Transcript
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You know what? It was. It was really nice. We
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watched a lot of football. My Packers won. Ate a
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All right. Well, you can't beat that. I'm still trying to get the Linda Blair
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He hasn't responded to me yet, but I'm going to send her an email right now again.
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I appreciate that. She should be talking to me.
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I know. It should be crazy. Well, everybody should be talking to you. Who wouldn't want
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I'm talking to you right now. I know. I need to get you on the show
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sometime. You have this crazy little life we never get to talk about.
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This John has got me going because he's doing producing podcast
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like this one. And I just was talking to
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him, but I used to. My manager was Jackie Kahane for Elvis
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Presley's Soul Opening Act. And I'm going to
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do a podcast on him because John says to do podcasts
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Yes, you totally should. All right. Well,
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you know, I'm a podcast producer, so you could just do
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Oh, wow. I know that's a good business. Do you do
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Okay, so you're like John, he does the same thing. That's kind of
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I probably cost a lot less than John. All
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right, we'll talk. The quality is just as good. I'm sure. Hang on. Okay. Hey,
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Jamie, John. Well, hello, John Cryer. Hey, how
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are you? I am so excited to welcome
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you to the KJ Today show for the first time. I think we've talked
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over the years because I've been a radio forever. But this
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is the first time we've had you on our little positive vibe
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show here. So thanks for being here, John. Oh, so
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glad to be a part of it. Well, I tell you what,
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I mean, obviously, there's a lot of people that are
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listening and excited and love you from Pretty in Pink and
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Two and a Half Men. But the conversation that we have been
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having today about this new podcast, it's
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just, honestly, it's been brilliant and
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exciting. And I don't want to say too much more. I want to hear from
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you, your perspective when you first started
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you know, hearing this story from your friend, Suzanne,
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about the man who calculated death being her
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Yes. Well, you know, you forget that history
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is all around us and it's, you know, all the people around us
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have, are a part of history. You know, we just, we don't always see
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it that way. And, and the crazy thing was that I was, this, this
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whole thing came about because I was at a dinner party. And
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one of my wife's oldest friends, who's named Suzanne Rico, she's
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an anchorwoman out here on KCBS. You know,
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all-American girl, you know, beautiful blonde
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lady. And she was talking,
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I sort of blithely mentioned that I was a huge fan of the space race, and
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I loved the history of it. And she said, oh, my grandfather worked on
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the space program. And I said, oh, that's so cool, you know. She said,
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yeah, yeah, before that he worked for Hitler. But anyway, she just
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went on talking about that. I
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was like, wait, I'm sorry, you're going to have to rewind and
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tell me about the working for Hitler part. And
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it turns out she had been on this kind of crazy
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but gut wrenching adventure recently because her mother
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had passed away a few years before that. And on her deathbed, her
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mother admitted that she had been working on a memoir. She'd been writing
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a memoir, but that she wouldn't be able to finish it because she was dying. And she asked
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Suzanne to finish it for her, which
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is just a crazy thing to ask of somebody. I mean, finishing her
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memoir. I mean, I don't even know where you start from that. And Suzanne certainly didn't.
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So she had to go through her family history
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in a way that she had never really interrogated before. And
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so one of the first moments of the podcast is her going
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through her mother's things and finding a thing called the Knight's Cross,
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which is actually the highest medal that
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Hitler awarded. And she found out that her grandfather was
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awarded the Knight's Cross. And suddenly she
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realized, oh, wow, I've got to go a lot deeper into this story than
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I thought. And so she
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It turns out her grandfather was a guy named Robert Lutzer, who was one of
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Hitler's most important scientists. Hitler had had
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such horrifying losses in the
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Battle of Britain and in the Russian front
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that he was trying to find a whole new kind of warfare, which was robot war.
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And so Wernher von Braun, a very
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famous rocket scientist, And and Robert Lutzer were
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tasked with creating new wonder weapons for Hitler, and
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they succeeded. They ended up succeeding too late in the war. But
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but, you know, but but they were a huge part of Hitler's war effort.
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And so Suzanne did not realize that her
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father was such a big part of history. And
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yeah, and that her mother had always been horribly traumatized by
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the death of her mother, Suzanne's grandmother, who died mysteriously in
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a bombing. And Suzanne felt like
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the only way to really honor her mother and finish her mother's memoir truly was
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to solve the mystery of who killed her
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grandmother and why. And to
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her credit, and this is an amazing thing, when we started working on
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the podcast, she hadn't solved the mystery, but she did it.
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She actually, through shoe leather and just
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enormous man hours, managed to
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solve this 80-year-old mystery.
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It was just this incredible journey for Suzanne. This is
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not the kind of thing I generally produce. I generally
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make comedies and stuff. That's not
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what I'm known for. But
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seeing a friend go through this, and you know, you're a podcast producer.
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Doing a narrative podcast with when she had,
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I mean, she traveled to Europe. She traveled all
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over the United States. She was interviewing military historians
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and interviewing family members, interviewing concentration camp
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survivors. She was interviewing, just doing this incredible
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breadth of research, but just Just
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the hours and hours of audio she had to go through. I
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mean, hundreds of hours. Wow. It
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was just this incredibly daunting, challenging thing. And
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she has made a really beautiful, beautiful story
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of a family. And this is just the first half of it, by the way.
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This is just how they survived World War Two. Then they
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were illegally smuggled to the United States. to work on
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the space program. And so we're going to do the second season is going to
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be the story of Operation Paperclip and how her family got
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This is crazy. How many times? I mean, like you
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said, you've worked in comedy. I mean, you've had this big, long career. How
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many times did you say to Suzanne or yourself,
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Yes. Yes. Well, she has. Yeah, she has those moments all through
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the podcast. Because the story takes so many crazy twists
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and turns. I
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also did a podcast called Lawyers, Guns, and Money, which is about the Iran-Contra scandal,
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which is also an insane story of just insane characters.
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It's almost a comedy, Iran-Contra, except
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that it had global consequences. But
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that is the thing about so many of these true stories. There's
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stories that you wouldn't necessarily believe if they were fictional. But
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again, the amount of introspection that
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Suzanne does and if
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I found out, recently I had my
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ancestry dug into by a TV program and I
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said, guys, let me know if there's
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dark parts. you know, if there's if there's, you know, I'm sure,
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you know, not every not every human in my family is going to be a thing. And
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I and I'd really love to know where where everything goes
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wrong. And they sent me some things. I mean, there were there was
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fascinating things. The turns out
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I have a Mayflower ancestor who is an indentured servant,
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which is pretty cool, except that he was a
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drunk He was the first guy to ever get in
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a duel in New England, and
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he got in a duel and they both lost because
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they shot each other, but neither of them died. But
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he was apparently not a great guy and had a lot
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of brushes with the law. They had a lot more interesting stories
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as well, but that was one of the fun ones that I remember, but not
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nearly the history. spanning consequences of
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Sure. The Man Who Calculated Death is
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the podcast. And real quick, John, I promise Jim
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who's listening, because we just hit the end of an era
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with the Arrowverse and Superman and Lois finale airing
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and a lot of people grieving, but also looking back and reflecting. Can
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you share just a quick
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Oh, I had a fantastic time on that. The
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whole Arrowverse was just one for the nerds. I
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loved being a nerd. I loved reveling in
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it. We got into the deepest, darkest recesses of
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DC lore. It was great. We
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just reveled in it. It
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was fun because when we ended up shooting this insane crossover
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where we had five different shows crossover with
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each other. We had Flash and Arrow and all those, and Supergirl
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and Batwoman all crossover. And Legends of
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Tomorrow, as a matter of fact. And it
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was just this huge, ridiculous undertaking. And
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we all, I don't know. You
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know, we every now and then there were a few days when we'd look around and all of us in
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these ridiculous costumes saying these ridiculous things.
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And but we were all having a ball, you know,
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and I am sorry to see Superman and Lois go as well, because I think that
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was just a fantastic new look at
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those characters. I think they managed to really crack it by being
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by being, you know, faithful to who
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Superman is. but also finding a new way to show it.
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And that show is really, really solid. And
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my biggest regret is that I never was on it. Yes.
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Well, thank you, John. I know you got a lot more interviews today. The
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Man Who Calculated Death podcast is out. And when season two comes
