Transcript of Dave Eggers (writer and publisher)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shephard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi.

We have one of my favorite authors on today, Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers is a bestselling author and founder of McSweeney's. His books are The Circle: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Every, and of course, my favorite book, What Is the What? He has a new novel out now, Contrapposto. Please enjoy Dave Eggers.

We have not met, so Monica, nice to meet you.

Amanda made me want to give you guys these. This is a new McSweeney's in the form of a Trapper Keeper. Oh my God, a Trapper Keeper!

Monica, did they have Trapper Keepers?

Yes, of course. I've been testing people and you're the first, like, are you more millennial? 1987.

Millennial, yes.

'87. Nobody's had any idea what a Trapper Keeper is yet. What?

No, I loved Trapper Keepers. Yeah.

Which one did you have?

You know what's funny is that I did not have it because I didn't like the artwork. I was such a snob. I thought it was too gaudy.

You were already bratty about it. You were already pretentious.

I was. I had to have like a leathery watch.

In Detroit, you grew up in Illinois. Yeah. In Detroit, You aged out if you were a boy of a trapper keeper very early. Third grade and beyond, you were a target if you had a trapper keeper.

Yeah, for sure. Anything Velcro on your shoes?

Yeah, you're dead.

Velcro.

Kangaroos with Velcro.

With us, you wore a watch or calculator watch or anything like Casio, you're done.

So it was cheating?

It was really a—

No, it was just anything. I'm going to guess it has to be the same. Anything could flag you as being girly or gay. It's just like—

Or nerdy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's why, like, when the rise of tech, it freaked me out because I was like, well, these were all the kids that always got beat up if you had, like, boop, boop, boop on your wrist or whatever. And now those—

Yeah, why aren't they more benevolent?

I know.

You were born in Boston but moved pretty soon.

I never lived in Boston. My grandfather was an OB-GYN in Boston General. So we were all born there under his guidance.

Now, that's an interesting dynamic. Did your grandfather deliver your mother's children?

No.

Oh, OK.

But his colleagues.

Is nearby. But he was fascinating. Like, he was the gyno to all the nuns in Boston, and also all the unwed mothers. He ran a hospital for unwed mothers. I mean, fascinating stuff that we have been uncovering more and more lately.

Is that your mom's dad?

Yeah, McSweeney. Daniel J. McSweeney. So he's delivered half of Boston at some point. Probably 10,000 babies, you know?

It's a cool job in that way, that if you've been in practice for many decades, you really have— effectively delivered or brought a significant percentage of the population into the world in your area.

That's wild.

And you're part of everyone's best day of their life.

Well, that's where the McSweeney came from. Like, there was a guy that was adopted in this home for unwed mothers, and he was adopted by a different McSweeney family. But he saw my grandfather's name on the birth certificate, and later in life, he went, "Kkkk." He thought that was his real father. So he would seek us out and write crazy letters to us all my childhood.

Whoa.

Saying he was coming any minute on this train. He's going to come and reunite with his long-lost sister, my mom. So that was Timothy McSweeney, and that's why we named this whole thing after him. Sort of this lunatic screaming from the woods, which we thought we were at the time, like as a magazine. But I just found a bunch more of his stuff. Like, it got a little scary here.

Yeah, that sounds it.

That's an intense feeling if you're like, oh, my father's there waiting for me. That's a very motivating—

right? I'm coming home, prodigal son. Yeah, you've been looking for me.

Yes.

Yeah, some of these Relationships are just too intense, or they make them intense.

So what kind of attorney was your father? What kind of law did he practice?

Commodities law.

Commodities, because of the exchange there.

Yeah. So at the time, there was only a handful of people that did what he did. So he never went to court. And it's just a brief letter. I trust this settles the matter. John Eggers. Oh, really? Yeah.

You had some unique experiences early on that really, I bet you could acknowledge, set you up for the life you ended up having. Just this notion that I learned Mrs. Wright, second grade.

First.

First grade assigns you to make a book.

I still have this book. It's cardboard cover, yellow lined sheet of paper where we wrote the story, and then illustrations above, bound with yarn, blue yarn that it still holds up. And we spent months on it. These books were perfect. They had no typos. No errors were allowed. We had to redraft, redraft, and then draw the pictures very carefully. And on the back it says, "Copyright David Eggers." It would have been 1978.

Oh my God, that's worth so much money right now. I mean, I don't—

we then had a teacher, Mrs. Dunn, that had us do it again in 5th grade. I did another book in 8th grade. So by the time I was in 8th grade, we'd written and illustrated and produced 3 books. And then in high school, we did the first literary magazine with a computer. So they were brand new, it was 1986 or something. First Macs, first desktop publishing. And so I learned design and all of that stuff when I was 16, and then I was just—

You were set.

Booked.

When you made the first two, First Grade and Fifth Grade, were you more into and proud of the illustration portion? Absolutely. Or the writing part?

I only saw myself being a cartoonist. Like, that was all I did 24 hours a day till I was maybe 13 or so. And I thought, you know, I studied the Disney animators, or I wanted to be— you know, Calvin and Hobbes came about, I was gone. Peanuts, I studied, and all I did was draw all day.

What about like Far Side? Were you into that notion that you could communicate comedy through this?

For sure. I might have been 14 or so when he popped up.

What's his name?

Gary Larson.

Yes, I listened to the weirdest interview with him on Sam Harris.

Wow.

He has studied the art of persuasion, okay, to an insane degree where I'm like, who are you trying to persuade to do what?

So weird.

He knows the The science of persuasion. It's his big hobby.

But isn't it weird? Like, you have these amazing cartoonists, him, Berkeley Breathed, and Bill Watterson from Calvin and Hobbes, and they all retired at, like, the very top of their game. Like, Bloom County just went away.

Like, what age were they?

40s, 50s. It's so weird because I go to the Charles Schulz Museum up in Santa Rosa, which is incredible. Yeah. You go to his desk, and you see all of his stuff, and he worked till the very end, and he was really good till the very end. But uniquely, it's a job that people tend to knock off and quit at a certain point. Point and just go out on their best note, I guess. But I do miss The Far Side. Still, there's nothing as good as it.

I have a theory about comedians. Comedians don't tend to age all that well. I do wonder if it applies to these cartoonists. Comedy is about being shit on and calling out the powers that be and the injustices and the grievances and the friction of being a shithead at the bottom of the ladder. And with success comes a much more frictionless existence. You're not getting angry at Boss.

You ever heard Dana Carvey talk about this?

No.

On the Conan podcast, about like the billionaire comedian that's still trying to find things to be upset about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have to see it. You cry laughing. It's so funny. It's like, "Yeah, there's another fucking thing." And he just like tries to manufacture this outrage about tables and about forks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Private air travel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it.

But I wonder if that's the same— Cartoonists generally have a chip on their shoulder, right?

Some of them, yeah.

There's some strange folks.

In that medium.

You're friends with Kimmel?

Yeah, in part because he's been really supportive of our nonprofits, and he's hosted some events, and then just a very normal guy.

And he's a cartoonist.

Yeah.

I bet you— Yeah, yeah, that's his big hobby.

He's right there behind you in a statue.

Yeah, he's won the Best Boy Award a lot of times.

We figured this out. He did a comic when he was a kid that they featured on the show and sort of fleshed out with everybody in costumes and stuff, all these ridiculous characters. And I asked him if we could have a copy of it for this international library of young authors. So we feature, like, books written by well-known people, but when they were under 18, amidst all of our books by young authors. And he gave us a copy of it, and it's so ludicrous, but you gotta keep these things. And that's why we publish so many young authors, 'cause their minds are untethered. There's no structure, characters will pop up and disappear, and narratives—

No rules.

No rules. And they're still really fun to read. You gotta remember how unhinged narratives can and maybe should be, because All of the rules and constraints and everything, it's applying sort of an accountant's brain to what should be an anarchic process.

Uh-huh.

But anyway, but yeah, he was a good cartoonist.

I'm gonna campaign to get Yellow Limousine put in here. Yes, sir.

Yeah. Did you write a book when you were a kid?

In junior high, they put out one little zine at the end of the year, and it was all short stories from kids. Mine was in there, and I fucking thought I had won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Well, that's why we publish kids. We have kids that are like 14, and they've been published every year since they were 6. And they stand 12 feet tall. They're not like so grateful. They really feel like it's the right thing to have happened. I worked hard on it. Of course I'm going to be published.

Well, in the truest sense, if you succeed at getting the thing in your head out, whether that's in a movie or a clay or a drawing, there is an intrinsic pride that can't be matched by any other external validation.

Right.

And yeah, you should feel like your shit doesn't stink to some degree. If you executed exactly what was in your brain, that's the moment to be happy.

Well, and also I'm gonna do a little twist on that, and that's telling the kids that like, all right, fifth draft, sometimes they do have this perfectionism where they're like, "Shit, it's not ready yet." We're like, "It's really good. It's ready to let go of it. We're gonna put out this book." Being humble enough to know that somebody else's opinion that it's ready or it's okay or it's good enough. So it's like, "It's okay, we're gonna publish this and we're gonna put it in a nice paperback book. It'll be read for—" decades. It relieves that so many different things of a reluctant or hesitant kid or an English language learner. Doesn't have to be 100% perfect, but we're gonna work on it. Draft after draft. We're gonna honor it and put it in this platform that other people will see it. And then we're gonna do something else. It's not just the one chance, the one bite out of the apple. You can keep creating, and again, I always say it's all practice till you're 30, especially in writing. A reluctant writer, they always think that they're gonna be judged in a biblical sense on their first draft.

Like, you're either unworthy and cast down— It's vulnerable. —or you're Jesus. And it's like, no, it's—

Or you're Hemingway.

It's one of, like, 10 drafts you're gonna do.

We'll get there either way. Do you not like talking about your life? 'Cause generally in this show, we go through your life that leads to your work.

No, I always prefer talking about anything but my life. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. Even though you've written about it?

Did it 26 years ago. That was— And you were like, "That's it." No, it was just like, you know, you find this with a lot of memoirists or somebody that wrote it. That was like, that was why I wrote it, so that it's like— So I never have to talk about it again. You tell it. It's truthful. And this is again what we teach for kids that have, like, chaotic lives in any way, or every kid feels that the world around them is not under their control necessarily. They're not. Controlling every part of their experience, but on the page, it's all yours, and you can write this linear narrative that makes sense, and no one can mess with it. And so once they write these stories out, or mini-memoirs, or just a diary entry, there's like a calm that comes over the kids, and especially if they've done it every year. Those are the sort of most self-possessed, self-knowing kids you'll ever find, are the ones that have been asked every year, "Write your story." Who are you this year? And I always say that should be the first thing of every school year. The first 2 days is write your story on day 1, and then the other kids get to read each other's stories day 2.

Teacher knows all the students far better, and the kids are like, all right, now everyone knows who I am, my truth. And it's really different on the page than if you have to verbalize it to a bunch of kids you don't know in front of the class. You wouldn't ask them to do that. Yeah. But just pass them around and they get to know each other so intimately, and there's just like a confessional safety on the page that isn't there in any other place. I was trained as a journalist, and we've had oral history series, Voice of Witness, for years, and it's quite clear that there's 7.5 billion more interesting people than me out there. So it just feels like nonsensical to talk about my stupid, boring life, you know? It doesn't make any sense.

There is no stupid, boring life. I mean, I like it.

I just, like, would never bore people with it because I did pass— Two people on the way here, like on Franklin, I think, was like a guy shooting a film with his iPhone, and there was a woman in a grocery cart, and they were careening down the street. He's filming and she's bouncing up and down. I mean, and I really, I was so desperate to stop. Yeah. As a journalist, you get an excuse to ask questions of people.

Yeah, what's going on here?

What are you all up to? Yeah. And so it always pains me when I don't have the time or the window to do that because we've always had like a press pass and a reason to do it.

Did you have Do you have, though, favorite authors that you are not really interested in? I've never read a biography of a writer.

I'm not interested in any writer's private lives, and I also really want to preserve the sanctity of the illusion. And then again, biographers of writers, unless they're authorized and the writer's talking to them directly, most writer biographies are horribly mistaken. They make connections that don't exist. Well, it goes through their filter. Their filter. Yeah. Writers was another Chicago guy, Saul Bellow. You guys read Saul Bellow? Mm-mm. Can't get anyone to read Saul Bellow anymore. But anyway, won the Nobel Prize. He was the man for a long time, but nobody's reading him right now. But I do recommend him. Start with Herzog, which is a fantastic book. And there's never been a better sentence writer in the English language, in my opinion. But there was a big biography of him, I think in the '90s, and the biographer just spent the entire time just green with envy. About why he's not Saul Bellow. So the entire book was about, "I went to Harvard, he only went to University of Chicago. Why does he have a Nobel and I don't?" And this whole thing, everything is filtered through this twisted lens that he's looking through. And so, I know enough about any writer by reading their work.

And then if I peek behind the curtain and find out that they're left-handed or lactose intolerant or whatever, I'm like, it diminishes the fun. You don't wanna know, yeah. Interesting. And I'm like, I know— plenty by reading their body of work, and I don't need to know anything more. And I think it's sort of like peeking behind any curtain or knowing how a magic trick is done. Why? You know, why?

I have an answer to that, but I will say I can relate to you in that I loved Bukowski. That was my gateway into even liking writing. Then after he died, someone put together some biography of him, and it was all about how he was a communist. And I was like, "What the fuck? Where the fuck—" Like, he's the most anti-political person, period, that ever lived, much less a communist. The writer—

Was a communist. Was a communist, yes. You're always trying to get people into there.

That one went terribly bad, but I love biographies. One of my favorite books of all time is Titan, the John D. Rockefeller biography. It's just astounding. I'll read Churchill biographies left and right.

I mean, there's a lot of people that I'm interested in in that way, but not artists of any kind.

The reason I like it is that all of these things, even our hard sciences, there are very few binaries. It's like at best someone got it 60% right. We'll have another expert on from another university. They pitch the other side of it and it's very compelling. And you're like, the world is at best, you're like 60% certain. And that is why it is entirely relevant to know what someone carries into it, because you, as someone trying to discern reality, it's like you need these other plot points so that you can give it its right weight. It's like, well, this person was abandoned by their family and grew up with bikers. Of course there's, you know, like, I need to keep that in mind when I'm reading their research or when I'm just hearing their point of view.

It feels very relevant if it comes from them. I would put that very important distinction.

Yeah, posthumously telling us how someone was, I reject.

Yeah. If they're telling you themselves, I always think you don't know anything about anyone until they tell you. Any assumptions that you make otherwise are gonna be false or misguided. But if they say, "You know what? I was always curious about the human mind because I suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid, or my mom did, or whatever," then that makes perfect sense. There's so many people like that that are into it, or they become— law enforcement. Teddy Roosevelt, right?

He had terrible asthma, he couldn't play with other kids. Then he has this period where he goes to a ranch and he finds out he's actually strong and virile, and it like changes his whole life.

Or the people that are sickly kids and they make plays at home because they're in bed for so long. Yeah, yeah. Come into theater because they have to entertain themselves. There's so many of those. The polio generation all ended up really interesting because of that. They all had that time in bed and alone.

Or yeah, these people with agoraphobia that were writing, looking out their window. This is pretty fucking relevant. Emily. Emily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Suffice to say, I must note, you went to school with Vince Vaughn. Were you in the same grade?

We were same grade from, uh, 5th grade through high school. No way!

So you like truly saw the young— He was exactly the same guy.

He was. He was hilarious from day one. We had a uniquely cohesive class, and there were two people that were really key to that. Everybody was great, but Rob Pelinka was also in our class. He's the GM of the Lakers. Oh, okay. And so, Rob was like the best basketball player in Illinois at the time. We all went to his games. And then Vince hosted the talent show every year. Uh-huh. And with my buddy Paul Basie, who lives down the street still. And then they were in the plays. Vince was. But he was also hanging out with the football people. But Vince was cool with everybody, and especially the artists and the theater people. So he united a lot of different people by saying, "It's cool to be with the football guys, but if you're theater, that's very cool." very cool too. So we had a weird class in that everybody kind of cheered everybody on for whatever they were good at.

That's very unique.

It's unique, but you got to teach it. It's teachable. You need leaders. The captain of the football team, the quarterback, was in all my AP English classes. Oh yeah, super smart guy, interested in Faulkner and Heller. But I think that you could say, like, listen, a rising tide lifts all boats. If all the basketball people support the mathletes And the mathletes travel to see the football team when they're in quarterfinals or something, which all happened in our school. We were so cohesive. Everybody was okay with everybody.

Dave, that's impossible, especially in the '80s and '90s. I'm blown away.

But we also had John Hughes making movies about our area. We knew that we were in a charmed period.

And Vince worships him.

Were you also? Yeah, I was into all those movies.

They're so special.

They were in our town. And Ordinary People was filmed in our town when we were kids. And there was a lot going on. And then the Bears practiced— in Lake Forest, so we could go see the Bears practice. The Refrigerator Perry and the Super Bowl Shuffle.

Was that '84?

That was '84, '85. So, yeah, it was a really great time. But I give a lot of credit to those guys for being really nice to everybody. Everybody had to be in the talent show in our school.

Oh, really? It was required?

No, but all the cool kids did it. And even if you're just dancing to a Beach Boys song, which Vaughn did, and all of his friends. It was pathetic, some of these acts, but we all put on something. I did a— thing with Pee-wee Herman's song, "Tequila." Yeah. Our group did that, and we would do Monty Python sketches.

Did you go on your toes like Pee-wee had in those platform boots? Oh, no. I would've thrown tomatoes if you hadn't.

What's weird is it didn't seem risky, 'cause everybody was doing it, so it wasn't like you're facing this wall of unbelievers. Everyone's like, "Oh, a talent show.

Of course you do a talent show." So, were you stereotypically kind of an art kid or no?

No, I was on the soccer team 4 years and tried out for tennis, got cut twice. But we were all sporty. Our group was a little different than the football guys. We tended to be a little artier. My friends did the filmmaking telecom classes. I was in art classes and good at English class and stuff. And we did the literary magazine, columnist for the newspaper, wrote the yearbook, that kind of stuff. But we played football every weekend. Down at the end of my street, there was a park, and we played all year round. Like, in the winter, we played, you know, 3 on 3. 4, all-time quarterback, you know how that is, and tackle. We were really into that. So, what called you to Berkeley?

I mean, it seems obvious. It's a very literary—

Oh, no. I mean, that was where my sister was in law school. So, when my parents died, she had deferred a year, so we went to Berkeley.

That was the nearest support system. It wasn't a choice. For the people who didn't read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, you were taking care of your little brother from 21 years old on, I think is about right? That's a pretty unique scenario.

Yeah. And now looking back, I would have been in the Bay Area. I'd never been there before I moved there, I don't think. So I really spent my life in Chicago, and then we would go out east to Boston to the McSweeney clan. And so one of the first times I'd ever been on a plane was going to California. To live. We were a family of 6 with a Ford Pinto driving around. Vacations were Kentucky, you know, to see a cave. Mammoth Cave. Or the lesser caves too. There's a lot of them. But, you know, I've been in the Bay Area, what, more or less 34 years now. It really is, to me, the colors, the palette of a place is really important.

The topography and the landscape. It's an incredibly dramatic city.

It's so dramatic. And then you really only have to go— If you go over the bridge and into the headlands, it's exactly 3.5 miles from basically the center of the city, and you are in wild open land all the way up to Oregon, basically.

There's nothing on the coast. There's redwoods. Directly on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Muir Woods, the oldest trees there are.

And I never thought I would stay in one place for so long. It's not really my way of thinking about moving through the world, but I haven't been to a prettier urban environment.

How quickly do you find your footing as a writer there? You put out Might pretty quickly after Yap.

Yeah, day one. No one will tell you no in the Bay Area. That's the great thing and the burden of it. Uh-huh. Every stupid idea— happens. It gets interesting. There's no friction.

You already knew you were gonna write when you got there?

No. Oh. I had no clue. I got there, and the first summer I spent painting furniture. I thought maybe I would decorate furniture for a living. Sure. And then I worked as a temp until I was 28, more or less. You know, if you needed a graphic design— if you wanted somebody to make a lawn sign, I would do your graphic design for that. We had clients all over the city. And then we put out Might at the same time. But I didn't make a living as a writer till I was 30.

So not Berkeley the school.

No, but Berkeley— the area. The area, yeah.

Okay, that I got a little confused. I thought you went to Berkeley the school.

Yeah. I was like, how are you being a brother then?

Let's pretend I did. Let's say I did.

Okay, well, yeah, let's reword that.

We can blur that line a little bit. Yeah, but we put out that magazine. There was 5 of us. Nobody ever made a living, but we had a blast doing it.

At that moment, Had it changed at all? I mean, I know you have a degree in journalism, but was it still art first at that moment? No. When do you remember changing, like, "No, no, it's gonna be writing"?

It was probably college, because I worked at the daily paper every day for 4 years. And I did graphic design and illustration for that paper, but I did a little bit of art school and realized, like, the immediacy and the impact you can have in journalism. You know, front-page paper. There's a strike, there's a protest, there's a war going on, whatever. Compared to, I'm going to sit alone in a studio and maybe sell a painting 10 years from now. And maybe 9 people. To very wealthy people that'll put it in their bathroom, you know? So that to me, I was like, ah, that doesn't sound like what I want to do. Journalism is instant gratification. And it's just impact every day. You write it, you're finished at sometimes 9 PM, goes through copy editing, call it the slot. They write the headline. You're there pasting it up because I was a paste-up guy. And you send it off at midnight, and then 2 hours later or 3 hours later, it's like on the street. That rush you could never—

Yeah, some guy's taking a dump reading it within hours of you finishing.

Sure. That's the goal. Yeah.

That's the high-water mark of journalism. If a guy yells to his wife from the commode, "Honey, you're not gonna believe what I just read!" That's like, that's the real Nobel.

And it goes away. Pre-internet, if it wasn't good, it's completely forgotten. Yeah. And then you're on to the next thing. But every so often, there'd be something that would really make a difference. Make an impact. And then I edited different sections and magazines of the paper, and you get to bring up other voices and maybe discover somebody in your little way and help them get a platform, I guess. So that was what I'm still doing now. It's much more fun publishing other people than publishing your own stuff, always, because there's no complication. It's like producing a movie where, A, you're not on the masthead or on the marquee, so it's not your fault if it's not good, but You can take all the credit if it's— You can just sort of, you know, be in the wings and say— It's egoless. It's totally egoless. And it's such a pure celebration. We had a writer for The Believer magazine win an award a couple nights ago for the National Magazine Awards. We've only met this writer a few times, but it was way more pure joy than any other thing that we can do as a company because we're so tiny.

It's like really 6 full-time people. But every so often, we have a chance to kind of elevate a voice in our little way.

How old were you when you started writing for Salon? Probably 24. Was that your first kind of pay? Yeah. And was it enough to live on? Support yourself?

I was a cartoonist, so I had Salon graphic design work, and then I had a weekly cartoon in the SF Weekly. Those 3 things combined, I was making decent money. We had this little design company where I looked at these invoices that we used to send I'm looking through all this old stuff lately. Our main client was the SF Chronicle. We'd do, like, their in-paper ads. Like, "Read the Chronicle." Oh, you were on the inside and the outside. A little bit. Always. I mean, in journalism, it's that way. An ad would take us half an hour to make, but we had to just make up some number that sounded like— So it'd be like $507.32. No— All these numbers that I saw us make up were so ludicrous. There was no math or consistency, but we were undercutting the real businesses and established— And another place would charge 10 times that much. So we made really good money by being nimble and quick and cheap. And so I always tell anybody, like, out of school, if you undercut the bigger companies in any business, you'll do incredibly well, whether it's making rugs or landscaping or temping or design or whatever it is.

There's a very easy way to just be a little cheaper, a little faster than anybody else. Uh-huh.

Yeah.

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I was working at Esquire, big corporate magazine for the first time. Mike got us all jobs in real industries for the first time. So we were offered different jobs. Like, a buddy of mine, one of the other Mike editors, we were offered a gig writing for Letterman, like the two of us. No kidding. As a team, I guess. And it was Rodney Rothman who was the head writer at the time. And he was younger than us. We were, like, 27. I think he was 24. Wow. And the producer was Kate Adler, and we all met, and it was, like, the most exciting thing that you could ever imagine.

This is when he just went to CBS, it would've been, yeah?

I think so. Wow. We worshiped Letterman as growing up, and Chris Elliott, and had everything taped, and we'd watch everything over and over. But the hours and the uncertainty, you'd get, like, a 12-week contract, I think, at the time, and then you had to renew it. I was not in a place where I had that kind of uncertainty. I had a dependent, and then the hours. You can't be a parent and write as a young— Late-night talk show. Yeah, trying to prove yourself. But then I took this magazine job, and I really learned quickly that I was not meant to. I had never had a 9-to-5 anything. I never had to wear clothes of any kind to any job. In the Bay Area, it was all shorts every day. Nobody cared. So to have to wear pants and a button-down shirt and then try to get things published and they say no, I was like— And these are all all brand new ideas to me.

You were just doing whatever you wanted prior to that, right?

In the Bay Area, again, no one says no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So suddenly it was 90% no. It's not their fault. Like, there's only so many pages in a magazine. So we started McSweeney's. It was all stuff that was rejected from other corporate magazines. Uh-huh. And it was like the land of misfit writings. And so we did that, published it out of my apartment in Brooklyn, and just a couple of us.

Oh, so you had moved to New York at that point? Yeah. How did you do in New York?

Manhattan was not my thing, But once I moved to Brooklyn, it was much calmer. It was really Oakland-y and great, near Prospect Park, which is a beautiful park. I just have to be close to some kind of open space. So suddenly, you know, we had a ball. Putting out McSweeney's was just everything you want it to be. You go from this corporate constraint, everything, to just being back in your kitchen with a couple friends, doing anything you want to do, printing the book in Iceland, which we did. I got to go to Reykjavík for each. Press check and spend a week there going back and forth to the printer among all the blond pressmen in their blue jumpsuits. The whole thing was so surreal, but so much fun.

Was it always like this? Was it always, like, in a fun—?

No. Oh, okay. The first 3 were just white paperbacks, like black and white. They were really nicely made, but just black and white for the most part. And then the 4th one was a box with a bunch of booklets in it. And we made that. It was the first time. There's no boxes in Iceland. They have no pulp. They can't make anything like that. There's no trees. So— It was such a big thing. It was a big meeting. How are we gonna make a box, you know? And all these Icelandic guys trying to figure out how to make a box for this. So much fun. But that started this thing where I thought, "Well, why don't we reinvent the form every time?" Because if you're gonna pay us and subscribe to us, maybe we'll surprise you each time with what it looks like. So we've done a lunchbox the last few years. Yeah, we got a lunchbox recently.

That was what we got. Yeah, we tried it. There's definitely the archetype of the lone wolf writer, but you clearly like the communal aspect of it.

Yeah. I can only think of a handful of actual lone wolves. In the visual arts too, it's a trope that isn't borne out that often in real life. Bukowski is one of those guys, right? And you have Van Gogh. John Cocteau, probably. There's a handful, but people that I've known or met, I don't know a lone wolf writer. I can't think of one.

I would feel so comforted if I had surrounded myself with other people who are just like banging their head against the wall, fucking getting that rejection essay fucking postcard.

Well, or, you know, I tell this to students in MFA programs all the time. I was like, there was two of us in a kitchen that started McSweeney's for $2,500. That was the print bill for the first one. You sell those 2,000 copies, you have enough money to print the next one and print 5,000 copies. You sell those, you can certainly print 7,500, which was our trajectory. It's such simple math. I can't add anything together. I cannot balance a checkbook, but I could do that simple math. And so we just published everybody we wanted to publish. So that built up this little community of people. And you start something, the magnet, you know, you just— everybody's drawn to it, whether it's Upright Citizens Brigade or the Ground, you know, it's the same kind of thing. Thing. Everyone's like looking for somebody to start that thing, and then they're like, thank God, because not everyone is necessarily a starter, I guess, or ambitious or organized.

A little bit. You need people to fill little gaps. Yeah, like Melissa McCarthy. This would crack people up, but like Melissa McCarthy and Ben and I, we had this comedy troupe. Nobody came. We did shows. It was like Melissa was the manager. She told us where to be. She negotiated the theater rentals.

She delegated, "You're bringing beer." Someone has to get the space and do the thing.

She was organizing on it, and we were like, "Okay, I'll bring beer.

Ask Melissa what we're supposed to do." Well, if she has you there to help do those things, then yeah. You only need 2 or 3 people. I saw a student of mine that was at a crossroads. He's 35 now, but I knew him when he was in high school. And I was like, "Just find a couple people." Because alone, it's just sad and lonely or whatever, but a couple people, you're like a little cadre of people that you're gonna You can buck them up if they're down, they can buck you up if you're down, and together you can get, you know, a lot more done in a given day, and it's gonna be a lot more fun. So the idea in any art form of being that lonely person in the cabin throwing crumpled up sheets of paper in the corner is a canard. I don't know it very often to be true, and also it's so unnecessary. Sometimes you need isolation. I can only write when I'm alone, I can send a draft to all the different writers, mostly in the Bay Area, like, "Hey, what do you think? Is this anything?" And then you're in community with people that are like, "Yeah, keep going." And then you feel, okay, you have jet fuel.

But the idea of like, "I'm not gonna show it to you for 7 years," and then you create some mangled— Yeah. —Frankenstein novel that nobody wants, it's such a mistake on so many levels. I think that always trying to figure out is this the way I wanna do it where it's fun, or is there some other way to do it? Yeah. It's, like, worth the moment that you can spend. I worked in my garage for years. It was exactly like this except for one window in the corner, but it was the only space that was free and big enough to have all the stuff I needed in it. But it was really kind of grim. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, "Boy, I really don't wanna be inside in a dark garage 8 hours a day. Like, there's something wrong here." So I just had to, like, think about it finally after 30 years or however long it was. Was. And I was like, well, what if I had a friend— funniest to say this, but she's a ship captain. She has a giant ship.

I don't have any ship captain friends. Yeah, that is—

she sails in the bay. And I was like, would it be possible to get like a little sailboat that I could work in? And I'd find a slip in one of the marinas in the bay. And she like guided me through this process and helped me buy this boat. So now I've been working in this boat, which is, you know, not so much bigger than this table, really. Was it moored in Sausalito? It's moored, like, right under the Golden Gate Bridge on the north side. It's an old Air Force base marina, but it's a rickety, ridiculous marina. But I'm outside more, you know? I'm like, "There's so much more going on." And you get mad thinking, like, "Why didn't I do this 20 years ago?" And I think sometimes just to take that moment, whenever you're at a transition moment— and I don't know about you, but a lot of my friends at our age are, like, in between jobs right now. So there's, like, a thing that's going on in the business world in particular, where they get priced out, maybe they're too expensive for their company, they get laid off and they're looking for the next thing.

But we're all talking about it. Maybe it's an opportunity to, like, think hard about exactly what you'd like to do, how you'd like to do it, how do you want to spend your days and hours. And sometimes if you can get a little bit like, I definitely don't want to do that again, I don't want to commute an hour. And so you can get a little bit closer to something that can never be ideal, but you can get closer to an intentional way to live a life?

Well, I definitely think, for me, that comes with age in that the motivation at the beginning is like, "You're a piece of shit. You're a failure if you don't do this." You know, it's just hate. It's like self-loathing. Self-loathing, you need a little bit. And then at some point you go, "Well, what's the point of all this if I don't learn to enjoy the process?" This is all a waste. So I'm gonna die with a bunch of posters hanging. That's the proof of this thing. You realize this isn't worth doing if I don't enjoy the process. It can't be about the reward.

Well, are you enjoying the podcast?

Oh, absolutely. This is the greatest job I've ever had. Yeah. You've had, I guess, periods, right, where you've taken breaks? For sure.

Every 3 years, I'm like, "What if I instead..." 'Cause there's so many other things to do. Nature photographer. Wouldn't that be cool, right? Sit there looking for the snow leopard all day. Like, I really honestly see that as a thing. But then you also have to pay the mortgage and stuff.

I do have a question about The Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. You had so much going on at that time. Was it hard for you to carve out this time the time and the commitment to sit down and finish that book?

I had to quit the job at Esquire to do it because I couldn't do both. Yeah. I would need 8 hours a day of writing time to get anything done. I just have to get my head clear. That's like the first half. And then the self-loathing kicks in at hour 5. Like, what are you doing? Like, you've been here for 4 hours.

You find that little wind in your sails and you're like, oh, I got to get as much out as I can.

In the afternoon, you're more urgent about it, and maybe you could hit a word count that makes you feel like you've done something that day. What a life. It's still there, right? I'm just trying to make it a little bit more fun. And then there are books that just come out a lot easier than others. Now, The Eyes in the Impossible was a couple years ago. That was like the most fun I'd ever had, and I was like, how do I stay in that zone where it's fun? A lot of it has to do with voice, and it has to do with writing about something that you love. And so Contrapposto was like I love talking about and thinking about the art world and these characters. And so I was like, okay, that book too was just pretty much joy all the way through. But as a journalist, that's not as fun because you feel the duty to like cover Trump or to cover a disaster or go to Ukraine or whatever. And then you have to write it out and you have to get every last word right and check every fact over and over.

It's a slog that you are happy to have done at the end. Right. And you feel like maybe you enlightened a person or awakened somebody, but it's really no fun in any point of the process. Yeah.

How did you take on the success of that book? That was new to you, right? I mean, you were a finalist for the Pulitzer for that book.

The main thing— I mean, I'm looking at McSweeney's stuff because McSweeney's was brand new too. And so we were able to kind of take that new readership and sort of channel a lot of them. And so, we went on the road, 'cause I was finding all of these show runs. We went on the road with They Might Be Giants. And it was like me, writers like Arthur Bradford, Zadie Smith, some others, and we would do a variety show. And there'd be, you know, sometimes have like exotic dancers doing stuff, and then there'd be the band, and then Arthur would smash a guitar on the stage. He did this whole act. It was like to try to enliven what, at that point, was the most boring thing you'd ever could imagine, which was going to a bookstore to see a reading. You know, people would just get up and read for an hour. And we were trying to sort of shake that up. And I saw Arthur, who's like a filmmaker, the other night, and we were just reminiscing. He would buy an acoustic guitar in every town we would tour in, and then he told a story while he played, and then he would, during a crescendo of the story, he'd raise it up above his head and then smash it as like the punctuation mark of the story.

And then a stagehand would come out and hand him a new guitar, and then he'd finish the story with his acoustic guitar. So he had to buy two guitars in every town we went to, but it was ridiculously fun time. But to think that at this point, like, I don't love getting on stage, I don't love having to follow They Might Be Giants or anything like that. It's like, I can't believe that we did that, because these days I'm much more content to be in a smaller setting, a bookstore setting, not a big big hall. But at the time, we thought, well, maybe we could make books slightly less sedate and slightly less predictable.

Have you ever been to a Sedaris reading? Yeah, sure.

That was right then. Naked had come out. 1,500 people would come, and he would just read his work. Sarah Vowell was in our little coterie, and she was really tight with Sedaris. And Sedaris did benefits for our nonprofit in New York, 826 New York. And so he was always a hero to us and a mentor.

What he's done though, with like reading Reading literature out loud is insane. I currently can't stop listening to the live recordings.

Barrel Fever was how I met my editor, Jeff Klosky. He was the editor of Sedaris's first collection. He made humor literary. Before that, there was always the picture of, like, the— The humorous. You know, the humorous mugging on the phone. But then he put it in sort of a literary format, Jeff Klosky, this editor did, and I thought, "Okay, whoever did that," That I wanna meet. And so, that's why he became my editor.

It's a fun evolution too, to watch, 'cause like Naked, you can tell is written without any real notion that it'll be read out loud. And then now his writing is done like a stand-up by doing a draft, reading it out loud, rewriting. His workflow is so fascinating.

Well, really, I mean, it started with the Santaland Diaries. And that was a This American Life thing first. I think. And that was performed from minute one. And that was just like a thunderclap. Everybody was like, "What the hell? You could do that? Wow." Because there used to be something in The New Yorker called Casuals. They were like long-format literary humor, kind of like that. And then it sort of went away. And then Soderbergh started that up again, where you could have like a 20-page essay/comedy show. Comedy— Yeah. And then people would go out to it. But, you know, what's funny is that he's still— There's him, there's Sarah Vowell, there was David Rakoff for a while. There's not that many people that still do it. And it just shows how hard it is to do. And he's gotten better and better.

There's points where it's like, I'll listen to the most recent ones, like maybe Calypso on tape, and I'm like, "I don't know, man. You put him up against Chappelle laugh for laugh in a fucking 1.5-hour show." It's the precision of the writing.

It is. Yeah. Everything is about extra syllables. And Chappelle's really good at that. Seinfeld's talked about it, but one extra word and there you don't get to laugh. You've gotta be there at the end of the sentence before they're ready. And Sedaris is unique in that he never puts on extra verbiage or whatever to sort of make it—

It's lean. It's really lean.

Yet it's so full. And then he's funnier in person even than on the page. Yeah. It's just his voice and his attitude. And then if you go to one of those events, events, he's signing books for 6 hours afterwards.

He sees every single person, and he's writing wild shit in there. He's like, the amount of creative output just to write in their fucking—

he's connecting with each person.

Well, to me, that's my favorite part too, and I would much rather just be signing books and chatting with people because the high wire act of being up there with a microphone is a lot different. So to me, I'm always looking forward to the sitting and signing, but I do feel for the people that are waiting hours. Soder is waiting hours, but they go in knowing it, and the venue knows it, But the times that you're there and there's like a union venue and they're like, "You gotta get outta here." So then you're on the street and then the cops come, "You gotta get outta here too. You can't be there." That's happened to me. But to me, that's the most fun part is just the reader to reader. 'Cause in person, all people are normal. If you're just talking to an actual person with enough time, human to human, eye to eye, this solves everything.

This is our conclusion after 1,000+ episodes is like, we have guests semi-regularly that I don't like, that I've had interactions with around town. I'm like, I don't like this person. Mike is like, we got to have them. They're great guests. And 100% of the time, Dave, at the end of 2 hours, I'm like, I fucking love this person. And I'm like, literally, I challenge someone to sit for 2 hours with someone and be sincerely curious. And I just challenge you to not like the person. Well, the body wants to find common ground.

Just chemically, we want this. So I covered a lot of Trump rallies as a journalist, and I would embed. I never presented myself right away as a journalist, so I would just wait in line with everybody, get to know people.

Hope you take this as a compliment, you could blend in. I blend in. You're not coming across as like some lofty professor.

You should see my full uniform, because I've got the trucker hat and I have my flannel. These are clothes I own, so it's not like— It's not a costume. It's not so much a costume. And you know, I sort of I believe hate the sin, love the sinner. The folks that you meet, the people that you've seen on TV are usually the fringiest fringe. Oh, yeah. But in the middle, I mean, I do think it's so misguided, and he's by far the worst president that has ever been or could be conceived on so many levels, and certainly the most corrupt that we're seeing recently. But the people voting for him, I would find common ground with everybody, and they would have some reasonable explanations for supporting him for the most part. Out of every 100 people, there'd be one true lunatic. Sure, sure, sure. Wow, that poor soul. But as a journalist, you really, especially if you're listening and not like hit-and-run journalism, but like, I'm going to give you as long as you want to talk, I'm going to learn an explanation that I wouldn't have thought about. And sometimes they're voting in very narrow— my 401 went up last time he was elected, and I need that money.

Okay, I can't really argue with that. My parents waited 17 years to immigrate from the Philippines. I want everyone to wait the same amount of time.

I live in a border town. 250,000 people have come over this month. That scares me.

Well, I did cover the El Paso rally, so that was Beto O'Rourke on one side of the street having a rally when he's running for the Senate. About 4,000 people came to that one. Across the street, 90 feet, 15,000 people to Trump in El Paso a week after he said that El Paso was a dump and whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah, 50, 60% of that crowd was Latino. They laugh at this idea. I interviewed so many people that, like, the border— people are going up and down, back and forth every day from El Paso. So it's very porous. There's underground tunnels, there's all these different things. But then you have that conservatism of recent immigrants, right? So there was a family where the mom came over from Mexico illegally, got her green card. One daughter is a cop and is a Trumpy and won't talk to the mother anymore because she broke the law to come over. Oh, wow. But she's an American because her mother— Yeah, that's stressful. And so now no one's talking. To each other because she's iced out the mother. The sister won't talk to the other sister because— and it's all because of one guy.

Yeah, hey, come on. And so, you know, you gotta back up and say, it wasn't this way. For so long, the border was much more porous. You'd work in the U.S. because wages are higher, then you'd go back home because it's cheaper to live in Mexico. It was just back and forth for farm workers, for construction, for a lot of different things. And then suddenly, it wasn't Trump that did this, But everything became much more heightened and sort of you have to pick a side and choose. And it's wildly mismanaged. I don't have the solution in this podcast, but I will say that like—

If he dropped the solution, I'd be like, "Hey, why were you sitting on that so long?" We're on year 10 of this. Yeah. I do want to say this. I cannot remember, but I bet it had to be Kimmel who told me to. But what is the— what was the first book of yours I read? Okay. And I talk about it on here all the time. I just— I just love that book. It's just outstandingly beautiful.

You know, Valentino and I, we went to Kimmel's taping a year or two ago. Uh-huh. Jimmy Kimmel and Molly have given money to Valentino's schools in South Sudan. He has a foundation. And so it was really weird. There was a guy doing crowd work before, and he was like, "Where's everybody from? I want to see who's from the furthest place away." And he happens to find Valentino sitting next to me, and he's like, "Where are you from?" "South Sudan." And I was like, "Ah." You won, you got it. After the book came out, we went back to South Sudan, and all the money from the book went to this foundation, and then he had the decision to make, like, what do you do with it? And he decided to build a high school in his town. He was so successful that he became the Minister of Education for his whole region, so basically New England size, and now he's running his own schools in a town close to Marial Bai, where he grew up. You read about him till he was probably 22, I guess.

Was it Atlanta that they got sent to? Yeah. The heartbreaking part of this book, if you haven't read it, I really encourage— one of my very favorite books. But, you know, what these kids went through to cross the desert. I mean, there's literally lions picking guys off, which is just unimaginable. And they have this notion of getting to America, and then they go to Atlanta, and just the violence that's happening in the motel that they're at.

And the speed of life. Like, when I met Valentino, he'd just gotten in an accident, like, 2 days after getting his driver's license. They had 3 months of aid from USAID or whatever group it was. Maybe it was the UNHCR., but then they're on their own. And it's like independent nonprofits and churches that supported the Lost Boys all over the U.S. But to the credit of the churches and our ability to absorb refugees and people from the toughest post-conflict zones, they were absorbed and did quite well almost everywhere. And it was mostly the churches that did it, 'cause most of the kids were brought up Catholic. The churches reached out, whatever you need. "Come to us. You're part of our family." And then, in Atlanta, it was Mary Williams, who started the Lost Boys Foundation and got in touch with me. But you had 4,000, mostly boys, all unaccompanied, 18 to 25, sent to Fargo, sent to Omaha, cheaper places to live, San Jose, never in the middle of a city. And suddenly, after 3 months, it's like, "Well, you gotta pay that electrical bill." "What's an electrical bill?" "Okay, well, and you've gotta get to school now.

You have to have a job within 3 months." 3 months.

You have to know everything it took all of us 18 years to figure out, you have to know it in the next 3 months.

3 months. Most of them, if they were lucky enough to sort of have a family that takes care of them— Valentino had this couple, the Mazes, that are still in Atlanta, that became sort of surrogate parents and guiding him through all these questions. And you realize, like, whether it's the Lost Boys or whether it's first in their family to go to college in this country, you just need an advocate. You need somebody to pick up the phone and be like, "Okay, no, that's not what you do. Pick up this form, you gotta fill this out, I'll help you do it. I'll file that for you. Go to this website." 'Cause otherwise, it's just reading Sumerian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the speed of light. And if you don't do it, you're on the street. Like, all of those things at once. And you realize, like, I've been to Kakuma, which is the refugee camp that they grew up in. And for the most part, there's not electricity or running water in a lot of these camps. They were lucky to have a meal a day for years. These refugee camps are still there because they become cities unto themselves, right?

And they're still called refugee camps even though they've been there at this point 34 years or something like that. But there's a simplicity sometimes, or with a system you know, and our lives here in this country are so complex. We don't even realize how complex and needlessly complex they are and how irrational dysfunctional. So many of our systems are until you go to somewhere else. These cities in South Sudan, now that there's been relative peace for some time, are growing exponentially. Like Juba, the capital, when we were first there maybe 20 years ago, I think it was maybe 20,000 people. Like, you could really get across it in an hour or two. And now I think it's 2.5 million, and it just grows out, and there's entrepreneurship everywhere, and things popping up, and schools. And if people have anywhere whether it's this country 200 years ago or South Sudan, just if there's relative peace for a little bit of time, everything can happen. People will flourish, they'll figure it out, they'll flock to these centers, they'll solve problems. And it's the job of the international community to just invest, not aid, invest in businesses there.

Yeah. So you have Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants and businesses and places from Uganda that are going into South Sudan to make money, which is good, right? They employ people, they're selling them phone plans. This is the way that countries get out of a post-conflict situation. It's like actual living, not just aid, but actual investment. Valentino's doing a lot of that too.

Okay, well, we've eaten up way too much time. I would have loved to talk about The Circle a little bit and The Every, because I like hearing you talk about the— post-apocalyptic cyber age we're in. Find it. You're fun to listen to talk about this. But at last, your newest book, which is what we're here to talk about, is Contrapposto. That's the name of my Botox place, by the way.

Is it really?

Yeah. I didn't know this term before the book.

Oh, I've never seen it anywhere else.

Yeah, it's the first time I had heard it.

It's a form, right, in painting where a portrait subject is holding two positions that are intentional.

Yeah, it's like the Michelangelo's David would be the first, or is the best-known example, where the pose is off balance a bit. You're putting weight on one leg, or your hips are one way, your shoulders are another way, as opposed to a stock-still kind of rigid pose. So most poses we know could be qualified as contrapposto. But it's something you learn in art school, and you ask of the model, and I like the word always, and I felt like it applied to the relationship between Cricket and Olympia, There's sort of balanced imbalance between them. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

So, the book starts with a little boy, Robert, and he ditches that name because he has a shitty— not a stepdad, but mom's boyfriend. Is terrible. You're not gonna let me draw any parallels?

I never had a stepdad.

He sounded very familiar to me. But Cricket gets his name 'cause he doesn't want to be called Rob, 'cause it's now associated with Robert, who's upstairs, right? Yeah. The book starts with, like, this sanctuary this little boy has. Do you want to describe it a little bit?

Yeah. His grandfather lives at home in the basement, and then has created kind of like a botanical garden, almost, in the middle of a— like an Indiana basement in the middle of winter. It's frozen outside and white and probably below zero, but down there, it's humid and full of plants and green and— And spiders. He likes spiders. Yeah, insects. So, it's this humid, sort of fertile, kind of womb-like world almost that Cricket spends most of his time down there with his grandfather, who's pretty old and not super mobile. He doesn't really leave the basement. But he draws on the floor in front of him while listening to records and his father reading above him. And I think that those early sections about the grandfather, I just wanted to establish that when you're a kid and you can draw, or if you can write, or whatever you're doing, there's this, like, incredible peace that comes over a kid that— He's got all this chaos going on upstairs, but on that page, he controls everything. He can create any universe or world he wants to. He has validation from this grandfather that loves everything he does, which is what grandfathers are supposed to do, or grandparents.

Well, he treats him seriously, which is like this huge gift that someone can give you when you're a kid.

For sure. It's different, his mother's working full-time and is under all kinds of stresses, but down there, you know, I think every kid needs that sort of place where you're validated, I guess. You're competent, you're good at something. Everybody's gotta feel that. You have to find something that a kid is good at, and that's the parent's task. It's like, "Go to karate, tai chi." I mean, anything you can do. But until you find that, it's tricky. Once that kid finds that he's really good at something, then that competence carries over into everything else. Like, "All right, good. I have a place. I can do this one thing well." But then, you know, that leads into him taking more and more sort of art classes around and leaving— home. Grandfather doesn't last too long, but has taught him, I guess, the skills.

Well, also, this thing he's good at becomes a bridge also to friendship and to potential romantic interests, right? He's encouraged— it's kind of discovered that he's a good drawer, and he's encouraged to graffiti.

Yeah, everybody knows that kid, right, that can draw the angel guy and the Led Zeppelin cover, right? So, hey, can you do that for me too?

Or Eddie from Iron Man. Yeah, there's a couple kids in every high school, they could draw Eddie.

Same in prisons, right? If you can draw, those guys make money doing it. Like, I've met a lot of those guys. But yeah, for Cricket, it's really just like he's a quiet kid, but he meets Olympia, who recognizes that he has a talent, and then, of course, uses it to have him deface a public play structure using some form of calligraphy via a giant Sharpie. And so, I wanted to take it away from being too cute. They say horrible things on this play structure, but in an ornate, kind of almost Old English sort of font. But he's madly in love instantly with this girl who's maybe a year older.

Yeah, she's very worldly and provocative and dangerous, right? Yeah.

Not to spoil it, but the rest of the book is about them together over the years. But I think that she's so captivating, and at every stage, she's captivating in different ways. She morphs and shape-shifts a bit, but she's always infinitely more sophisticated. Educated than he is, and more verbal, and more worldly, and she knows how to sort of navigate through the art world, whereas, like, he generally doesn't have a clue and doesn't seek to.

We get into your kind of— or I'm assuming your take on art. We're exploring a lot this kind of tension between it's pretentious, it's exclusionary, it's inclusionary. Like, it has all these dynamics. What were you able to get off your chest about art?

Well, it was fun because I don't think I would ever write a book about the book world because I'm in it, and that's to me maybe just too close. And also for me being adjacent to it, like I paint and make prints and I draw and sell them and stuff, and I have a little gallery that sells them for the last 15 or so years. So I have like a little bit of a foray into that world. Used to write about art and everything, but there is something really unique in all art forms, like music. You go to a concert and, well, it used to be $20 and you'd see your favorite band, and it's $15 for the CD and you could take it home and own it and look through the booklet. And it's very democratic. The art world and the visual art world in the last 100 years or so is incredibly exclusive and very hard to, like, just experience as a regular person. You can't really own much. You could tear out a piece of paper from a magazine with your favorite painting. That's as close as you can get.

Well, even like the Banksy rise is so fascinating, right? Because it starts as like incredibly democratized. Yeah, for all to see on the side of a building. And then I have been to billionaire's house who has an enormous Banksy in his—

oh, is that right? Yeah, in his hallway. Somebody tore it off a building maybe?

No, what Banksy does artwork for sale.

I didn't know that. Yo, yeah, he did a piece on the side of the McSweeney's building years ago. Oh really? So he got in touch when he was coming in San Francisco and he said, I'd like to do something on the roof. And one of our staffers let him in at midnight and led him up to the roof.

Did he have to sign anything?

That's a good question. Or do to be blindfolded. I mean, that's funny. I always want to ask—

they've just discovered who he is, right? Have you been following? Yeah, it's like an English dude.

Yeah, it's always been an English guy. We didn't know. It was Chris Yang, who was on our staff. He let him up, and then he did this really cool mural, sort of— I don't know what you call it— picture on the side of what he would consider the roof, or this— the wall on our roof. But we have a flat roof, and he did it there, and we were so happy. We wake up, we see it. People were stopping on the street for a week in the middle of traffic. It was a big deal. Everybody knew that he'd done it. It's before social media though, so it was like just word of mouth. And then one day we wake up and it's gone. And we realized it was on the building next to us. So our roof is flat, but then there's an apartment building next to us. Oh, did they paint it over? And we didn't even think to tell this guy because we— anyway, so it was painted over within a week. And we could've, uh— I haven't seen a picture of it in years. It was tragic. There's a few other pieces in San Francisco, one in the port that they're trying to figure out what to do with and authenticate, 'cause he won't authenticate either.

I really like his work. Always have. I like the way he goes about things on his own. I don't love the secondary or tertiary people making money off of his stuff, but I was always looking for, and I think trying to explore in this novel, Like, how do you bring it to that democratized kind of level that music and even books— books are so simple. You buy, it's $25, you take it home. That's the experience. Anybody can access it. There's no exclusive part of the book world. But art is mostly exclusive, meaning, like, if you want to own anything and that person is really making a living doing it, it's incredibly expensive.

That's where I've called bullshit on art a a little bit, which is like, why is the print to you not valuable? I love the prints. Yeah, I'm just saying most people— yeah, like, if what you love is this image, yeah, you can't tell the difference, right? What are we talking about? Why is that not desirable?

Or the lithograph versus the real thing?

They make comparatively so few. So if an artist is doing 40 paintings a year, they only make a couple prints or lithographs of those works, and then maybe a book at the end of a show. I did different series of prints that looked exactly like the original so no one could tell, and I would sell them in a portfolio. You see them anywhere in people's houses and you cannot tell the difference, and I did that on purpose.

Did you mark the original?

No, I just signed it, you know, so it has the original signature in the corner. So if you were gonna really look closely—

I like the idea of someone has the original. Yeah, right, it's fun.

That takes place in the real world all the time. What you think is an original in certain museums is not the original. There's often a fake there because of wanting to preserve it or rest it or the danger of theft or whatever. So you don't always know. But I do think that this sanctification of these certain little objects— and Mona Lisa must be so much better than the painting next to it— and this sort of hierarchy, all of these things are very unique, I think, to the art world, whereas there's so much phenomenal work being done every day by people that we live among, and LA is obviously such a fantastic art city. But there's something intrinsic to it that's snooty, and that really attracts kind of a snobby sort of person, unfortunately. And at all twists and turns, we've got to try to favor the artists, the curators, the gallerists, the museum directors, everybody that makes it accessible, makes it more fun, on explains things. Why is that on the wall? Yeah, why is that Barnett Newman on the wall? Why am I supposed to like that? If you can't explain that, then you shouldn't be doing the job.

You know, you should explain why a white square is on the wall. Yeah, it's worth $6 million or whatever. And I think that for so long— it's getting a little bit better now, it's pretty pluralistic atmosphere now. Like if you go to LACMA, you'll see every kind of work imaginable, which is how it should be. But for a while, '60s, '70s, '80s, it had gotten so exclusive and so narrow where it was all about abstract work and abstract expressionism, little conceptual art. But anything outside of that, representational figures, anything like that, was like really frowned upon. Passé. Yeah. And it was like an art form uniquely susceptible to that. And you would never find that in music where it's like, well, now from now on, John Cage has brought us to this place where only silence and stones are It's over.

Yeah. Yeah, we don't like the Rolling Stones anymore.

Everything else is invalid, but we had reached that place with visual art for a while. It was a tough place and very unaccepting and very closed-minded.

Yeah, my grievance is like, it's the apex of arbitrary.

I just moved into a house and I was like, okay, I need art for my house now. And this has been crazy. Similarly, my parents bought me a housewarming present and it was a painting. And it's not a cheap painting. And then I got it and I love it. I do love it. But when I'm staring at it, I'm like, why does it cost—

Why was it that much?

So much money. Do you like the painting?

I do. I love the painting. And I look at it and I look at this print that's much cheaper that's framed next to it. And I'm like, yeah, none of this makes any sense.

Yeah. I was talking to a friend. She just had a show. All of her prices are super random.

She has a formula that's actually based on, like, area, you know, based on what you were charging the San Francisco Chronicle for your—

It's exactly the same. That just came to mind. So, is it like by square footage that you're doing this? Like, why would this be $412 and that one $680? And if it's by actual area, doesn't that seem weird? Like you're charging by the foot. But I think that that goes again toward how they've created a sort of a self-seriousness about it, and a little bit like, "I could explain it to you, but you wouldn't understand." That kind of thing. Yes, exactly.

Well, it reeks of elitism. Elitism.

You don't find that in any other medium. Even classical music, like, the first thing they want to do is explain it to you, you know? Like, okay, here's why this movement is about this. Not like, well, I don't know, you have a degree in music theory, then maybe I could talk to you.

Yeah, it's like, if you don't get it, that's on you. So you kind of have to be like, no, I get it.

We should add too, the world is filled with more criminals than any other. There are more paint salesmen who have gone to prison than any other art medium. They're just filled with crooks who are selling paintings they don't have. Yeah, they're selling fake paintings. But there you go.

And why is that? Why does it attract so many charlatans? And it's always been fascinating to me because you really just don't see as much of it in any other form. But the art forging stories, I do love those, like watching those. And also you'll see the gallerist in between who's sort of winking and nodding, like, does she or doesn't she know that she's selling a fake for $5.5 million to this Is she just running out the string before putting that in a Swiss account or whatever? And then somebody's gonna get caught, but she's just the pass-through. It's fascinating, but there is no equivalent in music or writing or whatever where you could defraud one person out of $5 million based on picture. You know? Like a bunch of paint on a 4x4 canvas, which the intrinsic value of that is like $150. $1 million, right, of like materials. And everything else is about this sort of suspension of disbelief or this shared illusion that we are all going to dream together that this is worth something now.

It's comforting, weirdly, to go like, "Oh, there's a handful of things that are so beautiful they're invaluable." Something about that story is appealing.

Well, and also there are people in between, like art consultants that will say this one's appreciating and that one's not. Or not this one's on the downslide and that artist's star is rising. Yeah. So a lot of it is sort of stock market-like. It's like vaporware, crypto, or whatever, where if we all believe together that this person is on the rise, then we can justify that. And then you do have a lot of manipulation. You'll find the same buyer buys a painting for $1 million, shows it in some gallery or traveling show, which raises its profile, Sells it to some friend for $10 million, who sells it again for $20, and everybody's sort of in on this, creating the marketplace. There's a famous story of the Christopher Wool painting that says— whatever that quote from Apocalypse Now. And it's just type, and it's like a long, tall painting. Within a handful of years, it went from $800,000 to like $22 million. And it was just like this churning.

Also, there's no sympathetic victims in any of these cases. You don't really feel bad for someone who has an extra $22 million to get taken. Taken advantage of. Now, I do want to bring it back to the book for one second to say, though, although Cricket's obviously observing all that madness, Cricket's also experiencing the real value of art in two kind of pivotal moments in the book. One being he gets singled out in high school for this painting of a weasel, right? Even before. I think they're like 10. And that is extremely hurtful to Robert.

He puts his stepdad or whatever's face on a weasel that's been hit by— he's roadkill. Police put on an art fair, and it's sort of like a PSA about careful on the road or something. So, he uses it as a way to get back.

Yeah, so he experiences the power of it. And then he's working at this store. He makes a painting of someone that's dear to two people in his life. Wilson. And it gets hung up. And he experiences the love of art, right? The transmission of love. Love. Yeah. So he's felt the power of it. Yeah. He's felt the love of it.

So there are these glimpses of what it's really about, for sure. I mean, I think at every step, Cricket, in the moment— and I don't know if you've had this experience, but with any art form, I certainly have painting, where you're painting and in the moment there's nothing better in the world than moving color around a canvas, and you think you're doing some masterpiece every single time. Yeah, especially if you're up close to it, and you're inhaling the fumes and stuff. And so, on every level. And then you back up, and it's a piece of garbage. It does not look like anything like what you intended to do, and it's not working in any way. But how can you sort of, like, stay in that moment when you were in love with the process and what you were doing? And Cricket always is struggling with transferring that moment of being in it to, like, the result, which is never what you want it to be. Be. And then there's that second stage, that artwork being put out into the world, which is often a miserable process that you don't want to have anything to do with.

So I think he never masters it, whereas Olympia would, and most people, or a lot of people, would master. Like, "Okay, well, I'll figure this out." But he never can transfer the love of what he wants to do in that moment, or a tribute to his friend, or drawing spaceships on the floor of his grandfather's basement, but to something else, and do something in public, or make a living at it, or master the business side of it. Because the teacher, Carpenter, at one point is like, "Probably the most talented guitarist in the world is playing for a Journey cover band in Reno." Mm-hmm. But there's many different reasons why that person isn't heading up some innovative band, but there's so many other things that you have to do. To sort of achieve whatever kind of success, however you might define it, but it's not just talent. And there's a lot of other things. Showing up on time. There's having or being burdened by ambition, and Cricket really doesn't have any. Olympia applies this ambition to, "Come on! Do this thing. Show up at this one thing. Do more of that. People will buy this." At no point— Trying to help.

—can he do it. And I'm fascinated by those people. And I can't say I know a lot of them, but like every so often you will find some artist in a little town off the beaten path in Alaska, and they just do this brilliant work, but never want to go anywhere else or do anything else. They live here. Yeah.

I often ruminate the stories I consider telling. They're my fears, right? Like, I think about writing a movie about something with children, 'cause I'm so afraid of that. Yeah. Do you think some part of you recognizes how fucking precarious the whole thing is? What an improbable result that you have made a living and a good one out of pursuing something artistic in that, you know, somewhere in the back of your mind, like, I could also be Cricket.

Sure. For anybody that has the luck of being able to do this for a living, and it's really just about a publisher saying they'll publish the next thing. That's all there is. That's the 100% of the success of it. It's like, really? You're going to do— oh, all right, good. If you can pay the bills doing it. You won the lottery. But these days, even though not everyone's reading as much as they used to, there are more readers by a factor of a million new people every day than there have ever been in the history of the world. 1900, how many literate people were there, right? It's a tiny percentage of the globe. And then suddenly we have almost universal literacy around a globe of 8 billion people. So even where some things are getting a little harder, probably the best time ever. To be trying to make a living as a writer, 'cause there's just more people, more ways to do it. The internet gets the books out in different ways. You can get the word out. There's Substack now.

Everyone can have their own Substack.

Yeah, if you can make that work, that's income. But in terms of publishing, and in terms of it being a time to do this for a living, it's really the very best time in the history of human evolution to try to be a writer making a living. There's more people more people making a living at it than ever before. 'Cause 1900, you could probably count a few dozen people, right, as novelists.

Yeah, my other last, just, curiosity is— I went through this program, The Groundlings. I think 3,000 people enter for every 15 that get to the Sunday Company. Was the number that was given to me. Maybe that's right or wrong. The point is, I saw and worked with and met so many people that were better at doing characters than I was. They were better writers than I was. They didn't have some combination of ambition or show up and do it whatever the thing was, I have this kind of weird survivor's guilt, and I could imagine myself writing this book motivated out of that a little bit. In my travels, I met crickets, and it's not fair, and I want to honor a cricket.

Yeah. I mean, I always say to my students, I've met a lot of brilliant first draft writers that will not revise. They do the one thing, and that's it. Enjoy. My offering. My—

I offer it to you. Feel free to read it multiple times.

"Kirk, I honor you with my first draft, and I'm going to lunch." Those people, we know what happens to them, right? They can't do the work. So humility is a real thing. And I'm not endorsing Cricket's way, 'cause I don't live that way myself. I'm happy to take feedback. I'm happy to, like, do the 20 drafts. I want to learn. And I also know how bad my first drafts are. And so, when you come up through newspapers, you're beaten down. You have no choice but to be humble. Because they chop every single thing you do. But then it makes you a little bit less precious and a little bit stronger, and you meet deadlines, and you work a little harder. You can do an all-nighter without a problem. But I think there's so much humility involved, and also knowing— I don't know. I mean, the guilt part, I feel bad that, uh—

That you don't have it? That I don't.

Well, because I always see anybody that does the work, I see, and I always believe, every good book will be published. We're all looking for them as publishers. So if you put in the work and do the 10 drafts or 12 or 15 like the rest of us do, and you listen, and there's maybe some spark there that's something unusual, it'll get published. We're all looking for those books. So I think, again, it's the most democratic medium because you don't need a degree in anything to be able to do it.

The problem is people's bar isn't just to get published. It's to be a you. You know, to be a household name. And that's a different bar. That's ego, really. Depends on who.

Then we get into, like, how do you measure success? For a lot of people, it's publisher will put out your next book, and then they spend a lot of time teaching, maybe. You know, they're teaching at UCLA. That's a great life to have. The luckiest life anybody could ever have is being able to convey what you know to the next generation. You get your books out every few years. Yeah. I have so many friends doing that, and they are unbelievable teachers. Couple at USC. USC has an incredible department. You know, there's so many people making a living adjacent to. We have Rita Bullwinkle, the editor of McSweeney's, is a novelist too, and she's balancing those two things, but that's a very lucky life too. But there are way more options than there ever were before. Do a little advertising writing, you do a screenplay there, maybe there's this, there's that, there's a Substack, there's a podcast.

People are probably writing tweets and they're writing Instagram copy. You know, as a side hustle. People are managing other people's accounts.

One of the funniest writers I've ever met has been at Facebook for like 20 years writing like internal stuff. Oh, really? A little brighter, but raising kids on it and doing great, and she's been treated very well. And if she wants to do side stuff, then that's great. What Cricket learns early when he's working at this gallery is that the ambition and the gap between where you want to be and where you reasonably should or could be be. That's where misery comes from. Yes. It's like, "I should be this, but I'm not realistic about getting there," or, "I'm not willing to do the work to get there," or, "Maybe I just don't belong there." Whatever it is, that's where you get the tortured artist. And so, trying to find, like, where's my equilibrium? What don't I love about this? Cricket learns he can't possibly be at an art opening with his paintings surrounding him, people pouring wine on him, or whatever. So, how do you rule out— you've probably done this 100 times. How do you rule out the thing I really don't like to do? Is it auditions? Is it this? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And say, okay, well, how do I gravitate to this and put together a different mosaic of the things I really like? And it might be on a different scale. You might not live in New York, but you'd live in Indiana or whatever. Cut your expenses by 90%. You know, all of these different things. You sort of have to think about it at so many stages of life to be like, well, now that the kids are out of the house, what does life look like? For us and how are we happiest, as opposed to just moving along at the expected rate of things. But I'm not saying I successfully do this all the time, but periodically you can assess what do you need to cut out, what miseries can you cut out of your life that are no longer obligations.

I just want to say, I just love 826 Valencia. I got to see, like, what you've done with these places. The first one, I guess, in the Mission, right? To have the lease that you guys got guys had to sell shit.

Yeah, zoning obligation.

Yeah, so they sell pirate stuff, Monica, and it's really just a place for— um, 826 Valencia is where kids can come and get tutored and they can get help writing and they get mentorship. But you can't just open up a mentorship clinic in certain zones. You have to sell products in the storefront. So a lot of these locations— now there's one in Echo Park, right?

Yeah, there's Echo Park Time Travel Mart. It's a 7-Eleven.

Yeah, from the way Do you know how that place was funded?

How? So Judd Apatow has been a supporter. He had an idea one time. He's like, let's do a fundraiser. He had been giving money for years, but he's like, let's do a fundraiser where we parody LA's tendency to pat themselves on the back for any sort of charitable stuff that they do. He's like, let's do a night of good intentions where we honor Seth Rogen. This was a long time ago. He had only done Freaks and Geeks. We're to honor Seth Rogen for the philanthropic work he's considering doing in the future. I love it. And so, Will Ferrell gets up and Ben Stiller and like Foo Fighters, all in one night. Like, you know, we're so proud of you, Seth, for considering possibly in the future doing something for somebody. And then he gets up and he's like, I have no idea who these people are. I mean, I don't know what 826 is. I don't know any of this stuff. I don't know what anyone's talking about. But Jud charged like $1,000 a plate, and so all the people in LA came. He had the 10-day-old flower arrangements from the Golden Globes. He had like Rocky V decorations.

But it was a really fun night to parody all of that. And then he raised enough money to build the entire center in Echo Park. Oh, wow. Which is like, you know, $250,000 in a night by parodying LA's, uh— Self-indulgent.

Self-congratulatory indulging.

So that one's been open almost 15 years now. It's a beautiful spot. After School Help Publishing. It's been home to a couple generations now of kids that have grown up there.

And they publish these kids' work. These kids get to have published work and the books are solid. They're fucking— Yeah, it's the coolest.

We have a library of 2,000 of these books now up in San Francisco. So if you're ever up there, there. Yeah. But come by there because it looks like a 7-Eleven. You walk right past it because it's exactly a 7-Eleven. Like, Bad Robot helped decorate it. And then Mac Barnett, who's a children's book author— he's the ambassador for children's literature right now from the Library of Congress, but he was the guy in charge. He was the executive director at the time. They all built it, so you'll walk right past it. But then if you go in, there's a secret door that leads to the back, and then that's the tutoring center. So for kids that get extra help, there's no stigma about it, you know? It's like going into this cool place as opposed to the sterile after-school help for kids falling behind sort of spot. So all of the centers around the country have different themes.

Yeah, you don't want to be behind a glass window with classmates, like, fucking looking in.

I mean, these places exist. Oh, it's horrifying. And usually you're paying for that tutoring. And to be seen— I won't name these ones that I know of, but it is horrifying. This is all free. Everything's free. If people want to support, 826 Valencia.

Is there a website? 826 Valencia.

826 LA is the one down here. Here, 826 Boston, whatever city you happen to live in, we accept money. Yeah. People wanting to donate it, we still accept it.

That's so awesome. It's very cool. I watch a lot of footage of these kids and they have these assignments like go out on the street and interview people right now. And like these little kids bump into someone who's like, this woman's the very first test tube baby.

That was my class. Oh, you're okay.

It was your class. San Francisco.

I sent my kids out to, and interview the most interesting person they see. And they went to a bookstore and they met the woman that says, "Well, I happened to be the first test tube baby. Got lucky." So they interviewed them, came back, wrote this up. You know, the other thing is you end up— we have about 1,000 tutors down here, so you end up meeting kids that you share the city with, and these kids meet all these caring adults that give a few hours a month. So it sort of tightens the fabric of a city, especially a vast one here. Where you can feel disconnected by roads and neighborhoods. But there, it's like, "Oh, I saw you live around the corner in Echo Park." You see the kid at the grocery store, you're both there. Yeah, it's like, you know, get to know the parents, everybody. And those kids, especially right now when they're being villainized and ostracized because their parents or they're immigrants, this is like a way to say, "No, you belong. You have all of us. We're all behind you. You got 1,000 advocates, you got 1,000 allies. Come to us." And so these are real safe havens.

Ravens, especially in the last 10, 12 years. The work has been a lot more urgent. Yeah.

Okay, the last thing that's very frivolous and not philanthropically motivated is, did you go to the Jetpack Academy?

Yeah, in Moorpark, California. You've been there? I have not.

I didn't know one could receive training for jetpack flight. So it's still there.

I mean, you're only like an hour away. You gotta go. Okay. It's in an avocado farm.

What's the propulsion system? Fuel? It is an actual jet.

It looks exactly like the cartoon of a jetpack. Okay, he's modeled it after every image you ever saw in sci-fi, and a version of it was in the Olympics back in like 1980.

The guy came in and landed in the—

yeah, so it looks the same. There's this crazy Australian guy that made his version of it, and you've got whatever, £12 of jet fuel, or however you measure it, on your back in the two things, but you're on a tether. Okay, so you're testing it in the middle of this avocado on a farm, and there's a landing strip. You know, you pull the throttle, you do a little bit of this and that, and then you're on a tether, which makes it extremely difficult because it catches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're like, "Aah," and then blah.

You can't really get a feel for it.

No, it's not as romantic as you want it to be. And then it burns the absolute shit out of your feet because, like, there's jet fuel coming and it's spreading out. Yeah, yeah. On the concrete where your feet are. So it's not a super romantic process. I really like experimental flight. I've tried a lot of different weird—

Yeah, are you into— the drones are gonna work. I'm watching people fly drones around. Any minute. Those are the most promising.

The problem is fuel and like how do you carry enough to take you really as far as you want to go? They all have pretty limited scopes.

What I almost did up in Ventura is the motor paragliding. Yeah. That interests me and you can do that in a weekend. I've done ultralights.

Oh, okay. More like a motorcycle with a hang glider on top of it. But my friends that know what they're talking about say that the, they're called parasailing. No, it's not parasailing, but that's the better view.

It's like motor and paragliding mashed up somehow.

It's got that sort of fan in the back.

Yeah, I watched a dude land on the beach in Malibu. I started talking to him like, where did you take off? He's like, oh, I took off from Thousand Oaks. And I'm like, what is this thing?

This isn't that thing where you're like in like the bat suit and all these people die?

No, that's a wingsuit. Those are deadly. Yeah, everyone that does it dies. This is— you have a paragliding parachute above you, and then you have a gas engine on back with a fan. Yeah. And it propels you, and you can fly. Oh, another— I was doing this movie Without a Paddle, and the stunt coordinator had shipped his to New Zealand, and we had to go into this jungle. It was either an hour and a half drive, or they started helicoptering us because it took so long. And this dude was flying from his hotel, his motorized paraglider, to work. And I'm like, what a stud. Look at this.

If you have a field, it can land on any kind field. You see a lot of it in, like, Nebraska. That's where they fly a lot of those. Yeah, yeah. And you don't even need a license because it's ultralight. It's below the category where you need a license. But I check every time they get a little bit closer to one of these. They're super expensive still. I mean, the real drone technology is like half a million dollars or something.

And I need a really good self-deploying parachute that noticed I'm falling quicker than I would want to fall.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's fun to go see the jetpack. The other The problem with it is that you can only carry enough, even if you knew how to fly it, the problem is you can only carry enough fuel for 2, 3 minutes. Right, right, right. So that's why you never see them anywhere. 'Cause it's like, boop, you know, you're back. But it's kind of fun.

Well, Dave, even though you don't like talking about yourself, we got through it. I wanna applaud you. We did it. Thank you very much. You revealed just enough for us.

So gentle.

I think you're just a beautiful writer. And Contrapposto is in keeping with all of your really wonderful work. So I hope everyone checks that out. What a delight to meet you. I've been hearing about you from Kimmel, and you deliver. Thanks so much.

Thanks for having me. Yes. Absolutely.

See you guys. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite Fact Checks. From your picture board?

No, this one wasn't on my board.

This one's improv. Pumped you? Oh wow, improvised. It's great. You know what's funny is I was, uh, in the shower today and I've been ordering a lot of slacks. You've seen me in them. There's new slacks. Yeah, drawstring, a little baggier. Trousers. Trousers. Pantaloonus. Multiple colors. Yeah. All this to say, I get them, I like them, I put them in my closet, and they're gone forever. You forget about them. Well, I wear the same two that are in front of me, and I actually was thinking in the shower, like, I need to do what Monica look at us. Or just another thought I had is like, lay out 7 outfits and that's what I'm gonna wear that week. Have you ever tried that technique?

Yeah, that's a common technique.

It's very common. Okay, so I didn't discover anything.

No, you did. You're on the brink, you're on the precipice. You should, because it's healthy. Stupid to buy clothes and not wear them.

Oh, and then I think I don't have any because I wear the same 2 pants that I like. Yeah. And then get more. And then as I'm putting those away, they're next to brand new other pants I bought that I like.

And that's a guy thing, cuz I'm the same way with my pants.

Oh, you are? Yeah.

I don't think it's a guy thing. I think it's an everyone thing. Like, people have their go-to jeans and their go-to— you forget when you buy new stuff to mix it up, unless you commit yourself like I have to fashion. Did you see my closet video? This could be— no. Oh my gosh, I posted a closet video.

Oh, And does it include your photographs?

Yeah. Oh wow. It's a bit regretful because it was also impromptu, improvised, um, very random. Jess came over, okay, and I was telling him about my fashion endeavors, and then I was like, oh, I should show you my closet.

So then I was doing that, and then he was filming, and so you didn't even realize it was something that you might post, but then you saw it and you're like, I'm going to post it.

Yeah, I was like, like, oh, it's funny. But it is funny. Uh-oh. It's not— aspirational. Yeah, I know, I know. It's sad.

Well, you got to stay a little relatable.

That's true. You know, I am relatable because right now my clothes smell bad. This outfit smells bad.

Oh God, what kind of stink?

I, I don't know if it's from the dry cleaning. Uh-oh. I did walk, so the sweat probably made it worse. Oh, it smells like Sweat? Well, that's great. It doesn't— it smells like a weird smell, and the sweat I think exacerbated it.

Okay, if you had to compare the smell to something, could you?

Well, then I wondered, like, is it moth smell? But then I don't know what moth smell is.

No, are you thinking of mothballs? Yeah, yeah. Moths don't smell. Mothballs smell to repel moths. Oh yeah, that's the thing I was curious about. There's kids in school whose mothers just chalk their closets full of mothballs, and then they reek like mothballs. Because what— it's human repellent as well. That's not—

because it's nasty. Okay, well, that makes me feel good. It's not moths. I thought mothballs were made from moths. Oh, okay. I thought they like were— sure, left behind little balls, spiders, you know, like they leave webs. Ew. Anyway, so it's not that. So it's the dry cleaner. Oh, fuck. Well, Okay, it definitely is. I've noticed it on a lot of my clothes lately.

This makes me think of something I don't think I should share, but I'm going to. So I was in my Miami trip, and I have a system when I travel. I throw all my dirty clothes in the corner of whatever room I'm inhabiting, and at the end of the trip, I have two sides of my suitcase. I keep all the fresh ones on one side, and I put all the dirties in a ball in the other side. Then when I get home, I just take that ball, I put it in the hamper, and then I put away my fresh clothes. So I had showered, I did very minimal things, and I went to work out. And then I, you know, I peed next to the garage about stuff. No, no, this is maybe a week and a half ago. It was after Miami. Okay, this resulted from Miami.

Okay, I think I know.

You do?

I think I can. Okay, well, take a guess.

That could be fun.

Okay, so you peed by the garage, and when you peed by the garage, you took your underwear down. And when you looked at the underwear, it was definitely dirty because one of the dirty clumps moved into the clean clump.

Okay, close. Poop stains. No. Okay, okay, so I guess it's not that bad. Oh, I don't in general have shit streaks.

I wouldn't guess that about you.

Yeah, you're pretty clean. I'm pretty meticulous. Well, just specifically, I don't even think I'm that clean. My anus is an obsession of mine. You know, I have the bidet, I have the Brondle, and I squirt water in there, and I'm just—

yeah, you put your fingers—

I do rub my finger on that. People don't like that, but I do. You know, fuck it, I put my finger on it in the shower. I clean it, and then I use toilet paper to dry off, and then I wash my hands. Yeah. Okay, so— okay, okay. So I peed next to the crotch, and then I went in, and then I sniffed my fingers, as you do. Yeah. I thought Oh my God, there's a little bit of like ball smell. Like, I would— which I don't— again, I also don't really ever get stinky balls. I have to not shower for a few days to get that. Okay, but I just showered that morning. I was like, what the fuck? How could I already have stinky undercarriage when I just showered? It was driving me bonkers, right? And then I peed another time and I'm like, goddamn it, it's there. Maybe it's even worse. Oh, now I'm consumed with with it. So when I finished my work, I'm like, I'm gonna have to shower. Well, actually, I didn't think I'm gonna have to shower again. I thought I'm gonna have to wash my testicles and penis in the sink, which I sometimes do.

Okay. And so I went upstairs and I was about to do that, and all of a sudden I just thought, oh my God, I'm gonna smell my underwear. I took off my underwear. Lordy Lord, what's obvious is they were not clean. Yeah. So although I was very clean, I put on my undies and it contaminated my—

So it was half right. Dirty one made its way into the clean section.

That's exactly right. Okay. And I'll add, I can't remember having Pantaloonies undercarriage, men's unmentionables that even smelled that bad.

Right, why would it smell that bad?

Well, Miami, okay. Sweat. Very hot, very humid. Sure. Then take them off and they're, God knows, you know, and they're just not getting any better smelling. Oh God. Anyways, what a humiliation.

Well, you were by yourself at least. That's true.

That's true. I'm like you, I go to the worst place. Like, I have a headache, okay, I got a tumor. So I'm like, oh my God, now I'm someone whose balls stink 3 hours after they shower. Scary. What's happening with me hormonally? Yeah, you know, I'm going to all these crazy explanations, never even thinking maybe my panties smell.

And they did. Wow. Well, that's an easy fix.

So best case. Yeah, I haven't experienced it since, but now I'm a little shook about that pair of panties. And I love that pair of panties. They're dark black with very colorful hearts on them. Uh-huh. So I wore them the other day and I sniff, sniff, cuz I was like, were they clean? And they're permanently— something's wrong with them. But then I sniff, sniff, sniff, clean as a cucumber. But I had some anxiety all day. I was like, every time I peed, I was like—

you thought maybe it was going to get released?

Yes, I just— cuz I had that traumatic experience with that.

Sure. Well, you know, I mean, there's reason to fear because sometimes when pheromones get crossed, weird stuff can happen.

I think you're referencing when you borrow a girlfriend's shirt and the girlfriend doesn't have B.O. Zero. And you don't have B.O. I hope I don't. You don't. I've known you for quite a while. Never smelled B.O. on you. And then.

But when I wear the shirt, I do have B.O. I have like a It smells crazy, but it's the mixture of the pheromones.

Yeah. And you have a, you know, which friends you can't share tops with. Kaley's one of them, right? Is she one of them? No. No, she's not. Okay. It's not gross cuz neither of you have beards. I know, but it's not her.

Okay. Ding, ding, ding. Kaley, this is relevant. So I had dinner with her and she just got out of COVID Okay. And during COVID she got really into Drive to Survive.

She did not. Yes. So, or MX.

Yeah, they've been watching it. And so she was, you know, cross-referencing with me a lot, like, okay, what do you like this person? Do you like this person? Who do you like? You know, that type of thing.

And then she had probably a whole new jealousy that you're friends with Daniel Ricciardo.

Okay, this is what I'm getting at. Oh my gosh. No, you're not gonna like it. Okay. Okay. So she said, what teams? And I said, I just like whatever Danny's on. He's my favorite. Favorite. And she was like, really? And I was like, yeah, what do you mean? I was like, I love Danny, he's the best one. And she was like, oh, he seems, he seems a little full of himself. And then I said, oh my God, that's the thing Dax was talking about on the show where some people think he's sincere about that, I guess, or something. And I was like, oh, that's that thing. But then I told her that he's perfect and lovely and very nice. And she said, oh, I was wrong.

Yeah, nicest manners in the world. Gentle boy. Yeah, not arrogant at all. No, that's his character.

I, um, I had to correct that. I had to right that wrong. She was receptive to it. Oh, good.

And, um, I'm glad she was flexible in her judgment.

Who does she love? She likes Zayn's. Okay, sure.

When you look at Zayn's, you go, this is— this guy is dirty.

I do think that when I see him, but I think the same thing about Leclerc. Like, they all stink bad. No, not stink.

No, no, no, stop saying that. You're perpetuating a false rumor. I'm saying like nasty, like get in the bedroom, he's throwing you all around, moving your body, doing all kinds of advanced Spanish lovemaking techniques. That's what I think. Okay, I think she's responding to his carnal sex appeal. Okay, maybe. Like, Leclerc is much better looking than Sainz.

Well, that's all in the eye of the beholder.

To me, I'm only speaking for myself. Okay. I think Leclerc is much cuter than Sainz. Mm-hmm. But if I had to guess, there were 10 volunteers who slept with both of them, my guess would be Sainz comes out as the better lover. That is my spidey sense intuition.

Okay. You're worried about me perpetuating rumors? That he's a good lover? Well, that also that Leclerc is not. Didn't say that.

No, basically did not say that. That's what he's gonna hear. No, he's not. I see what he's gonna hear is I think he's better looking, and then I think that Sainz is a little bit better of a lover, although Leclerc is a very generous lover. Although no, last time I was talking about Leclerc, I was hypothesizing that he was a two-pump chump. Exactly.

For fun. You've really made it clear you think he's bad.

No, I I love Leclerc anyway. He's in my top 3 drivers.

What if I said, you know, Dax is obviously better looking, but I would much rather have sex with—

oh yeah, yeah, you hate that. Well, hold on though, let's just be real. That was really good. It was kind of a cheat code.

Would be mad that I said the other part.

Well, so what you would need to say though, it's got to identical. You'd say you're much better looking than Bradley, but I think if you and Bradley had sex with 10 women, the women would prefer having sex with Bradley. Okay, and that's still rough. I said that's rough, but not as bad as what you just said before. Well, I say he's way better than you.

Yeah, that's what you're saying.

I didn't say that. Stop putting words in my mouth. I said that Sines is preferred, not way better.

You are splitting hairs.

Uh-huh, I am. Okay, that's what we do here with nuance. Okay, non-binary.

Okay, preferred. I'll change my verbiage to preferred.

Okay, okay.

10 girls would prefer sleeping with Bradley over you. Preferred the experience. Prefer the experience. They had sex with both of you and they prefer the— you'd hate it, of course.

Well, of course I'd hate it. You know what a good question is? We're getting somewhere good. We're actually—

we're approaching something good. Okay, so here's a—

here's an option. You only get one of these two: great looking or great in bed. What would you rather be known for? Oh, known for? Mhm. I, I know for me what it is.

Well, I know for you what it is.

What is it? Good in bed. Oh yeah, of course, cuz that's where the rubber meets the road.

I think every— I think everyone would rather rather be good in bed?

I don't know. I think some people who don't really give a fuck about sex, they're not super sexual, they'd rather just walk through the world being super attractive and people smiling at them and buying them drinks and whatnot. And they're like, I don't care if I'm good in bed, I'm good enough. Now, what would you rather be, Robbie? Good in bed. Yeah, yeah, good.

3 for 3. The hard thing is if you're, if you're not good looking, it's hard to prove you're good in bed. This is the conundrum. From, right?

Anyway, so does she want to start watching? Is she going to start watching races and shit, Kaylee? She wants to.

I think now she's in, she loves it. Great.

Yeah, though we might have to have them over for a race day.

Oh, they would love that. Max asked if I liked Pierre Gasly. So also, here's my brother's favorite.

Really?

Yeah, he loves them. I said he looked greasy, but And then Max said, no, it was just the sweat from driving.

They're playing a sport, basically. Like, you would never call a basketball player sweaty.

No, I didn't call him sweaty. Greasy. Oh, greasy.

That's a different word. That's got a little bit of a potentially racist connotation. Why? He's white. I know, but there are certain populations of white people that have a reputation of being greasy. Who? I'll tell you off the air, but I'm not going to do it here.

Tell me. No. Anyway, okay. So Max likes Pierre.

Does anyone like Max? No.

Oh, that's pretty, uh, universal. Yeah. Wow. He's so arrogant, Dax.

He's not even arrogant. That is not the word I would use to describe him. Okay. Like, he never says he's great.

That's not for me. First of all, he's the best driver in Formula 1. I don't disagree. Yeah.

And he doesn't even really say that.

I don't love a fuck-off attitude in general in life. I'm not attracted to anyone who's like that. Right. He carries himself like that. It's the same as me.

I know, but you love Michael Jordan. Like, Michael Jordan was punching his teammates in practice.

But Michael Jordan does not have a fuck-off attitude.

He's not like— God, if someone who doesn't know as much as him tells him what to do, he has a very fuck-off attitude. And that's what you see with Max quite a bit.

But he would—

but even just the way he talks to like interviewers, he refused uses to play the game even a little bit, and I don't like that. I'm like, these are fans, these are people who are paying a lot of money to see you.

Can you cut him a little bit of a cultural break that he's Dutch? They don't do the pleasantry thing. Everyone in the Netherlands, in the north there, they don't believe in the, in the little small talk, the pleasantries. They get right to it.

I don't believe in small talk either. I hate it. But you are a popular sports figure making a ton of money, doing exactly what you love, you have a great life, just be a little— just be a little nicer.

Okay, I'm just going to make an argument for him. Okay. Which is, he's not paid to do any of that stuff. He is paid to win races for Red Bull. Hold on, you said your piece. Okay, go ahead. He has one job: win races. That is his job, and that's why he gets paid more money. If you wanted a PR guy, you should have hired a PR guy. If you want a guy that thinks about nothing but winning races, is a psychopath about winning races, then hire me and I'll go win races. But if you need a guy to go sell Red Bull as a beverage or sell Formula 1 as a sport, I'm not the dude. I care about a single thing, winning races. I respect that.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, that was my piece.

I get it. I hear what you're saying. I— it's not attractive to watch someone be rude or short with everyone, could care less when people are excited. Like, it's, it's to me very off-putting.

Even when he wins though, do you ever listen on the radio when he wins? Like, when he comes across the finish line, I'll go like, that was P1, Max. And I'll go, oh, all right, whoa, that was a good race. That's it. The other people are like doing backflips car and screaming and stuff. He's just a very, you know, robotic—

yeah, yeah. Um, I'm, I'm not trying to convince you to not like him, you know.

Like, I don't think you are.

Love him, you can keep loving him, but not my preferred personality. Yeah, right. I like Danny, who's nice and kind and always looking out for the little guy and who's conscientious. I like that personality. That's what I'm drawn to. One of the questions lobbed my way was, what do you think of Will blank— I forget his last name— the journalist on Drive to Survive?

Back up.

What? What now? That was a question from Callie to me. Oh, you know, like, what do you think of this person?

What do you think of this person?

What do you think of Will Buxton, the journalist?

That's great. He's handsome. The English dude, right? Yeah, yeah, he's very handsome. He kind of looks like a driver a little bit. She's deep if she wants to know. That's right. Yeah.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Okay. What does Ashanti mean? Ashanti means Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. I can't really say it to you because I, I met you a long time ago.

I know. It also does— it does say enchanted.

Oh good, maybe we get enchanted from that. It's a very elegant word.

It is. Yeah, it's greasy. Um, farts on an airplane.

Like Snakes on a Plane? Farts on a plane?

Why you fart so much on planes? And is that how this was said?

Why you Why do you fart? Not why do you? Yeah, it says. Oh, it's why you fart. Yeah. It's an answer. Not a question.

Yeah. This says, as it turns out, there's a scientific reason people often fart more while traveling on planes or climbing high mountains. And it's even got a name, high altitude flatus expulsion. Ooh, flatus expulsion. The gastrointestinal syndrome was described in a 1981 study as characterized by an increase in both the volume and the frequency The passage of flatus, which spontaneously occurs while climbing to altitudes of 11,000 feet or greater.

I've never heard flatulence just shortened to flatus. Flatus. Oh my God, excuse my flatus. Enchanté.

That study found that as air pressure decreases at higher altitudes, gases inside your body expand and need to be let out. Oh. Although it was based more on being up in the mountains than inside a pressurized plane. But additionally, a 2013 study that had participants record who often they farted while driving up an Australian mountain hypothesized that quickly moving from a low altitude to a higher one draws more carbon dioxide into your gut. Oh, wow. Isn't that great?

It is, you know, and if you think about it, it's the reverse of the bends. Yeah. So you have less pressure on you, so the gas comes out. When you have extra pressure, it condenses it so much and gets in your bloodstream. Wow. Less pressure in your asshole, more pressure in your bloodstream. Keep it in your asshole, folks. Oh man. Oh Jesus.

Okay, this is the transition. Okay, so backstory.

Almost the second after I said that the Benz is on the absent scale, we stopped down, as we say in the biz.

What do we call it? Stop down.

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh wow.

Okay, I taught you something. Cool. Stop down. And, uh, we did a really cool interview. Uh-huh. And then things got cray.

Then we stopped up and all of a sudden the kids were home from school. Yes.

So this next section of the Fact Check includes some guests.

It's chaos. Please enjoy the chaos.

We had just finished Farts on an Airplane.

In my class today, and I don't know who it was, but I was suspecting him.

Here, sit over here, love. So someone ripped in class. And you were trying to figure out who it was?

Yeah. This is a ding ding ding to our fart story because— Yes. What happened today?

But I was just sitting there and everything's normal. We are redoing our multiplication unit and then I just smelled something in the air and I was like, oh, it's just a small one. And then it came at me. It came at me so hard.

Oh no, it grew and grew.

I had to stand up and pretend to stretch.

Oh really?

Yes. Did you look around the classroom to make eye contact with other people, like, are you smelling this too?

I have farted in weird places, so I know what position I love to sit in when I fart, which is silent. I saw the people sitting next to me, and I looked at Harper, and she was sitting on her knees, and I said, that's not a good place to fart. It would have like skimmed against your feet, so it would have made a loud sound.

Oh, right, really good sleuthing.

Yeah, and then I looked at Draven and she was sitting in the crisscross applesauce. I was like, no way, no, you're sitting on too much weight.

So that'd be thunderous if you farted during crisscross applesauce. It would be like a trumpet in your pants.

Um, and then I looked at Dylan and and he was sitting like he was hugging his knees.

Technically, I was like, that's not a good place to fart. Also a blast.

That'd be a trumpet. Unless you, unless you rolled up a little bit. You're right, you know.

No, imagine pulling your, your knees tight to your chest. It would be like, like, amplify. Yeah, it would fucking rip. What you're trying to get is like your buns as pushed together as possible, no pressure anywhere in your body, so you can let it leak out Exactly. You want it to leak down.

Wait, you guys, I have a much, this is fascinating. I have a much different tactic for a silent fart. Really? Yes, I want the butt cheeks to be spread. Splayed open? Yeah.

Oh, so you'll what, do the splits?

You'll bend over? No, I mean, I guess I don't really fart in public anymore.

Have you bent over and spread your butt cheeks? Cheeks and then it smelled a minute later, you might as well just made a noise.

Okay, normally I do this if I'm in like a public bathroom.

Oh, so I can use my hands and you spread your butt cheeks apart physically? Yeah. Oh my God, that's great. Oh wow, that's wonderful. Was anyone doing that, Lincoln?

Not that I saw. And then I identify the culprit.

Okay, and what was it, a male or a female?

It was a female. Will. Okay.

And how was— good for her, I will say.

Me too. I was afraid you were only going to blame it on a dude because we're gross, but you are. Yeah, that's right, I'm the worst. What kind of position was she in?

I'm just slowly lifting up my butt. Her butt was like high, so—

oh wow. Okay, wow, I'm impressed you figured it out. And then did she ask to go to the bathroom room like 5 minutes after that?

No, but then I actually had to pee during that time, so maybe I thought, oh no, did somebody think it was me?

Were you scared?

Yeah, I actually had to go to the bathroom before the fart came. Sure. And TJ said I can't go right now, so wait 2 minutes. Oh boy. And then the person started just letting it air out. It was like load and load and load. Wow. There was this one time time where I thought it was gone, and I was like, fresh air. And then new round, second wave, and it was even worse than the first. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And I feel like it was another person. This was also a female. She, she always points out farts when somebody farted, and she did not point at that.

So, oh, never smelt it, dealt it. Oh no, that's the opposite.

But She was sitting in crisscross applesauce, so maybe she lifted up her butt.

She might have a different technique like Monica, but I have to say, that's a really good proof. If she's always busting people about farting and it stunk in there like a dead raccoon and she was quiet, that's very incriminating.

Unless the teacher pulled her aside at one point and said, please don't do that anymore, it's embarrassing for the students. And I, I wish the teacher would do that because 'Cause, mm-hmm, that's me.

Well, you should be embarrassed for farting. No, sometimes you don't have to. Sure, but we must agree some things are embarrassing in society. 'Cause this is what I think I feel bad for you kids is like you're in your home, you've been farting since you were born, we don't care at all, we think it's funny. And then we send you to this box that you sit in with other kids and we haven't even told you it's not cool to fart in public and you gotta learn the hard way the hard way, right? Like, did you ever get embarrassed at any point? Like, did you rip one at any point that someone busted you?

No, nobody caught me.

You just knew somehow to keep them on the down low?

Nobody caught me unless I accidentally didn't know it was coming.

Yeah, sure, a surprise fart.

Yeah, that was a good fart noise.

I'm impressed. Okay, I do I think maybe it's evolutionary that we know not to do that in front of strangers. We'll get removed from the group.

Yeah, you'll be exiled. Because of stinkiness. Yeah. It's a good reason. You look like Zazie today. Zazie. Oh, thank you. Okay, last question. Yes? How frequently do you smell farts in the classroom? Is it every day?

There's only been, I don't know, 3 or 4 or 5 farts this month.

That's not bad at all.

Some people have been you're holding them in or just haven't had to fart.

Okay. Do you think it correlates to the school lunch? Great theory.

Like whatever hot lunch is, like cabbage, kimchi.

The weird thing is a lot of people fart before lunch.

Oh, that's interesting. Breakfast farts?

Well, maybe they didn't evacuate in the morning.

Oh, they're not on a good schedule.

Who's there? Delta. Hi, D-Money. Oh, he fell. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Purple hair. We did this beautiful purple hair.

It looks so good. Oh, and it matches your sweater.

You look like a little rock star.

You look like a little rat. Delta, did you smell any farts in your class today?

Coffee thingy.

Got teddy bear. Uh, yeah, that's a Starbucks teddy bear, but it has to stay in here because David brought it for the attic. You can come up here and play with it.

That's fine. She doesn't have every single stuffy.

She does.

That's from New Zealand, my love. That's from a far away country, like 17 hours in an airplane away. But you can come up here and play with it. It'll make you— it'll give you something to look forward to when you come up But did anyone fart in your class today, Delta? Oh, criminy, now you got chocolates. Yes, those come from New Zealand as well. They're not that good. They're not good at all. They're terrible. Don't tell David. It's like a Skittle, a chocolate Skittle. Those sound bad. Mikey likes it. You want to take it? Oh boy. When's the last time you smelt a bad fart? A Friday. Friday. Friday. And what happened?

I just smelled a toot. Oh, you did?

When you smell a toot in class, do you say, "Ew, somebody farted," or do you just keep it to yourself?

I just keep it to myself. That's nice. That's nicest. Yes, exactly.

How often do you fart in class? 20 times a day. 20 times a day. So it does smell like farts in the classroom, just your farts. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, well, you're making a real name for yourself because you're— you got purple hair and you're farting 20 times a day. I think the sky's the limit for you.

Wait, what is this? What are we on?

We're on television right now.

They can see us. We're doing a podcast and then Lincoln was up here, so we, we invited her to chit-chat.

You know, after the interview is a fact check, so just Monica and I I talk, she and Monica bust me on what facts I got wrong. A fart check. This has become a fart check.

Yeah, but why did it end? Oh, I do have like—

yeah, well, listen, why don't you guys shut up and listen to, uh, Monica, and you guys will learn.

Oh wow, so now you're shutting me up. You know, this is what boys do, I think, because I was explaining a math problem today and Draven didn't get it, and then Dylan said, don't worry, I'll explain it, and I said Excuse me, this is my problem. I can explain it.

Oh, there you go.

I'm proud of you for doing that. Yeah, you can explain it. You're capable.

Boys are the worst. That's why you guys don't want—

no one wants to sleep with us.

Yes, no one wants to snuggle there.

Absolutely wants to sleep with that because of the farts. No, no, those are bad also. But I feel so bad for Dad. He has to sleep with the stuff.

That's what they— no one wants to sleep with me at night. They're fight to sleep with mom. And I said, you guys, how do you think I feel? I always have to sleep with daddy.

Let's just be practical about it. What about sleeping with mommy is better? Mommy? I don't know.

She's just not daddy, which is enough.

Lincoln, you were so little, 3 maybe or 4, and, um, and I was carrying you and you, you said that— Did you poop my pants? No. Well, sure, I cleaned up a lot That's your poop. But I was carrying you and you said something like, "I can't hold you like a mom holds you." And I was so sad. But it was also the truth. I know.

These kids are heartbreakers.

This is very recent. Well, not very recent. This was when we were in the old house. And I was in the bathtub. I didn't know why, but this fart just came up and said, "Hello." And I turned around to grab the shampoo. And I found that I pooped in the bathtub.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that'll happen.

These things happen from time to time.

Linka, did you name your poop? You had a baby.

A poop baby. We have a pee baby. Monica and I have a pee baby. So why not have a poop baby?

Yeah, that's right. What's a pee baby? A pee baby is I peed in a toilet and there's no flush. Flush, and then Daddy had to pee, so he peed. So then our pees were in the same toilet and never flushed, so they turned into a baby.

He said it turned into a pee baby.

He lives at my house.

He's still there, just getting out of kindergarten at this point, I think. Can I tell the one story about you, Delta? Yeah.

Are you ready? I love this story.

I was putting you guys to bed. Delta, you were probably 3, and you said, oh, I gotta I said, okay, you went in and you took a poop and it was the size of a moose's poop. Like, I thought a moose had pooped in the toilet. And I said, oh my God, honey, when's the last time you pooped? And you're like, I couldn't— I don't remember. That was the biggest poop you'd ever taken. So then I put you in your diaper and then I put you in bed and I put Lincoln in bed and we read a book and we snuggle. And then I go outside, I shut the door, and I just turned on the TV and all of a sudden I heard Daddy, I farted. It's diarrhea. And then I went in there. I thought, how could you have possibly just had diarrhea? You just, you just had an entire evac. I went in there, I picked you up, your diaper was completely ruined. I took you into the bathroom, if you remember, and you had poop on your back and your butt crack. Blowout. Full blowout. And I was like, Where did all this come from?

Daddy, I'm farting. Okay, last thing. This is the last time you're gonna get to talk, Delta. Will you do your song? Okay.

Do you want to do it one more time?

It's my favorite new thing in the whole world. She did that 1,100 times this morning before school. Wait, where'd you learn that? That's what, um, Mommy does that. Oh wow, I love you. Thanks, D-Money.

Oh my God.

All right, now you guys have to Be quiet so we can do our business. We got a great fart story and we got a great diddle diddle do. Yeah.

Oh, that was great. Yeah.

Let's hear the fact. They got to see how the sausage is made.

Okay. We have one fact left. The fact is— oh, and actually this is relevant. Lincoln loves F1. Excuse me, everybody. I'm on Micah. Okay. The fact is about how many employees work on the Mercedes team. Mm-hmm. Oh, cool. Okay. More than 950 employees. An F1 team, but this isn't specific to Mercedes, but an F1 team directly involves between 300 and 1,200 people depending on whether it's at the front or back of the grid and how much in-house manufacturing it does and whether it produces an engine or buys one in. Yeah. And then how many people work at Mercedes, more than 700 employees work 24 hours a day.

Oh wow, that's confusing because that would have to be 1,400.

It makes me wonder if they're talking about— even though the thing is—

Mercedes has a million employees, right?

Okay, then yeah, it is saying that. And then the other one said 950, more than 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on the Brackley site.

Oh, Daddy, do you think by, uh, these Oh boy, this is, this is the tough question.

Mommy's is technically better because she's got control of her instrument. Yours is 20 times more entertaining. So how do we know? How would I decide? Wait, what do you mean? Like, Mommy sounds identical to the actual Jib Jab song, right? Because she's a and yours is so cute, is yours, and it's incredible. So I'm— I would say I would rather hear yours than Mommy's, and I think I got a hunch I'm gonna tonight.

Can I do it one more time for a goodbye?

For a goodbye? Yes. Is there anything you want to say before we go?

Farting in public should be weird.

Okay, great. Good to end on. And then we're gonna go out with a song. This is not an original, this is a cover song from the artist formerly known as Delta That's it. Beautiful, you did it. You look like a chipmunk when you do that. All right, I love you guys. I love you, love you, love you, love you.