You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My Heart Radio. Dustin Hoffman himself once said to me, he said, Alec, we're all in line when it comes to getting our hands on a good script. He said, we're all in line, Alec, he said, some of us are just in a shorter line. Hi. I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to this episode of Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Today, we have a guest who embodies the magic creativity. He's covered the spectrum of acting, theater, TV movies in both the commercial and critically acclaimed, and he's had huge successes in comedy and drama. He's an active participant in the world, and he was very early with his own podcast. He did podcasts before podcasting was cool. He's Alec Baldwin. Ali grew up on the south shore of Long Island, under the shadow of Manhattan. He had early aspirations to be a law here, but as he switched to acting, he paid the dues with all kinds of jobs, from waiting tables to being a lifeguard, and he was even a bus boy at the legendary Studio fifty four. He's hosted Saturday Night live more than anyone else and swept every word possible with his role on thirty Rock. There is so much to explore today. Welcome Ali, Thank you, Bob. Good to talk to you. It's great to talk to you. And here we are on the magic of audio. Before we dig in today, I want to get you in sixty seconds. You ready to go? Yes, sir? Do you prefer early morning or late night? Late night, New York City or Long Island, Long Island, New Yorker, California, New York? Instagram or Twitter, Instagram, film or TV film? George Washington University or New York University, n y You Jack Ryan or Jack Donneghie, Jack Donneghee, uh Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill and the c Williams. Class sickle or classic rock, classical, sweet or salty, salty cats or dogs Dogs Coffee is for closers or ABC Always be closing, Always be closing, ABC, Always be closing. It's about to get harder. Smartest person you know, Bob Pittman, the head of My Heart Radio, childhood hero Joe Namath, favorite play you've acted in, speet car named Desire, Political hero John F. Kennedy. First job I cut grass I was I was a lawn jockey with a landscape company. Favorite director, Oh that's a good question, Uh, Scorsese, favorite composer, Maller, Gustav Mahler, favorite sport, football, favorite movie theater, snack the popcorn with the raisin NEETs in the popcorn. Guilty pleasure, sleeping in. I got remarried and I have five of the kids, so sleeping in. That's a healthy pleasure around what's something you can't live without? It my wife? And what would you be doing if you weren't an actor. I'd probably be a lawyer. I think that's where I was headed before I went to acting school. Okay, let's get going. Let's jump in creative range. I want to start with that. You know what sort of set you apart from people is is that incredible range you have? How did you get that range and the opportunity to use it? Well, I think a lot of people have this in common, which is it's not like it's a plan you set out to execute. You know you you you have a plan, and it doesn't always go according to the plan. So you wind up being faced with the choices you have and for me, those choices were often very disparate choices. And then when thirty Rock came around, that was the chance to jump in with some people who I was very intimidated by them. You know, it's one thing to save funny lines, it's another thing to write it. And Tina and Robert, Carla and those people they were you know, I got into that show and just trying to fit in and watch them and try to you know, serve the material as best I could. But I found that everywhere I go, the rule is always if the choices a B or C, and I walk around going a B or CE, what's it gonna be a B or C? And the answer, more often than not is D. It's something completely not on the map. And I've wound up going off and doing you know, plays and TV shows and movies and things that I never imagined I would do. I've talked to a lot of people, and there's sort of this idea that that great ideas and opportunities sort of hit you on the head like a meteor. The best ideas are the best opportunities were totally unforeseen, unexpected, And it sounds like that's that's worked for you as well, well, you know, Lauren Michaels came to me to do thirty Rock and this is the best example. And I thought, oh god, I don't want to do a sitcom. I don't want to be I don't want to be a regular on a sitcom. But when Lawrence said, did you want to sign a contract? And I did the pilot and by the time we were done touring the pilot, I said to myself, this is fun. I mean it was. It was a lot of fun to do the show. Like when you do a drama, when you do a film, you're they're focused and it's very intense and you're thinking, how can we get the most out of this day? How can we get the most out of shooting these scenes today because we're not going to come back, you know, presumably where we rarely come back. And shooting a comedy was I mean, I cried laughing every day. They were the funniest people I've ever met in my life. When you started out, did you think you were going to one place? And if so, what was that place? Was a comedy drama? I think most people who started out as actors, you look at a career, I think the most gleaming example is Nicholson, where you do all these disparate roles, and you play these very different roles, and you do all these films where you have a great part. I mean, who other than maybe Spencer, Tracy or Bogart has had as many great films and his acting is what made them great. And Nicholson kind of stands alone, you know, in the modern world, Pacino, de Niro, Warren Beatty, Newman, Redford, all that crowd, Dustin Hoffman. But Nicholson has played so many disparate roles. Hoffman too, I mean very ranging, you know, Ratso Rizzo and Kramer versus Kramer and Lenny Bruce and everything. And that's I think what people want is to play a lot of different roles and different types of people and create different characters. And uh, that's difficult to access that material. You know. The search, the hunt for good scripts is something that plagues everybody. Dustin Hoffman himself once said to me. It was very funny, he said. He once said to me years ago, he said, Alec, we're all in line when it comes to getting our hands on a good script. He said, We're all in line. Alec, he said of us are just in a shorter line. So you you've done theater too, and which one theater, movies TV, what do you find the most rewarding, most challenging, and the most fulfilling for you? Well, with the film, there's an opportunity that if the film succeeds, and that I don't mean necessarily commercially or critically, it can be either one or both. You know, when I go do a blatantly commercial project like Mission Impossible, I've gone and done a couple of those, and you realize, you know, this is the apex, this is the pinnacle of big ticket studio movie making. And these guys just you know, they just tear it up, you know, and no one works harder than Tom. He's just the most hard working guy, and you're thrilled to be in their company and make that kind of movie. Then you turn around and you go make another movie, and the the entire budget for that movie is the budget for Ice on Tom's movie, You know what I mean. It's like you do the giant film with a big budget and then you go to a film like really really tiny, but you're still in there really trying to hone it and get and if the film works. You know, if you do a little film and it gets some traction and people think it's worthy the content, that's thrilling it. The theater is a place you go where there's risk, but just less risk. You know, if you go to a revival of Tennessee Williams, you sit there and say, well, we know the material works. You know, it's not like a movie where if the movie flops, that's painful and there's a lot of money at stake. But in the theater it's much more like music. You know, all of us are like a band, were there together to serve this piece, and we're there to support this piece, the writing, and you want to meet the challenge. Like when I did street Car, we were like, oh my god, this is like we're never going to have an opportunity like this in our lives again. This is it. We're going to be doing this play and no one's going to do it again for seven or eight or ten years or more. And that's thrilling. It's such an honor whenever I do a play. I'm not gonna say I like plays better, but the play experience can be sometimes be a more pure experience in terms of acting by the way I saw you at that and it was a powerful performance and one of those things that has stayed with me all these years. So if you were enjoying it half as much as I was, it was it was pretty powerful. Let's go back in time some for some context on you. You were born in the late fifties, grew up in the sixties and seventies in sort of middle class Long Island. Tell me about those times in that place. Can you paint the picture for everybody. My childhood was very modest. You know. My dad was a teacher, He had six kids, He had no money. Everything in his life was about not having enough money, and he was just all him and my mother did was complaining about you know. So when I walked out the door and I was a kid, I remember kind of sitting there and say, whatever you do, don't end up like your dad. I have to make a living. And it almost didn't matter. There was a part of me I thought, I'll sell insurance. I mean, I just don't want to be stressed out like my poor dad. Because my dad was a great guy and he was just stressed. He died young. He was only fifty five when he died. But at the same time, I'm not going to deny the fact that in many ways I was as happy or happier than than I am now, you know, because it was so simple. You know, we go out the door and throw snowballs at each other and make a snowman and go sledding, and we go play baseball in the summer, we play football in the fall, we go to the pool at the local park. We and of course, as you can appreciate, it wasn't the days of the helicopter parents. You know, I get on a bicycle, I get on a Schwinn Stingray bicycle and ride into the bowels of my neighborhood and south Shore, massive people along. My parents wouldn't see me for four or five hours. They had no idea where I was, nor were they looking for They were my parents, They had no idea. They took my word for it. You know, I was gone all day. I mean not that I was running, uh still somewhere making moonshine. I wasn't counterfeiting money. I wasn't doing anything illegal. But when we would take off, there were no cell phones and FaceTime, and you know, you came home and you came home at the requested hour, or my father would be very grim. But in a lot of ways, I mean, life, Listen, you are a media mogul. You know, you're a guy who has been on top of this business for so long now, which doesn't even seem real. You know, going back to MTV and I'm through a O L and your whole thing, and you've seen the changes in all of its technology. I mean, I'd love to hear your opinion of that it's technology. Well, you know, we also had TV back then was sort of a forced common experience that we could go to school the next day and everybody was talking about the same show they had seen the same thing. And by the way, we only had one TV in the house. We had the family TV, so my different tacks brook have in Mississippi even smaller, and we would, uh, we don't watch TV together, and it became a sort of a force to bring things together. And uh, I think you know your exactly the fireplace. Yeah, I'm not sure whether it's good or bad, but it's certainly different today. And we don't have any unifying experience. We don't have anything driving homogeneity, which you know, we saw the awful side of often, but we also there was a good side to it, which was it did sort of bring people together as one civilization, and I do think we missed some of that. I think an interesting thing is in terms of the news. You know, the news, it was something that you had an appointment with the TV set. My dad would come home from work and he would lie on a couch and he would read the New York Times. My father taught economics in American government in a public high school, and he was very politically engaged, and he would come home and it would be John Chancellor or Huntley Brinkley or croc Kite. Then rather you sat down in front of the TV. Nancy Dickerson and I remember all these names, Robert Trout. You watched all these old time veterans of the news, and the news came and you devoured it because it was no twenty four hour news cycle. Nobody had a phone in their hand where there were alerts on your phone. There was a morning newspaper and an evening newspaper, and there was radio and the TV at the specified times. And then the news went away and your relationship with the world went away. Yeah, which you're exactly right. So let's go on to that period. What values do you think you have today that came out of that experience and those times? You know, I got remarried. My wife and I are together now. Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of when I met my wife. I met my wife February two thousand eleven, congratulating together for ten years, thank you. And we had five kids in seven years. I got a seven year old, of five year old, of four year old, a two year old, and a five bold. We have a lot of kids here, and uh, the joke is people will come over and they'll sit down and we'll see, be careful, there might be a baby under that cushion. And you never know. In this house. There's babies everywhere. And what it's done for me at my age, because I'm about to turn sixty three years old, is it's made me go back into my own childhood and realize that this is a gift I've been given and that my family and my kids are really all that matters to me. And the COVID. Even though the COVID has been so debilitating, it has inhibited the way we normally interact in terms of acting, but other than that, uh, the effects of the COVID. I look at this time and I think I'll never have this time again. I'll never have this time again where I'm home with my kids every day. They don't go to school. They rely on their mother and I to help them negotiate the kind of peculiarity of this time in our lives. And all they want is to be together. That's all they want is your attention and you to listen to whatever they say about school. And my daughter will turn to me and say, did you realize that Saturday is not the only planet that has rings on it? And I'll go, no, I didn't know that. And she's lecturing me about the solar system and she's seven years old. And that's it. I mean, this time, this it's almost like a little house on the prairie. I mean, something very simple and pure with them is really the only thing I care about anymore in my life, truly. That's It's a beautiful story. We'll be right back with more math and Magic after this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic. That's you more from my conversation with Alec Baldwin. Let me jump a little bit. Let's go to your conversion. It's you had something sort of like Paul's conversion on the Road to Damascus. When you went from this George Washington University guy studying political science, expecting to be a lawyer. You had had I think interned in your congressman's office, you had in turned in a law firm, to suddenly you decide you're going to be an actor, and you go to n y U and you have these jobs that you would think beginning actors have. You're a waiter, you were a chaperone or a tour bus company. You were a lifeguard. You're a bus boy at Studio fifty four. I was, where did that conversion come from? Well, that's funny. I'm at g W, and I loved it there in g W, back in nine was beginning to mold itself into what it is now, and it was a different Washington and more sleepy Washington. We're always reminded of Kennedy's admonition that Washington was the city of northern hospitality and southern efficiency, and that was surely true when I was there. I worked as an intern on Capitol Hill and a guy there, he was an a turn and I said, now, you're on the staff of this congressman. And I'm sure it's not paying you a lot of money. He said, no, it's not. I said, what gives with that? He said, well, everyone's getting a law degree now just to have it as another arrow in their quivered. And me said, it's really tough for the competition is tough to get in. The competition is really tough to get a job when you get out. He said, I'm on the staff as a legislator. They with a law degree making sixty five dollars a year back then, which was decent money in the seventies. And I thought to myself, I'm not going to go to law school, which was my plan. I said, I'm gonna take a year off. I'm gonna try this other thing and see how I like it, because it seems stupid and silly and far fetched and very kind of dream like. And I went to n y U audition, got in. They gave me a scholarship, you know, a need based scholarship, but they paid for everything to go because it was it was expensive for my family. And I went there and as soon as I finished my first year, I got a job, and I got another job and I just I just kept working. I kept go go go, went out to l A, got jobs at nighttime TV, and it just kept going. Even though I wasn't necessarily that sure of my feelings about acting in the life of an actor. But over the course of the first couple of years I did it, I fell in love with acting. When you started in your career, did you know the kind of work you wanted to do? You and I wanted to fly airplanes as a kid, and when I got old enough to get my license at sixteen, I was fifteen, told my parents I want to take flying lessons get my license. They said, well, you better get a job. And the only job I could get in the small town of Mississippi was as a radio announcer. And I had really no interest in radio. It was just a job. But like you, I completely fell in love with it and uh and that took me on this wonderful career. And by the time I was twenty years old, I was at the NBC station in Chicago. They let me actually program the station in addition to being on the air. When then they sent me to New York to w NBC when I was twenty three, so it was this great career, but it was, as you say, completely driven by sort of the unexpected, and I completely fell in love with it, completely out of pattern. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I always wanted to be a doctor. Uh And somehow that just fell by the wayside and uh and this took over. The world has changed. So they asked you about and you know, sort of soaps is sort of an interesting place to get started. If you'd said where Alec Baldwin began, I wouldn't say in the soaps. But what did you What did that teach you about acting? Um, that's a good question. It teaches you two things that I remember vividly, which is about professionalism. That you come to work and it was like a Swiss watch. You know. They were you were in there at seven o'clock in the morning and we rehearse and you go to make up, and they were like, we gotta shoot this episode, you know, twenty two pages of daytime drama today. We've got to get this done today. And they would bring actors in there, some of them young people who would stay up all night and party. They had money in their pocket and they were gone within like a couple of months, like you, you had to show up and be reliable. We all have a job here to do. Your part of a collaboration of people. All of them have a job, and you have your job to do, and if you don't do it, if you screw up, you're going to affect everybody else. And it made me realize you gotta show up, you gotta know your lines. And then the second stage of that was the tendency to want to down grade or to look askance at the material. Daytime writers had very stressful lives because coming up with something worthwhile every day was tough. And someone took me aside and they said, you can't let that affect you. You've got to go to the opposite way. You have to find a way to make it work, because you're gonna find when you leave this job that if you only show up for work, if you only go to work and make films and television shows and do theater, whatever you do, and you only do you know the greatest you know, Steve Zalien script and Spielberg as you're you know, all this fan to see of like the Kreme de la Kreme. You know, Tony Kushner is writing and Soderberg is directing or whatever. That doesn't happen very often. You know, you you have a piece of material in front of you, and it's your job to try to mind it for as much value as you can. And one of the proving grounds for me was a soap because the material sometimes was dreadful. I mean, it was really horrible, and you had to find a way to try to make it work. And sometimes you succeeded and sometimes you didn't, but you had to make that effort. And I thought that that was very, very helpful for me in terms of my work ethic. You know, early in your career you were New York. You just sent in l A. And I know you go back and forth. Let's go back to sort of the eighties and in too today. How do those two cities differ in the creative process and what creativity means in l A and what it means in New York? And have you seen to change over time? Well, I'm sad to see that l A has been somewhat decimated, not because of the COVID but because of this tax breaks and different entities poaching if you will, with their tax structure. But I remember, even though I wasn't a fan of living in l A. I'd love to go out there and shoot for a month or two and then come home because I wanted to live in New York. And the reason I wanted to live in New York because New York is like a mountain range. And when you're at a dinner party or you're in an event in New York, it's people who are at the top of many different businesses. You're there with people in banking and real estate and art collecting and literature and journalism and music. I mean, you name the theater, political figures, academics, you name it. I mean show business has a place of equivalence in a range of mountains in New York. And when you go to Los Angeles, one mountain dwarfs all the other mountains. And when you go there, it's all about show business. It's like a city for the winners. And if you're a winner, if you go out there and you win an Emmy, and you and you, and you walk into the restaurant and you'd walk in there and they're like, oh, right this way, Mr Bold, don't be here please, and can we what can we bring a bottle of champagne to your table to celebrate your your winnings, and blah blah blah, you thought to yourself. I used to turn to my friends and go, let's enjoy the fellows because it ends tomorrow morning. It's over. But it's funny how I don't want to live in l A. But I love shooting in l A. And I was always disappointed when we wouldn't work out there because the best people are in l A. I always tell the same story. I say, when you go to the set of a movie somewhere and they'll say, the prop guy wants to come into your trailer and show you some wrist watches for your character. He wants you to choose a wrist watch for your character. And the guy comes into your trailer. It's you know, you're in rehearsals for fittings for the movie and the guy shows you like fifty watches and you go, okay, what about that that little brightling there or whatever. And then you go to l A and they go, the prop guy would like you to look at some watches for the show, and he bring you in six cases with four hundred watches. You know, everybody in Hollywood, it's Hollywood, you know, and everybody there is at the top of the game. When you're on a set in a studio, you know, when you're shooting. I think the last studio film my shot was a long time ago. But I never forget when I did Cat in the Hat with Mike Myers, which was a silly movie, but we were on the lot at Universal for five months and they shot this thing forever, and I'll never forget. The crew was the greatest crew, and I thought to myself, I'm never going to have it this good again, because we're on the lot the whole time. He almost shot the whole movie on the lot, And they're just something about being on a sound stage in l A and those crews out there. There's just nothing like it in the world. Nothing. And I'm sad that I don't really work out there as much as I used to. A lot of great old ghosts on the sound stages too. Oh yeah, oh god. You so, you know. In the early nineties, I think it was you made your first appearance as the guest host on Saturday Night Live, and all these years later, I think you hold the record for hosting the most Saturday Night Live. You were talking about Lauren Michael's earlier on Dirty Rock. What is it about Lauren Michaels, what's the magic? Lauren is smart in a way. He knows when to say yes, when to say no, how to say yes, how to say no, how to keep people engaged with him. And you you find yourself in a place where you trust that this is a guy who you know he has your interest at heart. Now granted it's in his interests as well, but he's doing things that if he believes in you, will benefit you career wise. Lauren is someone who he's wise, He's very wise, and he keeps you focused on having the preferred attitude. Like I always tell the same story. The first year we went to the m we didn't win. Actually I think we want ensemble cast, and then we lost to Modern Family or whatever. But but we we go to the Emmy's the second year and we win everything and we're we're heading to the Valet parking and we went to the Governor's Ball for the TV Academy. This is for the Emmy, is not the Oscars. And we go to the Governor's Ball and as we go to the valley, I go God, I said, you know last year when we lost, we were like in and atty here really quickly, you know. We well, we went to the restaurant, had dinner and had a lot of fun. I said, this year, we won, so we had to go to the Governor's ball and take pictures with all these people. I mean like we were taking pictures for like an hour and a half and we had to go table to table and get introduced to this guy and this guy and this person take pictures. I said, this is really like exhausting and what a pain in the ass. And we're standing at the Valley parking and Lauren takes his Emmy and he holds it up to me and he goes. But winning is better, right, Lauren is the one who helps you maintained perspective in a business that it's very easy to lose perspective. So so Saturday Night Live, I love it. Saturday Night Live got started about the same time my career at NBC started. A guy named Herb Schlausser was the president of NBC then and was really the champion of of Lauren. He was my mentor there and uh, and I remember I was programming in Chicago and he came out and talked to me about Saturday Night Live, among other things. How on earth do they keep that creativity going for this many years? Well, I think that the biggest and this is my opinion. I mean I've never heard anybody say this, but the biggest I think challenge for them, The biggest frontier was the digital frontier to take what was a diminishing network broadcast audience and to get that content and to get some form of that content in clips and snippets and scenes and sketches, I mean any way you can on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, you name it, to get it out there and to get the NBC content and the SNL content. I mean, you know, there were numbers for the show that we're very, very you know, good numbers for them over the years, and now the show does numbers that are just ridiculous. They're live on both coasts now, so they do the eleven thirty feet at night live at eight thirty on the West coast and they're live across the country. They don't have it to You're not watching a taped feet in l A anymore. And then they're all over the internet in the ensuing you know, Plus seven schedule and their numbers are equal to network prime time numbers. They're competing with prime time shows in terms of their numbers, which is just if you told me that fifteen years ago, I would have met everything I had against that. And this is again Lauren adapting. Lauren is always adapted in terms of the comedians, where they come from, who they are, the talent, music. You know, the joke was with Lauren his daughter. So the the joke was who's the musical act? How do they determine who the musical act is on Saturday Night Live? And when his daughter was young, they said, who's ever in Sophie's iPod? Lauren would take the information wherever he could get it. Who knows what's new, fresh happening, who's a young actor? But in the end, when this is the thing I among the things I love about Lauren the most, Lauren decides Lauren garners all this information about potential hosts, music sketches, material, who we make fun of, who we don't make fun of, how much we make fun of them. That the actual molding of a show that goes from eleven thirty at night till one o'clock in the morning and gets progressively I don't want to say adult, but a little bit more sophisticated, shall we say? As the night goes on. I've done sketches for Lauren where he'd sit there and say, that's a twelve thirty sketch. We put that towards the end of the show because it's a little more riskay, or it's a little more kind of crispy in that way. And Lauren's mastery of all the things that are in that world, I mean every element of it. You'll say to Lauren. You watch Lauren give notes. I meant of the notes he gives during the notes between shows. We do the dress in the air, you do a full dress at eight o'clock, you do the air show at and in between an abundance of his notes or camera notes go tighter here, Why is that light? Put another light on him? Why is that daktrob that color blue? He's producing a TV show where his eye it's like he's making a movie. Lauren is just he's probably one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life period, and he's certainly one of the three or four smartest people I've ever met in the business because of his his adaptability he's so adaptable. Well, he stands alone in the industry. I don't think there's anybody quite like Lauren. No, there wasn't. You talked about scripts, and it's so everybody's in that line to get a script. Some have the shorter lines. How do you pick what you're gonna do? What's your process? When I was young, I worked all the time. When I was young, it was like chain smoking. I just lit one off the other. And then as I got older, I got more discerning in that way. And now as I'm at the age of that now, you know, I think it's the same muscle. You sit there and go, I want to go to work, But when you get older, you think, what is not duplicative of stuff I've already done. Because a lot of people want me to come in and play some glengary type of guy that straightens everybody out, and there's a kind of a ferocity to that character, and that gets to be kind of boring for me. But I think when I work now, it's about the people. So you'll say to me, here's a guy that wants to work with you with the project, and you think, in most cases you know who it is and you'll sit there and go, oh my god, I'm dying to work with him. Like I never work in the summer. Here's a good example. I never work in the summer. I take all of July and August off, except except if it's Marty Scorsese, and so Marty calls me and says, would you come and do The Departed? Were up in Massachusetts and we're gonna shoot in August them like you got it. You know, there's people who when they when they there's people who when they call you, you just say, when's my fitting, let's go. You know, you're just dying to be around them. You're just dying to be around them, even if the part you're playing is not that significant, even if the film by no means pivots on anything you're doing. It's just such a joy to be around them. Bob de Niro asked me to do The Good Shepherd, and just to be on the set with Bob. It was just mind blowing. It was just mind blowing. You know. I've had a few experiences like that when we did Glen Garry and them. Around these actors that are these actors I worshiped. It's who you work with so let's let's jump the podcast. You're considered a podcast pioneer. Here's the thing with Alec Baldwin. What caught your attention with podcasting? How did you get there so early? What grabbed you? I had wanted to stay home. I didn't want to travel anymore. I wanted to work from New York, and I had pitched the TV show Talk Show. That was a disaster. I think we aired four or five shows, and of the five shows we aired, four of them were against Sunday night football, against the hottest games of the season. I mean, I think I think the entire audience from my show could fit in one elevator at sax S Fithaven, you know what I mean. It was like forget it. So when I started thinking of the idea of radio and podcast, I had different ideas, you know, like a Howard Stern type of bullpen with a cast of characters. And then the people I was working with finally said to me, listen, let's just try this at first, just you talking to people, and we did that for w N my C. It's not really an interview because it's a conversation. You know. Terry Gross keeps it all about her guest, and that's her show, and I love that show and I'm very admiring of her, but that's an interview show, and I thought to myself, that wasn't interesting to me. So if I bring on people, you know that our actors and performers, and talk to them about either something we have in common, you know, their peers of mine, or there's somebody like Debbie Reynolds did my show and my god, I mean just I mean, I could have talked to her for six hours about her career and uh, I mean, they're just so admiring of them and engaged by them. We've done pretty well and now we're on iHeart. As you know, we moved from public radio to My Heart and I'm very glad for that. The podcast to me, are always divided into two groups. Ones I like and once I love. I mean, I I like them all. I mean, there isn't one show we did that I regret it ever. But then we have people come on and it's just Billy Joel's handlers. If you will said, now, whatever you do, don't ask Billy to play. Don't ask him to play. Whatever you do, don't ask him to play. Now, I know Billy personally and I called him on the phone and I said, thanks so much for coming to do this with us. We're very excited. I can't thank you, and if I'm really looking forward to to doing this with you. And he said, you're gonna have a piano m And I said what he said, You're gonna have a piano. I said, we were told that it was forbidden for us to ask you to play. He goes, oh, that's ridiculous, come on, come on, and we go into a studio in my scene at the sound stage where they record music, and there was a piano, and oh my god. I think he's the one show we did where we didn't edit the show. It was one hour and five minutes or whatever it is uncut. We just played it from start to finish. Because he's so seamless about his knowledge of music and what influenced him musically. It was just absolutely What are the most thrilling ones we ever did creatively? What is podcast offer you that you can't get in any other form? Well? I think that like music. I mean I always say that music has a significance in people's lives that theater and film and TV don't have. Because you can consume it anywhere. You can be in the shower, you can be in the gym, you can be in the are And podcasts offer that podcast is the I mean, this is why I love radio. Audio is something that you can indulge just about any time, the same as music almost is that idea of its um availability, you can you can consume it anywhere. And I love that. And I listened to a lot of Part'm addicted to this American life and for years, and I listened to a bunch of podcasts. So as we wind down, you've had a front row seat in the entertainment business for decades. So I want you to think just a second and give a shout out to two people we always in the show this way because it's called math and magic. Who's the let's talk about the mathematician. Who's the best business person you've met you can think of an entertainment or media And who's the most creative the magic? Well, I would say that I love this question. By the way, Well, one person who I don't know, well, i've met him many times and I don't know well, but someone who and I'm sure you can appreciate this in your career. The person who I've always heard consistently is the guy with the Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to profit or is successful is Geffen. Geffen is someone who I always hear these really really like he just has some mystical ability in terms of his investment strategies and his businesses, and he's been this preposterously successful guy for a very very long time. Then I guess, in terms of the magic and the creativity, the person who always amazes me the most in terms of the range of his work. Now, of course he has every advantage that other people don't have because he's so successful commercially, and he's so on top of his game. He knows what he's doing. As Spielberg, I would say Spielberg is the person who And that's a tough question to answer because I've got many people, you know, Fincher and Soderberg and Marty and Di Palma and Coppola and you know, I mean, it's an endless there's so many hundreds of directors and you know, and and foreign directors and so forth, European directors. It's tough to pick one. So I'm really only picking one among many because I admire many of them to the same level. But there's something about Spielberg to me that is just uncanny. I mean that just the range. I mean things from AI and Jurassic Park to Jaws and munich Et and Lincoln and Amistad, and I mean just the range of his I mean even the things that Spielberg has done that have not been as successful creatively and commercially as his more towering achievements like Jurassic and Jaws, and even the ones that didn't do as well overall, there's still better than most other people's movies. I mean, Spielberg to me just is on an island of his own. He's on a planet of his own in terms of talent. A congratulations on everything. Thanks for taking the time today, and by the way, thanks for joining the Heart family with with your podcast. Always from Bob and I, my friends and I who were in this club. We all salute each other and we all left about this. I still have an a O L mail account Bob me too. Here are a few things I learned from my conversation with Alec. One understand what your job is and how to have value to it. But I only got his big break and soaps. He learned you have to know your lines, but you also have to work to sell them. To embrace the opportunities that surprise you, and Alex's experience. When you think you're choosing between A, B and C, the actual will probably be D. Three. Whether it's a costar or a co worker. Never underestimate how your collaborators can help you grow. These days, Alex chooses his projects based on who he'll be working with. The Next time you're searching for a new partner or collaborator, ask yourself, will this person challenge me? Will they help me grow? Four? And in these difficult times, take some comfort and the simple things. During COVID, Alec has found balanced by spending time outdoors, going on hikes and playing in the snow with his family. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki Eatore for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango, and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,

You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My Heart Radio. Dustin Hoffman himself once said to me, he said, Alec, we're all in line when it comes to getting our hands on a good script. He said, we're all in line, Alec, he said, some of us are just in a shorter line. Hi. I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to this episode of Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Today, we have a guest who embodies the magic creativity. He's covered the spectrum of acting, theater, TV movies in both the commercial and critically acclaimed, and he's had huge successes in comedy and drama. He's an active participant in the world, and he was very early with his own podcast. He did podcasts before podcasting was cool. He's Alec Baldwin. Ali grew up on the south shore of Long Island, under the shadow of Manhattan. He had early aspirations to be a law here, but as he switched to acting, he paid the dues with all kinds of jobs, from waiting tables to being a lifeguard, and he was even a bus boy at the legendary Studio fifty four. He's hosted Saturday Night live more than anyone else and swept every word possible with his role on thirty Rock. There is so much to explore today. Welcome Ali, Thank you, Bob. Good to talk to you. It's great to talk to you. And here we are on the magic of audio. Before we dig in today, I want to get you in sixty seconds. You ready to go? Yes, sir? Do you prefer early morning or late night? Late night, New York City or Long Island, Long Island, New Yorker, California, New York? Instagram or Twitter, Instagram, film or TV film? George Washington University or New York University, n y You Jack Ryan or Jack Donneghie, Jack Donneghee, uh Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill and the c Williams. Class sickle or classic rock, classical, sweet or salty, salty cats or dogs Dogs Coffee is for closers or ABC Always be closing, Always be closing, ABC, Always be closing. It's about to get harder. Smartest person you know, Bob Pittman, the head of My Heart Radio, childhood hero Joe Namath, favorite play you've acted in, speet car named Desire, Political hero John F. Kennedy. First job I cut grass I was I was a lawn jockey with a landscape company. Favorite director, Oh that's a good question, Uh, Scorsese, favorite composer, Maller, Gustav Mahler, favorite sport, football, favorite movie theater, snack the popcorn with the raisin NEETs in the popcorn. Guilty pleasure, sleeping in. I got remarried and I have five of the kids, so sleeping in. That's a healthy pleasure around what's something you can't live without? It my wife? And what would you be doing if you weren't an actor. I'd probably be a lawyer. I think that's where I was headed before I went to acting school. Okay, let's get going. Let's jump in creative range. I want to start with that. You know what sort of set you apart from people is is that incredible range you have? How did you get that range and the opportunity to use it? Well, I think a lot of people have this in common, which is it's not like it's a plan you set out to execute. You know you you you have a plan, and it doesn't always go according to the plan. So you wind up being faced with the choices you have and for me, those choices were often very disparate choices. And then when thirty Rock came around, that was the chance to jump in with some people who I was very intimidated by them. You know, it's one thing to save funny lines, it's another thing to write it. And Tina and Robert, Carla and those people they were you know, I got into that show and just trying to fit in and watch them and try to you know, serve the material as best I could. But I found that everywhere I go, the rule is always if the choices a B or C, and I walk around going a B or CE, what's it gonna be a B or C? And the answer, more often than not is D. It's something completely not on the map. And I've wound up going off and doing you know, plays and TV shows and movies and things that I never imagined I would do. I've talked to a lot of people, and there's sort of this idea that that great ideas and opportunities sort of hit you on the head like a meteor. The best ideas are the best opportunities were totally unforeseen, unexpected, And it sounds like that's that's worked for you as well, well, you know, Lauren Michaels came to me to do thirty Rock and this is the best example. And I thought, oh god, I don't want to do a sitcom. I don't want to be I don't want to be a regular on a sitcom. But when Lawrence said, did you want to sign a contract? And I did the pilot and by the time we were done touring the pilot, I said to myself, this is fun. I mean it was. It was a lot of fun to do the show. Like when you do a drama, when you do a film, you're they're focused and it's very intense and you're thinking, how can we get the most out of this day? How can we get the most out of shooting these scenes today because we're not going to come back, you know, presumably where we rarely come back. And shooting a comedy was I mean, I cried laughing every day. They were the funniest people I've ever met in my life. When you started out, did you think you were going to one place? And if so, what was that place? Was a comedy drama? I think most people who started out as actors, you look at a career, I think the most gleaming example is Nicholson, where you do all these disparate roles, and you play these very different roles, and you do all these films where you have a great part. I mean, who other than maybe Spencer, Tracy or Bogart has had as many great films and his acting is what made them great. And Nicholson kind of stands alone, you know, in the modern world, Pacino, de Niro, Warren Beatty, Newman, Redford, all that crowd, Dustin Hoffman. But Nicholson has played so many disparate roles. Hoffman too, I mean very ranging, you know, Ratso Rizzo and Kramer versus Kramer and Lenny Bruce and everything. And that's I think what people want is to play a lot of different roles and different types of people and create different characters. And uh, that's difficult to access that material. You know. The search, the hunt for good scripts is something that plagues everybody. Dustin Hoffman himself once said to me. It was very funny, he said. He once said to me years ago, he said, Alec, we're all in line when it comes to getting our hands on a good script. He said, We're all in line. Alec, he said of us are just in a shorter line. So you you've done theater too, and which one theater, movies TV, what do you find the most rewarding, most challenging, and the most fulfilling for you? Well, with the film, there's an opportunity that if the film succeeds, and that I don't mean necessarily commercially or critically, it can be either one or both. You know, when I go do a blatantly commercial project like Mission Impossible, I've gone and done a couple of those, and you realize, you know, this is the apex, this is the pinnacle of big ticket studio movie making. And these guys just you know, they just tear it up, you know, and no one works harder than Tom. He's just the most hard working guy, and you're thrilled to be in their company and make that kind of movie. Then you turn around and you go make another movie, and the the entire budget for that movie is the budget for Ice on Tom's movie, You know what I mean. It's like you do the giant film with a big budget and then you go to a film like really really tiny, but you're still in there really trying to hone it and get and if the film works. You know, if you do a little film and it gets some traction and people think it's worthy the content, that's thrilling it. The theater is a place you go where there's risk, but just less risk. You know, if you go to a revival of Tennessee Williams, you sit there and say, well, we know the material works. You know, it's not like a movie where if the movie flops, that's painful and there's a lot of money at stake. But in the theater it's much more like music. You know, all of us are like a band, were there together to serve this piece, and we're there to support this piece, the writing, and you want to meet the challenge. Like when I did street Car, we were like, oh my god, this is like we're never going to have an opportunity like this in our lives again. This is it. We're going to be doing this play and no one's going to do it again for seven or eight or ten years or more. And that's thrilling. It's such an honor whenever I do a play. I'm not gonna say I like plays better, but the play experience can be sometimes be a more pure experience in terms of acting by the way I saw you at that and it was a powerful performance and one of those things that has stayed with me all these years. So if you were enjoying it half as much as I was, it was it was pretty powerful. Let's go back in time some for some context on you. You were born in the late fifties, grew up in the sixties and seventies in sort of middle class Long Island. Tell me about those times in that place. Can you paint the picture for everybody. My childhood was very modest. You know. My dad was a teacher, He had six kids, He had no money. Everything in his life was about not having enough money, and he was just all him and my mother did was complaining about you know. So when I walked out the door and I was a kid, I remember kind of sitting there and say, whatever you do, don't end up like your dad. I have to make a living. And it almost didn't matter. There was a part of me I thought, I'll sell insurance. I mean, I just don't want to be stressed out like my poor dad. Because my dad was a great guy and he was just stressed. He died young. He was only fifty five when he died. But at the same time, I'm not going to deny the fact that in many ways I was as happy or happier than than I am now, you know, because it was so simple. You know, we go out the door and throw snowballs at each other and make a snowman and go sledding, and we go play baseball in the summer, we play football in the fall, we go to the pool at the local park. We and of course, as you can appreciate, it wasn't the days of the helicopter parents. You know, I get on a bicycle, I get on a Schwinn Stingray bicycle and ride into the bowels of my neighborhood and south Shore, massive people along. My parents wouldn't see me for four or five hours. They had no idea where I was, nor were they looking for They were my parents, They had no idea. They took my word for it. You know, I was gone all day. I mean not that I was running, uh still somewhere making moonshine. I wasn't counterfeiting money. I wasn't doing anything illegal. But when we would take off, there were no cell phones and FaceTime, and you know, you came home and you came home at the requested hour, or my father would be very grim. But in a lot of ways, I mean, life, Listen, you are a media mogul. You know, you're a guy who has been on top of this business for so long now, which doesn't even seem real. You know, going back to MTV and I'm through a O L and your whole thing, and you've seen the changes in all of its technology. I mean, I'd love to hear your opinion of that it's technology. Well, you know, we also had TV back then was sort of a forced common experience that we could go to school the next day and everybody was talking about the same show they had seen the same thing. And by the way, we only had one TV in the house. We had the family TV, so my different tacks brook have in Mississippi even smaller, and we would, uh, we don't watch TV together, and it became a sort of a force to bring things together. And uh, I think you know your exactly the fireplace. Yeah, I'm not sure whether it's good or bad, but it's certainly different today. And we don't have any unifying experience. We don't have anything driving homogeneity, which you know, we saw the awful side of often, but we also there was a good side to it, which was it did sort of bring people together as one civilization, and I do think we missed some of that. I think an interesting thing is in terms of the news. You know, the news, it was something that you had an appointment with the TV set. My dad would come home from work and he would lie on a couch and he would read the New York Times. My father taught economics in American government in a public high school, and he was very politically engaged, and he would come home and it would be John Chancellor or Huntley Brinkley or croc Kite. Then rather you sat down in front of the TV. Nancy Dickerson and I remember all these names, Robert Trout. You watched all these old time veterans of the news, and the news came and you devoured it because it was no twenty four hour news cycle. Nobody had a phone in their hand where there were alerts on your phone. There was a morning newspaper and an evening newspaper, and there was radio and the TV at the specified times. And then the news went away and your relationship with the world went away. Yeah, which you're exactly right. So let's go on to that period. What values do you think you have today that came out of that experience and those times? You know, I got remarried. My wife and I are together now. Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of when I met my wife. I met my wife February two thousand eleven, congratulating together for ten years, thank you. And we had five kids in seven years. I got a seven year old, of five year old, of four year old, a two year old, and a five bold. We have a lot of kids here, and uh, the joke is people will come over and they'll sit down and we'll see, be careful, there might be a baby under that cushion. And you never know. In this house. There's babies everywhere. And what it's done for me at my age, because I'm about to turn sixty three years old, is it's made me go back into my own childhood and realize that this is a gift I've been given and that my family and my kids are really all that matters to me. And the COVID. Even though the COVID has been so debilitating, it has inhibited the way we normally interact in terms of acting, but other than that, uh, the effects of the COVID. I look at this time and I think I'll never have this time again. I'll never have this time again where I'm home with my kids every day. They don't go to school. They rely on their mother and I to help them negotiate the kind of peculiarity of this time in our lives. And all they want is to be together. That's all they want is your attention and you to listen to whatever they say about school. And my daughter will turn to me and say, did you realize that Saturday is not the only planet that has rings on it? And I'll go, no, I didn't know that. And she's lecturing me about the solar system and she's seven years old. And that's it. I mean, this time, this it's almost like a little house on the prairie. I mean, something very simple and pure with them is really the only thing I care about anymore in my life, truly. That's It's a beautiful story. We'll be right back with more math and Magic after this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic. That's you more from my conversation with Alec Baldwin. Let me jump a little bit. Let's go to your conversion. It's you had something sort of like Paul's conversion on the Road to Damascus. When you went from this George Washington University guy studying political science, expecting to be a lawyer. You had had I think interned in your congressman's office, you had in turned in a law firm, to suddenly you decide you're going to be an actor, and you go to n y U and you have these jobs that you would think beginning actors have. You're a waiter, you were a chaperone or a tour bus company. You were a lifeguard. You're a bus boy at Studio fifty four. I was, where did that conversion come from? Well, that's funny. I'm at g W, and I loved it there in g W, back in nine was beginning to mold itself into what it is now, and it was a different Washington and more sleepy Washington. We're always reminded of Kennedy's admonition that Washington was the city of northern hospitality and southern efficiency, and that was surely true when I was there. I worked as an intern on Capitol Hill and a guy there, he was an a turn and I said, now, you're on the staff of this congressman. And I'm sure it's not paying you a lot of money. He said, no, it's not. I said, what gives with that? He said, well, everyone's getting a law degree now just to have it as another arrow in their quivered. And me said, it's really tough for the competition is tough to get in. The competition is really tough to get a job when you get out. He said, I'm on the staff as a legislator. They with a law degree making sixty five dollars a year back then, which was decent money in the seventies. And I thought to myself, I'm not going to go to law school, which was my plan. I said, I'm gonna take a year off. I'm gonna try this other thing and see how I like it, because it seems stupid and silly and far fetched and very kind of dream like. And I went to n y U audition, got in. They gave me a scholarship, you know, a need based scholarship, but they paid for everything to go because it was it was expensive for my family. And I went there and as soon as I finished my first year, I got a job, and I got another job and I just I just kept working. I kept go go go, went out to l A, got jobs at nighttime TV, and it just kept going. Even though I wasn't necessarily that sure of my feelings about acting in the life of an actor. But over the course of the first couple of years I did it, I fell in love with acting. When you started in your career, did you know the kind of work you wanted to do? You and I wanted to fly airplanes as a kid, and when I got old enough to get my license at sixteen, I was fifteen, told my parents I want to take flying lessons get my license. They said, well, you better get a job. And the only job I could get in the small town of Mississippi was as a radio announcer. And I had really no interest in radio. It was just a job. But like you, I completely fell in love with it and uh and that took me on this wonderful career. And by the time I was twenty years old, I was at the NBC station in Chicago. They let me actually program the station in addition to being on the air. When then they sent me to New York to w NBC when I was twenty three, so it was this great career, but it was, as you say, completely driven by sort of the unexpected, and I completely fell in love with it, completely out of pattern. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I always wanted to be a doctor. Uh And somehow that just fell by the wayside and uh and this took over. The world has changed. So they asked you about and you know, sort of soaps is sort of an interesting place to get started. If you'd said where Alec Baldwin began, I wouldn't say in the soaps. But what did you What did that teach you about acting? Um, that's a good question. It teaches you two things that I remember vividly, which is about professionalism. That you come to work and it was like a Swiss watch. You know. They were you were in there at seven o'clock in the morning and we rehearse and you go to make up, and they were like, we gotta shoot this episode, you know, twenty two pages of daytime drama today. We've got to get this done today. And they would bring actors in there, some of them young people who would stay up all night and party. They had money in their pocket and they were gone within like a couple of months, like you, you had to show up and be reliable. We all have a job here to do. Your part of a collaboration of people. All of them have a job, and you have your job to do, and if you don't do it, if you screw up, you're going to affect everybody else. And it made me realize you gotta show up, you gotta know your lines. And then the second stage of that was the tendency to want to down grade or to look askance at the material. Daytime writers had very stressful lives because coming up with something worthwhile every day was tough. And someone took me aside and they said, you can't let that affect you. You've got to go to the opposite way. You have to find a way to make it work, because you're gonna find when you leave this job that if you only show up for work, if you only go to work and make films and television shows and do theater, whatever you do, and you only do you know the greatest you know, Steve Zalien script and Spielberg as you're you know, all this fan to see of like the Kreme de la Kreme. You know, Tony Kushner is writing and Soderberg is directing or whatever. That doesn't happen very often. You know, you you have a piece of material in front of you, and it's your job to try to mind it for as much value as you can. And one of the proving grounds for me was a soap because the material sometimes was dreadful. I mean, it was really horrible, and you had to find a way to try to make it work. And sometimes you succeeded and sometimes you didn't, but you had to make that effort. And I thought that that was very, very helpful for me in terms of my work ethic. You know, early in your career you were New York. You just sent in l A. And I know you go back and forth. Let's go back to sort of the eighties and in too today. How do those two cities differ in the creative process and what creativity means in l A and what it means in New York? And have you seen to change over time? Well, I'm sad to see that l A has been somewhat decimated, not because of the COVID but because of this tax breaks and different entities poaching if you will, with their tax structure. But I remember, even though I wasn't a fan of living in l A. I'd love to go out there and shoot for a month or two and then come home because I wanted to live in New York. And the reason I wanted to live in New York because New York is like a mountain range. And when you're at a dinner party or you're in an event in New York, it's people who are at the top of many different businesses. You're there with people in banking and real estate and art collecting and literature and journalism and music. I mean, you name the theater, political figures, academics, you name it. I mean show business has a place of equivalence in a range of mountains in New York. And when you go to Los Angeles, one mountain dwarfs all the other mountains. And when you go there, it's all about show business. It's like a city for the winners. And if you're a winner, if you go out there and you win an Emmy, and you and you, and you walk into the restaurant and you'd walk in there and they're like, oh, right this way, Mr Bold, don't be here please, and can we what can we bring a bottle of champagne to your table to celebrate your your winnings, and blah blah blah, you thought to yourself. I used to turn to my friends and go, let's enjoy the fellows because it ends tomorrow morning. It's over. But it's funny how I don't want to live in l A. But I love shooting in l A. And I was always disappointed when we wouldn't work out there because the best people are in l A. I always tell the same story. I say, when you go to the set of a movie somewhere and they'll say, the prop guy wants to come into your trailer and show you some wrist watches for your character. He wants you to choose a wrist watch for your character. And the guy comes into your trailer. It's you know, you're in rehearsals for fittings for the movie and the guy shows you like fifty watches and you go, okay, what about that that little brightling there or whatever. And then you go to l A and they go, the prop guy would like you to look at some watches for the show, and he bring you in six cases with four hundred watches. You know, everybody in Hollywood, it's Hollywood, you know, and everybody there is at the top of the game. When you're on a set in a studio, you know, when you're shooting. I think the last studio film my shot was a long time ago. But I never forget when I did Cat in the Hat with Mike Myers, which was a silly movie, but we were on the lot at Universal for five months and they shot this thing forever, and I'll never forget. The crew was the greatest crew, and I thought to myself, I'm never going to have it this good again, because we're on the lot the whole time. He almost shot the whole movie on the lot, And they're just something about being on a sound stage in l A and those crews out there. There's just nothing like it in the world. Nothing. And I'm sad that I don't really work out there as much as I used to. A lot of great old ghosts on the sound stages too. Oh yeah, oh god. You so, you know. In the early nineties, I think it was you made your first appearance as the guest host on Saturday Night Live, and all these years later, I think you hold the record for hosting the most Saturday Night Live. You were talking about Lauren Michael's earlier on Dirty Rock. What is it about Lauren Michaels, what's the magic? Lauren is smart in a way. He knows when to say yes, when to say no, how to say yes, how to say no, how to keep people engaged with him. And you you find yourself in a place where you trust that this is a guy who you know he has your interest at heart. Now granted it's in his interests as well, but he's doing things that if he believes in you, will benefit you career wise. Lauren is someone who he's wise, He's very wise, and he keeps you focused on having the preferred attitude. Like I always tell the same story. The first year we went to the m we didn't win. Actually I think we want ensemble cast, and then we lost to Modern Family or whatever. But but we we go to the Emmy's the second year and we win everything and we're we're heading to the Valet parking and we went to the Governor's Ball for the TV Academy. This is for the Emmy, is not the Oscars. And we go to the Governor's Ball and as we go to the valley, I go God, I said, you know last year when we lost, we were like in and atty here really quickly, you know. We well, we went to the restaurant, had dinner and had a lot of fun. I said, this year, we won, so we had to go to the Governor's ball and take pictures with all these people. I mean like we were taking pictures for like an hour and a half and we had to go table to table and get introduced to this guy and this guy and this person take pictures. I said, this is really like exhausting and what a pain in the ass. And we're standing at the Valley parking and Lauren takes his Emmy and he holds it up to me and he goes. But winning is better, right, Lauren is the one who helps you maintained perspective in a business that it's very easy to lose perspective. So so Saturday Night Live, I love it. Saturday Night Live got started about the same time my career at NBC started. A guy named Herb Schlausser was the president of NBC then and was really the champion of of Lauren. He was my mentor there and uh, and I remember I was programming in Chicago and he came out and talked to me about Saturday Night Live, among other things. How on earth do they keep that creativity going for this many years? Well, I think that the biggest and this is my opinion. I mean I've never heard anybody say this, but the biggest I think challenge for them, The biggest frontier was the digital frontier to take what was a diminishing network broadcast audience and to get that content and to get some form of that content in clips and snippets and scenes and sketches, I mean any way you can on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, you name it, to get it out there and to get the NBC content and the SNL content. I mean, you know, there were numbers for the show that we're very, very you know, good numbers for them over the years, and now the show does numbers that are just ridiculous. They're live on both coasts now, so they do the eleven thirty feet at night live at eight thirty on the West coast and they're live across the country. They don't have it to You're not watching a taped feet in l A anymore. And then they're all over the internet in the ensuing you know, Plus seven schedule and their numbers are equal to network prime time numbers. They're competing with prime time shows in terms of their numbers, which is just if you told me that fifteen years ago, I would have met everything I had against that. And this is again Lauren adapting. Lauren is always adapted in terms of the comedians, where they come from, who they are, the talent, music. You know, the joke was with Lauren his daughter. So the the joke was who's the musical act? How do they determine who the musical act is on Saturday Night Live? And when his daughter was young, they said, who's ever in Sophie's iPod? Lauren would take the information wherever he could get it. Who knows what's new, fresh happening, who's a young actor? But in the end, when this is the thing I among the things I love about Lauren the most, Lauren decides Lauren garners all this information about potential hosts, music sketches, material, who we make fun of, who we don't make fun of, how much we make fun of them. That the actual molding of a show that goes from eleven thirty at night till one o'clock in the morning and gets progressively I don't want to say adult, but a little bit more sophisticated, shall we say? As the night goes on. I've done sketches for Lauren where he'd sit there and say, that's a twelve thirty sketch. We put that towards the end of the show because it's a little more riskay, or it's a little more kind of crispy in that way. And Lauren's mastery of all the things that are in that world, I mean every element of it. You'll say to Lauren. You watch Lauren give notes. I meant of the notes he gives during the notes between shows. We do the dress in the air, you do a full dress at eight o'clock, you do the air show at and in between an abundance of his notes or camera notes go tighter here, Why is that light? Put another light on him? Why is that daktrob that color blue? He's producing a TV show where his eye it's like he's making a movie. Lauren is just he's probably one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life period, and he's certainly one of the three or four smartest people I've ever met in the business because of his his adaptability he's so adaptable. Well, he stands alone in the industry. I don't think there's anybody quite like Lauren. No, there wasn't. You talked about scripts, and it's so everybody's in that line to get a script. Some have the shorter lines. How do you pick what you're gonna do? What's your process? When I was young, I worked all the time. When I was young, it was like chain smoking. I just lit one off the other. And then as I got older, I got more discerning in that way. And now as I'm at the age of that now, you know, I think it's the same muscle. You sit there and go, I want to go to work, But when you get older, you think, what is not duplicative of stuff I've already done. Because a lot of people want me to come in and play some glengary type of guy that straightens everybody out, and there's a kind of a ferocity to that character, and that gets to be kind of boring for me. But I think when I work now, it's about the people. So you'll say to me, here's a guy that wants to work with you with the project, and you think, in most cases you know who it is and you'll sit there and go, oh my god, I'm dying to work with him. Like I never work in the summer. Here's a good example. I never work in the summer. I take all of July and August off, except except if it's Marty Scorsese, and so Marty calls me and says, would you come and do The Departed? Were up in Massachusetts and we're gonna shoot in August them like you got it. You know, there's people who when they when they there's people who when they call you, you just say, when's my fitting, let's go. You know, you're just dying to be around them. You're just dying to be around them, even if the part you're playing is not that significant, even if the film by no means pivots on anything you're doing. It's just such a joy to be around them. Bob de Niro asked me to do The Good Shepherd, and just to be on the set with Bob. It was just mind blowing. It was just mind blowing. You know. I've had a few experiences like that when we did Glen Garry and them. Around these actors that are these actors I worshiped. It's who you work with so let's let's jump the podcast. You're considered a podcast pioneer. Here's the thing with Alec Baldwin. What caught your attention with podcasting? How did you get there so early? What grabbed you? I had wanted to stay home. I didn't want to travel anymore. I wanted to work from New York, and I had pitched the TV show Talk Show. That was a disaster. I think we aired four or five shows, and of the five shows we aired, four of them were against Sunday night football, against the hottest games of the season. I mean, I think I think the entire audience from my show could fit in one elevator at sax S Fithaven, you know what I mean. It was like forget it. So when I started thinking of the idea of radio and podcast, I had different ideas, you know, like a Howard Stern type of bullpen with a cast of characters. And then the people I was working with finally said to me, listen, let's just try this at first, just you talking to people, and we did that for w N my C. It's not really an interview because it's a conversation. You know. Terry Gross keeps it all about her guest, and that's her show, and I love that show and I'm very admiring of her, but that's an interview show, and I thought to myself, that wasn't interesting to me. So if I bring on people, you know that our actors and performers, and talk to them about either something we have in common, you know, their peers of mine, or there's somebody like Debbie Reynolds did my show and my god, I mean just I mean, I could have talked to her for six hours about her career and uh, I mean, they're just so admiring of them and engaged by them. We've done pretty well and now we're on iHeart. As you know, we moved from public radio to My Heart and I'm very glad for that. The podcast to me, are always divided into two groups. Ones I like and once I love. I mean, I I like them all. I mean, there isn't one show we did that I regret it ever. But then we have people come on and it's just Billy Joel's handlers. If you will said, now, whatever you do, don't ask Billy to play. Don't ask him to play. Whatever you do, don't ask him to play. Now, I know Billy personally and I called him on the phone and I said, thanks so much for coming to do this with us. We're very excited. I can't thank you, and if I'm really looking forward to to doing this with you. And he said, you're gonna have a piano m And I said what he said, You're gonna have a piano. I said, we were told that it was forbidden for us to ask you to play. He goes, oh, that's ridiculous, come on, come on, and we go into a studio in my scene at the sound stage where they record music, and there was a piano, and oh my god. I think he's the one show we did where we didn't edit the show. It was one hour and five minutes or whatever it is uncut. We just played it from start to finish. Because he's so seamless about his knowledge of music and what influenced him musically. It was just absolutely What are the most thrilling ones we ever did creatively? What is podcast offer you that you can't get in any other form? Well? I think that like music. I mean I always say that music has a significance in people's lives that theater and film and TV don't have. Because you can consume it anywhere. You can be in the shower, you can be in the gym, you can be in the are And podcasts offer that podcast is the I mean, this is why I love radio. Audio is something that you can indulge just about any time, the same as music almost is that idea of its um availability, you can you can consume it anywhere. And I love that. And I listened to a lot of Part'm addicted to this American life and for years, and I listened to a bunch of podcasts. So as we wind down, you've had a front row seat in the entertainment business for decades. So I want you to think just a second and give a shout out to two people we always in the show this way because it's called math and magic. Who's the let's talk about the mathematician. Who's the best business person you've met you can think of an entertainment or media And who's the most creative the magic? Well, I would say that I love this question. By the way, Well, one person who I don't know, well, i've met him many times and I don't know well, but someone who and I'm sure you can appreciate this in your career. The person who I've always heard consistently is the guy with the Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to profit or is successful is Geffen. Geffen is someone who I always hear these really really like he just has some mystical ability in terms of his investment strategies and his businesses, and he's been this preposterously successful guy for a very very long time. Then I guess, in terms of the magic and the creativity, the person who always amazes me the most in terms of the range of his work. Now, of course he has every advantage that other people don't have because he's so successful commercially, and he's so on top of his game. He knows what he's doing. As Spielberg, I would say Spielberg is the person who And that's a tough question to answer because I've got many people, you know, Fincher and Soderberg and Marty and Di Palma and Coppola and you know, I mean, it's an endless there's so many hundreds of directors and you know, and and foreign directors and so forth, European directors. It's tough to pick one. So I'm really only picking one among many because I admire many of them to the same level. But there's something about Spielberg to me that is just uncanny. I mean that just the range. I mean things from AI and Jurassic Park to Jaws and munich Et and Lincoln and Amistad, and I mean just the range of his I mean even the things that Spielberg has done that have not been as successful creatively and commercially as his more towering achievements like Jurassic and Jaws, and even the ones that didn't do as well overall, there's still better than most other people's movies. I mean, Spielberg to me just is on an island of his own. He's on a planet of his own in terms of talent. A congratulations on everything. Thanks for taking the time today, and by the way, thanks for joining the Heart family with with your podcast. Always from Bob and I, my friends and I who were in this club. We all salute each other and we all left about this. I still have an a O L mail account Bob me too. Here are a few things I learned from my conversation with Alec. One understand what your job is and how to have value to it. But I only got his big break and soaps. He learned you have to know your lines, but you also have to work to sell them. To embrace the opportunities that surprise you, and Alex's experience. When you think you're choosing between A, B and C, the actual will probably be D. Three. Whether it's a costar or a co worker. Never underestimate how your collaborators can help you grow. These days, Alex chooses his projects based on who he'll be working with. The Next time you're searching for a new partner or collaborator, ask yourself, will this person challenge me? Will they help me grow? Four? And in these difficult times, take some comfort and the simple things. During COVID, Alec has found balanced by spending time outdoors, going on hikes and playing in the snow with his family. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki Eatore for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango, and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,