Kieran Culkin, Campaign Commercials, Past and Present: Colonial Williamsburg

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Exchange and regulatory fees apply. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. Well, we're almost there. Election Day is just 48 hours off, bringing an end to this political campaign season. The voting part, anyway. Still, for the next few days, you're sure to be seeing even more campaign commercials, with candidates nationwide making one more last-ditch effort to win your vote. David Pogue is looking at the messages and the money behind all those ads. So if you love this country... Want to guess how much the candidates have spent on ads this year?

$16 billion. This is now a Wild West of front groups and hidden spenders reaching people on their phones, targeted very directly to somebody's likes and dislikes. When money is speech and outside groups can spend unlimitedly in elections, you are going to continue to see a bombardment of the American electorate.

The New Age of Political Ads, later on Sunday morning. On the hit series Succession, Kieran Culkin starred as the Roy family's foul-mouthed, immature but quietly ambitious middle child, a role that earned him Golden Globe and Emmy awards. This morning, he takes us back to his roots with Mo Rocca. Kieran Culkin is that rare actor who delighted audiences as a kid and is taken seriously as an adult. I've just been a real funk, I guess, since she died. Just haven't done.

Did you like it right away? I actually do kind of have a memory of being about five or six years old saying I want to be an actor. Ahead on Sunday morning, defining success with actor Kieran Culkin. In search of clues to our political present and future, Ted Koppel is visiting the past at historic Colonial Williamsburg.

What he discovers may surprise you. We are trying to encourage immigrants to immigrate here. If America's founders could speak.

Birth and a woman's health is a woman's sphere. What would they tell us about the upcoming election? Many of the issues that we deal with today are connected to the colonial era. A political party is a very dangerous fire. Well, they can and we'll hear from them coming up on Sunday morning. Martha Teichner takes a closer look at Venezuela, where a political crisis, including a disputed presidential election, has citizens leaving in droves.

Lee Cowan visits the set of Yellowstone as series creator Taylor Sheridan puts his actors through cowboy boot camp to earn their spurs. Plus election thoughts from Dr. John Lapook. Some humor to hopefully make you smile. And more on this Sunday morning for the 3rd of November 2024. We'll be back after this. So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month.

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We asked David Poe to take a closer look at all these mixed messages. Donald Trump has always loved this country. We choose freedom. For a few of us, it's a trickle. A flood of illegals.

For most of us, a flood. But in Pennsylvania, it's a tsunami of political commercials. Emails, texts, phone calls. It's in my news feed. It's in social media. In the last two days I counted, I had 30 spam emails in there all about the election. It's unbelievable.

Jack Levis is an independent voter in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which makes him one of the most desirable voters on the planet. And how about TV and radio? Anything? Come on. It's everywhere.

Are you kidding me? Ad after ad after ad. Okay, so I will first apologize to all the residents of battleground states because I feel their pain. I actually enjoy watching political ads. Of course she does, because Erica Franklin Fowler is the co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks campaign advertising. She also co-authored political advertising in the United States. Do political ads actually convince anybody? Political advertising does not have the sort of massive influence that sometimes citizens think that it does. Political advertising really only matters at the margin. That doesn't mean the margin doesn't matter, right?

The margin in this competitive election cycle is going to be the difference between making it into the White House and not. And what about negative versus positive? There's no doubt that negativity is more memorable. It is more emotion-provoking.

Now Kamala wants higher taxes on top of higher prices. But they hate those attack ads. Because for Trump, it's all about getting unchecked power. But Fowler says the positive ones don't say much. Citizens hate negativity, but negative ads tend to be more policy-based, more issue-focused.

And those details actually are very important for citizens who don't otherwise pay a lot of attention to politics. It used to be that we all saw the same ads. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson's Daisy commercial implied that his opponent would launch a nuclear war. The stakes are too high for you to stay home. And in 1988, the infamous Willie Horton ad made George H.W. Bush's opponent look dangerously soft on crime. Weekend prison passes.

Dukakis on crime. But these days, you and I won't see the same messages. It's not just three TV channels anymore. You see the social platforms, whether it be Instagram, you see Snapchat, you see TikTok.

People's driveways and signs. Everything has become a media channel in a way. Tiffany Rolfe is the chief creative officer at the ad agency RGA. She says that targeting ads at individual voters by location or demographic details has become an incredibly precise science.

The way they can target is, I think, just mind-blowing. Like, some of these are one-to-one ads. Coconut tree became a big meme across all platforms. She showed me how many of the ads on TikTok and Instagram are made not by the candidates, but by their supporters. People like Taylor Swift, who decided to also become a childless cat lady herself, and decided to get behind Kamala.

And Kamala then will repost that and reshare it. You have people now that have access to creative tools that can put an AI version of Trump on a lion. Right, so both candidates are now using all their fans as ad agencies. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's our competition out there too, right? People make their own videos, people do memes, people make their own ads. That's a good thing.

That's more participation. What's a problem is when some very wealthy individual or interest puts tens of millions of dollars into these ads that are sometimes manipulative, and we don't know they're doing it. The spending on political ads this year has broken all records, about $16 billion. And Michael Waldman's concern is not knowing where all that money is coming from. He's the president and CEO of the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. So this is now a Wild West of front groups and hidden spenders reaching people on their phones, targeted very directly to somebody's likes and dislikes. In 2010, the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision. You're watching the first wave of an oncoming flood of campaign ads. That case and subsequent cases removed all limits on what corporations and billionaires can spend on political campaigns. It struck down a century of campaign finance law. Now politicians know who's giving, the donors know who's giving, the only people who don't know who's giving is the taxpayers. So you're in the beating heart of this thing.

How depressed should we be? There's legislation that came very close to enactment in the last Congress that would say that you have to disclose who gave the money and the voter needs to know that. That would make a big difference.

Wow. And it's not out of the realm of possibility that it could happen. Voters really care about this. Democrats, independents, Republicans really care about it. When people get mad enough, when people get organized enough, throughout history our country has acted to improve our political system and it can happen again.

So if you love this country... The fragmented messages, the ad targeting, and the secret funding may all be new. But if you ask ad executive Tiffany Rolfe, some things will never change. At the end of the day, it's not just the policies or the product features. It really is like, is this person for me?

Do I like this person? Do I believe them? And I think no matter what, that will not change.

Just tell the truth, give it to me as it is. What happened to those... As for Pennsylvania voter Jack Levesse, I had one more question for him when we spoke this past week. Jack, the question is, have you voted? I'm mailing it today. Hey!

So, it's decided. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. Finding the perfect gift can sometimes feel impossible. This holiday season, give the gift of unforgettable travel experiences. With Viator, you can book guided tours, activities, excursions, and more. Viator has over 300,000 travel experiences to choose from, making it easy to find something for everyone on your list. And with real travel reviews, everyone can book with confidence, whether it's a unique way to explore their own city or an adventure on their next trip. A Viator experience is a gift you won't regret, so skip the predictable presents and make this holiday one to remember with Viator. Download the Viator app now and use code Viator10 for 10% off your first booking in the app. Regret less.

Do more with Viator. Political violence and economy in tatters, plus a disputed presidential election, have the people of Venezuela fearful and desperate. Millions have already fled to other nations, including the United States. Martha Teichner assesses a country in crisis. Christmas came early this year in Venezuela.

The season officially began October 1st, decreed by the country's authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro. The absurdity would be laughable if this weren't the perfect snapshot of Venezuela's black-is-white dystopian unreality. An oil-rich country so devastated economically that it can't even keep the lights on. Where life is so unlivable that a quarter of its population has fled.

A quarter. Nearly 8 million people. He needed a distraction. It spread in circuses. The title of former New York Times journalist William Newman's book about Venezuela says it all.

Things are never so bad that they can't get worse. Everybody knows that he's lost the election. He's the emperor who has no clothes.

He's cracked down. In July, Venezuela, with a history of on-again, off-again democracy, held elections. Maduro claimed he had been re-elected, but in a bold act of defiance, the opposition produced voting machine tallies, proving that this man, Edmundo González, had actually won the presidency by better than a two-to-one margin.

Impartial election observers agreed. Move! Move all day! Maduro called out the military to enforce his election denial. González was told, leave the country or else. He turned up in Spain.

At least two dozen people were killed and more than 2,000 detained in the chaos. He's out. He's out.

He's out. Maria Corina Machado, the face of the opposition, who would have run for president herself if Maduro hadn't barred her, is in hiding. I've been accused of terrorism.

The dictatorship has said that they are looking for me and that they want to get me as soon as possible. How could the country that's sitting on the largest oil reserve in the world end up like this? It rained money. They spent it, wasted it, and stole it.

It stopped raining. The people went hungry. And that's essentially what happened in Venezuela in a nutshell. Venezuela has been producing oil since 1914. But what's known as the resource curse really set in when the charismatic and controversial Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. When Chávez takes office, the price of oil was $7 a barrel.

Within several years, it gets to over $120 a barrel. So Chávez was very fortunate because he comes in just at the beginning of this great commodities boom. Chávez spent huge sums of oil money on social programs and borrowed even more, plunging his country into debt. But ordinary Venezuelans felt rich and heard for a change. The United States was his favorite boogeyman. Here he was at the U.N. in 2006, calling President George W. Bush the devil. When Chávez died of cancer in 2013, his handpicked successor was Nicolas Maduro.

He wasn't so lucky or so popular. Oil prices crashed. Inflation reached an inconceivable 300,000 percent. Maduro met public discontent with repression, and millions left the country. Looking at the map of the Venezuelan exodus since 2014, the United States is fourth among destinations.

Just over 750,000 Venezuelans have either been granted temporary protected status here or have applied. So Venezuela's crisis is here, at our doorstep, in our cities. We are broken. We were broken as a country.

For every aspect of our country could be no institution, no freedom. Nuyorca Melendez left in 2015. With temporary protected status, she and her husband can live and work in the United States legally. They founded VIA, Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid, a volunteer organization helping new arrivals in New York City. This woman left Venezuela with eight members of her family, including her four small children. When an armed group named Collectivos came to my house.

She's afraid, even here, to disclose her name. They took everything that I had. They took even the blender, everything, my computer, everything. And then they hit us because we didn't have the money, the exact money. They were asking for $500.

I didn't have that amount. So they crossed the Darien Gap, risking their lives. Since its contested election in July, Venezuela has resumed the human hemorrhage of its people. Resumed, exporting its crisis. Venezuela is today the biggest migration crisis in the world. Almost 25 percent of the population that remains in Venezuela is thinking about leaving. This is huge.

This could be five, six millions Venezuelans leaving the country. This is going to be worth watching. That's a scene from Yellowstone, the hit series starting what's expected to be its final season. One of the many things keeping fans coming back for more is its authentic portrayal of life on the range. An authenticity that's no accident, as our resident cowboy Lee Cowan learned firsthand.

Yellowstone. Since its debut in 2018, the series about ranching relatives and retribution on Paramount, part of the CBS family, has always had a thing for the unbridled grace of horses. Saddle another one.

Today you learn to ride. The actors seem just as much at home with the horses as the horses do with them. When the horse bounces up, let it stand you in the stirrups. When it comes down, sit back in the saddle. Yellowstone's writer and executive producer Taylor Sheridan won't have it any other way. Most westerns you've ever seen, it's a bunch of horses in the distance running together, and then you cut to a bunch of actors sitting on fake horses. Who wants to watch out?

Remind me of your name, buddy? A Texas-raised, self-professed cowboy himself, Sheridan could be as sharp as a spur if his actors don't look the parts that he's written for them. Initially we'll just trot around, okay? That means more than just donning a cowboy hat and chaps. It means teaching his cast how to really ride.

And that allows me to make a better product when I'm filming it. I've got happier actors and I've got happier horses. Which is why before almost every season, Sheridan hosts what he calls a cowboy boot camp for the cast. Think of it as kind of a Hollywood dude ranch without the horsing around. Does he put me on a different horse every day?

A different saddle every day? Cole Hauser plays Rip Wheeler. I've heard a lot of rumors about you, Mr. Wheeler. All of them bad.

Well, most are probably true. He too grew up on a ranch in Oregon. See that date? That's him submitting. What does that mean? Well, it means he's ready to go to work. To do this role requires serious saddle time from different disciplines, whether it's raining, whether it's cutting.

Those are things that you have to get in the saddle and do and repetition is a big deal. Right now, this is day two. I think my ears are sore.

I'm not sore right now. Sheridan crams a lot into the few days while he and his actors are corralled here at his Texas ranch outside Dallas. Where you look is where this horse is going. He's hired some of the best cowboys out there to make sure the cast understands the risks. You better be on your toes and pay attention, you know. Jay Green was hired as a horse trainer out of Utah.

But when Sheridan saw him, he made him a part of the cast too. What's that flag for? Well, it teaches these colts to use their bodies the right way before I put them on a cow. Why not just use a cow? Well, for hell sakes, lady, that's kind of like practicing a fist fight when you're already in the middle of one. To me, you can teach people a lot about horses in the arena and they feel safe and that, but it's better, in my opinion, to go ahead and, you know, go let them ride. You know, go up some trails and learn to ride, learn to jump ditches, learn to, you know, when a horse maybe trips on a rock, you know, and teach them that way. You ready?

Ready as we're going to get. That's how he taught Luke Grimes, who plays Casey Dutton. Green put him on a horse and they went for a four day pack trip into the wilderness. At that point, we'd only really ridden in arenas, you know, I kind of loping in a circle, just getting used to everything. And now we're jumping creeks and our horses are getting spooked by snakes. And it's, you know, just a whole different way of learning how to be on a horse. Authenticity is everything, you know, and believe me, if something's not quite right, I'll get I'll start getting phone calls and text messages.

And, you know, some of my close friends, you know, picking on me a little bit about it. Hey, were you in charge of that? Like, hey, man, easy. Ethan Lee was making saddles before he got the call to teach actors how to sit in one. The main thing is just to try to get them where they look really natural on a horse to look like they've been doing this all their life. Is that hard to do, though?

Yes and no. This is a rope. These are your hands. Thank goodness they're around because it is pretty easy to look like an idiot out here. Just like this. Just like that. But there is a welcoming spirit here.

Neither Jake nor Ethan, who also acts on the show, look down on those without mud on their boots. Step and step. Voila!

Instead, they take pretty kindly to newcomers. Right there. Whack! Perfect! Okay, we're all done here. Let's go ahead and go home.

He's gone. That's perfect. That was certainly the case for Jennifer Landon, who plays the unfiltered ranch hand, Teeter. Your name, Peter? Do I look like my name is Peter, you skunk-hard motherf***er?

She just called me a motherf***er. You understood that, didn't you, you bow-legged bastard? She wanted that part so badly that she had her managers spin an old West yarn about her actual riding ability. I haven't been on a horse since I was about seven years old, but I can trot. And they went, okay, we're going to tell them that you're a professional.

So I guess that lie worked and then we had to deal with the problem down the road. Five seasons down the road and she may now be more accomplished on a horse than her father, the late Michael Landon from Bonanza. I've gotten to the place where I can rope a cow at a dead standstill and I can rope a dummy cow being pulled by a gator off the horse. That's an accomplishment. It is. If Yellowstone really does ride off into the sunset after this season… I still don't know how many more times we'll get to do this. Me neither, son.

If anything, it might leave fans with a better understanding of the joy and poetry of horse and human in motion. You know, I got half of mine to run up that hill and do it again. But zero sugar and full flavor? We made that make sense with New Welch's Zero Sugar. All that passion fruit or tropical punch goodness and none of the sugar. You gotta sip it to get it.

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Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. Do we, can we, learn from history? A question senior contributor Ted Koppel ponders from a landmark of our past.

Act like you're happy. Colonial Williamsburg. Capital of the British colony of Virginia.

Preserved as a sprawling museum. It's mission that the future may learn from the past. The crown jewels of Williamsburg, Virginia are the interpreters. If you are a free man between the age of 16 and 60, you are part of the militia. Interacting with audiences of our day. So in May of 1776.

But in the context of a world as they would have known it in their time. Good day, Fred. Good day. How are you faring?

By way of example. You have no complaints. Thomas Jefferson. You must not be Virginians. If not from Virginia, where from? Pennsylvania, land of religious anarchy, welcome. The Ohio territories, welcome from terra incognita, welcome to civilization. Upper Canada. Upper Canada, bonjour. Are you immigrating here? No.

Oh, you should. We are trying to encourage immigrants to immigrate here. Indeed, immigration is highly controversial in Jefferson's time.

But from a radically different perspective than ours. I raised the issue with Kurt Smith who personifies Thomas Jefferson. And Catherine Pittman, a very feisty Martha Washington. He was there in 1776. And in the Declaration of Independence, you know that middle bit that everyone skips? In the 27 long train of abuses, Jefferson says he, he is the king, he's prevented immigration.

It is one of the reasons we declare independence. And how can we improve if we never welcome anything new? We're not talking about never welcoming anything new. We need to know who's coming.

We need to know whether they are people of good character. Isn't that what the argument is about? It's the argument in your time.

We can just speak to our time. Oh, cut it out. You started it. Yes. I'm in a pissing match with Mrs. Washington for God's sake. I think I'm going to win.

Yes, of course you are. The interpreters are well advised to merely hint at the issues of our day. How do you get a body of men to vote for something because it's the right thing to do? I don't know, maybe your politicians do it all the time. Leaving it to the visitors to grapple with the actual political problems of 2024. There are certain people that want all the power, like the king. They wanted the power over everybody, and I think that's what's happening now. This country is steeped in conflict and a fight for liberty, but I truly hope I get to live in a world where I have rights to my body. Abortion, right? You feel strongly about that.

I do. The world needs more Marthas. A subject on which Martha Washington has her own views.

How was the issue dealt with in that time? Within the home. Birth and a woman's health is a woman's sphere. One does not need to ascertain the services of a midwife if that is the course that you are wishing. These remedies are known amongst female kind. It is known in the indigenous communities, it is known in the African cultures, it is known in our European cultures as well. Be it different herbs, be it different techniques in order to rid oneself of an unwanted child.

But generally they are held within the female sex. But I know that my husband, General Washington, would be in full support of whatever I wanted to do with my own person. An even more contentious issue then and now, race.

So we honor you, we honor you. And in Jefferson's day, that meant slavery. Jefferson, despite owning as many as 600 enslaved men, women and children, put forward legislation to end the practice. But here's the problem with Bill 51. Bill 51 making the slave trade illegal has to be presented to a body of men all of whom own what? Slaves. Do we see the problem?

Yes. Williamsburg chooses to depict slavery in a particularly dramatic and unrepresentative fashion. Good day, my name is James. In the person of James Lafayette, an enslaved man who was directed to meet with the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who served the American cause and whose name James would ultimately adopt. And he says, what I want for you to do, James, I want you to sneak across the British lines as a fake runaway slave and ingratiate yourself with the officers of the British army and then report what you hear back to me.

James succeeded so brilliantly that he eventually worked directly under General Lord Cornwallis. I could take that British intelligence and information and share it with the American side over and over again, which I did. He faithfully served the American cause, but… I was not to be given my freedom for what I had done for American independence. I was sent back to slavery. I was sent back to Master William for six more years. Only after the Marquis de Lafayette petitioned the Virginia legislature for his freedom would it eventually be granted.

Given that extraordinary backstory, I wondered how Stephen Seales, who interprets James, deals with taking on that role. I understand that so many of the issues that we deal with today are connected to many of the decisions that were made in the colonial era. You can see the line from one to the other. And when you come to terms and you see that, I got very depressed. And I almost left.

I almost quit. If you're a free black person, you have to have your freedom papers on you. Then a colleague reminded him that he was giving a voice to the ancestors denied one during their own lifetimes. And the moment she said that to me, I had few issues with the fact that I had to play an enslaved person every single day because I now understood why I was doing it. So I love what I do. It's an honor doing what I do, but I live out in the middle of nowhere for a reason, because when I'm done here, I want to go and be away from it all.

It's how I cope. When I began, I mentioned that we should avoid seeing factions arise. I specifically mentioned by regional distinction, but it is just as important that we endeavor to avoid seeing factions arise by the spirit and fury of party politics.

Finally, there's the father of our nation, George Washington. Who would I support in the president? I'm not sure what you mean by presidential race, sir. You mean the election? Yes, sir. Race.

Can you imagine how lacking of any sort of virtue or dignity a race would have? We stand for elections, sir. We certainly don't run for it. Ron Carnegie gives a striking portrayal of the man who could have been president for life, but chose a different path.

And that is that my name shall not be amongst the number from whom your choice shall be made. Very often when I'm talking to people at the end, somebody in that group will say, I wish President Washington was running today. There's no way a man like President Washington could be president today. Because? He is aloof. He's not friendly. He's not outgoing.

He doesn't like to talk in public. And he doesn't want the job. How are you going to become president today if you don't want the job? Not a problem in 1800. John Adams very much wanted to keep the job. Thomas Jefferson wanted to take it.

Things are just as nasty in the 18th century as they are in the 21st. There are newspapers that call John Adams pretty awful things. And there were terrible things thrown in Jefferson's corner. There were New Englanders and New England newspapers that they were certain that if Jefferson was elected president, he would personally go into their homes and steal their Bibles. John Adams lost that election and conceded.

Jefferson calls the election of 1800 the second American Revolution. And it was precisely because for the first time in this country, there was a change in political party at the very top of government. And it was peaceful. It was a peaceful transfer of power. That's powerful. That had never happened before, but it set a precedent that lasted until our time.

Whatever happens this election day, our Dr. John LaPugue this morning shares his prescription for better times. Let's face it. This presidential campaign is not going to win any awards for civility.

They know how to manufacture bullshit, and they prove it every single day. Policy proposals aside, there's been name calling, vulgarity, and plain old meanness. And at times, it can seem like the rudeness of our politics has infected our personal interactions as well.

How did we get here? And on the eve of this election, what can we do about it? Well, to start, consider something simple, tone of voice. No, this is not a panacea for all our social and political ills, but this secret weapon for civility is biologically hardwired.

Want proof? Take a look at some video from years ago of my own family. Babies and toddlers react in predictable ways to both the tone of someone's voice and the expression on their face. Children learn to trust certain voices even before they can understand the meaning of words. And chances are an angry, loud voice will elicit fear and the very opposite of trust. Those deeply ingrained responses follow us through life and can help or hinder our interactions with others.

If we really want to have conversations instead of dueling monologues, we need to be genuinely curious about what the other person has to say. And if the way we communicate, not just the words, but the way we say them, triggers mistrust, there's little hope for a meaningful exchange of ideas. Let's be clear, a mean thing said nicely is still mean. And there are times when a warm and compassionate tone will do you little good. For instance, arguments with people who disregard facts. But for all those other times, consider taking a lesson from children. The next time you strike up a conversation with somebody who has an opposing view, try using a kind and gentle tone. It will signal that you are genuinely interested in hearing what they have to say. You might not reach a meeting of the minds, but look at the face.

Instead of a scowl, you just may see a smile. This episode is brought to you by Columbia Sportswear. From snowy trails to city streets, Columbia has you covered. Their OmniHeat Infinity jackets are the gold standard in warmth, pushing the boundaries of innovation. Feel the difference as thermal reflective technology wraps you in warmth, whether you're hiking mountains or conquering your daily grind.

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Download Thumbtack today. I don't feel like I'm losing a sister. I don't feel like I'm gaining a brother either.

I don't feel anything. Kieran Culkin took home both Emmy and Golden Globe awards for playing the crass and colorful Roman Roy in the hit series Succession. Mo Rocca has our Sunday profile. Do you remember, was it Helen and Mary that used to sit here? Yeah. How's Glenn?

He's fine. Is he home? Yes. Okay.

It's always fun running into old friends. Do you want to come up and see what the shape of the building is? Do you want to? Yeah. Do you want to come up?

Sure. What a treat. This one's not planned. This was not planned.

No. Especially when you haven't seen them in years. Which floor did you all live on? We lived on the third. This is where I was brought home from the hospital. Hi Glenn. Good seeing you, dude. Same here. Hi.

Is that people? Oh, this is so wild. That's weird. I love it's still leanie.

Oh, of course it's leanie. I remember my mom baking a cake and it would come out slanted because the whole apartment was on a slant. Your apartment was too.

It was on a slant. We used to put cars on one end of the kitchen and let go and see them roll. For 42-year-old Kieran Culkin, a visit with his former downstairs neighbors is a treat. Culkin C, apartment 3B.

I mean, they added this new fancy buzzer, but they didn't bother to get rid of this one. He spent the first eight years of his life in this building in Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood. We lived in a tight space where it was just seven of us running around. It was like a sort of little wolf pack mentality. His father Kit, himself a former actor, and mother Patricia, a telephone operator, raised their seven kids in a four-room apartment.

Kieran came fourth in the birth order. Whenever the door would open to let the kids in, I used to stand aside and make sure and I used to count to make sure all six of them got in before I got in. That's how I remember growing up, too, was I couldn't fall asleep until they all fell asleep.

Like, I only existed because they did around me. How did the family get into acting? Neighbors of ours were running like an off-off-Broadway theater on the Upper East Side, and they knew that there was this family that had a bunch of kids. And whenever they needed a kid, they were like, you know, we might need a kid for this show.

And my parents were more or less like, OK, yeah, what gender, what age? We got a whole bunch. Soon enough, Macaulay, two years older than Kieran, became world-famous as the star of Home Alone. Going on vacation?

Where you going? You hear me or what? Kieran had a small role in the movie, and a year later played Steve Martin's son in Father of the Bride. Ciao, Papa. Hey. And he brought me this candy bar all the way from home.

Kieran was cute and charismatic, but making it as a grown-up actor meant, well, learning how to act. I'm preparing to leave. Where do you want to go?

Far away. I was thinking about joining the Peace Corps. When I was 18, I did a movie, Bigby Goes Down, and the director really wanted me to break kid acting habits because he really didn't like kid actors. And he was like, you still have a few bad habits.

Culkin had to unlearn the tricks that had served him so well as a kid. He was like, you're doing something with your eyes. He would say tricks, sulfilizing, or sometimes he would say, you know, that was Nickelodeon or something like that. He was like, you're doing kid stuff.

And when that didn't work... He bought me a six-pack of beer, and he goes, I want you to take this beer and do the scene in front of the mirror. And I was like, I don't think I can do that. I was like, I'm going to be too self-conscious.

That's what the beer is for. Culkin got praise for Bigby, but he wasn't sure he wanted to keep acting. Were you also worried about becoming famous?

Definitely. I feel like any rational person got to experience fame secondhand, they would not pursue it. It's not a nice thing. And when you say secondhand, you mean because of your brother? My brother, Mac. He was such a big star. He was a huge international movie star, you know, at a young age. And I saw that and went, oh, I got it.

That's awful. Let's never do that. He worked on stage and only sporadically on film for years before landing the part he's best known for. Roman Roy. Guess who just didn't kill anyone, but maybe only lost a couple of thumbs? This guy.

The filterless, fast-talking middle child scheming to inherit a media empire in succession. I land the deal. I kill Kendall. I'm crowned the king, just like in Hamlet.

If that happens in Hamlet, I don't care. Even as a member of the fictional Roy family, though, Culkin's real family played a role. Back in 2008, his older sister, Dakota Culkin, was struck and killed by an automobile. After a couple of seasons on succession, I realized there was some stuff that Roman did that I was like, oh, that's my sister. That was her sense of humor.

She could find exactly what the right thing to make fun of you was that would get to you, but be really funny and make the room laugh. That was her. Sixteen years later, the loss of his sister is still devastating. I only knew who I was because of who my siblings are, so to lose one was losing a big piece of myself, but losing one of my favorite people in the world. It doesn't get better. It doesn't get easier.

It's just you get used to it, I guess. We stay moving. We stay light.

We stay agile. Culkin's newest project is also about family. In the movie A Real Pain, he and Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote and directed, play cousins on a trip to Poland to see where their late, beloved grandmother was raised and the concentration camp she survived. You don't feel weird being in a first-class car? No, we pay for it.

It's not hurting anybody. Dude, we are Jews on a train in Poland. Think about it. Culkin's character, Benji, is a charming but rudderless man-child, a contrast to Eisenberg's straight-laced family man. Why do you think you connected with the role? I don't really know what it was with me, but I went, I instantly knew who this guy was. I understood their dynamic and I really wanted to play. You've said, I'm one quick little misstep away from being that person. Yeah, I feel that's good.

What did you mean? I said that, good. I feel like I easily could have gone down that path. There was something in that that I recognized as myself, but I'm not that guy at all. But I think I'm worried that I easily could have become that guy. Had you not become married and had... Married kids or figured out how to, you know, get my shit together.

Indeed, Culkin is not that guy. He's been married to his wife, Jazz, for 11 years. The couple has two children. What do you like about being a dad? Oh man, everything. Everything except dinner time. Dinner time's a terror. I've seen some kids sit and eat dinner. It's great.

My kids sit and eat breakfast, they'll eat lunch, but dinner is just throwing things around the house and it's very stressful. Kieran Culkin may be at the top of his game, but he says he's still figuring it out. So there's different versions of success. I think for many years, success for me was like working on projects I really like, nobody really sees, fly under the radar, but keep getting to do what I do. And now I'm like, well, now I've got to figure out how to do the jobs I want, but also make money. And there's no, it's really hard to find the way to do that. One word.

Marvel. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash results.

Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. 89% of business leaders say AI is a top priority. The right choice is crucial, which is why teams at one third of Fortune 500 companies use Grammarly. Grammarly is the right AI assistant for your team. With top tier security credentials and 15 years of experience in responsible AI, Grammarly is how companies like yours increase productivity while keeping data protected and private.

See why over 70,000 teams trust Grammarly at Grammarly.com slash enterprise. Now, Kamala, take my pamala. The American people want to stop the chaos and end the drama-la with a cool new stepmamala. Kick back in our pajamas and watch a rum kamala. A moment of mirth from Saturday Night Live, which included an appearance by presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

The perfect way to tee up a look back at campaign 2024 just for laughs. I just want to say thank you, Joe Biden. Thank you for putting country first and for handing over the reins. I didn't want to. They made me. And guess what?

And by the way. I am officially retiring all of my Joe Biden is old jokes. OK, they were they're starting to get tired anyway, just like Joe Biden. That was the last one. I swear.

Now I'm going to retire them to use on Donald Trump. I do feel bad for all the undecided voters watching this debate because how embarrassing for you when it's lunchtime. Are you like, hmm, I could eat a sandwich or I could just chew on some broken glass. I want decided.

Let's hear both sides. Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to North Carolina to survey damage from the hurricane, which is the second time this year she swooped in after a huge disaster. She's up four points in Pennsylvania, which is a key swing state that could decide the election. But there's bad news, too, because The Washington Post says she and Trump are tied in Pennsylvania. Though another poll from Franklin and Marshall College came out today has Kamala up by three in Pennsylvania, whereas Emerson has her down by a point in Pennsylvania. In other words, none of these polls mean anything at all. They are meaningless. And yet we keep looking at them. They're like the Kardashians in a lot of ways. Check out the footage we got of CBS reporters fact checking Vice President Harris. This.

See that is interesting. Now take a look at this footage of them fact checking former President Trump. Totally different story. Would you have certified the results? You know, Nor, it's rich to say that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power. We said no fact checking and willingly and willingly. Don't check that got on his plane without incident.

Don't right after saving Obamacare. Don't check that. Well, if we're allowed to stand up here and lie, then I would like to say I actually was in Tiananmen Square. The political world is still reeling from reports that Trump repeatedly praised Hitler and Hitler's generals. And I know when I say reeling, no one's actually reeling. They're mostly just shrugging because we live in a nightmare world where this is somehow become normal. And everyone just goes about their day knowing that the most powerful person on earth could once again be a guy who thinks Hitler was cool because it's just another piece of content. We all scroll past on our magic little distraction boxes between cooking trends and tick tock dances and dogs wearing sunglasses. But I mean, come on.

How is this real? Did we all die during covid? And is this some strange, surreal purgatory? Americans are changing their vacation plans due to election anxiety. Yep, people are waiting till after the election so they know whether by a round trip or a one way.

Now, if you're stressed out, might I recommend a way to feel better? It's called voting. In fact, I.

This is true. In fact, I voted this morning. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at Wondery dot com slash survey. There's a lot going on right now, mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On the Media.

Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's on the media specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing the best idea yet. A brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the bold risk takers who brought them to life. Like, did you know that Super Mario, the best selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye? Or Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala?

From Pez dispensers to Levi's 501s to Air Jordans, discover the surprising stories of the most viral products. Plus, we guarantee that after listening, you're going to dominate your next dinner party. So follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the best idea yet early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. It's just the best idea yet.