The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Eric Is Most Likely Trump’s Second Favorite Child

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

David Roth and Jeb Lund play the Thanksgiving edition of “America 20 Questions,” including answering how thankful they think Donald Trump is for each of his kids. Plus! Danielle Moodie talks to Amelia Nagoski about the book she co-authored with her sister, Emily Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, which examines the scientific factors that determine the different ways men and women deal with stress. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedinan, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. One excellent show we have for you today. We hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving, so please bear with us while we're all recovering from our own holiday.

Amelia Nogoski, the author of Burnout, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, is here to tell us all about what letter to write the book and maybe even share some of those secrets. Then, journalist David Roth and Jeb Lund, the co-hosts of the It's Christmas Town podcast, join Andy to once again, out who amongst them is the greatest American. But first, let's have some fun. Folks, I am so excited to welcome to the new abnormal for the very first time, Amelia Nagoski, who is co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, Burnout, The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle, and also holds a DMA in conducting from the University of Connecticut. Amelia, I can't express to you how brilliant your book with your sister, Emily, is in terms of just me trying to process this moment that we are living in, this moment that we've been living in through a pandemic, through wars, through layered climate crises in trying to understand how to both analyze and provide context to people while. also trying not to lose my mind in the process of doing so.

Thanks. You're welcome. I want to start off with asking you what led to you and Emily writing burnout just to give the audience a 50,000 foot view as to how you got here? Yeah. Back in 2008 to 2013, I was in my doctoral program getting a doctorate in conducting. I don't know if people generally know, but the music field is very, very male-dominated. especially classical music and especially conducting. So I ended up with stress-induced illness that

landed me in the hospital. So my sister came to see me in the hospital and she brought this big stack of peer-reviewed research about managing stress and how stress can impact your physical health because she has a PhD in public health and she knows these things. And, you know, peer-reviewed research is how we express our love in my family. And I started reading about how this patriarchal misogynistic, white supremacist, late capitalist exploitative system was injuring my physical body. When Emily wrote her New York Times bestselling book, Come as You Are, the Surprising New Science that will Transform Your Sex Life, she had in it just one part of a chapter that was about managing stress and feelings when she, you know, traveled the world, talking to women about the science

of women's sexuality, which is the majority of the content of the book, they kept telling her over and over that this part about stress and feelings, that's the part where they felt the most direct impact in improving their lives. Because it turns out that the best predictor of a woman's sexual well-being is her overall well-being. But still, she was surprised that this was the one thing they latched on to. So I reminded her, hey, remember, when I learned that stuff, it saved my life. I had learned it, the stuff about, you know, feeling, feelings, processing feelings for the purposes of being on stage. and performing in my academic training as a musician, conservatory style training.

But I did not learn how to apply that to my actual life until that hospitalization. And when I reminded her about that, she said, we should write a book about that. So we wrote burnout. And we wrote it because it's the book that I needed. And I figured I can't be the only one who needs this connection explicitly spelled out for me between my individual well-being

and the systemic large scale from oppression, to microaggressions, the way that our broken system, the white supremacists, cis heteronormative, exploitative, like capitalist patriarchy impacts individual well-being. And I think that the reason why, I mean, so many people, millions of people have latched on to your book and to that writing is because of what you state, the both of you state in the book, and I'm not going to directly quote, but surmise that we live inside of a society that tells us to just power through. That tells us to just keep going. That tells us that whatever failures that we have are our own, that whatever obstacles that we can't, you know, surmount are our own problem. And that

particularly women internalize that. And then if you add in other identities that you may have, that you may live at the intersection of, whether you are a black queer woman like I am, child of immigrants, that came to this country at the height of the civil rights era, whether you you are a person who has been told that everything about your success is defined by external validating forces that are attached to a system that was not built for your success, it becomes really daunting. And so can you speak to the ways in which you talk about and you all have diagnosed in this text about, you know, completing the stress cycle and what that stress cycle is and why it's critical for us to kind of take into consideration our own personal issues and

struggles and identities, but how it is impacted by what is happening to us and around us in society. Yeah. First, I'm going to go back to what you said about being a person who does not conform to the very narrow socially constructed ideal. I have a song in one of the lines is, the less you conform to the socially constructed ideal, the greater is your doom. So it's not only constructed so that you're not going to succeed here. The world is intentionally constructed to make you fail. The less you conform to that white, slim, cis, able-bodied, straight, body hair located in certain places and of a certain texture and of a certain color. You know, in America, English has to be your... The less you conform to that very narrow socially constructed ideal,

it's not just more difficult for you to access power you need to gain the resources that will allow you to continue safely in your life. It is constructed actively to stop you from surviving. So I think it's even worse than you stated. But the good news is that the stress that this will inevitably create in your body that can kill you, you don't have to wait for the world to change before you start to feel better. And that's where the stress response cycle comes in. It's a resource that every human is born with. It has evolved into us. And if you imagine us in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, You can imagine kind of a proto-you down by the river, you know, getting some water to go take back to your village maybe. And, uh-oh, here comes a hippopotamus.

It's like the world's most dangerous land animal. And it's coming to get you. And they're so cute, but they're so dangerous. Hippopotamus is like charging at you. And in that moment, with a threat of life or death, your body has a stretch response designed to keep you alive, fight or flight. We all know. And it floods your body with cortisol and glucocorticoids and all the hormones and electrical signals flooding through you, literally flooding through the cascade of water that carries

on the nutrients to your body. And it signals every system in your body to change for the purpose of saving your life. And we all know, okay, it makes my heart increase. You can feel that. It makes your breath get faster and maybe deeper, depending on, you know, what the circumstances are. You might feel your palm sweat. You might feel the hairs rise on the back your neck. Now, this is systems that we do not have any conscious control over. Like, it's not really easy to make yourself sweat more, right? So this is happening way below the level of conscious awareness. And there's also systems that we cannot sense in the moment. So, for example, your immune system takes up a lot of energy. So in that moment of fight or flight, life or death, your immune system

gets the message, oh, hey, I need to like not use up so much energy at this moment because who cares about malaria when there's this scary, scary hippopotamus. Your reproductive system also gets the message. Oh, okay. Like, babies are really important and I take up a lot of energy, but who cares about babies? Because hippo. So it shuts off too. It doesn't shut off, but it like takes a back seat for that moment and does not work as efficiently. Yeah. So also that you can use all of your energy to run, which you do. You leap, you jump, you climb, you hide in the cleft of the rock. And when you look out finally, and there's the hippopotamus. And it is. walking away, you used up the stress response, neurochemicals, hormones, electrical signals in order to save your life. You used exactly what it was designed for. And you succeeded. You survived. You

want to go back to your village and jump up and down and tell the story to everyone you know and hug your friends and family and look how blue the sky is and how bright the sun shines. And you want to write a song about it and dance about it around the campfire that night. That is the complete stress response cycle. You use what your body prepared you to do in order to save you from the thing that caused, that initiated that stress response cycle. You know, fast forward a couple of million, millennial. Yeah. Into our evolutionary present. And honestly, it's only really the past century and a half since the Industrial Revolution, that the vast majority of the population is so disconnected from

that evolutionary heritage that on a vast scale we are suffering this disconnect, where it's no longer true that the things that cause our stress are more likely to kill us than the stress response itself. Now, the things that cause our stress individually, you know, our body doesn't have a whole lot of different responses. When that email comes that we're expecting, that we don't want to reply to, even if we open it up, it's going to be terrible. Because our body only really has this limited way to respond to stress source. And you can't fight or flight your way away from an email. So the secret is you need to complete the stress response cycle in a separate process from dealing with the thing that initiated your stress.

Because one of the things that you write about in burnout is the idea of being able to identify the stress separate from the stress. Yeah, this was so important for me. Yeah, so please, like, because I think that, again, many of us have the ability, like I can let, let's look at where we are right now. We feel like we're on the verge of a potential World War III. There, every single day, there is a new, historic, a fire, historic storm, historic tornado, historic flooding. Yeah, another mass shooting, potential civil war in the United States. All of these things are real. They're no longer hyperbole. They are real and they're happening every single day. That is the stress and then being forced because of our capitalistic structure to just work through it. Yeah. I say this, Amelia,

the other day I said to one of my friends, I said, you know what never occurred to me as we were learning about the plague? It never occurred to me that during the plague that people were still having to go to work. It never occurred to me that you were like climbing over bodies in the street so that you could, you know, go into the blacksmiths shop to, to continue. producing. And so talk to us about the separation of the identifying what the stresses are, some of which I've named that are external, that are societal, that are global versus the stressors. Yeah. The good news is that you don't have to wait for the world to change in order for you to feel better because you can manage the stress in your body separately from the, I mean,

managing the things you cannot control, right? We cannot stop World War III. Each individual one of us has no power to make that happen unless you are a high-ranking government official, in which case, please do complete the stress response cycles that are built up in your body. And I have lost track of what... Please do. Yeah. If you're a high-ranking government official, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. And good luck to you.

That might be rude, but sorry. And I was also thinking about how, like, in the plague, like in the Middle Ages, even as late as like the 1700s, which I think is maybe the most recent actual plague of the particular black plague, the vast majority of people's lives were not going into a job. Like, you were a farmer. Or if you were a blacksmith, that meant that you own the smithy and maybe your apprentices came in. But like, there wasn't a matter of, oh, we're all going to have a meeting with 75 people in the auditorium. And we're going to, you know, sing the company's song together and give each other a virus.

Like that wasn't how things worked back then. And also, if you were farming, if you were a smithy, you were using your body a lot. So you had opportunities for your body to go through the physical experience of burning up the, you know, glucocorticoids and cortisol and adrenaline. So even the last major plague we had of that nature was not as drastic in terms of like causing burnout of this, this gap between how much stress occurs in our body and how many things in the outside. side war. Anyway, my point is that even in the early 20th century flu pandemic, the nature of urban life became so congested. What I'm trying to say is that it's not a matter of what's happening right here right now. How to manage stress has always been true throughout all of history. And so for my personal world war that I experienced in my doctoral program, fighting to like be a human being who was assigned female at birth and turns out is not neurotypical and trying to be a conductor and to fit into the expectations, it doesn't matter how large the scale is. Is it World War

3 or is it trying to raise a child on your own? It doesn't matter because you don't have to change the outside world. If you can give your body an experience of moving you from danger to safety, And it doesn't even have to actually be from danger to safety. It just has to believe that it's moving you from danger to safety. So if walking one block tells your body, oh, I have moved, and therefore I'm capable of moving myself from danger to safety, just that small amount will communicate to your body that the world is a safe place to be and it doesn't have to be in panic mode. It doesn't have to be holding onto anxiety.

It is safe and it can make you safe. Does that make sense? Did I connect those dots? Yes, you absolutely did. And please tell folks about also the monitor. You're asking me about the monitor. I'm so glad nobody ever asks me. It's so important. What?

Are you kidding me? Like, if you look at the highlighted pages of my copy, please tell people about the monitor. Yes, it was life-changing for me. Okay, the monitor is what we call a system in your brain. It's called the discrepancy of reducing. increasing feedback loop, but like, what the hell is that mean? It means the monitor. So it's the system in your brain that can keep track of what your goal is, how much progress you're making toward that goal, and how much effort it's taking to make that progress. So for example, if your goal is get to the

mall, how long will it take to get to the mall and how harder will it be? Like, it's a 20-minute drive. No biggie. So let's say that you get in your car, you're expecting 20-minute drive, I will achieve my goal. If there's like no red light. and no traffic and you just sail to the mall in like 14 minutes. That feels so good. It's so satisfying and so celebrant victorious because your monitor has noticed that you achieved your goal with less effort than anticipated. That's the expectancy. How much effort is it going to take? 14 minutes. That was amazing. But of course, you can also imagine when you have the goal drive to the mall. And it's, you know, you hit that first red light, and then of course you're going to hit every other red light,

and then you're like, you know, four minutes away, and then there's an accident, and you end up just stuck there for five minutes, six minutes, seven, and you just want to like, bang your head on the steering wheel and scream, or eventually you just end up just like sobbing, hopelessly, I'm never going to the mall again. This is terrible. Because your monitor has kept track of your goal. it has stayed the same. It has kept track of your progress, not enough. And it has kept track of your effort way too much. Those three parts together, in those measurements, make your monitor so angry. And in a thing like going to the mall, clearly it's a small scale, low key thing. But when your goal is to like fit in and conform to the white supremacist, his heteronormative, exploitative late capitalist

patriarchy, that is an unachievable goal. And yet you are surrounded, constantly by messages that that's all you're here to do. You are on the planet to conform. You are on the planet to be enmeshed in this system. And that's not because, you know, you're stupid and you can't differentiate yourself from, you know, these external messages. It's because we are a herd species. We are meant to live in cooperative communities. People are not meant to be alone. We require society of others in order to be our complete cells. So when we get these messages, here's how you conform. We want to believe them.

So with that being our goal, our monitor lives in a constant state of frustration. But we can help our monitors to understand. No, no, no. Our real goal is not to conform to this large-scale Uber culture goal. Our real goal is to conform to my friends, my immediate bubble of love. The people who care about my well-being as much as I care about theirs, They remind me that I am myself already am worthy of love. I am already deserving of compassion and care.

I belong. And that means that your new goal is so very achievable. You just need help from those people to remind you, hey, no, no, no. Your goal is right here. You've already achieved it. You are magical and worthy. And then your monitor gets way more comfortable

with the amount of effort it takes to exist as a human in society. Amelia, I could speak to you for hours. Your book, your work has been so eye-opening, and I just appreciate the way that burnout has laid out what we feel, what we may know, but struggle to truly understand. And I think that the way that both you and Emily contextualized it gave it color and feeling and examples that, we can relate to really help us find ways to complete our stress cycle individually and hopefully

as a collective, then that will reverberate out. I really hope that you'll come back to the new abnormal to continue the conversation because it was so good. Folks, the book is Burnout the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Amelia Nagoski. Thank you so much for your time and your work. Thank you. David Roth is an editor at and co-owner of Defector and co-host of the Distraction Podcast. Jeb Lund is a journalist whose writing has appeared in such places as The Guardian, Vice, Rolling Stone, Gawker, and the New Republic. He's also the co-hosts of the Quaid and Foll podcast. And when they fist bump each other and chant the magic words, say you, they are the super co-hosts of the It's Christmastown podcast and my next guests.

Jeb, Dave, welcome. Say me. Wait. No, it's say you. It's a Johnny Thunder reference. Many of our listeners will get that. I'm still stuck in Lionel Richie. I know.

I understand. Okay. So this is our special taped in advance all-star Thanksgiving episode. A little later, we'll have Fox News as Jesse Waters live in studio to share his crafty plan for getting that special turkey to come home with him. And we'll also have Emmy Award winning actor James Wood stopping by to yell at everyone under 60. But first, Jeb, Dave, the way this works is I'm going to ask both of you a series of questions. And then at the end, I'll announce who is the greater American.

My choice will be completely objective, and as always I will be guided by the principles of Emmanuel Kant as laid out in his critique of pure reason. The immutable laws of physics as set forth in Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, as well as the weird sexual mores of science fiction Grandmaster Robert Heinlein. Guys, are you ready? We've definitely done this before, and I don't know if I am ready, but yeah, let's get it. Let's do it. Okay. I checked the tape. The last time we did this quiz, Jeb went first. So in the interest of fairness, my first question this time goes to Jeb again. Jeb, what do you imagine Thanksgiving dinner for the Trump family is like?

And keep in mind that S&L is off this week, so your answer can be as obvious as you want. Well, I think overdone. I think the entire bird is dark meat when it's finished. Dave, same question. It's a white meat culture there. That is true. I'm thinking primarily of the viscosity of the gravy and how it is delivered. Like, there's certainly an elaborate.

elaborate gravy boat service there, but we're all in agreement that this is a buffet-style affair, right? Like, nobody's passing anything to anyone else at a table. That's not how it works. Right. There would be a carving station, too, I think. Yes. I mean, you've done a lot of work on Trump and carving stations, I think.

Ordinarily, as you know, very modest and self-effacing, but I do feel like nobody has done more on that topic than me. And that's something that I should really work on or unpack. not on this podcast obviously but yes it's grimly shuffling forward past a just a big bucket full of very fluffy orange dinner rolls but yeah to get like three pieces of white meat four for mr trump and then yeah you just then it's time to get it saucy with it nobody else gets four no four is for that's for closers that's for leaders I mean it's hard to imagine like in some ways I feel like he's a brown food guy as a general rule and this is a

our greatest brown food holiday. And yet I, um, I can't imagine that there's really like a whole lot of promising, like, even within the sort of like Flintstonian boundaries of what a Thanksgiving dinner is. Like, I don't think they're really doing great. So on a style note, I would imagine that the turkey has those little toque kind of things for the ends of the drumstick. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Encrusted with zirconia. At the end of the night, he fires him into the crowd. He's like, terrific. Have fun. You can exchange that for hurricane supplies. Yeah. I was thinking like a drummer throwing his sticks into the crowd, being like, you're an awesome show. Thank you, Cleveland.

Okay. I think that covers it. Dave, we'll let you start this one. And this will blessedly close out the Donald Trump portion of our competition. Donald Trump has a minimum of five children, Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron. Baron is under 18, so we'll leave him out. Please rank the other four children in order of how thankful Trump is for them, from least thankful to most thankful. Oh, gosh.

I mean, it's, I feel like it's Ivanka and then the rest of the field. Tiffany's in Dead last. No matter what. I don't care how good, like a bird was. Seamus, you can bump that in the broadcast, right? We can just have like a bird playing underneath this whole segment. Yeah, Tiffany's the one where there's a Simpson scene where when they're getting ready to take Maggie away from them. And one of the people from child services says Margaret Simpson and home goes, lady, you got the wrong guy.

I feel like that is Trump's reaction every time he's given the five children's number where he's like, hmm. Like I do like to round things up. Like I often have people I have seven, but. So you're both in agreement that Ivanka is one. and Tiffany is four. Yeah. And then I think you probably, I guess it's Eric Don Jr., but I mean, it's a real.

Eric, is he more thankful for Eric or less thankful? I think he's less actively unthankful for Eric. Is that fair to say? Yeah. So say you have two dogs in your house, right? And you hate them both. And one of them is running around constantly.

As you do. And eating your slippers and like getting in the garbage can in the bathrooms, just stuff all over the place. And then the other dog is just the kind of like dog that just sleeps in front of the refrigerator all the time. And that's irritating too, because you need to get into the fridge. But it's not like eating your toilet paper. And I think that that is basically the dynamic here with Eric being asleep in front of the fridge

and Don Jr. are constantly getting caught like, yeah, just like eating some pants. Okay. So I think Trump admires the effort though. So like Don Jr. You know, he gets all coked up and just start shredding the newspaper and, like, gnawing on the end of the Barka lounger. But occasionally, he terrorizes the person outside that Trump thinks is ruining the neighborhood. That's true. Whereas Eric is, while quiet, always an impediment to Diet Coke.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's a fair point. The idea that the thing that Trump would respect about Don Jr. is that the mailman hates him. Yeah. Federal employee. Yeah.

I mean, he owns the mailman. So I think that's important. Okay. That's going to be a tough call. on that one, who gets more points. So let's move on and talk about Thanksgiving in popular culture. Jeb, in the 1983 film Trading Places, there's a scene early on where Eddie Murphy's character, Billy Ray Valentine, is in a police station cell with a bunch of other people, and he describes the karate skill known as the Court of Blood technique. After he does this, two rather large men confront

him, and one of them utters a holiday-themed line. What is that line? I don't know. It has been so long since I've seen trading places. I just remember Mortimer and it's Donamichi and Ralph Bellamy, right? Yes. That's it. That's my trading place's knowledge apart from the nudity and the gorilla on the train. Right. I was going to say, like, this guy's leaving out the nudity.

What's going on here? What have they done with Jeb? Dave, do you know the line? No, I don't. Really? Oh, you're talking shit up to a second ago, right? But then it turns out. There was a time in my life when I probably knew the line.

At this point, no, I'm more concerned about Jeb going woke and not mentioning the toplessness right off the top. I'm more interested in your whole, like, teacher. I'm sorry I didn't have the answer now, but I had it when you taught the answer to me three weeks ago. That's a fair encapsulation of my argument. Annie, may I have my points, please? The correct answer is, it ain't cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving.

Oh, that actually is a pretty good line there. That makes sense. Yeah. That was a very, very disappointing round. Let's see if you guys can make up for it. This question is probably a lot easier. Dave, Terence Malik's 2005. film The New World is widely considered by me to be the best Thanksgiving movie, despite it taking

place in Jamestown, Virginia, and having nothing whatsoever to do with Thanksgiving. What musical cue plays over the opening of the film? So it's a Terence Malick movie, which makes me think more of like wind going through trees and dappled sunlight while someone is like, existence, what is it? Ah. I've seen this movie again. I'm going to get dinged by Jed for this because I used to to know things. Well, I'm not going to pretend I didn't know them, Jeb, but I don't know the musical cue. Is it a harp glizondo? Jeb, do you have any idea? ACDC back in black.

I am so disappointed in the caliber of contestants this week. Well, what is it? It is the for spiel, or prelude, to Wagner's Das Reingold. Nice. That is also appropriately Terence Malikian. You didn't really care when different types of music got made. Yeah. I mean, so it's, yeah, a chronological music. It's not the right country. I would just like to point out there. I think everybody knows where Wagner land is and where America is. Yeah. Yeah, but this is what sets Terrence Malick apart from everybody

else. A lot of people wouldn't make a movie where the whole thing is just Rachel McAdams walking through a field of wheat, but he does do that. I don't think it's fair to ding us for Terence Malick not being very good at movies. Excuse me? Excuse me? There's a certain number of Hallmark movies that you watch where eventually you're just sort of like, I prefer a Lacey Chabair film. That is a despicable. I will have you know at my last family Thanksgiving gathering, I sat everyone down to watch the three-hour director's cut of the New World. I am fairly certain they all loved it.

They haven't invited me back to tell me, but I am fairly certain they all loved it. Anyway, it is actually, it's a severely underrated film and you all should watch it ASAP. Yeah, I also, I was clowning on it in the way of like a lesser Malik. I think it's a good movie as well. You were, yes. It's really what Jeb said that. Yeah. A lot of negative points involved there.

All right, Jeb, you're going to need a big comeback here. Our last category is Thanksgiving throughout history. Jeb, Thanksgiving became a national holiday because a 74-year-old Karen named Sarah Josepha Hale wrote a letter to a president telling him she was sick of different states, having Thanksgiving on different days, and urging him to make it a federal holiday on a fixed day. And he agreed. Who was that president? Was it Abraham Lincoln?

It was. It was. On October 8th, 1863, President Lincoln issued a proclamation of Thanksgiving. He loved proclamations, didn't he? It was written by his Secretary of State, William Seward, who four years later would pay Russia $7.2 million for Alaska, which directly led to the existence of vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. One of our worst deals.

Yeah. Clearly. A terrible deal, you know, we. don't we don't do that anymore yeah the I'm glad that it was Abraham Lincoln because the alternative for me is this has been like a big part of growing up and being politically aware is realizing that a lot of things that I had thought of as sort of indelible American traditions actually date to like 1971 yes right like the under god and the pledge of allegiance you're like oh yeah that's Eisenhower era right cool all right that's good that that was like something

that was come up with like basically while my parents were in college yeah or it was or it was or it was originated by Andrew Jackson while he was in the middle of exterminating Native Americans. Yeah, that's, well, and so that's where it is also nice that it was Lincoln as well, and then it wasn't the sort of thing where it was like, Andrew Jackson wants you to take a minute to be thankful or, you know, whatever, like Richard Nixon encourages you to spend time with your family and eat. Pet your little dog. I think we're going to do it.

Yeah, the one out by the gourds, not in front of the fridge. Last time we did one of these quizzes, we ended on a really weird question. You don't think that Terrence Malick was a weird question? No. What was weird was that neither of you knew the answer. This is unfair. But so I'm going to try not to do that this time. So I'm going to throw this out there.

I guess Dave, I think it's your turn to go first. Fuck, Mary Kill, Thanksgiving side dishes. I'm not giving you any choices. You can pick any three. Okay. Well, I think it's a question of how polarizing I want to be here. So for me, I'll just go. ahead and say this, whatever. No one's going to hear this, right? You're not recording anything that I

say. This will be aired the day after Thanksgiving, so literally nobody will be listening. What a relief. Okay, then in that case, yeah, I would probably fuck Brussels, marry stuffing. And then this is where, you know, there's some easy answers here. There's like a canned product that I could say. I am not a big candied yam person. And while killing candy dms would deprive a lot of people of certainly the sweetest vegetable dish that they're likely to eat in a year. I feel like I have to live my truth. So that is the one that I would, that I would off. Those are good answers. Thanks, Jeb. I appreciate it. You've taken a lot off the table for me. I was also going to marry dressing or stuffing. I think there's a lot of wonderful

variety you can get there, a lot of different ways you can prepare it. Do you like it crunchy on the top and completely sodden mush underneath? Don't do that, but you can. You can put apples in there and walnuts. You can just have walnuts. You can just put like little, you know, just have sourdough

and celery and time, you know, that's, it's wonderful. Also reheats really well. I would say, fuck mashed potatoes. Yeah.

Because they're delicious. Also, in a purely, you know, anatomical sense, you could fuck mashed potatoes. That's true. If it's that kind of party.

In a way that you can't fuck a Brussels sprout. Yeah. They're warm. They're warm and buttery. You know. But I would kill, I mean, you've already killed the yams.

or sweet potatoes or whatever, I feel like everybody makes it with like at least a half a pound of brown sugar at this point. Like I can feel as it approaches my teeth like a layer of enamel melting off. So my kill would be the cranberries. Not like proper cranberries,

because I know you can do it really well if you have fresh cranberries, you really think about it, you prep it some days in advance. Nobody does that. And not the band to be clear. No. No. There's nothing wrong with the cranberries. RIP Dolores. Yeah. Now like generally you're going to get something much closer to the can end of the spectrum.

And that's just inexcusable. I mean, and the only thing, like, it's bitter if you haven't adulterated it with the other half of the box of sugar. And then it's too sugary when you have. There's no way to be happy there, I don't think, unless you're very careful. Jeff, I think those are good answers, too. Thank you. Both of you were very close. I will give you that.

But what's the correct answer? The correct answer is fuck stuffing, marry mashed potatoes and kill yams. Wow. And I'm being told that this was a survey done of, uh, approximately four million Americans. It's a solid sample size. The reasoning seems to be that stuffing is fantastic, but you don't want it every day. So you fuck stuffing.

Mashed potatoes you could eat any time with any meal and generally be happy. So that's the marry. And kill yams are just terrible. They are a mockery of the potato family. And they have no business existing on a Thanksgiving table or any other table. Again, this is not me saying that. This is over three million. No, this is four million of our country.

It is close to four million. It is close to four million. Yeah. Like, sweet potatoes are a thing that we eat in our household a decent amount and they're fine. Like, the thing, you just should not try to turn them into like a Charleston chew bar, in my opinion. Yeah. Like, just let them be normal. You don't need to, like, do the blanket of sugar on them.

Right. I don't appreciate the deceit with the sweet potato. Like, well, I'm just going to go ahead and fry it like a round. regular fry and you're going to maybe not notice until you take it. But I don't like that. But that's still better than sugaring them up. Like at least make them seem like they're fine on their own. Well, and the other thing is like the one benefit of the sweet potato is for people who are, say, diabetic or whatever, they're much lower in carbs than their regular potato. So as soon as you're pouring, you know, a half gallon of sugar on them, you're kind of killing that vibe and you're

taking away their only reason for existence. Yeah. That's like when they used to do the like the pimp my ride thing on MTV and it would be like, I drive this car to work and then like exhibit and his guys would put, they were like, weird that you wanted an IMAX theater and you're a Honda accord. So like now you can't drive it to work anymore because it gets, you know, whatever, 0.75 miles per gallon. Yeah. I do understand what you're saying though, Andy. But on the other hand, it's America. How many people here can be diabetic? Like 12? It's true. It's not a, uh, it's not a very common disease here in America. Land of the fit, I believe is for two. No one knows how Americans become diabetic.

It's immigration, David. It's immigration. Oh, wow. I didn't realize that the Jesse Waters segment had started already. We've got to shut down this side discussion until we figure out what's going on. Complete and total shutdown on stuffing. That seems to be a good way to end a Thanksgiving quiz. I'm waiting to hear from the judges, though, which view is the winner?

And I'm being told, oh, this is interesting. It's me. Wow. Congratulations. This is another ringed election, Andy. This may have happened back on the July 4th episode as well, which is just very, I was not expecting this. It's just an honor to be up against such great competition. And that's really all I have to say.

This guy had remarks prepared. You've overturned the will of the people and I'll see you in January, Bob. Once again, this is America. Jeb, Dave, thank you so much for being here. And we will see you again when there's another holiday upon us. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Yeah. Have a good one. holidays. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a

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