Stuff You Should Know - Guardian Angels: Behind the Red Beret

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

If you grew up in the 1980s, then you know who the Guardian Angels are. If you don't then you're in for quite a story. Listen in!  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there.

There's Jerry over there, and this is Step You Should Know. Y'all got our red berets on. We're trained up. Yep. We're ready to kick some New York City subway butt. I got my nun chucks. You probably had those when you were a kid, huh? No, I never did.

Just throwing stars? I had a mom who cared about me. Okay. Who allowed you to have throwing stars? No throwing stars. No throwing chucks. You can sneak. I thought you had throwing stars, no?

Tommy Roper had the throwing stars. He just trained me on them. I didn't actually ever own my own. I gotcha, I didn't either. But you could hide a throwing star on your bedroom. It's hard to hide those nun chucks unless you do it under mattress and you know it's there. That's right.

Already. Yeah. You're pretty proud of yourself for that one. I was, but I got no laugh. He's just dissolved. Thought you might like it. It was good. So obviously, since we're talking nun chucks and Tommy Roper,

we're doing an episode, Chuck, on The Guardian Angels. And let me tell you, from experience, you probably ran into this as well, but researching guardian angels on the internet brings up a lot of crackpot stuff. Yeah. It's very tough to find the stuff I was looking for, but I finally did.

I hacked through it and I got to the actual guardian angel stuff. Yeah, and we have a special guest at the end of this episode. Right. We were gonna announce that, right? Well, you put in a title, didn't you? Yeah, but I just want,

if people don't read the full title. Okay. If it doesn't display on your pod player of choice. Okay. Our old friend, John Hodgman is here in the office today. Yeah. Right now, he's in Jerry's office right now.

Oh, is that where you put him? Yeah, we put him in Jerry's office so he could have some alone time. His suitcase is right there. I think it'd be kind of hilarious for us to go through it on the air. It is. I have that exact suitcase.

Oh, it's nice. Former sponsor of the show. Oh yeah. We didn't get suitcases though. I got one. Not from the show, did you? I got one for End of the World sponsorship. You did?

Yeah. Oh, I'm so mad. I had to pay real cash money. Did you? I got one for free. It's pink. You got the pink one? Yeah.

We won't mention the name brand. Okay. You have to go listen to End of the World to hear that. Or they have to advertise again. Yeah. I'm so mad because I even asked. I was like, hey. I can't believe it.

Can I get one of these bags? Yeah. And they're like, no, they're not going to send them to everyone because it's too expensive. Really? That's it. Peloton, send us a peloton. A peloton.

We have pelotons. These are thousands of dollars. I know. And they advertise for like two minutes. Thanks, peloton. Oh man. So anyway, John Hodgman is here in Jerry's office waiting on us to finish recording about The Guardian Angels.

Right. Because he has a new book coming out called Medallion Status. Yeah, I just put that together. That's really coincidental that Hodgman showed up to be on the show right before his new book comes out. Medallion Status, True Stories from Secret Rooms that you can pre-order now.

Have you read it? I didn't get a chance to. Did you really read it? I really read it. That's impressive. Because we just got him like a few days ago. It's a good read. It's fun to read.

It kind of sucks you in. It's great. Can't wait. It's a good read. John will be here and he will talk incessantly about Medallion Status. So we'll just save that. Yeah, we'll let it just kind of peter out at the end.

Jerry will like fade and that's how the episode will end. I bet he'll have something to say about The Guardian Angels too because John lives in New York City. Yeah. And I noticed in this article that it was, I guess, assumed that everyone knew what it was because it was never even really described

what The Guardian Angels is until the fourth page. Right, that's what I want to say. There are probably a significant number of people who think we're going to talk about angels looking over your shoulder. No, we are talking about in New York City and now 130 other cities and about 13 countries. Yeah, that's okay.

Yeah, sure. There is a group of, they are a group of citizen anti-crime activists. Some would call them vigilantes. That formed a nonprofit under the leadership of Curtis. How do you pronounce that? Sliwa. Sliwa in February 1979.

And if you grew up in the 80s, in the 70s, you saw a lot of guardian angels and this dude in particular on every TV show you could imagine, every non-fictional scripted TV show. They were maybe like nine tenths as famous as Mr. T. at his peak. They were that famous. And you get the feeling that he loved it being famous.

Well, let me tell you about this guy because this is one really big accusation that's leveled against the guardian angels. That they were just in it for the PR. And they definitely did know how to get PR. And Curtis Sliwa was a PR magnet from his birth basically. It sounds like it. Age six, he makes his first public appearance

on Romper Room, remember Romper Room? Sure. So he was a guest on Romper Room. Years later, he was a news boy who got news boy of the year because on his route, he saved six people from a burning building and ended up getting to shake Richard Nixon's hand as a result. This guy, Forrest Gump.

Okay, it keeps going. All right, what else? As a younger kid than that, I think he collected single-handedly five and a half tons of recyclable paper to be recycled. Years before anybody even knew what the word recycling meant. That's awesome.

He organized trash pickups around the place. Cool. Around New York, I should say. He was a legit real deal PR machine who would then also follow through and make an actual impact on the world. Like a real self-starter, even as a kid. Yes, self-starter, also big-time self-promoter.

And that is a real big part of The Guardian Angels. So much so that, yes, it is a very widespread accusation that's level against them, but most people who lived in New York in the 70s and 80s would say, so what, you know, these guys, what they're doing actually is worth all that publicity, so leave them alone. So let's talk about crime. Okay.

Because I have a lot of feelings about this whole organization too. I was flip-flopping all over the place. Really? Yeah, because when you grow up as a kid and you don't know much about them, you're like, oh yeah, man, put on those berets, get on that subway and take it into your own hands.

You get to be a little older person. You're like, no, no, no, don't do that at all. All right. Let's stay out of the cops way. Sure, yeah. So here's the deal. In the 70s, crime, we talked about this, I feel like on something else, I don't know,

that was on a different podcast. No, we talked about it. We talked about Julianne and cleaning up New York. Yeah, but I was thinking about the movie crush episode on Escape from New York. No, you weren't. Which sort of that movie fed into this hysteria about crime. So did Deathwish, Deathwish II, Deathwish III,

Deathwish IV, definitely Deathwish V. Have you ever seen Deathwish III, I think? Oh, I think I only saw the first one. I went on a little kick not too long ago where I watched all of them. Really? And not the remake, obviously, the real throws. I saw the remake too.

I was on that big of a kick. You saw the Bruce Willis one. Yeah. Was it terrible, as they say? It was really bad. It was like Eli Roth, you know, of course he's gonna make this astoundingly nuts. And he didn't, he made a real straight forward.

Like I think he was saying like, well, this is gonna be my entree in the mainstream. Why was it so bad? Like how do you mess up Deathwish? It wasn't bad. Bad's not the right word for it. It was thin, thin's a good word. Like it really could have been much bulkier

and bigger and just better. And it just wasn't enough to it. Oh, okay. And Bronson, I mean, he was like a walking cardboard standup in a lot of ways, especially with his acting. And his stuff was more, there was more to it. And I think it was because they went so far beyond the line in those movies,

like attacks on women and like just incredible violence and just like the Deathwish movies are really violent. Like these were mainstream films that came out. But Deathwish 3, I think is totally off the rails. The first two are at least trying to maintain some sort of semblance of reality. A man and his family being attacked and like... Right, and he fights back.

Exploring real topics. That definitely ties into this mentality of the guardian angels. Deathwish 3 also does in the way that it describes this New York where it's just chaos. There's no law, there's no order, no one's in control. People are shooting rocket launchers at each other. Like gangs are just doing whatever they want.

And if you're an honest citizen, you have to go murder other people or else you're going to be murdered yourself. Well, that was how they got you to buy into Escape from New York was that in the year 1997, which is hysterical to think about now, crime got so bad that they shut New York down and just made it into a prison.

They built a wall around Manhattan Island. Uh-huh, just kind of a fun idea. Yeah, really? It's a great premise. Yeah, I thought that was a good movie too. So anyway, let's talk about real crime and how bad really was it in major metropolitan areas in the United States.

And here's some stats for you. Ed, the Grabster put this together for us. And I think some of the stuff is funny that Ed said. Really? More than 1,600 homicides in New York in 76, more than 1,881. And he said, homicide rates vary between 19 and 25 murders per 100,000 residents

in the 70s and 80s. Which is, I can't make hazard tales of that. It's real numbers I need. Well, those are murders. Then you've got muggings, obviously rape, burglary, vandalism, stuff like that. But I did some figuring. They're on pace in New York City this year

for 272 murders. Okay, that's actually kind of high. There were 1,800 in 1981. Yeah, that's really high. Which is five murders a day. But then you think about like, yeah, but you know, New York's a huge city. There's five boroughs.

That's like one murder per borough per day. That's to be expected. Like the idea that like you can't walk around without being killed is preposterous. You're probably, the likelihood is that you're never gonna be even in the vicinity of a murder, much less the victim of one. Okay.

With that kind of population. But there were, in 1978, there were nine murders on the subway in 1978. Period, on the subway alone. And in 1979, there were 250 felonies a week on the New York City subway. Right, so. So it's a real concern to ride the subway

in the 1970s in New York, like a legit fear. It really was, right? So there was a lot of violence. In addition to violence, in addition to violent crime and robbery and muggings and rapes and all, like just violence, right? There was also this sense of lawlessness on the subways in particular,

where there's graffiti everywhere. And like, you could get beat up, you could have somebody like shake you down. Just riding on the subway, they were really, they just seemed dangerous too. In addition to actually being kind of dangerous, especially compared to today, they seemed dangerous. So people were freaked out riding on the subway.

There were 250 felonies a week on the subways a lot. Okay. And then on top of that, in the 70s, so in 1975, New York apparently came just within a few hours of going bankrupt. And they faced some real severe budget cuts. One of which was the transit police. They laid off 1,400 of their 3,600 cops.

And they cut off patrols from 7 p.m. to I think 5 a.m. Yeah, so the criminals were like, oh, it's just Lollis down there. And it really was. And so it was in this context that Curtis Sliwa basically said, hey, you know what? Somebody should do something about this. The cops aren't doing anything.

The city's not doing anything. Somebody needs to do something because people are getting robbed and mugged. And at the very least, people are afraid to ride the subway and we should do something. Yeah, he said, I'm a world champion recycler. Yeah, I've met Richard Nixon.

Listen to me. So should we take a break already? I think we just worked ourselves up on your frothy break. I got to calm down. Let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about Sliwa's background right after this. We should now, we should now, we should now, we should now.

We should now, we should now, we should now. We should now, we should now. YSK, KSK, KSK. We should now, we should now. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Curtis Sliwa, founder of The Guardian Angels, was born in 1954 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up there. Webster's defines Curtis Sliwa. Depending on who you ask. And there are a lot of different stories about Sliwa.

Even within his own story, he has sort of varied things over time. He either dropped out of high school or was expelled for student activism. And he has a long life of activism. Well, that's what I was talking about. For sure. So like he never, still is today.

Sure. He never lost that, which is great. And his dad said, go get a job, you punk. He went to McDonald's in the Bronx, got a job there. And he basically said, this McDonald's was nuts. And I don't know if you've ever been to McDonald's late night in New York City, like now. I have.

It's nuts now. I don't think you're not getting murdered. But it is crazy town. And at McDonald's at 2 in the morning in the safest parts of New York City. Sure, yeah. Like Midtown Manhattan. Yep.

It is kind of fun to go and witness, actually. Yeah. Because it's like. It's never normal. No, no, it's definitely not. But it's also, it's not really dangerous these days. No, it's not. But it's never normal.

I mean, I've only been done this a few times. But there's always been an incident or something going on. All right. I think you just came up with New York's New Tourist Campaign. It's never normal. Never normal. So he describes basically this working there

as a nightly battle against gangs. And he said that the people that work there kept like a nunchucks back in the back in the kitchen, like a stash next to the fryer. Like Tommy Roper. Yeah. And if something happened, which things always did, we were ready.

Right. So apparently one night, that actually came in handy. When some gang came in and they were hassling the customers, Sliwa was the night manager. So it's up to him to do something. And he's the kind of guy who feels like you should do something about that, you know? Especially if you feel like the cops aren't

going to do anything, which is an ongoing theme of Sliwa's kind of. Rhetoric? Yes, perfect. So he jumps over the counter and proceeds to get beaten up by this gang. Well, for a while. Sure.

His co-workers, who had these weapons stashed around the fryer, grabbed their weapons and jumped in and beat the gang off. And apparently this experience, according to Sliwa, inspired him to say, let's make this particular McDonald's a safe place, a haven from crime, by defending it ourselves. And putting the word out that if you come here and try to make trouble, we're going to beat you up with our fryer weapons.

Yeah, and it's here that we should really, really emphasize that a lot of this is from his own words. And I'm certainly not calling the man a liar, but he is definitely a PR guy and has a bit of PT Barnum to him. So these stories should be taken a little bit with a grain of salt, I think. Yeah. One big thing that differentiates him in my mind

from PT Barnum is, number one, no singing. Number two, he did not view people as suckers or chumps to be taken advantage of. As a matter of fact, from everything that I've seen about this guy, say what you want about his kind of bravado and grandiosity and potential lawlessness, he seems to have been very much focused on inspiring people to better themselves in the community.

Absolutely. Like that does seem to be one of his legitimate goals. Yeah, not only making his community safer, but the guardian angels themselves, as we'll see, some of these might have been petty criminals that he's trying to reform. So he's done a lot of great things. So he said, all right, we got this McDonald's lockdown.

Everyone is coming in here, and they can eat their happy meals. This might have been a pretty happy meal even. Yeah. It was right around that time. It would have been during the time when they were in those awesome foam containers. I remember those.

Oh my god, they just make my brain fall out of my ear with nostalgia. Yeah. Remember the McDLT? Sure. Hotside hot, cool side cool? Yeah, sure. Extra waste of foam?

Oh yeah, no, the foam containers were in atrocity, but they were beautiful. I know what you mean. They had a shimmery quality to them. And the colors that they chose, everything was great. So wonderfully toxic. So he said, let's extend this out because it's working so well in McDonald's.

Let's take it to the streets. Let's take it to the Muggers Express, the four train that he had to ride to work with that was particularly dangerous. Right, because again, remember, there's no cops at night on the subway line. No cops. And so the McDonald's night shift

became known as the Magnificent 13. And he said, let's take it to the streets and let's start recruiting people to do this for real. But you know what? We need, because he's a PR guy, very smart to do this. He's like, we need a uniform. Like the Magnificent 13, we're all in our McDonald's uniforms.

Which McDonald's is like, can you guys not do that? Can you use other uniforms? Can you not bring nunchucks to work? That's sort of in the brochure. And so he developed the iconic red beret, shiny red jacket. What's that called, satin, like a satin jacket? Yeah. And a white t-shirt with their logo,

which is the eye peering out from the winged pyramid. I could not find why he came up with that design. I bet he hand drew it. Sure. Oh yeah, he's definitely tight, for sure. So they went from this Magnificent 13 to the Guardian Angels around that time. And they started patrolling the subways.

And we'll talk about some of their tactics and methods in a little bit. But one of the things that first struck Sliwa was that he found that they were not welcomed by the police. The police in the city didn't say, this is great. We need a little help. And these people are stepping up to help keep their community safer and fight crime.

The city did quite the opposite. They said, these guys are nuts. Don't listen to them. They need to stop what they're doing. And we're going to harass them, even though legally speaking, everything they were doing was within their rights. That's right. And one of the reasons the city wasn't down to begin with

was there was a bit of a history here. There was a group in 1968 in the Bronx called the Black Spades. And they had the goal of fighting racism and keeping the neighborhood safe, sort of like Sliwa. And they eventually morphed into a criminal gang. And the cops in the city saw this happen. You're like, look, the Black Spades were great

until they weren't. You guys are essentially a gang too. Right. That's what they said. This is the same thing. This is the same thing is going to happen. This is going to be some vigilante gang that turns into an extortion gang, and they're going to be violent.

They're going to start selling drugs, and it's going to be a problem. I also read, as far as the Black Spades are concerned, Africa Mumbata was a Black Spades member. And they credit the Black Spades and some other groups for creating hip hop culture, like those block parties. They all came out of these groups getting together and hanging out.

Oh, wow. Isn't that cool? Can you dig it? Yes, I can. Did you not know my reference? That was from the Warriors, right? Oh, OK. Gotcha.

But wasn't that the response? Did you not see the extended director's response? So here's some of the rules that he developed early on. And this is all Curtis Sliwa's jam. Like, he set this thing up. He developed all the rules, ran it like a, you know, with a tight fist. Brought all the members on?

Brought them on, and they were, besides their uniforms that he would hand you upon joining up, I guess. I guess that was a fun conversation. Oh, what size are you? Right. What size sat-in jacket do you wear? Exactly. Do you like to button it all the way up?

So you have to be at least 16. Not a serious criminal record, because like we said, he kind of liked taking some of these kids that, like, you know, maybe a shoplifter or a pocket picker and reforming them. Giving them a second chance to prove themselves. And that was a big thing that he did that the Guardian Angels did. This organization was, it said, hey, you live in an area where you can go sell drugs, you can go rob people,

all your friends are doing it, or you can come over here and actually combat that, make your community a safer place to live, get rid of this stuff, and you get the free sat-in jacket. But some people were given an option in this neighborhood, in some people, or in these neighborhoods, and some people took that and became Guardian Angels and actually, like, took a different path in life because of this guy.

That's right. A night manager from Bronx, McDonald's gave these people who joined this option to change their lives. So that's really respectable and commendable. It is. You could be anyone. You could be male or female. You could be any religion.

You could be any race. Any sexual orientation? Yeah, but we should touch on a little bit the racial stuff. It's complicated because if you see some interviews, it seems like he's using sort of blatantly racist language. He would probably say that he's just a realist and he's just talking real. He's from Brooklyn.

Yeah, from the streets. From old Brooklyn. Oh, yeah, not new Brooklyn, old Brooklyn. He's like, yeah, you know, I go to Warby Parker, all those places. You go to Restoration Hardware, you know? Check it out. That's pretty good.

So it's a complicated thing the way he talks in some of these older interviews. Right, but if you go to where the rubber meets the road, he was not only recruiting like Black, Latino, or I should say Latinx, men, women. Sure. Whoever wanted to be a guardian angel and follow the rules and did guardian angel stuff could join.

And these are the people he hung out with, spend his time with. It wasn't like he was in some ivory tower telling everybody what to do and enjoying bossing around these other people. These are people he hung out with. He made lieutenants out of and chapter heads out of it, leaders out of.

So like you said, it's complicated, but he proved himself to be fairly above racial politics as far as his actual practices go. That's right. If you hit the streets on patrol, they would go out together, usually 10 people, but you were never out there alone. No, well, that was the thing, because they

weren't allowed to carry weapons. Oh, no. So had it just been one of them patrolling, they would have routinely been beaten and put in the hospital. Yeah, so not only are they not allowed to wear weapons, but they pat each other down before they go out on patrol to make sure none of them have weapons themselves. And Sliwa would basically act as the dispatcher.

He would sit around and listen to the scanner, the police scanner, or he would get telephone calls from a pay phone, I guess, from another angel saying something's going down. And he would send people out on these patrols to specifically go to a crime that had been committed to try and help, or just go on patrol. Like this subway line would get on the ford train and walk up and down those cars, or go to this neighborhood

and patrol this block. So this is how their patrols would work on the subway in particular, it would be 8, 10, 12 of them. And they would all show up together. Each one would get into a car, so there would be a guardian angel standing out of tension, quiet, silent, looking very stern and serious, not messing around and just projecting that thing.

And that's what Sliwa said is the basis. Like, the guardian angels show up, and they're in control of the situation. So they're reassuring the people who are worried, and they're showing the criminals, like, don't try anything, because there's 10 of us and one of you, or even two of you, right? And then at every stop, all the guardian angels

would lean out and give some sort of hand signal that the coast was clear. If somebody didn't lean out of their car, all the other angels would converge on that car and help out whoever was in trouble. And that's how they patrolled the subways, and that's how they still do, actually. So imagine this, my friend.

I had this thought while I was researching this stuff. Imagine this exact same scenario, but they're wearing tights and capes and masks. And imagine how quickly they would be laughed at and ridiculed and just laughed off the streets. Isn't there a guy in Mexico City who is doing that? Oh, no, there's a documentary. There are quite a few people that do this,

and there's a documentary that follows these real-life quote-unquote superheroes that are trained up and can do martial arts, but they wear a cape and a mask. And it's funny to think about the perception. They could do the exact same thing, and if they're wearing a Batman mask, it's like... So what are you doing? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I wonder if anybody, I wonder if anyone who used to be a caped crusader is now just a regular crusader because that's more legitimate. Maybe, maybe. So here's the thing. They're not just standing there at attention to intimidate criminals, to make sure things are safe.

They don't just call in to the police when something happens. They get involved. We talked about martial arts. They are trained up to engage people physically, encouraged to do so. Right. And if you listen to our July episode 2015

of On a Citizen's Arrest, to make and perform a Citizen's Arrest. Which I was trying to think back, I didn't go back and listen to it, but I was trying to think back of what our overall message was. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was don't do it. Do not do it.

You're gonna get yourself in trouble. These guys routinely do that. Yeah, but I think we were just saying like, hey, if you're just an average Joe or Jane on the street, don't do that. But if you're trained to do so, like a guardian angel, still don't do it. But even still, they say like,

they're not afforded any special rights or privileges. They're just citizens following the letter of the law. But they don't just call the cops and say somebody's getting jacked right now or like you said, just stand there sternly. They go beat somebody up. Well, no, they're trained to use minimal force. Okay, that can still include beating somebody up.

They're trained to restrain somebody and use force, but that's the difference is they're not out there just like delivering a beat down. Because for retribution. Okay, so originally from what I read, that is actually how this whole thing started. That they would beat people down. That Curtis Sliwa and his friend Don Chin,

who was a big dude who also worked at the McDonald's with them. They started out with Sliwa riding the subway, all dressed up with jewelry and everything. Yeah, he was a plant. All right, and then somebody would come over and try to rob him and Chin would come out of nowhere and just beat him up.

That's entrapment. It is, like as a matter of fact, there was a quote from the police commissioner at the time. I read this really awesome New Yorker article from 1980 that was written by Nicholas Pelleggi, who wrote, wise guy, which was the foundation of Goodfellas. One of the greatest movies of all time.

It's definitely the greatest gangster movie of all time. Get out of here with that Godfather Crap. Okay, give me goodfellas every day. How many people's heads just popped right off of their bodies? I mean, they're both great. My head's not popped. I know yours isn't, but somebody out there just like broke through their desk.

Anyway, he wrote this article and in it, one of the police commissioners is like, this is awfully close to entrapment. Dangerously close as a matter of fact, what they were describing. So they stopped doing that. And I guess started doing what you were saying, which is following the law and using minimal force

and not entraping people. Yeah, I mean, that's the idea. And to his credit, he has changed his methods and what he's trained people to do over the years. He's tried to do the right thing it seems like. So a lot of people say to like, oh, this guy got rich off this thing. I don't think that's the case.

I think he leads a pretty modest existence on the Upper West Side still. He's a little bit Ralph Naderish in that respect. Yeah, and they're a nonprofit. The members are volunteers. I don't see how he would make money unless he's just like selling merch or something. Yeah, there was somebody gave him some money to do a,

like basically for his life story to make a movie about it. So he got like 10 grand or something back in the 70s. Yeah, more power to him for that. And apparently he used some of that money to try to sue the people because the movie was so bad. Oh, really? Yeah, so. What movie is that?

I don't remember, I saw it somewhere, but that would be pretty easy to find. But he... Was it Airwolf? It was Airwolf. There's this guy making sweet love to the Airwolf helicopter in the background. Oh, goodness.

It's like that hanged man of Oz. You have to like really look for it. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. Anyway, but yeah, from what I understand, he made no money off of it whatsoever. But some people say he didn't care about money. He cares about prestige. Yeah, and a lot of people say,

oh, he's just a blowhard, blah, blah, this and that. But when you talk to these and read interviews with these, because I've talked to them, these old former angels. Sure, yeah, I know. You roll with them. They all talk about this family and the fact that he did pull them off the streets. Not all.

There are some old former angels that are big time critics of him and his... Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't mean to get to that. But a lot of people have said that like, I was going nowhere, he saved me. Gave me a sense of purpose. Taught me how to do the right thing in life. And also a lot of New Yorkers,

just everyday New Yorkers were very supportive of the guardian angels and what they were doing. I would have felt better on that number four subway train. Yeah, a lot of them did. So that 1980 New Yorker article by Nicholas Pallegi was a hit job. It was just meant to kind of make them look bad and make Ed Koch, who as we'll see,

was not very happy with the angels. Right. Because he was mayor at the time. Make Ed Koch's point look more reasonable. But if you read the following edition, every single one of the letters written in response to that article, supported the guardian angels

and basically called out the New Yorker for just kind of convoluting things. For being the New Yorker. For basically being the New Yorker, being pro-Koch. Well, since he brought them up, he very much dismissed them. I called them vigilantes, the police union, the patrolman's benevolent association.

Ed Koch did. Yeah. Yeah. I said Koch. Right. Yeah. Well, you said him. Some people get lost sometimes.

I started talking like a New Yorker for all of a sudden. I got you. The transit police union, they all came out against the guardian angels saying, don't do this. Phil Caruso of the Policeman's Benevolent Association said, Mr. Sliwa is a publicity seeker. And he does a good job of it.

When you start putting authority in an undisciplined group, it's not only vigilantism. It reeks of Gestapoism. He, not Koch. Sliwa. Okay, so not Koch. Dictates who will be an angel and where they will work. It's preposterous.

Who said that last part, Ed Koch? No, no, no, that was Phil Caruso. Was he talking about Ed Koch? He's talking about Sliwa. But it just hit me today. No one says preposterous anywhere. I want to bring that back. Oh, okay.

That's a great word. You may just have. I hope so. It's preposterous. But a lot of people loved him. Governor Cuomo, whether or not it was a political thing or not, kind of came out in support of them here and there. So he had a good quote in that New York article,

which just go read it. What did he say? He basically said, you know, if these were the children, the sons and daughters of white doctors from Long Neck, we'd be giving them medals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Instead, we're just leveling all these accusations of vigilantism against them.

And like totally missing the point that these guys are taking care of their community and taking up the slack where the cops are leaving off. And frankly, the city's leaving off because they fired so many cops that, you know, it seems a little racist to me. He didn't put it that last part in that words, but it was definitely in there.

And this is 1980 that this guy's saying that. So it seems a legitimate quote. If he was taking a shot at Ed Koch, he disguised it well. So there are also supposedly the rank and file cops, like the guardian angels. I'm sure it just all depends. It's hard to make a sweeping statement like that. But from what I read, the rank and file

were a little more like, yeah, these guys are like trying to restore some sanity to New York. And it was the brass that couldn't really come out and or didn't come out and say that they supported them. Because this is why the presence, the very presence of the guardian angels. They weren't doing their job. Underline the problem that New York had.

New York couldn't whitewash it over because the angels were there, which is another big role that they played, kind of this meta role to kind of agitate the city to do more, agitate the police force to do more in addition to providing, you know, a feeling of comfort to people who are riding the subway. And it didn't help that Sliwa would go on TV shows

and champion Deathwish and taxi driver as inspirations for starting this out, taxi driver, more so, at least in Deathwish, this guy was like, you know, getting back at people that assaulted his wife and daughter and taxi driver, he's just a sociopath. Sure. Yeah. Buddy, I mean, it all worked out for the best in the end. That's right.

So as a result of all of this, Sliwa has long accused the cops of harassing him in multiple ways. He said he was arrested 76 times while carrying out guardian angels stuff. He said that he was kidnapped not once, but twice by two different police forces, one in New York, one in DC. In the New York one, I don't think he alleged

that he was beaten, but in the DC one, he was beaten, burned with a cattle prod arm and a sling, tied up, thrown into a muddy shallow part of the Potomac. They didn't realize it was shallow until he landed, like he thought he was about to be drowned. They heard thud owl and they were like, oops. No, he didn't realize it was shallow.

The cops did, they were messing with him. Who, Ed Koch? Right. Ed Koch ordered the DC cops to throw him in the Potomac, but he said, keep it shallow, keep it muddy. Yeah, and he's been attacked by private citizens who just like, you know, there's that guardian angel guy. Sure.

Let me see if I can get one in on him. As recently as last year in Penn Station, there were these four kids that looked like they were getting in a fight and one of them like, dropped drugs and then picked them up and he kind of went over and like, hey, what's going on here? And they were like, hey, look who it is.

They literally said the words, Newark in the house. Oh yeah? I guess they were from Newark. And one of them sucker punches them in the face and knocks out his front tooth. Front tooth, man. And he- That's expensive to get back.

Well, he said he couldn't afford to get it repaired. That's how little money he has. Very Ralph Nader-ish. He said, insurance won't cover it. They're calling it cosmetic. It's so funny, this is in the article even. He said, they're calling it cosmetic, but he said, my nerve is exposed.

It's very painful. I could totally, that's exactly, that's a Curtis Lee while quote, if I've ever heard one. It's pretty funny. Followed up by, well, for now, I've just kind of folded up some paper towel to stand in. With the pictures of him like, smiling big, missing that front tooth.

Nice. So I think he took, as always, the opportunity to be like, hey, I'm still out there. I'm still getting punched. Look at me. Yeah, and also my insurance company is really a bunch of deadbeats. So there was another incident

where there was a guardian named Frank Melvin. Oh, this is a big one. Heard about this incident going on. On the police scanner. Yeah. From Ed Koch. Rushed to the scene. And as he's rushing to the scene,

this is the cop's version. There's someone on the roof, a cop on the roof. Cop on the ground. And they say this guy comes rushing up. I guess they didn't see his red beret and red satin jacket. Allegedly. And ordered him to halt.

He didn't halt. The cop on the roof shot and killed him. 26 year old father of three. Sliwa says, this is a big cover up. That's not what happened at all. He said a sergeant on the street stopped him dead in his tracks. He opened his jacket and said, I've gotten a weapon, there's no reason to shoot.

And they shot him anyway. And as he was dying on the ground, they prevented other angels from giving him CPR. Which is a very specific claim. It is pretty specific, yeah. To make. So we held a press conference, alleging all this stuff immediately afterwards.

Very agitated, very upset. And this was a, I guess you could say, this is the low point of police guardian angels relations. Yeah, I would say so. A guardian angel has been shot and killed by the police. But from that point on, I think that was in, that was 1980. The beginning of, or the end of 1980.

From that point on, it just started to change and improve. And all of a sudden, the cops kind of got on the guardian angel side. Should we take a final break? Yes. A final break that sounds so cryptic. We're gonna come back and talk about the great 80s right after this.

That's what we should know, that's what we should know. That's what we should know, that's what we should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

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Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Watch, live, apply SKSK, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Okay, Chuck, we're talking about the Grady's. The Grady's are happening. I got Jerry over there. The Guardian Angel, she's listening for once, because Kodjman's coming in. So she's... Me so soup coming out of her nose.

So, The Guardian Angels are at their peak, supposedly topped a thousand members, And this is from Curtis Lee was a recollection in 1981, right? For his numbers. Yeah. Yeah. They're getting good publicity so much so that these budget cuts are going on and the crime rates still sky high. Mayor Ed Koch has no recourse, but to lukewarmly embrace them publicly. Right.

And that's the best way to describe that, I think. Right. Was like, okay. He described them as chicken soup. Have they hurt? No. Who said that? Ed Koch, mayor of New York City at this time. So he did.

So this is a huge turnaround from these guys are vigilantes and they need to stop what they're doing. So this is a big deal. And it actually, I don't know how much it had to do with the real rise of the guardian angels, but they definitely saw their membership swell, like you said, their patrols. It was the height of the guardian angels where the early to right in the mid 80s. Oh yeah, when we were kids and it was just all over the place. Yeah. I'm trying to think that they have a Saturday morning cartoon or something

because some part of my brain is like. Dude, they may have been on like Scooby-Doo or something. Okay. When they did those years where they had all those weird guests. Yeah, Jerry Lewis. The Three Stooges. Jerry Lewis and Jerry Reed. Oh, is he on?

Oh, he was on a bunch of times. Really? Smoky? Yeah, he would sing Pretty Mary's Sunlight or Sunshine. Oh man. So they could find him through the ductwork or something. It was bizarre. But he was on a few times. Remember Batman and Robin, the campy version run?

Yeah. Harlem Globetrotters? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don Knotts? Don Knotts, of course. I could do this all day. The Three Stooges, right? Oh yeah, with Curly Joe.

Oh, okay. They had their own cartoon for a little while. And I suspect that that's why they were on Scooby-Doo is to kind of launch the cartoon version of themselves. I definitely have a memory of seeing a cartooned guardian angel. I do too. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I know. I'm agreeing.

Okay. Just me, Mayor Ed Koch agreeing with you. Okay, good. Podcaster Josh Clark. Thank you. So they developed a system. They were like, all right, if we're all going to work together, let's get these guys an ID card at least. Not a badge.

He called it a badge. Sliwa did. Sure. But it wasn't a badge. Okay. It was an ID card that was official and a sort of a detente and said, hey, let's all quit giving each other hard time. We're all after the same thing here. And he said, this will allow me to open up franchises.

Did you say the badge was issued by the cops though? I don't think it was issued by the cops, but I think it was agreed upon that we'll have an official designation and an official ID card that you recognize. But part of getting that ID card was submitting as a guardian angel applicant to a police background check. That's right. So there was this shroud of legitimacy that came from the police force. But whether the police force wanted to be friends with the guardian angels or not, Sliwa made a very purposeful decision that the guardian angels would have nothing to do with the cops. Right. And he said later on in an interview, the reason why is because it would delegitimize the guardian angels in these neighborhoods that these people would be seen as basically narks or snitches or, you know, cops in neighborhoods where they didn't like cops very much.

But since the guardian angels were separate and had nothing to do with the cops, they had their own legitimacy that would have just been completely ripped away. Yeah. Had they been associated with the cops. I get that. Yeah. So they started popping up all over the country, Sacramento, LA, Buffalo, Cleveland. He's like Tyler Durden at this point. He sort of was.

But he would come in and he would not bring, maybe he would bring some people to train them up momentarily, but then they would go back home. And the idea was that they would run it themselves under his direction. Yeah. And so like the city officials who heard the guardian angels were coming town were worried that a bunch of New Yorkers were moving here to basically patrol this other city streets. And it was never that it was like you were saying they'd train local leadership. Sure. Just like a Dunkin Donuts. Yes.

Exactly like that. Run by Maricotch. Right. So I saw somewhere, Chuck, that Cleveland actually invited the guardian angels to open a chapter there in 1981. Oh, really? Yeah. So it wasn't all like, you know, get out of here. We're going to kidnap you and throw you in the Potomac.

Some cities were like, we need this actually. Yeah. Come breathe some life back into our downtown or whatever. Well, I remember in 1981 when the Atlanta Child Murders were happening, they came to Atlanta to help out here. And I remember very much that being on TV. Oh, yeah. You know, that whole investigation by the FBI or the GBI into the KKK as the suspects in the Atlanta Child Murders? Yeah, yeah.

The media found out about that because Spin Magazine reported on it. Spin Magazine heard about it from the guardian angels who had come to Atlanta. Wow. So they technically broke that story. Are you watching Mindhunter? No. Yeah. That's part of the new season.

Is it? Yeah. Cool. It's just medium good. That's my review. That's why I'm, yeah, I don't want medium good. Yeah, I get you. When's the last time you...

You want to watch a Death Wish 1 through 5 in the remake. I'm just punishing myself until something really great comes along. Sure, I hear you. That and Rift Tracks. I just watched Death Wish and Rift Tracks. So let's talk about vigilaniism for a sec in Bernie Getz. I think we should do a whole episode on the Bernie Getz incident. I was thinking the same thing.

So should we not talk about it at all? No. Really? No, no, we can't. All right. So the brief version is Bernard Getz, the subway shooter, was on a subway one night. These four African-American youths approached him and one of them said, hey, give me $5.

That was the extent of it, right? Yeah, no weapons. I mean, there's a lot of different versions of this story that came out in court, but apparently did not brandish any weapons. Later on, he said like one of them opened their coat and I thought he had a weapon. But he very quickly, and he even described it as a quick draw, and he had it all planned out. He said he had a sequence of shots in his mind, ready to go, left to right, one shot each.

And he shot these four kids and it was a very complex case. We shot him without warning. Yeah, it was a quick draw. But he didn't say like stand back or don't come near. He just quick draw and started shooting. Yep. Quick drew. He quick drew and shot.

He said that he was in physical danger and that one of them might have had a weapon. Everyone else, or not everyone else, was for the courts to decide, but that he was not in immediate physical danger. And then there's this whole disputed fact about whether or not he went up to one of them that was slumped down kind of on a seat, walked up to him and said, you seem okay. Here's another. Bam.

Oh, yeah. Later on, he said, oh, no, I probably just thought that. I didn't say it out loud. And then there's dispute about whether or not that shot even landed, and like if he was actually shot a second time. So I really need to dig into this if we're going to do it for real. Well, yeah. But the long and short of it is there was a vigilante shooting on the subway.

Half of New Yorkers were like, good for you, Bernie Getz. And half of New York said, no. Don't pull out a gun and start shooting people. Right. And the guardian angels said, oh, we're in the Bernie Getz camp. That's right. So much so that in 1985 on the one year anniversary of that shooting, they held a ceremony celebrating Bernie Getz in the subway where the shooting took place.

That's right, in that station. Which you just don't celebrate people being shot, but they really cast their lot behind Bernie Getz, and it really damaged their credibility as upholders of law and order in the minds of a lot of everyday New Yorkers. Yes, another thing that damaged the reputation of the guardians is when Sliwa was kind of forced to admit later that early on we faked some of these things entirely. Talk about damaging your credibility.

There was one of the first promotions that they may have even still been the Magnificent 13 was them returning a wallet that had $300 in it to like a parish priest or something like that. Oh, wow. And they drummed it up. They cooked the whole thing up. They told the media about it and got a lot of press, a lot of early press. And Sliwa says he regrets doing it, but also it really helped. And that either he said it or one of the early founders, co-founders said,

have we not done this? The organization probably never would have taken off. Yeah, some of the other things supposedly faked. One of them doused themselves in gasoline and said that, you know, a criminal had done this. Yeah, because there had been another crime where somebody had doused or set a ticket booth operator on fire in their ticket booth at the subway. And so they were basically capitalizing on that like it was going to happen again and they stopped it. Another one where you see these angels, they're all bruised up and bleeding. Turns out that one of them had like fallen down the steps and gotten bruised.

The other one picked off a scab and made it bleed again. Yeah, so gross. So this did not help their reputation, but you know, he's acknowledged being a big PR guy. Yeah, and that's the thing. If you read those replies to that New Yorker article, they're like, basically all you've done is demonstrate that they're PR hounds, but also that they're actually good at what they're doing. So, you know, that's fine. That is a real dent in their legitimacy for sure that they faked it because then you're like,

how many did they fake, which is in dispute too? Yeah, what is not in dispute that we should cover quickly is on June 19, 1992, Sliwa was kidnapped and shot after entering a fake taxi or I guess a stolen taxi. And it was supposedly at the hands of John Gotti Jr. Because Sliwa went on the radio show. I think he still has a show. Yeah, and 77 W ABC. Yeah, talking about, you know, Gotti's just a drug dealer.

He's a serial killer. And John Gotti Jr. didn't like that and was charged with this crime, but got off three different times, three different trials, including one in one of the most recent one, 2005. Oh, yeah. And all the juries said, I'm not going to. No, all three juries were unable to agree to convict him of these charges. For that reason, no, you never know. I'm not, you know, remember they used to call John Gotti Sr. the Teflon Don.

Yeah. Do you want on him too? Nothing sticks. The 80s are a gold mine for everything for episodes. Okay. What a decade. So the Guardian Angels still around. They came back again in 2018.

Although Curtis Sliwa during publicity said, we didn't go anywhere. We've been doing patrols every night, which may or may not be true, but you could still find them if you look hard enough or if you go watch videos from 2018. That's right. If you want to know more about the Guardian Angels, well, go meet one. They'll tell you all about it. But in the meantime, it's time for, it's time for our friend, John Hodgman. Did you see that signed on the back of the iMac?

You'd appreciate that. Mike from Bojack Horseman. I was wondering if that was a Bojack. I have not watched that show. I haven't. Don't tell Paul at dump. I've not seen an episode. You should totally sign the Mac though.

Yeah, I'd love to. That would be ironic. Get it? For the elderly. Sure. Is that a Nordic's hat you're wearing? This is not a Nordic's hat. Is that New Hampshire?

I know. I have yet to look it up online, but I wondered. I was like, that's not so bad. I, you're referring, of course, to the chapter of my new book, Medallion Status, entitled Extinct hockey, about the only sport that I like being. I was. Following the logos of Extinct hockey teams. Northampton.

Nope. You'll never get it. North Hamish. Is it an N and an H? It is. Okay. Yeah. I don't have any other guesses.

Let's try all the age towns with North and then go through and start over with New. It's not a town. Okay. Is it aville? So something hockey. It's not. It's not. And it's not the trick of it.

I'm leaving. Is that a cubs hat? There is a guy who would come to my events once I started talking about my fascination with the Hartford Whalers logo best logo in sports. It's pretty great. And the Quebec Nordic's logo worst logo in sports, like an actively aggressively bad design choice. Right. Like it slams the door in your face and you're like, I wasn't even going to knock.

Why are you doing this to me? Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm listening. I just have to find the. You need to look it up. I know it. The Quebec Nordic's.

Oh, sure. Well. Hockey. Hockey. Now, what would you say that is? Well, I mean, I get the hockey stick and puck part, but I don't know what the other party is. Well, first of all, the hockey stick. So it is supposed to be a blood red igloo bisected by a hockey stick.

That does not come through. With a very large puck, and the angle at which the hockey stick bisects the igloo is supposed to sort of suggest an N for Nordic's. I had always considered to be a deformed elephant. Sure. I was going to say, I'd always taken it as like, I've seen this before. I just didn't realize what it was. I thought it was some sort of Republican logo. Yeah, it looks because it is red, white and blue.

Yeah. The only thing that you can't really account for is the puck, which really is just a circle. It is. It's it's it's a confusing piece of design. Yeah. And there was a guy who had come to my shows in New York and still does name Jean Monterey Selle. But for a long time, I didn't know his last name. So I just referred to him as mysterious Jean because at the end of every show.

Yeah, you're looking at the Hartford Whalers logo. So good. So smooth. So so I mean, the beauty of the Hartford Whalers logo, of course, is not only does it have that beautiful whale's tail on the W, but the two together form a negative space H for Hartford. All of this has gone on ad nauseam in the book by the way. And now this is what you can read in medallion status. You never know.

What? No, no, he'd never noticed. I got to keep things going here. So right now, John is putting his tricks on everybody. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? There's this trick that you describe in the book where you show people that and you claim that some people have gasped when you've pointed.

Everybody sees the W. I don't know if I picked up on a gasp. But yeah, Chuck was impressed. That's like the arrow in FedEx. In FedEx, the negative space arrow in FedEx. You know that one, of course. Sure. Right. Yeah.

And you also had a new way of banning the 80s called negative space. I did. In the early 80s, if I'm not mistaken, right? Well, I did as a child. I thought you did. No? Was that someone else? I'm torn with the Thomas and Twins.

I was in Boston recently with another monster of podcaster, Nick Weiger, who's one-half of the Doughboys. Oh, sure. If you don't know those guys, feel their hot breath on your necks. They're coming for you. Sure. Doughboys are coming. Everybody knows.

Nick Weiger and I were walking through Boston, my hometown-ish. I'm from Brookline. I was like, and there is the Boston Common. They used to have concerts on the Common. And I said, that's where I saw my first concert. He said, oh, wow. What was it? I said, well, it was the Thompson Twins.

And he goes, who are they? Oh, yeah. And I just silently walked into traffic. Wow. That was fine. My first was hauling oats. Hauling oats, right. Till Tuesday opening.

That's amazing. Amy Mann. Yeah, Amy Mann, our friend Amy Mann. I would say friend of all people. My experience was cheap trick for a show. Yeah. And my experience with Amy Mann is I've met her a couple of times briefly as she's fleeing the room because more

than five people have showed up at the party. Amy Mann is very social. And she goes on the Jonathan Colton cruise, which- Really? Yeah, neither of you have been on, right? No, I haven't. You've never been invited. Really?

No, we haven't. Well, we can buy tickets, I think, is what John's saying. No, I think- Well, I'm selling tickets. That's why I'm here. In the form of giant boxes of peanut. Let me get my cigar box. I'll write out some tickets for you.

So anyway, Mysterious Gene would show up to my shows. And at the foot of the stage after every show, he would be standing there. And I consider Mysterious Gene because A, I hadn't bothered to learn his last name, and B, he was acting mysteriously. He would just lurk at the foot of the stage and bestow upon me a new extinct hockey hat that he had found somewhere. Each time?

Yeah, like multiple times. So like the Vancouver Millionaires who became the Vancouver Canucks, the Montreal Wanderers who were the English language community team, hockey team in Montreal, you know, because the Canadians were the, and are the French. No, they're the only hockey team. Why am I talking about sports, whereas we're talking about it? Because you know, you've traipsed out of extinct hockey

and into like real hockey. Yeah, I know. Be careful. I've accidentally become infected with a certain amount of actual sports knowledge. You're down with big hockey. Well, that's the beauty of like as a, as a non, I never under, I never got into sports because sports, as I discussed

in the book, sports tends to be about winning. It seems like winning is the point of the sports. Yeah. And that, and I am only, I'm only ever been a fan of an underdog, do you know, like, and so I could get with growing up in Boston, I could talk, I would be fine with the red socks because they were losers, they were losers for so long. And they were in this constant battle against the quintessential

bullies of sports, the Yankees, and then they would, they would fail. What are you talking about? Because when I was growing up, the red socks were like Wade Boggs and Roger Clemens and they were not losers. No, they weren't losers, but they wouldn't make, there was the bullseye. Yeah, they would, they would always lose to New York, but

they beat everybody else, right? And they wouldn't always lose to New York either. It was just, it was always a, there was always the, the curse, right? Okay, Bill Buckner. Right, right. Yeah, like, well, yeah, that was probably the, that was the 1988 World Series between the New York, between the Mets

and the Red Sox. Right, yeah, the Miracle Mets, but you're talking, why are we talking about this? I thought the Miracle Mets was 86. It could be, I can't remember. Yeah, I think it's 86, but you're talking about the curse, which is the fact that the Boston Red Sox traded away Babe Ruth.

Yeah, that's a way older curse. Forever cursed. Yeah, and they were Buckner. Right, and they were cursed and they were, and they were never, they couldn't win, they couldn't win the World Series and they couldn't, they didn't go to the World Series for a long time and when they did, the, the ball went right through Bill Buckner's legs.

That's right. Oh boy. And that, I, you know, I could get behind that because they were these consistent underdogs. When they won the World Series, I was like, you guys are dead to me. I can't, I can't handle that. I can't handle that.

So hockey is always underdog, no matter what, even at the highest level. Right. Because it's the least, it's the minorest of the Major League sports. Yeah. And everyone, everyone who is a hockey fan in the United States, you know, is some, is to some degree a man or woman

without a country and that country is Canada, like they just don't have, it's, you know, their teams are constantly failing and moving and renaming. I mean, they have hockey in Phoenix. Yeah. In Las Vegas. Yeah. It's ridiculous.

But you, well, you make the point in the book that like even in a big city, it's still like the little brother to the, you know, baseball or basketball or football or something. Right. And hockey fans are, they're true. I mean, they're true fans, but I don't want to give away too much, but I do, after my fascination with the extinct hockey takes root, I talk in the book about, I wonder

whether I would like actual hockey. Yeah. And I go to an actual hockey game. And for the most part, I found it be awesome. Yeah. Charming. It's nice that, that cool air, it's just so bizarre to be in a building and be cold like that.

Yeah. And it's a certain kind of cold. It feels good. Yeah. And I can make a lot of fun live though. It's, it's the one sport that seeing it live really like even if you're not a fan, you could probably enjoy the three hour experience.

Yeah. Well, what hockeyists are amazing, you know, ice skating alone is impossible enough, you know, just to prevent yourself from falling down all that time. Nevermind doing it backwards and then someone hands you a stick and says, now hit that piece of hard rubber into that tiny area. I did that for a little while.

It's hard. Yeah. It's, I can't, I can't imagine it's, it's so, it's so challenging that you, you know, the tension of the hockey game is you're waiting for this almost impossible event of getting a goal. It's like, what, waiting to see a quantum event. Right. So there's all this built up tension and there's massive

reliefs when it happens. Yeah. But it happens so quickly, like usually you look away for a second. Right. And, and then you miss it. But, you know, I, I enjoy, I enjoyed the, the, the hockey itself was very charming because it was a Pittsburgh

penguins game for whatever reason against the Tampa, Tampa bad guys. Yeah. Lightning. Right. I was, I was a penguins person because Ron France, Ron Francis went from the, went from the whalers to play for the.

Right. So there was a whalers legacy there. Yeah. I brought my people wear whaler stuff at the penguins. Well, no, no, not necessarily. I was just made that up. Well, no, no, no, no, people are really into whalers, merchandise now.

I think largely because of my personal lobbying for the amazing, the amazing sports design of the logo by Peter Good and West Hartford, Connecticut. But before I went to this game, I called a hockey blogger that I know, Greg Wischninski. And, of course he's a hockey blogger. And I was like, I'm thinking of wearing my, my whalers hat to this hockey game, but I don't, I don't want anyone to

hit me. Right. I don't want, I figure it's fine, but I just want to double check that there are no deep rivalries or something that I'm going to be, you know, triggering among the very wise and he said it was, it was probably people have a lot of fondness for the whalers and that was fine. But I, I, I didn't, I decided not to, I bought a penguins

hat and I wore the penguins hat. Right. And the thing about extinct hockey that is, that is so met, that is different from the thing about real hockey, actual hockey is different from extinct hockey is extinct hockey. The outcome is known. They, they lost.

Right. Right. You know what I mean? You just feel sad. You think about it. Right. And actual hockey is out. It's unfolding in front of you.

You don't know the outcome. Right. And as you know, I cannot tolerate ambiguity. I dislike it very much. And I came down to sudden death and I got really, really, really nervous. And Greg had, Greg had told me that, Greg had told me that, you know, when he would get nervous growing up watching

hockey, he would drink pink lemonade as a, as a young person and that would, that would help the team win. And I was offended by that because I don't love sports, but I have an appreciation for athletes. What they're doing is the, the product of hard work and training and, and, and physics and physical space. Right. You probably don't believe in superstition either.

Yeah. I believe in science. I think it's an insult to athletes for Greg to think he can control their bodies with his mind and beverage. Was he a kid? He was a kid at the time. Okay. But you know, there's plenty of adults that have superstitions.

Yeah. And of course in that moment, in sudden death, after, you know, three periods in a couple of over time or whatever, however it was, it had been a lot of hockey. I was like tired and cold. And I loved the hockey, but I was ready for hockey to be over. Sure.

And I, but I wanted my, my team to win the penguins. Let's go pens. And in that moment of sudden death, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to put on my heart for wheelers hat because it's going to help them win. Like science was abandoned. Yeah. And all of a sudden I was, I was not merely superstitious.

I was convinced that my, my putting on a different hat was going to affect the outcome of what was happening on the ice. And when you think about it, it makes sense. Whalers, penguins, they're both marine animals. They're going to work for each other. You know what I mean? And of course I put on the whalers hat within a seven seconds, penguins lose.

Really? Penguins lose. And just like the whole, the whole arena went dark. It felt like, and only I knew that I had caused it to happen. Did you keep it to yourself? Of course. I did not tell anyone. I'm sorry everybody.

I forced the outcome. The penguins did not win. Was it a playoff game or anything? It was a playoff game. Oh wow. But I think that that year, I don't think they were eliminated. It was, it was fine.

They went, they went on to do some more good hockey. What's the new, the NH on your hat? Oh, so Gene would bring, right. Mysterious Gene would mysteriously, like would mysteriously appear. He would apperate Harry Potter style to go to the stage with new hat. And the.

Loram ipsum. Right. And then, oh, there was one, the Brooklyn Americans, which is a. Wait, wait, wait. No, just keep, keep staying with Mysterious Gene. No, that was another happening. Okay.

There was a hockey team that played for one season. And then he started running out of hockey teams. And he gave me this hat, which is his really cool hat. It is not a hockey hat, however. And it is an existing sports team. But it is, it is, it is a sports team in Japan. Oh, okay. Is it a baseball team?

It is a baseball team. And it is, do you want to. I have no idea. I've never seen it before. Baseball teams in Japan are often organized around corporations. Okay. I don't know whether the corporations form the teams

or sponsor the teams, but this is a longstanding Japanese baseball team. Like the Xerox Tigers or something. The equivalent. Yeah. This is the, the, the company, the NH is Nippon Ham. Okay. Ham.

I've heard of that. Wow. Yeah. And these are the Nippon Ham fighters. Wow. This is the Nippon Ham fighters. That's a great. This is a great hat.

Great hat. Yeah. I mean, the logo doesn't really get that across that they're Ham or fighters. No, no. Even Japanese, but. It's pretty classy. The story behind it is pretty great.

It's a pretty good, it's a pretty good looking logo and anyone can look it up. It's the old fashioned one. If you're listening. It's no Hartford-Waylor's logo. No. But that, I'll tell you something that, you know, I was, I was, I was in Boston doing, doing another

podcast, the Doughboys podcast. Sorry. Who are breathing down our necks. Yeah. They're coming for you. Doughboys are coming for all of us. And no small part because you're aiding them apparently. No, I'm just, I'm, what, what is it when you are on

the highway and you drive real, real close to the back of a truck. Tailgate. Backdrafting. Backdrafting, right? Yeah. That's how you, you get mileage, right? Because.

Supposedly, yeah. You're not, you're, you're reducing wind shear against you. Right. You're, you're riding in their wake. That's what I'm doing. The NASCAR, they do that. That's what I'm doing with you guys.

That's what I'm doing. The Doughboys. It's a way to go. You're drafting. I'm just grabbing on and hanging on. I hope you guys will bring me. But you don't need any help. You have your own podcast.

Judge John Podgeman. It's a cult classic. I think it's bigger than ever too. It's doing very well. Yeah. I'm amazed. And you know, we've doing it not quite as long as you guys have been doing.

But it's been on for a long time. Yeah. And I, I know people who point to judgments that you've made to settle other disputes. Like no, Hodgman's rule that a hot dog is not a sandwich. Hot dog is not a sandwich. People like site that. It's okay.

I'm not going to get in. Yeah. I mean, it is not a sandwich at all. Thank you. I don't understand how that's true. Oh, you think it's a sandwich? It's not that I think it's a sandwich. It's more, I realize I'm inviting Hodgman to explain.

And I'm refusing. But I don't, I don't see how it has. How the, I just think I have to go listen to that episode because I'm more aware of the cultural aspect of your ruling than I am with the actual episode. It actually wasn't an, it wasn't an episode. I, I also write a little column net in the New York Times magazine.

Yeah. Called Judge John Hodgman. No one who reads the magazine knows that there is a podcast called Judge John Hodgman. I do. Thank you, Josh. You are of course the exception. It proves every rule.

And no one, no one who listens to the podcast ever reads the New York Times magazine and. I do. Oh, once again, exception rule. But someone had written in that he and his buddy were having a fight over where a hot dog was a sandwich. And I had to think about it for a long time. Cause I appreciate why you would sort of say, well, of

course it is, but there is something weird and different about it that makes the question sticky, right? I mean, like, and I was trying to think, you know, what would be the disqualifying factor? What would be the trait? Cause there are many traits that hot dogs and a typical sandwich, you know, your classic hand sandwich, Nippon ham, go fighters.

Yeah. Uh, having common in terms of bread and, and, and filling proportion and style and whatever. Condiments. Condiments. Yeah, especially like Chicago style. It's a sandwich. He is a hot dog.

Yeah. And it's obviously shaped, it's obviously shaped different than a classic Nippon ham sandwich. Right. Like straight up square cutting triangle. With bread that's not connected. Right. Right.

No, I think that's a big one. Yeah. The disqualifying thing that is shaped and it has connected bread. Well, I would say, I would never strike me to say that a sub or a hokey or a hero is not a sandwich. Oh, that's a great point. A hero ain't nothing but a sandwich.

Sure. According to young adult literature. I don't know that. That's an old. I don't know that reference. Is it a goosebumps reference or? It's before, even before then. Remember how it's like a Thompson twins ear thing, man.

I'm older. I'm older. I'm not young like you guys. You're my same exact age. I'm two months older than you. But finally the thing, is that true? March or June, right? I'm June.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Happy birthday, old man. Sure. You're getting it hard. Happy birthday to you both. Thanks. So, John, we're talking about your book here.

Oh, wait a minute. Hot dogs. Wait a minute. You didn't want to explain this again. But now it happened. So I said, what is the other trait that hot dog? Is there any disqualifying trait that a hot dog would have that a sandwich wouldn't or vice versa?

And then I realized like, well, yeah. Ahogia hero sub, grinder, wedge sandwich. They call those wedges and buffalo, I believe. You would cut those in half and share them. Any sandwich, anything that I consider a sandwich, you cut it in half and share. Like soup in a half sandwich. That's a thing.

You never get soup in a half hot dog. That'd be weird. Would you cut in foot long in half? No. Well, I'm not saying you physically can't. No, but would you? That's a really great point. No, I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever cut a hot dog in half.

Unless it's like to appease an extremely, not even an extremely picky job, but a child. Do you know what I mean? Right. You just made me physically high. You did something in my brain with that disqualifier. Plus the hot dog bun has that metal door hinge on the bottom that subs down.

Well, that's the same. The hoagie can, too. Yeah. They don't have a metal door hinge, do they? Sure, yeah. All right. A metal door hinge? Yeah, that's what the hot dog bun,

that's how it fits together, right? Metal? Yeah, it's got that metal door hinge on the bottom. That's what happened to your teeth, huh? That's what happened. I was doing a bit, guys. So, oh, sorry. Sorry.

So, I've read this book of yours. This is what your fifth book? This is my fifth book. Congratulations. Congratulations. It's called Medallion Status. It's due out October 15th in hardcover, I believe. In hardcover?

Also, electronic printing? I have pre-ordered. It's available for pre-order. Yeah. And audio book, also, all available on October 15th. Depending on when you hear this, you may either order or pre-order it at bit.ly.medallionstatus, all one word, all capital letters,

and it'll take you to anywhere you buy books, including Indie Bound, if you want to connect with your local independent shop. That's great, man. Two L's in Medallion these days, right? Two L's in Medallion. Did I spell it wrong in my mind? No.

Or on my book? No, no. Is that one of the typos you found in this Advanced Readers copy? So, in this book, it is dripping with nostalgia. And one of the things you're kind of famous for on our podcast these days is for considering nostalgia to be utterly toxic.

I don't know if you remember coming on a show last year, a couple of years ago. I remember very much, and nostalgia is a toxic impulse is also... So, how do you rectify? Has become a meaningful point of settled law on Judge John Hodgman, where people are trying to erase progress

and believe it can be done. And I think that that's a terrible social movement. And culturally, when we get too fond, over-fond of the past and just want to live in it and live in it and live in it, you get a culture where they're making Battlestar Galactica again. Right.

No, I totally agree. I mean, just announced today, you know, they're rebooting Battlestar Galactica a third... Well, now a second. Oh, I hadn't heard that. Is that right? Are you going to be on this one? I don't know.

Were you on the last one? Just because I believe that it's a piece of toxic nostalgia doesn't mean I don't need a job. I had one. I had a bit roll on the 2003 to 2009 Ronald D. Moore, David Ike show run Battlestar Galactica in Syfa. I was in the fourth season and I did not do a good job

and it was not worth watching. What was your big line? These pretzels are making me thirsty. It really is a very... I think I was referring to a guy's brain scan and I was a brain doctor, a space brain doctor, I should say. Sure, yeah.

It really is a very lovely image. All I care about is how crazy... All I care about is how perfectly this bullet got lodged in his main character's brain. Right. And his wife, Starbucks, is like freaking out because he can't speak anymore because he's gotten...

Shot in the brain? He's been shot in the brain. Sure. And it's... He's got that syndrome. No, but we call it word salad, but it has a term, a brain injury that causes you to be able to...

Aphasia? Yeah. Yeah? So he's going into aphasia, fugestates, and I'm like, yeah, it's called word salad, it happens, but anyway, this is really amazing. I thought Starbucks was the name of the robot and Buck Rogers.

No, you're talking about Tweaky. Okay. Tweaky? Maybe you need a little more nostalgia. Maybe I'll prescribe a little bit for you. I've been avoiding it ever since you came on last time, so I'm like, wow, if it is toxic. I feel bad if you interpreted that as

think, never think about the past. It didn't really, John. I was just going through here looking for something, something to hammer you with. They're kind of gotcha. Yeah, exactly. The Joshy Sandbag is known for. So this book actually made me laugh out loud multiple times.

Thank you very much. I'm glad. I can't remember the last time I read something that made me laugh out loud. Did you not read Vacation Lance, my previous book? I actually did not. Oh, you didn't?

No, I haven't read it yet. Well, that's interesting because, yeah, this is my fifth book, but the first three obviously, or perhaps not so obviously, were. Compendiums? Were compendiums of fake trivia, of fake facts.

Yeah. I loved making them, although by the third one I was like, I cannot come up with a zeppelin joke anymore. Like this is not what I want to be doing anymore. And by that time, you know, a lot of people were venturing into fake facts as a cultural and political tool.

And I wanted to get away from that. You took a long break though between writing those books. Yeah, I did. Vacation Lance. Well, it was a couple of years when I was just going up on stage in Brooklyn just telling whatever stories I could tell

to make people engaged and laugh, ideally, and then collecting extinct hockey caps from mysterious gene at the end of the night. And then I finally compiled those. But I was trying to figure out what I still had to say and what I realized about those stories were, they were all true.

They weren't dissembling. They weren't arch. They weren't absurdist humor. They were just sort of first person stories from my life. In Vacationland, as I was transitioning from one geographical place to another, from Brooklyn, New York to rural Maine, where we spend a lot of time now,

and traveling through a different wilderness of middle age and sort of adjusting to the fact that I was, the time does move forward and I'm not staying the same age. Well, the book makes it sound like you're adjusting rather well. Well, thank you very much. Well, so medallion status is not a, you know,

is stories from the same period of time, but rather than talking about the time that I spent in the cold, painful beaches and cold, painful water of Maine, back on the road working on various television shows and all the various weird jobs, because you talk about the Coolidge Corner movie house. I talk about all the weird jobs that I've always had,

including the weirdest job. You know, there was the most recent one, which was this unexpected experience of being on television and being somewhat famous and then the experience of sort of losing that job to a degree. Yeah. Not completely, just did it.

Just did a two episode arc on the unnamed television program. Yeah, it's really maddening just how little you actually name in here. You don't name drop almost at all. Oh, well, that's true. I guess, I guess I don't know why I did that because you could probably figure out all the different shows and people that I'm referring to.

But it's just, if you don't do that, it becomes this kind of ongoing saga. What show is he talking about now? I'm here to unload all the secrets. So you were killed a couple of times. Yeah. What shows were you killed on? I was killed on...

I just remembered another one. That's why I paused. Because the two that I always remember are the Nick and Blind Spot, but I was also killed on John Glazer's Delocated, but that's a different story. My main deaths were on the NBC thriller Blind Spot. Did not see that. Well, you were one of few people in the world.

Was it huge? Internationally, it's a huge show. Oh, that's great, man. Well, not so great because I got killed. Is it the one where you were a bad FBI agent? I was an evil FBI agent. Evil FBI agent who was a meanie to all the nice people. I also was killed offscreen in the Nick,

which was Steven Soderbergh's thing. But the Blind Spot death was particularly frustrating because the show was created by a friend of mine who had been a producer and writer on Board to Death, which is an HBO show that I was on. One of my faves. Me too, and I really missed that. Everybody does.

We created this new show, which is this thriller that is very smart and fun, and it's like a bunch of puzzles, and it's visually very distinctive, and I was very proud to be asked to be a small part of it. But all those things are great, but the really great thing about Blind Spot is, and I'm not sure everyone who watches it around the world

appreciates this particularly great thing about Blind Spot, is that it shoots at Steiner Studios, which is a 20-minute drive from my house. It was the greatest. It was like going, like as a person who has held tons and tons of different weird oddball jobs from literary agent to cheese monger, to traffic counter,

to famous minor television personality, to podcast or whatever. It's a wonderful itinerant experience where you learn a lot and you get to meet a lot of people, but you're hustling all the time, hustle, hustle, hustle. To just drive to my job and park at the studio and then go in and then have a little breakfast. How great was that?

And then say my words and make my faces, which is what acting is, and then drive home like a straight-up dad. Oh, the greatest. Bored to death was in your neighborhood too, right? Bored to death shot there a lot. Bored to death shot all over Brooklyn, however, but Blind Spot, a lot of it shoots just right in that studio,

and it was just this controlled, comfortable environment, and they have snacks for you. I was like, this is, I'm ready. I'll do this for the rest of my life. I'll cancel everything else. I'm going to Blind Spot it till the end. And then Martin goes, did you read the next script? I'm like, no, he's like, oh, you're going to like it.

And I do like it because it turned out my character was a monster. But then that monster got put down, rather than being a monster for years on the show. I was a monster for a second on the show. And I got the evil FBI agent got shot dead by the niceies. And I was like, I don't want that to happen.

And I said to Martin many times, like, is there any, you know, I notice a lot of people who die on the show come back as like a flashback or a hallucination. And he goes, yeah, that happens. Like, what if I come back as a hallucination or a flashback? I don't think that's really going to, I have an idea. How about I come back as my own twin,

except instead of as an evil twin plot line, this is a good twin. I'm the good twin. And I don't, and I'm not mean to everybody. And they make me part of the good guy club. And he's like, that will never, never, ever happen. But it was the show that sort of started the maximum in my career. And I would say to show runners whenever I would be hired

and guest role or whatever, I'd be like, you got to kill me. You got to kill me in the show. Because every show that I am killed in becomes a huge commercial and clerical success. And every show that I live in gets canceled. Yeah. And you almost, this is a part that you would have gotten killed in,

but did not, was Breaking Bad. You almost played Gabe. Was it Gabe? Which one was Gabe? It was a major character in the second or third season. I remember the actor who was cast, David Costabile, or David Costable is how he pronounces his name. I always thought it was Costabile, but I ran it.

He's an incredible actor. David Costable. And you've seen him in everything from the wire to Flight of the Concord. I think he's on billions or something now. He's a constantly working actor and entirely appropriately. And frankly, did a much better job than I could have done in that role. But I had been offered that role.

And this is a role of Walt's assistant after he and Jesse part. Right. Who gets killed. Who does get killed. Spoiler for those of you who have not watched All of Breaking Bad. And I was afraid to take the job because it meant going and spending a lot of time in Albuquerque. And I was just, it made me scared.

Like I'm leaving my family behind and being in Albuquerque. And it was a terrible mistake for me. I mean, it was a terrible, like, yeah, I should have left my family behind. Right. They would have handled it. It would have been an incredible learning opportunity for me. Yeah. And an incredible experience.

And so it was a terrible mistake for me and a great outcome for Breaking Bad. Because they got David Costable to do it. And I'm sure, I mean, what he brought to that. And I'm sure his role got much bigger because of what he was doing. I'm sure if I had gotten that role, there would be like, can we kill him sooner? Let's not draw this out. Let's just have this happen right away.

And I saw him at a coffee shop in New York. Eisenberg's my favorite old-timey coffee shop. Really? And he was there. And I just said, I'm really glad you got that role. He's like, it's actually, it's pronounced Costable. He said it. I always thought it was Costabile.

How does it, how's it pronounced on the audio version of Medallion status? I don't, I did not mention his name. I didn't really, I only told that story in reflection in Medallion. Yeah. Because in the book you say, like go to say yes. Yeah. Which I thought was really, it's a good, it's good advice. Yeah.

It, you know, I was asked the subtitle of the book is True Stories from Secret Rooms. Because I've always been adept even before I was whatever I am famous of sort of getting into, getting into rooms that I wasn't necessarily invited into. And I loved peering into secret societies of different kinds. And, you know, when you, when you're on TV a little bit, you get invited into gifting lounges at the Emmys and into private parties or whatever. And then, but on my own without, and I guess because I had a little bit of fame, I also was able to weasel my way into a dinner at Yale University at a secret society there

called Book and Snake and the secret societies at Yale University. I went to Yale and Yale's a very old college. It predates frats. So they had to come up with other systems for young men to hang around each other and live together. So they're like, they were still figuring it out. So they're like, they had two experiments. One was secret societies, which are these senior societies, about 15 to 20 seniors, originally all men at the time, you know, but a book, Skull and Bones is the most famous

one. Sure. Book and Snake, Skrull and Key are some of the other ones. And they inhabit these, these windowless, these beautiful, what look like, like beautiful old municipal buildings, architecturally very significant built in the 1920s or so, and often designated landmarks and they have no windows and they're just clubhouses for seniors. It's like, they're like tomb, they're called tombs and they're, you know, sort of museums of white privilege that you wander.

And then the other thing that the other idea they came up with was like, how many acapella, how many acapella singing groups can we have? 35? It's like, there's more acapella per capita in New Haven than anywhere else on the earth and no one's doing anything about it. It was shutting it down. So I had wanted to go into Book and Snake. This is part of the reason, I may be the reason I applied to Yale because I was fascinated by these clubs and I had gotten invited to go to one as a freshman, a party at Book and

Snake and I was so excited that I got runously drunk. As soon as I was in there, I fell down the stairs, hit my head, woke up in the hospital. It was very lucky that nothing worse happened. Yeah, that's pretty lucky. And you could have been in offering that evening. Maybe that was what was supposed to have happened, but I escaped. Somehow they found me screaming in New Haven, bloody wearing nothing but a loincloth and a goat mask.

I don't know what happened, it was wild. And I tried to remember, all I wanted to do was see inside this building and I had been in there, but all of my memory of the inside had been erased. I could not remember what had happened. I remember the last thing I remember was walking up to the door, I'm like, boy, these secret societies, no, they're stuck. He really came out to erase a mind. Just get somebody liquored up and push him down the steps every time.

I think I did it myself, but when I got a little bit of renown and would tell this story on stage and it was getting around, I was contacted by a couple of booking snakes. Snakeys? Yeah, snakeys. I won't say their names. It was a man and a woman, we'll call them Booker and Snakeya. And they said, why don't you come to dinner? And I'm like, yeah, I want to come to dinner in this clubhouse and I went.

And it was so weird and exciting too. And like, you know, life doesn't offer perfect circles very often. And the image as on the cover of the book by Aaron Draplina, the logo of Book and Snake is a book and a snake, an Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. So it's like this perfect, like that's a symbol of eternity. And also a symbol of the dumbest snake in the world. Maybe I like that snake was about to eat my own butt by going back in. But we had a wonderful time and, you know, there were really nice young people.

There were some older alumni who had come in. Like there was one guy, James, who's in his early 30s. And he had just told me he'd just been appointed. Public transportation czar for New Haven. Like, you know, if there are any Alex Jones people out there who are wondering is the public transportation of some small Southern Connecticut cities run by secret societies. The answer is yes. The Illuminati is real.

They're running your public buses in New Haven. And it was just, we had a fun time. We were hanging out and at some point the young people out of politeness said, you know, well, you know, what's the, what would you say is a secret to your success? Such as it is, you know, and. We can keep secrets, you know. That's right. The answer was go on television.

The advice that I gave them was first of all, don't get drunk and fall down the stairs. Please don't get drunk and fall down the stairs. Don't think that you're immortal. Don't, especially, you know, white guys truly don't understand that they're breakable until they get older. You don't grow up with the sense of my body can be harmed or taken at any moment by another figure of authority or another person in the way non-white guys feel every day. Like, so they do things like jump off cliffs in Hawaii, climb up mountains and fall down

stairs because they think they're immortal, but you're not, you can fall down, you can break your neck and die. So don't get drunk and stay on the stairs. And the other thing is the secret of my success is the same secret for what brought me to the secret society, which is someone invited me to do something and I said, yes. And, you know, don't say, you know, if, if you're not, if you're invited to do something interesting and it's not going to hurt you or somebody else, you should say yes. You should see what happens.

That's, I mean, it's so much harder to do sometimes than is said, but it is just that it's core good advice. Well, I'm an incredibly smart person. These kids, these kids, I'm sure, have thrived in my wake. But, you know, it's like, I didn't say yes to that job in Albuquerque and I regret it. I could have easily said yes, but people asking you to do interesting things is also, it's, it means sometimes having to leave a job. It means sometimes having to tell someone you care about, you're going to be away for

a while. It means getting out of your comfort zone and what time you wake up. You know what I mean? And it's really easy to come up with a lot of reasons why you would say no, but it's, it's better to just say yes and see what happens. And I haven't, I've hardly, I've certainly failed in that a lot, but. Take that Nancy Reagan. Yeah.

Just say yes. Just say yes. Gold Chuck. Just say yes. Do you have any tour dates that you want to plug? Yeah. So all, all of my, I'll just preface this by saying all of my tour dates are available at JohnHodgman.com slash tour.

Beautiful. The Medallion status tour is going to be taking me to famous JohnHodgman stomping grounds like Brookline, Massachusetts, Symphony space, where I'll be talking with our friend Elizabeth Gilbert, Los Angeles, where I'll be talking with our friend Amy Mann. Oh, cool. San Francisco, where I'll be talking with my friends Linus, the corgi and Chompers, the corgi, two famous corgis of Instagram, who've figured prominently in this book. Yeah.

They are two famous corgis of Instagram. They're even on the cover here. Yeah. They're on the cover. Look, I want the book to sell. Right. You know what I mean? Dogs.

Two corgis on the cover. I'm guaranteed a 10% bump in sales. Yeah. But when I, one of the stories I talk, one of the secret rooms that I got into was a party at during San Francisco sketch fest at Adam Savage's workshop, the Mythbusters. Adam Savage plows all of his Mythbusters money into his deep, deep and rewarding hobby of prop replication. Mm-hmm.

Have you been to his workshop? I have not. We should go there sometime. I would love to. It sounds amazing. Like he just, he makes things from the movies. So he'll make a perfect replica of Tom Skerritt's space suit from Alien. Mm-hmm.

Or that's Blade Runner gun. Yeah. He's made this, making Harrison Ford's blaster from Blade Runner has been this lifelong pursuit that he's perfected and perfected. I mean, he's made, I think, six for other people and six more for himself or something like that. Just in case it goes down. Oh, do they actually function?

No. No, they don't. And he's got like a Han Solo and Carbonite hanging up in there and he's got a full-size Admiral Ackbar that Admiral Ackbar is dressed up in Napoleonic war era naval uniform that is a perfect replica of Russell Kroskostin and Mastering Commander. That was a nice touch. And I was in this party enjoying this exclusive invitation-only party with all these other comedians enjoying, just watching and enjoying Nerd Minds exploding and I see these two dogs

in there and I turned to Kevin Murphy and I'm like, who invited the people with the dogs? And he goes, oh, the people weren't invited. The dogs were invited. I'm like, what? He says, yeah, that's Linus the Corgi and Chompers the Corgi, two famous corgis of Instagram. My friend Connor Lestoca is a huge fan of theirs. And he invited to the party and I'm like, wait a minute.

I just performed comedy on stage in English that I speak on two legs, not four. And I can sweat all over my body. I don't know, I just have to pant. And these guys are getting invited to my exclusive party because they're dogs. They probably don't even know what planet Admiral Ackbar is from. The answer is Mon Calamari. There you go, dogs. Is it really Mon Calamari?

Mon Calamari, it's a terrible, dumb Star Wars joke, it's terrible. So anyway, yeah, Linus and Chompers are going to be there in San Francisco. We're going to final, we've become friends now. And basically, I'm back drafting them. You don't want to back draft a dog too closely, but I'm following their route. Yeah, exactly. You can get pretty close. And then I'll be in Minnesota and Chicago and then in November, we're going to hit

a bunch of other cities, Jesse Thorne and I as a Judge John Hodgman tour. Fantastic. Now you're coming here to Atlanta. Coming here to Atlanta, the variety. Looking forward to that. That'll be a lot of fun. Washington, DC, Toronto, Portland, Maine and Durham, North Carolina. And all of those will be Judge John Hodgman shows, but Medallion status will be available

for purchase. Whether it's a Judge John Hodgman show or a Medallion status event, I'll be hanging around signing everything hanging out or whatever and you're big at that. I will say, you know, I will say this again, bit.ly slash medallion status. Sorry. In this, in this crowded culture, you got a hashtag always be plugging. That link is the pre-order link. And I ask people to consider buying it that way because getting a rush of preorders right

at the top is really, really helpful to the launch of the, but I don't want to punish people who have pre-ordered and then come to the book and then come to the book tour. Right. Because some of these events, not all of them, you have to buy a book to get in. So what if you already bought one, right? And then you got to buy another one to come in and see me. You're going to blow me off or feel like a jerk. Is there like a coupon they can print out?

We give them a little treat. Aren't you? I give them a little treat. Okay. Everyone who comes and gets a book on the book tour or the Judge John Hodgman tour gets an Aaron Draplin designed enamel lapel pin that has a picture of a corgi on it and it says famous corgi. Nice.

Hang on a second. Okay. It keeps going. Pretty nice, right? Right. What if you pre-ordered the book as a hardcover, as an e-book, as an audio book and then you get a copy of the book at the event, you get an upgrade, you get a new pin. Does it have a $20 bill that it's stuck into?

No. But this is only for people who buy two copies of the book and can show me in the signing line that they've got two copies of the book in any format for whatever reason. Double corgi. Oh, jeez. Double corgi. I've got two. This is all about medallion status.

This is all about upgrade systems, loyalty systems. I've got two of all your books because I always buy one and then you always give me one. There are even higher levels of status that you can achieve and you both have earned. For your long-term kindness to me and excellence to everyone, you both get a triple corgi elite badge. Oh, my God. Oh, man. There are triple corgi elite badges.

When I was suggesting this scheme to the publisher, I had a criterion for triple corgi elite that I have now forgotten. I think it's just going to be a little bit fuzzy. Discretionary. Discretionary. Yeah. Though you should be able to be discretionary. The triple corgi elite badges, they're all beautiful enamel pins designed by Aaron Drapp

and your friend. I can't wait to get mine. I think I have one for you in my bag. Okay, great. Well, John, thank you for coming. Thank you very much for being here. JohnHodgeman.com slash Tor, bit.ly slash medallion status. You want my newsletter?

It's bit.ly slash hodgemail hodgmail. It's a very fun newsletter. Yeah, it really is. Hey, thanks. It is all capital letters, all one word, when bit.ly medallion says bit.ly slash hodgemail, it's all small letters, all one word, because why be consistent? Also check out my new every now and then midday Instagram live show, Get Your Pets, where I interview dogs and cats on Instagram.

That's fantastic. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, John. Anytime we can do this every week if you want. Okay. Okay. I would love to. You come down.

We'll put you on. Why don't you come on the Judge JohnHodgeman podcast too? I've been on before. I know. I've been on these streams. All right. Got to do something to fight against these dough boys. Okay.

You got it. All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can get in touch with Hodgeman. What's your website one more time? It's the home of John Hodgeman. JohnHodgeman.com. Okay. At Hodgeman on Twitter.

Uh-huh. At John Hodgeman on Instagram. Okay. Their Facebook group pages for Judge John Hodgeman and stuff like that. Yeah, we don't care about that. And yeah, bit.ly slash medallion status. Okay. Plus, you can just go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and find all of our social links on there.

It's way easier. Oh, so simple. So simple. Yeah. Or you can email us. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

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