Podcast appearances and mentions of Cecily Strong

This week on the SNL Hall of Fame Podcast, we shine the spotlight on one of Saturday Night Live's most formidable and versatile performers: Cecily Strong. Nominated by our good friend and returning guest Kirstin Rajala, Cecily's Hall of Fame candidacy is given the deep dive it deserves.

Today in honour of April Fools, we are taking a break from hills and climbing to the peaks of comedy instead with the hilarious Curtis Raye. Curtis is a comedian from New Jersey and host of "A Comedy & Bluegrass Show About Strange Public Records." In 2020, he created "The Lonely Jukebox" show, where he used an app to play songs on a jukebox inside an empty pub that was shuttered by Covid. Nobody heard the songs--but guests on the show included Cecily Strong, Richard Kind, and Jimmy Pardo. He performs at the UCB Theater in NY and LA and Washington Improv Theater in DC.Curtis's upcoming shows will be listed here. Learn more about his public records comedy show here. He writes songs and acts in videos here.To help the podcast hike up more hills, comedic or otherwise, please be in touch with ideas of who I should be inviting on the podcast, and support me with some waterproof gear. All that and more ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you to all the supporters as well as to the amazing band Bukahara for their permission to use their fabulous, on point song '⁠⁠Storytelling Animal⁠⁠' as our soundtrack.The World is Storytelling podcast is based on the book by the same name. Written by Arjen Barel, Ronni Gurwicz, and Stu Packer, it is the definitive guide to how sharing stories can be used for social impact and personal growth. Buy your physical or digital copy ⁠⁠today⁠⁠!

Dianne is out on a very special assignment so Chris is joined by guest host (and real-life SAG voter) Ian Brodsky to discuss everything from the future of James Bond to Mike White's extremely specific references. Featuring our predictions for Season 3 of The White Lotus on HBO (uh, yes, we're going to talk about what's going on with the “Will They? Won't They” Brothers). But first! So much streaming, including: The best moments from the NBC SNL50 special (also Chevy Chase was there). Our undying love for the just-wrapped first season of ABC's High Potential. A ratings update on The Night Agent and Ian's elevator pitch for why Black Doves should be your next Netflix spy fix. And some big surprises from some even bigger personalities behind some of the world's biggest IP: Kathleen Kennedy plans to step aside at Star Wars and the Broccoli family finally relinquishes the keys to the James Bond kingdom (we're pitching our Bonds for Bezos, of course). Correction: Michael Wilson is Barbara Broccoli's half brother, not stepbrother. Stepbrothers were just on the mind this week! ———

In this special bonus episode brought to you by Airbnb, The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers recap their weekend participating in the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special! The Lonely Island: Musical Medley -  https://youtu.be/UV-RZYz8xTc?si=8IYmgJ8UEh4i2CM8Scared Straight - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNt1l2Kkfe4Lawrence Welk - https://youtu.be/DPeo-c0Fmfc?si=3codYph8jInkrvK1Black Jeopardy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qYM6bKl57ADebbie Downer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WNsYS1UN5kAdam Sandler's Song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXAbLeJyB0oIn Memoriam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN0-SPKkgqgWeekend Update (Drunk Uncle, Bill Murray, Cecily Strong, Seth Meyes) - https://youtu.be/fqu5AFEvz7U?si=j3l1FRAv9a6RL8DVBronx Beat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdmwLumvI-EAnxiety - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k94SUJ8UMKk&t=30sv Produced by Rabbit Grin ProductionsExecutive Producers Jeph Porter and Rob HolyszLead Producer Kevin MillerCreative Producer Samantha SkeltonCoordinating Producer Derek JohnsonCover Art by Olney AtwellMusic by Greg Chun and Brent AsburyEdit by Cheyenne JonesMix and Master by Jason Richards

Nick welcomes Chicago-based food and entertainment writer Marnie Shure to the podcast for a deep dive into her Saturday Night Live memories. They chat about her experiences growing up with the show, her favorite cast members, hosts, and musical guests. Marnie also counts down her all-time favorite SNL sketches, featuring unforgettable performances from Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Dana Carvey, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Andy Samberg, and more—plus appearances from Natalie Portman, Shannen Doherty, Seann William Scott, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's a fun and nostalgic look back at some of SNL's most memorable moments! [Ep 111]

Rihanna in court with her kids. A$AP Rocky's closing arguments with sons Rza and Riot inside his shooting trial. Then, a Beverly Hills Housewife's emergency surgery. Multiple tumors discovered on 43-year old Teddi Mellencamp's brain. What symptoms to look out for. Plus, Wendy Williams' new interview fighting to break free from assisted living. And, another resurfaced interview with Blake Lively. How she once ‘poisoned' the entire “Gossip Girl” cast against a co-star. Then, Renee Zellweger wedding rumors. Plus, a “Top Gun 3” update from Miles Teller just back from the Super Bowl. And, Lainey Wilson engaged. What the country star just told ET. Then, “Cobra Kai” comes to a close. Only ET is on set of the final season. Plus, we're celebrating 50 year of “SNL” with a pregnant Cecily Strong. And, Nicole Ari Parker and hubby Boris Kodjoe spill the E-Tea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cecily Strong, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Cheri Oteri, & Laraine Newman join host Andy Cohen. Listen to lively debates on everything from the latest drama surrounding your favorite Bravolebrities to what celebrity is making headlines that week live from the WWHL clubhouse.Aired on 02/11/24Binge all your favorite Bravo shows with the Bravo app: bravotv.com/getbravoSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Composer Christopher Willis joins moderator Tyler Morgenstern (Assistant Director, Carsey-Wolf Center) for a discussion of his work on Schmigadoon! They discuss how theatrical and movie musical history, as well as Willis' musicology background, informs the music of the show. They explore the challenge of composing an underscore, and incorporating the stylistic variation of decades of musicals, from the Golden Age musical tradition to the darker themes of 1960s and 1970s productions. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39993]

Composer Christopher Willis joins moderator Tyler Morgenstern (Assistant Director, Carsey-Wolf Center) for a discussion of his work on Schmigadoon! They discuss how theatrical and movie musical history, as well as Willis' musicology background, informs the music of the show. They explore the challenge of composing an underscore, and incorporating the stylistic variation of decades of musicals, from the Golden Age musical tradition to the darker themes of 1960s and 1970s productions. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39993]

Composer Christopher Willis joins moderator Tyler Morgenstern (Assistant Director, Carsey-Wolf Center) for a discussion of his work on Schmigadoon! They discuss how theatrical and movie musical history, as well as Willis' musicology background, informs the music of the show. They explore the challenge of composing an underscore, and incorporating the stylistic variation of decades of musicals, from the Golden Age musical tradition to the darker themes of 1960s and 1970s productions. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39993]

Composer Christopher Willis joins moderator Tyler Morgenstern (Assistant Director, Carsey-Wolf Center) for a discussion of his work on Schmigadoon! They discuss how theatrical and movie musical history, as well as Willis' musicology background, informs the music of the show. They explore the challenge of composing an underscore, and incorporating the stylistic variation of decades of musicals, from the Golden Age musical tradition to the darker themes of 1960s and 1970s productions. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39993]

Today, we're talking with veteran activist and theologian, the one and only, Lisa Sharon Harper! The conversation covers:-        Lisa's journey finding Jesus outside of Whiteness and White evangelicalism-        The centrality of advocating for political and institutional policy change to our faith in Jesus-        How respecting the image of God in all people is the starting point for following Jesus to shalom-        The unavoidable job we have to speak truth, even when it is costly-        Where Lisa finds her hope and motivation to keep going-        And after that, we reflect on the interview and then talk all things Springfield, Ohio and Haitian immigrants.Mentioned on the episode:-            Lisa's website, lisasharonharper.com/-            Lisa's Instagram and Facebook-            The Freedom Road Podcast-            Lisa's books, Fortune and The Very Good Gospel-            Make a donation to The Haitian Community Support and Help Center in Springfield, Ohio via PayPal at haitianhelpcenterspringfield@gmail.com.Credits-            Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Editing by Multitude Productions-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Lisa Sharon Harper: I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. Massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. We have a great one for you today. We are talking to veteran organizer and theologian Lisa Sharon Harper, someone who a lot of you probably know and who was pretty big in both of our individual kind of stories and development as people who care about faith and justice when we were younger people, which you will hear about as we talk to her. We are going to be talking to her about the centrality of our voting and policy choices to our witness as Christians, the importance of integrity and respecting the image of God in all people when making difficult decisions about where to spend your resources as an activist, where Lisa gets her hope and motivation and a whole lot more.And then after the interview, hear our reactions to it. And we're also going to be getting into our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our weekly newsletter that we send out to our subscribers. This week it will be all about Haitian immigrants to America in Springfield, Ohio. You will want to hear that conversation. But before we get started, Jonathan.Jonathan Walton: Please friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and get access to everything that we do. We're creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on politics, faith and culture that helps you seek Jesus and confront injustice. We are resisting the idols of the American church by centering and elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who narrow it to sin and salvation. The two of us have a lot of experience doing this individually and in community, and we've been friends [laughs] for a good long time. So you can trust it will be honest, sincere, and have some good things to say along the way.If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to all of our bonus content, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats with me and Sy, and the ability to comment on posts and chat with us. So again, please go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber today.Sy Hoekstra: Our guest today, again, Lisa Sharon Harper, the president and founder of Freedom Road, a groundbreaking consulting group that crafts experiences to bring common understanding and common commitments that lead to common action toward a more just world. Lisa is a public theologian whose writing, speaking, activism and training has sparked and fed the fires of reformation in the church from Ferguson and Charlottesville to South Africa, Brazil, Australia and Ireland. Lisa's book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World, and How to Repair It All was named one of the best books of 2022 and the book before that, The Very Good Gospel, was named 2016 Book of the Year by The Englewood Review of Books. Lisa is the host of the Freedom Road Podcast, and she also writes for her Substack, The Truth Is…Jonathan Walton: Alright, let's jump into the interview.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yay, I'm so excited to be here, and I'm here with a little bit of a Demi Moore rasp to my voice. So I'm hoping it'll be pleasant to the ears for folks who are coming, because I got a little sick, but I'm not like really sick, because I'm on my way, I'm on the rebound.Sy Hoekstra: So you told us you got this at the DNC, is that right?Lisa Sharon Harper: Yes, I literally, literally, that's like what, almost three weeks ago now?Sy Hoekstra: Oh my gosh.Jonathan Walton: You've got a DNC infection. That's what that is.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Lisa Sharon Harper: I have a DNC cough. I have a DNC cough, that's funny.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: So before we jump into our questions, I wanted to take a momentary trip down memory lane, because I have no idea if you remember this or not.Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.Sy Hoekstra: But in January of 2008, you led a weekend retreat for a college Christian fellowship that Jonathan and I were both in.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, I do remember.Sy Hoekstra: You do remember this? Okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Lisa Sharon Harper: I remember almost every time I've ever spoken anywhere.Sy Hoekstra: Wow, okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: I really do. And I remember that one, and I do remember you guys being there. Oh my gosh, that's so cool.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: You remember that. That's amazing.Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no.Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Hang on. Wait a minute [laughter]. We don't just remember it. Because, so you gave this series of talks that ended up being a big part of your book, The Very Good Gospel.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And you talked specifically about the difference between genuine and pseudo-community and the need to really address each other's problems that we face, bear each other's burdens, that sort of thing. And you did a session, which I'm sure you've done with other groups, where you split us up into racial groups. So we sat there with White, Black, and Latine, and Asian, and biracial groups, and we had a real discussion about race in a way that the community had absolutely never had before [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yep.Sy Hoekstra: And it actually, it is the opening scene of Jonathan's book. I don't know if you knew that.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God, I didn't know that.Jonathan Walton: It is.Lisa Sharon Harper: Which one?Jonathan Walton: Twelve Lies.Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow, I didn't know that. Oh my gosh, I missed that. Okay.Sy Hoekstra: So it was a… Jonathan put it before, it was a formative moment for everybody and a transformative moment for some of us [laughter] …Lisa Sharon Harper: Oooooo, Oh my goodness.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: …in that we learned a lot about ourselves and what we thought about race, what other people thought about race. I will tell you that in the five minutes after the session broke up, like ended, it was the first time that my now wife ever said to me, “Hey, you said something racist to me that I didn't like.” [laughs] And then, because of all the conversation we just had, I responded miraculously with the words, “I'm sorry.” [laughter].Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God!Sy Hoekstra: And then we went from there.Lisa Sharon Harper: Miraculously [laughs]. That's funny.Sy Hoekstra: So I have lots of friends that we can talk about this session with to this day, and they still remember it as transformative.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my Gosh. Wow.Sy Hoekstra: All of that, just to lead into my first question which is this, a lot of people in 2016 started seeing kind of the things about White evangelicalism that indicated to them that they needed to get out. They needed to escape in some way, because of the bad fruit, the bad political fruit that was manifesting. You saw that bad fruit a long time ago.Lisa Sharon Harper: A whole long time ago.Sy Hoekstra: You were deep in the Republican, pro-life political movement for a little bit, for like, a minute as a young woman.Lisa Sharon Harper: I wouldn't… here's the thing. I wouldn't say I was deep in. What I would say is I was in.Sy Hoekstra: Okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: As in I was in because I was Evangelical, and I identified with itbecause I was Evangelical and because my friends identified with it. So I kind of went along, but I always had this sense I was like standing on the margins looking at it going, “I don't know.”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: You know what I mean? But I would say literally for like a minute, I was a believer. Maybe for like, a year.Sy Hoekstra: But my question then is, what were the warning signs? And then, separately from what were the warning signs that you needed to get out, who or what were the guiding lights that showed you a better way?Lisa Sharon Harper: My goodness. Wow. Well, I mean, I would say that honestly… Okay, so I had a couple of conversations, and we're talking about 2004 now. So 2004 also, this is right after 2000 where we had the hanging chads in Florida.Sy Hoekstra: Yep.Jonathan Walton: Yep.Lisa Sharon Harper: And we know how important voting is, because literally, I mean, I actually believe to this day that Gore actually won. And it's not just a belief, they actually counted after the fact, and found that he had won hundreds more ballots that were not counted in the actual election, in Florida. And so every single vote counts. Every single vote counts. So then in 2004 and by 2004, I'm the Director of Racial Reconciliation for greater LA in InterVarsity, I had done a summer mission project that wasn't really mission. It was actually more of a, it was a pilgrimage, actually. It was called the pilgrimage for reconciliation. The summer before, I had done the stateside pilgrimage. And then that summer, I led students on a pilgrimage through Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia asking the question, “How is shalom broken? And how is shalom built? How is it made?”And through both of those successive summer experiences, it became so clear to me, policy matters, and it matters with regard to Christian ethics. We can't say we are Christian and be, in other words, Christ-like if we are not concerned with how our neighbor is faring under the policies coming down from our government. We just can't. And as Christians in a democracy, specifically in America, in the US where we have a democracy, we actually have the expectation that as citizens, we will help shape the way that we live together. And our vote is what does that our vote when we vote for particular people, we're not just voting for who we like. We're voting for the policies they will pass or block. We're voting for the way we want to live together in the world.So in 2004 when I come back from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, I'm talking with some of my fellow staff workers, and I'm saying to them, “We have to have a conversation with our folks about voting. I mean, this election really matters. It's important. ”Because we had just come through the first few years of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Iraq had just erupted a couple years before that, Afghanistan the year before that. And we were seeing young men coming back in body bags and this war, which had no plan to end, was sending especially young Black men to die because they were the ones…and I know, because I was in those schools when I was younger, and I alsohad been reading up on this.They're the ones who are recruited by the Marines and the Army and the Navy and the Air Force, especially the army, which is the cannon fodder. They're the ones who are on the front lines. They are recruited by them more than anybody else, at a higher degree than anybody else, a higher percentage ratio. So I was saying we have to have a conversation. And their response to me in 2004 was, “Oh, well, we can't do that, because we can't be political.” I said, “Well, wait, we are political beings. We live in a democracy.” To be a citizen is to help shape the way we live together in the world, and that's all politics is. It's the conversations we have and the decisions that we make about how we are going to live together.And so if we as Christians who have an ethic passed down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and we have the 10 Commandments, which is like the grand ethic of humanity, at least of the Abrahamic tradition. Then, if we don't have something to say about how we should be living together and the decisions we make about that every four years, every two years, even in off year elections, then what are we doing here?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: Who are we? Like, what is this faith? What is this Christian faith? So that was my first real rub, because I had experienced the pilgrimage to reconciliation. I had seen, I had rolled through. I had walked on the land where the decisions that the polis, the people had made, had killed people. It had led to the death of millions of people. Thousands of people in some case. Hundreds of people in other cases. But when coming back from Bosnia, it was millions. And so I was just very much aware of the reality that for Christians, politics matters because politics is simply the public exercise of our ethics, of our Christian ethic. And if we don't have one, then we're… honest, I just, I think that we are actually turning our backs on Jesus who spent his life telling us how to live.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And so that was, for me, literally that conversation with that staff worker was kind of my first, “Aha! I'm in the wrong place.” I needed to learn more about how this public work works. How do systems and structures and policies and laws work? So that's what actually brought me, ended up bringing me a year later, to Columbia University and getting my master's in human rights. And I knew, having had the background in the two pilgrimages and the work that we did on the biblical concept of shalom at the time, which was nascent. I mean, it was for me, it was, I barely, really barely, understood it. I just knew it wasn't what I had been taught. So I started digging into shalom at that time, and then learning about international law and human rights and how that works within the international systems.I came out of that with a much clearer view, and then continued to work for the next 13 years to really get at how our Christian ethics intersect with and can help, and have helped shape public policy. And that has led me to understand very clearly that we are complicit in the evil, and we also, as Christians, other streams of our faith are responsible for the redemption, particularly in America and South Africa and other places in the world.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So I think I'm placing myself in your story. So I think we intersected in that 2005, 2008 moment. So I've traveled with you.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, we had a good time. It was so much fun.Jonathan Walton: We did. It was very good. So getting to follow, watch, learn, just for me, has been a huge blessing. First with the book, with New York Faith and Justice, reading stuff with Sojourners, grabbing your books, gleaning different wisdom things for… it's something that I've wondered as I'm a little bit younger in the journey, like as you've operated in this world, in the White Evangelical world, and then still White Evangelical adjacent, operating in these faith spaces. And now with the platform that you have, you've had to exercise a lot of wisdom, a lot of patience and deciding to manage where you show up and when, how you use your time, how you manage these relationships and keep relationships along the way. Because you didn't drop people.Lisa Sharon Harper: I have. I have dropped a few [laughter]. I want to make that really clear, there is an appropriate space to literally shake the dust.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].Jonathan Walton: I think what I have not seen you do is dehumanize the people in the places that you left.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, thank you. Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And that's hard to do, because most people, particularly my generation, we see the bridge we just walked across, and we throw Molotov cocktails at that thing [laughter].Lisa Sharon Harper: Y'all do. Your generation is like, “I'm out! And you're never gonna breathe again!” Like, “You're going down!” I'm like, “Oh my God…” [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It's quite strong with us [laughs]. And so could you give any pieces of wisdom or things you've learned from God about navigating in that way. Things that we can and folks that are listening can hold on to as things shift, because they will shift and are shifting.Lisa Sharon Harper: They always shift, yeah, because we are not living on a book page. We're living in a world that moves and is fluid, and people change, and all the things. So I think that the best advice that I got, I actually got from Miroslav Volf. Dr. Miroslav Volf, who is a professor at Yale University, and he wrote the book that really kind of got me into, it was my first book that I ever read that was a book of theology, Exclusion&Embrace. And when we went to Croatia, we met with him. We met with him in the city of Zadar on the beach [laughs], literally over lunch. It was just an incredible privilege to sit down with him. And I've had many opportunities to connect with him since, which has been a privilege again, and just a joy.But he said to our group, our little InterVarsity group. And that's not at all to minimize InterVarsity, but we had a real inflated sense of who we were in the world. We thought we were everything, and we thought we were right about everything. And so here we are going through Croatia, which had just experienced a decade and a little bit before, this civil war. And it wasn't really a civil war, it was actually a war of aggression from Serbia into Croatia, and it was horrible. And it turned neighbor against neighbor in the same way that our civil war turned neighbor against neighbor. So literally, these towns, you literally had neighbors killing each other, you just were not safe.So basically, think Rwanda. The same thing that happened in Rwanda, around the same time had happened in Croatia. And so Miroslav is Croatian, and the lines by which things were drawn in Croatia was not race, because everybody was White. So the lines that they drew their hierarchy on was along the lines of religion. It was the Croats, which were mostly Catholic, mostly Christian. Some not Catholic, they might have been Evangelical, but they were Christian. And then you had the Bosniaks, which were Muslim, and the Serbs, which were Orthodox. So that was the hierarchy. And when you had Milošević, who was the president of Yugoslavia, who was trying to keep that Federation together, Yugoslavia was like an amalgamation of what we now understand to be Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.So he was trying to keep all of that together, and when he then crossed the lines, the boundary between Serbia and Croatia and invaded and just began to kill everybody, and the Serbs then went to his side, and the Croats went over here, and the Bosniaks were caught in the middle, and people just died. And they chose sides and they killed each other. And so we sat down to do lunch with Miroslav Volf, and in that context, interfaith conversation was critical. It was and is, it continues to be. One of the main markers of where you find healing, it's where you find interfaith conversation in Croatia and also Bosnia and Serbia. And so we, in our little Evangelical selves, we're not used to this interfaith thing.We think of that as compromising. We think of that as, “How can you talk to people and gain relationship with and actually sit down and…?” And he was challenging us to study this scripture with other people of other faiths, and study their scriptures. He was like, “Do that.” And so our people were like, “How can you do that and not compromise your faith?” And here's what he said. He said, “It's easy. Respect. It's respect, respecting the image of God in the other, the one who is not like me. That I, when I sit down and I read their scriptures with them, allowing them to tell me what their scriptures mean.” Not sitting in a classroom in my Evangelical church to learn what the Muslim scriptures say, but sitting down with Imams to understand what the Muslim scriptures say and how it's understood within the context of that culture.That's called respect for the image of God. And there's no way, no way for us to knit ourselves together in a society, to live together in the world without respect. That's baseline. That's baseline.Jonathan Walton: As I'm listening, I'm thinking, “Okay, Lisa made choices.” She was like, “We are gonna not just do a trip. We're gonna do a trip in Croatia.” And so as you're going on these trips, as you were having these conversations, you're making choices. There's decisions being made around you, and then you get to the decision making seat. And how that discernment around where to place your energy happens. So something that's at the top of mind for me and many people listening is Palestine.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh, yeah.Jonathan Walton: So how did you decide at this moment that, “Hey,this is where my energy and time is coming. I'm going to Christ at the Checkpoint. I'm going to talk with Munther. I'm going to be there.”How did that rise to the surface for you?Lisa Sharon Harper: It's funny, because I have, really have been advised, and in the very first days of the conflict, I was advised by some African American leaders, “Don't touch this. Don't do it. You're going to be blacklisted.”Jonathan Walton: I heard the same thing, yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: “Don't do it. You're gonna find you're not invited to speak anywhere.” Da da da da. Sometimes these decisions are just made to say, “I am going to act in the world as if I don't know what the repercussions are, and I'm just going to do the thing, because my focus is not focused on the repercussions.” I mean, in some ways, in that way, I do think that my constitution is the constitution of a warrior. Warriors go to battle knowing that bullets are flying all around them, and they just choose to go forward anyway. Somebody who cared, and not just cared, but I think there's a moment where you begin to understand it's that moment of no turning back. It's the moment when you stand at the freshly buried graves of 5000 Muslim boys and men who were killed all in one day by bullet fire in Srebrenica.It's the moment that you drive through Bosnia and you see all of the graves everywhere. Everywhere, especially in Sarajevo, which experienced a siege, a multiyear siege by Serbia. And they turned the soccer field, which at one point was the focal point of the Sarajevo Olympic Games, they turned that into a graveyard because they ran out of space for the graves. When you roll through Georgia, and you go to Dahlonega, Georgia, and you go to the Mining Museum, which marks the very first gold rush in America, which was not in California, but was in Dahlonega, Georgia, on Cherokee land, and you hear the repercussions of people's silence and also complicity.When they came and they settled, they made a decision about how we should live together, and it did not include, it included the erasure of Cherokee people and Choctaw people and Chickasaw people, Seminole people, Creek people. And you walk that land, and the land tells you. It's so traumatic that the land still tells the story. The land itself tells the story. The land bears witness. When you stand on that land and the land tells you the story, there's a moment that just happens where there's no turning back and you have to bear witness to the truth, even with bullets flying around you. So with regard to Palestine, having done what now goodness, 20 years of research on this biblical concept called shalom, and written the book, The Very Good Gospel, which really lays it out in a systematic way.I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. Two thirds. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. I mean, massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire. So we actually need international law. We need the instruments of international law. That's what stopped the war there. And they failed there too, but they also have been an intrinsic part of keeping the peace and also prosecuting Milošević. Solike making sure that some measure of justice on this earth happens, some shadow of it.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And what are we told in scripture in Micah 6:8, walk humbly with God. Do justice. Embrace the truth. So I think that when I saw on October 7, the breach of the wall, the breach of the gate and then the massacre at the festival, I grieved. I really grieved. And I was scared, really scared for the nation of Israel, for the people who were there. And I began to ask questions, because I've learned the discipline of not dehumanizing. Because to dehumanize is to break shalom. It's one of the first things that happens in the breaking of shalom and the eradication of it. And so part of what I had to do if I was going to consider Palestinian people human was to ask what has happened to them that would cause them to take such violent and radical action. How did we get here? Is the question.And the narrative that I heard from Israel, from the state of Israel, from the leaders of the state of Israel, which had been marched against by their own people just the week before that, and weeks for like a month or two before that, they were trying to depose the leadership of Israel because they were trying to turn their state into a fascist state. I was watching that as well. Trying to take the power of the judiciary away so that they could increase the power of the Prime Minister. So what does it mean then? What does it mean that this happened? And I was listening to the way that the narrative that Netanyahu was giving and his generals and the narrative they were giving is, “These are monsters. They are terrorists. They are evil. They are intrinsically, they are not human.”And I knew when I saw that, when I heard that, I thought Bosnia. I thought Rwanda, where they called the other cockroaches. I thought South Africa, where they called Black people not human, monsters, who need to be controlled. I thought Native Americans, who were called savages in order to be controlled, in order to have the justification of genocide. I thought of people of African descent who were brought in death ships across the Atlantic to South America and Central America and Mexico and North America in order to be used to build European wealth and they were called non-human. And even according to our own laws, our constitution declared three fifths of a human being.So when I heard Netanyahu and his generals dehumanizing the Palestinians, I knew, that for me was like the first signal, and it happened on the first day. It was the first signal that we are about to witness a genocide. They are preparing us. They are grooming us to participate in genocide. And I, as a theologian, as an ethicist, as a Christian, would lose my credibility if I remained silent and became complicit in that genocide through my silence. Because having studied the genocides that I mentioned earlier and the oppressions that I mentioned earlier, I know that most of those spaces were Christian spaces.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And they happened, those genocides and those oppressions were able to happen because Christians were silent.Jonathan Walton: Gathering all that up, I think… I mean, we've had Munther on this podcast, we've talked with him throughout the years. When he said, “The role of Christians is to be prophetic, to speak prophetic truth to power,” something clicked for me in that as you're talking about our witness being compromised, as you are saying, “Hey, let's ask this question, who does this benefit? What is happening?”Lisa Sharon Harper: That's right.Jonathan Walton: The reality that he said, “All of us are Nathan when it comes to empire. We are supposed to be the ones who say this is wrong.” And that resonates with what you said, like how can I have integrity and be silent? Genocide necessitates silence and complicity in that way from people.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. And here's the thing. How are you gonna go to church and sing worship songs to Jesus on Sunday and be silent Monday through Saturday witnessing the slaying of the image of God on earth. You hear what I'm saying?Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Like my understanding of shalom now is not just we do these things in order to be nice and so we live together. It is that shalom is intricately connected with the flourishing of the kingdom of God.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Lisa Sharon Harper: It is the flourishing of the kingdom of God.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And the kingdom of God flourishes wherever the image of God flourishes. And the image of God is born by every single human being. And part of what it means to be made in the image of God is that humans who are made in the image of God exercise agency, stewardship of the world. And the most drastic example or practice of warfare against the image of God is war.Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs]. Absolutely.Lisa Sharon Harper: War annihilates the image of God on earth. It is a declaration of war, not only on Palestinians or Gazans or even Israel or the empire anywhere. It is a declaration of war against God. It is a declaration of war against God.Sy Hoekstra: A phrase that has stuck in my head about you was from one of the endorsements to your last book Fortune. Jemar Tisby described you as a long-distance runner for justice.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That's awesome.Sy Hoekstra: That always struck me as accurate.Jonathan Walton: That is great.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Not a sprinter.Jonathan Walton: No.Sy Hoekstra: Not a sprinter.Lisa Sharon Harper: That was really pretty cool. I was like, “Oh Jemar, thank you.” [laughter]Jonathan Walton: I need that. We just in here. That's great [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: So here's the question then, where does your hope and sustenance, how do you get that? Where does it come from?Lisa Sharon Harper: Honestly, it comes from focusing on the kingdom. Focusing on Jesus. Focusing on doing the kingdom of God. And when you do it you witness it. And when you witness it, you get hope. I mean, I've learned, even in the last year, an actual life lesson for me was hope comes in the doing. Hope comes in the doing. So as we do the kingdom, we gain hope. As we show up for the protests so that we confront the powers that are slaying the image of God on earth, we gain hope. As we speak out against it and form our words in ways that do battle with the thinking that lays the groundwork for ethics of erasure, we gain hope because we're doing it. We see the power.The kingdom of God exists wherever there are people who actually bow to the ethic of God. Who do it. Who do the ethic of God. You can't say you believe in Jesus and not actually do his ethic. You don't believe in him. What do you believe? He never said, “Believe stuff about me.” He said, “Follow me.” He literally never said, “Believe stuff about me.”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Lisa Sharon Harper: He said, “Follow me. Do what I do. ”And that's ethics. That's the question of, how do we live together in the world?? So we do and we gain hope.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: I like that. That reminds me of Romans 5: There'll be glory in our suffering. Suffering produces perseverance, character, and character hope. It's like, it's not an intuitive thing necessarily, if you haven't done it before. But that's great, and that's a really, I like that a lot as a place for us to end [laughs]. To get out there and do it, and you will find the hope as you go.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: Can you tell us where people can find you or work that you would want people to see of yours?Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely. Well, hey, first of all, thank you guys so much for having me on, and it's been really a joy to start my day in conversation with you. Y'all can follow what I'm up to at Lisasharonharper.com. I live on Instagram, and so you can [laughter], you can definitely follow on Instagram and Facebook. And Freedom Road Podcast is a place where a lot of people have found the conversation and are tracking with it. And I'm always trying to have guests on that are pushing me and causing me to ask deeper questions. And so I really, I welcome you to join us on Freedom Road.Sy Hoekstra: Yes. I wholeheartedly second that.Lisa Sharon Harper: And of course, the books [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And of course, the books.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Fortune, Very Good Gospel, all the rest.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, exactly.Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a delight.Jonathan Walton: Thank you so much.Lisa Sharon Harper: Thank you Sy. Thank you, Jonathan.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, that was a fantastic discussion. Tell me what you are thinking about coming out of it?Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think one, is just it's just really helpful to talk with someone who's been around for a while. I think most of us… I'm 38 years old, but let's just say millennials and younger, we don't consume or receive a lot of long form content.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: And we don't also engage with people who are willing and able to mentor us through difficult situations. We're getting sound bites from TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and we don't get the whole of knowledge or experiences. So listening to Lisa talk about, “I grabbed this bit from L.A., I grabbed this bit from Palestine, I grabbed this bit from Croatia, I grabbed this bit.” We cannot microwave transformation. We cannot have instant growth. There is no, let me go through the side door of growing to maturity in my faithfulness and walk with Jesus.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: There is just doing it. And so when she said, “I find the hope in the doing,” you don't learn that unless you have done stuff. That's a big takeaway. I also appreciated just her take on the genocide in Palestine. And because she was mentored and has talked with Miroslav Volf, she knows what it smells like, because she's done the work in her own history of her own background. If you have not read Fortune, go read the book. The reason Black folks cannot find who we [laughs] come from is because they were enslaved and killed. The reason we cannot find the indigenous and native folks we were related to is because there was genocide. So there's these things.And she goes through that in her book, and to talk about how to wield our stories when we don't have one, or how to wield a story of tragedy to turn it into something transformative, is something I admire, appreciate and hope that I can embody if and when the time comes for myself, when I have collected and grown and have asked similar questions. I'm appreciative of what she had to say. And you know, I know I asked her the question about not burning things down, and so I appreciated that [laughs] answer as well. Like, there's just a lot of wisdom, and I hope that folks listening were able to glean as well.Sy Hoekstra: I totally agree with all that. I think all that was very powerful. And there isn't it… kind of reminds me of when her book we've mentioned a few times, The Very Good Gospel, came out. It came out in 2016, but like I said, when we were talking to her, the stuff that was in that book she had been thinking about for more than a decade at that point. And it was very clear. When I was reading it, I was like, “Oh, this is Lisa's bag—this is what she was talking to us about when we were in college in 2008.”Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: At that camp, but she'd been thinking about it for even longer than that. It was just like, you can tell when something isn't like, “Oh, I had to research this because I was gonna write a book about it, so I had to learn about it.” You know what I mean? You can tell when someone does that versus when someone's been soaking in a subject. It's like marinating in it for 12, 15, years, or whatever it was. She just has a lot of that stuff [laughs]. You know what? I just used the image of marinating and marinating and microwaving are very different things [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes, that is true.Sy Hoekstra: One takes a lot longer.Jonathan Walton: Put a steak in a microwave, see if you enjoy it [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so I totally agree with all that. I came out of it thinking a lot about how the things that she said thematically kind of connected to some thoughts that I've had, but also just in terms of historical events. Because I told her this after the interview, when I moved to Switzerland in 2001 I was 13, my family moved over there. It was just at the end of the Yugoslavian Civil War, which was what she was talking about Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia. And Switzerland took in a ton of refugees from that war.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So my neighborhood, there was a big apartment complex. I mean, big for Swiss standards, kind of small honestly for American standards. But there's an apartment complex around the corner from my house that they had put a bunch of Bosnian refugees in. And their school was right down the road, the public school. And so my neighborhood in high school was like the kids playing around in the streets and in the playground or whatever were Bosnian refugees. And the combination of the three countries, Serbian, Croatia and Bosnia, used to be one big thing called Yugoslavia, right.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And the first two syllables of the word Yugoslavia were in Switzerland, a slur for anyone who was from that country. And there was just a ton of bigotry toward them, basically because they displayed poverty [laughter]. Like they were one of the most visible groups of poor people in Zurich. And again, like Lisa said, this wasn't about racism. Everybody's White. But you're talking about like there were ethnic differences and there was class differences. And people dismissed them for their criminality, or for how the young men would get in fights in bars and on the streets or whatever, and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know how a lot of refugees from the Somalian war ended up in Minneapolis and St Paul, just like where a lot of them were placed in the US, and then a lot of them moved into North Dakota.It's like, a lot of… which is where my family's from. I've been there a lot. I hear a lot of people talking about the politics in that region. And you would hear similar stuff about them, except that it was about race. That it was, “Oh, we have crime now because we have Black people and we haven't before.” I mean, obviously Minneapolis, they did, but not really in the parts of North Dakota that my family's from. And so it was this lesson for me about the thing that Lisa was talking about, respect for the image of God in all people and how when you bring people who are somehow differentiable [laughter] from you, somebody who's from another grid, you can call them a different class, a different race, whatever, we will find any excuse to just say, “Oh, these are just bad people,” instead of taking responsibility for them, loving our neighbor, doing any of the stuff that we were commanded to do by Jesus, to the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant in our midst.We will find whatever dividing lines we can to write people off. It can be race, it can be poverty, it can be, it doesn't matter. It's not what we should actually be saying about poverty or violence, or the fact that people are getting mugged or whatever. What we should be saying is we have a bunch of people who just got here from a war torn society. They were cut off from education and job skills and opportunities and all kinds of other things. And this is, when you just stick them in a society that treats them like garbage, this is what happens every single time, without fail. And so what we need to do is [laughter] be good neighbors.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Treat people well and forgive when people wrong us and that sort of thing. And we just will find any excuse in the world not to do that. And it's because we are not starting from that place that Miroslav Volf, who I love by the way, said to Lisa, is the place where you have to start everything when it comes to these kinds of conflicts, which is respect for the image of God in other people. The fact that they didn't do that in Yugoslavia led to slaughter en masse, but it still happens when you leave and you put yourself in a different context. There's still that lack of respect, and it's still harming people, even when there's quote- unquote, peace.Jonathan Walton: This opens up another can of worms. But I thought to myself…Sy Hoekstra: Go for it.Jonathan Walton: …it's much easier to say, “I just don't want to help,” than it is to say, “This person's evil,” or, “These people are bad.” Because I think at the core of it, someone says, “Is this your neighbor?” Jesus says, “Is this your neighbor?” And the Jewish leader of the day does not want to help the Samaritan, whatever the reasoning is. Right?Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: We're trying to justify our innate desire to not help our neighbor. As opposed to just dealing with the reality that many of us, when we see people who are broken and messed up, quote- unquote broken, quote- unquote messed up, quote- unquote on the opposite side of whatever power dynamic or oppressive structure that is set up or has just made, quote- unquote poor choices, some of us, our gut reaction is, I don't want to help them. And if we would just, I think just stop there, be like, “My first inclination is, I'm not interested in helping them.” And paused it there and reflected on why we don't want to do that internally, as opposed to turning towards them and making them the reason. Because they were just sitting there.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: The person on the street who's experiencing homelessness was just sitting there. The one in 10 students in New York City that is homeless is just sitting there. They're just there. And so if we were able to slow down for a second and say, “Why don't I want this person to live in my neighborhood, in my own stuff? Well, I don't like change. I'm afraid of this being different. I'm uncomfortable with different foods. I'm afraid of my favorite coffee shop or restaurant being taken away. I'm uncomfortable around people of different faiths. I feel weird when I don't hear my language being spoken.” If we were able to turn those reflections inward before we had uncomfortable feelings, turned them into actions, and then justified those actions with theology that has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus, then I wonder what would be different. But that that slowing down is really hard, because it's easier to feel the feeling, react, and then justify my reaction with a divine mandate.Sy Hoekstra: Or just plug those feelings into stereotypes and all of the existing ways of thinking about people that we provide for each other so that we can avoid doing that very reflection.Jonathan Walton: That's all that I thought about there [laughs]. I'm going to be thinking about that for a while actually. So Sy, which tab is still open for you? We're going to talk about a segment where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. And remember, you can get this newsletter for free just by signing up for our mailing list at KTFPress.com. You'll get recommendations on articles, podcasts and other media that both of us have found that will help you in your political education and discipleship. Plus you'll get reflections to keep us grounded, from me and Sy that help keep us grounded every week as we engage in just this challenging work and together in the news about what's happening and all that.You can get everything I'm just talking about at KTFPress.com and more. So go get that free subscription at KTFPress.com. So Sy, want to summarize that main story point for us?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I mean, this is interesting, because when I wrote about this, which is the story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, it was two days after the debate, and the story has only exploded since then, and I think a lot of people kind of probably have the gist of it already. But some completely unfounded rumors based on fourth hand nonsense and some blurry pictures of people that have nothing whatsoever to do with Haitian immigrants started spreading online among right wing conspiracy theorists saying, for some reason, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Stealing, kidnapping and eating the resident's pets.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And the absurdity of this story was immediately apparent to me being someone who married into a Haitian immigrant family, Haitians do not eat cats and dogs [laughs]. It's a ridiculous thing to have to say, but I say it because I understand, maybe you have no, maybe you know nothing whatsoever about Haiti and you think, “Well, I don't know. There are some cultures around the world where they eat animals that we think of as pets or that we don't think of as food or whatever.” And like, okay, fine, that's true. It's not Haiti, though.Jonathan Walton: Right [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: The idea of eating a cat or a dog to a Haitian is as weird to them as it is to us. I promise you, I've had so much Haitian food [laughter]. So basically this rumor spread, Donald Trump mentions that the debates and now there are Proud Boys in Springfield, Ohio, marching around with cat posters and memes. There are people calling in bomb threats to schools and to government buildings, to all other institutions in Springfield. The Haitian population is very afraid of Donald Trump. At this point, we're recording this on Friday, September 20, he has said that he will travel to Springfield, and basically everyone there has said, “Please do not do that. You're only going to stoke more problems.”And every last piece of evidence that has been offered as evidence, which was always pretty weak in the first place, has been debunked at this point. There was one, the Vance campaign just recent, the past couple days, gave a police report to the Washington Post and said, “See, we found it. Here's a woman who actually filed a police report that says that my Haitian neighbors took my cat and ate my cat.” And the Washington Post did what, for some reason Republicans never expect journalists to do, and actually did their job and called up the woman who said, “Oh, yeah, I filed that report, and then I found my cat in my basement, and they were fine.” [laughs]Jonathan Walton: Yes. In her house.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And so I don't know, there have been a couple of blips like that where somebody is like, “See, I found evidence,” and then someone was immediately like, “That's not actually evidence.” There have been rumors of other rallies or whatever. It's basically just becoming a focal point and a meme for all of Trump and his supporters, immigration resentment.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: There was a story today about people in Alabama being concerned about, some small town in Alabama being concerned about becoming the next Springfield because they had 60 Haitian immigrants in their town of 12,000 people [laughs]. I don't know. It's all just bizarre. The main actual point though, around the actual immigration policy stuff, Gabrielle and a few other people, my wife's name is Gabrielle, and a few other Haitians that I've seen comment on this, keep bringing up the Toni Morrison quote about how racism is a distraction from actual issues.Jonathan Walton: That is literally what I was gonna read.Sy Hoekstra: There you go. Okay [laughs]. So the actual issue here is that there's this community of about 60,000 people in Ohio that has had an influx of about 15,000 Haitian immigrants, and so it's a lot of strain on the schools and housing and stuff like that, which those are real questions. But also, the Haitian immigrants are there because the local economy revitalization efforts led to a bunch of manufacturers coming into Springfield and having more jobs than laborers, and explicitly saying, “We need you to bring in more laborers.” And so they were Haitian immigrants who are legally in the country [laughs], who have social security numbers and temporary protected status at the very least if not green cards or whatever, have been filling these jobs, and not remotely even a majority of these jobs.They're just filling in the extra 10, 15 percent or whatever the workforce that these manufacturers thought they needed. And the story has become, “Haitians are taking our jobs,” which is absolute nonsense.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So those are the main points of the story. Sorry, I talked a while. I have a lot of feelings about this one [laughs].Jonathan Walton: No, I mean…Sy Hoekstra: But Jonathan, what are your thoughts?Jonathan Walton: For a good reason. Let me just say this quote by Toni Morrison, “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, and you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” So along with that Toni Morrison quote, I want to put that side by side with this quote from Robert Jones Jr.'s National Book of the Year, The Prophets.“To survive this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by the Toubab.” Toubab is a Western and Central African word for colonizer, European. “They push people into the mud and then call them filthy. They forbade people from accessing knowledge of the world, and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted and bleeding and can do no more, than they called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs, and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts and called the pieces savages. They stepped on people's throats with all of their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe.”“And then when people made an attempt to break the foot or cut it off one they screamed, “Chaos,” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order. They praised every daisy and then called every blackberry a stain. They bled the color from God's face, gave it a dangle between its legs, and called it holy. Then when they were done breaking things, they pointed to the sky and called the color of the universe itself a sin, [black]. And then the whole world believed them, even some of Samuel's [or Black] people. Especially some of Samuel's people. This was untoward and made it hard to open your heart to feel a sense of loyalty that wasn't a strategy. It was easier to just seal yourself up and rock yourself to sleep.”That to me, like those two quotes together. So the Son of Baldwin, Robert Jones Jr, great follow on Substack and that quote from Toni Morrison, an iconic Black female writer, wrote Beloved, The Bluest Eye, those two things together, like what racism does to a person. The giving up, the I just, “What can I do?” and the distraction for the people who do have effort, are just two roads that I wish we just didn't have to go down. But most people will spend our energy either resigned because we've spent too much or pushing against the lie as the powers that be continue to carry out genocide, continue to extract limestone from Haiti, continues to extract resources from Haiti, continue to destroy African economies through extraction in the Congo and Benin and all the places.And so my prayer and longing is that the resilience of the Haitian people and the legacy of Toussaint and all of that would be present in the people that are there and the diaspora. And I believe that is true. And I pray for safety for all of the people that still have to live in this, what is fastly becoming a sundown town.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: It's a very real thing. And I talked to someone else. Oh, actually [laughs], it was a DM on Instagram that I sent to Brandy, and she agreed that there's a lot of PTSD from when Trump was president, because things like this got said every day.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: All the time. And downstream of rhetoric are real actions, like lawyers and taxi drivers being mobilized to go to the airport to try and get the, quote- unquote, Muslim banned people now representation and get them to their destinations. You had very real terrible child separation that happened, that children are still separated from their families right now. And so downstream of all this stuff, are real, real concrete actions. And I am praying that… my daughter asked me this morning, Maya, she said, “Do I want Trump to win, or do I want Harris to win?” And I said, “Maya, I hope that Trump does not win.” She goes “Well, if Harris wins, will it be better?”I said, “It depends on who you ask, but I think there will be a better chance for us to move towards something more helpful if Trump does not win.” And then she said she knew some people who are supportive of Trump, and I told her things that her eight year old brain cannot handle.Sy Hoekstra: But wait, what does that mean? [laughs]Jonathan Walton: I just started breaking down why that is because I couldn't help myself.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, why people support him.Jonathan Walton: Why people would support him.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, okay.Jonathan Walton: And then she quickly pivoted back to Story Pirates, which is a wonderful podcast about professional improvisational actors telling kid stories like Cecily Strong and things like that. It's hilarious. But all that to say, I think this is a prime example of the type of chaos and environment that is created when someone like Trump is president and the cameras are on him at all times. And I hope that is not the reality, because he absolutely does not have any meaningful policy positions besides Project 2025. I don't know if you saw… I'm talking a lot. He was in a town hall in Michigan, and someone asked him what his child care policies were. Like what actionable policy does he have? And he said a word salad and a buffet of dictionaries that you don't know what he was talking about.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It was nonsense that somehow ended up with immigration being a problem.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And so I think that the worst factions of our country will have a vehicle to live out their worst fantasies about deportations and violence and racism, White supremacy and patriarchy and all those things, if he becomes president. And that's really sad to me, and I think it's a preview of that is what's happening in Springfield right now.Sy Hoekstra: Here's another angle on this. And it fits into everything you just said, but it's just from a different angle, bringing a little bit of Haitian history here. The Haitian Revolution is probably, I can't say that I've read everything to guarantee this, is probably the greatest act of defiance against White supremacy that the world has ever seen. For those who don't know, it happened right after the American Revolution, it was just the enslaved people of the island of Saint-Domingue, which is now Haiti in the Dominican Republic, rising up and overthrowing the French and taking the island for themselves and establishing, like writing the world's second written constitution and establishing basically the world's second democracy.Really the world's first actual democracy [laughs] if you think about how American democracy was restricted to a very small group of people. If you read things that people in colonial governments or slave owners throughout the Western Hemisphere wrote and like when they spoke to each other about their fears over the next decades before slavery is abolished, Haiti is constantly on their minds.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: They never stop talking about it. It's actually mentioned in some of the declarations of secession before the Civil War. When the states wrote why they were seceding, it was like, “Because the Union wants Haiti to happen to us.” For the plantation owners to be killed. It was an obsession, and so the colonial powers in Europe, you may have read some of the work that the New York Times did in the New York Times Magazine last year, maybe it was two years ago, about this. But the amount of energy from European powers that went into making sure that Haiti as a country never had access to global markets or the global economy, that they were constantly impoverished.They were still finding ways to extract money from Haiti, even though it was an independent country. The fact that the US colonized Haiti for almost 20 years in the early 20th century, like the ways that we have controlled who is in power in their government from afar. We've propped up some of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, honestly. We have been punishing and making sure that everybody knows that the defiance of white supremacy that Haiti showed will never be tolerated.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And so it is so easy for Haitians at every stage to become a scapegoat for whatever anxiety we have about the world becoming less White, the world becoming less of like under our control. Haitian immigrants were the reason that we started using Guantanamo Bay as a prison. They were the first people that we ever imprisoned there. We changed our policies, we like… Do you know for a long time, they wouldn't let Haitian people donate blood in America?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Because we said they'd had HIV. They had dirty blood, is what we said about them for years. Haiti is not at the bottom because of its choice. That's what we're constantly telling ourselves. Pat Robertson went on his show after the earthquake in 2010, and said the reason that these things still happen to Haiti is because they did Voodoo before their revolution, because they're pagans or whatever. We will make up any reason to not just take responsibility. Again, like with the Bosnians, the Somalis, we make up any reason to not just take responsibility for our actions.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And this is just a continuation of that. And I don't know that I have a further point beyond that, other than to say, everything that Trump and Vance and the Proud Boys and all of them are doing in Springfield right now is just a continuation of that. “You're immigrants that we will call illegal, even though you're not right and you are Black. Your whole pride in your culture and your history is about the way that you defied White supremacy, and you're foreign to us, and you are strange. And we will say that you do things like eat cats that you don't do, and we will just believe it, because we don't actually want to know anything about you other than that you are a monster who defies the way that the world should be ordered.”Jonathan Walton: Yep.Sy Hoekstra: I'm trying to stop myself from tearing up right now, and I don't know that I have points beyond this. Do you know what I mean? I'm just angry because this is like people, this is my wife and my daughter. I'm probably just taking time now to do what I should have done earlier in this process, which is just feel all the sadness and the anger. But that is what I feel. The Trump and Vance and the people that are a part of his movement are just horrifying. The fruit of their way of seeing the world is just evil, and I think that's where I'm leaving it for now [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. And the very thing that Haitian people are called, evil, voodoo all those things, is what White supremacy is.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: That is evil, and that is wicked, and it has been at work for centuries. And in Jesus name, as Connie Anderson would pray in the work she does with White people around White supremacy and leaving that behind, and she says she just prays that it would be overthrown. That demonic power would be overthrown, and people would be disobedient to that leaning.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And I pray the same would be true for many, many people before and after the polls close on November the 5th.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So in the newsletter, I put an email address where you could send a PayPal donation to the local Haitian community center. We'll have a link to that in the show notes too. The Haitians on the ground, especially some of the pastors and the churches there, are doing some incredible work to try and keep the peace. I think people have been overlooking that. There was a decent Christianity Today article on kind of what's going on the ground in Ohio, but it really focused on what the local White churches are doing to help [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And I really need people to focus on the Haitians, like what is actually happening there, and the fact that there are White supremacists marching around the town. And how terrifying that has to be for them, and how the people who are doing the work to keep the peace there are heroic, and they should not have to be. And they deserve all of our support and all our prayers. So I appreciate anything that you can, any intercession that you can do, any money that you can give. Any support that you can be. Any help that you can be just spreading the truth to people who may not be wanting to hear it or who might not be hearing it from their news sources right now,Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: We're gonna end there, then. Thank you so much for listening. Please remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber and support everything we're doing, the media that we're making here. Get the bonus episodes to this show, come to our monthly Zoom calls to have a chat with me and Jonathan about everything that's going on in the election. Bring us your questions, get access to comments on our posts and more pl

This week on the SNL Hall of Fame podcast we welcome Ashley Bower back to the show, this time to discuss the four-time host, Adam Driver.Transcript: Track 3:[0:41] All right. Thank you so much, Doug DeNance. It is a thrill to be here back in the SNL Hall of Fame on the SNL Hall of Fame podcast. My name is JD and welcome. Before you come on in, though, please do me a favor. Read the mat. Wipe your feet. eat. The SNL Hall of Fame podcast is a weekly affair where each episode we take a deep dive into the career of a former cast member, host, musical guest, or writer and add them to the ballot for your consideration. Once the nominees have been announced, we turn to you, the listener, to vote for the most deserving and help determine who will be enshrined for perpetuity in the hall. And that's how we play the game it's just that simple now one of the things we do before we play the game is we talk to our friend matt ardill and we get some trivia but before we do that i think it's important we know that we're going to be talking about adam driver today uh i gotta tell you he's one of my most favorite guests of this new era this new generation it would be mulaney and and driver for me for sure i could see them both being in the hall at some point it'll be interesting to hear what ashley bauer has to say in terms of building a case ash and we're thrilled so let's uh walk down the hall and talk to our friend mr ardill oh matt adam.Track 2:[2:10] Driver yeah yeah um One of my favorite hosts, to be honest. Six foot two, born November 19th, 1983 in Fontana, California. Did not expect him to be a Californian. I don't know why. Just doesn't have that. Yeah, just doesn't have that California energy. He attended Mishawaka High School and the University of Indianapolis before going on to graduate from Juilliard. This is a another juilliard grad uh who appears on snl uh he has been in had he has had 57 acting roles six soundtrack credits and two producer credits um as a youth he appeared in how to succeed in business without really trying uh into the woods and guys and dolls uh he's he's one of of those people who's had you know when you see an actor and they're like they just have depths that you didn't expect, Because they have lived experiences, and I feel Adam is one of those. He worked as a door-to-door vacuum salesman.Track 2:[3:19] He applied to Juilliard, was rejected, so decided, what the hell, I'll join the Marines. Where he was a Lance Corporal before being discharged due to an injury prior to deployment that made him unable to go into combat. So he decided, what the hell, I'll try Juilliard again. And this time was accepted. Does not like to watch his own performance and will decline to watch them in interviews, because he just does not like seeing himself on screen. Uh he's been nominated for oscars in lincoln a black k a kk black kk klansman i don't know how to pronounce the spike lee movie yeah it's a three k's it throws me off um and marriage story of course uh his wife is actor joanne tucker uh the uh their her grandfather is the politician henry Tucker, who is considered one of the most important politicians in Bermuda in history, who led the first government of Bermuda in 1968.Track 2:[4:29] Um watching his roles it's clear he's a bit of an intense person um because like after watching fight club he actually came away with the wrong lesson and decided to start a fight club in his high school um yeah so that was a choice uh now he did appear on broadway in mrs warren's profession and man and boy before going on to appear in Girls. Growing up, he was raised by a father and a stepfather who were both preachers, who had him sing in the church choir, which he doesn't really show off to the best of his ability inside Llewellyn Davis.Track 2:[5:13] Which is, to be honest, where I first fell in love with him as the singing cowboy. Boy uh but he's actually a very talented musician and in that episode where he played the piano on snl he actually played the piano he does know how to play the piano um now he's gone on found a charity uh called arts in the armed forces with his partner a non-profit that brings art to the active duty service members around the world and support staff free of charge uh together they have have a son uh but he actually kept it hidden for two years before the new yorker finally uh let it slip in 2019 so he is a man of uh many nuances and layers sounds that way what an onion he is yeah you know when i carve into an onion i often cry and when i listen to a thomas conversation Conversation with a guest, sometimes two, I often cry. Let's go to Thomas now.Track 2:[6:19] Grab your tissues. How's that for a segue, Matty?Track 4:[6:51] Well, hello, JD and Matt. Welcome to another edition of the SNL Hall of Fame Conversation. We are in the middle of a wonderful season six, continuing that today with a great nominee, one of my all-time favorite hosts. I'm going to be up front about how much I like today's nominee. It's Adam Driver, of course, and I'll be up front about how much I like today's guest as well. A very special guest first timer last season with kate mckinnon who i think uh will probably get in this year i mean a little soon after after her tenure at snl to get into the snl hall of fame i guess the voters decided that but i think um ultimately ashley will have gotten kate mckinnon into the hall um ashley uh joined me and daramie on a round table uh at the end of season five so So this is her third appearance to the show. So Ashley Bauer, thank you so much for joining me today on the SNL Hall of Fame, Ashley. Thank you so much for having me back. I'm kind of working my way toward my own five-timers club, hopefully. That's the goal. Slowly but surely. Yes, yes, you'll get there. You were very impressive in your first go-around, so I had to have you back this season. I've been following your exploits on Instagram, I'm not going to lie. So you're a world traveler, you're a Taylor Swift fan, so why don't you tell me, like, how's your summer going in both of those regards, Ashley? I'm kind of jealous.Track 4:[8:18] So it's a little bittersweet. So yeah, I went to Paris to see Taylor Swift at the Aris Tour in May, and it was everything I thought it would be and more. Like it was like being in Barbie land. Everybody supports each other. It's women supporting women. And it's this like happy, wholesome environment. And she's just such an incredible performer. And she was so amazing. And I was so depressed after the concert was over that I couldn't accept the fact that I would never see an AeroStore concert again. So I immediately booked another trip with a separate friend. And we were scheduled to go see her in Vienna. Just a couple of weeks ago but if anyone was watching the news they saw that the vienna shows did not happen um you know just terrorists or whatever no big deal wanted to blow up the venue so very grateful uh shout out to all of the national security agencies um in that country and whatever other countries may or may not have assisted because i'm here to talk on this podcast with you but yeah I know love traveling you're right 100% as often as I can get out of the country and go see somewhere new I'm gonna do it and if I get to combine it with Taylor Swift like.Track 4:[9:41] What better trip could I plan? So yeah, made the best of it, even though we didn't actually get to see her in concert. But got to explore. Still did some kind of musical stuff. We went on a Sound of Music tour in Salzburg. So made lemons, excuse me, made lemonades out of lemons. Yes. And now I'm just back in the U.S., I guess. Just back to the boring life. Yeah, just normal everyday real world. Not in Barbie land anymore.Track 4:[10:11] Oh, that's cool. So that's awesome. Again, I'm like admiring your travels from afar, admiring your Taylor Swift adventures from afar. So I'm glad you've had a great summer. And I'm glad you're back here with me in season six to talk some Adam Driver. And I'm going to be upfront, Ashley. I think Adam might be in my top 10 all-time hosts. He's a four-timer. I think he's already there for me. So I'm going to start the conversation with that to be full, you know, full disclosure with the listeners. I think I have him as a top 10 all time host. Is that aggressive on my part? No, not at all. And I promise he's not paying me to say this or to just agree with him. But like I 100% he needs to at least be in the five timers club. He is so natural. Like it was like he was born to be an SNL host or somehow like he needs to somehow be associated with SNL for as long as I'm capable of watching the show so yeah not aggressive at all and I know we're going to talk a lot about why, he's just so freaking good at it like it's hilarious it's intense it's everything.Track 4:[11:21] Yeah, and I was doing this exercise because I made an appearance on the Saturday Night Network's host countdown this summer. And I was just kind of doing my list and going through the hosts and everything like that. And I surprised myself and was like, I really have Adam Driver this high? I guess I do. And I guess I think he deserves it. So that's where I'm coming from. I think that's where both of us are coming from with this episode. So that's why I was so excited to do this one. So a little brief background on Adam. He did a little acting here and there. Until 2012, he started really getting breaks in 2012. He was in Lincoln, Francis Ha, the Greta Gerwig movie.Track 4:[12:02] Girls, though, was arguably his biggest break. So I first saw Adam Driver on Girls. Is that the case for you and your first exposure to Adam? Or was it like somewhere else that you first saw Adam? him no so unfortunately mine was it wasn't until he got a little bit more mainstream my first exposure to him was when he played kylo ren in star wars um and then it was kind of you know going back and realizing that he had been like making his way through and kind of breaking through over the last few years um but all that to say again i thought he nailed that role in star Star Wars, it was just so well done that playing this just villain that you kind of find yourself, rooting for in a weird way, which is terrible because obviously you're not supposed to do that. But I think just the way that he captures the whole essence and as they build his story and kind of his arc and realizing...Track 4:[13:02] You know obviously he chooses very poorly at the end but you know that there was something in there that was almost good um yeah and i'm not even really that big of a star wars fan like probably upset a lot of people with how little i know about it so very basic very mainstream for me to say like oh yeah he was so good in star wars that that's where i first got experience with him no he was so good in star wars though he played that role really well uh i think maybe i don't want to speak for J.J. Abrams or Rian Johnson, but you think you were supposed to kind of feel something for him, and especially with the backstory with Luke and all that. It's like, okay, maybe he kind of had a point as far as how angry he was, but Adam played those nuances really well, so definitely made his really mainstream mark playing Kylo Ren. On girls, he really stood out because Adam has this unique look about him. He doesn't look like the classic, and this is said with love, He doesn't look like the classic handsome Brad Pitt, George Clooney, movie star Clark Gable kind of person. Adam has a distinct look about him, and that came out in Girls. He was this kind of aloof guy who Lena Dunham's character had an on-again, off-again thing with. And you could see even then some of the comedy chops, and I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. He played intense really well, but then some of the stuff he said was low-key really funny in Girls.Track 4:[14:28] So, there were signs there for him being a good SNL host, I should say. Yeah, I think once somebody gave him the platform and gave him the opportunity to really flex those comedy muscles, he just needed somebody to give him that chance and let him demonstrate. I'm so glad they did.Track 4:[14:45] Yeah, that's what happens sometimes with people who aren't known for comedy. And that's what I wanted to ask you, just like in a general way. What's your initial reaction when someone is tabbed to host for the first time, but isn't necessarily totally known for a comedy? Is the anticipation still there for someone like that? I think so, because I think I've learned over the years that some people just really surprise you in a really great way about it. And I know like several, several years ago, the first time Mark Wahlberg did something with comedy, I was so shocked, like so shocked that Mark Wahlberg didn't just do a comedy movie, but absolutely nailed it. It was so freaking funny.Track 4:[15:28] And so I kind of used that experience to give other people like Adam Driver a chance. Answer because i admit yeah like because all i knew about him at the time was star wars when i first saw that he was hosting i thought okay this you know he's big you know he's popular i see what they brought him in but oh my gosh just even from the beginning his first time coming out with the monologue like it was like he had been there before it was so surreal to me it made me forget that that was his first time hosting yeah there's a comfort about it that you can see as snl fans We can see some sort of comfort level or some sort of fit, I think, right off the bat. And something that I've learned, Ashley, since I've been an SNL fan for going on almost 35 years now, is that the best hosts, in my opinion, are hosts who are really good actors. So being good at sketch, to me, isn't just about having a sense of humor anymore.Track 4:[16:26] It's about being a great actor and having timing and things like that. And Adam Driver happens to be a great actor and has a sense of humor. But I think a lot of those quote-unquote dramatic actors, people who are really skilled at that, are really good SNL hosts. Because I think you need to be a good actor to be good in sketch and not just funny. Oh, I completely agree with you. And I think that's what makes Adam so successful, is because he has the training and the just mixed with the natural talent of 100 committing.Track 4:[16:58] To a role in a situation and just completely dedicating to it and i think because of that i think you see this too in so many of his sketches i keep trying to look for when he's gonna look at the cue card and i can never find it yeah like sometimes i kind of wonder if i'm like making myself believe that his eyes moved just because I'm trying to catch him. I'm like, I don't think he does. I don't think he's ever looked at a cue card. And if he has, then he's completely fooled me. And I think that commitment and dedication to memorizing his lines to completely go all in with whatever sketch they've given him has really been a huge part of why he's been so successful in his hosting gigs. Yeah, 100%. And then we saw that, as you mentioned, mention his first host hosting gig was season 41 episode 10 uh musical guest chris stapleton and his monologue like he was comfortable they played off the whole uh kylo ren star wars theme he was promoting the force awakens but i thought it was really cute just to kind of like get to know the host you had some uh bobby and taryn and leslie had a funny appearance there but the those first monologues for the for these new hosts it's like i i love when they're just up there and loose and maybe they need playing with the i think i think it helps them if they're playing with the cast a little bit even in the monologue ashley i don't know if it's something that you noticed at all.Track 4:[18:24] I actually was thinking about that for one of his later monologues, too. It's his ability to play off other cast members, the band, the camera, just working the different camera angles so naturally. I think that really shows and it helps show the audience how comfortable they are from the get-go if they're able to come out and immediately start bantering with these professional SNL comedians. And he was able to do that.Track 4:[18:52] But it really is an honor to be in Star Wars. Never, never, ever will you find a more devoted fan base. They're very intense. I know. Star Wars fans, ridiculous, right? Quick question. What happens in the next film, Adam? You know, I can't tell you that. They won't even tell me that. Oh, you can't tell me because the audience is here, right? Okay, okay. I'm going to ask you at the after party, though. No, you won't.Track 4:[19:27] I've been dealing with this all week, leslie confused him with mini driver so she asked him why he wasn't in the martian with matt damon because she thought it mini driver was in goodwill hunting with matt damon why wouldn't you be in the martian with matt damon so uh so he had to correct her but uh fun monologue uh i think this is a this This is a fun episode for me, like really fun episode for me. So, but I'm going to throw it to you. Like from this first episode, what stood out to you? Oh my gosh. Again, so, so many. Since I'd only really known him from Star Wars, I thought that undercover boss sketch was immediately one of the greatest of all time. Like it was so brilliant. The concept was genius. Shout out to the writers of that sketch. But again, like his ability.Track 4:[20:19] To, you know, bring Kylo Ren alive into this like comedic realm was so hilarious. And as a lawyer, shout out to all the lawyers who got the rights to let him do that. Because thank you. Otherwise, we wouldn't have this sketch. But yeah, he was so freaking intense in that. And it ended up being so funny. And I think in the moments where he wasn't even really trying to be funny, he was just playing Kylo Ren because of the setting that they had and the concept of what they were doing. Just made it immediately funny even when he was you know pained and trying to like talk to the camera do the interview off screen he's like i'm really looking forward to meeting everybody like it just pained him to have to say it kylo is going undercover among star killer base personnel as matt a radar technician you get so caught up in restoring the galaxy to its rightful state that you miss what's going on behind the scenes. I'm looking forward to having some real talk with some real folks. The shout out to everyone else who kept up with him in that sketch too.Track 4:[21:27] Bobby Moynihan, Taryn Killam in that as well. I think that was such a huge standout. Yeah episode i thought hilariously intense that was like a a phrase that that came to my mind was adam was hilariously intense uh in this sketch and taryn yeah taryn's saying that he's 90 sure that matt is kylo ren but then cutting to him telling a sob story to presumably to get money from kylo because he kind of knows how these shows work so he knew it was kylo ren and he's He's just kind of like laying it on the sob story. So Kylo would like give him something like Matt. Kylo Ren as Matt, the radar technician using the force to choke Bobby's stormtrooper. Just all these fun beats. It's like a modern classic. And this is his second sketch as host of SNL. And he turned in like a modern classic right away. Yeah, exactly. Just right out of the gate. Gold. Like I was just so impressed. So that's undercover boss star killer base with Adam as Kylo Ren. One that I wanted to throw out there for sure, and maybe I'm showing my Vanessa Bear bias too, because she's great. I'm the biggest Vanessa Bear fan on the planet. The Golden Globes pre-tape.Track 4:[22:42] And again, one of those, and SNL did it really well around that time period where they showed a really cute subdued scene and then kind of juxtaposed it with something intense that was happening. So they like to do pre-tapes that had that kind of back and forth. So this one, it was Adam and Vanessa. They play a couple who just won the Golden Globes Award. And they have a wild night on the town. And then their kids, played by Kyle Mooney and Kate McKinnon, are just at home kind of waiting for them. When are mom and dad going to come back? And this and that. And they're just like peaceful, about to go to sleep. And just all hell breaks loose in this pre-tape. And it's one of my favorites. And I don't know how much SNL fans go back to it, but they really should. It's just like a favorite pre-tape of mine from this era ashley.Track 4:[23:29] I agree. Oh, my God. It's so funny. I loved the contrast of this. Yeah. You know, if you're watching, go to bed. And it transitions, yeah, into that. Oh, yeah. Like, what is actually happening when people say that there are kids, you know, going to bed and then waiting for mom and dad to come home and then the absolute shift to them doing cocaine off of the trophy. And like do you think mom and dad miss us and like this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to us forgetting about their kids um but i think what made this so fun you're oh my god yeah vanessa bayer agree she's lovely um she's amazing was i think this shows adam driver's range again that like his classical training and acting and his ability to bring that into like bring the intensity into this this sketch because he also starts as this cute like kind of dad and he's thanking everybody and then he you know picks the fight with keenan and vanessa's yelling at him like be a man for once and hit him and just completely escalating this whole situation, whoa guys guys sorry stars only you man don't push my wife be a man for once kevin hit him You don't want to hit me, sir. Hold on to your hats! You're about to get pounded!Track 4:[24:52] I thought that was so impressive. He runs off like Vanessa has left there to deal with security, and Adam just runs off. He ditches her. Yeah. Yes, so good. Yeah, I just thought that right off the bat, that shows his range. That he could, again, just like with the undercover boss sketch, be so intense, but make it so funny. Yeah. Yeah, they ended up having a, presumably having a fun night with Leo Schreiber as well. After Adam is talking about seeing him at the urinal and everything. And the next morning, Adam and Vanessa are passed out on the couch and Leo Schreiber's in the kitchen shirtless with an apron and making eggs in the kitchen. And the kids are like, he's like, you can get yourself dressed for school, right? That's probably best if you guys go do that. Yeah, he asked the kids, do you guys like eggs? They're like what is happening like oh good mom and dad got home they fell asleep and they're just like strewn about on the couch but as his boob is like hanging out of her dress like there's still cocaine on adam's face like it's just it's perfection yeah it's just madness yeah the golden globe sketch uh one that kind of like amongst a lot of those pre-tapes to me it kind of slid a little bit under the radar um but i think uh if you know you know and and that one's It's a great one.Track 4:[26:14] There's one, and I don't know, I may put you on the spot, but there's one in this episode that screamed Ashley to me. I don't know if we're on the same wavelength, but one in particular screamed Ashley Bauer to me. Do you want me to guess? Yes. Was it the Aladdin? No, it wasn't, but I can see that as well. Yeah, talk about that. I was like, that one, yeah. Big musical fan, obviously. Big Disney fan. And so the fact that he could sing, I know a lot of actors do have that training. I'm pretty sure he went to Juilliard, but for acting, that doesn't necessarily mean he can sing. But he didn't just sing with Cecily Strong. Like, he harmonized with her. Right? I was like, oh, okay. All right. Like, go off.Track 4:[27:03] And again, just the commitment and everything. I thought that one was so fun because it combined my love of Disney. Yeah. kind of a straight man yeah he is poor cecily's getting like hit with a bomb and like the plane like opens it's like it dumps all the bathroom stuff on her and she's just straight up not having a good time and he's so oblivious to it he just wants to sing his song um but no what was the one that you thought was was me it was america's funniest cats oh okay yeah no that's fair yeah because it reminded because i because i know like it so reminded me of like late 90s early 2000s snl uh with this was it was adam playing a kind of a nerdy weird guy named finn reynolds he does he hosts a show where he does like kind of goofy voiceovers for cat videos and then he has two french women on his guests played by kate and cecily so this was just like awesome and i'm like i bet i don't know for some reason i thought like i, I think Ashley might like this one. Okay, wow, you guys do it a little different than us. We try to make the bloopers a little sillier, like with sound effects and stuff. Do you know what I mean? I wake up boyoyong. Oh, boyoyong.Track 4:[28:19] We can try boyoyong. Oh, yeah, yeah, great. Throw some boyoyongs in there. I'm just going to roll a bunch of clips and you guys just go crazy, okay? Yes, of course. Boyoyong. this cat has neurological disorder she cannot gauge a distance between herself and the cow isn't that the one where uh yeah they played the french women and they're just completely like i don't want to i don't want to make anybody mad but like what you what they portray in the media as being uh traditional french women yeah like more nihilistic yeah yeah they're like um they make fun of the cats they're like kind of have more dark humor everything like the cat is doing that the cat's about to probably like die in the video like even if they're doing the cutest thing they're like so yeah but adam's adam plays this really fun nerdy guy that's again like almost he he's a outlandish character in his own right but he's almost in a way like a like a foil or like a straight person to them um their voiceovers are a lot darker than adam's so he's a good like foil to the dark voiceovers that Kate and Cecily provided. It was almost like an anti-Sprockets, where instead of the host being super dark and intense, the guests were, and the host was just trying to be this awkward, nerdy, funny guy doing these cute videos, and then.Track 4:[29:43] These women come on and completely like ah well maybe that's not exactly what i intended i absolutely love that comparison to sprockets like the inverse sprockets like that's so good what a great pull anytime i can shout out to mike myers like i'll find a way, yeah you're talking to someone who when he was a little kid dressed up in like a black turtleneck and pretended to be Dieter from Spraw Kids. So I just made Ashley choke on her wine.Track 4:[30:14] I can see that. And that must have been before we met. I know we've known each other a long time, but the fact that I never got to see this is so disappointing. I'm glad there wasn't like my parents weren't on social media at the time and taking pictures and post. Yeah, that would have been a mess. We're older than social media, Tom, unfortunately. So you lucked out.Track 4:[30:39] Uh yeah this was a fun i i have one more i don't know if anything one actually that really surprised me from this episode but i don't know if you have any shout outs uh any more from this his first hosting gig uh no i really yeah i'm not gonna lie the undercover boss one stood out oh wasn't this also the the season where he was playing the football announcer and pete davidson gets absolutely like laid out breaks his legs that was another really good one Yeah.Track 4:[31:09] He's not so much the star of that. Like he's kind of a side person in it. But that would really sit out to me from that episode as well. Yeah, that was a good one. That was the first sketch of the night. Actually, that like led off the night. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. There was one I kind of forgot about. And I loved Adam Driver, obviously, before I started going back and rewatching these episodes. But there was one called Awareness Seminar. it was adam and cecily and their class speakers talking about social social puppeteering to the class and the stories that adam and cecily are sharing are so good and these stories are just like giving kids ideas about like elaborate ways to like mess with their classmates and make them like gaslight them and just thinking certain things and and they're just like telling their classmates like avoid social puppeteering and watch out for this for example and then they'll go into like a story about social puppeteering the class is like that sounds so cool like.Track 4:[32:12] Inadvertently talking the class ended doing it but it was just like a little gem that i had forgot about okay well in simplest terms uh it's manipulating others for your own amusement i'm hijacking someone's reality to feel powerful here's an example of something i did in the sixth grade. I paid like 80 kids a buck to go up to this kid, Nathan, and say, hey, nice hat. So what's the problem? Nathan wasn't wearing a hat. If 80 kids say you're wearing a hat, you start thinking, maybe I'm wearing a hat. And watching him wrestle with that made me feel good. I took the most valuable thing he had, his mind. That's the idea behind social puppeteering. Any questions? i don't think there was a dud in this whole episode like the last sketch of the night it was um 80s character kid character who wanders into a porno scene that's right that's right.Track 4:[33:06] Oh, my gosh. So that's how they ended the night. Adam did a great job at bad acting in that sketch. But that's like, I don't think there were any misses his first hosting gig, which is rare for a first timer. Like sometimes even the great ones, you look at their first time and you're like, okay, there were like some bumps in the road. But I don't think there was like a bump in the road here, Ashley. No, I agree. And I think this shows how much faith and trust that the writers had in him as well to give him such big sketches for his first time hosting.Track 4:[33:40] So whatever they saw early in the week, I think really built that rapport and that trust because they did. They just kept giving him just like amazing sketch after amazing sketch. And he completely delivered on it. Like some of these, you know, could potentially have been duds, but I think he kind of took them across the finish line. And I think this was also our first glimpse into seeing the comedic chemistry he was going to have with Cecily Strong, like just how perfect they were in sketches together. They're so funny. And I'm glad that we got some more with them later when he came back. Yeah, 100%. So it didn't take that long for him to come back. Three seasons, which isn't that much. Season 44, he led off. It was the season premiere of season 44. And he wasn't done any favors with this one I don't think right off the bat Because they did.Track 4:[34:34] Such a long it was a brett kavanaugh cold open matt damon came on and played brett kavanaugh and i enjoyed it but it was so long i think it just kind of messed with like the timing of the show and the tempo and the vibe um so that was kind of weird like excited about the season premiere but like the brett kavanaugh thing had just happened um the the whole like uh the the hearing to try to see if they would confirm him for supreme court justice and so that was very topical, but it just went on for so long and it seemed like they were just playing catch up the entire night, but there were like some good stuff, including arguably the best sketch of the whole era. One of the best sketches of the entire era happened to this in this episode. So, so still like a great perform, great outing by, by Adam. Yeah, you're right. I mean, how do you follow Matt Damon playing completely?Track 4:[35:30] Shout out to Melissa Villasenor, white male rage character in Brett Kavanaugh. It kind of did monopolize the show. It took a really long time. And living in DC, I've gotten to see oral arguments now. And that has ruined me because listening to Justice Kavanaugh ask questions during oral argument, I'm sitting there trying not to giggle and break my bearing because all I can picture is Matt Damon playing him in Saturday Night Live but yeah like it was so hard I think to follow that such an aggressive.Track 4:[36:03] Tone although come to think of it maybe Adam was the perfect one to follow that because he is so intense and aggressive and we got um oh my gosh what was the character's name I remember Pete's name was like Mordecai in this are you talking about Abraham H Parnassus yes thank you oh my god yeah so we get your i think yeah one of the greatest sketches of the era maybe all time um i think anyone i talked to about adam driver doing snl this sketch always comes up i think more than any of the other ones and for good reason i keep talking about his commitment and dedication like this is exhibits a through like z right here everyone else is just dying and losing it in this sketch pete especially right in front of him and he doesn't blink he He doesn't flinch, he doesn't hesitate, like just utter commitment to staying in this character. Mr. Parnassus, why don't you tell us about what you do for a living? Hear me now, children. For my occupation is of much import. For 82 years, I've been an oil man, a baron, some have called me. Now what does an oil baron do? The answer?Track 4:[37:18] Crush your enemies grind their bones into dirt make them regret they were ever born oh sick yes speaking of my shout out to melissa v and senor a minute ago i think she kind of like she's the perfect side person for this sketch because her reactions to him oh my god we're so perfect i think her reactions are some are just as funny as him playing this um oil bear she's like yeah like jp higgins sucks like this is some of the best acting i think that adam's ever done honestly like in movies and girls uh this to me this career day sketch like can rival any of his best acting in that he's done in movies because commitment he was yelling about like crushing your enemy enemies and his feud with hr pickings i love these names for old oil like that's perfect um you mentioned melissa i think she was the one who said i want to be you when i grow up and then adam delivers perfectly and so you shall he gets like all intense it's like it's so ridiculous and pete knew how ridiculous and awesome it was gonna be because as soon as adam started i think even before when he just came out i think pete just looked at him and was like oh god he like kind of started giggling yeah uh pete loses it immediately Adam doesn't even open his mouth, and Pete's completely lost it.Track 4:[38:46] Yeah, this is Beloved for Good Reason. Career Day, he plays, again, Abraham H. Parnassus, which is right up there with Kylo Ren, whatever his character's name was in Marriage Story. I forgot, I liked him in that.Track 4:[39:03] Just anything, Adam from Girls, it just rivals to me. It rivals anything. I absolutely love this sketch. It is up there as far as like an essential, just amazing sketch from this whole era. So that's the first one that you got to shout out, right? Oh, for sure. I want to know if he improvised the part toward the end of that sketch where he throws the bird down on the floor and starts impaling it with his cane. Because everyone else's reaction in that room is like genuine shock and terror. And then kind of like trying not to crack up. And I think it appears to me, based on those reactions, either they were just so perfectly committed to nailing those reactions, or that was improv, because they seemed to not know that he was about to do it, which makes it even better. Yeah, yeah.Track 4:[39:54] Yeah, there's another one. Well, you had mentioned that he and Cecily had developed a rapport from the previous episode. And another one I liked from this, again, total commitment. There's anger, drama on both Adam and Cecily's part. It was that coffee shop one where they're drinking Domenico's coffee that they were told was actually Burger King coffee. And just Adam and Cecily's just dialing it up. They're dialing up the anger, dialing up the drama, all the way to 11. This is a fun sketch, I think. But the fun thing is, is that you actually drank BK Joe. Well, probably everyone else's is a BK Joe, but mine wasn't. I'm a Domenico's girl. My new wife is a Domenico's girl. Okay, sure, but that coffee is BK Joe. And get this, it costs just $1.99.Track 4:[40:48] $1.99? You better take that back, you pervert! Whoa, sir, there is no need for that. You fed my wife this garbage? Huh? This burger juice? How dare you? The day after our wedding. You came here the day after our wedding? And I'm already laughing because I love this sketch so much that to this day, I will be out getting coffee with my husband, and if we go to a new coffee shop, I'll be like, mm-mm, I'm a Dominico's girl. And I just completely start cracking myself up again. Yeah, he's so embarrassed to be around me, my poor husband. No, he's great, but he just knows me so well by now. He knows to expect it. But yeah, every time, like, mm-mm. No, I'm a Dominico's girl.Track 4:[41:30] That's awesome. Yeah, it's just sad that, like, Cecily does. And Adam found a true kind of, almost like his twin on the show in some ways, just in Cecily. Like, they worked off each other so well. like it was we saw that with the aladdin one before that but yeah this this sketch is like uh they're they're fueling each other like one neither of them are the straight person they're just like building off the other one's anger and rage and drama and it's just it's fantastic so uh we've learned today that ashley's a dominico's girl so and that this is a fun sketch, um those were yeah those were a couple highlights um i don't know if there's any more with this episode not many sketches like i said because it just got off to kind of a long start with the with a really long cold open, Yeah, so I'm glad that they gave him so many good ones for his first hosting gig. Obviously, I don't know that they were this prophetic to know that they wouldn't really have this chance the next time he hosted. But I think, you know, I think it was okay to kind of have a little bit more of a dud. And no fault to his own.Track 4:[42:43] But then, of course, you know, the next time we see him, the next two times we see him, I think they make up for it again. Oh, boy, do they. Yeah, no, this is like a classic. It seems like a classic episode. Um season 45 so he comes back the next season uh season 45 episode 11 um this one actually has my favorite monologue um by adam and actually one of my favorite monologues of this whole era i think um and adam's trying his best to be chill and he says he hates red carpet stuff because he's bad at smiling and then he's like uh walking toward the camera and staring into the camera But the whole conceit is just like, I'm just going to try to be chill for this monologue up here. And it's just Adams can't do chill very well, actually.Track 4:[43:34] No, not so much. And I think this shows how self-deprecating he is, too. And I know we see this. They do this every now and then for those actors that maybe kind of get a certain reputation in the media about how their personality is. And they come on SNL to debunk this myth that this is how they really are, but then ultimately the formula of the sketch is to just really prove everybody right at the end of the day. I'm not an intense guy. I'm actually very chill. So tonight I'm just going to be myself, open up a bit, and be chill. Can we get some chill music? No, I don't like that. Can you play something else?Track 4:[44:17] Okay, I like that less. Can you go back to the first one? Okay, that's fine. You can hear that's better, right? Okay, good. Anyway, I'm very chill, and I'm just gonna prove it. I'm just gonna, you know, Take my time up here, be myself, and enjoy this moment.Track 4:[44:37] Yeah, I think he does this so well, too, again, because, again, starting from the beginning, I'm super chill. Three notes into the song that he asks the band to play. No, I don't like that. Change it.Track 4:[44:50] Like, five notes into the second one. Actually, no, I like this less. Go back. He's just being this, like, demanding diva. um and i know i talked a little bit earlier about like his first monologue and kind of how he was interacting with the other cast members but yeah this one you're right he's interacting with the band he's interacting with the cameras he does the awkward sit next to the audience member kind of thing and tries to yeah i can sit and talk to the people and then just kind of gives him this action figure thing and if i see this on ebay i'm gonna kill you um it's just yes you're it's so memorable so funny yeah these are the types of monologues in my opinion that all-time great hosts do like i can see steve martin tom hanks alec baldwin like any of the all-time greats just holding court in a monologue like that looking so comfortable so confident they're owning the main stage they're owning home base there in studio 8h and this is just a throwback back to like this is a monologue that that i watch and i'm going like this guy is an all-time great and this is something that makes me confident in calling him like a top 10 host ever is because of something like this like it's it's just it's just it was just so fun to watch it it's like one of those monologues honestly that like made me makes me uh reaffirms why i like watching snl because i get to see something great like this.Track 4:[46:18] Yeah, and it's something that could have just completely failed if he didn't have the ability to carry it. Like, he carries this entire monologue that could have been so awkward and just nails it. It's quiet. It's just him. He's interacting with these other people and entities, but they're not really engaging back with him. Like, he's carrying this whole monologue, and it's funny from start to finish. And I just think that, yeah, it really goes to show how talented he is at this. And it's so fun to see. Yeah, people, you need to go back and watch his monologue from season 45, episode 11. To me, it's like up there with like some of the better like Martin Short monologues or hosts like that. It's pretty awesome. So I was in New York this weekend.Track 4:[47:05] And my wife and I were leaving our luggage at our hotel to go like do some sightseeing before we had to get back and then go to the airport. They told us how much it was. they said that they didn't take card and I looked at my wife and I was like oh man I'm all out of cash so so that made me that reminded me of such a classic sketch from from this episode Ashley that was a that was a shaggy a little shaggy dog way to get to to get to this Del Taco sketch, I love it oh my gosh did you pick this sketch because of my prior comments about Kyle Mooney a little bit, i mean because part of me is like oh another kyle mooney sketch but then well like the evil part of me is like oh this entire sketch is like designed to absolutely humiliate him 100 yeah and i will say i end up i do end up feeling so bad for him by the end of it when he's like fake crying um because they make him say the line like 100 times over again and it's still wrong and they're just telling him how bad he is at it yeah yeah let's hear it oh man i'm I'm all out of cash. Aw, man, I'm all out of cash. No, you don't want to kill yourself. You just want to talk about it.Track 4:[48:18] You should be like, aw, man, I'm all out of cash. Okay. Now say it. Aw, man, I'm all out of cash. Aw, man, I'm all out of cash. No, you're not a pervert. He's got to get out of his head. I think we just got to beat the hell out of this guy. No, no, no, no, we can't. Aw, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. I know, sir. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Adam plays such a great, like, he plays the VP of branding for Del Taco. Del Taco. They're shooting a Del Taco commercial. Beck's the director. Chloe Fineman. It's an early, I guess, early Chloe Fineman. I was surprised. I actually kind of forgot that Chloe was in this sketch. So it's early Chloe Fineman and Adam or Kyle are playing these two actors. And he and Kyle has to say the line, oh man, I'm at it all out of cash. And Beck's trying to coach him.Track 4:[49:09] And You don't want to kill yourself. You just want a taco. You're not a pervert. Just all these different things. He looks at Beck and he's like, I think we just got to beat the hell out of this guy. And then he's like, put your shirt on your head like Cornholio. Take your pants off. Like Cornholio. I love that. He just kind of slid that in. We all know who he's talking about. The great Cornholio. This is another classic So like You can watch all four of his Episodes and I think there's like Classics from the era Yeah, in each one of those episodes. And to me, this is one of them. This Del Taco commercial shoot. I think immediately, Ashley, I looked online when it happened and people were repeating that line right away. It became an instant classic. So where does I say, oh, I'm a Domenico's girl. You're the, oh, I'm all out of cash. No, it's like, oh, man, I'm all out of cash.Track 4:[50:21] Please don't make me do it like Cornholio. You just crack each other up drinking Domenico's while eating Del Taco. That would be it. Yes. That would be a fun time. What else do you need? They also did, Ashley, a sequel to a sketch that we both loved from his first gig. It's the undercover boss, Where Are They Now? So how did you feel about part two of this undercover boss? I really liked it. It's always so hard to do a sequel to anything. I was just so happy to have him back. Um i didn't think it was quite as good as the first one that may be in a popular opinion, um but i think i've probably just built up in my head so much like the perfection that is the first one that yeah you know there's no way to ever really compare it um but yeah obviously it was such a favorite they knew they had to bring it back for the fans i'm so glad they did yeah well it got a huge cheer when the sketch started it got a huge cheer so we showed how beloved the The last one was immediately they showed Adam as Kylo and everybody just start shooting because they knew what they were in for pretty much. And then it has a gif that that kind of lives on toward the end when he's giving that strained kind of thumbs up at the at the end of the sketch. So for nothing else, like I thought this was a pretty good sketch, but then like that thumbs up kind of lives on.Track 4:[51:44] Yeah, I mean, again, no shade to Adam Driver. I think he nails it again. I think it's kind of just more some of the other people. Bobby Moynihan, just not sure enough sucks. Like, when you go from that to, like, everybody else, you don't have Leslie Jones anymore, you know. Maybe I'm just biased again because I loved those actors so much. But, yeah, if nothing else, at least now our world is blessed with that gif of the author of Thumbs Up. There's a series of sketches that I think Adam's, like, a perfect host to play. So it's the science science room sketches and he could play really annoyed, like very, very well. Uh, so, so he plays the host of the science room. Of course you have like Mikey and Cecily is their little kid characters who, who are just like the most annoying little kids. But isn't Adam not perfect for something like this? Oh my God. Yes. Cause again, just his complete ability to, and he times the escalation of his aggression. So wow. Like he doesn't come out of the gate at a hundred. Like he really knows how to just dial it up a little bit more, a little bit more each time. And you see that with this, like at first he's like so happy about the kids and seems like, you know, a TV host that's going to be so natural and doing a science show with kids. And then just completely ends it with like wanting to absolutely murder these dumb children. And he's throwing the tape like through the window and.Track 4:[53:11] Um, again, just Cecily, like, I think she helps carry that through, like her comedic timing and delivery of the, you know, somewhat inappropriate comments about what her sister says about what happens in the science room. Always. Yeah. It's always something she, she repeats what her sister says. What comes first in the science room? Um, the guy, the guy. Yeah. My, my older sister said the guy like always comes first oh my god no no that's not what that means the guy does not come first here the girl comes first no my sister said the girl never comes it's safety safety comes first.Track 4:[53:56] That was an awful conversation we just had adam had the best response uh he just sort of casually goes like that was an awful conversation we just had it was like the way he said it was like i was like the voice for us like yeah that was somebody like called it out yeah i love it i love when snl does that too um i think by one of my favorite examples of that is uh again kind of going a little off topic i apologize but the larry david episode where they're doing the fbi training and pete davidson just simply repeats what larry david said with this like like incredulous like just demeanor like did he just say can a bitch get a donut and it's like the audience yeah you're right it's just really repeating what the audience is thinking in that moment it seems so simple but it's.Track 4:[54:50] Kind of i think it makes the audience like oh yeah that's right yeah this is funny because this is exactly what i'm thinking and i think adam did the same thing in this sketch yeah for sure that's like a mikey day street or side l kind of thing too i think yeah yeah like the audience perspective um in that as well though uh yeah just a wonderful uh the science room they've done that a few times and you need those like great actors who can like pull off that sort of frustration that like escalating sort of frustration that adam did um i have one more that i think that i really love from this uh from this episode i don't know if you have anything from his third hosting gig that that we should go over um no yeah those are kind of the big ones for me i think we might be thinking about the next the same next sketch though the only other one i can think about from this uh episode well mine was um it's an example of a sketch that has a ridiculous premise and kind of really works because of someone like adam i guess adam and cecily again and it's the marrying ketchups sketch yes that they did at the end of the night and it's just like of course at a restaurant one of the closing duties married the ketchups or whatever so they're pretending to like have a wedding with the ketchups and So basically Adam and Cecily are playing these catch-ups. I think Kyle comes in as like Cholula or something.Track 4:[56:17] But this is such a dumb, dumb premise that I find really entertaining.Track 4:[56:22] And it's basically because of Adam and Cecily. So them as a duo I find really entertaining performing a really dramatic dumb scene.Track 4:[56:33] Wanda, I know you're only a quarter full and I'm three quarters full. But together it won't matter We'll just be one full ketchup No, we won't Because I'm not ketchup at all, i'm catsup what did you just say you heard me.Track 4:[56:54] You're telling me i've been gallivanting around town with some cheap off-brand generic ketchup, don't you dare you're not even heinz you dirty hunt you're really gonna call me a hunt in front of my family i love it because it's supposed to be like this dramatic.Track 4:[57:12] Like almost marriage story-esque you're right and um he's yelling at her and the puns are just chef's kiss like you're right it could be so dumb it could be so bad but they nailed it like i don't relish telling you this but like it's like come on like please um and i think it it was heidi gardner who was it was heidi who was yeah heidi was the manager i think heidi bryant played the manager yes yes and it's um cecily almost she kind of breaks a little bit when she like breaks off the label and realize it reveals that she's catsup and not ketchup and he's just appalled um and then they have the little like ketchup packet baby i can't like everything about out this sketch is so funny to me but i do kind of like dumb humor yeah no absolutely no dumb humor is great especially on snl it's like i don't know like the commitment just to just to really to sell something dumb is just like it's one of the reasons why i do love the show is just to see these just sometimes you see these people sell the most ridiculous thing and it's It's like they're just putting themselves out there to look stupid and to have fun. That's a lot of reason why I watch the show. And something like this, it's just like it's perfectly executed in that.Track 4:[58:40] Oh yeah and like when she she starts kind of pushing back she's like well at least i don't have to slap him on the back for him to perform yeah yeah oh that's that so we were both thinking the same thing that's marrying catch-ups that was the last uh it was like a 10 to 1 it was the last uh sketch of the night um very great episode his third one we had a classic monologue the del taco commercial shoot was classic some other like really fun sketches um adam got to show his acting chops a lot in the medieval times sketch adam got to show like some really over dramatic fun acting like a like adam driver does um so really really strong third outing people were clamoring for him to come back it's just like he's showing that he's an all-time great already but we need him back and when they announced him and kate hosting i think they hosted like back to back they were part of a batch of uh announcements it was like okay we're in for something special uh so adam came back this past season in season 49 um and i think one of these sketches was probably my top two sketches of the season and adam played it perfectly but the but this was like a i think season 49 was maybe kind of an up and down episode but.Track 4:[1:00:05] To me this was like had a lot of highs compared to a lot of the other episodes of this season but like when you saw adam was coming back like excitement oh yeah definitely like i said you know he he came out just from his his very first season of hosting and was so good at it.Track 4:[1:00:22] If he just kept getting better and better every time they've announced him, I've been so, so excited. I'm going to be even more excited if they announce him for a fifth hosting gig, but yeah, definitely always excited to have him back.Track 4:[1:00:38] Yeah. So, so I think, I think some fans felt like it was bumpy to start the season. And then we were like, Oh, Adam's coming back and Kate McKinnon's coming to host. Like, so this, this really like, I think rejuvenated a lot of people.Track 4:[1:00:51] And, um, the sketch that I want, that I wanted to bring up first was like, uh, maybe my favorite sketch of the season. There's another one with Kristen, in the Jumanji sketch was up there too um but beep beep um with Adam and uh Andrew just mukes essentially kind of facing off in this sketch like Andrew's honestly my favorite current cast member to so to see Andrew and his weird humor uh his kind of intense silly humor play off of adam so well uh in this sketch which is like it's kind of a dumb premise like two guys are like putting their dishes on the table and saying excuse me beep beep so they use the word beep beep and then adam and andrew get there at the same time and they say beep beep and then it starts getting tense it's like a tense standoff i'm sorry boys is everything all right everything's fine sweetie i said beep beep no no no no no no i said beep beep no no no no no no i don't think you understand see i'm a little car right now and i'm honking at you with my little horn.Track 4:[1:02:12] Beep beep you couldn't get two better people one you couldn't get a better host two you couldn't andrew was the perfect cast member to pull this off so beep beep ashley maybe my favorite sketch at least in the top two of the season oh yeah i think that one really threw me off i didn't think, you know it was gonna be as good as it was when it kind of first starts like oh here's another like holiday get together type sketch you know they do these all the time um but oh my gosh Gosh, you're right. I do feel like Andrew Dismutes has been kind of this like dark horse, this silent assassin where you didn't really –.Track 4:[1:02:47] He's so kind of quiet and unassuming, seemingly, that you think he's just going to be hiding in the background. But I remember being so impressed with how well he held his own with Adam Driver in this scene. Adam is so intense. He's so experienced. And Andrew Dismukes is still kind of new. And you could not tell. and I know you got a little of that too when he had that sketch with Ryan Gosling where Ryan's trying to like bail on the engagement and I feel like you get kind of that same Andrew Dismukes with Adam Driver in the Beat Beats sketch, and yeah like that same just perfection of escalating it at the right time, but also I think anyone who's been to like a dinner party with their parents was like oh my god yes like this This is the cringy stuff that dads do with each other. But to see the twist of it turning into this, like, fight to the death is so funny. One of them must relent.Track 4:[1:03:54] Yeah, it's just, I'm a sucker, just in my time as an SNL fan, I'm such a sucker for silly premises that take dramatic, tense turns. Like, as you mentioned, it's a silly premise. this you know dumb dads are just like goofy dads i should say uh just kind of doing their thing and i just love when those types of slice of life kind of things take such a dramatic turn and it's just tense and you see andrew looking at him just staring into like adam's soul and like i said beep beep and it's just like it turns like such like cold tense like wow okay like that escalated. I'm a sucker for that, Ashley. Out of like the different sketch types, that's one of my absolute favorites. Oh, yeah, I think it goes back to what we were talking about the juxtaposition of, you know, where they like for the pre taper, they do something so calm and kind of sweet. And then it turns into this like epic, like, rage type scene, you know, next. And obviously, this is a little bit of a different formula, but they write the same idea of something that could be so dumb, but that everybody connects with everyone thinks is funny, because they've executed it so well. And then you just have Caden come in and he shows his gun like just takes it from a hundred to like a million.Track 4:[1:05:14] I just oh my god yeah perfect way to end it because sometimes I do take issue you know they're not really quite sure how to end really good sketches sometimes, and sometimes there's just this kind of awkward fade away but not with this one like start to finish, I think it's James Austin Johnson is one of the people in the back like kind of like Like, yeah, explaining, no, no, no, like, this, once they said beep beep, you cannot relent, like you said. Yeah, beep beep, I'll continue to spread the good word about this sketch, because it immediately, like, impressed me and floored me. It was awesome. Yeah, this episode was one of my favorites of the season, probably. You had him and Bowen as that gay couple that just told their friends like that they're trying. I'm so, so happy for you. So tell all now, what's your plan? Are you gonna adopt? No, we're just gonna try. Oh, so then you're doing the surrogate route. That's great. Huh, surrogacy. Well, maybe down the line, but for now we're just gonna try. Trying so uh don't come knocking on our door either oh.Track 4:[1:06:34] Heidi michael sarah and andrew all asking them like so how are you are you adopting he's like no we're just trying okay like yeah so i just love their like him and bowen just kind of casually just throwing out that they're trying so that was something else that stood out to me i mean anything with bowen of course he's so good at playing off anybody as well like he's so versatile i love it yeah no yeah what'd you think about this episode as a whole and anything that like that you may have enjoyed i yeah i mean obviously yeah the beat beat was the one that stood out to me the most so we were trying um the old friends one was really funny but kind of like reaching out hadn't heard from somebody in a while like that would also kind of take like a really dark turn. But yeah, you know, I feel like.Track 4:[1:07:26] This episode showed a little bit more that they don't always like the sketches don't always have to be him front center. Like he can also, I think play like the side guy, the side person and, you know, really still contribute and, and not just be somebody who's hiding in the corner or they're not just throwing him in because he's the host. Um, and he wants a certain amount of screen time. And I think he ends up really contributing to everything that he's in, whether he's front and center or he's playing one of the side characters. And I think we've got probably a few more sketches, I'd say, where he was the side character in this one. Or maybe even a little bit calmer sometimes. Yeah, especially toward the end. Yeah, there was like a PSA, which is like elderly people saying like, stop pranking me, basically. So you have all these elderly people. Yeah. And Adam was just part of an ensemble there. Tiny Ass Bag ended the night. And Adam was just sort of part of the sketch. But he's front and center when he's playing a baby on an airplane. Oh my god, yes. Adam's front and center for that one. Okay, yeah.Track 4:[1:08:32] I mean, that's an example of a sketch that could go off the rails so quickly if the host isn't selling it. And Adam is selling it. It's just his face because basically he's sticking his head through an airplane seat and then it's like a little baby's body. So it's just Adam facial expressions as far as like his ears hurt and, his mom is playing like a Peekaboo or not peekaboo, but like showing him his toy and like where'd it go and then Adams like oh my god he's like so this is just total like facial acting just commitment and another sketch that could really go off the rails unless It's like a confident really great host. I've been there before raised three on my own. How old is he? Oh.Track 4:[1:09:22] I'm 11 months oh oh wow you mean 11 months in like 15 000 days my ears feel strange.Track 4:[1:09:36] It's okay honey that's just the pressure from being up high yeah no my ears they feel different i don't like it, it's okay here do you want your ipad sweetie the peppa pig device that is the only thing i want, and i think too like this shows like he's so willing to not take himself too seriously like the sketches that he's taken on and agreed to do and then just absolutely nailed i think shows that like he's not afraid of looking silly he's not afraid of being stupid um and you're right kind of taking these premises that coul

It wasn't easy, but we managed to release this episode of Cinemaholics not on a Monday...unless you're on the east coast. Special guest Matt Serafini returns to the show this week to help us review The Garfield Movie, directed by Mark Dindal and featuring the voice, uh, talents of Chris Pratt, oh and also Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillén, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang, and Snoop Dogg. It opened in theaters on May 24 through Sony Pictures Releasing. Read Will Ashton's written review of The Garfield Movie here. Our intro music this week is “Tarantino Margarita” by l'eupe. Links: Email your feedback for the show to cinemaholicspodcast [at] gmail.com Join our Discord! We have a Cinemaholics channel here. Follow us on Twitter: Jon Negroni, Will Ashton Check out our Cinemaholics Merch! Check out our Patreon to support Cinemaholics! Connect with Cinemaholics on Facebook and Instagram. Support our show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cinemaholicsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alexis Hejna and Zachary Strobel present their The Garfield Movie 2024 Move Review!The Garfield Movie is a 2024 American animated adventure comedy film based on the comic strip Garfield created by Jim Davis. Directed by Mark Dindal from a screenplay by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds, the film stars Chris Pratt as the voice of the titular character, alongside the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillén, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang, and Snoop Dogg. In the film, Garfield is reunited with his long-lost father, a street cat named Vic, being forced into joining him on a high-stakes adventure.The Garfield Movie was released in the United States by Columbia Pictures through Sony Pictures Releasing on May 24, 2024. The film received negative reviews from critics, and it has grossed over $154 million worldwide.Disclaimer: The following may contain offensive language, adult humor, and/or content that some viewers may find offensive – The views and opinions expressed by any one speaker does not explicitly or necessarily reflect or represent those of Mark Radulich or W2M Network.Mark Radulich and his wacky podcast on all the things:https://linktr.ee/markkind76alsoFB Messenger: Mark Radulich LCSWTiktok: @markradulichtwitter: @MarkRadulichInstagram: markkind76

When you think about art, education, advocacy, and mentorship, what comes to mind? For us, it's all about the power of creativity to change lives, and that's exactly what we're diving into with today's recommendation.Arts Educators Save the World is a celebration of the unseen heroes who are making a difference in the world through arts education. Featuring guests like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bradley Whitford and Cecily Strong, this podcast shares inspiring artists' stories about the mentors who impacted their lives.Listen to more of Arts Educators Save the World: https://episodes.fm/1638989034Interview with Erica Halverson: https://tinkmedia.co/interviews/erica-halversonA production of Tink Media.Executive Produced by: Lauren PassellProduced by: Devin Andrade and Andreea CoscaiEdited by: Wil Williams and Devin AndradeTheme music by: Aakshi SinhaFollow Tink for more!https://linktr.ee/tinkmediaHosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

For our latest episode, we sit down with the inimitable Cecily Strong to explore her fascinating path from the fashion world to the culinary scene. Cecily takes us through her early days being scouted at the mall as a teen, globe-trotting adventures in the modeling world, and learning the ins and outs of the restaurant industry from the ground up with Eat Free Pizza. She shares behind-the-scenes stories from opening Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream with Ed Marszewski and Won Kim, the joys and challenges of taking over an old school pizza joint with Kim's Uncle Pizza in Westmont, and her latest venture -- Pizz'amici in West Town. Along the way, we dive into the nitty gritty of dough hydration, the perfect martini, an impassioned defense of Taco Bell, and as always, so much more.   

Hey everyone... Garfield returns to the big screen in a new animated adaptation! The Garfield Movie is the latest summer 2024 blockbuster but one of the first to be directly aimed at kids so it's going to be interesting to see how the box office shapes up for this film over the next couple of weeks. While I was pretty big on reading Garfield comics on newspapers when I was younger, I can't exactly say that this is one of the IPs from my childhood that I've been clamoring to get rebooted. So, does The Garfield Movie provide innocent family fun and feel true to the character... or is it a generic 'kids' film? Find out in this review! The Garfield Movie: Directed by: Mark Dindal Screenplay by: Paul A. Kaplan & Mark Torgove and David Reynolds Based on the Garfield Characters Created by: Jim Davis Produced by: John Cohen, Broderick Johnson, Andrew A. Kosove, Steven P. Wegner, Craig Sost, Namit Malhotra Executive Producers: Jim Davis, Bridget McMeel, David Reynolds, Scott Parish, Carl Rogers, Tom Jacomb, Crosby Clyse, Chris Pflug, Simon Hedges, Louis Koo, Steve Sarowitz, Justin Baldoni, Peter Luo Music by: John Debney Edited by: Mark Keefer Casting by: Monika Mikkelsen Production Design by: Pete Oswald Art Direction by: Jeanie Chang Cast: Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillén, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang Synopsis: Garfield, the world-famous, Monday-hating, lasagna-loving indoor cat, is about to have a wild outdoor adventure! After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father – scruffy street cat Vic – Garfield and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered life into joining Vic in a hilarious, high-stakes heist.

For this "Quick Screen" episode, Michael checked out the brand new theatrical film "The Garfield Movie". What are some of his thoughts on this animated adventure comedy film featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillén, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang, and Snoop Dogg? Check it out and see! Be a part of the conversation! E-mail the show at screennerdspodcast@gmail.com Follow the show on Twitter @screennerdspod Like the show on Facebook (Search for Screen Nerds Podcast and find the page there) Follow the show on Instagram and Threads just search screennerdspodcast Check out the show on Bluesky just search screennerdspodcast Be sure to check out the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, Overcast, Amazon Music or your podcast catcher of choice! (and please share rate and review!) Want to be a guest or share your thoughts on the podcast? Send me an e-mail! Thanks to Frankie Creel for the artwork --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/screennerdspodcast/message

Andra Day & Cecily Strong join host Andy Cohen. Listen to lively debates on everything from the latest drama surrounding your favorite Bravolebrities to what celebrity is making headlines that week live from the WWHL clubhouse.Aired on 05/15/24Binge all your favorite Bravo shows with the Bravo app: bravotv.com/getbravoSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lori and Julia talk about Barbra Streisand's new upcoming album, Cecily Strong on WWHL with Andy Cohen, and they talk with Chris Hewitt about movies and books! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lori and Julia talk about Barbra Streisand's new upcoming album, Cecily Strong on WWHL with Andy Cohen, and they talk with Chris Hewitt about movies and books! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Powerhouse actors Cecily Strong and Andrea Syglowski provide insights into their acting careers, and how they navigated life's complexities throughout their journey. The two talk about the show they currently co-star in,“Brooklyn Laundry”, their admiration for playwright John Patrick Shanley, and the play's portrayal of women. Cecily opens up about how she relates to the play's themes, reflecting on her own experiences of loss and self-discovery, particularly the loss of her cousin to brain cancer and the impact it had on her outlook on life and love. This loss inspired her to write her memoir, "This Will All Be Over Soon". She recalls her time on SNL, and what made her shift from comedy to “serious acting”. Andrea shares her love for teaching acting, how she deals with uncertainties. Both recall their motivations for pursuing careers in the theater, highlighting the joy of storytelling and the opportunity to connect with audiences, and perseverance. Andrea Syglowski is an actress who was last seen in “DIG” at Primary Stages. Her additional stage credits include Broadway's “Passover”, off-Broadway's “Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven” and “queens”. Her TV credits include “Evil”, “New Amsterdam”, “Blue Bloods”, “Elementary”, “The Good Wife”, and “How to Get Away with Murder”.  Cecily Strong is best known for her work as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 2012 to 2022, which garnered her multiple Emmy Award nominations. She was most recently seen on Apple TV's hit musical series, “Schmigadoon!”, in addition to film credits that include “The Female Brain”, the recent “Ghostbusters” reboot, as well as Melissa McCarthy's “The Boss”, “The Bronze”, and “The Meddler”. She made her New York stage debut in 2021 and hasn't looked back since.  Together, Andrea and Cecily are 50% of the four-member cast of “Brooklyn Laundry”, a world premiere play written by Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Patrick Shanley. Connect with Cecily and Andrea: Instagram: @justcaseylikes Twitter: @justcaseylikes TikTok: @justcaseylikes Connect with The Theatre Podcast: Support the podcast on Patreon: Patreon.com/TheTheatrePodcast YouTube: YouTube.com/TheTheatrePodcast Threads, Twitter & Instagram: @theatre_podcast TikTok: @thetheatrepodcast Facebook.com/OfficialTheatrePodcast TheTheatrePodcast.com My personal Instagram: @alanseales Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doubt runs at the Todd Haimes Theatre on Broadway until April 21st. Find out more at www.roundabouttheatre.org.Brooklyn Laundry runs off-Broadway at City Center Stage I until April 14th. Find out more at www.manhattantheatreclub.com.  Follow The Present Stage on Instagram at @thepresentstageThe Present Stage: Conversations with Theater Writers is hosted by Dan Rubins, a theater critic for Slant Magazine. You can also find Dan's reviews on Cast Album Reviews and in The New Yorker's Briefly Noted column.The Present Stage supports the national nonprofit Hear Your Song. If you'd like to learn more about Hear Your Song and how to support empowering youth with serious illnesses to make their voices heard though songwriting, please visit www.hearyoursong.org

Nick focuses on one of the best, and most underappreciated cast members in "Saturday Night Live" history: Bobby Moynihan. This remarkably talented comedic actor spent 9 seasons of SNL, creating some of the funniest characters and hilarious moments to ever happen on the stages at Studio 8H. Nick will play back some of the most memorable stuff, including visits from the Food Network's Guy Fieri, 2nd Hand News Correspondent: Anthony Crispino, and of course, Drunk Uncle makes an appearance. Bobby's history and background are discussed, as is his impressive voiceover work, movie roles, and terrific sit-com performances. You will also hear an example of how amazing he was when working with a full ensemble of cast members including Jay Pharoah, Vanessa Bayer, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Kenan Thompson, Taran Killam, Nasim Pedrad and more. From his first audition, to his final episode, it's all here on a FULL THROTTLE look back at the career of Bobby Moynihan. [Ep61]

"Brooklyn Laundry" is a new off-Broadway play written and directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley. The story is set in a Brooklyn laundromat and follows the owner Owen (David Zayas), and his conversations with three sisters, one played by Cecily Strong, who frequent the joint. We learn more about the ups and downs of their lives throughout the play. Shanley, Zayas, and Strong join to discuss "Brooklyn Laundry," which is at New York City Center Stage through April 14.    

"Brooklyn Laundry" is a new off-Broadway play written and directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley. The story is set in a Brooklyn laundromat and follows the owner Owen (David Zayas), and his conversations with three sisters, one played by Cecily Strong, who frequent the joint. We learn more about the ups and downs of their lives throughout the play. Shanley, Zayas, and Strong join to discuss "Brooklyn Laundry," which is at New York City Center Stage through April 14.    

A Morning News Update That Takes Into Account The News Stories You Deem 'Highly Conversational' Today's Sponsor: Resume Solutionhttp://thisistheconversationproject.com/resumesolution Today's Rundown: Toy Story 5, Frozen 3 & Zootopia 2 Get Release Date Windowshttps://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/1531226-toy-story-5-frozen-3-zootopia-2-get-release-date-windows Vegas mayor says A's should stay in Oakland, then walks it backhttps://sports.yahoo.com/vegas-mayor-says-stay-oakland-001442815.html Coke hopes to excite younger drinkers with new raspberry-flavored Coca-Cola Spicedhttps://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/coke-hopes-excite-younger-drinkers-021238568.html Disney to invest $1.5 billion in ‘Fortnite' maker Epic Games to create games, entertainmenthttps://apnews.com/article/disney-epic-games-fortnite-deal-investment-2416beb86a5306476b5a11a4cfc9cab6 Savannah Chrisley Alleges Her Parents Have Not Spoken In A Year|https://okmagazine.com/p/todd-julie-chrisley-havent-spoken-phone-one-year-prison/ Jesus Commercials Return to Super Bowl: He Gets Us and Hallow to Air Adshttps://www.christianheadlines.com/contributors/michael-foust/jesus-commercials-return-super-bowl-he-gets-us-hallow-air-ads.html#google_vignette Yellowstone's Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser and Luke Grimes Want Major Raises for New Spinoffhttps://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/yellowstone-kelly-reilly-cole-hauser-134421996.html Bill Maher Calls Kanye West a 'Charming Antisemite,' Won't Air Interviewhttps://www.thewrap.com/bill-maher-kanye-west-antisemite-tmz-investigates/ Website: http://thisistheconversationproject.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/thisistheconversationproject Twitter: http://twitter.com/th_conversation TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@theconversationproject YouTube: http://thisistheconversationproject.com/youtube Podcast: http://thisistheconversationproject.com/podcasts #yournewssidepiece #coffeechat #morningnews ONE DAY OLDER ON FEBRUARY 8:Ted Koppel (84)Seth Green (50)Cecily Strong (40) WHAT HAPPENED TODAY:2007: Model-actress Anna Nicole Smith was found unresponsive at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. She was pronounced dead at a local hospital a short time later. Her death was ruled an accidental drug overdose of a sedative.2012: Elizabeth Taylor's collection of artworks by Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas sold for over $17 million at Christie's in London.2016: Mexico's president announced the recapture of drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. PLUS, TODAY WE CELEBRATE: Laugh and Get Rich Dayhttps://nationaltoday.com/laugh-and-get-rich-day/

For episode notes, transcripts, and further reading and resources, visit The A Files website. Follow Renee on Instagram and X (Twitter) Follow Regina on Instagram and X (Twitter) Follow The Meteor on all platforms and visit our website to learn more. Everyone loves someone who had an abortion! 

In this episode of Casual Chats, Patricia and special guest Arun Mehta from The Arun Mehta Show discuss about the 2023 Netflix/Happy Madison Productions animated film Leo starring Adam Sandler, Bill Burr, Cecily Strong, and Jason Alexander. Leo is a 74-year-old tuatara living as a class pet with a turtle named Squirtle. After learning that tuataras live up to 75 years, Leo decides that he's going to break out and make his way to the Everglades, but things change when the main teacher leaves due to maternity leave and a strict substitute takes her place. One assignment they get is to bring a pet home and they take Leo. Leo talks to them individually and gives them advice on how to better themselves. When the film premiered on Netflix, it received positive reviews from critics calling it a sweet, funny, charming, and endearing film that replaces Eight Crazy Nights and the Hotel Transylvania films as Adam Sandler's best animated film he's ever been in. In addition, it has received more positive reviews than Disney's Wish. What did Arun and Patricia think of the film? Listen and find out. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/old-school-lane/support

Broadway and Musical Theatre Fans, in this episode we are breaking down many of the Broadway Rumors that have been circulating as of late! To kick it off, we talk about the possibility of Nicole Scherzinger and Sunset Boulevard coming to New York in the 2024 season. Darren Criss announced this week that he and Evan Rachel Wood will follow Corbin Blue and Constance Wu in Little Shop of Horrors come the end of January. To round out Broadway News, we gush on a new Off-Broadway play, Brooklyn Laundry, starring Cecily Strong and directed by John Patrick Shanely. In excitement for the upcoming Broadway season, we break down all of the upcoming Broadway shows and plays. Leave a review and share with your Broadway bestie!! TikTok: @FromTheMezzanine_PodcastInstagram: @FromTheMezzanine_PodcastYoutube: @FromtheMezzanineBroadwayBroadway Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5t55fULcCqN0NMmK4OnfOA?si=89c08b1a8bb34d95

Dax Holt and Adam Glyn get you caught up on the biggest stories in Hollywood in the Raw Rundown! The guys talk about Kanye West's new KKK-style mask he debuted on stage, Selena Gomez defends her relationship with Benny Blanco, Tom Cruise has a new leading lady in his life, & MORE! Take a dive into Hollywood unlike any you've done before. Real, raw, and uncensored. Join us as we talk to celebs living their lives in front of the cameras AND hear from the paparazzi, bodyguards, and private flight attendants that surround them. Find out what your favorite celebrities are REALLY like. Hosted by entertainment news veteran Dax Holt and NYC photojournalist Adam Glyn. Follow Hollywood Raw TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hollywoodraw  Instagram:instagram.com/hollywoodrawpod Facebook:facebook.com/HollywoodRawPodcast Twitter: twitter.com/hollywoodraw  Dax Holt Insta:https://www.instagram.com/daxholt/ Twitter: twitter.com/daxholt TikTok: tiktok.com/@dax_holt Adam Glyn Insta: https://www.instagram.com/adamglyn/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamglyn TikTok: tiktok.com/@adamglyn YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AdamsAppleNYC/ This is another Hurrdat Media Production. Hurrdat Media is a podcast network and digital media production company based in Omaha, NE. Find more podcasts on the Hurrdat Media Network by going to HurrdatMedia.com or Hurrdat Media YouTube channel! CHAPTERS: (00:00) – Intro/Banter (01:18) – Fan Review (02:00) – #10 Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards are in a good place (06:12) – #9 Taylor Swift's 34th Birthday (10:15) – #8 Todd Chrisley talks prison (14:43) – #7 New evidence against Jonathan Majors surfaces (19:00) - #6 Tom Cruise has found a new love (23:10) - #5 Oprah reveals her weight loss secret (27:16) - #4 Kevin Costner and Jewel are dating! (29:44) - #3 Selena Gomez defends her relationship with Benny Blanco (32:24) - #2 Cecily Strong speaks out about SNL's Antisemitism sketch (36:27) - #1 Kanye West sports a KKK-like mask (39:45) – Banter/Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Corey Feldman wants your money, Ivy League schools under fire, top Google Trends of 2023, Golden Globe nominations, David Lee Roth's Christmas “song”, an annoying woman on a cop cam, and Amanda Bynes' podcast is the best. Sports: The Detroit Lions look to bounce back Saturday night against the Denver Broncos. They are favored by 4 points. Juwan Howard rumors about fighting his coach. Patrick Mahomes had a rough night and is whining. Travis Kelce's ex-Kayla Nicole won't go away. We draw our latest Legacy winner! Congrats to _____________! We'll be live on YouTube first thing Sunday morning. Harvard staff has Claudine Gay's back. The Congressional Testimony debacle is not going away quickly. We check out what dumb things America was up to this year in Google Trends Year End review. People online gave Dylan Mortensen crap for trying to move on with her life after Bryan Kohberger. We've been stricken from editing Wikipedia pages due to Stuttering John Melendez. Saturday Night Live is getting crap for making fun of Elise Stefanik. Ex cast member Cecily Strong knew better. George Washington University seems pro-Hamas. In California, 3 people were BLOWN OUT for not letting a Jewish woman use the toilet at a coffee shop. Dictator Donald Trump remains in the news. Rudy Giuliani is facing a major defamation trial vs. Georgia two election workers. Former Michigan hockey player Johnny Druskinis drew a dong and dong only. Therefore, he's suing a website for defamation. Sebastian Bach is rocking and will join us tomorrow. David Lee Roth has a new Christmas song out and it is terrible. Get your Corey Feldman Funko Pop today. Corey was pushing it hard on a TV appearance in Los Angeles. The Golden Globe nominations are out. Kanye West and his wife made a public appearance wearing stupid clothes. Diddy remains on the hot seat. Amy Robach really knows how to make things all about her. Bryan Adams loves to 69. The Mayor of the Sunset Strip Rodney Bingenheimer is #MeToo'd. Diddy and Justin Bieber go way back. There are some wild allegations going down. We watch an entitled “obviously” drunk woman via cop cam. Bahamian murder-for-hire wife Lindsay Shiver is in court to plead not guilty. Amanda Bynes thanks you for checking out her podcast. We check out episode 1 and it is fantastic. We'll check in with MR. Skin tomorrow due to technical difficulties. Use our Amazon portal for all Amazon needs. Visit Our Presenting Sponsor Hall Financial – Michigan's highest rated mortgage company If you'd like to help support the show… please consider subscribing to our YouTube Page, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Drew and Mike Show, Marc Fellhauer, Trudi Daniels, Jim Bentley and BranDon).

The State Department condemned images of stripped and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners as "deeply disturbing." The deadly war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas , a militant Palestinian faction, has revealed deep social and political fissures in America and California is not immune.  Former Saturday Night Live (SNL) star Cecily Strong reportedly pulled out last minute from performing in Saturday's widely-panned cold open, which targeted GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY) for her questions during a recent Congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in colleges and universities instead of the college leaders who were widely criticized for their testimonies. Embattled Harvard University President Claudine Gay responded Monday to mounting allegations of plagiarism, saying she stands by her work. Disney actress Rachel Zegler, a vocal left-wing activist, is singing a different tune about the 1937 animated film “Snow White” amid backlash over her past feminist complaints about the Disney classic — and after The Daily Wire announced it is producing its own take on the timeless fairy tale.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Robert Smigel and Triump the Insult Comic Dog do famous impressions and talks about his new movie "Leo" starring Adam Sandler, Bill Burr, Cecily Strong, Jason Alexander, Rob Schneider, Jo Koy, Allison Strong, Heidi Gardner and Nick Swardson. Robert Smigel is an American actor, comedian, writer, director, producer, and puppeteer, known for his Saturday Night Live "TV Funhouse" cartoon shorts and as the puppeteer and voice behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Howie Mandel Does Stuff available on YouTube "Leo" available on Netflix Visit https://www.howiemandel.com/ for more stuff! Get your brand new "Stuff" merch here: https://store.roosterteeth.com/collections/howie-mandel Thanks to our sponsors: Go to http://shadyrays.com and use code HOWIE for 50% off 2 or more pairs of polarized sunglasses. Go to http://buyraycon.com/howiedoesstuff to get 15% off your entire Raycon order. Go to http://liquidiv.com and use code HOWIE to get 20% off your order. Social Links @triumphicdhq @howiemandel @jackelynshultz

"Leo" is only the second animated film from Happy Madison Productions following "Eight Crazy Nights." It has garnered positive reviews for its animation, comedy, voice-acting, and music and stars the voice talents of Adam Sandler, Bill Burr, and Cecily Strong. Co-directors Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim made their feature directorial debuts with this film (and co-directed alongside "The Week Of" director Robert Smigel) and were kind enough to spend a few minutes talking with us about their work on the film. Please be sure to check out the film, which is currently streaming on Netflix; take a listen below and enjoy! Thank you. Check out more on NextBestPicture.com Please subscribe on... SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/nextbestpicturepodcast Apple Podcasts - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/negs-best-film-podcast/id1087678387?mt=2 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7IMIzpYehTqeUa1d9EC4jT YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWA7KiotcWmHiYYy6wJqwOw And be sure to help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month at https://www.patreon.com/NextBestPicture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We wrap up Spooky Season activities by wrapping up our coverage of 2016's Ghostbusters: Answer The Call! Special guest and Ghostbusters-superfan Matt (AKA Toaster) walks us through the lengthy development hell that got us from Ghostbusters II to now, Jack presents his fix for this film, we get sad about celebrity deaths that had particularly large impacts on us, and we have a thorough discussion about the state of franchise filmmaking and whether nostalgic legacy sequels can actually work as good narratives. Buckle up to learn more than you could have expected! For more information about the Unofficial Willem Dafoe Bad Art Short Film Festival, visit derazzled.com/festival. To submit a film, email it to derazzledpodcast@gmail.com and put "Willem Dafoe" in the subject line. Stuff Mentioned in This Episode: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Chris Hemsworth, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, Rick Moranis, Groundhog Day, Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters: Hellbent, Ghostbusters: The Videogame, Ben Stiller, Chris Farley, Will Smith, Chris Pratt, Emma Stone, Ann Faris, Anne Hathaway, The Black Fire House Podcast, Arm The Animals, Razor's Edge, Some More News, Lex Luthor, Donald Trump, Back to the Future 2, Robert Zemeckis, Alien, IDW, Route 88, Extreme Ghostbusters, Lorenzo Music, Stan Lee, Amy Pascal, Michael Linton, MCU, Spider-Man, Channing Tatum, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Black Cat, Gwen Stacy, Dane deHaan, The Interview, Cecily Strong, William Atherton, Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, David Bowie, Robin Williams, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Sandra Bullock, Keke Palmer, NOPE, Scream Queens, The Love Guru, Bill Pullman, Casper the Friendly Ghost, The Blindside, Andy Garcia, The Matrix Resurrections, Jonathan Groff, Keanu Reaves, Star Wars, Tron, J. J. Abrams, Oscar Wars, Ike Perlmutter, New Hollywood, Finn Wolfhard --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/derazzled/support

Improv isn't just for comedy. If there are superfoods like blueberries that are good for your health, improv may just be a super-skill that has implications and applications that are also good for your health. No joke. And the skills are highly learnable and can measurably help you become a better person. They can make you a better collaborator in marriage, parenthood, business, and just about everywhere in life. Many Fortune 500 companies, including Clorox, have been able to boost their bottom line by using the skills they've implemented from improv. I had the pleasure of speaking with Kelly Leonard (https://www.secondcity.com/people/kelly-leonard+), the Vice President of Creative Strategy, Innovation and Business Development of Second City in Chicago, the oldest continually operating improv center in the world. The list of graduates who have come from Second City is utterly astounding. If you are a fan of any of these people, you can thank Second City: Amy Poehler, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Joan Rivers, Jordan Peele, Alan Alda, John Belushi, Stephen Colbert, Cecily Strong, and so many others. All of them developed their chops under the same roof, where my guest has worked for 35 years. Kelly is the author of an excellent book on improv called, Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, but" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration - Lessons from the Second City. I loved this book and so did a fella by the name of Stephen Colbert who said the book, “…is for anyone looking to be more creative in their work and in their life.” Other similar praise came from Dan Pink and Vanity Fair. In this episode, you will hear how improv works, and why you should consider developing these skills. You may even find yourself bringing people like Kelly to your workplace to help improve performance and employee morale through the types of play that only improv can bring. So, listen in as Kelly and I talk about why you need to learn improv, the super-skill in life.

Nick talks about Cecily Strong's incredible Weekend Update Feature piece in which she played "Goober The Clown." On September 1st, 2021, Texas effectively banned abortions, leading to other bans and changes in policy and law. So, in response to the ban, on the November 6th 2021 episode of SNL, Strong wrote an Update piece in which she revealed her very personal experience with abortion and its effect on her life....only she was dressed as Goober the Clown while delivering the monologue. The result is one of the most important, devastating, revealing and hilarious pieces ever presented on the show, a feature so personal, funny and biting, that it caused a groundswell of support (and a fair share of hatred and controversy), and a big change in what was presented on Weekend Update, by opening the doors for other performers to follow. You will learn about the writing of the piece (hearing audio from Strong and her two co-writers), it's first performances, and how it played live in the studio, and around the country, on that fateful night. You will also hear this remarkable sketch/feature in its entirety. Cecily Strong will go down in history as one of the best cast members in the history of SNL, and "Goober the Clown" is easily her crowning achievement. [EP38]

Nick has a fantastic conversation with Katie Rich, an incredible writer/performer who spent 6 seasons writing on "Saturday Night Live," exclusively working on Weekend Update. They talk about Katie's early life growing up on the Southside of Chicago (as a Cub fan!), her days working at "iO" with people like Charna Halpern and Cecily Strong, the time she spent of stage at Second City, and the tense and amazing years she spent writing jokes and working every week on Update. She talks about what it's like to be in the studio while Update is being performed and her jokes are being told, her favorite Update segments, what it was like to write during the insane political and news period that started in 2016, and the time she got to appear on stage with Bill Murray & the World Series Champion Chicago Cubs. Nick and Katie also talk a lot about baseball (and their shared love of the '93 Phillies), throwing up in LaGuardia Airport, getting great advice from George Wendt, and Katie's work in the world of animation. This is a must-listen interview with a hilarious and gifted writer who made wonderful and funny contributions to SNL. [EP37]

TICKETS TO OUR 2023 TOUR ARE NOW ON SALE!  On today's episode of Who's There, our weekly call-in show, we receive a LONG-AWAITED update on the Lawsuit of the Century before playing your comment calls about Lauren Sanchez, Chance the Rapper, and the “American Coleen Rooney.” Moving on, we go long on Josh Seiter's “death hoax” + his brief relationship with Monica Beverly Hillz, talk about the post-Reservation Dogs future of D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, make a guess about Cecily Strong's recent Instagram post, find out Marcia Gay Harden's alter-ego, and more.  Call in at 619.WHO.THEM to leave questions, comments & concerns for a future episode of Who's There?. Support us and get a TON of bonus content over on Patreon.com/WhoWeekly. And COME SEE BOBBY CHAT WITH RUMAAN ALAM AT BARNES AND NOBLE ON SEPTEMBER 7th!  (And buy THE OLD PLACE in paperback on August 29!) xoxo in paperback on August 29!) xoxo To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get ready to dive purse first into this week's podcast because we are thrilled to be joined by comedian, drag queen, actor and activist, Bob The Drag Queen! You might know him from his memorable appearances on "RuPaul's Drag Race" and "We're Here," but did you know that he and Vanessa are pretty much best friends now? Plus, on this episode we all get real about social etiquette: What to say if you don't remember someone, how to react if someone tries to shame you for not remembering them and the do's and don'ts of how to act if you want to be Bob The Drag Queen's friend. Bob also brings out Vanessa's fierce alter ego "Bitchy Vanessa," talks about his background in stand-up comedy and tells a very memorable story about how some social cues lead to a misunderstanding with a very big star. The three of us also get nostalgic during our segment BACK TO THE PRESENT where we discuss the Carvin guitar mail order catalog, Fisher-Price karaoke toys and the rise and fall of the PT Cruiser. Don't forget to check out Bob The Drag Queen on tour with Madonna on the Celebration Tour starting this fall!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kristin Chenoweth talks about her nickname for the Sutton Place Hotel in Vancouver, discusses living with Cecily Strong while filming Season 2 of Schmigadoon! and spills on her obsession with the Real Housewives and the Vanderpumps. (Originally aired April 6, 2023.)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Crown & Anchor, Greyhounds! In this episode Marisa, Christian, and Brett have a conversation with Cinco Paul, the co-creator, executive producer, songwriter, and showrunner of Schmigadoon.In addition to Schmigadoon, Cinco Paul is also known for his work as a screenwriter for beloved films like Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax, The Secret Life of Pets, and the Despicable Me trilogy – all of which he worked on with his longtime friend and collaborator Ken Daurio.For the uninitiated, Schmigadoon is a musical comedy television series that centers on the relationship of two NYC doctors, Josh and Melissa – played by Keegan-Michael Key and Cecily Strong, respectively. The show is a brilliant love letter to musical theater which also cleverly parodies many of the genre's most recognizable features through hilarious and heartfelt performances from the A-list cast of musical theatre stars.We here at Richmond Til We Die are huge fans of Schmigadoon. Luckily, Cinco's a big fan of Ted Lasso too, and so we were thrilled to have an opportunity to chat with the man who helped create another one of our favorite shows!And this is your official warning - there are some light spoilers for the first four episodes of Ted Lasso's third season as well the first three episodes of Schmigadoon's second season in this episode.More extensive show notes can be found on our website: https://www.tedlassopod.com/cinco-paul-schmigadoon-schmicago-ted-lassoRichmond Til We Die is an episode-by-episode conversation about the Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso, where we explore the characters, their relationships to each other, and how they're able to make us laugh until we can hardly breathe one moment and then feel with the deepest parts of our hearts the next. When you're here, you're a Greyhound.

Melissa Gorga & Cecily Strong join host Andy Cohen. Listen to lively debates on everything from the latest drama surrounding your favorite Bravolebrities to what celebrity is making headlines that week live from the WWHL clubhouse.Aired on 04/11/23Binge all your favorite Bravo shows with the Bravo app: bravotv.com/getbravoSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Leaving SNL, Trump hosting, and teeth acting with Cecily Strong. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Heidi Gardner (Saturday Night Live) joins Ralph Sutton and James Mattern and they discuss Heidi Gardner being one of the longest running current cast members of Saturday Night Live, starting out working as a hair stylist and how her career path changed, doing a movie podcast with her brother and why Spaceballs is better than Star Wars, Cecily Strong leaving SNL, Heidi Gardner's favorite hosts and moments on SNL, betting on sports at 6 years old, her love of the 80s/90s, prank calling as a kid and doing voice over work as an adult, recording pandemic episodes of Saturday Night Live, Heidi Garder's first concert, first drug and first sexual experience and so much more!(Air Date: January 21st, 2023)Support our sponsors!YoKratom.com - Check out Yo Kratom (the home of the $60 kilo) for all your kratom needs!To advertise your product or service on GaS Digital podcasts please go to TheADSide.comand click on "Advertisers" for more information!The SDR Show merchandise is available at https://podcastmerch.com/collections/the-sdr-showYou can watch The SDR Show LIVE for FREE every Wednesday and Saturday at 9pm ET at GaSDigitalNetwork.com/LIVEOnce you're there you can sign up at GaSDigitalNetwork.com with promo code: SDR for a 7-day FREE trial with access to every SDR show ever recorded! On top of that you'll also have the same access to ALL the shows that GaS Digital Network has to offer!Follow the whole show on social media!Heidi GardnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/HeidiLGardnerInstagram: https://instagram.com/HeidiLGardnerJames L. MatternTwitter: https://twitter.com/jameslmatternInstagram: https://instagram.com/thejamesmatternRalph SuttonTwitter: https://twitter.com/iamralphsuttonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamralphsutton/The SDR ShowTwitter: https://twitter.com/theSDRshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesdrshow/GaS Digital NetworkTwitter: https://twitter.com/gasdigitalInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/gasdigital/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Executive produced by Story Pirates Studios, we're proud to share another episode of Arts Educators Save The World, a show for gronwups who believe in arts education. In this episode, Cecily Strong talks with an important arts mentor from her life. If you like it, you can hear more episodes right now by visiting artseducatorspodcast.com or find it wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A professional glassblower (Cecily Strong) discovers Eric's natural talent and tries to convince him to go pro. Featuring two new stories: “The Mismatched Puzzle Piece,” a song about a backwards journey through the alphabet, written by Olivia, a 7 year old from Colorado, and “The Sad Queen,” the story of a queen and her court who learn to appreciate all their subjects, written by a 7 year old from Florida named Arjun. For more from the Story Pirates, visit storypirates.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices