YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Sagal

lines on the record
104
first
2018-09-24
most recent
2018-09-24
sittings or episodes
1
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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. “Oh my god And then we finally come up with a script where we've got jokes we think we like and got subjects we think we like. And then we go into front of a live audience, usually downtown Chicago. Sometimes it places as surprising as Tanglewood or Carnegie Hall as we all in December. The Greek theater in LA next week, and we just throw it at the panelists and see what happens. And usually, almost inevitably, all the stuff we've prepared gets immediately thrown out because Paula Poundstone or Alonso Boden or somebody has a much better idea. And we go with that.”

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

  2. “We all do it together, so it's a staff depending on where we are at any given moment, it's five or six people. We're all doing it together. I'm one of that group. And then we redo it and redo it. We rehearse it on Thursday with Bill Curtis. We try everything.”

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

  3. “You've ever done comedy or been in a writer's room, you know that all the initial stuff gets thrown out and you start elaborating and choosing and changing. And a lot of times you have to do something. How many writers?”

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

  4. “Researching and writing and pitching stories to others. Oh, there's this goofy story, or there's that goofy story we can make fun of this, or we can make fun of that. My job has evolved to be the guy who's sort of taking the point on the major news stories. So I'm the guy who's saying, okay, what are we going to say about, oh, back in the old days, you know, the State of the Union or the election coming up or some candidate and trying to figure out what we're going to do at the top of the show. But we all do this together. We pitch stories to each other. We start writing on Wednesday. We start writing jokes. I will write every week like a full page of Donald Trump jokes”

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

  5. “The way I like to put it is we prepare all week to be unprepared. So we have a staff, including your friend and mine, Lily and King, as well as some other very talented producers and writers. And we spend all week.”

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

  6. “Moved to Chicago from New York at the time. My then wife and I had just had our first child who's now a junior at the University of Chicago. And we, she, I should say, really didn't want to raise a child in New York City because, as you know, what happened to children raise in New York City? They moved to Chicago. Exactly. Why not get a jump on it and get out there quickly?”

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

  7. “In a desperation move, Berman and the other producers said, Well, the Segel guy, he seems hosty. They called me up and they said, How'd you like trying to be the host of the show? And I said, Sure. And that was 20 years ago. And here we are”

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

  8. “And so the show went on the air, and it wasn't doing well. And public radio is a very conservative culture. And I mean that, of course, not so much politically as kind of surprise people. Yeah, I know, I know. You'd be surprised. But they don't like change public radio. It's why Garrison Keeler did his show for 40 years. It's why Kartalk continued after one of its hosts died. It's just not a culture that likes change and all of a sudden we showed up. We displaced other shows people liked. People were very, very unhappy with us. And so things were not going well.”

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

  9. “The show was invented, it was a corporate product by NPR in the early to mid nineties. They felt they needed something for people to listen to on the weekends that wasn't a news program, but that would appeal to people who liked news programs, because people like that, people like us, people like me are the primary listeners to public radio. Give us something that we can enjoy in the weekends. And they said, okay, I bought a news quiz. And they brought in Doug Berman, who had produced CarTalk, the most successful poem, Public Radio, and they cast a wide net for interesting panelists, and they somehow found me. At that time living as a playwright in Brooklyn. And I auditioned and was a cast, if you will, as a panelist. And the show went on the air. It was originally based here in Chicago. Who was the host? A gentleman named Dan Coffee, who was a perfect resume for the job. He had been a part of a sketch comedy group. He had been on public radio. He was a funny, charming guy, but it didn't work. It was not a successful match.”

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

  10. “Absolutely. Manipulation. And one of the things, of course, that's happened is not just that technology has been You no longer have to mimeograph stuff and post it to telephone polls anymore. Now you can put it on blog and everybody will see it or on Facebook. But not only that, it's also been monetized because the John Burr Society for all their success never made a lot of money. They never figured out how to make a living from promulgating their lives. But it turns out that it's a successful business model. And that, I think, is as much as a root of our problems as any other part of psychology.”

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

  11. “Absolutely. To Hitler, exactly. And what all of those people do is they believe that they're not being evil, they're just taking a necessary step to prevent a greater evil from having its way. And what's weird is to see, to make it contemporary, is to see that kind of weird expression of weakness being adopted by the most powerful human being on the planet. But that's beyond my ability. I didn't take anything. What do you think the impact?”

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

  12. “Not just Holocaust Oh, yeah. It's like I'm a hipster. Oh, yes, I was into that before it was cool. What's interesting about that is Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theory, like many other conspiracy theory. And it has certain things in common. How conspiracy theories work? What psychological benefit they provide to people who are promulgating them? I could go on about this, but very briefly, it's a way, if you feel weak, if you feel powerless, if you feel beset by forces you don't understand, it's a way of turning the tables, of making yourself instead of the helpless victim of forces you don't like, modernization, the Jews, whoever, climate scientists, it's a way of turning the tables and making yourself the powerful one because you're the one who perceives the truth. And that, I think, is something...”

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

  13. “Engineering that everybody wanted to do computers had to take. And he wrote this book explaining why the Holocaust didn't happen after he got tenure. And Northwestern couldn't get rid of him because of academic freedom. And so for many, many years, people would go and take his class knowing who he was and know what he did. But he knew that the second he mentioned anything about this in class, he'd be fired. So he was this weird presence. Every now and then a president or academic at Northwestern would condemn him, but they couldn't do anything about him. And that whole particular saga came when he, the person on whom I had based my central character, actually saw the play when it was produced here in Chicago. And he blogged about it. And that was weird.”

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

  14. “But if you start saying that this extraordinarily horrible thing that happened to us didn't happen, we will get very, very angry. And I just started wondering why would that be? I mean, if you want to assault and insult black people, you don't go on about how slavery didn't happen. It's ridiculous. You say other things. And same with any other ethnic group you want to slander or hurt. But with Jews, we just hold this historical event so central to our identity. Why do they hurt us so much? Why do they, the anti-Semites, Nazi sympathizers, know that that's how to get us? And I really became interested in that. And so I wrote a play about one. I had to research more than was good for my mental health, these people who actually do it, including a guy who is a fairly notorious figure here in Chicago, a professor at Northwestern, whose name I won't mention, who wrote a book called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, taught at Northwestern for many, many years. A required course in electrical”

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

  15. “What inspired you? Well, like a lot of things, it was a series of events. One of them was reading a news story about an African-American lawyer who had a civil rights lawyer who had defended a Klansman against some unfair charges, which he did in the course of his day. Another was the movie Schindler's list had just come out. This was early 90s. And I was really struck by how, and maybe you'll understand this as well from your background, how central the Holocaust was to modern Jewish self-worth in a weird way. Because one of the things that I noted at the time was that we Jews, as we've already evidenced, can blithly laugh off most anti-Semitic smears, right? You know, like, oh, yes, yeah, we run the world. Have you been, we're having a bake sale for the World Jewish Conspiracy? I mean, we just like, fine, whatever.”

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

  16. “And I kind of absorb that, but nonetheless, when I was sitting around waiting for Hollywood Stardom to somehow find me, I decided I'd do something I enjoyed and what do I enjoy? So I wrote to some theaters and got a job and ended up working at a theater in downtown LA called the Los Angeles Theater Center where because they were poorly managed, they gave somebody like me who had no experience in qualifications a lot of responsibility to find new play. So I met all these playwrights. Donald Margalis, Tony Kushner, who went on, of course, to be justly famous, Paula Vogel. And I became inspired to try it myself. And I started writing serious plays and ended up quitting my job to do that and won some fellowships and ended up getting some productions, including at the Longwarf Theater in Connecticut and various commissions and was actually doing okay.”

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

  17. “You had some critical success. I did. Well, what happened was I had always been involved in the theater, but I never assumed this. I had sort of absorbed this from my parents, that you can't make a living in the theater. What kind of job is that for a nice Jewish boy”

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

  18. “That's what I got. And then the guy back, like a small box of chocolate, and then the guy drove away. Actually, I have a chair to this day that I won on Jeopardy that I've kept with me all those years.”

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

  19. “I remember one day I was walking down the street and an 18 wheeler pulled up. This is two weeks later. And the guy said, are you Peter Segel? And I said, yes. And he said, I have something for you. And he pulled over the 18 wheeler, walked into the back, opened up the refrigerated compartment, reached in and gave me a box of chocolate.”

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

  20. “But I did get a lot of stuff. This was back in the era where they gave you lots of door prizes going away prizes. And so I got all kinds of things.”

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

  21. “And I was accepted, and I went on jeopardy in 1988. And I remember, you know, you do these interviews and then Alex Trebeck uses these interviews. And he said to me, well, Peter Sagel, so I understand you're a writer. And I said, Yes, that was my ambition. And he said, well, that's pretty hard. How are you doing? And I looked at him and I said, because basically I was doing terribly. I had achieved nothing, had met nobody, had made no money. And so I said, well, I appearing on jeopardy. At that point, my score was minus $200. And he said, you know, that little thing in the front should be a plus sign. And I said, thanks, thanks a lot. And that was my interaction with Alex Tracker.”

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

  22. “The Jeopardy So the Jeopardy thing happened because I decided, long story, that I was going to go out to LA after college. This was just when a lot of Harvard people were heading out to LA to sort of write TV. This was the start of that wave. And a lot of those people who went out that time ended up doing things like creating shows like News Radio and Creating The Simpsons, which Connor O'Brien wrote for. And I decided to be part of that wave. And so it didn't work out for me so fantastically well as it did for Mr. O'Brien and many others. But I did run into somebody who'd been on Jeopardy and said, you should try out for this. And I tried out for Jeopardy.”

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

  23. “You'd And I said something to that guy. I said, you don't understand that man is an asshole. He's not going to find this funny. And the guy said, don't worry, don't worry. It's a prank. We'll give it back to him. And they did. And we had to deal with Bert Ward being very upset. But he eventually played along with a prank.”

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

  24. “Yes, a security guard leapt up And said, no, actually, no, I believe it was Conan O'Brien himself, leapt up in the audience and said, Riddle me this, Robin. When is a security guard not a security guard? At which point the two security guards who nobody had arranged for it grabbed... Costume and ran out And I chased them. And I did something that I have never done before and have never had occasion to do since that day is I tackled him like a really good open field tackle brought him down while his... Accomplice ran on. I got the wrong guy. His accomplice ran off. Shouldn't”

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

  25. “Yeah, yeah. And he actually, for all his personal flaws, did a great presentation. And one of the things he displayed was the original or one of the original Robin costumes. And he had it on a mannequin. During his presentation.”

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

  26. “We were doing this. He did this public presentation to the students at Harvard. And the students at Harvard were actually very excited about this because Harvard was somewhat stuffy and the people we got were like Nobel Prize winners and so on and so forth and nobody got anybody who the students would actually want to hear from.”

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

  27. “And did something so toxic in there that nobody could enter the bathroom for a good. I can tell this now. Nobody here knows Bert Ward. So it was an interesting thing. And then, of course, it all came together because”

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

  28. “And he said, Where are they? And we said, Where are who, Mr Ward? And he said, where's the press? I was told there'd be press meeting me at the plane. And he immediately got on a phone, a payphone. This was way back in the prehistoric era, and called his publicist and proceeded to shout at that person for a good 10 minutes about the fact that there was no press. And so Bert Ward. I guess I can say this now. It's been a long time. Was a real jerk. Yeah, he was not a pleasant guy. He also visited our room in Pennypacker, went into the bathroom.”

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

  29. “Well, Robin, I think, has had a sort of reward, though. Pretty much had one job. And Bert Ward came out, and so our invitation arrived, and he was like, yes, this is going to be the key to my comeback. And I have very specific memories of Britt Ward's visit. One of them was getting off the plane. We were like these Harvard undergraduates. We'd put on our little blazers and ties, and we were standing there waiting to meet Mr. Ward. And he cut off the plan and he looked around.”

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

  30. “Yes, I know. Eventually I got to interview him on my show, so everything comes around. But Bert Ward, it turns out, was at that time deciding after however many years it was time for his comeback. He was going to How”

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

  31. “Oh, God. Wack Pow. Zap. He played Robin. And the thing I don't understand is why didn't we think we were worthy enough to get Adam West? But no, we went right for Robin.”

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

  32. “He is. He is extraordinary. Yeah, he's hard to get him on the phone these days. And we decided that we would try to get some vengeance or at least some recompense out of this humiliation of being put out in these, you know. Satellite housing by trying to take advantage of Harvard's name, and we decided that we would use Harvard's name to invite somebody we wanted to meet. So we invented Name of the dilapidated department building was Penny Packer Hall, so we'd called ourselves the Penny Packer Speakers Bureau and invited what's weird about this is who we chose to invite”

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

  33. “And we were so bitter that we decided to do something about it. And when I say we, I mean. Myself and my then roommate, and continues to be my closest friend Jess Braven, who was made a name for himself as the Supreme Court reporter for the Wall Street Journal.”

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

  34. “Invisible I would. And traditionally, the freshmen, however, get to live there, so they get to sort of immerse themselves in this centuries-old academic glory. But there are too many freshmen. So some of us get stuck out in what were called at that time the union dorms, which were these horrible old apartment buildings that were bought for like overflow. It was like the Harvard equivalent of refugee housing. It wasn't good.”

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

  35. “You have done your research. Yes, this was very strange. So Harvard, as most people think of, is this beautiful Harvard Yard with its ivy-covered buildings covered with ivy and history.”

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

  36. “He might have, in fact, been the guy who maybe this my entire career is a weird kind of vengeance on Conan O'Brien, although I think if it's more a vengeance on Alex Strab after I lost on Jeopardy.”

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

  37. “Yeah, it was a little, I gotta tell you, it may be a little emotional. Yeah, it was very painful because that's what I was going to do. One of the things that I am familiar with is a lot of my peers in my business grew up watching David Letterman or stand-ups. I didn't. My thing was the comedy writers. I worshipped Henry Beard and Doug Kenny, who had been part of the Harvard Lampoon and founded the National Lampoon. I worshipped people like Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman and all the great... Comedy writers, and that's what I thought I was going to be, and I thought I was going to go to the Harvard Lampoon and I was going to do that with them as part of that tradition And they had other ideas.”

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

  38. “You submit Harvard has its weird traditions, and one of them is called a comp. Most universities, most normal universities, if you would like to do something, you can go do it. They appreciate your enthusiasm. At Harvard Oh, no, it wasn't enough to compete to get in. You have to compete to do the extracurricular activity. So Harvard lampoons, so with many other things, you have to audition. You have to write material and go through a series of judgments. And I was found wanting. So there's painful.”

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

  39. “Weirdly, yes, but my main thing was I was intent on becoming, I guess I can confess this now, it's been long enough. My intent was to be part of the Harvard lampoon.”

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

  40. “Absolutely. I mean, because, like I said, it was clear what you were supposed to do. You just memorize what you're supposed to say. And if you say them with the appropriate emphasis and emotional commitment, people will enjoy it.”

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

  41. “Yeah, I sort of recently figured this out. At a certain point, I'm sure you'll stop relating, but I was a socially awkward kid. I didn't know how to sort of manage just people around me. I don't know why exactly. But I found, like, a lot of kids in my situation that theater was a way of managing that because theater was a way of being in front of people with instructions.”

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

  42. “Exactly. I mean, we all want to hedge our bets, I think. But it is strangely true that we can eschew the religious ceremony and yet still profoundly identify as Jews.”

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

  43. “Oh my God. This is something that I find that non-Jews don't understand in that you say to the people, well, I'm Jewish. They said, well, do you go to synagogue? Well, no.”

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

  44. “I was brought up to believe that I was supposed to do that, and it is a great shame to me that I did not manage to rebel and did what she wanted, but I was an obedient child.”

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

  45. “That is an embarrassing story. It was more that my mother who grew up in Cambridge, her father, my grandfather, that's the other side of the family, had a grocery store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the evergood market for those of you who may have shopped in that section of Cambridge. And if I'm not mistaken, I might have discussed this briefly once, and the one time I met him in person with your former boss, Mr. Obama, because he was a Harvard Law School student. I used to come over and get there snacks from us. He ran that story for 40 years in the Shadow of Harvard, and his daughter, my mother, went to Harvard School of Education, got her master's. And so for her, Hard dream was to have a child who went to Harvard. And so as soon as I evidenced some mental acuity at the age of four, I would pick my nose but not eat it. It was like that level. She decided that this one was going to go Harvard.”

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

  46. “Yes, and then there's this little Maddie sagel with his horn rimmed glasses and his hair remaining at that time. So I wonder how that worked out for him. But he still has a certain loyalty to Texas. He's a nice man.”

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

  47. “Highland Park is where among many other people George W. Bush lives now. It was the suburb of Dallas that was populated by By the oilmen and their attractive wives and even more attractive children. So if you look at the, and I have the high school yearbook for my father, Highland Park Hide, has all these tall, mostly blonde, mostly perfect oilmen's kids, cheerleaders, the football players. I think they were all cheerleaders.”

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

  48. “Exactly. Exactly. We don't work here no more. My father's generation were like, how the hell do we get out of Greenpoint? And now all these hipsters are trying to get into Greenpoint. He can't get over it. At any rate. And his mother remarried, Mark Segel, and he immediately transported them to Highland Park.”

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

  49. “And so I write about this in my book, which I just can't get over how strange this must have been. My grandfather was growing up in Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, which to this day my father cannot believe people want to live there. I took him there once.”

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

  50. “Yeah. So my father was adopted by another nice Jewish man named Mark Sagel, who married my grandmother, adopted him, changed his name to Sagel, and raised him in a fairly unusual way for Jewish people of that generation because he, my adopted paternal grandfather, was an engineer and managed to get an engineering degree from Cornell in the 20s, which wasn't easy, I think, for Jews at that time.”

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