Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Dave Eggers (writer and publisher)

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Dave Eggers (Contrapposto, The Circle, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) is a bestselling author, founder of McSweeney’s, and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Dave joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the strange family lore behind McSweeney’s, growing up in John Hughes-era Illinois, and falling in love with writing and designing books as a kid. Dave and Dax talk about moving to Berkeley to help raise his little brother after his parents died, shaking up literary readings with They Might Be Giants, and building a creative community out of rejected magazine pieces. Dave explains why kids should be published, how writing can give order to chaos, and why the happiest creative life might be the one with the least preciousness.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. Experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. We have one of my favorite authors on today, Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers is a bestselling author and founder of McSweeney's. His books are The Circle, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, the every.

And of course, in my favorite book, What Is the What? He has a new novel out now, Contraposto. Please enjoy Dave Eggers. We are supported by Airways. Airbnb. You know, Moni, I was just reminiscing recently about this trip. I took to Musco a while back. Canada in the summer, it's just unbelievable. The lakes, the trees, all these gorgeous wooden boats everyone collects around there. NHL players on the lake. What a place. It's just one of those places where you immediately feel your nervous system calm down. I do feel like every time you talk about that trip, you feel very at peace. I really was. I think part of what makes a trip like that memorable is when you actually get to settle into a place. You start finding your rhythm, your coffee shop, your morning walk.

There's several little restaurants on the lakes. They're all connected. There's a big chain of lakes. And the restaurants are so good. And you park your boat out there and you get to sit on the water. It's just heaven. That's my favorite kind of trip when it starts to feel less like visiting and more like you live there for a little bit. And honestly, it's even better when you can share it with family or friends.

It's those little routines and moments that end up becoming the stuff you remember later. That's why I love finding places on Airbnb that helped me feel like a local, somewhere new. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace and I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work. And it's been private. It's been yours. But at some point, you're ready to put it out.

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off your first purchase of a website or domain. He's an object expert. So, Monica, nice to meet to you. Amanda made me want to give you guys these. This is a new McSweeney's in the form of a trapper keeper. Monica, did they have trapper keeper?

Yes, of course. I've been testing people And you're the first, like, are you more millennial? 1987. I'm a millennial, yes, 87. Nobody's had any idea when the trapper keepers yet. No, I loved trapper keepers. Which one did you have?

You know what's funny is that I did not have it because I didn't like the artwork. I was such a snob. I thought it was too gaudy. You were already brady about it. You were already pretentious. I was. I had to have like a leathery one. In Detroit, you grew up in Illinois.

Yeah. In Detroit, you aged out. if you were a boy of a trapper keeper very early. Third grade and beyond, you were a target if you had a trapper keeper. Yeah, for sure. Anything Velcro on your shoes? Yeah, you're dead.

Kangaroos with Velcro. With us, you wore watch or calculator watch or anything like Cassio. You're done. It was really a statement. No, it's just anything, I'm gonna guess it has to be the same. Anything could flag you as being girly or gay. Oh.

Or nerdy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why, like, when the rise of tech had freaked me out, because I was like, well, these were all the kids that always got beat up. If you had, like, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo on your wrist or whatever. And now those. Yeah, why aren't they more benevolent? I know.

You were born in Boston, but moved pretty soon. I never lived in Boston. My grandfather was an OB, G, Y, N, and Boston general. So we were all born there under his guy. Now, that's an interesting dynamic. Did your grandfather deliver your mother's children? No. Oh, okay.

But his colleague, so he's nearby. But he was fascinating. Like, he was the gyno to all the nuns in Boston. And also all the unwed mothers. He ran a hospital for unwed mothers. I mean, fascinating stuff that we have been uncovering more and more lately. Is that your mom's dad? Yeah, McSweeney, Daniel J. McSweeney.

So he's delivered half of Boston at some point. Probably 10,000 babies, you know. It's a cool job in that way that if you've been in practice for many decades, You really have effectively delivered or brought a significant percentage of the population into the world in your area. Yeah. Yeah. And you're part of everyone's best day of their life. Well, that's where the McSweeney came from.

Like, there was a guy that was adopted in this home for unwed mothers, and he was adopted by a different McSweeney family. But he saw my grandfather's name on the birth certificate, and later in life he went, he thought that was his real father. Oh, okay. So he would seek us out and write crazy letters to us, all my childhood. saying he was coming any minute on this train. He's going to come and reunite with his long-lost sister, my mom.

So that was Timothy McSweeney. And that's why we named this whole thing. After him, sort of this lunatic screaming from the woods, which we thought we were at the time, like as a magazine. But I just found a bunch of more of his stuff. Like it got a little scary here. Yeah, that sounds it. That's an intense feeling.

If you're like, oh, my father's there waiting for me. That's a very motivating. Right. I'm coming home. Prodical son. You've been looking for me. Yeah. Some of these relationships are just too intense, or they make them intense.

So what kind of attorney was your father? What kind of law did he practice? Commodities law. Commodities because of the exchange is there. So at the time, there was only a handful of people that did what he did. So he never went to court. And it was just a brief letter. I trust this settles the matter.

John Eggers. Oh, really? Yeah. You had some unique experiences early on that really, I met you could acknowledge, set you up for the life you ended up having. Just this notion that I learned, Mrs. Wright, second grade? First grade, assigned you to make a book. I still have this book.

It's cardboard cover, yellow line sheet of paper where we wrote the story and then illustrations above, bound with yarn, blue yarn that it still holds up. And we spent months on it. These books were perfect. They had no typos. No errors were allowed. We had to redraft, redraft.

And then draw the pictures very carefully. And on the back it says, copyright, David Eggers. Would have been 1978. Oh, my God. That's worth so much money right now. Then I had a teacher, Mrs. Dunn that had us do it again in fifth grade. I did another book in eighth grade.

So by the time as in eighth grade, we'd written and illustrated and produced three books. And then in high school, we did the first literary magazine with our computer. So they were brand new as 1986 or something. First Macs, first desktop publishing. And so I learned design and all. of that stuff when I was 16, and then I was just booked. You were set. When you made the first two, first grade and fifth grade,

were you more into and proud of the illustration portion? Absolutely. I only saw myself being a cartoonist. Like, that was all I did 24 hours a day until I was maybe 13 or so. And I thought, you know, I started the Disney animators or I wanted to be, you know, Calvin and Hobbs came about. I was gone.

Peanuts, I studied, and all I did was draw all day. What about like Farside? Were you into the notion that you could communicate comedy through this? For sure. It might have been 14 or so when he popped up. What's his name? Gary Larson. Yes, I listened to the weirdest interview with him on Sam Harris.

Oh, wow. He has studied the art of persuasion. Okay. To an insane degree. Where I'm like, who are you trying to persuade to do what? So weird. He knows the science of persuasion. persuasion. It's his big hobby. But isn't it weird? Like you have these amazing cartoonists, him,

Berkeley Brethren, and Bill Watterson from Calvin and Hobbes. And they all retired at like the very top of their game. Like Bloom County just went away. Like what age were they? 40s, 50s. It's so weird because I go to the Charles Schultz Museum up in Santa Rosa, which is incredible. Yeah. You go to his desk and you see all of his stuff. And he worked till the very end. And he was really good till the very end. But uniquely, it's a job that people tend to knock off and quit at a certain point and just go out on their best note, I guess. But I do miss the far side.

Still, there's nothing as good as it. I have a theory about comedians. Comedians don't tend to age all that well. I do wonder if it applies to these cartoonists. Comedy is about being shit on and calling out the powers that be in the injustices and the grievances and the friction of being a shithead at the bottom of the ladder. And with success comes a much more frictionless existence. You're not getting angry at the boss.

You ever heard Dana Carvey talk about this in the Conan podcast about like the billionaire comedian that's still trying to find things to be upset about? You have to see it. You cry laughing. It's so funny. It's like, yeah, there's another fucking thing. And he just like it tries to manufacture this outrage about. tables and about forks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so good. Private air travel. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. But I wonder if that's the same. Cartoonists generally have a chip on their shoulder, right? Some of them, yeah, there's some strange folks in that medium.

You're friends with Kimmel? Yeah, in part because he's been really supportive of our nonprofits, and he's hosted some events and then just a very normal. And he's a cartoonist. Yeah. I bet you, yeah, yeah, that's his big hobby. He's right there behind you in a statue. Yeah, he's one the best boy at work on.

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

No rules. No rules. And they're still really fun to read. You've got to remember how unhinged narratives can and maybe should be because all of the rules and constraints and everything, it's applying sort of an accountant's brain to what should be an anarchic process. But anyway, but yeah, he was a good cartoonist. I'm going to campaign to get a yellow limousine put in here.

Did you write a book when you were a kid? In junior high, they put out one little, zine at the end of the year and it was all short stories from kids mine was in there and i fucking thought i had won a Nobel peace well that's why we published kids we have kids that are like 14 and they've been published every year since they were six and they stand 12 feet tall they're not like so grateful they really feel like it's the right thing to have happened i worked hard on it of course i'm published well in the truest sense if you succeed at getting the thing in your head out whether that's in a movie or a clay or a drawing there is a

is a intrinsic pride that can't be matched by any other external validation. Right. And yeah, you should feel like your shit doesn't stink. To some degree, if you executed exactly what was in your brain, that's the moment to be happy. Well, and also, I'm going to do a little twist on that. And that's telling the kids that like, all right, fifth draft, sometimes they do have this perfectionism where they're like, shit, it's not ready yet. We're like, it's really good.

It's ready to let go of it. We're going to put out this book being humble enough to know that somebody else. else's opinion that it's ready or it's okay or it's good enough. So it's like, it's okay, we're going to publish this and we're going to put it in a nice paperback book. It'll be read for decades. It relieves that so many different things of a reluctant or hesitant kid or an English language learner.

It doesn't have to be 100% perfect, but we're going to work on it. We're after draft. We're going to honor it and put it in this platform that other people will see it. And then we're going to do something else. It's not just the one chance, not one bite out of the apple. you can keep creating. And again, I always say it's all practice until you're 30, especially in writing.

A reluctant writer, they always think that they're going to be judged in a biblical sense on their first draft. Like you're either unworthy and cast down or you're Jesus. And it's like, no, you're Hemingway. One of like 10 drafts you're going to do. We'll get there either way. Do you not like talking about your life? Because generally in this show, we go through your life

that leads to your work. No, I've always preferred talking about anything but my life. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Even though you've written about it? Did it 26 years ago? And you were like, that's it? No, it was just like, you know, you find this with a lot of memoirists or somebody that wrote it.

That was like, that was where I wrote it. So that it's like, it's gone. You tell it. It's truthful. And this is, again, what we teach. For kids that have, like, chaotic lives in any way or every kid feels that the world around them is not under their control necessarily. They're not controlling every part of their experience,

but on the page, it's all yours. And you can write this linear narrative that makes sense, and no one can mess with it. And so once they write these stories out or mini memoirs or just a diary entry, there's like a calm that comes over the kids, and especially if they've done it every year, those are the sort of most self-possessed,

self-knowing kids you'll ever find are the ones that have been asked every year. Write your story. Who are you? year. And I always say that should be the first thing of every school year, the first two days, is write your story on day one, and then the other kids get to read each other's stories, day two. The teacher knows all the students far better, and the kids are like, all right, now everyone knows who I am, my truth. And it's really different on the page than if you have to

verbalize it to a bunch of kids you don't know in front of the class. You wouldn't ask them to do that. Yeah. But just you pass them around, and they get to know each other so intimately, and there's just like a confessional safety on the page that isn't there in any other place. I was trained as a journalist and we've had oral history series voice of witness for years and it's quite clear that there's seven and a half billion more interesting people than me out there. So it just feels like nonsensical to talk about my stupid boring life. You know, it doesn't make any sense. There is no stupid boring life.

I mean, I reject that promise. I'm just like, would never bore people with it because I did pass two people on the way here, like on Franklin, I think, was like a guy shooting a film with his iPhone and there was a woman in a grocery cart and they were careening down the street. He's filming and she's bouncing up and down.

And I really was so desperate to stop. Yeah. As a journalist, you get an excuse to ask questions of people. Yeah, what's going on here? What are you all up to? Yeah. And so it always pains me when I don't have the time or the window to do that because they've always had like a press pass and a reason to do it.

Did you have though favorite authors that you are not really interested in? I've never read a biography of a writer. I'm not interested in any writer's private lives. And I also really want to preserve the sanctity of the illusion. And then again, biographers of writers, unless they're authorized and the writers talking to them directly, most writer biographies are horribly mistaken. They make connections that don't exist. Well, it goes through their filter.

Their filter. So one of my favorite writers was another Chicago guy, Saul Bello. You guys read Saul Bello? Can't get anyone to read Saul Bello anymore. But anyway, won the Nobel Prize. He was the man for a long time, but nobody's reading him right now. But I do recommend him. Start with Herzog, which is a fantastic book.

And there's never been a better sentence writer in the English language, in my opinion. But there was a big biography of him, I think, in the 19th. And the biographer just spent the entire time just green with envy about why he's not Saul Bell. So the entire book was about, I went to Harvard, he only went to University of Chicago. Why does he have a Nobel? And I don't. And this whole thing, everything is filtered through this twisted lens that he's looking through. And so I know enough about any writer by reading their work. And then if I peek behind the curtain and find out that they're left-handed or lactose intolerant or whatever, I'm like it diminishes. is the fun. You don't want to know. Interesting. And I'm like, I know plenty by reading their body of work and I don't need to know anything more. And I think it's sort of like peeking behind any curtain

knowing how a magic trick is done. Why? You know, why? I have an answer to that. But I will say I can relate to you in that I loved Bukowski. That was my gateway and even liking writing. Then after he died, someone put together some biography of him and it was all about how he was a communist. And I was like, what the fuck? Where the fuck? He's the most anti-political. person period that ever lived, much less a communist? The writer was a communist. And they're always trying to get people into their tribe. That one went terribly bad, but I love biographies.

One of my favorite books of all time is Titan the John D. Rockefeller biography. It's just astounding. I'll read Churchill biographies left and right. I mean, there's a lot of people that I'm interested in in that way, but not artists of any kind. The reason I like it is that all of these things, even are hard sciences. There are very few binaries. It's like at best, someone got it 60% right. We'll have another expert on from another university.

They pitched the other side of it. And it's very compelling. And you're like, the world is at best. You're like 60% certain. And that is why it is entirely relevant to know what someone carries into it. Because you is someone trying to discern reality. It's like, you need these other plot points so that you can give it its right weight. So like, well, this person was abandoned by their family and grew up with bikers.

Of course there's, you know, like I need to keep that in mind when I'm reading their research. or when I'm just hearing their point of view, it feels very relevant. If it comes from them, I would put that very important distinction. Yeah, posthumously telling us how someone was, I reject. Yeah. If they're telling you themselves,

I always think you don't know anything about anyone until they tell you. Any assumptions that you make otherwise are going to be false or misguided. But if they say, you know what, I was always curious about the human mind because I suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid or my mom did or whatever.

That makes perfect sense. There's so many people like that that are into it or they become law enforcement. Teddy Roosevelt, right? He had terrible asthma. He couldn't play with other kids. Then he has this period where he goes to a ranch and he finds out he's actually strong and virile and it like changes his whole life. Or the people that are sickly kids and they make plays at home because they're in bed for

so long. Yeah, yeah. Come into theater because they have to entertain themselves. There's so many of those. The polio generation all ended up really interesting because of that. They all had that time in bed and alone. Or yeah, these people with agoraphobia that were writing, looking out their window. This is pretty fucking relevant.

Emily, yeah, yeah, yeah. Suffice to say, I must note, you went to school with Vince Vaughn. Were you in the same grade? We were the same grade from fifth grade through high school. No way. So you, like, truly saw the young... He was exactly the same guy. He was.

He was hilarious from day one. We had a uniquely cohesive class, and there were two people that were really key to that. everybody was great, but Rob Palinca was also in our class. He's the GM of the Lakers. Oh, okay. And so Rob was like the best basketball player in Illinois at the time. We all went to his games. And then Vince hosted the talent show every year.

And with my buddy Paul Bazy, who lives down the street still. And then they were in the plays. Vince was. But he was also hanging out with the football people. But Vince was cool with everybody, and especially the artists and the theater people. So he united a lot of different people by, saying it's cool to be with the football guys, but if you're theater, that's very cool, too.

So we had a weird class in that everybody kind of cheered everybody on for whatever they were good at. That's very unique. It's unique, but you've got to teach it. It's teachable. You need leaders. The captain and the football team, the quarterback, was in all my AP English classes. Oh, really? Right next to me.

Super smart guy, interested in Faulkner and Heller. But I think that you could say, like, listen, a rising tide lifts all boats. If all the basketball people support the athletes, and the athletes travel to see the football team when they're in quarterfinals or something, which all happened in our school. We were so cohesive. Everybody was okay with everybody. Dave, that's impossible, especially in the 80s and 90s. I'm blown away. But we also had John Hughes making movies about our area.

We knew that we were in a charmed period. And Vince worships him. Were you also? Yeah, I was into all those movies. They're so special. They were in our town. And ordinary people was filmed in our town when we were kids. And there was a lot going on.

And then the Bears practice in Lake Forest so we could go see the Bears practice. The refrigerator Perry and Super Bowl Shuffle. Was that 84? That was 84. 85. So, yeah, it was a really great time. But I gave a lot of credit to those guys for being really nice to everybody. Everybody had to be in the talent show in our school.

Oh, really? It was required? No, but all the cool kids did it. And even if you're just dancing to a Beach Boy song, which one did and all. of his friends. It was pathetic some of these acts, but we all put on something. I did a thing with Pee-Wee Herman's song, Tequila. We all did. Yeah. Our group did that and we would do Monty Python. Did you go on your toes like Pee We had in those platform boots? I would have thrown tomatoes if you

hadn't. What's weird is it didn't seem risky because everybody was doing it. So there wasn't like you're facing this wall of unbelievers. Everyone's like, I don't know, a talent show. Of course you do the talent show. So were you stereotypically kind of an art kid or no? No, I was on the soccer team four years and tried out for tennis, got cut twice. But we were all sporty. Our group was a little different than the football guys. We tended to be a little artier. My friends did the filmmaking telecom classes. I was in art classes and good at English class and stuff. And we did the literary magazine columnist for the newspaper, wrote the yearbook, that kind of stuff. But we played football every weekend. Down at the end of my street, there was a park, and we played all year round.

Like in the winter, we played, you know, three on four, all-time quarterback. You know how that didn't tackle? We were really into that. So what called you to Berkeley? I mean, it seems obvious. It's a very literary... Oh, no. I mean, that was where my sister was in law school. So when my parents died, she had deferred a year. So we went to Berkeley. That was the nearest support system. It wasn't a choice. For the people who didn't read a heartbreaking work of staggering genes. You were taking care of your little brother from 21 years old on, I think is a pretty unique scenario. Yeah, and now looking back, I would have been in the Bay Area. I'd never been there before I moved there, I don't think.

So I really spent my life in Chicago, and then we would go out east to Boston to the McSweeney clan. And so one of the first times I'd ever been on a plane was going in California. To live. We were a family of six with a Ford Pinto driving around vacation. were Kentucky, you know, to see a cave. Mammoth Cave? Or the lesser caves, too. A lot of them.

But, you know, I've been in the Bay Area, more or less 34 years now. It really is, to me, the colors, the palette of a place is really important. The topography and the landscape. It's an incredibly dramatic city. It's so dramatic, and then you really only have to go, if you go over the bridge and into the headlands,

it's exactly three and a half miles from basically the center of the city, and you are in wild open land, all the way up to Oregon, basically. There's nothing on the cross. There's redwoods directly on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Near woods, the oldest trees there are. And I never thought I would stay in one place for so long.

It's not really my way of thinking about moving through the world, but I haven't been to a prettier urban environment. How quickly do you find your footing as a writer there? You put out Mike pretty quickly after, yeah. Day one. No one will tell you no in the Bay Area. That's the great thing and the burden of it. Every stupid idea happens.

It gets entertained. There's no friction. You already knew you were going to write when you got there? No. Oh. I had no clue. I got there in the first summer I spent painting furniture. I thought maybe I would decorate furniture for a living.

Sure. And then I worked as a temp until I was 28, more or less. You know, if you needed a graphic design, if you wanted somebody to make a lawn sign, I would do your graphic design for that. We had clients all over the city. And then we put out might at the same time, but I didn't make a living as a writer until I was 30.

So not Berkeley the school? No, but Berk? The area, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a little confused. I think you went to Berkeley, the school. Yeah, that was like, how are you doing it? Let's pretend I did. Let's say it.

Okay, well, yeah, let's re-write that line a little bit. Yeah, but we put out that magazine as five of us. Nobody ever made a living, but we had a blast doing it. At that moment, had it changed it all? I mean, I know you have a degree in journalism, but was it still our? art first at that moment? No.

When do you remember changing, like, no, no, it's going to be writing? It was probably college because I worked at the daily paper every day for four years. And I did graphic design and illustration for that paper, but I did a little bit of art school and realized, like, the immediacy and the impact you can have in journalism, you know, front page paper, there's a strike, there's a protest, there's a war going on, whatever, compared to, I'm going to sit alone in a studio and maybe sell a painting 10 years from now. To a very wealthy people that'll put it in their bathroom.

You know? So that, to me, I was like, ah, that doesn't sound like what I want to do. Journalism's instant gratification. And it just impact every day. You write it. You're finished at sometimes 9 p.m. goes through copy editing, call it the slot. They write the headline.

You're there pasting it up because I was a paste-up guy. And you send it off at midnight. And then two hours later or three hours later, it's like on the street. That rush you could never. You know, some guy's taking a dump reading it within hours of you finish. Sure. That's the goal. That's a high water market journalism.

If a guy yells to his wife from the commode, honey, you're not going to believe what I just read. That's the real Nobel. And it goes away. Pre-internet, if it wasn't good, it's completely forgotten. And then you're on to the next thing. But ever so often, there'd be something that would really make an impact. And then I edited different sections and magazines of the paper

and you get to bring up other voices and maybe discover somebody in your little way and help them get a platform, I guess. So that was what I'm still doing now. It's much more fun publishing other people than publishing your own stuff always. Because... There's no complication.

It's like producing a movie where, A, you're not on the masthead or on the marquee, so it's not your fault if it's not good. You can take all the credit if it's... You can just sort of, you know, be in the wings and say... It's ego. It's totally egoless, and it's such a pure celebration. We had a writer for the Believer magazine win a award a couple nights ago for the National

Magazine Awards. We've only met this writer a few times, but it's way more pure joy than any other thing that we can do as a company because we're so tiny. It's like really six full-time people, but every so often we have a chance to kind of elevate a voice in our little way. How old were you when you started writing for salon? Probably 24. Is that your first kind of pay?

And was it enough to live on, support yourself? I was a cartoonist. So I had salon, graphic design work, and then I had a weekly cartoon in the SF Weekly. Those three things combined. I was making decent money. We had this little design company where I looked at these invoices

that we used to send. I'm looking through all this old stuff lately. A main client was the SF Chronicle. We'd do like their in-paper ads. Like, read the Chronicle. Oh, you were on the inside and the outside. A little bit, always. I mean, in journalism, it's that way.

An ad would take us half an hour to make, but we had to just make up some number that sounded like, so it would be like $507 and $32. No, all these numbers that I saw us make up were so ludicrous. There was no math or consistency, but we were undercutting the real businesses. An established place would charge 10 times that much, so we made really good money by being nimble and quick and cheap.

And so I always tell anybody, like out of school, If you undercut the bigger companies in any business, you'll do incredibly well, whether it's making rugs or landscaping or temping or design or whatever it is. There's a very easy way to just be a little cheaper and a little faster than anybody else. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare, we are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds. on car insurance. Not checking that your keys are actually in your hand before you close the car door. Have you ever stood in a parking lot full of sun staring at your keys sitting right there on the seat four inches away and completely useless to you?

It's a very specific kind of humbling. Yeah. Checking first is a good idea. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club, incorporated an all-state affiliate. In 98, you start McSweeney's. Right. What prompts that?

I was working at Esquire, Big Corporate Magazine for the first time. Mike got us all jobs in real industries for the first time. So we were offered different jobs like Buddy and Myrower. mine, one of the other might editors, we were offered a gig writing for Letterman, like the two of us. No kidding. As a team, I guess. And it was Rodney Rothman, who was the head writer at the time. And he was younger than us.

We were like 27. I think he was 24. Wow. And the producer was Kate Adler, and we all met. And it was like the most exciting thing that you could ever imagine. This is when he just went to CBS, it would have been. I think so. Yeah.

Wow. We worshipped Letterman as growing up. Chris Elliott and had everything taped and we watched everything over and over. but the hours and the uncertainty, you'd get like a 12-week contract, I think, at the time. And then you had to renew. I was not in a place where I had that kind of uncertainty. I had a dependent, and then the hours. You can't be a parent and right as a young person.

Yeah, trying to prove yourself. But then I took this magazine job, and I really learned quickly that I was not meant to. I had never had a 9-to-5 anything. I never had to wear clothes of any kind to any job. In the Bay Area, it was all shorts every day. nobody cared. So to have to wear pants and a button-down shirt and then try to get things published

and they say no. I was like, and these are all brand new ideas to me. You were just doing whatever you wanted prior to that. In the Bay Area, again, no one says no. So suddenly it was 90% no. It's not their fault. Like there's only so many pages in a magazine. So we started McSweeney's.

It was all stuff that was rejected from other corporate magazine. Uh-huh. And it was like the land of misfit writings. And so we did that. published it out in my apartment in Brooklyn and just a couple of us. Oh, so you had moved to New York at that way? Yeah.

How did you do in New York? Manhattan was not my thing, but once I moved to Brooklyn, it was much calmer. It was really Oakland-y and great, near Prospect Park, which is a beautiful park. I just have to be close to some kind of open space. So suddenly, you know, we had a ball.

Putting out McSweeney's was just everything you wanted to be. You go from this corporate constraint, everything to just being back in your kitchen with a couple friends. doing anything you want to do, printing the book in Iceland, which we did. I got to go to Rikovic for each press check and spend a week there going back and forth to the printer among all the blonde pressmen in their blue jumpsuits. The whole thing was so surreal, but so much fun. Was it always like this? Was it always like in a fun? Oh, okay. The first three were just white

paperbacks, like black and white. They were really nicely made, but just black and white for the most And then the fourth one was a box with a bunch of booklets in it. And we made that. It was the first time there's no boxes in Iceland. They have no pulp. They can't make anything like that. There's no trees. So it was such a big thing.

It was a big meeting. How are we going to make a box? You know, and all these Icelandic guys trying to figure out how to make a box for this. So much fun. But that started this thing where I thought, well, why don't we reinvent the form every time? Because if you're going to pay us and subscribe to us, maybe we'll surprise you. through each time with what it looks like. So we've done a lunchbox in the last few years.

Yeah, we got a lunchbox recently. That was what we got, yeah, lunchbox. There's definitely the archetype of the lone wolf writer, but you clearly like the communal aspect of it. Yeah. Yeah. I can only think of a handful of actual lone wolves. In the visual arts, too.

It's a trope that isn't born out that often in real life. Butkowski is one of those guys, right? And you have Van Gogh, whoever. John Fonte, probably. There's a handful. But the people that I've known or met, I don't know a lone wolf writer. I can't think of one. I would feel so comforted if I had surrounded myself with other people who were just like banging their head against the wall.

Fucking getting that rejection. S-E fucking postcard. Well, or, you know, I tell this to students in MFA programs all the time. I was like there was two of us in a kitchen that started McSweeney's for $2,500. That was the print bill for the first one. You sell those 2,000 copies. you have enough money to print the next one and print 5,000 copies. You sell those, you can certainly print 7,500, which was our trajectory.

It's such simple math. I can't add anything together. I cannot balance a checkbook, but I could do that simple math. And so we just published everybody we wanted to publish. So it built up this little community of people, and you start something, the magnet, you know, just everybody's drawn to it, whether it's upright citizens brigade or the ground. You know, it's the same kind of thing. Everyone's, like, looking for somebody to start that thing.

And then they're like, thank God, because not everyone is necessarily a starter, I guess. Or ambitious or organized. A little bit. You need people to fill a little gas. Like Melissa McCarthy, this would crack people up. But like Melissa McCarthy and Ben and I, we had this comedy troupe. Nobody came. We did shows.

It was like, Melissa was the manager. She told us where to be. She negotiated the theater rentals. She delegated, you're bringing beer. Someone has to get the space and do the things. She was organizing on it. And we were like, okay, I'll bring beer. Ask Melissa what we're supposed to do.

Well, if she has you there to help do those things, then yeah. You only need two or three people. I saw a student of mine that was at a crossroads. He's 35 now, but I knew him when he was in high school. And I was like, just find a couple people. Because alone, it's just sad and lonely or whatever. But a couple people, you're like a little cadre of people. And you're going to buck them up if they're down.

can buck you up if you're down and together you can get you know a lot more done in a given day and it's going to be a lot more fun so the idea in any art form of being that lonely person in the cabin throwing crumpled up sheets of paper in the corner is a canard i don't know it very often to be true and also it's so unnecessary sometimes you need isolation i can only write when i'm alone but then i can send a draft to all the different writers mostly in the bay area like hey what do you think Is this anything? And then you're in community with people that are like, yeah, keep going. And then you feel, okay, you have jet fuel.

But the idea of like, I'm not going to show it to you for seven years. And then you create some mangled Frankenstein novel that nobody wants. It's such a mistake on so many levels. I think that always trying to figure out, is this the way I want to do it where it's fun? Or is there some other way to do it? Yeah. It's like worth the moment that you can spend. I worked in my garage for years.

It was exactly like six, except for one window in the corner. But it was the only space that was free and big enough to have all the stuff I needed in it. But it was really kind of grim. And I was like, boy, I really don't want to be inside in a dark garage eight hours a day. Like, there's something wrong here. So I just had to think about it finally after 30 years or however long it was. And I was like, well, what if I had a friend, funny to say this, but she's a ship captain. Yeah.

I don't have any ship captain. She sails in the bay. And I was like, would it be possible to get like a little sailboat that I could work in? And I'd find a slip in one of the marinas in the bay. And she's like guided me through this process and helped me buy this boat. So now I've been working in this boat, which is, you know, not so much bigger than this table, really. Was it moored in Saucalito? It's moored like right under the Golden Gate Bridge on the north side.

It's an old Air Force base marina, but it's a rickety, ridiculous marina. And I'm outside more, you know? I'm like, there's so much more going on. And you get mad thinking, like, why didn't I do this 20 years ago? And I think sometimes just to take that moment, whenever you're at a transition moment, and I don't know about you, but a lot of my friends at our age are like in between jobs right now. So there's like a thing that's going on in the business world in particular where they get priced out. Maybe they're too expensive for their company.

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

Well, I definitely think for me that comes with age and that the motivation at the beginning is like, you're a piece of shit, you're a failure if you don't do this. You know, it's just hate you. It's like self-loathing. Self-loathing, you need a little bit. And then at some point you go, well, what's the point all of this if I don't learn to enjoy the process? This is all away. So I'm going to die with like a bunch of posters hanging.

That's the proof of this thing. You realize this isn't worth doing if I don't enjoy the process. It can't be about the reward. Well, are you enjoying the podcast? Oh, absolutely. This is the greatest job of you ever have. Yeah. You've had, I guess, periods right, where you've taken.

and breaks? For sure. Every three years, I'm like, what if I instead? There's so many other things to do. Nature photographer. Wouldn't that be cool, right? Sit there with looking for the snow leopard all day. Like, I really honestly see that as a thing, but then you also have to pay the mortgage and stuff. I do have a question about a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. You had so much going on at that time. Was it hard for you to carve out the time and the commitment to sit down and finish that book? I had to quit the job at Esquire to do it because I couldn't do both. I need eight hours a day of writing time

to get anything done. I just have to get my head clear. That's like the first half. And then the self-loathing kicks in an hour five. What do you do it? You've been in four hours. You find that little wind in your sales and you're like, oh, I've got to get as much out as I can.

The afternoon, you're more urgent about it and maybe you could hit a word count that makes you feel like you've done something that day. I want a life. It's still there, right? I'm trying to make it a little bit more fun. And then there are books that just come out a lot easier than others. Now, The Eyes and the Impossible was a couple years ago.

That was like the most fun I'd ever had. And I was like, how do I stay in that zone where it's fun? And a lot of it has to do with voice and it has to do with writing about something that you love. And so Contra Pasta was like, I love talking about and thinking about the art world and these characters. And so I was like, okay, that book too was just pretty much joy all the way through. But as a journalist, that's not as fun. Because you feel the duty to cover Trump or to cover a disaster or go to Ukraine or whatever,

and then you have to write it out and you have to get every last word right and check every fact over and over. It's a slog that you are happy to have done at the end. Right. And you feel like maybe you enlightened a person or awakened somebody, but it's really no fun in any point of the process.

Yeah. How did you take on the success? of that book. That was new to you, right? I mean, you were a finalist for the Pulitzer for that book. The main thing, I mean, I'm looking at McSweeney's stuff because McSweeney's was brand new too. And so we were able to kind of take that new readership and sort of channeled a lot of them. And so we went on the road because I was finding all of these show runs. We went on the road with They Might Be Giants. And it was like me, writers like Arthur Bradford, Zaddy Smith, some others. and we would do a variety show,

and there'd be, you know, sometimes have, like, exotic dancers doing stuff, and then there'd be the band, and then Arthur would smash your guitar on the stage. He did this whole act. It was, like, to try to enliven what at that point was the most boring thing you'd ever could imagine, which was going to a bookstore to see a reading. You know, people would just get up and read for an hour,

and we were trying to sort of shake that up. And I saw Arthur, who was, like, a filmmaker the other night, and we were just reminiscing. He would buy an acoustic guitar in every town we would tour in. And then he told the story while he played, and then he would, during a crescendo of the story, he'd raise it up above his head, and then smash it as like the punctuation mark of the story,

and then a stage hand would come out and hand him a new guitar, and then he'd finish the story with his acoustic guitar. So he had to buy two guitars in every town we went to, but it was ridiculously fun time. But to think that at this point, Like, I don't love getting on stage. I don't love having to follow. They might be giants or anything like that.

It's like, I can't believe that we did that because these days I'm much more content to be in a smaller setting, a bookstore setting, not a big hall. But at the time, we thought, well, maybe we could make books slightly less sedate and slightly less predictable. Have you ever been to a Sedaris reading? Yeah, sure. That was right then. Naked had come out.

1,500 people would come and he would just read his work. Sarah Vowell was in our little coder. and she was really tight with Sedaris, and Sedaris did benefits for our nonprofit in New York, 826 New York. And so he was always a hero to us and a mentor. What he's done, though, like reading literature out loud is insane. I currently can't stop listening to the live recordings. Barrel fever was how I met my editor, Jeff Kloskey.

He was the editor of Sedaris's first collection. He made humor literary. Before that, there was always the picture of like the humorous. The humorous mugging on the front. But then he put it in sort of a literary format, Jeff Kloskey, this editor did. And I thought, okay, whoever did that, I want to meet. And so that's why he became my editor. It's a fun evolution, too, to watch.

Because, like, naked, you can tell us written without any real notion that it'll be read out loud. And then now his writing is done, like a stand-up, by doing a draft, reading it out loud, rewriting. His workflow is so fascinating. Well, really, I mean, it started with a Santa Land Dieter. That was a this American life thing first, I think. And that was performed for minute one. And that was just like a thunder clap.

Everybody was like, what the hell? You could do that, wow. Because there used to be something in the New Yorker called casuals. They were like long format, literary humor, kind of like that. And then it sort of went away. And then Sedera started that up again, where you could have like a 20-page essay slash comedy show. Yeah, and then people would go out to it.

But, you know, what's funny is that he's still. there's him there's sarah vow there was david rackoff for a while there's not that many people that still do it and it just shows how hard it is to do and he's gotten better and better there's points where it's like i'll listen to the most recent ones like maybe calypso on tape and i'm like i don't know man you put him up against chappelle laugh for laugh in a fucking one and a half hour show it's the precision of the writing it is yeah everything is about extra syllables and chappelle's really good at that seinfeld's talked about it but one extra word and they're you you don't get to laugh.

You've got to be there at the end of the sentence before they're ready. And Cedaras is unique in that he never puts on extra verbiage or whatever to sort of make it. It's lean. It's really lean. Yet it's so full. And then he's funnier in person even than on the page. It's just his voice and his attitude. And then if you go to one of those events, he's signing books for six hours afterwards.

He seems every single person. And he's writing wild shit in there. He's like the amount of creative output just to write in their fucking. He's connecting with each person. Well, to me, that's my favorite part two. And I would much rather just be signing books and chatting with people because the high-wire act of being up there with a microphone is a lot different. So to me, I'm always looking forward to the sitting and signing.

But I do feel for the people that are waiting for... Sederas, waiting hours, but they go in knowing it and the venue knows it. But the times that you're there and there's like a union venue, and they're like, you've got to get out of here. So then you're on the street and then the cops come. You've got to get out of here, too. You can't be there. That's happened to me, but to me, that's the most fun part, is just the reader to reader.

Because in person, all people are normal. If you're just talking to an actual person with enough time, human to human eye to eye, this solves everything. This is our conclusion after a thousand plus episodes is like, we have guests, semi-regular that I don't like, that I've had interactions with around town. I'm like, I don't like this person. I'm like, we got to have them. They're a great guess. And 100% of the time, Dave, at the end of two hours,

I'm like, I fucking love this person. And I'm like, literally, I challenge someone to sit for two hours with someone and be sincerely curious. And I just challenge you to not like the person. Well, the body wants to find common ground. Just chemically, we want this. So I covered a lot of Trump rallies as a journalist. And I would embed.

I never presented myself right away as a journalist. So I would just wait in line with everybody, get to know people. Hope you take this as a compliment you could blend in. You're not coming across as like some lofty professor. You should see my full uniform because I've got the trucker hat and I have my flannel. These are clothes I own. So it's not like...

It's not a costume. It's not so much costume. And, you know, I sort of believe hate the sin, love the sinner. The folks that you meet, the people that you've seen on TV are usually the fringiest fringe. Oh, yeah. But in the middle, I mean, I do think it's so misguided and he's by far the worst president that has ever been or could be conceived on so many levels, and certainly the most corrupt that we're seeing recently. But the people voting for them, I would find common ground with everybody,

and they would have some reasonable explanations for supporting them, for the most part. Out of every hundred people, there'd be one true lunatics. Sure, sure, that person. But as a journalist, you really, especially if you're listening and not, like, hit-and-run journalism, but, like, I'm going to give you as long as you want to talk. I'm going to learn an explanation that I wouldn't have thought about. and sometimes they're voting in very narrow. My 401k went up last time he was elected, and I need that money.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't really argue with that. My parents waited 17 years to immigrate from the Philippines. I want everyone to wait the same amount of time. I live in a border town. 250,000 people have come over this month. That scares me. Well, I did cover the El Paso rally.

So that was Beto O'Rourke on one side of the street having a rally when he was running for the Senate. About 4,000 people came to that one. Cross the street. feet, 15,000 people to Trump in El Paso. A week after he said that El Paso was a dump and whatever. It doesn't matter. 50, 60% of that crowd was Latino. They laugh at this idea. I interviewed so many people that like the border. People are going up and back and forth every day from El Paso. It's very porous. There's underground tunnels. There's all these different things. But then you have that conservatism of recent immigrants, right? So there was a family where the mom came over from Mexico.

illegally got her green card. One daughter is a cop and is a Trumpie and won't talk to the mother anymore because she broke the law to come over. But she's an American because her mother. And so now no one's talking to each other because she's iced out the mother. The sister won't talk to the other sister

and it's all because of one guy. And so you know, you got to back up and say it wasn't this way. for so long, the border was much more porous. You'd work in the U.S. because wages are hard and then you'd go back home because it's cheaper to live in Mexico. It was just back and forth for farm workers, for construction, for a lot of different things.

And then suddenly, it wasn't Trump that did this, but everything became much more heightened and sort of you have to pick aside and choose. It's wildly mismanaged. I don't have the solution in this podcast, but I will say that like... If he dropped the solution... I know.

Hey, why were you sitting on that song? around year 10 of this. Yeah. I do want to say this. I cannot remember, but I bet it had to be Kimmel who told me to. But what was the first book of yours I read? Okay.

And I talk about it on here all the time. I just love that book. It's just outstandingly beautiful. You know, Valentino and I, we went to Kimmel's taping a year or two ago. Uh-huh. Jimmy Kimmel and Molly have given money to Valentino's schools in South Sudan as a foundation.

And so it was really weird. There was a guy doing crowdwork before. and he was like, where is everybody from? I want to see who's from the furthest place away, and he happens to find Valentino sitting next to me. And he's like, where are you from? South Sudan. You won, he got it.

After the book came out, we went back to South Sudan, and all the money from the book went to this foundation, and then he had the decision to make, look, what do you do with it? And he decided to build a high school in his town. He was so successful, but he became the Minister of Education for his whole region, so basically New England size.

And now he's running his own schools in a town close to Mario by where he grew up. You read about him until he was probably 22, I guess. Was it Atlanta that they got sent to? The heartbreaking part of this book, if you haven't read it, I really encourage one of my very favorite books. But, you know, what these kids went through to cross the desert, I mean, there's literally lions picking guys off, which is just unimaginable. They have this notion of getting to America.

And then they go to Atlanta and just the violence that's happening. in the motel that they're at. And this speed of life. Like when I met Valentina, we just got in an accident, like two days after getting his driver's license. They had three months of aid from USAID or whatever group it was. Maybe it was the UNHCR,

but then they're on their own. And it's like independent nonprofits and churches that supported the lost boys all over the U.S. But to the credit of the churches and our ability to absorb refugees and people from the toughest post-conflict zones they were absorbed and did quite well, almost everywhere. And it was mostly the churches that did it

because mostly kids were brought up Catholic. The churches reached out, whatever you need, come to us, you're part of our family. And then at Atlanta was Mary Williams who started the Lost Boys Foundation and got in touch with me, but you had 4,000 mostly boys, all unaccompanied, 18 to 25,

sent to Fargo, sent to Omaha, cheaper places to live, San Jose, never in the middle of a city. and suddenly after three months it's like, well, you've got to pay that electrical bill. What's an electrical bill? Okay, well, and you've got to get to school now. You have to have to have a job within three months.

You have to know everything it took all of us 18 years to figure out. You have to know it in the next three months. Three months. Most of them, if they were lucky enough to sort of have a family that takes care of them, Valentino had this couple, the mazes that are still in Atlanta that became sort of surrogate parents and guiding them through all these questions. And you realize, like whether it's the lost boys or whether it's first in their family to go to college in this country,

you just need an advocate. You need somebody to pick up the phone and be like, okay, no, that's not what you do. Pick up this form, you've got to fill this out, I'll help you do it, I'll file that for you, go to this website. Because otherwise, it's just reading Sumerian and at the speed of light, and if you don't do it, you're on the street. Like all of those things at once, and you realize, like, I've been to Kakuma,

which was the refugee camp that they grew up in, and for the most part, there's not electricity. or running water. And a lot of these camps, they were lucky to have a meal a day for years. These refugee camps are still there because they become cities unto themselves, right? And they're still called refugee camps,

even though they've been there at this point, 34 years or something like that. But there's a simplicity sometimes or a system you know. And our lives here in this country are so complex. We don't even realize how complex and needlessly complex they are and how irrational so many of our systems are.

Until you go to somewhere else, these cities in South Sudan, now that there's been relative peace for some time, are growing exponentially. Like Juba the Capitol, when we were first there, maybe 20 years ago, I think it was maybe 20,000 people. Like, you could really get across it in an hour or two.

And now I think it's two and a half million. And it just grows out, and there's entrepreneurship everywhere and things popping up in schools. And if people have anywhere, whether it's this country 200 years ago, or South Sudan, just if there's relative peace for a little bit of time, everything can happen. People will flourish, they'll figure it out, they'll flock to these centers, they'll solve problems,

and it's the job of the international community to just invest, not aid, invest in businesses there. So you have Ethiopia and air train, restaurants and businesses and places from Uganda that are going to South Sudan to make money, which is good, right? They employ people. They're selling them phone plans. Yeah. This is the way that countries get out of a post-conflict situation. It's like actual living, not just aid, but actual investment.

Valentino's doing a lot of that, too. Okay, well, I've eaten up way too much time. I would have loved to talk about the circle a little bit and the every because I like hearing you talk about the post-apocalyptic cyber age we're in. Find it. You're fun to listen to talk about this. But at last, your newest book, which is what we're... are here to talk about is contraposto.

That's the name of my Botox place, by the way. Is it really? Yeah. For real? Yes. For the book. Oh, I've never seen it anywhere else. Yeah.

It's the first time I had heard it. It's a form, right, in painting where a portrait subject is holding two positions that are in tension. Yeah, it's like the Michelangelo's David would be the first or best known example, where the pose is off balance a bit. You're putting weight on one leg or your hips are one way, your shoulders or another way. as opposed to a stockstill kind of rigid pose. So most poses we know could be qualified as contrapostal.

But it's something you learn in art school, and you ask of the model, and I like the word always, and I felt like it applied to the relationship between cricket and Olympias, where there's sort of balanced imbalance between them. Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. So the book starts a little boy wrong, Robert, and he ditches that name because he is a shitty, not a stepdad, but mom's boyfriend is terrible.

You're not going to let me draw any parallels. I never had a stepdad. He sounded very familiar to me. But Cricket gets this name because he doesn't want to be called Rob because it's now associated with Robert who's upstairs, right? Yeah. The book starts with, like, this sanctuary this little boy has. Do you want to describe it a little bit? Yeah.

His grandfather lives at home in the basement and then has created kind of like a potato. mechanical garden almost in the middle of a Indiana basement in the middle of winter. It's frozen outside and white and probably below zero, but down there it's humid and full of plants and green and spiders. He likes spiders. Yeah, insects. So it's this humid sort of fertile kind of womb-like world almost that cricket spends most of his time down there with his grandfather who's pretty old and not super mobile. He doesn't really leave the basement. But he draws on the floor in front of him while listening to records and his father reading above him. And I think that those early sections about the grandfather, I just wanted to establish that when you're a kid and you can draw, or if you can write, or whatever

you're doing, there's this like incredible piece that comes over a kid that he's got all this chaos going on upstairs. But on that page, he controls everything, can create any universe or world he wants to. He has validation from this grandfather that loves everything he does, which is what grandfathers are supposed to do or grandparents. Well, he treats them seriously, which is like this huge gift that someone can give you when you're a kid. For sure. It's different as mother's working full-time and under all kinds of stresses. But down there, you know, I think every kid needs that sort of place. You're validated, I guess. You're competent. You're good at something. Everybody's got to find something that a kid is good at. And that's the parent's task. It's like, go to

karate, Tai Chi, I mean, anything you can do, but until you find that, it's tricky. Once that kid finds that he's really good at something, then that competence carries over into everything else, like, all right, good, I have a place, I can do this one thing well. But then, you know, that leads into him taking more and more sort of art classes around and leaving home. Grandfather doesn't last too long, but has taught him, I guess, the skills. Well, also this thing he's good at becomes a bridge also to friendship and to potential romantic interests, right? He's encouraged.

It's kind of discovered that he's a good drawer and he's encouraged to graffiti. Yeah, everybody knows that kid, right, that can draw the angel guy and the Led Zeppelin cover, right? So, hey, can you do that for me too? Or Eddie from Iron Maiden. There's a couple kids in every high school that could draw Eddie. Same in prisons, right? If you can draw those guys make money doing it, like I've met a lot of those guys.

But yeah, for cricket, it's really just like he's a quiet kid, but he meets Olympia who recognizes that he has a talent. And then, of course, uses it to have him to face a public play structure using some form of calligraphy via a giant Sharpie. And so I wanted to take it away from being like too cute. They say horrible things on this play structure, but in an ornate kind of almost old English sort of font. But he's madly in love instantly with this girl who's maybe a year older.

She's very worldly and provocative and dangerous, right? Yeah, not to spoil it, but the rest of the book is about them together over the years. But I think that she's so captivating. And at every stage, she's captivating in different ways. She morphs and shapeshifts a bit, but she's always infinitely more sophisticated than he is and more verbal and more worldly, and she knows how to sort of navigate

through the art world, whereas, like, he generally doesn't have a clue and doesn't seek to. We get into your kind, or I'm assuming your take on art. We're exploring a lot, this kind of tension between it's pretentious, it's exclusionary, it's inclusionary, like, it has all these dynamics.

What were you able to get off your chest about art? Well, it was fun because I don't think I would ever write a book about the book world because I'm in it, and that's to me maybe just too close. And also, for me being adjacent to it, like I paint and make prints and I draw and sell them and stuff, and I have a little gallery that sells them for the last 15 or so years.

So I have like a little bit of a foray into that world. You used to write about art and everything, but there is something really unique in all art forms, like music, you go to a concert and, well, it used to be $20, and you'd see your favorite band, and it's $15 for the CD and you could take it home and own it and look through the booklet. and it's very democratic. The art world and the visual art world

in the last hundred years or so is incredibly exclusive and very hard to like just experience as a regular person. You can't really own much. You could tear out a piece of paper from a magazine with your favorite painting.

That's as close as you can get. Well, even like the banks he rises so fascinating, right? Because it starts as like incredibly democratized. It's for all to see on the side of a building. And then I have been to a billionaire's house who has an enormous Banksy in his... Oh, is there right?

Yeah, in his hallway. Somebody tore it off a building maybe. No, well, Banksy does artwork for sale. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. He did a piece on the side of the McSweeney's building years ago. Oh, that's cool. So he got in touch when he was coming in San Francisco,

and he said, I'd like to do something on the roof, and one of our staffers led him in at midnight and led him up to the roof. Did he have to sign anything? That's a good question. Or do you have to be blindfold when you let him in? I mean, that's funny. I always want to ask. They've just discovered.

who he is, right? Have you been following this? It's like an English dude? Yeah, it's always been in English guy. We didn't know. It was Chris Ying, who was on our staff. He led him up, and then he did this really cool mural, sort of, I don't know what you call it, a picture on the side of what he would consider the roof or this wall on our roof.

But we have a flat roof, and he did it there, and we were so happy, we wake up, we see it. People were stopping on the street for a week in the middle of traffic. It was a big deal. Everybody knew that he'd done it. It's before social media, though, so it was like just word of mouth. And then one day we wake up, but it's gone. And we realized it was on the building next to us. So our roof is flat, but then there's an apartment building next to us.

They painted over it? And we didn't even think to tell this guy because we, anyway, so it was painted over within a week. And we could have, I don't even seen a picture of it in years. It was tragic. There's a few other pieces in San Francisco, one in the port, that they're trying to figure out what to do with and authenticate. because he won't authenticate either. I really like his work.

I always have. I like the way he goes about things on his own. He's so fucking punk right. He's so fucking punk right. He's so fucking country or tertiary people making money off of his stuff. But I was always looking for and I think trying to explore in this novel. Like how do you bring it to that democratized kind of level that music and even books? Books are so simple.

You buy it's 25 bucks. You take it home. That's the experience. Anybody can access it. There's no exclusive part of, the book world, but art is mostly exclusive, meaning like if you want to own anything and that person is really making a living, doing it,

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

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

and I did that on purpose. Did you mark the original? No, I just signed it, you know, so it has the original signature in the corner. So if you were going to really look closely. I like the idea of someone has the original. Yeah, you don't know who. It's kind of fun. That takes place in the real world all the time.

What you think is an original in certain museums is not the original. There's often a fake there because of wanting to preserve it or rest it or the danger of theft or whatever so you don't always know. But I do think that this sanctification of these certain little objects and Mona Lisa must be so much better than the painting next to it and this sort of hierarchy. All of these things are very unique, I think, to the art world, whereas there's so much phenomenal work being done every day

by people that we live among, and L.A. is obviously such a fantastic art city, but there's something intrinsic to it that's snooty and that really attracts kind of a snobby sort of person, unfortunately, and at all twists and turns, we've got to try to favor the artists, the curators, the gallerists, the museum directors, everybody that makes it a... accessible, makes it more fun, explains things. Why is that on the wall? Why is that Barnett Newman

on the wall? Why am I supposed to like that? If you can't explain that, then you shouldn't be doing the job. You know, you should explain why a white square is on the wall. Yeah. It's worth $6 million or whatever. And I think that for so long, it's getting a little bit better now. It's pretty pluralistic atmosphere now. Like if you go to LACMA, you'll see every kind of work imaginable, which is how it should be. But for a while, 60s, 70s, 80s, 80s, it had gotten so exclusive and so narrow where it was all about abstract work and abstract expressionism and little conceptual art. But anything outside of that, representational figures, anything like that was like really frowned upon. Passet. Yeah.

And it was like an art form uniquely susceptible to that. And you would never find that in music where it's like, well, from now on, John Cage has brought us to this place where only silence. Stones are over. Yeah. You know, we don't like the rolling stones anymore. Everything else is invalid, but we had reached that place with visual art for a while. It was a tough place and very unaccepting and very close-minded. Yeah, my grievance is like it's the apex of arbitrary.

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

So, do you like the painting? I do. I love the painting. And I look at it and I look at this print that's much cheaper that's framed next to it. And I'm like, yeah, none of this makes any sense. Yeah. I was talking to her friend. She just had a show.

All of her prices are super random. She has a formula that's actually based on, like, area. Based on what you were charging the San Francisco Chronicle for your... It's exactly the same. It just came to mine. So is it like by square feet? footage that you're doing this? Why would this be $412 and that one $600? And if it's by actual area, isn't that seem weird? Like you're charging by the foot. But I think that that goes again

toward how they've created a sort of a self-seriousness about it and a little bit like, I could explain it to you, but you wouldn't understand that kind of thing. Well, it reeks of elitism. You don't find that in any other medium. Even classical music, like the first thing they want to do is explain it to you. You know, like, okay, here's why. This movement is about this, not like, well, I don't know. You have a degree of music theory. Then maybe I could talk to you. Yeah, it's like, if you don't get it, that's on you. So you kind of have to be like, no, I get it. We should add, too, the world is filled with more criminals than any other. There are more paint salesmen who have gone to prison than any other art medium. They're just riddled with crooks who are selling

paintings they don't have. Yeah. They're selling fake paintings. There you go. And why is that? Why does it attract so many charlatans? And it's always been fascinating to me because you really just don't see as much of it in any other form. But the art-forging stories, I do love those, like watching those. And also, you'll see the gallerist in between who's sort of winking and nodding like,

does she or doesn't she know that she's selling a fake for $5.5 million to this gullible couple? And is she just running out the string before putting that in a Swiss account or whatever? And then somebody's going to get caught, but she's just the pass-through. It's fascinating, but there is no equivalent in music or writing or whatever where you could defraud one person out of $5 million based on picture.

You know? Like a bunch of paint on a four-by-four canvas, which the intrinsic value of that is like $150, right? Of like materials. And everything else is about this sort of suspension of disbelief or this shared illusion that we are all going to dream together, that this is worth something now. It's comforting, weirdly.

to go like, oh, there's a handful of things that are so beautiful, they're invaluable. Something about that story is appealing. Well, and also there are people in between, like art consultants that will say this one's appreciating and that one's not. This one's on the downslide and that artist's star is rising. Yeah. So a lot of it is sort of stock market like. It's like vaporware or crypto or whatever where if we all believe together that this person is on the rise, then we can justify that. And then you do have a lot of manipulation.

You'll find the same buyer, buys a painting for a million dollars, shows it in some gallery or traveling show, which raises its profile, sells it to some friend for 10 million who sells it again for 20, and everybody's sort of in on this creating the marketplace. There's a famous story of the Christopher Wool painting that says, whatever, that quote from Apocalypse Now. And it's just type, and it's like a long, tall painting.

Within a handful of years, it went from $800,000 to like $20,000. $22 million. And it was just like this turning. Also, there's no sympathetic victims in any of these cases. You don't really feel bad for someone has an extra $22 million to get taken advantage of. Now, I do want to bring it back to the book for one second to say, though, although Cricket's obviously observing all that madness, Cricket's also experiencing the real value of art in two kind of pivotal moments in the book.

One being he gets singled out in high school for this painting of a week. Weasel, right? Even before, I think they're like 10. And that is extremely hurtful to Robert. He puts his stepdad or whatever's face on a weasel that's been a hit by his roadkill. Police put on an art fair, and it's sort of like a PSA about careful on the road or something. So he uses it as a way to get back. Yeah, so he experiences the power of it.

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

Yeah. He's felt the love of it. So there are these glimpses of what it's really about. For sure. I mean, I think at every step, cricket, in the moment, and I don't know if you've had this experience, but with any art form, I certainly have painting where you're painting and in the moment there's nothing better in the world, the moving color around a canvas. And you think you're doing some masterpiece every single time. time, especially if you're really up close to it and you're inhaling the fumes and stuff. And so on every level. And then you back up and it's a piece of garbage. It does not look like

anything like what you intended to do and it's not working in any way. But how can you sort of like stay in that moment when you were in love with the process and what you were doing? And cricket always is struggling with transferring that moment of being in it to like the result, which is never what you want it to be. And then there's that second stage, that artwork being put out into the world, which is often a miserable process that you don't want to have anything to do with. So I think he never masters it, whereas Olympia would and most people, or a lot of people would master, like, okay, well, I'll figure this out. But he never can transfer the love of what he wants to do in that moment or a tribute to his friend or drawing spaceships on the floor of his grandfather.

there's basement, but to something else and do something in public or make a living at it or master the business side of it. Because the teacher, Carpenter at one point, is like probably the most talented guitarist in the world is playing for a journey cover band in Reno. But there's many different reasons why that person isn't heading up some innovative band, but there's so many other things that you have to do to sort of achieve whatever kind of success. However you might define it, but it's not just talent. And there's a lot of other things. things, showing up on time. There's having or being burdened by ambition,

and cricket really doesn't have any. Olympia applies this ambition to him, come on, do this thing, show up at this one thing, do more of that. People will buy this. At no point, can he do it? And I'm fascinated by those people,

and I can't say I know a lot of them, but like every so often you will find some artists in a little town off the beaten path in Alaska, and they just do this brilliant work, but never want to go anywhere else or do anything else. Yeah. I often ruminate the stories.

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

Sure. for anybody that has the luck of being able to do this for a living. And it's really just about a publisher saying they'll publish the next thing. That's all there is. That's the 100% of the success of it. It's like, really? You're going to do, oh, all right, good. And if you can pay the bills doing it, won the lottery.

But these days, even though not everyone's reading as much as they used to, there are more readers by a factor of a million new people every day than there have ever been in the history of the world. 1900, how many literate people were there? Right? It's a tiny percentage of the globe. And then suddenly we have almost universal literacy around a globe of 8 billion people.

So even where some things are getting a little harder, probably the best time ever to be trying to make a living as a writer because there's just more people, more ways to do it. The Internet gets the books out in different ways. You can get the word out. There's substack now. Everyone can have their own substack. Yeah, if you can make that work, that's income.

But in terms of publishing and in terms of it being a time to do this for a living, that's really the very best time in the history of human evolution to try to be a writer making a living. There's more people making a living out of than ever before. As 1900, you could probably count as a few dozen people, right? As novelist.

Yeah, my other last just curiosity is I went through this program, the groundlings. I think 3,000 people enter for every 15 that get to the Sunday company was the number that was given to me. Maybe that's right or wrong. The point is I saw and worked with a

met so many people that were better at doing characters than I was. They were better writers than I was. They didn't have some combination of ambition or show up and do whatever the thing was. I have this kind of weird survivor's guilt and I could imagine myself writing this book. Motivated out of that a little bit. In my travels, I met crickets and it's not fair and I want to honor a cricket. Yeah. I mean, I always say to my students, I've met a lot of brilliant first draft writers that will not revise. They do the one thing and that's it. Enjoy my offering. I honor you. I honor you with my first draft and I'm going to lunch. Those people, we know what happens to them, right? They can't do the work. So humility is a real thing. And I'm not endorsing Cricket's Way because I

don't live that way myself. I'm happy to take feedback. I'm happy to like do the 20 drafts. I want to learn. And I also know how bad my first drafts are. And so when you come up through newspapers, you're beaten down. You have no choice but to be humble. Yeah. Because they chop every single thing you do. But then it makes you a little bit less precious and a little bit stronger and you meet deadlines and you work a little harder. You can do an all-nighter without a problem. But I think there's so much humility involved and also knowing, I don't know, I mean, the guilt part, I feel bad that, that you don't have it? That I don't. Well, because I, I always see anybody that does the work, I see, and I always believe, every good book will be published.

We're all looking for them as publishers. So if you put in the work and do the 10 drafts or 12 or 15 like the rest of us do, and you listen, and there's maybe some spark there that's something unusual, it'll get published. We're all looking for those books. So I think, again, it's the most democratic medium because you don't need a degree in anything to be able to do it. The problem is people's bar isn't just to get published. it's to be a you, you know, to be a household name. And that's ego, really. Depends on who.

Then we get into like, how do you measure success? For a lot of people, it's publisher will put out your next book. And then they spend a lot of time teaching maybe. You know, they're teaching at UCLA. That's a great life to have. The luckiest life anybody could ever have is being able to convey what you know to the next generation. You get your books out every few years. Yeah.

I have so many friends doing that. And they are unbelievable teachers. There's a couple at USC. USC has an incredible department. You know, there's so many people making a living adjacent to. We have Rita Bullwinkle, the editor of McSweeney's, as a novelist, too, and she's balancing those two things, but that's a very lucky life, too. But there are way more options than there ever were before.

Do a little advertising writing. You do a screenplay there. Maybe there's this, there's that. There's a substack. There's a podcast. People are probably writing tweets, and they're writing Instagram copy, you know, as a side hustle. The people are managing other people's accounts. One of the funniest writers I've ever met

has been at Facebook for like 20 years, writing like internal stuff. Oh, really? A little brighter, but raising kids on it and doing great, and she's been treated very well. Yeah. And if she wants to do side stuff, then that's great. What cricket learns early when he's working at this gallery

is that the ambition and the gap between where you want to be and where you reasonably should or could be, that's where misery comes from. It's like, I should be this, but I'm not realistic about getting this. or I'm not willing to do the work to get there, or maybe I just don't belong there, whatever it is. That's where you get the tortured artist.

And so trying to find like, where's my equilibrium, what don't I love about this? Cricket learns he can't possibly be at an art opening with his paintings surrounding him, people pouring wine on them or whatever. So how do you rule out? You've probably done this a hundred times. Like, how do you rule out the thing I really don't like to do?

No. ...stopping, yeah, yeah, yeah. And say, okay, well, how do I gravitate to this and put together a different mosaic of the things I really like. And it might be on a different scale. You might not live in New York, but you'd live in Indiana or whatever. Cut your expenses by 90%. You know, all of these different things,

we sort of have to think about it at so many stages of life to be like, well, now that the kids are out of the house, what does life look like for us? And are we happiest as opposed to just moving along at the expected rate of things? But I'm not saying I successfully do this all the time, But periodically, you can assess what do you need to cut out. What miseries can you cut out of your life? They're no longer obligations.

I just want to say, I just love 826 Valencia. I got to see, like, what you've done with these places. The first one, I guess, in the mission, right, to have the lease that you guys had to sell shit. Yeah, zoning obligation. Yeah, so they sell pirate stuff, Monica. And it's really just a place for 826 Valencia is where kids can come and get tutored and they can get help right. and they get mentorship, but you can't just open up a mentorship clinic in certain zones.

You have to sell products in the storefront. So a lot of these locations now, there's one in Echo Park, right? Yeah, there's an Echo Park time travel mark. It's a 7-Eleven from the way back. Cool. Do you know how that place was funded? How? So Jud Apatow's been a supporter.

He had an idea one time. He's like, let's do a fundraiser. He had been giving money for years. But he's like, let's do a fundraiser where we parody L.A.'s, tendency to pat themselves on the back for any sort of charitable stuff that they do. He's like, let's do a night of good intentions where we honor Seth Rogan. This was a long time ago. He had only done freaks and geeks.

We're going to honor Seth Rogan for the philanthropic work he's considering doing in the future. I love it. And so Will Ferrell gets up and Ben Stiller and like foo fighters all in one night. They're like, you know, we're so proud of you, Seth, for considering possibly in the future doing something for somebody. And then he gets up and he's like, I have no idea who these people are. I mean, I don't know what A2-6 is. I don't know any of this stuff. I don't know what I was talking about.

But Judd charged like $1,000 a plate. And so all the people in L.A. came. He had the 10-day-old flower arrangements from the Golden Globes. He had like rocky five decorations. But it was a really fun night to parody all of that. And then he raised enough money to build the entire center in Echo Park. Oh, wow. Which is like, you know, $250,000 in a night by parodying L.A.'s.

Self-indulatory. Self, yeah. Self-congratulatory indulgent. So that one's been open almost 15 years now. It's a beautiful spot. After-school help, publishing. It's been home to a couple generations now of kids that have grown up there. And they publish these kids work.

These kids get to have published work and the books are solid. They're fucking, yeah, it's the coolest. We've got a library of 2,000 of these books now up in San Francisco. So if you're ever up there. Yeah. But come by there because it looks like a 7-Eleven, you'll walk right past it because it's exactly a 7-Eleven. Like bad robot, help decorate it.

And then Mac Barnett, who the children's book author, he's the ambassador for children's literature right now from the Library of Congress, but he was the guy in charge. He was the executive director at the time. They all built it, so you'll walk right past it, but then if you go in, there's a secret door that leads to the back, and then that's the tutoring center. So for kids that get extra help,

There's no stigma about it. You know, it's like going into this cool place as opposed to the sterile after-school help for kids falling behind sort of a spot. So all of the centers around the country have different themes. Yeah, you don't want to be behind a glass window with classmates like fucking looking at.

I mean, these places exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's horrifying. And usually you're paying for that tutoring. And to be seen, I won't name these ones that I know of, but it is horrifying. This is all free. Everything's free.

If people want to support 826 Valencia, is there a website? 826 Valencia. here, 826 LA is the one down here, 826 Boston, whatever city you happen to live in. We accept money. Yeah, as you should have. Yeah.

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

That was my class. Okay, it was your class. In San Francisco. I sent my kids out to, interview the most interesting person they see. And they went to a bookstore and they met the woman that says, well, it happened to be the first test tube baby. You got lucky.

So they interviewed them, came back, wrote this up. I mean, the other things, you end up, we have about 1,000 tutors down here. So you end up meeting kids that you share the city with. And these kids meet all these caring adults that give a few hours a month. So it sort of tightens the fabric of a city, especially a vast one where you can feel disconnected by roads and neighborhoods. But there, it's like, oh, I saw it. You live around the corner in Echo Park.

You see the kid at the grocery store. You were both there. And it's like you get to know the parents, everybody. And those kids, especially right now and they're being villainized and, like, ostracized because their parents or their immigrants. This is like a way to say, oh, you belong. You have all of us.

We're all behind you. You got 1,000 advocates. You've got a thousand allies come to us. And so these are real safe havens, especially in the last 10, 12 years. The work has been a lot more urgent. Yeah. Okay, the last thing that's very frivolous and not philanthropically motivated is do you go to the Jetpack Academy?

Yeah, and Moore Park, California. You've been there? I have not. I didn't know one could receive training for jetpack flight. So it's still there. I mean, you're only like an hour away. You've got to go. Okay. It's in an avocado farm. What's the propulsion system? Just jet fuel. It is an actual jet engine. It looks exactly like the cartoon of a jet pack. Okay.

He's modeled it after every image you ever saw in sci-fi. And a version of it was in the Olympics back in like 1980. The guy came in and landed in the opening ceremony. So it looks the same. It was this crazy Australian guy that made his version of it. And you've got whatever, 12 pounds of jet fuel or whatever, you can measure it on your back in the two things. But you're on a tether.

So you're testing it in the middle of this avocado farm. And, you know, there's a, you know, a landing strip. You know, you pull the throttle, you do a little bit of this and that. And then you're on a tether, which makes it extreme. difficult because it catches. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't really get a feel for it. No, it's not as romantic as you want it to be.

And then it burns the absolute shit out of your feet because, like, the jet fuel coming and it's spreading out on the concrete where your feet are. So it's not a super romantic process. I really like experimental flight. I've tried a lot of different weird. Yeah, the drones are going to work. I'm watching people fly drones around.

Any minute. Those are the most promising. The problem is, is fuel and like how do you carry enough to take you really as far as you want to go. They all have pretty limited scopes. What I almost did up in Ventura is the motor paragliding. Yeah. That interests me and you can do that in a weekend.

I've done ultra lights. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's more like a motorcycle with a hang glider on top of it. But my friends that know what they're talking about say that they're called parasailing. No, it's not parasailing, but that that's the better vehicle. It's like motor and paragliding mashed up somehow. And it's got that sort of fan in the back. I watched a dude laying on the beach in Malibu, I started talking.

I'm like, where did you take off? He's like, oh, I took off from Thousand Oaks. Yeah. And I'm like, what is this? This isn't that thing where you're like in like the bat suit and all these people die? No, that's a wingsuit and those are deadly. Yeah. Everyone that does it dies.

This is, you have a paragliding parachute above you. And then you have a gas engine. I'm back with a fan. Yeah. And it propels you. And you can fly. Oh, another, I was doing this movie without a paddle. And the stunt coordinator had shipped his to New Zealand.

And we had to go into this jungle. It was either an hour and a half drive or they started a helicopter during us because it took so long. And this dude was flying from his hotel, his motorized paraglider to work. And I'm like, what a stud. Look at this. If you have a field that can land on any kind of field,

you see a lot of in like Nebraska. That's where they fly a lot of those. Yeah, yeah. And you don't even need a license because it's ultra late. It's below the category where you need a license. But I check every time they get a little bit closer to one of these.

They're super expensive still. I mean, the real drone technology is like half a million dollars or something. And I need a really good self-deploying parachute that noticed I'm falling quicker than I would want to fall. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fun to go see the jetpack.

The other problem with it is that you can only carry enough, even if you knew how to fly it. The problem is you can only carry enough fuel for two, three minutes. Right, right, right. So that's why you never see them anywhere. Because it's like, you know, you're back. But it's kind of fun. Well, Dave, even though you don't like talking about yourself,

we got through it. I want to applaud you. We did it. Thank you very. Yeah, you revealed just enough for us. So gentle. I think you're just a beautiful writer and contraposto is in keeping with all of your really wonderful work. So I hope everyone checks that out.

What a delight to meet you. I've been hearing about you from Kimmel and you deliver. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Absolutely. You guys. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite fact checks.

From your picture board? No, this one wasn't on my board. This one's impromptu? Oh, wow. Improvised? It's great. You know, it's funny as I was in the shower today. And I've been ordering a lot of slacks. You've seen me in them. There's new slacks. Yeah. Drawstring, a little bag ear. Trous. Trousers. Drowsers. Pantilunis. Multiple colors. All this is say, I get them. I like them. I put them on my closet and then they're gone forever. You forget about them? Well, I wear the same two that are in front of me. And I actually was thinking in the shower, like, I need to do what Monica does. Exactly. Or just another thought I had is like, lay out seven outfits.

And that's what I'm going to wear that week. Have you ever tried that technique? Yeah, that's a common technique. It's very common. Okay, so I didn't discover anything. No, you did. You're on the brink. You're on the precipice.

You should because it's stupid to buy clothes and not wear them. And then I think I don't have any because I wear the same two pants that I like. And then I get more. And then as I'm putting those away, they're next to brand new other pants I bought that I like. And that's a guy thing because I have the same way with my pants. Oh, you are? I don't think it's a guy thing. I think it's an everyone thing like people have their go-to jeans and their go-to.

You forget when you buy new stuff to mix it up unless you commit yourself like I have to fashion. Did you see my closet video? This could be, no. Oh, my gosh, I posted a closet video. Oh, and does it include your photographs? Yeah. Oh, wow. It's a bit regretful because it was also impromptu, improvised.

Uh-huh. Very random. Just came over. Okay. And I was telling him about my fashion indebt. and then I was like, oh, I should show you my closet. So then I was doing that and then he was filming. Hmm.

And- So you didn't even realize it was something that you might post, but then you saw it and you're like, I'm gonna post it. Yeah, I was like, oh, it's funny, but it is funny. Uh-oh. It's not. Aspirational? Yeah.

Oh. I know. I know. Sad. Well, you gotta stay a little relatable. That's true. You know? I am relatable because right now my clothes smell bad. This outfit smells bad.

Oh. God, what kind of stink? I don't know if it's from the dry cleaning. Oh, oh. I did walk, so the sweat probably made it worse. Oh, it sounds like sweat? Well, no, it's great. Pheromones?

It doesn't. It smells like a weird smell, and the sweat, I think, exacerbated it. Okay. If you had to compare the smell to something, could you? Well, then I wondered, like, is it moth smell? Mm-mm. But then I don't know what moth smell is. Do they smell?

No, are you thinking of moth balls? Yeah. Yeah, moths don't smell. Mothballs smell. to repel moths. Oh. Yeah. That's the thing I always curious about.

There's always kids in school whose mothers just chalk their closets full of moth balls. Okay. And then they reek like mothballs but guess what? It's human repellent as well. Because it's nasty.

Okay, well that makes me feel good. It's not moths. I thought moth balls were made from moths. Oh, okay. I thought they like were like spiders, you know, like they leave webs. The little eggs. Ew.

Anyway, so it's not that. So it's the dry cleaner. Oh. Well, okay. It definitely is. I've noticed it on a lot of my clothes lately. This makes me think of something that I don't think I should share

but I'm going to. So I was in my Miami trip and I have a system when I travel. I throw all my dirty clothes in the corner of whatever room I'm inhabiting. At the end of the trip, I have two sides of my suitcase. I keep all the fresh ones on one side

and I put all the dirties in a ball in the other side. Then when I get home, I just take that ball. I put it in the hamper and then I put away my fresh clothes. So I had showered, I did very minimal things.

And I went to work out and then I, you know, I pee next to the garage about seven. No, no, this is maybe a week and a half ago. It was after Miami. Okay. This resulted from Miami. Okay. I think I know.

You do. I think I can. Okay. Well, take a guess. That could be fun. Okay. So you peed by the garage. And when you peed by the garage, you took your underwear down.

And when you looked at the underwear, it was definitely dirty. Because one of the dirty clums, moved into the clean clump. Okay. Close. You know his poop stays. No, okay. Okay, so I guess it's not that bad.

Oh. I don't in general have shit streaks. I wouldn't guess that about you. Yeah. You're pretty clean. I'm pretty meticulous. Well, just specifically, I don't even think I'm that clean.

My an anus is an obsession of mine. You know, I have the, I have the brondel and I squirt water in there, and I'm just, yeah. And you put your fingers in. I do rub my finger on that. People don't like that, but I do. You know, fuck it.

I put my finger on it in the shower. I clean it, and then I use toilet paper to dry off. And then I wash my hands. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. So I peed next to the garage and then I went in and then I sniff my fingers as you do. Yeah.

I thought, oh my God, there's a little bit of like ball smell. Like I would, which I don't, again, I also don't really ever get stinky balls. I have to not shower for a few days to get that. Okay. But I just showered that morning. I was like, what the fuck? How could I already have stinky undercarriage? When I just showered, it was driving me bonkers, right?

And then I peed another time, and I'm like, God damn it, it's there. Maybe it's even worse. Now I'm consumed with it. So when I finish my work, I'm like, I'm going to have to shower. Well, actually, I didn't think I'm going to have to shower again. I thought, I'm going to have to wash my testicles and penis in the sink, which I sometimes do. Okay. And so I went upstairs and I was about to do that.

And all of a sudden, I just thought, oh, my God, I'm going to be a lot. I'm going to smell my underwear. I took off my underwear's, Lordy Lord. What's obvious is they were not clean. Yeah. So although I was very clean, I put on my undies and it contaminated my testicles of my penis. So it was half right. Dirty one made its way into the clean section.

That's exactly right. Okay. And I'll add. I can't remember having pantalunis undercarriage men's unmentionables that even smelled that bad. Right. Why would it smell that bad? Well, Miami, okay. Sweat.

Very hot. Very humid. Sure. Then take them off and they're, God knows, you know, and they're just not getting any better smelling. And then they're in the, oh, God. Anyways, what a humiliation. Well, you were by yourself at least.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I'm like you. I go to the worst place. Like, I have a headache. Okay, I got a tumor. So I'm like, oh my God, now I'm someone who's ball stink three hours every day shower. That's scary.

What's happening with me hormonally? Yeah. You know, I'm going to all these crazy explanations, never even thinking. Maybe my panties smell. And they did. Wow, well, that's an easy fix, so best case. Yeah, I haven't experienced it since. But now I'm a little shook about that pair of panties,

and I love that pair of panties. They're dark black with very colorful hearts on them. Uh-huh. So I wore them the other day, and I sniff, sniff, sniff. Because I was like, were they clean, and they're permanently something's wrong with them? But then I sniff, sniff, sniff, clean as a cucumber. But I had some anxiety all day.

I was like, every time I peed, I was like, you thought maybe it was going to get released? Yes, I did. just because I had had that traumatic experience. Sure. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, there's reason to fear because sometimes when pheromones get crossed, weird stuff can happen.

I think you're referencing when you borrow a girlfriend's shirt. That's right. And the girlfriend doesn't have B.O. Zero. And you don't have B.O. I hope I don't. You don't. I've known you for quite a while.

Yeah. Never smelt B.O. on you. And then. But when I wear the shirt, I do have B. I have like a, it smells crazy, but it's the. mixture of the pheromones. Yeah, and you have a, you know which friend you can't share tops with. Callie's one of them, right? Is she one of them? No, she's not. It's not gross because neither of you have me. I know, but it's not her. Ding, ding, ding, ding Callie. This is relevant.

So I had dinner with her and she just got out of COVID. And during COVID, she got really into Drive to Survive. She did not. Yes. So. Oh, her MX? Yeah, they've been watching it. And of So she was, you know, cross-referencing with me a lot. Like, okay, do you like this person? Do you like this person? Who do you like? You know, that type of thing. And then she had probably a whole new jealousy that you're friends with Daniel Ricardo.

Okay, this is what I'm getting at. Oh, my gosh. No, you're not going to like it. Okay. Okay. So she said, what teams? And I said, I just like, whatever Danny's on. He's my favorite.

And she was like, really? And I was like, yeah, what do you mean? I was like, I love Danny. He's the best one. And she was like, oh, he seems a little. little full of himself. And then I said, oh my God, that's the thing Dax was talking about on the show where some people think he's...

Sincere about that. I guess or something. And I was like, oh, that's that thing. But then I told her that he's perfect and lovely and very nice. And she said, oh, I was wrong. Yeah, nicest manners in the world, gentle boy. Not arrogant at all. No.

That's his character. I am. I had to correct that I had to write that wrong. She was receptive to it. Oh, good. And I'm glad she was flexible in her judgment. Who does she love? She likes Sains.

Okay, sure. When you look at Sains, you go, this guy is dirty. I do think that when I see him, but I think the same thing about LeClerc. Like, they all stink bad. No, not stink. No, no, no. Stop saying that. You're perpetuating a false rumor.

I'm saying, like, nasty. Like, get in the bedroom. He's throwing you all around, moving your body, doing all kinds of advanced Spanish lovemaking techniques. That's what I think. Okay. I think she's responding to his carnal sex appeal. Okay, maybe.

Like, LeClerc is much better looking than the signs. Well, that's all in the eye of the beholder. To me, I'm only speaking for myself. Okay. I think Leclerc is much cuter than signs. But if I had to guess, there were 10 volunteers who slept with both of them, my guess would be signs comes out is the better lover. That is my spidey sense intuition. Okay. You're worried about me perpetuating

rumors? That he's a good lover? Well, that also that LeClerc is not. Didn't say that. No, basically. Did not say that. That's what he's going to hear. No, he's not. What he's going to hear is I think he's better looking. And then I think that Signs is a little bit better of a lover, although LeClerc is a very generous lover. Although, no, last time I was talking about LeClerc, I was hypothesizing that he was a two-pump chump. Exactly. For fun. You've really made it clear you think he's bad.

No, I love Leclair. Anyway. He's in my top three drivers. What if I said? You know, Dax is obviously better looking, but I would much rather have sex with. Oh, yeah. Well, that's true. You'd hate that.

Well, hold on, though. That was really good. It was kind of a cheap shot. But also Bradley Cooper would be mad that I said the other part. So what you would need to say, though, it's got to be identical, you'd say. You're much better looking than Bradley, but I think if you and Bradley had sex with 10 women,

the women would prefer having sex with Bradley. Okay. And that's still rough. That's rough. But not as bad as what you just said before. Well, I say. She's way better than you. Yeah, that's what you're saying.

I didn't say that. Stop putting words in my mouth. I said that signs is preferred, not way better. You are splitting hair. Uh-huh, I am. Okay. That's what we do here, nuance. Okay.

Non-binary. Okay. Preferred. I'll change my verbiage to prefer. Okay, okay. Ten girls would prefer sleeping with Bradley over you. They preferred the experience. Preferred the experience.

They had sex with both of you and they prefer the experience. You'd hate it, of course. Well, of course I'd hate it. You know what a good question is? We're getting somewhere good. We're actually, we're approaching something good. Okay. So here's an option.

You only get one of the. too. Great looking or great in bed? What would you rather be known for? Oh, known for. I know for me what it is. Well, I know for you what it is. What is it? Good in bed. Oh, yeah, of course. Because that's where the rubber meets the road. I think everyone would rather be good in bed. I don't know. I think some people who don't really give a fuck about sex, they're not super sexual. They'd rather just walk through the world being super attractive and people smiling at them and buying them drinks and what, And they're like, I don't care if I'm good in bed. I'm good enough.

Now, what would you rather be, Robbie? Good in bed. Yeah. Yeah. Good, three for three. The hard thing is if you're not good looking, it's hard to prove you're good in bed. This is the conundrum. Right.

Anyway. So does she want to start watching, is she going to start watching races and shit, Kali? She wants to, I think. She does. Now she's in. She loves it. Great. Yeah.

I might have to have them over for a race day. Oh, they would love that. Max asked if I liked Pierre Gasly. So also here's a part That's my brother's favorite. Really? Yeah, he loves him. I said he looked greasy.

But then Max said no, it's just a sweat from driving. They're playing a sport, basically. Like you would never call a basketball player sweaty. No, I didn't call him sweaty. Greasy. That's a different one. That's got a little bit of potentially a racist connotation. Why?

He's white. I know, but there's certain. populations of white people that have a reputation of being greasy. Who? I'll tell you off the air, but I'm not going to do it here. Tell me. No. Anyway, okay, so Max likes Pierre.

Does anyone like Max? No. Oh. That's pretty... Universal. Yeah. Wow. He's so arrogant, Max.

He's not even arrogant. That is not the word I would use to describe him. Okay. Like, he never says he's great. That's not for me required. He's the best driver in Formula. I don't disagree. Yeah.

And he doesn't even really say that. I don't love a fuck-off attitude in general in life. I'm not attracted to anyone who's like that. Right. He carries himself like that. It's the same as, I know, but you love Michael Jordan. Like, Michael Jordan was punching his teammates in practice.

But Michael Jordan does not have a fuck-off attitude. He's not like... If someone who doesn't know as much as him tells him what to do, he has a very fuck-off attitude. And that's what you see with Max quite often. But even just the way he talks to like interviewers, he refuses to play the game even a little bit. And I don't like that. I'm like, these are fans.

These are people who are paying a lot of money to see you. Can you cut him a little bit of a cultural break that he's Dutch? They don't do the pleasantry thing. Everyone in the Netherlands and the north, they don't believe in the little small talk, the pleasantries. They get right to it. I don't believe in small talk either. I hate it. But you are a popular sports figure making a ton of money, doing exactly what you love.

You have a great life. Just be a little nicer. Okay. I'm just going to make an argument for him. Okay. Which is he's not paid to do any of that stuff. He is paid to win races for Red Bull. Hold on.

You said your piece. Okay. He has one job, win races. That is his job. And that's why he gets paid more money. If you wanted a PR guy, you should have hired a PR guy. If you want a guy that thinks about nothing but winning races is a psychopath about winning races, then hire me and I'll go win races. But if you need a guy to go sell Red Bull as a beverage or sell Formula One as a sport, I'm not the dude.

I care about a single thing, winning races. I respect that. Okay, that was my piece. I get it. I get what you're saying. It's not attractive to watch. watch someone be rude or... Short with everyone.

Could care less when people are excited. Like, it's, to me, very off-putting. Even when he wins, though, do you ever listen on the radio when he wins? Like, when he comes across the finish line, and they'll go, like, that was P1 Max. And I'll go, oh, all right. Woo, that was a good race.

That's it. The other people are, like, doing backflips in the car and screaming and stuff. He's just a very, you know, robotic. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not trying to convince you to not like him, you know? I don't think you are.

Love him. You can keep loving him. But it's not my preferred personality. Yeah. Great. I like Danny, who's nice and kind and always looking out for the little guy and who's conscientious. I like that personality. That's what I'm drawn to.

One of the questions lobbed my way was, what do you think of will blank? I forget his last name. journalist on Drive to Survive. Back up. What, what now? That was a question. From Cali to me. Oh. You know, like, what do you think at this person? What do you think of Will Buxton, the journalist? That's great. He's handsome.

The English dude, right? Yeah. Yeah, he's very handsome. He kind of looks like a driver a little bit. She's deep if she wants to know when you think of Will Buxton. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Okay, what does Oshel

Ashante mean. Ashante means nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I can't really say it to you because I met you a long time ago. I know. It also does, it does say enchanted. Oh, good. Maybe we get enchanted from that.

It's a very elegant word. It is. Yeah. It's greasy. Farts on an airplane. Like snakes on a plane, farts on a plane? Mm-hmm. Why you fart so much on planes and how.

Is that how it's? was that why you fart? Not why do you? Yeah. Oh, it's why you fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an answer. Not a question.

Yeah. This says, as it turns out, there's a scientific reason people often fart more while traveling on planes or climbing high mountains. And it's even got a name, high altitude flattis expulsion. Ooh, flatus expulsion. The gastrointestinal syndrome was described in a 1981 study

as characterized by an increase in both the volume and the frequency of the passage of flattis. which spontaneously occurs while climbing to altitudes of 11,000 feet or greater. I've never heard flatulence just shortened to flattice. Oh my God, excuse my flattice.

Ashante. That study found that as air pressure decreases at higher altitudes, gases inside your body expand and need to be let out. Although it was based more on being up in the mountains than inside a pressurized plane.

But additionally, a 2013 study that our participants record how often they farted while driving up an Australian mountain hypothesized that quickly moving from a low altitude to a higher one draws more carbon dioxide into your gut. Isn't that great? It is, you know, and if you think about it, it's the reverse of the bends.

Yeah. So you have less pressure on you so the gas comes out. But when you have extra pressure, it condenses it so much and getting your bloodstream. Less pressure in your asshole, more pressure in your bloodstream. Keep it in your asshole, folks. Oh, man.

Oh, Jesus. Okay, this is the trans-ish. Okay, so backstory. Almost the second after I said that the bends is on the opposite scale. We stopped down, as we say in the biz. What did we call it? Stop down. Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, wow. Okay, I tell you some things. Stopped down, and we did a really cool interview. Uh-huh. And then things got cray. Then we stopped up, and all of some of the kids were home. from school. Yes. So this next section of the fact check includes

some guests. It's chaos. Please enjoy the chaos. We had just finished farts on an airplane. You sit over here, love. So someone ripped in class. Mm-hmm. And you were trying to figure out who it was? Yeah. This is a ding, ding, ding

to our fart story because what happened today? But I was just sitting there and everything was normal. We were redoing a multiplication unit. And then I just smelled something in the air. And I was like, oh, it's just a small. And then it came at me.

It came at me so hard. Oh no, it grew and grew. Yeah, I had to stand up and pretend to stretch. Oh, really? Yes. Did you look around the classroom to make eye contact with other people like, are you smelling this too? I have farted in weird places,

so I know what position I love to sit in when I fart. Oh. So it's silent. I saw the people sitting next to me and I looked at Harper. She was sitting on her knees and I said, that's not a good place to fart. It would have like skinned against your feet

so it would have made a loud sound. All right. Really good sleut thing. Yeah. And then I looked at Draven and she was sitting in the Crisk Cross Applesauce. And I was like, no way. No, you're just sitting on too much weight.

So that'd be thunderous. If you farted during Crisscrest Applesauce, it would be like a trumpet in your pants. And then I looked at Dylan, and he was sitting, like, he was hugging his knees technically. I was like, that's not a good place to farm. Also a blast. That'd be a trumpet. Unless you rolled up a little bit.

You're right. You know. Imagine pulling your knees tight to your chest. It would be like, like, like it would fucking, what you're trying to get is like your buns as pushed together as possible. No pressure anywhere in your body so you can let it leak. Exactly. You don't, you want it to leak out. Wait, you guys, I have a much,

this is fascinating, I have a much different tactic for a silent fart. Yes, I want the butt cheeks to be spread. Splayed open? Yeah. Oh, so you'll what, do the splits? No, I mean, I guess I don't really fart in public anymore.

Have you bent over and spread your butt cheeks and then it smelled a minute later? You might as well have just made a noise. Okay, normally I, do this if I'm in like a public bathroom. Oh, okay. So I can use my hands. And you spread your butt cheeks apart physically? Oh my God, that's great.

Oh, wow. That's wonderful. Was anyone doing that, Lincoln? Not that I saw. And then I identified for the conference. Okay. And what was it a male or a female? It was a female. Okay. And how was... Good for her, I will say. Me too. Yeah. I was afraid you were only going to blame it on a dude because we're

gross. But... You are. Yeah, that's right. I'm the worst. What kind of position was she in? I'm just slowly lifting up my butt. Oh. Her butt was like high.

So. Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. I'm impressed. You figured it out. And then does she ask to go to the bathroom like five minutes after that? No.

But then I actually had to pee during that time. So maybe I thought, oh, no, did somebody think it was? Were you scared? Yeah. I was like, I would have thought that. I actually had to go to the bathroom before the part came. Sure. And he just said, I can't go right now. So like two minutes. Oh boy. And then the person started just letting it air out. It was like load and load and load. There was this one time

where I thought I was gone. And I was like, fresh hair. And then. New round. Second wave. And it was even worse than first. Oh. Oh. And I feel like it was another person. This was also a female. She always points out far as when somebody fart, and she did not point at that. Oh, never smelt it, doubt it. Oh, no, that's the opposite. But she was sitting in Chris Carras applesauce. So maybe she lifted up her butt.

She might have a different technique like Monica, but I have to say that's a really good proof if she's always busting people about farting and it stunk in there like a dead raccoon and she was quiet. That's very incriminating. Unless the teacher pulled her a, at one point and said, please don't do that anymore.

It's embarrassing for the students. And I wish the teacher would do that because that's me. Well, you should be embarrassed for farting and stinking up the classroom. Sure, but we must agree some things are embarrassing in society. Because this is what I think I feel bad for you kids is like you're in your home. You've been farting since you were born. We don't care at all. We think it's funny.

And then we send you to this box that you sit in with other kids. And we haven't even told you it's not cool to fart in public. And you've got to learn the hard way, right? Mm-hmm. Like, did you ever get embarrassed at any point? Like, did you rip one at any point that someone busted you? No, nobody caught me. You just knew somehow to keep them on the down low.

Nobody got me. Unless I accidentally didn't know what was coming. Yeah, sure. Surprise fart. Yeah, sure. That was a good part noise. That was good. That was good.

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

Yeah. It's a good reason. You look like zazzy today. Zizzy. Oh, thank you. Okay, last question. How frequently do you smell farts in the classroom? Is it every day?

There's only been, I don't know, three or four, five farts this month. That's not bad at all. So people have been holding them in or just haven't had to bark. Okay. Do you think it correlates to the school lunch? Great theory, like whatever hot lunch is, like cabbage, kimchi. The weird thing is a lot of people. That's interesting.

Breakfast farts? Well, maybe they didn't evacuate in the morning. Oh, they're not on a good sketch. Who's there? ID money. Oh, he fell. Oh, my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Purple hair? Yeah. That's beautiful purple hair. Purple hair. Purple hair. Oh, and it matches your sweater. Uh-huh. You look like a little rock star.

You look like a little rat. Delta, did you smell any farts in your class today? Yeah, that's a Starbucks teddy bear, but it has to stay in here because David brought it for the attic. You can come up here and play with it. That's fine. She doesn't have every single stuffy. She does.

That's from New Zealand, my love. That's from a far away country, like 17 hours in an airplane away. But you can come up here and play with it. It'll give you something to look forward to when you come up here. But did anyone fart in your class today, Delta? Oh, crime. Now you got chocolates. Yes, those come from New Zealand as well.

They're not that good at all. They're terrible. Don't tell David. It's like a skittal, a chocolate skittal. Those are so bad. Mikey likes it? You want to take it? Oh, boy.

When's the last time you smelled a bad fart? A Friday. Friday. And what happened? I just smelled a toot. Oh, you did? When you smell a toot in class, do you say, ooh, somebody farted, or do you just keep it to yourself?

I just keep it to myself. That's nice. That's nice. Yes, exactly. How often do you fart in class? 20 times a day. That's 20 times a day. So it does smell like farts in the classroom, just your farts.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Well, you're making a real name for yourself because you've got purple hair and your fart 20 times a day. I think the sky's the limit for you. Wait, what is this? What are we on? We're on television right now.

They can see us. I'm telling us! We're doing a podcast, and then Lincoln was up here, so we invited her to chit-chat. You know, after the interview was a fact check. So just Monica and I talk, and Monica busts me on what facts I got. wrong. A fart check. This has become a FARC check, yeah. But why did it end? Oh, I do have like Yeah, well listen. Why don't you guys shut up and listen to Monica and you guys will learn. Oh wow. So now you're shutting me up. You know, this is what boys do I think because I was explaining a math

problem today. And Draven didn't get it. And then Dylan said, don't worry, I'll explain it. And I said, excuse me, this is my problem. I can explain it. Oh, there you go. I'm proud of you for doing that. You can explain it. You're capable. Boys are the worst. That's why you guys don't want... No one wants to sleep with Dad. Yes, no one wants to snuggle Daddy.

No one absolutely wants to sleep with Dad. Because of the farts? No. No, those are bad also. But I feel so bad for Dad. He has to sleep with a snobloat. That's what they... No one wants to sleep with me.

At night, they're fight to sleep with Mom. And I said, you guys, how do you think I feel? I always have to sleep with Daddy. Let's just be practical about it. What about sleeping with Mommy is better? Mommy. I don't know. She's just not daddy, which is enough.

Lincoln, you were so little. Three, maybe, or four. And I was carrying you, and you said that. Can I poop my pants? No, well, sure. I cleaned up lots of your poop. But I was carrying you, and you said something like, I can't hold you like a mom holds you.

And I was so sad. But it was also the truth. Oh, I know. These kids are heartbreakers. This is very recent. This was when we were in the old house. And I was in the bathtub. I didn't know why, but this fart just came up and said,

hello. And I turned around to grab the shampoo, and I found that I pooped in the bathtub. Yeah, that happened. These things happened from time to time. Lincoln, did you name you poop? You had a baby. A poop baby.

We have a pee baby, Monica. I have a pee baby, so why not have a poop baby? Yeah, that's right. A peevee baby is I peed in a toilet and there's no flush and then daddy had to pee so he peed. So our peas were in the same toilet and never flushed. So they turned into a baby. We said it turned into a pee baby.

He lives at my house. It's still there. Just getting out of kindergarten at this point, I think. Can I tell the one story about you, Delta? Yeah. I'm ready? I love this story. I was putting you guys to bed.

Delta, you were probably three, and you said, oh, I got a poop. I said, okay, you went in and you took a poop, and it was the size of a moose's poop. Like, I thought a moose had pooped in the toilet. And I said, oh, my God, honey, when's the last time you pooped? And you're like, I don't remember. That was the biggest poop you had ever taken. So then I put you in your diaper, and then I put you in bed, and I put Lincoln in bed, and we read a book, and we snuggle.

And then I go outside. I shut the door and I just turned on the TV and all of a sudden I heard, Daddy, I farted. It's diarrhea. And then I went in there. I thought, how could you have possibly just had diarrhea? You just had an entire evac. I went in there, I picked you up. Your diaper was completely ruined.

I took you into the bathroom, if you remember, and you had poop on your back and your You had a full blowout. Full blowout. And I was like, where did all this come from? Daddy. I partied. Okay, last thing I'm, this is the last time you're going to get to talk, Delta. Will you do your song?

Okay. Didle da-da-da-do-do. Did-da-de-do. She just learned this. Do you want to do it one more time? That sounds like my favorite. She did that 11. hundred times this morning before school.

Wait, where'd you learn that? That's what, Mommy does that. Oh, wow. Oh, I love you. Thanks, DeMoney. Oh, my God. All right, now you guys have to be quiet so we can do our business. We got a great fart story and we got a great deed-old deed-a-do.

Yeah, oh, that's great. Yeah, let's hear the fact. They got to see how the sausage is made. Okay, we have one fact left. The fact is, oh, and actually, this is relevant. Lincoln loves F-1. Excuse me, everybody. I'm on Monica.

Okay, the fact is about how many employees work on the Mercedes team. Oh, God. More than 950 employees, an F1 team, but this isn't specific to Mercedes, but an F1 team directly involves between 300 and 1,200 people, depending on whether it's at the front or back of the grid and how much in-house manufacturing it does, and whether it produces an engine or buys one in. Yeah.

And then how many people work at Mercedes, more than 700 employees work 24 hours a day. Oh, wow. That's confusing because that would have to be 1,400 employees, 12 hours shifts. It makes me wonder if they're talking about, even though the thing is how many. Mercedes has a million employees. Right, okay. Then, yeah, it is saying that.

And then the other one said 950, more than 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the Brackley site. Oh. Oh boy. This is the tough question. Mommies is technically better because she's got control of her instrument. Yours is 20 times more entertaining. So how do we know? How would I decide? Wait, what do you mean? Like Mommy sounds identical to the actual jib jab song, right? Because she's a mimic. And yours is so cute. Is yours and it's incredible. So I'm, I would say. I would say, I would. say I would rather hear yours than mommy's and I got a hunch I'm gonna tonight. Can I? For a goodbye? Yes.

Is there anything you want to say before we go? Farting in public should be weird. Okay, great. Good to end on. And then we're going to go out with a song. This is not an original. This is a cover song from the artist formerly known as Delta. Dida-de-do-do-do-de-da-do.

Beautiful. We did it. You look like a chipmunk when you do. All right, I love you guys. I love you. Love you, love you, love you, love you.