John Lovett (62:00)
All right, one more time. Thank you to Ron Pearlman. Thank you to LA and Kerman. We'll be right back. Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love it or Leave it coming up. Love it or Leave it is brought to you by Ship Skis. If you've ever gone on a ski trip, you know that traveling with your gear can be a hassle. Sure can. Who wants to lug around oversized bags for a crowded airport? Thankfully, Ship Skis came up with a solution to get all of your winter gear to your destination. You'll be shoop, shoop, shooping in no time. No troubles. We're not just talking about your skis and snowboards. They'll even ship Your boots, boots, jackets, snow pants, goggles, all of it including your luggage so you can focus on the adventure, not the hassle. Just schedule your shipment, attach your label and Ship Skis handles the rest. Delivering your gear directly to your destination. 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Here in Los Angeles, it's very easy to make one donation that's split among incredible charities doing critical work for our neighbors and first responders. Thanks to you, we have already raised nearly $200,000 for these great groups so far. And you can learn more and make a tax deductible donation@votesaveamerica.com relief. We really appreciate if you've donated, so go to votesaveamerica.com relief. All right. Also this week on Assembly Required, our show with Stacey Abrams. As Republicans and all these opportunistic freaks claim that DEI is the cause of all of our problems. This week, Stacey Abrams and NYU law professor Kenji Yoshino tackle the myths, legal arguments, and share why DEI hasn't been the problem. It's a solution. You can tune in to this great episode now on the Assembly Required feed. All right, here we are in our beautiful, slightly charred city, which has seen obviously better days. But while first responders work to extinguish the fires, our love for the city burns brighter and fiercer. Much like Sabrina Carpenter's official $23 Erewhon Smoothie, L.A. is a delicious combination of flavors, protein, and things that sound nice, but do nothing. And tonight on the show, I would like to invite you to share what you love about this town in a segment we're calling I Love it la. All right, so let's can we bring the lights up? If you have a favorite restaurant or cultural quirk or LA story that you'd like to share, just raise your hand and our producer Chris will come find you. Also, if you like the design of this graphic. Not with my face, though. If you like the design of this graphic, you can buy it as a shirt from the Cricut store. There it is. 100% of the proceeds go to the disaster relief fund. So if donating isn't your thing, this is technically intentional shopping. So win, win. All right, who out there? Just a quick something you love about la, something very LA that happened to you. Ryan Gosling changed your tire. Ryan Geisling hit your car, whatever it is. We got one right over here. We can go right there. Her hand went up, went up with confidence. I moved here during the pandemic and we were just walking around a neighborhood to have something to do out of the apartment. And there's this really beautiful house. And my friend that was walking with me, she's lived in LA for decades. And she was like, oh, I think I know someone who, like, did the garden on this house. And she was showing it to us and the owners were like, hey, we're home. And my husband's an architect and he built this house. Do you want to come inside and get a tour? We were like, okay. And we went inside and it was like the most beautiful, like, unexpected, like, avant garde house that I've ever heard of. And I looked the guy up and he was like a famous architect. And so I was just like, oh, I guess I'm just going to walk around a neighborhood and get a personal tour of this incredible home by a famous architect. Okay. That never happened to me anywhere else. That's great. Well, I think it is something. There's something about, like, other cities, they have a design style or a look or a culture that you see in its architecture. But in la, people come here from all over, and you can see in a lot of the houses that people came here with an idea of either what LA would be or what they would be. And so you can walk down a street in Los Angeles and there'll be houses of every different kind. They'll be like a strange Gothic house next to a Spanish bungalow next to an ultra modern home. That's the flip side to the idea of LA being a transient place where no one's from here, which is obviously not true, but that there is a feeling here. Like, you know, New York. It's. If you, if you make it here, you can make it anywhere. It's like, well, fuck you. Like, why is New York's like kind of cultural slogan a dare? Right? And I think what's that? LA is more like kind of spiritually welcoming. And people. I think that's an unspoken thing. People appreciate about it, that it's understood that you came here from somewhere with a very difficult thing to do that you may not ever do, but it's good that you're here to try. And that's, I think, why, like, all these stories every once in a while about LA being over, it's like, okay, you think this is the first time that people have said LA's golden age is over? Have you not seen Sunset Boulevard? Not on Broadway, because it's kind of a mess. Hi, Betsy. Hi, John. I love how dog friendly Los Angeles is. Oh, yeah, I like that too. You can take your dogs into Trader Joe's, you can take them into restaurants. Nobody cares. Yeah, nobody cares. You're not supposed to take the dog into the Trader Joe's. In a sense, that's also an argument for how you can rob banks anywhere somebody else. We were, like, recently walking down the street in Highland park and ran into, like a kind of famous Nepo baby, and she ended up giving us her French bulldog puppy and a super expensive French bulldog puppy that we're obsessed with, and we named him Goblin, and he's perfect. First of all, love that. There's something funny about LA too, when it comes to the Nepo babies and it's this. Everyone. There's a. Everyone's allowed to make fun of the Nepo babies and root against the Nepo babies. But everyone's goal is to come to la, become so successful that if you have children, those children will have your advantages. Everyone comes here to make Nepo babies. That's the dream. You come here and you hate the Nepo babies. Your dream is to love a Nepo baby more than anything else on Earth. Can't make sense of it. You just simply can't. I live in Pasadena, and my neighborhood was affected by the fires. We lost about 13 homes about one block north of my house. But the thing that I'm loving is that my neighborhoods come together. And I met some neighbors who live across the street. I've always loved their house. And the woman who lives there is the head of the Altadena seed library. And so you may have seen some stuff about her online and discovering that she was doing this awesome thing and the seed library was burned down, and so she's collecting seeds. So I gave her all the seats that I had, and she came over to say thank you. And I mentioned to her that Hannah Einbinder had reposted some of her stuff and said, oh, my God, I love her. So just that kind of weird conglomeration of celebrity culture, but also helping the community, but also our neighborhood coming together in the face of this immense tragedy is amazing. So I'm so glad to. I love my neighborhood, and that's beautiful. How many seeds did you have? Not enough. Right. Presumably it's a seed library. Do you have one of each? How bad of a is this? Like, when Alexandria burned down, none of these were in danger. This isn't like the seed vault in Svalbard, I assume. I don't know about that, but she's trying to help reseed urban lawns with native plants that are less likely to burn. Oh, I like that. I like that. I like that. You can get fresh fruit from a fruit cart in any part of the city whenever you want. And it's the freshest fruit you've ever had, and it's better than any fruit in the grocery store. And it's between 6 to $12, depending on where you are for the same size fruit. I love that, too. I love that, too. So I love movies, and I love of, you know, just all of the theaters here, all the repertory ones. The 12AMCs in Burbank and stuff. Yeah, yeah. The 6, the 8, the 9, the 12, the 15, 16. Yeah, yeah. And I love that, you know, you can just like go to a screening and like randomly there will be the director there, like doing a Q A afterwards and stuff. Like I've seen Guillermo del Toro three random times in Q and A's afterwards. One of them unpopular opinion, but was after Amelia Perez, which was a very good movie. Hell yeah. Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. I want to. You keep the mic, keep the mic. Hold on. Can everybody who has seen Amelia Perez applaud. To everyone who has a positive review, applaud. Everyone who fucking hated it, applaud. That's a good movie. That's a good movie. That's a good movie. It's either gonna be great or it failed while daring. Great. And I'm excited to find out. I'm excited to find out. Go on, sir. Well, that was about it. But one more unpopular opinion is I don't like dogs at Trader Joe's. So it's not everybody. There's one of me. Los Angeles is a city of contrasts. Hi, I think I'm Ron Perlman's dead aunt. He was staring right at me. Wow. So that was a big part of your night. That's a big part of your night. I get that. Yep. I saw David lynch in the Wild once and it was at the Hollywood Arc Light. So rest in peace to two Hollywood legends. Yep, that's right. That's right. Capitalism took what fire couldn't with the arclight. What? I still don't get why the Arclight closed, by the way. Made it through the whole fucking thing. Then I was like, oh, we're out. What the fuck? We're right near the end. I want the arclight back. What's going on in that dome? Nothing. I can't see the mic. Oh, hi. This is just a silly LA story. When I first moved here, I was cruising Facebook Marketplace a lot for furniture for my house and I found a listing for a 8ft tall, 250 pound gorilla lawn ornament. And I showed the listing to my husband and we agreed that we needed it. So we went to this guy's house and there it was in his front lawn, this 8ft tall gorilla. And he showed us a tour of the rest of his house. He had some couches for sale as well and lots of other random lawn ornaments. And he told us that he bought his first gorilla eight years ago and he had it in his backyard and he showed us that to see how it aged over the eight years. And he was like, well, I have one for my backyard now. I need One for my front yard, and he got one for his front yard, and then this just became a rotating gorilla for him. And now it's like his side hustle that he will get this gorilla, and he loves having it for the time that he has it until he sells it, and then he gets another gorilla. And this just became his side. I'm sorry. So I guess he's making it on volume. What are you talking about? What is the business? He buys them, and then. Then people pass by and buy them from him. Yeah, he lists them on Marketplace, and then he just, like, makes a couple hundred dollars on them. He flips them. Exactly. Okay, good for him. So this is what I love about la. That's what you love about la. I will. I will do one, and then we gotta. We gotta call it a night. But I remember when I moved to LA and I had. I moved here, I didn't know anything about Los Angeles, and I was working so hard as a speechwriter. It's hard to believe now, but it was true. I was working very hard and wearing a suit. And then I left to come out to LA and I sold a script, and that allowed me to come out here, which was a very fortunate thing. That doesn't happen, but I felt it was, like a crazy thing, but I didn't know what I was doing. And so I'm, like, freaking out. And I write a pilot, which I've never done before, and again, that becomes a show called 16 Under Pennsylvania. And I get to. And I'm living out here for years. I would say that my writing career had its ups. And then the other thing that happens, I can't remember what they're called the opposite of ups. And then we start, and years go by, and I'm like, like, learning about the city and making the city. But then we start this podcast, and somehow, because of the podcast, I end up at a very fancy party. And it's the kind of party where there's, like, a lot of celebrities. And Josh Gad, who I worked with on 1600 pen on that one perfect season, is at this party, and he introduces me to Rachel McAdams, and he says, rachel, this is Jon Lovett. He hosts Pod Save America. And she doesn't know what that is. And Josh Gad says it's a podcast. And he might as well have said, like, he's a proud boy. You know, it's like, you know, like, he builds model trains. Like, it was so not. It was just like. It was so the opposite of what she wanted to hear in that moment, with all love and no disrespect. Totally appreciate it. It was a very funny interaction. And then Josh realizing that it's not that he didn't. He goes, no, no. Like Rachel, it's very popular. And she's like, oh, how? Like in a sweet way, how popular. And I was like, how popular. I'm at this party. Do you see any other podcast hosts here? And that's our show. Thanks everybody. Coming out. Go to go to votesaveamerica.com relief. We'll be a Dynasty typewriter next week. Thanks to Ron Perlman and Langston Kerman for being here. There are 654 dates until the 2026 midterms. Yeah, that's right. The House. When you're thinking to yourself, all is lost, you remember that we can win the House. When you think, oh my God, does anything matter? Remember that there are Republicans in vulnerable district, that we can win the House. It's not going to be easy, but we're going to fight and win the House. 654 days till the 2026 midterms. Have a great night. Thank you for coming out. Hang in there. Thank you very much. Have a great weekend. Love it or Leave it is a Crooked Media production. It is written and produced by me, John Lovett and Lee Eisenberg. Kendra James is our executive producer, Chris Lord is our producer and Kennedy Hill is our associate producer. Hallie Kiefer is our head writer, Sarah Lazarus and Jocelyn Kaufman, Peter Miller, Alan Pierre, Will Miles and Mohana Del Shiki are our writers. Evan Sutton is our editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis provide audio support. Stephen Colon is our audio engineer and Milo Kim is our videographer. Our theme song is written and performed by Shore Shure. Thanks to our designer Bernardo Serna for creating and running all of our visuals, which you can't see because this is a podcast guest. And to our digital producers, David Toles, Claudia Shang, Mia Kelman and Matt De Groat for filming and editing video each week so you can it you see where your business can go. To get there, you may need another 10 trucks. At Sentry Insurance, we put more than 115 years of industry experience to work to help protect you as you launch a new delivery service or expand into a new region and reach your business goals. Sentry Right by you Property and casualty coverage and render written and safety services are provided by a member of the Sentry Insurance group, Stevens Point, Wisconsin. 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