Jonathan Safran Foer

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[1] Experts on Expert.

[2] I'm Dax Shepherd.

[3] I'm joined by Emmy -nominated Monica Pladman.

[4] Hi.

[5] Do you think I'll say Pladman so frequently?

[6] Some people start thinking your name is Pladman?

[7] I'm nervous about that.

[8] You are for endorsement deals and such?

[9] Yeah.

[10] Well, sure.

[11] I got to look out for myself.

[12] You got a brand to protect.

[13] We have an awesome guest today.

[14] Jonathan Saffron 4.

[15] He is a novelist.

[16] He's written a bunch of big books.

[17] Everything is illuminated, extremely loud.

[18] and incredibly close eating animals tree of codes here i am and his new book we are the weather saving the planet begins at breakfast you know i really enjoyed jonathan me too it was really interesting what he has a very cool story he's an incredibly cool story i wouldn't say cool actually traumatic oh we got a copter invasion what's crazy is everything just fell apart i heard a military Chopper, looked out the window to see a huge bug crawling on the window.

[19] Now I'm panicking about a bug infestation.

[20] I saw that earlier.

[21] You did?

[22] And you didn't say anything.

[23] That's okay.

[24] Well, Jonathan, he has a certain energy.

[25] Yeah.

[26] It was so soothing for me. Oh, yeah.

[27] And we joined his energy, which I love when that happens on the podcast.

[28] That's true.

[29] He's like, no, no, I'm going to be me and you'll meet me there.

[30] And we did.

[31] And I loved it.

[32] Me too.

[33] He also really got into my craw about my ethics a little bit.

[34] Uh -oh.

[35] Well, not because of him.

[36] He just made you think.

[37] He made me think, yeah.

[38] He made me realize I could do better and I probably need to make an attempt to do better.

[39] Anyways, he's incredibly fascinating and he's got a really great message and he's just a really interesting guy.

[40] I really enjoy talking to him and I hope you guys enjoy Jonathan Saffron Fower.

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[44] He's an object to be.

[45] How are you doing?

[46] Are you tired?

[47] No, I feel good.

[48] You do feel good.

[49] I feel great, yeah.

[50] But you came in from Toronto.

[51] Yep.

[52] And you're on a book tour.

[53] You know, what's interesting about writers, I think, in general, is that, and by the way, this extends to actors on some level.

[54] as well.

[55] It's like, you hire them because they have this skill set, which is they can pretend there's something or they can memorize lines.

[56] I'm not sure what the skill set is.

[57] But then, you're then required or expected to go sell this product, which those aren't necessarily the same skill set.

[58] And quite often they're opposite skill sets.

[59] And I would say it's even more compounded by being a writer, which is a very solitary activity.

[60] Totally.

[61] I mean, actors have charisma.

[62] Well, some.

[63] Some.

[64] They have something like charisma, all of them.

[65] A lot of writers become writers precisely because they suck at selling themselves in real life.

[66] Yeah, it's kind of true.

[67] And then, yeah, writers are then asked to go on book tours and promote their product.

[68] And I got to imagine whatever anxiety an actor has, it's just got to be times five for a writer.

[69] Yeah.

[70] But some people, do you, is there anyone, and I'm thinking of someone specifically, and I'm wondering if you'll have the same, is there anyone that you think does a very artful job of being a public version of themselves as a writer?

[71] An artful job, like, they succeed at it or, like, I respect it?

[72] Like, they're almost as interesting as they're writing, if not more.

[73] You know who I'm thinking of.

[74] I do.

[75] You're talking to him right now.

[76] Well, that's what I think I'm going to find out, which is exciting.

[77] Let's see, David Sedaris.

[78] Well, David Sedaris, there's, like, no line between who he is as a person who he is as a writer.

[79] That's true.

[80] Which is great.

[81] I mean, it's why people, I like, I like him very much as a person and as a writer.

[82] Yeah.

[83] And he can, like, he can do public readings where he really holds cord and takes you want to ride right, just verbally and in the moment.

[84] Yeah.

[85] His signings last, like, no joke, they can last like six hours, eight hours.

[86] The reading, as I understand, I've never been to one of his readings, but, you know, the readings are like an hour.

[87] And that's just like the appetizer.

[88] And then everybody's there for the interaction with him afterwards.

[89] And it just goes on forever.

[90] Yeah.

[91] He hugs every single person, takes a picture with every single person, makes a doodle for every single person.

[92] And he writes something that would kill any other person's career in the book.

[93] Like we had him on and he would say like he'd written in someone's book like, I hope you get raped in the ass.

[94] And it's like, well, you know, there's very few people that can write that sentence in America and be totally good.

[95] Yeah.

[96] Trump.

[97] Trump and Zedara.

[98] That's true.

[99] I did a, I once, from one of my books, they sent me to the warehouse to sign.

[100] I signed like 8 ,000 in one day, and then they mailed those to bookstores all over the country, so it could say autographed copy, whatever.

[101] And he was the guy who was there before me, a day or two before, and they have a wall that you write on afterwards, and you say, like, thanks so much, or boys my hand tired.

[102] Yeah, yeah.

[103] And his was something like, you know, 53 years of jerking off, made me king at this, you know, whatever.

[104] And it was in this conservative place in the Midwest, and they painted over it with white.

[105] Oh, they did.

[106] So his shit doesn't fly everywhere.

[107] It's just very interesting in culture who's in trouble and who's not in trouble.

[108] And I think largely when I'm circling as an idea is if you're hiding something, it's a story and if you're not hiding something, it's not a story.

[109] Do you think that's possibly part of the equation?

[110] I think it is possibly part of the equation.

[111] I mean, Trump is sort of proof of that in a way.

[112] Yeah, it's all out loud.

[113] Yeah, he just is what he is.

[114] There's no shame.

[115] there's no concealing it.

[116] Cedar is also doesn't live in America.

[117] And I think for whatever reason, he's sort of subject to different rules because of that.

[118] Yeah, I imagine it's liberating.

[119] Now, you grew up in D .C. Yeah.

[120] And you have learned parents.

[121] Not really.

[122] No?

[123] Fully ignorant parents.

[124] Oh.

[125] Professional and degrees and stuff.

[126] They have degrees.

[127] They bounced around through a lot of different jobs.

[128] My mom, she worked in PR for a while.

[129] And for the last 10 or 15 years, she sort of found her calling running this sort of like the 90 seconds.

[130] Do you know what the 92nd Street Y is?

[131] No. Shame on you.

[132] Tell us.

[133] It's a kind of like literary arts community center on the Upper East Side.

[134] They have a Jewish day school.

[135] But it's also where if like a writer is coming to New York, they'll probably do an event at the 92nd Street Y. Oh, okay.

[136] So she ran something like that in D .C. that was in an old, what once was a synagogue, then was a Baptist church.

[137] now is this center where they host cultural events.

[138] Yeah.

[139] And my dad was trained as a lawyer.

[140] And then my grandfather started a jewelry store in D .C. And he died of a heart attack very, very suddenly.

[141] My dad had to step in.

[142] Just ended up doing that for a long time.

[143] He started something called the American Antitrust Institute.

[144] And that is a...

[145] He wanted to break up big conglomerates?

[146] Yeah.

[147] Really?

[148] Sort of think tank.

[149] But it was like a think tank of one, really.

[150] He ran it out of our house in D .C. Uh -huh.

[151] He's my dad is like an old -fashioned liberal just like believes what he believes and fights as hard as he can he had a surgery i don't know 10 15 years ago he had like a stint is that what it's called sure put into an artery artery in his neck and everybody in the family it wasn't particularly dangerous but we all gathered to be there when he woke up you know we were all standing around my mom my two brothers eyes like opened one at a time we were like dad dad and he said we really got him And we said, what?

[152] He's like, the bastards, the monopolies, we got him.

[153] And that was like his first thought upon returning to consciousness.

[154] And where do you think his desire to topple the monopolies started?

[155] Was he subject or was his father subject to some kind of strong arming by a multinational?

[156] No, not at all.

[157] I think it's like sometimes in life you just pick up a pet issue for whatever reason.

[158] Uh -huh.

[159] Was there a villain in his worldview?

[160] Villains have changed as the monopolies have changed.

[161] Okay, sure.

[162] He's not nuts about Amazon.

[163] It's not nuts about Facebook.

[164] It may be what in the 80s when you were a kid with like GE maybe or?

[165] So he didn't get into this until 2000, something like that.

[166] So it was a good time to get into that.

[167] Yeah, the tech.

[168] Yeah, it was a racket.

[169] How does he feel about Facebook?

[170] Probably not great.

[171] He doesn't feel great about Facebook.

[172] Anything that has a name that we would all recognize, he doesn't feel great about.

[173] Yeah, that makes sense.

[174] Although what about Costco?

[175] I think that's a really good.

[176] company.

[177] They're big fans at Costco.

[178] Okay, that makes sense.

[179] But you know, there's a difference between being a fan in practice and being a fan conceptually.

[180] So they buy plenty of shit from Amazon as well.

[181] Yeah, you have to.

[182] Yeah.

[183] I mean, that is in fact the problem with monopolies is you end up doing a lot of things you wish you weren't doing because it doesn't feel like there are other ways of doing them anymore.

[184] Yeah.

[185] Now, I have a kind of anti -progressive view on some monopolies based solely on reading Titan and being obsessed with John D. Rockefeller and then recognizing that his goal for his monopoly was literally to stabilize the rate of lamp oil.

[186] It was $10 a gallon one day.

[187] Then it was five cents.

[188] And it just, it's someone needed to do something.

[189] And then ultimately everyone benefited from that thing.

[190] So I've seen a version of it where I'm like, well, I don't know.

[191] I guess there's versions.

[192] To be honest, it's nothing I know a hell of a lot.

[193] You don't care.

[194] You didn't inherit that.

[195] I care a little, but I don't care a lot.

[196] Right.

[197] Okay.

[198] That's fair.

[199] Yeah.

[200] And Judaism is a big component of your childhood in your life.

[201] Is that accurate?

[202] Not from a religious family at all.

[203] I went to Hebrew school, but that was just kind of part and parcel with where I came from.

[204] Everybody I knew went to Hebrew school.

[205] I didn't go to a Jewish school, but it was effectively Jewish, you know.

[206] It sure seemed like everybody who went there was Jewish.

[207] Yeah.

[208] And definitely a very culturally Jewish atmosphere, kinds of.

[209] friends I grew up with, the kinds of stories I was told, TV, we watched.

[210] And grandmother on your mom's side was a Holocaust survivor.

[211] Yeah, and in fact, my mom was born in Europe.

[212] Oh, she was.

[213] Born and spent her first couple of years in a DP camp and then came to America when she was four.

[214] It would be nearly impossible for you not to have inherited the weight and stakes of what it means to be Jewish on planet Earth, right?

[215] I think that's right, but, you know, there are things that you don't believe that.

[216] that they're true until you're presented with evidence, like a moment in a trial when the prosecutor waved the bloody glove and says, like, well, the defendant's been telling us that he couldn't have been at the crime scene.

[217] And the defendant's telling us he would have no motive to do this horrible act, but his blood's on the glove, so.

[218] Yeah.

[219] And I've had a lot of moments like that with Jewish identity where, you know, you're asking me what my identity is, and I'm not even sure I'm the best person to answer the question.

[220] Right.

[221] I don't walk around feeling the identity, but I do walk around doing.

[222] things that would suggest the identity is important to me. Well, isn't that so often the case?

[223] It's like we have an ideology of who we are.

[224] And then if one of, an anthropologist, a garbologist goes through our trash, they'll likely know a lot more about us than we're keenly aware of, yeah.

[225] Is that word garbologist?

[226] Yeah, that's a sub, and it was, it was started because it, one specific ethnology they were doing of this town, they were trying to figure out the diet of the town.

[227] And what mothers, this was in the 50s, were feeding their children.

[228] And when questioned, they would say, oh, I cooked a meatloaf on Monday, and then I made a casserole on Tuesday, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[229] And then one of them had the idea of like, let's go through the town dump and look at what's in the trash.

[230] And if you looked at the trash, it was like, you know, umpteen thousand boxes of craft macaroni and cheese.

[231] There was all the stuff.

[232] And they quickly realized, like, well, this can't all be true at the same time.

[233] And it created a whole field called garbology and anthropology.

[234] And even when they're looking at remains in the archaeological record, some of the, much of what they're going through is just the trash site where they were putting all their crap.

[235] That's what they're figuring out from that.

[236] I think that bizarrely sexy scene in Jurassic Park when Laura Dern goes elbowed deep in the dinosaur crap.

[237] Oh, sure, sure, sure.

[238] Yeah.

[239] She was just having her period or whatever it was.

[240] I can't remember what the discovery was.

[241] God, I should go watch that after this.

[242] Yeah.

[243] I grew up an area of Michigan adjacent to West Bloomfield and Bloomfield Hills of Michigan, in which is incredibly high concentration to Jewish folks.

[244] And many people just went to school as if we had sent our kid to a private school, I guess we'd just be like, well, you know, whatever private school is, I guess, affordable that our friends are going to.

[245] And I think that's often the case of how you end up right at a, you know, quote, Jewish pre -K or something.

[246] Yeah.

[247] So, you know, again, my school was not Jewish.

[248] Right.

[249] I went to a school called Georgetown Day, which is like.

[250] But that's high school?

[251] Or that was K through 12.

[252] I went there pretty much K through 12.

[253] I went to public school through.

[254] fourth grade, something like that.

[255] And then it became hard to stay in the public school system for junior high.

[256] So when my older brother switched, I just went with him.

[257] Yeah.

[258] And you're a middle child.

[259] Yeah, three boys.

[260] Okay, three boys.

[261] Yeah.

[262] I'm a middle child, but there's a gal below me. What is the age gap between these?

[263] So my older brother is two and a half years older.

[264] My younger brother is five and a half years younger.

[265] So is brother like quintessential older brother?

[266] Is he like first born?

[267] Are you guys falling into?

[268] that pattern at all?

[269] Are you a lost child in your bedroom?

[270] There's a baby and there's a teenager and there's really no air left for you?

[271] I don't know.

[272] My older brother is a very, very warm.

[273] He is a big brother type.

[274] And I think he's a big brother to people that are not even his brothers.

[275] You know, he's the kind of guy you go to.

[276] He edited a magazine for years, the New Republic.

[277] And he's just like a trustworthy guy, very stable.

[278] Even keel.

[279] Yeah, a good guy.

[280] A good guy.

[281] A good guy.

[282] Yeah.

[283] Oh, so he was, and he was, he was kind to you as a little brother.

[284] he really was we didn't what is that i threw a joystick at his head once and that's literally the only strife i can remember from our childhood but that that is its own slightly odd thing i suppose like just to return to what you're touched on with being the grandson of a survivor the son of a survivor as well there are a lot of ways to deal with trauma like historical familial trauma and one of them is to like really emphasize what's good and not talk so much about what's difficult or bad because relative to that historical trauma like what are you complaining about you know well that to me is what i would get a chip on my shoulder about because i think of this in terms of i'm an a and i go to a meeting at someone's house and it's mostly private airplane problems right and on the surface i could go like oh what the fuck are these people complaining about but my conclusion is like we as a species we're going to ruminate on shit and it doesn't really matter.

[285] It's just the suffering of the wanting of some different state of mind or being.

[286] And that's all relative.

[287] So it's like you'll find some issues in Eden.

[288] And so to constantly have your concerns be diminished by this historical event that'll never be topped doesn't feel entirely fair to it, I completely agree.

[289] I couldn't, I agree more strongly.

[290] Yeah.

[291] I mean, like, your pain is your pain.

[292] Yeah.

[293] You know, whatever, whatever the reference is.

[294] It's funny.

[295] I remember when I had when my older son was was really little my kid tripped or something like that and I did a you're okay it's all right you're fine you know hop up and I said to my dad god you know I think I could talk him out of pretty much any pain like I think there's a way to say it's not that bad you're right come on let's get oh you're great at dealing with this oh man you're so brave yeah and he said you probably could but then you're not letting him be himself like you know letting him experience pain which is part of the human drama.

[296] When we repress, like, really fundamental parts of the human drama, we can get in big trouble.

[297] Yeah, yes, I totally agree.

[298] But it was interesting.

[299] My grandmother, who is the matriarch of our family and really the sun around which everything orbited, she passed away last year.

[300] In the last year of her life, she kind of came into her body in a way that I had never witnessed before.

[301] And we came into a physical relationship in a way that I'd never had with her before.

[302] She, like, a stupid example, which maybe isn't stupid at all, but felt really poignant, as she started to eat tons of chocolate in the last year of her life.

[303] She started listening to lots of music.

[304] I'd never seen her do either of those things.

[305] Oh, wow.

[306] And as, and this was in, you know, in the context of her body giving out, she kind of entered into her body.

[307] And, you know, I was very, very close with her.

[308] I received, who knows how many tens of thousands of kisses, you know, from her.

[309] Yeah.

[310] But I never kissed her, actually.

[311] It was just something that wasn't done in my family, which was just as loving as they come.

[312] I mean, it still is.

[313] Like, I have a wonderful relationship with my parents and with my brothers.

[314] It's not a lot of physical affection, which may be a kind of something Jewishy wartime residual about it.

[315] Like, almost if you expose yourself too much to love, then you acknowledge what can be lost.

[316] You're also showing your cards to the people around you who are.

[317] preying upon any weakness.

[318] It is weirdly a display of your vulnerability.

[319] I think you're right.

[320] And it's funny because if you think about what is the Jewish residue of trauma, it's humor.

[321] And most of that humor is like, I'm going to punch myself in the face before you punch me in the face.

[322] You think you can make fun of me. I can definitely make fun of me better than you can make fun of me. Yeah.

[323] Which is, I suppose, a kind of perverted safety.

[324] In anyway, it feels like the opposite of giving a kiss, like to make a joke at your own expense.

[325] Yeah, and you know, I have no data to support this.

[326] It's all anecdotal, but having worked in this business for 15, 20 years, a disproportionate amount of Jewish comedy writers.

[327] It's a very significant chunk.

[328] I want to say like in the 30 % range of writers on staff at TV shows, and yet Jewish Americans make up.

[329] I don't know what it is, 2 % of the population or something less.

[330] We tried to figure that out at one point.

[331] But yet it is interesting.

[332] There's like, there's a couple, the Canadians too, they do very well in common.

[333] in this country.

[334] That's harder to explain.

[335] Well, my theory on that is they are close enough to understand everything, and yet they are outside enough to have some pretty great observations about us.

[336] It's like they can pass as us, but yet they have a different lens that they're seeing us through.

[337] Could be.

[338] They probably also have, like, a better education system than we have.

[339] Yeah.

[340] There may be something.

[341] I was in Amsterdam just a couple weeks ago, and somebody explained the design sensibility of the Scandinavians, which is like the best in the world.

[342] You know, it's people who live in their own houses, arranged little objects in their windows, and it just, everything is like a little diorama, a little museum exhibit.

[343] And so much of the great design of the 20th century was made by Scandinavians.

[344] And it was explained to me that it was so unpleasant outside.

[345] It's very dark.

[346] It's very cold.

[347] It's very rainy.

[348] That all of the emphasis is put inside.

[349] Yeah.

[350] And so one can put the emphasis inside physically, like arranging things, making beautiful things, making a house comfortable, or you can do it, you know, emotionally or intellectually.

[351] They have a word, right, that's, it would translate basically to warmth.

[352] Higa.

[353] Yeah, yeah, Higga.

[354] I'm sure my pronunciation's a bit off.

[355] Yeah, and that drives the aesthetic and all the decisions.

[356] Yeah.

[357] And then they have another word too, right, which is like the perfect amount.

[358] They're obsessed with not too much and not too little, which I think is an amazing pursuit.

[359] Hig is a real thing.

[360] I mean, have you ever.

[361] changed like a texture in some place that you really care about or given thought to like trying to be close to a fireplace for example or using like wall lights instead of overhead lights or even I mean it sounds so pretentious and precious to talk about but using a candle instead of electric light I don't really want to be necessarily that guy who like has candles all over the house but I bet if I were I'd be happier I'd be mellower you know well I can tell you the example that immediately comes up to me is my wife collects damaged dogs.

[362] And, you know, we got one now that just appease every single day in the house.

[363] And so we've had to basically get rid of any fucking rugs in our house because they all smell.

[364] And I hate our living room now.

[365] I've hated it for four months.

[366] It feels harsh.

[367] It does because it's just a wood floor now.

[368] And I'm like, I hate this room.

[369] It was that little bit of fabric was making the difference between whether me loving the living room for 15 years or now hating it.

[370] I've had similar experiences.

[371] is I got divorced about eight years ago, seven years ago, and the first thing I bought afterwards when I was moving homes was this incredibly soft rug.

[372] The kind of thing where you could drop a deck of cards in it and lose it because it's that thick and hairy, yeah.

[373] And like, you know, you go up to your shins when you walk in it.

[374] And I have three dogs now in my house, and they think it's outside.

[375] It's that soft and nice.

[376] And so they piss and crap.

[377] but you can't even blame them for it.

[378] Yeah.

[379] It does become like a little bit of a Sophie's choice.

[380] Yeah.

[381] Your physical environment is a huge impact on your mood.

[382] I know because I have seasonal affective disorder, self -diagnosed.

[383] But it is so funny how different, every day could be the exact same of what you're doing.

[384] But if it's bright outside or if it's gloomy outside, the mood is so shifty.

[385] Yeah.

[386] It's fascinating.

[387] Yeah.

[388] We're sensitive little creatures.

[389] Very.

[390] Some of us more than others.

[391] That's true.

[392] Okay, so I went, my mother, single mother, three kids took us on a trip to D .C. to see the monuments and whatnot.

[393] And we were on a very tight budget and we stayed in a place that was very, very scary.

[394] That kind of was my memory of D .C. for a long, long time.

[395] And then we went back, my wife and I for like the White House correspondent's dinner or something.

[396] I was like, this place is beautiful.

[397] It's like Europe.

[398] But all that to say, D .C. in the 80s was a little dice.

[399] was it not?

[400] I mean, it was a...

[401] Yeah, DC was the murder capital of America for quite a long time.

[402] Yeah.

[403] I think it's...

[404] I don't know, it's still near the top, but DC is an unusual city because it's very divided.

[405] It's very racially segregated.

[406] And it's very segregated by economics as well.

[407] And it's also separated by the federal parts and by the sort of neighborhood parts, the transient population that comes when there's a new administration and people like my parents and grandparents on my dad's side who've just been there for a long time, didn't work in government, live in these kind of old -fashioned neighborhoods.

[408] And that was how I grew up.

[409] I wasn't anywhere near the monuments or any of that kind of stuff.

[410] It was people whose parents and grandparents lived in the same area.

[411] Kids went to the same schools that their parents went to.

[412] And it was a great place to be a kid, a really good place.

[413] You know, my brother and I had two or three public parks within a walking distance.

[414] We could walk everywhere.

[415] We walked to school.

[416] You know, we had like summer.

[417] jobs it feels like something that doesn't even exist anymore yeah yeah yeah we were just we had someone in who had grown up in an area of new york that was kind of similar to the area of michigan i grew up in and i was like yeah Halloween like did you did you go to the cider mill around this time of year and she was like oh my god he has the cider mill and then we started talking about field parties and fucking like a real hay ride and all that kind of stuff and i thought yeah wow that's my kids are not going to have any of that it's like football on the lawn on thanksgiving yeah down to the mall the the mall meaning where the monuments are on the 4th of july we would all get drunk or get high and lay on our backs and watch the fireworks like fall down on us get sneak into the grounds of different embassies and like romp is a good place but it's changing now you went to this georgetown day school it's it's affiliated with the university no oh it's not no that's georgetown prep which is where cavanao went very very different scene my school was really progressive You call the teachers by their first names.

[418] Teachers would smoke in class.

[419] Oh, good for them.

[420] Have sex with the students?

[421] For only that.

[422] Yeah, that was part of the curriculum.

[423] No, very, very liberal mellow place, not associated with anything but itself.

[424] Now, why did you then aspire to go to Princeton and not Georgetown?

[425] No reason?

[426] You wanted to get out of there or what?

[427] I didn't really aspire to go to Princeton.

[428] I aspired to go to other places that I didn't get into.

[429] Oh, like where?

[430] Where did you not get into?

[431] Harvard and, yeah.

[432] And another question is, why would I even aspire for that?

[433] Well, that's obviously my next question.

[434] I don't know why.

[435] That was like, you know, every kid has expectations, some of which are like explicit, some of which are subtle or invisible, most of which are invisible and subconscious.

[436] And I guess there's a trajectory that my family took from like everybody but my grandmother being murdered.

[437] She came to the States.

[438] They started managing grocery stores and living above the grocery stores that they managed.

[439] My grandmother clipped coupons to the day.

[440] she died, and her life's dream, which she accomplished, was to send her kids to school, to college, which she did.

[441] And then my parents, like, inherited a lot of that ethic of, let's give our kids the best education that they can get and let them fulfill a kind of American dream, which is basically to have more than your parents had.

[442] This is part of the problem we're facing right now in the country.

[443] Oh, that's over.

[444] Yeah, yeah.

[445] And globally.

[446] I won't do half of what I've done.

[447] Guaranteed.

[448] Yeah.

[449] And they shouldn't.

[450] Yeah.

[451] Like, I mean, it's not a good dream.

[452] The American dream is not a good dream.

[453] No, no, no. I know.

[454] You got to get it, though, to realize that, don't you?

[455] Well, we're going to have to figure out a way for that not to be the case because it's unsustainable in every single sense.

[456] Sure.

[457] So what I hear there is that on some level, you're kind of living out a previous generation's wishes.

[458] You must be aware of the impact.

[459] you getting into one of those schools will be and how you'll have been fulfilling everyone's dream.

[460] In my case, I had a mother who really believed in me. I mean, like, you know, preposterous levels of what she thought I was capable of, which was awesome.

[461] I wouldn't trade it for the world.

[462] But what it also did for me was, I got good at compartmentalizing.

[463] So I was like, I was living out some expectation, and then there, and then I had another side of Dax no one really knew about, which ultimately caught up with me by the time I turned 30.

[464] But did you have any, any kind of split personality stuff going on?

[465] Did you have like a secret, Jonathan, that was for you?

[466] Yeah.

[467] I mean, first of all, I would, I can't imagine that there's anybody who doesn't have some version of what you just said.

[468] I wouldn't trust somebody who didn't have some version of what you just said, like an exterior and an interior life that aren't really matching or a kind of like alienation from oneself.

[469] We're so used to talking about alienation from others, but I think much more powerful is an alienation from oneself.

[470] like the knowledge that this isn't exactly me this me that I'm walking around performing sometimes it is sometimes the overlaps are like pretty complete but there's an awareness that there's just somebody else that you are yeah and I had that it wasn't explicit like it wasn't secretly gay or secretly an addict or anything like that but I was secretly somebody a little bit different than I presented myself as and it's taken me a long time to figure that out what it means because it can be really subtle and hard to articulate.

[471] Yeah.

[472] But it's also impossible to miss. If you are experiencing that distance, you know it.

[473] Yes.

[474] I think that it's so hard when you're younger to even know that this is happening because you don't have a life to compare your life to.

[475] But as you get older and things start to branch and you meet different people, you have different kinds of experiences.

[476] Life has different chapters.

[477] Then you can look back and say, oof, this is this thing that was happening to me at that time.

[478] And for me, often it's when I feel the relief of the end.

[479] end of that kind of alienation.

[480] Yeah.

[481] That I can recognize what it was that I had in the first place.

[482] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[483] We've all been there.

[484] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[485] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing.

[486] But for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery, like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[487] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[488] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[489] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[490] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[491] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon music.

[492] What's up, guys?

[493] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good.

[494] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[495] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[496] And I don't mean just friends.

[497] I mean the likes of Amy Polar, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[498] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[499] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[500] Something happened to you when you were eight.

[501] Yeah.

[502] The way we used to do is you would go to school until the last day of the school year.

[503] Then you'd start summer camp at the same school and just do that through the summer.

[504] And it really resembled school.

[505] And I was in a, it was called a talented and gifted program, but there was no threshold of talent and giftedness that you had to exceed to get in.

[506] Just anyone who wanted to was sufficiently talented and gifted.

[507] And it was the first day of that camp, the first period, in fact, was, a science class, and we were making sparklers for the 4th of July, which was at the end of the first semester.

[508] I mean, can I interject?

[509] I mean, we already know the story is going to end up bad, but is that an ideal activity for eight -year -olds?

[510] It was like a mid -80s idea.

[511] Yeah, like homemade lawn jarts or something.

[512] It's like, well, hold on.

[513] No, the kinds of things, God, that we did.

[514] So, in fact, it was a substitute teacher.

[515] The teacher was supposed to be there that day.

[516] I don't know what he had a stomach bug or something and so there's a substitute teacher who had done this before it wasn't part of the regular curriculum we were divided into tables of four kids at each and we each had a pot in the middle of the table and we were adding chemicals that we would get from it's funny I haven't really remembered it in this kind of detail in quite a long time getting chemicals from a sort of like island at the front of the class where the teacher stood according to this recipe.

[517] I remember it was called a recipe that was written on the chalkboard and I just sort of zoned out for a while.

[518] I found it kind of boring.

[519] We had to take turns getting the chemicals and mixing them so when it's not your turn like what could be more boring.

[520] Remember I went to the bathroom and I just kind of stood there.

[521] I didn't pee.

[522] I just hung out in the bathroom for a little while and I came back and I got a drink of water and I mean this may sound like an invented memory but I really remember the drain of the water fountain really vividly.

[523] I remember looking at it, the holes in it, little circular holes, watching the water go down, went back into the classroom, and I remember looking at the board at this recipe, and then there was just this incredible event.

[524] In retrospect, I know it was an explosion, but at the time, I didn't really.

[525] If you had told me the ceiling fell on you, I would also believe that.

[526] Can you back up for one second?

[527] Yeah.

[528] So what you just described about going to the bathroom and stuff, it sounds like you were stoned, basically.

[529] Like, were you already kind of was...

[530] Well, no, I definitely wasn't.

[531] I mean, I was...

[532] No, no, I know.

[533] You're eight.

[534] I'm saying, was there some kind of toxic in the air that you...

[535] Oh, no, no. Okay, so when you went to go pee and you just didn't pee, it's not because you were like...

[536] It's because that's what I was like.

[537] Oh, okay, okay.

[538] Okay, yeah.

[539] I also sort of wondered that.

[540] Did you kind of think, because when you were describing, I was like, oh, that's me walking around a house stone.

[541] No. Why didn't I thought I had to pee.

[542] Did I order to be what this.

[543] Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

[544] Huge explosion.

[545] It was at the table that I had been working at.

[546] So the three kids who were at the table were the three kids who were really badly injured.

[547] I sort of somehow got out of the room.

[548] I don't really remember how.

[549] I don't remember a door or anything.

[550] I just somehow got out of the room.

[551] There's like tons of smoke.

[552] Another class of kids started to file out, which my brother was in.

[553] I remember I waved to my brother.

[554] We sort of said, are you okay?

[555] Yeah, I'm okay.

[556] And then it was just a kind of chaos.

[557] and it's chaos in the real world and a chaos in my mind as well.

[558] And it's hard to differentiate those two chaoses.

[559] I saw my best friend on the ground and he was really, really, like, nearly fatally burned.

[560] Oh, my gosh.

[561] Yeah.

[562] And we had this exchange where I spoke to him for a little bit.

[563] He was sitting there slumped.

[564] I looked at him.

[565] I asked him, what do I look like?

[566] And he was like, what do you mean?

[567] And I said, because, you know, your skin is like not on your face.

[568] is my skin on my face and you know this is the one of those moments that you spend your life wishing you could take back like yeah I wish you could be the comforting friend he says you're in the middle of trauma yeah and I was eight yeah yeah but you do you do beat yourself up regardless of that yeah yeah yeah it doesn't matter the reason doesn't really can't think yourself out of it yeah so we had that exchange and then some adult at some point picked me up wrap me up in a blanket and carried me downstairs and a lot of other crazy things happened that day.

[569] You ever been hypnotized?

[570] No. I went to a hypnotist a couple years ago because I thought I might try to write about this event.

[571] Yeah.

[572] And I was just curious what would happen.

[573] It was a hypnotherapist, like not a guy who's at frat parties, but a guy who charges like 500 bucks an hour with a four -hour minimum session.

[574] And it was really profound how he walked me through this event.

[575] And one of the things that he said about hypnosis is it's not like it gives you access to something that was concealed from you in your mind or repressed.

[576] What happens often when we tell stories is there's a part we can't get past either because we can't remember a detail or it's painful.

[577] And so we just stop there as if it's a permanent impasse.

[578] Hypnosis can help you get around or get over that impasse and you can find the rest of the story.

[579] I didn't really know what he was talking about until we went through this event and I got up to the point that I just told you about this exchange I had with my friend and I was like and that's pretty much it and he said well what color shirt was your friend wearing I was like who cares I don't know and he was like just tell me I have no idea and he said just tell me even if you're wrong I said I don't know gray and he said and then what happened it's like oh and then I and then I started to tell the rest of the story.

[580] Oh, he distracted you enough maybe from that.

[581] He somehow got me past this impasse, yeah.

[582] And what did you then remember?

[583] Oh, I remembered when I was carried downstairs a conversation that I had with the camp director who took me into his office and had hit the insurance company on the phone.

[584] I was just going to say, was it about you being litigious?

[585] Yeah.

[586] And then I was taken into the school office to call my parents.

[587] And a kid who was actually most badly injured was sprawled out on the sofa.

[588] He was African -American, which made Burns look a lot worse, you know, because like the pale flesh against the dark skin was, it's just more graphic.

[589] Yeah.

[590] I mean, he was really screaming and totally out of control, just, you know, animalistic.

[591] And then I remember a fireman who tricked me into going to the hospital who said that there was this girl who said I was her friend and she was afraid of going alone and would I just go in the ambulance with her.

[592] great.

[593] You appealed to your chivalry.

[594] Yeah.

[595] I think I didn't even care if I was being tricked at that point.

[596] You know, like I wanted an adult to tell me what to do.

[597] I wanted to be in the care of adults.

[598] Yes.

[599] And not the substitute teacher.

[600] Yeah.

[601] I mean, the substitute teacher.

[602] Oh my God.

[603] I feel horrible for that person.

[604] For who?

[605] The teacher?

[606] Kind of.

[607] I mean, I do in retrospect, because can you imagine carrying that weight for the rest of your life?

[608] Who hasn't found themselves in a situation in life where they're like, I guess I just got to wing this.

[609] You know, and most of us get really lucky.

[610] You don't wing it with gunpowder, though.

[611] Well, in retrospect, you're right.

[612] I would have just brought like some Reese's pieces and cut them open.

[613] Put a movie on.

[614] Yeah.

[615] No, you dump a baking soda and a trash can and throw vinegar on it.

[616] You have a volcano.

[617] No, that's a fun summer right there.

[618] So she just got the equation wrong.

[619] What?

[620] Well, you made it to her.

[621] You know what?

[622] I was going to just point that out, too.

[623] Yeah.

[624] I think I can see it at one point.

[625] Yeah.

[626] It was a he.

[627] Wow.

[628] Oh, that's bad.

[629] What do we have to hypnotize you right at the second?

[630] That was bad.

[631] What color was her shirt?

[632] Pink, obviously.

[633] Oh, no. That's fascinating.

[634] Did you just hypnotize Monica?

[635] She's currently hypnotized.

[636] I think so.

[637] So what were the extent of the other children's injuries?

[638] Like, were they in the hospital for a while?

[639] Yeah, I was there for two nights, three nights.

[640] What were your injuries?

[641] Just like second degree burns on my hands.

[642] No, like concussion or anything?

[643] Nope, no. But what's so funny is I always think about like how differently intention frames our opinions of things.

[644] Like if you were in Belfast and you were English and this, the exact same explosion happens to you.

[645] But you know that there was some intention of terrorism.

[646] Now that thing becomes something.

[647] But this one is like, it's benign, but the level of physical trauma is identical.

[648] It's just very, it's fascinating to me. That's a really, really interesting point that I never thought about.

[649] and the benigness of it is actually one of the most terrorizing parts.

[650] I bet because, and this is, you know, we've talked about this on here before, Dan Carlin history.

[651] I don't know if you ever listened to.

[652] Hardcore history.

[653] He's amazing, but one of the things that he articulated that I would have never really put together in my head is that the reason people love conspiracy theories is that it's just too scary to imagine there's a man, some bozo in Dallas who can affect the course of history by shooting Kennedy, that is too scary for us because that means there are seven billion variables and we're all fucked.

[654] But if there's a grand scheme, a grand intelligent design of all this, somehow that's more comforting.

[655] And yes, yours is like, oh, great.

[656] So I guess now anywhere you're at at any given time, shit could fucking blow up.

[657] I have to imagine it's a very unsettling worldview shifter for you.

[658] Yeah.

[659] I think I have struggled with like a feeling of safety in my life because of that.

[660] And I would imagine you already inherited a nice dose of fearing your safety.

[661] Yeah, absolutely.

[662] And it's weirdly confirmed at that point.

[663] Even if you're, I guess at eight, I don't know, you're at that age yet to do it, but you're hearing grandma and Dan, and you're like, a party has got to be like, yeah, I get it.

[664] But that was Germany or that was Ukraine.

[665] That was 1940.

[666] No, guys stop it.

[667] We live in, and then you go to school, that happens.

[668] And you're like, they're fucking right.

[669] This is a dangerous place to be.

[670] Yeah.

[671] I mean, life.

[672] Life is in fact a dangerous place to be.

[673] It's a hard thing with kids, you know, to be honest about, especially, you know, in an age of like school shootings, in an age of climate change, to talk about what it means to be safe that in a way that's both honest, but also, you know, comforting.

[674] I remember when my older son was, whatever, two, three, he started asking about death.

[675] And I asked my therapist, like, ooh, God, what's the right move?

[676] here, you know?

[677] Like, yeah, you're dead and you're dead forever and you don't feel anything.

[678] You don't dream and nobody comes to visit you after a day or two.

[679] Yeah.

[680] Or what?

[681] And he said, you know, he has like the rest of his life to figure out what he thinks about it.

[682] But at this age, like, just make him feel safe is the best thing that you can do.

[683] Because you can really get screwed up if you start to have anxieties when, not that you can get screwed up, but they can be hard to undo in their childhood anxieties.

[684] So he said, I decided, he said, why don't you just tell him there's heaven you know and that goes against everything that I believe in the sense of what I believe happens after you die yeah yeah but there's a part of me that very strongly believes in offering comfort where their comfort can be had especially to a kid it's not the same as an adult and we had this conversation where he was like I'm so afraid of dying I'm so afraid I was like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm sorry I'm sorry I was like I'm like I'm really just super his ice cream every day ice cream every day grandma grandpa there do i have to do homework no you don't have to do homework anyway it culminated with him saying like i want to die right now oh okay yeah well you know what's funny is we had the exact same thing right uh i think our oldest daughter was then maybe four she said are you guys going to die and i said yes we're going to die but not for a long time she said am i going to die and i said yes you're going to die too but much longer like a hundred years from now.

[685] And she said, and then I'm going to die.

[686] And I said, yeah, but in a long time, she started crying.

[687] She got scared.

[688] I was looking at my wife and we were both like, oh, God, I know the solution.

[689] Just say there's a heaven.

[690] You'll be out of this.

[691] And then I was like, oh, this is how it's perpetuated.

[692] And then we were like panicking and we were looking at each other to kind of like steal our resolve.

[693] And then by God, 90 seconds later, she was done crying, completely over it, went on with her day.

[694] That was pretty much it.

[695] And I was like, oh, wow, I was like, I bet five more seconds of crying.

[696] I would have been like, but there's a heaven and you're going to meet your, my dad.

[697] And she's a pastor at a megachurch 30 years later.

[698] Again, I don't advise anyone.

[699] I have no opinion on what people should do.

[700] That was our experience where I was like, I was panicking for 90 seconds.

[701] And then it just like every other fucking thing, it just passed and she went on her way and that's that.

[702] But grandma was visiting and she was telling my four year old, my now four year old, she's talking about her mom dying.

[703] My friend was, where'd she go?

[704] And my mother -in -law's like, Heaven.

[705] And she goes, what's heaven?

[706] And she's like, you know, heaven.

[707] It's where you go and you die and you're with your family.

[708] And I'll just like, yeah, but where is it?

[709] And she's like, it's above the clouds.

[710] And I'm just knowing how my kids are.

[711] I'm like, this is getting worse and worse and worse.

[712] Like, if you now put it somewhere physically in space, welcome to 25 more questions about why can't I see it, blah, blah, blah.

[713] It was kind of entertaining to just observe.

[714] And did it resolve with just getting bored of stuff?

[715] She got bored.

[716] She totally just got bored.

[717] But one thing that their school does those kids, which I think probably is why she was able to get over at 90 seconds, is like from age two, the spider will be dead on the ground and they'll be like, oh, look, the spider's at the end of its life cycle.

[718] And so, like, they're kind of putting it in from day one.

[719] This is a normal thing that happens.

[720] Yeah, they've had a few pets that have died.

[721] They had a chicken.

[722] And then they had a service for the chicken.

[723] They buried the chicken at the school.

[724] Like, all this stuff I was like, God, I wish I would have had just any of this as a kid.

[725] I don't know.

[726] What's your experience now?

[727] I'm not forget about kids.

[728] I find these things harder and harder to think about.

[729] And there's nobody telling me stories, you know?

[730] Yeah.

[731] Well, here's what I do.

[732] I go, it's going to be blackness.

[733] That's heartbreaking.

[734] But then I remind myself, I'll have no awareness that it's blackness.

[735] So what am I?

[736] I'm fearing an emotion that's never coming.

[737] I'm fearing a sense of loss that's never coming.

[738] I'm fearing the absence of the emotion that's never coming.

[739] The mental gymnastics I do, I go, I won't experience it.

[740] It's almost like telling me, you know, last night while you were dead asleep, you got up and jumped the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle.

[741] Are you scared you did that?

[742] Well, I don't have any memory of that.

[743] So I done my business almost.

[744] But that's okay because you woke up today.

[745] Yes.

[746] You know, that's the.

[747] By the way, I was at total.

[748] I won't say total.

[749] I was at 70 % peace with this worldview I have until I had kids because the thought of not being able to see my fucking daughters is insufferable.

[750] So in that way, I've definitely been like, boy, I hope I'm wrong.

[751] Boy, I'd love to be wrong.

[752] I would love to come to and go, hey, and two blinks, your kids will be here with you.

[753] I feel like that's actually a version of the alienation we were talking about before.

[754] Like, I want so badly to believe.

[755] And I just can't.

[756] I can't bring myself to the place.

[757] And so do you, have you drilled down into, because I've drilled down in like, why are you so skeptical?

[758] Why by nature are you this skeptical?

[759] And I have my reasons from my childhood, but do you then try to track why you're even that way?

[760] Well, because that skepticism is in keeping with everything else about me, except for my desire to believe.

[761] Do you think there was anything in your childhood that made you distrust what you were being told?

[762] Well, they weren't telling me about heaven.

[763] I mean, my parents don't believe any more than I believe.

[764] There's a Jewish philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig who was asked, if he was religious.

[765] And the answer he gave, which is my favorite answer to that question is not yet.

[766] And an acknowledgement that that's not where I am right now.

[767] And also an acknowledgement that if I could get there, that may be where I'd like to be.

[768] Oh, sure.

[769] Yeah, if we could take one of the two pills, I certainly would enjoy the comfort of thinking I'll see my kids for eternity.

[770] Yeah, it may require a pill.

[771] Yeah.

[772] It may exist.

[773] It doesn't end there.

[774] Your story with the explosion does not end there.

[775] You recover, obviously, from the burns and whatnot.

[776] But you then, for three years, have kind of a mental distress, yeah?

[777] Yeah, it was delayed, actually.

[778] So the following year, I was pretty much fine.

[779] I seemed to be fine.

[780] I went to school.

[781] Everything seemed cool.

[782] It wasn't going to shrinks or anything like that.

[783] And then, I guess it was two years later, I just started to have a very hard time.

[784] I was nervous all the time, or that was the word I applied to it.

[785] Maybe it wasn't nervousness at all.

[786] But when I would try to describe to people what I was feeling, to my parents, very nervous.

[787] I was terrified of being called on in class, or that I would have to read aloud in class.

[788] That was like the worst thing I could possibly imagine.

[789] I often just wouldn't go to class for fear of being called on.

[790] Couldn't sleep over at anybody's house.

[791] I would pee in my pants, just like out of control.

[792] and it kept like crescendoing and becoming worse and worse and worse and I remember thinking at one point you know you either have to like stop doing this or you're going to have a very bad life something really bad's going to happen and you're going to make other people's lives really bad and I just stopped and again it's like you pay your price for just stopping yeah yeah yeah it's not great for the system.

[793] But, you know, it looked okay.

[794] Like, I was able to go to school again and all of the ways that the problems were expressing themselves just stopped.

[795] And I think I started to become a different person around then.

[796] Like, when I was a kid, I was very flamboyant.

[797] I would dress, I'd wear like bow ties and rings and it's just like...

[798] You were like a magician.

[799] Like a magician without tricks.

[800] Trickless magician.

[801] A good title for something.

[802] And then I was like not a magician without tricks.

[803] Like I was more like the person who's sitting across from me now.

[804] Yeah.

[805] She's like fairly conservatively dressed.

[806] Like I...

[807] And this would have been around 11 -ish?

[808] Even like 11, 12.

[809] Uh -huh.

[810] I remember my bar mitzvah, and I was 13, I...

[811] It was like a scene from a sitcom.

[812] I went into the rabbi's office before I started crying because I was nervous.

[813] That feeling, nervousness really came back.

[814] And I surmounted it.

[815] because, you know, I had to.

[816] What are you going to do?

[817] Call off the party.

[818] Flowers go home, band go home, caterer go home, relatives from out of town go home.

[819] I just couldn't do it.

[820] And maybe that is actually what it was to have a bar mitzvah in some way, like to move into a kind of adulthood where it was more being a participant rather than being the star of my own show.

[821] Uh -huh.

[822] But, again, it's not uncomplicated.

[823] Yeah.

[824] I can't relate at all to having.

[825] I mean, had an experience like that.

[826] But it does make me think of being in like 10th grade, you know, just hating how I looked and dressed in 9th and 10th grade.

[827] And then one day just waking up and going, you know what, we're not betting on your looks.

[828] You got a good personality and that's your fucking ticket out of this thing and it's time to shift gears.

[829] And it was a very like, you know, specific thought process and a decision and I launched out on this new thing.

[830] And it is interesting that young people can make those kind of decisions.

[831] I think about that a lot now actually watching like Greta Thumburg and watching kids that age.

[832] You know, there was a Washington Post poll or survey a couple weeks ago, two weeks ago, that found that the majority of American teenagers are scared about climate change and angry about climate change.

[833] When I was a teenager, I was scared and angry too.

[834] And like I felt very much at the mercy of what the adult.

[835] world was doing you know or well we we grew up in the cold war the movie the day after like you literally had in the back of your mind oh nuclear holocaust is an option yeah short of that just a holocaust a bargain basement holocaust yeah and i think it's i mean i don't envy teenagers now it's got to be really hard yeah and then coupled with far higher level of isolation in far higher.

[836] You know, there's so many things happening.

[837] Totally.

[838] You go to Princeton.

[839] Okay, it was not your first pick.

[840] You'd much rather have been at Harvard.

[841] Monica and I are Unifiles were really obsessed with fancy.

[842] Yeah.

[843] Fancy schools.

[844] Schools that we didn't go to.

[845] So we really dig it.

[846] We think it's cool.

[847] But I have to say, we haven't had anyone from Princeton.

[848] And when we read that he would go to Princeton, I literally went, hey, what happened at Princeton?

[849] You used to say when I was growing up was like, Princeton or Harvard, Princeton or Harvard.

[850] now I don't feel like that's what people say it's like you know I don't know what it is Stanford and I don't really know what people say either and I honestly I went to visit it with my dad and it was like the weather was nice I had a good sandwich I was in a great mood I was like I'll take it this place looks great you know this looks like a college for sure yeah it was a totally totally uninformed decision totally uninformed if I had done like the tiniest bit of research probably I would have gone somewhere else it was fairly conservative campus and it just like wasn't the most obvious fit.

[851] Well, a big departure from your school where you called, you know, your science teacher ed and stuff.

[852] It's almost the opposite experience.

[853] Yeah, but there were wonderful things about it because of that.

[854] They have amazing art department and creative writing department.

[855] And there's people aren't like clamoring to get into the classes.

[856] That's just not where like the interests of the student body lie or didn't back then.

[857] Yeah, they're all future world leaders basically, yeah.

[858] Future world destroyers.

[859] Yeah.

[860] So I got to take, you know, writing classes with like Joyce Carol Oates because I applied and I it was really easy.

[861] But you were a philosophy major.

[862] So that was, was that initially an elective basically to take?

[863] So I didn't choose a major until the last possible moment, whenever that was.

[864] I want to say it was like junior year.

[865] And I remember I was sitting on a bench and I was like, God, I got to pick a major.

[866] What am I to do?

[867] I could do English, I guess.

[868] But I don't really want to do that because maybe I'll be a writer and it just feels.

[869] feels like putting sour cream on cream cheese, like too similar, don't want it.

[870] I could be a psych major, but then what I was like, you know, it would sound great is if I were a philosophy major.

[871] If I could spend the rest of my life telling people I was a philosophy major, and that was pretty much how I just.

[872] That's also, isn't that, that's one of the most common transfers for law school, isn't it?

[873] A lot of, a lot of lawyers are philosophy majors, yeah.

[874] Did you have favorite authors at that age?

[875] Were you obsessed with anyone?

[876] I really wasn't a big reader.

[877] And oddly enough, I'm still not a big reader.

[878] Like, I didn't come to writing through a love of literature.

[879] It was really more through a back door of like, first of all, I love having control of my time and not having a boss.

[880] Yeah.

[881] I like being able to explore different.

[882] I mean, being a writer is not at all different than what you're doing right now.

[883] Like, you get to just explore things and think about things and talk, except that I'm talking to myself instead of to somebody else.

[884] Well, I initially was trying to be a writer.

[885] I self -submitted 8 ,000, you know, short stories, the whole thing.

[886] I was obsessed with several different writers.

[887] And I've only later come to realize that I just loved the control of it.

[888] I loved creating a world where everything I said went.

[889] Yeah.

[890] And I deeply desired that control.

[891] And it's a way to close that distance that we were talking about.

[892] Like on the page, I'm myself.

[893] Oh, yeah.

[894] You almost have to lie to yourself and say, like, no one's ever going to read this.

[895] Just write this thing and pretend no one's going to read it.

[896] I just kind of dissociate.

[897] I don't even think about it.

[898] What I'm writing, I'm just writing.

[899] And it's really the one place in life where there's no etiquette, there's no expectations.

[900] I don't have to please anybody.

[901] It's really unconstrained.

[902] And that makes it hard because then if it sucks, it's because you suck.

[903] Well, also, limitless options creates fatigue almost, right?

[904] Yeah.

[905] That's why, like, creative boxes are sometimes so useful.

[906] It's like, oh, I got to make it work right here.

[907] There's this great Borges story about, I hope I'm getting this right, but two kings.

[908] And they challenge each other to create a labyrinth that's more difficult to get out of.

[909] And so King A puts King B in this enormous labyrinth, like the size of a city with a million forking paths and dead ends and all of that.

[910] And it takes King B three years, you know, of stumbling around and making wrong terms to be, finally gets out and then king b puts king a in the middle of a desert and he says get out of this and you know if there are no walls there's no way to escape yeah yeah yeah and oftentimes with writing i feel like the freedom of it is itself a kind of like enslavement yeah for sure okay so you start working with joyce carol oates and she gives you some encouragement right she kind of likes what you're writing and and really encourages you to pursue that and you end up doing a thesis and It's largely about your grandmother, yeah?

[911] Yeah, I mean, my thesis was a draft in my first book.

[912] Everything is illuminated.

[913] How much of everything is illuminated is your grandmother's story or inspired by your grandmother's story?

[914] Like, how much is?

[915] Virtually none of it, actually.

[916] Is her actual story?

[917] Yeah, so my grandfather had a wife and a baby, and he worked just outside of the village.

[918] And the Nazis came through while he was working outside the village and killed everybody.

[919] and when he was on his way home he had no knowledge that anything had happened a friend of his stopped him just a couple kilometers outside of town and said you can't go back this is what happened and he said i'm going back i don't care they can kill me i don't care what happens anymore just let me go and his friend had to physically constrain him like force him to survive and he ended up being hidden by some christian family and you know, made his way, like survived a day at a time and ended up meeting my grandmother in a D .P. camp.

[920] Oh, wow.

[921] Yeah.

[922] So there is a photograph of him with his family.

[923] The Christian family.

[924] Yes, this is a real thing.

[925] Were they baptizing him in the photo?

[926] They were feeding him white bread.

[927] So, and like, I guess it was the summer after my junior year of college.

[928] I was before the summers, the end of the squares, think about what I should do.

[929] Like, should I get a job?

[930] Should I?

[931] I was like, you know, maybe I'll just, I don't even know what led me to this thought because it's not the kind of thought that I would have had at that time, except that I did have it.

[932] Maybe I'll just go.

[933] Like, check out where my grandfather came from.

[934] And this was the Ukraine?

[935] Yep.

[936] Okay.

[937] I shouldn't say the Ukraine, right?

[938] It's just Ukraine.

[939] You know, Trump will sort it out.

[940] Don't leave me. When we get the transfers, we'll know for sure.

[941] I don't know what I was thinking.

[942] And sort of like the decision to go to Princeton.

[943] I was totally unprepared.

[944] And this is 1999, yeah?

[945] This is 98.

[946] So it's probably pretty bleak there, yeah?

[947] Well, where I was going was super bleak.

[948] I mean, it was just out of time.

[949] You know, it was dirt roads.

[950] A horse drawn carts and stuff.

[951] And because I had done almost no preparation, I just found nothing.

[952] I was like an idiot.

[953] Like I got off the train.

[954] I was like, all right, let's anybody know these people in this picture?

[955] You know, literally like that.

[956] But because it was such a complete failure and because I was beginning to think about writing, it kind of worked like it stimulated my imagination rather than well you're probably terribly lonely there right yeah well I wasn't there for that long but you weren't no I was only there for three days and then and then I was in Prague oh that's a great place it really is a great place yeah probably a little less great as time passes but yeah also so cheap then probably a little less cheap as time passes but I lived there for that summer two months and that's where I wrote the first draft of this book oh wow sort of in response to the nothingness that I found in the Ukraine.

[957] Yeah, you basically just had to make up your own story because you didn't get the one you were looking for.

[958] Yeah.

[959] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[960] You published it in 2002, so only a few years later, yeah.

[961] Mm -hmm.

[962] And then the book's a big success, and it gets made into a movie.

[963] At this point, do you suffer from imposterous?

[964] syndrome at all?

[965] Are you like, there's a mistake?

[966] I've fooled them.

[967] I'll be discovered.

[968] It's a little too fast even to have those reactions.

[969] I was so inside of the experience.

[970] I just wasn't capable of reflecting on the experience.

[971] Yes, or seeing maybe even the, yeah, uniqueness of what was happening to you.

[972] I mean, I knew the uniqueness because the same book, every word in the same place, I sent it out to agents, maybe, I don't know, 15, 20 agents, is rejected by all of them.

[973] I finally found an agent.

[974] She sent it out to every publisher in New York and it was rejected by every publisher in New York and then she fell ill and had to stop being an agent so I was like oh Christ what am I going to do now do I continue to try with this book do I start a new book do I just go become a lawyer like what am I going to do with my life and I sent it to another agent who isn't my agent still oh that's nice yeah it changed my life talk about like dropping something in a mailbox and your life changes and then she ended up having a lot of success commercial success with it you know finding publishers who wanted to have an auction for this book that just a little bit before nobody even wanted to look at.

[975] Isn't that crazy the power of a salesman, really?

[976] It is.

[977] I mean, you know, the fact is everyone is working on a book, right?

[978] Yeah.

[979] And so editors, there are not that many editors in New York.

[980] They get, I don't know, 20 manuscripts a day, 50 manuscripts a day, it's too much to read.

[981] They depend on the curation of people that they trust.

[982] You know, when someone says, I know you and you're going to like this, and they give it a read, yeah.

[983] So I was the beneficiary of that.

[984] So I knew even while it was happening that there was something a little fishy about the experience, like a little...

[985] Yeah, how could have been rejected 80 times and now all of a sudden it's, yeah, yeah.

[986] Well, that's like Harry Potter, too.

[987] She has that same story where, like, Harry Potter was rejected by all these publishers and stuff.

[988] Get out of here.

[989] It's the Swedish girl who...

[990] Get out of this.

[991] She just sailed across the Atlantic.

[992] Anyway, but that's crazy.

[993] Like, then you're the, yeah.

[994] The biggest bookseller of all time.

[995] When it got pitched to you, like, hey, was it Leah of Shriver, who originally was he the first person to express interest in making that?

[996] Yeah, so I was, when I met with my agent, this one I was just telling you about, we met in her office.

[997] This was when she was just not beginning, but it was near the beginning of her career.

[998] And her office actually had used to be a closet.

[999] This little tiny room, maybe a fifth of the size of the room, we're in, right now.

[1000] That's tight.

[1001] Yeah.

[1002] She said to me, what are your goals?

[1003] Like, what would you love to happen with this book?

[1004] I said, I really want $12 ,000.

[1005] She was like, that's the weirdest answer I've ever heard.

[1006] Why do it was $12 ,000?

[1007] I said, because then I think I could go to Spain and like live there for six months and that's just what I want to do.

[1008] And she said, I bet you we can get you $12 ,000.

[1009] She got me $12 ,000.

[1010] And I went to Spain.

[1011] And this was in the period before the book was published, you know, after it had been sold.

[1012] But there's like, the publishing industry is pretty slow.

[1013] It makes a long time between finishing a book and it being out in the world.

[1014] Sometimes it's six months, sometimes a year, sometimes it's two years.

[1015] So I was in Spain.

[1016] And during that period, an excerpt of the book was in The New Yorker.

[1017] And I got a phone call from someone at the New Yorker who said, this guy, Liev Schreiber, read your piece and wants to be in touch with you.

[1018] Is that cool?

[1019] and I actually didn't know who he was at the time.

[1020] You had never watched HBO Sports.

[1021] I think I had, but you don't see his face or hear his name.

[1022] You just hear that voice.

[1023] Yeah, it's so great.

[1024] It's so very great.

[1025] It's the best.

[1026] Yes.

[1027] The bucks are coming down the field.

[1028] Yeah.

[1029] Oh, God, sign me out.

[1030] The Warriors of Sunday.

[1031] I said, sure.

[1032] And we ended up talking briefly.

[1033] And when I was back in New York, I went to, I think, his 40th birthday, is it possible?

[1034] Maybe it was even 35th.

[1035] I don't know.

[1036] any case, we met.

[1037] And he just had this vision, which I found super compelling.

[1038] He had his own personal story, right?

[1039] His family was in that part of the world during that time.

[1040] Yeah.

[1041] It was just the confluence of a lot of things.

[1042] His story, my story, where he was in his career and a desire to direct, his sense of humor, my sense of humor.

[1043] He and I, we're really good friends.

[1044] We've been friends for years, and we're a funny pair.

[1045] Like, if you were to see us standing next to each other, you wouldn't necessarily, like an alien wouldn't recognize us both as humans.

[1046] Well, he is, I have had dinner with him once.

[1047] Monica, he is one of the most masculine men I've ever met in the most conventional definitions of masculinity, right?

[1048] I mean, you just, there's a heaviness to him where you're like, okay, shit goes sideways with him, like, you got your hands full here.

[1049] This guy is a beast.

[1050] Yeah, no, he's the guy who, like, rushes the cockpit during a hijacking.

[1051] Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[1052] But he's also a very, very sensitive, thoughtful, super smart guy.

[1053] And, yeah, we've had this great friendship for years now.

[1054] You didn't write the screenplay, did you?

[1055] No, he wrote it.

[1056] He wrote it.

[1057] He wrote it.

[1058] He directed it.

[1059] It was his baby.

[1060] And how easy was it for you to turn over something to someone else and let it go through their filter?

[1061] I found it at the time simple for a couple of reasons.

[1062] One, like I was much better then than I am now at full dissociation.

[1063] Just like, it isn't happening.

[1064] You know, like, it's happening over there, so it's just not happening.

[1065] Yeah.

[1066] And I was psyched that, like, somebody would pay me. Yeah, of course.

[1067] Another 12 grand.

[1068] And I was psyched that it was going to bring a lot of readers to the book because, you know, the film industry, TV and film, it's, like, not like literature.

[1069] They're on a totally different scale.

[1070] So when a film or TV show makes an adaptation of a novel, the novel is going to get 10 times, 100 times, 1 ,000 times ,000 times as many readers as it had before.

[1071] Oh, wow.

[1072] Oh, interesting.

[1073] And I was just like to see what he would do because he is a smart guy.

[1074] Yeah.

[1075] He has a perspective and charisma and he cared about it.

[1076] And when you saw it, did you go like, oh, he got it right or, oh, this is a different thing, but I do enjoy it.

[1077] Well, there was no getting it right.

[1078] Yeah.

[1079] I got it right.

[1080] And I don't mean that in the sense of quality.

[1081] I mean that like I made the thing I wanted to make, which has nothing in the world to do with, whether it's good or bad or it just was what I would.

[1082] wanted to you know in the same way that like you get your own breaths right you know and he made something really different i mean he actually removed fully half of the book the book has these two braided stories and he just took one of them and so yeah i looked at it and it was just like strange to see somebody else's choices yeah and there were a lot of layers of removal like i was kind of writing a book about something that may or may not have happened and i fictionalized it to some extent through like the filter of my own imagination and concerns and then he kind of made an adaptation of this adaptation of this history that may or may not have happened and it was filtered through his concerns and then like Elijah Wood kind of played me like a character as my name and yeah and it goes through his filter yeah yeah and that that was an experience that was funny not like ha ha funny but funny like this tickles me a little bit funny uh -huh as a surreal kind of thing right yeah and a lot of these decisions that you know when I write I write like in bed or in like a chair in my kitchen and I make decisions that feel very very personal and intimate and totally insignificant when I make them but then sometimes they resonate it's a weird experience to share these like artifacts of my very inner life I'll you know go to do a reading and someone will come up and say you know what meant so much to me and really changed my life is that moment in the book when, and they'll say something, I don't even remember.

[1083] They literally don't remember writing it.

[1084] And then the things that I agonize over and care about and that actually move me, oftentimes are never mentioned by anybody.

[1085] So it's both, like, exciting, and it's also a kind of price that's paid for, like, exposing oneself in that way.

[1086] Yeah.

[1087] So after the success of that, you do extremely loud and incredibly close, which is about a little boy who's dealing with the loss of his father.

[1088] or he died in 9 -11, and he finds a key of some kind.

[1089] Is that what it is?

[1090] Yeah, it is.

[1091] Although the funny thing is, if you push me too hard, I literally won't remember.

[1092] Sure, sure, sure.

[1093] If you're like Ozzy Osbourne singing the Black Sabbath songs, you need to tell you like that.

[1094] Just no Sharon.

[1095] But I wonder if just knowing your, obviously your father did not die, but I was curious, like, do you think in any way you were, and this sounds so armed cherry, psychologist, But does it have anything to do with the eight -year -old who got an explosion in front of him?

[1096] So at the time, I would have said no. Uh -huh.

[1097] You know, my first book was called Everything Is Illuminated, which would have been a pretty good title for a book about the explosion.

[1098] My second book...

[1099] It was very literal, yeah.

[1100] My second book was called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which would be maybe even a better title for a book about the explosion.

[1101] And I just was not thinking about it at the time.

[1102] Yeah.

[1103] I often have plans for what I'm going to write and things that seem like good ideas.

[1104] I've never once had a good idea that turned out to be a good idea.

[1105] I've written, I think, three or four proposals, sold proposals to publishers.

[1106] And I've never turned in the book that I proposed.

[1107] It's always just gotten sidetracked.

[1108] I realized the thing that in my head was clever in life wasn't.

[1109] And the world changes and the things that interest you in 2005 or not necessarily the things that interest you in 2007.

[1110] I've also become the older I've gotten less reliant on or confident about my abilities I know what I'm capable of and it doesn't thrill me like it's not that exciting to me but what is exciting to me are the like accidents the things you stumble upon the weird coincidences one of my favorite lines about writing by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky who said the rhyme is smarter than the poet people write in verse because it's pretty it sounds great but also when you have to end a line with a word that rhymes with the one at the end of the line above it's like a problem well it's the box you've put yourself in the creative box exactly right yeah it's it's funny you say that about the titles of your book because you're right there they're like literal descriptions of what you win through which is interesting and i i'm on a show with my co -stars this actress like bell and she's directed two movies both of which have ellipsies in the titles which is a very very weird thing to have in a title of a film and then her acting is very ellipsies there's a lot of like she thinks on her feet she takes the second to you know and i pointed that out to her and she was like oh my god you're right and it's so funny how many things you can see on the outside that like in the forest you just can't see so i don't know if it's because we're looking or because it's true you know the other thing is it may be that like she does what she does subconsciously or keep stumbling into these elliphy It may also be that you're the kind of person who observes that kind of thing.

[1111] Like the observation says something about you just as the...

[1112] Well, I'm almost just explicating something.

[1113] I'm deciding what I think a pattern is in a weird way as well.

[1114] Yeah.

[1115] Well, I would imagine, too, that you would have been very likely to develop kind of second album syndrome after everything is illuminated because it's exceeding your wildest dreams.

[1116] And then I imagine it's a little daunting to follow that up.

[1117] I think I had that after my second book.

[1118] Okay.

[1119] I was too, again, like, it happened quickly.

[1120] I wrote my second book quickly.

[1121] I didn't have the perspective yet to have that fear or anxiety.

[1122] But I did after everything's illuminated.

[1123] In fact, I didn't write another novel for about 10 years.

[1124] I wrote a nonfiction book.

[1125] And at the time, I would have said it's because I'm drawn to this other material.

[1126] I want to explore this stuff.

[1127] In retrospect, I'm sure I was also driven by fear.

[1128] Yeah, well, get real.

[1129] We don't do a single thing on planet Earth.

[1130] not somehow has its origin and fear.

[1131] I don't believe.

[1132] It's in the mix.

[1133] Yeah, yeah.

[1134] It's always in the mix.

[1135] Yeah.

[1136] You have in extremely loud and incredibly close, there's a, I guess I would describe it as almost a multimedia facet to it, which has been called a visual writing as a technique.

[1137] That's new to me, that concept.

[1138] So within that book, you've got like lots of pictures and the book ends with maybe 15 pictures, illustrations or something.

[1139] How do you decide?

[1140] What would brought you to that?

[1141] You know, people love it.

[1142] Some people hate it.

[1143] What's the...

[1144] Probably fear was a lot of it.

[1145] Like, I wouldn't do it that way now.

[1146] Okay.

[1147] It's interesting having...

[1148] I've written, let's say, like six books.

[1149] It sort of depends what you call a book.

[1150] But there are ones I like more than others.

[1151] Sure.

[1152] It's not as if they're all equal to me. I don't love that book.

[1153] Oh, interesting.

[1154] And what's really weird is it's my most read book.

[1155] Yeah, it's very popular.

[1156] Yeah.

[1157] And it was made into a movie.

[1158] that Tom Hanks and Sandra Bowork star and was it nominated I think even it was yeah wow yeah how ironic I love it yeah what about it yeah I feel like it was trying rather than just being itself like I like things that are done for their own sake and love people that just live in the way that they are you know yeah yeah and in retrospect it was it was really trying well again you you had to live up to the first book.

[1159] I can see where you're very perfectly positioned to try.

[1160] Because when you were writing in Prague, no one's reading this fucking thing.

[1161] You're not selling this thing.

[1162] What do you care?

[1163] Right.

[1164] Exactly.

[1165] And now I knew that my second book would be published and I knew that there would be some amount of attention on it.

[1166] So I should say at the time, none of this was conscious.

[1167] I wasn't aware of any of what I'm saying now.

[1168] Right.

[1169] I just thought, this is a good way to tell this story.

[1170] And this is a visual expression of this child's imagination and why is literature so conservative anyway?

[1171] Why aren't books more interesting looking?

[1172] And I actually believe those things, but I also believe that I was like influenced by my own anxiety.

[1173] So then you wrote eating animals now.

[1174] Now this is something that intrigues me because I don't know what happened to me. I am someone who loved reading growing up and about I guess 15 years ago I switched to nonfiction.

[1175] I guess I blamed John Crockhauer.

[1176] I switched to nonfiction.

[1177] I cannot fucking go back.

[1178] I've tried to take someone like the class, everyone, you know, unanimous, everyone loves them.

[1179] I'm reading Lolita.

[1180] And I'm like, I'm kind of getting into it.

[1181] I'm like, wait, this whole thing was imagined by some guy, you know.

[1182] So nonfiction for me, I don't know why now is all I can read.

[1183] So in this interest me because there are things that we know ethically what to do.

[1184] And yet, for me personally, I go, and tough shit.

[1185] Like, guess what?

[1186] I'm not going to bat a thousand in this lifetime.

[1187] I'm picking the things I'm deciding to be ethical about.

[1188] This isn't one of them.

[1189] I would never try to mount an argument that what I'm doing is ethical.

[1190] But eating, eating animals intellectually, I could probably sit here and argue with you as an anthropology major that we are fucking omnivores, whether you like it or not, and that we're all, we've been eating meat.

[1191] So I don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[1192] I used to tassel corn.

[1193] I looked at the fucking chickens and pigs and I was like, ooh, this is gnarly.

[1194] I roofed a slaughterhouse in Detroit.

[1195] Ooh, this is fucking gnarly.

[1196] You know, I read Fast Food Nation.

[1197] I'm like, this is rough.

[1198] And then I went to McDonald's.

[1199] Yeah.

[1200] Yeah, yeah.

[1201] But yours was motivated, right, because you had a two -year -old son.

[1202] I was my husband.

[1203] Oh, I wasn't even born yet.

[1204] Oh, okay, he wasn't born.

[1205] I mean, it was motivated because I had a discomfort about it since I was a kid.

[1206] And I think most kids have some discomfort about eating meat.

[1207] Yeah, I have one right now that has elected to be vegetarian.

[1208] I mean, mom's been vegetarian for 30 years, but eating meat is, this has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of it.

[1209] Yeah.

[1210] It is really different than the other stories we tell about animals.

[1211] Right.

[1212] You have pets, you treat them well.

[1213] You read a bedtime story.

[1214] The animals are heroes.

[1215] We'll go places just to look at fucking cows.

[1216] Yeah, you stuffed animals, and we love animals, except we also like...

[1217] Eat the shit out.

[1218] Yeah, eat the shit out.

[1219] So it was born out of a discomfort that I'd had since I was a kid that I just couldn't really let go of.

[1220] I mean, I was good at letting go of it sometimes.

[1221] I ate meat for various stretches of my life, but I never lost that feeling that, like, I don't know if I want to do this.

[1222] Right.

[1223] And that doing this may require, like, willfully forgetting who I am, which doesn't feel like the best policy.

[1224] So I just researched, like, what's the actual story in America?

[1225] Where does this food come from?

[1226] Like supply chain and everything.

[1227] Yeah.

[1228] But just to return to something you said, which to me is, like, the basis of the way I think about this, the way I think about climate change.

[1229] Like you said, I can't always bat a thousand, you know.

[1230] I think when we recognize that something's important and that we care about it, not that other people care about it, that we care about it.

[1231] We kind of go to these extremes of like, I'm going to bat a thousand or I'm going to bet zero.

[1232] I'm going to be a vegetarian or I'm just going to eat the shit out of animals.

[1233] Yeah.

[1234] And there are other options.

[1235] Like, it's possible to recognize that we don't want to endorse a certain kind of behavior.

[1236] We don't want to partake.

[1237] We don't want to support it with our money or just even with our personhood and to still do it sometimes.

[1238] Like that doesn't make us radical hypocrites.

[1239] We've gotten into this habit of like measuring our distance from perfection, which no one's going to attain anyway, rather than just measuring our distance from doing nothing at all.

[1240] Well, yeah, a good friend of mine who's much smarter than me said, you know, you could eat meat once a week.

[1241] That would be a huge improvement.

[1242] And if everyone just said, okay, don't panic.

[1243] We're not saying don't ever eat meat, but just if everyone went down to one or two days a week, You can't imagine the impact of that.

[1244] If everyone just went down to dinner, it would make an enormous, enormous difference.

[1245] It would get us so far toward where we need to be in terms of climate change.

[1246] We're talking about tens of billions of animals, if you care, you know.

[1247] Better for our health.

[1248] Better for farmers.

[1249] There is really not any argument for eating more meat.

[1250] There are an awful lot of arguments for eating less.

[1251] But it's good to think about it, I think, as eating less.

[1252] You know, Beyond Burgers, 90 % of the people who buy Beyond Burgers also bought meat supermarket in that same period of time.

[1253] And I think it's reflective of this change in the culture where it's not about like you're a vegetarian or you're not.

[1254] Well, that's the thing I've always hated is it's a very bizarre thing to make a pillar of your identity.

[1255] I've just always kind of rejected that.

[1256] You know, I'm a vegetarian.

[1257] I'm a meat eater.

[1258] It's just a weird identity source.

[1259] Well, I mean, I get that people either feel proud of it.

[1260] By the way, it's not my strategy.

[1261] Like, I don't introduce myself that way.

[1262] I don't think about it that way.

[1263] But I get it, why some people do.

[1264] But I'm saying, forget the ethics of the situation.

[1265] Defining yourself by what you consume, to me, is almost a reverse of what your identity should be.

[1266] It's like your identity is your output.

[1267] You know, you've referred to yourself as an addict a bunch of times.

[1268] That's what I consume.

[1269] And it's what you don't, and what you choose not to consume.

[1270] Yes, but it's like you feel, I assume there's like a strength that you derive from like stating it, articulating.

[1271] Like this is important to me. This is my, maybe it's a struggle.

[1272] I say it so you won't offer me a Xanax when you leave.

[1273] No. It's a huge part of you're right.

[1274] No, it totally is.

[1275] It totally is.

[1276] That emanates from me and those substances are the symptom of what an addict is.

[1277] So it's not really the cocaine.

[1278] It's this obsessive.

[1279] impulsive desire to regulate my internal emotions with external things.

[1280] So that's what an addict is to me. It's not the all the substances are irrelevant.

[1281] It could be sex, could be gambling, could be blank.

[1282] It's this compulsion.

[1283] Not to like stretch an analogy, but do you think food is at all like that?

[1284] Like, people consume food as a way of regulating?

[1285] Yeah.

[1286] Yeah, I do.

[1287] I do.

[1288] I do.

[1289] Obviously, it's not physically addictive, which makes it a world of difference.

[1290] Well, but it is emotionally addictive.

[1291] Little physically.

[1292] I mean, you definitely feel craving after you introduce it.

[1293] I mean, so I've been an on and off vegetarian for most of my life.

[1294] I find it very, very, very hard not to eat meat.

[1295] I would bet that if you became a vegetarian tomorrow, you would find it easier than I find it, despite the fact that I've written a book and, you know.

[1296] Well, I believe you because my wife's not an addict at all.

[1297] And when we both went vegan for a year, it was a thousand times harder for her.

[1298] Because I'm just used to going like, oh yeah, I can't have the thing I want really bad.

[1299] Right.

[1300] Right.

[1301] I'm not used to that.

[1302] And I have so many, first of all, I really like the smell and taste of meat.

[1303] And I have a lot of positive associations.

[1304] Like my grandma, who we talked about, like the primary vehicle of her love was chicken that she would make.

[1305] And so if I see chicken, of course, I'm looking at a food that smells and tastes good.

[1306] But there's also something in me that's like spinning.

[1307] Yeah.

[1308] Remembering that.

[1309] Or my dad grilling burgers in the backyard.

[1310] Yeah, it means something.

[1311] Yeah, there's a lot of associations.

[1312] And those are powerful and those are valuable.

[1313] and they shouldn't be dismissed.

[1314] So I kind of get it when someone's like, this is who I am.

[1315] I believe in these things and I'm going to talk about the fact that I've oriented my life away from them.

[1316] Yeah.

[1317] That said, like the aesthetic of vegetarians and vegans is often like not exactly for me. Yeah.

[1318] And I think it's not exactly for most people.

[1319] I did a reading in Toronto last night.

[1320] Right in the middle of it, someone got on stage and had a poster that said, isn't you know never right to eat animals animals are to be respected and cared for and everybody starts booing and the crass security guards to come and try to get her off stage but she's like a handful and what I said was what I said was you know it's a shame because I bet everybody in this audience pretty much agrees with pretty much everything she was saying but she was saying in a way that's really hard to hear and like makes us feel well there's a righteousness to it and then I my need your self -defensive thoughts are okay let's get into it motherfucker let's go through your whole life let me evaluate your morality yeah okay you're probably spotless on this topic but let's go through all of it like let you want to have a morality off that i get that's i get enraged it feels judgmental and holier and thou and righteous yeah i often feel that too and i don't like it when people make me feel that way yeah and my reflex is to attack yeah yeah because i feel attacked and it's a shame because we actually think the same things.

[1321] Yeah, and they just care about animals.

[1322] I recognize that.

[1323] They care about animals in the same way that you do.

[1324] They don't care about them more than you do.

[1325] I bet.

[1326] I mean, I don't eat meat.

[1327] I doubt that I care about animals more than you do.

[1328] I bet you you like animals more than I do.

[1329] I just you know, and for me, it's not a philosophical thing either.

[1330] It's not about, like, is it right or wrong to eat animals?

[1331] The truth is, I don't even know if I have an opinion on that question.

[1332] Yeah.

[1333] But I know what the situation is in America.

[1334] I know that 99 .9 % of the animals we come from factory farms.

[1335] I know that if you went to a factory farm, if I went to a firearm, if anybody listening, I mean, every single listener of this, if they went to a factory farm, maybe they'd still eat meat afterwards, but they would definitely say, oh, I don't like this.

[1336] Oh, yeah.

[1337] It's a, it's a horror show.

[1338] Yeah.

[1339] And so if we can do less of it, we should do less of it.

[1340] Great.

[1341] So I totally subscribe to that.

[1342] Do you think it's possible to ethically have a meat industry and also produce enough meat for the level of consumption that exists.

[1343] Is that even attainable?

[1344] I have been to farms that are really good, where I can imagine, like if I were a cow, if I can imagine myself into that position, I think, okay, here's the deal I'm getting.

[1345] I get to spend my life like this, like in this setting, engaging in all of my like species specific behaviors, hanging out with my pals, like eating food that I like, living a reasonably long life.

[1346] And I am killed in a way that I don't anticipate and is as painless as we can manage.

[1347] Yeah.

[1348] I would probably take that deal as opposed to not being born.

[1349] Right.

[1350] The problem is 99 .9 % of the animals we eat don't get that deal.

[1351] Yeah.

[1352] And the real problem is what you said, which is there are too many people who want to eat too much.

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] And it's only getting worse.

[1355] The amount of animal products that we consume now in the year 2019 is the same as if every person alive in the year, 1 ,700, ate 950 pounds of meat and drank 1 ,200 gallons of milk every day.

[1356] Oh, my God.

[1357] So some of that is because our meat and dairy habits have, like, gone through the ceiling.

[1358] Yeah.

[1359] And part of it is because our population has gone through the ceiling.

[1360] Yeah.

[1361] But this is our reality.

[1362] So, like, we could have a really interesting conversation about the ethics of meat eating and the abstract.

[1363] And I could tell you, man, if we had farms, they're like certain farms I visited.

[1364] Yeah, that seems okay to me. But we just can't if we're eating this amount.

[1365] amount of food with this number of people.

[1366] Yeah, but if everyone went down to, as you said, dinner or three days a week or two days a week, whatever, then it starts to get manageable.

[1367] Yeah, we could start to dismantle, like, this factory system and move back to what we all imagine.

[1368] Like, when we imagine farmers, we imagine, first of all, we imagine human beings, right?

[1369] There are not human beings in American animal agriculture anymore.

[1370] We had more farmers, I don't mean as relative to the population, not per capita, but as a real number.

[1371] There were more farmers during the Civil War than there are today, despite the population having increased 11 -fold.

[1372] Yes, become so mechanized.

[1373] Yeah, the whole point of factory farming is get rid of people and get rid of nature.

[1374] And then you can like turn serious profits.

[1375] So when we imagine farmers, we imagine humans.

[1376] We imagine like grass, sunlight, people who care about their animals.

[1377] People don't go into farming because they want to be cruel to animals.

[1378] People but they'll go into farming because they want to destroy the planet.

[1379] It's crazy.

[1380] Why would you do that?

[1381] People go into farming because they like animals and like the planet.

[1382] And they like the idea of providing, right?

[1383] I don't know if you'll like this given your history, but we have an area on I -5 if you're driving to San Francisco.

[1384] It's one of the biggest catalogs.

[1385] I know exactly what you're about to say.

[1386] I've been there.

[1387] Yeah, yeah.

[1388] And it is, man, the first time you see that, you're like, oh, I can't see the end of it.

[1389] And I know that my eye can see 20 miles.

[1390] You can't smell the end of it either.

[1391] Oh, it's in the, yeah, and they have to water the tops the cows because the birds will be on there just eating them a lot.

[1392] I mean, it is horrific.

[1393] But don't stop your car to look because, like, if you do, some guy's going to pull up in a pickup truck and say, keep it moving.

[1394] What are you doing?

[1395] Keep it moving.

[1396] Oh, really?

[1397] No, the secrecy of like animal agriculture in the United States is crazy.

[1398] If you wanted to know about any food, this water that we're drinking, whatever snack you've had, go get a bagel.

[1399] You could say to the guy who bakes it, hey, like, how do you do this?

[1400] What's up?

[1401] I guarantee they'll say, come on back.

[1402] I'll show you.

[1403] You mix the flour.

[1404] you do the water, da -da -da.

[1405] Yeah.

[1406] This is the exception.

[1407] It's like the military.

[1408] Like the level of secrecy.

[1409] And it got much, much worse after September 11th.

[1410] To trespass now on a farm is considered an act of domestic terrorism.

[1411] Oh, really?

[1412] Because what they proposed that someone would poison the food supply chain or something?

[1413] And nobody will ever be a more efficient poisoner of our food supply system than our food supply system.

[1414] Yeah.

[1415] You know, 38 million people a year get sick from foodborne illness from animal agriculture, almost exclusively.

[1416] You know, we have animals that require antibiotics to live.

[1417] You know, the turkeys that are sold in the United States, not some, not most, not 90%, 100 % of the turkeys that are sold in supermarkets in the United States are the product of artificial insemination because they've been bred to grow so big that they can't have sex anymore.

[1418] And like, this is our symbol of what's natural and a harvest and a bounty.

[1419] And I always find it interesting when people start to wince.

[1420] when talking about, like, a veggie burger, you know?

[1421] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[1422] Like, it's just not natural as like, but an animal that can't have sex and has to be.

[1423] I will say, I just to circle back, I do think in general, the other big issue for me is I do think, and this goes for alternative energy, anything, you cannot rely on people's shaming and ethics to steer us out of this.

[1424] Like, the market has to create options that are delicious, affordable, all this stuff.

[1425] And I do think things like Beyond Burger and Light Life and all these things, they really, they're solving the problem in a way.

[1426] I just think appealing to people's like guilt and everything, I just don't see that as the way out of this stuff.

[1427] Maybe I'm just cynical in nature, but.

[1428] I don't think that appealing to guilt is the way out.

[1429] I think appealing to people's own instincts is helpful.

[1430] I mean, I agree with you that as things change in like the marketplace, it just gets easier to make good decisions.

[1431] I also think we're capable of making good decisions on our own and like other social justice movements, you know, like look at what's happened with gay marriage in the last 10 years.

[1432] You know, those weren't the result of legislation.

[1433] I mean, ultimately, legislation followed the public will.

[1434] Yeah.

[1435] And it wasn't the result of any change in the marketplace.

[1436] It's because things happened from the ground up.

[1437] Conversations in families, conversations that escalated to being in media and culture.

[1438] So, individuals can't do this stuff alone.

[1439] And one of the problems is, like with climate change, if what it took to solve climate change was to stop, like, punching ourselves in the face, then we would have solved it already.

[1440] But we have to do less of things that are really good, you know, that we like, either that are pleasurable, like, flying or eating meat, or that even feel like ethically good.

[1441] Like, it feels good to see other parts of the world and have your perspective expand it.

[1442] I like the idea of taking my kids to other parts of the planet.

[1443] I like eating the kinds of foods my grandmother served me. But, you know, this is our situation, and it's dawning on us.

[1444] Yeah.

[1445] And people like us don't want to think of ourselves as science deniers.

[1446] I really don't want to think of ourselves as ignorant.

[1447] So then we have a choice.

[1448] Like, we can act on what we know, or we can not act on what we know.

[1449] Not because someone's shaming us.

[1450] Maybe nobody's telling us to do it at all, but because we have, like, an awakening.

[1451] I want to be part of the solution.

[1452] I want my kids to witness me being part of the solution, not because I'm self -righteous, but because I want them to have what I have.

[1453] I love my life.

[1454] I love being able to walk outside.

[1455] I love being able to experience the seasons.

[1456] I love coastal cities.

[1457] I want people, not only I'm related to, but halfway around the world who I'll never meet to have these great things.

[1458] I don't think that that's a kind of shame or a negative emotion, and I don't think it's something that has to be forced on us, but it does require like a collective shift, a new norm for how we think about these things and live.

[1459] Yeah.

[1460] You have a new book, which is also not fiction.

[1461] We are the weather.

[1462] We are the weather.

[1463] Yeah.

[1464] And what it's about, it must be about the climate.

[1465] It's about the climate and food.

[1466] Oh, okay.

[1467] So good.

[1468] We were already kind of talking in the realm.

[1469] Accidentally.

[1470] Perfect segue.

[1471] Yeah, it's about, it's not an argument that I'm making and it's not some conclusion that I reached and wanted to share.

[1472] I was having a hard time over the last couple of years thinking about climate change and knowing what I know, which is no more than you know.

[1473] I read newspapers sometimes.

[1474] I read magazines sometimes.

[1475] I listen to podcasts.

[1476] People forward me stuff.

[1477] I'm a citizen, you know, in the world.

[1478] And knowing what I know about climate change and caring as I care, not because I'm an especially sensitive guy.

[1479] I don't think of myself as an environmentalist.

[1480] I'm just like a person in the world who, likes living on this planet as it is and who has kids, which I think also influences my thinking, I started to feel a version of like this alienation that we were talking about before where I knew that there was something I should be doing.

[1481] Like I knew that I should be participating and I just wasn't.

[1482] And even worse, like my carbon footprint is worse than that of most science deniers.

[1483] You know, the people that it's so fun to point at and say, if it weren't But for you ignorant schmucks, like we would have solved this problem already.

[1484] Yeah.

[1485] It's not true.

[1486] In America, twice as many people believe in the existence of Bigfoot as denied the existence of climate change.

[1487] The problem is not that half of our country is ignorant.

[1488] Yeah, right.

[1489] The problem is that we're not acting on what we know.

[1490] Like, we know that the planet is in deep shit because of human activity.

[1491] And yet we have a hard time, like changing our activities collectively or individually.

[1492] I find it really hard.

[1493] You know, I just flew here from Toronto.

[1494] Right.

[1495] I'm flying back to Brooklyn tonight.

[1496] That's bad.

[1497] That's really bad for somebody who knows what he knows and cares as he cares.

[1498] Yeah.

[1499] So it's a struggle, but we have to engage with the struggle and not just, like, throw our hands up in the air and say, well, whatever.

[1500] You kind of hinted at it earlier, and my wife's on a show called The Good Place, which kind of explored this in a very interesting way, which is they kind of had discovered that the good place is like heaven.

[1501] basically, right?

[1502] And they had discovered no one had been admitted in the last 300 years or whatever it was.

[1503] And it's because the world has become such a complicated web that any decision you make, if you really want to track, you know, what impact it has downstream, it's almost impossible to not have casualties just by being alive.

[1504] Because everything is so complex and interwoven.

[1505] And so I think what's daunting about it is what you brought up earlier, which is like, If we're constantly evaluating, are we perfect?

[1506] We're going to be defeated immediately as opposed to like focusing on incremental steps or the best next step as opposed to, you know, the stakes of, it just feels overwhelming.

[1507] I completely agree.

[1508] And it's helpful to like simplify things as much as possible to acknowledge that we're going to cause harm pretty much whatever we do.

[1509] But not all harm is equal.

[1510] The industrial vegetable production is bad, but it's not nearly as bad as industrial animal agriculture.

[1511] Flying on a plane is bad.

[1512] It's not nearly as bad as flying on a private plane.

[1513] There's a hierarchy of how much destruction we're causing.

[1514] I just agree with you.

[1515] It's overwhelming.

[1516] And that feeling of being overwhelmed leads, I was going to say people, but I'll just say me, because it is my experience, to these two different modes.

[1517] one is we're fucked and one is we're going to be fine and the truth is we're not fucked and we're not going to be fine like we're in the beginning of this process of really extreme loss and loss that we care about like the loss of coastal cities the loss of life expectancy lives of children to climate drought food shortages climate related illnesses fires in California fires in California burning of the Amazon the melting of the ice sheets some of the loss has already been determined, but like the great, great majority of it hasn't.

[1518] And it will be determined by what we do.

[1519] And when I say we, it really is like people like me and you.

[1520] Yeah, I get easily defeatist about it, which is like, oh, I think the damage is done.

[1521] Now it's like buckle up for the ride.

[1522] I sometimes think that, you know.

[1523] Well, it's definitely easier to think that.

[1524] Yeah.

[1525] Something weirdly soothing about thinking that.

[1526] Yeah.

[1527] Like, we blew it.

[1528] Yeah.

[1529] It's kind of like when I would choose to go out on a vendor, I'm like, okay, we're fucked yeah let's see where we wake up in five days there's something weirdly liberating about that so what changed you in that context i was so miserable even in the desired state that it just didn't work anymore and i suppose you could you could apply that to this will become so miserable that we've got no choice but to act dramatically it's like i went and visited my mom last summer summer before in Hood River, Oregon, which is so beautiful, looks like the Hidden Valley Ranch label.

[1530] And Washington was on fire, Mount Hood was on fire.

[1531] And then there was also a fighter from Idaho.

[1532] Idaho was on fire.

[1533] It was all blowing into this valley.

[1534] And I was like, oh, no joke.

[1535] The world is on fire.

[1536] Like, you see it on the news, but to stand there and you couldn't breathe.

[1537] And I was like, oh, and it's in all directions.

[1538] Where would one even escape?

[1539] You sprint to the ocean.

[1540] And at that point, yeah, you got, you're going to act out of life or death, which is generally how also people get sober.

[1541] It's like generally takes till it's life or death and then, you know.

[1542] So we have a problem, which is by the time we reach that, it will be too late.

[1543] Yes.

[1544] I mean, in a way, in a funny way, Trump has kind of brought us to that place.

[1545] Like, you know, if Hillary had been president, I campaigned for Hillary.

[1546] I voted for Hillary.

[1547] Very, very disappointed when she wasn't elected.

[1548] If she'd been president, the U .S. would have remained in the Paris.

[1549] Climate Accords.

[1550] And like every single country in the world, except for Morocco and the Gambia, we wouldn't have met the goals of the Paris Climate Accords.

[1551] There's not a country in Europe.

[1552] There's not a country in Asia.

[1553] There's not a country in North America that's going to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accords.

[1554] But we would have felt kind of good and kind of complacent because our signature was going to be on the right line on the right document.

[1555] Trump, just through the force of his ignorance, I think is like awakening.

[1556] a wisdom in a lot of people, and the force of his apathy is awakening a kind of action.

[1557] I don't think we would have seen millions of kids in the streets if Hillary had been president.

[1558] That is the crazy thing about viewing history pulled out enough, where it's like, of course, now we all, us liberals somehow kind of think George W. Bush was great in some way, right?

[1559] Like, now I think he's kind of charming and cute.

[1560] I love to have a beer with him.

[1561] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1562] But I was aware at the time, it's like, well, thank God he was so reviled at the end of his presidency because it really paved weight for our first black president.

[1563] And that might have been another 40 years out had it not been for him.

[1564] So what is service he provided in some weird way?

[1565] And my glass half full opinion of Trump is like, we might get our first female president out of this.

[1566] Or we might get a real substantial commitment to the climate.

[1567] Or we might, you know.

[1568] So, yeah, in the long term, I don't think we know yet.

[1569] what the result is of that.

[1570] Well, you know, I find that, like, conversations about climate change tend to be about other people.

[1571] It just always becomes about somebody who isn't present.

[1572] Yeah.

[1573] So I'm curious just about you.

[1574] I'm the worst.

[1575] Well, when you were talking about this experience in Oregon, when there are all these fires and you had this moment of, like, holy shit, this is for real?

[1576] Yeah.

[1577] Did that, did it change you?

[1578] No. Why do you think it didn't change you?

[1579] I have this totally flawed, erroneous assessment of the situation.

[1580] situation.

[1581] This is what I tell myself.

[1582] And this is all to relieve myself of the guilt because I love off -roading and motorcycles.

[1583] I tell myself, hey man, it's 1920 and prohibition's coming.

[1584] It's coming.

[1585] The party's over.

[1586] So am I going to be the person that quits drinking two years before prohibition?

[1587] Or am I going to fucking be the last guy drinking?

[1588] You know what I'm saying?

[1589] I know that's so repugnant, I'm sure to a lot of people to hear me say that.

[1590] But it's truthful.

[1591] I go like, oh, this ride's about to end.

[1592] Everything's going to go electric.

[1593] That's obvious.

[1594] It's so clear.

[1595] I want them to invest.

[1596] all the money that goes into the DoD into renewable technologies.

[1597] I want that.

[1598] I think Tesla is the answer personally.

[1599] I'm like, no one's making a sacrifice to drive a Tesla.

[1600] It's a fucking awesome car, and it's a big win.

[1601] Why wouldn't someone do it?

[1602] That's the solution.

[1603] That's all coming.

[1604] These are the dog days of my fossil fuel life, and I'm going to enjoy it.

[1605] Is that, am I horrendous?

[1606] No, I've certainly never heard that before.

[1607] I mean, you're hastening the end, right?

[1608] Like, the more you do of these things, one of the problems with climate change, unlike prohibition, is it's a ticking clock.

[1609] And if we don't solve the problem, then we will never, by a certain time, and we will never be able to solve the problem because we enter into these positive feedback loops.

[1610] Yeah, they amplify each other.

[1611] You start letting more methane out of the swamps and the hierarchy.

[1612] And then you just, whatever you do, there's no going back.

[1613] Yeah.

[1614] So there is like a responsibility to act now, or there's an imperative to act now.

[1615] now.

[1616] I also don't know who these leaders are who are going to make the changes that you're talking about if they're not forced to.

[1617] And it's great to vote.

[1618] Voting is the most important thing one can do as an environmentalist, but we don't get that many chances to vote.

[1619] You know, we only vote for a president every four years.

[1620] Yeah.

[1621] And political change happens very slowly.

[1622] It's certainly like political change spreads more slowly than a fire.

[1623] Yeah.

[1624] And there are things that we can do now that will not only have real world consequences, but also push the culture.

[1625] So somebody like you, right?

[1626] Lots and lots and lots of people listen to this, to what you do.

[1627] You don't have to shame anybody.

[1628] You don't have to wag a finger.

[1629] I actually really like your approach of just admitting to your own.

[1630] Well, by the way, I live with someone who is as carbon neutral as you can get.

[1631] And another lie I tell myself, is like, oh, you add us up.

[1632] We're doing pretty amazing as a couple.

[1633] She might even be, you know, somehow absorbing carbon.

[1634] So that's a lie I tell myself.

[1635] tell myself, another one, because I'm going to own them all right now.

[1636] Yeah.

[1637] I also think humans by nature are fatalistic.

[1638] That's why religion works, is everyone thinks they're going to see the return of the Messiah in their lifetime that believes in that.

[1639] There's a lot of arrogance.

[1640] Everyone has thought they were going to witness the end of the world.

[1641] It's a pattern that humans have.

[1642] I don't know why we're prone to feeling guilt and shame and that we've ruined everything.

[1643] I think everyone's decided this is going to be the worst thing ever.

[1644] I am open.

[1645] There's a 10 % chance in my mind that, yeah, then everyone moves.

[1646] north.

[1647] Guess what?

[1648] The vast majority of the untainted, unspoiled, unsaturated with mercury and lead poisoning land on planet Earth is all Russia, Canada, the northern latitudes.

[1649] Utopia might be.

[1650] We were forced to move there.

[1651] It got warmer.

[1652] It was sustainable there.

[1653] We did it the right way this time.

[1654] We may look back and go, oh, thank God all that happens.

[1655] I know that sounds crazy, but there's 10 % of my brain that goes, yeah, this is the same thing and everyone's going to think it's so terrible and we're going to look back on somehow this, you know, again, I would not bet on that.

[1656] I would try to lobotomize that 10%, because it may be that for people like us, we will have the ability.

[1657] To move to Canada.

[1658] The great majority of humankind will not have that ability.

[1659] It doesn't have the ability now.

[1660] We're already seeing it.

[1661] Unfortunately, climate change is a problem where the people who are most responsible for it are going to be the last to really feel it.

[1662] Yeah.

[1663] And there's millions and millions of people suffering right now because of our reluctance to make small changes.

[1664] No one is asking anybody to like flip a switch and become a different kind of person.

[1665] You know, you said that you live to off -road and ride motorcycles.

[1666] You don't have to stop doing that.

[1667] Do that.

[1668] If that's the thing that you're crazy about and you love, do that.

[1669] You're not destroying the planet.

[1670] How often do you do it?

[1671] A couple times a week.

[1672] Oh, God, no. Maybe six times a year.

[1673] So do that.

[1674] And like, could you make changes in other places?

[1675] like food, you know, I'm not saying become a vegan tomorrow.

[1676] Right.

[1677] Like, that's hard.

[1678] And to ask that of yourself is almost setting yourself up for failure.

[1679] Can you just eat it at dinner?

[1680] Yeah, like, I'm open to that.

[1681] Yeah.

[1682] Yeah.

[1683] I think that we have this conversation in the wrong way that makes it feel.

[1684] Like, I'm going to have to give up everything I like being on planet Earth for.

[1685] Yeah, and you're really not.

[1686] And also, like, you want your kids to be able to enjoy the things that you enjoy.

[1687] Right.

[1688] And we can do that just with moderation.

[1689] Yeah, I'm like the gun guy who's like, you're coming for my guns because you want to get rid of a salt rifle.

[1690] Well, you know, unfortunately, that's the way everybody is now with the climate.

[1691] Like even like Elizabeth Warren had this like news clip that went around where she was like, corporations want you thinking about your light bulbs, want you thinking about your car choices.

[1692] I mean, as if there's anybody who doesn't give some thought to those things.

[1693] But, well, I'm here to tell you, no one's going to take away your car.

[1694] No one's going to take away your cheeseburger.

[1695] And I was like, she sounds like fucking Charlton Heston talking about a gun.

[1696] done.

[1697] And it's okay to admit that like we've gone over the top with consumption.

[1698] Yeah, we're in the dog days of Rome or something.

[1699] Yeah.

[1700] Like it's okay to say, like we don't need to reinvent life in some radical way.

[1701] We kind of just need to un -invent it.

[1702] To live a little bit more like our parents or grandparents live.

[1703] You don't need to never have meat again, but we also need to stop having like a massive brick of meat at the center of every single plate that we ever is put in front.

[1704] of us.

[1705] We don't need to stop flying, but we do need to like change how we fly.

[1706] I had this really, really moving experience that happened about two weeks ago.

[1707] I was in Brussels.

[1708] I was giving a reading from this book.

[1709] And at the end, there was a signing.

[1710] And a couple came up to me. They opened to the page where I normally signed, the title page, and it was filled with their handwriting.

[1711] And it's like, what's this?

[1712] And they said, well, we're getting married in a couple months.

[1713] And we decided tonight that we need to have some kind of plan, because if we don't have a plan, we're just just going to keep doing what we've always done, because that's what people do.

[1714] You do today, what you did yesterday, more or less.

[1715] And their plan was eat vegetarian unless served meat at a friend's house, eat vegan two days a week, have no more than two kids, and drive no more than 1 ,500 kilometers a year, this was in Europe.

[1716] And then instead of just having me sign it, they'd written a line that said, witness.

[1717] And they wanted me to say, oh, that's cool.

[1718] And I found it really charming, and it was fun to get an insight into who they are.

[1719] It feels very European, too.

[1720] in some way.

[1721] And then I realized, holy shit, like, I was the guy on the stage.

[1722] I'm the guy signing the book, and I don't have a plan.

[1723] And I went home to my hotel that night.

[1724] I took a piece of hotel stationery and wrote out of plan because I realized I'm that schmuck who says, yeah, I'm going to try to fly less, which means nothing.

[1725] If you say that, you just live like you live before, like, I'm going to try to drive less.

[1726] It means nothing, nothing.

[1727] It's empty.

[1728] And worse than empty, it's like pure narcissism.

[1729] You know, it's just virtue signaling.

[1730] Look at me, I'm the good guy.

[1731] Yeah.

[1732] So my plan was to not eat animal products for breakfast and lunch, and at dinner, I'm a vegetarian.

[1733] I'm not going to fly for vacations in 2020.

[1734] Like, I have to fly for work, or I feel like I do.

[1735] And there are times like this where it feels really worth it.

[1736] Fly because you can expand the conversation about these issues.

[1737] But I don't need to fly for vacation.

[1738] I live in New York.

[1739] I can take my kids on a train to like a million awesome places where we will have no less fun and maybe even like sharing the story of why we're taking the train could add something yeah i'm not going to take more than three cab rides a week and i'm going to give a day of the week to volunteering for 350 .org which is an environmental organization that i really believe in and working in the new york city public school system to talk to kids about like what's going on and what's the reality and what is your own power you know inside of this situation that can feel so alienating and distant and depressing.

[1740] 350 .org.

[1741] Yeah.

[1742] My only point is you don't have to be dishonest about what your limits are.

[1743] You say I love biking and I love off -roading.

[1744] So that's like on the other side of your limit.

[1745] Just like keep that away.

[1746] Yeah, it's almost like people who go to SLA, right?

[1747] They have to define sobriety because you can't not have sex, right?

[1748] Or if you're in a relationship or you get married.

[1749] So there's circles, right?

[1750] And you draw these circles and you decide for some guys, it's no hand jobs at massage parlors anymore.

[1751] And that's the final circle.

[1752] And then their sobriety is if they don't do that, then they're sober.

[1753] And it's a very similar approach.

[1754] That's a really powerful.

[1755] I didn't know that.

[1756] Yeah.

[1757] I like that.

[1758] But yeah, you can define what your circle is and what you're going to stay inside of.

[1759] Yeah, giving it words and like numbers.

[1760] I'm rarely encouraged.

[1761] And this is having an effect.

[1762] Good.

[1763] This is the thing.

[1764] Like we're all on the same team.

[1765] And not everyone can.

[1766] contribute in the same ways you know like well i can admit i'm in the best possible scenario to do it better because i have resources and most people don't i'm not scrambling to just keep my head just barely above water in a way that so many americans are that you i get it like i'm sorry yeah that's important but fuck man i can barely get these kids to and from and then pay for everything well i i'm really glad that you brought that up because i think there's a misunderstanding about a lot of these things being elitist when they're really not.

[1767] So Harvard Medical School did a study in 2018 and found that it's $750 a year cheaper to eat as a vegetarian than as a meat eater as to eat a healthy vegetarian diet as opposed to a healthy meat -based diet.

[1768] And it's $250 a year cheaper to eat a healthy vegetarian diet than an unhealthy meat diet like burgers.

[1769] McDonald's, yeah.

[1770] Two and a half times as many people who make less than $30 ,000 a year describe themselves as vegetarian than people who make more than $75 ,000 a year.

[1771] Oh, really?

[1772] And people of color are disproportionately vegetarian.

[1773] So you often hear people say like, yeah, but it's a privileged, like white guys thing to talk about eating less meat, but it's actually privileged white guys who level that complaint most often.

[1774] It's just not in keeping with reality.

[1775] There are two really important caveats.

[1776] One is there are people in the country who just don't have access to fresh food.

[1777] Yeah.

[1778] Right.

[1779] Like live in urban food deserts.

[1780] And that's a huge problem that we need to solve.

[1781] It's wrong.

[1782] There should not be anybody who doesn't have access to fresh good food, but we shouldn't just point at them as a justification for our not changing, which is often done.

[1783] The other point I would make is even if it's cheaper, it's still harder for most people to eat less meat because we're used to doing it in this way.

[1784] Well, it's so convenient.

[1785] There's a drive -through on every corner.

[1786] Yeah, or you just go to supermarket, buy like burger and put it in a pan and that's it.

[1787] It'll get full.

[1788] And it's like a lie to pretend that it's easy to just like completely change the way that you think about food.

[1789] I find it hard and I have all the like privilege in the world and all the time in the world.

[1790] And if I find it hard, then I know that other people are going to find it hard.

[1791] So we just have to find ways of doing it incrementally and like applauding each other's efforts and achievements rather than like you're the asshole who tells me this but also does that.

[1792] Yeah.

[1793] Now I really need a burger to regulate my feelings.

[1794] You shame me. Now I'm going to sprint towards in and out.

[1795] Well, you're a goddamn pleasure.

[1796] I'm really glad you made your way from Toronto here.

[1797] Really appreciate it.

[1798] We are the weather.

[1799] We are the weather.

[1800] And when does it come out?

[1801] It's already out.

[1802] It's already out.

[1803] About two weeks.

[1804] Two weeks.

[1805] Okay, great.

[1806] We are the weather.

[1807] Is it on audiobook?

[1808] Yeah.

[1809] In fact, yours truly.

[1810] No way.

[1811] You have a very soothing advice.

[1812] Oh, this is a done deal then because I listen every night to an audio book.

[1813] Yeah.

[1814] Okay, great.

[1815] I'm going to audible when I get home tonight and I'm going to get it and I'm going to listen to it.

[1816] So thank you so much for coming in.

[1817] I wish you a ton of luck and talk to more idiots like me and slowly.

[1818] There's only one idiot like you.

[1819] All right.

[1820] Thank you.

[1821] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1822] I'm enjoying a rare indulgence right now in the trailer.

[1823] Still on our field trip.

[1824] I got you three cookies from catering.

[1825] You did.

[1826] I broke my fast and had some thinking, oh, I'll have a bite.

[1827] Now I've had at least half of one of those cookies, maybe even a full one.

[1828] They're pretty tasty.

[1829] Yeah, that chocolate.

[1830] Anytime the chocolate looks like it's already melted in there, even though it's not fresh out of the oven.

[1831] That's very appealing to me. Yeah, it has a nice mix of crispy and soft.

[1832] A lot of butter.

[1833] It's good.

[1834] It's not good.

[1835] What are how many people are pulling into coming?

[1836] go right now and buying some chocolate chip cookies do you think they have good cookies at come and go oh the best no yeah okay yeah they have cookies and cream at come and go oh gross i'd love my come and go t -shirt by the way yeah i think they thought like they were sending me like a joke yeah jokes on them and me i think it's a really cool shirt it is a cool shirt and it's pink it's pink which i don't own many pink tops, if any.

[1837] You almost need that pink pastel backdrop to put a word like cum, K -U -M on it, and for it to not be aggressive.

[1838] Offensive.

[1839] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1840] They designed that nicely.

[1841] Like if the shirt was black and it said come in gold.

[1842] In white.

[1843] Oh, in gold.

[1844] You'd be like, ooh, too agro for me. Yeah.

[1845] Those are my colors.

[1846] I just put it in my world.

[1847] Sure.

[1848] Yeah.

[1849] I really want you to declare some colors, by the way.

[1850] I think it's added to my life.

[1851] All right.

[1852] Did either parent, like my poor dad, it was decided that he liked elephants?

[1853] Oh, I know.

[1854] Yes.

[1855] In every birthday, Father's Day Christmas, I just went to the mall and I tried to find a statue of an elephant.

[1856] And I did.

[1857] I bet I personally bought him 36 elephants.

[1858] And his poor house was, there was hundreds of elephants.

[1859] Everyone would get them now.

[1860] I know.

[1861] Come in.

[1862] You should be Nick.

[1863] I am.

[1864] I'm very sorry.

[1865] If anyone follows Instagram and I posted a picture of the man on set who humiliates me physically.

[1866] Sure.

[1867] He's now in the trail or humiliating me in front of Monica and Rob.

[1868] It's the best way to do it.

[1869] I didn't mean to do that.

[1870] I'm really sorry.

[1871] This is Nick from season two.

[1872] Bless his mess.

[1873] Now, do you know, Monica, that Nick and I have elevated our friendship.

[1874] We've got a work friendship.

[1875] Okay.

[1876] But we have a loose plan to work out in my basement.

[1877] Oh, my God.

[1878] That I actually am really excited for me. Me too.

[1879] I'm looking forward to.

[1880] I can make some real strides working out with each other.

[1881] Some real gains.

[1882] Yeah.

[1883] Yeah, I'm nervous because you're clearly much stronger than me, but I'm going to put on a good show.

[1884] Obviously, we're going to be trying to impress each other, but we can't get hurt.

[1885] It's going to be.

[1886] No. No one can get taken out.

[1887] I mean, ideally, both of us have a hard time walking the next day, but not a full out.

[1888] Yeah, no. Are they calling for me?

[1889] Yes.

[1890] They are.

[1891] They'd like to see me on set?

[1892] Yes.

[1893] Okay.

[1894] Well, we'll put a pin in this, but a great stop by.

[1895] from Nick.

[1896] Yeah.

[1897] Thanks for the stop.

[1898] No, thanks for having me. I didn't mean to stumble in like...

[1899] No, well, that should be your autobiography.

[1900] Stumbling into fun shit.

[1901] Right on.

[1902] So as soon as you're ready, we'll see your own.

[1903] But anyways, back to the elephants.

[1904] When he died and I went back to his apartment to like, I don't even know, tell my brother what was in there, you know?

[1905] I did see all those elephants and I was like, it's kind of sad.

[1906] Did you take any?

[1907] To see a collection of someone who's no longer...

[1908] Yeah.

[1909] But it's also sweet.

[1910] In retrospect, I should have grabbed some more stuff.

[1911] Luckily, my brother went back two weeks later.

[1912] I'm like cleaned everything out and he took stuff.

[1913] And then he ultimately sent me all of his coins.

[1914] Or maybe it was my dad's buddy sent me all of his sobriety coins.

[1915] The box that's holding those coins is an elephant.

[1916] So I guess I did get one of the elephants.

[1917] And then also in the girls' room, the Babar picture in the girls' room, was my dad's.

[1918] It was?

[1919] Uh -huh.

[1920] Isn't that cute?

[1921] Oh, that is so sweet.

[1922] Wow, that's poster's really held up.

[1923] And you know what?

[1924] He probably only liked elephants so -so.

[1925] Barely.

[1926] I barely.

[1927] Especially the more that he accumulated.

[1928] Uh -huh.

[1929] Okay.

[1930] Jonathan Saffron Fow -Wer.

[1931] You have the easiest time saying Fow -er.

[1932] Fow -er.

[1933] I want to say Foyer or Fourier.

[1934] I think I was mispronouncing it for a long time.

[1935] I was calling him Foyer, but that's wrong.

[1936] Dennis Rodman Foyer.

[1937] That was what I was calling him.

[1938] Yeah.

[1939] I thought he had a lovely energy and was really nice.

[1940] and interesting and smart, Princeton, Unifile.

[1941] Big time Unifile.

[1942] He did this thing that Bill Cosby famously did on stage, which was he sat down, which is not what a comedian is supposed to do.

[1943] You're supposed to take a position of authority and power and control the audience.

[1944] But Bill Cosby had so much confidence, he just sat on a chair and told you a story.

[1945] And he was in that time, the best comedian out there.

[1946] Not that we're comparing what those two did.

[1947] in life, only the one comparison.

[1948] Cosby is a vile piece of shit.

[1949] Also a brilliant fucking comedian, one of the best ever.

[1950] Yeah, he is.

[1951] And uniquely positioned himself in a beta position while doing comedy, which is still worth recognizing.

[1952] Oh, yeah.

[1953] Yeah, I'm just making it clear.

[1954] Oh, yeah.

[1955] I love this notion that you can't say, like, you know, Cosby was a good comedian.

[1956] Like, what?

[1957] I think you can.

[1958] Well, right, but I mean, you've got to say, oh, also, I think he's a piece of of shit.

[1959] Well, you can't just say I think he's a good comedian.

[1960] Now, I didn't say I think he's a good human.

[1961] If my statement is, I think he's a good human, we've got some problems.

[1962] Yeah, but if I say he's a great comedian, I don't know, it doesn't need an asterisk or does it?

[1963] I think it does if there's like horrific stuff attached.

[1964] Like saying Hitler's a great painter.

[1965] Yeah, I think you have to say, and also, now again, I don't think Hitler was a great painter, but he was certainly a better painter than I am.

[1966] Have you ever seen any of his painting?

[1967] I've never seen any, no. I want to say in the book, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, they show some of his paintings in there.

[1968] You know, he's in Vienna or whatever, trying to be of artists.

[1969] And they're pretty good.

[1970] They're, you know, they're good.

[1971] Yeah, they're not.

[1972] They're much better than I could do.

[1973] Wow.

[1974] What if he had just become a painter?

[1975] Yeah.

[1976] Wow.

[1977] Much better for the world.

[1978] But you also think of all the things that have come out of World War II.

[1979] It just set the world in such a different direction, the United Nations, and Israel being its own country.

[1980] country and nuclear fission and all these weird things, vulcanization of synthetic rubber.

[1981] The whole world's different without World War II.

[1982] So if he's only a painter, better, but also, who knows, we might be like back 40 years.

[1983] Or we don't know this is a sliding door situation.

[1984] Textbook sliding door.

[1985] Also, maybe everyone still ends up in the exact same place.

[1986] Just their different equifinality.

[1987] That was, wow, we love equifanality.

[1988] That's going to be our new word.

[1989] We're going to say it in every fact check.

[1990] We're going to, I find that I have a desire to explain that concept often.

[1991] And I don't have the word for it.

[1992] And now I do.

[1993] I always talk about Kristen and I took radically different routes to the same house with the same kids.

[1994] That's equifinality.

[1995] Well, that's aquafinality.

[1996] That's aqua finality.

[1997] Yeah, yeah.

[1998] Don't get it myself.

[1999] All rivers lead back to the ocean.

[2000] Aquafinality.

[2001] But Jonathan.

[2002] Yeah, Jonathan.

[2003] What was going to say about?

[2004] him.

[2005] The reason I brought up Cosby was he refused to modulate his energy to meet mine.

[2006] Yeah.

[2007] Which was awesome.

[2008] Yeah.

[2009] Because I had to kind of come down to his energy.

[2010] Uh -huh.

[2011] And I loved existing at his energy.

[2012] It was very thoughtful.

[2013] Yeah.

[2014] But it was funny, though, because in the room, I felt that.

[2015] Yeah.

[2016] He's not getting, like, riled up by this.

[2017] Or his focus is small, it seems.

[2018] Which, yeah, it was just cool to witness.

[2019] But then when I was listening, I did not feel that at all.

[2020] And we've had the opposite where someone's very animated and physically energetic.

[2021] Yeah.

[2022] In person.

[2023] And their voice, when we hear it back, it's like, oh, there's not the same energy level.

[2024] Yeah.

[2025] They're not commensurate.

[2026] It's just fascinating.

[2027] But anyways, he was so darn good.

[2028] And he really is one of the handful of guests where afterwards I was like, I might have to change who I am a little bit.

[2029] Make some changes.

[2030] Yeah.

[2031] Yeah, it was compelling.

[2032] Very.

[2033] And because he's not, he's not preaching.

[2034] No, he's not preachy.

[2035] That's how it gets through to you.

[2036] Yeah, he's not saying anyone has to go to any extreme.

[2037] In fact, he's saying the opposite.

[2038] He's saying, you don't do that.

[2039] That's actually, you're not going to reel to any results.

[2040] Yeah, don't go vegan.

[2041] Yeah, if you don't, if that's not anything in your realm of possibility, don't make that your goal.

[2042] But, yeah, one meal a day.

[2043] Yeah, for me, it would be the commitment to cut my meat.

[2044] consumption in half lunch i generally have some chicken breasts and some kind of vegetable right and then at dinner time i generally again have a chicken breast and some kind of vegetable or or a meat breast or a human breast oh if things go well are we allowed to eat human breasts yes if both parties are implicit do you think whenever you think about the alive situation like the people who got in the plane crashed in the andy's and had to eat one another uh -huh or the dalmer pass.

[2045] These famous, these are historic episodes of cannibalism.

[2046] Oh.

[2047] Always curious.

[2048] What's the first body part you eat?

[2049] Because I'm wondering if titties would taste good.

[2050] I mean, they certainly look good and they feel good.

[2051] You would try that one.

[2052] I feel like I would try those first, but do you think they would taste weirdest?

[2053] They're fat.

[2054] Yeah, yummy.

[2055] Well, we love our bone and ribbyes with the fat.

[2056] Marbled fat.

[2057] But I'd probably eat like the thigh.

[2058] Go with the chicken approach.

[2059] You know why?

[2060] Because prosciutto, I think, comes from the thigh.

[2061] The thigh.

[2062] I could be really wrong about that.

[2063] Yeah.

[2064] But I do like prosciutto.

[2065] The loin, a tender loin, a cow is this inner your loins.

[2066] But I think if I had to like spread someone's legs and then eat around their loin, I probably would feel gross.

[2067] You would take bites right out of the carcass.

[2068] I would carve some off and put it over a fire.

[2069] Are we allowed to do that?

[2070] Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[2071] Oh, oh, okay.

[2072] You can prepare.

[2073] You can cook it?

[2074] Oh, okay.

[2075] I think they have fire.

[2076] Cheek.

[2077] You know, people eat pig cheek.

[2078] I bet your cheeks tastes delicious.

[2079] You think?

[2080] Yeah.

[2081] You got kind of chubby cheeks.

[2082] I do, yeah.

[2083] Well, I don't want anything tendingy, ropy, rubber bandy tasting.

[2084] I'm going to stick with leg.

[2085] Okay.

[2086] Okay, but Jonathan.

[2087] Yeah, Jonathan.

[2088] Oh, no, wait.

[2089] So we're going to lower our consumption.

[2090] Yeah.

[2091] We're going to both.

[2092] And there will probably be a New Year's resolution for me. I've been trying to eat less meat.

[2093] Already?

[2094] Yeah, ever since we had them on.

[2095] And how's that been going?

[2096] Well, remember, I think I don't eat much meat?

[2097] Yeah, that's not true.

[2098] I still think I don't.

[2099] Although I had chicken last night.

[2100] What did you have for lunch today?

[2101] I didn't eat anything.

[2102] I've had two cookies today.

[2103] Oh, boy.

[2104] Oopsies.

[2105] That's not what for your would want for you.

[2106] Yeah, I'm going to replace meat with cookies.

[2107] Okay, that's a bad plan.

[2108] Then I'm going to eat your belly.

[2109] Yeah, you should.

[2110] It'll taste like cookies.

[2111] It'll taste like cookies of milk.

[2112] Y 'all.

[2113] We've got to make an actual list like he suggested.

[2114] Wobby Wob's going to make one.

[2115] Yeah, the three of us are going to make.

[2116] I think we should set the goal as New Year's.

[2117] Okay.

[2118] New Year's, we're going to make our list.

[2119] We're going to post it.

[2120] And then if people want to make lists, they can do the same.

[2121] Yeah.

[2122] Yeah.

[2123] Okay.

[2124] So you said that when Sederis was on that he was talking about book signings and stuff and that he wrote, I hope you get raped in the ass.

[2125] Something like that.

[2126] It was something like that, but not that.

[2127] Okay, what was it?

[2128] Okay, so he said when he was signing one person's, he must have drawn a picture of Snoopy in a barn or something.

[2129] He was like, oh, that's Snoopy.

[2130] Where Snoopy is at a dog house?

[2131] No, it's a whore house your mother works at.

[2132] And look at those people in line.

[2133] What are they doing?

[2134] Oh, Snoopy's in line to fuck your mother in the ass.

[2135] There we go.

[2136] There we know.

[2137] I knew someone's getting fucked in the ass.

[2138] But it's not saying, I hope.

[2139] That's true.

[2140] And he didn't say the R word.

[2141] Yeah.

[2142] And I want to really set the record straight.

[2143] He didn't not say that.

[2144] Maybe you should just cut that part out that I said.

[2145] Okay.

[2146] So you said that in the 30 % range of writers on staff in L .A. are Jewish.

[2147] Mm. And that Jewish people make up 2 % of the population.

[2148] But we don't know.

[2149] What percentage of the writer's room?

[2150] Yeah.

[2151] Yeah, we don't.

[2152] There's no stat on that.

[2153] There isn't.

[2154] But there's a lot of Jewish copywriters.

[2155] There's a lot of them.

[2156] Disproportionate to the population at large.

[2157] I think that's great.

[2158] Yeah.

[2159] So do I. But in 2013, Pew Research, very trusted brands.

[2160] Yeah, that's very.

[2161] Release the study of the U .S. Jewish population.

[2162] And I read this in a 2018 article, so my guess is there hasn't been updated research since 2013.

[2163] But it's kind of hard to define Jewish.

[2164] Sure.

[2165] So it says, if you define Jewish only by those who practice the religion.

[2166] Oh, fuck that.

[2167] Pew counted 4 .2 million adult Jewish Americans or 1 .8 % of the total U .S. adult population.

[2168] Mm -hmm.

[2169] The estimated population would grow by 1 .2 million if you include people of no religion who consider themselves Jewish in a cultural or secular way and have at least one Jewish parent.

[2170] Mm -hmm.

[2171] There are another 1 .3 million children being raised at least partially Jewish and religious.

[2172] living in households with at least one Jewish adult.

[2173] Totaling those groups, you reach 6 .7 million Jewish people all ages in the U .S. in 2013.

[2174] Mm, okay.

[2175] Do you know what the percentage is?

[2176] 6 million, 300 million, 5%.

[2177] I don't know.

[2178] I think so.

[2179] Okay, great.

[2180] I think.

[2181] Oh, you were right.

[2182] This is one of those moments.

[2183] The rare moments.

[2184] Well, this is a rare moment where I was like, oh, he was right.

[2185] That's cool.

[2186] Well, fine.

[2187] I'm excited to hear.

[2188] Because you said the Scandinavians have a word for not too much and not too little.

[2189] Oh, what is it?

[2190] Fuggy?

[2191] It's Lagom.

[2192] Or Lagoon.

[2193] Lagoon.

[2194] I don't know.

[2195] It's L -A -G -O -M.

[2196] Oh, wow.

[2197] Hey, come in.

[2198] Nick's back.

[2199] Oh, shit.

[2200] I got another job.

[2201] No, it's just come to you.

[2202] We're just a couple of minutes away.

[2203] Okay.

[2204] Yes.

[2205] Nick is telling us, a couple minutes away.

[2206] Yeah, another update.

[2207] Nick's in and out of here.

[2208] I was thinking about it.

[2209] I just want to give a shout out to all the ladies that gave us love on your post.

[2210] Oh, okay.

[2211] Did everyone hear that?

[2212] Nick's grateful for the love that was shown of the picture of him.

[2213] Go ahead, Nick.

[2214] Just put in your own words.

[2215] Well, I mean, it was really a picture of us, but...

[2216] Yeah, but mostly you.

[2217] Never been a social media guy, but if I was, please understand I'd take the time to message everybody individually and let you know that.

[2218] I think you're cute, too.

[2219] I believe he would do that.

[2220] Man, you're expecting Nick to only delivered visually.

[2221] Because a guy that's that handsome generally isn't also going to be a sweetheart.

[2222] That's true.

[2223] And a gentleman.

[2224] That's true.

[2225] And funny, hence why we're going to work out together in the basement.

[2226] To tell jokes?

[2227] We'll do a lot of things.

[2228] We'll be nice to each other.

[2229] We'll be courteous to one another.

[2230] We'll spot each other.

[2231] Yeah.

[2232] Oh, my goodness.

[2233] We'll watch each other's form to make sure no one's going to get hurt.

[2234] Definitely.

[2235] And we'll help limber each other up, maybe even.

[2236] Are we going to sell tickets to this?

[2237] We should just do a live show or Nick.

[2238] And I lift.

[2239] All right.

[2240] Well, I'll try to wrap this up in the next five.

[2241] Okay.

[2242] All right.

[2243] Cheers.

[2244] Oh, I couldn't love them more.

[2245] I'm so, I have such a crush on him.

[2246] Okay.

[2247] Legome.

[2248] Legome.

[2249] Well, you know what?

[2250] Nick is legome.

[2251] Yes.

[2252] Not too much or not too little.

[2253] That's so true.

[2254] I go too far.

[2255] Like, I find out where the line is by stepping over it sporadically.

[2256] Sure.

[2257] I've yet to see Nick step over that line.

[2258] And he's dancing on fucking razor blades.

[2259] I mean, he's doing a good job.

[2260] walk in a tightrope.

[2261] He's doing good job.

[2262] Okay.

[2263] Legome is an overarching concept heavily ingrained in the Swedish psyche.

[2264] Loosely translated as not too much and not too little.

[2265] Just right.

[2266] Oh, very Goldilocks.

[2267] Very Goldilocks.

[2268] I wonder if that's a skin and even story.

[2269] I wonder.

[2270] I bet it is.

[2271] It feels very.

[2272] White.

[2273] Yeah.

[2274] Very white.

[2275] Legome is about finding a balance that works for you.

[2276] Yeah.

[2277] I'm so the opposite of Lagome.

[2278] That's true The antithesis of lagome The current murder capital of America Is East St. Louis, Illinois Illinois St. Louis, Illinois.

[2279] It's called East St. Louis.

[2280] Ew.

[2281] And it's in Illinois And it has a murder rate per 1 ,000 population.

[2282] 1 .13 So 1 .13 people out of every thousand will get murdered there.

[2283] Okay.

[2284] Okay.

[2285] Average number of murders 30.

[2286] In that town, annually?

[2287] I assume.

[2288] Okay.

[2289] Oh, okay.

[2290] I feel so embarrassed.

[2291] Oh, no. Because when he was telling his story, I assumed that the substitute teacher was a female.

[2292] Oh, yeah.

[2293] And it was a male.

[2294] And you're so embarrassed by that.

[2295] I am embarrassed.

[2296] I should be embarrassed.

[2297] That's embarrassing.

[2298] No. It's very anti -feminist.

[2299] What's interesting is there's a couple layers there Because one I was immediately going to say like I didn't do that But I'd love to do that You know Like I generally make it I fall into the stereotype Yeah I think because I knew they were making an explosive device Oh I thought that's more of a guy teacher thing to do Oh you did another stereotype Yeah Which I got I'm gonna go out on a limb You can take me to court over it I think guys are more into pyrotechnics than women I just do say so yes so but i do believe now that i think about it that he was saying that the experiment was already set i think it was his science teachers you know i think i went to the stereotype of stem i was like oh it's a science teacher it's probably a guy oh wow so in in that case i'm not embarrassed right yeah no you did it right but i didn't because it was a substitute teacher that's the part yeah i generally do think of substitutes as being women i feel like there were more females substitutes.

[2300] But mind you, there were more female elementary school teachers in general than male.

[2301] Well, and I will say this.

[2302] When he's telling me the story, I am picturing my high school physics class.

[2303] Like, that's the room I have in my head.

[2304] And I had a fee, all my science teachers were female.

[2305] They were.

[2306] Yeah.

[2307] Well, that's great.

[2308] So maybe I'm just extra feminist and I'm like, only females can do science classes.

[2309] But here's a bigger global debate, which is if you're going to take a guess at something, you should guess.

[2310] whatever the percentage favors.

[2311] You'd be a dumbass not to.

[2312] Like if I've got money on $1 ,000, I'm going to guess whether the science teacher is male or female.

[2313] And I happen to know that 70 % of science teachers in America are male.

[2314] That doesn't make me anti -feminist to say male.

[2315] That's just statistically the best guess.

[2316] Well, yeah, but we don't know that that's true.

[2317] We don't know that it is.

[2318] We do know that STEM is drastically more populated by males in college.

[2319] It's a big issue that we're trying to address.

[2320] Trying to get more females in STEM.

[2321] Yeah.

[2322] And then it becomes this, like if you're guessing, it's logical to guess that it would be a male.

[2323] There's not a moral dilemma there.

[2324] It's a statistical probability that you're betting on.

[2325] I mean, I guess.

[2326] And also, like I said, every single one of my science teachers were female.

[2327] Yeah.

[2328] So.

[2329] That's great.

[2330] Thank you.

[2331] Pause.

[2332] Pause.

[2333] Because this is going to be such a punctuated fact check because we keep leaving the trailer to go shoot scenes.

[2334] And then things happen.

[2335] And now we're talking about the different things that women can use for their menstrual cycle.

[2336] And I didn't realize that you can wear undies.

[2337] Thanks, underwear.

[2338] Thanks.

[2339] If you're listening, I'd love some more.

[2340] Oh, wow.

[2341] And you're saying that your drennial tampon user nocturnal diaper wear.

[2342] That's right.

[2343] I wouldn't call it a diaper.

[2344] Okay, while your mouth is packed What kind of soup did you get?

[2345] That's another thing.

[2346] We stopped for soup.

[2347] Here's the best part about being on a film set is there's food all the time And now there's a soup bar And I had a meatball soup, Wobby Wob had meatball soup.

[2348] What did you have?

[2349] Chicken and wild rice.

[2350] Oh, was it great?

[2351] It was really nice.

[2352] Oh, good.

[2353] I mean, I would give the soup I just ate 8 and a half.

[2354] Rob?

[2355] You'd say 7 or 8.

[2356] Okay, and you're a foodie.

[2357] I should have gotten that.

[2358] What would you give yours is a 6 and a half?

[2359] Yeah.

[2360] Okay.

[2361] And I wish I'd tried the cake.

[2362] Asian potato.

[2363] Yeah, that sounds, smells nice.

[2364] Yeah.

[2365] And we're going to get interrupted in a minute because Armando, who's the sweetest human being in the world, has prepared a special treat that when you visit, I make sure that he makes for you.

[2366] Sounds so busy.

[2367] What it's me, not you.

[2368] You don't come here and go, Armando, can I have the banana wrap?

[2369] But he's going to make it.

[2370] Go into your car.

[2371] Oh, come in.

[2372] Banana delivery Oh it's Nick Oh my God Nick's what are you doing here It wouldn't be a comedy thing That's true You need to come The rule of threes Yes Okay We'll see you again Nick Later What were we saying Are you embarrassed for me When you watch me act Like when you're on set No And you have the headset Well you're embarrassed When I sing Or do a character voice You're a really good actor Singer I can't say that No not a good singer I'm not a good singer.

[2373] And you're not making crazy faces and staring straight at me when you're acting.

[2374] But in that particular scene, I was having to play a little disheveled.

[2375] So I was making some bigger choices.

[2376] But you're staring straight at me and like you're testing me. You know?

[2377] Oh, I get it.

[2378] So maybe we're on to something.

[2379] Maybe you're more nervous about that I'm expecting some reaction from you.

[2380] And you're like, I don't know how to give you what you want.

[2381] That might be it.

[2382] That's how I feel when people play guitar and sing.

[2383] You know, and they look right at you.

[2384] while they're doing it.

[2385] That's what you're doing.

[2386] But again, I don't mind looking at them singing and playing guitar.

[2387] I start panicking about what my feedback's supposed to be.

[2388] So it's really my own insecurity.

[2389] Yeah.

[2390] It might be that.

[2391] Oh, that could be.

[2392] We just went on the wall.

[2393] Oh, yay.

[2394] Come in.

[2395] Oh, yes.

[2396] The party continues.

[2397] Thank you so much.

[2398] Thank you, Armando.

[2399] Oh, you sweet son of a bitch.

[2400] I love you.

[2401] Thank you, Armando.

[2402] Oh, our treat arrived.

[2403] I can't eat this on here.

[2404] I'm going to take one bite.

[2405] No one can listen to this fact check.

[2406] This is a nightmare.

[2407] So I think the last thing we were really talking about was the substitute teacher and feminism.

[2408] You know, is it anti -feminist to just be talking about statistics?

[2409] Yeah.

[2410] I don't think so.

[2411] It's not about my experience with science teachers.

[2412] It's my experience with substitute teachers, I think.

[2413] And I would like to know stat.

[2414] Like, what's the percentage of female and male?

[2415] I think in general there are more female teachers than male.

[2416] And then I think in general there are more male STEM teachers than female STEM teachers.

[2417] I guess all I'm asking you to do is to do a hypothetical.

[2418] Let's say it is a fact that there are far more female substitutes, and you thought of a female.

[2419] And let's say it's a fact that there's more male STEM teachers.

[2420] Why is that wrong to guess the one that's in the highest percentage?

[2421] I don't think there's a, it's not like a moral dilemma, is it?

[2422] No. But you also don't know the percentage.

[2423] Do you want to make a bet right now?

[2424] I'm not like, oh, I hope it's women.

[2425] Kind of, though, right?

[2426] You hope that there is as many female STEM teachers as male STEM teachers.

[2427] Well, I would love for that to be the case, but I'm not saying that's what it is.

[2428] I'm not arguing with you saying there are more female or the same amount even.

[2429] I just don't know what it is.

[2430] You don't know.

[2431] And you don't know either.

[2432] No, I believe that to be true.

[2433] So when I'm making my guess, it's based on this, what I believe.

[2434] leave is true.

[2435] Do you go to statistically what's most probable?

[2436] But in your mind.

[2437] I mean, we can find out a stat on that.

[2438] Do you want to do it really quick?

[2439] Just ask.

[2440] Yeah, let me just ask.

[2441] What percentage of high school STEM teachers are male?

[2442] National data show that 77 % of all teachers are women.

[2443] 9 % are Hispanic, 7 % are black.

[2444] Okay, so right out of the gates, we agree.

[2445] More women are teachers.

[2446] There are many more female STEM teachers now than 20 years ago.

[2447] Over the last two decades of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, teacher field has become much more female, slightly more diverse, and more qualified.

[2448] Perhaps most notably, the percentage of female STEM teachers has dramatically increased from 43 % in 1988, which is roughly when his story took place, to 64 % in 2012.

[2449] 64%.

[2450] So now you would be smartest to guess it's a female.

[2451] email, STEM teacher.

[2452] But in 1988, 57 % of them were males.

[2453] Yeah.

[2454] Yeah.

[2455] Well, I feel...

[2456] We both feel vindicated.

[2457] Right?

[2458] Yeah.

[2459] I do.

[2460] Because I went with the majority.

[2461] The majority then.

[2462] Yeah.

[2463] His story was set in 1988.

[2464] Okay.

[2465] Or around that.

[2466] But you're also wrong.

[2467] You're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, yeah, you are because that person was a substitute teacher, not a science teacher.

[2468] Substitute teachers are their own category they're not teachers of that subject that just happened to step in their their own thing that they just pop in yep yep yep yep yeah but again it's all about context so the the whole entire conversation stems from us trying to guess what his teacher was no and i yeah what his substitute teacher right right right great yeah yeah yeah but still all i'm saying is said in 1988 we weren't guessing what his teacher was yesterday.

[2469] I would guess in 1988, most substitute teachers were female.

[2470] That would be my guess.

[2471] Yes, but I was thinking, oh, they must have special science substitute teachers.

[2472] I know, but that's not true.

[2473] Well, do we know that?

[2474] Yeah, for sure.

[2475] Do you think they send a non -science?

[2476] Once you're doing experiments, they'd send like some bozo.

[2477] Well, it sounds like they did send a bozo.

[2478] They did.

[2479] No, they do.

[2480] They, like, if there's a lesson plan that kids can like sort of do on their own.

[2481] Sometimes a substitute teacher were just like put that out.

[2482] But no, they're not like specifically qualified for science or math or anything.

[2483] I buy that.

[2484] Yeah.

[2485] Anyway, wow.

[2486] So Ukraine versus the Ukraine.

[2487] Oh, right.

[2488] Well, in 1991, Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its dissolution at the end of the Cold War.

[2489] Before its independence, Ukraine was typically referred to in English as the Ukraine.

[2490] But most sources have since moved to drop the from the name of Ukraine in all uses.

[2491] So.

[2492] We're evolving.

[2493] Yeah.

[2494] It's changed.

[2495] It has changed.

[2496] In people's defense.

[2497] It has changed.

[2498] Yeah.

[2499] In your defense.

[2500] I've started saying Ukraine and I hate it.

[2501] You do?

[2502] Yes, because I was raised in an era where you said, the Ukraine.

[2503] Were you saying it a lot?

[2504] Always, always, always, always.

[2505] I had a lot of Ukrainian neighbors in Santa Monica.

[2506] Oh, right.

[2507] And are we always saying like, oh, my neighbors are from the Ukraine?

[2508] I'll say the Ukrainians, two doors down, OD the other night, which, which, which, happened.

[2509] Well, that's normal grammar.

[2510] You'd say the Germans as well.

[2511] Oh, right.

[2512] I wouldn't say you.

[2513] Oh, Ukrainians, two doors down.

[2514] Oh, deed.

[2515] Yeah.

[2516] That was quite a sight.

[2517] I watched through their window.

[2518] Brie and I were like sitting there watching TV and all of a sudden I saw flashers out the window and then I heard people hustling in the little alleyway and then I went downstairs to take a look and I was right behind the medics as they went into the apartment.

[2519] Huge ground floor window.

[2520] I just watched the whole thing.

[2521] he was on the ground completely fucking greenish yellow like he was not the color of human should be and they one of the medics said uh hold his shoulders and a guy like held him down and then he said he's gonna wake up uh what was the word he used not aggressive but something like that like he's gonna and he gave him a shot and he like woke up and he tried to sit up and the guy was like holding his thing and immediately like you've OD done heroin and they start telling him like what's going on.

[2522] It was pretty wild.

[2523] But he lived.

[2524] He lived, yeah.

[2525] Scary.

[2526] I'm scared by that.

[2527] Should we call it the OD?

[2528] Yeah.

[2529] Okay, so I mentioned that Harry Potter got rejected by lots of publishers.

[2530] So it got rejected by 12 publishers.

[2531] Oh, wow.

[2532] They hate that decision.

[2533] They definitely do.

[2534] And she posted some of the rejection.

[2535] letters on Twitter and I think she like crossed out the names and stuff but to give people a boost Oh that's great.

[2536] Which I loved.

[2537] Yeah.

[2538] Were any of them mean?

[2539] Yeah.

[2540] Really?

[2541] Yeah.

[2542] What'd they say?

[2543] Stupid magic story.

[2544] Who the fuck cares about a little boy?

[2545] I don't know because I pulled it up really quick but I couldn't like zoom in and really read it.

[2546] So people can go look at it.

[2547] Ie.

[2548] Your eyes maybe.

[2549] Okay.

[2550] Maybe it was my eyes.

[2551] But people can look that up.

[2552] But yeah, I did say a few of them were me. One of them, I think, was really mean.

[2553] It's tricky, though.

[2554] It's very tricky because we had the gal on a forthcoming episode, the journalists who did Dr. Death.

[2555] Oh, yes.

[2556] And there's also a problem with people going, like, don't listen to anyone else.

[2557] Like, some people also aren't getting feedback that they suck at something.

[2558] Oh, sure.

[2559] So that's another thing to evaluate.

[2560] Some people are belligerent in their conviction, and they need either lessons or to pick another thing.

[2561] So that's part of it, too.

[2562] You're right.

[2563] You know, we hear about the rejection letters that were wrong, but we don't hear about the ones that were right, and probably the vast, vast majority are right.

[2564] True, but I still think it's a good message to say, keep going, keep trying, because the more you try, the better, you will be.

[2565] Yes, yes, but I will say, I think it might be a story that we also love in this country, because if you look at this country, we believe in the American dream, right?

[2566] Now, we don't care statistically that people, that the vast majority of people do not migrate north.

[2567] of the socio -economic group they're born into.

[2568] But when it happens, we celebrate it so much and we all believe that could be us that it keeps this system afloat that might not ultimately benefit the majority of people in the country.

[2569] Being tenacious is not ever, I think, going to be a bad thing.

[2570] Like, I think that's a good quality.

[2571] What do you think about capitalism in general?

[2572] The notion of the American dream that in this country, anyone can become anyone.

[2573] I like, I love that.

[2574] I love it too as a concept.

[2575] But if you look at the data and you find out, that's not actually true.

[2576] Not everyone can become anyone.

[2577] That 90 -some percent of people are just becoming exactly what they were born into.

[2578] Then you start to have to, you have to question whether that premise is actually true in practice.

[2579] No, no, no, no, no. But it's not that you're entitled to become something.

[2580] Right.

[2581] It's that you have the opportunity to become something.

[2582] So no one's saying that everyone should just be better than their parents and that, That's automatic.

[2583] Personally, I think this is one of our problems in this country is that there's some white entitlement.

[2584] Oh, yeah.

[2585] That, you know, the people that are saying, these people are coming and taking our jobs, they feel entitled to those jobs.

[2586] Yeah, because their parents had them.

[2587] Exactly.

[2588] And it's like, no, no, no, you have to earn your position.

[2589] You have to work your way up.

[2590] But the American dream is that there are opportunities.

[2591] Yes, but I also don't think that someone who, who is cleaning houses in L .A. is working less hard than you and I. I agree.

[2592] So I think people are working really, really hard and they're not ascending the ladder.

[2593] Yeah.

[2594] And I don't think that people have the same opportunity.

[2595] I think I had a different opportunity than a black kid did.

[2596] Absolutely.

[2597] And a Latino kid.

[2598] Yeah.

[2599] That's the truth.

[2600] And so we have to acknowledge that just because Will Smith made it or Barack Obama became president, it would be easy to say, oh, the things working.

[2601] Look.

[2602] It produced Will Smith.

[2603] It produced Barack Obama.

[2604] Yeah.

[2605] And then you could just ignore that it's not working for 90 plus percent of the people.

[2606] Some people would say like, well, they did it.

[2607] That's my point.

[2608] And I totally agree with you.

[2609] That's crazy.

[2610] It's supporting something that the data might not support.

[2611] Well, I think both things can happen.

[2612] Like we can look at there's a lot of discrepancy and inequality in this country that needs evening out.

[2613] And also, it's good to put out a message of, you know, work hard and stick to your guns at things.

[2614] Chris Rock has the best bit about this.

[2615] He lives in a big house.

[2616] He lives in a neighborhood.

[2617] And Mary J. Blige also lives in that neighborhood.

[2618] And Jay Z also lives in the neighborhood.

[2619] And he said, yeah, America is a place that a black person can end up living in that neighborhood.

[2620] He said, but I'm the best living comedian.

[2621] my neighbor is an average white dentist of course yeah so yes if you are the best i know in the world at something sure you can ascend but if you're just an average white dentist you can also live right next to j z and fucking yeah the best comedian alive i agree that it's not it's so unfair in that way i think it's unfair to poor white people too i don't think it's all just black or white i think people that grew up in Aaron's neighborhood did not have the shot that I did, did not have the shot that you did.

[2622] Yeah.

[2623] There's no system in place to take the kid whose parents are both annihilated drunk and not looking over their homework and not involved.

[2624] There's no system in place to help that person have the same opportunity I did.

[2625] Yeah.

[2626] Oh, that's it.

[2627] That's it?

[2628] Yeah.

[2629] Well, that was a real slalom course of a fact check, right?

[2630] Bobbing and we even.

[2631] If you've stuck with us through this, thank you.

[2632] You deserve a gold star.

[2633] A gold cherry.

[2634] Yeah.

[2635] All right.

[2636] I love you.

[2637] Love you.

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