David Sedaris #5

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Speaker 1 Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Sticky Brain.
Sticky Brain. Yes.
My

Speaker 1 nickname. Pneumoniker.

Speaker 1 Heavyweight champion returning. Number five.
Yeah. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Speaker 1 David Sederis. My God, I couldn't love someone more.

Speaker 2 Our most

Speaker 2 frequented guest. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What an honor to have him as our most frequented guest. If I had to pick of most frequent

Speaker 1 tie between him and Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, we got some good.
Yeah, we got a couple of good repeats. We're loving offenders.

Speaker 1 Sedaris is a humorist, a comedian, an essayist, a best-selling author, a radio contributor. He's on the television on one of those morning shows.
He's got kind of an Andy Rooney vibe on site.

Speaker 1 I love it. His books, Happy Go Lucky, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Calypso, A Carnival of Snackery, the best titles ever.
Dress Your Family and Denim and Corduroy. Cowui and Denim.

Speaker 1 Kelly Corduroy and Denim.

Speaker 1 He is on a 40-city tour across the United States starting March 30th till May 19th,

Speaker 1 including Burlington, Vermont, Albany, Philadelphia, Boston, Akron, Detroit, Fort Wayne, Dallas, Nashville, and many, many more. Go to DavidSederisBooks.com to see his tour.

Speaker 1 A lot of Arm Cherries have gone per our suggestion, and I always hear how much they love it. He puts on a great show.
I really do recommend you go see him live. There's really nothing like him.

Speaker 1 He's a gift. And as I've been talking about lately, we're listening to his short stories every night before bed.
There's one-offs before bed. It's just, it makes me so happy.
I love David Sederis.

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Speaker 1 He's an upchart star.

Speaker 1 Yeah, my prized possessions are behind me. He was mad that the face wasn't turned out.
And I said, I don't care about fucking picture. I want the writing of this man on vitalized.

Speaker 2 He picks them out so specifically that I understand.

Speaker 1 Maybe I'll do a glass wall in my next house and I'll hang it and you can choose whether you want to see what site you want to see.

Speaker 3 We went to Egypt a couple months ago. All the postcards were bullshit.
I went to Fiji. It was the same thing.

Speaker 1 I would expect that from Fiji and not from Egypt. Where is this from? No way.
That's impossible timing. You just brought up being in Egypt.
There being bad postcards.

Speaker 3 And then here one arrives. I got that in Australia, but it was Egypt, and I wished I'd brought it to Egypt.

Speaker 1 You know what's so nice about this is that I wasn't going to bring up that I haven't gotten a postcard from you in a while, but I've thought about and noticed and been scared that I haven't got a postcard from you in a while.

Speaker 1 And I would have never brought it up, but here one has arrived and now I don't have anything to even do you want to read it aloud?

Speaker 1 Well, I don't know if these are like private exchanges.

Speaker 3 It says, it's not the first time I've cheated on Hugh, but

Speaker 1 somehow this one stings for some reason. I want to read this first by myself and my dad.
I just

Speaker 1 on the fact check. Okay.

Speaker 3 Hugh doesn't want postcards. He doesn't want me to text him.
He wants letters with stamps on them.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's a high bar. That's a lot.

Speaker 3 If I'm going to like 44 cities,

Speaker 3 I have to get the letters printed out.

Speaker 2 That's a commitment.

Speaker 3 And I have a lot of stuff to do.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 2 Already. Of course, you're busy.
That's why you're there.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm going to read it. Thank you.
Good idea because there's nothing incriminating. But okay.
Dear Dax, have you been to Egypt? If you like being hassled and tugged on, it's the place for you.

Speaker 1 There are a hundred million stray cats there. So it's good too if you're afraid of mice.
I didn't see a single one in Australia now. Sincerely, David Sedari.
These are my...

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't want to make you uncomfortable. These are like the treasures of treasures.
We have the fires. I put my journals in a huge fucking suitcase and then I grabbed this off my wall.

Speaker 3 We were just talking last night. We had dinner with somebody.
You can name drop. Jennifer jason lake

Speaker 1 she looked out her window and saw flames so she had to evacuate and she didn't grab anything and so we were talking about what would you grab exactly what did you say what did you say picasso painting this big yeah yeah yeah grabbable see i'm jealous that you have that because in all these different fears i have like somehow i'll still end up penniless i'm still convinced that'll happen i wouldn't like one item that i could just put in a backpack and land somewhere and be like okay well i will have rent for some time this picasso is going to still be valuable And, you know, it's small.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I have a France Klein painting that isn't much bigger, so I could put that in the same coat bag.

Speaker 1 You're set.

Speaker 2 Do you want to explain the value of art to Dax because he has a hard time understanding it?

Speaker 1 I understand it.

Speaker 2 Well, you fight back against it.

Speaker 1 My argument is if you enjoy the image, I don't understand the difference between a nice print and the original work of art. Unless you're collecting it for an investment.
Money.

Speaker 1 But like if your claim is just, I look at this and I feel a certain way, I think it's a mental trick that because it's only one of them, I feel even more different way. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, if you told me that you had a Picasso print, I would be like, well, that's nice.

Speaker 1 Well, for so long, I wouldn't tell anyone I had one. This would just be for me to sit in a room and stare at and get whatever transcendent thing you all are claiming to get from it.

Speaker 3 You had a Picasso painting.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I would say, oh, God, I'd love to see it.

Speaker 3 I don't usually go to museums because what they have, I can't buy it.

Speaker 2 Well, the vagina soap museum you went to changed our life.

Speaker 3 The vagina soap museum.

Speaker 3 But I went to a museum somewhere a while ago, and I had time on my hands. And I looked at the Picasso paintings that they had, and he was such a forerunner and such a genius.

Speaker 3 And the surface of those paintings was so alive. No one can touch that guy.
You know, Picasso was an asshole. And when you stand before his paintings,

Speaker 1 you don't know. Why do you have to

Speaker 1 force yourself to go through all of his worst moments? Yeah. Yeah.
It's interesting that it's really troubling for people with artists and art, but no one is like, guys, bad news.

Speaker 1 Einstein raped his niece. E equals MC squared.
We can't touch it no more. No one has any issue with any kind of scientific breakthrough that was done by a monster.
There's no moral dilemma.

Speaker 1 It's like, if this thing serves me, it's a technology I want. I don't give a fuck what the person who invented it did.
Yet the art serves you.

Speaker 1 You can't really make an argument that one's more important than the other, yet there is this very arbitrary distinction we make between scientists who are pedophiles and shit and then artists that were.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 1 Thank you. I wanted to land one good point today.

Speaker 3 But even with writers like Celine, was mostly.

Speaker 1 Most of French.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You can't deny his skill.
You can't deny his power as a writer. Another thing is he wrote quite a while ago, so it's not like young people are getting swayed to read his books.

Speaker 3 But right now, we're doing something that in 50 years from now is going to be unforgivable. But we can't even imagine it.
We're not even thinking, well, it's probably

Speaker 1 eating animals. When I bring it up to my friends and colleagues in Los Angeles, no one wants to acknowledge this.
There will be a moment where they'll look back in time and they'll go.

Speaker 1 So anyways, in L.A., do you know in 2025, brown people worked and white people didn't. White people didn't cut their grass.
They didn't clean their house. They didn't make their food.

Speaker 1 They didn't deliver their food. They didn't do anything.

Speaker 1 It was only brown people that did that stuff. People go, that's nuts.
That's going to happen. And when I bring that up to friends, and I'm not saying like, fire your Latina housekeeper.

Speaker 1 I'm just saying have enough humility to say we're engaged in it now. And they'll go, no.
Well, it was a huge improvement from where my housekeeper came from.

Speaker 1 And I go, that's exactly what the slave trader said. It's the same argument.

Speaker 3 I think maybe fossil fuels will be part of it. Maybe eating meat will be part of it.
That's going to be part of it. But that's the stuff we can suspect.
There's things we cannot even truly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like they wore blue shirts. Can you believe?

Speaker 1 I think the fossil fuels will go more in the category of like, human people used to smoke?

Speaker 1 They used to pull smoke into their lungs and then hold it for a minute and do that several hundred times a day. It just seems stupid.

Speaker 3 I have a list on my computer called countries I have been to. Now, my boyfriend Hugh criticizes me because he says I just want to go to a place in order to cross it off my list.

Speaker 3 But yeah, it's that simple. It means a lot to me.
This is what I want to do. We went to Monte Carlo last year.
So we went to this Michelin-starred restaurant and our food just arrived.

Speaker 3 And three men at the next table lit cigars. And then two men at the other table on the other side of us said, oh, we can smoke cigars.

Speaker 3 And then the waiter came and said, how's your meal? And I said, well, now that you mention it, it tastes like ashtrays.

Speaker 3 And he said, well, we can't can't say anything and they couldn't say anything because people were so rich the people smoking the cigars at the next table it's like well we've finished our meal so the important people at the end

Speaker 3 and I said can I burn a tire at the table

Speaker 3 that's what I would like to do I've got a little money

Speaker 1 yeah a little inner tube a little bottle glue set it ablaze I thought maybe the server was going to come back and light up a cigar to think that edgy ceased to be normal oh yeah yeah I smoked on an airplane on a flight to Germany when I was 16.

Speaker 3 I woke up in the middle of the night and I was just wondering. Yeah.
Was there a time when you couldn't order a drink on an airplane because it was a Sunday?

Speaker 1 Oh. Oh, I have no idea.

Speaker 2 That's a great question.

Speaker 3 Or let's say if you were flying over North Carolina, would they say, you got to finish your drinks in like a minute because they're flying over North Carolina?

Speaker 3 You couldn't sell liquor on Sunday in North Carolina until...

Speaker 2 It might have to do with the hub of the plane. Delta is an Atlanta plane.
I think you can drink there now on Sundays or buy liquor, but at one point you couldn't.

Speaker 2 So maybe you wouldn't be able to on that plane. But on United, you could.

Speaker 1 What if you're taking a red-eye David and you left New York at 1.45 a.m.

Speaker 1 and then you could have one drink, then it was two, but as soon as you got to Chicago, all of a sudden it was 1.46 again and everyone got to have a round.

Speaker 1 And then you just chased the time change for the 2 a.m. cutoff.
Although I guess in New York, it's 4 a.m. That scenario would work great leaving Detroit because it's 2 a.m.

Speaker 3 One of the things you don't count on when you write is you're dated so quickly. Even if you write something about people not having exact change for the flight attendant.

Speaker 3 Because there was a kind of man who would get on a plane and buy a drink with a $20 bill and he knew the flight attendant wouldn't have change.

Speaker 3 Whereas my mother always taught me, if you have a $20 bill, buy a newspaper, buy some gum, buy something in the airport so you can have correct change when you order a drink.

Speaker 1 Because they would not give you change.

Speaker 3 Well, they would, but it's a pain in the ass.

Speaker 1 Then the flight attendant has a lot of pay. Oh, it's the kindness.

Speaker 3 Yeah, if everybody pays with the 20, the the flight attendant's like, fuck. And you know, the flight attendant used to go down the aisle, say, does anybody have any change?

Speaker 1 Right. Do you feel very protective of flight attendants? Because I do.
Monica saw me get into it with a first-class customer that was sitting in front of us in rapid order.

Speaker 1 He was at the bulkhead and he had his bag in front of his feet. And there's nobody that doesn't know you can't have your bag there, right?

Speaker 1 So they ask him to put it away. Oh, yeah, I'll get to it.
And then he doesn't. And then they come.
Now they really need to take off.

Speaker 1 Sir, we really need you to put the, oh, I thought I could get it by you. No, you can't.
So I'm flagging him. We're right behind him.

Speaker 1 I'm like, I don't like this guy and I'm going to pay attention to everything he does. So then the next thing was she came to say, have you made a selection for lunch? He said, what are the options?

Speaker 1 She's like, the menus right next to you. Well, just tell me the options.
We have a short rib and we have a chicken breast. No, she said chicken.
Chicken. It was a chicken thigh.

Speaker 1 And he said, is that white meat or dark meat? And I wanted to go like, how could you have gotten to 56 years old and not know the thigh is fucking dark meat? Why are you making this

Speaker 1 So then

Speaker 1 I needed a pee. He had gotten up to pee.
I'm sitting on the armrest. Clearly, I want everyone behind me to know, don't get up.
I've claimed that I'm next.

Speaker 1 So when he exits, he sees I'm in the waiting position to go in. So he gets to his seat, which is one row in front of us.
And then he decides to like open up the thing.

Speaker 1 And he's just kind of looking around. He's not even grabbing his bag.
He's just blocking it. And then, like a hockey player, I just fucking ran through him and shoulder checked him into the seat.

Speaker 1 Do you like the ending of that story, Monica?

Speaker 1 There's more.

Speaker 2 No, that's not the end of the story.

Speaker 2 There's an important piece to this, which all that happens, Dax is being very aggressive.

Speaker 2 And look, I hate that guy. That's annoying that he's behaving that way.
But I'm more concerned about his behavior than I am about this stranger.

Speaker 1 Because I represent you.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And you know better.
Why cause even more chaos?

Speaker 1 Because someone needs to smack this guy on the nose. That's why.
That's very simply why.

Speaker 2 So then he causes this ruckus. He sits down.
and a few minutes later, the guy turns around.

Speaker 2 We were at South by Southwest accidental panel. This guy turns around.
Hey, I saw you last night doing the panel. You were so great.

Speaker 1 Like he was so nice to him. You're gonna like

Speaker 1 that.

Speaker 1 Worse, then we had to Google who he was. Well, I was like, oh no, he was at that panel.
We are just signing a deal with Amazon. That was an Amazon movie.

Speaker 1 Did I just fucking shove one of our new bosses?

Speaker 1 Now I'm staring through the gap when he lifts up his laptop to do some work. Thank God it says his full name on this sign-in for his password.

Speaker 1 And then the second we land, I open it up and I find out I was like, oh, he's just a fucking lawyer. I knew it.
He was like a lawyer representing one of the actors that was on the panel.

Speaker 3 It's so funny, though, how you can be on a plane and have a towering hatred for somebody. And they have no idea.

Speaker 1 I would have given anything to find him in a parking lot. That's how mad I was at how he was treating this flight attendant.

Speaker 3 I was in Australia a couple weeks ago. They made an announcement.
They said the flight to Tasmania is full. So we're asking you to gate check your bag.

Speaker 3 If you don't care to, and you want to bring your bag on the plane, you'll soon find yourself in a situation where there's no room for your bag. We will gladly send it on the four o'clock flight.

Speaker 3 So that's a way to do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, big threat.

Speaker 3 I just had a knapsack and I had something else under my seat. Now I have my knapsack in the overhead band.
So he puts his bag in there and he's pounding on it.

Speaker 3 It won't go in all the way because of my knapsack.

Speaker 3 And I said, I think it won't go in there because of my knapsack. So he pulls my knapsack out and puts his bag in and says, What do you want me to do with this now? Oh, no, we didn't.

Speaker 3 I said, just go. And I was in first class.
I said, just wherever you are back there.

Speaker 1 Just go. Just keep on walking.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 That is so crazy, though.

Speaker 1 Did he get shoulder checked? He doesn't

Speaker 1 get shoulder checked. What needs to happen to him?

Speaker 2 You say, put it back, please.

Speaker 1 Okay. And he goes, eat this ass.

Speaker 1 I saw a flight attendant once.

Speaker 3 A guy was pounding on a bag to get it in. The flight attendant turned to me and said, I just thank God it's not a living thing.

Speaker 3 But I had a towering hatred of a flight attendant.

Speaker 1 That can happen.

Speaker 3 Because he was standing right at the door of the plane and he said, can I get you something to drink, young man? And so I just ignored him. And he said, young man.
And I ignored him.

Speaker 3 And he said, young man. And I said, I'm not young.
Why don't you just say old man? Because that's

Speaker 3 what you mean. Oh, that's his charm.

Speaker 1 He's going to flatter you because you want to hear that you're not.

Speaker 3 You see it a lot with Bellman at hotels, too. Yeah.
Can I cut you with that bag, young man?

Speaker 3 He'll say things.

Speaker 1 He's going to women more. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He'll say it to like a twisted stick figure with a walker.

Speaker 1 Hey, young lady.

Speaker 3 And she's supposed to say, he thinks I'm young.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 She waddles off.

Speaker 3 Here's my new thing. Okay.
And And again, I go on these tours, and that's why I'm traveling, and somebody else is paying for my ticket. And I'll admit it, I'm in first class.

Speaker 3 Already you're thinking, you don't have that much to complain about. Look, you're in first class.
But the flight attendant kneels and looks at the manifest and says, Mr. David, what would you like?

Speaker 3 And I'll say now, oh, can I see the manifest for a second? I say, see, it says David Sederis. I said, David is my first name.
My last name is Sederis. So I'd be Mr.
Sederus.

Speaker 3 Because they don't want to take a chance on pronouncing your last name.

Speaker 3 So they just call you whatever your first name is. That's just laziness.

Speaker 3 Part of my job when I sit down and write books is to pronounce people's names when they put them in front of me on a post-it note. And I pride myself on it.
You know those Irish names?

Speaker 3 Someone said, oh, those Irish names, they always look like a Wi-Fi password. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Do they have some symbols above their alphabet, too? They play with.

Speaker 3 And those can be hard, but if you worked at the airport or something, you'd get them after a while.

Speaker 3 Chinese names, you'd get them if you you took an interest and asked people, and you would say yes whenever you were right about them. So I just object to the laziness.

Speaker 1 My childhood friend who was just out, Ken Kennedy. Ken Kennedy.

Speaker 3 Ken Kennedy.

Speaker 1 I've used his name in many movies if I have to improv, because it has such a great alliteration. So Ken Kennedy, he lived in Novi, Michigan, and he grew up on Buckminster Way.

Speaker 1 And one night he was coming home from work and he got pulled over by a cop.

Speaker 1 And the cop came up to the window, license and registration, looks at his thing and goes, you have any idea why I pulled you over tonight, Mr. Buckminster?

Speaker 1 He saw his street name and thought his name was Buckminster. Like really trying to hand it to him is a big mistake.
It was a street name.

Speaker 3 Buckminster is my first name. My last name is Street.

Speaker 3 It was interesting. When I was in Australia, not a single person waiting for me at the baggage claim to take me into town said, how was your flight? Which I hate.

Speaker 3 If you ask me how my flight was, you're just dead to me. And I've said to people before, that's such a bad icebreaker.
I know.

Speaker 1 Then why do you... Do you just call that out?

Speaker 3 Yeah. At a hotel, not a single person said, welcome in.
How are you travels?

Speaker 3 They would say instead, gosh, that suitcase. How do the wheels work on that? Are those good wheels on the suitcase? You know, the actual question.

Speaker 1 It's something specific that you could actually ask. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It never felt gimmicky.

Speaker 2 You don't like platitudes.

Speaker 3 Yeah. It just felt more genuine.
But like a corporate personality is no personality.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like getting through every single single thing.

Speaker 2 Do you think everyone has to have a personality that you interact with?

Speaker 3 No, I'm not opposed to it.

Speaker 1 It's preferable, right?

Speaker 3 I like it if I'm going to the security check at the airport and that person has a personality. Me too.
Love that. TSA guy, personality, love that.
Everybody, I'm happy.

Speaker 1 You know who I don't want to have a personality is the pilot. Sometimes you're on a Southwest flight and they kind of pride themselves on that they make jokes.

Speaker 3 That's not who i want making jokes but i was on tour in the fall and i went to chicago and i was checked in by a woman with down syndrome at a hotel or at the airport at the airport she checked me in for my flight and she had a very hard time pronouncing the name of the city i was going to but it was difficult name and a lot of times if you have down syndrome your tongue is kind of thick so it can be hard to say so i had to ask twice but i thought wow why haven't i seen this before and then i started thinking they should hire a guy with down syndrome or it could be a a woman, dressed in a pilot's uniform to stand at the front of the plane at the beginning of every flight and say, we'll be flying over Cloud de Col.

Speaker 3 And then all the people who get off the plane immediately would be the right people. And then we could just take off.

Speaker 1 They would be the right people.

Speaker 3 Just hire people with Down syndrome to pretend they were the pilots. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you think that's like a test to just weeds out

Speaker 1 the riffraff. That's interesting because I don't want to get political, but when I was sounding the alarm a year ago, going, guys, Biden, he's too old.
We must have another option.

Speaker 1 And people were offended by that. My analogy was, if you got on an airplane and Biden came out of the cockpit and was like,

Speaker 1 you know, you would get the fuck off.

Speaker 1 And isn't running this huge country more important than flying one airplane? I thought that was a good analogy. It wasn't.
Thank you so much. It's probably tied with your Down syndrome analogy.

Speaker 3 It bothered me when people took that and said, well, you're just being ageists. And it's like, no, there are people his age who are vital.
He's not vital.

Speaker 3 And you would just be on the edge of your seat. It's like having your kid in the school play.
You're so afraid they're going to fuck up. Every time he opened his mouth, it was just anxiety.

Speaker 1 People are like, Did you watch the debate? And I'm like, no, no, I would never watch that. I don't want to see, like, on YouTube years ago, bum fighting, right? They pay two homeless guys to fight.

Speaker 1 I don't want to see that. I never heard of that.
You haven't heard of bum fighting?

Speaker 1 Oh, it's so nasty.

Speaker 3 I was in the Philippines a couple of years ago and I was on a television show called Wow Wow weed like they invited me to be on this show people there are so desperately poor and people would wait in line for days to get in to give the host money so he gets a fist full of money and he says i've got a hundred dollars here for the craziest dancer and then there'll be like people in their 80s like break dancing really humiliating themselves in order to get the money and it was like i didn't know the show is gonna be like this yeah what did you do every now and then you're on a show and it goes somewhere and you're like fuck I'm just standing now in this situation.

Speaker 3 I was just brought on and then I gave money to the host to give away. And then

Speaker 3 I saw what was happening. And it was like bum fighting.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It is a version of that.

Speaker 3 That seems like it would be in the Bible under things not to do. Yes.

Speaker 1 There should be some mention of bum fighting if you look that word up in the dictionary. Is that the word? Exploitative.

Speaker 3 Okay, but is this just as bad? So I was in Pakistan. This man came up and he was begging for money.
And I said, I will buy your shawl. Then he was like, oh, I'll give you the shawl.

Speaker 3 And he was trying to give it to me because that's what people are like there. If you say to somebody, I like your glasses, they give you.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, no, luckily there was someone who could translate. And I said, you want money from me and I want something from you.
So I pay you.

Speaker 3 I mean, the money I was paying him for his shawl was like 50 times what the shawl was.

Speaker 2 You were just making it a transaction.

Speaker 3 But he wanted to give me the shawl. And I was thinking, it's nicer for you if it's a transaction, too.
Because you're not begging me for anything. I'm just a customer buying.

Speaker 3 Anyway, we finally made that understood. And then we went over here and then we came back.
And he already had a new shawl on and he was modeling it. And then I was like, I want that one too.

Speaker 3 Everything just looked better on here.

Speaker 1 You just wanted to have his frame more than that.

Speaker 2 That's a good model.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. That is so fun.
I have a similar situation and really who it bit the most in the ass was Kristen, which was I was in Italy and I have a good relationship with Ducati.

Speaker 1 I got to tour the factory where they make the motorcycles in Bologna and the tour was given to me by this very, very nice man who did not speak nearly any English.

Speaker 1 And he had a very cool vintage Ducati leather jacket on. And I had mentioned two or three times how awesome his jacket was.
And at the end, he took off the jacket and he tried to give it to me.

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, no, no, I absolutely cannot accept this vintage jacket. I was successful in not taking the jacket, but I was so moved by this gesture.
He said, I'm going to Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 And I was like, you must stay with us.

Speaker 1 I was really panicked because the gesture was so nice. And he fucking did.
This man came for a week at our old house and I was working the whole week shooting a show and Kristen wasn't working.

Speaker 1 There was just an Italian man in our house that spoke almost no English.

Speaker 2 He should have taken a jacket at that point.

Speaker 1 Bring that jacket when you come.

Speaker 3 That would have been fair.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Exactly. I regret not taking the jacket after he was there, day seven.

Speaker 3 I went to Australia with my friend Dawn. Her dad had a music store and he would get a lot of letters from prisoners.
Oh, can you send me some guitar strings? And he was a lovely man, Dawn's father.

Speaker 3 So people would get out of prison and they wouldn't have any place to go. And so Dawn would be at home alone.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 3 With someone who just gotten out of prison, stole from her jewelry box.

Speaker 1 Oh, fuck.

Speaker 2 Sometimes kindness can really bite you.

Speaker 1 I mean, it really can.

Speaker 2 Actually, this is interesting when you were talking about the shawl. For us, it's humiliating for him to just give you something and then you're giving money.
But is it humiliating? Objectively?

Speaker 2 Not really, right? If they want the thing,

Speaker 2 emotionally, it feels horrible to watch it, but also they don't feel horrible.

Speaker 3 When I was in Australia a a few weeks ago, there was a hotel that had a notice on the desk that said we are cash-free.

Speaker 3 And then it said, money can contain 163 bacterias, something like that. And then they had written, we charge a X fee for using the credit card.
No.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Anyway, when I was in Egypt, there was this kid selling big balloons and they weren't inflated, but you didn't inflate them yourself. They were just big.

Speaker 3 I thought, oh, they'd be good to give away to people at a book signing or something.

Speaker 3 So I bought all the ones that he had and I gave him money and he kissed kissed the money and the money there you have to have a big stack of it like a hundred dollars would be such a big stack of money you could barely close your wallet and it really stinks like the money really stinks yeah

Speaker 3 and here was this kid kissing it and this other place won't even take it exactly right and they don't know what stinky money is like australian money is that plasticky money you could put in the dishwasher if you wanted to and it'd come out fine yeah i guess nothing's objective were you doing readings in Australia?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay, so you two are worldwide.
Yeah. What are some of the countries? Australia?

Speaker 3 I went to England and did something, and then I went to Australia, and that was just a vacation.

Speaker 3 And then I went to New Zealand, and then I went to Australia, and then I went to Fiji, but that was just a vacation. And then I went to Hawaii, and that was for work.

Speaker 1 Everyone used that as a vacation.

Speaker 3 When I was in Hawaii, someone told me I was in Hilo on the big island.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 3 okay. Someone said, oh, there was a woman who recently had a baby on the ground.
She just stopped. The baby came out of her, and then she kept walking.

Speaker 3 The baby was being dragged by its umbilical name.

Speaker 1 No, that's no. That's what I said.

Speaker 3 And they said, no, it happened in front of Pineapple's restaurant.

Speaker 3 Lots of people saw it. And I said, what was the baby's drag name?

Speaker 3 And they said, it was her 11th child.

Speaker 3 And she just kept. She didn't give it.
But you know what?

Speaker 3 If you had 11, I know. You might be like, yes.

Speaker 2 It's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm not in a position to judge. I haven't had 11.
God. I want an update from you.
Where are you at on your smile journey? Because we've kind of caught you throughout your progress.

Speaker 1 You had gotten all your teeth fixed, but you were telling us that even though they're fixed, you still just have this muscle memory where you hate to smile.

Speaker 3 I don't do it in front of the mirror. I still can't look at my teeth.
I had to go to the dentist the other day, and she held up the mirror. And I'm like, have we not been through this?

Speaker 1 I can't look.

Speaker 1 I don't ever want to look at my mouth.

Speaker 3 During the pandemic, i got those invisaligns because i had massive gaps i was at a nice hotel checking in i would feel them thinking you don't belong here it's shocking not to feel that way like no one's ever said to me you have beautiful eyes just no one's ever said it to me right i don't know what that's like to have beautiful eyes but i'm fine with that yeah but yeah nobody ever said oh you have such a nice smile And then somebody said it to me after I got my teeth fixed.

Speaker 3 And I thought, I never in my life thought I would ever hear that from anyone.

Speaker 1 Did it feel good or did it feel like a cheat?

Speaker 3 You know, there are women who have magnificent breasts. Me.
Just born with magnificent breasts.

Speaker 3 And then I think if somebody else then has a maid, you know what? This is a better analogy.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 I don't know that I still have them, but I used to have magnificent calves. They were like Popeye's arms, like bowling balls.
And then people started getting calf implants.

Speaker 3 And it's like, I have big calves because I'm short. It's something you get as a bonus.

Speaker 3 And because I walk so much. And you just paid to have your big calves.
But ultimately, I don't really care.

Speaker 2 Yeah. This is the exempic conversation for a lot of people.

Speaker 3 I was picking up trash in England and I found a strap-on penis that was like an inch and a half long.

Speaker 1 Sell that.

Speaker 3 And I thought, who are you going to fuck? A cabbage patch doll?

Speaker 1 That's

Speaker 1 a kink for everything.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 Maybe they were in love. I got to pick the right species that would be smart enough to be consenting.

Speaker 1 Like maybe they were in love with a small chimpanzee and they wanted to consummate the relationship. We've talked about this a lot.
Like, is there an animal that is morally fine to be in love with?

Speaker 1 And we've concluded that female humans can guilt-free date male dolphins. Because male dolphins are so horny.
They constantly are getting caught trying to fuck the people they're swimming with.

Speaker 1 They're perverts. And there's the scientists that studied them and the dolphins some of the scientists.

Speaker 1 We don't think it's right for a male human to fuck a female dolphin, but vice versa is totally fine with us. What's your verdict on that?

Speaker 1 Gosh, because bonobo chimps are famously very horny, so I think I'd be fine with a male bonobo chimp dating a female.

Speaker 3 No, I'd be better with a water creature, it would just be more sanitary, I guess.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 but ethically,

Speaker 1 it's more an ethics question.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

Speaker 1 If you dare,

Speaker 1 we are supported by JCPenney.

Speaker 2 You know what's even better than getting compliments on your holiday outfit?

Speaker 1 Getting compliments on your holiday outfit that you got for way less than anyone would guess.

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Speaker 1 Not checking your phone's volume before blasting your morning pump-up playlist in the office break room. Or not checking that your laptop camera's off before joining the meeting in your robe.

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Speaker 1 we are supported by quince So I'm standing in my closet the other day and I realize I'm reaching for the same three things over and over again.

Speaker 1 And they're all coming from Quince, which got me thinking, when did I become that guy who actually cares about where his clothes come from? I'll tell you when, when I discovered Quince.

Speaker 2 Exactly. I was at a happy hour a couple of days ago with a very cool woman named Margo, very chic.
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Speaker 3 A friend recently showed me a YouTube video, and it was Spanish feminists protesting the rape of chickens. And I thought, oh, who would be so low as to rape a chicken? They meant roosters.

Speaker 1 The roosters were raping the chicken.

Speaker 3 And then their point was.

Speaker 3 That if you have free-range chickens and a rooster starts raping it, the chicken can run away or something. But if they're in close captivity,

Speaker 3 the chicken doesn't have any. And then I thought, okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 It does have some backing behind it.

Speaker 1 I'm okay with that.

Speaker 3 A female snapping turtle has no peace.

Speaker 1 The male is just constantly in top of the middle.

Speaker 3 But at least they can try to swim away or try to escape in a way that they couldn't if they were.

Speaker 1 They also must be master disassociators because they can just literally leave the world and go inside their shell. You know, they can really disassociate, quite literally.

Speaker 1 I read the hem of his garment this morning, which is phenomenal. I was in the New Yorker September, I guess, of last year.
That's a pretty crazy story.

Speaker 1 Will you tell Monica that you got invited to go meet the Pope?

Speaker 3 The Pope wanted to meet with humorists and comedians from around the world. Wow.
So I was just minding my own business, and then I got an email.

Speaker 3 I guess it had been sent earlier, but it didn't get to me. And it said, after tomorrow, you're invited to meet the Pope.

Speaker 3 And I was in England, so it was an easy flight.

Speaker 3 So anyway, I thought, I'm not a Catholic and I honestly don't care about the Pope, but I thought it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'd be dumb not to do it.
So I went and I met the Pope.

Speaker 1 There was a hundred of you invited?

Speaker 3 Yeah. When I came back, I was like, I met Chris Rock, because he was one of the big people.

Speaker 3 That to me was more like, oh my God, I can't believe I met Chris Rock.

Speaker 1 You listed every comedian that was invited virtually in the article, and you're like, each one of those people I would want to hang out with for sure and meet more than the Pope.

Speaker 1 But they're going to be there. So this is kind of a fast pass to meet all these other people.

Speaker 3 I would. Most of the comedians were Italian, but they were from all over the world.
I met this one woman from Switzerland. There was an Italian woman.
She was the only person to speak.

Speaker 3 And I'd met her before. Very well-known Italian comedian.

Speaker 3 And when I met her, she had just adopted two teenagers from Romania.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Teenagers.

Speaker 3 They were taking her... canceled checks and selling them because they had her autograph on them.

Speaker 1 Oh my God. They were gypsies.

Speaker 3 And then she thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Anyway, so I asked about the kids and, oh, they're doing great.

Speaker 1 Oh, they're great. They're in jail.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I see them once a month. Everything worked out.

Speaker 3 So we just went. The Pope read something to us.

Speaker 1 That's what I don't understand. I would presume if I were you, oh, he wants to have some kind of dialogue.
Right. As you said in the article.
Yeah. Why have you guys all come?

Speaker 1 And then he sits in a chair and then this woman makes a speech and then that's that. What was gained from this?

Speaker 3 She made a speech that was like 45 seconds long. Oh, and then she

Speaker 3 read a speech and it was in Italian.

Speaker 1 Did anyone ever translate it to you?

Speaker 3 And then they gave us a copy of it. He could have saved laughter makes the world go round is essentially what he said.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 So he was thanking you for a while.

Speaker 1 It sounds more like he was acknowledging your contribution to the planet.

Speaker 3 No, he was just saying like, oh, it helps to laugh.

Speaker 1 Why aren't you all flying as a man?

Speaker 3 God would like us to laugh and laughing's okay.

Speaker 2 He's a progressive pope, right? That's a whole thing.

Speaker 1 But he had said said faggotry twice in the three weeks preceding David's arrival. He said it in Italian, but it translates to faggotry.

Speaker 3 But he was saying there was too much fagotry in the seminar, which I thought was just funny. And then he apologized, and then he said it again.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. Oh my God.

Speaker 3 He's 86. He is.
And there were people, I can't believe you went, and I would have boycotted. I wouldn't have gone.
He said faggotry. But the Pope cannot perform a gay marriage.

Speaker 3 But he was blessing gay couples about to be married. He's a very progressive guy for a pope.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He sat there and we all met him.

Speaker 1 You shook his hand. Friends of yours had advised you should kiss his ring.
Then others said, no, you don't. He actually doesn't like kidding his ring.

Speaker 3 This one doesn't like you getting his ring kissed.

Speaker 1 Did you watch Conclave? Loved it.

Speaker 1 I loved it. But you must have had a particular interest having just been there and experienced it.

Speaker 3 Did you cry when you watched Conclave?

Speaker 1 I didn't cry. Did you?

Speaker 3 I cried when the guy from South America spoke in Spanish. He starts off off speaking English and then it moves into Spanish.

Speaker 3 What he said was so beautiful and the Spanish was so beautiful and his face. I'm not a religious person and I'm not a Christian, but I thought, I'll follow you.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And what he said was that the church is not the past. He said, the church is what happens next.
I don't even know what it means.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Because it's like a great song. You don't know the lyrics do that you're not to my eyes.

Speaker 3 And I saw it and I rented it and then I played that again and again and again and again and again and again.

Speaker 1 I loved it. Yeah, I did too.

Speaker 3 The clothes in that movie, I mean, come on.

Speaker 1 They're remarkable. Well, that's where the story goes.

Speaker 3 Well, because there were 100 people there and you figured every single one of them was going to put it into a routine. So what would my take be? And my take was the clothes.

Speaker 3 And I went to a place that's been dressing the public.

Speaker 1 Well, before you get to there, I need to know, are you off the dome that knowledgeable about all those articles of clothes? Or do you yourself have to do some research when you write that piece?

Speaker 3 I looked up the names of things because I didn't know those.

Speaker 1 And they're inherently interesting, those names. Like they're words I've never heard.
So I'm like, oh, I'm intrigued.

Speaker 3 Like a cassock. That's pretty simple.
But the sash is called a fascia.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I like it when I read something and there's technical language in there. Me too.
Like not too much, but just some of it. It was trying to describe the clothing as well.

Speaker 3 And then I went to a place that's been dressing the Pope for 300 years. And and I thought they wouldn't sell to a layman.
And you went with Julie Julie Weed Dreyfus. Julie Louise Dreyfus.

Speaker 1 What could be more fun than having her in tow?

Speaker 3 She was just fantastic.

Speaker 1 So you were trying to think of a ruse by which you'll be able to buy these robes.

Speaker 3 It takes nine months to have one made. But then they had one that was never picked up for some reason.
So anyway, I walked right out the door. Off the rack.
And then I started wearing it.

Speaker 3 And it's so interesting. I wore it in London where it's not a Catholic country.
With the collar? Yeah, with the collar and everything.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 And then would see me from a distance and then look away when they got close. They couldn't look at my face.

Speaker 1 They're scared you'll see all their sins just screaming across their face.

Speaker 3 I don't know. Again, it's not a Catholic country.

Speaker 1 I'm an atheist and I don't like looking at a priest. I'm like, he can see what a scumbag I am.
This is his stock and trade. He's like, you fucking need to come in.
I think it triggers that in people.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, we're in trouble.

Speaker 3 Maybe that's it. Oxford Street in London.
It's like there's a shift change. And at six o'clock, Christians go home and Muslims take over.

Speaker 1 Oh, really?

Speaker 3 Even the beggars on the street go home and are replaced by beggars from the Middle East.

Speaker 1 Wow. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 And so everybody on Oxford Street after a certain time at night is Muslim. And often they're dressed in, I don't know, the names for the clothing.

Speaker 3 And there, I was treated differently. There, people look me in the face because they're living a very pure life.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 They were living a religious life.

Speaker 3 I felt like they were looking at me like, whatever. You know, if you want to believe that, go ahead.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 We're both wearing black.

Speaker 3 And so it was interesting.

Speaker 2 That is interesting.

Speaker 1 I can't imagine anything more amusing than being on a trip to London and knowing who you are and then just looking over and seeing you strolling around in a priest's outfit. That's really spectacular.

Speaker 1 I'm almost jealous of anyone who saw you and knew who it was.

Speaker 3 It has 33, or is it 32 buttons, one for each year of Christ's life? Okay.

Speaker 3 And so you're supposed to think about that every time. Second time you put it on, you're pulling it over your head.

Speaker 3 Or you're wishing that he was crucified at 12.

Speaker 3 That is a lot of work. I wore it on stage one night and the lights were really hot.
And so I'm trying to unbutton it while I'm reading.

Speaker 1 Will you tell Monica your joke about Epstein nails?

Speaker 3 A man dies, and he has a company that sells nails, and he turns it over to his son-in-law. And one day he opens a newspaper, and he sees a full-page ad, and it's a picture of Jesus on the cross.

Speaker 3 And it says, We used Epstein nails. And the guy calls his son-in-law and says, Are you out of your mind? This is no way to sell our product, right?

Speaker 3 A couple days later, he opens a newspaper and he sees a picture of a cross, and lying face down in the dust in front of it is Jesus Christ. And the caption says, They didn't use Epstein nails.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, that's fantastic.

Speaker 3 And what I like about that, too, is that people think it's a Jewish joke. It's not.
It's just a dummy joke. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The best joke I've heard lately, someone told me at a book signing, was a guy wakes up in the hospital following a horrible accident and says, doctor, doctor, I can't feel my legs.

Speaker 3 And the doctor says, I know. I just amputated both your arms.

Speaker 2 That's great. It's funny what you just said about you think it's a joke about one thing and then it's not.

Speaker 2 And that's why it's actually funny because it's actually not offensive but you're scared that it is and then you're like oh i can laugh there's like a relief in it i was watching shane gillis's stand-up have you watched him have you seen him oh you would absolutely love it he's very very funny but it came out like a year ago and a lot of people watched it and i remember kristen was like i don't think you should watch it you won't like it to me so i didn't and then since then we've had some other people on who i do think are offensive so then i was like now now I want to see this guy and see.

Speaker 2 And I don't find it offensive at all because it's so nuanced who you're making fun of.

Speaker 2 And that to me is the difference between what's offensive and what's not.

Speaker 3 Isn't he really sweet?

Speaker 1 He's really sweet.

Speaker 1 And then back to, I almost brought this up when you were talking about the Down syndrome check-in person, which is he has several family members that have Down syndrome and he has opened up a bagel and coffee shop in the small town he's from that's run entirely by these Down center people.

Speaker 1 And he goes, yeah, it's running. You know, it's up, people go in, and it's going exactly how you think it would.
He says, There's a really long line, not because.

Speaker 3 Well, there's a place in, is it Savannah or is it Columbia, South Carolina? And it's a coffee shop, and everyone who works there has Down syndrome, or some people will have brain damage.

Speaker 3 You know, they were in an accident or something like that. It's so funny because they don't take cash because making change is too much.

Speaker 3 When you get a coffee, it just takes a really long time to get it and it's filled up to the very top, but you just feel really good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 3 Someone told me about a place in Dallas called Howdy and it's ice cream parlor and everybody who works there has Down syndrome. And so I said, I'm going.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And we went and they make the ice cream too. And they had Dr.
Pepper ice cream. I would have tried it, but it had chocolate chips in it.
And I can't eat chocolate chips.

Speaker 1 You can't eat chocolate.

Speaker 3 But it's such a good idea for a business because you don't care. I mean, yeah, it takes a little bit longer.

Speaker 1 But you're happy.

Speaker 3 The Shane guy, is he southern?

Speaker 1 He's from, I think, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 I know what you mean, though, that sometimes I think people hear a word and then you're making a joke at the expense of something. And it's like, no, you weren't really listening.

Speaker 3 You stopped at the word and you didn't listen to the rest of it. That happens a lot.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think that's what separates.
a very, very good comedian from a shock jock. And to some people, it can all sound the same, but it's really, really not.

Speaker 1 I'm glad you liked him. I think he's the funniest guy.
We saw him live at the Greek, and it's the greatest stand-up I've ever seen. You would love his special.
What's it called?

Speaker 2 Beautiful dogs.

Speaker 3 Gosh, something you said a second ago. Somebody gave me a rape whistle.
It was a red whistle, and it was in a plastic bag that had rape whistle written on it.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 And I thought, oh, I'll give it to a teenager at my book signing. So I was waiting for the perfect person.
The 17-year-old boy came with his mother and I gave it to him.

Speaker 3 And I said, I'm not exactly sure how it works, but I think you're supposed to blow into it the second you start raping someone.

Speaker 3 And then someone was offended by that. And I thought, no, no.

Speaker 1 A woman's being raped.

Speaker 3 She's got her hands full. Why can't the guy?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's the least a guy could do is blow into a rape whistle.

Speaker 1 Do your part.

Speaker 1 Oh, one thing I want to hear you talk about a tiny bit is in the hem of his garment. You say, I'm not queer.
I'm gay. Tell me the distinction between that.

Speaker 3 My objection to queer isn't that it used to be a slur.

Speaker 3 and it really is a generational thing when i'm signing books if i meet gay men my age i say there's not a right answer i said but where do you stand on the word queer and 90 of them feel the way that i do which is it used to be yelled at you right right but i don't care that it used to be a slur it's the fourth time in my life that i've been rebranded and nobody ever asks i was in australia not long ago And the flight attendants for Qantas were getting new uniforms.

Speaker 3 And I just said to one, oh, I love your uniform now. I love the way the navy blue is next to the red is next to the pink.
And she said, well, we're getting new uniforms.

Speaker 3 And I said, what if you hate them? And she said, we're all getting a chance to vote on them. But nobody did that with queer.
The word just changed to queer.

Speaker 3 And then people say to me, as a queer writer, and I just like, no.

Speaker 2 I didn't pick that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I didn't pick it. And also, it's an umbrella term.
When I was in Australia, somebody said, oh, I know a nun who identifies as queer because she's married to God.

Speaker 3 And that is an alternative sexual state. I meet a lot of women who identify as queer that are married to men, but they're open to the idea of a three-way or something so that they identify as queer.

Speaker 3 And I just don't know why I'm on their team.

Speaker 2 You're like, we're not the same.

Speaker 3 Right. Somebody lumped us all together.
I just want to know who did the lumping or BIPOC. What's BIPOC? Black, indigenous people of color.

Speaker 3 If you're like a Native American or you're black, or you're not.

Speaker 1 But wouldn't you just rather be Native American or be black?

Speaker 3 Right. But somebody decided.
But it wasn't Native Americans or black people.

Speaker 3 It was some humanities professor who decided that we're going to invent this word.

Speaker 2 It's so ironic because it's an attempt to be inclusive. And then in fact, it just sort of erases people's individual identities.

Speaker 3 I mean, I was just thinking this earlier today. I thought if they were straight people and gay people, picking sport teams, gays would be like, we'll take the trans.

Speaker 3 I just feel like the genderqueer people would be the last ones on the field. You know what I mean? And be like, talk, we already took the nuns.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Take the genderqueers as well. You know, and they have green hair and their septum rings and they come over

Speaker 3 where they just complain about everything. I did a little CBS Sunday morning thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't want to be. And then I don't ever read anything about myself, but apparently my friend Pamela Paul, who writes to the New York Times, she said, can I quote you for my op-ed piece in the Times?

Speaker 3 And then the Times ran a letter and it was like somebody went off on that aspect of it and called my position problematic. But it's like, if I'm gay, I think I have a voice.
Yeah,

Speaker 3 I should be able to say I don't like that. It's not like there are people in Puerto Rico being called something and I say, I don't care.

Speaker 3 It's a word people are directing toward me. Plus, I have a problem with problematic.
If everything's problematic, nothing is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that word for me is a big, um, it's problematic. Yeah, I get a rough problematic.
Yeah, it's rough. I do read the comments of this show, and I had made a Boy Scout joke.
I've now forgotten.

Speaker 1 It was like a Boy Scout leader and a young boy walking into the woods. They're going to go camping.
I'm sure you know this.

Speaker 3 I got to walk out alone.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Exactly.
The little boy goes, oh man, I'm so scared. It's so dark.
He goes, how do you think I feel? I'm going to have to walk out alone. It's a great joke.
Someone was very mad at me.

Speaker 1 How dare you make that joke? It's disgusting. And I wrote to them, I was molested.
If I earned a single thing out of that, I can fucking make that joke as many times as I want.

Speaker 1 And she goes, well, I wasn't, so I don't know. And I was like, well, you weren't.
And you're telling me how to deal with it. You don't have any business in this, really.
That one got me mad.

Speaker 3 I wrote an essay in The New Yorker about my close friend, Dawn. And I just said in passing that one of her lungs had collapsed.
So she was super.

Speaker 3 nervous about COVID. And so she wore her mask long after everybody else.
And she and I were at O'Hare Airport. And I said, Dawn, I think it's time to let it go.
Look around you. Nobody else.

Speaker 3 And she took her mask off, immediately got COVID. Oh!

Speaker 3 But the story was about our almost 50-year-old friendship.

Speaker 3 So then my publicist called and said, I just think you should know this is happening. And it was like a tidal wave.
I was ableist. And I bullied a vulnerable person into taking her mask.

Speaker 3 I hope she never talks to you again.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 You almost killed her. I hate people like you.

Speaker 1 And it never occurred to me.

Speaker 3 No one was angrier than Dawn because she doesn't identify as vulnerable. Right.
And you can't bully her into anything.

Speaker 1 It takes away her autonomy in this somehow.

Speaker 3 Also, if it's a New Yorker, your editor is like, I don't know about this. No one saw that coming.
And then people were so angry about it. I didn't respond to any of it.
I didn't read it.

Speaker 3 Some of it got back to me, but I just thought, I'd love to meet one of those people.

Speaker 1 I have that fantasy too. Like, I wonder if I sat and talked with them, could we join the same reality together at some point? I do have a curiosity.
Like, some of these people are very mad.

Speaker 1 I just want to go, like, I would love to have lunch with you and see if at the end of that lunch, you could really still feel that way.

Speaker 2 But as soon as they even meet you for lunch, they're not going to be that. They're not that.
That's a presence you're able to have when you're not in front of another person. That's an online rage.

Speaker 1 I think what's a little bit happened is there was a barrier of effort before where your passing thought to get to you would have involved sitting down and writing on paper and then finding an address and a stamp and all that.

Speaker 1 So you wouldn't do it. You would just let it remain a passing thought.
But now you're already at the keyboard and the passing thought can come out.

Speaker 1 And so I have to often check myself and go, let's just recognize this person might not even think this. It was in their head that second and they had the keys right there and they did it.

Speaker 3 I've only written a comment one time and it was the New York Times, did an article about Tom Brown, fashion designer. And people wrote in, oh, I can't believe who would wear that?

Speaker 3 I can't believe that's so expensive. And I wrote, you don't have to wear the whole outfit.
And if you were to hold this jacket, you would understand why it costs so much.

Speaker 3 And also, somebody's being paid well to make that jacket.

Speaker 2 Paid properly.

Speaker 3 And that's all. And then there was something the other day people were going off on.

Speaker 3 I think sometimes I'm pretty lucky to be my age because I think certain people like Lena Dunham, who I've done a show with and spent a little bit of time with and is a lovely person big person and talented person but i think it's hard for her because of her age her audience her peers rather grew up online and they are brutal yeah yeah yeah amy schumer it's the same thing people are just brutal amy schumer has a new movie yeah

Speaker 3 but it was funny

Speaker 3 and then people like

Speaker 3 you know i wanted to write like really i thought it was really funny but then i thought

Speaker 3 then do i become a part of sexual

Speaker 1 That's kind of my policy. I don't defend myself, but I defend other people I like.
I'll get involved in the comments to defend other people. You wrote a children's book, Pretty Ugly.

Speaker 1 Did people buy it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I guess. It was written 20 years ago.

Speaker 1 It was?

Speaker 3 More than 20 years ago. And Ian Falconer did the pictures, but it was for a project of cartoons for kids that the art director for The New Yorker put together.

Speaker 3 And then a couple of years ago, she decided to bring it out as a book. Ian died a couple months before the book came out.

Speaker 1 Oh, so it was done 20 years ago, but it came out a couple years ago? Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 What I love about it, because you're on Seth Meyer's talking about it, but you're like, there's no message in this book for the kids, there's no lesson and there's no message.

Speaker 1 And I just loved your defense of that. Well, poor kids.

Speaker 3 I mean, everybody,

Speaker 3 look at every children's book. There's a message, and it's not doing any good.

Speaker 3 There's still an

Speaker 1 look at these adults. It didn't work.
The baseline of piece of shit has has not really fluctuated at all. Pre or post all these great books.

Speaker 3 What was some message of rain, eggs, and ham?

Speaker 3 Not a message.

Speaker 3 Dr.

Speaker 1 Seuss was pretty good at. He wasn't beating kids over the head with anything.
But you're right. There's this impulse for everyone to teach them a lesson every second they're awake.

Speaker 1 And it must be exhausting.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, it's interesting to me, too, the reviews of children's books now in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, which are publications that review new books. And it was so interesting.

Speaker 3 It said, character's skin color is the same as the page because they all review the books for diversity. What color are the people and how many? That's a consideration.

Speaker 3 I don't read children's books, you know?

Speaker 1 It's been a while. Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 3 There was one that I bought 20 copies of, and it's a German book.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 3 And it's a mole and someone shed on its head. And it goes to different animals and said, did you do do this? And then the horse says, no, my shed looks like this.

Speaker 3 And the goat says, no, my shed looks like this.

Speaker 1 This is so German.

Speaker 3 And it's really beautifully drawn. And

Speaker 3 it was a great size. And then it got translated into many different languages.

Speaker 1 What's the name of that book? I want to get that. It's got the word mole.

Speaker 3 It's like the little mole who wanted to know who did it on his head.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 How could he not?

Speaker 3 And there's not a lesson in it, except you see what horseshed looks like. Sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you get educated on scat. Yeah, that's fine.
Which is important. We did a whole episode on toilets as they vary around the world.

Speaker 1 And the German toilet in particular is designed with a landing pad so you can examine your shit to diagnose your health. And I was like, that sounds pretty smart.

Speaker 3 The first time I went to Germany, I thought,

Speaker 1 what? Why is there a staging area for me to earn before it fucking goes into the sewer system?

Speaker 1 They're sick over there. I like it.
I know. It's pretty fun.

Speaker 3 When Hugh just had his hip replaced, I went with him to the hospital. I was with him in this little examining room.

Speaker 3 And one nurse or one doctor after another came into the room and they asked questions. Each one of them had a personality.

Speaker 3 And one of them said to Hugh, when was the last time you had a bowel movement?

Speaker 1 And I said,

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 3 we don't do that. You know, we do not do that.
We do not talk about that. We do never, ever, ever, ever, ever.

Speaker 3 And I thought everything could fall apart

Speaker 3 if I listened to his answer after 35 years.

Speaker 1 35 years. So impressed.
I'm shocked because I didn't think I would ever wander into the area that you're a prude. I mean, you acknowledge this is like very prudish of you.

Speaker 3 No, I think it's good for a relationship.

Speaker 2 A lot of people think this.

Speaker 3 Never happened in our house. I mean, I know people who have that relationship.

Speaker 1 So when you guys get a hotel room, do you make sure you get a suite that has two toilets in it so that you guys can split up?

Speaker 3 No, but if he were to go into the bathroom, I would

Speaker 1 respectfully not turn on the TV.

Speaker 3 Not the TV, but something. It would depend.

Speaker 3 If there was a bathroom and it had a paper door and he went in there, then I would say, I'm just going to listen to this podcast with these big noise-canceling headphones on it.

Speaker 1 Time for me to practice my accordion. Yeah, or I would leave.

Speaker 3 When we lived in Normandy, there was one bedroom and then the bathroom and then the kitchen. And when we had company, he would be out somewhere and I would say, I'm going to go for a walk.

Speaker 3 I would be back in exactly 20 minutes.

Speaker 1 You know, so people would know now's the time to try to move your bowels. Yeah.
This is interesting.

Speaker 2 I'm surprised and I do like it. I mean, this is an ongoing debate for people in relationships.
Does it ruin the romance?

Speaker 1 Does it ruin it?

Speaker 3 We had a house guest a while ago who said, oh, I'm going to go downstairs now and take a shit. And I said, why do you even say that? Just go downstairs.

Speaker 1 I'm glad I know this about you now because I talk about it a lot.

Speaker 1 And I probably would get myself disinvited had i not known this prior to coming over it's just a different way of life they're two different paradigms right people who acknowledge it and say it's a part of life i think it's funny i think it's very inherently funny i like hearing about other people do you like a pant shitting story that's my all-time favorite story there's nothing better i like your story about shitting in your pants was it home depot yes bending over to pick up some wood and the bathroom was a quarter mile away yeah and i know there's cameras in there and i know i'm recognizable and I'm walking.

Speaker 1 I clearly shit my pants. Did I tell you when I got in there?

Speaker 1 The great relief was there's trash cans in all the stalls at Home Depot, which I think lets you know what the overall health of the laborers in the parking lot is.

Speaker 1 Like clearly they had so many pairs of underwear in the bin for the paper towel that they were like, we got to put 55 trash cans in each stall.

Speaker 3 I was at the airport a few weeks ago and my friend said, oh, look at that man. He looks so good in his seersucker suit.
And he was like in his 70s.

Speaker 3 And I fell in behind him later and he had completely shit in his pants.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. That's a gift, though.
Do you get immediately excited?

Speaker 3 No, I felt contempt for him.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 3 I got really early for my flight to the airport. I knew there was a gift shop.
I knew they sold clothing. I'm like, why didn't you go and buy a pair of pants at the gift shop?

Speaker 3 If you thought this is a nice suit, I'm going to put it in a plastic bag. And I thought, you can't not know.
Even if you sat in someone else's shed, you'd be like,

Speaker 1 it triggered your laziness thing again. I think that's the recurring theme is that when you smell laziness, literally.
Like, fucking handle your business. It wasn't about anything other than that.

Speaker 3 Then I thought, well, maybe he took his underwear off.

Speaker 1 And he just still stinks of it.

Speaker 2 You could see it or you could only

Speaker 1 see it.

Speaker 3 And I thought, what would I have done? So I would have bought the shorts. If you're that married to the pants,

Speaker 3 I would have completely washed them in the sink. It takes some work, but it's sear sucker.
You could get it done.

Speaker 3 If they had a hand dryer, you could go through all that and hand-dry them and put them on again if you needed to. But I wouldn't even feel confident to do that.

Speaker 3 I would have thrown the pants away or wrapped the jacket around your waist.

Speaker 1 I sent Monica a photo one time. I was at the pharmacy and I was in line, and the woman in front of me, who was wearing yoga pants, had shit herself.

Speaker 1 Her pants were full of shit, and she was waiting in a very long line, and she was so casual. And I just thought, this woman's a gangster.
I couldn't do that.

Speaker 1 I had to admire the bravery and the fuck itness of her demeanor. I just was like, man, whenever I shit my pants, I'm racing to handle it.
This woman was like, no, I'm going to stop by the pharmacy.

Speaker 1 That's on my list.

Speaker 1 God knows where else she went. She might have gone grocery shopping.

Speaker 3 I would have gone to the second person in line. And I would have said, this woman back here.

Speaker 1 who's shitting her pants.

Speaker 3 Do you mind if she goes in front of you? And then when you led her up there, people would look at the back of her pants because they'd want to say, hey, and then be like, okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was in life. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I probably would have judged her for wearing sweatpants outside the house.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There would have been a lot of offensive things.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the shit in the back of it would just be secondary.

Speaker 1 The entree would be the sweatpants. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair experts,

Speaker 1 if you dare.

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Bump bump out. Wow.

Speaker 1 okay, I was earmarking Instagram because Amy's so funny on Instagram.

Speaker 3 Oh, she's great at it.

Speaker 1 She's so great at it. I don't know where she's finding these.
She is the most obscure. I implore everyone to follow Amy Sederis on Instagram.

Speaker 1 It's probably the best follow on Instagram, other than Shaquille O'Neal. Where is she finding this? Do you actually?

Speaker 3 She's just at it all the time.

Speaker 1 She's scouring the corners, though, of the internet.

Speaker 3 It's Instagram curated.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she's like a museum curator. She's not posting pictures of herself or anything.

Speaker 3 It's really her point of view. You could not get her to put something on there that she doesn't think is funny.

Speaker 1 I don't know her at all. I've never met her.
I feel like I know her better than anyone I know who's posting actual photos of their real life.

Speaker 1 I'm like, oh, I understand her brain completely by these posts.

Speaker 3 When Amy's on a talk show, it's different when it's someone in your family because you're like, that's not really her because it seems more manatee. And she's not.

Speaker 3 One of Amy's best qualities is that she's a really really curious person. And I think that's expressed in her Instagram.

Speaker 1 Does it ever encourage you to have an Instagram?

Speaker 3 I have one, but I've never seen it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So you don't really have one, but the team has one.

Speaker 3 Every now and then I'll go to a play and I'll say, oh, would you put this on the Instagram account? Or they'll say, we want you to be more involved. And I'll do it for like a day, but then I forget.

Speaker 3 I don't know. It's just not my thing.

Speaker 1 I understand. But I feel like you might be able to curate some stuff as well.

Speaker 3 But it really takes a lot of time.

Speaker 1 It does.

Speaker 3 I've been watching this thing lately on Instagram and it's people getting sentenced for crimes they committed. So somebody will get 900 years in prison and it'll pass out.

Speaker 3 So it's just interesting to see. But anyway, one of them I watched not long ago, I don't know what he had done, but the judge is off camera and the judge said, you did this to a child.

Speaker 3 You would do this to other childs.

Speaker 1 I thought,

Speaker 1 childs?

Speaker 1 Given the position you have on the calves, what is your thought on the ozempic trizepatide GLP-1?

Speaker 3 I'm struggling to lose five pounds.

Speaker 1 And you walk 30,000 steps a day.

Speaker 3 But I don't care. I know there are people who struggled for years.
Their entire life. And I think this must be just great for them.

Speaker 1 Yes, I'm so supportive of it. But I was just curious, since you put so much fucking effort into.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they're not taking anything from me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's my opinion.

Speaker 3 It's made such a massive change in so many people's lives and made them happy. And then people say, well, we don't know what the long effort.
No, True, we don't.

Speaker 1 Although diabetics have been on this medicine for like 20 years, they do. I don't think that's a really strong objection.

Speaker 3 I really care about baths. I want to take a bath.
I don't want to take a shower. I look forward to my bath all day.

Speaker 1 How long do you stay in the tub when you're in there? 45 minutes. Oh, nice.
Okay, it's awesome. And I look forward to dinner.

Speaker 3 And so if I were on a Zempic, then I wouldn't, I can't walk away from food. Last night we were at dinner.
I noticed some people had some food on their plate.

Speaker 3 And normally I would have said, actually, pass that over this way you ate most of whoopy Goldberg's dinner at the Pope invitation I'll eat anyone under the table well we should really have a meal because that could get violent really even people who think oh you can't out eat me yeah no I like to eat until I hate myself yeah yeah yeah that's when you know you're there

Speaker 1 yeah when the shame sets in

Speaker 3 my brother and I are exactly the same. And I don't know if it's because having six kids, they tend to

Speaker 3 corral my plate to keep you away from it. And I just would eat because if you finish first, then maybe you can get second.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 3 It's not like I need counseling, but watching my brother eat, I think that's me.

Speaker 1 Yep. Same with me and my brother.
Limited resources, and it was a race every time we ate. And I hate sharing.
I think of myself as a very generous person. I'll buy you anything.

Speaker 1 I don't want to share any of my food. I don't enjoy it.
I'd rather not do it.

Speaker 3 I went out to dinner a couple nights ago with some very generous people. And what I ordered was so good, I didn't offer anyone a taste because I wanted it all for myself.

Speaker 3 And they would all say, Do you want some of this? Do you want some of this? And I would take their food, but I never

Speaker 1 reciprocated.

Speaker 3 I didn't offer any of my own.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've been in that position too. I mean, you're ordering the thing you want to eat.
So, I, yeah, you don't want to give half of it away.

Speaker 3 I don't like it sometimes when you go to places with people you don't know that well, and it's a small plate thing that you share because papas

Speaker 1 and I want all of it. When we're ordering, that's where I have to start the whole process.
My wife will go, oh, should we get such and such for the table?

Speaker 1 And I'll go, like, well, I want one for myself. Yeah.
So make sure I have my own appetizer.

Speaker 1 And I feel crazy, but I can't even enjoy it because I'm racing.

Speaker 2 You can soften it by just saying, let's get two.

Speaker 1 But I don't mean to. I don't want four people sharing two.
I want three people sharing one. And I have my own.

Speaker 3 I want my own and then part of yours.

Speaker 1 Exactly. I want my own and then the sharing one we're all giving.

Speaker 2 Okay, but you both have money. So you can say, let's start with two and maybe we'll get another one if everyone's still hungry.
Nope. You guys aren't resonating with this?

Speaker 3 You know what I like to do is when dessert time comes, I like to order more dinner. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 You might like this. We were in Austin six months ago and we went to Lambert's, my favorite steakhouse there.
I got a ribeye. And you would know as a fellow addict,

Speaker 1 the first bite, I'm angry. I'm like, Fuck, this is so good.
It's going to disappear. I should have ordered two.

Speaker 1 It'd be crazy now if i ordered a second one because monica will be waiting i was very uncomfortable with how good it tasted and how panicked i was it was gonna run out so we went back two nights later and i got two ribeyes i could relax and breathe and i enjoyed the shit out of both of them but it's like you know when something's so good my first thought is like fuck it's gonna go away there's a place in melbourne called tipo zero zero which is a kind of flour they make pasta out of oh and it's one of my favorite places so i was there for two days and so i I went both days that I was there.

Speaker 3 And the second day I ordered two pastas. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And did you eat them both all? Or were you like, I'll save some, take some home or no?

Speaker 3 I ate them both all. And I would have eaten dinner there both nights too, but I was doing a show and I eat dinner while I sign books because otherwise I'm not getting out of there.

Speaker 3 All the restaurants are going to be closed. I hate having my picture taken.
I hate how people take your picture like you're a statue. They don't ask you.
It's so rude to me.

Speaker 3 Anyway, so they have signs up, no pictures. And this woman came up and and said, after standing in this line, watching you eat for 10 minutes, I understand why you don't want any pictures taken.

Speaker 3 Because I eat like that like a caveman.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, maybe part of it is the big family, but the addict thing is up to you.

Speaker 1 Can you relate to the panic the second you recognize it's something you really love?

Speaker 3 But I haven't been to that place. I'll go there.
The Four Seasons there has a smoked ribeye.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Pretty great.

Speaker 1 My fetish is that same hotel.

Speaker 3 We were in Tokyo end of January, and so we went to a tepanyaki restaurant at the Peninsula Hotel, and it was the best steak I've ever had in my life.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 3 Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 I will go just for that now. That's still the greatest gift in life is when you have a meal like that.

Speaker 3 And I was just sitting there thinking, how many entire cows have I eaten in my life?

Speaker 3 And this is the best.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 3 And then I like to sit next to somebody who I know doesn't finish their food.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, yes, that's very smart. Tactical.

Speaker 2 But back to the Ozempic thing, I agree with you. I think that takes away your desire for food.
And that's sad.

Speaker 1 I know. I've thought of many people I know who live to eat and I thought, I can understand that they don't want to lose their passion.

Speaker 2 Their excitement for dinner.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 But plus, Hugh is a really,

Speaker 3 really good cook. And he's a very generous cook.
He'll say, what would you like for dinner?

Speaker 3 And if it takes four hours to make it, and I'm not saying he'll do this every night, but a lot of times he'll spend four hours.

Speaker 1 What's your single favorite dish of his?

Speaker 3 It's this manicotti my mother used to make. Other people have tried to make it and he just makes it perfectly.
It just takes me right back to my mother.

Speaker 3 And most people, they don't make a meat manicotti. And I like the store-bought shells.
He started making his own shells and it's like, no, no, no, I like those ribbed store-bought shells.

Speaker 1 The big boys. They're like a taco shell, pasta style.

Speaker 3 It would really change our relationship if we didn't have that to do together. We always eat dinner at the table.

Speaker 3 The only time we're allowed to watch TV is at the Academy Awards, but we eat dinner at the table with candles on the table. It's a lovely thing to have with somebody.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Where would we be if we didn't have that?

Speaker 1 Well, you just eat half of a man of cotti, I guess. I have many friends on it, and they seem to still enjoy it.
They just don't want to overdo it like you and I want to do.

Speaker 3 I just can't imagine putting anything away. You know, like when you meet people who take three puffs of a cigarette and put it out.

Speaker 1 Four sips of wine.

Speaker 3 Right. Or just turn back to their scotch and it's all, all the ice is melted.

Speaker 1 Or I'm regularly at a table and people go, should we get that banana pie to have a bite?

Speaker 2 That's me.

Speaker 1 I just don't eat dessert. I got to do some bargaining with myself.
So I'm like, I'll go savory. I go as hard as I want on savory, but that's off the table for me.

Speaker 1 And I just think, look at these psychopaths. They're going to order a dessert and they're going to have a bite.

Speaker 3 Well, last night at dinner, we split a piece of banana cream pie.

Speaker 3 Oh, this ding, ding, ding. I felt good about that because I could have had a whole piece of banana cream pie for myself, but I need to lose 4.8 pounds by the 28th of March.

Speaker 1 Okay. What is that?

Speaker 3 I start a new tour.

Speaker 1 Okay, and you want to be very specific.

Speaker 3 I want to be 145 pounds. Okay, wow.
When I start my tour, that's the only way I do it. I'm just strict with myself and I get out of control and then I kind of rain it.
But it's like a five-pound rain.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You just talked about your mom and how much you like that. It reminds you of her.
And I just want to say out loud.

Speaker 1 I heard you say the sweetest thing in one of these interviews I was watching where you said, my whole mission as a writer has been to make the rest of the world love my mom as much as I did.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's what I feel. That's so funny.
And my dad would get so mad. What did you have to say that for? But he never understood.
My father would say, I loved my mother. She was a wonderful woman.

Speaker 3 What was so great about her? Oh, I loved her. She was wonderful.
How was she wonderful? She was a wonderful woman. And it's like he could say to me, my mother

Speaker 3 was an alcoholic or my mother pressed my face against the skillet one time to teach me a lesson. And she didn't do any of those things.

Speaker 3 It wouldn't make me dislike her. It would make her more real to me because when you're just saying she was a wonderful woman, you're not telling me anything.

Speaker 3 If you can include somebody's weaknesses in something that you write, I wrote something recently.

Speaker 3 When we were kids, we'd have dinner together and my father would leave, go downstairs the second he could.

Speaker 3 And the rest of us would sit around the table with my mother for hours and hours at 10 30 on a school night and we're still with our mother around the table i think she really liked having a lot of kids and she liked us and we liked her and she would go to the bathroom and we would follow her to the bathroom

Speaker 3 and she would throw up every single night and then she would come out and say i ate something that didn't agree with me and it wasn't until you're older that you're like oh the dental problems mama's bulimic maybe now it would be a bit different but at the time there wasn't a word for it.

Speaker 3 That didn't make her a bad mother.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 3 Right. If my goal is to make people love my mother, I don't think that that impedes my goal any.

Speaker 2 No, it just makes her human.

Speaker 1 Okay. You're going on a 40-city tour.
You do it every single year, right?

Speaker 3 Every fall and every spring.

Speaker 1 Do you love being on the road? Yeah, I do. You will do a reading.
And as you already know, lots of armchairs go. And we hear about it all the time.
Like, oh my God, I saw Sederis and Skokie.

Speaker 1 I saw him in all these places. And you do book signings generally? And they go on until they're over, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 How long are they?

Speaker 3 The longest one was 10 and a half hours.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 that was on a book tour. Right.

Speaker 1 Can't you get piles? Is that a thing? Isn't piles the old word for hemorrhoid? Probably. Well,

Speaker 3 people are only going to wait in line for 10 and a half hours once. They're not going to do it a second time.
Gotcha.

Speaker 3 But usually if it's a lecture tour, it's a different thing because people bought a ticket. But I've got the longest one I did recently.
It's like five hours. hours.

Speaker 3 But usually I get to the theater and I start signing books immediately because I don't need any prep time. And I'm there at the theater because I got to do sound checks.
So what am I going to do?

Speaker 3 Sit in the dressing room? So I do it beforehand and then I do it after. And usually you do it an hour before and two hours after.

Speaker 1 I reread themes and variations today. Do you recall that story of yours? It's so good.
And it's all about signing. I mean, mostly there's so much fodder in these signings.

Speaker 1 You get so many wonderful stories. But yeah, this woman came up to David and said, like, I put my bra back on for you.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she said, I take it off when I come home from work. I don't put it on for anyone.
Once it's off, it's off.

Speaker 3 And it explains so much to me because I found this woman's phone in England and I tracked her down, which is really hard to do.

Speaker 3 And I knocked on the door and her husband came to the door and I said, I found a telephone. And he's called over, Sherry.

Speaker 3 And then she comes to the door with her arms crossed over her chest as if I stole her phone. And then I realized, oh, she took a bra.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And her arms are crossed.

Speaker 1 Now he starts asking everyone who comes up to get a book sign when do you take your bra off that's actually a great question for people yes some of the women are like oh heavens no i take it off in the car they don't wait to get home i met a scottish woman who takes it off on the bus

Speaker 1 And I hadn't even thought of it either. Reading that story again, I was like, it must feel incredible to get that fucking bra off.

Speaker 1 Like, I can actually feel the sensation of liberating these boobs that have been bound up.

Speaker 3 You know, like sometimes you're you're wearing a pair of shoes that's too tight or something. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And you come home and you take them off and you're like, oh, the last thing you want to do is put them back on.

Speaker 2 I am not in a rush to get it off, but I wait till the longest moment before I put it on in the morning. So like if it's a weekend and I'm not going out anywhere, I probably won't wear one.

Speaker 2 But when I get home from work, I'm not like, I got to get this thing off.

Speaker 1 You're not dying to get out of there. Now, is there any element of that that you're like, I must protect their buoyancy?

Speaker 2 Why I don't put it on?

Speaker 1 Why you don't take it off right away. No, no.

Speaker 2 I just forget. Okay.
I have great bras, skims, shout-outs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, big, big shout-out.

Speaker 3 But is that like when I was in Hawaii, I saw people with long-sleeve shirts on, and then they had hats on, and they had things protecting their necks, and they had sunblocks.

Speaker 3 But part of me thinks when you're 60, you're going to look 60. Whether you live your life in the shadows.

Speaker 1 In the shadows.

Speaker 2 You're going to age regardless.

Speaker 3 So is that like that with breasts?

Speaker 1 I've had girlfriends. That's why I asked.
I've had girlfriends that are like, I have to keep it on until I go to bed because I don't want them to get saggy.

Speaker 1 They're thinking of maintaining the buoyancy of their breasts.

Speaker 2 I don't think that's going to help.

Speaker 3 But by that reason, then a tight brief would keep your ass firmer than boxer shorts.

Speaker 1 But I'll tell you this from anecdotal experience and one experiment. My testicles were getting droopier and droopier and droopier.

Speaker 1 And one of the most embarrassing moments I had, which I've told on here before, is I was shooting as a guest star on the TV show, and the lead actress was not working that week.

Speaker 1 They gave me her trailer. And this is a very perverted, and I'm sorry for this story, but this was 20 years ago.

Speaker 3 I already love it.

Speaker 1 I finished my last day of work, and then I was told, oh, they're actually calling her in, this actress, back to her trailer.

Speaker 1 And so I started getting kind of horny with the notion that she might walk in while I was naked. And then I happened to walk by a mirror and it was a very hot day that day of shooting.

Speaker 1 And I looked and I was like, oh my God, my testicles are longer than my penis. This is a nightmare if she walked in and saw how droopy these balls are.

Speaker 1 Your dick should always be further down than your testicles. And again, this was 20 years ago.
And I was like, where are these balls going to be when I'm fucking 50?

Speaker 1 Like, I'll have to tuck them in my socks. That's what I was en route to.
Then I did a movie. I guess it was 10 years ago, nine years ago.
And in the scene, I had to wear meundis. They were tight.

Speaker 1 They were boxer briefs. And I was like, oh, I actually like these.
And I switched to those kind of panties.

Speaker 1 And David, my testicles are half the length that they were when I was wearing boxers for a decade.

Speaker 3 Hey, it's really funny to hear a man say the word panties.

Speaker 1 I'll never call a woman's undergarments panties, but I exclusively will call men's panties panties.

Speaker 3 Because a woman said to me, I had used the word panties in an essay. She said, only men say panties.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's true.

Speaker 2 I think women say it in a sexual context but I agree that you're not like I'm going shopping for panties today what would you say unmentionables not underwear

Speaker 3 personally that if your testicles they look like taffy I gotta add that yeah like saltwater taffy if you put an ice cube then the coldness so maybe the heat had something to do with it had an enormous amount to do with it but I'm telling you even ice

Speaker 1 cubes would not have rectified this situation and I put my clothes on so fast and got out of that trailer you can't imagine.

Speaker 3 Have you ever seen kangaroos balls in Australia? They're just really disturbing.

Speaker 1 So long, taffy-like. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 We're going to have to do some googling.

Speaker 1 I could have put mine in a ponytail.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 I absolutely love that you say that.

Speaker 3 When my second book came out, my first book, it was just stuff I'd written. And the second book, they said, what's your book going to be about?

Speaker 3 And I said, I'll go to a nudist colony because I'd never read anything about it. And I don't even like walking around my house barefoot.
I'm the last person to go to a nudist colony.

Speaker 3 And I kept putting it off. And then my editor found a place, and it turned out to be a senior citizen's nudist trailer park in upstate New York.
So I went and I lived in a trailer.

Speaker 3 So I would get to my trailer and I would put my clothes on. And then someone knocked on the door.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, just a minute.

Speaker 3 Racing to take my clothes off. Because if you answer the girl with your clothes on, they'd be like, what's going on here? It was opposite land.

Speaker 3 I was invited to somebody's house for dinner naked. And And I went naked, and you bring a towel, and they're naked.

Speaker 1 Well, you did that for how long? 10 days. Wow.
That's the problem. I have seen enough documentaries about nudist colonies.
It's just not what you want it to be.

Speaker 1 It doesn't attract the people you want to see.

Speaker 3 And this is senior citizens.

Speaker 3 So they were playing Fatonk a lot, which is a game where you take a metal ball and you toss it. And then the game's over, and you go and you bend over and collect.
So you were seeing people's asshole.

Speaker 3 Yes. At a snack bar, and the waitress would have a tampon string hanging out yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 3 no no people would come out of the bathroom and they'd have a big ring around their bottom so you would know exactly

Speaker 3 sometimes people go in the bathroom and you think oh maybe they needed to wash their hands or something clean out their seersucker suit

Speaker 1 wow what a thing

Speaker 1 too

Speaker 1 yeah it's not sexy you want it to be sexy and fantastic if there's dick and balls around i'm gonna stare at them i can't imagine myself getting immune to it it.

Speaker 3 You know, I think being gay and being in a locker room or something, you're always kind of living in fear that someone's going to say, what do you stare? You know, yes, yes.

Speaker 3 You're just extra super conscious.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's my straight privilege. I can totally stare at dicks and balls.
Yeah. And no one thinks anything.
It's not dangerous for me.

Speaker 3 But I always thought people are just sub wasting their time when they're thinking about like trans women in the bathroom. Hey, there's nothing to look at in the bathroom.

Speaker 3 And a trans woman is like, that's gay people you don't want in the locker room. You know what I mean? But not that they're going to attack you, but they're going to appreciate you.

Speaker 1 You know, they're going to look at you anyway.

Speaker 1 Well, my bigger issue is it's always the same thing. No one's worried about a trans man going into the bathroom.
They're worried about a trans woman going into the girls' bathroom.

Speaker 1 So they believe that this person is a predator who will abuse children. And they're like, they can't be in the girls' bathroom.
They must be in the boys' bathroom.

Speaker 1 There's no concern that the boys are going to get molested by this predator. It's just like they're with girls.
They can't be with girls. They must be with the young little boys.
Nothing got safer.

Speaker 1 You've prioritized little girls getting molested over little boys. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Speaker 3 But I haven't read about a single person being attacked.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. It's never happened.
It's craziness. And now you're monitoring this.
Let's say it passed. No trans women in the bathroom.
Is someone at the door checking dicks and genitals?

Speaker 1 Is that what we're all signing up for? No trans men in the bathroom. I have to show my dick and balls to go into the...
I mean, try to work out how it's going to be enforced. And I'm not clear.

Speaker 3 You know, know when people were ragging on ellen degeneres and i don't know her i've never met her but i think she did so much more for gay rights than most activists because people watched her and people grew to love her and then she said i'm a lesbian and they were like okay

Speaker 3 i already love you too late yeah and i just think trans people need that because i can't think of a single one that i've met who's i was like oh get that tiresome asshole away from me i just can't think of and that doesn't mean that they're all lovely, but I was in Australia and I went into a drugstore and there was a trans woman working in the drugstore and she had real personality.

Speaker 3 And she's like, oh, do you want to take that packaging off that before you leave? It hurt me to think that anyone might not wish her the best.

Speaker 1 Totally agree.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But I agree with you.
That's how all things become palatable. You meet people who you like, who are of different religions, races, all of these things.
And then you're like, oh, that's fine now.

Speaker 1 Most hardcore racists, they've never even been in class with a black kid. They don't know any black folks.
They hate them, but they've never ever even met him. It's generally the case.

Speaker 3 Did you watch Sing Sing?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 We had Coleman Domingo on for that.

Speaker 3 Because when I said earlier that when Dawn, you know, prisoners would come get out of prison and stay at our house.

Speaker 3 When I saw that movie, I thought I should take prisoners in my house because when he got out of prison at the end, I was so glad to see that his friend was there waiting for him.

Speaker 3 But I thought, oh, I want him to come and live live in my house and then find a job and i'll be that step between and again it's not like he was really in prison it's just that movie made me you want coleman domingo to come live in your house yeah yeah i think he lied i think

Speaker 1 he was on the show

Speaker 1 yes i love him he's pretty special

Speaker 1 do you know him no Oh, he is as special as they get.

Speaker 3 Is he pretty tall?

Speaker 1 Yeah. He's tall.
He's got gorgeous legs. He was wearing short shorts.

Speaker 2 As you know, amazing fashion.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's crazy into fashion. Okay, but I want to really, really beg people to go see you in person

Speaker 1 reading your stuff. It's so, so fun.
I've done it. And you're going to 40 cities.
And I think people will be shocked how close you'll probably be to where they live.

Speaker 1 It's not like you're just in major cities. You're in Akron.
You're in Fort Wayne. You're in Burlington, Albany.
You're all over the place. People should go to David SederisBooks.com and get tickets.

Speaker 1 It's such a fun evening. And if you want to hear him ask you a weird question, very high likelihood that'll happen if you stay in line.

Speaker 1 You'll talk to everybody and you'll write something very inappropriate in their book. You'll ask them a very inappropriate question.
It promises to be a real experience. Oh, that's nice of you.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And also, for anyone who's not listened to the audio book of Happy Go Lucky, I really recommend it because themes and variations, that recording of that story is from a live show.

Speaker 1 And the amount of laughs in that, you don't pound for pound here, comedians really getting that long of laughs. It's such a funny piece.
And to be an audience listening to it, I think is so great.

Speaker 3 Well, I want to do my whole next book completely live.

Speaker 1 Ooh. That's a good idea.

Speaker 3 Well, because sometimes if you record it in the studio, then it can be edited in such a way that it fucks your timing up. But if you're doing it live,

Speaker 1 you can't.

Speaker 3 I like that.

Speaker 1 That and

Speaker 1 you're you're getting real-time feedback of what part we want to sit in for a second.

Speaker 1 It's impossible for you to really know what part we'd like to sit in for a second, but the audience forces you to sit in some things.

Speaker 3 I tried reading something about going to Fiji. I wrote it when he and I were in Hawaii, but I was on tour, but I had a five-day break.
in the tour.

Speaker 3 So I read something out loud and then I go back to the room and rewrite it and read it out loud. Because you read it out loud and you think, oh, I thought people could relate.

Speaker 3 People can't relate to this. So, how do I make this more relatable? And people are just confused by that.
So, let's get rid of that.

Speaker 3 Ultimately, you could have an editor telling you that, but I'd rather you be the editor.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You're working in like a stand-up routine in some way.
And I think that's kind of cool and novel. So, I have new stuff.

Speaker 3 A lot of times people are, oh, you're going to be reading from your books. No, I never do that.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right, right. So, anyways, everybody go to davidsedarisbooks.com and please go see David live before you perish because it's totally worth the trip.

Speaker 1 And then, yes, listen to Happy Go Lucky because I had so much fun re-listening. I adore you.
Oh, thank you so much. I think you're our leading guest.

Speaker 2 You, I think, have the crown for the children.

Speaker 1 You're our Alex Baldwin. Let's keep it up.

Speaker 2 Keep coming back, please. Every armchair, if you ask anyone, like, who are your favorite guests?

Speaker 1 We pull them.

Speaker 2 Always come back.

Speaker 3 I meet so many people who listen to your podcast in Australia.

Speaker 1 I even met a lot of people who listen. We want to go there and do a live show.
Yeah, that's what I say.

Speaker 3 Go see him live.

Speaker 1 That's what I said. That's exactly what I told him to do.
All right. Love you.
See you around soon. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for the fact check. It's for the party, Jack.

Speaker 1 You're stressed out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I'm trying not to be stressed out because

Speaker 2 Buddhism.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I'm trying.
I was yesterday.

Speaker 1 Did you get impacted by the

Speaker 2 extremely impacted by White Lotus Valley? We won't talk about it with the details because you haven't finished, but I do want to talk about it overall. There are so many parts of the whole season.

Speaker 2 The whole season is about...

Speaker 2 I mean, the whole series is really about Buddhism, I think.

Speaker 2 But this season specifically

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 2 like, you know, kind of hitting you over the head with it a little bit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 In the most realistic way.

Speaker 2 Yes. He, oh my God.
I just, Mike White. I just think Mike White is

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 brilliant in his accuracy.

Speaker 2 Like everything,

Speaker 2 every storyline is so accurate. It's so funny.
He dabbles in Buddhism. So it comes through in all the seasons, I think.

Speaker 2 Because I think what they're all saying in different ways, obviously the first season is a class, is speaking to class, you know,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 second season is speaking to relationships, and then this one is religion. That it's, he just shows over and over again how

Speaker 2 flimsy our grasp on reality is.

Speaker 2 Like what we think is true to us, and what our identities are and who we are. And even our beliefs

Speaker 2 are so flimsy. Everything

Speaker 1 around what is, at the end of the day, another animal on planet Earth. But we've created all these things and manufactured things.

Speaker 1 And then, yeah, we have institutions of thought, and they all feel really substantial and permanent and real.

Speaker 2 Nothing's real.

Speaker 1 But it's just all stuff we made, and it's ideas we thought up and told other people, and they caught on.

Speaker 1 We're just here. I was thinking in the simplest terms, they were going to breakfast.

Speaker 1 They're always going to breakfast on the show and it seems so fun. Yeah.
I get like so excited at the notion of being at a hotel and going and getting breakfast when I see the scenes.

Speaker 1 And I go, oh, yes, breakfast is so fun.

Speaker 1 And then I go, yeah, because it's eating.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's the essential thing we, we, we really do have a purpose, which is we have to eat food.
That's like one of our purposes. You're like the most consistent source of joy in your life is eating.

Speaker 1 Like you're almost guaranteed three times a day to have this like fun pick-me-up.

Speaker 2 Not anymore for a lot of people.

Speaker 1 Well, true. That's a good, I'd bring up Ozemp.
I know.

Speaker 1 Peptop. Does that make any sense? I was like, it's, oh yeah, it's not a mystery why breakfast, lunch, and dinner are so fun because we have to eat to stay alive.
That's our purpose.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but we, we, but then we put so much on top of it. The expense, like, oh, I'm going to a fancy restaurant tonight.
That proves that I, I'm

Speaker 2 doing a valuable in society and that people want to be, I'm superior. Like we put, we make all these hierarchies and

Speaker 1 it's all

Speaker 2 made up. Like everything is made up.
I was, because yesterday I was walking to go somewhere to work

Speaker 2 and I like sat down with my computer and I thought, how do Buddhists work? Like I.

Speaker 2 Don't want to do that. Like, what is the point of this? What is the point of sitting here and picking apart this

Speaker 2 conversation and making it sound good and all of this is for money and like why

Speaker 1 well hold on no why

Speaker 1 very buddhist approach to work yeah you should definitely know

Speaker 1 well if you make it about money then yes being diligent and meticulous and thoughtful and mindful about process

Speaker 1 is very buddhist it is i know and

Speaker 2 I know. But for me, there's stress on it, right? Like, I'm doing it so that it's so good so that

Speaker 2 we are able to

Speaker 2 have all these downloads and then we're able to earn our money. And it's all like, and I'm able to

Speaker 2 feel comfortable in that big house.

Speaker 1 And I like, it's all

Speaker 1 you're having a real reckoning.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's all dumb.

Speaker 2 And it is so, it's so ironic and so stupid. But I,

Speaker 2 the weekend started. I mean, again, this is like a bottle.
This isn't a bottle episode, but it kind of is.

Speaker 1 You love your bottle episodes. Yeah, yeah.
You want to keep them going.

Speaker 2 On Friday, I mean, on Saturday, I went shopping with Callie.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 And as we love to do.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And you went to a new store.

Speaker 2 I went to a new store that I was really excited to go to. That's a fancy store that, you know, you walk in and you do, it's a very pretty woman.

Speaker 2 you come in and you have to prove yourself there a little bit right and um

Speaker 2 Callie even said she's like opposite of Costco I'm just finishing the acquired Costco episode completely opposite of Costco Costco is a fantastic company like when we walked up they said do you have an appointment and we said no

Speaker 2 and then and then they said okay it's fine how many we said two and they said we could go in while we were there there was a watch beautiful watch

Speaker 2 there was a gorgeous watch, two, actually. And the first one I tried on was gold Cartier.
Beautiful. It has like this tiny face.
I love, I love a tiny face.

Speaker 1 I love a tiny face, yeah. I like a bigger face.
I love it.

Speaker 2 It's so tiny, you wouldn't believe it. Okay.
And it's vintage. It's from like this one.

Speaker 1 I like a magnifying glass to see what time it is.

Speaker 1 What if it came with its own matching magnifying glass you stuck in your pocket? Yeah. But it was tiny too.

Speaker 2 And it was, it's so tiny. And, you know, I put it on, and it was beautiful.
And then he said the price, I was like, You had to tell your face not to react, yes, and I was kind of like,

Speaker 1 Get it off, like, I can't get it away, it shouldn't be on me, like, get it off. How much was it?

Speaker 2 50,000.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 cowabunga, yeah.

Speaker 2 So, he took it off, and then, but there was this other one I had seen, and Kyle's like, Maybe you should try on that other one. He put it on my wrist, white gold cartier, tiny face.
Um, also vintage,

Speaker 2 I mean, it is so pretty. It looks great on my wrists.

Speaker 2 It's extremely unique.

Speaker 2 Asked the price. He told me it was significantly cheaper than the first one.

Speaker 1 Right. So then it felt like a bargain.

Speaker 1 Felt cheap.

Speaker 2 I said, I'm going to think about it. Yeah.
Okay. Took it off.
Callie made me promise her I wouldn't buy it. that day.

Speaker 1 Good girl, Callie. Good girl.

Speaker 2 She said, that's something to think about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a think about purchase.

Speaker 2 And I said, sure. Yes, that's right.

Speaker 1 And I... She's like, just wait till you watch White Lotus on Sunday.

Speaker 2 Well, that's where this is going.

Speaker 2 So I

Speaker 2 was ruminating on this watch for 48 hours, basically.

Speaker 1 We spoke about it even. Yes.

Speaker 2 And I, you know, I was like, I really...

Speaker 2 You know, I was looking on the internet to see if I could find anything like it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Couldn't find it.
Tonight. No.
Because my first thing would simply be

Speaker 1 anything vintage at a really nice store, they're marking it up 100%.

Speaker 1 So why not find it in the wild if you really want it?

Speaker 2 Well, I've, I've been scouring.

Speaker 1 And you couldn't do it.

Speaker 2 It's nowhere to be found the only one.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 and so, you know, then I was like, God, should I do it? And then I've been asking people. And of course, some people are like, absolutely not.
No. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then some people are like, well, I mean, like, it is an investment it's a you know people do that so anyway you know I've been doing this whole thing

Speaker 2 a lot of math a lot of thought about this watch and

Speaker 2 and then I'm watch I am watching the episode yeah

Speaker 2 and there's a scene yeah there's a scene with the mother and the daughter have you got there yeah okay we're basically the daughter who's been she's there to become Buddhist she wants to go to this monastery she wants to live there for a year.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 And the mom says, you need to stay there for one night. Yeah.
And like, if you're fine with that, then okay. We sign off, which seemed like an easy thing to do, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And she goes and she comes back. And essentially, if you haven't watched this yet, maybe turn it off.

Speaker 1 But like, fast forward is that

Speaker 2 she's crying

Speaker 2 because she just can't do it.

Speaker 1 Yep. She's crying because she's spoiled.

Speaker 2 And she says she's

Speaker 1 so spoiled.

Speaker 2 But even the fact that

Speaker 1 she's a victim in that

Speaker 2 is also funny to me.

Speaker 1 Well, I took it as she was really disappointed in herself.

Speaker 2 She was, but it is like, I don't know. She's getting comforted because she's so spoiled.
She can't live in a monastery. You know, I don't know.
Anyway, she basically says, like, I can't do it.

Speaker 2 And the mom is like,

Speaker 1 I know,

Speaker 1 you can't.

Speaker 2 Like, and she basically gives sort of a disgusting, but in some ways, scarily

Speaker 2 viable reason for why they should be spending their money and living rich.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And I, I was just like, oh my God.

Speaker 1 How we twist this.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, and then there's, for me, the most poignant scene in the, well, there's a few.

Speaker 1 Fast forward. But he basically asks these, his family members if they can live without money.
Is that what you're going to say? No. That's the one that really hit me.
So that one hit you.

Speaker 1 The one that hit me was like, you know, yeah, the dad's finding out if these kids can live without money. His wife's already told him she can't.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm sitting there going like, yeah, if someone asks me that question, it feels like a way bigger proposition than I want it to feel like.

Speaker 1 yeah i mean it feels embarrassingly like i'm i've become dependent on this thing

Speaker 1 this thing gives me comfort yep like i think a less generous version is like people want to feel superior i don't i don't know if it's that dark for most people most people just want to know like i did good

Speaker 1 I did good. There was like,

Speaker 1 you could do good or you could do bad. You could try hard or you could not try.
You could study. You could like,

Speaker 1 okay, yeah, I did good. I did all the things I was supposed to and I did good yeah that's

Speaker 1 much less than like oh I'm way better than Mike who can't own a

Speaker 2 subconscious like it's not

Speaker 2 it's it is a I did good

Speaker 2 but with the I did good comes subconsciously some

Speaker 2 on this hierarchy of humanity.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I have achieved a position that's fairly high up.

Speaker 1 Well, what I totally agree with you.

Speaker 2 And that's wild and dumb.

Speaker 1 What's dangerous is what you're really afraid to lose is actually not the trip or the first class.

Speaker 1 It's the

Speaker 1 pride that you did good. The notion that without those

Speaker 1 symbols of that, you could no longer say I did good. That's right.
Which is a terrible way to evaluate your life because

Speaker 1 you're a a good friend and a good parent.

Speaker 2 Also, what if your job is you go work at the nursing home? You did fucking good.

Speaker 1 Okay. That is actual good.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But they don't have money and cartier watches to show for that. Right.
They're all presentations. I mean, it's so depressing.
Like it is so. Mike White says, you know, identity,

Speaker 2 what Buddhists believe identity is suffering. You know, that is what causes it.
You're tied to your identity. Yeah.
And yes, and it can cause pride.

Speaker 1 And even the belief that you have an identity. Yes.
Because Buddhists are like, it's contextual. You're a different version in every single environment you enter.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 In this obsession with, no, it's one, I have one thing in all environments and in all contexts. Yes.
Creates all this suffering. Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 That's the whole. point is nothing's fundamental.
Nothing's fundamental.

Speaker 2 It's all based on where where you are, who you are in that moment, what you believe in that moment, but could change it any second. But there is,

Speaker 2 I do think, one thing that

Speaker 2 is fundamental, which is love. Like, that is part of this show, this series, but also this

Speaker 2 season two,

Speaker 2 where like one of the characters has the most bizarre arc of the whole, I think, of anyone,

Speaker 2 Saxon, that character, where he's like repugnant

Speaker 2 and very much tied to money and being a successful businessman like his father. Exactly, you know, masculinity.

Speaker 1 Being alpha in the worst version.

Speaker 2 And then by the end, he like

Speaker 2 two of the character, he sees love for real.

Speaker 1 He sees,

Speaker 2 he witnesses it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And he is about to, he's like crying.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because he wants, he wants that. That's really what is all there is to have.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I'm not getting my watch.

Speaker 1 But I think the distinction between who's, who is it made miserable and who is it not is,

Speaker 1 is their identity just that achievement or not? I think it's tempting to just evaluate

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 expensive stuff is bad or expensive life is bad. And I don't, I'm not willing to go there.

Speaker 1 I think having your identity

Speaker 1 completely anchored to that is very bad. Now, I've loved it and I've been reading it and I really like it.
And it brings me a lot of perspective. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I'm also going to say the world can't be Buddhist.

Speaker 1 They could be. Yeah.
We would not have vaccines. We would not have medicine.
We would not have all the many things that we also really like and think are beneficial for mankind.

Speaker 1 That's not their pursuit. Their pursuit is acceptance and harmony.
So, you know, I can't go fall.

Speaker 1 I don't think I'm willing to go full in on the whole world should be Buddhist and no craving and no striving and all that stuff, because I also don't, I don't, I think we're in a much, much different world.

Speaker 1 But maybe you could argue maybe everyone would be happier, but they'd be dying much sooner and there'd be no solutions for a lot of things we want solutions for.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they don't think like that.

Speaker 1 They're not going to, They're not going to band together to come up with the huge hydroelectric power plant or the sanitation system or that. That's not what they're going to do.

Speaker 1 They're going to live very simply in harmony.

Speaker 2 I mean, they're not going to try to anti-age. No, they're going to, they're going to, they're accepting that this is one

Speaker 2 droplet out of the ocean and we come back to it. I do

Speaker 2 think it's a very beautiful idea that we come back and we find this

Speaker 2 we find our people again.

Speaker 1 I like that a lot in different

Speaker 1 comforting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think I believe it. Like there are people in my life that I feel I've I've known you've done this dance before.
Yeah, in a different who knows, like who knows in what way. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Here's the scene I thought you were responding to

Speaker 1 is the teacher is saying, Often we wake up with anxiety.

Speaker 2 What does he say? I don't remember.

Speaker 1 He's like, we wake up with anxiety and we're uncertain about what will happen in the day and we have fear. And so what we do is we reach for our identity or our ego.

Speaker 1 I don't remember the exact words, but we reach for that thing to comfort us. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I like anytime, AA is great at doing this, anytime that someone acknowledges what the real feelings are. Like, yes, I wake up with anxiety all the time.

Speaker 1 That's my roughest part of the day is right when I wake up. Because it's like, yes, what could go wrong today?

Speaker 1 What has to be done that I'm afraid I can't accomplish? All this stuff.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 it's almost CBT to just go, oh, yeah, they've been already acknowledging this for a long time. And they're basically just saying observe it as well.

Speaker 1 There's a little distance from it. There's an acknowledgement.
It's very human. Yeah.
It's standard.

Speaker 1 That's what's very comforting to me about Buddhism. It's like, yes, these feelings are very normal to humans.

Speaker 1 And here's what you will normally do to try to push the fear away.

Speaker 1 And here's another thing you could do. And I like that part.
Right. The kind of global judgment of things, it gets too dogmatic into like every other religion for me at that point.

Speaker 1 If there's like this big judgment about

Speaker 1 other things, I don't think it's not a judgment.

Speaker 2 It's an acknowledgement that the way modern humans, mostly, not all,

Speaker 2 walk through the world is doing us a disservice. Like is causing, we are causing ourselves so much suffering in pursuit of pleasure.
Of pleasure. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, on the worst side and then just safety, which is defendable. But for all of it, there's always these, you know, there's just too many great exceptions for all of it.

Speaker 1 So it's like, I immediately think of Bill Gates. Like, here's a guy who, per a Buddhist assessment, has generated way too much of everything, money,

Speaker 1 create all these products.

Speaker 1 But that's clearly not his identity because he's giving everything he's made away.

Speaker 1 And he's impacting the world in measurably tens of thousands of lives saved.

Speaker 1 And so the whole endeavor is outside of that. belief system and I think really valid and admirable.

Speaker 2 Right. But I guess they would say that's his identity.
he doesn't have one. He's a person that did those things.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, I think his identity is kind of like

Speaker 1 Rockefeller's, which is like, I was put here. I was given this crazy gift.
It allowed me to generate all this thing and pool this money so that I can go fix things.

Speaker 1 Like that's their identity, and it's a cool one. I support it.

Speaker 2 Right. Yeah.
I mean, I hear what you're saying.

Speaker 1 But I guess the goal,

Speaker 2 I think, is that you aren't doing any of that you aren't doing that you're not like saying my identity is that i help people even that like that you you don't put the labels on yourself because they're they're as they would say a prison your identity is a prison it's a cage

Speaker 2 whether it's a beaut a good cage whether it's an admirable cage or not it's still a constriction yep that's true anyway Anywho.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a lot to sit with. Yeah.
I'm not getting my watch. I am wearing another watch I have right now.

Speaker 1 I bet a lot of people listening would go, like, I can't relate to this at all. But I would say, ask yourself

Speaker 1 if you could move to a place that's half the size that you currently live in. That's all that's happening.
It's like, it's the proposition of having less than you have. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think that's a universal fear.

Speaker 2 It's not about, I mean, yeah, we brought in material items and

Speaker 2 things, but it's just about the

Speaker 2 treadmill. The treadmill every person is on

Speaker 2 to get to the next rung. Yeah.
No

Speaker 2 real satisfaction that we're all doing that wherever you are on this ladder.

Speaker 2 And that's the whole thing that is

Speaker 2 causing pain.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So I'm Buddhist.

Speaker 2 I'm quitting.

Speaker 1 I'm quitting everything. I'm selling my house.

Speaker 2 And I'm not buying that watch. I'll tell you what.

Speaker 1 I do think it has the a little bit of appeal that a geographic has.

Speaker 1 And people didn't listen to that episode 10 years ago, but a geographic is a common solution for addicts. It's also a common solution for people with mental health disorders.

Speaker 1 I'm going to go somewhere else and I won't have my problems there. Yeah.
And I do think there's a little bit of a fantasy.

Speaker 1 I think if you sold everything and you quit your job and you got into this one bedroom tiny bachelor thing, I don't believe your happiness or fulfillment or purpose is going up. I don't.

Speaker 1 I think you're going to get in that little box and go, huh, wow. Okay.
I did all that

Speaker 1 because that was going to result in something.

Speaker 2 Well, no. If you are truly committed to Buddhism,

Speaker 2 there isn't a goal. You're there.

Speaker 2 You are present. That's the goal.
Like, it's not

Speaker 2 to even enlightenment, isn't it?

Speaker 1 I'm just saying, I think if you did all that and you pursued all that, you would get to a point where, like, I could have done all this and not changed anything.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm going to try. I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's just a lot. Like, it's hard to look around.
It's hard to have this sense of like, that's correct. Like, I think that's correct.
That our identities are

Speaker 2 prisons. Yeah.
Yet I have constructed a

Speaker 2 hard identity for myself and I know that. Yes.
And so to carry both, like to know I'm doing a thing

Speaker 1 that I'm participating.

Speaker 2 I'm participating in a thing that I actually know

Speaker 2 is not the ideal way.

Speaker 2 That's like a hard thing for me currently today to reconcile.

Speaker 1 I think fully committing to a singular view, I just, I like nuance and moderation. It's like, no, there's some good tenets

Speaker 1 and there's lots of great points to, that bring to your attention that you should observe and track. Yeah.
And you can improve on.

Speaker 1 But like, is full Buddhist the correct thing or not Buddhist at all, the capitalist thing, correct? I guess I'm just like, no, again, they're just two stories. They have valid points.

Speaker 1 And you try to make the version that leaves you

Speaker 1 with the most peace and contentment.

Speaker 2 I think most people could never

Speaker 1 achieve

Speaker 2 full enlightenment.

Speaker 1 Mom could.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or be like truly Buddhist. I don't.
So, yeah,

Speaker 2 everyone who believes, not everyone, but most people who believe any of this is you are combining it with the reality of, especially in this country, with our

Speaker 2 world, you know, with our

Speaker 1 reality.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.

Speaker 1 If you dare.

Speaker 1 A diamond is forever. Here on the show, we talk to guests about their past, where they are today, and what they want for the future.
And it kind of makes you realize you're never really done, are you?

Speaker 1 You're constantly changing, shedding old versions of yourself to reveal someone stronger, smarter, funnier even. Although my kids might argue that.

Speaker 1 The point is, you're evolving, becoming better every day. That's why desert-toned diamonds are the perfect way of celebrating all that you are and all that you're still becoming.

Speaker 1 They come in a range of unique, unexpected colors, colors that reflect your unique, unexpected journey, like warm whites, pale champagnes, deep ambers, smoky whiskeys, natural colors that are truly unlike anything else.

Speaker 1 Just like you. So, this holiday season, gift yourself a desert diamond to reflect all the shades of you.
That's why a diamond is forever. Visit adiamondisforever.com to learn more.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 2 This is for David Sederis.

Speaker 1 Oh boy, oh boy. The fun thing about Sederis, aside from that, he's just so perfect every time,

Speaker 1 is it always reinvigorates me to go back and re-listen to all this stuff. And I've just, since we've interviewed him, I've just been on a tear of listening to all of his stuff.
So fun.

Speaker 1 Listen to this incredible one in Happy Go Lucky. And the actual, and the specific story is Blady Marmalade.

Speaker 1 Okay, great. It's wild.
The stuff he is able to cover.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's incredible.

Speaker 2 He's just incredible.

Speaker 1 It's kind of Mike Whitey, actually. He's just so brutally honest with it.

Speaker 1 The Marmalade story is about like... Over the years, the many weird things his dad did that were very perverse, but didn't seem to cross the ultimate line for him was also it was the

Speaker 1 70s or whatever yeah but like he examined he wanted to examine um

Speaker 1 david's asshole at one point because he's his stomach hurt and he's like you probably have hemorrhoids and he was like didn't know what that was and his dad made him bend over the counter and he looked at his ass no as he said he didn't like put his finger in his butt or anything but he definitely like examined it he said as if he were looking at a gem oh my god

Speaker 1 and he did that three times throughout his childhood. He also wanted, he was very into photography and had these art photo magazines.

Speaker 1 And he wanted, he asked David's sister when she was 17 if he could take pictures of her topless in the woods. Yes.
It's like very bad. Yeah, very bad.
Just a series of things.

Speaker 1 And then later, his sister, who ultimately died by suicide or of suicide, accused the dad of sexual abuse. Really?

Speaker 1 And then them trying as siblings to evaluate whether they believe her or not, which is like so real.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's just so real. It wouldn't be this way on TV and it wouldn't be this way in the media, but this is really what happened.
This is what really happens. Yeah.
It's such a delicately assembled story.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 was there a time where you couldn't order a drink on an airplane because it's Sunday?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe at some point you couldn't drink at all, obviously, on planes, but state laws regarding alcohol sales, such as blue laws, do not apply to alcoholic beverages sold on airplanes, even if the state has such laws.

Speaker 2 Airlines are subject to federal regulations regarding the sale of alcohol, which generally supersedes state laws.

Speaker 1 If you really step back, it's interesting that they allowed drinking on an airplane.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I know.

Speaker 1 When you got 100 strangers sitting in a very tight area and you're allowing them to get drunk, which we know makes humans unpredictable. You could see where it would have never been allowed.
I agree.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm all for it. People are nervous.
Makes the time go by. You don't have a problem like me.
It's lovely.

Speaker 1 But it is a curious policy. It is.
Like, they should allow weed, I guess, too. But, like, I don't know, mushrooms? Probably not.

Speaker 2 Well, weed is different unless they're eating it. Like, you wouldn't want the smoke.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you wouldn't want the smoke. Yeah, you're eating it.
Yeah. Yeah, I guess.
I mean, it's fine, I guess. But there's obviously certain drugs PCP don't knows.
Well,

Speaker 2 a legal drug

Speaker 2 are probably not allowed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Shooting dope no. You can't have ODs up in the air.
I don't think so.

Speaker 2 The priest dress,

Speaker 2 a cassock, Catholic cassock or cassock.

Speaker 2 It has 33 buttons representing the years of Jesus' life. Anglican cassocks may have 39 buttons symbolizing the 39 articles of religion.

Speaker 1 Right. But I don't know.
I didn't know there were 39 articles of religion. religion.
I neither know that.

Speaker 2 Okay, I have a surprise. Oh,

Speaker 1 I like surprises. I know.

Speaker 2 I brought everyone one of the books, the book, the children's book, The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodone It.

Speaker 2 This is the story about the poop on the head.

Speaker 2 I got one for you too, Rob.

Speaker 1 And they said it's German. Well, Werner.
Yeah, Holzworth. Yeah, these are very German names.
Wolf and Werner.

Speaker 2 And on the back, it says, when little mole looks out of his hole one morning, plop, something lands on his head. Who done it?

Speaker 1 Oh, and guys,

Speaker 1 just

Speaker 1 for the viewer, here's a holdup of it. And the listener, it's not like a little bit of bird poop.
It's a big turd. It's like a soft served turd.

Speaker 1 It's covering his entire head.

Speaker 2 And there's flies on it.

Speaker 1 Well, I cannot read this to the children. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is going to be right up their alley. They're disgusting like me.

Speaker 2 Well, you made them disgusting.

Speaker 1 I think I did.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so this is an exciting

Speaker 1 thank you. Oh, I love it.

Speaker 1 Oh, fun. It's a yak dumping big plops of.

Speaker 1 You would know, you know, whenever you see that horse droppings, which I see on the hiking trail sometimes. Oh, sure.
Make no mistake about it. It's horse dumping.
I know.

Speaker 1 Because there's like clumps of hay still in it. Oh.
Yeah. I'm so glad we don't eat hay.

Speaker 1 That's a Buddhist thing. They could probably figure out how to eat hay, but I can't.
I want to eat. I want to eat ribeye.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I want a burger.
I think I'm going to have a burger tonight. Oh,

Speaker 1 burgy?

Speaker 2 And it's like so indulgent to eat burgers.

Speaker 1 Oh, no. I'm not sure how this is going to work out.
I know.

Speaker 2 I'm going to New York on Friday.

Speaker 1 Be a Buddhist when you get home.

Speaker 2 Really indulge there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, be a Buddhist when you get home. Okay.
There's plenty of people.

Speaker 2 I'll give myself another week to be

Speaker 1 heathen.

Speaker 1 Fully actualized. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Oh, I had to bring this up because he talks about diversity in kids' books. And

Speaker 2 so I have completed the studio since we last spoke or since we interviewed Seth.

Speaker 1 Do you love it as much as I did?

Speaker 2 I loved it so much.

Speaker 2 So I, you know. My privilege, the Buddhists wouldn't like this, but my privilege that I had access, we had access to all, we had to the screeners, but I couldn't get in to the screeners

Speaker 1 beforehand.

Speaker 2 So I was like, whatever, I'll just watch it when it comes out. And so the first two episodes came out and I watched it and immediately I was like,

Speaker 2 we got to figure this out.

Speaker 2 ASAP. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I have to watch all of it. I watched it all one day.
Oh, great. I was obsessed with it.
It's so good.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It is so good. It is so

Speaker 2 stressful.

Speaker 1 It's so stressful. I almost want to watch it again without the stress.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's so,

Speaker 1 but Buddhism.

Speaker 2 Oh no. Buddhism's my new the pit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you switched right from,

Speaker 2 but, but. Oh, this would interest you.

Speaker 1 I was talking to Tom Hansen.

Speaker 1 Well, I had lunch with, I had dinner with him yesterday before my meeting. Uh-huh.
And he was just coming from seeing John Wells. Oh, fun.
And I said, he said, are you watching it?

Speaker 1 I said, no, but Monica's watching it for me and she brings it up on every single episode. And he's like, it is so good.
He went on. He is right with you.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 The cool kids know it.

Speaker 1 He's like, Noah Wiley's such a man now. Oh, I know.
Oh, wow. He and I kind of went through the same transformation.

Speaker 1 Right? Wasn't he a, wasn't he a medium-sized person?

Speaker 2 He was. He was.
Well, he's in the show, he's wearing a hoodie, so you can't see his body really.

Speaker 1 But he's kind of, he's really masculine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he has. He's really become quite masculine.
His neck is thicker.

Speaker 1 You want his bod, right?

Speaker 2 You mean I want it on me or anything?

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, I do.

Speaker 2 I am so attracted to him. Yeah, that's him.
That's him on Friends.

Speaker 1 No, that's ER, right? No. Oh, they guest start on Friends as doctors.
That's cute. Yeah, so that looks like me and

Speaker 1 punked.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 he's still, he's so cute.

Speaker 1 And let's see him now. Oh.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 Is he hot?

Speaker 1 Wow. Okay, so I'm just, I haven't watched.

Speaker 2 When you see him intubate.

Speaker 1 Ooh, he can intubate like a motherfucker.

Speaker 2 I bet he knows how to intubate.

Speaker 1 Oh, in real life. Yeah.
Probably.

Speaker 2 He's done this so many times.

Speaker 1 But you would think I would know how to mix some music from how many times I hit buttons on parenthood, and I don't know anything about it.

Speaker 2 I think it's different with this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Okay, because he's a better actor. You haven't seen it.

Speaker 1 But he... Wow.
I would let him intubate you.

Speaker 2 I would let him perform a surgery on me.

Speaker 1 Oh, you would.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 I think he would kind of know how to do it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 I know you're mad about that.

Speaker 1 I want you to expand how many people you let do surgery on here. Not limit.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 That's very Buddhist of you.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Anyways, hot.

Speaker 1 There's enough room. I think you'll have enough surgeries.
There's enough.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's

Speaker 1 enough surgeries for Noah and Ida. Don't say that.

Speaker 1 You're going to get another one of those piercings. I know it.
I know you. I do want to.
I know you so well. You'll get another infected piercing.
I will. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Another ring swollen around your. These are all coming.

Speaker 2 Yeah, something happened. Oh, remember I told you I had an earring in recently and it was hard to get out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, got infected.

Speaker 1 Your ears are telling you very clearly, we don't want

Speaker 1 adornment.

Speaker 2 And I refuse to accept it for you. Anyway, identity.
I love that he, I love that he loves the pit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 People love it. It's like really gotten a huge.

Speaker 1 I'm going to go in. Yeah, you got to go in.
You got to go in. I'm just behind on Righteous and I was behind on White Lotus.

Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 2 Okay. Now, why was I bringing up the pit?

Speaker 1 Paris.

Speaker 1 Oh, Buddhist is your new pit.

Speaker 2 Right. But it was, I was going to say something.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
So the studio. So there's an episode in the studio about diversity, about casting.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. And it is.

Speaker 1 Yes. Ice cubes in it.
Yeah. It is so well done.

Speaker 2 Funny. Yeah.
And so well done.

Speaker 1 No one can figure out what's racist. That's so true and funny.

Speaker 2 It's so accurate.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I was laughing so hard.

Speaker 2 So hard. And also, like, because they each individually have the realization that something is potentially racist.
And you see them all have the realization at different times. And it is, oh, my God.

Speaker 2 It is brilliant. It is chef's kiss.
Chef's kiss.

Speaker 2 Highly recommend the studio.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Now, how many cows does an average meat eater eat in a lifetime? Okay. Okay.

Speaker 2 The average American consumes approximately 174 animals per year, including 23 chickens, a third of a pig, a tenth of a cow, three quarters of a turkey, and smaller amounts of other animals like fish and shellfish.

Speaker 2 This translates to roughly 11 cows over a lifetime.

Speaker 1 I think I've eaten more than that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you do think that.

Speaker 1 Does it count human DNA in hot dogs? Huh? Oh, yeah, like one millionth of a human from the hot dog.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, maybe that counts. Maybe that counts.
Okay, is piles the old word for hemorrhoids? Yes. Swollen inflamed veins in the lower rectum and anus.

Speaker 1 Oh, ding, ding, ding. This is what David's father was checking.
Oh, my God. Yeah.
Whoa.

Speaker 2 They can be internal or external.

Speaker 1 I am shocked that I've never had a hemorrhoid. It feels impossible.
Are you sure you have a heart? I have some weak systems, but I have some bulletproof systems.

Speaker 1 As we know already, my teeth are bulletproof. Right.
I think my anus is too, because we both know I sit on that toilet for fucking, as long as I can, as long as my life will permit.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But you have had bliss as well.

Speaker 1 So my legs fall asleep.

Speaker 2 You've had blood. What did you have? Fissures.

Speaker 1 Fissures. Yeah, I had a bad run of fissures.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's not strong.

Speaker 1 It's rough, but it's not a tongue hanging out of your your butt.

Speaker 1 Piles.

Speaker 2 I've never had piles. Okay.
But if I did.

Speaker 1 Would you let Noah Wiley get them?

Speaker 1 Would you let him look at your piles?

Speaker 2 If I got waxed and everything.

Speaker 1 Everything else was gorgeous. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How old is he? Oh,

Speaker 1 53.

Speaker 2 Great age.

Speaker 1 Mature.

Speaker 1 Just about to be picked off the vine to make into wine. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 He's lived such a long life in the ER.

Speaker 1 Oh, God. That's crazy.
He's still at it. It's exhausting work.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 2 It's getting to him. He has a, I won't tell you.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 All right. That's it.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. Great.

Speaker 1 I love you, David Sederas.

Speaker 2 I love you, David Seder.

Speaker 1 So much.

Speaker 2 All right. Oh, yeah.
He brought us.

Speaker 2 We have postcards, but I didn't bring mine.

Speaker 1 Isn't it behind you? Yours is. Why isn't yours behind you?

Speaker 2 I have it in my house.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's a good place for it. Yeah.
I thought for some reason it went behind your head.

Speaker 2 It's on my throat.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Love you. Love you.

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Speaker 5 Mom and dad, uh, mom and mom, dad and dad, whatever, parents, are you about to spend five hours in the car with your beloved kids this holiday season? Driving to old granny's house?

Speaker 5 I'm setting the scene, I'm picturing screaming, fighting, back-to-back hours of the K-pop demon hunters soundtrack on repeat.

Speaker 5 Well, when your ears start to bleed, I have the perfect thing to keep you from rolling out of that moving vehicle. Something for the whole family.
He's filled with laughs.

Speaker 1 He's filled with rage. The OG Green Gronk, give it up for me, James Austin Johnson, as the Grinch.

Speaker 5 And like any insufferable influencer these days, I'm bringing my crew of lesser talented friends along for the ride with A-list guests like Gronk, Mark Hamill, and the Jonas Brothers, whoever they are.

Speaker 5 There's a little bit of something for everyone. Listen to Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.