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Sunday, October 2
· Recap of the Week – U.K. economic crisis
o Yikes, this description of Liz Truss’s tax cuts! – “Wow. ‘If you care more about the poor, then you’re not gonna like this package.’ That sounds less like someone defending an economic plan and more like Jeff Bezos describing his penis.”
o After the value of the British pound tanked, Truss didn’t show her face, to the point where a newspaper headline read “Missing: Have You Seen This P.M.”
o Excellent point – “Remember, she took office less than a month ago. The only people experiencing a shorter honeymoon period than that are praying mantises.”
· And Now This – Shopping networks acknowledge Queen Elizabeth II’s death
o Of course, this montage gave us people invoking the late queen to hawk overpriced stuff on TV. My favorite was this fawning over a pair of purple jeans – “Look at how rich that purple is! Isn’t that rich?”
· Main Story – Antiquities
o Valid – “Honestly, if you’re ever looking for a missing artifact, nine times out of ten, it’s in the British Museum. It’s basically the world’s largest Lost and Found with both ‘Lost’ and ‘Found’ in a heaviest possible quotation marks there.”
o Oh my god – “Nearly 90% of all of Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside Africa by major museums.”
o Great line, about a Congolese man stealing an artifact back from a museum – “Obviously, that man was unaware of the museum’s very clear policy, ‘No stealing African antiquities, starting… now.’”
o One major example we looked at were the Benin bronzes, which were broken up and sold across dozens of museums. But while the British Museum talks about how having bronzes in their collection allows “everyone” to be able to see them, one Nigerian artist pointed out, “Most Nigerians will never see them” – “Exactly. The generations of British children who’ve grown up loving the Benin bronzes come at the expense of generations of Nigerians who haven’t.”
o I loved the description of a French museum curator as someone who “seems less like a real person and more like a character in Tintin: How We Saved the Egyptians from Themselves.”
o In response to the “it was a different time” argument about how stolen antiquities wound up in colonizers’ hands (i.e., by looting them,) we looked at a British prime minister who spoke out after a cultural plunder of Ethiopia – “And he was saying that in 1868! We didn’t even know how to fix a UTI without leeches back then, but we knew that raiding other countries for their shit was ‘deeply lamentable,’ which is British for ‘super fucked up.’”
o Ugh, the museum curator who claimed that stolen artifacts operate according to “Solomon’s law” – “The one who loves the baby most gets the baby.”
o To make all of it even worse, many prestigious museums only display a fraction of their collection at any given time (for the British Museum, it’s about 1%,) while the rest stays in storage – “It can be pretty galling for people to find that their heritage, which is often part of a vibrant present-day culture, is sitting in storage in the British Museum’s underground loot prison.”
o We also looked at the way many museums conveniently ignore red flags that the artifacts they’re acquiring were stolen/trafficked – “Okay, a pretty good rule when asked, ‘Do you work with art thieves?’, is that any answer that’s not an immediate ‘no’ is instantly suspicious.”
o The Met has been subjected to 9 warrants in 5 years, with 37 of their pieces being seized as a result.
o I loved the ending, which featured Kumail Nanjiani previewing John’s idea for the Payback Museum, which steals cultural pieces from former colonizers until they return stolen antiquities to the Global South – “Honestly, I don’t even like it. I think Stonehenge sucks. It’s just big dumb rocks! But I don’t want to return them, to spite you. Are you having fun? I am.”
o Nanjiani went so hard in this bit – “Here we are in the storeroom, where we keep some of our most prized possessions, items so valuable we know it’s morally indefensible for us to have them: the good shit.”
o After claiming to have three of Gerald Ford’s ribs in a box, Nanjiani was prepared for the argument, “He hasn’t been dead nearly long enough for that to be okay!” – “Oh yeah? How long do you have to be dead for it to be okay? I’m serious! Give me a number for how long after his death it’s okay to have a part of someone’s body sweating in your museum’s hot storage. Hmm?”
Monday, October 3
· Headlines – Kim Kardashian investigated by the SEC, competitive fishing scandal, Putin annexes four regions of Ukraine
o I laughed at this line, from an opening blurb about Burkina Faso experiencing its second coup in less than a year – “But now the new guy will be like, ‘I think we can all agree that this is the exact right number of coups, eh? Two feels like the right vibe, you know what I’m saying?’”
o On-point joke about a cheating scandal in competitive fishing – “I haven’t seen white dudes this mad about fish since Disney announced the Little Mermaid thing.”
o Trevor gave a shoutout to a cameraman who filmed Putin from an angle that emphasized how short he was compared to the other men in the frame – “Whoever that cameraman was, you better have someone taste your food for the next few months.”
o While announcing his annexation of eastern Ukraine, Putin pointed out how the West is no stranger to exerting its power over other nations and territories, citing the U.S. as the only country who’s ever used nuclear warfare on a civilian population – “You know, this is the thing that sucks about bad guys. Oftentimes, they’ll use the truth to justify their evil actions, you know? Because part of what he’s saying is true. It’s like—yeah, but it’s Putin who’s saying it. I hate it when that happens. Bad guy says, like, a real thing. Like, do I agree that the human population is over consuming and slowly killing the Earth? Yes, I just wish that Thanos wasn’t the one that said it. Do you know what I mean?”
o Roy was the headline correspondent, and he was salty because, in Trevor’s leaving announcement last week, he specifically mentioned Roy commenting on the seven years they’d been working together – “I shouldn’t even be talking to you. You’re liable to leave during the next commercial break. We’re probably talking too much right now.”
o Roy found a way to tie his hurt feelings over Trevor leaving to multiple stories from the headlines. Here’s what he had to say about Burkina Faso – “Say what you want about a dictator, but at least they stay until somebody forces them out. They don’t quit on their friends and then throw their friends under the bus.”
o This new conservative dating app was created by a former Trump staffer who’d struggled to meet people on existing apps – He said that, when they found out he worked for Trump, “girls would just get up and leave, or abruptly try to end the date.”
o Good line – “Good luck to all you conservatives out there hoping to match with that special FBI agent monitoring the sites.”
o In response, we got a fake ad for a dating app that takes a completely different tact – Hate F**k, deliberately pairing people with their ideological opposites to “bang out your differences.”
o I smiled at the tag line for Hate F**k – “Because you can’t see red or blue when the lights are out.”
· Interview – Rapper/actor Cliff “Method Man” Smith
o In response to Trevor praising his long and varied career, Method Man said, “I wish these people could tell my kids this, because I don’t know if they know how cool their dad is, you know.”
o I liked what he said about getting into acting as a rapper – “This is something that a lot of actors study for years. There are actors out there right now that you guys probably haven’t even heard of that are cutting their teeth every day, every month, every year, still working a 9 to 5 job, but making those auditions. So who am I to cut the line and not do the work, you know?”
o When asked how he stays humble through all his success, he credited the people in his life – “I have a lot of people around me who let me know when I’m full of shit. And that keeps me pretty grounded. Because you can smell it when you’re grounded, you know. And, you know, where I’m from, every opportunity that comes along is a something like a blessing, you know.”
Tuesday, October 4
· Headlines – Aftermath of Hurricane Ian, protests in Iran, Elon Musk is being messy again
o The Elon Musk stuff was practically its own mini-segment – I liked Trevor describing him as “the man who will save the world or blow it up by accident, could go either way.”
o Sigh… Musk polled his Twitter followers to see if Russia should be allowed to annex parts of Ukraine – “People, not only is this insensitive, a Twitter poll is not the place to be deciding the future of a country. That basically has the same legitimacy as those fortune teller things you used to do in middle school, you know? It was like, ‘This says you live in Hawaii, and get married to Becky, and then invade the Donbas region.’ It’s not a thing, Elon.”
o Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is now back on – “One thing about this story, it just shows you how being a billionaire is so wild, you know. They go back and forth on buying a giant company the way most people move UGG Ultra Mini boots back in and out of their Amazon cart.”
· Main Story – Herschel Walker
o We started out by looking at a number of out-there GOP candidates, including Dr. Oz, who we recently learned was involved in experiments that killed over 300 dogs – “Which is not a great look. There’s literally a Disney villain who did that, right? Like, what’s next? We’re gonna find out Dr. Oz botched the surgery that killed the grandma in Coco, huh?”
o Trevor found it wild that, in just a few years, we went from a party that embraced Paul Ryan to one that stands by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Doug Mastriano – “If [Ryan] got caught in the same room with these new people, they’d beat him to death with his own khakis.”
o Onto Herschel Walker, who’s been doing things like displaying his ignorance on the public stage – “Yeah. If there’s humans, then why are there still apes? If there’s an iPhone, how come my grandma still has a landline? Checkmate, Charles Darwin! How does that happen?”
o This was a solid point – “One of the main reasons Republicans love Herschel Walker is because, as a Black man, he’s never afraid to tell Black men what they’re doing wrong. ‘Pull up your pants, smile at the police, and let white people touch your hair. It’s good luck, you know.’”
o One of the things Walker has been taking Black men to task for is abandoning their children – “And then we found out the abandoning was coming from inside the house.”
o Valid – “This always happens. Whenever a politician comes down weirdly hard on a specific group of people, that’s when you should be suspicious—when they come down on one thing. There’s always a politician that’s like, ‘We have to stop these perverts that love to like the back of people’s knees at the public pool.’ We’re like, ‘I think this dude licks the back of people’s knees.”
o Walker, who supports a federal abortion ban with zero exceptions, was also recently accused of encouraging and paying for his then-girlfriend’s abortion back in 2009 – “This woman says that she has a receipt, a check, and a get well card that he signed. The only way there could be more of a paper trail is if he bought a souvenir T-shirt from the abortion clinic’s gift shop.”
o By Trevor’s measure, the fact that GOP leadership hasn’t denounced Walker signifies Trump’s effect on the party – “Less than a decade ago, a candidate this hypocritical, this flawed, and this off the rails would not have had the support of the party. But because now winning is more important than any principle or any value that these politicians once held, they’re willing to go full speed ahead, even if it means going full speed into a brick wall.”
· Interview – Rep. Cori Bush
o In discussing her new book, Bush talked about how her own past painful experiences motivate her work in the House – “That pain stays before me. I still remember what that pain was like to be hungry, to go for days without eating, just making sure my children ate. I remember what it was like to close my eyes and hope my kids didn’t freeze to death in the car while we were sleeping in the car, unhoused. I remember what it was like to be brutalized by the police back in Ferguson in 2014. I remember what it was like to go through those sexual assaults and not have any type of help, not have any crime victim support helping me. I remember what it was like to not get justice.”
o It’s that pain that leaves Bush anxious for real change, impatient with the typically incremental pace of Congress – “There’s somebody out there that’s hurting the way that I had to struggle and hurt for so long, when I was wondering who helps, who speaks to my issues, who’s gonna help me? There’s somebody saying that right now. And I’m in a position to do something. And so why am I in the position if I’m not willing to push and put everything on the line to save lives?”
o This was the guiding principle that drives her – “If I save one life, then it was worth it because somebody died because we didn’t push harder.”
Wednesday, October 5
· Headlines – Aaron Judge breaks homerun record, countries consider dropping “best before” label, House of the Dragon criticized for darkly-lit scenes
o Opening blurb on Goodwill’s plans to open an online store – “Yeah, so if you’re wanting to buy a shirt for $0.40 but then pay $20 in shipping, you’re in luck.”
o Trevor tried to contextualize how long it had been since Roger Maris set the American League record for most homeruns in a single season – “I mean, back in 1961—you understand how long ago that was—in 1961, America didn’t have a Voting Rights Act and abortion was illegal. Very different times.”
o I laughed at Trevor’s insistence that Aaron Judge should be criticized for losing so many balls with his homeruns, since, per an opening blurb, “America is $31 trillion in debt!” – “You know who we should be celebrating? We should be celebrating the bastards who missed the ball completely so we can keep using it. Those people are the real heroes.” Grinning at the audience, he added, “I’m really fun at parties.”
o Trevor agreed that “best before” dates unnecessarily confuse consumers and lead to food waste – “When is the date that this food is going to turn my butt into a Supersoaker? Anything before that is fine. I don’t care.”
o Good intro – “A lot of people were so disappointed in the Game of Thrones finale that they said they weren’t ever going to watch House of the Dragon. But now, even the people watching House of the Dragon are complaining that they can’t watch House of the Dragon.”
o Trevor took issue with HBO’s claim that the dark lighting on House of the Dragon is an “intentional creative decision” – “Look, I am not Steven Spielberg or Barry Jenkins. All right, I haven’t directed anything. But in my opinion, if your intentional creative decision is that people can’t see the TV show that you’re making, then you’re making a podcast, all right?”
o I liked Trevor’s impression of a House of the Dragon character – “At least just tell me, is this a fighting scene or a sex scene? I don’t know. I don’t know. Okay, I’m just going to stumble around with my sword out and my penis out and we’ll see what happens.”
o Trevor and Dulcé always have a fun back-and-forth when she’s the headline correspondent – Talking about America’s debt, Trevor explained, “America owes the world, Dulcé.” To which Dulcé replied, “Do we? We got all the guns. We got all the guns! Come get it!”
· Correspondent Piece (Ronny) – Pillow Fight Championship
o Despite Ronny’s skepticism, the creator of Pillow Fight Championship told him there was a market for it – “Some people don’t like violence. They don’t want to see all the blood, but they still want to see a good competition.”
o Naturally, Ronny challenged a PFC fighter to a match, and naturally, he quickly discovered he was way out of his depth, which led to an amusing “training” sequence between him and Roy – I smiled at Ronny’s narration, “It was the longest montage of my life.”
· Interview – Reporter/author Maggie Haberman
o In her new book, Haberman was interested in writing, not just about Trump’s administration, but specifically about his relationship with the media – “Trump needs the media in a way that’s unlike any other politician I’ve ever seen. He craves attention, and I explore this in the book. He just constantly wants to hold the media’s gaze. And he wants to see if he can sell you on a version on himself.”
o This was a good point – “The other thing that I think that people don’t understand—and I try to show this and explore this—is his fascination with violence and how much violence informs what he thinks of strength. And then strength informs what he thinks is a strong boss or a strong leader.”
o This trait fed into his tendency to value “ruling with an iron fist” and praising authoritarians like Xi Jingping or Vladimir Putin.
o Interesting point from Trevor – Despite the perception of Trump as setting trends, “He is oftentimes a victim of the trends, and then he plays to them. So he’ll say something to his crowd that he believes. The crowd won’t vibe with it, and so then he’ll change what he believes in to keep going with the crowd, which makes him even scarier. Because if you think about authoritarian leaders or any others out there who go, ‘I rule with an iron fist,’ their fist is their fist, but Donald Trump says, ‘How would you like my fist to be?’ And then he keeps it in that direction.”
o Unnerving – “His ethos that he came to define in New York in that period you’re talking about, in the 1980s, really was hate as a civic good. Hate should be a civic good. He would talk about that. He would talk about in the context of racial violence in New York that he would want to hate people. And that is what he exported. So he didn’t create it, but he fueled it. And he has benefited from it, and there is a tremendous trickle-down effect.”
o This line from Trevor resonated for me – “It feels like he has turned American politics forever.”
Thursday, October 6
· Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That – OPEC+ announces cuts in oil production, fears over rainbow fentanyl, Biden announces federal pardons for simple marijuana possession, Elon Musk teases plans for app X
o I felt that – “At this point, I’m really struggling to understand the relationship between America and Saudi Arabia. Because it seems like a very one-sided friendship. America sells them weapons and ignores their many human rights abuses, and then Saudi Arabia is like, ‘And in return, we will kill your journalists and raise your gas prices and do 9/11s. Thank you, my friend.’”
o At the end of each story on Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That, Trevor also mentions what else we could be discussing about each topic if we had more time – On the OPEC+ bit, this included, “We could even talk about how gasoline comes from dinosaurs, which is crazy!!”
o Good joke about the news media’s habit of constantly finding a new “Halloween peril” to fearmonger about – “It’s almost like every single October, the news is like, ‘Well, this Halloween, we’re going to go as a gullible grandma who believes everything she reads on Facebook.’”
o Nice job breaking down the illogic of the rainbow fentanyl panic – “What are you saying? You’re saying that drug dealers are trying to get little children addicted to drugs. So then what? They can use the millions they’ve made from the tooth fairy to keep the drug business alive? Huh?”
o Loved this joke – “People, I know rainbow fentanyl is scary. But can we just take a minute to congratulate it for being an ally? Huh? Hey, cocaine, maybe your white ass could learn a thing or two about that!”
o Valid – “Can you imagine getting pardoned for this after seeing how mainstream weed has become in America? I bet witches probably feel the same way, you know? It’s like, ‘Oh, so these hipster chicks can walk around Brooklyn with their candles and crystals, but when I did it in Salem, I got burned bitches! I got burned!’”
o Trevor didn’t like Elon Musk’s idea for turning Twitter into a one-stop-shop “everything app” – “I will tell you now, I hate that idea. I don’t want Twitter to do more things. I like how it works now. Every day, the entire world picks one person and destroys their life! And then the next day, we find someone else. It’s perfect.”
· Midterms – Herschel Walker
o More on the ongoing saga of Herschel Walker’s hypocrisy over abortion – “Oh, that’s awkward. Oh, man. He says he doesn’t know the woman, but it turns out she is reportedly the mother of one of his kids? So either Herschel Walker is lying, or his penis does some crazy shit while he’s asleep. Yeah, penis is like, ‘Ah, he’s finally out, time for me to hit the streets and do what a glizzy got to do.’”
o Trevor repeatedly emphasized that his issue is the fact that Walker, who’s known as “the anti-abortion guy,” reportedly paid for his then-girlfriend’s abortion – “It’s like if you caught Smokey Bear torching a forest. ‘Remember, only I can dance among the beautiful light of the screaming flames, kids!’”
o We were treated to a montage of GOP folks brushing aside these allegations – Some of the responses included, “He had a lot of concussions coming out of football,” and, “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”
o Trevor summed up the GOP position – “What you’re saying is, you’re fine with an abortion if you need to win a Senate race, a Senate race. But you’re not fine with a woman needing it to save her own life. That’s what you’re saying.”
o This was a great point – “I’m constantly amazed at how quickly Republicans forgive certain people. They’re like, ‘Herschel Walker deserves forgiveness for his sins.’ I’m not even disagreeing. But it’s interesting how quickly they move. Right? But when it comes to prison reform or college debt, suddenly they’re like, ‘People have got to pay the price for what they have done. There are consequences in life! You do something, and then there’s a consequence.’”
o We got a FOXsplaining bit from Desi at the end of the story – I liked, “I’m sorry, but we’re supposed to believe all these stories from Herschel Walker’s kids? They’ve never even met Herschel Walker.”
· Interview – Actress Constance Wu
o Wu was there to discuss her new memoir, Making a Scene, including the multiple meanings behind the title – “Growing up, I sort of felt that it was unladylike to make scenes, and how that repression was something that I’ve been struggling with my whole life as a naturally extroverted, emotional person.”
o When Trevor asked about her choice to depict certain events from her life in a screenplay/script format, Wu said she wanted to try and present these events without a “slant” – “I felt like, by putting it in a scene format, it sort of took you out of the book in a way that made the experience more objective.”
o Trevor asked how she was able to show empathy to people who’d harassed and abused her – “I do feel that if I am asking for people to look at my life and my mistakes and curiosity and empathy rather than judgment, I feel like I want to do the same for other people.”
o They spent some time talking about the controversy that blew up over Wu’s kneejerk emotional reaction to the last-minute renewal for Fresh Off the Boat’s final season, which saw her get raked over the coals on social media at the expense of her mental health – “It was lonely—and I’ll tell you what, it remains a little bit lonely because one of the things I wanted to talk about was how the Asian American community has largely remained silent because they’re so hyper-focused on this idea of positive representation. And I think that is such an illusion. It’s like the model minority coin, but just the other side of it. We need whole human representation, which includes mistakes, which includes insecurities and vulnerabilities.”
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