Lights, Camera, Inaction!

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "Lights, Camera, Inaction!"

Date: March 16, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz
Panelists: Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, Eliana Johnson

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the cultural and societal shifts underlying the ongoing decline of Hollywood’s influence, the waning power of the Oscars, and the shrinking relevance of the American moviegoing experience. The hosts examine why even dedicated cinephiles barely watch Oscar-nominated films, reflect on the broader collapse of shared cultural moments, and connect the hollowing out of movies with trends in music, television, and American social life. The discussion shifts in the second half to current geopolitical crises, focusing on U.S. and Israeli actions in the Middle East, and the Trump administration’s strategies in handling war, oil, and alliances.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Oscars: An Institution in Decline

(Begins ~04:00)

• Panel’s Oscar Movie-watching:
  • None of the panelists except John (9/10) had seen more than a few Best Picture nominees.
  • Seth: “I think I saw zero.” (04:51)
  • Eliana: “Zero.” (04:58)
  • Abe: “Three, possibly four.” (05:03)
• Moviegoing Habits in Sharp Decline:
  • 37% fewer tickets sold in 2025 vs. 2019 (not just revenue, actual ticket sales). (06:09)
  • Moviegoing used to be a generational ritual; now, only about 7-9% of Americans see more than two movies per year in theaters.
• Abe’s Perspective:
  • “The decline and fall of the Hollywood motion picture is totally and completely deserved because Hollywood is irredeemably wretched, morally depraved, repulsive, hates America, et cetera.” (07:35)
  • Movie theater experience itself has become less appealing, though with fewer people, the previously prevalent "phone screen distraction" issue has improved. (08:56, 09:28)

2. Cultural Fragmentation & Shifting Attention

(11:20 onward)

• Generational Shift:
  • Once, everyone shared movies and Oscar moments; now, fragmentation means even pop culture followers are often out of sync.
  • Trailers and kids’ movies keep some hosts connected, but even that’s waning.
• Reality TV as New Tabloid Fodder:
  • Entertainment media focuses on reality TV and personalities unknown to older audiences.
• Eliana’s Take:
  • “The classic Disney movies... remain appealing to young kids... So it’s not a hostility to movies or theater. It is what Hollywood is producing right now.” (15:12-15:49)

3. Technological and Social Roots of Moviegoing’s Demise

(17:00–30:00)

• John’s Historical Perspective:
  • "In 1946... 90 million people in the U.S.—a majority—went to movies every week. That number is now under 7%." (20:54)
• Home Technology:
  • Massive improvement and affordability of home viewing makes theatergoing unnecessary.
  • “You can argue that watching a movie at home on a 100-inch screen is a more optimal viewing experience than going to a movie theater.” (27:38)
• Loss of Social Rituals:
  • Shared moviegoing, religious services, and community activities have all declined, contributing to increased solitude and isolation.
  • “People talk about a loneliness crisis. It's not a loneliness crisis. It's a solitude or isolation crisis. It's about this broad desire to be alone that has taken over.” (25:15 – Abe)

4. The 2025 Oscar Movies: High Quality, Little Impact

(31:36–39:58)

• Quality Year, Audience Apathy:
  • “2025 was the best year for American movies in about two decades... But so what?... Maybe you'll watch them on streaming or maybe you won't.” (35:44)
• Highlights:
  • John touts "Eddington" (ignored by Oscars), "One Battle After Another" (winner, praised but politically loathed), "Sinners" (genre-blending folk horror), and "Marty Supreme" (Chalamet’s performance).
  • “Timothée Chalamet... gives what is easily the performance of the year, if not the decade.” (36:51)
• Politics and Paradox:
  • Hollywood’s best work can be “leftist, anti-American garbage, but pretty great.” (34:25)
  • Modern movies don’t catalyze national conversations as “The Graduate” and earlier hits once did.

5. Oscars Ceremony: Politics and Selective Memory

(41:05–55:47)

• Oscars Less Political This Year:
  • "Only two really bad political moments": Javier Bardem’s "Free Palestine" remarks and a director using an anti-Putin documentary win to attack Trump. (41:35–45:02)
• Awards’ Prestige Hollowed:
  • Eliana draws a parallel to the Pulitzer Prize: what once signified excellence now seems like "a political reward award." (45:04)
• Monoculture Replaced by Elites:
  • “America does not have a monoculture anymore... Now the monoculture is upper middle class opinion leaders, all of whom think exactly the same things...” (46:43)
• In Memoriam Snubs:
  • Robert Duvall, a legendary (and conservative) figure, received only brief acknowledgment—“He got 30 seconds... and yes, he was quietly a conservative.” (53:04–54:01)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On moviegoing’s decline:
  • "Americans are no longer going to the movies... One of the two major cultural habits of Americans: watching television, one; going to the movies, the other." — John (06:45)
• On elite cultural rewards:
  • “It's like a political reward award. I think that's happened across a lot of our institutions.” — Eliana (45:04)
• On movie home viewing:
  • “You can argue that watching a movie at home on 100-inch screen is a more optimal viewing experience than going to a movie theater...” — John (27:38)
• On loneliness vs. solitude:
  • “People talk about a loneliness crisis. It's not a loneliness crisis. It's a solitude or isolation crisis.” — Abe (25:15)
• On the death of monoculture:
  • “America does not have a monoculture anymore, right? We're not watching the same TV shows, we're not watching the same movies... Now the monoculture is upper middle class opinion leaders..." — John (46:43)
• On Robert Duvall’s Oscar snub:
  • "He got 30 seconds... and yes, he was quietly a conservative... He actually thought actors should keep their mouths shut... And Javier Bardem got 30 seconds to say 'Free Palestine'." — John (54:01)
• On this century’s changes:
  • "Things have a century of life in them and movies have had their day." — John (55:25)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Oscars/Moviegoing Decline — 04:00–15:49
• Cultural Fragmentation, Home Entertainment — 15:49–30:00
• Historical Perspective on Moviegoing — 20:54–27:38
• Analysis of 2025 Oscar Movies — 31:36–39:58
• Oscars’ Politicization / In Memoriam Segment — 41:05–54:01
• Broader Cultural Shift, Isolation, Monoculture — 25:15–46:43
• War, Geopolitics, Trump Administration (Second half) — 55:47–79:19

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Tone & Language Highlights

The panel maintains a conversational, sardonic tone typical of Commentary Magazine: slightly nostalgic, culturally conservative, and sharp in critique—especially regarding Hollywood, political monoculture, and elite opinion, but also with moments of humor and self-deprecation.

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Brief on Final Segment: War & Geopolitics

(From ~55:47)

• Discussion turns to Trump’s handling of the Iran crisis and U.S. foreign policy, emphasizing the complexity, the administration's unexpected steadiness, and the role of allies like Saudi Arabia.
• Panelists broadly agree that traditional midterm political calculations may not be driving the administration’s war strategy.
• John: "There’s no sign from him when he talks every day ... that he is anywhere near [wanting an exit]. He sounds like he's in it for the win." (76:33)
• Seth: "He sounds unusually at peace with his own decision that he's made here." (78:04)

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Summary Takeaway

"Lights, Camera, Inaction!" offers a thoughtful, acerbic, and at times elegiac conversation about the passing of Hollywood as a central pillar of American life; the fragmentation and politicization of shared culture; and the broader social consequences of retreating from public life. While warning that the dominant art form of the 20th century may be irreversibly in decline, the hosts also underline the way technology, politics, and society have all shaped this moment. The conversation seamlessly bridges cultural and geopolitical commentary, offering a signature Commentary Magazine blend of passionate opinion, historical depth, and sharp observation.

Transcript

[A]

Look, I've spent decades arguing that ideas matter, and I really believe that sleep does too. I suffer from sleep apnea and dealing with my sleep apnea has been one of the signal issues of my life. If you or someone you love suffers from mild sleep apnea or snoring, there's an FDA approved daytime therapy called Excite OSA available through GoodnightRx. And you need to hear about this. No masks, no equipment strapped to your face while you sleep. Just 20 minutes a day, strengthening the muscles that keep your airway open. And in clinical studies, it cut apnea events nearly in half. Think of it as a workout for your tongue. Go to goodnightrx.com and use code pod at checkout for 25% off. That's goodnightrx.com code pod sleep better so you can argue better. Hope for the best. Expect the worst Some drink champagne, some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best. X welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Monday, March 16, 2026. I am John Pothor, it's the editor of Commentary Magazine. Our April issue is [e-mail] we have a cover package. We've called it Iran Amuck. It features four pieces. One you heard about last week, talk through by Jonathan Schanzer, which we call Regime Change Without Nation Building. One you heard Eli Lake talk about last week, which is called One Israeli American Battle after Another, which is about Israel's 20 year quest to achieve the military capabilities necessary to fight this war. One is by Todd Lindbergh, which is about how the logic of this war mirrors precisely the logic of the war in Iraq fought in 2003, how that makes you feel. Todd attempts to make it clear that it should cause you to think differently, in retrospect about the Iraq war than you are probably feeling. And then there is a piece by me called they should have Listened to My dad and I'm not going to say any more than that. There are many other glories and wonders in this issue. I'm very proud of it. Please go to commentary.org if you are not a subscriber, please subscribe. And while I'm mentioning subscribing, we have a very active channel on YouTube. We are up on YouTube every day. You can watch this podcast on YouTube. We have clips, we have all kinds of different things. Please go to our channel Commentary Magazine Podcast and like and subscribe because it will help you you. If you like this podcast, it will help surface it to more and more people who will give it a chance and sample it. I say the same thing about Apple Podcasts and others, but YouTube is more of our focus on this. So please do subscribe on YouTube. It don't cost you nothing. Unlike the commentary.org subscription which will cost you and you should be paying it because we are a nonprofit that we keep the lights on with your subscriber dollars and with a lot of generous donor dollars. That's why we're here every day. So Please [e-mail] But you know, the easiest thing you can do to give us a hand is to like and subscribe on YouTube and @Apple Podcasts. And by we, I mean executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.

[B]

Hi John.

[A]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.

[C]

Hi John.

[A]

And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi Eliana.

[D]

Hi John.

[A]

Okay, I want to talk about a major shift in American life in my lifetime. The oscars, Academy Awards, 98th annual Academy Awards or 99th, I can't quite remember which aired last night. And I texted everybody here to ask if you work felt competent to talk about what happened on the Oscars or the choices made by Oscar voters or whatever based on whether or not you had seen my collective panelist friends many or most of the movies in question. And now I'm just gonna go around. Okay, so Seth, 10 Oscar nominated films for best picture, how many did you see?

[C]

I think I saw zero.

[A]

Zero. Okay. Eliana, 10 Oscar Nowaday pictures, how many did you see?

[D]

Zero.

[A]

Okay Abe, 10 Oscar nominated pictures. How many did you see?

[B]

Three, possibly four. I'm not sure.

[A]

Okay, I saw nine of 10. I still haven't seen Train Dreams. Don't ask me why. I've seen other movies that should have been nominated, like it was just an accident that, that that were not. And Eddington, which was actually the best movie of last year, which was nominated for nothing, which is a scandal. We could talk about that in a minute. In relation to the movie that actually won, what we are seeing here is a massive cultural shift that has now taken full flower. There's a pretty good piece about this in Tablet magazine by David Mikish about sort of like the end of Hollywood. Tom Rossman, the head of Sony Pictures, had a piece in the New York Times last week in which he revealed the following salient number. The number of ticket sales. I'm not talking about receipts, meaning how much money Hollywood took in from motion pictures in theaters, but ticket sales down in 2025 from 2019 37%. 37% fewer tickets sold in 2025 than 2019. Why? Well, 2019 was the year of the biggest. Of the biggest movie of all time. That was Avengers Endgame. So that contributed. I think so. That's a big reason. But nonetheless, the point is that moviegoing was a habit that was in decline anyway, because I think we were at around 14 million tickets sold. In 1999. This number was double the number of tickets sold then in 2019. We are now down 37% from 2019. What this means is that Americans are no longer going to the movies. 60% of that. That drop means that the number of people who see more than two movies a year in a movie theater is something like 7 to 9%. And so this, of course, was once one of the two major cultural habits of Americans watching television. One, going to the movies, the other. So, Abe, I think I can confidently say that based on the emails and texts that you were sending me last night, that you believe that the decline and fall of the Hollywood motion picture is totally and completely deserved because Hollywood is irredeemably wretched, morally depraved, repulsive, hates America, et cetera.

[B]

The answer to that is yes, but I would like to see it otherwise. I mean, I would like to see it, you know, sort of like get in shape and someone come along and make movies that didn't celebrate our enemies or castigate our allies or this country itself. But it's funny, while you were talking, I was trying to think, like, I literally don't remember the last time I went to a movie theater. And it's something I used to cherish. It was absolutely one of my favorite things to do. And I'm trying to think what changed. In part, it is true that I don't. I'm not interested in what's playing. But another. Another aspect of this has to do. I mean, this is like me just complaining about everything, Not. Not just the movies, not just the products. But the behavior in movie theaters is so unpleasant now that it's less unpleasant

[A]

than you think because you haven't been going. Fewer people in the theaters. Right. So the behavior has actually correspondingly improved. That's a weird effect of the hollow out.

[C]

Depends which movie you went to see. Children's. I did go to see Minecraft with the. During the, you know, with the chicken jockey situation.

[A]

Okay. But Abe's. Abe wouldn't see Minecraft, so that's not an issue.

[B]

I just want to elaborate.

[A]

It's. It's okay, go ahead.

[B]

I got very tired of seeing everyone's little handheld screens in my peripheral vision while I'm trying to watch the movie. That was.

[A]

That was again, again, I believe, because. Because people have shifted, and the people who are going to movies are moviegoers. You're not seeing a lot of phones in people's hands when people were going because they were still atavistically going, anachronistically going to the movies, but were basically alive in the 21st century and simply could not be rid of their phones. Then there was much more of that. But as the audience dwindles and the people in the theater are repeat viewers who are interested in focusing on what's on the screen, some of that has improved. If I were to try to give you a reason to go. But the larger point is that neither Seth, who is still very. Seth, you are very interested in music. You've always been very. Probably more interested in music than the movies, but you've always been very interested. You know, bands, you know, new bands. You're paying attention. Another world in which the transmission points of popular music have atomized and it's, like, not so easy anymore to find out what band you should be listening to or to. You know, there is no top 40 radio anymore. And if you go to Sirius, if you have Sirius in your car, you're likely to be listening to the songs you heard 40 years ago, more likely than you are to hear songs of today, but you are interested enough that you keep up. But obviously that just is not the case with. With film. Abece Solo Quire Suna Buena Historia and TikTok Encounter Us. Short dramas, Emotionales Rapidosi, Difficiles Dejar Descarta TikTok Ahora.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, the thing with film is that I keep up in a very different sort of way these days because I have young kids. And so there are, like. There are movies that my kids really like to see, and we really enjoy the, you know, family going. But it's also very expensive. But really, you know, in terms of the movies keeping up, it's like there are movies coming out. Like, for example, there's a Super Mario movie coming out that everyone in my house is very excited about. And so that's the sort of thing that I pay attention to more than, you know, definitely much more than the others. The thing is that I watch trailers religiously, so I know I desperately don't want to be, like, totally out of the loop on any aspect of. Of culture, but I find myself, you know, I'll watch trailers and I'll go, oh, that one looks. You know, I'll mark it down. And then you Know, I don't know. I watch a tenth of the, you

[A]

know, the 12 years from now, you aren't going to be watching those trailers that, in other words, you've gone from interested movies to interest in kids movies to trying to keep up with trailers, and then you're just not going to watch the trailers anymore. You're not. It's going to be like those magazines at supermarket checkout stands that at some point shifted from Hollywood to reality television. And they have, you know, whatever was there, you know, what used to be Star or whatever. And the headlines are something like, why Cheryl won't talk to Dominika anymore because of what Brad did. And you have no idea who any of these people are. And they're on a reality show that you have never heard of. Because all of the other Hollywood news gravitated to online sources like Deux Moi on Instagram, and there's no point. And they all curate their own Instagrams. So in order to keep these magazines going, they have, like gone to this very low point. So you'd never read People magazine anymore because it's covering people that are of no interest to you. That's what's going to happen with trailers. And Eliana, you too have.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, the, the, the reality show is a big, is a big part of it. Because when I read entertainment news, it's name checking the Real Housewives or whatever.

[A]

And the first name Real Housewives already, that's already. That's like covering the royals now. Like you might have heard of one of them. The stuff that they cover. We're getting third level. You've heard of them. Okay, fair enough. Okay, so maybe you're reading those. Okay.

[D]

This whole thing is interesting. My starting point is that I didn't even know that the Oscars were yesterday. I've seen none of the movies. And then I look them up and I have to say that they're really not of interest to me. When there are movies of interest to me, we do try to go out and go see them. And I was thinking, what are the last movies I've seen in the theater? They were the Bob Dylan movie, the title of which A Complete Unknown. Yeah. Which was fantastic. And maybe before that was Top Gun, Maverick. But how many of those movies are there out there with broad appeal like that? And then John, you know, we did watch Eddington, but the rest of them. There just aren't very many movies out there that are unabashedly patriotic or that have broad appeal anymore. And when I was growing up, we watched the Oscars every year. We watched the red carpet, wanted to see what people were wearing, what they had to say. And we went to movies all the time.

[A]

Right.

[D]

And so I do acutely feel that shift. And the other thing that is striking to me is that we subscribe to Disney and the classic Disney movies my husband and I were just talking about over the weekend. It is incredible how appealing all of the old classic Disney movies remain to young kids. And the Disney movies are still just absolutely wonderful. So it's not by any means a hostility to movies or theater. It is what Hollywood is producing right now.

[A]

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Okay, here's where you're obviously right, but saying that people love great movies, you know, let's say that there have been 250 movies that were made in the 20, you know, the hundred years since movies became the dominant pop culture form. So 110 years since Birth of a Nation came out. 110 years and there are 250 movies that, that everybody likely has seen or is conscious of or something like that that everyone will say, those were great. You know, I mean, I could name 20 off the top of my head. It doesn't matter. Those were great. They're fantastic. The same way you could say, you know, it's great. The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, that's a great one. You know, Monet's bridge paintings, the, you know, with the lily pads that, those, those, those are pretty great. Gilbert Stewart's painting of Washington. That's pretty great. Rodin's Thinker, Edvard Bunch, the Scream. They're like. You could probably name 20 paintings that even that many, if not most people getting a glimpse of them would say, oh yeah, I know that. That's, wow. You know, boy, doesn't mankind do great things? Movies were a default cult behavior. Going to the movies was a default American behavior. Was the thing, one of the things you did on a Friday or a Saturday night because there was nothing else to do. Television came in like, ate a lot of movie theaters, lunch. But until the 20, until the 2000s, Fridays and Saturday nights on television were deserts, except for some of CBS's programming, precisely because TV, this was the one point at which TV thought, well, you know what? We can't really compete. Well, we're not going to put our best stuff on, particularly on Friday night, because people are going to want to go to the movie theater. Well, we'll, we'll just, you know, we'll see that night to you guys. And it was a default behavior in 1946. Again, we're talking 80 years ago. So this is an important number. But 90 million people in the United States went to the movies every week. 90 million out of a population of 140 million, a majority of Americans attended a movie theater every week. That number is now down to 7% or lower. So we have a behavior that has ended. And it's not because the movies aren't good. It really isn't because the movies aren't good. In part because the behavior has ended or because Hollywood has been trying for 25 years to figure out why people don't do default and how to program against that to make people have to go to see something that they make so they spend more money per movie. They try to make everything a spectacle or a scene. That's high risk. It's a high. All these are bets that you can get mass audiences. And then if it's not that they're little things, they're littler than movies used to be, or they don't, you know, they don't talk about, they're not that provocative. So they're not like things you talk about at the water cooler. They're not that socially forward, so you don't feel like you need to see them in order to be part of the cultural conversation. All of that in part because television came along and started making that fair as cable and streaming then really started competing for American attention not only with movies, a lot of which show on streaming, but not, not just with movies, but with other forms of entertainment, gaming, politics, as a. As a consumer. Good. All of that. Yeah.

[B]

All the people that used to annoy me with their screens in the theater are now at home looking at their phones.

[A]

Right. Or they're watching something on streaming. Yeah, right. On their phones. But that's. That's fine because that's. They could do whatever they want. You know, I used to watch Gilligan's island and read while I was watching Gilligan's Island. So it's not like you can't multitask. You know, why would you actually have to pay full Attention to Gilligan's island, particularly if you'd seen every episode five times, which was also a feature of being a kid in the 60s or 70s.

[C]

Well, you don't want to miss it if per chance they get off the island.

[B]

When you talk about the change in behavior, John, it reminds me. So there was a story last week, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, about the general drop in crime in the country and why the this sort of broad drop in crime. And one of the reasons adduced was that so is that we don't. People don't do things together anymore. So there's the opportunity to commit to transgress on someone else's life is minimized because you're not with other people. And what was interesting about this, when I looked at the numbers about how many hours people spend Americans spend alone a week. So this peaked obviously during COVID Right? And then as Covid sort of lifted and we started thinking, okay, the pandemic's come. Americans rushed out and they started doing things together for a little while. And then they went back right back to the COVID hours, which is where we are now, which is unbelievable. So people talk about a loneliness crisis. It's not a loneliness crisis. It's a solitude or isolation crisis. It's about. It's about this broad desire to be

[A]

alone

[B]

that has taken over.

[C]

I mean, but even people who used to go to movies alone don't do that anymore. Like going to movies alone was something that plenty of people did and even that they don't.

[A]

Right. Well, I mean, all of that. I was very struck by that as well, that the idea in that Wall Street Journal survey that one of the ways to make Americans safe is to keep them from interacting too much with each other because some spark might be lit between two people with friction that will lead to something bad. But of course, a lot of things that people used to do together would not involve any such things, like going to church or going to religious services or going out for, you know, a meal on Sunday after church, or playing bingo on Monday nights or doing any of those things. People used to have to go out to find entertainment because the entertainment they had at home was very monochromatic, like it was TV or radio. And it's not that people didn't consume vast amounts of TV and radio, but there's only so much of it you can take before you, like, the air is stale. Also, people didn't have air conditioning. You know, 50 years ago, everybody didn't have air conditioning at every Part of their house, it was hot in summer, you went outside because it was more pleasant to be outside than inside. Stuff like that. We have been able to control and contain our atmospheres where we are and to design them in remarkably fluid ways so that we have a TV movie sound setup that is the equivalent of a movie theater. Like when I was a kid, you had a 19 inch color screen that often the reception wasn't so great. So if you actually. It wasn't, it wasn't an optimal viewing experience. You can argue that watching a movie at home on 100 inch screen is a more optimal viewing experience than going to a movie theater where the screen is going to say the insanity of

[C]

TVs definitely has to play a part.

[A]

Right.

[C]

We had a TV that we considered a big screen tv but of course in today's day and age it was not. But we had to replace it. And so we got a new TV and we got the smallest version, you know, we went to Costco, whatever. We got the smallest version of those, you know, the, the, the smart TVs and it didn't fit on the stand that we had the other one on. Yeah, like the TV didn't fit on the bookshelf stand. I was blown away that this, that in that few years you couldn't even get a TV that could fit on our old. But so there is, there is one part of this is that the TVs are totally insane and that makes them so much cheap, cheaper. You know, it's a, for everybody can have a screen that, you know, even I, you know, never met. The biggest thing I ever experienced was my friend had one of those Sony projection screens in the 80s, you know, that we used as a table also. That was the closest thing I'd ever seen to modern.

[A]

But that wasn't as good as a movie theater. Your set, the sound quality you can get out of a sound bar that you pay 400 for and attached to your TV is likely better than the sound. Unless you go to a really hyped up newly constructed Dolby theater and a movie theater, the sound is going to be better, the picture will be as sharp and all that. So all of that contributes. But culturally, and now we can get to the Oscars. Culturally, movies, which were at the center of American popular culture, they defined what we followed. They defined the people that people looked up to. They defined the subject matter that expanded outward as the society loosened its belt on a lot of subjects, sexual subjects, subject of, you know, frank daily life that Hollywood didn't cover because There was a, there was a self censorship regime in order to prevent legislators from coming in and shutting, shutting them down. And so TV was, excuse me, movies were measure, were a measure of how the society was opening up to new topics and things that you could then talk about. I happened to watch last week the graduate, made in 1967, considered one of the landmark moments in the opening up of American cinema to subject matter with my 15 year old son who I frankly couldn't make a lot of sense of it. And it is, it is in fact very dated in odd ways. But you know, the subject of the graduate is a 21 year old kid, 20 year old, he hasn't even turned 21 yet. Having an affair with his parents, best friend's mother who is 40 and then falling in love with her daughter. And then there's this triangle, right? That's the subject of the, of the Graduate. And it was like, does anybody, does an upper middle class kid in America have a friend's mother who is 40, who is Ann Bancroft? Like that doesn't happen. Everyone has, everyone in this class has kids in their 30s. So if you were going to have an affair with Mrs. Robinson, she would be 57 years old. It's not the same thing. So, but that was America in the 1960s. People got married at 19, they had kids at 20. And then, you know, then there were, they're at 40, alcoholic, bored, hungering for some excitement and then, you know, like, you know, so swooping in on poor Dustin Hoffman. But there are a lot of Graduate,

[B]

there are a lot of May December movies made.

[A]

I mean, I'm not, yeah, I'm not talking about that. I'm just saying that the Graduate was a moment in time in which people could go to the water cooler on Monday morning and say, whoa, boy, things are sure changing in this country because look at this, right? So that was one of the things that, that, that movies did and now they don't do anything, they don't do anything culturally. I mean they did, they shifted to superheroes and they shifted to fantasy and they, the, the techniques of being able to make that stuff as hyper realistic as possible contributed to that because then they really were like you were seeing things you'd never seen before and not affairs between 20 year olds and 40 year olds, but like a flying dragon, you know, a dragon or you know, the, the eye of Sauron or you know, planet being blown up. Yeah, dinosaurs, right, all of that. Okay, so here's the thing about this year and the oscars. The year 20. 25 was the best year for the for American movies in about two decades because there were seven or eight and internationally there were seven or eight genuinely provocative, interesting, original, messy, well worth conversations afterward movies for adults. And it's been a long time since that was the case, including things that we might hate. So I mentioned Eddington, which was nominated for nothing, but was the best movie of last year, which is a movie about COVID and about a small town in which the COVID wars are crystallized in this one little town in New Mexico where everything goes haywire because everybody goes insane because of the rules imposed on the society by Covid. And then there was the Oscar winner, One Battle after Another, which is set in a slightly alternate version of America in which ICE is what the liberal fantasy of ICE is and is like creating refugee camps and imprisoning vast numbers of illegals. And a broken down old weatherman living under an assumed identity and basically spending his life getting stoned, has to reactivate himself because his daughter is now getting menaced by one of the people in. In this war on immigrants. And here's the thing. I loathe the politics of this movie. Leo Leibovitz has a piece at the Free Press about how morally disgraceful it is. And I associate myself with every word of the piece as a moral and philosophical matter, except it is one hell of a good movie. That's the problem. And Hollywood was like this in the 70s. It wasn't like in the 70s, the best time for Hollywood cinema. They were making patriotic rah rah movies that made you feel good about America. Quite the opposite. It was a bummer. Everything ended unhappily. Things were terrible, people got shot in the back. You know, America was. It was a portrait of a country in decline and morally compromised. And it was the 1970s, so it was crime wave, we lost Vietnam, you know, Nixon was doing Watergate like it was. It was terrible. Things were terrible. And the movies kind of showed that and were a reflection of that, even though they were also leftist, anti American garbage, but pretty great. Like the Godfather is our movie about how, you know, capitalism destroys families and neighborhoods and lives in pursuit of its own relentless needs. And the two Godfathers are the two best movies ever made. So it's not like that's not a thing. And so one battle is a hell of a movie. Sinners, which was the second biggest winner, which is a folk vampire movie, but it's really about. It's really about segregationist Mississippi and is also has very radical politics. If you drill down into it beautiful to look at. Really interesting. A fascinating plot. This integration of blues music and this kind of horror story and gangsters and Irish immigrants and black people and stuff. It's like. It's very original and fascinating. And just down the line, I could mention nine or ten movies this year that were genuinely worth your time, but so what? Like, maybe you'll watch them on streaming or maybe you won't, some of them. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned my favorite aside from Eddington, Marty supreme, which was blank last night, and Timothee Chalamet, who gives what is easily the performance of the year, if not the decade, as the title character, did not win Best Actor. And this is a movie about, you know, 1952 New York, and a Jewish hustler kid who was trying to get himself to a ping pong tournament in Tokyo, and everything that goes wrong along the way. Spectacular piece of work. People are arguing over it, who see it, because it's one of those classic questions, which is, can you like a movie that has a morally compromised protagonist who seems to behave in bad ways? And the answer is, obviously, you should be able to. You like the Sopranos, you like Breaking Bad. I don't know why you can't like Marty supreme, but. But there it is. And anyway, I'm saying, you know, in a world in which people cared about the movies, there was more than enough. More than enough this year.

[C]

Does. Does the sort of thing, like I'm curious about was. Was Timothee Chalamet's comments about ballet and opera. Is that the sort of thing that costs an actor? Because. And it was Misty Copeland's appearance also a shot like what was. What was, was.

[A]

Okay, let me talk about this very quickly, and then we should talk about the ceremony. So Timothee Chalamet talked about the topic that we are talking about now. He said, I don't want the movies to become what opera and ballet are like now. Which is to say that when the Met here in New York opens an opera, or when the abt the American Ballet Theater, in which his sister was a dancer, when they start their season, nobody even knows it's happening or pays attention. I don't want that to happen to the movies. To which the response was, how dare you. Ballet and opera are incredibly important. What he said was patently and obviously true, and it is true that this is the crisis in moviegoing. Timothee Chalamet had to deal with dance cartwheels for three months in promotion just to get people to even know that Marty Supreme Existed because it's an unusual movie without a superhero in it. And he was doing promote. He was jumping off buildings and standing at the top of the sphere in Las Vegas and do, you know, like eating hot peppers and doing whatever he could just to get attention on a movie that 40 years ago would have opened to a very large box office just because he was a big star. It had like a funky director and it was a big movie about, you know, America and ambition and stuff like that. And he got gets whale tarred over it. Although in fact it was not. Did not have this effect because the comments he made came the day that voting on the Oscars closed. But it's an interesting insight that Timothee chalamet saying, I'm 30 years old. I'm. I'm a movie actor. I want my business at my professor to remain a central preoccupation of Americans and I'm doing whatever I can to make that happen. He's right and he's right to worry and he's right that, that 15 years from now, just as Eliana didn't know when the Oscars was. No one's gonna know when a movie opens.

[B]

There's a point slash question I want to make, John, about your saying that this was a great year for standout movies. And I, and I take that and I. The few I've seen, I think are the ones you've mentioned. And here's my thing and maybe this is just the way I'm shaping the past, but I don't think it is. Wasn't it the case that the. There used to be non stand. More non standout movies that held more appeal, in other words. So. So you get this block of worthwhile movies that you see. And I saw less than a handful, fewer than a handful of them. But I feel like it used to be the case that something else else would pop up and say, yeah, I'll try that. I'll bet that that sounds good. Whereas now every other movie that I see, I got. There's no way I'm watching that. That looks completely terrible. I've seen that premise 9,000 times. That's another horror thing. That's another stranded in the woods thing. That's another superhero, you know. So.

[A]

Yeah, well, yeah, but I mean the way to answer that is that this gets complicated is that the rise of extraordinarily high quality television just ate that lunch. And so the fact that you can make middling fair with the expectation of getting a decent return. So it's like the famous. It's like hitting singles and doubles in baseball. You know, you can be Rod Carew, you can be the greatest hitter of all time and, like, hit 12 homers a year because you hit singles and doubles. If you could, you could be. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran Disney famously in the late 80s, said, we want to make movies that'll hit singles and doubles because that minimizes our risk. We'll make a movie for $10 million, it'll make $40 million, and that's fine. If we do that 10 times a year, we're the most successful studio on earth. And then that strategy stopped working because you couldn't make $40 million off $10 million, but you could make a billion and a half dollars off $250 million by creating a spectacle that everyone said, oh, my God, you got to see this in the theater. And so the model stopped working. Now, let's talk about the Oscars themselves, because truth to tell, there were only two, I thought, particularly bad political moments from our perspective. And shows have been much more political and much more loathsome in the past, in my experience. But maybe it matters more because, like, you are now getting to a point at which you are literally making sure that anybody who doesn't vote Democratic is not going to watch the Oscars ever again. So two moments. One, Javier Bardem, the Oscar winning Spanish actor who's very radical, came out and said, no more wars and free Palestine. And there was a huge ovation from the audience. And the other was that the best documentary feature, which is a movie called Mr. Nobody vs. Putin, which is about a teacher in a. In the provinces in Russia who starts filming surreptitiously. This is a documentary about him filming surreptitiously the way that the, that the Russian government is propagandizing about the war in Ukraine, trying to encourage people to recruit, to go into the military and lying about what's actually happening on the ground in Ukraine. Then he smuggles this film out to this American director who cuts it into this documentary. I've not seen it, but the director, they win unexpectedly win the Oscar. And the director gets up to speak, and what does he do? This is a documentary about Putin and his war in Ukraine. And he for two minutes talks about how evil Trump is. It's a documentary about Putin who has invaded a country and tried to swallow it up. And there's this heroic resistance that is now actually having real success in turning the tide. And he talks about Trump and how evil Trump is. It's kind of disgraceful and loathsome like if he had said, I'm angry because Donald Trump isn't supporting the Ukrainians enough in their noble effort to free themselves from Russia, that would be like a thing, right? But he was talking about how this is how democracy dies is little bits of horrible things that happen that eat away at its foundations. Like there is any comparison between the authoritarian, near totalitarian government in Moscow and whatever Donald, whatever chaos and corruption and, you know, bullying Donald Trump does is.

[D]

John?

[A]

Yes, class?

[D]

Hearing you talk, I have a thought occurring to me that there's, there's a parallel between the Oscars and the type of person and politics that Hollywood rewards and the, and what award awards are designed to honor what that culture honors and what's happened in journalism and the way Americans have responded to journalistic institutions and the kind of tuning them out, their loss of credibility. Because when you're talking about what these stars have gotten up and said when they win, I think about who's been awarded the Pulitzer Prizes, what do they get up and say when they win these prizes? How have Americans responded with their trust in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal and those awards? I'm thinking when I grew up, it used to mean something to win best picture, best actor, best Actress. I don't really pay attention to it anymore. And it used to mean something to win the Pulitzer Prize. I thought it was a big deal. Now I don't think it means anything. It's like a political reward award. And I think that's happened across a lot of our institutions. And I think it's one of the reasons that many people in America have tuned these people and these institutions out. Because hearing what you said about Javier Bardem, I didn't hear it because I didn't listen to him. My thought was like, I just don't want to give these people my business.

[A]

Right? And you're exact. I mean, this is an exact parallel, right, in this sense, which is it's who gets tenure. It's. This is elite culture, right? This is the, you know, the high, you know, the high castles of American culture, right? The Oscars. Who makes movies, who publishes books from major publishing houses and wins not just the Pulitzers, but other awards, who gets tenure at universities and sets the tone, who wins awards in journalism. And there is the monoculture. America does not have a monoculture anymore, right? We're not watching the same TV shows, we're not watching the same movies. We're not listening to the same music. The monoculture used to be the mass Culture was a monoculture. Now the monoculture is upper middle class opinion leaders, all of whom think exactly the same things, are motivated by exactly the same reward system and, and, and, and incentive structure and are increasingly divorced from the interests and needs of the people that they are theoretically both in a market sense or in a leadership sense, serving. Right. What is the trans? If trans is an issue that deserves attention, it is an issue for 1% of the population, which means that it deserves 1% of the attention and 99% of the attention should be going elsewhere. Right, But I think. What would you say? I would say that in the last seven or eight years the trans issue has taken up 10 to 20% of the attention on social issues in the United States. We didn't do that because we're only responding to their effort to fire hose this into, into American life. But it is not a matter that is of that normal people who like are having difficulty buying groceries need to be focused on. It is obsessional focus at the top. And so yes, the movies I think are exactly there. And of course there's a lot of. I'll give you an example. Cross culture in movies and journalism very quickly or leftist, whatever. Over the weekend, a left wing journalist, activist, political person, tweet, tweet or whatever, very influential in his way named Matt Stoller, who is an anti monopolist. He and Elizabeth Warren worked for Bernie Sanders. He worked for Elizabeth Warren. He's one of the sort of the theoreticians that says that American culture is monopolizing and that we need to use antitrust to break everything up. Matt Stoller went on Twitter on Thursday or Friday and emerged by the end of one of these days when he was getting into a controversy as a full out, full bore Jewish anti Semite accusing a cabal of billionaire Jews of controlling American society with their billions and controlling the world because Israel is a bad country and we're having wars against Israel and all of that. Why do I mention Matt Stoller? Because his brother is a leading American filmmaker. His brother's named Nicholas Stoller. He made Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He made the two Neighbors movies with Seth Rogen. He makes the series Platonic with Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne on Apple. And he has made three movies with Will Ferrell, one of them now in production. He is one of the two or three leading comedy directors of the last 20 years. And there's Matt Stoller and there is his brother. His brother doesn't make movies that are particularly political. Although Will Ferrell's longtime partner, Adam McKay, who made Anchorman and Talladega Knights and various other things, describes himself as a communist and makes disgusting advice. The movie about Dick Cheney and makes disgusting anti American movies while sitting in his three mansions in Malibu and Pacific Palisades and in Hawaii and being driven around on a golf cart and eating whatever it is that he is eating, having, having the glories of American society and capitalism raining down on his head. Would like to destroy them. It's the same family. They're all, they're related, they're just, they're all, they're all part and parcel of the same family. So, Abe, you noticed something in the in memoriam and then maybe we can talk about something else. But there was a mo. So the in memoriam section where you talk about who's died. And this was a very big year because there were, first of all, there was of course the monstrous, horrible murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by, by their son, which Billy Crystal, who was Rob Reiner's best friend, paid beautiful tribute to, I thought. And then there was a tribute to Diane keaton by Rachel McAdams, which is also very nice. And then Barbra Streisand came out and talked about Robert Redford and basically said, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Memories like the corners of my mind. So it was all very nice. And there were pictures. And then there was a fourth person who died this year who is a major American figure in the history of movies. Oscar winner, starred in several like deathless classics, Kill a mockingbird for decades. 60 years. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1961. Right. Godfather movies, Tender Mercies, Days of Thought, like, you know, a six decade career of uncommon versatility and brilliance and all of that. And that was who, Abe?

[B]

Robert Duvall.

[A]

Right. And how much time did they. Robert Duvall, Oscar winning actor, a lot of other years, would have been the last person in the reel. The one that, you know, you come, you build to the end and then it's the biggest star who died. It happens. Redford died. So he's the biggest star probably in Hollywood history in many, by many accounts. So he, it wasn't, it wasn't dual, but they did have these three tributes and there was not a fourth to Duval. Yeah, and there could, I mean, why would that be?

[B]

Because he, of his politics, he was as, as you've said, mutedly but conservative. And if you think about the caliber of stars and directors and producers who could have come out to deliver a tribute, you know, the ones who he's worked with. It would have been, you know, it would have been an extraordinary lineup.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. But nope, Tom Cruise could have come out and talked about him. Francis Ford Coppola could have come out and talked about him. I mean, they're literally. He worked with every major director. He worked with every major star, and he was one of the deathless greats. And he got 40. He got like 30 seconds. Yeah. And yes, he was quietly a conservative. He did not trumpet his politics. He did not make, you know, he didn't make like a movie for the Daily Wire for Ben Shapiro. That's not what he was. He actually thought that actors should keep their mouths shut. He made a movie about it. He made a documentary about a gypsy kid in New York or Romany kid in New York named Angelo, my Love. And he made a movie about tango. And like, that's the kind of thing that obsessed him. And a movie about an evangelical. About a very highly morally problematic evangelical minister called the Apostle, which he wrote, directed and starred in. And he got 30 seconds and Javier Bardem got 30 seconds to say Free Palestine. So the Oscars are dying. They deserve to die. The movies are dying. A lot of that is technological, but it just is a moment to mark the passing of the dominant art form of the 20th century. The dominant art form. And it happens. Epic poetry was the dominant art form of the 18th century. And the novel came along and killed it off. You know. You know, sort of realistic painting was a dominant visual art form until photography came along and killed it off. This is. These things happen. Things have a century of life in them and movies have had their day.

[C]

Okay, so just not to extend it. But just the big worrying thing for me is that what's different is that the movies are dying in an age when everything is in the home and nobody goes out anymore. And so there's. There's a feeling of like the last. There's a feeling of like everybody being shut ins now and concern about, you know, socialization and stuff that weren't necessarily there before. When it shifted from poetry to the novel, it didn't like, it wasn't such a disruption. It didn't prove such a disruption of people's, like, own personal social styles. But this is like, you, you put me in, you know, you, you put

[A]

me in mind of something which is that, you know, we. We've been spending 20 years hearing, and I'm a. My oldest is almost 22. So I've been hearing about this. I basically escaped a lot of this because of the. What My kids are like, not all of it, but, you know, we've been hearing this whole thing about how, oh, helicopter parenting. And everyone's a helicopter parent and there's not enough free play. Kids don't go run out the door with their friends, and then they're back at dinner time and you just open the door and they go out, they play with their friends, and it's terrible that we don't let them do that anymore because of, you know, false ideas about safety. And all we do is drive them to sports, and they're in sports leagues, and it's terrible. There's so much competition, and the parents yell at the sidelines and sports and the travel sports, and it's so unfair, and it's awful. But what if this thing is a natural outgrowth of this unbelievable vacuum, like pressure to pull you back inside? And every parent has this innate understanding, without being able to articulate it, that they need to do something to push their kids out. They have to go out and they have to. They have to use their legs and their arms and their bodies and run around and be out in nature and be around other kids. And the only way to do that is to plan it and make it happen with these sports and leagues and things like that, because otherwise, it is just the devil of a time to get your kids outside the house, because the pleasures inside the house are just so overwhelming. Just. It's one of those momentary spasms of thought that you. You encouraged. So it's okay to have a league, is what I'm saying, and stop having people tell you that it's bad that your kids are competing in leagues because it's fine. And kids do need to learn how to compete so they can learn how to lose, and they can learn how to win gracefully, and they can learn that life is a competition and that getting ahead in life involves interacting with people in a way that. Where you show your best without showing your worst and all of that. So I now bless you if you want to do a lot of soccer leagues and travel teams. So go with God. Zeigaz. Everything is great. Okay, how about quickly, should we. Should we do a quick war thing? We're bet we're now in the again. Trump planned nothing for the Strait of Hormuz. He planned nothing. And now there's the Strait of Hormuz. And now only Chinese and Iranian tankers are getting through the Straits of Hormuz, and it's terrible. But now we've sent an expeditionary force. We blew up a lot of sites on Carg island, which is the main export point for Iranian oil, as a message that they better not, you know, will. That we will take out their oil capacity if they continue to try to disrupt international oil travel. And, of course, everything is Trump's fault, as far as I can tell.

[D]

It is actually impossible for me to believe media accounts that the president wasn't briefed on the risk that the Iranians would, for all intents and purposes, close the strait. It's inconceivable to me. It now does look like he's trying to assemble some kind of international form to reopen the strait. And yes, the president on Friday targeted the military infrastructure on Kharg, but he is threatening to target the oil infrastructure on the island, which would effectively shut down the Iranian economy if he does that.

[A]

And he doesn't want to do that because he wants to leave an Iranian economy in some fit condition for whoever stages the coup against the regime to have the resources to continue to run the country under. Under new management. I mean, that seems to be the implicit idea, is that if the ultimate. Not the ultimate goal, but the, The. The best result that could happen is that the mullahs fall and something comes to replace them, that whoever comes to replace them have the means to A, help rebuild what has been destroyed, and B, can provide the people who have found the currency declining to nothing and are increasingly desperate that they can relieve some of the burden using the nation's natural wealth. So this is like a needle threading. But I just think it's interesting how the hunger to say that Trump didn't know because he's an idiot. So that's a, That's. That's an absurdity. We also know it's not true. We know, we've heard.

[D]

It really wouldn't even be Trump being an idiot. It would be his ability advisors being an idiot, his brief, you know, military being an idiot for not briefing him. But it is literally inconceivable to me that this wasn't. They've been threatening to do this for 40 years. Yeah, it's impossible to believe.

[A]

So then there are other leaks scenario

[D]

that was played out.

[A]

There are other leaks over the weekend, like Israel. According to Semaphore, Israel has informed the United States it is dangerously low on the interceptors it needs to disable or blow up Iranian ballistic missiles. Dangerously low. Very low. Extremely dangerously low. It's the nightmare. Israel is going to have to stop the war if they. Whatever. Israel denies it. We do know that, you know, there are a finite number of interceptors you can't just make an inter. Doesn't take a day to make an interceptor. It's essentially another missile that you have to use to hit another missile. So it has to have all the telemetry and this and that. It's like a complicated piece of equipment. It costs a lot of money. And maybe they're. Obviously, they should be concerned because this is the defense against the ballistic missile attack from Iran. However, the key is that Iran and Hezbollah to some extent, but Iran, the threat to Israel from ballistic missiles comes from Iran. Therefore, defeating Iran ends its threat of ballistic missiles. Therefore using these interceptors to kill off Iran's ballistic missile attacks against it. And Hezbollahs, which is basically Hezbollah, will die if, if the mullahs die. I mean, they'll be a different kind of regime. They'll be a different kind of force because they're basically a, an Iranian satrapy. That's the right use of the interceptors because they're not going to be threatened by another nation with ballistic missiles. And the time is now. And that's why they have them in order to intercept the Iranian ballistic missiles if they were ever to fly. So now they're flying. And more important, so when you hear this kind of like ga shrying, my view is this is coming from Vance's office. They're constantly looking for ways to say the war isn't going well and we need to claim that we've won and get out. And the central fact that I think it is important to note is this fact. Iranian ballistic missiles fired at Israel from the beginning of the war to the end. On the day the war started, 90 missiles were fired at Israel yesterday. 7, 90, 60, 25, 20. 20, 20, 15, 15, 12, 10, 10, 10, 8, 8, 7. Would that not indicate to you that the Iranians are running out of ballistic missiles to fire? Are they somehow hiding lots of ballistic missiles somewhere in the 25,000 sites that Israel and, and, and the United States have hit? They've missed the 25,000 first where they're hiding 500 ballistic missiles that they will fire off at Israel when they, when the interceptors are gone? I don't think so.

[D]

You know the scoop we're not reading, John, Iran dangerously low on missiles.

[A]

That's always. So it is the framing.

[D]

That's exactly the front page of the New York Times.

[A]

Yeah, I don't want to be a meliorist. This is a difficult war and you know, something very complex is going on and all of that. But you know, it's almost like you have to cite all the positives because the focus on the negative is so overwhelming and it's so distorting.

[C]

And also like this, the stories are clear if you read them through to the point where they give you information that the Saudis are really cheerleading this as well. Like the Saudis are telling Trump, you gotta just, you know, put your shoulder down and run through the line sort of thing. And that's a very big difference from the, the discourse that was set, has been settled on here in America is how much is Bibi pulling the strings of Donald.

[D]

I was just gonna ask, do you think we'll see a cartoon with MBS controlling Trump on, you know, puppet strings anytime soon?

[C]

Exactly. And the truth is that these Gulf allies, they, they, they, they don't want him to cut and run now. They, you know, they want this to accomplish something serious. And they have real skin in the game, too. They are. These, the idea that the allies who have been, you know, who have been most supportive or, or, you know, most enthusiastic about taking out Iran's power, the fact that they wouldn't have been talking about the missile and drone threat is absurd because they live under it. They live under it and they're getting more missiles. Some of them are getting, the UAE is getting hit harder than Israel by

[A]

terms of numbers and stuff. I do think that they're reeling because they haven't been hit before. So, you know, they're, now, they're being hit. It's like, oh, my God, what the hell? Like, I, you know, I, I, we've been planning for it, but geez, this is awful and I really don't like it. Please win the war faster. That's totally understandable. Right. The Saudi thing is really interesting because basically, who thought that in 2026, the Margaret Thatcher to Trump's George H.W. bush in 1990 would be. Mohammed bin Salman would be the one to say, Donald, don't go wobbly.

[C]

Mohammed bin Thatcher and, and, and crucially that he wants the world to know that he's saying this. The Saudis want it public that they are pushing Trump to win the war.

[A]

Do we know that? There's a certain background stories. So I'm not, I don't know.

[C]

I think the Saudis just have been pretty good at, at framing their own role in this.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And as soon as they saw it going off in a different direction, they did this huge course correction. You know, they, they were accused of being anti Israel and anti Abraham Accords and whatever, and they, they overcorrected in such a way that they really wanted everybody to know were on board. Actually, we love Trump. Trump is the greatest. Trump this, Trump that. We're on board for all this. And so since then, they seem to have been making a real effort to, you know, show up and be seen backing Trump.

[A]

Right. Okay, let me pose one last question. The midterm numbers don't look good, right? It's March and the midterm. It's, you know, middle of March and the elections in November, and the midterms aren't going to look good for the Republicans. And oil, if oil prices spike, that'll be bad for Republicans, and the midterms don't look good for Republicans. And there's this idea that Trump will want this to end as soon as possible to help the Republicans in the midterms. What if it's the opposite? What if Trump has inhered in his head that the midterms are a lost cause? Because, let's face it, I mean, the Senate may not be. The House is a lost cause. Like, it would take a miracle for Republicans to retain the House, which means there'll be impeachment proceedings and all of that stuff. Isn't that liberating for him? It's like, okay, I'm not. Nothing I can do to win the midterms now. It's baked in the cake. Partying power always loses the midterms. This is essentially the sixth year of my presidency. It really goes badly in the sixth year of a presidency. Reagan in 86, Bush in 2006, Obama in 2014 always goes badly in the sixth year. There's nothing you do about it. And the economy is actually worse than we thought it was in the last quarter and whatever. So I'm screwed, or Republicans are screwed. So what incentive does he have not to win? Not to, like, try to win this war and have that as his feather in the cap and his gift to history, as opposed to ending it early?

[B]

Well, I think in any event, ending it early on uncertain terms with all sorts of messy after effects still in play, that's not going to help him no matter what. So I don't think he's looking for to do that.

[A]

I'm just talking about what's in his head.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know.

[A]

What's in his head is I'm not going to worry about the midterms. They're bad, and maybe they'll be a miracle, but there's nothing I can do. It's hard for me to imagine that

[B]

he thinks in terms of lost causes, he might you know, but it, something tells me like, you know, he doesn't,

[C]

but I don't know, does he hear enough bad news to come to that place? Does he have people who are like, really being straight with.

[D]

He's got people telling him the poll numbers. He may not accept them, but I think he's being, they're being shown to them. He may say, like, that's a, you know, I don't, I don't believe it, it's a fake poll. But I absolutely do think it's being put in front of him. What I, what I think is the case for Trump, and we've seen this since 2016, is he doesn't except various. And I'm not sure this is the right term, but I'm going to use it as intellectual constructs or meaning he ran for the Republican Party nomination and rejected. There may be a better term, but the intellectual construct of what it meant to be a Republican, particularly when it came, this is in 2016, when it came to some core domestic policy views. I'm thinking about immigration and fiscal policy and entitlements. That was in the first term, you know, running in 2024. It appears that he's rejecting some of the constructs that members of both parties have operated in when it comes to foreign policy. And that appears to be a play for history. And I think he views himself especially, and we've heard him talk in these terms since the assassination attempt is having a God given chance to really play for history. And he's saying, I reject the way that Republican and Democratic presidents alike have dealt with foes of America, whether it's Maduro in Venezuela or Castro in Cuba or Khamenei in Iran. And I'm not sure he's actually thinking, thinking about it with respect to the midterms.

[A]

Right. Well, so two things about that, one of which is he also rejects conventional wisdom, Republican wisdom on things that he shouldn't, like interfering with the housing market with this awful, horrible housing bill that he, you know, this kind of semi communist housing bill that he seems to want the House and the Senate to pass. So he does reject all convention and goes the way that he would go, all the tariff stuff, all the tariffs, all that stuff. But last week, Jonathan Schanzer said he's hearing from the Israelis that the administration would like to wrap up the war by the 30th of March, because he has this summit with XI that's supposed to start on the 30th of March. And so that was Shanzer's concern was that he would, he would turn tail or declare victory in order to move on with Xi. And that struck me as being a pretty interesting idea. And then yesterday the White House let it be known that if they have to postpone the summit with Xi, they'll postpone the summit. Don't have to have it then, you know, could have it in a couple of months. Don't have to talk, talk with them now. No immediate crisis. And so this idea that he started this war, it didn't go the way he wanted it to and he's look, going to look for an exit ramp is a kind of wish casting on the part of people who seem to want America to lose or want him to lose or want him to know that he's failed. And the people in the restrainer camp on the right who do not want this to be a new model for American foreign policy and who are eager for it to be something else without saying that he's lost because they don't want to say that. But who don't want this strategy with the Israelis as the junior to not so junior partner to go, wow, this really worked. This is reap real dividends. The world has changed and you know, aggressive pursuit of the national interest using martial means, you know, with a country that you all seem to dislike because of the hook nose monsters who run it that no longer obtains. And so you have this weird, you have this weird alliance of people who seem to want to say, well, he's only going to do it for another couple of weeks because they're running out of interceptors or the oil price is going to be too high or the, it's going to be too hard to patrol the Straits of Hormuz, or it's going to be too hard to bomb Carg island or too dangerous or whatever. And there's no sign from him when he talks every day on the plane or whatever that he is anywhere near that emotional relationship to this war. Like he doesn't seem crazy the way he did during COVID I'm sorry, this

[C]

morning he's threatening to, to push off the, the meeting with she if she doesn't join in armada that he pushed through the Straits.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So he's actually talking about not meeting with Xi if he's not going to participate in his war. That's, that's, I mean that goes towards Derby.

[A]

Right. And I'm saying it's not like I was thinking about the last time that we were in this kind of position, which is that he was talking every day but in the midst of a major crisis, which was Covid. Those daily press conferences at the White House, which were a calamity beyond words, right? They made everybody feel unsure, unsafe. You didn't know who you were listening to. Fauci and Burks were rolling their eyes behind him because they didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He couldn't get off stage. It was all. All of this. And now he, like, comes back on the plane. They're like, Mr. President, the war. The sky is falling. And he's like, the sky isn't falling. Got a lot of options. We're gonna do what we have to do until we're done. Like that. He sounds actually like the saner person in the conversation with the reporters because he's like, oh, come on, it's all going fine. You know those images you're seeing of those parade saluting the new Ayatollah Junior? A lot of that is AI faked. You know it's AI faked. I know it's AI faked. I didn't actually know that they were AI faked, but I watched them very closely. But I'm just saying, like, he doesn't sound crazy. He sounds like, I'm doing the serious thing. It's going to take some time, and I'm in it. He sounds unusual. He can't be in it. He can't possibly be in it. Look at oil prices. And he's not saying that. And he's not saying I have to pull out because of the midterms. And he's not saying any of that.

[C]

He sounds unusually at peace with his own decision that he's made here.

[A]

Right?

[C]

And he flip flops sometimes. It can be easily knocked off. But this appears one of those times where he. He appears genuinely at peace with the choice that he's made to go to war here and to prosecute the war. That's how he seems. I don't know if that's really insensitive.

[A]

Particularly defensive. That's what I'm saying. I don't think the tone of these interactions is as defensive. He's not like, you're an idiot, and I give, you know, like every. You're all idiots and shut up. And that's a stupid question, and I hate your news network. I mean, he says it a little bit, but that's not the music. Those are the lyrics. The music is, you know, don't bother me. Like, we're at war and I'm fighting a war, and we're going to win the War. And you can, you can, you're like, you're like gnats. You're like coming. You're annoying me. Or we've won it.

[B]

We've won it already. Is the, I mean, that's, you know,

[A]

right, but that's the ultimate provocation is that we want it already thing is like, he's crazy. How can you say that? You're still bombing. He's like, what he means is that it's still the case that American planes and Israeli planes are flying at will, at no risk to themselves. In a war in which, if this were any kind of war, similar to any war in the past, we would have lost 15 planes already. The Israelis would have lost 15, 20 planes. One of those ballistic missiles would have caused a mass casualty event in Israel. Maybe they would have hit an American base and hundreds of people would have died. None of that has happened. So that gives ballast to the we've, We've won already. Meaning if in a war you get to act at will. And we're choosing not to put boots on the ground, but we could, but we're not, we're choosing not to. And right now, looking at the order of battle, if I were to put boots on the ground, he kind of said, I do it and that would be fine. You know, we haven't won the war yet because the aims haven't been fulfilled. But in terms of daily battle reports, it's as I said last week, you know, it's like the score in the football game is now 55 to 3. We keep increasing our point score and the Iranians are at three because they hit one, they hit a building in Bet Shemesh, they hit a, they hit a helipad in the embassy in Baghdad and they seem to have hit one of the runways at the, at the Dubai Airport and a couple of ca, you know, and there have been, there have been 14 casualties. But again, we're at war for three weeks and there are 14 casualties. Seriously, I don't mean to be heartless, but seriously. All right, so I'm sorry went so long. We're not going to talk about the movies again for very long time. So I hope you enjoyed that and if you did, you got your fill, so. And if you didn't, we'll be back tomorrow with the usual stuff. So for Seth Abe and Eliana, John Pot Horowitz, Keep the Candle Burning.