Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Suleika Jaouad (on creative alchemy)

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Suleika Jaouad (The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life) is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and bestselling author. Suleika joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why in a memoir you should save the sharpest knives for yourself, being excited when something holds up a mirror to our ugliest parts, and moments of creative injury and the validation that can come from them. Suleika and Dax talk about finding her sense of belonging in books, choosing to play the double bass, and meeting the love of her life Jon Batiste at band camp. Sulieika explains how her leukemia was misdiagnosed as burnout syndrome, the experience of witnessing her worst day alchemize into one of her best, and why the only way for her not to be consumed by her fear during her illness was to collaborate with it.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dak Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Monsoon. Hi there.

Hi, today we have Suleika Jouad. Yes. Who we've been dying to meet since, I mean, we met her in real life a couple of times, but ever since watching that incredible documentary about her and John Baptiste, she's such a special, incredible person. She's a bestselling author, she's an artist, an advocate.

Her books include Between Two Kingdoms and now The Book of Alchemy, a creative practice for an inspired life. She's insanely inspiring as a person. Yeah, this was a beautiful conversation. It really was. And even though Dax and I get into it at the beginning, we will revisit it in the fact check

and you can stick around for that. I can't wait. This is also news to me. Yep. All right, please enjoy Suleika. We are supported by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online.

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I did a movie that shot New Zealand and they would go, you want your trickies? I'm like my what? Your trickies? Which were my track pants. I see. Your trickies. Which is what they call sweatpants. But it was trickies. And everything is ease.

Yeah. It's very playful. It's very cute. Yeah, it's very cute. Yeah, it's very cute. It is very cute. I go by Sulake sometimes. Oh! Do you add I's or Y's to your names?

Yes, they call me Monnie. I don't get Daxie too much. Daxie's a lot. Yeah, it's like Daxie Waxie. Daxie Waxie. Daxie Waxie, twiddle-dum. Widdle boy. Yeah, how do I emasculate a man and just add a Y to the end of our name. It's true.

Maxi, Maxi Pad. Maxi Pad. It all circles back to periods. Exactly. We can't get off the topic, you and I. I know, we really can't. It's my favorite topic. Speaking of women, did everyone see Taylor Swift got the rights to her music back today?

I did not see that. Oh, she did. Today, she bought them to her music back today? I did not see that. Oh she did. Amazing. Today she bought them back. Are you celebrating? I am. I almost wore a Taylor shirt, but I forgot. Are you a Swiftie?

Yeah, I love her. I love her for those re- I mean I love her lyrics and stuff, but she's a boss. She just will not quit until she gets what she wants. It's so cool. And I was talking to a friend about it this morning because I was getting so many texts like, oh my God. That's such a phenomena.

I know, but because it's a female thing. And I do think so many women, regardless of who they are, they see themselves in her. It's such a gift that she has that you can just place yourself on her. So when she has these wins, even though she's a legitimate billionaire, you take them almost as personal wins.

It's true, and she's been so open about the struggles. Yes. I love her. I love the impact she has visibly on my daughters, mostly my oldest, and I've gone to the concert with her. What a gift to give this little girl. But I have tiny criticisms, and they're not permitted. Okay. Anytime that happens I get very flared up about responsible critique.

What are your criticisms? Well would you acknowledge that Swiftie's in general there's no room for any kind of possible she's incredible. Also, I don't love the endless victim narrative in the breakup song, but I'm not allowed to say that. And then the rights to her music thing is a little one-sided, what everyone perpetuates. Go ahead, because you're already, do you see that physical reaction? But I don't know if you know all the stuff.

I do, I've watched two documentaries about it. Okay, so what is the one-sided factor? She could have gotten them back. She tried to get them back from Scooter. She didn't wanna pay what Scooter paid to buy the recording company that owned the recordings. She wanted to be let out of that deal and have the music. And they said, well, it costs this much money. And she said, I'm not paying that.

And Scooter Braun paid that. It wasn't Scooter who owned the music. He bought the recording studio, of which her father owned a percentage of. We're gonna have to do a big fact check on this. So are you someone who, when there's a topic that is too hot to touch, it makes you wanna talk about it? It's not specifically that,

because actually I can dodge a ton of the hot button topics. It's when you're not allowed to question it. Like a sense of censorship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that healthy debate's not invited. And I think as topics have to land in a political side now, I mean, you can almost not find a topic that one side hasn't claimed ownership over.

Totally. So if I wanna pressure test our side of it, I'm anti our side and I'm anti my party. I don't like that. That's a real trigger for me. How do you feel about that? I am very put off by binary thinking. Anytime there is an all or nothing paradigm,

I get activated and I'm drawn to the messy middle. That to me is where the richness is. I like to fumble through my ideas. I like to not even necessarily know if I'm 100 percent sure of what I'm arguing, but I want the freedom to figure it out. That's when I get most excited conversationally. Me too. So I guess just the Scooter Taylor things like,

Scooter's the villain, he's an evil man and she's an angel and already the archetypes. Those are too extreme for both people. Totally. Even in books, I don't like a clean villain or a clean angel. Yeah. Those aren't interesting stories. And a villain who does a few nice things. And that feels more believable to me.

Yeah. Oh yeah. So I'm with you and this isn't specific to Taylor Swift. You're not voting on that. I'm not even waiting in there, because honestly I don't know enough to wait in there. But I do feel a kind of knee-jerk skepticism any time there are clear narrative roles that don't allow for messiness.

Yeah, that makes total sense. But I do think there's sometimes some hypocrisy that can happen. Like, when you live a life that's, I don't believe in two sides, you do in your life. We have had our own business situation where you definitely feel like there's a right and wrong thing happening here. And it's still messy. I understand points of view on both sides.

Like the politics thing, of course, no one's perfect. No one's an angel. Villain is a little bit trickier in that position. But yes, it doesn't mean that one person isn't better for a position. I don't know. Yeah, I'm happy to assign gradients to each person. But in the canon of Taylor,

it's like Jake Gyllenholt's a terrible man. All the exes are like terrible people. And I'm just afraid of that. I'll end my Taylor thoughts at that. I'll say as someone who has written memoir, I feel like it is your responsibility when you write in the first person, be it in a song or in book form,

to save the sharpest knives for yourself. And I also believe that that makes for the most interesting stories. Yes, absolutely. We just interviewed Gerard Carmichael, and he has a new special. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Don't be gay. And I've never seen a person go hard around themselves in public. And it's not even hard, because obviously he's at peace with who he is, which is the beauty of it. And it's not even hard, because obviously he's at peace with who he is,

which is the beauty of it. But his willingness to go like, yeah, and this is what I like sexually, and I want to dominate, it's like, oh my God, this is wonderful, people don't say this, they think it, but they don't say it. I think that's the thing that made me fall in love with stories from the time I was really young,

is that moment when you read something, and it can be fiction or nonfiction and you're like, holy shit, I didn't know you were allowed to say that out loud. I didn't know you were allowed to feel that out loud. And that glimpse of recognition when someone holds up a mirror to the ugliest parts of you or to the parts that were told we need to conceal,

that really excites me. That's in your book right at the beginning, the dissolving of loneliness because you recognize, I'm not alone in this feeling, this thought, this experience because I've just read it here from this person, and that's very comforting. Because really loneliness is maybe the saddest place to occupy. I think it's the epidemic of our time.

For sure. Yeah. What was the first thing you read that really ignited that same thing where it's like, oh, I'm not alone in my weirdness. So my dad was a professor. French. French literature. Skidmore. Skidmore College.

They were strict in some ways, like typical immigrant parents, but when it came to reading, I could read anything I wanted, which is why I read Lolita at age 12. Amazing. There was nothing off limits. Quickly, I can't let you move on from that.

I certainly know what the perspective of an older person reading Lolita is. What is a 12-year-old? Because Lolita is roughly, I don't know, what is she in that book? She's about 12, 13. She's just pubescent. I did not understand it through a problematic lens.

Like, I saw the cover, and it was the old vintage cover with the heart-shaped sunglasses, and I was like, that's cool, I want some heart-shaped sunglasses. So that was my first draw into the book. So I will say, I devoured Lolita. I was fascinated by it, especially at an age where, for me, I was having my first inklings of intrigue

about romance and not sex necessarily, but sexual bodies, what's appropriate, what's not. This mysterious energy that you're feeling sometimes in your body without explanation. Totally. So I credit that book with inspiring me to write. And also the end result of that inspiration was a semi-traumatic experience that made it such

that I didn't share my writing again for a decade. Oh no. Someone read your private musings? So I was in seventh, eighth grade as an extra credit project, my English teacher invited the class to write a fictional short story. And so I was reading Nabokov, I was reading Paul Bowles, who wrote these incredible novels set in North Africa

with all sort of seedy subterranean characters. I was having like a real explosion of exposure. And so I went so hard on this extra credit project. I filled up an entire Yellow Legal Path, maybe 50 pages, with a novella. Handed it in. I was so proud of this story. And a week later, everyone got their assignments back, except me.

And I was like, cool, cool, cool. My teacher's waiting to have a private meeting with me to tell me how brilliant I am. Yeah, it's a percosis, If you thought of publishing. All the things. And then I got called into the school psychologist's office and she was holding my yellow legal pad. And so my story was heavily inspired by my recent reading inspiration. Were they nervous there was some sexual impropriety

happening in the household? It featured a 12 year old Arab American protagonist who was working as a prostitute and a brothel in Tangiers. Wow, so you were just combining all the pieces that you were actually reading a little bit. She was an LPM smoking 12 year old prostitute. Wow. I can imagine being your teacher and within a page going like,

oh my God, okay, oh fuck, what are we gonna, the panic that would set in if you were reading that. Well, and the most horrifying thing about it, I was so humiliated, but she never said a word to me about it. She didn't. No. She left it to the psychologist. And I felt really deeply shamed. Like I felt like I had done something bad and wrong,

that I had exposed some part of my psychology that was bad and needed professional intervention. And so I kept writing in the privacy of a journal, but it really made me scared to give my imagination free rein and to share whatever emerged from my imagination to anybody. Yeah, I'm surprised you rebounded from that. It took me a long time. I'm so interested by those formative moments, either those moments of creative injury or those moments of validation. It's that kind of sliding doors-esque exercise and that question of if we end up where we're going to end up irregardless of those moments

or if they really set you on a path. Yeah, if you had a different teacher that was like, I think there's really something brilliant here. Let's push her in this direction. Who would you have been? And maybe it would have yielded the opposite effect. Maybe I'd be an accountant in Cleveland right now. You can imagine a scenario where they were like,

oh my God, like the scene in Christmas Story where it's like, Ralphie, your paper! A plus plus plus, you have that experience, and now you're like, oh, I'm supposed to be a great writer. That could also be a resting in some way. But it was that ignition of that pilot light of self-consciousness for me that maybe is happening irregardless at that age because you're entering puberty, where I suddenly felt

very porous to the opinions of those around me and especially people in authority. And not necessarily in a good way. I was a little bit of a hell-raiser as a kid, but I was over-correcting in either direction. By either rebelling against it or really yearning for it as a marker of what I should do next. Wait, what city was this happening in? I went to like 10 different schools on three different continents by the time I was 12. And this was in upstate New York in Saratoga Springs

where my dad was a professor. Okay, I have a lot of intrigue about Saratoga Springs. Having read all these 19th century patrician class with a vacation there. Totally. So I have this really vivid image of it without ever seeing anything. Is it lovely?

It's lovely, but I was a townie. And so when you're a townie, the second the kind of big hat wearers, the people who come in the summer for the horse races arrive, everybody gets out of there. My family always would like rent their house because that would fund the whole year. So a lot of people do that.

And your dad was on a college schedule. Exactly. And would you guys go traips around the world or was it generally with intention? Beyond my immediate family, all of my dad's family lives in Tunisia, all of my mom's family lives in Switzerland. So we would spend summers there. But occasionally what we would do is rent our house and with the funds from the rental,

we would travel for two months and not in a fancy way. We'd get a ticket, say to Mexico or Nicaragua and we had one rule as a family. We were only allowed to bring a backpack for the whole summer. Wow. And my parents are not planners. We'd arrive, there would be no hotel reservation.

We'd stay in youth hostels and ride chicken buses and I found this supremely embarrassing at the age of 12. All I wanted was to go on like a Royal Caribbean cruise. Yes, with a schedule. With a schedule like all of my classmates were doing when their families took vacation. Okay, I want to know how your mom and dad met, because yeah, he's from Tunisia, she's from Switzerland.

This is quite a pairing. And it was in the 80s, I presume? Both my parents immigrated to the Lower East Side in the 80s. And my mom, as a visual artist, came here on an artist grant. My dad came here for his PhD. And my dad at the time was working at the United Nations International School. And my mom was trying to be an artist and had a number of side hustles. I don't even know if I should share this, but her sister was a substitute teacher.

When her sister couldn't make it, my mom would go in as her. Oh, nice. I love that. Who cares? A hustler. A hustler. And so that's how they met. My mom pretending to be my sister, and there was like a little bit of sisterly tension

because my aunt was like, I saw him first. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How exciting. It was very exciting. Well, both of these Swiss Mrs. both liked them. Both of them liked them. That's a meat cube.

It's real meat cube. There's something in the genetic stew of this all too. There's a real francophone connection. They're both adventurers. They both have left their native land. They're both attracted to what they don't know, novelty. Like there's some clues in here about the recipe that becomes you. They're both misfits.

They're both the only ones from their family also to have left and stayed. Okay, and how did the religion play out? Was that an issue? My dad was raised Muslim. My mom was raised Catholic. I would say they're agnostics bordering on atheism, but they're very much culturally what they were raised as.

So my mom had no interest in getting married. Most of her friends in Switzerland have been partnered and have families but have not gotten married. So the idea of marriage is very bourgeois. They've transcended marriage in a few countries. And my dad, you know, my grandmother had 13 kids. Yeah. Never learned to read or write, never left her village, got married at 14, 15 as was

very common. Well, if you have 13 kids, you got to start right away. You got to start early. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he really wanted to get married. So she eventually relented because she needed a green card. And they were very much planning on being together, but had their little city hall wedding. And do they speak French in Tunisia? Yes. Tunisia was colonized by the French so that's their common language and what I

grew up speaking. Oh no kidding. You have siblings? I have a brother. Older or younger? Younger. How did he like this lifestyle? It was tough for us as kids. I think as a kid you want to be normal. You want to assimilate. When we'd go to Switzerland, our cousins would call us their American cousins. We'd go to Tunisia and we were like a little too white to be fully Tunisian. We'd go back to the U.S. and especially post-9-11 it was always because of my name, where are you from, where are you really from, that whole thing. I think we both really struggled to locate some sense of belonging and we dealt with that in very different ways.

My brother was very shy and kind of went inward and I remember he was in ESL, an elementary school, and he came home and said to my mom, I'm the dumbest kid in my class. So heartbreaking. And my mom was like, you're not dumb, you just haven't learned the language yet. And I think I dealt with it

by becoming the professional new kid. Like I could like walk into a cafeteria and just clock every segment of the social fabric of a school and be like, these are the cool kids, this is the bully. It was like a game of chess for me. Yeah.

Do you feel like you were able to diagnose in order to be friends with this group, I need to be this type of person? You get very chameleon-esque when you're in that position. Which is a real skill set in terms of adaptability, but there's also a danger to it in that when you're constantly assimilating, it's hard to locate that through line.

Yes, who are you? Who are you? I remember begging my parents tearfully to let me legally change my name to Ashley because the coolest girl in fourth grade was named Ashley. They always were. And she went by Ashtray as her nickname,

which was even more sophisticated. So in my dream, I would be Ashley Ashtray-Jawai. Oh wow, and Ashtray was not a pejorative, it was celebrated. No, it was very cool. It was cool. Oh wow. Ashtray. That does show how cool is so subjective.

So subjective. I'm like Ashtray and for free. We could be interviewing someone else and be like, and I was so bullied, they call me Ashtray. Exactly. Yeah, that does suck. What about you Monica? Exact same story.

But there was more, maybe not more, but shame. My parents didn't make us travel. My mom would make dinner for her and my dad and then dinner for me. Eggs, you know, like American food. I was fighting being Indian, but it was all so extreme and unfair. In retrospect now when I look back on it, they weren't making us speak any language. Nothing. I hated the way other people saw them,

or I was worried about how other people were seeing them, especially my dad, because he had an accent, and it was in Georgia. I could just be at the restaurant and feel like he's ordering and he's saying this wrong, and it's still there. I was with my mom last weekend, and I have apologized to her so many times because there

is nothing more brutal than your child correcting you in general. But when you have an accent, like she would say TJ Maxx's, there's always an extra S or missing S. She just moved to Michigan. That's the Detroit thing. We put S's on everything. We were with her and she ordered a salad with protein. And I knew from the way that she pronounced it

that probably the waiter hadn't understood. And I was like, let me be mature and not regress and just like, let this be. Yes. And sure enough, the waitress brought out salad with a side of poutine fries. Oh no. Were you in Canada?

It was poutine on the menu. We were in Providence, Rhode Island. So my parents did double down on the culture. We were not allowed to speak English at home because my family members didn't speak English outside of it. And so my mom would make a high-pitched beeping sound whenever we spoke in English until we switched to French.

Can I hear that sound? It was like beep. It was so annoying. Oh wow. That is so funny. What about bringing friends home? So the food thing, I used to lust after just the odorless beauty of a pop tart. Anything stoffers, anything you put in the oven. The things we now know are horrible for you.

I'm totally. I remember being in the second grade and my mom making a cheese plate for my friends and it was not just any cheese, like really smelly. And I was just so horrified. Mom put some fucking Kraft singles out. It was like, the Swiss thing was embarrassing, the Tunisian thing certainly was smelly, spicy food. Yeah, the smelliness.

And I am kind of obsessed with smells, and I think maybe that is part of it. Walking into the house and having to check before a friend came over, like opening windows. Absolutely. Like for no reason whatsoever. It is crazy. And I remember saying to my mom the next time I was like,

please just make macaroni and cheese. And I had an idea of what that was going to be. My friends come over and she had made not what I was hoping for, which was toxically orange Kraft mac and cheese. Powder. She was like grating nutmeg. And I was just like... Isn't this so sad?

The thing that makes me feel the worst is I used to throw away my lunches when I got to school. And I ate another butter every single day for lunch from the veggie machine in the dead. And my mom was a wonderful mom who took such care in making these healthy foods. Oh my God, the Kraft Mac and Cheese, it's so specific. It's so specific.

And I would go to friends' houses and they would obviously always have Kraft Mac and Cheese. It was so good. To this day, I don't know what they were doing to make it different, because then I was also like, we need to buy this and I need to eat it. And so she did.

And I was like, this isn't right. She couldn't do it. Like you're doing something wrong. I feel the same way. It doesn't taste like it does at my white friend's house. There's only two ingredients, milk and butter. There's no way she was doing anything wrong, but I was like, no, it tastes Indian.

Something's wrong with it. There's turmeric in this, I can taste it. You added curry to this. It's so weird how it stays and how it still lives, but now it has so much guilt taste it. You added curry to this. It's so weird how it stays and how it still lives, but now it has so much guilt with it. I would imagine if you're feeling all these feelings, it'd be all that much more rewarding to be connecting with people via their writing.

I would say that this whole experience made me an astute observer of the world around me because that was part of the survival skill was observing behaviors. I kept a journal of American colloquialisms and idioms. That way I would try to just like fold into conversation until they sounded natural or slang words that I wanted to roll off my tongue. And so I became really attuned to dialogue. I felt like a little amateur anthropologist all the time.

Slash spy. Totally. Yeah, yeah. It really sharpened my powers of observation, but made me interested in those little particularities that make a character come alive on the page, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. And I do think that desire for connection, that sense of belonging,

I never found that despite my best efforts, but I would find it in books. What social rung did you end up in? I know you were at Juilliard at 12, playing the double bass. That doesn't scream homecoming queen. So I spent seventh and eighth grade trying to become as popular as possible. And that felt like safety to me. It was like a kind of armor.

You know, I went to public school. Did you go to public school? Yeah. I had a real epiphany thanks to a movie. What is the movie? It's Julia Roberts. She teaches at an all-women's college, Mona Lisa Smile. Oh, yeah. So I watched that movie, and I'll never forget the scene on the first day to a movie. What is the movie? It's Julia Roberts. She teaches at an all-women's college, Mona Lisa Smile.

Oh yeah. Okay. So I watched that movie and I'll never forget the scene on the first day of class, Julia Roberts is a professor, she shows up and all of the girls have already read the textbook and they are so smart and they were cool in a way that I had never been exposed to.

They were cool because they were ambitious and they were talented and they were leading with that. And I came home from watching that movie at the Wilton Mall and was like, oh, however I'm trying to be cool right now is not actually going to lead to what I want, which is to get out of here and to live an interesting life. And the very next day, I walked past the lunch table with these cool and an upstate sort of way friends and went straight to the library and was like, I need to get my shit together. And I've always been prone to dramatic shifts like that.

I imagine you have an active romantic imagination of life. You don't want this one, so we must go get the one we want. Yeah, it's like writing a little character sketch for yourself and then trying it on for fit. I had only a few times in my life where I've had like a stark epiphany like that, where it really set me on a different course. But from that moment onward, I remember finding

the best student in my class, it was Patrick, and going up to him and being like, will you teach me how to study? And he's like, um, yes, uh. Oh, you're the reason it's our life then. And I started practicing the bass. We were beautiful, and she was like in the popular group. This is like out of Friday Night Lights.

He's like, oh, this is Landry being asked to help Tyra. Yeah, look at him. Landry's the coolest character. Well, we learned that, maybe Patrick is too. I became very focused, practicing the bass on getting my act together. I'd been a terrible student and kind of getting into trouble. Smoking cigarettes. Oh yeah, all this.

Oh yeah, great, good stuff. I had my first cigarette in sixth grade. Same, that I had stolen from the IGA, full carton. When I interviewed John, because you famously met at this Juilliard band camp, I said, I would have immediately been so attracted to any young girl who chose the stand-up bass as her instrument.

There's a lot there. That's a real statement to pick that, don't you think? Just generally speaking in all the school bands. I started in piano when I was five and my mom was super strict about it. I had to practice every day, I hated it. And I remember, what grade is it where you get invited to pick an instrument, I think fourth grade.

And I remember all the girls clamoring for the violins. Violin, the flute. The basic bitches of the orchestra, basically flute. The basic bitches of the orchestra. Yeah, basic bitches of the orchestra. And nobody wanted to play the bass. There were like a couple of tall hulking guys. And I remember thinking of it as like its own kind of misfit or outlier in the orchestra. And that for me was another kind of turning point where I was like,

oh, no matter how hard I try, this whole assimilation thing is not working for me. Let me own this. It also reads as confidence. Absolutely. And I really, from the moment I picked up the bass, fell in love with it. Part of it was a way to inconvenience my parents,

especially my mom, who had forced me to practice this instrument. It was wildly inconvenient. I couldn't carry it myself. Oh, you know they have to buy a truck. Yeah. Totally, they had to get a station wagon to be able to fit it in there. You don't think about your kid picks an instrument,

you're like, fuck, we gotta get a different car. Yes. Absolutely. Because it's so sticky with this. It was a nightmare and I loved it. What about it other than that it was a little different than the norm? It was not basic bitch instrument.

And it's the only instrument you have to kind of hug with your whole body when you play, and you feel every vibration in your chest, and there is something so primal to me about it. I love being the only girl in the bass section. You're kind of wrestling that instrument. It's a full body experience, and I also liked it because I remember my teacher saying,

like, your hand isn't big enough to play the bass, and I was like watch. I'll show you. I'll tell you get calluses like you're walking around your whole life aware of this dedication you have. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Airbnb. Oh, I love Airbnb.

We love Airbnb. We use it nonstop. We traveled. Most memorable. Exactly, we've traveled the whole country and the world. Yes, we've been on tours and stayed exclusively at them. It's so fun, so much cozier. Yeah, you really feel like you're kind of a resident.

Yeah. Of wherever you're visiting. Because some trips are better in an Airbnb. Kingston, Buskers Rendezvous is back. Starting July 10th, come to downtown Kingston for this crowd-wowing festival. And enjoy four days of jugglers, musicians, acrobats, comedians, and more. Talented performers from all over the world can't wait to entertain you all weekend long. It all starts on Thursday, July 10th, with performances right in the heart of downtown Kingston. And don't miss Buskers After Dark, the Friday

Night Fire Show. For more information, go to downtownkingston.ca. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And we're the hosts of Wanderers podcast, British Scandal. Pray, good fellow, please join us in our latest, most gripping series. What on earth are you doing? Well, speaking in Tudor English, you know, because we're doing Amberlyn. So I thought it would help people get in the mood and take them back to the court of King

Henry VIII. Now, if I know British Scandal listeners, and I think I know British Scandal listeners, they will be reeled in with talk of treachery, sexual jealousy, backstabbing and treason. There is a lot of that to be fair, but at its heart, isn't it just a traditional girl meets king, girl loses king kind of story? Yeah, with a divorce, a nation altering religious reformation and the show trial to begin all show trials. So listen to the story of Amberlyn now.

Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts and binge entire seasons early and ad-free on OneGay+. Today is the worst day of Abby's life. The 17 year old cradles her newborn son in her arms. They all saw how much I loved him. They didn't have to take him from me. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, families shipped their pregnant teenage daughters to maternity homes and forced them

to secretly place their babies for adoption. In hidden corners across America, it's still happening. My parents had me locked up in the godparent home against my will. They worked with them to manipulate me and to steal my son away from me. The godparent home is the brainchild of controversial preacher Jerry Falwell, the father of the modern evangelical right and the founder of Liberty University. Where powerful men, emboldened by their faith, determine who gets to be a parent

and who must give their child away. Follow Liberty Lost on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. ["Wonderful Wonders of Liberty"] So Bandcamp is not a cool place to be, but a badge of honor at Bandcamp is if you play so hard that you not only get a blister, but then you bleed. If you bleed on your strings, you're like super cool.

And then you probably don't want to wash it off, but then you're like, I'm supposed to. Totally. Yeah, this is getting indulgent, but I don't ever want to see. So that Bandcamp, was it in a pastoral, beautiful, was it in Saratoga? It was in Saratoga Springs. Oh, it was, okay, perfect. There was an orchestra camp, which I was in,

jazz camp, which John was in, and a ballet camp. So you weren't in the same discipline within the camp. You remember obviously meeting him. I did, because he was in a band with my first ever boyfriend. So I hung out with them quite a bit. But John was so shy that he barely spoke to me. Like he couldn't make eye contact.

He had a mouth full of braces. Skinny. Skinny as can be and like oversized clothing and just awkward and delightful and already so brilliant. That's my curiosity. Did you get inklings of like, oh, this is special? At the end of the summer, there was a kind of recital. And I remember he played this piano solo.

And mind you, he'd been playing for two years at that point. And everyone gave him a standing ovation. And you're not really supposed to do that at a kid's concert, like, because everyone's kid is special. Everyone's equal. And it was just an involuntary reaction. Wow. And I remember thinking to myself,

I've never met someone quite like him. I have chills. And then just totally forgetting about it, because it's summer camp. He's from New Orleans. Never going to see each other again. And fast forward four years later, and it was my first weekend at Juilliard.

And I was on the one train with my friend Michelle. And we see this guy who's, like, attracting stares because he had headphones on, and he was, like, humming to himself and rocking around and playing the air piano. And everyone was like, who is this crazy dude? What age was everyone at that point? I was 16 and John was 17.

He was a freshman at Joliet. I was in the pre-college program. And he was just vibing in his own world. Yeah, you can picture it. Making sounds. When I'm explaining John to people who don't know who he is, I'm like, you'll never meet anyone that feels more

from another planet. John and I, we call each other aliens. There's like a wonderful thing when you meet a fellow alien. Yes, yes, yes. Even if you're not from the same planet. Our planetary system. There's like a game, recognized game. Yeah.

And that happens. And so in that moment, I was like, oh, I know that guy. I remembered him because he was so awkward and weird back then, too, in the most delightful way. And I was like, that's John Battiste from New Orleans. And then I said, just blurted this out, I said, that's the man I'm going to marry someday. And my friend Michelle was like, say hi to him.

And I was like, no, no, no. And she went, John! Right as the subway doors opened, I like ducked and ran. And I totally forgot about it. And she was at our little living room wedding and told this story. And she was at our little living room wedding and told this story. And she said it.

Oh. God, life is wild. Isn't it bizarre? And it's beautiful. We have no interest in each other romantically. Do you have an explanation for why you started journaling so early? Cause you have journaled your entire life,

which is pretty rare. I was a really angry kid with a lot of big feelings, in part from all this moving around and upheaval. And so I think I needed a receptacle for that to kind of get it out of my body. And so I think that was the first impulse and I always felt so much better after I journaled. And then I think in the course of just trying to transcribe whatever swirl of feelings or thoughts was happening inside of me I also started to kind of delight in it like I started to have fun in my journal I would read back

and my journals are full of lies things that definitely did not happen like boys you were dating yeah boys I said I kissed that I certainly never did. Fantasy. Yeah there was a fantasy element and a sense of possibility and there was a lot of trying things on for fit and writing my way into it and seeing how it felt and so I think from an early age I realized that the journal is this rare space where you're not doing it for a grade. You're not doing it for anybody other than yourself. It's kind of like a chrysalis. Like you get to be your goopiest, messiest, most unformed self and there are no stakes. Yeah. You're not turning it in to get critiqued. It's not good writing. It's not even grammatical writing, it can just be whatever you want.

I could experiment on myself with myself and just see what emerged. And I think I'm someone who I don't actually understand what I'm feeling or what I'm thinking until I write my way through it. I often, and I noticed this in my writing and I don't know what it's like for you, when I went to work on my memoir,

all of the first drafts of that book were full of lies, like the story I wanted it to be. And then I would write it and be like, that does not actually feel true to what I'm actually thinking or feeling, and then I have to go back and revise. And I think so many of us in the way that we think back on the stories of our lives

and on the stories of who we are, they live in the aspirational as opposed to what's actually happening. The honesty. Yeah. But then you weirdly manifest this whole life that you've been practicing in a secret way. You do kind of end up becoming the thing

you're fantasizing about a lot. In the act of keeping a journal, it keeps me honest that I can then manifest. I know you journal a lot, but something will come up enough times that I'm like so bored by whatever petty grievance or whatever thing it is that I'm finally like, I have to do something about this. This is intolerable.

I cannot spend another minute of my one precious life rehashing the stupid thing that happened with my ex-boyfriend or whatever it is. And in the act of noticing those patterns or noticing sometimes the undesirable things that are coming up, it liberates me enough to actually move towards what I want. And that's what therapy serves as well, same sort of thing, where it's like, oh my God, I'm talking about this again? It's embarrassing.

Oh my God, like I guess, ugh. Yeah, you can kind of get shamed into changing. You're like, this is embarrassing. Totally. Yeah. When did you start keeping a journal? I sporadically journaled through high school and then I took this really long road trip when I graduated and I journaled pretty good during that. I too, I had this very romantic sense of the life I wanted to live and it was inspired

by people I had read. And so the worst version would be to call it like, there's some egomaniacal nature to it. Good journaling? Just to the whole thing. Were you writing for your future biographer? Well, writing with the notion I'd be reading it when I'm older, which is like this weird trap and I think you got to learn to break that.

Self-conscious but no audience. It was going to be me and I knew every time I looked back in life, I was always embarrassed by what I thought was so cool. Then it was gone for a while and then when I got sober, I started journaling. And I noticed this crazy pattern where it was like I would be religious about journaling every morning, and then I went and journal for eight days, and then I'd relapse. And once I figured out that pattern, I think just superstitiously, I decided if you can't commit to journaling every day, you're not going to commit to sobriety.

So I've been journaling for 21 years straight, but I stopped and I noticed you have periods where you stopped. Yeah. I want to talk about stopping because I stopped for a period because the journal was always where I was dead honest, and I started to have some things I couldn't even be honest about with my journal. I didn't realize that till later, but I was like, oh, I stopped writing because I couldn't

bear to write in it and not be honest. When the truth is too hot to touch, did the way that you journal change when you were in that midst of the kind of dark night of the soul and early recovery? Were you still writing with that self-consciousness or were you kind of writing to save your life? Writing to save my life and writing with great humility. And you can almost track when I'm feeling good and bullish in my recovery. But no, it's the punctuated starts, right? It's like returning to journaling after a two-month bender, basically.

And the level of humility and lack of self-consciousness, just like, I'm going to die. That's really the pure zones of it. I think that for me is always what journaling has felt like is writing to save my life. Like I'm not actually doing it with the idea of re-reading it. Any vanity.

No, it is when I'm my most laid bare, stripped down self and when I have only questions, like I feel like I am entirely made of questions with zero answers. And to me, the epigraph that I included in the Book of Alchemy is that book, a line of, live the questions now and eventually someday you'll live your way into the answers, the idea of living the questions. Living the questions. The book is called The Book of Alchemy, A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. And I thought, well, first we should talk about

what alchemy is, and then I want inspired life. And I thought, well, first we should talk about what alchemy is, and then I want to talk about the first time you were in the hospital, because I think that might be the most tangible sense of alchemy I've ever heard. So alchemies, people used to try to turn random objects into gold. And it's always been one of my favorite words in the English language. I've always been drawn exactly to that traditional popular definition of alchemy, this idea of transmuting something base, something considered worthless like lead into something precious and noble like gold.

So I think as a kid, I was just interested in it as someone who was interested in magic. I don't want to be too corny, but I think you are a piece of gold that everyone thought was lead and you were waiting for everyone to recognize that you were gold Yeah, I think that's what's going on. It's kind of like the ugly duckling Yes, amongst all these people that you're being told they're gold and you're like, but I'm not like them But I think I have something to offer Value yeah, but no one's seeing it you have this incredibly literal value, but no one's seeing it. You have this incredibly literal experience with alchemy.

I'm sure when I say hospital, you could probably think of many times where this happened, but I'm thinking you and John weren't romantically involved. I don't know how you come to know each other from the subway to your first diagnosis with leukemia, but you're in the hospital at 22. How have you and John reconnected at that point? So we had stayed in touch.

It's so funny, we both got honorary doctorates at Brown last weekend. Oh, congrats. Thank you. I know. We felt very fancy. I'm sorry I didn't address you correctly. Yeah, exactly. You can refer to me as Dr. J for the remainder of this conversation. But I was having so much deja vu to that age. I was like, when was the last time I was in a cap and gown with my parents present? So we reconnected the summer I graduated from college and he crashed my going away party.

I was a total mess. I nearly missed my graduation because I was so hungover that I slept through my alarm. Like I was so shame faced. I couldn't meet my parents' eyes. That was a disaster. And you just graduated from Princeton. I just graduated from Princeton. And I was such a creative kid,

but I graduated from Princeton. Whatever sense of freedom and imagination that I'd had, I went into Princeton, I was on a full financial aid scholarship, and was like, I need to honor the sacrifices my parents made for me, and I need to honor this opportunity. My interpretation of that was I needed to have a practical plan. And so I had no idea who I was, what I was doing.

And I had this sense of anxiety. Bezos gave our commencement speech. And I remember him saying something about how at the age of 80, you'll survey your life. And the choices that you make now are extremely important. No, too much pressure. And I was like, I already felt like I had failed when I graduated.

I was like, I had no plan, no job. Well, if you go there in a full ride and you have double minor in French and in gender studies. What's your major? I did Near Eastern Studies in French and gender studies. Okay, wow. I would argue too, you're a bit of a wunderkind and there's easy ways to achieve the wunderkind things

and now it's up to you. Well, but there are easy ways to continue achieving the wunderkind thing when you graduate, and they're not always the things you actually want. Yeah. So I was like, maybe I should go to law school. That sounds impressive. All of my plans were about what sounded good.

Of course. And how to sound impressive when someone asked me like what I was planning to do after graduation, and none of them actually felt appealing to me. Were you still playing music throughout this time? Not really. I really was so lost. I reconnected with John and moved to Paris

and was working as a paralegal. I was sick at the time and didn't know it, so I had this real sense that something was deeply wrong with me. When you have leukemia at the beginning, what are the symptoms feeling like? So I have a strange kind of leukemia that starts with a disease called myelodysplastic syndrome, pre-leukemia. So it moves very slowly until it grows into full-blown leukemia.

So I had been sick my whole senior year. In leukemia, you end up with way too many white blood cells? It depends what kind, but not enough white blood cells, not enough red blood cells. So I was constantly getting sick and went to see a doctor who told me it was probably because of my period and sent me home with iron supplements. Your test results are back. You're a woman.

Exactly. I was exhausted all the time and saw someone and they were like, maybe you're partying too hard, burning the candle at both ends. All of it was attributed to me and my feelings as a person. I was so exhausted.

I would drink eight cups of coffee to get through the day and could not function. My most dangerous era of self-medication was that year and that summer because I just could not function. And I thought it was me. I didn't think it was a health thing. Yeah.

Did you get any cocaine? Oh yeah. Wonderful. Started with Adderall, and then the big. That was my drug of choice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would do cocaine, and it felt like a cup of coffee. Like that's how exhausted I was.

Wow. Like I was like, oh okay, I can keep my eyes open. I've done an April and I can take a nap. Wow. I wish I would have bumped into you in Paris in this phase. Well, so I went to Paris because cocaine is not cool in Paris. And specifically to get away from the whole crew of people I was hanging out with, because I knew by the end of that summer that I was in trouble and that I was someone I did not want to be. And that I needed to make a change.

And the only way, you know, my whole childhood change was changing your zip code. not want to be and that I needed to make a change. And the only way, you know, my whole childhood change was changing your zip code. And so I took this paralegal job and was like, I need to get out of here and I need to start over. And I did clean up my act and it was without all those substances in my system that I really realized something was deeply wrong.

And I kept getting misdiagnosed, because as a woman, and especially as a North African woman in Paris, nobody took me seriously. I got hospitalized for a week and they diagnosed me with burnout syndrome and released me from the hospital. Like I really thought I was going crazy.

And so the weird thing is it was a relief to get a diagnosis. I was about to say you must have felt so good. It really was. I was so relieved that it wasn't all in my head, that I wasn't a hypochondriac, that I wasn't making all of this up. That you are causing it. Or that you couldn't handle life.

That's how it felt. I felt like I remember writing in my journal, I can't cut it in the real world. So a year to the day after graduation, I got admitted to the hospital in New York and spent the whole summer inpatient. And that, to go back to alchemy, is when I feel like I really started to think about the applications of a particular kind of creative alchemy in my life. And it really was John who I feel like modeled that for me. Yeah. So you're in the hospital room, you're absolutely miserable, everyone on the hospital floor is miserable.

It is a cancer wing of the hospital. John shows up with a few musicians. Yeah. So I'd been in there six weeks. Whatever I thought that whole experience is going to be like was not it. I had brought a suitcase full of books. I was like, I'm going to read through the rest of the Western canon. I was like, I'm gonna read through the rest of the Western canon. I was like, I'm gonna make this productive. And I did none of those things.

And at the end of the summer, I was the sickest I've ever been, none of the chemo was working, and I was going into bone marrow failure. And that same day that I got that news, John showed up with his whole band, because he just learned I was in the hospital. And again, we were just friends.

This is who John is. He shows up for people in the most difficult moments and he always shows up. He's the guy who will fly to New Orleans for three hours to see his eight-year-old nephew's soccer game. And so right there in my hospital room, they started to play for me. And as the sound of the music floated out into the hallway, these patients and doctors and nurses were like poking their heads out, like what is happening here? And everyone started to sing and clap their hands and started to dance. And it was

such a profound experience of witnessing this profoundly depressing, musicless place where the only sounds that you hear, the beeping of IV poles and the wheezing of monitors, alchemized into this joyous second line and everybody was so happy. And it was one of the best days of my life. And it had started as this terrifying day that unlocked something for me and that I felt such a sense of powerlessness.

Whatever plans I'd had for how my life was going to go were obviously out the window. But when you're stuck in a hospital bed, in a room with no end date of being released in sight, you have every excuse in the world to do absolutely nothing. And it's so easy to feel like you have no agency in your seating control to doctors and to caregivers and to whatever mysterious happenings are taking place in your body. And it was this moment where I started to think about how survival necessitates its own kind of creative act. Like when the chemosaurs make it too painful to speak,

you have to find different ways to communicate with your friends and family. And when you're bored out of your skull because you're 22 and you're stuck in bed and all your friends are like out starting their lives, you have to use your imagination to not go crazy. And so I returned to the journal in the most serious way I'd ever returned to it, in a really daily way.

You took this 100-day challenge basically, yeah? Yeah, and I started using it as a kind of reporter's pad. I would write little details about what was happening in this cancer ward. Like my neighbor down the hallway, Dennis, who declared a hunger strike because all of the meal trays kept arriving with the food still frozen. And he was like going around trying to rally all of us to join us in this hunger strike. I'd write about the nurses and their gossip. I was watching a lot of Grey's Anatomy at the time,

because that weirdly was the one thing that made me feel a little less isolated within this experience. I was like, oh yeah, I get this. And I remember asking one of the residents if her life bore any resemblance to the cast of Grey's. And she was like, we have just as much sex, but everyone's significantly less attractive. I was like, write down these little lines of dialogue

and I was like, actually, I don't want to be here, obviously, but this place is really interesting and there's a lot of stuff happening here. I don't mind being on record saying this and I've said it before, but people in the medical industry are perverts in the best way possible. They are perverts. That's a good group. Seems like you were at that time with the writing

and then even with John bringing music back into your life, you were kind of getting tethered back to your old self. Totally. And it was because I had leukemia, so there were no expectations of me for the first time since childhood. And I think all kids are creative. You're not thinking about being a good artist or a bad artist.

You're just playing make believe. And you're able to do that because there are expectations of you to monetize it or turn it into your passion or into your major, whatever pressures we put on ourselves. And so I was just doing it for myself because it was fun and there was no goal, no outcome in mind. Scarier than even the possibility of death was the idea of being some tragic story of unmet potential. And more unbearable even than that was the idea of continuing along the path that I was on where I was really living for what the journalist David Brooks describes as the resume virtues, the traits that make you attractive in the modern marketplace

as opposed to the eulogy virtues, which are the traits that were remembered for long after we're gone. Like, were you kind? Were you brave? Did you take interesting creative risks? It's not about your GPA. It's not about how cool your job title sounds. So it was profoundly humbling to me and I started to

research our long lineage of bedridden artists and writers throughout history, like Frida Kahlo who was in a bus accident at around the same age and was stuck in bed. And her mom gave her a lap desk and an easel and she started making the self-portraits that obviously turned her into one of the most famous artists of all time.

Or Virginia Woolf, where there's so many examples of people who use that confinement as a springboard for something totally unexpected and as a space that was useful. And that to me was exciting. It's always been what's exciting to me about writing is even when some tragedy befalls you, the second you write about it, it becomes grist.

It becomes something that you can excavate on the page. It becomes material. It's useful. Yeah. You even talk about becoming excited for your nightmares. What are you framing? I was keeping this journal for myself, writing about a lot of the things

I couldn't talk about out loud. I was writing about infertility. And also there's nothing quite like being sick to humble you. There are so many indignities. You lose your dignity every single day when you are in cancer treatment. You have no privacy every single day when you are in cancer treatment. You have no privacy. No privacy. People are in and out of your space.

Totally. Touching you. I think they designed the backless hospital gown. This is a further fuck you. Exactly. I'm like surely there is a better design out here that we can come up with that does not make you feel so literally exposed. I know why do they need to access your back so much? They don't. Never once has there been an immediate urgent need for access to the backside. Why can't I just rope in the front like a rope? Absolutely.

I put one on backwards one time, because I was like, oh, this makes sense. And then I came out and then I was quite embarrassed. They're like, you have that on wrong. Someone not me should design something. They're like, you have that on wrong. Someone not me should design something. I feel like what you feel you're owed in life dissolves immediately when you're in there. Because what you're owed is not having your ass exposed, really.

It becomes so real and human about what we deserve and don't deserve. Absolutely. And in the process, I had such limited energy. I'd have two hours maybe where I felt okay. I had to get really specific about what I wanted to do in those two to three hours and who I wanted to spend those two to three hours with. And that was a really useful exercise.

I still think about that. I'm like, if I only have two hours today, what makes me feel most alive? Who makes me feel most alive? What do I really want to do? How are your parents during all this? And also just because knowing with immigrant parents being like, I have to maybe interfere with the server

and say how to pronounce this. You're always kind of looking out for them in a different way. Did you feel sort of burdened by that during your time there? I had worked so hard to be independent. I'm a very proud person, we are a very proud family. Like I really struggled with the accepting of help

and the needing of help. Oh, that's my number one. And especially at 21, 22, where like the last thing you want to feel is infantilized, you're like, I've got this, even though you definitely don't got it. Yes. Whether you're in the hospital or not, you don't got it.

Exactly. You're clearly in a nosedive. No one has it, in fact. No one has it. You know, that same guy, Dennis, who started the hunger strike, he never had any visitors the whole summer. And, like, I remember being really struck by that, because I was having all kinds of feelings about my friends, some of whom were really there and many of whom were not.

Which in retrospect, of course, the people I was playing beer pong with or doing cocaine with were not like by my bedside holding my hand as my hair was falling out. So he ended up dying and nobody came to collect his body. And I remember being so humbled by that and shocked by it. That's independence. It really makes you think twice.

And I started to really realize how lucky I was to have parents who were there every single day. My mom who was like cooking me the very things as a kid that I was tossing in the trash can because the meal trays kept showing up frozen. And it really changed my relationship to my parents. When I was writing my first book, Between Two Kingdoms, my mom actually gave me her journals from that time

because I wanted to understand her perspective. And that was so sobering. They say there's a word for someone who loses their parents' orphan. There's a word for someone who loses their spouse, orphan. There's a word for someone who loses their spouse, widow. And there's no word in the English language for a parent who loses their child because it is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. And so I think for me too, it was this moment of seeing the humanity in my parents and worse

than that, seeing them trying so hard to be brave and strong and knowing that it was devastating. That really humbled me in such a big way. And it also, I think, really made me think about the kind of relationships I wanted and the strength and quality of those relationships, relationships to my family or to my friends or romantic relationships. So in that time, you also start writing this column in the New York Times,

Life Interrupted, and then post-treatment, which takes three years, you're not cancer-free for three years at that point. You go around the country, you drive thousands of miles and you meet people who have written you letters based on that column. And then that becomes the basis for the memoir Between Two Kingdoms. And then after that we do the beautiful documentary American Symphony. John is up for 11 Grammys.

You're a successful writer. He's writing a symphony. This should be a wonderful time. And it returns. And then in that return, you know journaling as a practice is your superpower, but then your vision gets so fucked up from all the medication, you're only left to paint. But that was the thing, when I watched the doc,

I was like, look at this volcano of creativity. Like take writing away and she just is going to paint endlessly. It was very inspiring to watch your output during that time. I feel like the most powerful acts of creativity sometimes are born from a place of desperation, from like a savage place of urgency. Again, it's like that writing or painting

or whatever it is to kind of save your life. And that's what it was for me. You know, I went into that hospitalization was getting a second bone marrow transplant, being like, oh, I know how I'm gonna navigate this. I had 10 journals with me. I had my shared journal with John, my medical journal, my personal journal.

And I was seeing triple and quadruple and having these really intense medication induced hallucinations where I was having nightmares about 10-foot tall giraffes that doubled as IV poles. And I knew from having been through this once before that instead of resisting what I was most afraid of, instead of numbing myself against it

or turning away from it, the only way for this to not be a miserable or a solely miserable traumatic experience was to engage with my fear and to collaborate with it. And so I started transcribing these weird hallucinations and nightmares in watercolor. I'm not a painter. I haven't painted from the time I was a kid. And again, it was doing this thing purely for myself without any expectation of it needing to be a thing. And I would do one every day. It was like a visual journal, essentially.

Because watercolor, in some ways, is like a perfect medium because you can't control it. Yeah. You're not the sole agent of it. It's like an aquatic dance or something. Yeah, it moves. It moves. And that's sole agent of it. It's like an aquatic dance or something. It moves. And that's the beauty of it. It's like all about the happy accidents on the paper.

And I became obsessed with it. My nurses every day would come in and they were like, let's look at the new painting. It was like a surrealist art gallery. And this young woman who would come to clean the floors said to me, like, I always clean the floors in here for longer than I need to because I like the way I feel in here. Ultimately, I really believe that that same creativity

we have as kids, that we have natural access to is something that if we cultivate as adults, you don't have to be a screenwriter as your day job or a framy winning musician or whatever. It is just an energetic shift. Like there's a miracle to it. You make something where there was nothing before and it becomes something new. It's that alchemy. And that for me is how I've navigated

all the peaks and valleys and tried to look at my life as a sort of creative project that I get to constantly reimagine. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. This is Nick. And this is Jack. We're best friends, ex-finance guys, and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, The Best Idea Yet, we're bringing you the untold stories

behind your favorite products. For instance, can you guess which billion dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit? Or which cartoon turned four turtles into a global toy empire by accident? It started as a joke. Last one, which cold beverage was so hated by Starbucks, they actually ended up acquiring it. Spoiler, the Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame and then he bought it. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy Couture to the Orange Mocha

Frappuccino. Join us every week to learn how your favorite things got made. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. And if this podcast lasts longer than 45 minutes, call your doc. Well, I left one part out. So during COVID, given your experience, you started a newsletter, a sub stack, the isolation journals, and that accumulated hundreds of thousands of readers and participants and it's still alive and it remains like one of the biggest artists communities in the world, this thing you started. So did that experience with kind of prompting others to get engaged in it, encourage you to write the book of alchemy?

It did. And I really resisted writing this book because I worried that journaling sounds unserious and it also seems so self-evident. You need a pen, you need a notebook, and off you go. And yet, to your point about stopping and starting, how many times have you bought a journal, filled out the first few pages, and then just left the whole rest of it blank, and then bought another one,

because that journal is ruined. It's tainted. And you have to start fresh. It symbolizes your failure. Totally. I think especially in the moments where I've fallen off, even as someone who has loved keeping a journal, it's actually a really hard thing to do,

to be in conversation with the self. And often when you need it most most is when you resist it most. And so that idea of being prompted and I'm someone who if you had told me at 20 like right to a prompt I would have been like absolutely not. That sounds like homework. I'm not interested in that. Well, there's a section you quote another writer, a poet, who says like, as soon as you tell me, tell us about a favorite memory in the wilderness or some shit. I forget what it was. He's like, that's like putting your finger in

a goldfish pond and all the goldfish immediately run to the shadows. I'm like, that's how I feel about prompts. All of a sudden, I can't remember one thing. To me, it's not the prompt, it's the reading that accompanies the prompt. So my whole life, especially when I'm feeling stuck, I start by reading something. And the prompt I think of as it's not homework.

You don't have to follow it. Sometimes I read a prompt and I'm like, I hate that prompt. That prompt irritates me. And I write into that irritation and that yields something interesting. It's that kind of kaleidoscopic effect where you just shift the barrel just so and the light falls differently.

And so for me, journaling, when it yields the most rewards is when I'm doing it consistently. It's like exercise. Yeah, it's like going to therapy once a year. Yeah, so in order to get myself there, I need some structure, some container, and something to prod me. Yeah, I loved your explanation of trying to write the memoir

and going to Vermont and get in the cabin and you're all set up to do it. And then just the agony of trying to write a book and how the way you broke out of that is just reading other people's work. And I relate to that enormously. In fact, anytime I have had writer's block, my break the glass is Catcher in the Rye.

For whatever reason, if I read like three pages is Catcher in the Rye. For whatever reason, if I read like three pages of Catcher in the Rye, I remember what I love about writing. I want to do the thing I just saw. Totally. And I love reading the journals of the writers I admire most. Like I like reading about their struggles with the writing life or whatever it was that they were dealing with. My very favorite thing to do is to try to sync up the journals of my very favorite writers with the books they were writing at the time

and to try to understand the movement of what was happening. That's cool. I also think writing is very intimidating to a lot of people. And I think in some ways, the journal is the most democratic of writing forms because you don't have to be a good writer.

And it's actually specifically about not doing precious writing, self-conscious writing, where you're like, how is future me going to think about this? Yes. Yeah, I think a journal is bad if we end up getting copies and it's like, oh, they're just doing a thing. They weren't being honest or they weren't rambling even. You need some of that to know it's real.

But I think what's required to overcome that is repetition and volume. I don't think you get there by starting and stopping and starting and stopping. I think it's like the act of it consistently will erode that self-consciousness. I also find that it sharpens my memory. Like the second I write something down, I remember it. And so it's so easy to just like tumble head first into your life and to have moments that feel significant that you think you're going to remember.

And then obviously inevitably you don't, but even in the writing of a memoir, people are like, how do you remember all of this shit? And I'm like, cause I recorded it. And the second you write it down, it kind of traps it in amber. Do you have fear of people reading your journals? Or are you someone who lies them around

hoping someone will be interested enough to look at them? I don't want anyone to, and I don't care. I feel the same way. I was gonna ask you, I don't ever read any of them. I don't either. The only one I do like to go back and reread is my joint journal with John.

When we first started dating, we were for years so full of angst about relationships and marriage in a way that wasn't even necessarily about each other, but just our own baggage that we were bringing into it. And both of us were spending a lot of time on the road and we would do the thing that couples do when you're apart where you have a call and you're like, how are you? How was your day? And it's like, you never really get to the there there. And it's so easy to feel disconnected. So John was like, instead of, because we were doing morning pages at the time, instead of doing our three pages a day,

what if we direct them at each other and snap a photo and text them to each other? OK, so that was my curiosity, mechanically, how they get shared. How it works. So we started doing that. And things would come up in these entries or in these letters essentially to each other that I didn't even know I was feeling insane with him or certainly would not have come up in a phone call.

And all these kind of questions and doubts and anxieties we were having about our relationship and it's fun to go back and reread those. So intimate. It's so intimate. How long has that been going on? Does it get interrupted? Yeah, when I was in the hospital, there was like a period of time where we couldn't see each other because he'd been exposed to COVID at work.

He was writing letters, but I would do like a voice dictation. And that's the other thing I like about journaling. It doesn't have to be pen and paper. Like, John does piano journal entries. Oh. I'll sometimes do voice notes when I'm walking. The painting, you said, was a version of that. From the isolation journals, we did a kind of 100-day journaling project during the pandemic

and this woman, never forget, who had lost her 13-year-old daughter, decided that her version of journaling was going to be using her daughter's art supplies to create a visual journal entry every day. It became like a grief journal for her and it was a memory of her daughter every day. And she loved it so much that she kept doing it because she was like, this is the first time I've been able to feel the joy of remembering my daughter and not just the pain of it. And I was like, ugh. Yeah.

What a creative and deeply powerful way to engage with your grief and also to reinterpret journaling. I have the opposite. I started a journal at the beginning of the year, and I stopped pretty quickly. But also, I was very hung up on someone. I live by myself.

There is no reason for me to be worried that anyone's gonna like find it, read it. And I was like, should I tear the pages out and shred them every day? Like I don't want anyone's ever seen this. We need to get you a lock box. Yeah, I guess. Probably, yeah.

It's not that I'm writing some major secret or anything. It's just, I don't want anyone to see it and I don't wanna to see it again. I want it gone. Is there a feeling of shame? I wouldn't have said so, but the strength at which I was like. It has the hallmarks of.

Yeah, it definitely does. It's strong enough that there is obviously something else happening. I think that's very common. Yeah, I think it might be why people steer away from it. Like what if someone reads it? And more interesting than that is what you just said. It's like, what if I read it? I don't want to scroll through and see something from last week

that is going to remind... I want it gone. Yeah, I think that'd be interesting to write into. Yeah, true, probably. We just went on tour for the book. We wanted to recreate our living room set on stage. So in Brooklyn, we actually hired a man with a van to take our entire living room furniture to the fan off our house, like our couch, our coffee table, everything. The one thing that did travel with us city to city were all of my childhood journals,

maybe 50 or 100 of them. And so I had a suitcase with a combo lock code, because I'm like, what could go wrong? An audience full of people who are curious. Yeah, exactly. All of my most shameful. And at one point, we left the suitcase by accident. Oh my god. At a venue and only realized when we got to the airport. And I had a moment where I was like, you know what?

Actually, I'm okay with this. Wow. Whatever things I'm embarrassed by, whatever particularities feel like so unique to me, it's all good. It's the same shit we've all been struggling with since the beginning of mankind. I also think it's a little bit telling

of your own list of virtues. So for me, I think bravery is high on that list And I think the bravest thing I could do in my lifetime is Have no fear that someone would know all of me. That would be the ultimate kind of self-actualized. Yeah, there's all my journals I trust that I'm still lovable after you know this I try to head towards that direction But I was curious so I didn't even have a sense of my journals until the fires happened. And then it was like, what are we taking?

And I was like, all I want is my journals. I had never put them in bags. I couldn't believe how much room it took up. I'm never gonna read mine unless I'm writing. Yet I do have this in the background fear that they're gonna get lost, burnt, something. The thought of all that disappearing. Do you have any of that?

This is a great prompt. Susan Cheever, John Cheever's daughter, has a great essay and prompt in the book called Letter from a Burning Building. I'm trying to think, I'd probably grab my paintings before, but I think I would grab my journals. And why is that? I don't know, it's not because I need them

or want to reread them, but they do feel like morsels of myself. Yeah. The record of your existence in a lot of ways. There's this wonderful Joan Didion line where she says, we're well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be. And that's how I feel about my journals. They're my past selves and I want to keep on nodding terms with the people I used to be.

Yeah. Okay. So the book is broken into 10 chapters and they are prompts. And then within each chapter, and it's like on grief, on love, we go through all these many big segments of life on earth, really. And within each chapter, you have all these contributing authors. There's like a hundred? A hundred people have submitted stories that are kind of prompts. And the

list is incredible. Gloria Steinem wrote something for it. Gloria Steinem is our oldest contributor at 91. Our youngest was six at the time, Lou Sullivan, who's a two-time pediatric cancer survivor. It's sort of a collection of the people who have most creatively inspired me and who are not necessarily what you think of when you think of as creative. Like there's the George Saunders and the Salmon Rushies of the world in it, but there's also Lou, a man on death row, weeks out from his execution and a young mother who is about to become a widow who writes one of the most beautiful essays

and has this beautiful prompt in the title of it is I Begin Again, and she's imagining herself beginning again on the other side of this thing that she knows is coming and is happening. And I structured it in those 10 thematic chapters because I did go back for the first time ever and reread all of my journals. And I tried to distill the themes that kept coming up again and again and again.

And it was fear and purpose and love and the body. That was sort of the initial conceit of it. And it's kind of like a memoir and essays. It has these long chapter essays for me. And it's meant to be designed as a sort of 100 day project if you wanna do it that way. That keeps coming up. There's just many people that prescribe

this kind of 100 day commitment and then see what happens after that. As you said, on beginning, on memory, on fear, on seeing, on love, on the body, on rebuilding, on ego. My mom was like, why did I kick off the On Ego Chopper? Because she's one of the essay contributors. She's like, what are you trying to tell me? On purpose and on alchemy.

Yeah, and there's just an incredible list of people that contributed as we just said, you mentioned many of them, but Ann Patchett. Love Ann Patchett. Incredible. Have you had her on? No. Anne Patchett. Love Anne Patchett. Incredible. Have you had her on? No. No.

I'd love to have her. Yeah. Selman Rushdie, Elizabeth Gilbert, we've had her on Lena Dunham, we've had her on Gloria Steinem, John Green. John Green was a late edition, so I wrote the On Love chapter, which begins with my relationship

to his very famous novel, The Faults in Our Stars, which for me, like, taught me so much about love. More than Lolita. More than Lolita. Thankfully. Good one. And I read this essay out loud, and it was like three days before the book was due, to a friend of mine, and I was like,

I just wish John Green could have been a contributor to this book. And she was like, did you ask him? And I was like, of course not. He's John Green. And I hung up the phone and I just sent him a cold DM on Instagram. Yeah. Asking him if he might want to contribute to the book, which by the way, was due in three days,

which is super weird. And he sent me an essay and prompt a couple of hours later. Incredible. Yeah. Do you have an allergy to earnestness? It's one of my big allergies. And yet when I'm earnest, I'm proudest of myself. I said to John the other day,

we got to stand at the gates at this graduation last weekend. And I was like, God, it's so exhausting to be cool. I don't think being cool has made anyone happier. And seeing the nerdiest of these kids, because you exit these gates right as you graduate, we're like cheering and doing dances. and then the cool kids were just like... They couldn't enjoy it. They couldn't enjoy it.

Yeah. And so, you know what? As someone who has had an allergy to earnestness, I think I'm ready to try to live a lifelong case in defense of earnestness. Yeah. I'm just done with the too cool first school. The facade, yeah. What about you?

Yeah, I mean, I'm moving towards it more and more. I think kids are enormously instrumental in that. If it's earnest, there's a lot of like, blue feet earnestness. Or saccharine. And I am saccharine, leaning in. There's a lot of signaling. Signaling, hoping to get a reaction.

You can feel that and that's disgusting to me. Totally. But someone who just is who they are, saying what they think or believe. That they love and are excited by is so beautiful. That is cool. That's cool. Yeah.

I'm gonna go tell you, my kink is I'll watch these videos of really elaborate wedding proposals or the Olympians dancing on the airplane. And I just bawl. I cry the whole time. I'm like, in the face of all the negativity and the face of so many people that can make fun of you when you are willing to stand up and dance and sing

and be beautiful and be vulnerable, what a thing. And make a fool of yourself and not care. In a world that just can't wait to fucking destroy you for it, it's so brave and beautiful. It's so brave. Yeah. Well, I feel so honored to know you and John destroy you for it. It's so brave and beautiful. It's so brave. Yeah. Well, I feel so honored to know you and John, and what a delight to have watched that documentary and fallen so in love with both of you and

then get to know you personally. And I think this is, as a devotee of journaling, I think this is the perfect book to encourage people to try this. I really encourage people to read it. You're going to get to read so many wonderful different writers. I find it hard to believe that you couldn't be activated try this. I really encourage people to read it. You're going to get to read so many wonderful different writers. I find it hard to believe that you couldn't be activated by this. Thank you both. This is so fun. You're prolific. You'll write more books. We'll do it again. We hope you enjoyed this episode.

Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. You complimented my shirt and I thank you for it. I really like it. I like the color on it. I need to order more colors of this. What brand is it? We did this last time and I've already forgotten. Um, okay, it's-

Kmart? Nope. Weiss and Maid? Yeah. Weiss and Maid, let's look it up. Yeah, order me a bunch while you're there. Weissen made, W-I-E-S-M-A-D-E. This looks very all American.

Classic. Classic. Textbook. Not, like they're affordable. Yeah, you know I'm not too crazy. Well, I can't say that I lost the right to say that. I do have three crazy pieces of clothing. You also have been giving gifts that are crazy.

That's right, I have some nice sweaters from my friend Monica that are very pricey. And from your friend Wad Pitt. Well, that's what I was saying. I have a few items of God's true, which is, you know. So I didn't know if saying this would make people like mad, but I feel obligated to say.

Yes, we should thank publicly. Brad sent. Our boyfriend. Our boyfriend Brad sent us some goodies from God's true cashmere. He sent you a gorgeous button down, green. Which I've already worn in an interview. It's beautiful, it really is so nice.

He gave Kristin a top and pants. Uh-huh, Kristin got more than you and I, let's just say. Yeah, we don't like that. I don't wanna talk about that. It's okay, it's okay. For you. Okay. Please don't speak for me.

But I got the blanket. And it is incredible. Have you been using it? Yeah, it's great. You don't put it on top of you when you're watching your perverted show. I don't know what to talk about. Oh no, you gotta keep that very far away

from your extracurricular activity. Why? Because it's- I thought I would think you would want me to be using that. I like you using it as chore play, but then getting it out of the whole area when it's time. Why? You want to preserve its freshness.

I think he would like it. He would love it, yes. If he found out you were incorporating it, he would love it. In fact, let me do that and then I'll send him a text. Okay, so things have really turned. Yeah, Monica's been enjoying sexually the blanket that you gave her. It's such a beautiful blanket. And it was such a kind gesture.

It really was so sweet that he sent us those things. God, now do I tell them, now we've opened up a can of worms because I was watching on Father's Day, Godfather. And Marlon Brando has this very, very long scene. People will remember it's when he dies. He's in this cute- Spoiler. No, it's okay, it's a 50 year old movie.

He's in this garden in his backyard playing with his grandson and then he dies. But he's wearing this incredible, looks like cashmere button down, but it's so, it's set in the 40s or 50s. And so it's time specific, but it's got the most beautiful like hints of, I guess it'd be plaid, but very subtle.

It's such a gorgeous shirt. It's so distracting that I said to the boys, I was like, look at this shirt. This shirt's like, so then I took a, no. Nope. But that's interesting, because that's also a scene. I have the, I took a screen grab. That did not look good.

You know, here, I'll send it to Rob. Oh, okay, yeah. Okay, so this is a gorgeous shirt. I'm so into the hintiness of the lines, like it's like the silhouette of lines. Okay, yeah, it's a green, it's kind of greenish, but like. With yellow checkered. Yeah, plaid. It's incredible.

And I was just, I was obsessed with the shirt and just imagining being in the shirt. And what did I do? I took a picture of it. I sent it to Brad. And I said, was this motherfucker pushing God's truth 70 years ahead of schedule? Secondly, you can manufacture, can you make us this shirt?

He immediately wrote back and said, oh yeah, he's the original OG and yes, I'm on it. What the fuck? So I might be getting a matching shirt that maybe only Brad and I have. No, this is great, no. That was made famous by Marlon Brando. I can't.

This is a hat on a hat on a hat on cherry on icing on cherry. This is too much. This is way too much. If I can be using him, I'm not kind of- Don't use people. Well, I'm kind of, I'm contradicting what I said about if I knew the president, I wouldn't call the complaint about prescription prices.

Yes. I am abusing my access to him by asking him to make me a shirt I liked from a movie. But he seemed to like it as well, so well, TBD. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah Anyway, it was so nice of him And the price point is a little different than this tea you're wearing. Yes Dramatically, so speaking of what you just said something and it reminded me of something. Okay, you said we yeah

No, sometimes if you do somebody else's podcast or you get interviewed, they'll ask you What is your favorite episode or what have you learned? Yeah from the show and I always forget this But I need to remember to say it because this is the thing that I think has stuck with me most out of 900 plus episodes we had an expert on I Don't remember on what, but basically he was like, you can tell if people are using you or I or we in the way they talk.

And I have never, I'm so attuned. I am too. To when people are doing it. Yeah, that affected me as well. Where I notice it all the time. And in fact, we were watching Rocky with the kids and Rocky comes home and he finally admits to Adrienne and they're newly dating.

I can't fight him, he's gonna beat me, I can't do it. You know, and this is gonna happen and that and he wants to quit. And she goes, oh, it's okay, what are we gonna do about it? And they're brand new dating. And I paused and I said, you hear that girl? She said, what are we gonna do about it? And they're brand new dating. And I paused and I said, you hear that girl? She said, what are we gonna do about it?

Well, it could be more loving than this is our problem. It's so sweet. I remember this too though. And how you can include people. Exactly. How you can include and exclude people. There's a lot said in the way you identify we, I, you. And I make effort.

Do you make an effort? I do make an effort. But I'm also like, I'm really sensitive. Yeah, so I think I do a good job about always saying our show and we blank. But when I say, when I'll say it on X, and as I'll say I interviewed. Yeah, you do say that.

Yeah, and then I hear myself saying that, and then I'm like, well, that's hurtful, and I don't mean it, but also, in some way, I conduct the interview. I don't mean we're not doing it, I just mean like I don't know, I have the research. To me, saying, and I asked is one thing, or like I said, or whatever.

But it does like jolt me out when you say I interviewed. Yeah, and I know it immediately. Yeah, that's interesting. And then I go, oh, that's weird, because I'm really good at saying our show, and we did this, and we have 900 episodes, and we blank, blank, blank. We had so and so. I'll always say we blank, blank, blank. We had so and so.

I'll always say we had. I'll never say I had so and so. I'll always say we had so and so on. But then I do often say it was interviewing so and so. Yeah, I think that's the thing that I have really, I mean, I've taken a lot of things, obviously, from the shows, but that one has really stuck. And I hear it all the time in the world around me,

the way people talk about themselves or their partners or their friends. It's interesting. There's all kinds of opportunities for you to do it right or wrong. Like I'll often say my daughters. Yep. And I probably should say our daughters all the time.

Well, no, it depends on if she's there, yeah. Yeah. Our daughter. Yeah, yeah. But if you are not with Kristin, I think my daughters is fine. Yeah, but I still think, oh, I should always just say our. And I'll say to people sometimes

when you come to my house at eight. And then even that I'll go like, I should have said R. Interesting. We, I, you, these are important pronouns. Right for triggers. Right for triggers, right for opportunity. Speaking of we, I had a very fun morning date yesterday. Ooh, what?

My friend Ethan Supplee, who you know, he's one of my- We love him of my handful of people I would describe as magic Yeah, yeah, there's a category in my life of people have met that I think are magic and he's really really up there but he was in town and He famously has lost 300 pounds Wow Through diet and exercise Wow his Instagram is so fun to follow because he's really embedded now in that space. Uh-huh. It was really interesting because I was like, are you taking GLP once? Right. He's like, no. I'm like, why?

Like what's the reservation? And he's like, he's kind of like circling this thing and he's not really articulating it but all of a sudden it just emotionally it occurs to me. I go, hold on, is it like if they created a pill or a pill or a shot that would allow you to drink? Is it like that? Because if they invented a pill that allowed you to drink three drinks, I wouldn't take it.

And I'm sure a lot of people will be like, well, why? There's a pill or a shot that makes you not an addict. But I have so much baggage in history and trauma with this struggle. That's like, A, I don't know if I could ever trust it, even if I was watching it work for everybody, the stakes are just so high. Plus like all the benefits I got out of it

through not having a shot available that I had to work these steps and learn all these tools. And he's like, that's exactly, that's it. And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense. That's so complex. Very complex. And I'm sure he takes a ton of pride. Absolutely, as he should.

As he should in, you know, on his journey to be a healthier person. And I'm sure when you've done that, you take pride in it, that feels like a weird shortcut that doesn't give you the feeling. Right, and the identity and all the other stuff. Exactly.

Okay, so him and then Jonathan Tucker, friend of the pod. Oh my God, oh my God, Jonathan Tucker, that is a deep cut. We had him so long ago, I think COVID, and he was in his car. He was in his red Cadillac, red interior, his 80s Cadillac.

Yeah. Most colorful, interesting, energetic boy. Oh gosh. So the three of us. Whoa. I guess they had done a movie, they'd have done a Nick Cassavetes movie back in the day. And so they remained friends.

And, oh, and then something really kind of sweet was, Ethan was, I don't know what it is. Now, Ethan had his own batch of friends. He grew up in LA. His childhood friends have become the most successful actors of all time. So maybe that's part of the story. But he did say, do you know of all the movies,

and Ethan's been doing movies for 30 years, and big ones. He's like, yeah, you two are the only two guys I've ever maintained a friendship that I made on a movie after the fact. Wow. Yes, and I guess I felt grateful and flattered. And then also like, oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah, because I've kept in touch with a lot of the folks. Right. But we had a pump. That's interesting. We debated politics, we lifted. Nice. Yes, it was really, it was fascinating. I think that actually him growing up here

and being around famous people. The most famous kid in the world. Exactly, the most famous kid in the world and famous people. I bet he is not, there's zero sense of enamoration with anyone, so he's just like, if I like you. Certainly, but I've never maintained any of those friendships because I was blown away with their celebrity.

Like even in fact, like on Without a Paddle, Ethan and I became great friends. He wasn't the star of Without a Paddle. He was like maybe seventh on the call sheet or something. Right. Well, I don't think you're only being friends with those people because of that. But you are attracted, you can be, or you were,

you were maybe more so at some point. Certain people. Yeah, certain people you're attracted to because of their. Yeah, and I can name them. It's like the people that I worked with where it was like I couldn't believe I was working with them is like Burt Reynolds

out of the gates, Tina and Amy when I did Baby Mama. I was like, wow, I can't believe I get to work with Tina and Amy. So cool. Yeah, now mind you, there were Academy Award winners in Baby Mama, but like Greg Kinnear was in Baby Mama. I think he won for as good as it gets. He did, great movie.

So I wasn't necessarily attracted to the acclaim or I wanna work with an Oscar winner, but people who I deeply admired from a distance, when I got to work with them, I was pretty blown away. Or when I got to do The Judge, I was like pretty, couldn't believe I'm in a scene with Robert Downey after all this time. Yeah, really cool.

By the way, I do need to, I need to tie up one loose end on Godfather. Okay. We're midway through the movie, and all of a sudden I realize I'm like, well, of course no women like this movie. There's no women in this movie. Exactly.

I mean, there's Diane Keaton's in it once in a while. The sister's there getting beat up to justify Sonny beating up the husband. But it's like, oh yeah, this is a movie about all guys. Yeah. And duh, no Wonder Girls aren't clamoring to see Godfather. Exactly. Yeah.

Although, oh wait, I guess there's an exception, but like Ocean's Eleven is a lot of men, but Julia Roberts is in it and she's so good in it. Oh, I love that movie. And we went to Mission Impossible last night as a family. The kids had never seen a Mission Impossible movie. Okay, how did that go? It was good, I loved it.

It's not the right starter, Mission Impossible, because it's like reckoning it might be the last one. I don't know. Yeah, it's supposed to be the last one. I don't buy it. Yeah. I hope it's not the last one. But this one was definitely a darker version. Lincoln loved it. Delta was like, that was the longest,

worst movie experience of my life. Okay. Lincoln now loves it. And now he's in a Catch-22. I'm like, well, my impulse now is like, Lincoln, there's eight of these. Like, summer's here. This is what we're doing.

We're gonna watch the fucking Mission Impossible this summer. This is tricky. And then Delta was like, and then I go, oh, but actually that's a terrible game plan for you Delta, you hated it. And she goes, well, I'm open to giving it another try if I'm at home and I can leave.

And I'm like, okay, so we're gonna give some of the more uplifting, funner versions of it. Okay, one thing I wanted to share. Okay. Is indulge it. I have long heard the word rapture. Okay. I've always heard rapture.

It's almost always been in reference to Jesus. Like the rapture of Jesus's love. I never hear rapture outside of that. You never hear enraptured? I guess rarely. Just I think every time I hear it, it's like the rapture of his love or something. Anywho, I was, it weirdly happened two times in one night.

So maybe it was just me, probably it was just me. But we were laying on the couch watching TV and Lincoln loves to get in and extract whatever's left in my ear piercing hole from 35 years ago. She likes to get in there and root around and try to get the little ball out. And I love that so much when she's digging in my ear. And then I just happened to say,

I just like love when you dig in my ear. So then long after the extraction was done, she was playing with my ear while we watched Friday Night Lights. And I was laying on the couch and this little girl was playing with my ear. And I was like, just radiating warmth. I felt so at peace and so happy.

And then that same night, I felt so at peace and so happy. And then that same night, I'm talking, Delton, just her and I in bed, and we're talking about how I always, I drive them crazy because I pet them and they hate it. So I'm not allowed to pet anyone. If I put my hand on their leg, I can't rub their leg. I just gotta keep it still. And I always forget.

The thing I do that's a bad habit is when I'm holding their hand, I circle their thumb with my finger. So I'm doing that and then I say to her, sorry, I do that. I go, I think it's a bad habit is when I'm holding their hand, I circle their thumb with my finger. So I'm doing that and then I say to her, sorry, I do that. I go, I think it's genetic. I go, my papa Bob used to do it to me and my dad used to do it to me and I kind of loved it once I realized they both did it to me.

And then I found myself that I just do it genetically. It's like a tick I do. And then I just said that. And then we're laying in bed in a way that she's snuggling me in my nook and I'm holding Both of her hands and she starts rubbing her thumb around my thumb because she knows that I like it from my dad And we were laying there and she was doing that and I just started like just kind of Weeping like I was just kind of leaking tears

and I could feel her whole body as if it was just like in mine and then she was this act of generosity and caring about me. And I really was thinking like, oh, this is rapture. And it's funny, we're so like obsessed with did we get enough love from our parents or did they do it right? But the feeling of your child loving you is rapture.

It's like so, it's so filling. There's something about it that's just really special. That's lovely. Yeah, it was really one of the most wonderful moments I've had playing at our, this little sweet girl who's thinking about her, wants to express to her dad that she loves him. Oh, it's like, it's a mega, it's a 10 ton mega bomb.

Well, I'm happy for you. Yeah, it was very sweet. Good. Well, I don't think we're gonna top that, so we should do some facts. Oh, okay. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. ["The Armchair Expert's Theme Song"]

Okay, facts for Suleika. Oh, yes. What a fun conversation. Yes. Now, we're about to get into it, me and you. A little bit, not really, I don't want to. I don't want to fight. I'm not in the mood to fight.

Okay, so this is a very mixed signal. So you go, we're about to get into it, I don't want to fight. Well, I don't, I don't want to fight. So I want us to be nice to each other. Okay. Okay? Because at the beginning of the episode, we have a mini argument about Taylor Swift

and the masters and stuff, okay? And we say we're gonna discuss this on the fact check. I asked Nathan Hubbard for some help. Nathan is a big, big music guy. He's the CEO of Firebird Music. He was the CEO of Firebird Music. He was the CEO of Ticketmaster. He's very, very deeply entrenched in the music world.

And he has a podcast that I love on the Ringer Network, great network, Bill Simmons. He has a podcast called Every Single Album he does with Nora Prinziotti. And they, yes, they go into deep, deep, deep stuff about Taylor, so I asked him, I'm gonna read it. I said, hi, I have a question for you, and no worries if you don't have time to answer it.

Dax and I are in a debate over what happened with Taylor's music, and so there will be an upcoming fact check where we discuss it. Dax feels like the zeitgeist narrative about Scooter and her isn't exactly accurate. I need the facts. Any chance you can give me an objective rundown of what happened? First of all, I applaud how neutral that question was. Thank you. I am here to learn. Okay, great.

Okay, ready? Yeah. He said Scott Borschetta who heads Big Machine, Taylor's original label, started shopping the entire Big Machine catalog around 2014. Lots of people got a look at it including weird places like Twitter and Facebook. Taylor's camp knew about this but the terms at which Scott was willing to give Taylor back her masters were erroneous. They required she extend her deal with Big Machine and the payback felt arduous.

Taylor still feels that before actually selling the catalog that Scott had an obligation to bring the deal to her, in which case she might have chosen to seek financing to buy the catalog. Instead, it was sold to Scooter. Taylor had a lot of issues with Scooter that had already. So really quick, we just, so the points I've made, this is all very consistent with what I was saying,

which is she was offered a deal, it had an extension, she didn't wanna do that. Well, she wanted, she's saying she didn't have the opportunity to even get financing to do it, that it was then sold to Scooter. But hold on, you just, hold on, this is good faith and we're keeping it good. It's important she did have access to it,

but it included an extension with her deal. Yeah, it included things that they felt were crazy. That's right. Yep. Yep, so I just wanted to be clear, because this is one of my main points, is that it was brought to her, she didn't like the terms.

Right, because the, which, I mean. Because the common narratives is like, all this happened, she had no idea, and she didn't like the terms. Right, because the, which, I mean. Because the common narrative is like, all this happened, she had no idea, and she didn't have a chance. And that's part of my issue is right there, is she was offered it and she didn't like the deal. She didn't like the deal, which, as people who have been involved in business deals,

sometimes they are crazy. That's fine, that is, I don't mind that she didn't like the dealer or that it was a bad deal. I just want it to be crystal clear. The guy was shopping the entire catalog of the label. She was offered this. It would have involved an extension of her services.

She didn't want to do it. Okay, now it goes, go ahead. Instead it was sold to Scooter. Taylor had a lot of issues with Scooter that had been aired, that were clearly exacerbated by his company making the acquisition out from under her. The press around Scooter owning the catalog became painful

right at a time when a lot of money began pouring into acquire music catalogs. Spotify and Apple made it possible to model out the cash flows for music. Shamrock came in and made that acquisition and immediately reached out to try to involve Taylor. Deals get done based on people and relationships as much as price. They stayed persistent and as exemplified by her note today, Taylor's note, clearly earned her trust. For them, they get a stamp of approval as they look to invest billions in these assets.

Taylor Swift just called them hugely trustworthy. That matters in these transactions. I think there is some debate around whether she was realistic in her negotiation with Big Machine the first go around and whether she just couldn't cobble together the funding to make it happen or thought nobody would buy it without her approval. But there's no debate that she felt betrayed, that she felt she'd been attacked previously by Scooter and that she became hell bent for a decade

on writing the perceived wrong. Great, yeah, so that, we're not gonna fight because that's, I feel like that's exactly what I was saying about this story. And again, I don't like Scooter Braun. Well, that's irrelevant. No, it's super relevant because the reason it didn't go well is she had previous issues

with Scooter Braun. She already didn't like Scooter Braun. But you take Scooter Braun out of it. They brought her the catalog, she didn't like the deal terms. She passed on it. Another buyer came in, Mike Herbowitz. He bought the catalog. And now she wants the catalog back

and she wants to buy it off Mike Herbowitz. That's a very like non-emotional way of looking at it. And these things that are your IP and your creations and your heart and your soul, emotions are real. They're a real factor. I just think if you remove Scooter Brown, which is a perfect antagonist in this story, he's so unlikable, if you remove him from this story,

I don't think people would feel the same way. If it's a different human being that saw an opportunity and bought the catalog, I don't think it's this crazy story of her being a victim. You don't know what's gone on between her and Scooter. There was all kinds of stuff beforehand. That's what was already aired, and part of why this was so bad for her

is that it was sold to someone that had already, she had already had all kinds of issues with, who's had issues with a billion other artists. They've all left his label So clearly he is doing something to them. That's making that happen. You can't say just because someone is rich They're not a victim. We don't know what I wouldn't say that I wouldn't say that I would say the first deal She wasn't a victim. It was a standard deal Okay And then I'd say the second go-around where she to buy her masters, which very few people have done,

and there's no well-worn path to that. She didn't like the terms and she chose not to buy it. So I don't think she's a victim there. Like no one forced her to do anything. And then the worst person imaginable ended up getting, paying the price. And that was infuriating to her emotionally and to all the fans and to you.

Everyone's been furious about who ended up with the rights to it. I don't think that's a healthy narrative to say this endlessly successful, accomplished everything on her own, self-made billionaire. Unfortunately, I don't think in the music space she's been a victim. She's not one of these people. Part of the self-made billionaire is because she has been so dead set on this and re-recording the music. And she even says, she said,

the era's tour paid for this. It paid for her to be able to do this. That was explicitly stated at the beginning of the tour. Like this is the point. She wanted to own her masters, which is a rare thing. She wanted the rights to her music instead of her enemy having the rights to her music. That is totally fine. And when she had an opportunity to buy up, she didn't.

Yeah. Cause she didn't like the deal, that's great. She also didn't have the opportunity. She didn't have the money at that time. And that's fine, no artists do. There's nothing unique happening to her. didn't have the opportunity. She didn't have the money at that time. And that's fine. No artists do. Right. There's nothing unique happening to her. She wanted to own all her music, which is just really rare. Well, whatever. Who cares? She wanted it and she did it.

She couldn't afford it at the time. Yeah. And Scooter could. So he got it because the company was just selling this catalog, which happens. And she just wasn't singled out or bullied or victimized. No one's saying she's bullied. Well, I don't know. I think everyone thinks. Well, I don't know what happened between her and Scooter before.

So I don't know. Yeah, I don't either. And I have a sense it's probably something really shitty. I'm being very clear. I don't think Scooter's a great guy. I don't like Scooter Braun. I think if someone who we hate is holding the rights to our,

it's not like, it's you. They're holding the rights to you. I think it makes. Well, let's just be clear. He's holding the rights to these recordings. But Dax, you're making, that's so like weird black and white, that's not a create, as a creative person.

He has no say over what she performs, what she writes, what she does. He has zero control over her by owning these masters. I'm saying her work is her. It's her words, it's her experiences, it's her. If someone is holding the rights to that who you hate, it makes tons of sense to me to do everything in your power to take that from them.

And that's what she did, that's what the recordings were all about. Do you think I'm not supportive of her getting her masters back? I don't know. I am. You haven't said that once. I am.

I'm delighted She owns her masters But she owns her masters because she's a shrewd badass not because she's a victim. That's fine. You're so hung up on that I am I think it's a very Terrible narrative for people to have yeah, I think it's all a great triumphant story Here's this woman who created all this music, and by George, she ended up owning all of it on top of it, in the same way that the Beatles did, which was also radical. Yeah, yeah, I think it's awesome.

But it does avoid the bigger thing that we were actually debating. That was one symptom of the larger debate, of just when people are beyond criticism, when that's not allowed, I think that's a very dangerous scenario. I think AA should be totally are beyond criticism, when that's not allowed, I think that's a very dangerous scenario. I think AA should be totally open to criticism, and I think there's valid criticisms of AA.

Like, I don't think anyone should be above criticism. I guess. I'm like, I don't know. I listened to all these pop culture podcasts, I listened to all these things, and I'm like, why? Why does everyone need to have a criticism of someone? Why does everyone need to have an opinion of other people?

I'm kind of bored of it. It's like just, I don't know, I don't know. Especially ironically, knowing people, you and Kristen who are in the public eye, who people have criticisms of, who people, why, it's so unnecessary. If Kristen and I made a public enemy out of somebody, and we had 50 million fans who were actively angry at a human being, it has to be a one-to-one comp.

So Kristen and I have some public enemy that we're talking about all the time, is the bad guy in our story. Well, her fans are. I'm sorry? Her fans are, not her. She is very public. She has music about it, but she doesn't talk about him.

They talk about him and they've made it, the fans, the Swifties have made it also their identity to take this on for her. She sings, there are songs about him, I mean, not his name, but there are clear songs about him, but she's not out there on talk shows talking about him. I think if one individual mobilizes 50 million people to hate one individual, I think we need some fair criticism there.

I think that's a dangerous situation, and it is, I do think it's important for people to go, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. What do you think really happened? How evil is this person? Are they plotting against her? We need to pressure test this ire. And I think yes, I think definitely when someone,

human being has mobilized 50 million people to hate one person, that definitely is a time where some scrutinizing is in order. And if 50 million people hate Jake Gyllenhaal who doesn't deserve it. Well, they don't. They don't.

They don't all hate it. That's the other thing. I think you've made it such a big deal. Like everyone hates, obviously everyone doesn't hate Jake Gyllenhaal. He has an incredible career, he's doing well. Well no, I'm saying Swifties.

Well you can't be doing his level of career and have 50 million people hate you. You wouldn't be cast in anything. You wouldn't, if all the Swifties. No you could, you still have 300 million people to entertain. That's not, no. I, not everyone who likes Taylor Swift

hates all the boyfriends. In fact, most people don't. They find it very entertaining. They find this all like fun and reading between the lines and who she's writing about in X, Y, and Z. But are they like, that person needs to die or we can't support that person. I'm not going to their movies.

Maybe a chunk. I personally don't know anyone who's like, I'm never gonna go support a Jake Gyllenhaal movie because of her. I've never heard of that. Again, I'm sure there are extreme people, but that's not the norm. So I also think that's unfair to make like,

maybe some radical extreme people, extreme Swifties, the face of all the Swifties. I mean, I don't, I love Jake and I love her. So why can't I be the example of that? I think many of her fans have deified her and I think it's very dangerous to make a deity out of a human being. That's what I think.

And I think when someone has become a deity in public, whether they're a cult leader or they're, anytime there is a deity in public, that they're a cult leader or they're, and anytime there is a deity in public, that is the time for a lot of scrutiny. I think that is what the Fourth Estate does. I think that's what people's obligation is. And I think it's what a social primate does when one deity has arose, arisen.

I think it's really important for people to go, well, hold on a second. And I think the fact that that's not even permitted is scary. And I think anytime that's not permitted, it's really important for people to go, well, hold on a second. And I think the fact that that's not even permitted is scary. And I think anytime that's not permitted, it's scary. Yeah. Sure. That's fine.

Anyway, okay. Well, thank you, Nathan Hubbard for weighing in. That was very helpful. That was a great answer. Okay, how old is Lolita in the book? Lolita is the book? Lolita is 12. At the beginning of the novel. She's 17 when she, oh, spoiler, dies.

Dies in childbirth. Ooh. Yeah. Ugh. So. Ugh. I've never read it. I read the first third.

It was when I got scared that I could never enjoy a novel again. I was like a third of the way through it and I was like, oh, this didn't happen. This is someone's weird imagination about falling in love with a 12 year old. I think I'm out. I mean, it says the novel details a protagonist Humbert.

Humbert. Red flag number one. Yeah. Obsession with and sexual abuse of the 12 year old. Okay, well, Russian, you know. Nabokov is Russian? I thought he was... Vladimir Nabokov?

I, maybe he's not, but that's... I thought maybe he's Czech or something. Oh, maybe. You look up what he is. He's Russian. He's Russian. St. Petersburg, Russia. Oh. It would he is. He's Russian. He's Russian. Yeah, St. Petersburg, Russia. Oh.

It would kind of be like Raj Patel not being Indian. Yeah. We can make some assumptions. Vladimir's a pretty good clue. Yeah. Okay, now, well, we talk about loneliness and you know Vivek Murthy. Yes.

He taught us about loneliness. Yeah. That's more dangerous than smoking. Yeah, and it's so sim because he was in my dream last night. Vivek? Yeah, Vivek Murthy. Oh, wow. And then I was listening to this episode this morning

and loneliness. He had fixed my friend's car. He had like taken off a piece and made it a Honda or something. He was like a car guy and I thought I went to prom with him, but I didn't. This is a weird dream. Vivek Murthy as a peer who's a mechanic. Yeah. But it was still him, but he was able to do this car stuff too.

Ambiereage? Yeah, I went to prom with him and then it didn't look like him. Okay. It didn't look like the real Vivek Murthy, but that was the name that was being used. What do you think spurred this dream? I think the magnesium's making my dreams crazy. Okay.

They've been wild lately. Oh, wow, wow, wow. Speaking, Dakota Johnson. She's in the dreams now? No, but on Amy Poehler's podcast, she tells a story about a dream, which you know you're not really ever supposed to do that. You shouldn't do that.

I mean, that's a PSA to everyone. Don't ever tell anyone about your dreams. Right, but I did just do it. And then she did it on that show, and that has gone viral. Oh, it has? Oh, ding ding ding, because it's about Maddie Healy.

He has some history with Taylor. Anyway, she had a dream about him, and he kept turning into asparagus. Oh, that went viral. Well you never know what's gonna go viral do you? You don't. Why does a hospital gown open in the back? Hospital gowns open in the back primarily to facilitate medical procedures and patient care. This design allows easy access to the patient's body for examinations, treatments, and monitoring without requiring them to fully undress,

which is particularly helpful for those who are bedridden or have limited mobility. The open back also simplifies gown changes, especially when a patient is soiled or requires frequent changes. Soil. So it's more for extreme. Soiling.

Yeah, extreme situation. Oh, bedpans. Oh, Oh, bedpans. Oh, now, bedpans makes sense. Yeah. But the rest of it doesn't, because I feel like they're looking at the front of you way more than they're looking at the back of you. So if easy access is the point,

they're definitely upfront way more than they are in back. They'll listen to your lungs in back, but in general, they're tapping all over your abdomen. Yeah. I mean, it's just not where the bulk of the business is done. So it makes more sense to open up the front, but the bedpan totally explains it, I think. I think it's more for people with not a lot of mobility.

Sure. Still though, if they wanna get at the front, it's hard to get at the front with the back opening gown. You have to take the whole thing off. Right. I don't know. So I think they've prioritized Bedpan, which is the right decision.

Yeah. Okay. She talked about commencement speeches. So. No. I think I might need to revisit. We already did. If the front half wasn't, Taylor, then yes.

Let me just say, welcome to New York, it's been waiting for you. Okay, that's her opening line? Yep. Okay. Because it was for NYU. Because it was what? I think it was at NYU.

Oh, okay. And that's a lyric. Oh, it is? Mm-hmm. Okay. Do you want me to keep going? On the speech? Yeah. Only if you need to keep going? On the speech? Yeah.

Only if you need to. Fine, I won't. All right. Well, why don't people in the comments go ahead and write their favorite commencement speech line? Great. And then we can read some of those. Yeah. I'll know not to look at the comments of this episode because I dared push back. Sure. I dared push back. Sure.

I'll know better. All right. Well, that's it. Okay. I love you. Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts.

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