"David Remnick"

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Sean.

Hey.

You're feeling kind of sleepy.

Uh, I am?

You're feeling a little bit drowsy.

Oh, I am.

And you're listening to my voice.

Oh, wow.

This is crazy.

And when I say three, two, one, you're under my control, Sean.

Okay.

I don't believe this would work, but let's try it.

I hate tuna sandwiches.

Oh. Say, I hate tuna sandwiches.
I hate tuna sandwiches. You didn't say 3-2-1.
Did I not say 3-2-1? God, I'd make a terrible hypnotist. Welcome to SmartList.
Smart moved out of your house. Yeah, I did.
Yeah, so listeners, so Will moved out of his house, but he still has a recording booth there in the house because he does make a grip on voiceover work. And so he's asked this new owner if he can come in and use his audio studio that is hilarious wait so it's different families living there right now but you're in there with yeah i just met the new owners as i came up and they let me and they agreed to for the next week let me continue to use the what i call my booth it's technically their booth you're joking right no you're watching people living in your kitchen as of last week was your kitchen your living room everything I just met them in in what is now their kitchen um I don't know how do you deal with that well luckily I'm very cut off emotionally um so I don't you know I don't let, but it was very strange like they open the door, come on in, into a house.
I built this house, as you know. Well, a crane, a crane did, a container crane did.
Oh yeah, don't get Kimmel started on me building this. You know, Sean, his house is one of those kind of new, fancy, modern, we're just going to stack a bunch of glass boxes on each other.
Oh, yeah, no, I saw it. It's like a Costco.
Prefab. I went shopping in there.
Yeah. It's a beautiful house.
It was on the cover of Dwell Magazine. I don't need to sell it anymore.
I already sold it. Yeah, you did.
Any of your personal things still there that they're rummaging through? Just in this, it's like I'm in the Vatican, you know, like I'm just, I've got this little oasis here, this little temple inside their house. And I did, I will admit this, I came up here and they were like, you can use, you know, by the way, these people are so nice and so, so sweet.
And they said, yeah, feel free to use it the next week, don't, all good. And then I get in here and they're downstairs in the kitchen.
I was like, I really got to take a leak like i wonder if they'll know if i just pop around the corner and i did i popped around like just tiptoeing around in what one week ago was my house that's so crazy tiptoeing in to take a leak it was very uh it's very odd but i will say the kindness it reaffirmed my faith in humanity these people are very sweet to let me uh continue to do this. That's nice.
So I'm very nervous. I know that you have heard me introduce guests before by saying today's guest is going to really class us up.
But today it has never been more true. I have been an admirer of this man for as long as I have been smart enough to admire smart people, which is sadly only the second half of my life.
This man has won, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk. He started his career in journalism at the Washington Post in 1982.
He covered Metro Sports style. Then in 1988, he became their Moscow correspondent.
I'm not smart enough. This is a number.
In 1992, he became a staff writer at the New Yorker and a short six years later was named editor, a position he remains in to this day. You got it.
You can only one of five people to hold that title in the magazine's 100 year history. He's one of our smartest and most cultured thinkers that we have today, and I have zero idea why he said yes to the big swing I took when I asked him to join us.
Friends, please welcome Mr. David Remnick.
Oh, my gosh, David Remnick. No way.
Oh, there he is. Look at this.
Look at this man. Wait, David, you look so young to be only one of five editors in the history of The New Yorker? Is that true? I'm not the only one.
No, no, no. You know, some die off and some retire.
Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, but that's 25 years or something. It's kind of incredible.
We've been around for 90, what is it, 95 years or something. And the first two, Harold Ross went for 25 years or so and William Sean for 30 odd years, 35 years or something.
David, how long have you been editor? 23 years. Wow.
Jeez, that's what I'm saying. Older than any pair of khakis that any of you have.
Sure. You can put some mileage on khakis, because they really don't fade in any sort of substantial way.
So I'm going to get right into The New Yorker and my own subscription and my battle with my subscription with The New Yorker for many years. Here we go.
Which is, here we go. the shame I would feel when I'd be like, well, first of all, the victory I would feel when I'd read an entire issue.
And then the shame I'd go away and I'd get behind and then they'd pile up and then I'd have on my counter, you know, I've never heard this before. North of 40.
Not once. And I'd be like, I'm going to get, okay, I got to get to that.
Now I got to get to that. And then I would ultimately have to put them in the recycling.
And I'd think, I never got to all 10 of these. Throwing away all that knowledge.
This is our editorial. This is our highest editorial aspiration.
Number one, to make you feel really bad. Terrible, always.
And number two, to feed the recycling bin. So I feed the recycling and keep the subscription, which is now, now here's how I figured it out.
Now I'm on a digital. Yeah.
There you go. Yeah.
So I'm now on the digital. Pretty slick.
Very slick. But I have, the New Yorker is one of the, of course, I mean.
But you guys should talk. I think Netflix rolls over too.
I don't notice like myself getting a bill in the mail from Netflix. So, you know.
Yeah, yeah. We're all on the same deal.
Sure. Now, David, there's no way that you can read every issue cover to cover.
Yeah, I don't have to make a TV show or anything else. This is what I do.
In fact, no kidding around, that's the great pleasure is to read the stuff. And I read it multiple times.
And in addition to the thing you get in the mail or what's known as the issue, the weekly issue, we also publish a whole bunch of things every day online on newyorker.com. So it's, the reading is increased.
Yeah. So David, when you started, so you started as a journalist, I imagine.
What was your trajectory? You had an illustrious academic career. Well, since it was denied to me playing second base for the Yankees or being a supermodel, that's what I wanted to do.
Same, same. I wanted those, I don't know about you guys, but once in a while you meet somebody who ended up doing exactly what they wanted to do since they were a kid.
And in high school, we had a high school newspaper and I went to a place called Pasquac Valley and the mascot, and it's a terrible word, the use now mascot is the Indians. And the newspaper was called, wait for it, The Smoke Signal.
And no one was interested in this newspaper except for me. and I used to write, I don't know, two-thirds of it using fake names and so on and do it on my kitchen table in the days when you printed these things out and cut them in columns and pasted it.
I knew I wanted to do this. I loved the idea of going out into the world and in a sense hiding behind a notebook.
In other words, engaging with the world, but having a kind of purpose and come back with your material and make something of it. That seemed like an exciting thing to do.
And nobody, nobody that my parents knew did such a thing, considered such a thing. It was, my parents thought that this was insane, insane.
Was the draw to that more a, just a simple dry reporting of the facts of news, or were you confident enough, interested enough at that age to, to weave in some opinions, some, to sort of editorialize? I wasn't that sophisticated. I was a kid.
And, and, but it gave me the, you know, I grew up in a really boring town, kind of Springsteen North, that kind of church. Really dull.
And with no ocean and close to New York, but a million miles away. So everything that was exciting was across the river.
The world seemed to be across the river. And so how do you get to that? And I didn't come from an incredibly sophisticated or intellectual family.
I came from a family, though, that you were meant to aspire. Right.
What did your parents do, David? My father had a very small dental practice. And to be perfectly glum about it, my mother was sick.
She had MS. And eventually my father lost his dental practice because he had Parkinson's.
You don't want a Parkinsonian dentist unless you want Buster Keaton as your dentist. You can get a deal.
You can get a really good deal, I can show you the paper. And so it was a difficult situation and they wanted me to do something incredibly secure, be a lawyer or a doctor.
That was the range of it. Was that the attraction to reading, though? Sort of that escapism, getting into a book? Yeah, or all of it, radio, TV.
Radio in those days, when I was a kid, and I'm older than you guys, was... You don't look at David.
Look at you. Look how hydrated.
And so I would listen to these, obviously rock and roll was in the air, but also there were weird radio stations, like Pacifica radio stations, and you would kind of, the counterculture would come in by listening to it at 2 o'clock in the morning as an adolescent who couldn't sleep. So it was excitement, but it was over there.
And then somehow the idea that journalism would get you over there. Get you over there.
But kind of to what Jason was saying about the reading, do you suspect that there was, whether you were writing or you were editing the school paper, was there a part of you maybe now, have you ever thought about the idea that you were recreating by observing other lives and actually by, you know, putting together this newspaper, you were creating a life or a world that was different from the world you were existing at the moment. I think that's right on the money.
That's right on the money. And I also didn't, it was not given to me to have the self-confidence or to live in a world where people were artists.
Right. My parents knew people who sold things or fixed things or ran a store or something like that.
The idea that somebody would be an artist was preposterous and laughable and just otherworldly. So a journalist seemed like a middle ground.
You know what I mean? You could make a living at, there was a job that you could occupy, you could work at a newspaper or something like that. Right.
And a proximity to the artist, but also another foot firmly in sort of establishment. I knew from a very young age in some intuitive way that I would have to make some sort of living to, quite frankly, to support them, much less myself.
Right. And that's what ended up being the case.
You know, Duddy Kravitz, the apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. I know it all too well.
It's so good. And that great line of like, a man is nothing unless he owns land.
Like that thing, like you have to do something. You have to own land.
You have to do. Well, I just had to make sure that they somehow got to the end of their lives.
You know, we don't, I hate to turn all terribly serious on you, but we live in a political system where if you are weak or sick or left behind, you're in deep trouble. Whether it's about health insurance or it's about a minimum amount of income or whatever.
And I could see that coming like a freight train. Yeah.
You started it. So this is where I want to go.
And we can lighten it up as we go through it if we want to. But we're going to go darker.
I want to use your brain for a second here. So I mean, I know that there's no solid answer for this, but I would love your perspective on, in your gut, do you think that we are now currently in a period nationally that is temporary, you know, an anomaly that will make for interesting retrospection? Or do you think that we are in potentially the first chapter of what may be an endless story about two tribes without a happy ending, potentially? I mean, let's ruin everybody's mood right away.
Sure. Let's just kill it.
Yeah, it's a good idea. Yeah.
Because then it's only up from there. Exactly.
It's kind of a rhythmic thing. It's never going to get more glum than this, listener.
What we've just gone through this year and a half is a rehearsal. A rehearsal.
The pandemic is a rehearsal, not just for other pandemics, but really for climate change. And if we don't get our shit together, politically, environmentally, we are going to face something that there's no vaccine for.
Right. There's for.
That's number one. Number two, we're living in a period where we're playing very fast and loose with the greatest gift we've had.
This is a country that had the great gift, despite all its problems and slavery and so much more, of a period of enlightenment philosophers who gave us something called liberal democratic society. And we are in the process of willy-nilly seeing it being thrown out the window.
I think we can go into that if you want at some point. Or we can talk about the cartoons in The New Yorker.
No, no, I want to talk about it. And, and, and.
And I think that we're in a moment also of a racial reckoning that's long in coming or it's happened every so often, but now it's at its next stage. That's extremely serious.
So that's just three big things. And isn't it interesting though, because I always, whenever I hear, I'm a news junkie just as much as the other person until I realize I can't do anything about any of it except vote.
And that's what really is. Yeah, I don't think that's true.
It's like, yeah, oh my God, it's so frustrating. Sure, we can go out and protest.
We can do these things. But we don't, all we have the power to do is vote.
Otherwise, we're just filled with anger all day long. I think you also have the power to make art.
Yeah. To protest.
For sure. To be funny in ways that are provocative.
Thank you. I have no illusion that the New Yorker, which has a circulation of a million to three and then maybe four or five million people read it, I have no illusion that this is going to be a conversion experience throughout the United States, most less in Red America.
I'm not deluded. But each person, each in their own way,

can play some kind of role.

That's what the whole thing is about anyway in large measure.

And if you give in to resignation or give up the game each in your own way,

then maybe we didn't deserve it in the first place.

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And if they're not available, I will talk to a therapist. And I've been going to therapy for a long time, and it's always great.
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That's betterhelp.com slash smartless. While Hilton is always expected to have top-notch service, you'd be surprised at the unexpected places they're offering it now.
They've partnered with AutoCamp, which offers insanely cool airstreams in iconic outdoor destinations. Hilton also has an exclusive partnership with small luxury hotels of the world, providing Hilton Honors members access to luxury boutique hotels across the globe.
And they've added romantic and refined nomad hotels and graduate hotels in your favorite college towns to their portfolio. Explore all the new ways to stay with those Hilton honors points you've been saving at Hilton.com.
Hilton, for the stay. And now, back to the show.
So, you know, somebody in The New Yorker who I really enjoy, who plays around with a lot of the themes that we talk about, but in a really delightful way is Andy Borowitz in the Borowitz Report. Can you talk a little bit, did he predate your becoming editor of The New Yorker? Yeah.
So Andy, you know, Andy's career. Did he create the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? So my understanding is he met, he was at the Harvard Lampoon.
Right. And I think he either met Bud Yorkin or Norman Lear or somebody like that through that high office.
And he wrote a treatment for or some kernel of what became the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air eventually. And, you know, which, by the way, I think pays better than freelance writing.
Sure. Creating a TV show in the 90s? Yeah.
Yeah. Lots of named will smith etc we're not throwing we're not throwing a benefit for andy anytime soon well i would never ask him but what is it you have to go over 100 episodes and then then it's just not anymore nobody cares so and i think andy you know is able like the onion and like a lot of of our best comedians are able to see the absolute absurdity in political life and he and he does it through this headline form and he's pretty hilarious yeah yeah he's hilarious i find it it's so delightful and i find it to be so we kind of brought him he had his own gig on online and we kind of brought him into the new yorker he was always around The New Yorker.
He was doing things for The New Yorker, but the constancy was brought from his, I guess what used to be called a blog. And then brought on, right.
So now that we're still on The New Yorker, the other thing I want to ask you, because this is really important, and I want to ask you, David, first, and then I'm going to go around to the fellas. And you have to be honest.
And I know that you have a lot of, you're going to have a lot of favorites. It's kind of like asking, who's your favorite child? Favorite New Yorker cartoon of all time.
What is it? Describe it, please. Oh, ask those guys first, then I'll think.
Okay, okay. Sean or Jason? Okay, I got it.
I got it. Oh, wait, wait, sorry, David.
Yeah, Sean and Jason, you're on ice again. And it's completely self-involved and it involves a gift.
So I think one of the great comic geniuses in the country of any kind is Roz Chast. You guys know Roz Chast.
And she has this kind of wobbly line and her humor comes out of, you know, Brooklyn neurotic old parents who are school teachers. And when I turned 40, which I'm loathe to admit was some time ago, I was feeling pretty.
I don't know how you guys turned 40, yes, right? Yeah. It's not the best day of your life.
I currently play 38. Yeah.
What was the question? Like Jack Benny. And I contrived some reason to stay home from work that day.
And yet this thing came in, you know, it was delivered to the house, a big framed thing. And it was Roz Chast had delivered, or the office had delivered or gotten me, this strip that Roz had done about her childhood and her obsession with Charles Adams, who was one of the great New Yorker cartoonists.
And so that strip hangs in my apartment,

and so I have to give that pride a place.

Yeah, yeah.

She has a very distinctive style, Roz Chast.

She sure does.

Yeah, very, very cool, very funny.

Sean, do you have one?

No, I don't read.

The New Yorker cartoons?

Hang on, hang on.

We're still doing this.

They're cartoons, one sentence at a time.

Jason, do you have one?

I'm embarrassed to say that I just read the articles and not even as often as I would like to. I do not spend time with the cartoons.
We'll get to it. I was teeing, I was teeing myself up.
I was teeing myself up. Okay, go ahead.
Good. I was just gonna say, keep in mind the title of the, of this show is called Smartless.
Go ahead. Right.
My favorite, uh, New Yorker cartoon of which I have two framed versions because two people knew i loved it so much they gave it to me as gifts is uh the the the image is a piece of penne do you know what i'm getting at it's a piece of penne pasta and he's on the phone he's picked up the phone and he's saying fusilli you crazy bastard how hell are you? It looks better than it sounds. It's incredible.
Charles Barsati is the cartoonist. I remember it well.
It's incredible. To me, it's the funniest joke of all time.
You know the process how they do this. I guess it's the individual version of a writer's room.
It's that these guys, and thank God it's no longer all guys, it's much more diverse in all ways in recent years, which is the achievement in many ways of Emma Allen, the cartoon editor for the past several years, is the artists are at home all by their lonesome and they do what's called roughs, kind of a rough version of the drawing and they just do ideas and ideas and ideas and then they send them in, you know, six a week, 10 a week, however many. And the cartoon editor goes through the huge stack and then one day a week even has a meeting and the people come in, like into an emergency room or something and one after another comes to see Emma and they talk it through.
And she whittles down the stack to about, I don't know, 50 or 60, and then she and I go through it, and we pick 20. It's pretty brutal.
No way. Very tough.
That sounds so fun. It's tough.
Have you ever had to disqualify one that you regret, that you're like, oh, it was so, has one ever stuck out to you that you thought, ah. Because it's too filthy or something? Or something, or whatever.
Well, sometimes people make the same joke that we had five years ago. So our fact checkers, and we have a small army of wonderful fact checkers, not only check the articles and really drill down on the facts, but they also check cartoons.
One, to make sure we haven't made this joke before. that it's accurate yeah imagine that accuracy in in joke writing in humor and and if it's inaccurate you obviously you work with the artist and do they want to do that do they want to say that the you know the empire state building is only 100 feet tall or whatever but so you you want to get there and but they're like i don't know I've kind of come to think of cartoons as like little hand grenades.
Either they blow up or they don't. Well, but there's also the cultural hand grenade of it.
Do you find yourself caught in between the potential perceived pressure on one side to have the satire be based in sort of wokeness? which, you know, one could make an argument that the left-leaning base of the New Yorker would demand versus the pressure from the other side saying, well, you guys are getting too far over here. You don't even want us to read the magazine anymore.
It doesn't come in cartoons all that often. I think that you see that more in political argument.
Yeah. And I think it's less left-right as it is liberal, left-liber, you know, radical, as it were.
Ah, gotcha. At least in these precincts, that's where you see the tension.
And I don't mean just the New Yorker, I just mean overall. Yeah, no, that's where the real battle is now.
So to what degree do you guys respond to, are you aware of social media and response? Because now the response is so immediate and so often filled with vitriol. To what degree does that drive or steer what you guys do or how aware of it, how much of that? It's a dilemma.
Yeah. It's a dilemma because on the one hand, I've made two really good decisions in my life.
For me, one was to marry my wife, who I'm married to for 30 years, and there seems to be no end in sight except for the mortality. And then the other one is to not...
She's not after this. We're going to ask her the same question.
She disagrees, by the way. You should tune in.
We've got a rebuttal. She will have a rebuttal.
And the second thing was not to sign up for Twitter. Because people in, I don't know about you, but people in jobs like mine, whether they're running the New York Times or the Atlantic or the Washington Post or Small Magazine, whatever it is, they do one of two things.
Either they quickly become unbelievably boring and say we had a really good piece about this, then we had a really good, it becomes promotional and then nobody gives a damn.

Or somebody tweets at them something that pisses them off and at two o'clock in the morning

after having a couple of beers or whatever their pleasure is,

they decide to become honest.

And that's a disaster.

That's a disaster.

And I've seen that happen too.

So of course I look at Twitter

in the same way that Jimmy Stewart looked at his neighbor in Rear Window. I lurk because it's interesting.
That's Jason's move. I've heard that.
Is the circulation growing? Did you notice over everything, print and social? So here's what's happened to our business. The magazine business and the New Yorker's business used to be predominantly, by a huge majority, advertising.
And then something happened in the world, and it's related to what we were just talking about. Google and Facebook in particular took up all the advertising in the world, like 75% of it.
Wow. so if you look at an issue of the new yorker from 1967 it's fat with ads for products that some of most of don't even exist anymore but it's fat with ads if you look at the print magazine now it's far less so you would look at that and say well how the hell did they exist we exist because we made because we made a bet.
And the bet was, in the old days, what you paid to subscribe was a trivial amount of money. The bet was, and thank God it worked out, is we basically said to the reader, you need to pay a more reasonable price.
How about as much as a small cup of coffee at Starbucks once once a week yeah so 150 bucks a year right and our readers thank god love the new yorker enough so that they did this and so that we're doing okay i mean it's it ain't facebook it's not google do you still do a lot of blow-ins on the uh yeah but most you do that but most people are subscribing obviously digitally blow-ins sorry it's the magazine business david and i know sorry little cards the things that fall out of the print magazine it's not what you think just a little yeah just for david well david i mean you know you would never say this but i'll say it i mean you're at the top of the mountain where do you where do you see yourself going with a job? I mean, you just

stay there till you die? I mean, you couldn't

what could be better than being the editor

of the New Yorker? Jesus Christ, Bateman.

You're asking about death?

Don't make him face his mortality

this morning. No, but what do you want to do after this?

What could be better than this?

And I'm speaking

about the Smartless podcast.

Being the editor of the New Yorker is the top of the mountain. A, how's the view? And B, what could you ever do after this? What would you want to do after this? Well, unusual for most editors, I came to this through writing.
In other words, I was a writer at The New Yorker after being at The Washington Post for five, six years. The editor was Tina Brown.
One fine day she quit to go off to do another magazine, talk magazine. Oh, yeah.
Talk about fireworks. Anyway, we won't get into that.
No. That's between you and David.
And I really got and do get along exceptionally well with Tina. I think she's an exceptional talent and person.
Sure. And I became editor in 1998.
And I remember the conversation I had with my wife. She said, well, if it doesn't work out after a couple of years, you know, you just quit and go back to writing.
So, it wasn't a couple of years, but at some point, if I, you know, still have, you know, I don't have scrambled eggs for a brain, I'll write again. And I'm 62 years old.
I shouldn't stay there forever. The great editor of The New Yorker in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s was William Sean, but he kept at it until he was almost 80.
And I'm not sure that's a brilliant idea. I'd love to see you take over for Charlie Rose.
I used to love, that's why I first started falling in love with you, just watching those great conversations you guys used to have. And I miss his show.
And I'd love to see somebody like you take over for that. I'd like to see you take over for Jason on Spoiler List.
Will. David, I was going to say, so you win, you know, you're not only where you're you're a writer with considerable acclaim and I forget the title of your book that you wrote that you won the Pulitzer for.
Was it Lenin's Tomb? Lenin's Tomb. It was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Right, Lenin's Tomb. And then you become an editor at The New Yorker.
It's a gear shift, of course. It is.
It's a massive gear shift to go. It's kind of like, you know, going from actor to director, which Jason knows all too well.
You're staying within the same discipline, if you will, but you're looking at it from a different perspective. Well, it's other people.
It's other people. In other words, a writer, what I want to create for writers at the New Yorker is a kind of paradise.
In other words, that they know they're making a living, but equally important that they have the freedom to explore the things that they want to explore and have the time to do it where that's appropriate. And that's not the case at a newspaper.
In a newspaper, you're assigned very often to X, and I was, and I was perfectly happy at it for 10 years. And my last assignment was heaven on earth, meaning Moscow.
But I want at the New Yorker people never, ever, ever to be working on something that bores them or they're not interested in. What were those last days like in Moscow as it fell with Gorbachev and then going into Yeltsin and all that stuff.
What was that like, just sort of as an observant,

not even just from a news standpoint, just sort of watching that whole shift? You know, I've never been a war correspondent. And war correspondents, when you ask them that, you know you're never getting a full answer because there's so much tragedy and horror and fear and peril involved that they never can, unless they're writing their fullest book and from their fullest soul, they never get a full picture.
I can answer your question because really it was a revolution in which, I mean, there were people who died in certain incidents in Georgia and Azerbaijan and certain areas. But, you know, even the coup that ended the whole thing in August of 1991, three people were killed.
I mean, which is a tragedy for them and their families and everybody they know. But how often does that happen? It was, to answer your question, thrilling.
My wife and I lived in a tiny, crappy apartment and we worked from nine in the morning, she for the New New York Times, me for the Washington Post from nine in the morning till two in the morning, every day for four years and never regretted a second of it. And even on the rare moments when we went out of the country and we're on kind of relative vacation, we missed it and couldn't wait to get back.
How drunk was everybody? Well, here's the thing. So I'm a Jew.
You might have possibly guessed this. And so I found myself, you know, at these occasions, pouring the vodka into the potted plants half the time because I can't keep up.
I can't. I can't do it.
I can't do it. I can't do it.
That's hilarious. And we will be right back.
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All right, back to the show. Wait, back to the New Yorker.
Do you have a favorite interview of all time that you've ever done? Well, they've ranged from Howard Stern to Alexander Kosoljynitsyn. I occasionally get a chance still to write pieces, and I've been on a streak of writing about older musicians.
And right before the election in 2016, a friend of mine was friends in California with Leonard Cohen, who I really admired. And he said, do you want to meet Leonard? And I flew out to L.A., we met, we talked for five hours.
He's the most unbelievably eloquent, prolific, charming man. Great Canadian.
A great Montrealer, yes. Yeah, a great Montrealer.
And so I asked to interview him. And, you know, usually these profiles, and you've been through this process, usually these profiles, when they're not just junket things, you're spending a lot of time with them, you're going to this, you're seeing that.
By this time, Leonard was in his 80s, and he was, frankly, dying. He had a number of illnesses, and he knew what was up.
And so all this piece involved, which ended up being, I don't know, 10,000 words, which is long, was sitting there for two days and asking him questions for five, six hours each time, including a moment on the second day when he was furious with me and my friend because we screwed up the time and we were late or whatever happened. And he accused us of torturing a dying man,

which is not what you want to hear from Leonard Cohen.

You really don't.

Doesn't yield a lot of open answers.

Oh, no, I felt terrible.

But I just found him to be a person of really profound depth

and wit and learning.

And I don't know how he managed with all the women

because he was easily the most charming person I ever met. yeah ever well how do you do it yeah well yeah David you're just getting to know me but I suspect that there's going to be a 200,000 word I'm feeling it yeah David what is the dumbest thing that you enjoy doing every day or every week or is it a is it a crappy reality show is it i watch more tv than i'm i'm really willing to admit right here and you still get time to read and everything like that i mean yeah you know i it's to my advantage that i don't sleep very well what's your guilty pleasure that people would be surprised to hear about i just watch one of these you know there's all these Nordic thrillers, and some of them are really good, right? Great.
Some of them are really good. There's also some that are incredibly boring.
Yeah. I mean, so, this one was set in Iceland.
I don't even remember. And it wasn't even in Reykjavik it was so boring.
It was in, like, a bad town up the fjord or whatever. I know the one you're talking about.
I couldn't follow a thing, and yet it was just having to watch it because it was like... But that's still you watching something highbrow.
I'm talking about... That wasn't highbrow.
What is the stupid-ass thing that you do? No, this is highbrow to him. It's highbrow to him.
Sorry, David, keep going. No, I...
I'll tell you, you know, I also, for my sins,

we do a podcast called The New Yorker Radio Hour,

which I find enormously fun.

But I have such a hard time sleeping late at night.

What I do is I find the most boring podcast I possibly can,

and that's it.

You're welcome.

Please say it's us.

Please say it's us.

Please say it's us.

No, it's not. I promise you.
Could you make a commitment today to write a hit piece on Sean and Jason? Can you just like a real, I want one of these real hit pieces that just takes them apart. Can you just take them down? Take them right down, right down to the studs.
I want to ask you guys something. You guys have all had reporters come to you.
When a reporter approaches you is it like when a mountain lion approaches you on a on a walk through the hills of la or or how much trepidation is i have to tell you i figured it took me years and years to figure this out but a lot of times journalists will whether it's on camera or print or whatever they'll ask you a question they know is a little racier that you don't want to go there you don't want to answer and I finally learned this tactic they do. They'll ask you a question they know is a little racier, that you don't want to go there, you don't want to answer.
And I finally learned this tactic they do. They'll ask you a question, and then they'll wait.
And they'll let you fill the awkward space. It's the oldest trick in the book.
That's Howard. That's Howard.
I told Howard that. Howard Stern does the very thing.
The first time I did Howard Stern, I go in there and I go, I figured out, Howard, what you do. It's a rope-a-dope, right? So he brings up stupid things.
You get into dumb conversations about whatever it is. Psychoanalysis.
Right, and then what he does is, then he says, and, yeah, of course, somebody will bring it in and say, and, yeah, and you had an awkward thing with the police. And you go, and there's a positive thing.
He goes, and he says, go ahead. And he's suggesting that you had brought it up.
He's changed. He's changed.
I agree. But what I learned was then just to have a staring contest.
Now I don't answer until they keep going. Yeah.
Did you win? I'm just completely quiet. Must be a great piece that resulted from that.
Yeah, absolutely. It's about a page.
It's about 20 words. You know what's annoying that reporters do? And it's generally not current reporters because they're much more engaging and they're looking for actual answers.
But oftentimes you'll go, you'll do something and they'll say, they'll go, oh, so Lego movie. There's no question.
And I've started to get to the point where I just go, there's no question here. Or they'll go, that was fun.
Yeah. Oh, the best is in sports.
And I experienced, I covered the, first of all, I want you to know I was the Washington Federals correspondent for the Washington Post. This was the USFL.
Oh my God. And I was the second string boxing correspondent.
Second string. But the, my favorite thing is, you know, you're in a locker room, which has kind of receded.
Now it's much more formal and it's press conference-y. But you just go in a locker room and the guys, you know, with the radio mics would just go, LeBron, that shot.
And then they'd extend, everybody would extend their arms with the microphone. But LeBron knew what to do.
Yeah, right. And I was such an idiot that I would think I have to ask a really good question and um so i i was covering the bullets as they were named now they're now the wizards because bullets was not good with the murder rate in washington at that time that's true what happened to that and the best player on that team was jeff ruland who by the way was not so good but that's that's what we had and i said you know ralph sampson is coming into the league and how do you think ralph samson's going to be is he going to be a great nba center this was week two of the season 82 games he would not speak to me for the rest of the year so good questions can can can you know screw you up what's your sports passion now is it basketball basketball i'm with i'm with the nets the nets yeah the nets are a great team they are stacked you know in this new world of what's it called player empowerment yeah you know in which everybody seeks you know the superstars all seek each other in this kind of new way of doing well the players decide where the dynasty is going to be right well and the agent you know we just we just ran a profile of Rich Paul, who's LeBron's agent.
And he's the pioneer in this. Yeah.
Ask me what I'm thinking of right now. How about cupcakes, maybe? Or just a bag of, fresh bag of cookies? Dr.
Brown soda with a little cupcake. Sean, as soon as we're done, Sean is like, I know Sean.
Here's Sean's schedule for today. He's going to watch last night's hockey playoffs.
Either he goes in the kitchen and he makes a tuna salad sandwich on white bread with chips, with plain chips on the side. Okay, so he either does that.
That's not a Jewish meal, Sean. Or he orders food and he'll get in the car himself because he doesn't like other people grabbing his food and he'll go pick up.
He won't do delivery. This is true.
And he'll go, and he'll get in the car sometimes, and he drives close to where I live, and I

go, where are you going?

It's like, you know, seven o'clock at night.

He's like, I'm going to pick up dinner.

I'm like, you know, they have Postmates.

He's like, no, no, no, I don't want them to pick up my food.

And then five o'clock is bowling league.

Can we go back to the part where you watch repeat hockey games?

That's sarcasm.

That is really, that is just desperation.

Sean still thinks there's four quarters in a hockey game. Sean doesn't.
I do, in fact, but Sean does not. I watch him.
He balances us out, you know. I couldn't, I just can't do it.
Chalkboard play by play. Chalkboard play by play.
David, we could hang out with you all day because you just, you make us feel better about ourselves and I didn't get to half of my pre-written questions. I was so proud of the way I wrote them.
And this is... Ask my wife.
What's your toughest one, Jason? They're all political and boring, but I just... Let's let it go.
I love you, your brain, your kindness and all of that stuff. And I'd love to have you come back, please.
This was really fun. David, for you, I pray that you never find yourself like in a social situation where Jason is stuck to you and he's hammering you with, and at first you're thinking, I'm talking to Jason Bateman.
He's great from Ozark and stuff. And four minutes in, you're like, I will sever my own limbs off to get out of this fucking guy.
Here's the thing. Ozark scared that shit out of you.
Oh my God. I pray for you, David.
We're doing the last season now.

It's a musical, so it'll be fun.

Is it?

Yeah, it's really fun.

That I will rewatch.

What a departure.

We just made news right there.

I think that's a great turn.

There's a lot of fun bits.

You can't live on plot alone.

No.

David, it was a pleasure meeting you.

David, thank you so, so much.

What a pleasure.

Great to see you. Thank you, David, very much.
Thanks, David right man take care bye buddy oh you know i i really uh i really i have so i have so many questions for him i feel like he could really solve a lot of uh a lot of our issues why why isn't somebody like that um in charge He's a smarty-past. Because it's...
I guess he is in charge over there at the magazine. Because it's the most thankless thing to do now.
Hey, but, you know, we don't have to go on and on about this, but you know that thing about when I said, it feels like there's nothing else we can do but vote. You know what I mean? Like that.
He's like, no, there's more. There's tons of you do.
I just don't know that people know what to do or where to go or how to help. People just don't know and they want to.
I mean, you know. He said art.
I think he means graffiti. Yeah.
You got to tag stuff. Yeah, just get into tag.
Let's start a tag crew. The three of us.
You just have to turn your hat sideways a little bit, right? Dude, let me get my visor on.

Yeah.

Good to go.

I feel like it's all about penetrating those who— Excuse me, sir.

It's about trying to get to the people that don't listen to facts or don't have access.

I mean, I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

No, I think he's right, though.

It is like people continuing to write. It is art.
I mean, that seems to be the way that it always happens. Right, eventually.
And through education. The most chilling thing he said to me was, he said that at the end of it all, and if it doesn't work, then maybe we didn't deserve it.
I know. I was like, uh-oh, wow.
Christ. And you know what? He's kind of right.
Maybe we don't. And it's like...
We'll be dead by then. Well, yeah.
It's like the idea that like, okay, well, you don't think that anybody deserves to... Well, you don't think that people should be taken care of.
And you don't be... And then ultimately, that's going to be you that's not taken care of.
Do you feel like this new family in your old house is taking care of you? I got to see... I don't know.
I don't know if I can call them family yet, but I do know that there's a lot of love down there. Oh, boy.
And I might jump into it. What about if you leave your little sound booth right now, open up the door, you're going downstairs to say goodbye and everything, and they're all, what if they'd, like, just got out of the shower and they all have the towel on, or someone's on the couch just farting, watching TV.
Like, you don't want that to be the last vision of your house, people just, you know, almost literally peeing on the furniture. First of all, what do you think? You've got to sneak out of there.
You know, listen, this is a nice, these are nice people, so what is the scene you're describing you're talking about? I just don't, why would you want your last image to be somebody else nesting in your place? Are you going to be all right with that? Well, it's not exactly. Well, it's not what I wanted, man.
This is the situation I'm in. Well, Sean and I are doing it on a laptop.
You don't need to be in your sound booth. This is where all my stuff is, dude.
Guess what? You unplug the laptop. It is made to be portable.
Here's the other thing. Because I have to do, I have a lot of other voice commitments,

so that I'm just lugging around,

schlepping everything up and down.

You plug a mic into your laptop.

And now I got to go back and forth

between here and where I'm currently living.

Uh-huh, yeah.

I'm Googling words that begin with, bye.

Are you?

Oh, my God, you're the worst.

That's all you think about when we do our little post wrap-up.

Are you going to win the bye competition? I know. You know what? Fucking, you're banned for a week.
Yeah, you're out. You're out.
You can't call buy. You cannot call buy for a week because you've just squallered by yourself.
Oh, my God, I'm crying. Yeah, that's like using a computer for a crossword puzzle.
Yeah. What are you doing? Yeah, you can't do it.
What's the best one you came up with there, Sean?

Which one are you excited about?

Read them out, you dick.

Bylaws, but that was B-Y-E.

I used that one.

Oh, you did?

Are we allowed to recycle?

That's a question.

No, you're not.

And you know what else you're not allowed to do

is fucking chew gum on a podcast.

What are you doing?

Sorry, I just put it back in when David...

I saw that.

God, that was funny.

Do you want to know what kind of gum I chew?

No.

Okay, then nobody will know.

Great.

Way to go.

You just denied our listener from hearing what kind of gum I chew.

Well, you know, if you chew it too hard, you might accidentally bite your cheek.

I did it.

Did I do it?

Bite.

Bite. Bite.
I did it. Did I do it? Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
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