Hello Isaac with Isaac MizrahiIsaac Mizrahi chats with the beloved host of NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me,” Peter Sagal. Peter shares some surprising and hilarious behind-the-scenes stories, what it’s like to have a newborn at 58 and how he landed the job writing “Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights.” Plus, Isaac challenges Peter to his own version of “Not My Job” and so much more.
Follow Hello Isaac on @helloisaacpodcast on Instagram and TikTok, Isaac @imisaacmizrahi on Instagram and TikTok and Peter Sagal @psagal and @waitwaitnpr.
(Recorded on November 14, 2023)
So the story was based on vaguely in her experience. It was but a young woman, an American, there in the Cuban Revolution. She's there to witness it, she gets involved in it, she meets people who are involved in it. So I wrote a screenplay in which you see the Cuban Revolution from this young woman's eyes.
And it's a good idea.
It was a fabulous idea. I thought. I don't know who the screenplay was, but I did my best, and the note I got back was we were hoping for something more like dirty dancing.
Aha. Oh wow. This is Hello Isaac, my podcast about the idea of success and how failure affects it. I'm Isaac Mizrahi, and in this episode I talked to writer humorous and host of NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, Peter Sagel.
Hello, Isaac. It's Peter Sagal, And I just want to say that one of the things I've carried with me through my life is that when we met in person back in two thousand and six, even though you are an icon of high fashion, you were dressed in the same kind of shmata that I wear every day. And it's just kept me going as I've continued to buy my clothes at targeting Costco. So I'm looking forward to seeing you again and getting that same fashion validation.
Peter Sagel is one of those people that I really really relate to, only because I think he's so good on his feet. I noticed that in the show he does wait wait, don't tell me that I've been listening to forever. He is really, really, just witty, and I want to talk to him about what it means to be witty and funny and if there's any difference and how it all comes together for him on that show because it is literally one of the great institutions in this country, and he is just beloved in my book. So let's get started. Peter Sagel, Hello Darling.
Hello Isaac. How are you you.
I'm okay. Actually, Can I just say one thing, which is already a shock because I listen to your show nearly every week and you have this unbelievable voice that was meant for radio Darling, and we've met several times, and every time I see your face, I'm like, Nope, that's not Peter Segel. It can't possibly be. Like the face doesn't match the voice.
Yeah, I'm well aware of that. Nobody who's ever met me, and this goes back for all twenty five years of my radio career has ever said, oh my gosh, you look exactly what I thought you'd look like. And then I asked him, well, what did you expect? And they say various things. One person said to me, quite famously, you don't sound bald, and I don't know how that.
Oh God, that nice, love.
How do you sound bald?
I don't know, darling. But here's the thing. The first time I was on Wait Wait was in literally like the nineties or something. It was like ninety eight. I know that because I had an assistant at the time called Sam Wilson, who was very groovy, and he discovered your show very very early on, and the request came through and he was like, you have to do the show and I was like, Sam, do I really was like, no, you really do, because it's the greatest show. So I reluctantly was like hello. It was over the phone, right, it's like, what do you want? I literally was like, yeah, can I help? I was so rude, I remember on the show and then you asked me all these ridiculous questions like you did all these games, and I was like, who are these people? This is not gonna last. Meantime, it became like my favorite show after I listened to it and I did it again, and we did it in person. But that first time I remember like absolutely disdaining the whole idea.
But there you are, and now you are and we're all still here. I have the dates. People say to me that, oh, I'm your number one fan, and I say, no, you're not your best number two, because we have this fan named Lynn Fomm in Portland who has, over the years, maintained a database of all the interesting stats of our show. So with a quick look, I can tell you that your first appearance on our show was You're correct, it was by phone in March of two thousand and three.
Oh okay, tame.
Then you joined us on stage in New Haven of Alta Haven in September of two thousand and six.
Thank you, Lynn Farm, thank you Darling, Thank you Lynn. So let's start with a little history about you. You now live in Chicago. Are you from that area? Did you grow up?
I'm from suburban New Jersey.
Really what brought you to Chicago?
Well, they offered me this job. I was living in New York. I was living in Brooklyn in nineteen ninety seven. I was married to a person to whom I'm no longer married, who was a nice Midwestern girl.
Nice at any rate.
She very much didn't really want to live in New York and certainly didn't want to raise our child in New York. Wow, and she was pregnant. So we had this deal. It was like something from a fairy tale. We would live in New York City to the first birthday of our first child, at which point we would have to leave to someplace, and I had no idea where. And then I had tried out to be a panelist on this new radio show, and just between you and me, Isaac, my initial impression of it was very similar to your. And then, much to my amazement, they offered me the job of host, which would require me to move to Chicago. And I don't know if you've been here, but Chicago is in the Midwest.
Yes I have. I love Chicago is.
A great town. So it suited my then wife, it suited me, and off we went. And I did not expect a number of things. I did not expect i'd be here for so long. I did not expect I'd do this job for so long. I did not expect that someday I would be no longer married to that person. But stuff happens, and you.
Know, yes it really does happen. It does. But where were you educated.
I was a product of public schools in suburban New Jersey and then Harvard College.
As we comes, just people like to say yeah, wow, yeah, And you never missed the opportunity to say right well about this.
And say, I don't know how many minutes we are into this podcast, but I did not say it before. Then, before you were in a little credit.
Congratulations, I asked you did ask.
I would have had to try to bring it up somehow, So I thank you for saving me that effort.
So how did you make it from public school in New Jersey to Harvard? Like, how did you.
Guy that the biggest goddamn suck up you've ever met, suck up to the teacher, to anybody, especially teachers, sometimes parents, school administrators. I was just a brown noser, and I guess I still am. I guess it might be my only skill. And rather than being like intelligent or talented, I'm clever and clever, My friends will take you a long way, especially when you're taking standardized tests and impressing people who might give you a recommendation. So I had a reputation as being very clever, very smart, as my mother from Boston might have said. And basically I was more popular with adults than I was with my peers. And it turns out that those adults are far more important to getting you into a good school than your peers are.
Interesting and what did you study? What did you see yourself doing as a young man or a little boy, What did you want to do well?
My first professional ambition was I was going to be a pediatrician. And that was partially because my mother really wanted me to be a doctor. To nice Jewish mother exactly really really that stereotype rayal her whole life, but also because I was under the mistaken impression that the profession was called peter attrition. Thus I thought, I'm talking about the age of four or five.
Ah.
I see, as soon as I was able to sort of like consciously express my own actual desires apart from those around me and my parents, I always wanted to be a writer. That was my goal. I grew up loving written humor like S. J. Perrolman and Woody Allen's early books, and more than anything, that's the sort of thing I wanted to do. In fact, one of the reasons I really really wanted to go to Harvard was because of the Harvard Lampoon, which was even then, back in the late seventies early eighties, legendary, and I wanted to be a part of that. And as it happened, they wanted nothing to do with me once I got there.
The Lambone, they rejected you. That's filling. Yeah, you talk like a like I prequalify a lot of things, like the sentences are quite structured. Congratulations, it's a beautiful and I note that on the show. That's how you talk, right, just in general, like that's probably how you address your infant children constantly.
I'm constantly saying, excuse me, Theodore. But I was wondering, I was wondering if, in fact, if, in fact, given the proposition given, assuming for the moment, Theodore, that you've pooped in your diaper.
But Darling, you don't really have a background in theater, do you.
I do. Actually, that was my other thing, because my other love passion. Whatever you want to call them enthusiasm growing up with theater, so I was a theater kid in high school. I started in the plays, and then I went off and my other thing I wanted to do in college was put on plays. I ultimately acted in them, I wrote some, I directed a bunch, so that was my thing. I was not the greatest student in the world, never have been, but I was very good at like running around and trying to be in shows and putting on shows. By the time I got out of school, I ended up pursuing that as a career, sort of by accident, but I spent the first ten years more or less out of college pursuing a career in the theater, first working in the staff of a now defunct large institutional theater in southern California in LA called the La Theater Center Shout out to Spring Street if you're listening, and then became a playwright myself and managed to sort of start on the first rungs of that career, including some fellowship, some awards, and then ultimately some productions. And that's what I was doing when I was first introduced on Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me as a panelist and now joining us from Brooklyn playwright Peter Segel. That was what I wow, this is actual, reliable.
Yeah right, well we know that you actually wrote Dirty Dancing too, or Dirty Dancing? Is it with Absolu?
I am the second story credit on Dirty Dancing to a Vana Knights.
Vana Knights. Okay, well that's a big credit, Darling.
I got the poster, I got to go to the premiere. I got to insult Patrick Swayze without meaning to. It was a big time.
Did you go to Havana to research this?
I didn't. I imagined that this would be to me. This movie would say Chinatown was to Robert Town, which put me on the map as a screenwriter. Well, this is what happened. So I had written a few plays and one of them came to the attention of a producer you might have heard of or even met, named Lawrence Bender, who was very well known at the time for being Quentin Tarantino's producer. Yes, he produced Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and he wanted to do a movie with me, having read my play, and we kicked about some ideas and we came up with a story based on the autobiography, or at least the life story of a dear friend of his, a dancer and choreographer named Joanne Jansen. Joanne, who was a vivid person, had spent her youth part of it in Q but with her father, who worked for I think Alcoa, and she had been living in Havana at the time of the Cuban Revolution, right mm hm, And so the story was based on vaguely in her experience. It was but a young woman, an American, there in the Cuban Revolution. She's there to witness it, she gets involved in it, she meets people who are involved in it. Parenthetically, the Cuban Revolution is an amazing story that has never been properly told, and I thought I would properly tell it. So I tried, and I wrote a screenplay in which you see the Cuban Revolution from this young woman's eyes.
And it's a good idea.
It was a fabulous idea, I thought. I don't know who good the screenplay was, but I did my best. And the note I got back was we were hoping for something more like dirty dancing.
Aha, oh wow, which that's great.
I don't know how I missed that to begin with, but I did. And at which point in retrospect, I should have said, well, you know that's not me. I'm not the guy for that. But you know, it was my first job in Hollywood. I wanted to do a good job. I wanted to be a trooper. So I kept at it, and every draft I did, trying to make more like Dirty Dancing, I e. A romance between boy, girl and music. It got worse because I was not then more am I now a sixteen year old girl.
Darling. I'm going to recommend a book in case you haven't read it, that you must must read. It's Joan Dideon and John Gregory Dunn's experience writing I don't know, some movie from Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford. It's called Monster, and it is so I've heard about, incredibly funny and wonderful. It's like you hand in one thing and they're like, well, we were thinking, can it be more like Dirty Dance? It is just one of the funniest books in the world. Allah what you're talking about right now, and the thing about you as a person on the show, and I'm guessing as a writer because I never read anything that you wrote, but I think you're extremely witty and you're extremely funny. Did you ever do stand up? And if not, how did you escape doing stand up?
I never did stand up. It never occurred to me to do stand up. I've done monologues, and I've done sort of comic things. Of the plays that I wrote, I like to think, even though they were all in very serious topics, often had lots of jokes. Right, And I was known, like a lot of theater kids were as the class clown, and like a lot of people who grew up that way, you're raising your hand.
Yes, I'm raising my hands exactly, a lot of.
People who for various reasons, didn't fit in in high school. Right. Maybe they were socially awkward, Maybe they were you know, closet, maybe they were gay, Like, maybe they were gay.
And you're about to come out of something after having five children and two right exactly.
Yeah, No, not me, No, that's not me. But I had other problems. But a lot of us, as you well know, masked that or got around it, maybe by being funny. You know, if you weren't socially successful, or you're not good looking, you're not good at athletics, or anything else that might impress the cohort of high school students. You make jokes. My problem in general was that my jokes again were far more appreciated by the adults around than the kids.
But that's smart adults, by the way, Yes, only the.
Best adults appreciating my jokes as a seventeen year old.
Right, well, let me ask you this, because the show that you do every single week for what is it about twenty five years?
Sent years?
Twenty five years? Okay, yes, so that show gets put together. I'm guessing there's a lot of writing in advance, right, Do you write jokes? Actually?
Do I write jokes? But thank god I am not the only one who does. And I think if I write, I would have been around for twenty five years. We have what is essentially a writer's room. I mean, we don't call it that, but we have producers who work on the show, many of whom have other duties as well. Everybody contributes. We have some people who are professional writers. That's all they do is I write jokes for us. For example Peter Gwynn, who is a veteran of Stephen Colbert and New York and other high level comedy stuff. And so yeah, when I stand up to do the show. I have in front of me, a script that's been written and rewritten with stories that we've selected and pitched to each other, with jokes that we've written about those stories, and I absolutely contribute to it. Sometimes it'll be my jokes. Sometimes it's my edits of other people's jokes. And I had to get used to this because this wasn't what I was used to as a writer. I felt very strongly about credit. It was really weird for me at first to perform other people's jokes and get a.
Lot right, I understand, Darling, I under I.
Was like, well, no, I'm glad you enjoyed that, and eventually I realized, no, no, just stake the applause.
Darling, Darling. That's what's called show business. They exactly, you know, But how much of it happens on the spot.
A lot of it happens on the spot, and the show is designed that way. Our gimmick, if you will, is a spontaneity, and as George Burns said about sincerity, if you can fake that, you've got it made. So in the space if you will of comedy of satire, you've got people like Stephen Colbert who are both brilliant and have amazing staffs of writers. You've got, say John Oliver, who's got, you know, just an incredible staffag producers who create those very funny, lengthy packages that he does that's become his hallmark. That's amazing. I am incredibly impressed. We don't have the money to do that. They have enormous staffs. We have a staff of maybe seven people in a good week.
That's a lot of people writing jokes. Because here's the thing about all these people who have like writing staffs and jokes and whatever. I mean, you're the sieve through which everything. Yeah, and so when you read the script, do you ever go like, yeah, that's so funny. I can't tell that.
It's more like this, you know, as you know, we have this panel and the panel very funny people changing from week to week. But they're all great. They don't know what we're gonna ask them, they don't know what we've written. They sometimes can anticipate what the top stories are, so maybe they're thinking, oh, yeah, I better come up with something to say about I don't know the state of the Union speech. But almost always I'll start something, start with our best jokes that we've written about, you know, the topic a right, and then the panel will come up with something and my job is to follow them see where they go. You know. Sometimes I'll encourage them to go further. Sometimes I'll hit the ball back. Sometimes we never go back to the written script at all. Right, it's like, this is much more interesting, and all these amazing jokes that were written with blood and sweat over the course of a week vanish, never to be heard from again. Sometimes I go back to the script and pick it up if things aren't going in a useful direction. And sometimes I'm almost embarrassed to admit this. Sometimes I am able to offer a written joke as if I just thought of it.
Well, we all can do that, darling, I mean, any of us who perform on stage, I have learned to do that. I mean, that's that is just.
But I had to learn how to do that. That was one of the skills that I needed to acquire after we got these talented writing.
Speaking of doing a show that is so of the moment, and yet it's not daily, it's weekly, you know. It's like because sometimes news changes from literally it.
Does, especially a couple of times over the years we've had to go into the studio on Friday, even after performing the show and a live audience, and had to fake live audience to change something that happened on Friday. Famously. I remember once it was in the spring of two thousand and nine, and it was the Nobel Prizes that had come out, and we did it thing about Nobel Prizes, and then Friday morning they gave the Peace Prize to Obama. We've done the show in this enormous auditorium in Boston, so we had to fake that echo with effects and we had to reassemble. Everybody was doing a reshoot in a major motion picture. But generally speaking, we have two advantages. One is that most of the stuff we do in the show is not with the exception of the first couple of stories, is not like absolutely timely this week's big story. A lot of it. It's just goofy stuff that can hold you know. The other advantages we don't really care. We stopped caring during the Trump YU there was just so much crap over the transom. My joke was it was like that famous I Love Lucy's sketch with the chocolates. It just keeps coming faster. And so during the Trump administration. Our attitude went from oh my god, we have to anticipate what might happen with the story. We'll record two different things depending on what happens on Friday too. After seven thirty Central Time on Thursday, it is no longer our problem. Right, We're going to go home and put our heads under the covers like the rest of you.
You've been doing wait, wait, don't tell me for twenty five years, right, And it's a lot of shows because you have like guest hosts occasionally I have see how many shows do you do a year?
We do about forty shows a year, okay, which is more than That's a lot of shows, a lot of shows.
It's more than we have the Gilmour Girls.
Yes, exactly exactly, because we're weird. We're sort of an entertainment show but on a news show schedule. So we do about forty shows a year. And wow, we celebrated our thousandth episode in the fall of twenty nineteen, so maybe we're up to I don't know, twelve hundred maybe, right, Since then.
Is it a grind? How do you keep it fresh? I mean, you know, talk about that, talk about doing anything for twenty five years, you know, which, by the way, is very appealing to me.
There were there were times, especially when I was younger, where I was like, oh my gosh, is this all there is? To quote the torch singer, and was eagerly trying to move on to the next thing, because this is America, right, You're supposed to move on to the next thing. Isn't that right? You're supposed to get the next thing? Yes, and I did try. I did a bunch of projects, some of which even saw the light of day, but nothing ever came along as steady and as reliable and frankly as successful and popular as wait wait, don't tell me right. And now I have now aged to the point, Isaac, where rather than being frustrated that this is all I get to do, I am grateful that I get to do it. Oh my god, of oh my god, I've got this amazing gig. I get to do a show of a kind in front of a live audience every week. And not to get too sentimental on you, but because we have been doing it for so long, we've become kind of an institution background yes, yes, yes, And so my favorite thing is we'll be doing a show and this is back when we could meet people after every show. We stopped that with a pandemic, and maybe we'll go back to it. But even now and then, it happens people will raise their hand in the audience and volunteer this. A young woman, for example, will say, you know, I grew up listening to the show with my dad on the way to soccer practice when I was in the third grade. And now I'm twenty five years old and here is my father and I've taken him for his sixty fifth birthday and they wave and I.
Oh, my god, it's incredible.
It's amazing.
You know.
Look, we're basically dad jokes and fart jokes, and except.
You're talking about something that you know, went from being this kind of crazy anomaly, right, yeah, to becoming this beloved thing. You know, how has it changed? Are there things about it that you like better?
Yeah? Oh, absolutely absolutely. Let me start with myself. I think I'm a lot better at it than I was. We've been doing this thing recently where there's a sort of like a little podcast extra for supporters. We will go back and we will listen to segments from shows from twenty years ago, like the first time you were on the show, and then will listen to me asking questions, and then in the present moment, myself and a special guest a listener will try to figure out what the answer is from the distance of twenty years, which gives me an opportunity to listen to myself twenty years ago. And ah, oh man, Honestly, if I am a terrible person and I end up in hell, my torture will be having to listen to me doing this show the first five years when I had no idea what I was doing. So I think I'm better at it in a number of ways, and I can tell you sort of what my evolution was. Obviously, I think over the years we acquired and happy have been able to keep a bunch of really talented people came in and to make our show a lot better.
Not to mention some of the panelists, and.
That's the last and most important thing. That's the place where we try to really keep the show fresh by bringing in new voices, some of whom will join us for a show or two, some of whom will become beloved members of the family. As it were. These amazingly talented young comedians.
Well, you know what Is it just funny? Is your show just funny?
We occasionally have arguments on our staff, good ones, about what's to stress. What do we need to talk about this week? Is this too tasteless? Is this too serious? But the one thing we all agree on is even those of us and that would really be me who think that we have an obligation to take on the major stories of the week, is that people turn to us for a break. And that has to do with a larger media environment, which can be very, very depressing. I don't need to tell you that. It also has to do with the specific environment of public radio, which tends to be very serious. You know, like in our market here in Chicago, we come on after Scott Simon's morning news story, and these days it can be pretty bleak, and so by the time people get to us on Saturday morning, usually they are ready to lighten up. And that can be both us saying rude things about the major people in the news, be they whatever president, be they whatever thing that's happened. But it's also just as goofing around with the silliest stories we can find. And that's another thing I should say that has been confirmed and reaffirmed over and over again by our audience. They say, oh my god, sometimes just waiting to hear you guys goof around gets me through the week. Of course, particularly true during the pandemic when we continued to do shows not in front of a live audience but on zoom got helps us all and people said the same thing. You know, knowing that you guys were still doing this show was really encouraging for me and helped me cope. So again, it's a privilege, in an honor to do that work, to just be goofy.
Darling, go back a minute, because you were saying sometimes you have to segue from this really really heavy duty news into a kind of a light comic show. But I want to talk to you about fatherhood, because Darling, you took that very seriously. Like you've got some kids, Darling, you you have it.
I have a lot of them. Strangely, I've lost tracked with some of them you have.
Indeed, First of all, what the hell were you thinking? Like what kind of a person listens to the news and then goes, yeah, I'm gonnappropriate, I'm gonna have another generation. Tell me a little bit about your kids. First of all, how old are they?
My first batch of kids, my.
Rady Budge, the first yeah, Zaegel Budd.
We were born in nineteen ninety eight, two thousand, two thousand and three, all girls, and they're out in the world. They're being adults. And so you know, to my credit, things weren't so dire back then. So you know, I guess and so and so I think we can be forgiven.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, you were like, oh, nine to eleven, that's fine. To eleven happened, what can possibly.
Yeah, you know, it'll be fine. I think our last daughter was born after the invasion of a rocket. She was to see before, you know, before it happens, right, Okay, we get to pass on that. The second round was very unexpected, but very welcome, I should say, in case my kids ever listened to this, glad you're here. So basically, my incredible good fortune was after my marriage exploded in a pretty bad way. I spent a couple of years in the wilderness as one of those awful divorced men in his forties. Oh lord, but I met an astonishingly lovely and kind and as far as my needs went forgiving young woman named Mara to whom I am now married, And it was obvious to everybody whoever met her, even if it wasn't immediately obvious to her, was born to be a mother, And so this was something we decided that we wanted to do. And I mean my feelings about it were where shall we say a complex. I had done it four, I had children, I'd experienced that for good and for bad. She never had, though, and I knew she wanted to, and it felt unfair to say to somebody, oh, I'd like you to spend the rest of your life with me and also give up this deeply important thing to right. And also, you know, I'm older than she is, and it is my plan to die long before she does. I work pretty I very much want her to have somebody around that she can complain about me too, knowingly. Right, Remember when your dad used to do this and matterss thing? Yeah, Mom, that drove me crazy too.
Remember when that asshole called your father? Right exactly, Wait a minute, did you at least make a deal with this woman to go you know what, You're going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting because I'm fifty five. How old are you, darling?
I'm fifty eight, now.
Fifty eight okay, And when did you have your last kid?
My son, Teddy, who I do think will be my last kid in both ways ahaha, was born in January of this year, uh right before.
So like basically like you and Elton John and Alec Baldwin like this exactly.
You meet every among the so many things we have in common. Also, one of the great pleasures of my life, as you can imagine, is whenever an elderly celebrity has a child, I hear about it. Right of course, here you had a baby. He's eighty.
God, that is so great. That is so great. So one of the great things I love about wait, wait, don't tell me are the games that you play with people. So I want to play a game with you. We know that you wrote this screenplay for Dirty Dancing Too Havana Knights, and we were thinking we were going to play a game with you called Dirty Diapers. Oh, because of these.
Things, I am on top of this, my friend.
You're ready, okay. Marion Donovan has been credited with creating the first practical disposable diaper in nineteen fifty by using which of the following materials A an umbrella B, A shower curtain C A pillowcase.
I'm going to go only because of its moisture protective quality. Is a shower curtain B?
You're right? Question number two. Marion's final diaper design included nylon parachute cloth, which was breathable and eliminated diaper rash. She also used metal and plastic snaps instead of elastic or sharp diaper pins. What did she call it? Did she call it the boater, the floater or the bloater?
Wow?
Gosh.
I was going to eliminate C because why would you call a commercial product the bloater? But you said exactly, it's something encouraging me to skip that. Then I was going to say, well, on the other hand, maybe that was like internal use because it would bloat with So the other one is the boater like a yes, or the what was the other option?
The floater?
The floater? Uh, only because a floater is really kind of gross in the context of what goes into the diaper. I'm going to go with the boater.
Yes, you got it right, You got too right. I'm so happy. I don't know what you're going to win. You're gonna win like me on your answering machine, so I would take it. This is the third question. How long does it take for a disposable diaper to decompose completely? Twenty to fifty years A, one hundred to two hundred years B or two hundred and fifty to five hundred years C.
Only because I am incredibly guilty about using these things, I'm going to go for the longest period, which was C.
Wow, Darling, you see because you have a lot of experience with these games. I'm not kidding. I'm sorry about my dog, but he's very excited with the bell and everything. No, that's fine, all right, I have another game. Is that all right? Ok? Seriously this is called not my job anymore.
Ah, that's a twist. So this is lily about something I used to do.
Yes, I read somewhere that you were a magician's assistant. That's sort of right, sort of true.
Everything about me is sort of true. I sort of wrote Dirty Dancing to Havanna Knights. I sort of was a magician's as in that when we were growing up, my older brother, now a rabbi still in New Jersey, was a children's magician, and I would be his beautiful young assistant.
Sometimes, right, did you wear something dressed? No, I don't know, cape.
I don't remember. I vaguely remember wearing some sort of costume. It might have been a T shirt that said magician's assistant, but it's been a while.
Okay, we'll have the following true or false questions about magic. The FBI hired a magician to train agents in sleight of hand techniques for use, and there mickey slipping LSD experiments.
Wow, Okay, I know they did LSD experiments, but you might be trying to fool me. I'm gonna say yes, because that's the sort of thing they do.
Well, it's sort of false because it's the CIA, not the FBI. The true question I had like a buzzer like I was distracted.
I was distracted by the magician thing, and I let that little factoid go by.
See see you learn it, Darling. Okay, Question number two, it's illegal in Queensland, Australia to own a pet rabbit unless you can prove that you're a magician.
MM. Is that true or false? Yes, that's true because rabbits are a terrible problem in Australia.
Darling, that is true. How would you ever know.
That because I mentioned my actual skills. I just have this amazing ability to collect tidbits of useless information. And I remember reading that rabbits are an invasive species in Australia and reproduce like mad and eat all the crops.
The other thing I heard about, like, you know, we think koalas are so cute, and they're infested with disease and they have like crazy like rashes on their butts and they're disgusting.
According to they get chlamydia, right, a lot of.
Chlamydia from the koalas. All right, here's another question lifestyle, right exactly. Hey, hey, watch what you say about life? All right? Question number three. In two thousand and six, David Copperfield and two assistants were robbed at gunpoint. David was able to use sleight of hand to conceal his possessions, and when the thieves turned to him, he called his spontaneous illusion reverse pickpocketing.
See here's the thing. I just have an instinct about this in that I think that might have happened, but I don't think it was David Copperfield for reasons that I can't quite say. But I'm just gonna go with my gut and say that's false. It was another magician.
It's actually true, Darling, it was David Copperfield. Damn. You see, I'm sorry we threw you off with that CIA FBI.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, that one's just on me. I followed my instinct, and my instincts.
All right, do you want, darling, do you want one more to make it?
Yes?
Yes, so you could actually win my voice.
But one of the things I do is, whenever anybody comes in the show, it might have done it with you back in two thousand and six, is I always talked to them beforehand, and I tell them you're gonna play the silly quiz on our show, and it doesn't matter. Don't take it seriously. It's totally fine if you lose and I am down two to one and I feel terrible to see you.
See what I'm saying. What I'm saying, well, you won the first round, so this is the second round. All right, you're ready for this. Apollo Robbins, a pickpocket magician, struck up a conversation with Ronald Reagan and his secret service agents. Within a few minutes, he emptied the agent's pockets of everything except their guns, is that right, false or true?
I happen to know Apollo. He's been in the show. I've met him a few times. He's a really nice guy. Okay, And even if that's not true, I'm gonna say it's true because Apollo can do anything. So I'm gonna say true just as a tribute to my friend.
Okay, Well, it's true that he did it, but not to Ronald Reagan. It was Jimmy Carter. It was just s see you see. Yeah. Well, listen, by the way, you won the first round, which means that I will record your if you want me.
You know what, I might really enjoy that.
No, wouldn't it be hilarious, Like Hi, darlings.
Why not? It would be very unexpected. I think it would be hilarious. So yes, I will take you up on that.
All right, I'm going to ask you now a question that I ask most of the people that I speak to on my podcast, which is about their obituaries, because I am literally obsessed with obituaries. What does your obituary say when you die in about fifty years from now?
Fifty years? Thank you? I appreciate that, my sons appreciate that. For many years I always said it was going to be Peter Sagel, who wrote Dirty Dancing Havana Nights without ever meaning to right, I think I would have to quote The Times or Vanity Fair to paraphrase what they said.
It will say.
Peter Sagel, who affably told dad jokes on public radio for many years, died today of frustration when he didn't get a quiz.
Correct, you say, well, I hope not, and that is not why you die. And by the way, you know you said that a little bit earlier about dad jokes. Yes, and I'm not so sure that's what it is, because, first of all, a dad joke can be really, really funny.
Okay, well that's true, and I don't mean to diminish the quality of dad jokes.
And right, so there you go. But I find the show to be so much more than just dad jokes, you know. And I'm wondering, asking for a friend, now, how do you become a panelist on that damn show?
Basically, you become a panelist on our show by being generally very funny and sharp. I should say, by the way, that we have had over the years some incredibly funny people, including people who have gone on to astonishingly successful careers like Keegan. Michael Key is a great example. Wow, we have been on our show and despite their an amazing talent, just couldn't fit in that we were a weird gig. We require a bunch of different skills that are not necessarily the kind of skills you need to be a successful comedian or anything in this world. They're just particularly to our show. So yeah, you have to know a lot about the news. You have to be quick, you have to be at the same time willing to grab the spotlight. You have to play well with others.
You have to get along with Paula Poundstone.
You have to get along with Paula pound I don't know if you ever met Paula. That's not hard.
That was amazing. Absolutely, agree to go out of your way to not exactly all right, Well, is there something you want to promote on the podcast?
I will say that I do a book that is in print that came out a few years ago called The Incomplete Book of Running that I'm proud of and people tell me they enjoyed. So I recommend that from your local independent bookseller or library. And other than that, just tune in to wait wait, don't tell me on the weekends or listen to it on a podcast. It's always great when you spend time with us.
Well, here's the thing. I want your voice on my answering machine.
It would be an honored darling.
That would just be the greatest thing in the world. And first of all, what answering machine?
That's another question. When the show began, we actually said answering machine. I always say voicemail, but I guess everybody's got a voicemail. It's just that nobody is rude enough to leave you one. Right.
I have one of the most absurd and hilarious messages from like nineteen ninety three from Liza Minelli. It's one of the great things ever. I forgot that what she says, like, honey, it's me, and I forgot what it was. It was some of the most like ridiculous, hilarious thing in the world.
Isaac, Can I ask you a question. Sure, you're an eclectic fellow, and I might make a guess as to what the lead of your obituary might be, But what do you want it to be?
I think, I boy, well, you know what. The more I ask people that question, the more they go oh, I want to just be remembered for being a good person. You know, you're talking to like someone so incredibly accomplished, so incredibly like career orient They're going, I want to be known as a good dad or a good mom, right, And I go, like, are we living in the same planet? You know, Darling. I used to have like a recurring nightmare that I would be on the phone with my shrink and my mother at the same time, going, you cannot let them publish this obituary. It's not going to happen. This cannot be And so I'm not exactly sure. Here's the thing. I don't want it to be about fashion or clothing, That's all. I know.
That's a big ask for you.
I want it to be like third paragraph in.
By the way, what And you know, I'm just I'm just imagining what your obituary would say. And in addition to his extraordinary humanitarianism and sexual prowess, yes, it his own clothes, no, Darling, No, no, but why not? I mean, clothing was your first love. It's how you first became well known. And you're very very good at.
You're right, You're absolutely right, You're absolutely.
Right, And I will say that, that idea of being remembered as a good person, that's become more and more important to me as I've gotten older. I too read obituaries, and what I look for when I read those obituaries is I look for the people about whom other people have really good things to say, you know, I mean, I remember just two random examples. There was an obituary recently of a very wealthy man. He made his money, I think with duty free shops, and he gave all his money away all yeah, did anonymously.
That was incredible. I read that a bit.
And I also remember, and this is a you know, obviously a kind of outlier of an example, but I remember reading the obituary of Rush Limbaugh, and it was all about his career and who influential he was and his hands and all these things and wow, and nobody had a goddamn nice thing to say about him. Nobody said, oh, yeah, the Rush. I knew he was such a great friend, right, Oh, his dinner parties were wonderful. You always knew if you're going to rush his house, you'd ever Nobody said anything like that.
Well, by the way, did you read the obituary the other day about the chicken Lady. Did you see that? Wait a minute, yes, the woman who was chicken activist, the chicken rights lady, the chicken rites. That was amazing. I thought that's my obituary. Actually, I do have one final, final, final question. I hope you have one second to.
Do for you, Isaac Bubbola.
Is there some kind of a failure in your life that you don't remembered? Uh?
Yeah, I mean there's been a lot, but the one thing that stays with me, and I also should say that this is a little bit of what my book is about, was my divorce. Because I grew up my parents had a very happy marriage. It lasted for sixty three years until my mother died just two years ago. And you know, it wasn't perfect, but they were devoted to each other. And for me and my brothers certainly, and most of my extended circle of friends, the idea of ever getting divorced, ever being that guy, seemed imposiit ah, And like a lot of people, I probably delayed what would have been a healthy thing, which is ending the marriage for man and many years, just because I didn't want to have that failure. I didn't want to be that person I never could have imagined being, And it just so happens that Without getting into it, it was a particularly ugly divorce. I had hoped to have one of those amical divorces you sometimes hear about. It didn't work out that way. It was really brutal. Ah. It cost me a lot. And what was so awful about it was I felt like Job. Not to be too dramatic to the biblical, but in that you remember what happens to Job is everything he has accumulated is taken away. It's family is wealth. And I felt that way I did in my house. My family was separated from me. Everything that I had felt I had worked for and gotten, and I'm making little quotes I had lost. Now it is also true that, like Job, I have regained all that in spades. Although I didn't get back what I lost, I've gotten other things that are even better. But one of the things that it really did to me when you ask what I learned, is how much I had to change my attitude from that sense of accumulation. Like you go through life and you accumulate these things. You get a house, you get a career, you get a wife, you get a family, and then you have these things that I guess I don't know. When you die, they add them up and they give you a score.
Well only you see, going back to a bit starling, right, Yeah.
And I kind of learned to put that feeling aside of both accumulation gain and loss, and to try to live my life in a different way about being far more in the moment and far more about appreciating what I had rather than what I could get and other things.
This is a really really good lesson for us. Also, by the way, you're totally a good looking guy. You're sort of like the Stanley Tucci of the Jews or something like that. Did you have like a hard time meeting your second wife or did it just happen.
It kind of just happened in the sense. I mean, I'm very lucky in that when I became divorced, I had a public profile, so it was a little easier for me to meet people to date. But it turns out that I think this is true, that my wife had actually been to see my show, you know, long before she met me. Oh, she wasn't that crazy about it, But I will tell you the story. Because you are a showman. And the refversion is this. I met my wife because I was asked to be the special guest star in a show here in Chicago that was a parody of a Christmas Carol and other Christmas specials, including the old Andy Williams style specials with Oh who was at the door, and every night they had a celebrity guest, and in Chicago, I count as a celebrity, so I got to do it. And the night before they had had a person who will go unnamed, who was terrible, and they gave scores. The stage manager and cast gave scores to all their guests one to five stars, depending on how lovely they were to work with, and she got zero stars. This person z I showed up the next night, and because I had been in the theater impressed the stage manager with the fact that I knew that stage left was stage left, I knew not to props, and then when somebody said to me five minutes, mister Segal, I knew to say thank you five And so in comparison to the terrible person who had been on before, and thanks to my background in the theater, I am now happily married. I married the stage manager.
Ah I was waiting for that. God, so she just liked you. I was going to say, how many stars did you get?
Dark I got five stars. But there again, I think I looked good compared to my immediate predecessor. But you know, I scored some points and everything then thereafter came from that. So everybody, learn your stage etiquette. Stage left from the perspective of the performer the audience.
That's right, right.
Okay, don't touch the props, don't touch the costumes.
Touch the costumes, don't touch the props.
God, never mess around. Know your lines, know your cue, and the appropriate response. When someone tells you what the time is before your performance, they say ten minutes, you say thank you, indicating you just heard that and you know it.
That's right.
Learn that and you will end up as happy as I am.
Well, Darling, that is incredible advice to leave our listeners with.
I think so you are.
An amazing, amazing podcast asked guests, thank you so much.
Please, I think you are a delight. You're in every way. I'm just so thrilled to know that you're out there listening. It's very exciting to me all.
The time constantly. That was such a delight it's everything I hoped it would be, and in a funny way, it's exactly what I hoped it would be. For one thing, he's the first guest, or one of the few guests I've had on who actually just answered the obituary question without a flinch. And he answered it so intelligently, and he said what I was expecting him to say, and then he asked me the question, and what I said to him was something he wasn't expecting. And I guess that's why I asked that question on every single podcast, because what people expect my obituary to be and what I really wanted to be about are not the same at all. In his case, I was just thrilled and delighted that Peter understands what that show has become in this country and who he has become in this country as a kind of like an icon and a beloved weekly character in our lives. Anyway, I had a lot of fun between everything that Peter said and playing the games and pretending to be Peter Segel in some ways, and I'm glad you've got a chance to hear it. Thank you so much for listening, darlings. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and tell someone, Tell a friend, tell your mother, tell your cousin, tell everyone you know. Okay, and be sure to rate the show. I love rating stuff. Go on and rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts so more people can hear about it. It makes such a gigantic difference and like it takes a second, so go on and do it. And if you want more fun content videos and posts of all kinds, follow the show on Inta and TikTok at Hello Isaac podcast and by the way, check me out on Instagram and TikTok at. I Am Isaac Msrahi. This is Isaac Misrahi. Thank you, I love you and I never thought I'd say this, but goodbye Isaac. Hello Isaac is produced by Imagine Audio Awfully Nice and I AM Entertainment for iHeartMedia. The series is hosted by Me Isaac Msrahi. Hello Isaac is produced by Robin Gelfenbein. The senior producers are Jesse Burton and John Assanti. It is executive produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Cara Welker, and Nathan Klokey at Imagine Audio Production Management from Katie Hodgens, Sound design and mixing by Cedric Wilson. Original music composed by Ben Waltzon. A special thanks to Neil Phelps and Sarah katamak at I AM Entertainment.
