The Brothers Weisberg on The Americans and Trumpcast
Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen
PRX
4.6 • 675 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2018
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2013, novelist and former CIA officer Joe Weisberg created the FX TV series The Americans. It’s about a pair of Russian spies living as Americans in Washington D.C. Three years later, Joe Weisberg’s older brother, Slate’s editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg, created the podcast Trumpcast.
At first, it seemed like the creative pursuits of the Weisberg brothers had little to do with each other... until intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Kurt Andersen talks with Joe and Jacob Weisberg about the genesis of their shows and the unexpected ways they overlap.”Were Donald Trump not been such an important character today,” Joe Weisberg says, “we might have actually had the idea of putting him in [The Americans].”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From PRX. |
| 0:07.0 | This is Studio 360. I'm Kurti Anderson. |
| 0:14.4 | Five years ago, Joe Weisberg, who used to work for the CIA, co-created the Americans, the FX show set in the 1980s. |
| 0:26.2 | It's about a pair of Russian spies living as Americans in a suburb of Washington. |
| 0:31.2 | I was 17 when I joined the KGB. |
| 0:34.4 | Never had a boyfriend. |
| 0:36.6 | They put me with you. |
| 0:38.2 | And then two years ago, back when Donald Trump was merely a contender for the Republican nomination, Joe Weisberg's older brother, the journalist Jacob Weisberg, created a podcast all about it. |
| 0:50.1 | Hello and welcome to Trumpcast, the show about the Harvey Weinstein type who still has his job, Donald Trump. |
| 0:58.1 | The creative pursuits of the Weisberg brothers seem to have not much in common, but then came this about Hillary Clinton's missing private emails in July of 2016. |
| 1:09.1 | Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. |
| 1:17.6 | I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. |
| 1:21.6 | After that came our intelligence services conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in all kinds of ways. |
| 1:29.8 | So the Weisberg's creative pursuits have lately had a lot in common. |
| 1:35.0 | The Americans will soon begin its sixth and final season. |
| 1:38.5 | And Trumpcast is produced by Slate, where Jacob Weisberg serves as chairman and editor-in-chief, |
| 1:43.6 | and where we happen to make |
| 1:44.7 | this show. |
| 1:45.8 | So I asked Jacob and his brother Joe to come in to talk about the collision of their fictional |
| 1:51.1 | and non-fictional creative worlds, the brothers Weisberg. |
| 1:55.0 | Joe and Jacob, welcome to Studio 360. |
| 1:56.7 | Thank you very much. |
... |
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