YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Sagal

lines on the record
104
first
2018-09-24
most recent
2018-09-24
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Well, that is what I do because all professional comedians, what I really want to be doing is being taken seriously. I know it's sad. It's just like, can I just be happy? Apparently not”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “She ended up trying to kill herself. And you'd say to yourself, well, you didn't assault anybody. You didn't do anything wrong. But she felt there was something so profoundly wrong with her that this had happened in her life, that it must reflect terribly on her. And of course, she was an adolescent at the time. You're not feeling so clearly. But at the same time, that is something that's endemic to all of us, that we take these tragedies and we interpret them emotionally or internally as failures. And I think it's important to, and the same thing happened to me. I started talking about what happened with my family or other struggles, and people came out and they were like, oh, thank you. If it happened to you, then maybe I'm not that much of a freak as I thought I was.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Right, exactly I mean, I'm sure for you with the loss of your father, everybody else is sort of talking about their father and their parents and how great it is, and I'm going to go see my paint. And you can't talk about that because of what happened. I have the same feeling about, you know, cheerful stories of families and happy marriages. It's just, and you feel like somehow you fail. Like there's this something that every human being does and every human being succeeds at, and something was so wrong with you that you couldn't manage that. And you better just keep that quiet and just carry your shame around with you. And that's applicable to so many things. There's so many women these days in this moment talking about how being sexually assaulted made them feel that way. There was an amazing thing on the daily podcast just the other day in which Michael Barbro talked about a woman who was assaulted in high school and how”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “One of the things that all of us deal with is there really is, and you can attribute it to the Facebook culture where people are posting cheerful pictures all the time and trying to show everybody how great their life is, there really is a taboo of talking about these issues, despite our confessional culture. One of the things you find out is if you do something terrible happens to you, an acrimonious divorce, a suicide, a mental illness, or even as we find out in the current moment, sexual assault. It's hard to talk about it because you feel with some reason that people really don't want to hear about it, that that's not what...”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Because my kids are my kids and they have their own lives, and they're going to be, I hope, Making their own decisions and coming to their own understanding of what their childhood was like and who I am and what our relationship is. And if in my only message to them, I doubt that they'll find their way to this podcast, but the only message to them is that I love them and whenever they decide that they'd like to talk to me about anything, I will be here”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “The short answer is no, but I really hope to. You live in hope. And because of that, it's kind of important that I just not talk about.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That's something I think a lot about. I had always, of course, like a lot of us really was worried about what grade I would achieve in life, however you want to manage that. And I think that certainly I sacrificed a little bit of my family, maybe more than a little of my family life to that, which is something, of course, I profoundly regret. Yeah. But it was really in the club. Yeah, I know. A lot of us, you know, it's weird. I know a lot of people who struggle with that because a lot of my friends are artists who are touring musicians or who are out on the road or whatever. And they all struggle with that. And so it's been an interesting A lot of stuff was taken from me that I had wanted to hang on to. And it has been a bit of a struggle to realize that sometimes you just have to let stuff go.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I did. And I'm very, very happy. Yeah, I was at a point, and I write about this in the book without giving away a lot of details where for Someone who had been expected, as we've said from a very early age to be a vast success, who had felt that my job was to be a vast success, found myself approaching the age of 50 as a complete failure, i.e. everything that I was supposed to achieve in terms of a family and being a father and a husband had just blown up.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And didn't need you to be anything for them to fill that day's hole. And so when I realized that those are the people I actually wanted to be with, I've been trying to work on being that person, which is maybe in its own way a paradoxical way of trying to get other people's approval. But I think it's a healthier attitude.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It is totally crazy making, and it's no way to live. And what I've learned as I've gotten a little older is that those people who are constantly trying to do the next thing, to achieve the next thing, who are dissatisfied. And you may admire them, but you don't want to hang out with them because they're crazy making. They can't relax. They constantly are worried about the next thing. They can't just be in the moment. And I've realized that the people I've actually wanted to hang out with were like the relaxed people and the happy people who didn't need you to approve of them, who were happy to see you.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Exactly. And that for some people it can be a tremendous spark toward, you know, I mean, maybe because, as you say, I've been around in Dunafair a bit, and it's probably because I've never quite satisfied with, you know, will they like me yesterday? But what do I do today to make sure they like me? And that, I guess, can be positive in terms of the work it creates.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I appreciate that. Thank you. And it's just something that... It's frankly, it's something that I've been struggling with that I think a lot of people struggle with. Those of us who were raised or through natural inclination to see validation in external marks, you know, metals, how'd you dwell in this test? What college did you get into? What grades did you get one after you got into?”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Oh Lord yeah, I mean it bothers me that we've been sitting here talking for more than half an hour and you've only laughed like three times because I've noted. And no, it's really tough, I think.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “No, no. I have a friend who has been friends with Robin Williams in the old days and the 70s in the comedy scene in San Francisco. And he says, Robin Williams, the thing was he couldn't stop. He'd get off stage and he'd still be doing routines at the bar. And they wanted to say to him, my friend did, Robin, you can stop. You don't have to perform anymore. And that is something that I think is endemic to a lot of people in my line of work, that if they're not making people laugh, if they're not doing a routine, if they're not performing, they don't know what to do with themselves, which is nice for those of us who gets to watch and perform, but it's not a good way to live”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I ran the New York Marathon last fall as a guide for another blind runner, which was gratifying. I have no plans to run one this year, which is sad, just because I haven't been able to train in the way that I have. But I run races and I still get out there every week and every day when I can.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “To get the hell outside and to do something physical. It doesn't have to be running, although running has the particular advantage of it doesn't require any skill. And just get out of your heads and understand that none of us were supposed to be living this way. None of us were supposed to be living in a world in which we just use our bodies to move our heads from this screen to that screen to the size of the screen varies during the day. And I think that's bad for us. I think that we were all born to be moving. And I'm a great advocate of that. And it doesn't matter if you ever run a marathon or if you win anything. I've never won anything. But it does matter, I think, to get people out of their heads and back into their bodies. And I become an advocate. You're still running?”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “No one will ever know. Here, let me flex a little bit for you. You're a radio guy. I'm a radio guy. No one will ever know. And so it turned out, I mean, I've become a tremendous advocate for people of my ilk, people who spend way too much time in their heads”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And when she did that, I was like, wow, that makes me feel a little better because Rachel Maddow is a genius. She is an amazingly accomplished person who I admire in every way. And if she struggled with it, I feel a little bit better myself. And I realized that I could kind of pay that forward. If I did the same, and a lot of people have come up to me sometimes in person, sometimes over email, and said that, which is very gratifying. But yeah, one of the weirdest things that happened to me is that I became a fairly accomplished middle-aged athlete, which I never expected to ever happen to someone like me. I'm a stubby, non-athletic, you know, bookish kid from the suburbs who...”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yep, absolutely, which I've talked about, which I sort of did as both an exercise in sort of confronting my own self. And also, I hoped offering something to some other people. I had heard, it was actually Rachel Maddow who talked about her own struggles with it. And I said,”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh God, yes. As people might have gathered, if they know anything about me, I spend way too much time in my head staring at me.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “If that guy is running that fast, something really bad has happened. And that's when we began to get the news that there have been a bombing and people have been killed and et cetera, et cetera.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “No, no, no, no. All of our guys are all wearing spandex. But this guy is like from George V. Higgin's novel and he's running down the street and he's shouting for everybody to get the hell out of the way, clear the street. And I'm saying to myself,”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We walked out and there was a siren and a Boston cop, like a classic Boston PD cop, overweight, big mustache, is sprinting down the street, his equipment jangling, yelling. Get out of the street.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, it's weird because I was only 100 yards away, but we saw and further knew nothing. If you've ever been to a marathon, you know that the finish line is a big superstructure. It's got cameras and lights on it, towers and steel. We were on the other side of it, so it was blocking a view of the carnage. So we didn't know exactly what had happened. We were hustled away by the staff, who also didn't quite know what had happened, but something very bad had happened. And we also didn't have our phones. We just run a marathon. You don't carry your phone. And so none of us had any idea what had happened. So while the rest of the world was seeing these first pictures, we were blithely walking through the chute with increasing senses of dismay. But at the same time, getting Gatorade and getting a...”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So I went off. I've guided a guy named William Greer, and we ran the Boston Marathon that day, and he had a tough race, but he managed to gut it out, and we crossed the finish line, and we were sort of standing there gasping for breath and celebrating our achievement when boom, the bombs had just went off like 100 yards behind us. And what's interesting about that day among many, many, many other things, is that William didn't really want to run the last mile. He was dying. He was like cramping up in every way you could cramp up. But he gutted it out. He decided that he was going to run that last mile because you got to run the last mile the Boston Marathon.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Five minutes. Yeah, it's a long story, basically, which I will summarize by saying around in my family home. My marriage was breaking up in a bad way, so I was accepting invitations. Somebody called me up and said, hey, you run marathons. Would you like to run the Boston Marathon as a guide to a blind guy? And I'm like, yes, why not?”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yes, exactly. Well, do you remember that book? I'm afraid not. In the 70s, you and I are old enough to remember that. Jim Fix. Jim Fix. That was the Bible of the big running boom in the 70s. And everybody had a copy, including my father, and this was long before I ever could read, ever could run, ever could walk upstairs without gasping, but I would take out that book and look at the pictures of the happy thin people running. Imagine what that could be like. And so it's both an homage and a little bit of a satire that I've written my own.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “You got to go to one because there were people from all over the country, excuse me, people from all over the world, 40 countries were represented that day. There were people from Africa and Ireland and, of course, Mexico and all the other places. And all these people had come together and they were all becoming Americans that day. And what bound them together was not obviously national origin or language or cuisine or culture or anything, but this sort of general faith in democracy, in civic order, in the fact that we would all be subject to law and that we would settle our disputes not with violence, but with elections and the process of law, and that if you lose an election, you don't go and attack the guy who beat you, you try to beat him the next time. And all these things. And it was so encouraging. And at the end of this, they showed a video again starring your former client. And then they ended the video with Lee Greenwood's God bless the USA. And they were the same video. It was like, you know, the Jets and the Apple Pie. And this time we were all like waving our flags. Yes, it was fabulous.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Chicago, just at the federal building in Congress. And it just worked out that way. And it was the most amazingly. I don't know, encouraging patriotic things.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And, I mean, especially when these Tea Party people seem to be very much against it working. And what I came to understand, and actually, it's a story that I love to tell, we went to this Tea Party rally, which I've described, and it ended with a video montage of patriotic stuff, including, of course, the famous Lee Greenwood, God bless the USA. And they had the video and they had the Jets, and they had the baseball, and they had the apple pie and Glee Greenwood's going to be an American. And we were all incredibly bitter and angry and alienated. And we were like, these people will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Me and my film crew, this whole thing was rather ugly. The very next morning, we went to a citizenship ceremony in...”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Is I really became obsessed with if nobody understands any of this, if nobody understands how this actually works and how Supreme Court jurisprudence works and what the Bill of Rights does and what it doesn't do and so on and so forth, then how has it worked?”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “No, no, a lot of people aren't. He shares that in common with not just, I should say, nobody knows anything about the Constitution. We would go out to people and say, well, tell me about the Constitution. What do you think? And they'd say, I love the Constitution. And you'd say, well, what do you love about it? And they'd say, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And you'd say to yourself, hard to argue against that. That's not on the Constitution. That's the Declaration of Independence. But what's really interesting.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And they were very, very angry about that and very, very bitter. And it was a Make America Great event la lettre. It was the Trump wave four years ago. And you could just see that anger and rage then. And it was really sort of shocking to me how angry and alienated people were and how their view of the constitution or constitutional culture was such that basically the Constitution guaranteed that they get theirs. And if they're not getting theirs, then something is profoundly wrong. And that was something I think that we have seen come to fruition since the year since then.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “The environment of change. One of the things that happened was one of the reasons we were doing it. There was a lot of talk at that time. This was around the 2012 election about constitutional conservatism and how we needed to get back to the Constitution. And that was a tea party rally. And we went to AT Party rally, Tea Party Express up in Appleton, Wisconsin. And I think I can say the distance of time, it was like the ugliest political event I've ever been to. It was a bunch of angry, generally older, exclusively white people who were furious because they felt that their country had been taken away from them by, well, your former client among them”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Ted Olson and David Boyce. We met their clients in the Prop A case in California. We met people who were working for a guy named Steve D'Angelo, who was a cannabis activist. We met people who were involved in all kinds of interesting fights, gun activists and property rights activists. And it was just a fascinating and amazing time and really sort of, I found it as educational, perhaps more so than I think the viewers did. I had always been vaguely interested and have become sort of a constitutional law fan.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I know. Yeah, I did a documentary. This actually was a tremendously exciting and fun thing for me. I was approached by a guy named Steve Ives, who would work with Ken Burns, one of his sort of crew. He wanted to do a documentary about the Constitution for PBS. And the notion was most people think of civics in its boring, its boxes connected by arrows, judiciary, and executive and legislative, its pictures of old men, or rather antique men and wigs and tights handing each other documents and parchment. And they wanted to do something that was contemporary about like the Constitution today. So they put me on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and I rode around the country, and I talked to people who were engaged in current constitutional disputes, including some of the”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “No, no, no, no. But she is, yeah, she's not the person you want to be talking about. Let me just say this, given what she said about other gentlemen who she had encountered who were well known to me at that private dinner, her recent comments about involving quite quite.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “No, I looked that up and we had our dinner seven months before she encountered Donald Trump in Lake Tahoe. But when the news came out that Donald Trump had paid a particular adult film star not to speak about their encounter and that her name was Stormy Daniels, born Stephanie Clifford, I said to myself, this is going to be good. And it totally has.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I'm spelling it the traditional way, so it's all right. And she was, and I said this at the time, amazing. She was the funniest, smartest, most engaging storyteller. She had the table in just in stitches because she was so great. And she talked about her upbringing in Louisiana and how she was poor. And she says homely, and she decided she was going to get out of there and get rich. And she decided she was going to do it this way and how she was in control of her career. And she told us stories. And she was amazing. She told me a lot of stories that I couldn't repeat in the book about various men she had encountered. And I was wondering.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “It was One, I met, I wanted to write about the pornography industry, and I met a woman named Carly Milne, who was a publicist in that world. And she said, oh, Peter, this will be great for your book. I'm coming through Chicago with a tour of some women who've contributed to my book. Why don't you have dinner with me and some of these women, these women who are performers in the industry? And I said, great. So I sat down there with Nina Hartley, who's quite well known. Another woman named Shane, who was quite well known, and a third woman who I had never heard of, but I was told was an up-and-coming person in the industry, and her name, of course, was Stormy Daniels. So I got to have dinner with some up-and-coming.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Oh, yeah. When we do our show normally in our theater, we always meet anybody who wants to come up and say hello to us afterwards. Sometimes we'll hang out for as much as an hour. And people just constantly tell me, thank you because, man, your show helps me get through the week or through the day. Sometimes it used to be when people told me that, oh, it's because they're going through a hard time personally, maybe a divorce, maybe a job loss. Now it's they're getting through a hard time just reading the news. And they find our show to be a brief respite. And that's what we can do.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So, I think it's really important for all of us to realize we're not changing anybody's mind. What our job is is to make people feel better for however long we have their attention.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And these coal miners keep getting up, and they keep saying things like, Well, Mr. President, we need this, and yet you're taking it away. And then Alec Baldwin would say something funny and say, yeah, but we need healthcare and your policies are... And it was interesting because it was so obvious that Saturn Night Live had realized that if Trump was watching, maybe they can convince him to do something. And that's death to comedy. If you think that you can have a real world, I mean, whatever that sketch was, it wasn't funny.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Yes, I think about that a lot. In fact, probably too much for my own good. A lot of people have talked about the role that humor and satire has played in our current moment, if we have any role, if we do any good. And I believe that in terms of actual political change or even changing of minds, we don't do any good. And I think it's the worst thing in the world to imagine that we do. Because if we start thinking that way, then we're going to sacrifice our primary mission, which is to be funny. There was this thing that happened that stuck in my mind on Saturday Night Live last year after it became clear that our dear president was watching and sort of hate watching Saturday Night Live. And they opened one night with a sketch in which Alec, help me out. You know, him, the guy who plays Trump on, you know, he's famous is part of a family of famous actors. Thank you, Alec Baldwin. He's doing Trump. And in the sketch, he's addressing a bunch of coal miners.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “That's helpful. Yeah. We did a show, we don't do live radio. And a few times I've done live radio, I found out why we don't do live radio. It's scary.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “But I couldn't figure out who that one person was and if they were happy and what if they weren't and how do I get them back. I just, I was a wreck. Put me in front of an audience who might laugh or not. And then I'm comfortable. Then I'm like, okay, I can deal with that, both in terms of getting reinforcement, in terms of, yes, this is working, and also guidance like, no, this is not working. Stop, do something else.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “I do. I mean, I was a theater kid and felt most at home doing live theater in front of an audience. And when I first started doing radio, I didn't know how to do it. I mean, who are you talking to? How do you know if they like it? Ira Glass used to gave me some very standard advice. Ira was at that time doing his show in Chicago and he said, what you do is instead of thinking about the hundreds of thousands or millions of people, God forbid, who might be listening to you, just speak to one person. When you think about it, it makes sense. People who are listening to this presumably are by themselves in their car or wherever.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “20 to however long bit of written produced comedy. And it's amazing. We don't have the resources and we wouldn't be able to compete if we did. Those guys are really, really good. What we do is we provide something different, which is an actual spontaneous event. I mean, the reason it sounds live is because it really is. And when we edit the show, we edit to favor those moments, the stuff that nobody expected. So when you hear me cracking up at something somebody said, it's totally genuine. I had no idea they were going to say it.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “We have a lot of editorial options, but we try to edit the show to capture the spontaneity because one of the things I think about a lot is if you watch the other people who do what we do as part of the satirical industrial complex, people like, say, Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert or any of these people, they have an or John Oliver may be the best example right now. Team of writers. They have a team of designers.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “We broadcast about 54 minutes, and we usually record a minimum of 90, sometimes as often as two hours. Depends. If Paul is in the show, two hours. It's just how it is.”

    2018-09-24 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 271 — Peter Sagal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source