[65] The Culture Show - Part One

With the sports calendar finally about to wake back up, Bob and Mike use one last stretch of the offseason to talk about some of the things they spend plenty of time discussing when the microphones aren’t usually rolling: movies, music, books, and culture.

Using their personal top-10 lists as jumping-off points, they wander through favorites, disagreements, old memories, and plenty of the tangents you’d expect when these two get going.

Along the way:

• The pre-football temperature check: Why IU’s newfound place in the college football hierarchy has changed the way other fan bases—and particularly Notre Dame fans—seem to view the Hoosiers.
• Movies: Bob and Mike compare their favorite films, with everything from Lawrence of Arabia and Casablanca to Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, Goodfellas, Airplane! and Monty Python opening the door to a much broader conversation about great filmmaking.
• The directors behind them: Stanley Kubrick and David Lean lead into a discussion of what separates truly great directors—and why certain movies keep revealing something new decades later.
• Music: The guys turn their attention to favorite songs and performers, which naturally means revisiting some longstanding Bob-and-Mike debates about musical eras and what actually holds up.
• Books: Their reading lists provide another excuse to bounce between history, fiction, politics, culture, and the works that have stuck with them over the years.
• The lists behind the lists: Neither Bob nor Mike pretends these rankings are permanent. The fun is less about settling a definitive top 10 than figuring out why certain things have stayed with them—and what their choices say about their tastes.
• And because it’s Xs and Joes, even an episode devoted to culture can veer from classic cinema to 1990s politics to Willie Nelson before somehow finding its way back toward basketball.

It’s a different kind of episode: less decoding the winning formula in college basketball and more getting the conversations Bob and Mike would probably be having anyway.