WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 830 - David Remnick

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

David Remnick is a seasoned journalist, an accomplished writer and a proud amateur guitar player. But he's also the gatekeeper of an American institution as editor of The New Yorker. Marc and David talk about the versatility of The New Yorker's content, from poetry to fiction to investigative reporting and more, and how the current political and cultural climates demand our engagement with all aspects of art, literature and information. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So, no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Gold tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those, too.

Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Death is in our air. This year's most anticipated series, FX's Shogun, only on Disney+.

We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that. An epic saga based on the global bestselling novel by James Clavel. To show your true heart is to risk your life when i die here you'll never leave japan alive fx's shogun a new original series streaming february 27th exclusively on disney plus 18 plus subscription required t's and c's apply all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck publicans what the fuckocrats what the fuck nicks what the fuckeristas all right okay what's happening you know there's

some days where i think like am i still doing that it's sort of an evolution of a thing i used to do back in the day on the radio keeps going keeps going keeps hold you know the you get into these patterns you take these forms you get into these habits they become a signature thing and then one day you hear yourself doing it and you're like wow i'm still doing that am i a recording device well that according to william burroughs yes that's what the brain is just a uh fairly complicated but primitive but highly highly sophisticated sophisticated recording device. Series of repetitions, it comforts us. Anyway, let's not get too deep or down some sort of rabbit hole right out of the gate here. How's it going?

This is being recorded a little ahead of time because we're kind of taking some time. I'm taking a little time, a little downtime, get a little relaxation in. My business partner and producer Brendan's taking a little downtime. So we put these in the can a little bit ahead. Like I didn't do this last night is what I'm saying. And I don't know why I'm being transparent necessarily, but I feel like I owe it to you for you to know that if this just posts I feel like I owe it to you for you to know that if this just posts and it's all that's left on the burning landscape are random speakers with my voice coming out of them. I should have said something a little more powerful. I should have said something a little more relevant. But what the fuck would be relevant at that moment?

that moment just a sparse smoldering landscape with some you know scattered speakers here and there from cars and maybe a you know half of a computer speaker system just me rambling that's what it feels like in my brain some days today on the show uh david remnick david remnick is here i went to new york and i was uh hanging out and i went over to the new yorker offices and i interviewed david remnick who is the editor of the new yorker he's also the host of the new yorker radio hour uh very smart guy great writer uh broad broad based intellectual and thinker, has written some great stuff about the current administration and also is at the helm of a very important publication. A very it's the New Yorker is like it's not a holdout because it stays current, but it is a sort of an intellectual Alamo in a way that there's a there's something about the themes and content of the New Yorker magazine that represents what culture should be. And I believe this to be true, whether you read it or not. I don't know.

But within every New Yorker, there's poetry, there's humor, there's fiction, there's cartoons, there's cutting-edge journalism, there's good journalism, there's international stories, there's stories about art, theater, film, painting, sculpture, dance. It's just all-encompassing, intellectually and culturally, of the things that should be seen as important because they are important. They are our lifeline there. It's a, it's almost like a portal to, to where we need to stay and where we're drifting from that. There's something about involving and including all those different disciplines,

journalism, art, fiction, all those different disciplines journalism art fiction like all the stuff that keeps the uh the american cultural spirit moving forward you can't let that shit drift all right we're just in idiocracy we just kind of are just sitting around jerking off to varying various degrees of porn, completely subdued by binge watching garbage, entranced into a paralysis of eating and just taking in stimulus, tweeting, checking our texts. You got to let it breathe you gotta go out and see the world and know that other people are thinking and doing and creating and and embracing things that aren't you know in your immediate periphery oh there's a text from a guy i gotta oh shit i'm gonna fucking tweet that thing

oh did i do i have all episodes of this it just, we've got to keep the world big. The cultural world has to be big, has to be embracing, has to be diverse, has to engage the human spirit at this juncture in history. The final quarter, perhaps. God damn it.

God damn it. Look, I'm guilty of not necessarily being as it's not a matter of not open minded. I just don't have the time to maintain an open mind. I don't know. I can't remember the last time I actually made it through an entire issue of the New Yorker, but I'm happy it's there. It's the only thing I think it's one of the only publications that my, uh, my, uh, girlfriend, Sarah Kane, the painter, Sarah Kane, the abstract painter, she reads it and tells me what's

up. Then I go read it. It's important. It's really important. You can condescend this stuff or you can dismiss it. But if you, if you throw away or push aside what the New Yorker represents in its context, it's going to be very simple and dark, but probably completely engulfing and shallowly satisfying culture we live in. Was that just a roundabout way of me saying that I don't see enough theater?

I think it might be. I got an email from somebody yelling at me about that. Got to stay on the pulse. Got to stay informed. Got to stay awake. Got to enjoy life and do do new things is that the point i'm trying to make on every fucking episode of this show stay open stay interested engage i do but sometimes i i admit you know i got i've got a context myself i got a wheelhouse i've got

things i'm interested in i should i should throw some more wood on the fire. But I did get this, and I think it's important that I read it. Okay. Subject line. Dude, eyelid twitching. Yeah, that grabbed me. Hey, Megan the Playwright in Los Angeles here. I love you and WTF.

And Glow is beautiful, badass, and cathartic. And you knocked it out of the park with your performance in that. But if I hear one more time on your podcast when you interview playwrights who also write for TV from you or them that there is no theater in Los Angeles, I'm going to implode from the most visceral, primitive, Medea-like of rages. I loved your most recent of podcasts with the Glow Writers, who are also playwrights, but my left eye started to twitch from anger. For them, or for you to say that it's difficult to see theater in L.A., or that there's no theater scene here, or whatever elitist New York slant they harbor against the West Coast,

is just completely wrong. Theater in L. in la is fucking vibrant theater here is brave eccentric experimental weird as shit the good weird expansive provocative intellectually thrilling and completely itself a unique weird mystical desert baby dreaming slash tripping by the pacific. Fucking arty shit up downtown and getting spoken word tacos in Boyle Heights. There are more black box theaters here than in New York City for Christ's sake. She's worked up. Yes, there are duds and a lot of crap.

But the unabashed will to experiment and dream is so palpable here. It's vastly sexually exciting. And there's rarely any ego or elitist stuff attached the chicano theater scene is of legendary stuff and la has the largest and most prominent slash notable native american and asian theater companies in the country native voices at the atri at griffith park close to you in Highland Park, and East West Players in Little Tokyo. Also, one of the most exciting theater companies here is Circle X, and they are at Atwater Village Theater, another Highland Park neighbor. Go see some L.A. theater, Mr. Marin, ASAP! And obviously, I don't know your GF at all, but if she's a contemporary abstract artist,

then she might dig the theater-slash-performances at Red Cat, an experimental theater and performance space attached to the Disney Hall downtown. They do some awesome and crazy shit there. Go twitching, Megan. Okay, I think I get your point. I think what you're saying is that I should get out of my little bubble and go see some theater if I'm really interested in seeing theater. You know, it's just finding time to not sit and spin in my little world. Everyone, you know, there's little bubbles, then there's bigger bubbles, and then there's even bigger bubbles than that. I guess the point of this is as i head into

the david remnick interview i i want to uh i can't overstate the uh the importance of the journalism he's been doing and the crew at the new yorker have been doing in response to this administration which remains important uh gotta be some checks there's got to be some checks against the bubble time but also just the new yorker in general i always you know i pick it up and it makes me realize that there is a a world out there man and it always has you know even if i've never been able to read an entire uh copy of the new yorker cover to cover i've tried but just knowing it's all happening it's all there and there is that context of of what uh you know just you know progressive not in a political sense but just evolution evolution evolutionary culture

evolutionary international arts literature news humor, all of it. I'm glad it's out there, man. I'm glad it's out there. And I'm going to go right now after I talk to David Remnick and engage in some stuff that I've never engaged in before. I'm not sure what that is. But that can be food, right? Food counts.

Anyways, this is me in New York talking to David Remnick. He's the, again, the editor of The New Yorker and the host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. You can go to newyorker.com for all things David Remnick and The New Yorker. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category.

And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, Thank you. means? I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5pm start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in

attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5pm in Rock City at torontorock.com For care. At torontorock.com. So you talked to President Obama about me. The people around him always thought that it was a terrible idea for Obama just to talk to the traditional

media. Right. Oh, you got the inside scoop. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You did some research for me. Is this in the book? No. We used your book.

We used your book as a source. Oh, that's nice. My producer, Brendan McDonald, did. Did you credit the thing? No. What do you mean, credit the thing in a conversation? Footnotes. I wouldn't have been able to come up with this if it weren't for David Remnick's amazing

book. Well, I'm glad you're saying it now. Yeah. And they were obsessed with this. And so the first thing, you know, Huffington Post and sort of the, you know, Web 1.0 and 2.0 and all the rest. And then they got into podcast land. And they were really proud of themselves that, yeah, that they did.

That they were able to land him on WTF. They were like, man, we didn't think Mark would go for it. Exactly. The president. We're not booking him. If you listen to the podcast we did after that one, there was some problems, but it was never about whether or not we would book him. But it didn't fit my schedule quite right. Well, yeah, it should.

But we made it work. Exactly. Good. I'm glad you did. But we made it work. Exactly. Good. I'm glad you did. But wait, so did you talk to him about me? I said I was glad you could fit me in after Mark Mary. Yeah. Yeah.

And what did he say? He just did one of those giant Obama smiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The earlobe and ends at the other earlobe. It's pretty wild to have him over to your house. Has he ever been to your house? He has not. Or my garage. It's pretty wild to have him over to your house. Has he ever been to your house? He has not. Or my garage.

It was quite a day. So how old are you? We have to start with the hardest question of all. I'm just curious because I know we're close in age, but I know that the— I'm older, Mark. I'm 58. But not much. So you're 58.

So that means you were born— And I grew up about 15 minutes, 20 minutes from you. From where my folks are from. You're from like Pompton Lakes. My mother's from Pompton Lakes. My grandmother lived in Pompton Lakes. My father's from Jersey City. So I was actually born in Jersey City.

I lived in Wayne for the first six years of my life. I wouldn't say that I was from there. My father's best friend lived in Wayne. My grandfather owned an appliance store in Haskell. Do you know the Haskell-Butler-Pompton Lakes Triangle? It's known as the Bermuda Triangle of New Jersey. The Bermuda Triangle of New Jersey Appalachia. You disappeared.

Yeah, it was quite a place. But yeah, I'm a Jersey guy. But I was just trying to figure out when you were coming up, growing up. I guess you're officially a boomer, really. I'm not quite because I'm 53, 63. When does that end? I don't know. And it gets thrown in your face all the time.

It's some terrible thing. I grew up in a town called Hillsdale, and the high school was called Pascak Valley. And I was the editor of the school newspaper, the only time I was an editor before being made the editor of the New Yorker. And the name of the paper was called The Smoke Signal. Yeah. Because we were the Pasquack Valley Indians. Oh, so a little inappropriate. That would have gotten Bill Maher thrown off the air. But Bill Maher, he grew up about five minutes away. He went to Pasquack Hills High School. Was he a... He was the comedian.

He was always a little older than I am, and he was always getting into trouble with things like, you know, talent shows. I was in a band that played in somebody's basement. What did he play? I play guitar. Really? And then we would take a break and play in Bill Maher's driveway. And Bill Maher's, by the standards of my growing up,

Bill Maher's father was famous. Sure, he was a radio guy, right? He was famous. Sure. He was a radio guy, right? He was a radio guy. News guy. He did the news. Yeah. So you knew of his father. Did you listen to his father? You would have thought his father was Frank Sinatra. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because the local celebrity.

It was huge. All right. So you were in a band. This is good information for me. You want to form one? Yeah, I can. I play pretty good. Do you still play? Yeah. Where do you find time to play? It seems like you're doing 900 things. It's the only thing I do that's not about reading and writing.

Me too. That's it. It's so relaxing. What do you play? I play guitar. Yeah. I play electric guitar in my garage. It's a horrible cliche, isn't it?

No. The middle-aged man with his electric guitar. I know, but I'm not out there trying to make records or playing in bars. I'm taking lessons every Sunday. I take lessons from this great guy. So you're re-engaged. You're re-engaged. So I did that once.

And apparently you can get better. You can. I've gotten so much better in the last five years. But I'm primarily blues country. That's my wheelhouse. But I'm getting better at certain licks. I have Jimmy Vivino from Conan's band he shows me stuff whenever I do Conan you take lessons from him well every time we've

got this pattern where this thing that ritual where I do the Conan show he always puts a guitar in my dressing room one is a great guitar so I can you know noodle around while I'm waiting I can't do it well I've got hooked up I got hooked up with Gibson. I've gotten a few free guitars. What are you playing? That's not fair. What are you playing?

I can't take free stuff. Why not? I'm a journalist. I can't take free shit. What do you think? That's going to protect Gibson? I'm going to go to journalism jail. Yeah, right.

He can't comment on the Gibson controversy, whether they're using real old wood or this is new wood. What do you play? My best, my favorite guitar that I've got lately, remember on the rooftop concert the Beatles played? And George is kind of wearing this big giant coat, and he's playing a Fender Telecaster. Is he? But it's made of one piece of kind of, one piece of mahogany. It's a kind of brown and black telecaster.

It's a fantastic guitar. Oh, nice. And I'd never seen it. And I walked into, I guess it was the Guitar Center, which is a kind of chain. Yeah. Where you normally should not, you shouldn't buy guitars and chains if you really want to make the cool decision.

Well, it's hit or miss, you know. You might find a good one. And I just picked this thing up. It was just heaven. Yeah. Yeah, you don't, I mean, sometimes you get a good guitar at Guitar Center. I mean, they have them. It's just a little hit or miss.

But these poor teachers, you know, there's no one... So it's heavy, right? Mahogany? It is, as we say in New Jersey, a gazunta guitar. Yeah. Is that what they say? It's not as heavy as a Les Paul. So you're locked in with other Jewish guitar players of your generation?

Eating smoked fish. And worshiping one God. Yeah, of course. Not two, my friend. One God. Just the one. Which guitar God would that be? Ah, Jimmy, yes.

Oh, really? Yeah. He's the one. He played a Strat, though. How do you end up with a top? I got one of those, too. Of course you do. Five positions, which?

I've not bought a car. I'm married to the same woman for 30 years. You're saying the same thing I say. I got a Camry. The biggest thing I bought was this Macintosh amplifier for my records. Mark, I've got worse than a Camry. What? I got a fucking minivan.

Really? Yeah. Well, you got kids, right? Yeah, but still. You're doing what you have to do. I think what I'm going to do is endorse a Fender Stratocaster for president for the New Yorker. Yeah. I'll get one for free.

Sure. You can work it out. Why don't you just create a back channel to Fender? And, you know, don't tell anybody. That's all you got to do. That's going to work.

The back channel, no one's going to know. And if they do, say it wasn't for me and was always supposed to be that way. I have to say, I take lessons on Sunday.

It is an absolute, I just gift from the gods that I'm doing something that's not work. And this wonderful guy, Robert Ankner is his name, the problem with musicians now is that there's not that much work anymore. There used to be a whole flock of studio musicians, and now Apple laptops are taking that over. And so unless you're the one or two top guys, and in that world it's a lot of guys, you're teaching. And usually what you're teaching, at least maybe in this neighborhood, is either middle-aged guys like me, and there's a lot of dead fans. A lot of guys wanting to learn the Mixolydian scale and Jerry Leeds.

The Mixolydian, yeah. Someone just hit me learn the Mixolydian scale, and Jerry leads. The Mixolydian, yeah. Someone just hit me with the Mixolydian. Or you're teaching 12-year-old, usually girls, to play Taylor Swift songs, and that's it. But that's what drives the entire— And this guy's a fantastic—Robert's a terrific player. Yeah. But that drives the entire guitar industry. It's people with dreams.

You bet. And people, like, you know, they could never make it if it was just people who were professional players. And, Mark, I have no idea what kind of player you are, but these guitars that I have are like too much guitar for me. Yeah, I feel the same way. That's why I don't buy them. Like, I'm happy to get them for free, and I don't know what to do with some of them. And, like, I gave, I had an Epiphone that was given to me, and I gave it to my cousin. Right.

By the way, an Epiphone, perfectly good for the Beatles. Sure. But not up to your collection. Right. Well, I think Epiphone was different then. I think, were they always a subsidiary of Gibson? It was the junior. It was like the lesser Gibson.

Yeah, and the Beatles also played those Rickenbackers. And Guilds. Guilds, yeah. They were an awfully good band, I thought. They were pretty good. They holed up. No one thought they would. The best thing they did was stop, I think.

It's always good when they stop for whatever reason. Hopefully they're not dying, but even that turns out well for some people. Well, the reason I was asking your age is just to sort of get a time frame of what was pummeling your brain as a child because I have vague memories, given what we're going through now. I have very vague memories of Watergate, right? So I'm not even 10. I have good memories of it. Right, because you're a little more conscious. I don't know.

What was your family like? Were they political? They were political-ish. Yeah. And look, the first thing that pummeled my brain, other than, you know, the tribal memories, is from a cultural, political point of view, I wanted in on what was happening. And I was listening to the radio all the time. I was a little, little kid. I was in this quiet, boring town in New Jersey.

Yeah. No one sold to it. And I was riding in some van, and some kid was talking about a new album called The Best of 66. So I was seven years old or something like that. And I go out. It's the first album I ever bought for like $1.50 at Corvettes. Corvettes. And it had on all kinds of things.

You know, it had the birds and Paul Revere and the Raiders and some R&B. And then it had this thing, this song called I Want You by Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah? And I didn't understand this. I was seven years old, but everything in my mental universe, everything in my mental universe for the next years to come bloomed out of that. Anything that I liked that was worth anything came from that. He'd mention, you know, I'd be 14 years old, he'd mention Ezra Pound. I don't know what that, Ezra Pound. And I'd go to some used bookstore and buy a book. And it was like the birth not of knowledge but of pretension.

Right. But pretension. But there is that attempt. It's a good thing. Yeah. What was it? The Cantos? You know, was that Ezra Pound?

Which I couldn't understand. To this day, I don't understand. No one understands it. Most of it. I don't know that, you know, a lot of it was beyond Pound's understanding. But I just – it awakened me. He'd mentioned Allen Ginsberg. And so I'd buy those little black and white, you know, But you could understand that.

You'd get cottage. You could, you know. Way more. It's culturally identifiable. My father saw Allen Ginsberg's book, and he said, Allen Ginsberg. I went to school with Allen Ginsberg. My father grew up in Patterson. So, you know, all these kinds of.

That kid. You need some hub of your mental world. And for some people, you know, in a different century, it's, you know, religion or – I don't know what. But for me, it was that. But it's interesting though. You say pretension. But that's – you're kind of – you're retrofitting that. The truth is that these people, if you're prone to that type of intellectual curiosity,

which at that time was a kind of explosion. There was a hippie explosion. That's right. Exploring poetry, the beatniks. Dylan was doing a folk thing. And you have this whole sort of cultural revolution of creative ideas. And it made it available to me. Right.

It's almost mystical, though. These things, like someone mentions it, someone like Dylan mentions Ezra Pound, of course you can go by Ezra Pound. And then you want the thing to come to life

and you feel like an idiot for not being able to grasp any of it. But you know the answers are in there. But it was, you didn't have to feel like you understood

everything because you could feel cool. Yeah, okay. Cool is a substitute in some ways for mastery. Yeah. Right? Sure. So you could feel cool because you could feel cool. Yeah, okay. Cool is a substitute in some ways for mastery. Yeah. Right?

Sure. So you could feel cool because you grew your hair long and in a way you're being... So you were a long-haired 14-year-old? Yeah, I had this stand. I looked like the white Sly Stone. Sure. Do you have a big jufro?

Gigantic. Do you have elder brothers? I have a younger brother. Oh, a younger brother. So it was on you to guide him. How'd you do? Well, he became a doctor who likes the out of doors. But when did things start to sort of intellectually consolidate for you in your brain?

At what point did you decide to study writing or how did it go? to, to study, you know, writing or what, how did it go? Well, in, in all seriousness, I, this didn't feel like anything intellectual. It felt in the beginning and that's why it took, in other words, it wasn't from school. It wasn't, it wasn't somebody, um, declaiming the romantics or something like that. It was part of the church of what was happening then. Right. And so I entered it in that way. And so by the time I actually started really learning stuff. Which was when?

Who knows? It's like an instinct. High school? Yeah. And you had people to talk about things with. And it wasn't a particularly great high school, but there were a few teachers and a few kids that you could awaken with. Yeah, you need one or two.

Yeah, that's all. Yeah. That's all. And that was a great blessing. But you were on the side of like, you know, things aren't what we think. You know, there's some bad shit going on. Like the country was in turmoil, right? You know, come 72, 69 through 72.

It was. It was. But remember, I was young enough so that my contemporaries were not going to Vietnam. Right. I certainly had no contemporaries getting on buses and going to Mississippi and teaching voting rights or what have you. So there was a real distance from this that I wanted to bridge both in time and just a little younger. You're a little younger Yeah, so by the time I got to college the I remember my freshman year of college The biggest album because rock and roll went backwards or down a down a bad shoot for a while the biggest album

My freshman year was Frampton comes alive shoot for a little while. The biggest album my freshman year was Frampton Comes Alive. So thank God there were other things that started to happen. What was that, like 77? 77, yeah. Frampton Comes Alive. Yeah, I remember that tour. Do you feel like I do? Yeah, I didn't.

Yeah. I didn't either. I didn't know what that tube was in his mouth. He's a terrific guitar player. Yeah, he's all right. Yeah, so all right, so that all right. Yeah, but. Yeah. So, all right. So that's it. So that answers my question. So, you know, I romanticized the 60s and the 50s and that, and I missed it, but you missed it too, really. Yeah.

Yeah. Because my real coming alive was in the 70s. Right. Which was just debauchery leading into it. Not for me, my friend. But like the 70s, like when all music was appropriated. And I didn't even go near drugs. Certainly when I was in high school, it just seemed scary and stupid at the same time.

Yeah, why is that? Because your parents were like, you know, you do what you want to do, but it's not good. I was a good boy. Right, right. Just out of fear. And then when I got to college, I just smoked a whole lot of dope for a period of time until it got boring

and then that was it. Isn't that weird? You call it dope still. It's not weed to you. Weed, pot. I smoked a lot of dope. It was just, it was fine.

Sure. But it was just, but I smoked it in a kind of disciplined way. I would, my freshman year, yeah. You had a box?

I'd work until midnight, smoke some weed, get a sandwich, and fall asleep. It just seems a little joyless. Yeah, the sandwich at 12.30 at night in college every night, you paid for that. Not really. I think at that age, you could eat a styrofoam box and it wouldn't affect you. I just remember doing it, having that sub place across the street at 12.30, trying to eat a full sandwich, full tuna melt. With pickles.

Yeah. Yeah, of course. Chips. Whatever you need. So you went to Princeton? I did, which is a much fancier version of New Jersey, I'll tell you that. Yeah, yeah. And it was, academically, it was heaven.

Yeah. Heaven. Yeah. And that's when I started. Totally. You were. I hated the social side of it. I don't know if you know anything about Princeton.

It had these eating clubs. And in those days, it was incredibly undiverse, call it. Foreign students meant that you were the son or daughter of a, you know, dictatorship somewhere around the world. Whereas today, you go to the same place, and for all its faults, a foreign student means the Romanian math champion. Right, but back then it was still like

all those Ivy League schools were servicing, you know... Yeah, Marcos' kids. Aristocracies around the world. Trailed by three security agents. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And dressed very flashy. Yeah, and going to New York all the time, which seems an impossibly glamorous thing to do. But academically, I loved it.

I loved it. And the other thing I did in school was I started working as a, it sounds preposterous, but as a professional journalist, I started as a stringer for all kinds of newspapers in the area in Philly and New York and Jersey. It was part of this club. So I would write an obituary. So for my audience, tell me what a stringer is. Oh, so Prince of New Jersey is not a place where you need a full-time correspondent if you're the New Brunswick Home News or the Newark Star-Ledger or the Philadelphia Inquirer or whatever.

Really? They don't have international correspondents? But once in a while, somebody would drop dead that they need an obituary about it or a news thing could happen or a feature thing could be contrived or whatever. And I, as a member of this club, which was competitive to get into, I'd write the piece in question. And then, you know, some weeks later, I'd get a check for 50 bucks. Oh, okay. So that's how you started doing that. I did.

And, you know, I grew up in a house. I wanted to be a writer from very early on. What's your old man do? My father, who's gone unfortunately, was a dentist. Had a very small practice. Yeah. Very middle class. And when he was younger than I am, he got Parkinson's.

And so he really lost everything. And my mother, who's still alive in her 80s, has multiple sclerosis since I'm six years old. So I had this powerful sense of responsibility, that I knew I would have to make a living right away and help them. Yeah. There wasn't going to be a period where I was going to finish school and, you know, go into debt and— Go to Europe.

Go to Europe. Find yourself. Right, find, yeah. Yeah. And so I—in a way, journalism was a kind of compromise. Mm-hmm. There would be writing, and then there would be a check at the end of the week. I'd make a living.

And also— And it was exciting. It was a way end of the week. I'd make a living. And also being— And it was exciting. It was a way to see the world. Engaged in life. Yeah. So did you study journalism then? No. No.

No. Can I be honest with you? I don't— Please. People have gone to journalism schools. I go to visit them, and I speak there once in a while, but it wasn't for me. I wanted to learn something about books. I wanted to study literature. I wanted to study history. I wanted to travel some if I could. I quit school in the middle and I told my parents I was, I'd done miserably

in Russian, ironically. But you took it. I took it and I got a C plus and a D. Are you from Russian? Yeah, Russian Jewish. But nobody spoke Russian. The elders spoke Yiddish. Right.

And I decided to take off from school. And I told my parents I was going to study at the Allianz Frances. They didn't know what that was. I barely knew what it was. And instead I went to Paris and I schlepped this guitar with me. So you did go to Europe to find yourself. I did, I went to Paris and I schlepped this guitar with me. So you did go to Europe to find yourself? I did, but I worked. Every day, I would be a busker from about 10 in the morning till about 1.30 in the afternoon. And I'd make enough to pay my hotel, my movie tickets,

whatever I was going to drink that night, whatever I needed. So that's a romantic idea to go there in France. It was ridiculous. Were you singing Bob Dylan songs? Neil Young, you know. In the train? Otis Redding. Oh, yeah? Not only in the train station, but in the damn train, because that's how you would do better.

Because you were, in other words, to make people go away from you. Not an appreciation for what you're doing, but to make you go away from you not an appreciation for what you're doing but to make you go away yeah they pay you 10 francs yeah there was a guy in the new york subways that used to play saxophone terribly like he'd get on and you'd pay him to stop it was and i saw him twice it was the greatest racket in the world lately i've run across some terrific musicians there was a guy in the wewe're here at One World Trade Center, which is right where the trade towers used to be. And in the station nearby, there's a guy that plays nothing but Ornette Coleman.

Yeah. It's really hard. It's tricky. Really hard. Yeah, yeah. And he's terrific. Hard to play and hard to get. He's terrific.

Yeah. So you go, and you're in France. Do you speak French? Petit peu, a little bit. So how long did you do this for? Six months. And the other six months I interviewed American poets like we're doing now. And then I came back to school and I did much better, much, much better. Which poets? Who did I interview? Alan Ginsberg and Philip Levine, Denise Levertov, Amiri Baraka.

Why poets? I wrote poetry. I read poetry. That was the center of what I was studying. I did some of that myself. What do you think was about that? What do you think? Because I was thinking about this recently. Poetry still has a place in the idea of political empowerment. It wasn't about politics.

No, but you hear that, the poets, like, in certain revolutions... I do, but I thought... You know, if I have, you know, a hero in poetry or somebody that I revere enormously, it's Joseph Brodsky, a Russian-born poet who was forced out of the country when he was about in his 30s. Yeah. country when he was about in his 30s. And the way he saw poetry was not as about message or even politics. Obviously, these poems are about something, but they were, their greatest subject was language itself.

Right. And that poets were the greatest servants to and developers of the greatest of all human inventions, language. And that interested me. It still does. And I work at a magazine where we still publish poetry. Yeah, one of the few. And New York has been doing it forever.

There's at least, what, two poems in every issue? That's right. Yeah. But I agree with you. I think when you write poetry, there's that moment when you work a line or two and you just keep working at it. Do you still write? Yeah, yeah, I do.

I generally write more poetry stylistically than I do jokes or anything else. But I would think, Mark, that not that they're the same thing, but poetry and jokes have a similar sense of economy. If you're beholden to jokes, I tend to be a lot more conversational in my stand-up. But when I write things, I've written poems. I don't know really what to do with them. But there is a rush to, you know, an image coming from wherever it comes from. You know, and a lot of times they aren't worked too hard initially. But you just sort of write something out and you start to refine that thing.

And the image kind of does something other than what it just does on the page, which is what poetry should do, and you can't really define what it does and it kind of transcends. That's the beauty of that thing. And I get off on that, you know, if I can find one. Well, there are lots of things to regret in this life, but one of them is that, unfortunately, but one of them is that unfortunately I think mostly contemporary poetry anyway is read by people who are in the contemporary poetry world. Oh yeah, everything's very— What gives me joy about what The New Yorker does with poetry is that you're bringing two poems a week, which are brought to you not only by the poets themselves but also a poetry editor.

We have now Paul Muldoon who's a great Irish-born poet who lives here. And come the fall, another poetry editor named Kevin Young, who's at the Schomburg Library. But what you're doing is you're bringing those poems to an audience that doesn't necessarily write poems or live by poetry in any serious way, other than the New Yorker sometimes. They're not buying poetry books. I mean, a popular book of poetry, if it sells a few thousand, it's a lot. It's a lot.

And I suspect a lot of those sales are to libraries and to other poetry. Yeah. So if I can, the New Yorker is a weird invention. It's an incredible, and it's not my invention. It's something that was invented more than 90 years ago by Harold Ross, and in it are, it's just a weird thing. The cover has no photographs. That makes us different from everybody right away. Always drawn, always art. Always. Yeah.

And in the midst of a 10,000-word political piece or a piece of reporting from Africa or something, there are gag cartoons sprinkled in. And no one thinks twice about this anymore. There are poems. There's fiction. Now, I would bet that the vast majority of our readers or let's say this. A majority of our readers don't necessarily read the fiction. But for the people who do, which is I think a very healthy minority or maybe it is a majority, I don't know, it means the world to them. So it's a very strange thing that's coming at you every week and now online every day. Yeah, and you guys are doing great

work. But getting up to that point where you take this job to edit The New Yorker, it's funny because I saw a play, at different points in my life before the Internet, I had subscribed to The New Yorker. And just the guilt of them stacking up. That's what we're in business to do. We want to make you feel horrible. No, but there was a time when you were dealing with hard copies. They'd come every, what, two weeks? Every week, my friend.

Every week. Every week. So every week, it's like I didn't get through the fiction. And then I was like, I'm going to get to that. And then there was another one on top of it. And then there was another one on top of it and then there was another one on top of it. It's not like I'm hearing this

the first time. Let me let you in on a secret. I don't have to read everything? The only person who reads all of it every week more than once is me. I get paid to do that.

I know in my heart that even our most loyal readers gives me something to do. It's like I really want to make sure I read all New Yorker every week. It's a good deal. I know that you're going to see something.

I watch people on the subway reading it. I see, I'm going to pass on that. Then they go right into this. Everybody reads it each in their own way. I get that. No one, by the way, same thing with the New York Times. Does everybody read the New York Times every day? No.

I always aspire to it. No, you flip. Nobody does. By the way, same thing with the New York Times. Does everybody read the New York Times every day? No. I always aspire to it. No, you flip. Nobody does. You can aspire to it. Joe Lelyveld, one of the former editors of the New York Times, used to take a day off every six months. Yeah. And he would read the whole paper. But he needed the whole day.

He needed the whole day. See, I just assumed that people that meant business were reading the whole thing. No. I know. It was stupid, but I need something to beat the shit out of myself about. You need more? Yeah. Really?

That guy's reading the whole New Yorker. I know he does every week, that guy. But, okay, so leading up to this gig. I'm letting you off the hook. You are? Yeah. Thank you very much. No problem.

Well, thank God for the phone. I read it bits and pieces. Exactly. But I did just recently, outside of knowing I was going to talk to you, I resubscribed recently. I'll tell you that. Well, here's what I like about, one of the many things I like about WTF is every time you have an author on, you make sure to tell him or her, you know, I'm not finished with your book. Every single one. I'm about 40 pages in.

I have a problem with it. Exactly. And Al Franken says, yeah, the good stuff is on the last page. Did you solve all the world's problems? He's like, yeah, it's on the last page. I just interviewed him again. I moderated him at Book Expo.

The first thing I said to him was, I finished the book. It took you long enough. It took you weeks. I have a weird thing with the last 30 pages of anything. I don't know if I don't want it to end. You were worried he was going to be dead or something? No, but it's a sad thing with the last 30 pages of anything. I don't know if I don't want it to end. You were worried he was going to be dead or something? No, but it's like it's a sad thing when something ends. Very few things end satisfactorily.

Have you told your therapist about that? No, I haven't seen him in a few weeks. You might want to bring this up. Well, I mean, what do you mean? I can read Ernest Becker and know that it doesn't end well for anybody. Here's what happens in therapy. At one point, the therapist says, I think our time is about up. Yes.

Yes. See? See? And that's very sad because you had another funny story to tell. Right. Sometimes. Sometimes I got nothing to say and I'm holding back. And if I want the guy to keep working, I'm going to keep that secret for another three weeks.

Let him chip away. That's his job. Give me your best, baby. Yeah, exactly. I don't trust you yet. But how do you get the chops? I mean, you interview poets, you play guitar in France. So at some point, you had to get the chops to do what you do now. Look, any schmuck can play guitar in the streets of France. You just need a guitar. I know. I'm talking about journalism. That's a different thing. I've been at that for a pretty long time. And you...

Look, I was a sports writer for two years. I must have written... Are you a sports fan? Eh. I certainly told them I was when they offered me the job. I mean, as I get older, I eliminate one sport every so often. I'm pretty much down to the NBA now. How many baseball games

can I watch? But do you pay attention though? You were a sports fan as a kid, so it wasn't completely alien landscape. But the thing, the kind of jobs I had when I was a young reporter, I got out of school and I got a job at the Washington Post eventually. And I wrote every day. I was in the paper every day. In Moscow, I was in Moscow for four years between 1988 and the end of 1991, and I wrote probably twice a day. So that means reporting whole stories and then writing them. And, you know, your muscles get bigger. Of course, right. Yeah, of course.

Well, I mean, what drove you to Moscow? Or at least you get fast. Did they just offer you the gig or you wanted to be there because it seemed like you had some predisposition to fascination with Russia? So as I told you, I was a lousy college Russian student. But you chose Russia. So therefore, I had to make my living at it. Yeah. And in 1987, just as I was beginning a relationship with the woman whom I married, Esther Fine,

we were both living in Washington at the time, and a job opening came up in Moscow, and Gorbachev was in office. This was a terrifically exciting thing, and I think two or three people applied for it. Almost nobody. And the idea was to open a second – to have a second person in Moscow, as if this was a lot. I mean, this is 10 time zones worth of expanse in Russia, and the Soviet Union was still very much alive. And I got the job because they think, well, you know, he's a good feature writer and he'll supplement well the more serious news guy. And I started studying Russian again, this time with a little bit more purpose and attention.

And my wife did too. And we went to Middlebury and did that kind of thing where you don't speak English all summer and take intensive Russian. Then we show up, just married, very young, late 20s. It was fantastic. It was unbelievable. It was a revolution that was happening with a minimal number of people getting killed. You know, I would never say going, you know, people talk about covering war and it's incredibly important, but it's also incredibly dangerous and your colleagues or you're losing colleagues and all the rest. That wasn't the case in Moscow.

And this was when Gorbachev came in? Gorbachev came in in 85. We got there at the very, very beginning of 1988. And what was the revolution that was happening? The Communist Party was more or less going out of business, putting itself out of business. Gorbachev was opening the country up to ending censorship of the policy then called glasnost. Dissidents were being given political power. Democratic or at least semi-democratic political institutions were starting up after decades and decades of dictatorship.

Enormous sense of promise. Enormous sense of optimism that's, I hate to say, now in the era of Putin, almost unthinkable. So that must have been an exciting and almost hopeful time to be writing. It wasn't an almost hopeful time. It was an incredibly hopeful time. Just the idea that the Soviet Union would end as an empire and that these individual countries would potentially become – Kind of autonomous?

Not only autonomous, but freer, if not free, was amazing. Now, the results, you know, 25 years later, are at the very best a mixed bag, a really mixed bag. We look at Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia is probably worse off now than it was when I was there. Was Putin a reaction to Gorbachev? I mean, can you frame that along the lines of Trump's success here? Well, there was something in between. There was Gorbachev who gave way to Yeltsin. And Yeltsin appointed Putin as his successor, even though Putin has proved to be in many ways Yeltsin's opposite.

even though Putin has proved to be in many ways Yeltsin's opposite. I think what Putin is, is a, first of all, he's an authoritarian. He's born and bred in what used to be called the KGB, now called the FSB. But he is a, he represents a yearning for stability. But along with that stability has come an end to politics. There is no politics in Russia as we understand it. It is a reaction against what seemed to be to so many Russians a chaos of the 90s. Putin is against chaos. He's against revolution. This coming fall will be the 100th anniversary of the 90s. Putin is against chaos. He's against revolution. This coming fall

will be the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. You can be sure there'll be no kind words said about it in the official press. Because what Putin fears most, to get all serious on you, what Putin fears most is to be toppled. That's why he hated the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine, why he hated the Arab Spring. He relates to autocrats who are suddenly overturned by their people. So he's doing everything he can. And he thinks, and he thought Hillary Clinton represented a threat to him in that way. That's why he hated her so much. He did not.

I don't think to the extent that the Russians got involved in our electoral processes, it wasn't to elect Donald Trump so much as it was to destabilize the person they thought was going to win, which was Hillary Clinton. Yeah, I get that. What's interesting about what you just said, though, is that there was this large contingent of Russians that could not quite frame or handle freedom to the degree that may have been available. Well, because, look, in fairness, there was an economic mess, depression, and at the same time, you saw a new phenomenon in Russian life that didn't exist in the Soviet times. There really wasn't wealthy people in the Soviet Union. There were people who were privileged. There were people who had some money. But they usually went to party, right? Well, yes.

And usually what existed was something called Uranilovka, meaning a kind of equality in poverty. Everybody was equally lower middle class. Right. And then suddenly there were these staring you in the face, especially in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, wildly wealthy, usually crazily corrupt new Russians. And then here you were, not only couldn't you afford the Prada handbag that was now staring at you from a window. But you were having a hard time making a go of it.

So what Putin was trying to hold out was the opportunity to become middle class. But what middle class people want in these circumstances when they achieve it is political liberty. And so there were demonstrations in 2011, 2012, that were uprisings against the Putin regime. And Putin put a quick end to that. Well, it just sounds like the craving for that kind of justice or at least to have some economic traction in culture is sort of what compelled people to put this guy in office that we have now. Well, look, the reason Donald Trump is in office is a whole complex of reasons.

And history may even look back on it and say this was a freak, that a whole series of, in my mind, terrible circumstances conspire to cause it. I think we can empathize with people who are Trump voters who are suffering, but we don't have to agree with them. So there are those. There's also the racial component to it. There's the misogynistic component to it. There's potentially interference in our electoral processes. There's the Comey letter. There's the whole list that we all know.

You're doing a very good job at wrangling it in your writing, I'll tell you that. Well, I mean, you know, you've done a few pieces about the presidency, and each one of them, even though they're months apart, have this amazing range to them because there's so much coming at us at all times. Well, thank you. I mean, I think it's important, though, to not just indulge in endless woe is me. And, you know, in the early days of the Trump campaign, it was hair jokes. And it was, you know, how long his tie is and speculation about his hands, et cetera, et cetera. Fine. I get it.

I get it. Those are easy jokes. And, you know, my hat's I get it. Those are easy jobs. Yeah, and I, you know, all my hats off to Alec Baldwin and everybody else. But this is an emergency. Yeah. The way I think of this

is a political emergency. I am not a conservative, but I understand that this is a divided country and that there are going to be conservative leaderships and liberal leaderships and Democratic and Republican.

This is different. Yeah. This is different. Yeah. This is different. We are being ruled by someone who doesn't believe in fact, in science, who has no preparation for this job, whose businesses were often scams, and we're going to learn more and more about this as time goes by, scams, and we're going to learn more and more about this as time goes by, who doesn't give a damn about human rights, who doesn't give a damn about whole sectors of our society, who just yanked us out of an essential climate change agreement simply to pay off the base. Yeah, and despite his predecessor.

pay off the base. Peter Robinson Yeah, and despite his predecessor. Peter Robinson And in the same week, within the same week, he did an unprecedented amount to undermine the treaty, NATO, that has kept peace, more or less, on the European continent since the worst conflagration in human history, the Second World War. How much damage can one man do? It's kind of astounding. This isn't a matter of jokes.

Yeah. And he's going to press in the Supreme Court and hope for the best that he can get his Muslim ban through and onward from there. And people who think that this is going to be easily eradicated by impeachment or resignation or some early end to what has been an agonizing several months, I think have another thing coming to them.

And so as a result, people have to think clearly. They have to think about what it is they didn't do before, what they can do now. I'm not a political organizer, but God knows I'm a journalist, but just on the standards of rescuing the values of truth, the values of fact, of science, of reasonable argument, to say nothing of decency between men and women, that's what's at stake. That's what's at stake. Yeah. And when you are putting together a magazine on an editorial level that you understand the seriousness of it and that we are in an emergency, but you have to put together a well-rounded magazine that has humor, that has cultural criticism, that has fiction, poetry, entertainment. I think it's possible that our greatest humorist when it comes to these last 20 years and never more so than in the Trump era has been Barry Blitt.

Barry Blitt is an artist who does our covers and he's a kind of genius of juxtaposition. He's able to take two elements that are in the air at the same time, join them together and make comedy out of them and satire out of them. And he's done this with Trump over and over again. I remember in one week, there was a senator who had been caught trying to seduce some other guy in a bathroom stall. And in the same week, Ahmadinejad of Iran had declared that there are no gay men or lesbians in Iran. And so what did Barry do? He drew a cartoon of Ahmadinejad in the can, reading a newspaper while someone's foot was trying to seduce him from underneath. It's just these images.

And, you know, occasionally he gets in trouble too. But, you know, it's – in trouble too. And we all, but, you know, it's. In trouble by the. That happens to the. Public opinion. Yeah. You know, we had, I don't know how many covers making fun of Bush. Right.

Over and over and over again. that we recognize that any number of people believed that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, the birtherism preceded Trump, that he was a Muslim, as if there's anything wrong with that, that he was not patriotic, that his wife was, you know, some, you know, kind of some, an armed member of a radical group with a machine gun or something. And so Barry put all those images together in one cover with an American flag burning in the Oval Office fireplace.

And people went crazy. People were really angry because our readers, who probably tend more to the Obama camp than the Bush camp, I think it's fair to say, thought, okay, I get the joke. By the way, the title of the cover, in case anybody didn't get it, was called The Politics of Fear.

And we got letter after letter after letter saying, of course I get it, but those people out there, meaning those rubes in the square states, very condescending, won't get it and they'll use it as an emblem for racism or blah, blah, blah. And I think they were wrong. But this happens, you know, comedians who have to dare to go too far. So Barry will send rough drafts, ideas. Like this week, for example, I said, Barry, you know, Comey is going to testify, FBI Director

Comey is going to testify on Thursday. We need a cover for Friday. I know it's a tall order. But do you have anything in mind, any sketches? And I guarantee you by Wednesday, Thursday, he will send seven, eight, nine sketches. And two or three of them, and it happens every time, are crazily too far. Oh, yeah. Crazily too far.

You know, obscene in some way or whatever. Right. And so I'm in the old man position of saying, no, you know, too much. Yeah. Too much. But I think he enjoys that because he wants to see where the limits are. And he trusts me that I'm not such a wimp that I'm going to tamp him down. Sure.

But that maybe I'll save him from something so gratuitously incendiary that it's a mistake. Well, ultimately, who gets the flack? You, right? The magazine. Barry feels it, too. Yeah. Barry feels it, too. And that's okay.

Have you ever made any editorial decisions that you regret? Individually, yes. Like what? regret? David Schoenbrod, Jr.: Individually, yes. Peter Robinson, Jr.: Like what? David Schoenbrod, Jr.: Well, I think in the run-up to the Iraq War, A, we should have, like everybody else, we should have, our investigative pressure on the argument about weapons of mass destruction wasn't enough.

I mean, independent of my own position, opinions about it and so on, you can argue. So you bought it? Yeah. I mean, when Colin Powell went to the UN, that performance was, unfortunately, temporarily impressive.

I mean, I hate saying it now. Obviously, it was bullshit. Right. Obviously, history tells us it was bullshit, and I'm very proud of a lot of the reporting that we did during the Iraq War. But, yeah, I mean, yes. And it seems to me now— And I think we've paid—I think the Iraq War,

we've paid a price for it not only in Iraq, but over and over and over again. You take something like Syria, it's very obvious why Barack Obama wanted no part of Syria, because of Iraq. Peter Robinson You want it to happen again? Peter Robinson Yes. Peter Robinson Or destabilize the region even more. Peter Robinson Yeah. I'm not suggesting for a second that there was a military answer to this horrendous disaster,

but I don't think you can count any American policy as a success in Syria because look at the outcome. The outcome is 500,000 people are dead. Millions of people are dispersed. The migration out of Syria has helped to destabilize political understandings throughout Europe, ISIS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not saying Obama should have done X as opposed to Y. I'm just saying that on no score can we count our any policy having to do with Syria as

a raving success. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq. Afghanistan is different than Iraq. But I mean like in terms of success. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq. Afghanistan is different than Iraq. But I mean, like, in terms of success. And it's forced a lot of people to become isolationist in their reflexes, which I'm not so sure is a great thing at all. Yeah, well, it's clearly not because so much of it is based on limited information and paralyzing fear.

limited information and paralyzing fear. Well, you know, there are a lot of people who feel that isolationism as such is the right way to go. The truth is that, you know, that American power has done good at times. The question is when and how, and it's not completely known in any given moment. I would bet that there are a lot of Rwandans who would have hoped that either France or the United States had been able to intervene during that— Peter Robinson The slaughter?

Peter Robinson That horrendous, horrendous slaughter. Peter Robinson Yeah. So in terms of reporting, in terms of the New Yorker being very sort of known and proud of its fact-checking, what has changed since even – since that – the misinformation that we got even from Powell? I mean how – Well, remember, no publication is itself an intelligence agency. Yeah. Well, that's what I mean. They're very different.

And so fact-checking, it can help you a lot and save you from a lot, but it can't do everything. It can't do everything. Well, maybe I should be more specific. How has reporting changed now that the information technology and the pace of news? Like it seems to me that journalists have really stepped up here. I think that's the case. And I think Jeff Bezos is re-energizing the Washington Post led by Martin Barron, the New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR,

any number of institutions that were being dismissed as what Sarah Palin called the lamestream media, or even more commonly, the mainstream media, I think they've stepped up. If Congress were to step up as much as some of those media institutions- Right. They're filling a void for the check and balance. I would say this. They're doing their jobs.

Right. They're doing their jobs for the check and balance. I would say this. They're doing their jobs. Right. They're doing their jobs. A lot of them. I think the job of the media can be a lot of things. It can be entertainment. It can be emotional. It can be all kinds of things. But above all, above all, the top one, the highest priority, the singular one, is pressure on power.

Pressure on power. Any kind of power. Liberal power, conservative power, whatever it is, Democratic, Republican, pressure on that. Pressure on bullshit. Pressure on lies. Pressure on concealment. That's an incredibly important civic duty. And when we fall down on the job, and historically we've had moments where we've fall down on the job, and historically, we've had moments where we've

fallen down on the job, the New York Times missed a small story called the Holocaust. There are books about this. And that's the best newspaper we have. That's the best we've got. It's a very difficult thing to do perfectly all the time. But the principle has to be intellectually and in terms of how you deploy your people and resources and all the time. But the principle has to be intellectually and in terms of how you deploy your people and resources and all the rest, pressure on power. The interesting thing is this is happening right at a moment when a lot of these institutions are having difficulty, financial difficulty. The internet is all well and good, but it also created some unintentional consequences for places like the Times or the Post or anybody. You know,

no media company now, none. No television, no cable television, no movies, your business, none of them are stable. None of them are sitting back fat and happy. Not for long. Right. Not for long. They all have to think about, my job as somebody who's also running a business is to get the New Yorker from what I inherited in 1998,

which was a terrific magazine in print, to at some point in the future when I'm gone, something that is a healthy enterprise online, on the radio, podcasts, in print, wherever, but with our soul intact, with our sense of purpose still there, with our depth and accuracy and all the rest. If I cheat it just to get an economic result and start undermining the principles of the magazine and what we're all about, then I've sold us out. Right.

And I won't do that, and I know my colleagues won't. It seems like you have a— It's a sense of idealism. I'm not embarrassed about it. Yeah. I don't know where you have time to play guitar. I mean, you're writing— That's why I'm such a bad, bad, bad musician.

You're writing. You're managing the entire future of an institution. Maybe if I didn't care that much about it or didn't have a family or whatever it was, maybe I'd be Eric Clapton, but I somehow doubt it. I think you're doing probably a bigger good than Eric is at this point. Eric's pretty damn good. He's a great guitar player, but like you said, we are in an emergency. And I guess the one thing that I keep coming up against in my own brain is, and I think a lot of people are, and I'm curious about your opinion on it, is that, you know, is this constant barrage of lies and sort of constant information that is horrendous and destructive coming out of this administration, you know, is it incompetence or is it a plan to destabilize the very sense of truth and reality that some people still have? It's nothing new to Donald Trump.

Right. When Donald Trump was opening Trump Tower, a 58-story building, he called in his architect and said, look, we're going to go in and we're going to have a press conference. Just remember, give him the old Trump bullshit. Tell him it's 68 stories. In other words, Trump's been doing this for a lifetime. He is a creature of the New York real estate world, kind of the shadier side of it. And at the same time, a kind of show business P.T. Barnum figure. I get it. He's a, you know, there's a philosopher named Harry Frankfurt.

You know this name? Harry Frankfurt was an expert in Hume, Descartes, all kinds of complicated problems of philosophy. He was at Princeton. He was at Harvard. Very distinguished philosopher. And then he comes along some years ago and he wrote a little book,

it's called On Bullshit. Oh yeah, I remember that. On Bullshit. And he said, you know, liars at least have some sense of what the truth is and then they try to betray the truth. Bullshit artists don't care. Bullshit artists, there's no line between truth and its opposite. That's what Donald Trump is. At any given moment, he's willing to say anything. I was for this. I'm against this. To save his own ass, usually. Or to sell something. Yeah.

Or to sell, above all, to sell himself. Right. To inflate his own sense of importance. Yeah. To win over the other person, whether for business purposes or personal purposes or sexual purposes or whatever. He's a bullshit artist. Yeah, he's very good at it.

He's fantastic at it. And for a period of time, we were mesmerized by it. CNN showed one rally after another without anywhere near enough analysis or editing or sense of what the hell this all meant. And there were reasons why this mesmerized us. And he did the unthinkable. He won? He won.

He won. And with all the explanations and the popular vote versus the electoral vote, blah, blah, blah. He won. By the rules blah, blah, he won. By the rules of the game, he won. And he's uniquely American. Oh, my God. That's the interesting thing is that America loves bullshit. Well, look.

It's George Carlin, right? It's like something out of a George Carlin. George Carlin was the master of explaining this, right? George Colin was the master of explaining this, right? He said, you know, he lives at the intersection, like the corner of Bullshit Avenue and Bullshit Street. Yeah. That's where he sits. And we're paying the price. And it's not funny.

It's not just a show on MSNBC or CNN. It's terrifying. Or Saturday Night Live or WTF or the New York or whatever it is. It has world historical consequences and not all of them are you going to be able to put back in the bag. What's going to happen when the inevitable happens? All it takes is some crazy person walking into a store or whatever, a subway station. How are we going to react? Are we going to react with probity and intelligence and all the kind of poise that we need in situations like that? Or are we going to be led by somebody who's capable of gales of bullshit?

And violence. And, well, and has the instruments of violence on his side. And the use of social media in the most perverse way. So, look, I don't mean to scare people, but I don't think people are at all fooled. I think that people understand the stakes. Well, you put it very poetically in one of your pieces, a new hell every day.

It's pretty bad. Dorothy Parker used to say, what fresh hell is this? Yeah, yeah. And that's what it feels like turning on the news. The fact is the Democratic Party has a ways to go. I did this interview with Obama the day after he saw Trump in the White House. And he did a pretty good job of masking the fact of how down he was because, well, it's obvious why he would have been. But at one point in the interview, I said, so what does the Democratic Party have?

What's the bench? Who's going to – essentially, who's going to beat this guy next time out? And he did one of those Obamian pauses. He said, well, we've got Kamala Harris, senator from California, who at that point had been a senator for zero seconds. who at that point had been a senator for zero seconds. And then he paused and he said, no, there's that guy who's the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Couldn't remember his name.

Remembered that he was gay and that he was a Rhodes Scholar. Couldn't remember his name. And then he named Elizabeth Warren, if I remember correctly, and Bernie Sanders. In other words, it wasn't as if there's this rich bench of top-flight Democrats waiting to go. And that is – that's of some concern, I'm sure, to the Democratic Party. But how do you – as a journalist and as somebody who does the work that you do, what's daunting is that there's a pride in ignorance. There's a hostility towards intelligence people. But Trump and people who respect him, that this idea of intellectual elitism, that there's

actually a contempt. I think we shouldn't get obnoxious about it and assume that everybody who voted for Donald Trump is anti-intellectual or racist or this, that, or the other thing. I don't know. I don't know what the numbers are on that. Does this phenomenon exist? Both of those phenomena exist. There's no question. I think that it's the job of all of us to do our part even though we may disagree on any number of issues and to do it truthfully

and decently. Whether it's as a demonstrator, as a journalist, as a broadcaster, as a comedian, as a citizen. Look, we live in a country where half the people vote. What a shonda that is. What a shame. What a crime that is.

And that was the only reason Obama did my podcast was really to get people to vote. Yeah, to get people engaged in politics, to get involved. It's pathetic. It's pathetic. It's fantastic. It's fantastic when there's a big demonstration like the women's demonstration the day after the inauguration. It was incredibly moving. My wife went to Washington.

I'd never seen her more energized, more moved to this day. But, you know, the simple act of voting, the simple act of participating, however corny it may seem, however limited it may be, it's certainly not the whole picture. But if we've learned anything, if we've learned anything in the last six months, it's that elections have deep, deep consequences. And you should just take the hour, drive over to the place. It's ridiculous. And do it. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And, you know, getting people to vote always sounds like, the most boy scouty, girl scouty sort of endeavor. But think of what we've sacrificed to be in a position to make those choices and think of what we've now sacrificed, not least because we didn't all take it seriously. Exactly.

Well, before we finish, I do want to thank you for the nice piece you wrote about Chuck Berry. I love, you know, Chuck Berry, I don't know who the grandfather or grandmother of rock and roll is, and maybe Rocket 88 was the first song, but Chuck Berry is an originator.

And this year, a friend of mine brought me the most moving present I think I've ever got. Really? It was at Seder, in fact. And a friend of my wife's, friend of Esther's, brought this. I thought she was giving us a photograph.

I thought, how wonderful. And I opened it up, and she had gone on eBay, and Chuck Berry had taken the pick guard off of one of his guitars and signed it, and I have a framed Chuck Berry pickguard. Oh, that's great. What more could one ask for? Yeah.

I think you really put him into a beautiful context. He was a difficult guy. He was an impossible guy, and his behavior with women was not great, to say the least. But as a musician and as a figure in the culture of this crazy country, he couldn't be more important. Well, it was great talking to you, David. Great to see you. You feel all right about it? I'm good.

Me too. I'm good. Good. Thanks. Okay, that was it. Go do something culturally enriching for yourself. Come on. Go out there and blow your mind.

Gosh, I play guitar because I'm tired and my ears are a little fucked up. I'll do it next week. All right. I'll work on some stuff. All right. Okay. Okay.

All right. Boomer lives. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So, no, you can't get an ice r need with Uber Eats. Well, almost almost anything. So no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea and ice cream? Yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats.

Get almost almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton.

The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5 p.m. in Rock City at torontorock.com.