Good evening and welcome to tonight's edition of the The Daily Show/Colbert Report chat thread. Remember to give a shout-out to our long-time host TiaRachel who is taking a few weeks off.
We have a group of regulars and everyone is welcome. Think of this as a late night kiddie pool. Nothing's off topic and the floor is open. Just tune into Comedy Central at 11 p.m. Eastern Time. Heck, you don't even have to watch with us, but you might not understand some of the snarky commentary here...not that there's anything wrong with that...
Without further ado, let's check out Jon and Stephen's guests.
Jon's guest tonight is Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize winning cancer biologist and the author of "The Art and Politics of Science." The Daily Show's webpage even has a helpful link to buy his book for $24.95 directly from the publisher.
Info from the Amazon description of this book.
Varmus earned his bachelors degree in English and did a year of graduate school in literature at Harvard before he decided he wanted to study medicine. He is a veteran of many policy battles including stem cell research, global health and budgets for health. He is president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the former director of the National Institutes of Health
This should be a good interview, even if he his pushing his book.
Stephen's guest tonight is another musician. Tonight he has David Byrne, who recently teamed up with Brian Eno on "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." Here's a clip:
Byrne was a founder and principal song writer for the Talking Heads back in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, he has been involved in a lot of music projects. I assume Byrne will get the Colbert Bump as he heads to Bonnaroo in June.
Byrne also has his own Internet Radio station here.
He was one of the people who grasps the evolution of the music distribution. He posted the following comment in 2007:
There was another piece in the Times today about yet another 20 percent drop in CD sales. (Are they running the same news piece every 4 months?) Jeez guys, the writing's on the wall. How long do the record execs think they'll have those offices and nice parking spaces? (Well, more than half of all record A&R and other execs are gone already, so there should be plenty of parking space). They, the big 4 or 5, should give the catalogues back to the artists or their heirs as a gesture before they close the office doors, as they sure don't know how to sell music anymore. (I have Talking Heads stuff on the shelf that I can't get Warner to release.) The "industry" had a nice 50-year ride, but it's time to move on. Luckily, music remains more or less unaffected — there is a lot of great music out there. A new model will emerge that includes rather than sues its own customers, that realizes that music is not a product in the sense of being a thing — it's closer to fashion, in that for music fans it tells them and their friends who they are, what they feel passionately about and to some extent what makes life fun and interesting. It's about a sense of community — a song ties a whole invisible disparate community together. It's not about selling the (often) shattered plastic case CDs used to come in.
I guessing we'll hear some music just before midnight.