks about this movie having a forward looking thing to predict something about the future of entertainment and media, not by a long shot.
Reality TV Mysteries Blur00:05:24
This moment is the one that a lot of people point to as a thing that eventually, you know, became reality TV.
Right.
But I want to draw a distinction here because when we talk about reality TV, Conversationally, we often talk about like the reality TV game shows like Survivor, Big Brother, Amazing Race, uh, you know, I guess The Bachelor, if you're gonna call that a game show, whatever.
Sure, uh, there isn't a big prize at the end, I guess, uh, except for a, I don't know, but it's supposedly unscripted, it's yeah, you know, right, sure, right, but um, I think that long before them were shows like Cops.
But also shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Ripley's Believe It or Not that were blurring these lines between a television show where you're writing a script and reality, right?
Or journalism, yeah.
Well, and they're not really like Dateline is like journalism where you're telling a story like this, where you're.
Right.
Well, that would be like unsolved mysteries.
Right.
I really see the jump over to reality TV with something like Cops, because that's just like live cam on a situation unfolding that's not like real storytelling except for the little interludes.
Right.
So, right.
Right.
But like Ripley's Believe It or Not was this show that was like the whole premise was that you weren't, you didn't know whether it was true or not, and you were left to guess.
I can't remember if they ever told you if it was true or not.
Jonathan Frakes had a show that lasted for a couple of seasons that was a lot like that show.
I can't remember the name of his show, but it was like that where he would tell you, I think it was like two stories, and then he'd try to tell you which one was fake, which one was real.
One of them was always fake, one of them was always real, and it would sort of act them out.
And same idea, right?
Where it's sort of blurring the lines and kind of making you guess what was real, what was not real.
You could look at unsolved mysteries as that, but they also dove straight into myth stuff.
I mean, they had a whole episode that was on Bigfoot, right?
Like they had a show on Bigfoot.
So the idea that it's just about like crime is definitely not the case.
It was just about what would sell.
And yeah, they might have helped to, I don't know if they ever helped us actually solve any crimes.
I don't know.
It was a, but they're blurring the lines in this way, right?
And it's more about, in the same way that this would have been, I mean, the reason why a show like the Mao Zedong Hour would have got a 47 share isn't so much because it's real,
it's because it would be scary to the audience, I think, which is also sort of, The idea of where news went was headed at that time and ended up was this idea that the news has if it bleeds, it leads.
You talk about the murders before you talk about the thefts.
You talk about the thefts before you talk about anything else, right?
You talk about the arsons before you talk about the car accidents kind of thing, right?
Like you talk about the violence first.
And this didn't predict something like CNN.
But CNN directly comes out of that place where the news was a big deal.
So a famous rich guy, I can't remember his name, something Turner, Ted Turner, decides he wants a whole network that does this, but it's on cable.
And so it's going to be able to show things that regular news can't show.
And it's going to be on all the time.
And it's going to be able to go more in depth, supposedly, even though it ends up being just the same thing all the time.
You turn CNN on at any moment.
It just feels like every other moment on CNN.
It's just background stuff, right?
You might as well have the cooking channel on, only it sometimes has some useful info.
Sorry to any people who get useful info from cooking shows.
I'm not a chef of any description.
I make macaroni with hot dogs in it.
Very good.
But yeah, I mean, we get this sort of blurring of the lines between entertainment and reality that I think was an unhealthy move for media.
Unhealthy for the audience.
Certainly it was probably healthy for media because they made money on it, but I think it was unhealthy for the audience, and the media at the time didn't really care about the health of the audience.
They didn't you know if, if anyone tried to point out to them that this was a bad idea, they'd say, i'd stop doing it when my competition stops doing it.
Yeah, it's like cycling, if everyone's cheating, then everyone else has to cheat too, just to keep up.
Corporations vs Democracy00:15:37
Um, and yeah, I uh, I don't like it here.
At the end of the day, what do you think?
What do you think of all this?
I've been talking for a while, Patrick.
What do you think?
Not too much.
I don't know.
I don't really have anything to add to that.
It's just a really saturated space with, you know, like it has just progressively gotten, not, I mean, is it worse?
Arguably, yes.
What does it say about the society that chooses to consume it day after day after day until it has numbed them to the point of, you know, They don't even feel apathetic, but your life is an expression of apathy by how much you care to actually change things with your choices, with your voting, with your purchasing power, with any of that stuff.
Like, as humans, you'd think, oh, if decency was really the core fiber of our being, we would try to maybe steer away and only consume wholesome content.
But yeah, it is very telling that.
You know, this very competitive network space.
And I mean, this is a great named movie because it's almost describing a life form that has these different parts, these different organs.
You know, there's the finance department, there's the legal department.
These are all for the sake of this organism of the network to try to grow and outgrow the other networks that are, you know, facing the same kinds of constraints or motivators to act in the space.
But no, I mean, like what you said there is very true that if it bleeds, it leads, and it's very formulaic.
There was one point, too, in the movie where she's talking about, I think, where she's trying to pitch this, she's talking about how mundane so much of the news role is, right?
Like, cut to here.
We're always going to see this thing.
We're going to see the child who's been afflicted or something like that, or the feel good piece just feathered in there.
Again, so much of it is about that.
Cookie cutter formula of presenting what we call news.
But really, if we're presenting the news because we're choosing what news to present because of how it's going to capture market share, then absolutely 100% it's entertainment.
It's meant to capture attention and make you choose to continue consuming.
Yeah.
So nothing more to be said there.
Let's get to the last clip.
This is a part of a speech that was done by Ned Beatty, brother of Warren Beatty.
He was only on this screen for like five minutes of screen time.
And this is his only scene, and he does a speech.
The whole speech in total is like four minutes long.
I'm not playing the whole thing, I'm just playing a part of it.
But this one speech, he got an Oscar nomination just from this.
He was only on set for two days.
He flew in, he learned his one speech, he did it, and it was super easy because he doesn't have to interact with anyone really.
He's just pure delivery.
Yeah.
And then he flies home and then he gets an Oscar nomination.
He didn't win, but you know, whatever.
So here's this moment.
You get up on your little 21 inch screen and howl about America and democracy.
There is no America.
There is no democracy.
There is only.
IBM and ITT and ATT and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon.
Those are the nations of the world today.
Yeah.
That entire speech, like the whole four minute speech, is pretty incredible.
Yeah.
But I think.
Very compelling argument.
Well, also true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He hits a lot of points there.
And there's so much in there.
Like if I want to do a whole episode just on that one monologue, I absolutely could.
If anyone insists on it, I'll do some extra content on it or whatever.
But this one moment where he lays this out that.
That uh, America isn't the important thing, it's all the corporations that came from America that are important.
Um, this is how this is a a thing that drives a lot of conspiratorial thinking, the idea that the corporations are it.
I mean, if you were going to take someone who believed in Qanon and ask them to to point to the deep state, they would probably point to uh, a lot of the companies that are listed here, a lot of them still exist In some form or other, even 50 years later.
And they might add a couple names to the list.
Microsoft wasn't a thing in 1976, but it is now.
They would definitely add that one.
Apple, for example, all the tech companies, Amazon, Tesla, slash SpaceX, right?
They would all be in there somewhere.
But yeah, this idea that the money.
Is the only important thing.
And the godheads of the money are the corporations.
And that this is the thing that's driving the entire bus.
But a lot of us feel that in a lot of ways it's also the thing that's making the bus not worth being in, you know, at the end of the day.
In that same way, I mean, working it all back, how much, in the same way that the network doesn't care about The social health of the people who are watching any of the shows that they're producing, the corporate anchors, or their anchor, yeah, yeah, or the mental health of their anchor.
Uh, the people who sit in boardrooms that would be look a lot like the room that this, you know, was filmed in this big, empty, looks like a big hall with a big, long table in it, and he places them at one end and he stands way at the Far end of the other and screams at him from across the table.
Yeah, yeah.
All these bankers' lamps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And with no one else in the room, like he could have been right close to him.
Nope.
Put him with the far end.
And the idea that they should care about any of the individual people in the world, those two ideas sit side by side and are very, very similar.
All the people who would like to have unfettered capitalism and no restrictions on what. corporations can do in order so that they can do more things to drive more of the economy also tends to lead to worse outcomes for all the individuals who aren't the customers of those corporations, right?
Like that's the thing that we like to think about sometimes.
Because why would they care?
If it's not a thing that directly affects their ability to make the money and maybe affects their ability to make the money cheaply, What they might call the bottom line, the price they have to pay to produce the thing that they use to sell.
Yeah, what do you think this whole idea that already in 76 we were looking at the world not as a series of nations, as in money from Saudi Arabia that's coming to buy a thing in America and that that's a thing that does or doesn't make sense, but instead a series of corporations that just move the money across borders and everything is just, those are the new countries of the world.
I mean, there is a lot to be said, I think, about how money is the power.
And I think that, you know, like his warning there is about like it's not really up to the will of the people.
Like it's not democracy that defines the outcomes for society.
It is the movement of these, you know, all of the capital and all of the liquidity and stuff like that.
And you see that.
You see that brought to life in all of our political systems.
Anywhere lobbyists are applied, you see law is made by the people who have the most money, right?
So, this money making system of corporations that have all the legal shielding, but given the rights of people, like corporations are treated as people legally, right?
So, it's this weird.
Not then, but so now, right?
The decision came since that time to make it.
The case, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, it's so compelling to really ask yourself how would we, if we all decided that we want to change, how would we see that change, even if we elected all of the people that we want to elect?
How fast could they possibly change the entire economic landscape that currently supports what power rests there in order to change it so that that power either becomes more beneficial for all of us or?
Is re awarded to more benevolent caretakers of that power, if you will, or stewards of that power.
Yeah, I mean, he says here in this clip that there is no democracy.
I think he also said that a couple of other times throughout the whole speech.
And him as this corporate CEO, the money and the movement of it is the sacred thing, which says a lot about him as a character, or some might say a caricature of a CEO, sort of.
Certain aspects of a character amplified, right?
Yeah.
But also, it is true, even in the context of the movie, the only reason why the conversation is happening at all is because democracy is there.
Like, Howard Beale has raised enough of a problem about this specific sale of a company to people in Saudi Arabia that it might get, I think it was the sale of the network to people in Saudi Arabia, it might get blocked by.
Uh, senate subcommittee kind of thing, right?
Like people who will make up the representative representatives of the people who are elected might be swayed by a popular uprising against the idea to not allow it to happen.
So, I mean, this man, this Ned Beatty's character, I don't even know his name in the movie, he's just uh, like he's basically.
He's basically the monopoly guy, right?
Um, so I would call him that.
I think I refer to them in that generally, he's sort of like the character of the rich business owner, Mr. Moneybags.
Yeah, Mr. Moneybags.
Yeah.
Um, He's saying that money is the ultimate thing and that democracy doesn't exist, but it does exist.
And the reason the conversation is happening is because democracy is in his way.
Democracy is an inconvenience to the workings of the money that he wants to flow.
And that's.
And Beale is agitating that democracy to make it more of a hindrance for him, which is why he's so outraged or upset about.
Him meddling with powers beyond his understanding, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's the phrase that's used the powers beyond your understanding, yeah, yeah.
Uh, and uh, I don't know, like, we were already on track for this in 1976.
This has only gotten far worse.
I mean, conversations about the uh wealth gap were sort of.
Starting then, and a lot of people were already saying, Oh, that's a momentary blip.
It's not, it hasn't, you know, it hasn't been going on long enough for anyone.
You know, these things will even out eventually.
These things, you know, this will go away.
It will, you know, why are you getting so worried about it right now?
But that situation has only gotten worse far, far worse.
And in fact, accelerated.
To the point now where we have people, like it's not even about companies that act as countries, nations of the world, as he's saying.
It's more like the personalities that drive those companies are acting as their own nations, as it were, right?
Which is the Elon Musk's, the Bill Gates, the Jeff. Bezos's of the world.
Yeah.
The Larry Binks.
Yeah.
And I think that, man, we're going to have more conversations about that.
We have to have more ways to hit the democratic, you know, pull the democratic levers that get in their way, that make things go our way more, that prevent the The them from paying the government through the back channels that they do in such a way as to make all the things happen the way they want to happen.
Concentrated Signal Fails00:03:28
Yeah.
You think about how much money they spend on things like lobbying and influence, where if that money was instead just channeled to the public good and they were winning votes because they were doing things that was good for everybody, you know, as opposed to just using that money for influence.
Even if it was just.
factory jobs.
You know, we're going to make more of these, I don't know, microwaves or whatever, right?
And we're going to have people who work in there and they're going to get paid making, building these microwaves or whatever.
Like, like that's a thing.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Anyways, I think we've gone on for long enough, just over an hour.
That's, that's plenty long enough for this episode.
Yeah.
This was a good movie.
This was a, this is a golden movie.
This is top 10 movies of all time for me.
This is every couple of years I watch it again.
It's, oh, do you?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's so good.
It has this almost like nostalgic, inspirational feel like change is possible.
It's possible, really, if we think about it, for us to all get on the same page with the idea that there are shortcomings that need to be addressed because we all kind of want a better life than we're living right now.
Right.
Yeah.
We get lost in the weeds, though, with politics and how to get there is just to come.
Yeah.
Which changes the most worthwhile and what's it going to cost people?
But yeah, no, it's almost naive for a moment there.
We know nowadays nobody's going to be shouting out their windows, even if you'll never have that much concentrated attention.
Go to Twitter and say this or whatever.
The whole broadcast time, too, locked in.
Now it's like I want to watch news at 2 in the morning.
That's what I'll watch, right?
I don't have to tune in for the newscast.
The whole idea of it being on demand means I don't know if there's going to ever be an opportunity for the concentrated signal to reach all the people with something, a message so meaningful that it activates all of us, or at least enough of us to prompt a change.
Yeah, well, maybe one day Mr. Beast gets political and, you know, and then you see a landslide take place somewhere unexpected.
More likely to see Joe Rogan do it and pull it the other way.
Yeah.
Joe Rogan and Jake Paul for president and vice president.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
2032.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
So with that, I will say that if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they Heard on this podcast, you can send an email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And I have not yet received anyone who gives me feedback, but my offer still lies open to anyone who wants to do that and let me know if they want a dog picture or a cat picture.
Holding On To A Dream00:01:50
You'll get your very own pet picture, just like this new level of customization.
Yeah.
Yeah, just like this guy that was just sleeping in my feet the entire time I was doing this podcast and is still trying to sleep in my arm.
He's trying to hold on to a dream.
Only people on YouTube get to see this, but that's okay.
Nice.
Yeah, with that shameless kitten plug.
Oh, before we go, a couple other housekeeping things.
I know you like to mention that our friend Jeff Powell is the author and creator of the music.
I was going to mention at the start, but I got distracted by my extended tagline that didn't work.
Yeah.
I'm here to keep you honest.
Thank you.
No, that's good.
That's good co hosting.
That's good.
Yeah.
And then the other thing, my question is what do we have any idea what our next movie is going to be?
Yes.
I've thought a lot about it, and it's time to do Superman.
Oh, fun.
Like the Christopher Reeve Superman?
Well, it's going to be the concept, but if we're going to refer to a piece of media that was created as Superman, it's going to be the original Christopher Reeve movie from 1979.
Pretty sure it was 1979, 78, 79, somewhere in there.
Because that's my favorite one.
Awesome.
I'm in.
Fight me.
I don't care.
There were other ones that came after that.
But to me, that one is precious and it will always be better than all the others.
Sorry, not sorry.
Awesome.
But yeah, we're going to talk about Superman as that concept.