Transcript
Speaker: Keep doing this bro, let's get off.
Speaker: Welcome, welcome, welcome back to Death is a Photograph Culture at the End of History. We were laughing a little bit off mic about ah sort of an Ealing Studios style comedy where a someone needs to do a sort of a British radio show or a podcast, but they don't want to defame anyone. So they turn to assassination and murder to an ensure they can talk about people behind their backs.
Speaker: Yeah. Or after they pass. But today is, I think, a momentous day because this is a film, Sam, that's that you have been talking about doing for a long time. I'd never seen it.
Speaker: And you said it would be sort of a perfect bridge for winding down Gen X and thinking about their encounters with millennials. And my God, were you correct? I didn't know how correct you were going to be when I went into this film. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you were right. It's almost too on the nose as a film. It's almost like a medieval morality play or like a classical... The characters lack interiority. They're just sort of shapes on Plato's cave representing the true form of Gen the true form of millennials.
Speaker: Bown Batch is the director of While We Young, we should say, knew what he was doing with this film. Well, and it's, I mean, down to the fact that even the hat, like if you want to think about these as silhouettes on Plato's cave, like yeah each of them would have to wear the sort of hat of their respective, you know, office and age. It's the casting too. So, I mean, the four main leads in this movie are sort of like avatars of the generations they're from. So there's you know there's a Gen X couple and a millennial couple.
Speaker: Movies from 2014, right? So this is when you know your oldest millennials are in their mid-30s and your oldest Gen X are approaching 50, almost. the old The very oldest of all Gen Xers are approaching 50. So you have the two couples...
Speaker: On the Gen X side, weighing in at probably a combined 250 pounds, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts, who are you know very much kind of just you know two of the biggest actors from their generation.
Speaker: And on the millennial side, similar ah similar sort of thing we have. Yeah, they're sort of coming up with, the well, one of them is very famous at this point. The other one is sort of still on the come up, I think. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess it depends. It's because i when I think Naomi Watts, I think Mulholland Drive, which is... dealing I meant Adam Driver. Ding, ding, ding. Oh, you mean the millennials, yes.
Speaker: On the millennial side, yes, we have ah weighing in it probably slightly more just because he strikes me as very tall. He's a big man. Adam Driver. who Yeah, that's a you know little pause here. was talking to Gabby about this recently.
Speaker: It's crazy how if you get too tall, it like distends you. will you know You just look a little different. He's an man. It's just funny that if you break like six five you start looking like Ray Romano's brother on Everybody Loves. And there's just kind of nothing you can do about it. I don't know. It's it's just interesting to me. I always look like the massively tall actors I see on the screen end up actually being the same height as me. Or he's like It doesn't make any sense. you know he's He's not that tall. He's shorter than I am. He's 6'2".
Speaker: Really? He just has the face of a man who's like 6'8". You know what I mean? yeah one those I think it's just because most actors are so short that he being sort of tall but not exceptionally tall looks very tall.
Speaker: Well, you know first of off all, of course, Adam Driver, former Marine, agent of American Empire. oh have I respect that. i do risk not I don't respect the the the warmongering or or the imperialism. I just like, know, there's that meme where it's like ah boomer actors and it's like, what did you do before acting? So I was a carpenter, a drug dealer, yeah a Marine. Then I got into like boxing and then like I was being pimped out as a gigolo and then like this agent fam. And then it's like, you know, like millennial actor. Like, what did what did you do before you started acting? I went to Yale and my parents were actors. Yeah. So like I do. Yeah. I respect him for like, you know, having done something else as opposed. No, you're, you're completely correct. I mean, it's, yeah, I, I think about that with boomer actors all the time. I think it's, you know, Peter Falk was like, you know, in world war two and then like just a glass eyed, like New York guy. yeah And I think it's, um, Robert Mitchum was like lathe operator who like burned and seared his eyes with, you know, I don't know, stuff coming like just crazy stuff, crazy stuff.
Speaker: We don't have these like these Timothee Chalamet style, you know, Upper West Side twinks just sort of yeah falling out of the bourgeois into acting. Adam Drove is a real person. you know hes He's weird looking. He's gangly. he served in the army. i say yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and still chose to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts. So God bless him. um So Adam Driver on the Millennial side, along with Amanda Seyfried, who I feel like I don't, maybe she's still doing a lot. I don't know. I'm not keeping up.
Speaker: But certainly in 2014, I think of as like, oh yeah, she did The Housemaid recently. So she's definitely still out there. Yeah, she was in the Millennial film, in my mind, ah Jennifer's Body. Yes, and she's in, like, Mamma Mia, Dear John, ah you know, a lot of these. And, of course, everyone's favorite David Fincher film, Mank. um But in any case, she is, again, like, the ur-millennial actor. She's only 40 now. She was born in 1985. So these are sort of, like, younger millennials. They would be literally about, what, 30 when the movie was made, roughly. Like, a little bit under the late 20s. Yeah, they were 30, 31, about playing 25-year-olds, isn't it, as the ur- Yeah, and so it's, you know, I got to give Bomback some credit here. He really kind of like set this up in ah in yeah an almost like overdetermined way where like from the actors to the way that the characters are sketched is almost over the top. It's almost like Brechtian with how ridiculous it is and draws attention to itself. Yeah. There's literally a scene where when Ben Stiller decides he hates millennials again, he takes that the hat he has put on to signal his like youth and he throws it in a garbage can. like it's It's that sort of big. A true beat. There are so many ironies. This film, like I think, bears re-watching multiple times. It's not the best film. I think we both got it gave it three and a half stars. It's not an excellent film yeah by any means.
Speaker: But I do think it's a film that is fun to watch every couple of years As the kind of generations progress in age, it's sort of fashions and assumptions change, right? So obviously, this trilby is the sign of youth for Ven Stiller. But obviously, in 2026, the trilby is kind of like, you're sending middle-aged signals. sir Well, yeah, you're like sending upsetting messages to women on Hinge. Or Reddit, yeah, yeah. You're a Reddit forum moderator, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's it's funny.
Speaker: i think I've talked about my my love for the guys podcast on here before. Shout out. If any listeners also listen to guys, let us know in the comments. And Brian Quimby, one of the hosts on that, loves to talk about how in like 2004, when he was trying to be fancy, he would wear a fedora and like a t-shirt everywhere. And my favorite story of this is him taking his like wife and, you know, they're in their like mid-20s at this point. to like a fancy French restaurant in Columbus, Ohio.
Speaker: And he ordered the steak frites with his little fedora on. And of course, said it completely wrong. Demanded a bottle of ketchup immediately. And so i and they said that's what I think of when I think of these hats and sort of what's become of them. you know oh Adam Driver and Ben Siller both look like, um do you remember Jason Mraz?
Speaker: Yes. Oh, yes, of course. yeah And there's his his debut album that has the the very famous single, I'm Yours, on it. It's just like a bad sketch of like a man in a fedora. And it just looks like a kind of fusion of both Adam Driver and Ben Stiller. So, yeah, it's it's it's a weird it's a weird film in the sense that Adam Driver's dress sense is now obviously kind of fae, over-determined. They call it them chunguses, don't they? Is chuggy? Chuggy, chuggy. Yeah, very chuggy.
Speaker: Adam and the driver's walking around with like suit trousers that are too high with like no socks and brogues on. Yes. A classic millennial look. A classic millennial look. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know those feet are stinking. That's all I have to say. see that shit and I'm like, put at least put some slips on, okay? I don't... These guys are like kind of like moderated versions of... um Alabama, Arkansas. Oh, yeah. my ah The Stomp Clap Pay stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But they're like but they're just like completely unwashed and look like kind of a they run a cult. Yeah. well this And this is a movie that has like all of the symbols of
Speaker: yeah I mean, it's a little late at this point for it, honestly, but kind of like 2010, 2009, 2008-era hipsterdom. So, like, Adam Driver rides a fixed-gear bicycle and gets Ben Stiller to ride a fixed-gear bicycle. They go to restaurants that are using, like, aioli for the first time that have sort of, like, yeah you know, metal fittings that are exposed in the restaurants, and you sort of order something with sriracha in it. Like, it's very... um these things have either died or become so second nature to us that I think it's easy to forget that there was a moment where like the great Brooklynification of the world was happening. Yeah. um And this is a movie about kind of a later stage of that moment in Brooklyn. Yeah. And of course, what could the content of the movie be except that it's about what, what authenticity and reality really are for Gen X and for millennials. Yeah. And I should say, I've watched this film about three times.
Speaker: I think I first watched it when it came out, aged, what how old was I in 2014? At 19. And then re-watched it maybe in 2020, and then re-watched it again today. And it is interesting, the cycle cycles of feelings I have for the the two main characters, ah millennials are Jamie and Darby, which are incredibly millennial names as well. Especially Darby.
Speaker: Jamie played by Andrava, Darby by Amanda Seyfried. I thought they were so cool in the first time i watched it when I was 19. When I watched it in 2020, when I was about 25, I hated them. And thought it was, you know, they were the those awful, overly earnest sort of, um you know, lacking cynicism people.
Speaker: Or lacking the right kind of cynicism. They still contain cynicism, but lacking right kind of cynicism. When I watched it this week, I kind of felt... I still, Jamie's a bad person, the but the character played by Driver, but I felt more sympathetic again in the sense that, okay, a lot of that stuff is played out. ah You know, the the chickens in the flat, the big light loft flat, and like all just people have been priced out of that.
Speaker: But there is something admirable about the kind of ah focus on being in reality that millennials perhaps had of that age group. Yes, there's a lot of stuff about phones. There's a lot of stuff about phones in this movie. Yeah, yeah. Like, ah for all Adam and Darby's faults, like, they are sort of, like, living in the world, and, like, their shallowness in all the ways. They are engaging with the world in, like, a physical sense. Or trying. Like, they're collecting things. They're trying to. they're collecting things. They're making things.
Speaker: you know, they're walking railway tunnels, which, yeah, okay, can see like it's probably like an Airbnb feature now in New York. But like, I still, yeah, I still feel that in some ways compared to what we've ended up with with Gen Z, there is something good about the millennials for all their foibles in in this kind of like, yeah, desire to make things. And um I think Adam Curtis once said to me...
Speaker: that's Sorry, that's... well i was good he did He did once say to me that um he thought that the kind of millennial attempt to almost like recapture the sort of artisanal nature of the eighteen ninety s this kind of pickling things and you know like making dairy products from scratch and DIY stuff.
Speaker: It's very 1890s, and that that was a kind of cope, a kind of like a mid-Victorian-style cope for ah that you'd see with someone like ah Thomas Carlyle or William Morris ah for the rapid change. of For one, the rapid change in technological acceleration and social media and the alienation that produces, but also for downward mobility. Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right. I think that's like spot on. Yeah, I don't think that's wrong, but I also think as someone who likes to make chemistry from scratch, I'm just going to say like there is, I think that and ah structural analysis is right about the millennials, but I also do think there is something to be gained from like fixing things and making things.
Speaker: Oh yeah, I didn't mean it as a moral judgment. Yeah, I know. I think both of those things are true. Yeah, just as a normative here. seeing this movie did sort of force me to confront the various ways in which I am millennial, you know, that I can't sort of escape that. leka Because I'm, you know, it it is true that when I encounter like a true, like a pure millennial, like one who is like, regardless of age, someone who is like soy in the way that that word gets used on like Twitter, I find it like repugnant and it it puts me off.
Speaker: So I don't think of myself in those terms, but it's different strains of millennial culture, It's like, that stuff is scary to me. And honestly, as we've seen through this season, has a lot of origins in Gen X stuff, right? It just intensified in the millennial generation.
Speaker: But the stuff you're talking about here, Sam, like, we collect records and CDs, we have VHS tapes, Why? Because like when and if we have children, we want to be able to show them like media in a physical form that won't require us like jacking their brains into into a device, right? So I can like put on a tape for them, know exactly what it is they're going to see, and know that... like I think it's something that's good and you know that isn't going to lead immediately to like AI vegetable cucking videos or something. you know like for Things that you have to be afraid of.
Speaker: um And then it's also just that I like being able to... physically interact with the world. It's true. um Like, when we were in Europe recently, one of the days we spent in London was just spent going to, like, probably four or five different record shops around London, like, from the West, basically from the West End all the way into, you know, the Chelsea, or Soho, excuse me, and then kind of around. so It's just um i had to confront that and be like, yeah, that's... I i also like a well-made piece of food. i don't want to eat like a can of green beans that's been microwaved with you know yeah the sort of pre-treaded Parmesan cheese on it. like That's not... yeah i don't like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I do think, like, yeah, to give millennials, and I think we're here, we're talking about geriatric millennials, right? People who are 10, 15, maybe 20 years older than us. To give them their G, like, again, they did make food a lot better. They did, yeah. like but that but And they made it more just more democratically dispersed as well, right? So, like, it's not that there wasn't good food before the millennials. At least, I don't know what happened in America, but Gen X pioneered the sort of gastronomic revolution in the ninety s in the UK, right? Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And they did massively improve food, but it was at select restaurants. So there's some these very good restaurants you'd go to. Whereas I do think it was the millennials who made it so that you could like stumble into a random restaurant in Zone 2 London or you know Manchester or whatever. It's not particularly fancy and still get quite good food.
Speaker: But they've also ruined food at the same time. They've they've made it better, but it's double-edged sword because they also do the thing of... like um loaded fries with this, with this, with this, with, know, like... The over-determined... With fried mushrooms, with Swiss cheese.
Speaker: And I hate that. But, yeah, it's definitely film that made me sort of think, well, what do I want to keep from, you know, what from this generation was useful and what wasn't, I suppose. But we should sort of, like, sketch out the contours of the film. The film itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I do like that it's causing, as you want to say on this podcast, it's causing sort of pristine reveries. Because it is interesting because now, neither of us, of course, is particularly Gen X in any way.
Speaker: But now that we're sort of forced to confront something that we actually grew up with, like we grew up with the fumes of Gen X. We grew up with like... on the movies from Gen X, but I remember when this stuff was current. like I can remember you know being... And we will get to the movie listeners. you know My apologies. Mike, don't cut this. I have to flagellate myself.
Speaker: um i remember being in college, and I graduated college in 2015. So kind of at the you know the kind of the end of this moment, like the hipster thing was sort of done. But i was visiting New York a ton, and I can remember...
Speaker: Being sort of repulsed by some aspects of this, but still finding parts of it kind of cool, like ah especially the physical media stuff and some of the some of the fashions, though now I look upon them quite dubiously, but at the time they seemed like a good idea. um And i it's weird to think of that as being dead. like This is the first culture that I knew that is no there's only with us in ah in the in like a sedimented layer that the archaeologists have to sort of brush away right to get to. yeah Yeah, like the idea of like wearing trilbies, wearing a trilby and like short suit trousers, but your ankles out. It's just, you yeah. well Yeah, that that I meant, but i I guess for me it would be like, I remember Clark's, like the sort of wallaby Clark boots were quite popular at a certain point. I feel like they're still quite popular in the UK.
Speaker: But I guess Clark's is a patriotic, it's kind of a patriotic thing. In America, like i I saw people wear them in a defined period from 2007 to 2012, and then i never saw them again and haven't seen them since. know Interesting. or like um I'm thinking also of like the commitment to like the collared shirt or the flannel shirt, which I feel like disappeared from sort of regular men's fashion for a period of time and then was kind of... Yeah. resurrected by the millennial a hipster sort of person. But then the other side of that is the awful graphic t-shirt, which has lived on in increasingly horrific ways. I mean, I i just remember being a kid and there was a store that opened up. This is probably 2005 or something like that.
Speaker: And it was called Funk and Standard. And it sold fedoras, trilbys, ah like t-shirts with sort of ridiculous things on them, which you see in this movie, by the way. um One of the people who works on film with Adam Driver and Ben Stiller has shirts that say like, some fucking band nobody cares about or you know, these sort of like very ironic t-shirts.
Speaker: And I remember when I was that age, it was like my favorite store on earth. And I bought a rainbow colored fedora that I remember wearing when I would go on like video chat with like my friends. And like, I don't know if i was talking to girls, I'd be like, they're go to love this fucking hat. And it was probably the stupidest hat of all time. but like at the time I was like, this this rocks. Like I am so cool. And now I'm just like, I looked like gay Jason Mraz probably because it was, you it was this rainbow like kind of plaid hat. It was ridiculous with a shirt that probably said like,
Speaker: you know um too busy gaming you know or something like this. All right, I'm done with my my confessions. ah So we we should yeah we should outline the song because it it is just quite generative. um Yeah.
Speaker: as as just as as a a sort of conceit, maybe, sort of what happens when Gen X meets Millennials for the first. well' like I suppose that these Gen X characters will have met Millennials before in this in this world. This is the first time they really sort of internalize them or internalize the void or the ratio, the the gulf between their two experiences.
Speaker: um I think it it has it has two dimensions. One is you have to get old enough to be like... ready to confront your agingness to want to run from it, right? So like in this movie, they've reached an age where they're starting to, be this is Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts, where they're starting to feel bad. Like Ben Stiller finds out he has arthritis in his knee. And there's an early scene where, you know, he's talking to the doctor and he's like, is this like a new kind of arthritis? And the doctor's like, no, like you just have arthritis. Like you're getting older, this happens. And you know, Ben Stiller again. accept this.
Speaker: He realizes they've been working on the same film for 10 years. i think the significance of that is not so much even the movie and that it stinks. It's just like 10 years a long time. Like when you're a young person, you can't have worked on anything for 10 years, right? Like that's just a lot of your life.
Speaker: I wish to set out right that Ben Stiller's character, Josh, is is a filmmaker The kind of piss take of maybe like Errol Morris or Adam Curtis. Like his films are called like The Power Elite.
Speaker: Yeah, no, which I was so excited. For those who don't know, this, I gotta say, Noah Baumbach, it turns out is woke because there is, did you catch this, Sam? Are you familiar with the book, The Power Elite?
Speaker: ah yeah Yes, vaguely. By C. Wright Mills. I mean, so he's making a documentary that is an attempt to like cinematically represent the 1965 sociological study, The Power Elite by Wright Mills, which is an interesting book and and kind of a cool book.
Speaker: Or 1956, excuse me, not 65. But like the very fact that the director knows what that is and is putting it in a movie in 2014 is nuts, is absolutely insane.
Speaker: He has that sort of Jewish professor, doesn't he? He's like making references to Lukács and like Alphyser and stuff. No, precisely. but And so Ben Stiller is, yes, kind of this like pretentious sort of, you know, he he knows his academic stuff. He wants to make real documentaries about real problems. And so he's almost like,
Speaker: Like if Ken Burns were Adam Curtis is how I would describe it. Like if his approach were more Burnsian, but his like interests were more Adam Curtis-like is how I would. Yes, I think you're correct about that. So he's, yeah, he's about 43, 44, isn't he, in this film.
Speaker: And then his wife, played by Naomi Watts, whose name is Cornelia, is maybe like 40, 39, 40, roughly. And she is a, works as a producer for her father who's like,
Speaker: ah Very, very, very, very famous ah documentary maker, maybe on the level of... Who's the most famous American documentary? Frederick Wiseman, I would say, probably Frederick Wiseman. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of yeah but he's kind of supposed to be that high level. He's so he's a so boomer, silent gen of that era, sort of fading into his dotage, but still very successful and very well thought of.
Speaker: And Josh is... ah His name's Leslie Breitbart, which is quite funny. Breitbart, because obviously in like two, three years' time, Breitbart needs is going to become like a massive ah preoccupation of liberals everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, we should say also that this is pre-Trump, which is funny. It feel it feels isn it, though. It's an odd era. It's like it's like Obama 2. Obama 2 is a weird era for me. Oh, it absolutely. I mean, i this is like dead history now. it's Well, I think the Chopper Trap House guys talk about that, that there are like a lot of people, i think they say, who want to return like the eternal 2014. where that was just sort of like as good as things got, and then... Yeah, because you have like, history rears its head again, right, in 2008, 2009, 2010, because Obama's elected, you have the Great Financial Crisis, you're still ah the sort of the tail end of the war on terror.
Speaker: Like, it's still, it's quite high stakes. But then, yeah, by the time you get to Obama too in 2012, yeah, it's an odd period of politics, really. It's quite muted. And it is really funny that there's that one bit of...
Speaker: Adam Driver's character goes, I voted for Mitt Romney. Yes, that's amazing. when there Is that during the ayahuasca scene? Yeah, he's like, oh, I don't think government should fund art. You should have to do it yourself. I voted for Mitt Romney. Well, okay, so let's go it let's go back to the the setup because we are getting ahead of ourselves. other No, no, no. It's very good. So Ben Stiller is married to a woman who is the daughter of like a premier filmmaker, a premier documentarian, who is about to have a retrospective that he keeps calling his memorial in this kind of like droll way um over and over again. he says this. And Ben Stiller has been stuck on the same movie for 10 years to the point where he's interviewing this sort of like recluse, like emeritus professor from Columbia. and he can't show footage of himself because he ages so much like in the documentary.
Speaker: So he's at a loss and he's clearly like paying the bills by teaching like community learning classes to, you know, people at a college somewhere in New York. Well, that is one of the questions I had, which I always have is that how did these people afford their lives?
Speaker: Yes, and my guess in here is that ah Cornelia is making the money and Ben Stiller is kind of just, you know. But she but it also seems like she's just producing her dad's films and that's it. Like she's not working and producing for anyone else.
Speaker: Yeah, but the dad seems wildly successful. So my guess is that... I mean, I'm not... Listen, I don't think Noah Baumbach is getting us to like have to answer that question, but if I had to, that's how I would answer it. Yeah. But Adam Driver and his girlfriend, ah played by Amanda Seyfried, and their names are Jamie and Darby, as Sam said earlier.
Speaker: and they start flattering Ben Stiller immediately. They're like, oh, your movie, you know, um i can't remember what it's called, but it may as well be called like... It's called The Paralete.
Speaker: Oh, right, right. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. That's what he's making. The first documentary is called The Paralete, and then the documentary he's making now doesn't have a title as far as I can tell. Oh, right, yeah. And he's like, how did you get that shot of those animals eating out of that garbage can? And he's like, well...
Speaker: I saw they were doing it and I told the camera guy, get a shot of that and there it was. yeah yeah adam Adam Driver says, like how did you stage it? right Which is the early... Oh, yeah. Good point. Baumbach is sort of like hinting at what's to come.
Speaker: you're making this movie sound better than it is. No, that's a good point. it does it's not that so It's not that sophisticated of the movie, but he does foreshadow some of what's to come with yeah this idea of staging and you know right in the first scene where Adam confronts Benson as character.
Speaker: Yeah. And I guess one thing we haven't mentioned that's worth saying is that there Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts' main friends who are their age have just had a baby, and they're clearly feeling alienated because they have been unsuccessful in their attempts to have a baby, and this is also leading them to want to kind of... rediscover their youth. So when they meet um the Adam Driver character and um the Amanda Seyfried character, it becomes an opportunity for them to like explore. And so they're immediately initiated into, yeah, like walking the subway tunnels and like going to different kinds of restaurants and looking at physical media collections and like
Speaker: going to a community barbecue at one point where they're kind just outside cooking meat. I don't know you remember that scene. They are sort of like reinitiated into life in a serious way. i just just I remember watching this film with my dad when ah in about 2020. Both my parents who are Gen Xers. I remember the the cookout scene. was that There's like a water slide or something. It's somewhere in bush Bushwick. My dad just like grumpily exclaiming, well, my 20s weren't like that.
Speaker: Well, and there's, wait, that's, thank you so much for reminding me of this because there, it also shows some of Adam Driver's incredibly millennial text messages that like, I think if a Gen Z person were to watch this movie, they'd be like, there's no way that's real, but it definitely was. Like, he calls it Bush, Bush of the Wick at one point in text message. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's constantly doing prayer hands as well. Yes, he's doing the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. And that's another thing they get them to do. They get them to go do ayahuasca at this, like, insane... It's just in, like, a guy's house, and there's, like, a white guy in robes who's leading this. I think he's a Kiwi. He's from New Zealand. Oh, my God. Although, I will say,
Speaker: as ah Fake as that might sound, i like it's like, oh, there's no way there are like ayahuasca guys in Brooklyn. I was once at a Kava bar in Brooklyn that I don't think exists anymore. And I don't know how it happened, but I got to talking with the bartender.
Speaker: And she was like, oh, yeah, I'm part of like a Brazilian ayahuasca church. We meet here in Brooklyn. And I was like, did Noah Baumbach meet the same lady in the same group and decide to stage this? like There's no way. Yeah, it And that is, of course, the amazing scene where, yeah, he says, Adam Driver says he voted for Romney. And also, he and Naomi Watts kiss initially because she thinks he's Ben Stiller, but then again, seemingly because, you know, she finds Ben Stiller's creative ah sterility and potentially his real sterility a little bit alienating, right? So that's creating problems between them.
Speaker: Yeah, and we should they're older for the friends who are the same age as as Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts. ah I just also like brilliantly Gen X. So the main guy is called Fletcher, which I just think is like straight out of like a a John Hughes film or something. Yes, yeah,
Speaker: And I just, I feel like I've met, in fact, he's played by Ad Rock, who's an American rapper guitarist. he's a member the Beastie Boys, is of course. Oh my God, that's perfect. That's so perfect. Fletcher's literally played by a member of the Beastie Boys. I thought I recognized his facial somewhere, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, I did not realize that. That is truly, truly amazing. The first shot of the whole film is actually ah the Ben Siddharth and Naomi Watts character like cooing over a baby. You think it's their baby, then you do a double take, you realize it's not their baby. It's Fletcher's baby. And he says, immediately he says, oh yeah, it's so special, you know I'm so connected to her, because I read to her in the room, she recognized my voice immediately. I read her Stephen King's Tommyknockers.
Speaker: a fifth kiss oh god It's just such a good send-up. The whole thing is just like a send-up, isn't it? It is, and it it it's very good about these signifiers and like knowing how to play them. I also do need to just point out that the character Tipper, who is not really super important for our purposes right now, is played by Ernest Hemingway's great-granddaughter. So just in case... Yes, I thought I recognized her. that is That is incredibly millennial because she What's her name again? It's something at Hemingway, isn't it? um Yeah, right.
Speaker: Dree Hemingway, I think. Yes, Dree Hemingway. She is like the love interest in the ah the vaccines. Do you remember the vaccines? No, I don't. The British band, the vaccines. Oh my God.
Speaker: ah You want to come back? It's all right or something. They were like the most millennial band ever, London millennial band. The song Norgaard, she plays like the the band are all like trying to like get with her. And she's just like, yeah, aspirational love interest called Amanda Norgaard in this, which was very defining for me as like a 13 year old. So there we go. The point is, Noah Baumbach has somehow really set up this like cast of like avatars of their generation in one place. I mean, even, what's his face appears, I think briefly in the movie, um Peter Bogdanovich, the like, you know, the sort of American boomer director of of great renown.
Speaker: Yeah, well, we should say that, in a way, i feel like Bombach is taking aim at himself, right, in the sense that he's taking aim at his generation. But also, I think maybe the Adam Driver and Ben Stiller characters are like different elements of who he is.
Speaker: Because obviously, Bombach is an incredibly sort of successful commercial, well, semi-commercial, semi-arthouse film director. He's very, very good at sort of, you know, getting people to watch films with some level of retention and complexity, but still having them commercially existly successful.
Speaker: But he obviously is interested in intellectual things. And I feel like, yeah, there though there's maybe the polarity between the Adam Driver character and the Ben Stiller character. are Sort of parts of Bam Batch's own personality in the sense that he he he is drawn in both these directions. The other thing I think is interesting is that Bam Batch is obviously, he's married, isn't he, to Greta Gerwig?
Speaker: um Yes, although was he at the time? Because I know that there, I feel like there's some like weird. Yeah, no. So he was married to Jennifer Jason Leigh until 2013. Because I think it was quite like an acrimonious divorce, if I remember correctly. Okay. And then he married Greta Gerwig recently, but I think they were. They might have been dating at that point. So, but obviously like, that's also interesting that he was perhaps at this point getting a view into sort of millennial hipsterdom through people like Greta Gerwig.
Speaker: No, you're right. And actually, she's in a movie. We will be watching the millennial season, ladies gentlemen, Baghead, which I know I've mentioned before, but I am so ready to watch. um Yeah, because Baumbach himself is sort of a... um He's a little bit older. like He's a Gen X guy, but he also is sort of the...
Speaker: kind of the Brooklyn, the kind of, the teller of hipsterdom as a filmmaker in some ways, as like an outside ethnographer. Also, a brief note, and then we really should get returned to the movie because this is just the like, hey, guess who's coming to dinner sort of situation here. But, the, also in the movie, bizarrely enough, is a guy, Peter Yarrow, who is the Peter in Peter, Paul, and Mary, the 1960s like folk act from the United States.
Speaker: So like this really is a kind of a goaded cast of just like random kind of boomer, Gen X, and millennial greats assembled in one place.
Speaker: But if we're trying to to be economical here in terms of summarizing everything or at least making the listener aware... Essentially, Ben Stiller and his wife are increasingly living out a kind of revitalized youth.
Speaker: They're feeling better because they feel attached to something creative. They feel, or at least Ben Stiller feels kind of um appreciated, something he obviously does not in his life, right? Because Adam Driver is like, oh, how'd you do this? What's going on with this? I really loved this.
Speaker: And this comes to a head... When, and I will say, Baumbach does a good job with this. Driver has what is like such a dumb millennial guy idea for a movie that Ben Stiller immediately recognizes as a terrible idea. And it's, I'm going to get Facebook and the first person I know in real life from high school who friends me, I'm just going to go and film them. And Ben Stiller is like, oh man, I really like this guy. I don't want to tell him how bad of an idea this is, but whatever.
Speaker: So, of course, and you can feel this coming from a mile away, Adam Driver goes, and the guy turns out to be like a whistleblowing Afghan war veteran who like you know took part in a massacre, but then tried to tell the truth about what happened. It was injured and like put away for a while and went to prison and now is in drug re... The perfect subject for a documentary, and you immediately now know that this means Adam Driver will eclipse Ben Stiller.
Speaker: like Ben st Stiller's life is ruined basically now because but he's helped this guy who's about to just destroy his career and leap right past him and never care about him again. But this is made more complicated when Ben Stiller, in his very Gen X way, uncovers...
Speaker: that this has been staged. And Adam Driver knew all along about this guy's background, and there was no actual finding out of the circumstances. The documentary itself was a setup.
Speaker: The story is real, but the narrative around the story is fake. So it's like a staging of the reality of the documentary. And this upsets his Gen X sensibilities to no end. And he sets out to destroy Adam Driver um with ah with sort of the sword the sword and buckler of authenticity.
Speaker: And that kind of takes us to the full confrontation between these two modes of truth-telling between the millennials and the Gen X sides of things. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. we get a very sort of like, almost like Shakespearean, Hamlet-esque showdown between the two of them and the atrium of, is it like the Lincoln Center or something? I dont know. Yeah. It's the award. It's the quote unquote memorial for Leslie Breitbart. Yeah. Yeah. And they're in the sort of atrium but outside of the the main stage. And there's this sort of like yeah like dialogue between the two of them about sort of truth and authenticity and comfort and anxiety. and um Yeah, it's it's ah I think Baumbach wants you to sort of... I don't know, it's interesting. It's played was played interestingly because I think he slightly comes down on the side of the Ben Stiller character.
Speaker: But... Yeah, I mean, again, I do think it's maybe an internal dialectic within himself, right? In the sense of this kind of like, well, yes, authenticity is important, but also like sort of getting, you know, the sort of more cynical element of the filmmaking industry, you know, getting money, winning contacts, impressing people, you know, making things happen is also very important. And I do, yeah, it's it does feel like a meditation on, yeah, where you draw the line between those two instincts and how you sort of compromise between them. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: rather than just perhaps like a authenticity versus, you know, sort of fabrication or something. I think it's slightly more complex than that. But it's interesting that he sort of exposes Adam Driver's fabrication to his ah father-in-law, who's sort of starting to become a mentor for Adam Driver, Leslie Breitbart, the big director. And he kind of goes, I don't really care.
Speaker: No, well, because earlier we hear him say to his daughter, like, your husband is a good filmmaker because he was his protege, it should be said. They no longer like each other, but he was previously his protege.
Speaker: And part of the reason that Ben Stiller kind of alienated himself from his father-in-law is that his father-in-law is clearly more cynical, more willing to do what it takes to succeed, like less sort of...
Speaker: you know Again, it's a classic boomer thing where he can like sell authenticity as the thing he's selling. So he gets to be authentic and to be really successful because the cynical thing to do is to be authentic. like The speech that he gives at his memorial is... you know A lot of people said, you can't just tell the truth with a documentary or whatever, but you know I was able to.
Speaker: or or what have you. Yeah, and importantly, he he tries to set Josh up with a hedge fund guy who's got like set his cash that he wants to invest. And ah Josh is like kind of, oh, well, I don't want to take money from a hedge fund. And Leslie kind of goes, don't be proud, Yoshi.
Speaker: Take the money. Take the phone call. Although the hedge fund guy does turn out to be like even worse than... you know like like he's Truly like a... Yeah, and Josh says, in the most Gen X way possible, he goes, I don't pitch. I don't think in soundbites. I don't understand this culture of soundbites. Oh my gosh. And I do think that's difference between Adam and Josh, is that Adam can like sort of boil down a complex idea into like one sentence, right? Yes.
Speaker: yes In a way that is perhaps like morally unfortunate that we have to do, but like normatively, just is how things work. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that comes up specifically because ah that hedge fund manager ends up investing in the Adam Driver movie, not you know like the documentary he's making.
Speaker: And when we see ben stiller when we see Ben Stiller do the pitch, he basically... It's so funny. it's like He can't get the hedge fund guy to understand anything. And the Adam Driver guy immediately gets him to understand like it's about Afghanistan and like a cool warrior. And he's like, oh. Afghanistan, like a cool warrior, that's awesome. like you know he just He knows to just focus on the thing that that guy is going to understand and appreciate and just kind of let all the other stuff like hang on its own. and yeah Yeah, whereas the Josh character is like, well, it's about the working class, but it's not but who can really speak for the working class? I know I can't speak for the working class. It's a film it's a film about America and America's tradition of biography. But it's also a film about like yeah economics. But really, it's a film about like can you really like biographically tell a self-biography through autobiography? It's just like that. Everybody loves a before and after. Everybody loves a before and after. They keep saying that. Yeah. yeah like it Is it also like a send-off the academic's worst tendency to be a fucking blowhard?
Speaker: Yes, yes. And Ben Stiller embodies that. But I will say this. As much as I completely agree that at this point, the kind of selling out stuff is, we can't even afford to spend any time on it.
Speaker: ah just because of the sort of dire economic circumstances in which we live. And although the movie doesn't really tell us this, you can read Adam Driver as a character who like just understands that that's how one has to operate because we're no longer in 90s.
Speaker: But I will say this, in an era where whenever I watch something on streaming, every commercial is a major celebrity trying to get me to gamble, um like When I turn on the TV, and it is a I've now gotten several of these. can't remember who the celebrity is, but it's someone pretty big.
Speaker: Doing ads for like an online casino, hard rock casino, where the point of every ad is you're an old woman, and no one around you cares about you or respects you anymore, and so you need to go in your phone to gamble. like There's one where...
Speaker: a woman gets called ma'am by a retail worker and it like shocks her so deeply that he just advised the, this host advises her to gamble on her phone. There's another one where middle-aged woman is like trying to serve hamburgers to her like daughter and her friend and they just don't even pay attention to the mom. So the guy comes in and is like, Yeah, just gamble on your phone. And then it shows the grandma at the grill gambling on her phone. like these like deep The kinds of things that our like highest level celebrities never would have disgraced themselves with before because it would have been considered beneath them because it's not worth taking like a couple million dollars to... like
Speaker: tell middle-aged women that they're like less than and need to gamble to like escape the horrors of of of life. I do yearn for like some kind of standard of behavior, some kind of like broad ethical standard of behavior that there can be things beneath. And it really does feel like the trade-off was...
Speaker: we got rid of the annoying authenticity stuff, but it has the bottom is just gone. And so now you can be like a major soccer player and do ads for like online gambling as part of the World Cup. And I just think it's disgusting. So that's yeah that's my one my one thing. So I do come down with Stiller on that, even though he's not fighting that battle. Not openly, but it's a related battle. No, and like Adam, the Adam Driver character isn't like...
Speaker: Well, we don't know what he'd be like in 10 years' time. Maybe he is like a famous director who's like appearing in gambling adverts. But yeah, mean that's that's not the question here. The question is, like is it okay to performatively stage things or like not ah cleave 100% to like objective and sort of like authentic reporting in a documentary? um Which is a question that comes up in a thin blue line, right? With like the high library enactments and stuff. 100% thinking about that, yes. yeah But just quickly on the Josh character...
Speaker: sort of not quite understanding where the world has got to in 2014, where it's heading. Like, he is the perfect Gen X character in that he harbors a resentment against Leslie Breitbart's success, and he kind of understands that things are more scarce now than they were before, but he can't fully accept that, right? So there's a conversation with his wife, Cornelia, where he's complaining about Leslie, and he goes, well, that's because your dad has everything, and then he gets more.
Speaker: And then he pauses, and he goes, but no, but he's right, there's enough to go there's enough to go around for everyone. a Right? Like, it's like a sense of scarcity, but that is it can't be fully admitted. And it has to be sort of ah qualified by this. Well, yeah, I mean, this Boomer guy, he's like he's just like been given everything and I'm struggling. But no, that's down to me. And, you know, the world's not... There's enough.
Speaker: there's enough But there is something kind of like Thatcherite about that too, though, right? Because it's always down to individual responsibility. Do you know what I mean? Like, he doesn't say, oh, well, the system is gamed against me. He says, well, you know, I guess I just have to kind of make it happen, you know, somehow.
Speaker: And hopefully we succeed. I do think, I'm happy you brought up Thin Blue Line, because I remember Eileen Jones saying something about that movie that it's really stuck with me. that you know people want to read it as this kind of postmodern pastiche film that's about deconstructing the objectivity of documentary. And she said, no, Errol Morris thought about it exactly the opposite. The point was, like sometimes staging is actually how you represent the truth.
Speaker: That like you can get people to understand what the truth is by you know making a set of creative decisions about how it's represented. And that's interesting because...
Speaker: That is basically Adam Driver's position. like He might be cynical. He might be sort of self-serving, and he might want to be famous more than anything else. We basically learn that he's studied Ben Stiller's movies to get to Ben Stiller's father-in-law. It's not that he actually loves Ben Stiller necessarily. He just knows that the connection to Leslie Breitbart would do him a lot of good. time, though...
Speaker: at the same time though He didn't invent the story. It's not like he just lied and said something was a documentary that wasn't. He invented the frame narrative, which was that the guy was a high school person he knew in high school who contacted him on Facebook.
Speaker: Like that is invented. But the fact of the guy being an Afghan war veteran, the fact of the massacre, the whistleblowing, the prison, the drug addiction, those things are all real. Right. Yeah. And I think it's he has a conscious sense that he needs to sell that, right? Because that he obviously is is clever enough and sensitive enough and a good enough journalist in the way that documentarians are to know that this is a great subject. But he's...
Speaker: But I think he's also aware that like that doesn't work in a pitch to the headphones fund guy, right? Whereas if you go, oh my God, yeah, like I was like yeah going to make a film about whoever the first person wants to reach out on my own Facebook, and it turns out that it that that just... I think that immediately just sells much better than like, oh, I want to make a film about the war on terror and it's going to be... like like That kind of unexpected like narrative that draws you in in that way is it's just going to sell much better. um And again, like I think it's a live and open ethical question about...
Speaker: whether you do that like whether your response to a constrained market and to scarcity and to shorter attention spans is to do that or's or if it's to stick to your guns I mean it's it's yeah yeah No, and I and i think it the irony, again, is that the boomer manages to get both in this movie. And that's a ah running theme of this podcast so far is that the perception of the boomer, at least, is that like you can sell your authenticity as the thing that you're selling, which allows you to then become like the richest man in you know New York documentary circles, basically. Yeah. um
Speaker: And i i do think it really is like, I would recommend people watch it if only to go kind of down memory lane and think about what 2014 was like. I mean, even the idea that you would make a movie about an Iraq war veteran or, you know, or an Afghan war veteran, I can't remember which it is. i say It's Afghanistan, yeah. Yeah, okay. Like, it is is kind of crazy. It's easy to forget, ah i think, especially for younger people who maybe just don't know,
Speaker: how overwhelming those wars were from a sort of media perspective for a number of years, and especially in the US. I can't speak for the UK, but you know it was a constant torrent of like it was on the news when people were dying, of course, but then it was movies. you know It was Jarhead. It was ah Zero Dark Thirty. It was... um Yeah, right. American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood movie, right? like these These things were massively, massively important in a way that I think the existence of Donald Trump has sort of just like thrown into the dustbin of history. But at the same time, I do think that afghan the Afghanistan war is massively underfilmed compared to, say, the Vietnam War, considering that the Afghan war went on for, what was it, 21 years?
Speaker: Oh, what yeah, no, yeah. ah Yeah, but it only ended technically under Biden, but that is actually kind of to my point that like it kept going for another decade essentially after we stopped talking about it. But yeah it just like Trump's entire first term included the war in Afghanistan. But like saying that sounds insane.
Speaker: You know what I mean? Yeah, and I do think at some point we should do a mini series on Afghan war films if there are any. Ristrapo is the only one I can think of. There are a couple. I'm trying to think off top my head. I know there are a couple, but it is true. I would be interested to see if there are any Soviet Afghan like movies about their invasion of Afghanistan. That would be sort of interesting.
Speaker: But yeah, I should say, it's just to sort of wrap this up, right? like um The interesting, I wanted to know what you made of the last scene, right? Which is horrifically Gen X in the sense that they're like doing a Madonna. Yeah. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts' character, they they can't conceive if they've waited too long. They're too old, basically. But they're they're going to an adopt a baby from Haiti, ah which is, you know, you can think what you like about that. It's it's complex, but...
Speaker: Gabby and I were guessing which, like cut wi basically, like the the the race of the baby, like which, that were they going to go sort of East Asian? We knew it was going to be some sort of weird, scary third world adoption situation. we just weren't sure which they were going to go with and what that was going to say about them.
Speaker: yeah Yeah, I mean, we should say these these these are like, these both but the Ben Stiller character and the Nightmare Once character are going to become unbearable as of 2016, right? Like, there's a bit where he's like, you know, is I'm addicted to the internet. i I check the Huffington Post every four minutes. Yes. And then there's like another clip with him watching Jon Stewart on the phone.
Speaker: This is worth actually underscoring before we talk about the end of the movie, and we do need to to stop soon, but I will just yeah underscore that one of the differences in the movie is that Adam Driver is maybe not tech phobic, but interested enough in living in the world that he consciously limits technological usage. This is the main reason he can do his Facebook thing. He doesn't have a Facebook. So the frame narrative works because a millennial audience expects him to not have a Facebook. And then he gets one and that's what, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: Whereas Ben Stiller is someone who is like, he has like his pussy hat is pre-made and he is ready to get radicalized by Rachel Maddow so hard.
Speaker: Because he is just, his brain is just like a Cronenberg style flesh tube links it to the television and and the internet. like he is He is in Videodrome. like He is so ready to hate Donald Trump and to spend every waking. I know from like my Facebook profile that I don't use very much, Gen X people like this who are on Facebook just constantly to this day.
Speaker: Yeah, but Ben Stiller is going to get obsessed by like Russian conspiracy theories. He's going to be like reading the Steele dossier. He's going to be like, oh, I like every... like bernie so He's going to be the kind of guy who's like, oh, both Bernie Sanders and Trump are like Russian plants against Hillary. Yes. Oh, he he's going to The pee tape is real. um You know, Trump is a full-on Russian asset. And like, Zelensky doesn't understand that by dealing with Trump, he's playing into Putin's hand or something. Like, just things we can't even imagine. Whereas I kind of feel like Naomi Watts might like...
Speaker: be like that for a bit and then actually become like a wild anti-vaxxer. Yes, she's definitely... She's got a little bit more of a... um There's like a less earnestness about her in some way. I think it's because of the cynicism of her father. She feels less earnest than the Ben Stiller character. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But we we should say that they're... Adopting the baby. They're adopting the baby. That matters slightly less. What is interesting is the the last scene in the film, which is a...
Speaker: four-year-old toddler yeah ah who looked like me as a toddler. you know i was i had a beautiful blonde hair as a toddler. There you And yeah, he's playing with an iPhone, right? And he's sort of playing on the iPhone and he goes to make a call on the iPhone. He can barely speak. you know he's He's a look toddler brain. And he's yeah he's trying to make phones on his iPhone. And the Ben Sir and Naomi Watts character look on in absolute horror. Yeah. And obviously, say this toddler, if he was what, five, four five in 2014, he's what now, like 16, 17 years old? Yeah, this is a a young Gen Z, very old Gen Alpha, basically. Yeah, yeah. yeah So this is these are the kids. of two So Bound Batch sort treats us to the you know to what is coming with Gen Z, effectively, in a very pressing way.
Speaker: Yeah, what strange beast latches towards Bethlehem to be born? like It really is. It is it is that moment. you know um it's It's kind of, yeah it's a little scary. I mean, because he's he's not wrong.
Speaker: You know, this is ah an interesting thing. I will just, maybe by way of leaving us off, um two things. One directly related to that, one not. The first is at the high school where I am employed, I remember the seniors looking down strongly on the freshmen because they think of the freshmen as Gen Alpha.
Speaker: And they see this as like almost like a different species. you know They sort of think of themselves as being like responsible in their technology usage, whereas Gen Alpha is like fully brain-rotted, fully destroyed. And I'm sure there's some truth to that, but also if you spend any time around these Gen Z kids, you would also think of them as being like very addicted to their phones.
Speaker: And I do think there's ah a sort of mirroring of the Victorian era, right? In the sense that if the millennials are the first generation to be exposed to kind of software capitalism, ah to platform capitalism, to social media, to like full digitization, they, a bit like early Victorians, they're the ones who kind of have harbored the most suspicion because they're the sort of the ones that are hit with it first.
Speaker: And they know, what they sort of, they still remember the world of before. Whereas that's not available that's not available to the people who just swim in it entirely um from birth. Yeah.
Speaker: ah And I do think that's why the Adam Driver character is so sort of technophobic in some ways. Yeah, and and it's true for me. I mean, I am definitely more technophobic than many of my my colleagues or you know teachers or admin or whatever in a school.
Speaker: But I will just say briefly that Hedge Fund Dave, and that is the name of the character, this feels, again, sort of significant in some way. like There's something about the casting of this movie that's truly like cursed or blessed, depending on how you think of it.
Speaker: is a man named Ryan Serhant, or Serhant, I don't know, who's a millennial, and he owns a real estate firm in New York and is the executive producer of Owning Manhattan, which is a reality TV show about real estate people in New York City. But he got his start...
Speaker: um at by ah going to a kind of liberal arts college, blah, blah, blah, and then becoming an actor on As the World Turns, like ah a soap opera, you know, that's been running for 5,000 years, one of these shows.
Speaker: So there's something funny to me about Noah Baumbach having like a real estate mogul guy who also goes on to be involved in reality TV and has a background in soap operas. Like the kind of guy who's definitely selling and buying buildings worth hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, in Manhattan real estate.
Speaker: have him play like the dopey, kind of stupid a hedge fund New York guy in this movie. And I can't quite like tease a meaning out of it, but there's just so much in the casting to this film that feels almost like hyper-real. Like, you know, Baudrillard is sort of like, you know, hovering over the movie in some way, or Adam Curtis. I think may one of the opening lines is about hyper-reality, isn't it?
Speaker: Yes, you were right. I forgot about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. i think Adam Driver like drops the that drops the term hyperreality to Ben Siller very early on. I think with that is where we should end this because it's, you know, um i will...
Speaker: simply thank everyone for listening and, ah encourage you to consider subscribing, rating, letting your friends know. We had some paid conversions for which we are extremely, extremely thankful. Uh, and i just wanted to say, i love doing this podcast and I love, um I don't know. I love getting interactive with you guys. So feel free to shoot us an email, leave us a comment, ah send us your sort of stories of what sort of trilbies you were wearing in 2014 or earlier, or what your experience of sort of millennial culture was.
Speaker: Cause we are getting towards the end of this season and starting the handoff. I think there'll be an announcement about that soon. And i should I should also say that we probably will, ah for for people who are eligible for it, do a poll for our next season at some point in the next couple of months. So look out for the sort of film poll.
Speaker: Yes, keep your eyes peeled, ah your your trigger fingers ready to type and select options. And yeah, with that, I guess I need to go grocery shopping because I live a a boring suburb. I know this pop podcast makes it sound like I'm very exciting, but in reality, I just need to go buy like cabbage so I can make my Slavic stews and whatever it is. Oh, that's very nice. what am i And i'm what am I doing?
Speaker: I'm having a Spanish lesson, so there you go. Buenos dias.
Speaker: Sorry. I don't know why. Buenos dias, when it comes out of my mouth. I need to get off this recording. You've insult it you've insulted the Latin American people, Jess. Lo siento. I am estupido. Okay, with that, thank you for listening and adios.
