Rob Reiner: "I Just Viewed My Child in Pain"
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In light of the recent tragedy, Mike unlocks a 2016 interview with the late Rob Reiner. It is a conversation that now plays differently: Reiner discusses his film Being Charlie, which was written by his son Nick Reiner—the man now arrested in connection with his death. Mike reflects on the director's legacy, the eerie prescience of their discussion on addiction and family, and the President's disparagement of the deceased. Then, The Spiel turns to the Compact magazine essay by Jacob Savage on the "vanishing" white male in cultural industries. Mike parses the statistics—from Ivy League hiring to MacArthur Grants—to ask if the corrective pendulum has swung too far.
Produced by Corey Wara
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. I bring you one from the vault and one from the |
| 0:08.2 | week. And on Monday, as I promised you, I'd bring you my full interview with Rob Reiner. This was from |
| 0:14.4 | 10 years ago. You'll hear me talking about my 9 and 7 year old kids. They're 18 and 17 now. And of course, we were talking about my nine and seven-year-old kids. They're 18 and 17 now. |
| 0:21.9 | And of course we were talking about kids because this was an interview with Rob Reiner. |
| 0:28.0 | Also, his wife, Michelle, was there. |
| 0:29.6 | He references her at one point in the interview. |
| 0:32.4 | And we're talking about a movie he had just made really about the life of his son, Nick, |
| 0:37.2 | who's been arrested for |
| 0:38.9 | his murder. I've never had a murder victim, someone who would become a murder victim on the show. |
| 0:44.5 | I certainly have never had an interview with such a person where the main topic of conversation |
| 0:52.0 | was the person who would murder him. It is also horrible and |
| 0:57.7 | macabre made more horrible by what President Donald Trump said and then dug in to continue |
| 1:05.0 | to say about him. And this was the thought I had about that. It is such a denigration. It is such a break with not only |
| 1:17.0 | decency, but with everything that you would want if you had any investment in what we broadly |
| 1:25.9 | call humanity. And here's why. Whenever we think about Rob Reiner |
| 1:30.8 | in the future, we will inevitably think about the circumstances of his death. Now, the reason |
| 1:38.1 | we even know his name is because what he achieved in life as an actor and then as a director, |
| 1:43.9 | the interview talks about his great movies. |
| 1:46.2 | I'm not going to interview Rob Reiner about a movie he put out recently without talking about |
| 1:51.8 | the great string of movies that he started his career with. But the legacy of Reiner, |
| 1:58.4 | like all people, is not defined by his death, but his death now becomes |
| 2:04.6 | so important and intertwined and the horrible circumstances of his death become indelibly |
... |
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