The One You Feed - How to Incite Joy with Ross Gay

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

In This Episode, You'll Learn How his “delight” project was about learning to pay attention Discovering that joy and delight are abundant if you are looking and paying attention Defining joy and all that accompanies this profound emotion How talking about joy and gratitude helps with the difficulties in life The importance of laughter and how it connects us to joy Why we need to slow down and listen to our bodies How busyness is a way of avoiding or escaping  How writing can be a tool for self discovery and gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves To learn more, click hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joy is that thing that we enter when we practice our entanglement, when we actually submit to and practice being entangled with one another, which we are, and we can fight it. And when we fight it, that seems to lead to misery. But when we practice it, maybe that is joy. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our

spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ross Gay, the author of many poetry and essay books and a teacher at Indiana University. He's a founding co-editor of the online sports magazine Some Call It Ballin', in addition to being an editor with Q Avenue and Ledgemule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free fruit for all, justice and joy project. He's received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Today, Ross and Eric discuss his book, Inciting Joy, Essays. Hi, Ross. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be with you.

I am excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, Inciting Joy, which has the shortest subtitle of any book I've seen in a long time, which is just essays. So, I mean, almost every book these days is like inciting joy, the miraculous practice for cultivating joy. And, you know, it goes on and on and on and on. And here's this inciting joy essays. I love it. So we'll, we'll jump into that in a minute, but let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, The one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do? Well, I mean, many things. It's such a beautiful parable. And one of the things that it makes me think about is, I've been thinking about this a lot in various ways lately, is sort of what feels

to me like an imperative that I often find myself recommending to students or people who ask, you know, talking about my work or whatever, which is that we study what we love. Because I teach writing and I go around talking about books and reading poems and essays and stuff. And I do have the occasion for people to say, well, if you give any advice to like a young writer or a not young writer, I sort of think about, well, one of the things that we're often not necessarily encouraged to do, or in my opinion, not encouraged to do enough is to devote our fullest, most abiding attention to that which we love. And by that, I mean also probably that which loves us. I probably mean that too. And partly that feeding the wolf that is angry or

vicious or whatever, versus feeding the wolf that maybe is compassionate and curious, but also the wolf that will love you. Something like that. I just feel like we're so inclined and trained to some extent to attend to what we hate, actually. And I feel like there's every reason to attend to what we need to duck to the extent that we need to duck it. But as far as mastering what we don't want to be, that's a bad idea, I think. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly that idea. I've heard it in political talk before is, not what are you against, but what are you for? Easy. Yeah. Right? You also used a word in there, which is devote. That's a word that I love. You and I

later are going to record a little bit for our episode of Mary Oliver. And she famously said that attention is the beginning of devotion. Yeah. When I talk to poets, I'm always interested in attention, because I think one of the things poets do is they have a capacity for attention, or a way of paying attention that's often different. It's why I love to read poetry, because it makes me look at the world differently and focus my attention differently. And so the other thing I'll say about devotion is, this is a little bit of a long story, but I'll bring it back around, which is I had a really profound mystical spiritual experience at one point. It was just a, you know, ecstatic

unity experience. And it went on, it lasted for a while and it changed me profoundly. But like many things in life, it faded. And I was talking to a spiritual teacher by the name of Adi Ashanti once about it. And what he said to me has landed on me. And it was so powerful. He said, devote yourself to what remains of it. And I thought that was a beautiful thing because even if the things that we love, as you said, or the things that love us in those moments, the feeling isn't necessarily there. We can still devote ourselves to the feelings that have been there. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. And as you were talking, I was thinking, it's also the, there's something that feels really compelling to me about also devoting ourselves to the feeling of love that has been bestowed upon us, but that we do not know who

gave it to us, you know, but we know who gave it to us, you know? But we know it was given to us. Like there are people who loved us long before we were born, you know? And, you know, you might extend that to sort of like, I like to say that when the gold finches are planting the sunflowers in my garden, that's an act of love, you know? That's an act of love. Or when it rains and we need rain, that's an act of love. Or, you know, need rain that's an act of love or you know the person who holds the door open for me when my hands are full or you can go on and on and on

you know which is a kind of to me it's a kind of ever-present and kind of threaded through our daily lives you know we're walking around and it's like it is a miracle again and again and again and again and again you know And it feels really important to articulate the ways that we are capable of and in the midst of profound care, you know? And I agree. I think that's so beautiful, that thing of like, if you can sort of, I forget exactly how Adyashani put it, but like cultivate or attend to what remains. So beautiful.

So beautiful. Yeah. So I want to ask you a question about delight and joy. Those are both of your books, Inciting Joy and The Book of Delights. Those are words. And as a mildly repressed, you know, Protestant white guy, right? Who also suffers from depression and low mood, words like joy and delight sometimes feel like an octave above my emotional range. But I don't think that's how you're intending them. I think that you're using those words differently and maybe more subtly than at least the typical idea

of joy or delight. Can you just say a little bit about that? Yeah. And one thing to mention Mary Oliver again, and that thing about attention. In a way, I sort of feel like that delights project is really an attention project. What does it do if we give ourselves the task of witnessing, articulating, and then like sort of possibly sharing what it is that delights us? Turns out for me, there's an abundance of that. It's not the only thing that there is by any measure, but there's an abundance of that. Sometimes it's like sort of grand. And like you said, sort of like a register above or something periodically it is, but mostly it's like, you know, that there's a kid wearing those shoes with the flashy lights, you know, like,

whoa. Or, you know, it's the fact that the Cardinals are back again, you know, or it's, you know, all of these things that we might say are sort of profoundly daily, actually. And as far as the question about joy, I feel like the way that I think about joy is it's a profound emotion, like as profound an emotion as I can think of. But the way that I think about joy is that it's absolutely tethered to sorrow. Not necessarily profound sorrow, but profound sorrow too. But it's connected to the very daily fact that we and what we love are disappearing in the midst of it. We and what we love are probably in some kind of pain. And if not now, will be, et cetera, et cetera. Part of what I think of as joy is the way that we attend to one another in the midst of that, or the way that even that knowing, or maybe not even that knowing knowing, but the sort of deeper, subtle knowing of that might incline us to behave in certain ways,

might incline us to sort of be in the process of reaching toward one another, something like that. It's funny, I wrote this book and I did all this kind of thinking about joy. And then afterwards I was like, oh, actually in that book, I say joy is what emanates from us as we help each other carry our sorrows. And I think that's true. But I also think maybe even more to the point is that joy is that thing that we enter when we practice our entanglement, when we actually submit to and practice being entangled with one another, which we are when we can fight it. And when we fight it, that seems to lead to misery. But when we practice it, maybe that is joy. And it doesn't just mean like happy, happy. It might mean, no, I'm practicing helping you die. It seems like you're soon to die and I'm going to try to be with you, you know? That to me is like joyful, actually. In your mind, is joy an emotion? Is it a way of

being? Is it an action? Is it all three of those things? I don't want to get too definitional here, pin down this thing that we all have a sense of. I'm just kind of curious because just in hearing you describe it, you've hit all three of those things. Yeah, it kind of is. Sometimes I'll think about that and I'll be like, yeah, what is it? I'll be writing something. Is it an emotion that I'm talking about? I think you're right. There's elements of all three. And then another way that I sort of think of it is like a kind of a noun almost. For some reason, I sort of, I can't remember if I talk about this in the book, but I sort of do think that the metaphor that I love is like the mycelium running underneath

the healthy forest, like that sort of, that you sometimes know is there and you sometimes don't, you know, but if you know, that's there, it's a kind of thing that's there that you can kind of enter into, or you can kind of join, or you can kind of like celebrate or something like that. That didn't answer your question at all, but I agree. It's a good question. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. There's a phrase I use on this show, maybe more than any other that I learned early in my recovery journey, which was sometimes you can't think your way into right action, but you could act your way into right thinking, right? And I've loved that because I've thought about that with things like gratitude, which is a cousin of

delight, right? Which is that I can feel grateful and it just emerges spontaneously, right? And that's good. There are other times that I can decide to look for something to be grateful for. And by looking, by engaging in an action, a practice, then maybe some of the feeling then tends to come along. And so, so much of this stuff, action, behavior, thought, they're bi-directional things to me, right? Like it's not one causes the other. It's sometimes, yes, one causes the other, but sometimes the other causes the one and back and forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think back to the parable, I think to some extent they also, those feed each other back and forth. I think that feels important to be aware of, that practicing a thing can make the thing sort of grow in itself and that then can

sort of increase one's desire to practice. Yeah, yeah. I was reading your work and thinking about joy and you said something, I don't know if it was in the book or another conversation I heard you say, and I may not have this exactly right, but it was something about like, you feel joy when you see people care for each other, you know? And I thought about, I'm a softy, like watching a TV show or whatever, like I'll cry at nearly anything, right? But I've thought about what makes me cry. And it's not this, I mean, the sad moment

sometimes, but that's not what it is. It's a moment of tenderness between people. And that what is coming out is tears is joy, actually. But I'd never named it that until I heard you say that. And I was like, that's exactly what I've, I've heard the term moral elevation. And I've recognized that that's what it is, moral elevation being you feel good when you see somebody act good, right? There's something to that. But I just was able to put a name on an experience I have very often of what I would consider pretty profound joy. And it's when I see tenderness between people, often in either a deep sense or an unexpected sense. Totally, totally. Yeah, me too. I was in the airport the other day and someone was,

you could just tell, just sort of took it upon herself to help this other person who maybe didn't speak English or whatever. There's something about reading the signs. And it was just like, I could tell at the ticket thing that they had assigned themselves to this person. And then I saw them 20 minutes later in the airport, just walking and walking them to their gate. Every day, if we open our eyes, that is available. That is happening. Or this time, I remember, and I write about this in the book, where I was doing this Zoom

thing. It was more of the Zoom times. A class, a high school class. And this kid like read something very moving to him. And he just broke down and he finished and it was beautiful. And after the class ended, at the time, I was sort of like, you know, I wanted to kind of reach through the screen and like care for this kid. And at the time, no one was doing anything. And I was like, oh no, we're doomed.

And then after the class ended, like very slowly, like the kids kind of came and they kind of like checked on him. And then within like three minutes, every child in that class was formed into a big hug around this kid. They were all hugging each other. And of course, same thing, like I'm watching the Zoom thing and like crying. Yeah. That too is who we are, you know? Yeah, it's interesting. I'm preparing to interview another poet who lives here in Columbus, Ohio with me, Maggie Smith. Oh, cool.

I know Maggie and she's got a new memoir coming out. But in it, she's referencing her poem, Good Bones. And I was reading it last night. And there's points in it where it says like, for every child that something good happens to, there's a child that something bad happens to. The world is at least half bad. And I read that and I thought, I don't think so, actually. I mean, yes, there's lots of awful, like there, you know, any moment, anywhere, anytime, right this second, there are countless awful things happening in this world. But there is so much love and beauty also all the time. And it's not to say that we should ignore one or the other, and that's clearly your message is not. But I do feel that the proportion of kindness and love, to me, it feels like there's more of it.

Yeah, I know. I was just in a talk, like an academic talk, and it was interesting. And there was, I guess there's a thing called, like an academic talk, and it was interesting. And there was, I guess there's a thing called, I can't remember, something like metaphysical pessimism or something. I can't remember, but it was some kind of philosophical term. But the premise is that they're sort of trying to figure out a way to articulate why it's okay to indulge in what this person was calling guilty pleasures, like dumb TV or whatever. But the premise was that if life is purely miserable, it's truly misery, then the point is not to get to know life better, not to understand the true nature of being or something. The point is to avoid the true nature. It's so funny to me because it's like

a real sort of, it's a serious philosophical endeavor i guess and i was sort of like well it seems to me that you could enjoy you know dumb tv while also believing that life isn't fundamentally awful you know yeah and it also seems to me that if your premise is that life is fundamentally awful, you must spend a lot of time avoiding attending to a lot of the stuff that's not fundamentally awful. Right. I was sort of like, this seems like an attitude more than any kind of relationship to events or phenomena. In phenomena, it's like, oh yeah, someone helps me unload the goat shit from my garden. That is not fundamentally horrible.

Right, right. You know, it doesn't mean that there's not also the fundamentally horrible mixed in, you know. It doesn't diminish or negate anything, but to suggest that it is, I was just like, okay. to suggest that it is. I was just like, okay. Yeah. I guess to give Maggie's view of the world of 50-50 a little credence, there's the old Buddhist idea of the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows, which I've always loved, you know, because it just says like, yeah, every life has both. And so one of the things that you've talked about is that you've been criticized before for focusing on delight or joy and also being a black man who is aware of systematic racism and injustice and inequality and all that. And, you know, this is not the time for trifling things like joy or delight. Right, right.

Yeah, totally. And to me, it's sort of like the, you know, I have a whole essay in that book, so I sort of devoted to that question. But what you might almost call like a command to focus on quote unquote serious stuff implies, first of all, that what makes us glad is not serious. And if it's the case that what makes us glad is not serious, and I'm not saying glad, and I'm saying glad, actually, I'm using that as a word that's like, sort of a light word. I mean it to be a light word. If what makes us glad is not serious, that's an interesting life. That's an interesting world, you know, for any number of reasons that we could probably talk

about for a long time. But furthermore, when I'm talking about joy and gratitude, I'm actually not talking about what makes us glad, though it might touch on those things periodically. I'm actually talking about how we survive, how we've been survived for. given in our lives, you know, in the midst of horrible shit, you know, that we've been cared for. We've been looked after. We've been imagined into being, you know, by people who didn't know us. At this moment, we're still being imagined into being by people who don't know us. Like, people are loving us without knowing us, you know? Somewhere, someone is like saving seed for a plant that's really not only delicious and beautiful and good for the birds and everything else, but it might actually grow at a time when some other things aren't growing. You know, like at this moment, you know, it's just going on on our behalf. Yeah. To me, that sounds like for those people who might, you know, sort of shit on the idea of like joy or something. To me, that sounds like rigorous and also serious as hell and also life and death.

Yeah. You know, I'm talking about life and death, actually. All this stuff gets to the question of what does it mean to live a good life, to be a good person, right? And I often reflect on that I do think that the suffering in the world is essentially infinite. on that I do think that the suffering in the world is essentially infinite. And what I mean by that is there's just more of it than I could ever imagine, think about, tackle, do anything about, right? To me, it's essentially infinite. You know, if there's a God out there, maybe it's not infinite to that being, right? But to me as a human, it doesn't matter whether it's 100 units of suffering or infinite units of suffering. It's way beyond my capacity to remedy. So given that,

what is my quote unquote responsibility or my moral obligation to try and remedy that versus my moral obligation to have some degree of delight and joy and love the people that are around me? And I mean, I just think these are, there's no answer to these questions, right? We all want someone to tell us, you know, I know you lost your father and my father passed just actually a couple of weeks ago now, um, after a long battle with Alzheimer's and my partner's mom did also. And, you know, as we were going through those things, I just remember wanting someone to tell me like, what was enough?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Am I doing enough? Yeah, totally. And there's no answer to that. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm my own person with my own set of values and my own relationship with my father and all kinds of circumstances. But I think it's the same thing when we start looking at what is enough to give to the world versus to give to ourselves. But I love what you're talking about with joy

is that it's not giving to ourselves. You actually say, you're wondering what the feeling of joy makes us do or how it makes us be. And you say, my hunch is joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that solidarity might incite further joy, which might incite further solidarity. Yeah, totally. It's funny when you were sort of saying the list of things that taking care of the people you love, you know, like loving people, being delighted by stuff, you know, how am I supposed to respond to the suffering of the world? You know, it's a little bit like that is responding to the suffering of the world too. A little bit. And in part, because it's like you're adding to the love, I think. But the other thing I've been thinking about lately, I was just sort of walking

around trying to think about like, what is the point of it? Like, what's the point of being alive or something? Like a meaningful point. And I was thinking, oh, it's just to care and be cared for. Maybe that's it. It's to care and be cared for. There's so much machinery to sort of prevent us from believing that or even to like doing that in certain ways, you know, and I've been kind of going hard on like these fucking menus that you scan with your phone. I'm like, man, fuck that. Give me the paper. Put it in my hands, you know? I might ask you like, what's good? What you like?

You know, and you might lean over my shoulder and tell me what you like, you know? And I might look with my friend what they're thinking about getting. I'm saying that's the positive. And the negative is that there's all of this machinery that is trying to alienate each other from these daily and more than daily

acts of care that are sort of positing themselves as acts of care. Like there's the idea that like, oh, if you don't have to touch something that I touched, I'm caring for you. Precisely the opposite. Precisely the opposite. Like if we don't touch each other, you know, like that is sort of the absence of care. You know, I'm just becoming acutely aware of how easily we can slide into that, thinking that that's like a reasonable way to be. When in fact, it seems to me the meaningful way to be is to be like bumping into people, you know? And when I say also bumping into people, I also mean like,

you know, bumping into the trees and bumping into flowers. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

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Totally, totally. Yeah. And she, I'm working, I'm like getting ready to go to a reading, but I'm like actually revising some of these delights, the first book of delights, I'm revising them. And this kid comes up to me and I notice, I'm like, listen to my music. I'm like in my alienation zone, actually. Like I got my headphones on and this kid comes up to me or I noticed this child, you know, she looks like a kid to me, like a high school kid or something, like standing to my side with her hand up. And I kind of look, what are you doing here?

And she screams to me like, you know, working on your homework. Good job. Come on, give me a high five. It was the cutest thing I ever saw, you know? And of course I high five this kid. And, but it just was like one of those moments where it's like, oh, right. One of the pleasures of being alive for me, you know, not everyone, like not everyone has the same delights, but like, you know, I, I i love i used to go to this bakery in south philly called sarcones is really great bakery and you know i was probably brought up a certain kind of way you know i don't know what it was but like a little bit like self-contained like my mother's from minnesota and you know a little bit midwestern yeah yeah and um i'm in south philly i'm at this bakery and it's like

it's really not how it goes there and i'm at this bakery and it's like, it's really not how it goes there. And I'm standing in line and there's no line. It's just like a bunch of these people like pushing to get their bread. And at some point this woman says, hey baby, if you don't shove a little bit, you're not going to get any bread. It was so sweet because she was a little bit tough on me. But she was also like, come on, honey, you got to push. This is what we do here.

You know, we actually like bump into each other, you know. It was so lovely. And those to me like constitute, among many others, but that constitutes to me like the fabric of life. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned that, you know, Midwestern. I'm in Ohio.

So I've got that whole, you know, Midwestern sort of buttoned up, you know. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's so funny how ingrained that whole, you know, Midwestern sort of buttoned up, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's so funny how ingrained that gets, you know. Like how profoundly I would be like, get in line, folks. Yeah, totally, totally. You know, but it's what I was sort of talking about earlier.

I was sort of making a joke of being like a semi-repressed Midwestern, you know, white guy. It's like, you know, it's not that I choose, like, I want to stay in this little thing. It's that I've been squeezed into it for so long that anything outside of it can make me uncomfortable. And I have to really work on that, you know, like just let the world in a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like there is that the buttoned up is a great metaphor because buttoned up also sort of implies like nothing's going to fly out. Yeah. You know, like everything is contained. I'm not porous when in fact we're totally porous.

Yeah. You know, as buttoned up as we try to be, we're actually like we're in the world, we're of the world, but it is beautiful. Like I'm totally the same way. So it's sort of this exercise of being like, all right, when I'm in the laundromat, it's like talking to people. It makes the laundromat so much nicer, you know? And it's also the risk. It's also the risk that someone's going to want to keep talking to you. And maybe they're going to talk about stuff that you don't actually want to hear. And I find that too, as like a kind of reason to sort of restrain sometimes my desire to actually be interactive. And I have to be like, yo, it's okay. Sometimes people say stuff you don't want to hear. It's okay. You can live on through it. You can live on through it. No, I agree. I think there is risk to all of that. It's funny. There's a number of social psychology studies that are out there. they're all various forms on this particular

sort of thing, which is let's study a group of people who ride home on the train and just stay in there. I don't know what you just called it. My buttoned up restriction zone, whatever. Right. Yeah. Who do that versus people who make conversations with people they don't know. And there's two things that are interesting that come out of those studies. who do that versus people who make conversations with people they don't know.

And there's two things that are interesting that come out of those studies. The first is if you ask people which is going to make them happier, they almost always think just staying to themselves will make them happier. So A, our prediction of what will make us happy is that. But then when they do it, most people report that it was more enjoyable, more meaningful when they actually did it. And it wasn't as risky or scary. So, so I think it's both that we don't think we will like it. Yeah. Right. Which restricts us, but then also that in reality, we tend to, if we give ourselves that freedom. And I think a lot of it comes down to how do we enter into those situations and what do we think our responsibility is or what do we think our need to be performative

is, right? Like I've got a partner who's an incredibly, she's one of the warmest, kindest people I've ever known. We just go out in public and she's just making friends with everybody. And I'm astounded by it. I also know, though, for her, that sometimes she ends up feeling like she has to be performing. Like she has to make everybody feel happy. So in those cases, it's draining for her. But when it emerges naturally for her,

it's energizing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All of that sounds very familiar to me. And, and I also like what you were saying that we often think that maybe it isn't going to be pleasant, but partly because, yeah, we have the idea that it's not going to be pleasant, but then we often have the interaction and it's like, oh, that was sweet. That was really nice. Part of the reason I love being in airports is that those things happen all the time. I just feel like, I mean, they're dramatic places anyway, but they're like sites for all of these sort of maybe slightly extra carry, you know, because everyone's in transit and we're all a little bit like caught. Yeah. And so people are just like, I mean, many things, but I feel like I often am in airports and having these really dear little interactions, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had one the other day on a plane. I was coming back from my father's funeral and I was sitting in an aisle seat and across the aisle was a little boy. And I'm very sound sensitive. You know, just racket, it troubles me. Right. And so I'm just hearing this rustling over and over and over. And in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, would this kid stop it? Right. That's my first reaction.

Not proud of it, but there it is. I'm coming from Orlando, lots of kids, right? You know, I've had maybe enough. Yeah. But I look over and what I notice is he's trying to open his little snack bag. So I just reach over. Yeah. And I take the snack bag and I open it up for him and he looks at me, which was nice and sweet. But the best moment was his dad from across the way just looked over at me and gave me a smile and a thumbs up.

It was just this little moment, but it was so, so enjoyable. And it was for me pivoting from being annoyed at a sound that I didn't like to trying to go, oh, what's going on over there? Totally. Totally. Yeah. To reaching toward it. Yeah. Like reaching toward rather than kind of holding up. Yeah. So, so beautiful. So beautiful. I feel like that's one of the projects of my life because I'm very inclined to sort of, you know, wall up. It's something that I'm more and more aware of in myself and more and more aware of is like, that's a lonely way of being, you know? Yeah. So I want to talk about laughter. You've laughed a ton during this interview, which is great. I love you seem to be somebody who laughs easily. And you were describing in one of your books, you were you were talking about being on a porch with

some friends. Yeah. And you're talking about people dying, your own parents dying. And you guys get really laughing about it. And you say, you know, I can't in good conscience even say what we were saying at this moment, right? Because you would think awful of me, right? And I was just reflecting on that because I also have a sense of humor that I'm the same way. I'm like, I'm not, I cannot bring that on air, right? That's not, it's not going to work. But it, how should I say this differently? It seems like it's off the rails and, you know, some people might say it's offensive, right? But there's a great joy in it.

And you make a distinction that I think is really important. You make it in the book, which is between laughing together with people versus laughing at someone. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I'm remembering being on the porch with our friends, and they live right across the way. And everyone's dad was dead, I think, and some of them sort of recently. And I also love that that little moment of sweetness you were talking about on the airplane comes on the way home from your dad's funeral. That's so lovely. Yeah. And it's just sort of

like, you know how sometimes you like go extra far and in a way going extra far, I don't even know what it is, but it seems like as a way to sort of understand or tolerate the intolerable. Yes. Or maybe sometimes as a way of sort of articulating just how absurd everything is. You know, look at this and we're still here together. We're still having popcorn on the porch. And isn't this something else, you know? Yeah, yeah.

It might incline us to actually like say really ridiculous shit you know yeah my best friend chris who's also the editor of this show we call it up the street and around the corner because it's just you just keep going you just keep going and just building absurdity upon absurdity you know but i'm a firm believer that levity is a spiritual virtue, right? Like, I mean, it's just so important. And it is one of the fundamental ways that I cope with life and its difficulty. Totally, I agree, yeah. It's the difficulty, of course,

and like very good thinking is done through comedy. Yes. You know, and it needs to sometimes be transgressive. That's the point of it. Like you think well by thinking too far, you know? You butt up against stuff. And it's sort of like, what I love about comedy is that it provides us all these spaces to do all of this stuff, you know, all of this stuff. And ultimately there is this bottom line thing, which is that sort of about reaching towards someone. It's about like sort

of articulating something about our existence or about what we don't understand or about what we in common sort of are hurt by and like, and that is understandable. But then it's also, and I love this, in that essay I kind of talk about is that when you laugh, your breathing changes. You become acutely aware that you have a body, you know? Yeah. Or at least your body becomes an acutely aware thing in the universe. And bodies die. Bodies die, you know? Or at least your body becomes an acutely aware thing in the universe. And bodies die. Bodies die, you know? Laughter and death, to me, it's like they're tied up. They're really

tied up. Yeah. You know, it sounds like you're a comedy fan. Are there comedians that you sometimes experience as like, all right, that was too far, or felt mean spirited. Do you feel into that for yourself? Are you kind of like, whatever anybody says is fine? I'm just kind of curious because there's a lot of debate about this. I mean, there always has been, I think, but it seems more acute right now about, is that okay to joke about? Yeah. me, like the point of joking is actually to go fucking far. Right. You know, I'm like a Richard Pryor. I really feel like one of my most important teachers. Yeah. You know, and Eddie Murphy too. Like I grew up like on Eddie Murphy. You know, or George Carlin, you know, George Carlin. And I'm interested in thinking that

it's possible by going to the edges. You know, the thinking that it's possible by going to the edges. Yep. You know, the thinking that is possible by going to the edges. And that is often difficult. My question is sort of like, I've been thinking about it. You know, one of the things, and I think Carlin really teaches this beautifully. One of the things that comedy does beautifully, or I think of, is it wanders about inside and out. The comedy that I'm interested in is often kind of fiddling around, trying to figure out, in a way, who's left out or something like that. It's wondering about boundaries, but it's also wondering about power often. That's the

comedy that I'm often interested in. And in order to sort of articulate those questions or to get into those questions, obviously that's messy as hell because power is complicated and messy. But I'm also interested, you know, I was watching that Carlin documentary recently and then kind of got back into his work. His objective, and I think it's the objective of a lot of comedians, is to actually trouble the idea that they're trying to come for who thinks they own the world. You know? Like Carlin is trying to like come for power. Yeah. You know? Like, Carlin is trying to, like, come for power. Not to have power, but to disrupt the idea of it.

Which is also to disrupt the idea that people would be, not disempowered, but like abused or something. That to me is really interesting. And it's difficult work. And it's also like, it's the reason I love comedy, you know? And I love comedy in the many ways that it tries to wonder about that. Yeah. Which is all kinds of ways, you know? All kinds of ways. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out

if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's another thing you and I have in common, which is your mother described you as possibly,

I don't have the exact line here, but in my mother's opinion, the single worst paperboy in the history of the occupation. And what's funny is you and I are similar in this. I was a good paperboy in that I always delivered what needed delivered on time. I actually took that responsibility very seriously. But what I didn't do was what you didn't do. Share that with us, kind of where your paper boy problems came in. When you're talking about like not collecting, is that what you mean? Yeah. I drove my parents crazy because they both actually had paper routes too,

maybe slightly after us. But my mother, it made her crazy because we would like, if we would go visit our grandparents, for instance, for a couple of weeks in the summer, and she would take over the paper route, my whole thing would be just a mess. It would be, you know, a little paper book. You remember you said a paper book that you punch out the things. And it would be such a mess. And she would get it all up to date, you know, because I would just do it by memory. I would just like remember who had paid me and who hadn't paid me. And so I would only collect basically when I needed to go to the movies or I would only collect when I needed some candy or something.

Oh, that made them crazy. That made them crazy. Because they were like, of course, well, you could be making $40 every two weeks. So what's wrong with you? And you're like, I'm making 18. That's all I really need right now. Yeah, 18 is pretty good. I might make 56 next week. Yeah. I was struck by it because it made me think like, well, why was I like that? Because I was very faithful in the duty. Yeah. You know, I was very faithful in the duty. And I can't remember now, I mean, part of me thinks I didn't like asking people for money, even though they actually owed the money. You know, I think there's

a little of that, like, you know, it's just put somebody out a little bit, made me uncomfortable. So I only did it when I had to do it. Maybe that was part of it, but I don't know. It's just a curious phenomenon to be like, well, I'm not lazy because I'm out here doing the work, but there's something about showing up and getting what's mine there that I just don't take that seriously. I know. And the thing that I was also, I realized, oh, two things about jokes, too. Also, back to about comedy, I was thinking, there's also like bad jokes. There's jokes that just suck, you know, and they suck.

They might suck because they're like, oh, that was supposed to be trying to like trouble something. It was mean and it was just stupid. Yeah. And I think that happens. And I also am like also am like yeah okay that's part of your job actually a comedian's job to me as much as anyone maybe not as much as anyone maybe all of us maybe just human creatures that's what we do is to actually like try a lot of stuff and sometimes it's actually stupid you know it doesn't work and it's dumb but that to me is like that's just part of the job and if it's perpetually dumb or persistently dumb there there's another comedian, you know,

that I'm going to actually listen to, you know, like I don't watch Stephen Colbert. Yeah. Cause I don't think it's funny. I just think, you know, I just don't think, you know, and other people have other opinions, you know, that's cool. Like, you know, I don't have to, you know, but anyway, but to the other thing is like i used to like little budding capitalist in me i used to get a kick out of like someone owed me four bucks and then two weeks later they owed me eight or nine bucks and then three weeks later and so everyone i'd be like oh yeah i'm not collecting but this time i might get 12 bucks Were you charging a vig on your paper route, man?

I know. They didn't know it, but yeah. I know, I know. Yeah. But so, yeah. So there was an element of that too. Like, ah, it's okay. They don't pay me this time because payouts can be big next time. Eight bucks. I mean, what can you do with eight bucks when you're 12? You can do a lot. It's funny. You just said, you know, you think maybe the job of us as creatures is to try. And the very short subtitle of your book, Inciting Joy, Essays, the word essay, tell us where it comes from, what it means.

Yeah, it means, I guess, I think it's a French word to mean to try, to attempt. Yeah. There's an essayist who I love and who's really a model for those essays named, well, I say Montaigne, I think it's Montaagna. And his essays were really just sort of wanderings. He would just wonder about things, about friendship, about humor, about liars. Yeah. I don't know if he said humor, but on liars. He has a great one on liars. And he sort of talks about, it's really funny too sometimes. The whole essay, as I recall, is, well, the part that most struck me was that he's trying to explain why he's not a liar.

And the reason he's not a liar is because his memory is so terrible that he couldn't lie if he wanted to. So he's like, when I'm lying, I'm actually, I just forgot. But it's brilliant. But they're all these like strange things and they don't have a thesis.

They don't have a kind of objective. They aren't like mapped out clearly. They're't have a kind of objective. They aren't mapped out clearly. They're just just sort of wandering through some thinking. And they are to me just beautiful. So some of my favorite things to read. Do you know whether he edited? Did he go back and try and edit it? Or was it just stream of consciousness and he drops it on you? I suspect they're so beautifully written. I mean, they have the element of it's it's really like a beautiful mind at work. So you do get to sort of follow the thinking happening, but they're so kind of clear. Because he wrote a million of them. I mean,

he really might have written 500 of them. Yeah. He's known for the form. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It would be interesting to see the first ones that he wrote versus the last ones, and to see if the last ones are more crafted or how they're different or something like that. I haven't done that. So that makes me think about your process, right? Because your essays, they have that following you as you think through something and they have a very stream of consciousness element to them, right? I don't think this is an offensive term, but like run-on long sentences that kind of go on and jump all around. And so are you also editing? Because

the language is beautiful. So I assume to some degree, yes. A lot. Okay. But you know how to edit in such a way that you don't tighten yourself up. Yeah. And that's part of the trick with my edits is that I'm trying to make it seem like what you're saying. Like I'm trying to make it seem, or not seem necessarily is that I'm trying to make it seem like what you're saying. Like I'm trying to make it seem, or not seem necessarily, but I'm trying to allow it to be meandering, sort of streamy, while at the same time not being as sort of all over the place as like a sort of proper stream of consciousness, for instance, would be. And this I started doing kind of with the poems where I started thinking hard about how do I make this sound like a spoken, like really like a speaker. And that takes quite a bit of work, you know, because one of the things we have to learn, I had to learn as a writer is actually to have this voice thing, to write like a person talks. And that's difficult because we

often think of writing as like not how we talk, but it's like this idea of good writing. Yep. You know, we often try to write aspirationally toward what quote unquote good writing is, which I don't know what that is. There's a million things that constitutes to me good writing. Totally. You undoubtedly have a voice. Thank you. I think your writing, I think I could pick out of a pack for sure.

You know, like, okay, I think I know where that's coming from. Yeah, because he's like, hey, friends. There's Russ. Another of your delights that you talk about is you talk about the delight in blowing things off. You talk about, you know, I had to revise my position in regards to the occasional lack of discipline. You also tell a story about, you know, trying to get your dad to blow something off. Do you want to share that little story about your dad? And then I've got a follow on sort of question where I'd like to try and take this. Yeah. In the essay, I'm sort of wandering around and I sort of talk about the pleasure of blowing

stuff off periodically and how in a way, like coming back to this sort of like, you know, buttoned up thing is like, that's like not, you know, and I played sports and I was like, I like literally never missed a practice, except this one time. And I messed up and I just overslept and it was terrible. But anyway, the essay arrives at my father shortly before he died, actually, and he's getting dressed on his way to work. And we had a tough, it's sort of embedded in the essay. I don't know if anyone gets it, but it's for me. That we had sort of a difficult relationship. We loved the hell out of each other,

but it was sort of challenging. And late in his life, things got easier. So I was around or something and he was going off to work. He worked at that point. That might've been his job at Applebee's or something, some shitty scene. And I was like, yo man, just blow it off. I knew he wouldn't and couldn't blow it off, but I said it anyway, you know, in the event. And he was like, yeah,

I wish I could. I really wish I could. And that's from a dude who had been working jobs that I presume he kind of hated for, you know, the 30 years that I knew him. And so the essay is sort of about, I mean, the essay is one thing about my father's devotion to us, actually. Now, he didn't blow stuff off because he had us. But the other thing is that how lucky it is when we have that opportunity to be like, you know what, I'm just going to sit in the sun today. Actually, what you just said was beautiful about, you know, my dad couldn't blow it off because he had us. I felt something there. My question was about knowing the right balance of those things, right?

Because you're clearly a pretty prolific guy. You write books. You're always doing talks. You're teaching. I mean, you've got a lot going on. So you're not blowing a ton off, you know? I'm just curious about how you think about, you know, like today I'm just going to give myself some grace and some slack. And you know what? Like, I'm just not. Nope, not today I'm just going to give myself some grace and some slack.

And you know what? Like, I'm just not, nope, not today. I'm going to sit in the sun. I'm going to spend more time in the garden, you know, wherever versus, okay, you know what? I don't feel like it, but you know, I need to hang in there here. Right. Cause, cause good things come out of hard work. Yeah, totally. Totally. It's a good question. And I think of that too. Cause I, you know, like I'm like a busy writer. I like to give talks. I like to give readings. It's funny. Recently I got a little bug and it was the kind of thing that I could tell it was like a day long or two day long thing. But I was like, oh, that's your body saying, settle down for a minute. You need to settle down. And it felt a little bit like the settling down was not only just that you don't feel

great. It was that you emotionally need to sort of slow down for a second. You know, you need to sort of like touch into some stuff that you might not be paying attention to. That's one thing. But as far as the sort of balance, it's a great question. And I don't feel like I know the answer to it. I do know one thing and maybe some of those stoppings like that, like sort of just stop for a second

or your body being like, you're going to stop for a second. Like you got the week off now. One of the things that that can afford us is to be like, oh, wait a second. You're spending a lot of time doing stuff you think you need to do, but you don't really want to do, or you think you need to do because you think people are depending on you, or you think you need to do because you think it's going to be good for something, but just to be like, but is any of that true? And to the extent that it's true, like, how do you want to respond? You know, just to at least raise the question, because I feel like a how do you want to respond, you know? Just to at least raise the question.

Because I feel like a lot of us are sort of, you know, just kind of built that way of like, get it done, get it done, get it done. More, more, more, more, more, get it done. It feels like in a way the kind of, you know, kind of a capitalistic mode actually. Even if it's not that we're trying to make money out of it. Even if it's just like accomplishment, you know,

for the sake of accomplishment or something. It does feel worthwhile to settle down and be like, well, you know, all kinds of things. I guess one of those things is like, what are we avoiding too? I think being busy is such a good way to avoid all kinds of things, including sometimes connection. You know, I think about that sometimes. Like I've been feeling so glad giving readings and stuff. And I want though also to be in rooms with people asking beautiful questions and all that. I also want to be acutely

aware of how that itself can be a kind of blowing off, like my relationships, you know, how that could be a way of actually escaping a different kind of intimacy, which is actually, you know, more vulnerable and sort of risky to come which is actually, you know, more vulnerable and sort of risky to come back to risk, you know, or can be. Yeah. I mean, I think you make a great point there, which is it's kind of about asking the questions and being intentional. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just thinking a little bit about it versus just reacting out of our sort of habitual patterns. I mean, I certainly have the habitual pattern of like, if it's supposed to get done, I'm going to get it done. And that serves me

generally well. And it's good to be intentional. I also think it's really helpful to know your tendencies, right? I've done a lot of, you know, coaching work with people in the past. And what I realized very early on was like, you can't say something like you should be easier on yourself as a general principle. Right. Because for some people, absolutely. Right. But then there are other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's not really the right approach, right? You know, and so I think knowing where we tend to fall, where do I tend to go to? Oh, I tend to go to pushing myself too hard. All right. Then when in doubt, I might think about dialing it down a little bit, or I have a tendency to not push myself very hard and later feel regret about not getting enough done. Okay. Maybe then I need to push my needle a little bit more in that direction. So I think, you know, like you said, asking the question about like, what am I doing?

And life is just so complicated with competing priorities, right? Because for most of us, like there's more that we would like to do, could do, than there is time to do it. Yeah, yeah, totally. And so you have to make difficult decisions. Absolutely, yeah. And again, like sort of discerning like what are those things that we would like to do truly and that we would like to have done. I would like to say that I have done, you know. Yes, yes. And that's hard.

And I feel like our conditioning is strong. And I even think about growing up, how I grew up. We were kind of broke. And so if you didn't accept an invitation to make some money, it was just crazy. You didn't turn that down. And so that's actually a thing that I am acutely aware of that is inside of me,

even though my bills are very paid at this moment, you know, to not be enticed out of, I need to pay my rent, you know? Like I got to take this. I got to take this. As opposed to like, oh, I would like to do this thing, actually, you know? Yeah.

That kind of, you know, I guess it's sort of like, you know, deprivation or scarcity or whatever. It's trying to have like a relationship to what is in fact the conditions of one's life or something. Yeah. I have another slightly deeper dive on something you just said. You said the things that I would like to be doing versus the things I would have liked to have done. Yeah. When it comes to something like writing or editing your writing, for a lot of people, a lot of writers will describe that as difficult. Yeah.

You know, that they don't always want to do that, that they may not feel like it. How do you frame that up in the context of what we just talked about, which is like, you know, I kind of want to have it done, but I don't necessarily feel like doing it right now. And yet I know it's something that's important to me and I love. How do you think about that? And you're talking about like writing and difficulty? Yeah. Like, you know, if you were to just go off of, do I want to do it versus do I want to have it done? I'm certain there's times you don't want to write in that moment, right? Or you don't feel like writing. So, but you still do. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. I've been thinking like there are some days when before

I like settle down to write, I'll kind of like clean up, you know, or do that thing, you know. Because I mostly think of like, I'm just excited to get back to whatever I'm working on. I'm like, I'm almost very rarely, unless it's like an assignment or something. When I have assignments, I often have a hard time. But when it's my own assignment or something. When I have assignments, I often have a hard time. But when it's my own work, I'm almost always pumped to get back to it. But sometimes I do find myself, like I have a day of revising I got to get to, I'll find myself sort of like figuring out other stuff to do and kind of warming up. And procrastinating is one of the words for that. With that work, the writing work, one of the

things that I just know, and it's a little bit, when you were talking, I was like, oh, it's a little bit like exercising or it's a little bit like, you know, doing yoga or something, you know, where it's like, sometimes getting there is a little bit challenging. But the thing that I know about writing that is so exciting to me about, which is why I love to do it, like love to do it, is that I will often approach something, get into something that I feel like I know a lot about. And in the process of writing about it, and that thing I think I know a lot about is often me. And in the process of writing about it, which really means sort of thinking very hard with syntax and language and sounds, I will be like, oh, you don't know anything about

that. So I get to sort of pleasure of kind of unknowing myself or revisiting my experiences, my thinking, my relationships, et cetera, in such a way that when the rethinking has sort of commenced for the time being, I'm like, whoa, that's an entirely new way to think about my relationship with my mother. I can't wait to tell my mom or whatever. So there is some kind of like, I don't want to say reward. I am actually thinking the word reward, but there is some sort of like depth of understanding. That's the reason that I write really. It's the kind of the often difficult depth of understanding that I get to, I get to better understand myself, you know, and also, and this feels to come back sort of all the way back, what I'm sort of curious about, I get to more deeply understand what I love.

That's one of the things. And, and I think that's really lucky. Well, that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Ross, thank you so much. I have so enjoyed this. You've been somebody I've wanted to have on for a while, so I'm glad we finally got to make it happen. Thank you very much. Good to talk to you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member

of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts