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Second Acts · Plausibly Live - The Dave Bowman Show Podcast

0:08
From the On Air Across America NEWSROOM, I'm Alex Ross and this
0:13
is your Morning News update. The Government Accountability
0:16
Office says President Trump cannot allow approximately $810
0:20
million in congressionally approved spending to expire
0:23
while lawmakers consider his request to cancel it.
0:26
The White House calls the targeted programs wasteful.
0:29
GAO says eliminating them without congressional action
0:33
would violate federal budget law and Congress versus power of the
0:36
purse. Boeing has won a $20 billion
0:39
contract to develop the Navy's next generation carrier fighter.
0:43
The FA XX is expected to provide greater range, stealth and
0:47
coordination with unmanned aircraft during the 20 thirties.
0:50
The Navy says an arresting gear failure caused Monday's landing
0:54
mishap aboard USS Dwight D Eisenhower. 2 aviators ejected
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from an EA18G Growler and were recovered. 6 sailors aboard the
1:03
carrier were injured. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
1:06
is expected to order a 20% reduction in general and Admiral
1:10
positions by January 2027. In baseball, the Yankees
1:14
defeated Boston 9 to nothing while the White Sox beat Houston
1:18
six to three in their Wild Card Series openers.
1:21
For the On Air Across American network, I'm Alex Ross.
1:52
Well, good morning, good evening or good afternoon, wherever you
1:55
are, whatever you do. A lot of things happening in the
1:58
world today, most of them are far beyond our control, you
2:01
might say. So perhaps it's time we took a
2:04
pause and thought about life and thought about the laws of
2:07
gravity, unconstitutional taxes, 2 1/2 men, or maybe other
2:17
things, I don't know. Not feeling very well this
2:20
morning. It's, it's weird.
2:24
Don't touch that dial. Just try to hear me out for a
2:26
little while. Telephone and text 209565 Dave
2:30
209565 Dave As we continue to add pieces, parts to the whole
2:37
shindig. And now I have this.
2:42
I've always had the text machine, but now I have this
2:44
magic text machine that's text and telephone.
2:48
SO209565 Dave is the telephone and text number.
2:55
I don't answer phone calls outside of the show so, but text
3:00
is always a good way to get a hold of me. e-mail is not, but I
3:04
have it. Dave at the Dave bowmanshow.com.
3:06
You can join me there. I still don't read them, but you
3:11
know, that's the way it goes. A loqui Conizio, Stand up.
3:15
Tell those who oppose liberty, don't tread on me.
3:28
Very good, good. This morning had a very busy
3:31
week ahead of me. It's Wednesday already and I
3:34
feel like the whole week is because the the new month starts
3:38
the new in the week. So I have several medical
3:42
appointments upcoming. I, I actually don't know if I'm
3:45
going to be here tomorrow. Got a couple of things I have to
3:50
do very early in the morning, which is when I like to do this.
3:54
And that's one of the problems that I have with establishing a
3:58
permanent live show is that I can't always be here at exactly
4:02
the same time. And you, you kind of need that
4:05
for consistency sake. So, so there you go.
4:09
Yesterday I was reading the Seattle Times, which I don't do
4:13
very often, but a headline caught my attention about a poll
4:19
that the Seattle Times had supposedly run that showed that
4:25
support for repealing the unconstitutional income tax was
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was fading and they were having a panic attack about or no, I'm
4:33
sorry, they were having the opposite of a panic attack.
4:35
They were having a basic, an orgasm over this.
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And I thought this would be a great discussion, talk about not
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just the income tax itself, but media in general and those kind
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of issues. And then I went to bed.
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And I've had shows in the past where I've, I've, I've talked
4:55
about things that are interesting to me.
4:57
And, and this is what every chat show host will tell you in the
5:00
world. Every single one will tell you.
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Well, it's about what interests me.
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And that's true to a point. However, comma, sometimes you
5:11
get to a point where things are just not interesting.
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They're just not. And I have a show, not going to
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tell you which one, last week where I actually sent Bill and
5:21
Rod a text after the show said, jeez, I just bored myself.
5:26
That's how bad it was. It was.
5:27
It was just, yeah, sorry. I was looking at something, got
5:35
distracted. It, it, it, it was in the middle
5:38
of the show. Yeah, you could probably hear
5:40
it. If you're listening real close,
5:42
you can you can almost hear my brain going, this is bad.
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This is really bad and it's the bane of being a chat show
5:52
person. It it sometimes you get the
5:54
stuff that really bores you. And so I started thinking about
5:56
this tax thing and I thought, well, I can talk about this and,
5:59
and believe me, I have some cogent arguments, not just about
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the tax itself, but about the way the media is treating the
6:06
tax and the way that the the media is, is lying point blank.
6:11
But we already know that, and the vast majority of my
6:15
listenership is not in Washington state anyway, so who
6:19
cares? And then I got the story this
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morning about, well, we actually had the story yesterday, but it
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became a little more detailed this morning with the the
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accident aboard USS Eisenhower. Now, for those of you who don't
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know, the USS Eisenhower is a Nimitz class aircraft carrier.
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She's the second Nimitz class carrier.
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So there's Nimitz, then Eisenhower, and with the
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retirement, the impending retirement of USS Nimitz, Ike
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will be the oldest carrier in the fleet.
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And I have some familiarity with her.
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She was stationed in Norfolk for many years and still is for all
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I know. My roommate when I was an
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instructor in Virginia Beach, my roommate who also attended the
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same House of worship that I did.
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So we rented an apartment together, was stationed on the
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Eisenhower and I had a couple of adventures going over there to,
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to, to pick him up or drop him off on, you know, when his truck
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was in the, in the shop or whatever.
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And so, or he deployed and then I would, you know, pick him up.
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And anyway, the whole, the whole point is I've been on the Ike a
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couple times. So I have, I feel like I have
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something of a connection to the Eisenhower, although I am not by
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definition a carrier sailor. I am a submarine sailor.
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And as you know, we are very suspicious for aircraft carriers
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to begin with. They are dangerous places.
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Submarining is dangerous. Carriers are dangerous.
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My roommate was a nuclear engineer, machinist mates, so he
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never hung out on the flight deck, which I read Once Upon a
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time that the flight deck of a modern aircraft carrier is the
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most dangerous 4 1/2 acres on the planet.
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When you consider there's fourteen of them in our Navy.
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So 14 * 4 is 28. I can't do math.
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It's too early. It's a dangerous area.
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And the reason it's so dangerous is because you've got jet
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aircraft taking off and landing, and of course they take off with
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afterburners and they've got jet deflectors and you have the
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danger of all the things that can go wrong with an airplane
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compressed into a smaller area and just on take off.
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It's dangerous, but landing is even more.
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It's a controlled crash is what it is.
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So the airplanes come in, they have a hook that dangles down,
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not making this up. And there are five large cables
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that go across the deck. And the, the goal is to catch
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the number 3. As I understand it, I'm not an
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aviator, but having read a few things, the the goal is to catch
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the number 3 hook. That's the perfect landing, but
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you're basically just slamming this plane down onto the deck.
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It's like boom. It's, it's not a smooth landing
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by any stretch of the imagination, which is why
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aircraft designed for naval aircraft carriers have to be
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designed differently. It's why there are very rare
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occasions when an airplane that's designed for the Air
9:17
Force ends up on a ship. Some, some examples like the the
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F4 Phantom, because it was so heavy and so rugged, I could
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handle it, but very few other ones could.
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The the F16 could never land on an aircraft carrier.
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It's too fragile, it's too light.
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But the FA 18, which was the computer for that for the F16,
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ended up on aircraft carriers in, in multiple forms.
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So these planes come down, they got this hook that dangles.
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They're trying to catch the number 3 hook as they slam into
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the deck. And if they're successful, the
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hook grabs and stops the airplane while they run their
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engines to full speed, because if the hook misses, they got to
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be able to take off again in a very short amount of space.
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This is insane, but we've been doing it since the 1920s, so
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we've gotten pretty good at it for the most part.
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Now, there are occasions when things don't work right.
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And apparently what happened here is that the arrestor gear
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that that cable failed somehow or another.
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That means it either broke or it didn't grab.
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Something happened with the arrestor gear and that led to
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the landing mishap, which had both the aviators aboard the
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plane ejecting. Now I can construct scenarios in
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my head. I wasn't there.
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I can tell you some things that might have happened.
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Maybe the landing gear collapsed, maybe who knows,
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Something happened to the airplane because the normal
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procedure is if the, if the, if the hook doesn't grab because
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they're at full throttle, they just take off and go around
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again. So something happened that they
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weren't able to do that Both pilots had to eject.
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They were rescued. But the the, the reporting says
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that six sailors also on the flight deck were injured by this
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as well. Now imagine this cable snapping
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going around, or maybe they got hit by debris.
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We don't know. We don't know the degrees to
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which they were hurt. There were no deaths reported,
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but we do not know the degree of the injuries At this point.
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It it's important because there's an automatic assumption
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when something like this happens, the pilots rate each
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landing. They, they debrief and they, you
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know, they criticize these critique, I guess criticize this
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wrong word, but they critique each landing.
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Did you do this right? Did you do that right?
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And so when something like this happens, the immediate
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assumption is pilot error. But arresting gear failure kind
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of shifts that from pilot failure to equipment failure,
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which raises the specter of, you know, this is the now the oldest
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operational carrier in the fleet.
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The Nimitz is no longer operational, although not
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decommissioned. And it it doesn't, we don't know
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why the system failed. We don't know what happened.
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Look, it's it's you're, you're on a ship, things break.
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Even brand new things, I can tell you from serving on a brand
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new ship, things break. I mean, it's just there's design
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flaws, there's problems, there's installation issue, who knows?
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It does raise those questions though, because it, it, it makes
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in an, in an era when we're talking about how long ships are
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deployed in the Eisenhower, I don't believe has been deployed
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recently. The there are ships that are
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headed out. The Teddy Roosevelt is headed
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back out. Of course, the Abe Lincoln is
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coming back in. We talk all the time about these
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aircraft carriers, aircraft carriers, aircraft carriers
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staying at sea for a long time. You know, we have more ships
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than that, right? And for every aircraft carrier,
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there are dozens of destroyers and cruisers and the likes of
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that. One of which, by the way, is the
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USS Princeton, which is also deployed right now out in the
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Persian Gulf. And that ship matters to me
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because that's where Alex is stationed.
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He's aboard the USS Princeton. And so got a message from him
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the other day that they've been extended for another 100 days.
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Things are going to break on those ships.
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Things are going to happen. Accidents are going to happen.
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And this is, this is the uncertainty of this kind of
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service. And I, and I say this all the
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time, folks, the ocean is always trying to kill you.
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Always. And if you let it in, if you
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take a moment where you're not paying attention to something,
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where something slips by or something doesn't get handled
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correctly, the ocean will kill you and that's it.
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Won't hesitate. So was this an isolated
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component failure? I tend to lean in that
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direction. The, the, the idea that this is
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somehow some sort of maintenance thing or, you know, deployment
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thing is, is not supported by the facts that we have at this
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point. It looks to me to be an isolated
14:20
component failure, but it could be, you know, a rush to get her
14:26
back into thing. Who knows?
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Both aviators are fine. 6 sailors are hurt.
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We don't know the degree, but what we do know is it's going to
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raise questions. And some of those questions are
14:40
going to make their way to the halls of the Pentagon, where
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Pete Hegseth has said he's going to reduce the number of Admirals
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and generals by 20%. OK, I got to be honest with you.
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To me, that's how do I say this politely?
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I'm a first class Petty Officer. I'm an E6, OK.
15:02
So maybe I see things a little bit different.
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I'm an E6 whose tends to think like an E5 because I really
15:08
liked being a second class Petty Officer.
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Second class Petty Officer was perfect.
15:12
You were the technician, you were the subject expert, you
15:15
were the equipment expert, and you were the operator.
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And when you become an E6 in the Navy at least, and certainly in
15:23
the submarine fleet, everything in your world becomes about
15:26
making E7. Everything it you need to do
15:29
this to make your jacket look better, to make chief, you got
15:31
to do this. To make chief, you got to, and
15:33
you're no longer you're, you're more into a management
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leadership role, which I did not particularly enjoy.
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I loved being an operator. So I, I think differently, I
15:43
guess maybe than most people, I don't know.
15:47
But to me, a 20% reduction in Admirals and generals is how do
15:54
I put this? There's an old joke about
15:57
lawyers, right? What do you, what do you have
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when you got, when you, when you have a boat full of lawyers and
16:02
it sinks, what do you got? A good start. 20% is a good
16:09
start, but it ain't enough. Stay with us.
16:13
We'll be right back. feeling this morning.
17:10
I don't want to talk about all this bad stuff all the time.
17:15
Came across a news story yesterday that kind of had me
17:18
surprisingly interested. This may surprise you, It may
17:22
not. One of my guilty pleasures.
17:26
You know what a guilty pleasure is,
17:37
but people might judge you. One of my guilty pleasures is
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the first nine, the first eight seasons, I guess, of 2 1/2 men.
17:48
I you can almost guarantee, particularly in the afternoon,
17:53
if there's no, if there's not a baseball game on or a football
17:55
game on or a hockey game. Now that's probably what's on my
17:59
TV, just for background noise. It's a show that I've always
18:04
liked. And I'll tell you The funny
18:07
thing about the show is the person who turned me on to the
18:09
show was my mother of blessed memory who just absolutely loved
18:14
the first season of 2 1/2 Men. She she kind of lost interest
18:17
after that, but she really liked the the idea of this little kid
18:20
and it was, she thought it was cute and I started watching it.
18:25
And so maybe it's a connection to my mom.
18:27
I don't know, but I really enjoy the show and I always have.
18:30
Charlie Sheen is one of those people that I know.
18:34
He's kind of AII know the reputation he has.
18:37
I know what most people think of him.
18:40
I I get it. But to me, I have always enjoyed
18:45
his acting. I have always enjoyed his
18:47
characters. I feel like he has a knack for a
18:53
certain kind of of humor that I really enjoy.
18:57
When he was in the movie Hot Shots and Hot Shots part you,
19:01
those are two of my favorite movies just because of the way
19:05
he can play humor so straight. And I, I, I just like, I've
19:12
always enjoyed it. There are plenty of things in
19:15
the news, though, to get angry about, but this isn't one of
19:18
them. Charlie Sheen is making a
19:22
comeback to television and he's going to do it on a show with
19:25
his father, Martin Sheen, who was also in his other show,
19:29
Anger Management, which was kind of a slap back at what happened
19:34
to 2 1/2 Men when he got fired from that by Paramount and so
19:38
forth and so on. But Martin Sheen is coming back
19:41
with him and I this is going to be an interesting.
19:45
It's a new sitcom, it's called Happy Jack.
19:48
They're starting production in January of 2027.
19:52
And I'm looking forward to this. I I thought 2 1/2 Men was the
19:57
original eight seasons of it was genuinely funny.
20:00
I really enjoyed it. The material produced around
20:03
Charlie's departure in Season 9 was funny, and maybe even the
20:11
final two episodes. But for the rest of it, I just,
20:14
the whole Walden Schmidt thing just didn't work With Ashton
20:17
Kutcher. It was it was not good.
20:19
I didn't like what they did with some of the characters.
20:22
I didn't like how they handled some things.
20:24
I hated, hated what they did to Courtney Thorne Smith and her
20:30
character Lindsay McElroy, who was one of my favorites.
20:35
And then they turned her into this drug addled insane.
20:41
Well, let's just face it, slut. And I, I, I, I couldn't forgive
20:45
them for that. I, I thought, that's just
20:47
reaching. But for those first eight
20:49
seasons, I thought it was a very clever show.
20:52
It was very funny, It was interesting.
20:55
And the material was based on the fact that Charlie had all
21:00
the money. He had the house, he had the
21:01
women. He had no responsibilities
21:03
whatsoever. You know, the golden eggs.
21:05
It would just drop out of his butt.
21:07
And then you had Alan with the responsibilities, the neurosis
21:11
and nothing else. And with Jake kind of pulling
21:15
them together, it would be easy to go, well, this guy is just an
21:19
ass. But what you saw over time was
21:23
the fact that Charlie wasn't just a drunken womanizer.
21:27
He wasn't just an irresponsible man continually finding himself
21:31
stuck with a family he claimed was ruining his life.
21:34
He kept repeatedly demonstrating that he did in fact, love them,
21:38
even his mother, and he actually cared about them.
21:42
In a lot of ways, it's a lot like Al Bundy in Married with
21:44
Children. You know, Al makes a lot of
21:46
jokes about, you know, getting rid of the wife and stuff.
21:49
You know, he never cheated on her and he never left when
21:52
Charlie Sheen left the show. And, and, and I get it.
21:56
I'm not going to sit here and excuse what he did.
21:59
I'm not, I'm not going to pretend that Charlie Harp or the
22:03
Charlie Sheen is a, you know, a perfect guy.
22:08
His collapse was real. And he ended up getting fired by
22:13
Warner Brothers after that period of addiction, erratic
22:17
behavior, very public war with Chuck Lorre.
22:21
He did a lot of damage to himself and he did a lot of
22:23
damage to the people around him and his career.
22:26
And in some ways, the fact that they kept the show going is good
22:30
because you don't even realize the show isn't just those three
22:35
people. It's hundreds of people,
22:38
writers, producers, technicians, camera people, sound people, the
22:44
people that, you know, make the the table for the food.
22:48
I mean, how many people would have lost their jobs over what
22:51
he did? I don't have to pretend that
22:55
didn't happen to enjoy what he did on television.
22:59
And I don't think acknowledging the bad things requires
23:01
believing the worst period of someone's life defines that
23:05
entire person. And say that myself, if you took
23:09
the worst moments of my life and said, well, that's who Dave is,
23:15
I'd feel I'd feel offended by that because I don't.
23:18
I don't feel like those bad times define me as who I am.
23:25
They have certainly influenced who I am and they certainly have
23:28
influenced the way that I see things and do things.
23:31
But is that who I really AM? And we shouldn't necessarily do
23:34
that with Charlie Sheen or anything.
23:36
Anybody. The idea that Sheen can be a
23:42
crummy person and yet recover from that has been an
23:47
interesting idea. He says that he's been sober now
23:50
for eight years, and I believe that he had a recent documentary
23:55
that deals with his addiction, his family relationships and his
23:59
responsibility for his past behavior.
24:01
He takes the responsibility for it.
24:02
He doesn't blow it off. He doesn't say, well, it's
24:04
somebody else's fault. It's, you know, society stressed
24:07
me, took responsibility for it. And it wasn't just a victory
24:13
lap. It was an opening into this.
24:16
Now we get this new TV show. Happy Jack.
24:19
Now listen to this premise. You ready for this?
24:22
He plays a guy by the name of Jack Chambers who is a lifelong
24:26
screw up, much like Charlie Harper, but he has two grown
24:30
daughters. And Martin Sheen will play his
24:33
father, who apparently deserves all the credit for raising those
24:37
daughters and how they turned out.
24:39
And Jack is suddenly confronted with the possibility that this
24:42
may be his last chance to stop living entirely for himself and
24:47
become a real father. There's an obvious echo of
24:52
Charles Harper there. Charles Francis Harper it.
24:58
It doesn't sound like, you know, Charlie Harper at 40.
25:01
He sounds like the logical question you have to ask about
25:04
Charlie Harper at 60. What happens when a charming,
25:08
irresponsible guy gets old and we all face that at some point,
25:14
you have to stop your life being rebellion.
25:16
You have to look at things different as the consequences
25:20
accumulate. Your children are growing up,
25:22
your father gets old. And eventually the question
25:25
becomes whether you're capable of being something more than the
25:27
guy everybody has spent decades cleaning up after.
25:30
And even if you're not that guy, there's a sense of that in all
25:34
of us. We're, we're all growing up
25:37
things, things that I, you know, I joke about being a second
25:39
class Petty Officer, but as I've gotten older, I realized that,
25:44
you know, leadership matters. Maybe I should have been working
25:47
harder on becoming a chief Petty Officer.
25:51
Would I have been a good chief Petty Officer?
25:53
Probably not at 29 or 30, but at 63, I think I would have been,
26:00
which is why I'm rooting for this whole thing.
26:02
Not because Charlie Sheen deserves another television
26:05
show. No one has a constitutional
26:07
right to a sitcom. I am rooting for it because I
26:10
like second acts. I like people getting that
26:13
opportunity again. Charlie Sheen was
26:17
extraordinarily good at a particular type of television
26:21
comedy, and this new show, Happy Jack, does not appear to be him
26:26
pretending he's still 40 years old at Charlie Harper.
26:29
It appears to be taking all the stuff that made that character
26:33
funny, the lovable screw up who sometimes still has a family all
26:37
around him, and asking what does that man look like 20 years
26:42
later? And he's not doing it alone.
26:45
Martin Sheen will be there. Some of the people who know how
26:48
to who who rode on 2 1/2 Men will be there.
26:51
They're shooting it as an old fashioned multi camera sitcom in
26:54
front of a live audience in the same studio where 2 1/2 Men was
26:59
filmed. That's enough to get me to
27:02
watch. And maybe Happy Jack will be
27:04
terrible. They've only given it.
27:07
They've only green lighted it for six episodes.
27:09
Maybe it'll suck, who knows. But there would be something
27:14
rather satisfying about watching Charlie Sheen walk back onto
27:17
that stage and make people laugh again.
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And I'm hoping that he gets that second chance and that it works.
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We'll see for us. Take the time right now tell the
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people that matter in your life you love them very much.
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You'd miss them if they weren't there.
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So don't pass up those opportunities.
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You don't want to have that regret.
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I will try to be here tomorrow. It may be later than normal, I
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don't know. We'll see.
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I've got a 2 appointments. If I can make it work I will.
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If I'm not I won't be here. But have a great day everybody
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and we will see you next time for plausibly Live Today at
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Bowman Show.