Trump’s Iranian Connection
S1: The following recording may contain explicit language I can’t get more explicit than May with you say it may. Hey, do you want to listen to the gist at home on your Aleksa? Turns out we at Slate have built a new Alexis skill, were perfecting it. So what you do is you say, Alexa, enable the gist to enable the skill on your Alexa device, and then you begin playing the show and to play it after that you can say, Alexa, play the gist first. Enable them play it just on the Alexa.
S2: It’s Monday, January 6th, 2020 from Slate, it’s the gist. I’m Mike PESCA. Unnecessary clarification of the month. I know it’s early in the month, but I thought I had this one now. When I read The New York Times story, Headless Body in CAVE is identified as 1916 ax murder suspect. I thought I came across the unnecessary clarification of the month.
S1: Under that headline about the 1916 headless axe murderer was a graphic of the actual wanted poster wanted for murder. Walt Kerans, about 40 years old. Not his actual name. So anyway, here’s how the story goes. In the spring of 1916, a bootlegger in Idaho escaped from jail by hiding a saw in his shoe and using it to cut his way out of his cell. Okay. I got to say, if that’s indicative of your pat down procedure, you Idaho jail, you deserve to be broken out of sorry, good citizens of Idaho who don’t want an axe murderer wandering around. But the jail cannot be allowed such laxity. That, by the way, is a note, not a clarification. Therefore, it is not the unnecessary clarification of the month. We’re coming to that because the article continues a few months later. The man murdered his common law wife by, quote, beating her brains out with an axe. End quote. According to a local newspaper. OK. How is it that you know how to break out of jail with a sore? But that’s how you do your acts related murdering. That’s not how you murder someone with an axe. This guy understands blades. The saw in the shoe thing. But when it comes to axes, apparently he beats her brains out. It doesn’t scan. Now, this rankles. Yes. It’s maybe the thing that rankles of the month, but it’s not the unnecessary clarification of the month in this story about a 40 year old who went missing in 1916. The story goes on this week, more than a century later. Officials in Clark County, Idaho, announced that Joseph Henry, loveless, loveless, shocking, but with how you treat the ladies. That, by the way, an aside, not an unnecessary clarification. Anyway, this week, more than a century later, officials in Clark County, Idaho, announced that Joseph Henry Loveless, the bootlegging escape artist, had been found. Of course, he’s long dead. Yes. And there it is, the headless body belonging to a man who was 40 in 1916. We need to say, is long dead. Yes, that is the unnecessary clarification of the month. Now, you have to say, if you were Joseph Henry Loveless and you found out what your legacy would be, how The New York Times would refer to you posthumously. And it was several times as a bootlegger or a bootlegger escape artist and not for fronting the whole axe murderer thing. I guess you take it. Nothing burnishes the old legacy like a beheading in a mystery. I guess they say tragedy plus time it goes comedy. Heedlessness plus time equals mystery status minus murderous NASW. I thought that was a shoe in for unnecessary clarification of the month until I saw what Donald Trump was saying about really, really wanting to do war crimes. They’re allowed to kill our people, Trump said, according to a pool report, they’re allowed to torture and maim people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up people, and we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site.
S3: It doesn’t work that way. The president is absolutely right. It doesn’t work that way because they’re not allowed to do it. Even if he was musing before a microphone, which makes it all okay, I guess, according to Kellyanne Conway, how do you square the fact that the president and secretary of state do seem to be saying two different things about international?
S4: We do seem to be. The president seems to say we are targeting cultural sites which would be illegal for historical and cultural sites. Did he not say that again?
S1: They are not in retaliation for this thing that they are not allowed to do. And this is going to blow your mind, which would be a war crime, because scientists will want to study it.
S3: Going to blow your mind even if they do bad things. We are not allowed to commit war crimes. queezy clause tucked inside the third basket of the Helsinki Accords. I know, I know. But I’m glad I could point this out. You’re not allowed to do war crimes just because you incorrectly think your adversaries are allowed to do war crimes.
S1: Sorry I had to point that out and I apologize that that right now is the leader in the clubhouse as the unnecessary clarification of the month on the show today. Mike’s treatise on the movies, maybe its premise more of a premise than a treatise. Anyway, I look at the role of movies, roles in movies, sneaking a semolina roll into the movies. But basically the role of movies in our culture. A treatise, maybe a premise. I just know it’s not an open letter of that, we can’t be sure. But first, Adam Davidson has been reporting on Donald Trump’s business dealings for years and he’s come across some wild stuff, demonstrable wrongs. But some of these specific things he’s uncovered have been ignored, at least by prosecutors. But with the killing of KSM Sulaimani, a top commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, I remember thinking about one of the stories Adam wrote, and it was about how Donald Trump has done business with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Adam Davidson of The New Yorker is here to discuss his prior reporting, which has gone from troubling to sinister within the last week. We know Donald Trump doesn’t like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. He killed its leader. And here he explains why he doesn’t like them.
S5: For years, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its ruthless Cuds Force under suleimani’s leadership, has targeted, injured and murdered hundreds of American civilians and servicemen. The recent attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq.
S6: But would it surprise you to learn that while on one hand, Trump decried the Islamic Revolutionary Guard as vicious murderers, on the other hand, he does business with them? This seems like the stuff of the wildest unprovable conspiracy theories, except for one thing, The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson reported extensively on that connection, and he’s here now. Adam, thanks for coming on. Thank you, Mike. You’re a man who mayors wears many hats. I do. The good and the bad. Yes. And now let us talk about the ugly. What is Donald Trump’s financial connection to the coulds force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard? Sure. So I will say this story does seem when you hear the facts, ridiculous and impossible. But you mean the story of Donald Trump being elected president, the United States? Well, the full story. All of it. But the story I’m about to tell you was thoroughly fact checked by The New Yorker. I talked with the general counsel of the Trump organization. He said there wasn’t a single fact that was in accurate. So I’m going to take you back a step.
S7: So we hear about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Iran, and it’s hard to understand what that is because it’s not a thing that exists in other countries. Iran has an army that fights its wars just like most countries do. Big army. A big army. But separately, it has an Islamic Revolutionary Guard that whose job is not to protect the territory of Iran or the people of Iran. It is to protect the Islamic nature of the Iranian regime. There’s also a massive part of the economy. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards, Cottam El NBA is their general contractor. They build everything. They build the roads, they build the subways, they build the ports. So when the sanctions were first put on Iran, they weren’t put on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, but they were put on Hatem Glanbia. This massive industrial concern that both did legitimate construction, it did, you know, built all these civil engineering projects. But it also was central to the weapons of mass destruction and terror financing and money laundering efforts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. So they got sanctions put upon them. And there was a clever idea. Let’s create a bunch of front companies, unnamed, that are not named as sanctioned entities and let’s do business through them. So we know that there are at least a thousand of these front companies that are all follow a clear pattern. They are run by high ranking officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. They have deep connections to Hatam Colombia. So perhaps the most obvious example of one of these front companies is a company called asar Persico. It’s run by two Darvas. She brothers brother Darvas. She. They’re called Sadrs. That’s kind of like a general. It’s a special title for Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Senior senior officer said the Dark Vishy Brothers were basically chief allies, chief deputies of Muhammed Bugger Ghalibaf, mayor of Tehran now, but former candidate for president and former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Air Force, which was tasked with getting the missile targeting systems for Iran’s weapons of mass destruction. So this is they were of, from an American perspective, bad guys. These were very, very, very bad guys. These were guys who were using a front company nakedly a front company. But they do need if you’re going to do money laundering, if you’re going to do external weapons of mass destructions, acquisitions, et cetera. You need a partner outside of Iran. And their chief external partner was Zia Mammadov, who is transportation minister. You’re of Azerbaijan. And this was not a secret. This was not something that I, you know, went into the belly of the beast and uncovered it. You went on their Web site and you got a friend with a Farsi translator. That was the first step. And the second step was the U.S. government has identified Ziemer mode of transportation, former transportation minister of Azerbaijan as a major money laundering partner of the Darvas she brothers and Zem amudha if we can get into it. But basically, Azerbaijan’s unimaginably corrupt in Azerbaijan. Zia Mammadov is considered just ridiculously corrupt. So Zima Madoff sends his son anar to the U.S. in 2010 to basically get commercial ties with the U.S. He hires Dan Burton, a famously sketchy former congressman and an agent assassination of a mellen in its backyard to show that Vince Foster was killed. Yes, he is. And a normal man. I’ve spent a fortune in the U.S. He tried to get meetings with lots and lots of businesses, no success. The easiest Google search reveals like, oh, this is not someone you want to work with, someone who is known to be a money laundering partner of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He got one major business partner. Who was it? Wait, let me guess. Yeah. Was it Tom Stier? It was not Tom. Was it Michael Bloomberg? No. I can’t think of any rich but Donald Trump. It was still. My God. Yes. So in 2010, Naama Madoff. At least the saying goes showed up.
S8: Cold called at the Trump Tower, as so many of these stories begin. Yeah, and fairly quickly they have a deal to build Trump Tower Baku in Baku, Azerbaijan. This project bore all of the hallmarks of money laundering. First of all, Azerbaijan itself is a huge red flag. There is I’ve talked to so many people who investigate money laundering, foreign corrupt practices, and a country like Azerbaijan, you just assume you have to prove it’s not money laundering or corruption. First of all, second of all, this was a project for the minister of transport of a country. It was on land that had been owned by the minister of transport. They got rid of all the existing residents using Azerbaijan force majeure, saying this land must be used for crucial government purposes and then was turned into the Trump Tower. Baku and many of the workers were paid in huge duffel bags of cash. So. To make all this simple, because I’ve thrown a lot of names and details, solar, meaning running the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, one of his closest allies, Mohammed Bugger Ghalibaf, is assigned to acquire weapons of mass destruction, specifically the missile guidance systems that will guide missiles to hit Tel-Aviv and American outposts. Ghalibaf two main deputies, create a massive, secretive front company for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Their goal is to do business with the West. Their partner, Zia Mammadov, has one major foreign partner, and that’s Donald Trump. Now, whenever I talk to Trump supporters, they say, oh, this is just how business is conducted. No, this is crazy. This is wildly irresponsible from a purely business standpoint. Forget about patriotism. Forget about just decency. The fines you would pay for working so hard to violate sanctions are massive. Now, do I think Trump decided? Oh, yes. I’m eager to help the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Of course not. But I do think that central to the Trump Organization business model, particularly in this period from 2010 to present, was doing deals with wildly questionable people who will overpay for license fees and overpay for other services because they know the Trump organization will not do the due diligence that any other American company will do.
S9: And let me say, Donald Trump, in announcing the targeting of Sooliman, he said for years the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its ruthless Cuds Force under suleimani’s leadership, has targeted, injured and murdered hundreds of American civilians and servicemen. Fact check. True.
S8: Yes. This is this is behavior that is beyond the pale of even the sketchiest layer of American business. This is now. I don’t believe that he targeted solely money because of this. I don’t believe that he wanted to do business with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. I think he’s. It sure seems clear he’s a wildly impetuous person who makes a horrible and self-destructive decisions based on very little information and has remarkably little curiosity. And he has a staff that supports this and it might seem at first glance. Oh, there’s a contradiction here. Why would a Trump do business with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard? Very simple. The Trump organization was a small and failing former real estate developer that was desperate to sell its name for sale license deals. It’s very hard business and there are other companies like Ritz Carlton than J. W. Marriott and others who are much more successful at this and are serious, serious business people. What the Trump organization discovered is if you don’t ask questions and if you offer to put a big gold name on the most sketchy projects in the world, people will pay you wildly more even if the project isn’t successful. In fact, often the goal is for the project not to be successful. Oh, because when you have it’s kind of like the show the producers, when you have a massive building project and it’s unsuccessful, it fails. You spend hundreds of millions of dollars. We know they spent hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s going all over. The world’s going to buy marble and brass knobs and it’s paying architects and engineers. And there’s huge amounts of money flowing all over the world. And then the project sort of fails. And there’s no entity even in a non-corrupt country that’s adding it all at it all up and saying, wait, did you spend the right amount for this project? So when it’s a failing project, it disappears. You can funnel hundreds of millions, billions of dollars through a failing project and it just is gone. Nobody knows about. But a successful ongoing project has some version of books to look at, has some version of books. It has some business sense that either makes sense or doesn’t make sense.
S1: If I can ask you, though, this just occurred to me, you know, still out there is the fact that he’s never given us his taxes. Would he be declaring? Is there a line item for I have laundered money from from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard? Would the taxes show that so?
S8: No, the taxes would not show that. And there would have been intermediaries, presumably. But some of the questions I would have if I had access to his finances are. Was there more money paid and how was that paid for? That would be one question. But the bigger question would be, let’s look at the five hundred and thirty, whatever entities that the Trump organization owns and let’s understand how money is flowing into them and how it’s flowing out of them. And and let’s try and get an understanding of. How he’s spending so much more money than makes sense based on everything we know about his businesses. Do you think there are people in the government who’ve done that and know that and have done the forensics, but for whatever reason, they can’t prosecute. They don’t have all the information or you think it’s just not been done? Do you have any way to know? Everything I know suggests they have not done it. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s possible to do. This wouldn’t be too it’s too tangled a web to unravel based on publicly available records. You can you can paint a pretty dire picture. And I think if you read not just my reporting, but David Fahrenthold reporting, Tim O’Brien’s reporting, Andrew Bernstein’s reporting, you know, this is a company that has fraud at its core and has all along. So.
S10: You know, I got a lot of initial praise and condemnation and scorn for saying, you know, almost two years ago when Michael Cohen was investigated. Oh, this is the end of the Trump present.
S9: Yes. You put you put a marker down beginning of the end and you may be proved right. But we won’t know. We won’t know. Time has passed. I mean, my my theory has been there. We’ve been ordered.
S10: There will be a decisive moment when we will see some clear, little simple fact that is irrefutable and clear. Yes. But I’m losing faith in that, because I think I would guess if you did a survey of Americans and said, do you think Trump helped oligarchs in third world countries, in developing countries launder money into the U.S. and did business with some of the most questionable, sketchy people on Earth?
S9: Don’t you think the vast majority of Americans will be like, yeah, probably right. I see what you’re saying. I would. I think that you’re losing faith because you’ve seen how, say, the Ukraine investigation played out. Where probably I don’t wanna put words in your mouth. It seems that they haven’t pretty much dead to rights. And look at the polling. You know how impeachment works. Not going to move the needle. So why would you argue that a much more complex investigation of things that occurred way before he was president? Why would that move the needle?
S8: Although what I would say is some of this is occurring right now. If you look at the Trump organization announcements recently, things they are pursuing today. The numbers don’t add up. They’re getting money from some source. That doesn’t make sense based on what they tell us about their business.
S9: And so they couldn’t that just be puffery about how successful their businesses. They’re not publicly traded. We can’t know what their disclosures. They don’t have true documentable does what they do file audited financials in the UK.
S10: They have two properties in Scotland and they also have a property in Ireland that follows the same laws. And just using those three projects, you see numbers that are just unsupportable by the evidence. And so they both don’t make sense as projects and they don’t make sense as where where is the money coming from. But. I’ve talked to many prosecutors and former prosecutors, current prosecutors who tell me they all tell me the same thing. Yes. Sounds really, really possible that something is going on right now. You’d ultimately need to do something big. You’d need to subpoena his banks and understand what’s inside his bank records. You need to subpoena his accountants. You’d need to get his tax returns. And you can’t do any of those things quietly, as far as I know. Right. Without a big fight. And it doesn’t seem like there’s an entity yet ready to do that. Now, it’s possible. You know, the Manhattan D.A. has hardly covered himself in glory in the last few years with non-prosecution, would not prosecute for against of rapists, of EPSTEIN, of not prosecuting Evancho and Judea.
S9: On the Trump Soho deal, was that within the Trump Soho that they got away with just wildly wild claims that they can back up the exact off.
S8: So it could be the New York A.G., could be Florida A-G, unlikely Republican. So, you know, as Jesse Eisenberg, ProPublica friend of both the US, says, most people get away with it. Yeah, that is the nature of financial crime. Yeah, most people get away with it.
S9: I don’t know if you’re brazen enough to do the financial crime. Maybe you’re also brazen. It’s a mindset I can understand. But you’re also brazen enough to say, and I’ll run for president and think I can still get away with it. But so far has been right. He’s been right. OK. So when Maria comes on the show, we do. Is that bullshit that we have the bottom line? Let’s do a version of that with everything you’ve said. Is that corruption? Just give me the bottom line sentence. Documenting what you care. What you have proved is the connection between Donald Trump’s finances and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran.
S8: I feel with a very high degree of certainty that Donald Trump received millions of dollars knowingly being part of a scheme to help the Islamic Revolutionary Guard launder money or do other nefarious acts like weapons of mass destruction, acquisition funding, terrorism, etc. I feel that confidently because the Trump organization told me that Adam Davidson is a writer for The New Yorker where he reported all this stuff and he’s also out with a new book that you’re going to hear more about.
S9: Oh, yes, you will. The Passion Economy, The New Rules for Thriving in the 21st Century. Adam, thank you so much. Thank you, Mike.
S3: And now the schpiel last night at the Golden Globes. And forget your face. He seems to have stopped caring. Did you get that? Did you pick up that vibe? I don’t know. Gotcha.
S1: That’s Gary aboard the Golden Globes marked the beginning of awards season when the best films of the previous calendar year are given awards. Although, according to this New York Times profile of Taryn Edgerton, award season really just rewards the best of the previous two or three months. The Times says, quote, The academy has given 50 best actor nominees slots per decade. Since 2009, 47 have been given to people in films released in the second half of the year. So in this profile, they make the case that Edgerton is deserving and it goes from truly impressive to wait. What are you trying to say about the nature of sacrifice set with fires? Anyway, so here’s what they write. Edgerton, 30, did all of his own singing. OK, that is impressive. Truly impressive. You’ve heard me sing. I know how impressive that is. There was intricate choreography that Edgerton sometimes had to perform in platform boots and towering feathered headdresses. OK. For me, I know I’d have broken three ankles, two of mine, one of an extras. They go on. Edgerton, who is heterosexual. Also filmed gay sex scenes. OK. Now, the main scene was with Richard Maddin. The guy played Rob Stark in Game of Thrones.
S3: So I can imagine many members of my audience thinking, does that really belong in the list of hardships and impressive and hard to pull off stunts. But I hear yeah, I hear you.
S1: They also say Edgerton did many of his own stunts, including tumbling drunkenly down a staircase. That does seem tough. And finally, and shave the front half of his head to get Elton John’s receding hairline just right. Oh, he’s shaved half of his head to go temporarily bald with a pate that can regrow hair at a moment’s notice. Oh, academy, give this guy not just the award. Can you work out a Nobel Prize for him? What a hero. Half a head, a temporary baldness. Now frigid, matted and shaved his entire body. But that’s another story. Guess it’s about best supporting actor. The point is that Edgerton was really great. And we’ll be a long shot to get the nomination because he wasn’t nominated in this slight, tiny, narrow window of time that communicates to us. This is an important film. But I say when it comes to film, the notion of this is the time of prestige. This is a time that was important or the very fact that some of this stuff is important. What we want from film in general. All of that has changed so fundamentally that the medium itself has been transformed as to become unrecognizable and now literally unrecognizable. Because I’m not talking about film versus video or aspect ratios or means of distribution with the ending of the star system or auteur ism, because for all those changes, the basic premise was the same. What was a film was the contract between film and audience. Audience surrenders a few hours of their time for a few hours of a discrete story. None of that has changed, but the feeling that we get from that experience has changed profoundly because set against the tapestry of storytelling on the best or even the second or tertiary level television shows, what movies are to us has changed. And I think or I was thinking they had diminished. But I’ve I have a new insight on that that I’m going to share with you in a second. Movies, by the way, this change is nothing that the movies did. Movies have been doing. Like I said, couple hours, you get your attention. They tell their discrete story. Movies have been doing pretty much what they’ve always been doing. You know, since the jazz singer, even some of the silent films. But as one character says in the play and later the movie Inherit the Wind, all motion is relative. Perhaps it is you who have moved away by standing still. All right. That’s a little on the nose, but it kind of has to be because it was in a movie. This brings me to my point, my premise. I have such a fundamentally different relationship to movies now because it’s good or pretty good. TV can just do so much more. It can lay out a character’s motivations completely. It could flesh out nuances of not just the main characters, but secondary characters or characters who on the list on the call sheet are 12th or 15th down. It can explain rationales. It doesn’t have to sacrifice the realistic for the dramatic. You can show real evolution. It doesn’t need necessarily to condense long processes into short time periods. Acting can show not just one or two scenes of conflict or heightened emotion, but it can show the complexity of human race. Compare walking Phoenix. Last night’s best actor in a drama. Compare what he was asked to and did finally what he had to play in Joker versus what Gandolfini or Bryan Cranston or Jon Hamm got to do through so many stories, through so many years, through so many moods and modes. It’s just not comparable. I believe that movies have become like poems, plotted poems, but sometimes poems have plots like poems. Movies can convey a mood or a feeling like pop songs, which are the lyrics are essentially poems. They can convey a sentiment but set against what TV can do. They are I’ll say 99 percent of them can’t compete on the basic fundaments of depth, nuance. And I also think believability in almost every movie, no matter how highly praised it, is really well-done movies. There are so many, many moments where plot developments are just sprung on us handwave door. They don’t stand up to strict scrutiny. And we’re supposed to say, well, you know, that’s that’s just idioms of the form. That’s just how movies work. I understand the limitations of the form. AHAR limitations in a sense. I guess it’s like being miffed at the presence of masks in Japanese no theater. I wouldn’t want no theater not to exist. But there is a reason why actors being able to display facial expressions has a comparable advantage to theater of no. Even among Japanese audiences. So what movies? What they sometimes deliver better than TV shows is spectacle. Only so often they don’t. Was the last movie that people went to specifically to look at Avatar. Before that Jurassic Park. Now there’s an abundance of the dazzling that what was formerly dazzling just seems rote. The very franchises that invented dazzling can’t survive on that and they fall down on their storytelling. Which brings me to Star Wars. Rise of Skywalker, which I saw over the break as Bryan Curtis of the Press Box podcast put it, as somebody like you who has grown up literally our whole lives with these movies.
S11: I’m amazed at. The how should I put this?
S12: The smallness of Star Wars now or how it just seems like another movie.
S1: Brian wasn’t despairing when he was a kid, like kids of our generation. He played with Star Wars toys and I wondered what a Tauntaun smelled like on the inside. But he had some distance. The despair at the deficits of the Star Wars franchise can really be felt in the voice of Griffin Newman, the actor who, along with Vanity Fair’s David Sims, hosts a podcast called Blank Check that actually started as an extended discussion of all things Star Wars. Here’s Griffin talking about Rise of Skywalker, this thing, right.
S13: That all stems out of initially this genuine love we had for sitting down and talking about all the hundred shared hundred writing about taking into the prequel or and just having fun, like riffing on it and being silly and like talking about Gore’s milers that could do this. So they do this for six year like Captain America fight Ray George Lucas. I could do this all day and I’m just sitting here as or having this conversation.
S14: And I I just had this thought. I find no joy in this.
S15: What’s not done to some degree, a beautiful touching moment in the fans like, wow, it’s really nice.
S1: But truly, it is this thing where I don’t know if it looks the latest Star Wars was not good, just as a pure letter, grade C minus. Although if you had told a 9 year old me that all Star Wars would become is someone retconning a fetch quest which didn’t elevate IP past slash fic, I would say George Lucas comes up with the craziest concepts. I thought a job war was wacky, but the real reason why Star Wars disappoints? Well, there’s many of them. But I think fundamentally it’s a movie trying to do what movies can’t and don’t do well. But what TV shows can do? It’s trying to be something other than a discrete story. It’s going beyond the limitations of the poem. There are epic poems. There are the poems of song of Roland and Beowulf and the Iliad. They all, by the way, pre-date the novel in the same way that films pre-date TV. I think that’s notable. And there are epic movies, Lawrence of Arabia and the Irishman, but they are not the cinematic equivalent to novels. But great TV shows really are movies are plotted poems. And look, poems are great. They can convey moods. They can affect you on the phrase or sentence level or leave you with an impression or a thought. Nothing against poems. Movies can do all that. But if you never knew that short stories or novels existed and you read one, you might find yourself looking at poems differently. You might find yourself looking at them as lacking. And I think that’s what I’ve been doing with movies, finding flaws, nit picking plot holes, rolling my eyes, a convention, comparing them unfavorably to television. Couple of caveats more of an intellectual person than an emotional person that might come into play. And if it seems in any way I’m degrading poetry, I’m not. But I’ve come to think of movies differently, not worse or lesser. OK, maybe a little lesser if I’m honest, because I prize the things the TV can do. But movies used to be my favorite form of visual media. But I gotta say, I’ve never been as moved or changed or as formed by a movie as much as I have been by the greatest TV shows, which I and I think this is important, which I have lived with over many years. The other part of this is that I do think great TV shows are more demanding. They’re literally more demanding of your time, which is more important than money. And when something is more demanding and it gives you something, you get more out of it. I think great television is going to move past the movies as the most prestigious visual medium. I predict that one day TV stars will have to be Lord over to do movies and that the Emmys will become more important than the Oscars. In fact, that the Oscars will beg TV stars to host, but no TV stars will be particularly interested. That’s already happened, by the way. And now that I think of movies as poems, I’ve actually begun to expect something different from them. And as a result, I’ve begun to enjoy them more. This all of this, by the way, is going to be increasingly irrelevant because, of course, podcasts will soon surpass them both for depth, breath, excitement and caché.
S16: And that’s it for today’s show, Daniel Shrader produced The Gist. This is his third nomination and fourth win the gist.
S6: I don’t care. I really don’t care. At a shot of a dyspeptic looking Tom Hanks. That’s cause of me, not because of Chet Hayes. Don’t back Willie down.
S16: Thanks, mate. Well prepared to prove it. And thanks for listening.
