Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show

Washington lawyer. Capitol Hill staffer. Labor lobbyist. Bestselling author. Historian. Playwright. And at 72, a stand-up comedy student. Robin Gerber has done it all, and she’s here to tell us how.Phil and Ted go from Robin’s wild youth of drugs, sex, and feminist activism to a career spent chronicling the women who changed the game: Eleanor Roosevelt, Katharine Graham, and Ruth Handler, the woman who gave the world Barbie. Along the way we hit the rise and fall of the labor movement and American politics from Reagan to Trump. We also get into the messy truth about caregiving.That truth is the heart of Robin’s new solo play, The Best Medicine, a funny, honest show about caring for her husband with Parkinson’s. It stars Caroline Aaron of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and runs at the Odyssey Theatre in West LA.Robin has also appeared on the History Channel and CNN’s First Ladies. Her first play, The Shot, starred Sharon Lawrence as Katharine Graham. Her alt-history novel Eleanor vs. Ike sends Eleanor Roosevelt up against Eisenhower in 1952.Links referenced in this episode:Odysseytheatre.comRobinGerber.comsexyboomershow.comCompanies mentioned in this episode:MattelThe Washington PostHistory ChannelBiography ChannelCNNLos Angeles TimesOdyssey Theatre

Watts, California. Two-point-one square miles. More than 65 gangs. A neighborhood in South Los Angeles that the news visits only when something goes wrong. One cop in the film says it plainly: it’s a Black neighborhood, and nobody gives a f**k.Then a businessman went on a late-night police ride-along, saw a Watts that never makes the news, and asked a simple question: what if the people living the story told it themselves?The answer is the acclaimed documentary, "Nothing to See Here: Watts." Victims of violent crime. Activists. Current and former gang members. Police officers. Students. No script. No director. Just iPhones, raw footage, and hard truths, shaped by more than 300 community members.The movie became a movement. Rival gang leaders with over 200 years in prison between them watched it. It played at the M.L. King Center, Harvard, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.After a peace pledge was signed, Watts’ four largest public housing developments have reported zero gang-related killings since the movie debuted eighteen months ago. Homicides across the area fell by more than 90%.Phil and Ted sit down with four people who lived this story. The mother of a young entrepreneur who survived a near-fatal shooting over a PlayStation, the daily reality of an LAPD gang officer, and an honest look at loss, forgiveness, resilience, and hope.A warning to listeners: this episode includes frank talk of shootings and death.Links referenced in this episode:nothingtoseeheremovie.comCompanies mentioned in this episode:LevengerAppleGooglePlayStation (Sony)Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)Community Service Partnership (CSP)California Army National GuardLos Angeles Harbor CollegeThe Healthy Room ProjectLos Angeles RamsU.S. Department of StateHarvard UniversityThe King CenterPeacock TheaterSundance Film FestivalCulver City Film FestivalSanta Clarita International Film FestivalAcademy Awards (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)Closing the Gap AcademyNothing to See Here, Watts (film)

The storm is coming. So is the punchline.Emmy winning weatherman and standup comic Fritz Coleman is back, and the forecast is wet. A Kelvin wave and a likely strong El Niño could mean heavy winter storms, king tides, and real trouble for the coast. We also get into burn scars that can’t handle a downpour, rising seas, and a state whose water storage and infrastructure are already straining.Then it gets weirder. Fritz walks us through a career spent making the weather funny, and why the standards for on-air meteorologists keep changing. We follow the news business as it shrinks, merges, and lays people off. We talk about billionaires and tech giants steering the culture, politics and elections, and the sudden surge in UFO disclosure. And we make the case for live performance, because shared rooms and real laughter are getting harder to find.See Fritz live in his show Unassisted Living at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood. It runs monthly, with a special program around Thanksgiving. Tickets and details at Fritzcolemancomedy.com and elportaltheatre.com.Sharp insights, big laughs, and a little hope for humanity. Sexy Boomer style.Takeaways:How El Niño and Kelvin waves can bring heavy rain and higher king tides.Warmer ocean water increases atmospheric moisture and fuels longer, stronger atmospheric rivers into California.The acute danger of post-fire erosion and flooding when intense storms hit burned hillsides in Southern California.The live show Unassisted Living at the El Portal Theater, aimed at older audiences and running on Sundays.How Fritz becaome a beloved TV weatherman on LA's Channel 4 without formal meteorology training.Media consolidation, streaming economics, and how concentrated power can suppress film distribution and public information.Links referenced in this episode:sexyboomershow.comelportaltheater.comfritzcolemancomedy.com

At 15, Albie Selznick hosted David Bowie’s circle for a post-concert party at his mother’s house in LA.Later, he juggled fire at Andy Warhol’s Factory.Magician, actor and one third of the punk circus trio The Mums, Albie spent a lifetime chasing one goal: to work with rockstar David Bowie. His new solo show, Letter From David, tells the whole wild story. Early loss, a refuge in magic, tightrope and juggling, nightclubs, hand-delivered letters and one surreal night out with Angie Bowie.On this episode, Albie takes us from Hollywood's Magic Castle to punk clubs, opening for iconic bands like DEVO and Duran Duran, and a stage full of showbiz hits and near misses.We dig into Bowie’s influence, the Berlin period and the resonance of Black Star. Along the way, you’ll hear ultra-rare behind-the-scenes stories and what it takes to build a moving one-person show, with plenty of help from his brilliant wife, Laura Maccabee, who co-wrote and directed it.Albie has also acted on more than 80 TV shows. Now he plays Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon in the film Michael.If you’re a Bowie fan, a magic fan, or just love a great story, this one’s for you. If an artist ever changed your life, or you ever dreamed of running away with the circus, you’ll want to hear it.Letter From David plays Sundays at 7 PM at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Details at letterfromdavid.com.Warning: you may come out a little obsessed with Bowie too.Links referenced in this episode:letterfromdavid.com

Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding to the folk-rock faithful) has hopped genres for decades: folk, rock, jazz, whatever the song demands. He takes us behind the curtain of One Last Heist, his latest album, and the Cabinet of Wonders, his one-of-a-kind variety show. He’s currently touring as a singer in the band Smithereens. Wesley walks us through his witty approach to songwriting, his leap into literary fiction, and how he makes his novels, including the hilarious Wonderkid and the unforgettable Misfortune. A British transplant, he explains why he's thrilled to have become an American citizen in 2025, and particularly during a challenging time in the U.S.Takeaways:Songs featured from Wesley Stace's new album One Last Heist.His dual career as a novelist and musician, and how the two intersect.The new album leans toward jazz influences and wider band arrangements.The Cabinet of Wonders variety show format of music, writers, and comedians.His decision to become a U.S. citizen, his feelings at the ceremony, and reasons for naturalization.His recording method preference for live band sessions to capture swing and collective energy in tracks.His novels draw from songs and personal history, including themes of identity, reinvention, and performance across decades.Links referenced in this episode:wesleystace.comCompanies mentioned in this episode:Sire RecordsThe Wall Street JournalWXPN (XPN)Free Library of PhiladelphiaCity WineryLargoNPR (National Public Radio)wesleystace.comThe Smithereens

How did one foggy city end up with the Beats, the hippies, the biggest gay community and the loudest rock scene of the 60s and 70s? Follow the trail back to the Gold Rush, where the lights came on all at once and nobody ever turned them off.Peter Richardson, author of Brand New Beat: A New History of Rolling Stone’s Early Years in San Francisco, takes us back to the city where it all caught fire. Think the Beats, LSD (legal until October 1966), the Human Be-In, the Summer of Love, and a few hundred hippies who just wanted to dance and accidentally rewired American culture.Then came Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner was a 21-year-old college dropout with big ambition and bigger moxie. Ralph Gleason was the grown-up in the room, a Chronicle jazz critic who ended up on Nixon’s enemies list. Together they bet the farm that rock and the counterculture were no fad, and they were right. The mainstream press called hippies candidates for “a very sound spanking.” Rolling Stone called them readers.We dig into how a scrappy magazine in a town that was never a media capital landed Hunter S. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Greil Marcus, and broke national stories like Altamont and Karen Silkwood.We also get into how Jann sweet-talked record labels into buying ads and then ran the bad reviews anyway. Plus the Reagan and Nixon years, the dark turn of the 70s, and Rolling Stone's move to New York, where, Peter says, the real reason was that the parties were better.Peter is a Berkeley-trained scholar who taught California culture at San Francisco State for 17 years. He also wrote Savage Journey and No Simple Highway. He explains exactly how a city, a drug, a soundtrack, and a masthead made history.Links referenced in this episode:sexyboomershow.comBrand New Beat- The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine

Zayd Ayers Dohrn, son of Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, grew up as a toddler on the lam, dodging the FBI while his parents traded protest signs for pipe bombs. Then a West Village townhouse blew sky high and took three of their own with it. The kids got the bill: arrests, exile, and scars that never healed. So what happens when people give up on democracy and start building bombs? Zayd knows. He was raised in the fallout.Takeaways:The Weather Underground moved from peaceful protest to planning violent bombings after key killings and frustrations.The West Village townhouse explosion was a catastrophic turning point that killed comrades and halted lethal plans.Parents used payphones, code words, and secret networks to evade the FBI while underground for years.Parents faced a moral dilemma: balancing child safety with commitment to revolutionary struggle and social change.The damaging effects on children who experienced instability, separation, and abandonment due to radical actions and arrests.FBI overreach, COINTELPRO abuses, and how illegal actions by authorities led to dropped charges against fugitives.Historical parallels and warnings that prolonged democratic failure can drive some toward radical and violent methods.The Weather Underground's campaign avoided civilian casualties after the explosion, yet its legacy remains morally and politically fraught.Read Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young—an inside look at a fugitive childhood and a searing account of a revolutionary era.Zayd’s own podcast, Mother Country Radicals, offers even more untold stories from the underground.

Season 7 blasts off with a mind-expanding conversation with bestselling author D.W. Pasulka, whose new book The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny has everybody from Silicon Valley to the Vatican talking.Pasulka pulls back the curtain on how faith traditions, Catholicism especially, saw this coming: a seismic shift in human consciousness now being accelerated by AI and emerging tech.Behold apocalyptic dread in Silicon Valley boardrooms, the rise of "grief tech" and AI resurrections of the dead, ancient biblical mysteries getting a 21st-century reboot, and why the smartest people in tech are suddenly reaching for scripture to make sense of what they've built.Pasulka connects the dots from visionaries like Teilhard de Chardin and Marshall McLuhan straight through to today's AI arms race, and asks the question none of us can quite look away from: as the synthetic starts to feel sacred, how do we know what — or who — to believe?Plus, Phil has a cigar with media prophet Marshall McLuhan, and Ted gets a personal transmission from Arthur C. Clarke in Saudi Arabia.History, science, and spirituality collide at warp speed. Season 7 is officially airborne!Topics include:How technology and AI are reshaping human consciousness and perception at scale.How social media amplifies mimetic desire and enables collective scapegoating that harms communities.Grief tech and AI-based resurrections can hinder healthy grieving and distort relationships with the dead.Religion provides the most adaptive framework to interpret nonhuman intelligence and potential disclosure responsibly.Historical examples show that anomalous aerial phenomena have long been mediated through religious language and ritual interpretation.The urgent need to protect children's interior life and cognitive development from early and constant screen exposure.Advances in sensor and military technology transformed UAP study from anecdote into verifiable data requiring national security attention.Links referenced in this episode:D.W. PasulkaHereticonSexyBoomershow.com

Everyone dreams of dropping out and building a better world. Almost nobody plans for the compost schedule, the group meetings, or the guy who thinks he's the Messiah. Phil and Ted head deep into California's utopian fringe — one stop in a Klamath Mountains commune, the other out in the high desert, scanning the sky for something that isn't from here.Guest Jonathan Berman, professor emeritus of film at Cal State San Marcos, made Commune (2006), the first real reexamination of 1960s communal life, centered on Black Bear Ranch — the Northern California commune that promised "free land for free people" and delivered a crash course in how exhausting paradise actually is.He also directed Calling All Earthlings, a look at desert UFO culture from the 1950s through the '70s, when believers, contactees, and at least one full-blown cult decided the Mojave was humanity's launchpad — building the Integratron to rejuvenate the body and, sure, maybe unlock the next stage of evolution while they were at it.Two very different roads out of the mainstream, same destination: total commitment to an idea nobody could prove. A commune. A saucer. A new kind of human.Trip out with Phil and Ted as they pursue higher spiritual consciousness, California style.Links referenced in this episode:sexyboomershow.comCommune DocumentaryCalling All EarthlingsThe IntegratronTakeaways:Black Bear Ranch was created as an alternative refuge from 1960s political unrest and the draft.How free love and communal practices produced both intimacy and deep conflict among ranch residents.The arrival of children shifted social dynamics and led many families to leave for conventional life.The dangerous influence of the Shivalila cult episode that separated families and caused real harm to children.George Van Tassel built the Integratron from alien instructions as a device intended to extend human lifespans.The Integratron and Van Tassel attracted countercultural followers, government scrutiny, and persistent conspiracy concerns.Archival preservation at the Huntington secures Van Tassel materials and aids public study of this history.Many countercultural experiments were sincere and influential, and their ideas later became commodified by mainstream culture.

How can you hate me when you don't know me?Daryl Davis walks into rooms most people would run from. A musician, actor, and author, Davis has spent decades doing something that sounds almost too simple to work: sitting down with Klan leaders and just talking. The result? Over 200 Klansmen have hung up their hoods for good—and more than two dozen have handed Davis their robes as proof. He keeps them, not as trophies, but as evidence of what honest conversation can actually do. Daryl breaks down the psychology of hate, gets real about the tightrope America is walking right now, and makes the case—hard-won and unsentimental—for why he still believes people can change.Takeaways:Daryl Davis, a black man, owns numerous KKK robes as a result of his unique approach to confronting racism.Through his efforts, more than 200 individuals have renounced their affiliation with the KKK after engaging in dialogue with him.Daryl's childhood experiences abroad fostered a worldview that was initially oblivious to racism, shaping his later pursuits.The central question driving Daryl's activism is: How can individuals harbor hate for someone they do not know?Daryl emphasizes the importance of finding common ground with those who hold opposing views, facilitating understanding and dialogue.His work illustrates that addressing racism requires a cultural shift, rather than merely changing individual minds.Links referenced in this episode:darrelldavis.comsexyboomershow.comAccidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & AmericaCompanies mentioned in this episode:TEDThe WireYouTubeAccidental CourtesyDaryl Davis, Race and AmericaSouthern Poverty Law GroupMark PotokKu Klux KlanOath KeepersProud BoysSimon Wiesenthal CenterD.C. Stevenson