[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the 80s. I’m Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: I am Jessica, and Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City.

[00:27] Meg: Where we still live and where we are now, podcasting about New York City in the 80s. I focus on ripped from the headlines.

[00:34] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:36] Meg: And before we get started, Jessica, I’ve got a few little updates.

[00:40] Jessica: I'm excited.

[00:41] Meg: I thought you would enjoy the fact that I was talking to Alice, my daughter, about celebrity kids, wondering if they had changed at all in the last generation. And she mentioned something called nepo aesthetic.

[00:57] Jessica: Oh, my God, this sounds so navelgazing. I love it already. What is it?

[01:02] Meg: Basically, these children of celebrities dress super well because their parents have been given all these wonderful clothes for free, and so they’ve got great style.

[01:14] Jessica: Well, Alice is nepo aesthetic.

[01:16] Meg: Is she? She's not a daughter of a celebrity.

[01:18] Jessica: Yeah, but didn't she benefit from the Sandra Dorfman Upper East Side collection? Meg: It's a little different.

Jessica: Okay. I feel like we're very famous. We're well known on York Avenue. The Dorfmans of York Avenue, you say?

[01:39] Meg: And yes, I have another update that my friend from Fleming sent me, who did a bit of a deep dive on gangs in the 80s in New York and came up with a website that described the 84th Street Bombers of Yorkville. They were actually called the 84th Street Bombers.

[02:02] Jessica: You don't say.

[02:03] Meg: Yeah. Mid 70s to mid 80s Yorkville section were a mixed race crew of Irish, German, Hungarian, Italian and Puerto Ricans turf. Ran from 83rd street to 85th street on both First and Second Avenues. Frequented Fresca's Pizzeria on 83rd and First. Enzo's Pizzeria on 85th and Second, the Minstral Boy Pub on 85th street. Brady's Pub on 82nd street, and the Clan Den Pub on 86th street. Colors were black and yellow, and they had sweatshirts and football jerseys with their name on the chest. Club dissolved over a two or so year period between 1983 and 1985, where two homicides were committed by two different corps members around the same time, and several of the other corps members joined the military.

[02:59] Jessica: Oh, my God. Please tell me the names.

[03:02] Meg: I don't know them. After the loss of approximately nine main members to both the military and prison, the few remaining members simply disbanded.

[03:11] Jessica: Good God.

[03:12] Meg: Isn't that wild?

[03:13] Jessica: That is wild.

[03:14] Meg: We're just learning more and more. Someday we're going to be able to interview an actual member.

[03:18] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[03:19] Meg: All right, are you ready?

[03:22] Jessica: You're ready? With that evil voice and grin?

[03:26] Meg: This is a crazy, crazy story I'm about to tell you.

[03:29] Jessica: All right.

[03:32] Meg: So, Jessica, on occasion, we have referenced Glee Club, and I am going to ask you… your engagement question is, why did we at Nightingale-Bamford, call Glee Club. Glee Cult.

[03:46] Jessica: Because we had a Miss Jean Brodie type as our coral conductor. I know you get upset when I name names. Should I refrain?

[03:59] Meg: Probably, yeah.

[04:01] Jessica: Okay, Mrs. R. How's that? Yeah. She was wildly charismatic and also scary. And we did anything she told us to, partly because she was a Miss Jean Brodie and partly because Glee Club counted towards college, like, extracurricular credits.

[04:27] Meg: But it was an intense experience.

[04:29] Jessica: It was insane. She had us rehearsing, like, five days a week and was really invested in these competitions that she put us in. I remember she had her mother write an original song. Her mother is like, a famous composer and had her write a song. And we were all terrified that we were going to fuck it up. Yeah, I remember vividly why it was glee cult. Well, can you tell? I'm scarred.

[04:58] Meg: My sources for this story are the East Hampton Star magazine by Spencer Schneider, culteducation.com, New York post articles from this year, and my mother.

[05:15] Jessica: Okay, I'm ready. Very excited.

[05:18] Meg: On January 22, 2021, Sharon Gans died from COVID at the age of 85 in her $8 million apartment in the Plaza Hotel. She grew up in the Bronx, starred in the 1972 film version of Slaughterhouse Five, produced the award winning documentary Artists and Orphans: A True Drama, and was the charismatic and abusive leader of the New York City based cult, The Odyssey Study Group.

[05:49] Jessica: Okay.

[05:50] Meg: At the time of her death, The Odyssey Study Group was raking in $1.2 million a year from member fees alone, and that was in cash.

[05:59] Jessica: Is this study group or steady group?

[06:02] Meg: Study.

[06:03] Jessica: Study. Okay.

[06:04] Meg: Remember Hari Krishna's in the airport?

[06:06] Jessica: Of course.

[06:07] Meg: And the Dianetics people in the subway asking if you want to take a stress test? Do you remember that stuff?

[06:12] Jessica: Yes.

[06:13] Meg: Okay. Well, OSG recruits their members differently. According to Spencer Schneider, who was in the cult for 23 years, the wealthy professionals who are targeted are carefully chosen and gradually indoctrinated and ultimately sworn to secrecy. In 1989, Spencer was a 29 year old corporate lawyer working on Park Avenue. His father had recently passed away. He was watching his friends get married and have children, and he was working 60 hours weeks. He was in a quarter life crisis. He played in a blues band, occasionally, in a dive bar in Tribeca, and became friendly with Malcolm the bartender. Malcolm, an Ivy League graduate, took Spencer for drinks at Pete's Tavern and told him he was a member of a, quote, esoteric school, which met a couple nights a week and had changed his life. Spencer was skeptical, but Malcolm insisted that while it was unusual, the group was filled with wonderful teachers and people who, like Spencer, were interested in ideas and philosophy and community. The first month was free, and after that it was only $300 a month. Spencer decided to check it out, mostly because he liked Malcolm and was eager for a community. The organization was shrouded in secrecy. Malcolm wouldn't even tell him the address of the meeting. He insisted on escorting him to the studio on Broadway and Franklin above a wholesale fabric store. Can you picture it?

Jessica: vividly?

Meg: There were 40 people in the loft that night, all looking very much like himself. And Sharon Gans, then in her 50s, with bright orange red hair, began to teach a class on the Fourth Way, which is a tradition defined by the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, an Armenian Russian guru and written about by Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky.

[08:27] Jessica: This is every flag red and otherwise flying.

[08:32] Meg: So Gurdjieff's basic teaching is that people live in a waking sleep, and that transcendence from the sleeping state requires a specific inner work.

[08:42] Jessica: Which includes paying Sharon.

[08:47] Meg: $300 just for starters.

[08:50] Jessica: Yes. Okay.

[08:51] Meg: Over the next few months, a guy named David called Spencer every day at work, at home, wherever he was on vacation. David never told Spencer anything about himself, not even his last name. But Spencer unloaded everything onto David. He told David his fears, his insecurities, his triumphs, the whole deal. And Spencer came to really rely on David emotionally. But Spencer didn't know that David was sharing all these confidences with Sharon. Spencer also didn't know that Sharon had fled San Francisco in 1979 after members of their theater group, the Theater of All Possibilities accused Sharon and her playwright husband, Alex Horn, of verbal and sexual abuse, beatings and fraud. According to the Cult Education Institute, the Theater of All Possibilities held classes, recruited heavily, and used the group as a vehicle for producing Alex Horn's plays, which often starred Ms. Gans. Members provided free labor and were convinced to do so was a privilege. The Horn students worked on productions, acted in them, sold tickets on the streets, built sets, prepared and served dinners, and provided whatever they could. According to some members, Alex Horn abused his students both physically and verbally, and Sharon Gans was known to berate members to keep them in line.

[10:26] Jessica: These people exhaust me.

[10:28] Meg: Right? I mean, the interesting thing is, having belonged to a number of theater organizations and going to theater grad school.

[10:40] Jessica: No.

[10:41] Meg: It's not far off.

[10:43] Jessica: But isn't that the treachery of the arts… that you're forced to become vulnerable, right, for your art?

[10:51] Meg: And then these people yeah, but they did add this extra layer of paying and also this idea of inner work.

[11:01] Jessica: Yes.

[11:02] Meg: After fleeing the scandals in San Francisco, Sharon and Alex regrouped in New York in 1980. This time they had a very different business model, focusing on ensnaring Manhattan professionals and keeping the organization top secret. So no more artists, no more selling tickets to theater. Now we're going to have classes in studios all around the city. That is, no publicity. Yeah. They even changed the name frequently to avoid being tracked down. Some of the group's many names: The Work, School, Good Omen, Everyman, Hudson Valley Artists Foundation, New York Playwrights Association and Gurdjieff-Ouspensky. Remember that one? OK. Spencer says, quote, we were invisible. We had to be. We took an oath of absolute secrecy. We never even told our immediate families who we were. We were your accountants, money managers, lawyers, executive recruiters, doctors. We owned your child's private school and sold you your brownstone. But you'd never guess our secret lives, how we lived in a kind of silent terror and fervor. There were hundreds of us. They met twice a week and attended retreats, but never acknowledged fellow members outside of those meetings. The classes and retreats added up to a minimum of $13,000 a year per member. Also, once you achieved a certain rank, what do you think you were expected to do?

[12:48] Jessica: Recruit. Yeah.

[12:50] Meg: Which can take up to 20 hours a week. So much for seeing any family and friends. So now you're isolated.

[12:57] Jessica: I'm just going to say that's the next step in the cult. Isolate.

[13:02] Meg: The ideal recruit was a professional with influence and money. But immediately disqualified as candidates, were black people, gay people (unless they were willing to convert) journalists or anyone with a close connection to law enforcement, the military, or intelligence services.

[13:24] Jessica: I'm actually speechless. I need a minute to process that. It's both practical and incredibly socially horrifying. But practical. I mean, the police?

[13:39] Meg: Yes, the police and the military and intelligence services and the journalists. Yeah. The black people and the gay people… she just is a horrible person.

[13:48] Jessica: She's just an asshole. That's a plain and simple yes.

[13:51] Meg: What do you think many New Yorkers would say is their most valued asset?

[13:58] Jessica: Time and… valued asset… connections. And something else… strength. Our fortitude.

[14:09] Meg: Real estate. Everything that you mentioned is incredibly valuable, but also because we are in a very confined area, literally, there's nowhere to go but up.

[14:21] Jessica: Yes.

[14:22] Meg: And real estate is very valued in this city in particular, and interesting, also in San Francisco. But anyway, Sharon made millions by flipping properties in the city and upstate, using members as unpaid labor. Members were indoctrinated to believe that one of the best ways to evolve was to engage in hard physical labor for the benefit of school. And according to the Post, Sharon was extremely controlling in her students personal lives, especially about sex and children. She ordered one married man to find a young girl to jog with and get oral sex. I couldn't picture it.

[15:13] Jessica: That would have been great look on going around the reservoir.

[15:21] Meg: And instructed a married family woman to go to Italy, stand at the fountain, wait for a man, have an affair. So she was arranging the marriages and then arranging the breakups. She ordered women to give their babies to other members to raise.

[15:39] Jessica: What, and these lunatics did it?

[15:44] Meg: Yeah. And to me, this sounds like she kind of… obviously she gets off on manipulating people, but also she's trying to weaken the relationships and family bonds.

[15:54] Jessica: So it's all part of the isolation.

[15:56] Meg: So that she's the only person that they trust. Yeah, we don't want a happily married couple. We want a couple that doesn't trust each other.

[16:06] Jessica: And people who are raising a child don't have time for this nonsense.

[16:10] Meg: Often in cults, the leaders try to redefine morality and ethics. So you no longer trust in your gut. So, yeah, those red flags, like you no longer have any red flags.

[16:24] Jessica: Moral relativism.

[16:27] Meg: And remember, the initial philosophy was about everyone being asleep. In other words, everyone is blind to what's actually happening. So she's going to tell you what is actually happening.

[16:41] Jessica: She's Neo. Actually she's Laurence Fishburne. But whatever. Go ahead.

[16:46] Meg: Right. And so now your head is just all turned around and you don't trust your instincts, and you follow the often very arbitrary edicts of this one person. In 1989, psychiatrist Louis, probably. Louis West or Louis West.

[17:02] Jessica: L-O-U-I-S.

[17:03] Meg: Yes.

[17:04] Jessica: Let's say Louis.

[17:05] Meg: Yeah. And Michael Langone.

[17:07] Jessica: As in Langone, I assume. Interesting.

[17:11] Meg: Defined a cult as, quote. I think it's interesting that that's when they define cults, “a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.” Interesting, right?

[17:42] Jessica: Yeah. I mean, sounds spot on to me.

[17:44] Meg: Right. According to culteucation.com, Gans’ group is brilliant at the three D’s of cultic manipulation: Deception, by recruiting under the false pretense of enlightenment, Dependency, by isolating, guilting, and punishing members and denigrating critical thinking, members become dependent on compliance oriented expressions of love and support. I thought that one was very interesting. And the last D, Dread of being abandoned by the group if you fuck up. Spencer said he witnessed countless incidents of members being brutally berated only to be love bombed when they were at their weakest. What finally pushed Spencer to break from the group? A fairly innocuous incident. “It was a common event, Sharon treating a woman like dirt. This time it was Connie, one of the kindest people I knew. During class one evening, Sharon lashed out at Connie for no apparent reason, and it continued for hours. Then my classmates piled on, insulting and degrading this fine woman, who was reduced to tears and begged in vain for forgiveness. I sat there in the front row with my arms crossed and a frown on my face. Sharon saw me and said that I needed to snap out of my negativity. I never came back to class again. And although Sharon Gans passed away last year, The Odyssey Study Group, undoubtedly under a fresh moniker, is still thriving under new leadership. Now, you may ask why my mother is a source for this story.

[19:30] Jessica: Was she recruited?

[19:31] Meg: Okay. While I was doing the research for this, I kept having this sort of nagging feeling, like it sounded kind of familiar. I don't know why, honestly. It was just like this weird feeling. And so I texted my mom last night. We lived in Greece for a year in 1980. We lived in Greece. And we rented out our townhouse to this couple from Texas. And the couple from Texas asked before they moved in, they were going to be there for a whole year. They asked if they could bring their man servant. And they're maid. And we were like… sorry, not me. I was a child. My parents were like, sure, whatever you want, couple from Texas. And my Aunt Laura would come and drop in once a month just to see how things were going. But they would never let her into the house. Now, Henriette Klein lived across the street from us, and she could see into the windows, and she saw these naked men dancing. And she sent word, I think there's more than just, like, this Texas couple. And they're like, man, something weird is going on. When we got back, my mother said everything was perfectly in place. It was like we had never left. This is another thing I forgot. She said they asked if they could paint the banister white. The townhouse was built in 1880. The idea that you would paint the.

[21:09] Jessica: Wooden banister white was insane.

[21:12] Meg: Insane. But I think maybe they were just trying to come up with work for these people to do. What can they do? Because it's so important to them that they have hard labor. So obviously my mother said, no, you can't paint the banister. But she comes in. Everything is exactly how we left it. And then she opens up the refrigerator. And there were 15 bottles of salad dressing. And each one had a name of a different person on it. And the toilet seats in the bathrooms had grooves in them. That's how many butts had sat on those toilet seats. Think about that for a second.

[21:50] Jessica: Dear listeners. My jaw is hanging down. I'm frozen. Wait. In one year…

[22:00] Meg: Upstairs and downstairs. And my mother found a business card that said Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Institute and gave our address.

[22:14] Jessica: Oh my God.

[22:16] Meg: We were the center.

[22:18] Jessica: Sharon Gans came to New York in 1980 and lived in your house. That was Sharon and Alex.

[22:28] Meg: We were the center.

[22:29] Jessica: Oh my God. Well, that explains a lot.

[22:37] Meg: How crazy is that?

[22:40] Jessica: I have to know what the salad dressing is about.

[22:43] Meg: There are just so many people there, and I guess they all have their particular taste in salad dressing. I have no idea.

[22:47] Jessica: I was imagining like, 15 identical bottles of Wishbone Italian with people's names on them. I don't know if they were, like, abused.

[22:59] Meg: I don't know if they were different kinds or what the deal was, but clearly it's not just like a couple living in the house.

[23:06] Jessica: Fucking insane. So. Henrietta. Let's go back to Henrietta. She's like, who was it on Bewitched? Who was the next door…

[23:17] Meg: Exactly. Always looking in the window.

[23:20] Jessica: Yeah, like, parting the curtains slowly and one giant, like, telescope coming out through the curtains to look, and she saw people dancing around naked.

[23:30] Meg: Naked men dancing.

[23:32] Jessica: Naked men dancing. Look, you know I love you, and you know I hold you in the highest esteem.

[23:39] Meg: Yes.

[23:39] Jessica: But this story really bumps you guys up a notch.

Meg: On what scale?

Jessica: I'm interested, intrigued, and that much more roped into your lives. I have to talk to your mother about this.

[23:56] Meg: It's so crazy. And what it made me think of is, like, the more that we do these stories, the more we're finding out, we're discovering things about our own childhood, we're uncovering mysteries. Do we want to go further or should we stop?

[24:12] Jessica: I want to know every dirty detail of every nightmare that happens. I want to know it all.

[24:21] Meg: I mean, what on earth?

[24:22] Jessica: Come on. You were the center. Wow. What would your mom do if we snuck in and just put 15 bottles of salad dressing in the fridge? Like Judy, Leonard, Paolo? Think of the pranks that we could start pulling on. I'm sorry, Bebbie. I know you're listening. That's pure comedy.

[24:46] Meg: And also discovering that they recruited professionals. I'm thinking that the real estate agent was a member of this cult.

[24:56] Jessica: Well, that's the thing about cults, isn't it? And I think it's one of the reasons that Scientology also gets people so anxious is they're not in a tent in the middle of a cornfield, like, didddling each other or whatever they do. They walk amongst us and you just don't know.

[25:16] Meg: Well, that's what Spencer is definitely telling us.

[25:18] Jessica: Right? So with the work or whatever they were calling themselves at any given moment, like, if they were so morally blank at that point, what were they really doing in their interactions with whoever?

[25:38] Meg: Sharon definitely seemed to be all about manipulation.

[25:41] Jessica: Sharon was all about Sharon and about…

[25:43] Meg: Twisting other people's heads around, which is…

[25:47] Jessica: The power of Sharon. That's what I'm saying.

[25:50] Meg: Like, of course, and making money.

[25:55] Jessica: Well, everyone needs a hustle. I'm not against her for the hustle. I'm against her for the mind games.

[26:02] Meg: Have you ever been invited to a group?

[26:05] Jessica: Yes. I shared a lot of office spaces throughout the years, and some of them were great, and some were cuckoo bananas. And there was a guy who was a photographer, and he was everything out of central casting of, like, the photographer who thinks he's super cool in New York. His hair was always slicked back, and he was in Italian loafers and jeans and name dropping so hard. He was one of, like, you know the type. Yeah. We had, like, a passing nice relationship because we had to share a space. But I was not his pal, okay? And his name was Tony. And one day he was like, let's have lunch. And I was like, maybe he wants me as a model. No, he wanted me to join Landmark.

[27:00] Meg: Okay. And Landmark is like Scientology or The Secret.

[27:06] Jessica: Yeah. Okay.

[27:08] Meg: And the thing is, yes, I have heard about this. I have LA friends who have run into this.

[27:14] Jessica: I'm on the fence because there are two people in my life, both men, who really feel that their lives were turned around by Landmark. And I've seen the before and after, and it's true, but they were not lifers. They did, like, a year or two and then out. But with that said, that's my caveat to these two people I care about very deeply. I was like, Tony, this is at the table. Tony, I'm never joining your cult. Forget it. Yes, I think I said I'm not a joiner. And that was it. Or so I thought. He tried two more times.

[27:57] Meg: Wow.

[27:58] Jessica: And I was like…

[28:00] Meg: So was he a bad judge of character, because you just would never have done that. Or do you think he had pressure from someone else?

[28:09] Jessica: He had pressure. He had a quota.

[28:11] Meg: Or did he something in you that you don't know about yourself?

[28:13] Jessica: I'm quite sure that he thought he saw something, but he thought wrong, because I was pretty consistent in Tony, Not for me.

[28:23] Meg: Yeah. My resentment of authority figures has kept me kind of clear.

[28:29] Jessica: Well, you do know that that's one of the principal building blocks of our friendship is that we are both highly skeptical of anyone in control.

[28:38] Meg: No one's going to be the boss of me.

[28:40] Jessica: Yeah, you're not the boss of me.

[28:42] Meg: No Cults. No Cults. Last week was No Drugs. This week, No Cults.

[28:47] Jessica: Yes. By the way, these are classic late 70s, early 80s PSA topics. Cults and drugs. Definitely. Do you remember deprogrammers were a huge thing. I mean, talk about an opportunity business. All of these people who are like, I used to be in a cult, and I'm going to get your daughter out of this cult, and I'm going to put her in a place. It was basically the Matthew Broderick plastic bag plan, but… call back. But to get people out of cults and then invariably an unmarked blue van, and they throw some unsuspecting culty kid in the van to take that kid away until their parents are like, come back, Jeff. But that was, like, a thing. That was the thing there were after school specials about. It like the drugs. Like Helen Hunt flying out the window. You know, the PCP after school special.

[29:48] Meg: Helen Hunt jumped out a window.

[29:49] Jessica: Helen Hunt plays a girl who's, like, a really straight laced girl, and her super hot boyfriend is like, here, just try it once. And she delicately sniffs some powder off his pinky and immediately, do pass go. Do not collect your $200 or $100. She goes ranting and raving around the classroom and then flies out through the glass. Like, she doesn't open the window, and she goes straight out and lands in the parking lot. And I think that the character, she didn't even have the good luck to die. I think she was a vegetable. And, like, her younger brother was like, man, I gotta get that boyfriend of hers. And it was a classic. You've never seen this?

[30:41] Meg: It sounds familiar, but no, I don't have a visual.

[30:44] Jessica: I have a feeling, I just have a feeling that this is the part of the podcast where there's going to be a lot of engagement in social media because there's this great video clip and I'm sure it's a GIF whatever of Helen Hunt. And they're shooting from underneath and she's suspended mid air with all of this broken glass around her. And she's wearing bell bottoms and has these big chunky heeled platform boots and is, like, flailing as she goes through the window.

[31:17] Meg: I will look it up. Absolutely.

[31:19] Jessica: I'll send it to you. The moment we're finished with this, we have to look at it.

[31:23] Meg: So, any closing words about Glee Club in this context?

[31:28] Jessica: I actually am really proud that I got kicked out of Glee Club.

Meg: You got kicked out

Jessica: For Insubordination.

[31:34] Meg: Did I know that? You came back?

[31:36] Jessica: I came back because my parents yelled at me. They were like, this is for college. You need an after school activity.

[31:43] Meg: You got kicked out of the cult.

[31:45] Jessica: Yeah. In brief. And if our buddy Sasha is listening, Sasha, this one's for you. So this girl who was kind of a nerd in Glee Club said something that was a malapropism of some kind, and everybody giggled and got over it. And Sasha and I couldn't stop laughing. And we were quaking. Like, you're not supposed to laugh in church. Kind of quaking. We could not stop. We were told, take a breather. Go to the bathroom or something. We went, we're in the stalls next to each other and Mrs. R, and we're like, that bitch That fucking bitch, She's such an asshole I hate her. Blah, blah, blah. And then Sasha goes in for the kill with she's so fat. So she goes on about the size of this woman. And I'm pounding on the wall between the stalls because I can see that Mrs. R is standing in the doorway. And now I'm laughing, trying to compose myself. We walk out of the stalls, start washing our hands, realize she's there, look at each other and absolutely lose it laughing. So then she's like, Come here and talk to me. And we're standing there just shaking in front of her. And she said, I don't think you really want to be in Glee Club, and I don't think that Glee Club really wants you. And that was the day that we left. And Sasha taught me how to smoke on the stoop.

[33:22] Meg: So how did you come back?

[33:24] Jessica: I had to beg her. My parents made me beg.

[33:27] Meg: Did Sasha come back?

[33:28] Jessica: I think her parents got mad at her for the same reason.

[33:32] Meg: I remember we were all… senior year… we were all together.

[33:35] Jessica: We had to write an apology letter and really scrape the bottom of the barrel of our emotional lives. And I know that there are certain people who may be listening to this podcast who went to school with us who think she's top notch.

[33:53] Meg: Yes. She's very adored.

[33:54] Jessica: Well, you're wrong. Oh, wrong again. No, bad lady. Bad.

Meg: I can't leave this in.

Jessica: What are you talking about? Don't you censor me. Don't you take out my honest opinion. No way. This is not mean, girling. This is truth telling. Okay? Power to the people.

[34:24] Meg: I'm sorry. That was such a long segment.

[34:26] Jessica: I loved it.

[34:27] Meg: Okay.

[34:27] Jessica: And I deeply thank you for the opportunity to unload all of that emotion that I had pent up about Glee Club.

[34:37] Meg: Okay. It did set you up for that.

[34:40] Jessica: Yes, you did. So I will be brief, okay. Because I don't want to take a second away from your segment today, but your cousin gave us some suggestions about what he'd like to hear us talk about.

[34:56] Meg: Taylor?

[34:57] Jessica: Yes, Taylor. And he made a suggestion that really resonated with me, but not for the reason you might expect. So here we go.

[35:05] Meg: Okay.

[35:06] Jessica: In the 80s, there were two guys who really embodied the grossness, the oiliness, the nastiness of Wall Street, and their names were okay, that's your engagement question.

[35:24] Meg: Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken?

[35:26] Jessica: Yes. You win a car. So these two ne’er-do-wells are really the model for a lot of what we think of as 80s corruption. Ivan Boesky was convicted of insider trading, for insider trading, and eventually did go to a federal prison that was actually - I was interested to know that the name of it was something Federal Prison Camp. And I was like, not wrong. Not far off, I'm sure.

[36:02] Meg: Didn't he play tennis?

[36:02] Jessica: Yeah, I was just going to say he was playing tennis while he was in the clink. But part of his plea bargain, which got his sentence down to, like, two years from something really huge, was that he had to rat on other Wall Street guys who were in the crosshairs of the ever present, the ever disgusting district attorney named...

[36:32] Meg: Rudolph Giuliani. I'm so good today.

[36:34] Jessica: You're on. You've been paying attention. So Rudy Giuliani had a real bee in his bonnet about the shenanigans on Wall Street, because you know what? I can't say that I agree with anything that Giuliani has ever done, but he wasn't wrong about this. So insider trading, for those who don't know what it is, is also what Martha Stewart went to prison for. It's when you are involved in a company, you're on the board, like you have inside information that the public does not have. And there's about to be some activity with the company that would let the people who have shares make a lot of money. Insider trading is giving people who are not in the know that information so they can cash in before the general public is aware. And that's a big no no. That's Boesky. He had a lot of people he could rat on, but the most high profile guy to go down was Michael Milken. And Michael Milken, his thing was he was the king of the junk bonds, and junk bonds are not that different. At first, I was, like, reading everything I could possibly find to understand this, because finance is not my bag, man. It's just not my thing.

[37:50] Meg: Nor mine.

[37:51] Jessica: I have other talents. So I was trying to understand this and the essence of junk bonds, and I'm sure that someone - I hope someone corrects me about this, but what I was able to glean is that junk bonds are buying bonds from companies that are really bad risks, okay? And because they're so bad, you buy them for a very, very small amount of money. And then when the time comes for them to give you the money back, you basically… it's usury. You have this incredibly high interest that they have to pay back. So he was giving his investors so Michael Milken was bringing people in to buy these junk bonds that he was recommending, and he was giving them 100%. They were doubling their money.

[38:38] Meg: Oh, wow.

[38:39] Jessica: Which is crazy. Anyone knows that's like Bernie Madoff, the percentage increase that he was offering people was a huge red flag. But people just want to believe, which is why Michael Milken is really interesting. He's a great example of, I'm going to tell you something that's utter bullshit, but it's so good, and I have such a strong network that will vouch for me that you're going to believe it, and you're going to do it, and you're not going to do any due diligence. You're just going to follow me like a lemming. So he was doing that, and he was also in some pretty shady mergers. I was going to say murders and acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions. So he was breaking up companies, selling off the pieces, and to great disadvantage of the people who owned the company. Just a corporate raider, pirate. Boesky dropped a dime on him, and he was a big get for Rudy, and he got him under, which I love this, the same act that mobsters would get nabbed with, which is the Rico Act. It's racketeering, organized crime. So Milken is another one who managed to get his sentence down. And Milken, just to make things…

[40:04] Meg: What did he do? Ivan Bosky got his sentence down by ratting on Michael Milken, and Michael Milken got his sentence down by …

[40:15] Jessica: He paid exorbitant fines? He was fined like, a total of something like a billion dollars, Like something completely nuts. He had to repay the company that he worked for. He had to repay the people who lost money because of him. He paid, I guess sufficiently? I don't know. And you know how I've talked in the past about my temp jobs and the guys who were running around doing blow in the office, slick back hair, trying to be Gordon Gecko and all of that? They were a joke. Like, they were nothing. They were just doing, like, LARP. They were live action role playing. And their jobs, the real movers and shakers were these dirt bags. I was thinking about it, and I was like, why do I care at this moment? I'm the pop culture person. Why do I care? And then I realized these two knuckleheads, their personas allowed for fantastic characters to be created in film. Their crimes and misdemeanors and the way they dressed and the way they behaved. They became some of the great movie villains of time and I was thinking, obviously, about Wall Street and the greed is good thing for those who are not familiar with it. Michael Douglas plays an incredibly unscrupulous trader, and he's doing everything that would get Rudy to put him in prison. And his motto is, greed is good. And he gets a young Charlie Sheen to do some really morally questionable stuff. And then Charlie has to make a decision about his life. Okay, but the greased back hair and all of that. The look that we know from American Psycho. Yes, that's from that. And then I was thinking Pretty Woman. And I was like, you know, I remembered that. Yes. So there's the character Vivian, played by Julia Roberts, and she's emotionally and spiritually rehabilitating Richard Gere's character. And she asks him, what do you do? And he says, in a really off hand way towards the beginning of the film, well, I break companies up, and then I sell off the pieces. And she's like, Isn't that bad? And he's like, no, it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to make him likable and make this romance that's completely, by the way, despicable. And we're going to have a whole episode on despicable themes of the 80s movies that we're supposed to love. Jason Alexander, who is that lawyer. I was going to say Dan is the baddie and such a bad guy. So gross ethically, not even ambiguous, but just flat out bad stuff. Well, and then he tries to rape Julia Roberts. And of course he's like, but she's a prostitute. And even Richard Gear in the 80s, his character, that's Edward I can't believe I remembered his name, Edward. He was like, yeah, rape is rape. Sorry. Jason Alexander. And then beats him to a pulp. So that's nice. But there's Pretty Woman. And then I thought about our favorite movie. I'm going to give you a hint. Let the rivers run.

[43:37] Meg: Working Girl. It is my favorite movie. It is.

[43:39] Jessica: It's one of the greatest movies ever. I don't know if you remember this, but at the beginning, she's working at some trader. And I didn't remember that she was a temp. I looked into it because she calls the agency that had placed her when she gets booted out. But she gets booted out because she gets set up for a mentorship with Bob from Arbitrage. Arbitrage, another nasty 80s financial duda. Look it up. And who plays Bob but Kevin Spacey? He was Verbal from The Usual Suspects, as we know. He was also the defendant in a Me Too trial and apparently diddled a whole bunch of boys. Bad Kevin. Anyway, so she encounters this and she's like, fuck this. And we think she's going to do very well because she gets placed with a woman. Sigourney Weaver, right? And the moral of this movie, I realized, was kill or be killed. It's not just, oh, she's making it. And through grit and whatever, she is lying and stealing her way through the movie.

[44:53] Meg: Oh, that is true. She is, isn't she?

[44:55] Jessica: She's lying and stealing and she is lying and stealing from some very creepy people, most notably Sigourney Weaver's character. The point is, the only way she can get ahead is if she does this. And it raises an interesting question.

[45:10] Meg: I mean, she's pretending to be someone.

[45:12] Jessica: She steals her appointment book. Right.

[45:14] Meg: But she does have authentically good ideas.

[45:17] Jessica: Right.

[45:18] Meg: But Sigourney Weaver tries to steal her ideas.

[45:21] Jessica: She begins with, there's no other way I'm going to get in unless I take over the persona of this person.

[45:30] Meg: Right. Because she didn't go to a fancy school.

[45:32] Jessica: I love how you are still excusing her. I'm not saying that there isn't a good conclusion to all of this, but she's not spotless.

[45:44] Meg: No.

[45:45] Jessica: Okay.

[45:45] Meg: Okay.

[45:47] Jessica: And what I think is really interesting is that it's sort of a great commentary on being a woman in the work world because it was either get fucked over or literally fucked in the back of a limousine by Kevin Spacey or fuck someone else over. And she did. She did what she had to do to your point. But that whole world, the world of money that she wanted to belong to was nasty.

[46:15] Meg: Yeah.

[46:16] Jessica: And yes, she does actually have the good idea. But at the end of the movie, do you remember? Because again, I watched it and I was like, oh, I love this so much. And the movie opens, and it's so glorious with that Carly Simon song playing and the city looks gorgeous.

[46:37] Meg: Staten Island Ferry.

[46:39] Jessica: And she's on the ferry with all of the big hair people. But the city looks amazing and you're on the water. And at the very end, when she makes it, she's in her office and the camera pans out, and she's just a tiny little worker bee in her little cell in the big hive, working for more money for Owen Trask. And I was like, this is so dark. Oh, my God.

[47:12] Meg: But that's what success… that's how success was defined in that period of time. That was a happy ending.

[47:20] Jessica: It was a very happy ending. Although, who knows? Maybe Mike Nichols was really making a very big point as the director. Maybe he was slipping that in. But yeah, I mean, I cheered it forever. It wasn't until I was like, I'll do Boesky and Milken, but I was like, wait a minute.

[47:43] Meg: So, Jessica, it is interesting. I'm still kind of absorbing what you were just talking about and how interestingly neither of us were seduced by the world of finance, even though that was such a strong value system in the time.

[47:59] Jessica: I don't think that our DNA allowed for that. I think it's that profound for us. And you and I also have a really high douchebag meter, and our ability to handle those types is really low.

[48:18] Meg: Maybe that's also why we didn't join cults.

[48:21] Jessica: Our unexpected tie in today could either be cults come in a lot of shapes and sizes, and it could be wanting someone to run your life, or it could be thinking that you're going to run someone else's life, but in fact, your life is being run by the money machine. So you've joined the cult of money.

[48:42] Meg: Yes.

[48:43] Jessica: I can go dark. People really want to belong to something. And the personas that came out of the eighties Wall Street scene were really seductive. And if you could be in that club, it's like rushing the best fraternity for a certain kind of person.

[49:06] Meg: So I know that is a very appropriate tie in.

[49:10] Jessica: I remember vividly when I went to law school and I met a lot of the specifically the guys who were entering law school with me in ‘93. They had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives. And I had this flash. I will never forget it. And I absolutely put it to myself exactly like this. These people are here to buy a personality. And that's what I feel about the finance people from back then. I'm not going to make any - cast any aspersions about them now. But back then, it was a ready made kit to have this persona. And that's not unlike being a cult. It's this homogenized belief system.

[50:07] Meg: You tied it up.

[50:08] Jessica: I'm very deep.