E32: Behind the scenes of Elon hosting SNL, CDC failures, America's real-time UBI experiment, post-COVID boom in jeopardy & more

Oh, God. In three, two.

Let your winners ride you, Rain Man.

David sat.

We open sources to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, queen of Kinwa. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. The all in podcast is back. Apologies about last week. I had a personal emergency.

Are we allowed to say why?

Of course. I mean, you can say it.

Go say it, say it.

Say.

Anyway, humble bride with us today.

David Freeberg, Chamath Bali Hopati, the dictator and the rain man himself, David Sachs. I was on a world tour.

I was on a world tour.

No, come on, I'll tell the story.

Obviously, I don't like to talk about a certain friend of mine because he's very high profile and I don't talk about it in public.

Just flex.

Just flex. Just do it and move on.

I've been lifting. I just want to let people know the show's back.

No, you were backstage at SNL helping Elon with the SNL appearance, were you not?

This is true.

Tell us what that was like. Tell us about the backstage experience.

Tell us about the backstage experience. I mean, we were living it out in real time with you guys, but tell us what it was, really.

Tell us why Elon recruited you to do it.

Are you Elon's funniest?

Know, I mean, guys, hold on.

Don't you remember the joke at Sachs's roast five years ago? Remember when Elon was late and I had that ad lib joke? There were two jokes that I landed at Sax's thing, which I thought were fun. No, Jason, my thing.

I was being roasted.

No, wait, was it party sax?

Oh, yeah, I hosted Jason's roast.

That's right.

It was your roast.

Yeah.

Anyways, okay, go ahead.

You're the funniest, otherwise known as the funniest night of all of our collective lives. Yes, it was.

That was really funny.

We have to tell stories from that sometime.

Sometime we'll tell the Jcal roast.

You probably are Elon's funniest friend and have a talent for writing. Let's not beat around the.

I'll take the compliment. So I left to go on a little trip to go to Austin to see some friends and then Miami to see some friends. One of those friends who I hooked up with and was hanging out with in Miami was obviously Elon, and he was doing Saturday Night Live. And we were just coming up with ideas around the dinner table, and we were just laughing our asses off, just brainstorming ideas that would never be allowed on know. And he said, hey, would you come with me to Saturday Night Live? And I was like, oh, that's great. Do you have enough tickets? I assumed he meant Saturday night. He said, no, I don't have a lot of tickets. It's Covid. It's, like, half his money. Would you come with me to the writers room and just be my wingman, basically? So I had, like, three, four board meetings, five talked.

It was like an instant.

Yes.

You have to check your schedule.

No, I mean, I take my work seriously.

You're like, elon, can you give me about half a second to decide?

I already made the decision in my mind that my friend needs help. You guys have been in similar situations where you've asked me for help. I've rolled with chamath on speaking gigs or going down to try to save Sachs from going into complete, utter madness.

Oh, my God, cabo.

This was not crisis management. Anyway, so you said yes. You went yes.

And without giving away anything that was private or confidential, they have a process that they've been doing for 46 years, and we came in with our own process of what we wanted to do. And it kind of was kind of an interesting thing, because a lot of the ideas I had were, let's just say, a little too far out for the cast or for the writers. But some of them landed, and I got to spend a lot of time with Lauren Michaels, and I really worked on my impersonation of him.

He's canadian. He's canadian.

And I was like, so, Lauren, tell us, who were the worst hosts ever? And he's like, it's an interesting. You know, we don't like to think of it that way, but in terms of people who thought they were smart and maybe were not as smart as they thought they were, Stephen Segal was a little bit difficult.

What a safe choice. That's a very safe choice.

There was Chris Christopherson back in 78. He wasn't a musical guest. That was Carly Simon, and he liked to drink. And in this very green room in 78, he had a couple of drinks during the rehearsal, the dress rehearsal. So we wheeled in some coffee, and like any sports team, when the game starts, we play the game.

Who was responsible for the Chad skit?

Okay, so Chad's an existing character, and that was a really amazing one to watch, because we went to Brooklyn to a warehouse, and the production was incredible. And the role I played, if I'm being totally honest, is to know, be Elon's friend and be there with him. But also, was that funny for you? Should I do that? Should I not do that? Because there are no.

You were a punch up man.

I was a punch up guy. I wrote some lines without taking anything away from the there who do the bulk of the work, and the actors and the set designers. It is amazing to see what they do. Like, we had to go through 40 scripts, and when you read something in a script, it's kind of hard to know if it's funny. But then when you put Chloe or Kate McKinnon or Colin Jose or Che or Mikey day, these people are phenomenally talented. So all of a sudden, the script comes alive. But for the two punch ups, I got really good. I'll just give you one anecdote, because I don't want to get myself in too much.

Were you responsible for besties in the Gen Z? Hawkins?

Don't comment on that one.

As soon as I saw it, I thought of you. And then the other one that I thought was incredibly well done was murder. Dirter.

Okay, so I had nothing to do with that one. And we thought that one was incredibly dumb. Like, when you read it on the script, it was like, is this funny or not? But this is the thing. You add tremendous performance and you add incredible set design. And we were in Brooklyn at three in the morning, and Elon comes out with that wig on in a suit.

And we just start laughing.

Hysterical, and he just goes right into creepy priest. It was hilarious.

What about the Asperger's joke? Yeah, because you use that as a tease amongst people we may mutually know a lot. And so when I heard it, I was like, oh, that's a ironic.

No.

But what's so ironic is the Asperger's joke came out, and then everyone, all these press articles got written saying, elon has admitted publicly to having Asperger's, and we are so proud of him. And it is such a moment to come clean about having this thing. And it was like a Jason joke. Yeah, this Jason joke that became a. Oh, my. It.

I'll tell you, I'm particularly proud of that one, because here's how that one went down. They had an idea to do Jeopardy. And it was probably the flattest pitch because it's like 11:00 at night. A writer comes in and says, we want to do jeopardy auditions, and it's kind of a feature for the cast to do auditions. I don't know if you ever saw the Star wars auditions, Jurassic park auditions, kind of in that vein. So I was like, for me, I was like, oh, that sounds like it's got potential. But it was a very dry pitch. They didn't have any examples. And when they actually did it, it was like, really weird characters that were obscure. So I had pitched my own version of Jeopardy. And Elon had his version of Jeopardy. Elon's version of Jeopardy. Was dictator Jeopardy. Which was Kim Jugun, MBS, Putin, et cetera. And then I was like, how to deal with your adversaries? And he was like, for 800, and he's like, plenonium. And I was like, genocide. It got really dark. And so we are laughing our s's about that. But then there were security concerns. Basically, we're kind of dialing this around. It would be a direct correlation of funny to the chances of Elon being assassinated by one of those people. So then we decided, maybe we don't do that one. And I said, I've got a great idea. Asperger's Jeopardy. And it would be Zuck Elizabeth Holmes, which Chloe from the show, who's an absolute genius, incredibly sweet, and she really engaged deeply with Elon and connected with our team. And then, obviously Elon. And so you'd have Elon playing Zuck, somebody playing Elon, and then Chloe playing Elizabeth Holmes, and they would be know how to deal with an intense situation with an employee and then press it. Don't make eye contact. One of the writers, I could tell she was not happy about this, and she says, listen, my husband has Asperger's, my two brothers have Asperger's. And all of a sudden, we're in.

Like, okay, we can't offend anyone land.

We can't offend anybody land. And I would say 80, 90% of the staff is very, let's go for it. And then there's probably ten or 20 who are very sensitive to different topics, and so there's a little navigation you have to do there. And then so Elon goes, I have Asperger's, and the whole room is like, wow. So then I was workshopping with somebody, and I wasn't in the writers room.