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Gahey, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And here's a dangerous notion

for you. Imagine everyone who you know sitting down at the same time in front of their

various television sets scattered all over the various cities where they may resign and watching

exactly the same thing at exactly the same time every night, week, for years. We understand this phenomenon

now with sport and probably reality TV and a few other boutique shows that sort of get the

zeitgeist like Succession maybe or White Lotus. But those things are flashes in the pen.

They last for a few years and then

they're replaced by something else. The phenomenon that our parents generation lived through

that only ended about 10 years ago where everybody watched basically the same small handful of

things. And when one of those things was really successful, everybody was on the same page,

everybody was talking about the same show at work, at school. That is something that's quite

hard for us now to wrap our brains around. But today's guest is a person whose importance

in the history of American broadcasting, it's difficult to overestimate,

because he was at its pinnacle at precisely the time when everybody was watching Dick Cavett.

Dick Cavett started his show, well, let's go back further. He started out as a writer on the

original Tonight Show. This was before

Johnny Carson. This was when Jack Parr created the late night show format that is now done

by all the Colbert's and the Kimmills and the Fallons and so on. Jack Parr created it. Dick

Cavett was a writer on it. Out went Jack Parr, in came Johnny Carson. Dick Cabot was writing

for Johnny Carson for the great came Johnny Carson. Dick Cabot was writing for Johnny Carson,

...