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The Man Behind Archie Bunker · Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Infinite Threads.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Bob.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: This week, I want to talk about television.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: But not exactly about television.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about what some of those old shows may have taught us
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  SPEAKER_00: without realizing we were being taught anything at all.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back now, I think they helped shape the way that I learned to see people.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm going to begin anywhere, it has to be with Archie Bunker.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Archie could be loud,
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  SPEAKER_00: he could be stubborn,
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  SPEAKER_00: and he could say things that were racist,
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  SPEAKER_00: sexist, insulting, and sometimes just plain awful.
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  SPEAKER_00: Norman Lear never asked us to pretend otherwise either,
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  SPEAKER_00: but he did something that I think was much more interesting.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: He refused to let Archie be only those things.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every so often,
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  SPEAKER_00: The show would pull the chair out from underneath the character
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  SPEAKER_00: that we thought we understood.
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  SPEAKER_00: The bluster would disappear.
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  SPEAKER_00: The argument would stop.
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  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, there was just a man standing there.
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  SPEAKER_00: I remember those moments.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not because I consciously understood what they were doing
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  SPEAKER_00: when I first saw them, but because they stayed with me.
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  SPEAKER_00: One of the strongest came when Archie and Mike got locked together in a storeroom.
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  SPEAKER_00: Normally, if you put those two in a room, you knew what was coming next.
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  SPEAKER_00: An argument, Archie yelling, Mike pushing back.
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  SPEAKER_00: Neither one giving an inch.
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  SPEAKER_00: But that night, that night went somewhere else.
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  SPEAKER_00: As they talked, Archie started telling Mike about being a kid.
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  SPEAKER_00: He talked about growing up during the Depression and being teased
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  SPEAKER_00: because his family was so poor that for a while he had to wear a shoe on one foot
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  SPEAKER_00: and a boot on the other.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then he talked about his father, the same father that Archie had spent his life defending.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: A father who hit him.
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  SPEAKER_00: A father who once locked him in a closet as punishment.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the remarkable part was that Archie still tried to explain it as love.
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  SPEAKER_00: His father had done those things because in Archie's mind, that was what fathers did.
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  SPEAKER_00: That scene did not magically erase Archie's prejudice.
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  SPEAKER_00: It didn't turn him into a different character the next morning.
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  SPEAKER_00: But suddenly, suddenly we could see more of him.
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  SPEAKER_00: We could see the boy inside the man.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that really matters to me now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because it connects directly to something that we talked about recently on Infinite Threads.
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  SPEAKER_00: Before somebody became the adult standing in front of us, There was a child.
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  SPEAKER_00: Life happened in between.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes a lot of life.
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  SPEAKER_00: And understanding what happened does not mean that we're approving of what came out of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: That may be one of the most important lessons that those shows gave me.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can understand someone without excusing them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Those are not the same thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Archie definitely could be wrong, very wrong, and still be human.
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  SPEAKER_00: Norman Lear trusted us to hold both thoughts at once,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that's much more difficult than simply giving us a villain.
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  SPEAKER_00: A villain is easy.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know what to do with a villain.
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  SPEAKER_00: You dislike him.
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  SPEAKER_00: Problem solved.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Archie would not stay that simple.
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  SPEAKER_00: We saw him with Edith.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was another place where the mask sometimes slipped.
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  SPEAKER_00: Public Archie had an answer for everything.
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  SPEAKER_00: Private Archie could be confused by his own feelings.
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  SPEAKER_00: Edith knew him in a way that nobody else did.
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  SPEAKER_00: She could frustrate him,
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  SPEAKER_00: disarm him, and sometimes reveal the tenderness he worked very hard to hide.
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  SPEAKER_00: There were moments when you realized just how much he depended on her.
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  SPEAKER_00: He might not have had the language for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: He certainly was not going to sit down and give a speech about emotional vulnerabilities.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it was there.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then came the moment when Edith was gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: By then, all in the family had become Archie Bunker's place.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Edith had died.
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  SPEAKER_00: Archie tried to keep moving.
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  SPEAKER_00: He resisted grief the way Archie resisted almost anything that made him feel powerless.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then he went into their bedroom and found one of Edith's slippers.
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  SPEAKER_00: That scene, oh my gosh, that scene is hard for me to forget.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because suddenly, there was no Archie Bunker performance left.
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  SPEAKER_00: No politics.
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  SPEAKER_00: No insult.
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  SPEAKER_00: No argument.
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  SPEAKER_00: Just a grieving husband holding something that belonged to the woman he loved.
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  SPEAKER_00: For years,
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  SPEAKER_00: we had watched him complain about Edith,
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  SPEAKER_00: interrupt Edith, call her a dingbat, and then she was gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly,
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  SPEAKER_00: we understood that beneath all of that noise was a man
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  SPEAKER_00: who had built his life around her.
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  SPEAKER_00: The mask came completely off.
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  SPEAKER_00: Guys, that is storytelling at its best.
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  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell us Archie was secretly wonderful all along because he wasn't.
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  SPEAKER_00: It tells us something more honest.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human beings can contain things that seem impossible to fit inside of the same person.
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  SPEAKER_00: Prejudice and love.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cruelty and tenderness.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fear and loyalty.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's uncomfortable, I know.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it's real.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think seeing that over and over probably did something to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: It taught me to look for the person underneath the behavior.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not so I could excuse the behavior.
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  SPEAKER_00: But so I could understand what I was actually looking at.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's a difference between saying Archie says hateful things
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  SPEAKER_00: because deep down he's really a good man and saying Archie says hateful things
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  SPEAKER_00: and there's also a wounded, frightened, loving human being inside of him.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second version doesn't erase responsibility.
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  SPEAKER_00: It expands the picture.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when the picture gets larger, empathy becomes possible.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think that's one reason that All in the Family worked.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: If Archie had simply been a monster every week, we would have learned very little from him.
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  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we were invited into his house.
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  SPEAKER_00: We met Edith.
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  SPEAKER_00: We met Gloria and Mike.
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  SPEAKER_00: We watched him get embarrassed.
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  SPEAKER_00: We saw his fear when the world changed faster than he could understand.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we saw him grow.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we watched him stubbornly refuse.
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  SPEAKER_00: That inconsistency made him human.
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  SPEAKER_00: And maybe without realizing it, we were practicing something.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: We were learning to stay in the room with a person that we did not always like.
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  SPEAKER_00: We were learning that understanding where somebody came from did not require us
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  SPEAKER_00: to adopt where they ended up.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: We were learning to look past the label long enough to see the life underneath it.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds familiar to me now.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds a lot like Infinite Threads.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back, I don't think I invented this way of seeing people out of nowhere.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think stories helped teach it to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Television helped.
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  SPEAKER_00: Characters like Archie helped.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because I wanted to become like Archie,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because the show would not let me dismiss him as only one thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Norman Lear kept reminding us that the loudest thing about
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  SPEAKER_00: a person is not necessarily the whole person.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think we need that reminder right now.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a time when somebody can say one thing,
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  SPEAKER_00: post one sentence,
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  SPEAKER_00: belong to one group,
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  SPEAKER_00: and instantly become a complete character in somebody else's mind.
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  SPEAKER_00: We decide who they are.
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  SPEAKER_00: We know their motives.
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  SPEAKER_00: We know what kind of person they must be, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe sometimes we're right, but human beings rarely fit that neatly.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's usually more happening behind the mask.
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  SPEAKER_00: Again, guys,
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  SPEAKER_00: understanding that does not require us to tolerate harmful behavior.
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  SPEAKER_00: Archie needed to be challenged.
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  SPEAKER_00: Mike challenged him constantly.
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  SPEAKER_00: Edith did too, sometimes in quieter ways.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the show understood something important.
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  SPEAKER_00: If all we do is condemn a person,
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  SPEAKER_00: we may stop looking closely enough to understand what made them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if we don't understand what makes people, how do we ever expect anything to change?
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  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the foundations of what I believe.
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  SPEAKER_00: If there's a malfunction in empathy, I want to understand it.
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  SPEAKER_00: If fear turns into prejudice, I want to know how that happened.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because I want to excuse the damage,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because I would rather prevent the next version of it than simply hate
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  SPEAKER_00: the person carrying it now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe television helped plant that idea long before I had words for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Archie Bunker may have been one of my earliest teachers.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because Archie was wise,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because Norman Lear was wise enough to show us the human being inside
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  SPEAKER_00: of somebody like Archie.
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  SPEAKER_00: Makes you think.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we need to think.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow, guys, we'll look at another show that did something similar in a different way.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're going to look at Chico and the Man.
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  SPEAKER_00: A bitter old man had a category in his head.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the category walked into his garage,
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  SPEAKER_00: became a person, and eventually became someone that he cared about.
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  SPEAKER_00: That story taught a lesson of its own.
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  SPEAKER_00: But today, I keep thinking about Archie sitting alone with Edith Slippers.
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  SPEAKER_00: The loud man had gone quiet.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything he usually hid behind was gone.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And what remained was something every one of us could recognize.
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  SPEAKER_00: A human being who loved someone and had lost her.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the mask is loud.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: The person underneath it, well, they usually aren't.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I love you guys very much.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very, very much.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I need you to do.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Go out there and pass that on, okay?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Later, Gators.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye.
• 14:15
  [music]