Steve Young

um so so i would like at some point if possible maybe to do an entire show on bathtubs over broadway um that would be phenomenal to do that because i have i got questions when it comes to that man like the the doc it seems like the doc would answer everything for me it just opened up a bunch of doors and and they do relate to letterman as well uh like some of them like like okay here's an example of one and then i'll we can talk about bathtubs but obviously you know what we're cultivating here is a letterman uh podcast and audience um but i gotta ask you this question tony randall made so many appearances uh especially in the early years of of late show and and and late night as well but but um when you first met tony randall like did you want to just rush over to him and start asking him about about industrial musicals or did that uh did you not cross lines when guys like that would show up on the show two factors prevented that happening number one i don't believe i ever met tony randall the number of guests on the show who i've actually personally met and said hello to could probably be counted on the fingers of two man's wow and number two i think tony randall had already passed away by the time my uh excavations got deep enough to reveal his involvement with this stuff and in fact i think okay it wasn't until i was looking at uh i don't know stuff at sid siegel's house around 2017 and seeing i think it was a hardee's restaurant show that tony randall was in oh my god tony randall did this stuff so that was way down the road oh man that is i i can imagine that must have given you kind of some shivers when you saw that because it's like that's a guy that you could have talked to very very very easily had you had that knowledge there have been ones like that but uh we had tony randall on dave's record collection uh he recorded a sort of uh 30s ish do whack-a-doo whack-a-doo whack-a-doo i just remember that was just sort of cheerfully silly in itself and then you had to have the blow-off line which was dave saying tony do whack-a-don't that's all you need that's all you need that's all a take my money um i uh okay so before we kind of leave bathtubs and i'm i mean i'm i'm fine if people just are you know confused by the start of this that's okay we got steve young much worse absolutely i will say not only bathtubs over broadway has dave letterman in it yes executive produced by dave letterman he lent his name to it very very kindly uh he supported us financially at the very beginning when no one knew what this was going to be yeah but it grew out of the dave's record collection bit on the show and we were the only people ever allowed to shoot backstage or in the offices at the letterman show yes and the filmmaker uh writer director editor david whisson ant i met her when she was a late show editor so the whole bathtubs experience top to bottom has this letterman pedigree to it oh it absolutely does yeah okay so anybody who is uh would consider themselves even a passing fan of of any of dave's projects and and wants to go a little bit further bathtubs over broadway needs to be watched because really at the end of the day it's the genesis uh i don't know if there's ever been a bit like i mean you know you got your wayne's world they got a movie uh the blues brothers they got a movie okay so we're talking some sketches here but this is a bit from a late night talk show literally uh evolved into a documentary and and um it's so funny there's a lot of folks out there who who myself included who would watch dave's record collection and be like like i was confused when when when these records would come on i was so confused i was like did they record this for the bit and get the art department to create a a bogus album and all of that stuff i thought it was g and if that was the case that would have been genius too but the truth is even better the fact that this thing even exists oh my god dave's barometer profound comedy he was very rigorous about it it's completely ruined if we monkeyed with it but uh the book which you see in the in the documentary came out in 2013 and i remember in the letterman offices showing the book to a guy i knew not well he wasn't he hadn't known about my collection really but he flipped through this book and said this is incredible this is wow well look at all that and then he looked at me and said but this is all made up right like you just thought this can't actually have all been real and that's what kind of rewires people's brains they think this enormous hidden piece of show business that on the face of it is utterly absurd and yet is like way off the charts in terms of the money spent and the talent involved this makes no sense you've never heard of this so there you go i uh we yes we can save deep dives into that for another time okay fair enough fair enough i appreciate i appreciate that um and and maybe i could maybe uh i can be professional enough to kind of segue this a little bit you weren't a fan of of broadway stuff so much uh the way that some folks are now there are a lot of folks that you worked with that love broadway and and are as and so the question i have is is i think about i think about guys like shecky uh who i know quite well and and some of these other folks who love broadway as you were moving down the the very interesting rabbit hole uh and and kind of learning about broadway and learning about some of these things through the industrials thing were you did you ever go to these people and pick their brain about hey did this person ever work on broadway or did you like because it was kind of neat you kind of jumping into that world because of this i knew uh like barbara gaines seemed to be quite knowledgeable about broadway shows and all that i in my early years of investigating this stuff i think i'm more leaned on uh talent department rolodexes like if i wanted to try to get in touch with hal linden sure because hal everybody loves barney miller i don't want to ask you about barney miller i want to ask you about the detroit diesel engine musical so occasionally there was a little uh a little help from that quarter but i didn't feel like people in the halls at the show were talking about broadway all that much so it didn't naturally organically come up although you mentioned shecky uh very helpful at various points because of his enormous film collection and he said oh i think i got some weird stuff in the back room on a shelf and is this the sort of stuff you mean and some of that shows up in the documentary like the purina dog child musical that i would not know about if it were not for shecky oh that that warms my heart so much i love that guy so much and and i appreciate that that's that's very very cool um again we're not we're not starting chronologically here and i'm cool with that uh did you i was told by another uh staffer to ask you about um some of the songs that you've you you've written and done the thanksgiving song of course um amazing she the staffer she said to me she goes that's my one of my very favorite things of the whole show was uh you know memories of the whole show was your thanksgiving song the super bowl song oh my god um were you musical when you started like back in the day at nbc were you already musical or did your musical ability and things uh evolve as your career evolved and it's just something that you did on the side that it very slowly evolved uh i was i would say an average music fan like i grew up kind of listening to a moderately eclectic batch of rock and roll and then i saw amadeus and got into mozart and then it's just this landscape of of like chuck berry and a little of this and then country music and bluegrass and but that was all just i didn't know how to put that together with my day job right very slowly started to come about i decided to get serious about guitar lessons around 2004 and wow started picking up some finger picking chops and thought oh i love this i seem to have a an affinity for this and so i had several years of lessons so i was getting pretty good and i was composing instrumental pieces but i for a long time felt like there's that realm of creativity and then there's the world of words and ideas that's the day job and i'm very cautiously thought what would happen if i made a venn diagram that overlapped these two circles and i think the the earliest was it was close to the uh the the thanksgiving song somewhere around 2013 or so uh there had been a couple odd outliers very early back in the 90s you may recall the piece we did on nbc and cbs the strong guy the fat guy the genius absolutely you composed that the theme song i worked up with rob burnett and then we sort of gave a demo to paul shaffer in the band and they as they always did just took your little nervous sounding sweaty scraps of whatever and turned it into a magnificent slugfest of music so that was kind of like a western sort of uh dude yeah you'll do it yeah yes right that's exactly the word yes yeah i think they all these guys uh and felicia ladies had such a wide range of references like you could just throw out something like they were working it up in rehearsal and and uh paul said to will and try try more like a rawhide base boom oh and did you enjoy my paul shaffer impression oh i've got i enjoyed them all right absolutely yeah there's not a moment of this steve that i'm not enjoying this is oh god that's that's pleasure and pleasant for me to hear as well but it was around 2013 that i'd gotten up to the point where okay i enjoy playing guitar and inventing things and i'm cautiously optimistic about saying i could write songs with lyrics that reflect my sensibility and uh it was probably the thanksgiving song and a couple others there was a christmas song i think that aired that year also i don't know if you know that one i don't know if that's on youtube anyway it was uh it's like hey dawn dawn are you what i wouldn't be surprised if he's watching i don't think he's got a feed into this or not but he's very quick uh you know he so don let's figure that out let's find it somehow let's give it to walter the christmas song early early 90s yeah uh oh this is the in the 2013 range okay okay feeling more deliberate and it was like a christmas song about uh uh it was called unsanitary manger it's like you're you're recording danger if you have your kid in a manger you're quoting danger if you have recording danger if you have a kid in a manger all those filthy camels each with millions of germs and those other middle eastern mammals many have parasitical worms and something like that it's just so festive well it writes itself after that doesn't it i mean yeah well the goal is with comedy or music to make it seem like it wrote itself and make it seem inevitable even though you've sweated uh behind the scenes on 100 drafts of something or whatever there's a special kind of joy when that perfect word just shows up isn't there yeah to the right anyway when uh the thing falls out of the sky on you and you just catch it as opposed to uh aggressively hunting small to medium ideas through the forests and fields for hours and maybe not catching them but you mentioned the super bowl song one of the few times when i actually had an idea that i i wanted to think about on off hours like i remember i never took work home on the weekend i mean yeah i'd think of a fun fact or some odd idea would occur to me but i sat down i had the idea for this song and i worked on it on the weekend and brought it in on monday and gave it to matt roberts and said see what you think of this and and he saw some value to it but yeah that was one of those uh like it has a 99 bottles of beer on the wall feel to it like when the the the singer i forget the guy's name he was terrific the nfl historian yeah yeah he he really uh walked a crazy tight rope in that performance and and made it across flawlessly but the audience i've always thought it was very interesting in that song the song for anyone who doesn't know it's it's basically just reciting roman numerals one through 48 which gets very tough rhythmically the further you get into xxx i xxx iv and i think when the audience realized i i iv vi and they thought oh no they're not seriously going to do this and somewhere around probably the 20s or the 30s i think there was a daunting realization this is actually working and he might land this plane and it will be kind of weirdly awesome yep and then you did land the plane and it's just oh my god and uh i've read that andy kaufman actually used to do 99 bottles of beer on the wall and have that affect the audience where the audience would be very angry at first yep how dare he embark upon this pointless extremely lengthy absurd conceptual project and then somewhere in the 60s or 50s we see over the horizon to the end of this and it is going to be unbelievable and awesome and we're going to be able to say you wouldn't believe what this guy did but he did it and we were there so there was a little taste of that somehow just i'm just so thankful it worked out paul in the band again turned uh a sort of crude iphone demo into this uh powerhouse of a performance with the that i think oh i can't remember his name now well maybe by the end of the episode or we'll try and maybe find it and quote it in the description if if possible or um i would love to uh i want to get this show to a place where uh like i'm i'm trying hard i'm calling walter and all these people i'm trying to get this thing official so it would be so cool if as we archive this thing um we could officially insert clips and things like that and and but if the the videos exist online we'll definitely put them in afterwards and we're building that mechanism into the show here and i would love to do that because there's a lot of people who did performances like that um similar similar again a fisherman can recognize another fisherman you know the way that you have uh brought awareness to the industrial music there's there's moments on the show and that's the part i just i can't wrap my head around um the fact that there is so much gold that you held for a moment and threw away because there was a next night where you had to mine for more gold if if you could and and and i call it the greatest body of broadcasting work in history because it is and there's so many of those moments that i would love to collect and throw out there um and and for for for generations to come because so much of it is timeless um you talk about uh i want to go back to something that you you talk about which is the journey of uh of a bit um and it could go long running like i mean how many times did dave ask a musical actor are those your drums and and you know six months later he's still asking the same question and we had steve weiner on the show not too long ago he talked about you know the the pencil through the window or the card through the window um and it wasn't funny you know but then it became funny then it became an institution um are there ever times like you're a genius when it comes to this stuff i'm sure you're gonna not accept this compliment but you are you're you're a mind of the highest caliber when it comes to comedy it everything at its highest level is philosophy can you predict that can you ever take an idea that's conceptual and then say you know what we could probably turn this into an institution or is that something that just happens it's very tricky and uncertain to plan for a refillable or plan for a signature bit and you well know the sort of offhanded way that something like uh the top 10 list came into being and then later okay sometimes dave wanted to retire the top 10 list or what can we do that it's great and comforting and stabilizing to have refillable forms you can go to but uh finding the right one that dave might say no on one day and if you pitched him the same idea a week later for some reason he might have said yes so you're always playing with 10 different ways for things to not uh hit the perfect spot but i remember will it float came out of one of those very specific we need a new signature piece we deliberately are going to try to think of a thing that we could do again and again with certain hopefully fun elements and unpredictability and kinetic television uh delightful chaos so but there are lots of other ideas in that batch of pitches which might have been good and just didn't happen to be picked i think we did very well with will it float which i think was carter and craig's idea yep i pitched uh in that same realm just like every night it's like what's in the cab's trunk and a cab would drive down fifty thirds cab driver would get out and open the trunk and there'd be some surprising thing there just sure sort of elemental and random and whatever and it might have worked it might have not caught on for 10 different reasons but yeah it is so unpredictable you can aim for the refillable and the classic bit you might try what seems like a surefire thing and it just somehow doesn't quite land with the audience and then you say all right never mind we'll try something else uh well one thing i'm glad about is that spike tv is no longer on the air because they would have taken that idea and it would be a show next week now um i don't i don't know uh you know i uh i think about like is that is this something uh you know you know or is this anything you know and then and then you have the bizarre performers from across the land i i love the idea of that and then you know dave and paul just kind of riffing off those things those were just riffs too right like yeah i think so yeah but that was an example of i don't know is this anything was actually a phrase that writers would use in like pitch meetings where you'd say i have the beginning of an idea i'm not sure see if you guys think this is anything yep and what if this and so you get this sort of ironic detachment at the same time you get to actually have the guy on unicycle spinning plates and it's like the embracing of some weird vaudeville act at the same time you're saying we don't know about this and we're not endorsing this necessarily so you get that sort of uh sort of dualism of yes this is on our show and we don't know what this is and this is barely our show right um i i appreciate you letting me kind of just pick your brain and jump around like this um i want to go back to the beginning and where i want to talk about this is mr o'donnell um what a what a what a class act of a man that that guy is um i i referenced uh one of the funniest speeches i've ever heard um you're a public speaker and and i want to talk to you about that before this show is over today um you know and and he received the the herb sergeant award and and and the footage of that it might be one of the greatest acceptance speeches i've ever seen um and and i don't think he ever accepted the award all he did was he talked about the beautiful amazing experiences he had with people that he worked with along the way and did it in an extremely clever manner um in as part of that speech i highly recommend anybody uh obviously not right now but you know when this is over go and yeah there you go then go and watch um that that the herb sergeant award where the uh with steve o'donnell uh won the prize steve young introduced him and it was very cool because while mr o'donnell was talking about all these people that he got a chance to work with along the way um he was kind of making the point of what your introduction was your introduction was here's a guy who put a hand down and pulled me up and gave me uh so much and i've heard that about him daniel kellyson talked about that and other other people have talked about how steve has done that for them safe safe to say as you were getting your start as you were brought into the fold uh steve o'donnell was a uh uh an immeasurable force to do with that yeah he was the head writer who hired me in 1990 i had known of him before that i think when i was about to get out of college in 1987 i actually called the show and how i even got a phone number i don't know i i must have had some uh uh transient whiff of ambition briefly in my life and then i got him on the phone in a weekday afternoon which is nonsensical right there because it was like being on the high speed speed treadmill of oh my god we have to tape the show in an hour and somehow he got on the phone had an amiable conversation with me and uh i think i referenced that in the uh remarks i make he did uh introducing him at the writer's guild awards but yes uh beloved and respected but many people are respected without being beloved steve was both because he was a real nice person who uh just related to people and wanted to meet them and and find out about them and if he saw a glimmer of something that entertained him he he was happy to try to help it find its home and that would with me and many other writers of that era he saw something that he thought could be cultivated and we were often given a little while to find our sea legs at the show later on it was much more if you're not getting good stuff on the air in the first six weeks or something if we're going to move you on out and try somebody else i was allowed to find my find my way and uh to my mind and generously it took many years i don't think i was really really good at that job until quite late in my tenure there and even then that's like a major league batting average is like oh you're hitting over 300 that's that's good i mean if you pitched 10 ideas and three of them were pretty good and worth trying that would be that would be a good average there as well so anyway steve o'donnell i've i've told this story elsewhere i don't know who's heard it but my very first day at the letterman show april 30th 1990 he met me at some elevator bank in 30 rock and i'm looking around oh my god i'm in the big leagues so exciting and brought me upstairs and said we got to find you an office and on the 14th floor of the certain part of nbc there were numerous empty offices several writers had skedaddled for the west coast after the eighth anniversary show that winter okay that show had been in la and people had been having meetings and suddenly had new jobs offered to them and this big turnover on the staff so i was part of the new generation coming in that involved paul sims spike ferriston wow steve o'donnell said let's get you in office how about this one and i said ah sure and uh i don't think did we even have computers yet maybe we did they had just started getting computers instead of typewriters but what was unusual about this office was there were boxes of record albums on the floor and i said oh what's all this with the records he said well previous writer in this office was in charge of a bit called dave's record collection and with these weird record albums hey maybe you could be the new dave's record collection guy and i said sure i guess okay and nice to start okay so he's giving you something on your first day right he's sort of he thought that i might have a good sensibility for that but really within the first 20 minutes of me arriving at 30 rock the the first domino had been hit in a long chain which would result in books documentaries lectures public appearances this whole twisted miniature empire which grew out of that i'm very very grateful that you you set the table so beautifully when it when it came to that because that was going to be my question is okay you kind of stopped at in the speech you stopped at when he got you the gig and i'm very i'm very interested to know you know what the first year or two looked like for you and you've really done a good job setting the table for that um was it was it difficult um you know you're in the big leagues now it's all new and and and and the attrition like you said yourself uh you know major league battle three out of ten uh for a comedy writer on a show like that i would think it's not even i mean my word um the attrition of of ideas um was it difficult for you like we had tommy rupricht on not too long ago and and he talked about how like hey what are some bits well the question i asked what are some bits that you pitch that you wish would have got done but they got left on the floor and it was so funny because he thought about it and thought about he was you know the only ones i could think of are the ones from the first few weeks in the in the gig before i learned the skill to just let it go and move on to the next and and i don't know if that relates or not but um was that was that a difficult uh transition for you or was it because you were so green you just learned how to do it right from the start i had had a couple other tv writing jobs so luckily i had the worst of the greenery maybe had been uh had been seasoned out of me at the comedy channel which had just started up before it was comedy central yeah uh hbo is not necessarily the news which was actually my first job but oh man that's i always when we would meet with the interns every semester and sort of toward the end of a semester they'd all come together and they could ask us questions all the writers and we would just try to give our perspective on what it all meant to us and what to keep in mind one thing i always said was you have to learn to care enough to do a really good job and really push yourself to like okay that's a pretty good joke but what's a better joke how can we push but not care so much that you're hurt and wounded and and knocked down painfully by something not getting on the show so i'm sort of with tom on that yes there were pieces that didn't get on that probably would have been great sometimes they hovered right up at the edge and they were produced and ready to go and didn't get on somehow sometimes it was oh i've always thought that if he had been pitched this idea on the right day dave might have loved this and then it would have gone but who knows you it's a volume business and the the blessing and the curse was whether you stunk the place up one day or had like the the funniest thing that you've ever had the next day you're back in the same boat with everybody else with a blank slate and uh you can redeem yourself or you can try to follow up something good but you're you're always just you get a new start every day pretty much yeah and that would seem to be a the thing about i call it the shorthand i call it is the pants family um i mean obviously you know it was before that with late night as well before it was officially pants and all that but i just caught a short hand called the pants family is that seems to be um there's a few things that everybody i talk to you know i i'm a good friend with uh scott ryan who wrote last days letterman it's it's my favorite book um and i love carter's books no offense to bill carter i love his books his books are just as dog-eared i love this book though because it really does a good job talking about the family um and and and it seems like so many of you guys and gals have such similar dispositions when it comes to certain things and and and dave is legendarily uh known for you know his postmortems and how uh uh you know how hard he could be uh on himself or on on on the shows if that didn't go well but that concept that well okay to at some point even up to dave who has that reputation at some point what you just said it's like a light switch that kicks on goes okay well tomorrow's a new show and we're gonna start from scratch and we're just gonna you know clean slate and take it from there um and maybe because of that culture that's why there are so many people who had the longevity that they did including the host himself i don't i don't know if that had to do with the longevity or not but it seems like it might have you learned if if you found your way there to trust like in the writers room i've heard of terrible writer's rooms where everyone is paranoid everyone is scratching for credit if i win you lose so i must win and you must lose there's i think no shortage of rooms full of uh talented but not necessarily beloved people who populate certain branches of the industry but we were lucky with a very long term stable core of people who were comfortable enough with each other to say uh i have the beginning of something but i don't know where it goes or i have this phrase and it may be stupid but i'm just going to throw it out there people would make themselves vulnerable on a daily basis in the writer's room and say wow whatever this is in my mind i don't have it you're going to have to help me and maybe together we can make something that neither of us could have made apart so on a good day that would be like somebody else pitches the beginning of something that i couldn't have thought of but then i had the detail that make oh my god now it's a slam dunk yeah two people together on a in a room like that or more i'm we did things on a collaborative basis sometimes it were just everybody helping but that took confidence that you believe these people are not rooting against you it's trust it becomes a trust issue yeah you want to do well you want to be funny you have that ego and you want to keep proving that you're worth the paycheck so if a long time goes by and you're not getting anything on that's not good but you're also feeling like if if tom ruprecht or joe grossman has the best idea today and the show is great tonight well we've all won we know it'll be my turn next time or next week or whatever and not all shows get to that uh sort of collective trust and there's all these other ways things can go wrong uh along the way uh production bottlenecks and uh some news story flares up in mid-afternoon you have to rewrite the whole show to be about that and throw away this other good stuff that you were excited about so yeah you just learned to trust people hopefully if it's a good place like that and not agonize about what what did get on hopefully over the long haul you'll have some hall of fame pieces you'll be glad about that they beat the odds and got on and were triumphant like one i remember is just one of these silly ideas it was fairly late and i think i did write a song for it it was just oh like a little music bit would start oh you know what that song means folks it's time for my grape break and there was a great break song and a grape lowered on a filament from the catwalk down to dave and and and the way i wrote it it was just gonna be like in a little box and he would open the box and eat one grape and it would be just a lot of effort for something nonsensical but dave kind of got a hold of it and said oh you know what put the grape on like a sewing needle and then he did this long thing where he's in his mouth and you see shots of that stage hand with the fishing pole with the grape on it and it was such good humored chaos because dave was in the right mood that day and said this is going to be stupid fun and and and i couldn't have predicted how it would turn out some days yeah dave would take something that you thought was this level and make it way up to here just decided to run with it well and i think that uh safe to say i mean so many people talk about there was an article that came out i forget where it was i apologize i wish i would i can reference it but it was like the top 10 uh david letterman moments and we even referenced it once on the show with somebody uh they're all blurring together already um i can only imagine what it was like after thousands of shows but it's pretty blurry for me honestly yeah i mean i was there for 25 years yeah exactly but the idea though um that um on one day uh like you just said there's one day that dave may be way into this the other may not um and and there were things that were built that were like institutions because of that there became rules uh don't write anything about this and and it became a rule all the way along no no no we never talk about that we never write about this we never write about that uh it was on tommy's show that's that's where that was and then but at the end of the day that rule may have just started from a a mood that he was in that day but then it became an institution within the show and it's fascinating to know that that's the framework of the show and the culture of the show came from from that uh i i i was fascinated by that there was a certain amount of criminology of uh what has the great leader said and what are the implications and what might have been just a irritated tossed off remark is now enshrined as some sort of inviolable rule yeah and then later no i don't i'm i don't hate that i don't know where you got that idea and you wouldn't remember why it started yeah so you do your best to try to understand an ever evolving ecosystem of rules and preferences and and at some point you found that oh but this contradicts that uh well that's the nature of the game just like every day the the mood may be different and the show evolves and the world evolves and now we're going to talk about this and we're going to find our own way to put an imprint on something like after 9 11 the classic dilemma of oh my god the world has changed how does comedy fit into this very different feeling world and the very tentative ways that dave tried to test our do we want to laugh do we think we should laugh at silly things and are we still fully human beings that have all these impulses not only grief but optimism and laughter and yes we we found our way slowly back to that well and and it's funny like that article that i was uh that i i forgot to reference in the last thing that i said too was was the the top 10 moments the top 10 dave letterman moments and eight of them or seven of them were moments where he was reacting to something like it was like an off the cuff because i don't i don't know if there's anybody uh on the planet who's better at reacting to things the way that dave does the the genius level of of of that um i think about after 9 11 you talk about this i remember him saying can we try a joke can we okay or is it all right that we and i mean i don't imagine that that was scripted like like even just that part of it alone um you know that's that's the off-the-cuff i mean they call it a midwestern sensibility that awesome personality that he brings he brought into it um did it take you a long time to i ask this question of all writers uh or at least if i don't i need to um did it take you a long time to start writing in dave's voice steve o'donnell recognized that i had some core sensibility that was a good match for the show okay so he said i'm going to put put some chips down on this guy i think things should work out if he if he immerses himself in the show more he'll be very good and reliable i had watched the show actually very little and i may be an extreme example of what i think is true of some of the earlier generation letterman creative people they were not necessarily enamored of television and did not absorb it like a sponge and worship it i had seen the show i don't know probably a handful of times the first time i ever saw it i was flabbergasted it was early 1983 and i i was up late with some friends i saw this show i'd never seen before never heard of before and i ended up on the floor curled up in a fetal position laughing so hard i could barely breathe and yet i did not from that moment say this is my life's destiny i must find the people and work with them no concept of that i didn't know tv shows had staffs really yes there's names going by at the end but i didn't mentally that and i also didn't even think i've got to find a way to stay up late every night now and watch it i don't know years went by in the mid 80s at high school and college where really ignored the show completely so it sort of doesn't make sense that i ended up there but it also makes complete sense because the early people like steve o'donnell and dave himself i think had an interest but a skepticism for television they were not hypnotized by the glamour and everything they just saw well this is this strange part of our lives which we will acknowledge and we will also satirize and keep it at arm's length sort of emotionally and and i was so i came into the letterman show not knowing a lot i think when i started i oh oh i better i better cram and i like i watched it every night for two weeks before i started so i kind of here i go i i can do this but there was so much that i didn't know that i didn't know like maybe the average viewer wouldn't even know this either but meetings people would talk about oh should we have calvert do this what if cal does that i finally said excuse me who is calvary come on you don't know everybody knows well larry button melvin that's what people on the other side of the tv know him as i don't know how many people knew him as calvert so i actually didn't feel too bad about certainly not at that time anybody would have known at that time i don't think anybody yeah there was there was no internet message board where people were talking about behind the scenes of all this but uh you'd have a good idea and someone said oh we did that in february of 89.

or and a fair amount of instances like that where somebody would have a good joke the craziest version of that i ever had which also was encouraging in a way it was the new books segment at nbc yep and just like make up fake books that the props department would put together and uh i proposed one was the new york city white pages arranged by height rather than alphabetical order okay and i handed that in on my page of however many and steve o'donnell called me down to his office and said i see you had this and i said yeah and he went over to a file cabinet and rummaged and he found one of the other writers like three years earlier had written the same joke and had it had not gotten on so there was no way i was drafting off of somebody else's ideas just that i bizarrely arrived at exactly the same conceptual bit of nonsense and even then i don't think it got on but it told me and probably steve o'donnell yes this is the right sort of person here for this place uh well i i oh man okay so i got a couple things i'm gonna i'm gonna just go off the freshest thing that you said elizabeth gilbert in one of her books talks about the idea that whimsy or or uh inspiration it goes from person to person until it's realized uh and and she's got examples of it in in in a couple of examples of it in in one of her books and she talks about that and and how okay so because i by her logic because that joke wasn't put on the air it's gonna float to somebody else until it does get put on the air did that joke make it on the air when you did it or did it did it has it ever been realized i think it has been now enshrined as this anecdote but i don't think that it ever got on the show i gotcha oh i mean people also talk about there was certain patterns of history where things were converging and it was the time in history where somebody was going to invent the steam engine around this time if it wasn't this guy would have been that guy and whatever and uh and if uh if a certain joke or tv show hadn't been invented by its credited person then other people like thomas edison we give him credit for the light bulb there were 10 people working on light bulbs varying degrees of complexity or efficiency and there is some talk that he occasionally either stole or bribed or whatever just so he could have the clean playing field on things but yeah i would see i ran the monologue from 2004 to 2015 yeah and we would get jokes in very professional good solid current events jokes and then jay leno would have the same joke on the same night and i don't think there was any foul play it's just that it's low-hanging fruit in a way uh for black people people are working with the same set of news stories and the same in internal templates oftentimes and we'll get to the same point you can't agonize over that but the the white pages one seems so improbable to me that is really close yeah uh i want to talk about your vocabulary a little bit um i i haven't asked any of the other writers this yet the thing that strikes me through so many of you um again from steve weiner who worked at the show a relatively short time but was there at the very beginning uh to guys who worked like to yourself i hear i hear echoes of dave's voice and where i really hear it are is in the vocabulary at any point in your career did you ever consult a thesaurus or did you ever uh bone up on vocabulary or have you always been gifted or at least interested in learning new words and things like that i know i've got favorite words and my next question is do you have any favorite words so i'm going to say favorite words are there two or three that pop into your mind uh i'm gonna defer the favorite words question for a moment okay vocabulary i think just came by naturally but being at the show and and being at close range with dave i'm sure that uh i was bolstered in my appreciation of precise words and artful word choices and i also loved when he would get things a little twisted in a wrong way that was even better than the usual reality and some of it i mean is just willful silliness like calling people by the wrong names sure but sometimes they were so wonderful like i remember you was talking to sarah jessica parker and he said how's your husband doing uh and he couldn't summon the name matthew broderick or he decided to set the real name aside uh how's your husband doing um you know a punky brewster yeah so what neural pathway got him to that yeah so i always appreciated that and just the the inner clockwork whirrings of his mind able to connect disparate things and ornate improbable details at lightning speed i really admired and part of that is verbal part of it is conceptual i think you can get too excited about words and get too heavy-handed and simplicity cut back he always wanted to simplify it cut it down make it shorter he didn't he didn't appreciate wordiness unless there was a joke about excessive worthiness i think so uh i i tried to walk this line of being interestingly precise yet not blah blah blah all the time yeah your guys's economy awards all of you i always feel bad because my economy of words is terrible i'm i am a writer like i do enjoy writing my wife and i wrote a book together and and i do enjoy writing not that i'm necessarily any good at it or entertaining by it but i do enjoy it uh but when i'm trading emails back and forth with you guys i'm really cognizant that uh all of you are ninjas when it comes to economy of words you can say in two or three sentences what it takes me two or three paragraphs to say even though i think i'm being clever along the way the idea of say it but just don't reiterate it and and get it down to that uh very quickly your economy of words is incredible i don't know if you had that if that was one of the sensibilities that mr o'donnell saw in you um or if you you know learned that along the way but yeah your economy of words are are um incredible um i i i but let's hey he said that look at that somebody on the show took a compliment actually took a compliment probably to get me to shut up and stop saying it i wanted to show that i could do it with one syllable but uh yeah dave was a great aficionado of artful brevity and and part of it was practical he didn't want a monologue joke that spilled onto a second cue card yes and so there'd be a lot of telegraphic sort of implied like hot today saw blah blah blah just like he could embellish it as conversationally as he wanted at whatever length and density he felt like in the moment but he sure indicated that things were were boiled down and carved down to the to the bone and so you you if you had any affinity for that you were only going to get better better at it so i i think i think i probably did uh increase my ninja-like word use you sharpen the pencil or the sword as the case may be um i saw i went and saw dave uh well it's a couple months ago now in may um when he was recording the uh the new show on netflix the stand-up show um that's my time with david letterman and i mean i'm right there in the third row the first two rows are our uh uh a planted audience you know it's a netflix thing they want to make sure they get their diversity and all that sort of stuff it was it was a a phenomenal experience um seeing him on stage again i didn't think i'd ever get a chance to see him after uh that night was the last night i saw him uh the night where we had that picture taken um and i was lucky enough to have my little moment with him photographed and immortalized uh i didn't think i'd see him again and watching him live it was amazing everything you're talking about was still very very true and and i didn't want to um you know get in trouble or disrupt the production but i was turning around constantly because he had the big they didn't have the cue card and todd wasn't there uh with the cue cards uh but on a big plasma or plasma plant just dated myself on a big screen behind the audience there was his cue cards they were there and and it was it was it was lovely and how uh how he could uh you know go through his process that way and i wanted to i was fascinated by it i wanted to turn around and just look at the screen the entire time but i would have disrupted the production and would have been told to you know stop that um but it's fascinating to me how he can take the bullet points and and and just with the ears to hear what he actually says versus what's up there um a tremendous skill and when you compare it to what johnny used to do when he johnny had everything lined up all in one uh very interesting it shows right there the difference i think between a comedian and a broadcaster um i don't know if that if that resonates with you or not but i i think it does i mean dave started in radio in college and this early training in just being comfortable with a conversational flow or even a not a conversation but just continuing to talk and form thoughts and martial thoughts and have something to say yeah if you become comfortable with that it's it's a a wonderful thing i i think he did get better and better at it over the years uh one of those uh maybe the zinaman book pointed out and yeah this struck me i don't think i'd ever considered this before in the early 80s he was not holding forth about his opinions and feelings and confusions about life and then as the years went by he felt more and more comfortable you know something i don't understand or here's what happened to me on the weekend and see if you think i'm crazy like he would start expounding about that he felt and that he experienced and early on he was much more of us a cipher and he would be asking good questions and listening and having a good conversation but he was not as much a character in the show as he was this uh hard to pin down iran assist or something and uh so he got better and better at that and yes i think he right after the late show ended he realized i just want to have interesting conversations with people yeah i wanted to take away the parts of the show from 20 or 30 years ago that i feel like i've had enough of and just go into the the deeper talk with people who interest me uh i was talking about this with um do you know who jay ryan is the guy who he's the guy that stole dave's microphone i don't know if you remember do you remember when dave's my microphone got stolen no this is the first i'm hearing of it and i'm outraged are you are you serious you don't you don't remember this um i don't know i hear you okay well he had in it was uh it was when the bridges um we got one of the bridges actually that's coming for our new set which i'm very excited about it was it was around the time when the red floor went away and they put up the bridges which ended up being the kind of the the the the um the stage dressing for the rest of the run uh dave had that old microphone that can go goes back to all the way to jack parr that he they stole it from nbc and they brought it over well there was a night where that microphone was was stolen um and and uh so jay was the guy that took it and he's trying to get it back to dave now and all that sort of stuff but i wasn't sure if you were aware of that you did you guys did some some bits about it the week of uh the set dressing show anyway regardless he and i were talking about that uh that exact what you were just saying he's a huge fan of late night versus late show where i'm kind of the other way where i love late show versus late night even though i love the entire evolution of things my very favorite segment of all time um and it's funny because in bathtubs uh one of the things that you see is is is you coming up and looking at the monologue going okay how much got butchered out how much got got taken out right um i also know there's another place that that would happen which is my very favorite segment of television for 20 years 15 20 years which was the first segment after the monologue um at late show when dave would sit down and just talk to the audience and many times uh we've come to learn sometimes with a blue card with a beautiful piece of comedy sitting right there and and sometimes he would just go the other way and start talking about uh have you seen how many shows there are about cakes what are people doing they're making cakes look like this and like that or or or something like that talking about the bear the bear well the bear story was probably planned but but he would talk about moments of his life and and do exactly what you what you talk about that's one of the things that reasons why late show was the one that spoke to my heart even more than late night uh because he did put so much of his personality into it and and got you used the word earlier um vulnerable and i think that that just made the audience even that more endeared to him once he started becoming vulnerable long-winded way to get to this question did the writing change when you recognize the fact that dave was becoming more vulnerable talking about some of these things did that change any of the way that jokes were written or topics did some of the things that were in the penalty box get released at that point well a couple things happened over the the course of the show evolving one was by the mid to late 90s you had new shows coming in like jon stewart who changed the complexion of the whole late night world and suddenly or maybe not suddenly but definitely it became more expected that a show like dave's would have its own take on the issues and the stories of the day we by when i started in 1990 there were little crumbs of uh topicality in the top ten list and a few monologue jokes but they were not like it was not trying to be the the daily show it was right a different kind of show but then after a while it was well we can't be the daily show but what does dave have to say about things and he would occasionally do some uh some bit that had a political bent but sure i i think uh if there was a change it was just sort of slow and systematic and you saw and you followed along but uh in terms of whether it's just about his personal curiosities and vulnerabilities and being able to i mean a great strength was the self-deprecating i'm just a dumb guy so i don't understand this maybe you tom brokaw can explain to me why yes so that is a very welcoming and inclusive way to say you people at home may need to know more about this and not even know how to ask i'm feeling the same way let's learn about it together but then also just more emotional stuff like once he was a father and yeah and wrestling with the just different stages of life yep i think there was probably a little more ability to do things that dealt with difficult emotions in comedy sometimes i remember a bit of mine that we that dave really liked i wrote it for thanksgiving and he brought it back for christmas it was this united airlines commercial about so you're supposed to go home for the holidays you know you don't want to so here's what we're going to do we're going to sell you a ticket for a fake united airlines flight it's going to look very realistic but at the last minute oh no that's like you cancelled you wished you could have been there but what can you do and so it's like an agony of of your family relationships and your ambivalence about like spending holidays with your family it's going to be awkward but you don't want to not do it you want to made the good faith effort and and so something about that gnarly human ball of emotions appealed to him um that reminds me of a one of the jokes he did on on on my next guest which i forget who the guest was uh which is ironic because you know they're supposed to need no introduction um they said to him uh do you have siblings and yes i do okay have you ever fought with your siblings or you know and and dave's response off-handedly really quick was i'll tell you when the fight's over you know and then they moved on to the next topic and and that just reminds me of that i can see how that would would appeal um i think you're right i think as time went on in the fatherhood thing after the heart attack for sure uh that vulnerability started showing up more and more on air and i just i just found it oh go ahead not technically a heart attack sorry the heart surgery yes thank you i can't believe i made that mistake i correct people on that all the time and i i was just kind of not technically a heart attack his heart exploded not true but i think he liked to say that but uh i love when he goes hyperbolas i i love that like when he talks about you know he got fired from cbs or you know they got fired from nbc because paul was stealing office supplies i love i love dave's hyperbolous uh nature of things i just find that really yeah almost comforting that way that he could tilt reality 22 degrees and it sounds plausible but it's completely not right like one of my favorite tiny things yeah that uh that i have quoted to friends over the years i don't know what year this would have been mid 90s i guess based on when the movie came out he he was talking about that movie uh speed yes and his capsule description of the movie speed was that it was about a talking bus that goes nuts which seems like i don't think that's right but it almost sounds plausible that's ex yes that is now that was dave that wasn't that wasn't written for him that was just dave doing being dave right right and who knows he made that up on the spot or thought of that earlier once in a while you'd say something in his presence that uh that he filed away for future use like one time and i would see him in the afternoon working on the monologue or something and i don't know if he had a cold or something and and i said oh you've got the drug resistant tb and like two days later like he was at the desk and coughed and said i've got the drug resistant tb so like he just held on to stuff for possible future use and i was uh a well-paid writer on the show he could take my off-handed remarks and repurpose them from dawn to dusk and i would be fine with it absolutely oh well uh mr mulligan and i had a conversation this week jerry mulligan and i and and he talked about that too he talked about how sometimes he would slip jokes in just to make dave laugh like like one the one that he referenced was a dick joke that obviously could not make air um it was there was a there was a story in the news about a doctor who was having inappropriate uh uh appointments with his clients or with his patients and uh and and and so there was again this is the first i'm hearing of this and i am outraged and many of the patients were as well uh a a select few probably weren't uh but anyways um he it was a thermometer joke and and uh and and so jerry put in the in the packet or whatever um you know the way that the doctor was taking the temperature well dave then on air a few days later spontaneously uh you know change it up a little bit and use the word finger instead of what jerry said on it so it was almost like jerry put that in to make dave laugh and then dave threw it into the show to kind of ping-pong it back to jerry and when he told me that and again the camaraderie i think there's so many of us that live vicariously through the the the camaraderie that you all had uh you know folks who wanted to just desperately be an intern so they could be part of that like i think about brian ted's journey i want to live vicariously through that career like the guy shows up as an intern ends up coming up on air talent a little bit here and there moves up segment producer now he's executive producing the view all of that sounds exquisite except for the view part um i i you know the camaraderie that you guys had you guys and gals had um again a family is the only way i can describe it uh with what jerry said there it made me think okay i'm gonna ask steve that question was there ever anything that you threw in whether it be a monologue joker or something that was yeah this is just for dave because i know it's gonna make him smile i know he's gonna take it and just do something else with it but was that did you ever do any of that i used to write a lot of the uh from new york's and man who's eventually after 9 11 it was just from new york the greatest city in the world but yeah we would need batches of from new york the uh the world uh just whatever odd freight and then and now bad boy electrician dave letterman just whatever odd craze you might have seen in the news or conjured yourself uh for staffers birthdays or at least writers and other navy producers uh you would get a bottle of very nice champagne from mr letterman with a little card happy birthday work so yeah i had not yet uh uh like the day after i thought well i guess i should write him a thank you note oh i know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna hand him a page of man from new york's and like sprinkled in there is going to be thanks for the champagne dude and he picked that one no kidding but then i don't think it went on the air i think somebody thought it was fun that he put it in the page it was even more fun that dave played along and picked it but really we're not going to do that we're going to stop the tomfoolery right now okay uh i'm sure you know about celebrum oh yeah i was going to ask you about celebrity gum that's on my list yep that was this project that i did just for the sheer pleasurable stupidity of it but dave really got behind it and it was kind of it was never on the show yeah it was just this satellite project but he took pleasure in it and and decided to elevate it and play along and actually paid a lot of money out of his own pocket to frame and professionally mount dozens of the photos at that year's uh late show holiday party which was at an art gallery downtown with all the photos around the walls and that seemed like all right he he called my bluff he he he liked my joke and then he expanded on it and made it we're gonna make this way too big now yeah he rolled up his sleeves and said check this out uh i think okay so so i'm okay at this i really appreciate when i have someone on the other side who's actually better at this than me and can lead the conversation um tom bonesman did the same thing he basically in the first 10 minutes of our interview asked all the questions that i kind of wanted to ask he summed everything up so we could go deeper with that you bring up celebrum right there and you bringing up also the fact that you used to um do alan calter's uh copy uh you know for this because this is this is stuff that fans want to know that i don't necessarily get around to to saying um and because i'm so excited just to just to shoot the with you um thank you for talking about how you were the one or one of the the ones who did those um those amazing uh alan kalter bumpers that he would do in between the commercial breaks or or or from new york and i love after 9 11 how it became the greatest city in the world and kind of stayed there um did you also because at a certain point it changed from broadcasting from new york in the heart of new york and broadcast all around the world or something like that the copy changed uh do you remember when and why that changed uh that particular detail i don't remember but uh you mentioned uh we called them the act fives in the last i don't know eight or ten years of the show just like coming up tomorrow on the late show dave's guests are blah blah blah blah blah blah and then there'd be some strange off-handed comedic flourish of some sort yeah and that became uh my fifetum and i was very happy about that very protective of it because it could be a true full flowering of a cheerful absurd sensibility that still was exactly true to the show but what dave loved about weird stuff in the act five it did not depend did not live or die according to an audience reaction because it was just the band was playing and everyone was going like this and if you heard what alan said and thought it was funny great if you heard it and just thought that's weird it didn't appear that the show had been damaged so that was one of the last places you could be wildly strange and experimental with no downside um and and it was cool too because alan uh in his delivery i'll tell you the genesis of where the show where i actually jumped off the pier and decided to do the show was after alan passed away uh because at the end i have such adoration for that man having never met him uh or spoken with him i i just adore him and he was one of the guys that would be the low-hanging fruit that would probably be willing to come on you know five six seven times to just shoot the about memories on the show he's such a from every every person who talks about alan calter i just appreciate uh how kind and generous and and how just willing he is to you know to be accessible um the fact that he would take those act five lines many times and put them on him or or something like that uh i just really appreciate that about him and the fact that um oh my granddaughter's coming in look at this hi sweetheart i'm so sorry about that look at that this is my granddaughter right there wow congratulations thank you memes okay so go up and talk to mimi i'll be up in just a few minutes yeah i'm almost done my love okay yeah okay my love steve says bye okay she said bye uh thank you for putting up with that um alan would take some of those lines and make them about him or if where you wrote them about him and it would just make the lore of alan calter that much stranger did you ever write any of alan's um pieces his remotes or anything like that or by that time oh you did any that come to mind that uh you're you're particularly uh fond of i think we did it at least once like alan calter makes your company's product sound sexy just some weird thing like that he really was and i don't know if they fully understood this when they hired him he was another ultra powerful secret weapon for the show in the same way paul shaffer turned out to be the perfect foil and balance for dave and we lucked out again and again like rupert he was just right there he i don't know if there was only a few interactions that dave would regularly have with people one was uh jack hannah and other times if it was dave talking to rupert but my my comedy damaged mind would be set free from its shackles and i would just roar with laughter of what was happening with with dave talking to rupert and he just happened to be there in that deli when we moved there and he's just this charming good-hearted guy who would just nod and sort of look rueful or placid or whatever and just what a what a bizarre wonderful chemistry that that was with him i uh don't know if you again i i would not be at all surprised if you're like okay this guy's an amateur i'm just gonna lead this whole thing i don't know if you do this on purpose or if it was just serendipitous uh and and it's just the one of the delights of my day is to get one of my heroes or architects of of the thing that i love most which is uh the late show and and put them into an unwitting make them a winning accomplishment uh a compliment i can't even say the word uh partners in a commercial uh but the the letterman podcast is brought to you by the hello deli our one and only sponsor is brought to you by the hello deli rupert's rupert cheese hello deli nestled in the womb of the ed sullivan theater um and one of the only places on earth you can buy late show with david letterman merchandise um please go to hello deli.com if you want to get a rupert t-shirt uh a david letterman mug uh from the late show or other uh plethora of merchandise and if you ask him really nicely he does pack them himself and if you ask really nicely he may add onions to your order so hello deli.com uh go on there the one and only sponsor of the letterman podcast uh we love you rupert thank you very much and uh steve does too apparently because it was gold everything that you guys did did you know that did you did you know that before and or was that that the that they sponsor us no i didn't know that happened the way it was supposed to serendipity say yes um and good business sense for all involvement uh i'm so grateful about this um celebrity gum yes before we before we finish off one thing i appreciate about you and i can i can say this uh you know if you want to get to know steve a little bit more again he has quoted verbatim uh many times in this book here and you definitely get a chance to get to know his sensibility uh hopefully that has come across here uh the comedy damage mind that he talks about here i mean you've seen so much and and the fact that you still even have the ability to laugh uh to go back to bathtubs for a second the moment pretend to laugh okay well there you go uh i i've seen childlike delight on your face and it was when in bathtubs when you um somebody said something i forget which commercial it was have you ever heard this commercial oh it's or not commercial this um this track off of one of the musicals it was delightful and and you're just kind of standing there and and looking at something and then the record player starts in the background and the commercial starts and the smile on your face like literally childlike joy shows up yes i know that moment and uh please don't confuse your viewers and listeners these were not commercials those were sorry these were musical productions only for in-house infotainment for the sales force but yes that was the uh the uh frigidaire uh 1963 song where you can put payoff punch in your selling with power of frigidaire or something and it was one i'd never heard but i immediately recognized oh this is a good one and i already have a suspicion about who wrote it based on the style and i was vindicated years later when i went back and did some more archaeology in a uh the families of a deceased composer with all the files in the basement and i found yes that was correct but anyway yes this child wonder i i always retain that i think and even if so many uh millions of jokes over the decades have beaten down and burned out certain receptors that make me able to laugh with child like wonder i still can regard things with childlike wonder and enthusiasm especially when they're not like scripted and meant to be funny and put through it uh a whole production pipeline it's the spontaneous moments of surprise that really can get me well and that full circle back to rupert right there because again you can't you could never script those moments uh you know where rupert was just you know being himself in front of the camera and kind of look and the things that they would go back and forth with the double meetings of things and and dave's reaction the ping-pong um the spontaneity i i appreciate that go ahead oh sometimes we would play with that like we would say let's take a look back at all the different talented actors who have played the paul shaffer role over the years like pretending that it had all been just cast and oh that guy for a couple of years yeah he wasn't quite right oh i don't remember him but then we found this guy in 19 1994 and he has been our paul shaffer ever since and isn't he and marvelously so we sort of play with the the reality of what exactly any of this was at and it was clear that it was a joke but it was also like it's if it's plausible i think dave loved things that were wrong but plausible that was part of his core sensibility well and go back to the record collection okay because then the the fun facts books or the different parody books that you did over the years but the record collection they were actually real records and again you as the viewer you weren't sure like in the plausibility of things i think you're right i think there's a lot of uh humor in that and the fact that you can dissect it again um you know everything at its highest level is is philosophy you sir are a uh a comedy philosopher uh there's no question about that i want to be conscious of everybody's time here um so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna cut it short here uh giller always gets uh he always points this out to me whenever i ask somebody if they will come back on air he said you know that they are required to say they will come back they're not going to say they're not going to come back if you do that and that's when i politely say to don yeah i know uh because i'll use any uh tactic that i can to get them to come back um can you and i do somewhere down the line can we do a podcast about bathtubs and and do that maybe that's the next way i i can weasel my way into a conversation with you steve absolutely yes uh uh there will be a long list of conditions and you might need to meet them but for now let the record show that i cheerfully agreed uh the record it is so entered into the record um i finish off uh these episodes uh by by asking a question i love dave's evolution many of us who watch this love dave's evolution many of us have uh their favorites of course favorite times of dave's career i love that he's moved into long form now i think it is a natural evolution and we've talked we've alluded to that i think uh in in our discussion today um i love that he's doing long form uh the kind of the tom snyder thing uh with my next guest um if there were three people uh and i say living or dead if there were three people living or dead that you would like to see if you were the show booker and you didn't care anything about metrics um pop culture where it's at now anything like that if there were three people that you would like to see dave do the long form with uh on my next guest who would those three people be so it can be living or dead yes sir we don't add alive but in a vegetative state yes we certainly can because that would very much test that would test dave's skills uh tremendously there probably would be no bigger tests than that all right um i'm just uh gonna go by pure raw instinct here uh i'm gonna say winston churchill yep uh i'm gonna say lenny bruce awesome uh i'm gonna say all right as oh i i shot out of the gate so well i'm just gonna throw something else in here on the top and then and call it a day but uh uh how about norman rockwell oh my god those are three awesome answers um man i can't tell you does it translate through the ones and zeros how grateful i am i hope it does it's very flattering and and and slightly alarming since i just think well it's a thing i did for a long time and uh and that was great and i regret nothing and i also i i as i said at the outset it's not my bailiwick to be the fan and the archivist and i'm so thrilled that there are people who are doing it right and yet it feels odd to me i i understand the impulse because i do it on a different sphere and so i i don't i don't think it's at all uh odd or wrong i just have now the experience of being on the other side of something where all my composer friends who wrote industrial shows are surprised that people are asking them about it and want to keep talking about the diesel engine show or whatever so i've felt it on both sides now but i still uh well i appreciate that uh more than more than you'll know um if people want to come follow you uh obviously steve youngworld.com is where the website is and there's some very cool things that are archived on there and and i think it does a pretty good job of going through all the different categories of how people might uh access you and and some of the projects you've been a part of um are you still doing the now that kind of the the the world is opening back up again are you still doing any lecturing or public speaking that sort of thing are there ways that i can get started starting to get uh some feelers going on some live shows again uh nothing to announce yet but i hope to be able to nail something down in the coming months and and start going out again and showing some of the crazy beautiful bizarre film clips from the bathrooms are coming or the ge silicones musical or whatever yeah i uh well my my hope is that as this thing grows and whatnot i'm really enjoying uh coming into this world the way that i have been my my hope is any any of you people uh who worked for the show are part of the pants family uh along the way uh my the wish is there that at some point we can cross paths where i can actually uh whether it's hire a former writer to to help me with some jokes or something like that or to somebody who uh tom dreesen does comedy workshops things like that i wanna i wanna i wanna employ him for a night somehow some way to do that i feel the exact same way about you i would love to support that if people wanna reach out to you is the website the best way to do it are you on the social channels as well yeah there's uh there's links on steveyoungworld.com to the various uh social media things but i think there is a direct email thing to click as well if you uh have even more questions about the grape break segment or we went into but yeah i'm i'm ambivalent about social media as i think many people are in different ways and mostly it's just a venue for me to put put up strange photos that i take and i was very proud also speaking of photos sometimes i would show dave letterman weird pictures i took and there was one that he was so enamored of again he just said i need this enlarged and framed in my office and uh what a what a stamp of approval that some odd moment that you captured with a camera resonated with him so much well what was the picture it was uh i think in riverside park in new york uh in the foreground there was a guy splayed out on the ground who's clearly he was hot and had taken his shirt off and he was like on the sort of marble steps of some monument or something he's just exhausted and flopped over and in the background there was a guy uh facing away from the camera and a t-shirt playing violin and it was evocative and and weird and urban and random and he just said that i need that um we've had mark carson on the show who did the late night bumpers early on and and whatnot and uh i love odd absurd pictures like that as well and that that seems akin to me is is very similar in style and uh bent perception perhaps a little bit um what a way to to end i appreciate you giving of your time and as you said uh becoming a little bit chatty um thank you so much for this uh of course a shout out to mr steve o'donnell who made this happen who made this connection happen and what not um thank you you talk about oh go ahead oh steve o'donnell by the way in the finale of bathtubs over broadway the big musical finale no without spoiling it too much but he is in it he makes a cameo appearance in it which i love because he was the one as i said who on that long ago first day at my uh job as a late show writer letterman writer put me on the track of the record collection and then uh 28 years later it had flowered to the point where there was a movie that we could put him in about the same thing uh oh great a great way to segue and when we do i don't know if you still have it or not but the uh the sequence tuxedo jacket you were wearing i don't know if you still have that jacket or not but uh that one had to go back to the edith head posture department at nbc universal or whatever it was but uh uh yes uh people asking about that uh sequin jacket so i'm gonna have to buy one of my own so very clearly well something to wear on stage when you're doing your lectures i think uh right there um thank you so much steve and thank you as i've said uh privately to so many of you thank you for helping to create um the odd brainwave brain pathways uh that have made me who i am and it is odd but i i am so grateful for it i appreciate you i appreciate uh everything that you have done um just read celebrum everyone if you want to see somebody who puts a lot of thought into something that might not really go anywhere and you look at the care of the words uh put in there uh you will see uh the heart of steve young thank you so much sir it's a blog i've left it up it ended and then i just thought i'm just gonna leave it there yeah well and and and it's good because uh uh like an undiscovered um you know treasure people will pick it up and they will appreciate it it's so awesome um thank you very much until we we talk again thank you steve i appreciate it uh there it is another episode of the letterman podcast thank you so much for everything until i don't have to say this anymore please like share subscribe uh i cannot wait until the scale is to the point where i don't got to say that anymore it's going to be a lot of fun and i'm really enjoying the process at this part of it as well so thank you very much everybody my name is mike go ahead would you actually at some point say we have too many subscribers uh if you could find it in your heart to sort of drift away from us we'd appreciate it hey i hope i hope to be faced with that choice at some point it would be a very interesting to see what i would say uh when i have that perspective so let's see what happens uh let's let's see let's check it out and find out so share it with everybody you know and then one day maybe we'll see if we uh if we tell you well okay time to back it off um thank you steve i appreciate it my name is mike chisholm this is the letterman podcast thank you and good night overcoat and underpants