The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Everything We Knew About Raising Kids Is Wrong

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Joanna Coles talks with Susan Dominus, author of the new book, 'The Family Dynamic'. Dominus demystifies why certain families produce super successful children. Through research, she reveals how some ...families are able to cut through the morass of day to day life and engage their children, yielding hyper-productive siblings. Joanna is also joined by Emmy-award winning actor, writer, and producer Dan Bucatinsky. The 'Hacks' star shares what life is like in Rome with his 20-year-old daughter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:03 Hello, I'm Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of The Daily Beast, and you're listening to The Daily Beast podcast. And my co-host today is the wildly talented Dan Bukotinsky. He's an award-winning actor, a writer, a producer. You loved him in Scandal. You still love him in Hacks. And I guarantee there is no listener who hasn't laughed at his jokes. Dan is currently in Rome. But I thought of him for today's discussion because he's an old friend. And from past discussions, I know he's interested in family dynamics. And that's what this episode is all about. So if you're a parent, if you're a sibling, if you're a child, if you're an only child, this book is going to explain so much of your life to you and you are going to find new ways of thinking about yourself and the people around you. So stay tuned. Dan even wrote his own book, a hilarious book called Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? Great title. It's the
Starting point is 00:01:05 confessions of a gay dad and it's currently a steal, Dan. I don't know if you knew this at 199 on Kindle. So hopefully people will go and buy it too because it's a great book about parenting. But today, Dan and his husband Don are proud parents of two fabulous teenagers, if not always the most easy of teenagers. But then what teenager is. He's a keen observer. of humanity. So it's always a pleasure to spend time with him. So Dan, thank you for joining us. And I'm very pleased to introduce you on air to an old friend, Susan Dominus, because today we're diving into the battlefield of the family home, where alliances are formed, grudges, calcify, and no one ever quite forgets who got the bigger or the best bedroom. Our beast of the week
Starting point is 00:01:54 this week is Susan Dominus, who's a long-time writer at the New York Times Magazine. and she's now the author of a book that had me planning to call my sister the moment I put it down. And to be fair, my sister-in-law I've only spoken once this year. So that was a big deal, Susan. Thank you. Wow. I want to hear about that. Well, your book is called The Family Dynamic,
Starting point is 00:02:16 why birth order, sibling rivalry and long-held roles still shape us. I love that the Times asked Ezekiel Emmanuel, brother of the powerhouses, Rahm and Ari Emmanuel, well to review it. And he called it wonderfully engaging. And I agree. It's a deeply reported, often moving and sometimes funny exploration that examines how some families produce multiple high performance individuals, I think they're called. Think of the Brontes. Every single one of them wrote a novel. Horrifying. But what Susan discovered is that much of the motivation to achieve came not from parents, but from their siblings. So if you're a failure, you might actually be
Starting point is 00:02:57 blaming the wrong person. Anyway, it's all fascinating. Welcome, Susan, and congrats on the book. I can't believe there isn't anybody who's interested in this book because everybody knows the issues of families. But you start the book with a memory of when you were a child and you go to spend time with another family and you realize that family rituals are different. And in fact, they were going around the table doing math problems. Can you just talk a little bit about what actually set you down the path of writing this book, sort of 40 years after that incident. Yeah, that was a really interesting. My parents used to go away for travel for two weeks at a time, and I would go stay with, and they would sort of drop us with family friends. People used to do that kind of thing,
Starting point is 00:03:44 two weeks at a time. And this family, dinner table for them, dinner table conversation with them, was a very elaborate math games. You know, the father returned to one of the three sons and say, A plane is leaving Cleveland flying 2,000 miles an hour, and another is leaving New York two hours later. At what point will they cross? And we talk about current events over dinner. That was sort of the expectation. And I thought, is this happening at every other household but mine? And I just love watching the boys do this math in their head.
Starting point is 00:04:12 I thought it was great fun until one day Michael Goldie turned to me and said, so Susie, a plane is leaving, you know, and I burst into dinner. Horrified. So stressful. My brain went completely blank. And in my own home, my father always likes to say that there was one role of the dinner table, which was we had to chew with our mouths closed. That was very strictly enforced. But also quite hard to do.
Starting point is 00:04:36 Yes, especially if you're nine years old. But I think that I became like a familyologist. I was always very interested after that in other, what was happening in other families? And I sort of collected string, you know, he's obsessed with like the Kennedy dinner table rituals and the football games and things like that. And then, of course, like many bookish nerdy girls, you know, but what's funny is I didn't just love the Brontes fiction. I was very obsessed with how did they all come to be the Brontes? How could three such talented young women all write groundbreaking, you know, innovative, beautiful works of fiction?
Starting point is 00:05:10 What was going on in that household? So I was just genuinely, I think I was a kind of ambitious little kid myself, like maybe weirdly so. And I wanted to know what was going on. that was not going on at my house, you know, there were other wonderful things going on in my household, that it wasn't like this concerted enrichment, you know, this cultivated kind of thing. It's fascinating because we as parents, all of us, all parents, you know, are so obsessed with what they have control over and what they do not have control over. And one would like, you know, a parent would like to think that, and you listen to parents when they're expecting, their expectations of the
Starting point is 00:05:49 child they're expecting are so great. Mine's going to be a concert pianist. Mine is going to be the first female president. And you already know, you already start to see the sneeds of their expectation growing while that fetus is growing. This is why your book I found riveting on so many levels. And your own curiosity, your own personal curiosity drives the narrative and your research and every conversation, every family in a way that is, that echoes our own. I mean, how much of it is us? How much can we really, you know, control and or shape and or cajole our kids towards success? And how much are their siblings or the competition they have with their siblings, the thing that's driving them towards success?
Starting point is 00:06:39 I just wonder, because you call the book a mystery and I wonder if when you finished it, you felt, like it was less of a mystery or it still remained a mystery. I think this should be a relief to parents. I think it is still a mystery. I mean, there is no secret code to this. I mean, first of all, there's also a tremendous amount of luck. I mean, most successful people would say that luck played a huge. There was always some fortuitous moment that could have gone a very different way. But the idea that, you know, a parent can make their kid into something and then not only make their kid into something, but like control the sibling dynamics so that they interact for a maximum.
Starting point is 00:07:14 productivity or achievement. I do think the best thing parents can do is create a spirit of possibility. You know what I mean? Possibility without pressure. So like I knew somebody who named their kid Galileo. Maybe not that. Like that seems like a lot to lay out of kids' feet. But to sort of say, look, if you want to reach for the moon, you can reach for the moon. Like that is within your power. And we've seen people do it. And people you know have done it without saying you must reach for the moon. You must touch the moon. We will be satisfied with. nothing less than you have touched the moon. So, you know, there's only so much control parents do have. The way it basically works is who kids are is, you know, some big portion of what accounts for the difference among population, people in a population, is it's their genes. There is some
Starting point is 00:07:59 genetic component to it, but that's not everything. The huge part of it is the environment, and parenting is just one small part of that. The environment is everything else. It's the video games they play. It's, was their bedroom sunny? Did they see a cool movie about whales? one day. You know, it's just, it could be anything. It's their teachers, it's their neighborhood. So I think parents should like create opportunity, create a sense of opportunity, optimism, but recognize with humility that there only is so much you can do. Well, and one of the things that you raised in the book, and certainly we talked about when I ran into was this under, really understudied fact of the sibling relationships. And in your book, you, you alternate between
Starting point is 00:08:41 chapters about specific families. And one of the families is the great. Groff family, Lauren Groff, a well-known novelist, her brother Adam, who's a serial entrepreneur, and then their athlete sister, Sarah. And I was fascinated by what was clearly competition within the family among the siblings and whether or not parents unwittingly or wittingly create that sibling rivalry. Can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, I can speak to the graphs. So I think that the parents in that family, what they created was a tremendous sense of, you know, energy and an emphasis on productivity. One friend of Lauren said to me, you know, there's some houses you can kind of hang around and eat ice cream and watch TV. That was not the Groff House.
Starting point is 00:09:26 So there was an emphasis on doing. But I don't know that the parents were so involved that they were actively fostering competition. The siblings would say it was all between them. I mean, obviously they were trying to please somebody, but to hear them say it, it was all about proving themselves to each other, much more to each other than necessarily to their parents. I mean, they wanted to make their parents proud. But the red hot emotional motivation that came from comparing, contrasting the siblings themselves. That was my sense. So Saratry basically said, what were you going to say, Dan? No, but just think about that. Think about the notion of a family where from birth, we know that the gaze of the mother means life to an infant, right? Getting her
Starting point is 00:10:12 attention means life. So as an infant, we learned that there's only so much attention. There's only so much food. So naturally, a sibling comes into the picture and there's natural competition just for those basic things. So true. Jump a few knees ahead. And Father Groth is offering a dollar for whoever can jump in that pool when the mucky pool gets opened. You know, very quickly, they are learning the value to that dad of doing something for that buck. So, Dan, let's explain the anecdote in full because if you haven't read the book yet, it's hard to know. But they open the pool at the beginning of the summer. It's freezing.
Starting point is 00:10:52 It's got all sorts of bugs on it from over the winter. And then sometimes they have to break the ice on it even. And he offers them a dollar to stay in for whoever stays in longest. They all have to stay in a minute, but it's whoever stays in longest, right? There's actually differing memories. Some thought, if you just have to stand for a minute, some thought whoever stays. Lauren remembers that as a competition. She's a very competitive person by her own admission.
Starting point is 00:11:16 And so it was, you know, to me, that was less about the siblings being pitted against each other. And it was more about instilling this value of toughness. They call it groffiness in the family. And, you know, both Janine Groff, their mom and their dad came from very hard scrabble backgrounds. I mean, her dad had actually been in an orphanage because the finances were so tough. So here he is this doctor and a very genial benevolent human being for sure. But I think, you know, I think in the back of his mind, some part of him wanted his kids to be as resilient and as tough as he was, you know. But he also was, you know, he went to college and played some, you know, he was a college athlete.
Starting point is 00:11:53 Like, those people are naturally competitive. And so I do think there's something that is just in the air. But you're right. I mean, it's not just that the siblings come out and find each other. They're coming out of a paternal and paternal context. And then maybe even if they think it's about each other, it is about. something else. It's, yeah, it sort of takes on a life of its own, I would say, because, yeah, it's more, the parental stuff was for this family, at least, I think it was at more of a
Starting point is 00:12:20 move. Yeah, yeah. It's complicated, right? Because, I mean, I have a sister. We're 19 months apart. And I don't think we are professionally competitive. We really diversified also, you know, she went into media and I'm a journalist. But I think sometimes with our parents, even though parents are in their late 80s. Sometimes I do think that we are competing for their attention, even as middle-aged women. It's so fascinating. Dan, you have a sister. You're competing for your mom's attention? Oh my God. That's such a complicated question. I think as a young kid, I was always, there's two things happening. One, I was always a performer. So I was always like making jokes and trying to get the family to laugh and dancing as fast as I can and sort of getting their attention by any chance that I
Starting point is 00:13:06 could. And my sister was a reader and more quiet and more shy. So I was perceived as the favorite. But I was, you know, secretly gay and had tons of shame about it and was trying to navigate this idea that if I could, if I could cover for what is a horrible, horrible fact, I can maybe win them over and it won't matter so much. So there was so much going on there. But if you'd ask my sister, she always felt like she was in the shadow of her brother. And I always lived up to my sister. So, but we're extremely close as adults. And, you know, my parents were Argentinian immigrants who were not parented in the ways that we are parents and are the way that we parent our children by any stretch. And in many ways, the deficits in their getting love and attention from their immigrant,
Starting point is 00:14:02 scrappy, trying to just make a buck parents, put it on to us to provide them with the love that they never got. So it is so complicated. I mean, this is why you've bid off such a huge subject matter because there are so many factors and each one's so different. We just need to take a little break to hear these messages from our sponsors and we'll be right back. And we're back with Susan Domino's and Dan Bukitinsky to Glean Insight. from Susan's new book, The Family Dynamic. Well, let's talk about birth order as a factor, too, because we assume that somehow the older child is the more responsible, the younger gets a, you know, the younger becomes the rebel.
Starting point is 00:14:47 But in fact, what you discover is that that's not really true. Certainly if you were going to break it down by personality, like conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits. And we all assume, oh, you know, it's all over TikTok, right? Oldest sister syndrome. and the best conducted research on birth order and its effect on personality with the widest samples has basically found that, you know, we tend, that there is no effect of birth order on personality and that we tend to think that the oldest child is the most responsible because they are the oldest.
Starting point is 00:15:17 But if, you know, the middle sibling, when that sibling reaches the same age, you know, if you compare them who are able to compare them at the same age, they might be equally or it might even go the other way. And also if you take the oldest sibling in a family and compare them to the general population, they may not be particularly conscientious, you know, relative to the rest of the population. So it's not as formative. Again, there's so many things going on in a child's life. Birth order is really only one of them. And also each of those siblings comes into the world with a certain genetic heritants that factors
Starting point is 00:15:48 towards people's personalities. So, you know, what you do see is the oldest sibling tends to have the cognitive edge. This comes up over and over and note. You really expect to see this at this point. The oldest child, even by age one, if you compare the oldest child to their siblings, when those siblings reach the age of one, the oldest child scores higher on cognitive tests. And they think it's because it's one of the best, it's one of the best proof we have that that enrichment early on really matters. They think it's about, as you were saying earlier, Dan, not having to share your parents' gaze and attention and focus. That just that, you know, there's a lot. You know, there's
Starting point is 00:16:26 they're an only child for longer than the other siblings, and it apparently makes a real difference. So you have the oldest child who's the most academic, and then the other siblings, they become kind of like the funny one or they become the sports one. They tend to differentiate a little bit because that lane has taken. This is on average, I should say, as the youngest of three, I'm just going to put it out there. And the effects are small, but it's real. Like, you know, even people who believe there's no effective birth order on personality whatsoever, and that's all a big crock, they will all acknowledge that, except for this one thing, which is cognitive strength. Weird, right? It's very interesting. My younger, I have one younger sister who's five years younger than me, sometimes six. So we have a big gap. And people often observed to us that we were like single only children. It was like we were a family of two only children. And she was actually much more successful than I was academically. I think she's. She worked harder and she got better exam results than I did.
Starting point is 00:17:24 And we're very different. We're very different. We're close, but we're different. But it definitely made me want to call her. But Susan, can you change the family dynamics? Because I think one thing that families sometimes know is they're sort of stuck in this dynamic. Is it possible to sort of move those boundaries? Yeah. I mean, I think we all see this in our own lives. I mean, but I do think sometimes it takes an external force that is as powerful as So, I mean, again, not to draw my own family, but, you know, one of my sons went away to this
Starting point is 00:17:56 incredible summer camp that's all about cultivating, you know, young men who are, you know, don't have toxic masculinity. And there was something about two months, you know, immersed with this other environment of older young men he looked up to. And he came back and he was kind of, he was able to reset the dynamic. He, you know, he said some things to us about what he felt comfortable with, what he wanted to change. I hope, I hope he wouldn't mind my sharing this with you. But distance allowed him to see something. So that's just my example. But it's not easy, right?
Starting point is 00:18:26 Patterns get very ingrained. It takes probably some real self-awareness. So personality also hard to change, but we know that one of the things that changes, for example, neuroticism, one of the other big personality traits, therapy. It's, you know, therapy does help. And, you know, I'm a big believer in I think family therapy can be really meaningful for people because you stop saying things within a family because it's the air you breathe. It's the water that you don't even notice. and so much goes unsaid and therapy just forces all of that stuff to get said and acknowledged. I cannot imagine anything worse than going for family therapy, either with my own family with my
Starting point is 00:19:03 parents, my sister or my own kids. I think my, if I suggested to my kids, we went to family therapy, they'll be horrified. But Dan, you're from California. What do you think? Well, I'm in therapy. Listen, I've been in therapy. My husband's been in therapy. Each of my kids have been in therapy and we've been in group therapy. So there's lots of therapy. happening in our family. But also, we're a very untraditional family. I mean, Don and I adopted our two kids. We're both dads. The nature, nurture battle has been something that obviously has been extremely relevant and prevalent in our thinking from the very beginning. We made an assumption when we adopted our kids, when we decided to become parents. We made an assumption. I quoted
Starting point is 00:19:46 a few things when I was reading the book. The underestimation of the nurture effect. right? But I think we also underestimate the nature effect. How much DNA, you talk about that in the book as well. Yeah, yeah. How powerful DNA is. You know, I have, both of my kids come from the same birth mom from Wisconsin, who's a mountain do drinking, smoking, you know, Midwesterner who couldn't be more different than these than a gay Jewish dad from, you know, Los Angeles. And raising my kids in whatever way we've felt was the right way or the books told us was the right way and we nurtured them and reflected back what we thought were good choices and all those words that made me want to blow my head off and
Starting point is 00:20:34 still do my kids are who exactly who they were going to be and this is just such an interesting part of the book itself to what degree we have to embrace the fact that that infant is on a path much of which has nothing to do with us. And the discovery of that, too late, if you ask me. Too late. Interesting. Do you think parents blame themselves for things that are beyond their control? I feel like the parents get blamed for everything at this point. I think parents do get blamed for things that are beyond their control.
Starting point is 00:21:06 But also I think that they, you know, because they think they have more control, they can do more damage. They can do real damage. So, for example, I've had parents say to me, I don't understand, you know, I have these two daughters. I've raised them the same way. I set the expectations the same for both of them, and one of them is meeting the expectations, and the other one isn't. And I wanted to say to her,
Starting point is 00:21:25 you have to know they're different children and probably different expectations are appropriate for them, because we know that if you set the expectations too high, that is a recipe for anxiety. If your child is not inclined that way, not every kid can be an A-plus student. And if you just say, well, yeah.
Starting point is 00:21:43 Who says it's the job of the kid to meet their parents' expectations. Right. Right. Are you kidding? This is the thing. Like, I have this revelation. Like, of course, you don't, listen, my kids didn't ask to be born. They certainly did not, were not involved in the question or the decision making of being adopted, which is a whole other subject for a whole other book. But their own feelings about who they are, how they wound up where they did, they have no business necessarily meeting our expectations or even hearing what they are. It's interesting that some of the tools that came out of the testing, that, you know, some of the
Starting point is 00:22:21 scientific testing that they did, what language you use when you tell them what's possible, what you tell them what you hope they will do, or what you model for them and show them what's possible and just hope that they pick up on it, are such different and interesting approaches to how to parent into their adulthood. I found it riveting. I wanted to ask you one thing. You often hear of people who don't speak to. a sibling. Siblings seem to be the easiest people not to speak to. You just hear people just no longer talk to that sibling. I'm wondering how people, if there's anybody listening who's got that situation and perhaps as they've gotten older they're trying to figure out,
Starting point is 00:23:01 I would actually like to have more contact with the sibling. What is the sort of, are there particular ways to do it? I mean, I do think that probably parents have impact in setting siblings up against each other possibly or there may be complicated reasons why the siblings no longer communicate, some of which may come out of childhood. But is that something that you think is a good thing for people to do to get back in touch with people they've lost touch with? Emondolen just wrote a lovely book called, and quite poignant book called The Power of parting, which is mostly about his own toxic mother and how long it took him to completely break off ties with his mother. And he basically advocates for if there's someone who,
Starting point is 00:23:43 does not treat you as well as a friend should, there's nothing healthy about staying in that relationship. If it's really toxic, it's not your job to spend your life trying to fix it. I can't weigh in on whether somebody should or shouldn't with siblings or even parents. But there is something, you know, a friend of mine hosted a lovely, was one of the host of a lovely event for in honor of the book. And what she spoke, she acknowledged that there's no one who can incite fury in her the way that a sibling, one of her siblings can. She tells a story and a roomful of people about throwing a yogurt in a car, like right at her sibling, you know? I mean, I definitely related to that because these are relationships that go back to that red-hot fury you felt as a toddler.
Starting point is 00:24:25 And so I think when you feel that anger towards a sibling, it's summoning up that toddler rage and that, you know, kind of almost inarticulate resentment of whatever it is. So I think it's fraught. We fight in the car. You know, talk about a long car ride when you're eight. With your siblings, you're willing to punch their face against the window. You would never do that to another kid. That feeling when you become an adult can get, you know, tripped so easily. My mother and her sister do not have such a terrible relationship.
Starting point is 00:25:01 And they're trying really hard later in life. One's 85, 179. And I keep telling them, like, you have a shared, you have some shared hands. history. You have points of connection. Forget about the points of disconnection because there are very many and they're obvious. But the only thing you have is a point of connection and drive in the direction of those because otherwise you're going to be shoving her 85 year old face against the windshield. Actually, I hope that doesn't happen. Well, Susan, it's a fascinating book. Thank you very much for your time. And you've left me with the image now of Dan, you know,
Starting point is 00:25:42 Dan's poor aunt having her 85-year-old face smashed against the windscreen of the car. But it's a fascinating book and just the sort of the fact that siblings have known you so long. And we all go through transformations as we get older. But the idea that they knew the original you is clearly a source of power for many siblings. Anyway, it's fascinating. Whether you're a sibling or not, any parent, any parent or anybody about to become a parent should read this book. There is so much in there that is helpful in terms of both your scientific research, your personal anecdotes, and these really interesting family snapshots, each one different
Starting point is 00:26:25 from the one before it, that gives a lot of insight into how little we really have to say about how successful our kids become. I so appreciate that, Dan, so beautifully summed up. And Joanna, it's just such a treat to spend this time with you as well, and I get to know you, Dan. So I just can't thank you guys enough. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Bye, guys. Thank you so much. Congrats. Bye. Bye. So, Dan, I'm expecting you to be transformed as a parent now. Transformed by this book. Dan will never make the pressure of himself. He's a writer. He's an actor. He's a producer. He's an endless threat, a quintuple threat. My daughter's 20 and is in Rome with us right now. And she won't leave her hotel room. She's 20, so we got her own room, which we thought would be the respectful thing to do of a grown woman. She has, she's in Rome. She's in Rome.
Starting point is 00:27:21 Would you understand? She's in Rome. She's been flown to Rome by her parents. She hasn't left her hotel room. And today I got her out to a pizza making class. And I almost wept because I got to see my daughter step out of her hotel and make some pizza. But I don't know what, you know, how do you create X-Pake? You can't turn someone into someone who wants to see the sites in Rome. what you want for them, right? Because the issue is you want her to become educated and sophisticated and a world-class traveler by getting to know Rome. And of course, that's not what she wants. No, she wants a mountain do. She wants a mountain do probably and a pack of Benson and Hedges, which I'm not going to buy her. So, Dan, how are you going to get your daughter out of her hotel room?
Starting point is 00:28:07 Well, today worked. Today was, we have one more day left. But so we took two, we did two cooking classes. One, on the third day we were here, pasta. Delicious. A, that was pizza. But both took an enormous amount of texting, prodding, tears. And, you know, this is not, the idea of going to Rome, I think, was very exciting to her. But the actuality of someone who has social anxiety, here's the truth of it. My kid is neurodiverse and has social anxiety and the impact of the pandemic on.
Starting point is 00:28:44 our kids who were coming of age right around that time, 12, 13, 15, 15, those ages. The impact of that on each kid is so unqualifiable. It really is hard to know what it has done to them until you sort of experience them. And she's having a hard time with adulting and she's nervous to make big moves. And a city like Rome on the week of the conclave is packed with people. Oh, my goodness, you were there for the conclave. I can't believe they didn't ask me to come in and weigh in because I had some of them. Well, I know you would have done.
Starting point is 00:29:22 You would have had thoughts. You would have had thought, even though you weren't Catholic. You would have known exactly who would look best in the robes. Duh. And also, listen, I've watched every season of America's next top model. And I feel like there are values that one learns from a show like that, that they can also bring into who would make the best pope. I mean, it would be an excellent, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:29:44 I think they should do it more often, and it would make a great reality. Yeah, they should do it more often. I agree. I can't believe you are there for the conclave. And of course, your poor daughter, to be fair, you live in L.A. You're, what are you, eight hours ahead, there, nine hours ahead. It's terrible jet lag. From L.A. to Europe is chronic jet lag.
Starting point is 00:30:03 I always hate that trip. That's hard. So she's probably just getting around to it. Exactly. 3 a.m. she falls asleep. She doesn't wake up until 2 p.m. the class that we've signed up for is at 3 p.m. And I'm like, get up, brush your teeth.
Starting point is 00:30:18 Come downstairs. The car's waiting for us, you know. And yesterday, the only thing she was looking forward to was this horseback riding trip, an hour out of Rome. And she didn't make it. She didn't come. And I went by myself. I didn't even want to go horseback riding.
Starting point is 00:30:32 And it was quite an experience. Well, at least you stayed upright by the looks of it. You didn't fall off. I did. My back, you know, doesn't feel great. I'm not 24 anymore. But I did do it. I did do it. I think I'm seeing a whole new array of potential reality shows here.
Starting point is 00:30:49 A conclave on horseback, something like that. Conclave Island, I think, has been something no one's sad. Conclave Island. Seriously. Twelve international cardinals are, you know, alone in Fiji with, you know, a lot of tequila and a bunch of things that they have, a bunch of, you know. A bunch of tasks they have to do. Who ends up with who? Who ends up with who?
Starting point is 00:31:15 We're going to burn in hell. Okay. Oh, we're definitely going to burn in hell. Dan, I'm so thrilled to have you as a co-host. Please come back soon. Your questions are terrific. It's very good to get a different point of view. And I wish you the very best for your last day in Rome.
Starting point is 00:31:29 Thank you. I need it. But it's been great. I just have to stop shopping. As a way of feeding my emotion, you know, the hole in my soul. I just find clothing that I think might actually. do it. I love shopping in Rome. It's such a beautiful place. It's a beautiful city. We'll do it together next time. Okay. We'll do a podcast from Rome live.
Starting point is 00:31:49 Perfect. Perfect. Okay. I miss you. Okay. Onwards. Go to Valentino for me. I will. I will. Bye. Bye. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the Beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline.
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