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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Experts.
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I m Dan Shepard, I m joined by Monica Lilly Padman.
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Hi.
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Hi.
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Hi.
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How are you?
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Good, I made a bowl of naes last night.
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You did?
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How did it turn out?
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As good as the last batch you gave me?
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I think so, because I started earlier, so I didn t feel so rushed.
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Okay.
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I really could chop those onions fine.
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Uh-huh, and the garlic.
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Yeah, the garlic you re supposed to slice, because you don t want it to burn.
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And so you wouldn t, it s not good for you, because you would, you would break out.
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Yeah, that s okay.
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It might be worth it.
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I ate a shitload of it last time.
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It was so good.
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I mean, you let me know, I have extra.
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Yes, and I found a gluten-free noodle that s in the fridge, over at Lazy Acres, that s delish, actually.
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Oh, great, I m glad you finally found a gluten-free pasta.
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Yeah, in fact, it made me want to make my own.
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It s been a long time.
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Yours is better now, you ve outgrown me.
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No, different and not better.
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This is a rare occurrence.
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It s the first time ever that you and I independently read books that we both loved on the same level, and then we both were starving to talk to the author, which is such, we talk about it in the episode.
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It s incredible, the privilege to be able to fall in love with a book and get to talk to the fucking author.
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It s like what I dreamed about as a kid.
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I would never trade that in, like the way I also happened, I also read it.
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Yeah.
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as we have declared, is fairly rare in these circumstances.
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Normally I don t, and I act more as the audience.
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I will say, even though I m so glad, I recognize that me knowing more, there are parts when we re talking about the book, it s good I don t read them.
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Right, because we can t have everyone on the inside.
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Exactly, because people who haven t read it are like, I don t know what you re talking about right now.
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What people don t hear on this show, which is cut out, is like, I often get too esoteric with the guests, because they know their subject matter really well, and I just brushed up on it.
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So we can depart from what the general audience might know, and you constantly go,
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Hold on a second, I don t think anyone is following this at this point.
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Yeah, but it s harder if I m also- Inside the bubble, yes.
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So maybe this episode sucks?
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So it s really bad, so don t listen.
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No, do listen, it s my favorite of the year.
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Okay, oh yes, so you said this in the fact check, this isn t a response to what we just said.
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Yeah, Barbara Kingsolver, she of course wrote our favorite book of the year, Demon Copperhead, which I m so prone to get wrong.
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I say Copperfield sometimes.
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You want to, but, which makes sense.
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Yeah, I think it makes sense.
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But Barbara, she won the Pulitzer Prize for the book this year, but she s written a ton of other beautiful books.
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The Poisonwood Bible, Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, Flight Behavior, and I encourage everyone to go get Demon Copperhead, and hopefully this will whet your appetite to read it, because it is phenomenal.
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She s so amazing.
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And she s even cooler than the book.
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She s so cool.
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She s better than the book.
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Yeah.
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Please enjoy Barbara Kingsolver.
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You re already here.
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I m here.
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Oh my goodness.
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She made it.
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Hi.
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Hi.
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I m so happy to have you here.
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Welcome.
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Thank you.
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Yeah.
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It s great to be here.
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I m very excited.
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You smell great.
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Oh, that s our candle.
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That s our candle.
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No, no, it s all me.
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It s all me.
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It could be a mixture.
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Good pheromones mixed with the candle.
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Good morning, nice browns.
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Thank you.
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I m in yeah browns.
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Yeah browns.
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That sounded a little bit like a euphemism.
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For?
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My breasts.
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Oh.
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Alas, it was not, but um.
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But I thought I d clear that up.
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Barbara, welcome.
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Thank you.
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Okay, this is a little self-indulgent, but I m just gonna tell you, it occurred to me what is so exciting about having you here, is if you would have told me, I don t know, in my teens and 20s,
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that I could have put down fear of flying and then gone and spoken with Erica Young.
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Or I could have put down Catcher in the Rye and then talked to J.D.
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Salinger.
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I m having a very big moment where I can t believe I get to read a book, fall in love with it, and then talk to you.
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It s like very exciting for me.
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Good!
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That s so much better than if you said, well, I kind of hated your book, but here s your chance to redeem yourself, Barbara.
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Win me over, Barbara.
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I know the Pulitzer s convinced that you did a good job, but I mean, you need to convince me.
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My standards are much higher.
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When you were young, who would you have most wanted to have talked to after reading their book?
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Oh, man, well, it depends on how young.
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Like, when I was 12, Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott, that s a toss-up.
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Then later, Doris Lessing.
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I actually did get to meet Doris Lessing.
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She was an icon for me in my late teens, early 20s.
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What was she saying that you were like, oh, right, that s kind of how I think.
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Thanks for saying it.
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The first books of hers that I read were the Martha Quest novels, The Children of Violence.
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I don t know that they re all that well known.
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The last of those five novels is The Golden Notebooks, which people do know about.
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But the series begins in what was then Rhodesia.
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So she was writing about what was called then the color bar.
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So she was writing about racism and she was writing about sexism.
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In what year?
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You can ballpark it.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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In the 50s, 60s.
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Okay.
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Those were the first novels that helped me understand what literature can really do, what it can talk about, what it can embrace, what it can change, what it can challenge, how it can make you feel uncomfortable.
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Or in my case, it was more like articulating these pressures on me that I didn t know how to name.
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Living in a place that was segregated, living in a world where all the women I knew were wives, that was their job.
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They were not encouraged to go educate themselves or pursue anything.
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It wasn t even about encouragement.
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It was about options.
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I mean, I just grew up looking around, seeing that men ran the world.
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Hmm.
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Seems like they still do.
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Yeah, you can use present tense for that.
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Yeah.
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There were authors along the way from Louisa May Alcott.
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Little Women is the first novel I remember reading that just took me completely away from where I was, which was the back of a station wagon going on some long, long family vacation.
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Post-Congo.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, you weren t reading that book at six.
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No, I was probably nine or ten.
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Well, she could have been.
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Some people are early.
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She could be a Doogie Howser, a prodigy.
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Then I went to medical school.
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No, I was an early reader.
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Actually, I remember the first word that I read.
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No.
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I do, because you know how you remember the things that stun you?
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Sure.
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Yeah, yeah, of course.
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Well, I was three.
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I know that because of where we lived.
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And my dad was a reader.
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When he was home, he had his face in a newspaper or even the cereal box on the table, whatever there was that had print, he was reading it.
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And I just remember watching him and thinking, I won.
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that.
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I want me some of that. 
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Whatever he s getting from those words.
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And I knew I had probably beleaguered my mother to teach me the alphabet.
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So I knew the alphabet.
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So I remember my dad laying down a newspaper and going to work and I climbed up on the couch and I opened that newspaper and just stared at it saying,
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Come to me.
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What is it?
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And I would just pick out words and say the letters and I saw O-R-A-N-G and it became orange.
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It was like that color and that flavor and that whole experience just broke on my mind.
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It was like an orange smashed me on the head.
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From these little symbols.
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Yeah, that first experience of the symbol becoming the experience.
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Like going straight into the brain.
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I mean, how could you forget that?
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Yes, yes.
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Okay, great.
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Because I was going to say two seconds ago, but this is yet another example of writing and reading is magic.
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There s a bunch of magic that happens.
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This is a crazy symbol.
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There s no way that should make you think of the smell or taste or visual of an orange.
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Likewise, the magic trick of literature, say Little Women, is that
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If I write an opinion piece, a nonfiction piece, and I make a claim about how the world should be or how it is, it s quite likely to induce defensiveness.
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If I ask you only to join this character on a journey,
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and you personally, your identity is not at threat.
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That s a magic trick.
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Where you can lead people with fiction is really magic.
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I completely agree with you.
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I say this all the time.
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It is a kind of truth.
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It makes me really sad to hear people say, well, they don t have
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time to read fiction or it s like secondary somehow to journalism.
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It s another kind of truth, but it s magical, as you say, because journalism informs you, it gives you information.
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Your point about defensiveness is exactly on point.
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You can decide, oh, do I believe this or not?
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But fiction
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is the only medium we have that takes you inside of another brain.
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It s an empathy machine for sure.
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You actually put your life down on the bedside table or whatever and you put on the life of another person so their kids are your kids and their worries are your worries and you feel their fear.
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It s even deeper than empathy.
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It s losing yourself inside another life and there s nothing
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to replace that.
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And I think it s awfully important to learn.
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I mean, not necessarily at age three, but learn when you re still young enough to train your brain to do that without the defensiveness of thinking about what am I reading.
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Yeah, what are they asking me to do?
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What opinion are they asking me to support or deny?
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Right, and what is the symbolism here or whatever?
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Just to learn to read fiction and do that magical thing of putting fiction on when you re young enough that your brain, I think, still has the plasticity to enjoy it.
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Because I m afraid that if you don t, like a second language, it s harder to learn that process later on.
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And there s so much going on, like we could look at biochemically, right?
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The part of your brain that s activated while reading a bit of news is like generally to fall into the amygdala.
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If you re looking at this empathetic human experience, which predates all of our political opinions, predates all of our civilized governments, everything.
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It s the truest thing that we can tap into.
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Yeah, it s just really magical.
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Yeah, I like what you just said, that it s the truest thing we can tap into.
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Well, I was trained as a biologist.
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This excites me greatly.
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I m an anthropology major, so the fact that we re both sitting here is hilarious.
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Anthropology was my minor in graduate school.
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And so I m really interested in the human condition as we were for millennia before this little blip of history where we began getting all our information, not from people, but from an intermediate source.
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We evolved as social animals.
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We evolved to receive information from people.
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We also evolved to be very quick to judge friend or foe.
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In-group, out-group.
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Yeah, exactly.
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All of those things are just in us.
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And so I think it s interesting that fiction is the one medium of gaining information that kind of replicates the human experience.
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Yeah, the early storytelling.
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Getting the experience from another person.
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And the advantage is that we can get that information from someone who s not in our family or our group, but from a stranger who lives in another side of the world.
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It s a way that we can experience the other without that defensive otherness.
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You can teleport in reading.
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You can time travel in reading.
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Everything we would hope that would be invented exists in this 3,000 year old tradition.
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Yep.
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Oh my God.
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Yeah.
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It makes me so excited.
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It is so cool.
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When you think about the aliens, let s imagine they can t read.
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Somehow they made it all the way here, but they can t read yet.
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And they re looking at us and they re like, what s going on with those people?
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They re just staring at a paper and they re crying or laughing.
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They probably think it s a slightly bigger phone.
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They can t read.
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Oh, they have these really big phones they occasionally look at.
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It seems to be at bed at night, on trains.
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That was me looking at my dad when I was three, like, what is it?
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What is the magic there?
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Because clearly it is.
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Clearly it s holding him there.
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Yeah, that s what the kids will think.
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I guess this is what the internet has become over time, but certainly when I was young, to be in Holden Caulfield s brain and go, oh, there s another person that feels like me, that feels like this place is really abstract, that feels like this is all arbitrary, that these rules and all this stuff is very confusing.
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I hadn t talked to another kid at school, nor was I likely to bump into one that felt the way I did and the comfort I got out of that.
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Oh, well, minimally there s another one of me in this fictitious world.
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Right.
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That feeling that someone has just touched you on the shoulder and said, yeah, me too.
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Mm hmm.
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Well, as they say, it s windows and it s mirrors.
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Both are really important to see yourself and to see somebody that you ll never be.
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Someone who s a different gender or so different that the only way you can really experience their reality is through an opera.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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So you already hinted at it, which is you majored in biology and got masters in ecology and evolutionary biology.
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Let s go back even further.
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Okay.
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Dad was a physician.
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You re born in Kentucky.
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Actually, I was born in Maryland.
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He was in the Navy, but I don t remember that part.
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We moved to Kentucky.
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Annapolis, you were born.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Who cares?
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My earliest memories are from Eastern Kentucky.
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Okay, then I just want to tell you more self-indulgence.
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So all my family s from Hazard, Kentucky.
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My mom was born in 1951.
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So similar, feminist, all these things.
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So much of your story I feel very connected to.
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But growing up in Kentucky up till I guess seven you go to the Congo?
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Yeah.
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I always say that s what I did instead of second grade.
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I skipped second grade in lieu of Congo.
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Right, in lieu of Congo.
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Which then was Zaire?
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It was the Republic of Congo then.
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We were there right after independence.
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So it was just a minute after Lumumba was killed.
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It was still up in the air and it hadn t become the dictatorship that it was under Mobutu yet.
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I was right in between the horrible colonization and the horrible what the CIA helped to impose after.
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A moment of hope for the Congo.
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Not that any of that was especially relevant where we lived because we were in a place that was so rural.
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I m just going to say it s probably hard for you to imagine because there was no plumbing, no electricity, no cars.
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You got your water from the river.
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You didn t need to study anthro, you lived it.
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You did field work.
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You were doing an ethnography at seven years old.
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Well, I ll tell you.
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It really changed my life.
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It was a deep dive into the notion that what s true and right and good in one place can be very different in another.
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And for example, I had never thought about being white before.
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And then I went to a place where nobody in the village had seen white kids before they had maybe seen white adults.
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Were they fairly fascinated by you?
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That s one word for it.
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Grabby?
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Handsy?
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Yeah, like, why don t you have any skin?
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Right.
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And I had really long hair, which kids just kept trying to pull up.
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And was it blonde?
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Like, that s so confusing.
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It wasn t, but it was long, you know, and straight.
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It was just like, what is this weird stuff you have on your head?
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So I was very self-conscious, and my brother and I just tried to learn ketubah and keep up with these kids who were so competent.
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By the age of probably nine or ten, all the kids in Kikongo were doing basically adult work.
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The girls were taking care of younger siblings.
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The boys were finding food, climbing trees to get birds out of a bird nest to eat or, you know, what have you.
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And I just felt really like this useless person.
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It was a very interesting way to discover a sense of race.
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Really quick, so dad was there doing health care work?
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Mom and dad?
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Yeah.
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Was it religious?
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Zero religious component.
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I will say that a lot of the social services that existed in the Congo after independence, because the Belgians didn t allow Congolese
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people any education at all.
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So when the Belgians left, there was sort of a dearth of doctors, any kind of professions.
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And so there were religiously based groups that organized things like what you would say, Doctors Without Borders now, to get people into places and kind of help with education.
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social welfare stuff.
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So there was probably a group of missionaries who helped set up this arrangement.
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My dad just was born with this vocation.
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He just wanted to help people that really, really needed medical care.
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And so we spent most of our time in Eastern Kentucky, a pretty poor region of the country.
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But now and then he d just get a wild hair and he would talk to a colleague and say, well, where do people need a doctor more?
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Where can I get the most bang for my buck?
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Right, like where would I be the only physician within, you know, like 500 miles?
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We re going to see 300 patients a day.
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This is it.
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Yeah, I want to see leprosy.
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I mean, seriously.
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And we did.
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I mean, my sister was two.
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I was seven.
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My brother was nine.
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And when I imagine taking my kids into this situation, I cannot.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because, I mean, we all had malaria.
1
SPEAKER_01
We all had one thing or another.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I wouldn t write that out of my history.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think it made me who I am in a big way.
1
SPEAKER_02
Did you know it was temporary?
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Were you scratching in the wall five, five, five years?
1
SPEAKER_02
At least knowing, like, this isn t for, I would feel better.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn t permanent.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was a huge adventure.
1
SPEAKER_01
I really did do this instead of second grade.
1
SPEAKER_01
There was no schooling.
1
SPEAKER_01
My brother and I were just feral children.
1
SPEAKER_01
We were just left to our own devices.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think my mother was trying to keep the two-year-old alive and try to figure out what to feed us.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, man.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there were hard things about not having enough to eat.
1
SPEAKER_00
So on one hand, we would go, dad s incredibly altruistic.
1
SPEAKER_00
But also if I m the child of dad, I could also say little egomaniacal to drag all of us.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, you have a hair up your ass.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now we all have to join you.
1
SPEAKER_01
And not eat food for a year.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And here s a wife who says, whither thou goest?
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, like, okay, honey.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I wouldn t do that.
1
SPEAKER_01
We ll just leave it at that.
2
SPEAKER_02
just an example, the place where I grew up in Kentucky and the public school system, I mean, bless their hearts, there were teachers trying hard, but we had so little funding.
2
SPEAKER_02
Even the efforts that have been made since to kind of equalize like state testing and stuff didn t exist then.
2
SPEAKER_02
So my high school had one science course and it was called science.
2
SPEAKER_02
I never did homework.
2
SPEAKER_02
I don t remember really learning anything in school.
2
SPEAKER_01
How did you get into DePaul?
2
SPEAKER_01
Was it challenging?
2
SPEAKER_02
That s the question.
2
SPEAKER_02
So it was like this in Congo.
2
SPEAKER_02
It was like this throughout my childhood.
2
SPEAKER_02
If I wanted to know something, I had to figure it out.
2
SPEAKER_02
We had books in the house.
2
SPEAKER_02
My dad, as I mentioned, was a reader.
2
SPEAKER_02
He read poetry to us.
2
SPEAKER_02
I remember really early, my dad reading Robert Burns to us, like a poem about a louse.
2
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, good for him.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re going, you re crowling fairly, however that goes.
2
SPEAKER_02
Just this fascination with words was always there and we had books and we had the bookmobile in the library and so I just... Supplemented?
2
SPEAKER_02
It wasn t even supplementation.
2
SPEAKER_02
It was like that was the primary.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was an autodidact.
2
SPEAKER_02
For example, my brother and I decided we were going to read the Encyclopedia Britannica.
2
SPEAKER_02
I started at Z. Oh, like you re tunneling.
2
SPEAKER_02
He started with A. By the time we meet, we re going to know everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, if you re together.
2
SPEAKER_02
That was our thinking.
2
SPEAKER_02
That was like, we re a team and we will know everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
Can I ask how far you got?
2
SPEAKER_02
We got pretty far.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s the sad part.
2
SPEAKER_01
My brother and I had a lot of plans, but they would run out of stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
We were gonna build a raft and go across Lake Michigan.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, we had those plans too, but we learned Morse code.
2
SPEAKER_02
My brother and I taught ourselves Morse code and we ran this wire through the register from my room to his and so we would, you know, like tap out.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s really tedious.
2
SPEAKER_02
And we were saying things like, are you asleep yet?
2
SPEAKER_02
But just that we did that.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you could think on the one hand, it was really pathetic.
2
SPEAKER_02
No.
2
SPEAKER_02
But you can think on the other hand, we were just figuring out whatever we needed to know and finding out how to learn things.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I feel like that served me so well.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s an enormous gift.
2
SPEAKER_01
It is.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have to learn all this stuff, which no one wants to have to do anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you re just on your own quest for knowledge, that s an entirely different endeavor.
2
SPEAKER_02
I think that it s why I m a novelist is I just feel like I can do anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
I hope that doesn t sound terrible.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, you feel competent.
2
SPEAKER_01
The opposite is you felt in Congo.
2
SPEAKER_01
You became to feel competent.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
Or anything I need to know, anything I need to become an expert on, I can.
2
SPEAKER_01
It kind of sounds like you re on Gilligan s Island a little bit.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
Without the comedy.
2
SPEAKER_02
Without the skipper.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, when I see people worrying a whole lot about getting their kids into even the best preschool and worrying so much that kids will be at a disadvantage somehow in this horse race of education if they don t get the best and the best and the best.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I had to figure out how just to get to go to college because people in my high school didn t.
2
SPEAKER_02
Nobody told us, oh, you need to take the SAT or anything like that.
2
SPEAKER_02
My brother and I figured that out from reading.
2
SPEAKER_02
Thank God you had your brother.
2
SPEAKER_02
You figured that out because that was in the S s.
2
SPEAKER_02
But definitely my brother and I were a team.
2
SPEAKER_02
It would have been different to be solo, but I didn t even
2
SPEAKER_02
know of the existence of the Ivy Leagues.
2
SPEAKER_02
This was a kind of long story.
2
SPEAKER_02
I got into DePaul on a music scholarship, which sounds crazy.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was a pianist and that s kind of how I got through high school intact, was just losing myself in music and playing the piano.
2
SPEAKER_02
I also played other instruments.
2
SPEAKER_02
That was sort of my social group, which was outside of the little town where we lived.
2
SPEAKER_02
I went to piano competitions and stuff.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so my first boyfriend was another piano player.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, this is hot.
2
SPEAKER_01
Classical piano.
2
SPEAKER_01
What if they re a couple at a piano bar?
2
SPEAKER_01
Dueling pianos.
2
SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_02
So yeah, I just figured out, because we needed scholarships.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so I got myself to DePauw.
2
SPEAKER_02
They had a good music program and auditioned and got in on a piano scholarship.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I just thought, well, this will work.
2
SPEAKER_01
Was dad at all urging you to pursue medicine or were you not inclined to pursue medicine?
2
SPEAKER_01
You obviously hold him in high regard.
2
SPEAKER_02
When I was young, I wanted to do everything.
2
SPEAKER_02
I remember
2
SPEAKER_02
Wanting to be a doctor and a farmer and I don t know, fly airplanes.
2
SPEAKER_02
Not that that was really an option.
2
SPEAKER_02
Concert pianist.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I kind of wanted to do everything and I found a way.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, exactly.
2
SPEAKER_02
Being a nautilus, you get to be everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
What a great point.
2
SPEAKER_02
I remember I didn t really know that women could be doctors.
2
SPEAKER_02
That wasn t clear to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s back in the day where the riddle, this may come from you.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh, the riddle.
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you remember when we were kids, there was a riddle.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
The doctor is not- The doctor and his son are driving in a car, there s an accident, the father dies, the son s rushed to the OR, and then the operating surgeon says, I can t operate on him, he s my son.
2
SPEAKER_01
How is this possible?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I was completely flummoxed by that riddle as a kid.
2
SPEAKER_01
And my kids, you ask them that and they re like, there s not even a riddle there.
2
SPEAKER_02
No, because the majority of students in med school now are women.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s actually one of the encouraging things I ve witnessed that we told them that riddle and they re like, this isn t a riddle.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, right.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, what is wrong with you?
2
SPEAKER_02
But no, I do remember thinking about being a doctor and I remember kind of this turning moment in my life when I realized I couldn t do that because of empathy.
2
SPEAKER_02
I would hurt too much.
2
SPEAKER_03
You had too much or you lacked it?
2
SPEAKER_02
No, no, the opposite.
2
SPEAKER_02
I think I was maybe a little opposite my dad.
2
SPEAKER_02
I knew I would be too invested.
2
SPEAKER_02
I thought that if I have to see people die, I will die.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
You weren t so interested in seeing the leprosy he was super interested in seeing.
2
SPEAKER_02
No, no.
2
SPEAKER_02
It felt too painful to me to put my whole life into people s pain.
2
SPEAKER_02
I just couldn t go there.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, I didn t know what I would do.
2
SPEAKER_02
I just knew I needed to get to college because all of the women
2
SPEAKER_02
that I knew growing up were completely dependent on men financially, and frankly, not very happy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, most indentured servants aren t super happy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s how it felt to me.
2
SPEAKER_02
I wanted to get out of indentured servitude, and college was going to be a ticket.
2
SPEAKER_02
And when I got there, it took me 10 minutes to figure out,
2
SPEAKER_02
not going to be a classical pianist.
2
SPEAKER_02
Maybe there are like 10 job openings and I wasn t in the top 10.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I realized that was not going to pan out as far as the financial security end of things.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I just switched to biology because it seemed solid.
2
SPEAKER_02
If I learn science, I can get a job.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I didn t think I was going to be a writer ever.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, great, because I look at your trajectory, I m curious when that starts to seep in.
2
SPEAKER_01
I obviously know when you start writing, but at that point when you join biology, again, you have a lot of fantasies, which I appreciate.
2
SPEAKER_01
But what is the primary fantasy that will happen after you get this biology degree?
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you think you ll teach?
2
SPEAKER_02
I wasn t that clear.
2
SPEAKER_02
I just thought I really like learning this stuff.
2
SPEAKER_02
It really clicked.
2
SPEAKER_02
I really love science.
2
SPEAKER_01
Meiosis is sexy.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
Well, biology is sexy.
2
SPEAKER_01
It is.
2
SPEAKER_02
No, I just loved learning it and I figured this is practical.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ll get a job.
2
SPEAKER_02
I didn t really nail it down.
2
SPEAKER_02
I still wanted to just do some living.
2
SPEAKER_02
I guess I wasn t yet ready to give up on the I m going to do everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
You go to France immediately after graduating for a year.
2
SPEAKER_02
I just wanted to see the world.
2
SPEAKER_02
I got one of those $200 Icelandic air tickets.
2
SPEAKER_01
I got to interrupt you.
2
SPEAKER_01
This usually takes me the entire episode to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
I know who it is.
2
SPEAKER_01
You say it first.
2
SPEAKER_00
Meryl Streep.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yep, Meryl fucking Streep.
2
SPEAKER_00
You have such a quality.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s crazy, usually that takes- Do you get that a lot?
2
SPEAKER_00
I do.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, of course, of course.
2
SPEAKER_00
People ask me if we re related.
2
SPEAKER_01
The voice is really similar too, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m so glad we re on the same page.
2
SPEAKER_03
I thought it like four minutes into this, I was like, oh my God.
2
SPEAKER_01
Half the time this annoys Monica, because we ll have like a really profound professor on or something, and I m so distracted by what movie star they look like.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then eventually I ll take some time to say that.
2
SPEAKER_02
We re like in the middle of an important conversation, which we are now as well.
2
SPEAKER_02
Okay, here s the difference between her and me.
2
SPEAKER_02
I don t have a star down there on that sideline.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yet.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yet.
2
SPEAKER_01
You should have one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Come on.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, she s wonderful.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, sorry.
2
SPEAKER_01
Back to France.
2
SPEAKER_02
I just got that $200 one-way ticket that you could get on Icelandic Air and hitchhiked all over Europe.
2
SPEAKER_02
I did whatever jobs that you could do.
2
SPEAKER_02
I worked on archaeological digs.
2
SPEAKER_02
No kidding.
2
SPEAKER_02
One in northern France.
2
SPEAKER_01
Finding Neanderthal bones.
2
SPEAKER_02
That s what we were after.
2
SPEAKER_01
Northern Gaul.
2
SPEAKER_02
Asterix.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Awesome.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, I just sort of fell into this French commune.
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t know each other well enough yet, but did you take on a French lover?
2
SPEAKER_03
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, wonderful.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, just one thing led to another.
2
SPEAKER_02
I lived in Paris for a little while, again, living with a whole bunch of people in a small apartment.
2
SPEAKER_02
Just the things you do.
2
SPEAKER_02
Then I worked in York, England for a while.
2
SPEAKER_02
I just moved around and did stuff and just experienced life.
2
SPEAKER_01
How did you know when it was time to come home?
2
SPEAKER_02
Because my work visa ran out.
2
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s how I knew.
2
SPEAKER_01
Was there a version in your mind that you would stay forever in Europe?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Why not?
2
SPEAKER_01
You were probably having the best time of your whole life.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I really liked looking back.
3
SPEAKER_02
at my country and not being in it.
3
SPEAKER_02
There were things I missed, mostly having to do with, it s so hard to explain.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s something about the way Americans reveal ourselves to each other, kind of an immediate closeness that you can establish, like this conversation we re having.
3
SPEAKER_00
Could not happen in Sweden.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it wouldn t happen in France either.
3
SPEAKER_02
You don t think so?
3
SPEAKER_02
No, and it wouldn t happen in the UK.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think that aspect of American culture is probably moving European cultures in the direction of- Well, I also think we have a historical explanation for that, which is like, we were the most multicultural place on the planet.
3
SPEAKER_00
If any group of people with their high dopamine levels could trust strangers, it s us.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
And these homogeneous populations have a much different everything.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Also, we re the apex individualists.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re capitalists.
3
SPEAKER_00
We got to get out there and sell ourselves.
3
SPEAKER_00
We got to connect, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s all in the stew.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s the part I didn t miss.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, of course.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
But I m a very verbal person.
3
SPEAKER_02
And while I became comfortable in French, I never was fluent enough to completely relax into words.
3
SPEAKER_00
I miss that.
3
SPEAKER_02
I was in a job where my supervisor had to lie to keep me on, to say I was doing something that no French person could do, which was not true.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Build a McDonald s franchise?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for example.
3
SPEAKER_01
Little did they know you could do something that no one else could do, but they didn t know yet.
3
SPEAKER_00
That wasn t proven yet.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to come home.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you then get to Tucson, Arizona?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is some wild shit, Barbara.
3
SPEAKER_02
I was footloose.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll say.
3
SPEAKER_02
I just wanted to see the West.
3
SPEAKER_02
I figured I d stay a couple of weeks, honestly.
3
SPEAKER_02
Uh-huh.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I had probably $150 in my pocket, and I just thought, I ll go see the West, see what happens.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I got a job, then I got an apartment, and then I got a boyfriend, and then the next thing you know, it s like a house and a kid.
3
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s where the Rolling Stones started gathering moss.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you feel trapped by that?
3
SPEAKER_00
Someone with such wanderlust and an appetite for all experiences?
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I would have just rolled on if I felt trapped.
3
SPEAKER_02
I wouldn t have thought of it this way until this very moment, but I spent most of my 20s running away from the notion of being trapped.
3
SPEAKER_02
Just because I grew up feeling so afraid of that, so determined not to be that woman who s tied down, that becomes its own trap.
3
SPEAKER_02
I was very reluctant to commit to relationships, to jobs, to place, to anything.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t have a home.
3
SPEAKER_02
We haven t really talked about writing.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t suppose you need to.
3
SPEAKER_02
I always wrote.
3
SPEAKER_02
I got a diary when I was eight years old.
3
SPEAKER_02
Somebody gave me that diary with the little keys.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah, we all had it.
3
SPEAKER_02
You did?
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that keyhole that could be opened with a bobby pin.
3
SPEAKER_00
Or you could just pull it apart.
3
SPEAKER_02
And what you would have found in my seven-year-old diary was, then I read a book and then I went to bed.
3
SPEAKER_02
Really, really boring.
3
SPEAKER_00
Sounds like my current diary.
3
SPEAKER_02
But along with reading, writing was just that private thing I did to process my experience.
3
SPEAKER_02
And my diaries did become more interesting in my teens and more confessional and thoughtful.
3
SPEAKER_00
I too started writing at a young age.
3
SPEAKER_00
There was also the element that I can t actually go have this adventurous life I want right this second, but I can have it on paper.
3
SPEAKER_00
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s funny, I not too long ago cleaned out the childhood home and found this cache of my short stories that I wrote when I was between ages 8 and 13.
3
SPEAKER_02
Every single one of them was about a little boy with some kind of terrible disability.
3
SPEAKER_00
You were really drawn to that.
3
SPEAKER_02
They were all in the first person.
3
SPEAKER_02
I am a boy with one leg.
3
SPEAKER_00
I am a blind boy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Here I lie, a boy with one leg.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, but you were in an environment where you were exposed to a lot of horror.
3
SPEAKER_01
Boys with one leg.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I am a boy with elephantiasis.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t know what that was about, but I just didn t want to be a girl, was what it was.
3
SPEAKER_00
Very limiting.
3
SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I think that my fantasies of being boys were based in that, but the obstacle.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because you couldn t escape how you really felt, which was disabled.
3
SPEAKER_02
Was disabled.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
It leaks in.
3
SPEAKER_02
But yeah, I was writing these fanciful stories and I wrote poems.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I also feel like writing about what I lived through, I was always really conscious of
3
SPEAKER_02
time getting away, which is a weird thing.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, kids aren t supposed to worry about time flying by, but I did.
3
SPEAKER_02
Maybe because I love seeing people die.
3
SPEAKER_00
Also, if you have a million fantasies in a romantic inner life, you have a finite amount of time.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re aware of that.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s really a good point.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was constantly like, we got to get the show on the road.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like if we re going to do all these things I want to do, can I really wait till 12th grade before I head out to California?
3
SPEAKER_00
You know,
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I would say I m a very impatient person.
3
SPEAKER_02
I have always had to cultivate patience.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s something I have to work hard on.
3
SPEAKER_00
Kids really help with that, don t they?
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, like the more in a hurry you are, the slower they go.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re the antidote.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you re struggling with patience currently.
3
SPEAKER_01
You guys have a baby.
3
SPEAKER_01
I feel like you could, not to be this capitalist girl, but you could sell those short stories now for so much money.
3
SPEAKER_01
You could give them to charity, the money, but wow, I d love to read them.
3
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
You should make a cash offer.
3
14,000.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what s in there.
3
SPEAKER_02
I could get canceled.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, you would.
3
SPEAKER_00
You couldn t.
3
SPEAKER_00
It could be bad.
3
SPEAKER_02
But back to time, I just felt like time is this river and I can t pin it down and
3
SPEAKER_02
Writing about what I did today, what happened today, what I saw or thought, or what hurt today, or what I accomplished today, it just kind of nailed that river to its banks.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s how I felt.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so that was the reason I wrote, not really for anything else but me.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I kept doing that.
3
SPEAKER_02
In college I wrote because I was a science major and I didn t have electives.
3
SPEAKER_02
I took one creative writing course and I loved it.
3
SPEAKER_02
My creative writing professor said, you know, you re good at this.
3
SPEAKER_02
You should take another.
3
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no.
3
SPEAKER_02
I have to take chemistry and physics.
3
SPEAKER_02
But my chemistry and physics books have poems in the margins and they re like poems about electrons and stuff.
3
SPEAKER_02
But I felt like if anybody knew I was doing that, they would think I was unserious.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
It felt frivolous.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Growing up in a working class culture and a working class place, you don t say you want to be an artist when you grow up.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, at least in Kentucky, you don t say that because it seems... It feels hoity-toity.
3
SPEAKER_02
It feels hoity-toity.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s what it feels.
3
SPEAKER_00
It feels upper class.
3
SPEAKER_00
It feels rich.
3
SPEAKER_00
We hate rich people.
3
SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s self-indulgent.
3
SPEAKER_00
What a luxury.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it s putting yourself above it.
3
SPEAKER_02
Like, I m not one of you.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s like saying, I m going to be Meryl Streep when I grow up.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, which happened on accident.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I just kept this to myself.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can I say as a boy, as a young boy growing up in very blue-colored Detroit area?
3
SPEAKER_00
It was gay.
3
SPEAKER_00
That was my fear.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was writing, I was being creative.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so my little paradigm I was stuck in was that was gay.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because it was feminine, which also is probably part of your feeling too.
3
SPEAKER_01
You want to be a powerful woman, which means more masculine.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
I need to do what the boys are doing.
3
SPEAKER_02
And they re not writing poems.
3
SPEAKER_02
Right.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s for sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s all wild that either of us would have had any thought like this thing needs to be private.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s so crazy.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and God forbid if you d wanted to be a dancer.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no, it wasn t on the table.
3
SPEAKER_00
People ask me that in interviews, like, when did you know you were going to be an actor?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did you act all through high school?
3
SPEAKER_00
I m like, you didn t go to my high school.
3
SPEAKER_00
I had to get my ass kicked in the parking lot every day.
3
SPEAKER_02
Not an option.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s how I felt.
3
SPEAKER_02
For a long time after I left Carlisle, Kentucky, being a writer was not an option.
3
SPEAKER_02
Saying I am a writer, I couldn t imagine it.
3
SPEAKER_02
I needed to be something real and practical.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I just wrote and all that time I was traveling around, I was still writing and I wrote poems in French.
3
SPEAKER_02
God, they re probably terrible.
3
SPEAKER_02
But I was writing and processing and I think what hit me in Tucson is I didn t have a voice.
3
SPEAKER_02
I wasn t from anywhere.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t have any authority.
3
SPEAKER_02
I was writing short stories set in Tucson, and they just felt fake, just as fake as those French stories that I wrote.
3
SPEAKER_02
There was no authenticity.
3
SPEAKER_02
And also, honestly, I had internalized the shame of being hillbilly.
3
SPEAKER_02
I mean, we haven t even started on that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no, we re getting there.
3
SPEAKER_02
But just as I didn t understand I was white until I went to the Congo.
3
SPEAKER_02
I didn t understand I was a hillbilly until I went to college in a state where people stopped me in the cafeteria and made me say words so that they could laugh at me.
3
SPEAKER_00
W-A-S-H.
3
SPEAKER_02
Warsh.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
And syrup.
3
SPEAKER_02
What s this syrup?
3
SPEAKER_00
Smells like a polecat.
3
SPEAKER_00
What?
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, just mocking my accent and saying, oh, you re wearing shoes, how cute.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I just kind of erased that.
3
SPEAKER_02
The accent you re hearing now, I code shift.
3
SPEAKER_02
When I m in Kentucky or when I m at home, when I m talking to my neighbors, I talk the way I spoke growing up.
3
SPEAKER_02
But little by little and not really intentionally, I just neutralized my affect.
3
SPEAKER_00
For sure.
3
SPEAKER_02
So that people will listen to what you re saying instead of stopping at the words.
3
SPEAKER_00
Really quick, you re arriving at a place that artists have to arrive at, which is you first start by trying to emulate things that you
4
SPEAKER_03
yourself find captivating or romantic and you can t succeed at it and then hopefully the road leads you to believing actually my version is worthy of telling and my voice is worthy of listening to
4
SPEAKER_03
And that s such a crazy road.
4
SPEAKER_01
I agree with you completely.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I d take it a step further.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to get to, I do have something to say.
4
SPEAKER_01
My voice is worthy.
4
SPEAKER_01
Furthermore, it s the only thing I ve got.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s your only true asset.
4
SPEAKER_01
And if all you have out there are antennae for what you think people want from you, you got nothing.
4
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely nothing.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s where I was for a long time.
4
SPEAKER_01
And when I was maybe starting to take my writing a little more seriously, even though I still hid it through grad school, but I was writing poems and starting to share them and starting to share stories.
4
SPEAKER_03
You re also writing for the school paper, you re doing science related.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, my first job after graduate school was as a scientific writer, just talking to scientists and translating what they said into English that other people could read.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the, what do you call it, when I fell down on the road to Damascus was, does that play?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I love it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Beautiful.
4
SPEAKER_01
Very poetic.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was becoming aware that I had no authentic voice somehow.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like the cogs weren t catching.
4
SPEAKER_01
And somebody gave me a collection of short stories called Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbi Ann Mason.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you know Bobbi Ann Mason?
4
SPEAKER_03
Never read, never heard of.
4
SPEAKER_01
Alright.
4
SPEAKER_01
She s Kentuckian.
4
SPEAKER_01
This collection, which would have been released early 80s, was quite renowned.
4
SPEAKER_01
People really paid attention.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was kind of the minimalist era.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was sort of a little like... Raymond Carver, were you about to say?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, ask a little after that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But she s from Western Kentucky.
4
SPEAKER_01
And all of her short stories were about people who worked in Kmart, and they did shift work, and they were my people.
4
SPEAKER_01
These stories were beautiful and they were respected.
4
SPEAKER_01
How inspirational.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was, like the scales fell from my eyes.
4
SPEAKER_01
It just really happened all at once.
4
SPEAKER_01
I understood what I had been- Repressing.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
The enormity of the ordinary life.
4
SPEAKER_03
And it can make the reader feel special.
4
SPEAKER_03
I remember those types of things made me feel special.
4
SPEAKER_03
Hemingway, I was like, oh, I m not in World War I. I m not going to sail a boat here.
4
SPEAKER_03
I don t catch marlins.
4
SPEAKER_03
I caught a big fish.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_03
I can t totally relate, but it s like,
4
SPEAKER_03
Oh, I know, the mundendity, the mundane being broken.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_03
I know that feeling so intimately.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it slows you down.
4
SPEAKER_01
It stops you in your own tracks and asks you to look at the lives that are being lived in your circle, in your own neighborhood, among your own people.
4
SPEAKER_01
and how brave they are, what they re dealing with, and that that s worthy.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s literature, too.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in my case, reading Bobbie Ann Mason, that I didn t need to be ashamed of my people.
4
SPEAKER_03
They could be heroes of stories.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, and they weren t ridiculous.
4
SPEAKER_01
All along, I knew better, but especially when you re young, you just internalize the shame.
4
SPEAKER_00
The world tells you something else.
4
SPEAKER_01
The world tells you that you re worthless.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I did a deep dive.
4
SPEAKER_01
I read Wendell Berry.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had been exposed before, but I hadn t really paid attention.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I read a lot of Kentucky authors.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then this collection of short stories I had been writing or trying to write set in Tucson.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I wrote a short story set in Kentucky called The One
4
SPEAKER_01
to get away.
4
SPEAKER_01
This girl in high school whose goal was to get through high school without being pregnant and get out of there.
4
SPEAKER_01
And she got this car.
4
SPEAKER_01
It had an engine.
4
SPEAKER_01
It didn t have a starter.
4
SPEAKER_01
And she drives across the country and someone puts a baby in her car.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then she gets to Tucson and she tells the whole story that I had been trying to write.
4
SPEAKER_01
with a Kentucky accent.
4
SPEAKER_01
I needed that first person Kentucky voice.
4
SPEAKER_03
And you were spelling out phonetically the accent?
4
SPEAKER_01
No, but that was the bean trees.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was my first note.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was being poetic.
4
SPEAKER_01
She needed a Kentucky accent.
4
SPEAKER_01
She needed a Kentucky identity.
4
SPEAKER_01
She needed to see things the way I saw things.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that finally worked.
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t know it was working.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was clicking for me.
4
SPEAKER_01
It felt like
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this is what I ve been trying to do.
4
SPEAKER_01
Also, ironically, while I was writing this novel about this girl who all she wanted in life was not to get pregnant and then ends up with a baby, I was pregnant.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was happily pregnant, but I really rushed that novel.
4
SPEAKER_01
I wrote it during my pregnancy because I couldn t sleep and I had all those extra hours.
4
SPEAKER_01
What a gift.
4
SPEAKER_03
Talk about making lemonade out of lemons.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t sleep very much and I call it my superpower.
4
SPEAKER_03
God, maybe I should embrace that for me too, because I m kind of just miserable half the night.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, no.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m serious about this.
4
SPEAKER_01
Embrace it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, so long as you can still function, because some people just don t need as much sleep as others.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, my doctor was saying, oh, do something really tedious that you, hey, like scrub.
4
SPEAKER_01
Literally, my doctor said, get a toothbrush and scrub the grout.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, screw that.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m writing a novel.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I did.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I sent it off to this agent right before I had my baby.
4
SPEAKER_01
And this is the amazing true fact of Barbara Kingsolver.
4
SPEAKER_01
I got my first book contract and had my first baby on the same day.
4
SPEAKER_03
On the same day.
4
SPEAKER_03
The two most pivotal moments of your life.
4
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
On the same day.
4
SPEAKER_01
Or one moment.
4
SPEAKER_03
So efficient.
4
SPEAKER_01
Twins.
4
SPEAKER_01
You birthed two.
4
SPEAKER_01
Two careers.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, the two most important things that I am.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Happened at once.
4
SPEAKER_03
The cornerstones of your identity all on the same day.
4
SPEAKER_01
And as you can imagine, I only noticed one of them at a time.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, I was like hormonal.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m the queen of the universe.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just produced a human being.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then, wait, what?
4
SPEAKER_01
I also sold my book.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_03
I want to read your journal from that day.
4
SPEAKER_01
I gave it to my daughter actually recently.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
But that s when I finally was able to say I am a writer because I sold a novel.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was finished.
4
SPEAKER_01
Very little editing.
4
SPEAKER_01
One sentence, I think, I changed.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was published and I got an advance that at the time I thought was an enormous amount of money.
4
SPEAKER_01
A billion dollars.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, right.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was enough for me to live on while I wrote another book.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that changed everything.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_03
So you re off to the races.
4
SPEAKER_03
That s 1988.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_01
The week it was released was the week my daughter learned to walk.
4
SPEAKER_03
Oh my gosh.
4
SPEAKER_03
It s all serendipitous.
4
SPEAKER_01
It is.
4
SPEAKER_03
So then you go on a tear.
4
SPEAKER_03
You have Animal Dreams in 90.
4
SPEAKER_03
You have Pigs in Heaven, which is a sequel to The Bean Trees, 93.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you know what?
4
SPEAKER_01
You re leaving out.
4
SPEAKER_01
Also, there was a collection of short stories.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I had four books in four years.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because there was a backlog.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had stuff I had been working on before that I just brought out of the closet and said, well, guess what?
4
SPEAKER_03
You guys like what I m writing, here s some more.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was able to get a bunch of books out pretty efficiently in those early years because I could just live from advanced to advanced.
4
SPEAKER_01
I did some other work, some other freelance work, which was good for me, I think, to be a journalist, but I didn t have to go back to a day job.
4
SPEAKER_01
You did the thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
You were supporting yourself.
4
SPEAKER_01
You weren t an indentured servant.
4
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had my own money.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
I could be an artist and be independent.
4
SPEAKER_01
Independent.
4
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_03
I m only going to fast forward because I want to spend a lot of time on Demon Copperhead.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think my publicist would agree with you on that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Would like that.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_03
I don t know if your publicist has told you, but Monica and I have already talked about Demon Copperhead.
4
SPEAKER_03
I bet you 40 times in the last seven months.
4
SPEAKER_00
I get these DMs from time to time.
4
SPEAKER_00
Armchair Expert really likes your book.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m glad it made its way to you.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s good.
4
SPEAKER_03
Life-wise, I just want to throw in there that in 94, you get
4
SPEAKER_03
Married to an ornithologist.
4
SPEAKER_03
We just had this incredible owl expert.
4
SPEAKER_03
Oh, yeah, and we got really deep into bird watchers ornithologists Wait, who was on Jennifer Ackerman?
4
SPEAKER_03
Do you know Jennifer Ackerman?
4
SPEAKER_03
I don t know her personally, but I know her work in that conversation She was very much drawn to bird watching and I said do you think if we had to generalize our stereotype the ornithologists and bird watchers are people who
4
SPEAKER_03
Very little stimuli gets them excited.
4
SPEAKER_03
In fact, probably pretty sensitive to too much stimuli.
4
SPEAKER_03
Is this the case with Steven?
4
SPEAKER_03
Was that true of him?
4
SPEAKER_01
He s also a rock and roll musician.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
4
SPEAKER_01
It goes right out the window.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like when I met him.
4
SPEAKER_03
We got to throw out the whole theory.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m the front man of a band and a professor of psychology.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he kind of does a lot of things like me.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s a polymath.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s very sexy.
4
SPEAKER_00
A rock and roll star and a professor?
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right, yeah, exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re gonna implode.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, no, he s the perfect guy.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s awesome.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that s wonderful.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, I forgot what was the question.
4
SPEAKER_03
I just wanted to update on this story before we landed even.
4
SPEAKER_03
I just want to mention that you marry an ornithologist.
4
SPEAKER_03
You have a second daughter.
4
SPEAKER_03
98, you write, or is released, the Poisonwood Bible.
4
SPEAKER_03
And that one gets a ton of attention.
4
SPEAKER_03
You meet Oprah for the first time.
4
SPEAKER_03
You re shortlisted for the Pulitzer and the Faulkner Award.
4
SPEAKER_03
Oh, man.
4
SPEAKER_03
You re very cemented at this point as a real titan in this space.
4
SPEAKER_03
So, I m saying all this to tell you and to admit to you my insane ignorance on you.
4
SPEAKER_03
before I read Demon Copperhead.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s not insane.
4
SPEAKER_03
I didn t know of you.
4
SPEAKER_03
It goes deeper.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_01
How can it be deeper than you know nothing?
4
SPEAKER_03
Oh, watch this.
4
SPEAKER_03
And I m going to name drop here.
4
SPEAKER_03
But Kevin Bacon, having dinner with him, and he goes, you know, I don t read books.
4
SPEAKER_03
I wish I liked them.
4
SPEAKER_03
I just don t like them.
4
SPEAKER_03
But man, I read this fucking book, Demon Copperhead.
4
SPEAKER_03
I can t believe how much I love this book.
4
SPEAKER_03
He gave such a sales pitch that I went home that night and I was
5
SPEAKER_00
I went on Audible, I typed in Demon Copperhead, it came up, I began, I didn t even look who wrote it.
5
SPEAKER_02
Who cares, doesn t matter who wrote it.
5
SPEAKER_00
At that moment, it didn t.
5
SPEAKER_02
I feel like it happened here, didn t it?
5
SPEAKER_00
It did, I m gonna walk her through that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Other prerequisite knowledge you must know is that I fucking hated the Hillbilly Elegy.
5
SPEAKER_01
Thank you.
5
SPEAKER_00
I fucking hated it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Monica and I had a bunch of arguments.
5
SPEAKER_00
I was screaming from the rooftop.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is a fraudulent account of all of this.
5
SPEAKER_00
The person wasn t there.
5
SPEAKER_00
They didn t experience any of this.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is bullshit.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the one good thing about him running and winning the position he has now is it s proof.
5
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
He s not one of us.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s the only thing that ultimately Monica had to
5
SPEAKER_02
I had to really eat my shorts or whatever that phrase is.
5
SPEAKER_02
We had a lot of arguments around that, because he was like, I don t buy it.
5
SPEAKER_02
I know that world.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I m also from the South.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m from Georgia.
5
SPEAKER_02
So I was like, well, you can t assume just because it wasn t your experience.
5
SPEAKER_02
Like, we had so many debates.
5
SPEAKER_02
We had a lot of debates about it, right?
5
SPEAKER_02
And then I had to be like, God, you were right.
5
SPEAKER_01
This fraud.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s his worldview.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
5
SPEAKER_01
Here s my complaint about that book.
5
SPEAKER_01
We don t even have to say the name of it.
5
SPEAKER_01
He s entitled to write his memoir.
5
SPEAKER_01
The fact that that got pitched and bought wholesale as my memoir too.
5
SPEAKER_01
And your memoir too.
5
SPEAKER_01
The explanation of a people makes me so mad because he had no context.
5
SPEAKER_01
He didn t talk about structural poverty.
5
SPEAKER_01
He didn t talk about the history of this region.
5
SPEAKER_00
It was a self-aggrandizement of his enormous accomplishment.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, it was like bootstraps.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I went to the Ivy League.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you only work hard enough, you can be... And the thing is, what s heartbreaking about it is that it really validated the stereotype.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was so widely... Sorry.
5
SPEAKER_01
No.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ve already eaten your shoulder.
5
SPEAKER_01
So embraced by the rest of America because they want to hate on hillbillies.
5
SPEAKER_01
They want to look down on us.
5
SPEAKER_01
We are the last class of people that progressive people get to make fun of.
5
SPEAKER_02
There s also a poll.
5
SPEAKER_02
Humans love a quote, underdog.
5
SPEAKER_02
People love an underdog story.
5
SPEAKER_02
And that s what it.
5
SPEAKER_02
felt like a little bit, which is very problematic because it s, again, this model minority issue where... Also, he s pretending he s Basquiat and he s not.
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right.
5
SPEAKER_02
It makes people believe, oh, well, if he can do it, what s wrong with everybody else?
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
And that s wholly wrong.
5
SPEAKER_01
A lot of us recognize structural racism, institutional racism, but structural classism is just not talked about.
5
SPEAKER_00
We just had Kerry Washington on and she had two different jumping into different world experiences.
5
SPEAKER_00
One was her school was moved because they didn t want the white kids to have to bust into the Bronx.
5
SPEAKER_00
So they sent everyone to this Italian neighborhood.
5
SPEAKER_00
So that was her first kind of cultural clash.
5
SPEAKER_00
Then she ended up going to this very, very, very expensive on a scholarship Manhattan school.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I asked her,
5
SPEAKER_00
What was a bigger chasm?
5
SPEAKER_00
The racial divide you experienced when you went to the lower class Italian neighborhood or the socioeconomic one you experienced?
5
SPEAKER_00
And she said tenfold the socioeconomic one.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, that is the enormous thing that no one wants to really sink their teeth into.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s maddening.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s right, because America is the classless society.
5
SPEAKER_01
We really, really bought that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the fallacy of meritocracy.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I didn t write Demon Copperhead as an answer to anything.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to give that guy credit for it.
5
SPEAKER_01
But when I read that, I was so angry about the lack of context that it gave me this hunger to write the great Appalachian novel.
5
SPEAKER_01
I wanted to somehow tell the whole story of what made us this way.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s the poorest hunk of America.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a big chunk of America that has really terrible unemployment, terrible rates of disability, and so many things stacked against us.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not because we re lazy.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I can walk you through how we got that way.
5
SPEAKER_01
The coal companies literally bought everything, including the schools, including the courthouses.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, talk about a company town.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a company region.
5
SPEAKER_01
They deliberately kept out all other kinds of employment.
5
SPEAKER_01
So people had to work in the mines.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then when the mine stopped employing people, then there s nothing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And likewise, the coal companies deliberately suppressed the culture of education.
5
SPEAKER_01
They still do.
5
SPEAKER_01
In Kentucky, it s even hard to explain how stigmatizing it was to be smart.
5
SPEAKER_01
I grew up hiding
5
SPEAKER_01
my brains.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know about that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you re like a rich kid.
5
SPEAKER_01
Nobody knows any rich people, so there s no frame of reference for that.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like, who do you think you are?
5
SPEAKER_01
You re not better than me.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s cultural.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that comes from a history of these companies that didn t want people to be smart and a family culture where they don t want you to go to college because then you ll leave home and they ll never see you again.
5
SPEAKER_01
So it s all of a piece.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not about laziness.
5
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, I wanted to write that novel and my point of entry
5
SPEAKER_01
into it I knew would be the opioid epidemic, because that s just this freight train of exploitation, starting with timber, pulling out the timber, then pulling out the coal, then tobacco.
5
SPEAKER_01
The fact that Purdue Pharma looked at data and they targeted us, our exact region.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s very parallel to the crack epidemic of the 80s and the victims of that.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, the most vulnerable.
5
SPEAKER_02
Wait, so finish.
5
SPEAKER_00
Okay, great.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because I think you ll get a kick out of this.
5
SPEAKER_00
It involves my hubris.
5
SPEAKER_00
I get this book.
5
SPEAKER_00
I come on here.
5
SPEAKER_00
I start talking about it all the time.
5
SPEAKER_00
And here s what I am saying repeatedly on here.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is so epic because I m wrong on like nine accounts.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I m like, boy, this book s the opposite of Hillbilly Algae.
5
SPEAKER_00
Whoever wrote this book was in those situations.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like I was in those situations.
5
SPEAKER_00
I had the violent stepdads.
5
SPEAKER_00
I had the young mother addiction across the board in the family.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m like, now this is an authentic.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m like, this is someone who lived it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ve been going on for a while.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t know at what point it occurs to Monica.
5
SPEAKER_02
We re like real time and I m like, who, okay.
5
SPEAKER_02
I look it up and I was like, oh, it s Barbara Kingsolver.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m like, wait, it s a woman.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_02
And not just a woman, like one of the biggest authors of our time.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m like, it s a woman.
5
SPEAKER_00
So wait, she s not a boy.
5
SPEAKER_00
That is how insanely good your book is.
5
SPEAKER_00
I honestly was on this mission to explain to everyone that
5
SPEAKER_00
This is what happens when an author actually has lived the thing and blah, blah, blah, and it turns out I m completely wrong.
5
SPEAKER_00
I then become actually more fascinated with you because now, and here lies most of my questions.
5
SPEAKER_00
Okay, let s just talk about really quick, because it s at the beginning of the book.
5
SPEAKER_00
You meet the boyfriend.
5
SPEAKER_00
The boyfriend s always a salesman.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then once they buy us,
5
SPEAKER_00
then they re an authoritarian.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like the most specific transition.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s all these clues.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m in that single wide when that s happening.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, I can remember the days.
5
SPEAKER_00
So how do you know that?
5
SPEAKER_00
How on earth do you know what I lived?
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you know how you know it?
5
SPEAKER_01
Here s the thing about being an author.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s so much better than being an athlete or a model or maybe even an actor because you get better with age.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s no cap.
5
SPEAKER_01
The older you get, the more things you ve been, the more lives you ve had.
5
SPEAKER_01
You have wisdom.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think what we really go to literature for is wisdom.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we want entertainment, but really we want to come through it kind of knowing more about life.
5
SPEAKER_01
The longer you live, the more of that you have to offer, the more scar tissue.
5
SPEAKER_01
I remember when I was young looking at old people, old people being like 40 probably, and thinking, well, they ve always been old, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, of course.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I mean, I just think you still do.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I ve seen on social media, how does this grandma person know what it s like to be a teenager?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know what?
5
SPEAKER_01
I was.
5
SPEAKER_01
What am I allowed to say on here?
5
SPEAKER_00
Everything you want.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
Goddammit.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was a fucking teenager.
5
SPEAKER_01
There we go.
5
SPEAKER_01
I remember being 13 much better than I remember being 35.
5
SPEAKER_01
The same.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right?
5
SPEAKER_00
The same.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s so foundational.
5
SPEAKER_01
You feel things so intensely.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s so many firsts.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re seared in.
5
SPEAKER_01
I still have a teenager in me.
5
SPEAKER_01
I have all of those people I ve ever been still in me.
5
SPEAKER_01
Many of them very unhappy.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m a happy person now, but all those unhappinesses are still in there.
5
SPEAKER_01
All of those terrible relationships that I feel lucky to have survived, they re in there.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I remember them.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ve read that actors, when you have a part, you think about the parts of you that relate to that part.
5
SPEAKER_01
I do the same.
5
SPEAKER_01
I haven t been a boy.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s the one thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
I can t tell you that I have been a boy, but I have two daughters, nine years apart.
5
SPEAKER_01
So what that means is for the better part of two decades, I had teenage boys in my house.
5
SPEAKER_01
Just saying.
5
SPEAKER_01
I know what they do, I know how they think.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s more of Demon in me than you might imagine, particularly two things about him.
5
SPEAKER_01
One is his sense of never belonging anywhere, the imposter syndrome.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, finally, we have a word for this for my whole life.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve thought, I wonder if anybody else feels like
5
SPEAKER_01
They re going to come any minute.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re going to come over here and say, you don t belong in this party.
5
SPEAKER_01
Leave.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, turns out, yes, there s a name for that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Can we add the thing I related to, and this is pretty arrogant to say, but it s the truth.
5
SPEAKER_00
I was observing adults acting worse.
5
SPEAKER_00
than I knew was right, and in ways I felt more mature than them, and I knew what was right and wrong more.
5
SPEAKER_00
I felt a little special about that.
5
SPEAKER_00
I felt it in him, whether I projected that or not, I felt like he was seeing
6
SPEAKER_00
everything.
6
SPEAKER_00
He wasn t a kid that was confused by this.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, he knew what the score was.
6
SPEAKER_00
He was in on it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s alienating and isolating in its own way.
6
SPEAKER_01
It is.
6
SPEAKER_01
Unless, I mean, he kind of belongs to an underclass of kids who have to be the adults because they don t have any adults in their lives.
6
SPEAKER_02
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I don t know that he felt special about it.
6
SPEAKER_01
It was just like, yeah, I m the one that gets mom to work on time.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m the one who finds her keys under the toilet.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know intuitively that that s the adults that are supposed to be doing that, not you.
6
SPEAKER_00
So when you re doing it, there s something that you feel older than your age.
6
SPEAKER_00
I felt, I should say.
6
SPEAKER_01
OK, well, it s a little complicated in this novel because he is telling you the story from the advanced age of maybe 25 or something.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he s in his early 20s.
6
SPEAKER_01
But he s telling you it s a hero s journey.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the good thing about that is, you know, he s going to survive.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh, man, I got to tell you, there are a bunch of times in the book I m like, how is this person still telling this story?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
But he was, so I gave you that.
6
SPEAKER_02
It had to be in first person.
6
SPEAKER_02
I don t know that people would be able to get through if they didn t know that.
6
SPEAKER_02
Right, exactly.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s a promise.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t like to read books, especially where children are in peril, especially after becoming a parent.
6
SPEAKER_01
I turn pages and look ahead to see if the kid s still alive.
6
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, I needed to give you that promise.
6
SPEAKER_01
So there is a little bit more maturity in the voice.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there are moments in the book where he breaks the fourth wall.
6
SPEAKER_01
He talks directly to the reader saying, can you believe we did that?
6
SPEAKER_01
And here s the deal, he says.
6
SPEAKER_01
I know what you re thinking, but look, this is what we had to work with.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I see what you re saying about his sense of himself as being maybe special.
6
SPEAKER_00
The otherness I think is in there somewhere.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think when he feels like life is perfect because he s just playing the creek with his best friend maggot and mom s up there with her mellow yellow and her cigarettes saying, don t y all put your eyes out with sticks and that s perfect.
6
SPEAKER_01
Life is great.
6
SPEAKER_01
And never mind that he s the one who s keeping his mom sober and getting her to work.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t think he feels especially, you know, victimized.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, victimized by that.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s just kind of how life is.
6
SPEAKER_01
And he does have Mrs. Paget feeding him when he s hungry and stuff.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think it s later adolescence changes his circumstances in many ways, but when he talks about going to Jonesville Middle School and he feels like a hundred years older than these other kids his same age because they ve had an easier life.
6
SPEAKER_01
They don t know what money is.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s actually been a wage laborer for several years already when he s 13.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so he can t believe the way they throw away money and he calls them blind puppies.
6
SPEAKER_01
So that s when I think he becomes more self-aware, which is common in teenagers.
6
SPEAKER_00
What I think a lot of folks too that haven t been in that situation don t recognize is that we re aware you think we re gross.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like in my town, I know you think I m gross.
6
SPEAKER_00
And at some point that s a bonding thing between me and all my friends.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then also a pride, like you care about that and we don t and fuck you and we do stuff that you can t do.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you cobble together some esteem
6
SPEAKER_01
from the solidarity of your victimhood.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he addresses that directly several times when he talks about hillbillies.
6
SPEAKER_01
And this is the truth.
6
SPEAKER_01
People from my region, where I still live in Appalachia, we see ourselves portrayed on TV and in film, on the news.
6
SPEAKER_01
If at all we see ourselves as a joke, a stupid hillbilly joke, or a poverty documentary, that s it.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s not just Appalachia, it s rural people in general.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s this urban elite laughing,
6
SPEAKER_00
coastal people.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s everywhere.
6
SPEAKER_01
There are late night comedians I can t watch because I know it s going to be only 30 seconds till the Tennessee joke.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think this is really important to think about and talk about because it s at the heart of the political polarization.
6
SPEAKER_01
That kind of condescension, when you feel it day after day from the national media that you re seeing,
6
SPEAKER_01
You reach a point, I mean, I don t vote the same way as some of my neighbors, but I get them.
6
SPEAKER_01
You feel that the system is so stacked against you that nobody s listening to you.
6
SPEAKER_01
You feel so invisible.
6
SPEAKER_01
You ll vote for the guy who just says, I m going to blow up the system.
6
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
6
SPEAKER_00
You have the most beautiful analogy in the book.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I remember when I was reading it, I was so emotional, which is,
6
SPEAKER_00
Imagine being in the stall of the bathroom at school and the other kids come in and you can hear them all making fun of you and attacking you and belittling you.
6
SPEAKER_00
That is exactly what it s like.
6
SPEAKER_00
We can hear you.
6
SPEAKER_00
We can hear you.
6
SPEAKER_00
We see you.
6
SPEAKER_00
That broke my heart for everyone that s grown up in that onslaught of endless punchlines.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s still going on.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I would say it s worse now than it was five years ago, because there s this kind of vindication.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like, see, those stupid people voted for that stupid guy.
6
SPEAKER_01
So we feel validated in our hatred.
6
SPEAKER_01
If we felt a little guilty before for our condescension, now we don t have to.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, because it s life or death now.
6
SPEAKER_00
It is us against them.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I m in an interesting position as a rural person, as an Appalachian who has a platform.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s pretty important to me to use it to say, this is life and death.
6
SPEAKER_01
We need to have a lot of conversations across these divides.
6
SPEAKER_01
And people only take information from those they trust.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s all.
6
SPEAKER_01
So if you open the conversation with, I m going to tell you stuff, you idiot.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Then that s over.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
I just disagreed with someone who said they don t think all Republicans are this or that.
6
SPEAKER_00
They just don t have the right information.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I said, well, what you re saying is if they were as educated as you, they would think like you.
6
SPEAKER_00
Not that, A, people think differently, regardless of education.
6
SPEAKER_00
There are differences of opinion.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s different dopamine levels.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s different everything.
6
SPEAKER_01
And different priorities.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think a lot of my liberal friends think, well, if everyone was as educated as I, they would have no choice but to think exactly how I do.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they would put their career ahead of their families, as I do.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they would work 90-hour work weeks, as I do.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_01
Nope.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right, right.
6
SPEAKER_00
They would value all the same stuff I value.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don t like it.
6
SPEAKER_02
Also, I do want to say, we left, you said you related to him in two ways, and we didn t get to the second one.
6
SPEAKER_00
God, you re good at that.
6
SPEAKER_00
You are so good at that.
6
SPEAKER_00
She saves us all the time.
6
SPEAKER_01
Okay, the one is the burden of his feeling like he is not wanted anywhere.
6
SPEAKER_01
Just nobody ever comes through for him.
6
SPEAKER_01
He feels like every place he goes, they re not gonna want to keep me.
6
SPEAKER_01
The good thing about Demon is he has this resilience.
6
SPEAKER_01
No matter what, there s something in him that s going to figure it out.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s going to get out of here.
6
SPEAKER_01
He doesn t stop moving.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s going to work on it.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s going to learn Morse code and he s going to read the Britannica.
6
SPEAKER_01
There you go.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s me too.
6
SPEAKER_01
This conversation that he has when he goes to this new school and this counselor who turns out to be really important in his life, Mr. Armstrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
He s read his DSS files that go back forever.
6
SPEAKER_01
And he says, well, one thing I can say about you, Damon, is that you re resilient.
6
SPEAKER_01
And Damon says, are you going to give me drugs for that?
6
SPEAKER_01
He thinks it s another diagnosis.
6
SPEAKER_01
And in a way it is.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I feel like I share that with Demon.
6
SPEAKER_01
I ve been through some really bad times, bad situations, hard situations, and there s something in me that doesn t give up, that really thinks there s a way to get through this.
6
SPEAKER_01
And furthermore, you know how the things that are easy for us, we wonder why they re hard for other people.
6
SPEAKER_01
I look around at other people and think,
6
SPEAKER_01
Just get on it, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
Stand up.
6
SPEAKER_00
Start moving.
6
SPEAKER_01
Just deal.
6
SPEAKER_01
If you re mad, do something.
6
SPEAKER_01
I very much share that capacity.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that capacity in Demon is what makes him readable and maybe lovable.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m very deliberate about this.
6
SPEAKER_01
I knew what I wanted to write about and where I wanted to take the reader.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s not an easy place to go.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s a horrible, hard place to go.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I knew that most of all, you d have to love this kid so much.
6
SPEAKER_01
And he had to be a kid.
6
SPEAKER_01
That was the answer.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I spent two years trying to just figure out how to crack into this story.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that was the answer.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let the kid tell the story because people will go there with a kid.
6
SPEAKER_01
He ll get your heart and you ll get in there.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, once he s an adult, he s at fault.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
You look around with your judgment, like, well, that person s made these choices and it s their fault.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_02
You get to see from the beginning how he didn t make any choices.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
He was given none.
6
SPEAKER_01
He just used the tools at hand.
6
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, it s that American meritocracy, isn t it?
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like, if you re not in a good place, you must have done something to put yourself there.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because if you were smart enough or hardworking enough, you d be rich or a senator from Ohio or whatever.
6
SPEAKER_00
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
6
SPEAKER_00
How did you get so knowledgeable on the addiction stuff?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because again, also I m an ex-opioid addict, so this thing just was a bullseye for me.
6
SPEAKER_00
It just really couldn t, every single patient was like, okay, good, here we go, I know this too.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m really sorry.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I know.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, but I mean, I m just saying, I m sorry.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t feel like I deserve that, but I appreciate you saying that.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s a terrible, terrible disease.
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you familiarize yourself?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me also say as the reader,
7
SPEAKER_01
As his own issues start burbling up, I go, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don t want this.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then I go, yeah, of course, duh.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s no way.
7
SPEAKER_01
It would be such a fucking lie if he didn t.
7
SPEAKER_01
I know the comfort that comes.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re not going to not accept that comfort.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so.
7
SPEAKER_01
I just hated it.
7
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And I was like, and it s the absolute truth.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re not going to be the child of an addict with that kind of trauma kicked around in the foster care.
7
SPEAKER_01
You look at any one of these aces, he s in the eights and nines.
7
SPEAKER_01
He s got an 85% chance of becoming an addict at this point.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
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And by the time he s a young teenager, pretty much everybody he knows is using everybody.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s the truth.
7
SPEAKER_01
And the other thing you nailed is these varying degrees where you can kind of go like, well, I m not so bad because this person doing this and everyone s kind of playing the same relative game.
7
SPEAKER_00
Except the ones like poor Dory, who s just given in.
7
SPEAKER_01
Junkies, like full on, yes, we re going to shoot dope.
7
SPEAKER_00
But there s this in-between sort of semi-functional and it s such hard work.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there are so many things that I wanted to help bring some compassion because that was my starting point.
7
SPEAKER_00
I live in Southwest Virginia, which was targeted by Purdue Pharma, Lee County.
7
SPEAKER_01
Same setting as Dope Sick.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, my older daughter is a mental health therapist and she works with teenagers.
7
SPEAKER_00
She s seen it all and it was because of her work that I became aware.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you can t not be aware.
7
SPEAKER_01
You were probably seeing it, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
When you were living there, people nodding off in grocery stores.
7
SPEAKER_00
I still live there.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, I m saying at the height of it, were you probably bumping up against it a lot?
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the height of it hasn t passed is the thing.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because it s a whole generation of these opioid orphans who are coming up through the system.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so among all of my friends and acquaintances where I live, I don t know a single family that hasn t lost somebody to overdose.
7
SPEAKER_01
I try to stay apolitical on here because who gives a shit?
7
SPEAKER_01
But I will say the only time I ever, ever, ever saw Trump misstep was when he made fun of Biden for having this
7
SPEAKER_01
No, no.
7
SPEAKER_01
He misstepped a ton.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, no, no, no.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, let me be very clear.
7
SPEAKER_00
I just want to be.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, no.
7
SPEAKER_01
He was right.
7
SPEAKER_01
He could shoot someone in the middle of the street and his base would still love him.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s what I m saying.
7
SPEAKER_01
He never violated the contract he had with his own base.
7
SPEAKER_00
With his people.
7
SPEAKER_00
He misstepped with his people.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes, yes.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
The only time I ever saw it happen is when he made fun of Biden for having a son with an addiction.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that was the first time I felt the base go like, eh.
7
SPEAKER_01
Slow down.
7
SPEAKER_00
Wait a minute.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, whoa, that s really telling how pandemic this is.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
And making fun of anybody else didn t do it.
7
SPEAKER_00
Even prisoners of war.
7
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I didn t lose them, but that one people didn t like.
7
SPEAKER_00
And for people who are outside of the epidemic, I wanted to try to reach across that gulf, this failure of empathy.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, I don t blame anybody.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a brainwash.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s been 50 years of the so-called war on drugs, literally taught kids in school that criminals use drugs, bad people use drugs, lazy people use drugs, because you could just say no.
7
SPEAKER_00
And this indoctrination has left us with this cultural
7
SPEAKER_00
gulf between people who have been consumed by this disease and their families and the people who are lucky enough to be untouched and just blame the victims.
7
SPEAKER_00
And treating this disease as if it could be cured by incarceration, it s just sickening to those of us who live there.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I knew I wanted to bring people into this really hard life to show people how hard
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, laziness, it s really hard work to be an addict.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s a chapter that just takes you through his day, how hard it is to wake up and find your means and find your connect.
7
SPEAKER_01
I ve been my most creative.
7
SPEAKER_01
I ve worked my hardest in pursuit of that.
7
SPEAKER_00
Addiction is not for the lazy.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s really true.
7
SPEAKER_00
And once you have that disease, the only thing you can do is stay alive.
7
SPEAKER_00
Just do all the things you do every day to stay alive.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re not chasing a high.
7
SPEAKER_00
Many people never were.
7
SPEAKER_01
Sounds like you had some help from your daughter.
7
SPEAKER_00
I did.
7
SPEAKER_00
She helped me to connect me with people I could talk with at DSS and the foster care system so I could learn how all that works.
7
SPEAKER_00
But as far as really being inside the experience of addiction, I needed to go and just sit with people who would tell me their stories, and a lot of them.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I made friends with Dr. Art Van Zee, who runs a clinic in Lee County, who most of his practice is treating people in recovery.
7
SPEAKER_00
He s been in a few of the docs.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
In fact, I resisted watching Dopesick for a good while because I didn t want to see these friends of mine being played by, you know, actors.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I ultimately did and it was great.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s tremendous.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s tremendous, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
And Beth Macy is a friend and I think she s done a wonderful job.
7
SPEAKER_00
Her next book is also really good, Raising Lazarus.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s about treatment and the gaps in the gulfs and how little help there is for people in our region.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I made friends with Dr. Van Zee.
7
SPEAKER_00
I told him what I was doing and he was very supportive.
7
SPEAKER_00
And he said, let me send an email to my patients and see if I can get people to talk with you.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that worked out.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so I just spent hours and hours and hours sitting down with people.
7
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who were wonderfully forthcoming.
7
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know what to expect.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you ve not spent time in rooms of AA or NA, it d probably knock you on your ass how honest people are, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, how people want a hearing, you know, just want to talk about it and just saying, ask me anything, just to have a sympathetic ear.
7
SPEAKER_00
Very, very helpful.
7
SPEAKER_00
There wasn t any format.
7
SPEAKER_00
I just usually would sit down
7
SPEAKER_00
with the person and say, this is what I m doing.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m not going to write about you.
7
SPEAKER_00
I will not tell anybody anything about you.
7
SPEAKER_00
I just want to know what your life has been like.
7
SPEAKER_00
the worst of it, the best of it, everything.
7
SPEAKER_00
How d you get there?
7
SPEAKER_00
How d you get out?
7
SPEAKER_00
And just let the tape roll.
7
SPEAKER_00
What stunned me, even though I thought I knew a good deal, what stunned me is how many stories began with a prescription from the doc who said, set your clock, don t miss a pill, because that s what Perdue told them.
7
SPEAKER_00
The so-called studies that Purdue gave them that said, no, no, there s no way that this will be addictive.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so on doctor s orders, they took the pills on schedule and when they got to the end of the bottle, they were addicted.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then 10 years of a life lost because of that.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, when I interview people, I would stop and say, and then how did that feel?
7
SPEAKER_00
And how did your head feel?
7
SPEAKER_00
And how d your stomach feel?
7
SPEAKER_00
And just, if you don t mind saying what were the worst symptoms, how does it feel when you re dope sick?
7
SPEAKER_00
And everybody has a different description, but ultimately you get the picture of how that feels physically.
7
SPEAKER_00
Just putting myself in their position.
7
SPEAKER_00
So a lot of talking and every symptom just about that someone described, I ve thought, okay, I ve had that.
7
SPEAKER_01
Usually from food poisoning.
7
SPEAKER_01
Usually from food poisoning.
7
SPEAKER_00
Or combined food poisoning, no sleep for four days and, you know, a broken limb or something, like put that all together.
7
SPEAKER_00
You did a great, great job.
7
SPEAKER_00
It just gave me so much compassion to imagine having that disease and having people spit on you and saying, why did you do that?
7
SPEAKER_01
The last thing I want to point out that seems impossible, you could have done it this well.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I want to talk about the context.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m curious how much thought went into this.
7
SPEAKER_01
What I really, really appreciated is I think there would have been a big temptation in our current society to handle the boys burgeoning adolescence and sexuality in a way of what should be versus what actually is.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I think it was such an accurate portrayal of how fucking horny we are.
7
SPEAKER_01
We re so horny and how preoccupied you are and how every conversation with every guy you ever had.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, 80% of your brain power is in that zone for like four years.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I was delighted that you didn t try to do a fucking self-actualized version of it or what society should be.
7
SPEAKER_00
What would that have been?
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t even know.
7
SPEAKER_01
People would do it.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think people would be afraid to do what you did with the boy s sexuality.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think at this point in our history, I found that to be refreshingly brave.
7
SPEAKER_00
But that s where fiction can save you a little bit, because you re not saying, you know, what are they going to say?
7
SPEAKER_00
They re going to be like, well, that s a character.
7
SPEAKER_01
Did any of that cross your mind?
7
SPEAKER_00
No, it didn t.
7
SPEAKER_00
I just was going for authenticity.
7
SPEAKER_00
And once I got this character in my head, once he started talking to me, I don t want to say he took over because I mean, I m fully responsible for all of it.
7
SPEAKER_00
I know this.
7
SPEAKER_01
Should we take that Pulitzer away?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it in the wrong study?
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you even know what I m saying?
7
SPEAKER_01
Does that make any sense?
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, he was really horny.
7
SPEAKER_00
Honestly, I m gonna tell you, those sensations are not alien to teenage girls either.
7
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t think they re alien.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, I m not suggesting that.
7
SPEAKER_00
Teenage girls also can be preoccupied.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I think boys suffer physical blue ball suffering that they had, and giving him that older girl that did the phone sex and tortured him,
7
SPEAKER_01
There s some suffering involved.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
I guess what I was conscious of always is that I have to keep the reader on board with Demon.
7
SPEAKER_00
I can t have him lose his audience.
7
SPEAKER_00
You really have to go there.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I thought that he could
8
SPEAKER_01
be as horny as he would really be and kind of as crude just because that s the language.
8
SPEAKER_01
But in his way, he s kind of a gentleman.
8
SPEAKER_01
When the girls are all putting underwear and stuff in his locker and he s just like, I don t want to come in at the end.
8
SPEAKER_01
I want to come in at the beginning of the car chase, not right before the car blows up.
8
SPEAKER_00
He wants the whole experience.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_02
Or even when the prostitute is trying to steal.
8
SPEAKER_02
At the truck stop?
8
SPEAKER_02
Yes, yes.
8
SPEAKER_02
And it s just like politely saying no.
8
SPEAKER_02
It s like, it s sweet.
8
SPEAKER_01
No lady.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to be Jane, no, thank you.
8
SPEAKER_00
You just nailed it for me.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s actually in the language you embraced, which is, I can see where a modern writer might think, if I m truthful about how they re talking, I m going to lose the audience.
8
SPEAKER_00
But it seems to me that you had a confidence that we would recognize that like, no, no, this is real.
8
SPEAKER_00
So you can bail, but it s kind of on you.
8
SPEAKER_00
This is the truth.
8
SPEAKER_01
He drops F-bombs every other sentence.
8
SPEAKER_01
I suppose if there was one thing I thought about dialing back was his language.
8
SPEAKER_01
Actually, I did a little bit.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, he s just so angry.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
And he s got every reason to be.
8
SPEAKER_01
But in the first draft, because I revise a lot, I rewrite everything a hundred times, every sentence is rewritten over and over again.
8
SPEAKER_01
So the first couple chapters I wrote, he was, believe it or not, even more pissed off than he is when you met him.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I realized I can t start there.
8
SPEAKER_01
I have to back up and get you on his side.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then you can see why he s so pissed off.
8
SPEAKER_01
But I think that I d written a hundred pages and I just thought, well, I ll just do a search and see how many times he says the F word.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was 174.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I thought that might be a bit much.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s two a page.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s a bit much.
8
SPEAKER_01
Let s see if I can set the goal to get it below 100.
8
SPEAKER_01
Stephen, my husband, he s always my first reader and he really responded.
8
SPEAKER_01
He s a good reader and he s an honest reader and if something isn t working for him, he ll say so.
8
SPEAKER_01
He does read fiction but it s not his favorite thing to read so that makes him a good reader because if I have him, I know I ve got a reader.
8
SPEAKER_01
But this, I think that I gave him about 19 pages and we sat on the front porch and he read it and he said, I love this guy.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so that made me happy.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Also, does anything feel better than impressing your mate?
8
SPEAKER_01
I think we re past that point.
8
SPEAKER_00
Really?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, we impress each other.
8
SPEAKER_01
What can I say?
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we both have skills.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think you can easily just be two human beings bumping into each other in the hallway.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
I just think we both get up and impress each other every day.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s a good life.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we should celebrate that.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s pretty great.
8
SPEAKER_01
Why I brought him up is the second thing he said is, this is not going to get the AP literature course adoptions.
8
SPEAKER_01
The language is probably going to keep it out of high schools, but I can t worry about that.
8
SPEAKER_01
No.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, honestly, I write with nobody looking over my shoulder.
8
SPEAKER_00
You d already come to that years ago.
8
SPEAKER_00
Years ago?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s why you re successful, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, is it?
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
You could also say that is a recipe for failure.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you go to any writing conference, which I don t, but I did for a while and I realized I don t belong here because it s all about marketing, marketing.
8
SPEAKER_01
What do people want?
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, what s working in the marketplace.
8
SPEAKER_02
You re very similar to Sedaris in that way.
8
SPEAKER_02
He just doesn t, he s like, I write for me and I don t care if people are mad or what they say.
8
SPEAKER_02
It s what we were talking about an hour ago.
8
SPEAKER_00
Six hours ago.
8
SPEAKER_01
The only thing I have is what I can say from this exact position in the universe that I inhabit.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so if I m thinking about what people want from me, that s going to get pulled.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like a point.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m sitting on a point and I can t risk getting pulled off of it.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I really do write with nobody looking over my shoulder.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t think that means that I m completely oblivious to audience.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, I mean, I try to make things clear.
8
SPEAKER_01
I ve tried to read some books.
8
SPEAKER_01
I won t name names, but there are great novels I ve tried to read and I just, I don t even know what he s talking about.
8
SPEAKER_00
And poetry.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m not that writer.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m committed to accessibility.
8
SPEAKER_01
I want to be understood.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t want readers to have to work so hard.
8
SPEAKER_00
I would imagine once you ve got stuff and you re going through your rewrite process, you are rightly going, what price do I pay for this?
8
SPEAKER_00
And what thing do I value the most in this moment?
8
SPEAKER_00
If I m going to devalue the thing I m trying hardest to do, because I want to do this little thing that I want to do, I m not going to prioritize the little thing I want to do.
8
SPEAKER_00
But not in any way that would be untrue to yourself.
8
SPEAKER_00
You would just recognize the balances.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s really more about, Stephen, as a reader, calls it bringing up the lights.
8
SPEAKER_01
He ll say, I think you need to bring up the lights on this scene.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know exactly what s going on.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because it s all so abundantly clear to me.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, that s the best thing I think other readers can do for you is tell you when you re overstating or understating.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s smart.
8
SPEAKER_00
I just had this experience where I was reading something out loud to the girls and my wife that I had written.
8
SPEAKER_00
And there was just one little throwaway line for me.
8
SPEAKER_00
It was about when I was a little kid and this boy I became friends with in my neighborhood and how he looked at your face and it didn t really feel like he was looking at your eyes and this and that.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then later, Kristen was like, so he was autistic?
8
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, no, he wasn t autistic.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, oh, okay, so that really makes you think he s, so I need to relay the same thing that was happening, but in a way that s probably less modern that makes you think immediately the boy was autistic.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s the best of what readers can do for you is just say, whatever s clear in your head here isn t being made clear in mine.
8
SPEAKER_00
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
And that s easy mistakes to make.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s not even a mistake.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of a titration to use a chemical because readers have different levels of acuity, different levels of attention.
8
SPEAKER_01
There are the readers that will read the book four times or eight times, and then there are the readers that are only mildly attentive.
8
SPEAKER_01
So you re trying to reach a medium here.
8
SPEAKER_00
bell curve of it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so that s one of the wonderful things about revision.
8
SPEAKER_01
You can keep honing it until everybody gets something and the readers that are really giving you a lot will get a lot back.
8
SPEAKER_01
So there s like always more.
8
SPEAKER_00
I hope you re putting me in that latter category.
8
SPEAKER_00
Of course, of course.
8
SPEAKER_01
Who s Barbara Kingsolver?
8
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, I like to write books that will be enjoyed on a second reading.
8
SPEAKER_01
Just like your favorite films, you want to watch them again because you know there s going to be stuff in there you missed the first time.
8
SPEAKER_02
Then how do you know when you re done?
8
SPEAKER_01
The editor says it s time.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s very hard for me.
8
SPEAKER_01
I could still be writing my first novel.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m a perfectionist.
8
SPEAKER_01
I have that disease.
8
SPEAKER_01
I revise and revise and revise.
8
SPEAKER_01
You can feel when you get to a point of diminishing returns.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I ve revised this whole manuscript and I changed a bunch of words and then changed them back, you know, when you get to that point where you kind of feel like you re there.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I m really pretty good at meeting deadlines.
8
SPEAKER_01
But when I turn in a book, it s exactly the book I want it to be.
8
SPEAKER_01
Which is why I don t read reviews because I m not the audience.
8
SPEAKER_01
This book is done as far as I m concerned.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s exactly what I wanted.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
My experience with it is over.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so whatever strengths or weaknesses other people might find in it, that s.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, this one really went your way.
8
SPEAKER_01
Actually, there were some people, I don t read them, but I get told my UK editor was really mad because one of the big UK papers accused me of writing about a place she s never been.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I live there.
8
SPEAKER_01
These are my people.
8
SPEAKER_01
So it just makes you realize that it s noise.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, Barbara, this was a blast.
8
SPEAKER_00
I feel very, very, very lucky to have gotten to talk to you about my favorite book.
8
SPEAKER_00
This has been so fun.
8
SPEAKER_01
Thank you for your support of the book and thanks for talking to all your friends about it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
8
SPEAKER_00
I hope you ll trick me again.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that was the best trick.
8
SPEAKER_00
When Monica broke it to me that it was in fact a woman and she was not a teenage boy.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, did you listen to the book?
8
SPEAKER_00
I listen to the book.
8
SPEAKER_00
I m dyslexic.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I read so slow.
8
SPEAKER_00
Most of the books, 99% of them I listen to.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s fantastic.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so, yeah, I m never holding the book.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so you don t see the author photo.
8
SPEAKER_01
There is my face right there on the back.
8
SPEAKER_01
Your name on the front.
8
SPEAKER_00
Your name s there, but it s like, I m in the chapters right away.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
And you were listening to Charlie Thurston, not me.
8
SPEAKER_01
I usually read my audio books.
8
SPEAKER_01
My publisher lets me do that.
8
SPEAKER_01
I like to do it.
8
SPEAKER_01
I like going into the studio and it s my one acting gig every two or four years.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s the Meryl Streep thing, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
8
SPEAKER_01
Her or me, one or the other.
8
SPEAKER_01
But it s kind of a catharsis for me because I ve had these characters talking to me in my head for years.
8
SPEAKER_01
And to get in the studio and replicate them and get their accents and everything as perfect as I can.
8
SPEAKER_01
I feel like it s a value-added product that I m giving my readers.
8
SPEAKER_01
But in this case, the one thing I cannot be is a boy.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so I auditioned several readers and I picked him and I was really happy he was available to do it.
8
SPEAKER_01
But that s another reason you could easily have thought that it was a male writer.
8
SPEAKER_00
It didn t help.
8
SPEAKER_00
It didn t help.
8
SPEAKER_00
But interestingly, I did not think the voice
9
SPEAKER_01
was the author.
9
SPEAKER_01
I didn t go that far.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s too good.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is a professional.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, well, thank you so much for coming in person.
9
SPEAKER_01
This was such a blast and I really can t wait to read the next thing you write.
9
SPEAKER_01
Get going.
9
SPEAKER_00
I ll be on my way.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thanks a lot for having me.
9
SPEAKER_00
This was fun.
9
SPEAKER_00
I like your space here.
9
SPEAKER_01
Thank you so much.
9
SPEAKER_01
We do too.
9
SPEAKER_00
Keep it cozy.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, it s comfy.
9
SPEAKER_01
Heavy on the knickknacks.
9
SPEAKER_01
Heavy, heavy on the knickknacks.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, if I had my own Wheaties box, I would display it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Try to hide it a little bit.
9
SPEAKER_00
You should have your own Wheaties box.
9
SPEAKER_00
We should get on top of that.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m going to talk to the folks at General Mills.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, right, right.
9
SPEAKER_00
Pulitzer, eh.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
9
SPEAKER_01
All right.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, be well, and I can t wait to see you again.
9
SPEAKER_01
Next up is the fact check.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t even care about facts, I just wanna get in their pants.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s the opposite, that it s like oily.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, I don t know about oily.
9
SPEAKER_01
It just looks very straight, like it s still a little bit wet.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m using new hair products.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, what kind?
9
SPEAKER_00
They re so good, this is a shout out.
9
SPEAKER_00
This is a little bit of an Easter egg, because look, we re in November, and you know what s approaching.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m, I m, I ve been waiting to see if you re even going to address it because you don t like doing it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Even though it s so wildly successful.
9
SPEAKER_00
I love doing it after I ve done it.
9
SPEAKER_01
There you go.
9
SPEAKER_00
As with all writing projects.
9
SPEAKER_01
I hate to write.
9
SPEAKER_01
I love to have written.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because this is dual.
9
SPEAKER_00
My gift guide, my gift guide.
9
SPEAKER_00
We re talking about my gift guide, obviously.
9
SPEAKER_00
Third.
9
SPEAKER_00
annual gift guide.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, congratulations.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s tricky because it s two things at once.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s me recommending products.
9
SPEAKER_01
Right.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then also me writing about them in a way that feels fun to me.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_01
Thus far, you ve done two very bang them up jobs.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like I actually, as you know, I use the gift.
9
SPEAKER_01
I buy everything that s on the gift guide.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I wait patiently.
9
SPEAKER_01
or impatiently for them.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know.
9
SPEAKER_01
But then also as a performance piece, it s a 10.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the writing s off the charts.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thanks.
9
SPEAKER_00
I do enjoy it, but I care about both missions.
9
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so it s a little bit of a burden because I care.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s right, you wanna make sure you.
9
SPEAKER_00
I wanna deliver.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, so.
9
SPEAKER_01
Maintain the high bar you ve set for yourself.
9
SPEAKER_00
This is probably an Easter egg, I m not sure yet.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
But I m considering putting this on the gift guide.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
9
SPEAKER_01
So then do you wanna withhold the product name?
9
SPEAKER_01
What do you wanna do here?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, I m gonna say.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, okay, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Rose Hairline is incredible.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s spelled R-O-Z.
9
SPEAKER_01
R-O-Z, no E. So Roz.
9
SPEAKER_00
But it Rose.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, but Roz.
9
SPEAKER_00
Nope, because Mara Rozak is a hairstylist out here.
9
SPEAKER_02
That s my friend s wife.
9
SPEAKER_00
No way.
9
SPEAKER_02
Taylor is in local natives that played our live show.
9
SPEAKER_00
Is married to Mara?
9
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_02
Oh, wow.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m learning so much.
9
SPEAKER_00
So excited now, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
Wow, how fun.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, I ve met her once and she s the sweetest, nicest.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, she s sweet, okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
And she s very prolific.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I mean, she has a lot of fancy clients?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s Kate Mara s best friend.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, ding, ding, ding, Kate Mara s best friend who we did talk about here because we thought that was impossible that her best friend s name was Mara.
9
SPEAKER_01
Right.
9
SPEAKER_00
Turns out Mara s in my orbit.
9
SPEAKER_00
Mara is very good friends with Sally Christensen from Argent, the suit company that I love and endorse.
9
SPEAKER_01
Tiny little web you find yourself in.
9
SPEAKER_00
My God, it s such a sim.
9
SPEAKER_00
It is.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s seven characters.
9
SPEAKER_01
Right.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I met Mara via Sally, she was wonderful, but I had already at that time started using her new hairline.
9
SPEAKER_01
Prior to meeting her.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and so obviously I was a big fangirl.
9
SPEAKER_00
Uh-huh.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s so good.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s a couple products, there s a hair oil.
9
SPEAKER_01
I really do like how much you like.
9
SPEAKER_01
Products?
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, products, but by extension, people.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like, I know you re over celebrity sightings, but you also still get, you get so amped up about certain people, which is still endearing and adorable, which I like.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God, this hair, she makes this hair product, like, she s married to, like, the excitement.
9
SPEAKER_01
I know, but it s really kind of cute.
9
SPEAKER_00
Hair products, as you know, you should know, that work well with your hair are hard to come by in this world.
9
SPEAKER_01
I only use one thing, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, when you find your thing,
9
SPEAKER_01
Here s the problem with Amazon.
9
SPEAKER_01
I used to know all my brands like in junior high, Aquanet, Extra Firm Hold, Extra Super.
9
SPEAKER_01
So it had like three expletives about how firm the hold was.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it was.
9
SPEAKER_01
I had a seven, eight inch spike and it didn t go anywhere all day.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I knew all my products.
9
SPEAKER_01
I liked the Paul Mitchell gel.
9
SPEAKER_01
I liked this Aquanet and it came in like a 70 ounce aerosol too.
9
SPEAKER_01
Ozone be gone.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because of Amazon,
9
SPEAKER_01
I go to past orders.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m like, and I type in hair, hair, and then it brings up the one I like that I ve ordered before.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s great.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I don t ever remember.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think it might be a Paul Mitchell product I m using.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s kind of a creme I use in my hair.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, your hair looks lovely.
9
SPEAKER_00
But I don t know what it is.
9
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if we could get Mara in.
9
SPEAKER_01
To spruce it up a little bit?
9
SPEAKER_00
Just do a little something.
9
SPEAKER_00
Dance it up?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, when people have created something I care deeply about or I admire, oh yeah, I love it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Love to see it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like, you like The Row, which is great.
9
SPEAKER_00
Like?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a great brand.
9
SPEAKER_01
Love.
9
SPEAKER_01
But then you, and you didn t have any interest in her as a celebrity before that, but now you ve elevated her to almost deity.
9
SPEAKER_00
Them, Mary-Kate and Ashley, MKM.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
I guess I go straight to Ashley, of course.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know, understandably.
9
SPEAKER_01
Egocentric.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, it makes sense.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, they were my first, I had a Michelle doll.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, that s their name?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, Michelle.
9
SPEAKER_00
I had a Michelle doll, so I always had an affinity for them.
9
SPEAKER_01
Right.
9
SPEAKER_00
But no, I could care less.
9
SPEAKER_01
Right.
9
SPEAKER_00
Until the rose.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, it s interesting.
9
SPEAKER_01
I like it.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh no, you re taking off your David Beckham sweater?
9
SPEAKER_01
It s too hot in here, and I know if I turn on the air, you ll be very cold.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can.
9
SPEAKER_01
Let s go down a layer.
9
SPEAKER_01
We ll start here, that ll be step one, and then if I continue to svets, svits, I ll have to.
9
SPEAKER_00
Wow, we have so many things left up in the air.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, tying up some loose ends.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, let s weave them all together.
9
SPEAKER_00
One is Mara s hair care is incredible.
9
SPEAKER_00
Rose.
9
SPEAKER_01
R-O-Z.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yep.
9
SPEAKER_01
Which spells Roz, but we ll.
9
SPEAKER_00
Can you just be respectful?
9
SPEAKER_01
But there s like a accent on the O, so I think that s what.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s what makes it the long-o.
9
SPEAKER_00
That gets us to a rose.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, then I stand corrected.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so it s a hair oil, and then there s, what you do is you put the hair oil in before you shower, and you just let that sit for like 10 to 12 minutes, maybe 20, and then you shower.
9
SPEAKER_00
You use the shampoo and the conditioner.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
Then after you damp it dry, towel,
9
SPEAKER_00
Damp dry, I have a tip.
9
SPEAKER_01
Dab it dry, is that what you mean?
9
SPEAKER_01
Damp it dry seems.
9
SPEAKER_00
Make it damp.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, you get the towel wet and then rub it with the towel on your head.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, well you don t make, no, no, no, your hair s dripping wet.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and you dab it with the towel.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, I wouldn t say dab.
9
SPEAKER_01
You would say damp, because that s what you said.
9
SPEAKER_00
You squeeze out the water, but you don t want to squeeze it out too much.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s very, it s damping it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, okay, great.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a word.
9
SPEAKER_00
I have a trick for that, that I learned from some video.
9
SPEAKER_00
I use, I do a towel real quick on it, just like a quick squeeze, and then I take a paper towel.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, and dab it like it s a greasy pizza?
9
SPEAKER_00
I damp it, no, you don t do it like that.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know what you re thinking, you re talking about like- Dabbing.
9
SPEAKER_00
Patting it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Patting, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, you take the paper towel and you like scrunch the hair.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, great.
9
SPEAKER_00
With the paper towel.
9
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
9
SPEAKER_00
Then it s stamped.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay?
9
SPEAKER_00
All right.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then you use a little, she has this milk, hair milk.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
9
SPEAKER_00
And this other little other oil.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I mix those, a small amount, then I put it in my hair.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then it looks good.
9
SPEAKER_01
Wow, so many steps.
9
SPEAKER_00
I know.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s a real project.
9
SPEAKER_00
It looks great, and I have a few other friends who are using it, and they love it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Satisfied customers.
9
SPEAKER_01
Would you agree that if you were someone who washed your hair every day, this would be too much to do daily?
9
SPEAKER_01
Five steps?
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t, though, and you don t have to if you use Rose.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, and you re once every three to four days on a hair wash?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, pretty much.
9
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes, what s the longest we ll go, seven, eight days?
9
SPEAKER_01
Longest we re depressed the sky s gloomy.
9
SPEAKER_00
Where are we sad?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean probably a week is the longest I Think yeah, cuz it does start to get keep start keeping a hair journal and then we ll know now
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, speaking of, I gave you homework.
10
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if you did it.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, fuck.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay, well I ll give you another week.
10
SPEAKER_02
What was the homework again?
10
SPEAKER_00
Five favorite podcast episodes of all time.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, fuck.
10
SPEAKER_02
Blame.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s still number one.
10
SPEAKER_00
We already know.
10
SPEAKER_00
You already established that.
10
SPEAKER_00
Now we need two, three, four, and five.
10
SPEAKER_02
I hope that every armchair has found their way over to Stereolab to listen to- Radiolab.
10
SPEAKER_02
Radiolab.
10
SPEAKER_02
That s an old favorite band of mine, Stereolab.
10
SPEAKER_02
Really great band.
10
SPEAKER_02
Fuck.
10
SPEAKER_02
This happens nonstop.
10
SPEAKER_02
This happened with Fred, when he reminded me of Tortoise.
10
SPEAKER_02
And then I get depressed that I forget about my favorite bands.
10
SPEAKER_02
That I don t listen to them for years, and actually, I get a pang of guilt.
10
SPEAKER_00
You do?
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, like I m not being faithful to them.
10
SPEAKER_02
And Stereolab is such a great band.
10
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to feel guilty.
10
SPEAKER_00
You can reframe it as you re excited to find it again.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
Would you wanna hear one second of Stereolab, just so you can get a flavor for what it is?
10
SPEAKER_02
Because it s very, very novel, original music, okay?
10
SPEAKER_00
Are there words in these songs?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
It sounds French.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
I like it.
10
SPEAKER_02
It s very French.
10
SPEAKER_02
They re incredible.
10
SPEAKER_02
How original is that sound?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I like them.
10
SPEAKER_02
Did you ever have a stereo lab phase, Wab?
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I like them.
10
SPEAKER_01
Did you know the lead singer s name is Mary Hansen?
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, here we go.
10
SPEAKER_02
No, I did not know that.
10
SPEAKER_02
And who is she married to, Rob?
10
SPEAKER_02
One of your aunts?
10
SPEAKER_00
Is she connected to Mara?
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, she still could be... She died in 2002.
10
SPEAKER_01
I just meant Tom Hansen, Mary Hansen.
10
SPEAKER_02
Wait, does singer die?
10
SPEAKER_01
Backing and lead vocals.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s another lead.
10
SPEAKER_01
I was mostly connecting the Hanson last name.
10
SPEAKER_02
94, 96, 97, 99, it doesn t appear that they have anything recent.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, she s passed.
10
SPEAKER_00
Maybe she passed because...
10
SPEAKER_01
I stopped listening.
10
SPEAKER_01
It looks like they became active in 2019 again.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wonderful.
10
SPEAKER_01
They took a 10 year break.
10
SPEAKER_00
It sounds like you do have some stuff to feel guilty about, actually.
10
SPEAKER_02
I always do, yeah, it doesn t take me long to remember.
10
SPEAKER_00
No, you can reframe it, and like, I can reframe, okay, do you want me to get you a Stereolab tea, vintage?
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, of course.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
I would love that.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna look into it, because you know I like vintage tea shop.
10
SPEAKER_02
What can I get you for Christmas?
10
SPEAKER_02
I m so bad at this.
10
SPEAKER_02
Let s go right to the horse s ass.
10
SPEAKER_00
I ll think about it.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
Now this shirt, this is similar to your Stereo Lab story.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
I was in New York with Molly, obviously, we ve talked about it, and then pinned, because you just were in New York.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I was.
10
SPEAKER_00
And we stopped into this vintage store, vintage tea store, and it looked like it was not going to be my style.
10
SPEAKER_02
Right.
10
SPEAKER_00
Then he had all these Gumby shirts.
10
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
10
SPEAKER_00
Gumby s, which I had forgotten until I saw these shirts.
10
SPEAKER_00
And it was so exciting for me.
10
SPEAKER_00
Gumby s was a pizza place in Athens.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, wow.
10
SPEAKER_00
And they had pokey sticks.
10
SPEAKER_02
And were they stealing the actual intellectual property of Gumby?
10
SPEAKER_02
Was he there?
10
SPEAKER_00
He was there.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
There s no way they had like a license for that.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think he was there.
10
SPEAKER_00
Um, and he, and they re, well, I mean they had pokey sticks, so they were obviously playing on this.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
But I didn t even know about Gumby really.
10
SPEAKER_02
Right.
10
SPEAKER_02
Cause that was very early Saturday Night Live.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I didn t know.
10
SPEAKER_00
I just knew the pizza.
10
SPEAKER_00
And we were obsessed with Gumby s.
10
SPEAKER_00
It was our spot.
10
SPEAKER_00
It was a hot spot.
10
SPEAKER_00
It was a CMBC.
10
SPEAKER_02
Uh-huh, CMBC.
10
SPEAKER_00
And we have such nostalgic memories.
10
SPEAKER_00
My group has such nostalgic memories.
10
SPEAKER_02
I m now...
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so OK, I think I m conflating some things.
10
SPEAKER_02
So there was Mr. Bill was a character on Serenite Live, but also Eddie Murphy would play Gumby.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, really?
10
SPEAKER_02
He played black Gumby.
10
SPEAKER_02
So he swore and stuff.
10
SPEAKER_00
It was it was great.
10
SPEAKER_00
Right.
10
SPEAKER_02
I had an inflatable Gumby that was six feet tall when I was in junior high, and I used to fight it nonstop.
10
SPEAKER_02
I would punch it and wrestle it.
10
SPEAKER_02
And my mom, for some reason, was very entertained because I would build up the fight.
10
SPEAKER_02
What?
10
SPEAKER_02
I d start talking to Gumby.
10
SPEAKER_02
What d you say?
10
SPEAKER_02
And then I would run and tackle him.
10
SPEAKER_02
And there s a whole show I would do.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
But maybe Gumby was a straight-up character outside of SNL.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I didn t know there was an SNL connection, but yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s also Sim because I bought an SNL shirt also.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh my god.
10
SPEAKER_00
Crazy.
10
SPEAKER_00
Can t even talk anymore with how many Sims.
10
SPEAKER_02
We re getting very close to short-circuiting.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, Gumby s is very nostalgic for me, and so I bought this Gumby shirt.
10
SPEAKER_02
I can t see it at all, your hair, your beautifully conditioned and oiled hair.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s Gumby in the Olympics.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, Gumby goes for gold.
10
SPEAKER_01
I found out why they can use the character.
10
SPEAKER_01
So when Gumby s creator, Art Clokey, came through Gainesville on a college speaking tour, they threw him a party and the founder said he had such a good time that he granted them the national rights to Gumby s and Pokey s names for 100 years.
10
SPEAKER_00
Wow!
10
SPEAKER_02
Wait, what year was that?
10
1986.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, because they closed Gumby s.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it didn t make it.
10
SPEAKER_02
Maybe you can bring it back.
10
SPEAKER_02
We have to stand out there and educate everyone on what Gumby s.
10
SPEAKER_02
Okay, so here s the thing about Gumby.
10
SPEAKER_02
A lot of you might think he s from Saturday Night Live.
10
SPEAKER_00
Kind of, but, and it s like- I don t think anyone at this age is gonna have any questions.
10
SPEAKER_00
I didn t even have any questions.
10
SPEAKER_00
You didn t.
10
SPEAKER_00
I thought he was a pizza boy.
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, okay, but what about someone out front, like giving a 30 minute lecture on what it is you re about to.
10
SPEAKER_00
That could be fun.
10
SPEAKER_02
And the chair is like, please sit down before you enter the store so you understand the full context of what we re trying to do here.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I ve had eight years.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s interesting.
10
SPEAKER_00
The pizza was so good.
10
SPEAKER_00
The pokey sticks were so good.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I miss it.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I bet.
10
SPEAKER_00
And also it s gone, so people can t have it.
10
SPEAKER_02
If we had our wishes, I would go eat at Flaky Jake s and you d go eat at Gumby s.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I wanna talk about something.
10
SPEAKER_00
Did we leave, did we leave so many?
10
SPEAKER_02
It s a disaster.
10
SPEAKER_02
I think we have so much stuff to go through, we gotta just keep storming ahead.
10
SPEAKER_00
Part of this is your fault.
10
SPEAKER_00
When you go away, we have too much to talk about.
10
SPEAKER_02
I agree, I know.
10
SPEAKER_00
My apologies.
10
SPEAKER_00
You went to New York.
10
SPEAKER_02
Went to New York, very early flight, 7 a.m.
10
SPEAKER_02
on Thursday, and if I can do a little light complaining, I don t mind when things are delayed when it s the afternoon, but if you wake up, I woke up at 4 a.m.
10
SPEAKER_02
to journal and meditate to get in the car at 5 a.m.
10
SPEAKER_02
to get to LAX at 6 a.m.
10
SPEAKER_02
to be in the, and then we didn t take off till nine.
10
SPEAKER_00
No!
10
SPEAKER_02
Yes, and I was like,
10
SPEAKER_02
No, I put in the, I did all the crappy stuff.
10
SPEAKER_02
So I had a little, I was struggling a little bit when we started going down the runway at 9 a.m.
10
SPEAKER_02
I looked.
10
SPEAKER_00
Were you on the plane for two hours or was it delayed?
10
SPEAKER_02
A good hour, yeah it had to be.
10
SPEAKER_02
I think like for some reason boarding, like they didn t shut the door till 7.45 and then by the time we were going down the runway it was 9.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yikes.
10
SPEAKER_02
I want to say he claimed that there was a stalled aircraft at JFK on the runway, like they were delaying people from even going there maybe, but whatever the case is.
10
SPEAKER_02
Flight was fine.
10
SPEAKER_02
But what happened is when we landed then, originally when we were supposed to land, we were going to have time to go to the hotel, get a bite to eat, and then Kristen would go to a musical on her own.
10
SPEAKER_00
Got it.
10
SPEAKER_02
And I would watch, I don t know what I would do.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
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Can t remember what I did.
10
SPEAKER_02
But we landed so late that then the cab ride was like, she had to be at the play in an hour and 40 minutes.
10
SPEAKER_02
And then we were going to go to drop me off at the hotel first.
10
SPEAKER_02
Her play s obviously in Midtown and we re downtown.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_02
And then the better something of my angel, better angels of my character.
10
SPEAKER_00
Nature.
10
SPEAKER_02
Nature.
10
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I was like, let s drop you off first and I ll bring all the bags.
10
SPEAKER_00
That was nice of you and smart.
10
SPEAKER_02
And it s 5 p.m.
10
SPEAKER_02
on a Thursday in Manhattan.
10
SPEAKER_02
So basically got on that flight at 6 20 a.m.
10
SPEAKER_02
and
10
SPEAKER_02
The long flight, then the cab ride was like two and a half hours.
10
SPEAKER_00
No!
10
SPEAKER_02
From the time we got in at JFK to the time I got out at the hotel.
10
SPEAKER_02
I was like, oh, I ve been for 12 hours sitting kind of confined and not able to move around and do my own thing.
10
SPEAKER_00
I hate that cab ride from JFK to the airport.
10
SPEAKER_02
Imagine going to Midtown first.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m giving you credit that adding anything, it sounds unbearable, because I hardly can stand that.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it s not great.
10
SPEAKER_02
And then when she got out and then I decided to Google Maps it myself, and then I saw it was gonna be like 57 minutes to get done.
10
SPEAKER_02
I was like, oh my God.
10
SPEAKER_02
And I couldn t get out and take the subway at that point.
10
SPEAKER_02
I had all the bags and shit.
10
SPEAKER_02
Anyways, got into the hotel, lovely hotel.
10
SPEAKER_02
What d I do Thursday night?
10
SPEAKER_02
Oh, I immediately.
11
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text Vincent D Onofrio because he lived down in that same area where we were staying.
11
SPEAKER_00
First I said, are you at home?
11
SPEAKER_00
Because I was going to meet him at Emily Brooklyn, maybe because he lives in Brooklyn.
11
SPEAKER_00
He said, no, I m in Michigan.
11
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So I was in his birthplace and he was in my birthplace.
11
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How lovely!
11
SPEAKER_00
But then he told me to go to Bubby s.
11
SPEAKER_00
Have you been to Bubby s?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yes, many times.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you have?
11
SPEAKER_01
You know all about Bubby s.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Bubby s is great.
11
SPEAKER_00
Bubbies.
11
SPEAKER_00
So he said to go to Bubbies.
11
SPEAKER_00
I went to Bubbies and I loved it.
11
SPEAKER_00
And people watching in New York and I love it so much.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I sat by myself and just stared at people and watched all.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I just love it.
11
SPEAKER_00
Looking out the window.
11
SPEAKER_02
Was it crisp?
11
SPEAKER_02
What was the weather like?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was perfect.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was like the high 50s.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, perfect.
11
SPEAKER_00
You know, I had my piece I was wearing my piece the whole time.
11
SPEAKER_02
To both pieces?
11
SPEAKER_00
Just the hoodie, zipper hoodie, and I brought some sweaters to look like Beckham.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I know Easter egg.
11
SPEAKER_00
We interviewed Jedediah Jenkins.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes, upcoming.
11
SPEAKER_00
Great episode.
11
SPEAKER_00
He recommended couples therapy and
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, right, I know, I need to start it.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, by luck, it was on the airplane ride to JFK, so Chris and I started it, and then when she got back from her play, we then watched a couple episodes.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s so good.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I m so excited.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, I love it.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s a great recommendation.
11
SPEAKER_00
Then Friday, we went to Bubby s in the morning.
11
SPEAKER_00
We worked out, we went to Bubby s.
11
SPEAKER_00
We were trying to keep it light, because we had a 5 p.m.
11
SPEAKER_00
reservation at Manhattan, Emily.
11
SPEAKER_00
And so we just kept it real light at Bubby s that time.
11
SPEAKER_00
But then we went at 5, immediately saw an armcherry with her mom, who was on vacation, who was there because we suggested it.
11
SPEAKER_00
So that was really cute, and she was so sweet.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then I went to Gutenberg,
11
SPEAKER_00
which is Josh Gad and Andrew Randles.
11
SPEAKER_00
And these two are insane.
11
SPEAKER_00
By the way, I ve only seen five musicals in my life, and now two of them are with these two guys.
11
SPEAKER_00
And they re insane together.
11
SPEAKER_00
They have such good chemistry.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then Christine gets on stage at the end.
11
SPEAKER_02
They do special guests at that show.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s right, at the very end.
11
SPEAKER_00
And what an ovation she got.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s lovely.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was so sweet.
11
SPEAKER_00
Because I know in some part of her,
11
SPEAKER_00
heart is broke that she didn t stay and do Broadway for a long time, or that she s not returned to do Broadway.
11
SPEAKER_00
I know that s a big thing for her.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, she will.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
But for her to get on stage and the level of excitement people had for her being there made me feel so good for her.
11
SPEAKER_00
Like, oh, you deserve this girl.
11
SPEAKER_00
You weren t there, but you are loved there.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
She s a huge part of that community.
11
SPEAKER_00
Get home that night from the play and
11
SPEAKER_00
I ordered Emily burger.
11
SPEAKER_00
It had just been there, 5 p.m.
11
SPEAKER_00
Ordered now gluten-free pizza and a whole round, pigged out, slept late.
11
SPEAKER_00
First night I was there, I slept 11 and a half hours, which was really, really helpful because of the very early morning, blah, blah, blah.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then she went to another play.
11
SPEAKER_00
I started watching F1.
11
SPEAKER_00
We went to Emily Brooklyn on Saturday.
11
SPEAKER_00
That was wonderful.
11
SPEAKER_00
Pigged out again, then walked around Manhattan for a couple hours.
11
SPEAKER_00
We walked like six miles.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then on the way back, I was like, I could go for Bubbies again.
11
SPEAKER_00
Went back into Bubbies.
11
SPEAKER_00
So now in one, yeah, you see the pattern.
11
SPEAKER_00
Anyways, ate at Bubbies four times in three days, ate at Emily Burger three times in three days.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s great.
11
SPEAKER_00
And that s pretty much the trip.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s wonderful.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was fun.
11
SPEAKER_02
Sounds great.
11
SPEAKER_02
I thought about this because you posted that.
11
SPEAKER_02
I was like, wow, that s so fun.
11
SPEAKER_02
You have your staples, you re going.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s very me.
11
SPEAKER_02
It is, it is.
11
SPEAKER_00
If I find something I like, I just want what I like over and over again.
11
SPEAKER_02
I know, it s interesting.
11
SPEAKER_00
You have a much more, you feel like you re missing out on meals if you were to go back.
11
SPEAKER_02
Exactly, but I do have both.
11
SPEAKER_02
I have the same issue in that if I love it, I want,
11
SPEAKER_02
Like when I got home from New York, I was like, when am I gonna have Thai diner again ever?
11
SPEAKER_02
Like I had to, I panic.
11
SPEAKER_02
But I can t go twice.
11
SPEAKER_02
I can t, although I did go twice to a breakfast place last time, but that s so rare.
11
SPEAKER_00
The other thing was I went, the first night was for dinner, and I noticed that they had gluten-free pancakes.
11
SPEAKER_00
But when I went back the next morning, I couldn t eat gluten-free pancakes because we were eating at Emily Burger in two and a half hours.
11
SPEAKER_00
So we had made a pack to keep it light.
11
SPEAKER_00
So I just had eggs, no breads.
11
SPEAKER_00
So now I still need the gluten-free pancakes.
11
SPEAKER_00
So I still gotta go back.
11
SPEAKER_00
So I m getting something different every time that I ve seen on the menu that I also wanna try.
11
SPEAKER_00
So it is somewhat, I m getting new stuff, but I understand.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s hard.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was great though.
11
SPEAKER_00
What a city.
11
SPEAKER_00
What a city.
11
SPEAKER_02
What a city.
11
SPEAKER_00
I was thinking about, I was like, how many Broadway theaters are there?
11
SPEAKER_00
Kristen guessed 15.
11
SPEAKER_00
She thought around.
11
SPEAKER_00
I m like, what s the average cast size?
11
SPEAKER_00
Like 10, 15.
11
SPEAKER_00
So if you think about it.
11
SPEAKER_02
If they re musicals, they re big casts.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then like this one that we just saw, uh, Gutenberg, this is two people.
11
SPEAKER_02
So there s like a handful of- But is she counting like off-Broadway?
11
SPEAKER_02
No.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, okay.
11
SPEAKER_00
So just Broadway, I was thinking, you know, for as enormous of an industry it is and how much space it occupies in our culture, you re really looking at maybe 300 people are employed at any given time doing that job, which is very small.
11
SPEAKER_02
Right.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I saw many people on the subway, because that was another thing, we rode the subway everywhere, which was really, really fun.
11
SPEAKER_00
Best people watching imaginable.
11
SPEAKER_00
Last thought on New York.
11
SPEAKER_00
I m reminded that when you re in New York, you just have to live out loud.
11
SPEAKER_00
You re seated so close to everybody when you eat.
11
SPEAKER_00
You re literally touching shoulders every time you eat a meal.
11
SPEAKER_00
So you re hearing everything they say.
11
SPEAKER_00
They re hearing everything we say.
11
SPEAKER_00
And so goes the subway and everywhere else.
11
SPEAKER_00
And you just, what are you gonna not live your life?
11
SPEAKER_00
You gotta just talk.
11
SPEAKER_00
So you re over, I was overhearing the most thrilling,
11
SPEAKER_00
conversations, intimate stuff.
11
SPEAKER_00
And that s just, it s a voyeurist paradise.
11
SPEAKER_00
I guess that s what I, my summation.
11
SPEAKER_00
Anyways, back to the, what I saw on the subway, I saw a few different groups of people that were actors talking about the stage.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I thought, man, there s only 300 jobs.
11
SPEAKER_00
There s all these people in all these schools.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s tough.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s hard.
11
SPEAKER_00
So hard.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, fun.
11
SPEAKER_00
What was your weekend like?
11
SPEAKER_02
One thing I wanted to bring up, which was interesting, it came up twice in the weekend.
11
SPEAKER_02
On Thursday morning, I was interviewed for something, which was very cool.
11
SPEAKER_00
A podcast or an article?
11
SPEAKER_02
An article.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_02
It was very flattering to be asked.
11
SPEAKER_02
And it was, it was very thoughtful.
11
SPEAKER_02
And then, you know, who knows how it will turn out, but it was, it was funny because I ve declared it here and it s, this is how true it is.
11
SPEAKER_02
I don t look at stuff.
11
SPEAKER_02
I don t read comments.
11
SPEAKER_02
I don t look into what people are saying about me.
11
SPEAKER_02
And it was reiterated that that is the smart decision for me because in doing this, she kind of brought up a couple things that people say.
11
SPEAKER_02
And she wasn t saying it to be mean.
11
SPEAKER_02
She was kind of saying like, it s sort of crazy that they say this and kind of like, what do I say to that sort of?
11
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, huh, well, I didn t know that.
11
SPEAKER_00
Right, right, right.
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, geez.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s got to sit you in a bad space for a minute during the interview.
11
SPEAKER_02
It was interesting.
11
SPEAKER_02
It was interesting.
11
SPEAKER_00
What did she say they said?
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
11
SPEAKER_02
So I guess a thing that people say is, well, a lot of like, why?
11
SPEAKER_02
Why aren t you talking more?
11
SPEAKER_02
Or what does she add?
11
SPEAKER_00
Oh, oh.
11
SPEAKER_00
Type of thing.
11
SPEAKER_02
Or like, no, no, no, not what does she add.
11
SPEAKER_02
Something about me not knowing as much as you.
11
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, well, of course I don t.
11
SPEAKER_02
I m not doing the same thing.
11
SPEAKER_02
I m not there to do the same thing he s doing.
11
SPEAKER_02
I thought that was very clear.
11
SPEAKER_00
Right, right, right.
11
SPEAKER_02
But maybe it s not to some people who care.
11
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I really, really don t care, but it did make me think.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, there s stuff being said that I just don t know about and happily, and I m just so happy to continue to not know.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
11
SPEAKER_00
As someone who reads all the comments, I will say she s shining a light on something that s less than 0.1%.
11
SPEAKER_00
Just however you need to file that in your heart.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s not like there s some, what she said is any kind of consensus or even 1% of comments.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
She said something about like,
11
SPEAKER_02
about being smart, people say I m not, and that was- I ve never read that.
11
SPEAKER_02
I don t remember.
11
SPEAKER_02
This is all like, you know, I m hearing it all at once, and so I m not sure if I m saying this correctly.
11
SPEAKER_00
Adding some things of your own, probably.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
I know I m smart.
11
SPEAKER_02
Right.
11
SPEAKER_02
It s one of the only things I know about myself.
11
SPEAKER_00
You don t have that insecurity at all.
11
SPEAKER_02
I really don t.
11
SPEAKER_00
Right.
11
SPEAKER_02
It was interesting to hear because I was like, oh, oh, they re just wrong.
11
SPEAKER_00
That should inform all, right.
11
SPEAKER_00
And you should reverse engineer from that, that exact same thing.
11
SPEAKER_00
Which is like, for someone to say that is as relevant as anything else that s being said.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
So that happened.
11
SPEAKER_02
And that was Thursday.
11
SPEAKER_02
On Saturday, we get an email from Adam, our publicist, and he sent this.
12
SPEAKER_01
He said, this is a nice article.
12
SPEAKER_01
He sent it and it was a opinion piece in Vogue, which I could not wrap my head around.
12
SPEAKER_00
It couldn t be more perfect for you.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
A really sweet, lovely piece.
12
SPEAKER_00
Very beautiful.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I want to applaud her as well.
12
SPEAKER_00
What was the...
12
SPEAKER_01
Her name is Lucy.
12
SPEAKER_00
Lucy.
12
SPEAKER_00
I want to applaud her because I think what s very tempting for people if they write something pro Monica, there s this inclination to pit us against each other.
12
SPEAKER_00
I ve seen this before.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s like if something s with you, then it s related to me.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I never I m always like celebrate Monica.
12
SPEAKER_00
I don t know why.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
But.
12
SPEAKER_00
Lucy was very, very generous about, I just think she was very accurate about what the whole thing is.
12
SPEAKER_00
There was no positioning you or I against each other, which I liked.
12
SPEAKER_01
No, it was a very flattering celebration of you don t have to talk all the time, basically me, acknowledging.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s a genius in talking when you should and when you shouldn t.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was really lovely.
12
SPEAKER_01
But it was also, you know, there s a line in it where she said the reason she thought to do this is because she was talking about the show with someone and someone said, who even is Monica?
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, wow, this is two things a couple days apart that are reiterating sort of the same.
12
SPEAKER_01
Thing.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was funny because when I was editing this episode of Barbara Kingsolver.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh Speaking of I think um, I Think my favorite episode of the year.
12
SPEAKER_01
Really?
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I really do.
12
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s great.
12
SPEAKER_01
I can t wait to hear it I just she s so awesome.
12
SPEAKER_01
She said that when she finishes a book she s
12
SPEAKER_01
done with the book.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, she doesn t read reviews, and it doesn t really matter to her what people say, because she knows she did what she wanted to do, and she s done with it.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I felt like that.
12
SPEAKER_01
I was like, yeah, that s sort of how I feel.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, it s weird to start hearing pokes, because I like what we re doing, and I like the role I m in.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, it d be one thing to me making these accusations if we were like a football team with a record of zero and 12.
12
SPEAKER_00
You start looking around for what s broken, but there s nothing broken.
12
SPEAKER_00
Like our show s doing as well as it s ever done and nothing s broken.
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, and also we re not a show where me and you are hosting equally.
12
SPEAKER_01
That s not the point of it.
12
SPEAKER_01
That was never the point of it and still not.
12
SPEAKER_01
And so I feel that I m doing what I m supposed to be doing correctly.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I like what we put out.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, listen, I read the thing as well.
12
SPEAKER_01
The article.
12
SPEAKER_00
The article.
12
SPEAKER_00
And it was great.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I saw that line as well.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I then naturally didn t want you to read that line.
12
SPEAKER_00
You know, I felt protective of you.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then it set me out.
12
SPEAKER_00
I spent a little while thinking about it afterwards.
12
SPEAKER_00
I really think I ve isolated what s happening.
12
SPEAKER_00
if you re interested.
12
SPEAKER_00
Like, no one s triggered by Michael Jordan.
12
SPEAKER_00
They see Michael Jordan and they go, oh my God, this guy dedicated every waking hour of his life to be as good as he was.
12
SPEAKER_00
No illusion that I could be Michael Jordan.
12
SPEAKER_00
I think when things get tricky is when people see someone like Paris Hilton and they re like, well, wait, I can do that.
12
SPEAKER_00
Like, she doesn t do anything, so I could do that.
12
SPEAKER_00
And they re resentful at her because, well, fuck, if she s got millions of dollars, I should too, because I can do nothing as well.
12
SPEAKER_00
So I think what s tricky for people is whether they were fans of mine or not, they ve at least known I ve been around for 20 years on TV doing stuff.
12
SPEAKER_00
So if I have a podcast, they don t go, well, I should too.
12
SPEAKER_00
They go, oh, he s been doing this for 20 years and I ve been aware of it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Now, when they see you and they re just meeting you for the first time, they go, well, fuck, I guess I could have been the babysitter in bed.
12
SPEAKER_00
Totally.
12
SPEAKER_00
Right.
12
SPEAKER_00
And they re willfully ignoring how incredibly funny you are, how intelligent you are, how much you worked on your writing and how beneficial that was to everything we did.
12
SPEAKER_00
They re not choosing to do that.
12
SPEAKER_00
You re a brand new person to them that they find out has the house across the street from us.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s what it is.
12
SPEAKER_00
They re like, well, wait, why?
12
SPEAKER_00
Why does she have all, you know?
12
SPEAKER_00
You re more relatable, which in turn makes them mad at you, which is so interesting.
12
SPEAKER_01
Right, which is also why the show works too.
12
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
12
SPEAKER_01
I know that.
12
SPEAKER_01
I thought the same.
12
SPEAKER_01
When I thought about it, I thought the same thing.
12
SPEAKER_01
I was like, oh, it s because they think they could be me.
12
SPEAKER_01
And so why did it get to be me?
12
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
12
SPEAKER_01
I guess, and I don t know where this confidence comes from because my confidence is so fleeting and it s in and out in so many ways.
12
SPEAKER_01
I just know they re wrong.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, I know... Your value to the show.
12
SPEAKER_01
I really do, and I know that this show would not be this show.
12
SPEAKER_01
It would be a different show.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what it would be, but it would not be this show that s working so well.
12
SPEAKER_00
I d probably be throwing bologna slices at women s asses.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what you d be doing, but it would be not this.
12
SPEAKER_01
It would not have this fingerprint.
12
SPEAKER_01
We have a bunch of shows on this network, and they re all great, and none of them are this, and that is that.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s a symmetry between you and I that is greater than the sum of our parts.
12
SPEAKER_01
And so, sorry if you re one of those people, and I don t think most people listening to The Fact Check are in line with the who is Monica, but...
12
SPEAKER_01
If you are.
12
SPEAKER_00
Now look, they would hate something else about you.
12
SPEAKER_00
I ll just be clear.
12
SPEAKER_00
Let s say that you had been on three TV shows and then we had this thing and then it was a big success.
12
SPEAKER_00
They wouldn t have that issue, but it would move to another issue.
12
SPEAKER_00
Of course, yes.
12
SPEAKER_01
But you know, I just know that s wrong.
12
SPEAKER_01
And not in a, I know it s wrong.
12
SPEAKER_01
I really have to convince myself.
12
SPEAKER_01
I know in my bones it is.
12
SPEAKER_01
I also know what I do for the show that no one knows that I do.
12
SPEAKER_01
So that helps too.
12
SPEAKER_01
So anyway, I just thought it was interesting.
12
SPEAKER_00
But a beautiful article.
12
SPEAKER_00
I hope everyone reads it.
12
SPEAKER_01
Really, really sweet article.
12
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, so that was part of my weekend.
12
SPEAKER_00
What else?
12
SPEAKER_01
We don t need to get too into it.
12
SPEAKER_01
We talked about it a little bit on sync.
12
SPEAKER_01
I went on two dates.
12
SPEAKER_00
Two?
12
SPEAKER_01
With two different people.
12
SPEAKER_00
Where d you go?
12
SPEAKER_00
To dinners?
12
SPEAKER_01
No, drinks both times.
12
SPEAKER_00
Drinks both times.
12
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
12
SPEAKER_01
And they were both great.
12
SPEAKER_00
Great?
12
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
12
SPEAKER_00
Do you have a favorite?
12
SPEAKER_01
No.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
I m just in an information-gathering period.
12
SPEAKER_00
Sure, sure, sure.
12
SPEAKER_01
I m not trying to overthink anything, which was fun.
12
SPEAKER_00
Congrats.
12
SPEAKER_00
Thanks.
12
SPEAKER_00
You re gonna have to reverse engineer your 2023 resolutions list.
12
SPEAKER_00
Do you ever do something, you have a to-do list and then you do an added thing so you write it on your list afterwards.
12
SPEAKER_00
Do you ever do that?
12
SPEAKER_01
No, but I should.
12
SPEAKER_00
I do that.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s so petty.
12
SPEAKER_01
So that you can cross it off.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I was like, I had to do all this stuff, but then I stopped and used the leaf blower.
12
SPEAKER_00
I ll add.
12
SPEAKER_01
I get that.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
I get the impulse, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
So similarly, you can now go back and go on X amount of dates.
12
SPEAKER_01
Go on two dates.
12
SPEAKER_00
In 2023.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_00
You can put that on there now, posthumously.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so we have some facts.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, from Barbara.
12
SPEAKER_01
So Meryl Streep, it was crazy.
12
SPEAKER_00
Nuts.
12
SPEAKER_00
Is that the first time we both had it at the same time?
12
SPEAKER_01
I never have it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Right.
12
SPEAKER_01
You re always looking for it.
12
SPEAKER_01
But this was so undeniable, it just popped off the page, if you will.
12
SPEAKER_00
It really did, in keeping with her work.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay, she mentioned the golden notebook
12
SPEAKER_01
which was one of her favorite authors early on.
12
SPEAKER_01
You asked what some influences were.
12
SPEAKER_00
That was one of my sadnesses, is we had no overlap of our favorite books.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
You always want, I always want that.
12
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
12
SPEAKER_00
To have the same favorite books as someone I admire.
12
SPEAKER_01
Or it s that maybe you ll like some of these other books.
12
SPEAKER_00
I m also excited to explore the ones she likes.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_01
So Doris Lessing was an author, she mentioned.
12
SPEAKER_01
She was talking about very progressive things for the time you ask the time.
12
SPEAKER_01
The Golden Notebook was written in 1962.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
She said 50s, 60s, and that s accurate.
12
SPEAKER_00
13 years before I was here.
12
SPEAKER_01
She said her dad read her Robert Burns poem about a louse and she started- Reciting it?
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
And so- You found it?
12
SPEAKER_01
I found it.
12
SPEAKER_00
Are you going to read it?
12
SPEAKER_00
Is it a long one or a short one?
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
So there s two a louse on seeing one on a lady s bonnet at church.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay, it s 1786, Scott s Language Poem.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh boy.
12
SPEAKER_01
By Robert Burns in his favorite meter, Standard Habbie.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay, oh wait, this is just the final verse.
12
SPEAKER_00
Give us the final verse.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wad some power the gifty gee us to see ourself.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, this got her horny for literature.
12
SPEAKER_00
This seems impossible.
12
SPEAKER_00
This would be a rap on literature for me.
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, she did say some crazy stuff and I was like, what is she talking about?
12
SPEAKER_01
But this now makes sense.
12
SPEAKER_01
To see ourselves as ithers see us, it wad fray mony, a blunder free us.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s not even English.
12
SPEAKER_01
And foolish notion, what airs and dress and gait wad lee us, an evan devotion.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay, that s the original.
12
SPEAKER_01
Now standard English translation.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, it s translated now.
12
SPEAKER_01
Oh, what some power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us.
12
SPEAKER_01
It would for many a blunder free us and foolish notion what airs and dress and gate would leave us and even devotion.
12
SPEAKER_01
I love that.
13
SPEAKER_01
I barely understand it.
13
SPEAKER_01
I just barely can hang on.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of exactly what we ve been talking about this whole time, for six years.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s self-awareness, knowing how other people see you, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
If only we could see ourselves the way others do.
13
SPEAKER_01
I can, because I have a mirror.
13
SPEAKER_01
They didn t have mirrors in 1480.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, they didn t, they didn t.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this is like basically an ode to a mirror.
13
SPEAKER_00
Okay, it also says, see also, so this was to a louse, this is to a mouse.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh, whoa.
13
SPEAKER_01
This is what, someone else s version?
13
SPEAKER_01
Him.
13
SPEAKER_01
He also has a poem called To a Mouse?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh.
13
SPEAKER_00
To a Mouse on turning her up in her nest with the plow.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh wow, okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
So they re plowing the field and turned up.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna read it.
13
SPEAKER_01
A mouse, okay great.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna read the original.
13
SPEAKER_00
Wee skleek it, cowering Tim Rouse beastie.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh what a panic s in thy
13
SPEAKER_00
Breasty, or breasty.
13
SPEAKER_00
Breasty.
13
SPEAKER_01
Titties.
13
SPEAKER_00
This is about me.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh, sorry.
13
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, I m saying, it might be about me.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s to a mouse, and then, okay.
13
SPEAKER_00
Thou need not start us hasty, we bickering brattle.
13
SPEAKER_00
I wad belathe to wren and chase thee, we murdering paddle.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m truly sorry, man s dominion.
13
SPEAKER_00
Wait, now you ve switched.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, it s still, it s still.
13
SPEAKER_01
Now it s going into translated.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s not.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m truly sorry man s dominion has broken nature s social union and justifies that ill opinion, which makes thee startle at me, thy poor earth-born companion and fellow mortal.
13
SPEAKER_00
I doubt not wiles, but thou may thieve.
13
SPEAKER_00
What then, poor beastie, thou man live?
13
SPEAKER_00
A dame and ichor in a thrave, sah, sah.
13
SPEAKER_01
You could make anything up at this point.
13
SPEAKER_00
Sah, small request.
13
SPEAKER_00
I ll get a blessing with,
13
SPEAKER_00
the lave and never missed.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, it s really long, I m not gonna keep reading.
13
SPEAKER_00
It is with the translation.
13
SPEAKER_00
I ll read a little bit with the translation.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I wanna hear if the mouse had a big brain.
13
SPEAKER_01
Sounded like what he was deeper on the bush about.
13
SPEAKER_00
Little, sleek, cowering, timorous beast.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, what a panic is in your breast.
13
SPEAKER_00
You need not start away so hasty with bickering prattle.
13
SPEAKER_00
I would be loath to run and chase you with murdering paddle.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_00
Still hard to understand.
13
SPEAKER_01
Life was so boring back then that when you were plowing and you saw a mouse, you went home and wrote a whole poem about it.
13
SPEAKER_01
That there was nothing to do but plow the field and then interact with a mouse.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s true.
13
SPEAKER_01
I can t tell if we got it better or worse, you know?
13
SPEAKER_01
I m back and forth all the time.
13
SPEAKER_00
I agree.
13
SPEAKER_01
But I just think of living this time like sitting in a dirt field with no electricity inside the house and nowhere to clean up and I just, oh my God, end it for me.
13
SPEAKER_01
Nothing to put gas in.
13
SPEAKER_00
We re on the opposite extreme.
13
SPEAKER_00
We are.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s for sure.
13
SPEAKER_00
Although I guess it could be where we could have real robot, like physical robots.
13
SPEAKER_00
In here with us?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
Distracting us?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
I wanna get two that are always trying to make us laugh.
13
SPEAKER_01
Like really distracting robots.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
13
SPEAKER_01
Like we look over and they re dry humping each other right now.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh God.
13
SPEAKER_01
Doing like really immature stuff.
13
SPEAKER_00
That would mean we d have to give them egos.
13
SPEAKER_00
Because they would want our approval.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s fine with me.
13
SPEAKER_01
You think we re going to be able to do this?
13
SPEAKER_00
Maybe.
13
SPEAKER_01
We ll use program them to make us laugh.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s what they re.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I see.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s what they re running.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s true.
13
SPEAKER_01
They re trial and erroring.
13
SPEAKER_01
And then they re remembering every outcome.
13
SPEAKER_01
And by the end, we ll just be laughing hysterically the whole time.
13
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
13
SPEAKER_00
That d be fun.
13
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
13
SPEAKER_01
You can hear their bodies.
13
SPEAKER_01
What s going on?
13
SPEAKER_01
For the listener, the robots are air-humping each other, and one s wearing a cowboy hat.
13
SPEAKER_00
The robots, they have an uphill battle because if they re trying to get both of us.
13
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, we have a lot of this.
13
SPEAKER_00
We do.
13
SPEAKER_00
We do.
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t know about the squeaking noise is really gonna get me so much.
13
SPEAKER_01
But what about dry-humping?
13
SPEAKER_01
Like if one was miming a robot, a stupid that would look, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
Sophomoric.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s too sophomoric.
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t think they can do what, like you can do wordplay.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh, they can do anything.
13
SPEAKER_00
You think they can do wordplay?
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and hairplay.
13
SPEAKER_01
Wow, that would be funny too is if while we were interviewing people both the guests and the two of us were just we had robots behind us playing with our hair the whole time That s the dream, okay, she said the majority of people in med school now are women and
13
SPEAKER_00
Okay, the acceptance rate for women applicants was 42.6% compared to an acceptance rate of 44% for men.
13
SPEAKER_00
The number of women first year students at U.S.
13
SPEAKER_00
medical schools in 2022 increased to 12,630.
13
SPEAKER_00
Women made up 55% of all first year students in U.S.
13
SPEAKER_01
medical schools.
13
SPEAKER_01
55, congrats.
13
SPEAKER_01
Huge improvement.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Okay, we talked about trauma and rate of addiction.
13
SPEAKER_00
So then I looked up,
13
SPEAKER_00
A score relationship.
13
SPEAKER_01
I think it s only like three if you have above.
13
SPEAKER_00
Having an A score of four nearly doubles the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, and increases the likelihood of becoming an alcoholic by 700%.
13
700%.
13
SPEAKER_00
People with a score of five or higher are seven to 10 times more likely to use illegal drugs and become addicted.
13
SPEAKER_01
Ding, ding, dingles.
13
SPEAKER_00
I know.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s a Sapolsky for you.
13
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
13
SPEAKER_00
The more I live with that, since we interviewed him, I m really starting to believe it.
13
SPEAKER_01
I stand where I was then, which is I don t think it s binary.
13
SPEAKER_00
I know.
13
SPEAKER_01
But I think it s huge.
13
SPEAKER_01
I think it s huge.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think it s more than 50%.
13
SPEAKER_01
But what I really still hold firmly onto is it only makes sense looking backwards.
13
SPEAKER_01
It just doesn t make sense looking forward.
13
SPEAKER_01
And everything in life, if you have the advantage of looking backwards, yeah, it all looked very predictable.
13
SPEAKER_01
So I just, they d have to go in the other direction for me just once to prove that it s possible.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, I think it s more good to know it so that you have empathy and compassion.
13
SPEAKER_01
Agreed.
13
SPEAKER_00
And how we have law, like how we structure society.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Okay, last thing.
13
SPEAKER_00
We talked about the war on drugs and
13
SPEAKER_00
how so many of us feel, well, it s kind of in keeping, superior, because we re not on drugs, where so much of it has to do with so many things out of our control, and that the war on drugs had such a big part of it, like, drugs are so bad, and people who do drugs are bad, and don t be that, because you ll be bad.
13
SPEAKER_00
When I was home, we talk about this on an upcoming Fightless Bird, when I was home,
13
SPEAKER_00
You know how I sit at my desk, my childhood desk?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
When I record from the little basement?
13
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm.
13
SPEAKER_00
And there s some stickers still there from when I was a wee baby.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
And one of the stickers, it was a anti-drug sticker.
13
SPEAKER_01
Right.
13
SPEAKER_00
And it was like...
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, it said, I dream of a drug-free world or something.
13
SPEAKER_01
One of your priorities.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s a circle and it says, I dream of a drug-free world around the perimeter and in the center of it, it says, just like me, exclamation point.
13
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I taped that to my.
13
SPEAKER_01
You want everyone to know you are not doing drugs.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, I m a good girl.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I m a good girl.
13
SPEAKER_01
Really good girl.
13
SPEAKER_01
Take me on some dates.
13
SPEAKER_01
Because I m so good.
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t do drugs.
13
SPEAKER_01
Although you have.
13
SPEAKER_00
Although I have.
13
SPEAKER_00
And if I was in so many circumstances, I would have done a lot more.
13
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, it s just so funny that that was given to me.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s from like, I was in kindergarten.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
13
SPEAKER_01
I mean, and you know, I m sympathetic to the people who are trying to curb this crisis.
13
SPEAKER_00
They don t know what the fuck they re doing.
13
SPEAKER_00
No one knows what they re doing.
13
SPEAKER_01
We re just like, we re throwing shit at the wall.
13
SPEAKER_01
Some of it backfires, some of it kind of works.
13
SPEAKER_00
I know.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s the other thing.
13
SPEAKER_01
I forget what guest we had on that did reference all this data, which is really important too, is if it s in your neighborhood, your odds also go up exponentially.
13
SPEAKER_01
So it s like you add ACE into availability.
13
SPEAKER_01
You weren t stumbling across anybody doing drugs.
13
SPEAKER_00
Not hardcore, no.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, people did stuff that I actively did not do, though.
13
SPEAKER_01
But I ve smelt weed smoke my whole childhood.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s always been around.
13
SPEAKER_01
And my dad s doing coke, my stepdad s doing coke.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s just around, you know?
13
SPEAKER_01
You see people giving other people Valiums and shit, and you know that they re not the doctor, so why is my aunt getting, you know?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, I know, it s just a much different.
13
SPEAKER_01
My mom, now, I m gonna be very clear, Laura was like, she didn t drink, she didn t do any drugs.
13
SPEAKER_01
I mean, she smoked weed when she was a kid, but.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
So it wasn t like in my house, there wasn t even really much booze.
13
SPEAKER_00
Right.
13
SPEAKER_01
But I just think, as far as this specifically, Babs Kingsolver, our boy in the book, Demon.
13
SPEAKER_01
Demon, yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s everywhere around him, in addition to all the ace score.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s one of the couples in season three of Couples Therapy.
13
SPEAKER_01
She has an accident and she gets prescribed Ferguson.
13
SPEAKER_01
She doesn t know.
14
SPEAKER_00
history of any of this.
14
SPEAKER_00
She also had a crazy miscarriage right before, maybe an abortion, something.
14
SPEAKER_00
Then the accident, then the Percocet, it was like total relief, and then addicted to Percocet.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s like, yeah, that can happen too.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s not can, it s epidemic.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s, oh God, it s so sad.
14
SPEAKER_00
Still thriving.
14
SPEAKER_01
I remember my mom at one point was on some painkillers for... Oral surgery.
14
SPEAKER_01
No, she had frozen shoulder.
14
SPEAKER_01
Oh.
14
SPEAKER_01
And.
14
Oh.
14
SPEAKER_01
Her shoulder was frozen.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
14
SPEAKER_00
She couldn t move it at all?
14
SPEAKER_01
It was, she like could barely move it.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, and she had a surgery for it.
14
SPEAKER_01
No, she didn t.
14
SPEAKER_01
She was just on painkillers for it.
14
SPEAKER_00
Cause it hurt.
14
SPEAKER_00
Get her through.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_01
And my grandma had it too.
14
SPEAKER_01
So I am a little anxious.
14
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
14
SPEAKER_01
So I move it a lot just to keep it moving.
14
SPEAKER_00
Good.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Keep it lubricated.
14
SPEAKER_01
And she was talking about being on them and I was like, you need to stop taking those.
14
SPEAKER_00
Even as a kid?
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it wasn t that long ago.
14
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay.
14
SPEAKER_01
And so she did.
14
SPEAKER_01
But it s a slippery slope for anyone.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Especially if you have a lot going on at the time.
14
SPEAKER_00
Like so much of this stuff is timing of everything.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s sad.
14
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I think that s it for Barbie.
14
SPEAKER_00
Last thing I wanna say about Babs, she said it herself.
14
SPEAKER_00
She said, choose my occupation, because you can do it into your 60s and still be relevant.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and you only get better.
14
SPEAKER_00
I find that abnormally encouraging, because that s not typically in our business.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s the opposite.
14
SPEAKER_00
Comedians get less funny over time, because they re less familiar with what s really driving the angst of the culture.
14
SPEAKER_00
Directors get very comfortable slowly throughout their career.
14
SPEAKER_00
They get to ask for shorter days and shorter days and shorter, you know, as they re, and then everything just.
14
SPEAKER_00
You don t see many people in our business doing the greatest work of their life later.
14
SPEAKER_01
But you get less hungry.
14
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you get satisfied, which is good.
14
SPEAKER_00
You get comfortable, less angsty, yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
And then rightly so, you make your environment nicer.
14
SPEAKER_00
So you ll say, I m not gonna shoot nights anymore.
14
SPEAKER_00
I got a family and blah, blah, blah.
14
SPEAKER_00
Well, but something crazy happens when you re up all night sometimes.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s all very understandable, but...
14
SPEAKER_00
I would say this is a rare, even look at physicists.
14
SPEAKER_00
They have this terrible, if you chart their breakthroughs, it seems to happen all at like 20 to 24, and then it just starts going down.
14
SPEAKER_00
All these things.
14
SPEAKER_00
So this is hugely encouraging, especially for me personally, who still has fantasies of writing many books.
14
SPEAKER_00
I guess I was just encouraged that I could still do the best writing of my life.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and that the older you get, the more experience you have on earth.
14
SPEAKER_01
You get better as a writer.
14
SPEAKER_01
You re better off a little bit later.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s cool.
14
SPEAKER_00
She s so impressive.
14
SPEAKER_01
I wonder if she ll like the writing in my gift guide.
14
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, everyone does.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s unanimous.
14
SPEAKER_01
All right, well, that s it.
14
SPEAKER_00
All right, love you.
14
SPEAKER_00
Love you.
14
you