958 – Transcript
Just Right Episode 958
Air Date: April 1, 2026
Host: Bob Metz
The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.
Clip (Castle 206):
Beckett: You know, you still haven’t told me where your fascination with murder came from.
Castle: I was five years old. We were summering in the Hamptons. I was pretty much left to my own devices. It’s one day I was walking on the beach. I was miles from where I’d started. I was just about to turn back. When I saw something had washed up on the beach, I thought, maybe it’s a whale or a turtle or a sea lion. So I ran over to see what it was.
Beckett: What was it?
Castle: It was a boy. My age. It was our housekeeper’s son. It must have just happened. Because the tide hadn’t washed away the blood. We had just played hide and go seek the day before.
Beckett: What happened to him?
Castle: They never found out.
Beckett: I’m so sorry, Castle. You made that up?
Castle: It’s what I do!
Beckett: You know what? You were so getting it for that one.
Bob Metz:
Welcome everyone. It is Wednesday, April 1st, 2026. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right.
Broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that’s not right wing. It’s Just Right.
You know, it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard Castle tell that story to Beckett, even when I know he’s just jerking her chain. That story itself holds its own power and elicits an emotional response. And I’m kind of a sucker for emotional manipulation when I’m watching TV and movie entertainment. And no matter how many times I’ve seen the same scene in a given movie or TV show that elicits an emotional response, it still works every time.
And today our theme is all about storytelling itself. And how the stories we share and hand down from generation to generation are the real binding force of cultures, religions, and social values. So it’s going to be a bit of an unusual pace for today’s show. It’s an eclectic mix about storytelling, including one new voice to our show who makes the case that the most dangerous weapon in the entire world is a story.
Well, if that’s so, then we’ve got a lot of dangerous weapons to share with you today. So let the narratives begin right after our reminder that you can write us at feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform and visit us at justrightmedia.org where you can access all of our social media links, archived broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show. Because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.
Now as many of you know, it is a signature of this show, Just Right, that we open every episode with a slice of drama and close with a smile, hopefully relating to the topic or theme of the day. And in featuring various audio bites from movies, TV shows, and comedies, the ideas and philosophies we discuss on the show each week can be turned into an experience that can often take a complex idea and express it in a simple story.
A story can be a complete fiction, yet convey a truth in a way not possible with straight descriptive narrative. Or a story can have all the facts correct, but still convey a lie or an untruth or simply get the narrative wrong. And of course, stories can also be used as political propaganda.
So to kick off our theme for the day is a new voice to our show, an intentionally anonymous podcaster who goes by the name of the Real Life Fake Wizard, which despite the weird name and silly costume worn by the host, is pretty objective and philosophically aligned with what we do here on Just Right.
So on both this and the return side of our upcoming bumper, his March 25th podcast on the power of stories makes some assertions and insights that go a long way towards explaining so much of what we’ve been seeing throughout the zeitgeist of human history.
Clip (Real Life Fake Wizard, March 25 2026):
Real Life Fake Wizard: Hello, I’m the Real Life Fake Wizard. Did you know the most dangerous weapon in the entire world is a story? We perceive stories as entertainment, movies, television, video games, stories to pass the time.
No. Stories are the most dangerous technology humanity has ever created. More dangerous than any weapon ever forged by human hands.
Yeah, yeah, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can do more damage than you could imagine. Every religion on this planet is a series of stories. Every nation is founded on a story. The American Revolution was not started by muskets alone.
It was started with pamphlets. Wars do not begin when the first shot is fired. You need to get all the men to the front lines first, and to do that, those men need to believe something, whether good or bad for them. And wars don’t end with treaties. Before the dust has settled and while the bodies are still warm, people are going to do what they were always going to do anyway.
Sit down and tell stories about what peace might look like. Paul Lindbarger is widely considered the architect of modern psychological warfare for the United States military. He wrote the Army’s official Psyops Handbook. He was also, not coincidentally, a science fiction writer who held the belief that words, when properly deployed, are more powerful than bombs.
But if we look back in time, Aristotle understood similar sentiments 2400 years before Lindbarger was born. In his book Poetics, Aristotle described drama and storytelling as a mechanism for moral education. When viewers and listeners and readers experience stories, they also experience catharsis, which is defined as an emotional purification that occurs when an audience witnesses characters navigate virtue and vice. In Aristotle’s philosophy, stories do not reflect the human condition. Stories shape the human condition. Stories are humanity’s operating system.
Change the stories and you change the people. Where’s my evidence? Look at all of human history. This has been documented, studied and weaponized. And for the last, well, my entire life and maybe yours too, people have been working tirelessly day and night to the tune of billions of dollars to systemically dismantle the very stories that made people believe in something greater than themselves. And the most powerful apparatus for telling stories in human history happens to be the American entertainment industry.
And it has very much been hijacked. Some say it’s because of ideology. Some say it’s because of arrogance. Some say it’s accidental. It’s incompetence that caused it. No, it goes further than that.
That’s all surface level. Whatever the motivations of humanity’s adversary is, the truth is that they want you to lose your stories. They have sacrificed humility and responsibility for selfishness and ambiguity. There is no good nor is there bad. They want you to silence your conscience and dull your dignity. Life is not wonderful and not worth fighting for. To these monsters, existence is morally gray. And to take advantage of your brothers and sisters is justified in a world without goodness. They killed your heroes and they did it on purpose.
If we look back in time, we will find in Aristotle’s ethics, he made an argument that is both simple and devastating. Virtue is formed through habituation. You become what you practice. You become what you repeatedly do. And by extension, you become what you repeatedly consume. Thoughts become things.
Although Aristotle didn’t use the word habit the way we use it today, like it’s some passive mindless routine, he used the Greek word heksis, which means an active condition, a state that must be deliberately held and maintained. Virtue is not something you achieve once and then put on a shelf like Elf on the Shelf. It must be practiced day after day and choice after choice. And stories were the mechanism by which an entire civilization practiced its virtues together in Aristotle’s age.
And for us here today, that hasn’t changed. When you watch a hero struggle with cowardice and choose courage anyway, you are personally rehearsing courage. When you watch a character face the temptation of selfishness and choose sacrifice instead, you are rehearsing sacrifice. The audience is actively and emotionally participating in the story rather than just watching it.
You empathize with the emotions the characters are going through and in your mind, it’s a moral exercise. Aristotle was explicit about what makes a proper dramatic character. In poetics, he said the character must be good, not perfect or flawless, but they must be aimed towards goodness. Do you know what that means? That means 2400 years ago, human beings understood dramatic theory and told us what would happen if you extracted goodness out of your stories. Firstly, you lose the audience.
Like that’s number one. Because the audience is human and even if they can’t find the words to describe it, they know what is right and what is wrong. The human soul requires moral nourishment the same way the body requires food. When you replace goodness with moral emptiness dressed up as complexity, you’re starving the soul and audiences will abandon ship as they have. And then we see box offices collapse. The North American box office is down 23% from pre-pandemic levels. Ticket sales have plummeted 40% in a decade. Per capita movie attendance has declined 46% since its peak. In 2024 alone, the industry torched hundreds of millions of dollars on films that nobody wanted to see.
Joker 2, Furiosa, Borderlands, Craven, Madam Web, 2025 saw Superman, the most recognizable superhero on the face of the Earth, fail to break even on a $350 million production budget. The relationship between Hollywood and its audience has inverted and eroded. And because of this problem, now the industry’s apologists continue to blame the pandemic. They will blame streaming, they will blame the SAG-AFTRA strikes, they will blame ticket prices and sticky floors and theaters and screaming kids and people on their phones. And some of those factors maybe are very real, but none of them explain why in the middle of this supposed death spiral, certain films explode with ticket sales. Top Gun Maverick cleared $1.45 billion worldwide, a story about a man earning redemption through competence, sacrifice and the refusal to quit.
Real jets, real stunts, and a hero you might aspire to be. Oppenheimer $32 million non-franchise opening, a three-hour dialogue heavy film about nuclear physics that trusted its audience to keep up. A story about a man wrestling with conscience, it demanded intelligence from its viewers and was rewarded handsomely for it. And that takes us to today where we see Project Hail Mary wrangle in an $80 million domestic opening. $140 million worldwide, 95% critics score, 96% audience score, the second biggest non-franchise opening in a decade. And it’s a story about a reluctant hero who overcomes his own cowardice to save civilizations. Not a single villain in the entire film, not a single green screen shot.
What we find here is an earnest, optimistic protagonist whose defining characteristic is a willingness to say, let’s figure it out. The pattern is so obvious that it should be embarrassing to Hollywood that anyone needs to point it out. The films that break through the noise, that get people off their couches and butts in seats in an era where every force on earth is conspiring to keep them at home, well, these films share a common DNA. Sincerity, heroism, respect for the audience, practical craftsmanship, and protagonists who are oriented toward goodness. The films that failed in similar time periods have a different DNA. They are rank with cynicism, moral emptiness contempt for the audience, corporate assembly line production, protagonists who serve no one but themselves, and also protagonists that are perfect because they believed they were perfect.
There’s no room for improvement for perfect female characters produced by the Walt Disney Company now is there. The entertainment industry has chosen moral ambiguity with boldness. They’re proud to tell stories that remove good and evil. They chose this path for reasons that have nothing to do with artistic sophistication and everything to do with convenience, cowardice, and something far darker.
First, the practical reality. Morally gray characters are easier to write. A heroic arc requires a bit of craft. It requires you to establish a character with genuine virtue, place that virtue under credible threat, force the character to fail, and then earn the redemption through sacrifice and growth.
That is a challenging thing to do. That requires a writer who understands human nature at a level deep enough to dramatize the struggle between who we are and who we could be. The relentless push towards moral ambiguity as the default mode of storytelling serves a very specific function.
It lowers expectations. If every character on screen is compromised, then compromise becomes the cultural norm. If no hero in fiction is expected to show restraint, courage, sacrifice, or moral clarity, then no leader, no institution, and no corporation is held to that standard in reality either. The Morally Gray narrative is not a reflection of the real world at all. They have issued a conditioning program with a goal of teaching audiences to accept that everyone is corrupt, that idealism is naive, that goodness is performative, and the only honest position is that of cynicism.
Okay? Well, who benefits from a population trained to believe that morality is just a spectrum and that everyone is equally compromised? Who would want to live in that world?
The people doing the compromising. They need you to believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong. Because if you believed in right and wrong, you would hold them accountable for what they have done to the stories you grew up loving. There is a right and wrong. People have a conscience.
We know the difference. Aristotle called it phronesis. Practical wisdom, the capacity to discern the right course of action in any given situation. It’s not naivety as many would demoralize you to believe.
The entertainment industry has spent the last 20 years trying to convince you that to challenge their belief system is a weakness and your desire for heroism for yourself and perhaps for your children is unsophisticated and it’s unrealistic.
Bob Metz:
Wow, that was refreshing. And talk about a profound observation in the statement that the morally grey narrative is not a reflection of the real world at all. Can’t say I’ve ever heard that said so simply in a single sentence.
And you know what that means? It means that most people are good or at least quote-unquote tend to the good. And note the implied polarity of any moral choice between good and evil. But I do have a point to make about his use of the term sacrifice. A word that Ayn Rand warned against being viewed as a virtue. As she explained, sacrifice is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a non-value. Thus altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values since help to a stranger or to an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less selfish than help to those one loves.
Boy, does that sound familiar? The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite. Always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. But when someone quote-unquote sacrifices something or value for a greater thing or value, does that still qualify as a sacrifice?
Because that’s how a lot of people seem to be using the term. It’s kind of like the proud parents who were to signal to their friends that they sacrificed buying their planned vacation cottage to pay for their son’s university education. Well, if that was actually a sacrifice in their minds, then they have confessed that they valued the cottage more than they valued their son’s education.
And then it would be a sacrifice. But if they valued their son’s education more than the cottage and made their choice on that premise, then it was no sacrifice at all. There’s was not about sacrifice, but about making a choice. Interestingly, real life fake wizard used the word sacrifice in both opposing contexts. In describing the characteristics of a hero as someone who faces the temptation of selfishness and chooses sacrifice instead, given that it is a choice and the correct or moral one, then the word sacrifice defined as a loss is completely inappropriate and out of context. And in describing how the American entertainment industry wants you to lose your stories, the wizard has used the term sacrifice correctly as representing the loss of a higher value for a lower value when he said they have sacrificed humility and responsibility for selfishness and ambiguity. There is no good and no bad.
Existence is morally gray. Well, we’ll be hearing the word sacrifice come up once or twice again in today’s show, but in the context not so much of suffering a loss than of expressing a moral choice. And if there’s a recurring theme to what seems to constitute good stories, it is definitely the theme of heroism and the hero himself. And in our own selection of audio bites taken from TV shows over the many years, now numbering well over 7500 different clips based on a minimum of 8 clips per show, there are of course two TV shows from which we are still able to draw a treasure of audio bites not yet aired, namely the TV series Castle, which ran from 2009 to 2016, and the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes. Castle, of course, is a series entirely based on telling stories and about telling stories, while Hogan’s Heroes was a particularly unique situation comedy drama dealing with one of the most politically incorrect topics of our day, Nazi Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler. In fact, I discovered online that as recently as 2005, TV Guide and TV Land listed Hogan’s Heroes at number 100 of the top 100 most unexpected moments in TV history, describing it as an unlikely POW camp comedy.
Well, to be sure, expecting a Nazi era prisoner of war comedy to ever become a hit would seem to be a long shot, but that’s exactly what happened. And one secret of its success can be found in the title of the show itself, which includes the very word Heroes. So if you’ve never seen a complete episode of Hogan’s Heroes, or even if you’re familiar with the show, get ready for a rather unique experience as we join a young married German couple living in Munich, Germany, and sitting down to watch two chosen episodes of Hogan’s Heroes for the very first time. And this just happened a few months ago, and they shared their live reactions to watching Hogan’s Heroes with their podcast audience on November 9th, 2025. The podcast is called Feli from Germany, spelled F-E-L-I, and I will leave it to the hostess herself to explain how and why they undertook this interesting experiment. We’re following, we will be able to share some of their observational highlights during key scenes of the show. Enjoy!
Clip (Feli From Germany, November 9 2025):
Feli: Hello, Servus, and welcome back to my YouTube channel. My name is Feli, I’m originally from Munich, Germany, and actually just moved back here after nine years in Cincinnati, Ohio, together with my husband Ben.
Ben: Hey guys.
Feli: And guys, after waiting for over a month, we finally have a couch here now in our new place. Nice couch. It is very nice. It’s very comfy, and I thought this is the perfect time to finally watch the show that you guys have asked me to watch for years.
Years now, Hogan’s Heroes. Have you seen it? I’ve seen it in the past a little bit. It’s like something that would be on TV whenever you just be flipping through a channel. I know it’s about World War II.
I know it’s like Americans that are prisoners of war, I believe. Yeah, I think it’s not just Americans, but so here is what I found out, because I’ve never actually watched it. I think I’ve seen like maybe a scene here and there through the years of like reacting to, you know, German language content on the Internet, but I’ve never actually watched a full episode. So from what I know, the show was from the 60s originally. It ran for six seasons, so it was pretty successful in the US. And it’s a comedy, of course, where the Germans are kind of supposed to be the silly ones. And the heroes and whoever Hogan is are the prisoners in a prisoner of war camp during World War II in Germany.
Okay, and since I’ve never seen it before, I figured let’s just go ahead and watch the very first episode so that I at least understand what’s going on. And then one of you in the past has also recommended episode 18 in the comments, so we’re going to check that out as well, I guess. Let’s do it. All right, here we go. Germany, 1942.
So I also read that this is the only episode that isn’t black and white.
Ben: Oh really?
Feli: The other ones are in color, yeah. That’s interesting.
Werner Klemperer. So several of them are German native speakers. And I think a lot of these actors from what I read are also originally Jewish and several of them have fled Nazi Germany themselves. Hmm. He’s definitely a German.
What is he doing? I wonder if any of these guys are World War II vets. Yeah, they were. Okay, yeah, it would be like the perfect time period. Ah, a distraction.
Oh, okay. Oh, they’re trying to escape. This reminds me of the Great Escape. You’ve never seen that, but it’s one of my favorite movies.
It’s hard for me to understand.
Schulz. You’re going to catch cold?
So that other guy is also a Nazi. He is a Nazi? No, he’s a prisoner.
Why is he talking to him like he’s his friend? Oh, that’s Hogan. Uh-oh. I can’t tell if that other guy that just came in is also a native German speaker.
He very well could be. I still am not following what their plan is. I don’t either. Why is he trying to come into the camp? Break in, yeah. The commandant.
Oh gosh, okay. What’s going on here? I’m going to get a message. Oh, I have nothing on you. Oh, hi, Izzy. Hi. There’s a war on. Whoa.
Who’s she? He has an affair with one of the German staff? I guess so. Sit down, please. Thank you.
Get the Kaiser home. What’s the other one? The monocle’s a nice touch. Now I will show the iron hand to the entire camp. You run a big operation here. Guards, dogs, civilians, the whole thing. That’s right. How many men would you need if we gave up trying to escape?
How many? Yeah, I mean, would they need a colonel as Commandant a captain could do it. A sergeant. A sergeant?
I don’t think they’re going to transfer you to the Russian front. Do you have something? Rumors. Where?
Who? Wasn’t one of my men. Was it Carl?
Carl. Fritz. Schulz. Aha, Schulz.
Boy, you’re clever.
I will say that it’s kind of a crazy situation to have like their prisoners, but they’re also all like military, right? Like they were fighting for the Russians, the Americans, the British. So they basically have the same jobs. They’re just like now in the position of prison guard and prisoner. But I kind of like the dynamic there was they still have the power to like make them feel insecure. And I feel like that I could see that. Yeah, maybe not too far off.
Yeah, there was definitely like in prisoner of war camps, there was definitely like still a chain of command even among the prisoners.
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense too. And it makes sense that he would possibly have information that the German wouldn’t have.
Yeah, they might not tell their commanding officers be fully transparent with them. So even the prisoners might hear things that the commandant doesn’t hear.
I’m of the old Russian school, the Heidelberg aristocracy.
Oh, just stealing some cigars.
Look closer, commandant.
I am impressed that he keeps saying commandants and not like commander or whatever.
You have given me their punishment. There will be no football game today.
That was ugly sir.
Dismissed. You gotta light.
Oh, yes.
Danke.
Incidentally, when we have more time, you have to bring me up to date on Major Campbell. Major Campbell? I’m sure with 151st you don’t know Major Campbell?
Oh, Campbell. Everybody knows Campbell.
That’s how they’re finding out he’s spying.
Yeah, figured it out.
Okay, so that’s Hogan, right? He’s a colonel. Yeah. So like, basically he’s the boss of them all because he was also the highest rank in the
Yeah, colonels are like right below like generals.
But so like they just kept that going for the entire prisoner camp even though they’re not even all Americans.
Yeah. Like he’s still like the leader of them all basically.
Yeah, because the commandant probably knows that he can pull like chain of command on the other prisoners and they respect him probably the most.
So why are they showing the spy everything?
They told him it was at the water tower. Right. So he doesn’t know where it’s at. They’re trying to make him look crazy I think.
Oh, okay, okay.
This man is operating an underground apparatus so vast and so complicated it’s the stagger of the imagination. And with a very nose of Colonel Klink there’s a printing press turning up enough counterfeit money to destroy the economy of the Third Reich.
He pick pocketed it.
Yeah, you’re right. They’re trying to make him look crazy.
Machine shops, steam rooms, barbershops. His secretary is a manicurist there.
Helga? A manicurist in an underground barbershop for prisoners?
Yes.
Helga? She’s the one who was so nice on my last visit.
Gosh.
Oh, he’s got a dueling scar. That was like a nice touch.
I think I read that that scar is real.
Ben: Really?
Feli: Yeah. Oh, there.
The tower is a fake.
He’s one of the ones that… Oh, god. That actually fought in the war. Yep, he’s going to be in trouble.
Yeah, he’s going to go to the Eastern Front.
My dear Klink.
These spies, Colonel, they are unstable.
Time on the Eastern Front will clear his head.
I think it’s interesting how they just throw in German words here.
Yeah. They’re like, the way they count it, danke, Herr Commandant. It’s not like a whole lot of words, but it kind of like…
It adds to the…
It adds to the effect. That was a really good first episode. I really liked the way it’s scripted. I did not expect it to be that good, honestly. I mean, also, it’s like it was a different time, different type of humor and stuff like that, but it’s not bad humor. This was all really well scripted.
It’s like charming and witty. And it’s so weird because it’s such like a…
Serious setting. Yeah, serious topic, serious setting.
I think that’s why it works so well with the comedy, because you’re making fun of it, you’re making it more lighthearted. I honestly expected it to be more slapstick and more goofy, which I’m not always the biggest fan of, but this was not too much.
Okay, so episode one was called The Informer. Makes sense. And episode 18 is called The Gold Rush. So let’s check it out. Okay, now we’re in color.
Oh yeah.
Okay, let’s see if we can still follow the plot. Jumped ahead 18 episodes.
I feel like every American knows the tone we’re schnell. Is it just from Nazi movies or is it one specific? I don’t know the specific ones, but yeah, we just know it from…
It’s really partly this too.
From film.
Welcome to the Adolf Hitler Biltmore.
Hogan, I’ll call you when I need you.
He definitely sounds the most German, like in his English, because what’s crazy to me is that of all the actors that are German native speakers, you can tell that they’ve also lived in the US for like so long that their English is flawless as well. They can pronounce the T-H and like all of that. They don’t have a full on German accent. I think only when they wanted to come out. So I don’t know, it’s just kind of funny, but he just sounded the most German when he came out and spoke English.
Out of all all of them for sure.
A big shipment of gold bars which we stole from the Bank of France is being shipped to Dusseldorf.
Not stolen confiscated.
When you defeat a country, you confiscate its gold.
I thought if you take something that does not belong to you, that is stealing.
The simpleton’s right. Yeah?
You think you’re so stupid? Silence! Captain, I want to inform you that you have been assigned to the strictest POW camp in Germany.
No one has ever escaped.
What do you see? You know that famous picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware?
Yes, I’m familiar with it.
This ain’t it.
Give me that. I must inspect it for security reasons.
I understand.
Is it porn? Probably.
American foolishness wouldn’t hurt you to distribute a few of those, you know? Can you imagine a picture of Herman Gearing in a bear skin rug?
A bear skin rug. It’s not far off from the truth. He’s such a good, I hope I’m a good actor, but Klink isn’t a really good actor.
Colonel Hogan, you have given me an excellent idea. Frau Helga, get me Gestapo headquarters in Hammerburg. I want to talk to the officer who’s in command of the gold shipment. Hogan, I thank you for your suggestion.
Me and my big mouth.
Basically, the prisoners are running the prison.
What does the commandant do?
He’s a good actor, too. They’re whistling the theme song. Very good of you to offer us your hospitality for our handy wears, Colonel. You have to be a servicer.
Accident is strong.
I won’t fail to mention your name to my superior, Colonel. Oh, that won’t be necessary, but I hope you do. George, see a wolf.
Guide the truck behind the X5. He a wolf, Herr Kommandant. Yeah, Wolf Herr Kommandant.
I will say I really like that the show is using all these native German speakers, because the new guide, the Gestapo guy is obviously a German speaker, and then the two commanders are. Darts! Nice, you get to have fun there, too.
I know POWs are treated better than people in concentration camps, but I wonder how accurate this is in terms of the freedom that these guys have.
It’d be fun if that was accurate, but I doubt it.
I doubt it, yeah.
Snip! Snip!
I think that was supposed to be German.
Yeah, it’s always German here. Yeah, danke. Yeah, good. Good, yeah. Good, good night. Good night. Fine, okay. Fine, okay, okay, I’m going to rewatch that part.
Ah, I’m not good at speaking German. Good and hot coffee. Very cold, but here is the limit, right? That right guy doesn’t fully sound like a native speaker. Good, yeah. Good, good nocht.
Fine, okay. I feel like the guard’s accent is accurate, though. Yeah, he was just a mumble. I mean, he just mumbles in general as a person. So I couldn’t understand what he was saying at first, but I mean, he’s a native speaker for sure, Schultz is. And then the guy on the right, I mean, either he has like a really strong regional accent, but I think it’s more just like a non-native speaker accent, but he did okay. And it’s cute that they put in like a short, full German conversation without even subtitles or anything. I like that. It makes it more authentic.
Oh, yeah, he drugged them too. He didn’t even realize. They’re conned.
Why? Girl, what happens if we’re challenged?
They better not get caught speaking English.
Yeah, should probably put some guys that know little German on this duty. Yeah. Da-da-da-da-da.
Is this just the theme song for the show? Yeah, it’s up. Okay.
That’s what I was talking about. He asked, is there anything new? And then, is everything all right?
It’s all in order. And he just said, I think it sounded like Yavol, which I think they’ve picked up on and then sound like Yavol. I mean, with the mumbling, I guess he passed. He passed?
Yeah. You did great. I had any sense of faint dead away. Oh, you spoke German? I didn’t either.
Five minutes ago. Don’t get on mixed up. The bricks you dipped in the gold, and the gold you dipped in the red paint. I’m telling you. Okay, so they are actually going to build the steps out of the gold bricks.
Okay. They have a whole workshop. That’s like really smart. Like the whole time I was trying to figure out what their plan was, and I didn’t even think of that.
Hogan’s cool, man. Wake up, French, wake up. What was the close?
Dank. Yeah, he has an accent. All right. I think the person suggested this one because there was a little bit of actual German dialogue in it between Germans. Yeah. And honestly, compared to all of these other scenes that I’ve seen in Hollywood movies and everything, I got to say that this show is doing it really well.
Yeah. Like, of course, a lot of the German is like exaggerated, and it’s like they just throw in a German word here and there in an otherwise English-speaking sentence, which of course doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. But at least the people who are doing it are native German speakers, and the German conversation that they had in this episode at least made sense, which you can say for some of these other Hollywood scenes, where they’re just speaking gibberish with each other. So I honestly, I feel like this is approved. This is German approved.
Check it out. And I also think that a lot of people wanted me to watch this show because they kind of want to know how an actual German will react to the Germans being like the goofy ones and the silly ones and the dumb ones. You know, do I feel offended by any of this? But I mean, I think it would be weird if us Germans actually felt offended by that because obviously we also considered the Nazis the bad guys.
But I think even aside from that, even if these were like modern day Germans, I think it is just very well made.
Yeah, it’s just fun.
Yeah, it’s really funny.
It’s fun. And it kind of captures that time period in like film, which is like one of my favorites.
It’s really good writing. Like I’m very impressed with the writing. No wonder that it won, I think several awards too, or at least it was nominated for a lot, but I think it won some awards too. That makes a lot of sense because it’s really good.
And I honestly didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. Like I wouldn’t mind watching a couple episodes with you just for fun.
We’re definitely going to watch some more episodes with this.
Like I thought this was more something that’s going to be like, yeah, okay, I have to watch it. It’s going to be a little cringe. It’s going to be a little outdated. But that’s honestly not what it was.
Bob Metz:
You’re listening to Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. What a fascinating experiment. In 2025, sitting a German couple down to watch a 60s American TV show depicting America’s war with Germany in a comedic form, set in the time period of World War II. Yet, says Feli, this is German approved. Do I feel offended? No, we also considered the Nazis bad guys.
And on the basis of just watching two episodes of Hogan’s Heroes, they concluded that all the actors in the show are excellent, especially the person who played Klink, which of course was Werner Klemperer. And he had a tough role to play because he had to play the fool. And talk about Klink being the ultimate symbol of narcissism. You got to see it if you haven’t seen it before.
But mostly they realized that the show captured the time period and that it was really about the writing and that they were very impressed with the writing. Well, that kind of says it all, doesn’t it? But what makes the writing impressive? It’s the stories. And personally, I share Feli’s impression that Hogan’s Heroes is neither fringe nor outdated.
And on the language front, one thing she and her husband Ben might come to notice when they do watch more episodes of Hogan’s Heroes is that the show treated the French language much in the same way as they treated the German.
So here’s hoping they got a lot of happy heroism ahead of them.
Meanwhile, Real Life Fake Wizard earlier informed us that 2025 saw Superman, the most recognizable hero on the face of the earth, fail to break even with a $350 million budget. Well, I’ve always been a fan of Superman movies and TV shows and pretty much enjoyed them all to varying degrees, at least until I stopped watching them a couple of decades ago. But for my money, the best Superman interpretation was the Lois and Clark TV series starring Terry Hatcher and Dean Cain, both of whom still look pretty good to this day.
And by the way, Dean Cain, the actor, also happens to be an ICE agent. Imagine getting deported by Superman. But the secret to all the best Superman interpretations always depended upon the relationships between the characters, relationships and interactions that could remain completely real and relatable to the average person, even in the midst of a complete fantasy. Which is why the real action in Lois and Clark wasn’t when Superman was using his superpowers to defeat super villains, but when he was completely vulnerable in his attempts to win the love of Lois Lane.
Clip (Lois and Clark, 301):
Clark: Lois, I’ve been thinking.
Lois: Me too.
Clark: What about?
Lois: You first.
Clark: Okay. Come on! Give me a break!
Lois: You want to go back?
Clark: If the Earth opened up at my feet, I wouldn’t move until I’d said this. Lois? Will you marry me?
Lois: Who’s asking? Clark? Or Superman?
Clark: Okay. I guess the first question is, how long have you known?
Lois: Really? I would have thought it would have been. How did I figure it out?
Clark: It’s kind of neck and neck with… how mad are you?
Lois: Let’s save that one for last.
Okay.
So, how long have I known? Since yesterday. How did I figure it out? When you did this. It stopped.
So, how mad are you?
I’m not mad.
Clark: Excuse me? I’m not mad at all.
Lois: Lois, this is not really a time to hold back.
I’m not.
Clark: I’m sorry. I was talking to Lois Lane. I know she was here a second ago, and I know she couldn’t really react.
Lois: I’m hurt. I’m really, really hurt.
Clark: Which is going to be worse than mad, isn’t it? Okay, Lois, okay. I’ve been rehearsing this for months. Let’s see if I can get it right. I know this is a shock. And I wanted to be the one to tell you so that you could understand how hard this has been for me. How I’ve carried this secret… by myself. And how long I have wanted to tell you. But when I decided to become Superman, I…
Lois: You became a target. And so, anybody close to you became a target, and it just got more complicated when you realized you loved me.
Clark: Which was about two minutes after I met you.
Lois: Ha, don’t try and score points.
Clark: Sorry. Look, I get it. I really do. It’s logical. It’s, uh… It’s even thoughtful. It’s just when you get right down to it, you made me believe that you were two different people, and you did that by lying. And that makes me feel like I don’t know you, and that really hurts me, and you know what? I am mad. I’m really mad. I’m really, really mad. Clark, I’m just furious. I cannot believe it, and then you’re super…
Clip (Real Life Fake Wizard, March 25 2026):
Real Life Fake Wizard: Sadly, I can already hear a lot of your objections from the comments, saying things like, Wizard, these are just movies. It’s just entertainment.
What? You need all your movies to be feel-good movies? What are you, a big baby?
Why do you care so much? You’re all foolish naysayers, because they are not just movies. They never were. And the people making them know that better than anyone.
Here’s some more examples. William Marston created Wonder Woman in 1941. He was a psychologist. He did not create her for entertainment. He specifically called her openly and explicitly psychological propaganda for the new type of woman. A comic book character. Propaganda.
His words, not mine. And it worked. Wonder Woman reshaped how an entire generation understood female strength and capability. A drawing on paper changed the trajectory of a culture.
The earliest war stories dating back to 3000 BC were tools for survival, meaning, and memory. The Iliad was the moral operating system for Greek civilization.
It taught young men what courage looked like and the price of pride. Every culture in human history has used stories this way. This is what I mean when I say stories are more dangerous than weapons. A weapon can kill a man. A story can kill a value.
A weapon can destroy a city. A story can destroy a culture’s capacity to rebuild one. When you systematically strip heroism from your stories, you are performing a kind of a cultural lobotomy. This is like cutting away part of a civilization’s imagination that allows it to dream of something better. Unlike what many people in this comment section would have you believe, there actually is a right and a wrong. People have a conscience and we can choose actively to be better as people. Hollywood took your heroes on purpose.
I think it’s time to take them back. The barrier to entry for storytelling has never been lower in human history. You can write a novel on your phone. You can shoot a film on a camera that costs a few hundred dollars and it will be in 4K. Soon you will be able to make video games from a laptop in your bedroom. You can create a comic, you can animate a short, you can record a podcast, publish a book and distribute it to the entire planet without asking a single executive in Los Angeles for permission.
This is the single greatest shift in the history of human storytelling and it happened right under their noses while they were busy turning Superman into a box office right off. So here is your mandate. If you are a writer, write. If you’re a filmmaker, pick up the camera. If you are a game developer, build worlds that mean something to people. Creatives, aspiring creatives, storytellers, lead us the way out. And if you are not a creative, if you don’t write, you don’t film, you don’t code, then you have a job too and it’s just as critical. Encourage the people around you who do.
Share their work by their book. Play the game, watch the short film your friend made. Support the creators who are doing this right because they are out there and they are doing it without billion-dollar budgets. They need you. They need your attention and your word of mouth and your belief that stories still matter because they do. You may not understand the extent of what an encouraging word means to someone.
It could be the difference between going the distance or not. Hollywood killed your heroes because they want you to be demoralized, to feel dehumanized, and make it so you don’t think you have a chance of overcoming the status quo. Don’t give them the satisfaction. It’s our time now. Let the dinosaurs go extinct.
Until next time my friends, create, innovate, inspire others to do so as well, and for the love of God, cancel Disney Plus.
Bob Metz:
Real-life fake wizard says, there actually is a right and a wrong, and he rejects the notion that morality is just a spectrum. Just as words and concepts are the software for the hardware of the mind, stories are the moral operating system for civilization, and as the wizard correctly observed, every culture in human history has used stories this way, and this is why he says that stories are more dangerous than weapons. And of course, wherever heroism is involved, so too is the great polarity.
Good versus evil, moral versus immoral, love versus fear, and of course in politics, right versus left, which like morality, those on the left would also have you falsely believe is a spectrum.
Clip (Castle 506):
Beckett: You know it’s never too late to live out your fantasy. You’re right, okay, it was a stupid show. It was cheesy and melodramatic.
I mean a handful of academy cadets on a training mission, suddenly the earth is destroyed and they’re all that’s left of humanity. I completely understand why you hated it. But, Castle, I also understand why people loved it, why Annabelle loved it.
It was about leaving home for the first time, about searching for your identity and making a difference. I loved dressing up like Lieutenant Chloe. She didn’t care what anybody thought about her, and I kind of did at that time. I mean she was a scientist and a warrior, and that was all in spite of the way that she looked. It was like I could be anything, and I didn’t have to choose. So don’t make fun, okay?
Castle: Okay.
Beckett: Besides, it didn’t hurt that my legs looked great in her outfit.
Bob Metz:
Now as you know, we like to close our show with a smile, and this week is no exception, but for the fact that this week’s smile is a bit longer than usual and comes with a story about heroism and sacrifice, expressed in the positive sense we discussed earlier. Of course, one actor who’s always been associated with heroism is William Shatner, thanks to his role as the iconic Star Trek hero Captain Kirk. But heroism and sacrifice come in many forms, and in our closer today, William Shatner portrays a hero of a very different sort.
From his short-lived television series, Shit My Dad Says. And if ever you want to hear the idea of, shall we say, virtuous sacrifice expressed in as unique and funny and loving away as you’ll ever imagine, I think you’ll appreciate the punchline that comes at the end of the story.
So while that story captures your undivided attention, don’t forget that the story about our journey in the right direction continues next week. When you are invited to join us once again, and until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We’ll see you then.
Clip (Sh*t My Dad Says 103):
Henry: You got him fired? I didn’t do anything. I’m so fired he denied me sustenance. That’s a violation of the Geneva Convention. Dad, I don’t think the Geneva Convention applies to pancake houses.
Dad (Ed): Does to international pancake. You’re unbelievable. Do you even care that you just ruined this guy’s life? Why do you care so much? Let’s just say I have a soft spot for people you screwed over.
Henry: Excuse me? You wreck people’s lives, and then you walk away. What people? Who are you talking about? This is who I’m talking about.
Dad (Ed): Blockbuster?
Henry: I thought it was Mom. What’s your mother got to do with this? You think she keeps calling you to tell me how happy she is? She’s never gotten over what you did to her.
Dad (Ed): Henry, there are a lot of reasons why a marriage doesn’t work.
Henry: Oh, come on.
Dad (Ed): Sometimes the pig walks to slaughter because he knows it’s better for the farmer.
Henry: Yeah, you’re gonna have to explain that one to me.
Dad (Ed): Sometimes the pig walks to slaughter because he knows it’s better for the farmer.
Henry: I don’t know if you’re the pig, I don’t know if you’re the farmer, but I know one thing. Your marriage didn’t work for one reason. You cheated on my mother. You’re looking to say sorry for something. How about that, Dad? And you owe Blockbuster $7 for Transformers 2.
Dad (Ed): That I’m sorry for.
Henry: What happened?
Blockbuster Employee (Cain): He just got this guy fired from the diner.
Henry: Oh, wow. Food must have come later than sooner. What’s it to you?
Just brought up all these feelings about what he did to my mom. What are you talking about? He cheated on her. Is that what your mom told you?
No, she didn’t have to. Everybody knows. That’s why they got divorced. That’s why she has 20 ex-boyfriends. 21.
Dad (Ed): Henry, I have to tell you something.
Henry: Oh, my God. You? What do you want?
Blockbuster Employee (Cain): How much to call my son and tell him that I’ve apologized to you?
Dad (Ed): How much? Why don’t you just apologize?
Blockbuster Employee (Cain): I’m not sorry.
Dad (Ed): Okay, $1 million. Or you can say I’m sorry and I’ll do it for free. Why is it so important to you?
Blockbuster Employee (Cain): Because I can’t say I’m sorry for the one thing my son wants me to say I’m sorry for.
Dad (Ed): What does he want you to say you’re sorry for?
Blockbuster Employee (Cain): That’s none of your business. Look, I’m sorry, Cain. Forgive me. Wait. Come back.
Dad (Ed): I don’t know why I always get sucked in by you. Hullo? Tell you what. I’ll make the call if you tell me what you can’t say you’re sorry for.
Blockbuster Employee (Cain): Cheating on his mother.
Dad (Ed): You cheated on his mother? Dad didn’t cheat on your mom.
Your mom cheated on dad with the gravel guy.
Henry: What? That makes no sense.
Dad (Ed): Sure it does. We used to have a circular driveway. It was the envy of the cul-de-sac. So much gravel.
Henry: Not about the gravel. About dad. Dad cheated on mom with Mrs. Fastinello. Mom found out about it and she split.
Dad (Ed): No, Henry, you were too little to remember, but I used to hear all the fights. As a matter of fact, I remember the day that your mom jumped in the Chevy and peeled out of here. There’s gravel flying everywhere.
Henry: Why would dad take the heat for something he didn’t do?
Dad (Ed): Because she was raising Henry and if he found out the truth, he wouldn’t respect her. And that was something I found unacceptable.
Henry: So you kept that lie alive just to protect his mother’s integrity? That’s quite a sacrifice.
Dad (Ed): No, she was a single mother bringing up a five-year-old kid, so who was making the bigger sacrifice?
Henry: Wow. Maybe he was embarrassed.
Dad (Ed): No, that’s not it. He was protecting my mom. He was protecting me.
Henry: Why would he do that?
Dad (Ed): Because sometimes the pig walks to slaughter because he knows it’s better for the farmer.
Henry: I totally know what you mean.