Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is David Sedaris. David, when we talked
Speaker 1: about doing this, you said, oh, it could be eleven
Speaker 1: o'clock or later. Are you a late night person?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am, well, especially because I'm in England right now,
Speaker 2: so there's a big time difference. So sometimes when I
Speaker 2: have to do interviews, I'll do them like it. I
Speaker 2: don't know, midnight, that's always a good time to me,
Speaker 2: you know, that's I don't know, still a reasonable hour,
Speaker 2: you know, on the West coast of the United States
Speaker 2: or even on the East coast.
Speaker 1: Well, if you don't have to do an interview, what
Speaker 1: time would you go to sleep?
Speaker 2: Usually between two and three?
Speaker 1: And what are you doing late at night?
Speaker 2: I leave? I usually leave at midnight and I walk
Speaker 2: to the train station because with a headlamp on. I
Speaker 2: live out in the country and there are any street
Speaker 2: lights or anything like that. But it's a five mile
Speaker 2: walk to the train station and back. So I usually
Speaker 2: do that because there's not any traffic then and I
Speaker 2: can clean the busy road, you know, pick up trash
Speaker 2: on busy roads and not have to worry about traffic.
Speaker 1: And do you listen to anything on your phone or
Speaker 1: are you in silence? What do you do?
Speaker 2: I listen to audio books and sometimes I listen to podcasts,
Speaker 2: but mainly books.
Speaker 1: And how do you view the experience of audio books
Speaker 1: as a writer yourself, as opposed to reading a printed book.
Speaker 2: I think the difference is a book comes into you go.
Speaker 2: You enter the world of a book, and an audiobook
Speaker 2: enters your world. Right, So I can recall where I
Speaker 2: was when I was listening to certain audiobooks, but I
Speaker 2: can't recall where I was when I read a book,
Speaker 2: you know, Like I often don't think, oh, I remember
Speaker 2: I was lying on the sofa when I first read
Speaker 2: that passage. But I can remember, Uh. You know there's
Speaker 2: a like less you know, a novel by Andrew Greer,
Speaker 2: whan I remember the stretch of road I was cleaning
Speaker 2: when I just really was just just convinced I was
Speaker 2: listening to the best book ever. Uh. I like audiobooks
Speaker 2: because you can do other things at the same time.
Speaker 2: You know, I have a I have shit to do.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Do you find that your mind drifts and you have
Speaker 1: to rewind or you concentrate. No problem, if it's if.
Speaker 2: It's you know, if it's not a very compelling book,
Speaker 2: that'll happen. But uh, but I think it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's probably just like skimming, you know, it's the same thing.
Speaker 1: And how do you decide what to listen to?
Speaker 2: Gosh, Well, there's this writer named Alexander Heman, and I
Speaker 2: read something by him years ago, and then a couple
Speaker 2: of days ago, I thought, oh right, Alexander Heman. So
Speaker 2: then I bought one of his audio books and just
Speaker 2: loved it. And so now I'm listening to another one,
Speaker 2: and so I'll just kind of dig him for a while.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you're walking late at night? Are you also
Speaker 1: walking after you wake up?
Speaker 2: No? When I wake up, I just go to my
Speaker 2: desk and work.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you'll only walk once a day?
Speaker 2: No, I walk at midnight. I go out, now walk
Speaker 2: five miles, and then at one o'clock I'll go out
Speaker 2: and I'll walk you know, ten twelve miles.
Speaker 1: Okay. How often do you have to replease your shoes?
Speaker 2: Well? The main issue, I mean more than that, my
Speaker 2: toenails fall off a lot. Like I'll take my socks
Speaker 2: off and I'll feel something hard in my sock and
Speaker 2: it's always a toenail. They fall off like you wouldn't believe,
Speaker 2: Like like autumn leaves, my toenails fall off because I
Speaker 2: walk so much.
Speaker 1: Well, what's your strategy there? How do you prevent them
Speaker 1: from falling off? Is it about the sock?
Speaker 2: I don't shoe, I don't, I don't know. I don't
Speaker 2: know what else I can do. I have, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't worry me, Like it didn't hurt when they fall
Speaker 2: off and new ones grow back, So I think it
Speaker 2: really doesn't bother me in the least. I just am
Speaker 2: mad because I wish i'd started collecting them years ago.
Speaker 1: How many do you have?
Speaker 2: I'd have a jar fall by now. But you know
Speaker 2: how that is. You don't start collecting something, and then
Speaker 2: I always feel it's like too late to start collecting,
Speaker 2: you know, like, oh, if I started collecting now, I
Speaker 2: would just have like three toenails in my jar with
Speaker 2: heart start, you know, ten years ago in vi a
Speaker 2: jar full.
Speaker 1: Well, I remember when my mother my father died. My
Speaker 1: mother threw out everything you owned within a week. So
Speaker 1: all these things you're collecting, what do you anticipate will
Speaker 1: happen to them? Or are you leaving them to when
Speaker 1: you die.
Speaker 2: Well toenails would be an issue. But other things I collect,
Speaker 2: like well I collect. I have a really good collection
Speaker 2: of model mushrooms.
Speaker 1: Okay, and I don't.
Speaker 2: Know what will happen to my mushrooms when I die.
Speaker 2: I mean it's a really nice collection, and they look
Speaker 2: really good in my house here where I've got them.
Speaker 2: They just seem like they just you know, I'm in
Speaker 2: England right now and it's a five hundred year old
Speaker 2: house and there are beams everywhere, and the mushrooms looked
Speaker 2: just like they just came up on their own. You know.
Speaker 2: It's not like having them in a in a sleek
Speaker 2: modern setting, but they would they could work there as well.
Speaker 1: Where's a good place to find model mushrooms?
Speaker 2: Gosh, Paris is a good place to find them. I
Speaker 2: often find them when I'm traveling in other countries, Like
Speaker 2: if you can find a like a kind of a
Speaker 2: shop that sells natural history stuff, you know, like two
Speaker 2: headed cow skulls and weird like there's a it was
Speaker 2: a store I went to once that sold like wax
Speaker 2: figures that they used to to show what different diseases
Speaker 2: look like, you know, like a woman with horrible herbes
Speaker 2: blisters on her lips. H You know, walk into a
Speaker 2: store like that, there pretty much guaranteed they're gonna have
Speaker 2: some mushrooms in there.
Speaker 1: So how many mushrooms do you own?
Speaker 2: I only have, like, I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 2: thirty mushrooms, but they're good ones. I discriminate, you know.
Speaker 2: Sometimes people give me mushrooms and I say, that's great,
Speaker 2: but I don't keep it because it's not the standard
Speaker 2: to which I'm.
Speaker 1: So what do you do? What do you do with
Speaker 1: a substandard mushroom?
Speaker 2: Give it away to somebody? When I go on tour,
Speaker 2: I always have gifts for teenagers, and quite often it's
Speaker 2: things like that. It's things people have given me and
Speaker 2: then I say, oh, I've got something for you. And
Speaker 2: then you know, they can go with you do with
Speaker 2: it what they want, but I don't want them to.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm always so flattered that a teenager
Speaker 2: would come to my show. I mean I was flattered
Speaker 2: thirty years ago, but now I'm like their grandfather's age.
Speaker 2: So that's somebody going to hear someone their grandfather's age
Speaker 2: read out loud. But they would just be poisoned to
Speaker 2: a teenager but still they come with their parents sometimes
Speaker 2: and I just always want to have something for them.
Speaker 2: I can really count on one hand the time I
Speaker 2: haven't had something for a teenager.
Speaker 1: Okay, what if someone comes to your house and says,
Speaker 1: where's the mushroom I gave you?
Speaker 2: Most people wouldn't do that. But here's the thing. This
Speaker 2: sounds bad. I have two I have six houses, so
Speaker 2: I just say it's in another house. I say, Oh
Speaker 2: it's in Paris, or oh it's at the beach, or
Speaker 2: oh it's in North Carolina, or oh it's in London.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have six houses, are you viewing another one
Speaker 1: to purchase or you're looking at downsize? Your six is
Speaker 1: the right number?
Speaker 2: Well, my boyfriend Hugh, he's the one who takes care
Speaker 2: of everything, and it's always something. You know, A couple
Speaker 2: of the houses are on the coast of North Carolina,
Speaker 2: and you know, a hurricane comes and tears the roof
Speaker 2: off the house, you know, so you have to put
Speaker 2: a new roof on. Or somebody needs the account and
Speaker 2: needs to know how much interest our French checking account
Speaker 2: earned last year, you know. So I would never do
Speaker 2: a thing like that. I would just never answer that
Speaker 2: kind of an email. I don't even open emails from
Speaker 2: the account, right, I don't open any envelope that doesn't
Speaker 2: look like fan mail. I'm useless that way. But my boyfriend, Hugh,
Speaker 2: he takes care of that. So he sold something recently
Speaker 2: and I thought, well, okay, I can't really complain. He's
Speaker 2: the one who has to take care of it.
Speaker 1: So now, if you have six houses, houses need maintenance.
Speaker 1: There's issues with theft. Is there someone in every house
Speaker 1: at all times, a caretaker, someone looking after it sometimes?
Speaker 2: I mean there was a man we knew in London
Speaker 2: named mister T and his wife kicked him out of
Speaker 2: their house I don't know, thirty years ago, and he'd
Speaker 2: been living in his car ever since. And so mister
Speaker 2: T used to stay at our house in London for
Speaker 2: months when we weren't there, he would stay there. We
Speaker 2: told him to make himself at home, but he never slept.
Speaker 2: He brought a sleeping bag and slept on top of
Speaker 2: the bed. And he uh only used one cop. Well,
Speaker 2: you never used any pots and pants, just one cop.
Speaker 2: And then eventually there was nice mister Government found a
Speaker 2: house for him, an apartment for him, uh, and he
Speaker 2: would go on weekends. He had a friend who lived
Speaker 2: in a trailer and didn't have any legs, So mister
Speaker 2: T would carry this guy to the car and they
Speaker 2: would go bird watching all week But mister T, everyone
Speaker 2: needs someone like that. You know, he's a plumber as well.
Speaker 2: You know, he just operates out of his car. But
Speaker 2: mister T was exactly the kind of person who Or
Speaker 2: one time I was in Greece and I met this
Speaker 2: woman and she was working in a tomato plant and
Speaker 2: the museum of a tomato in the gift shop of
Speaker 2: a tomato paste factory, right, and I'm.
Speaker 1: Waiting to hear what they sell there at the gift
Speaker 1: shop of the tomato Peasce factory.
Speaker 2: Well, they had like big cans of tomato paste that
Speaker 2: they turned into baskets. They had different labels, you know,
Speaker 2: old labels from tomato paste. I actually bought a lot there.
Speaker 2: But there was this woman who worked there, and she
Speaker 2: used to have her own TV show in Greece, and
Speaker 2: then the economy tanked and then her English was perfect,
Speaker 2: and and I said, do you think you can get
Speaker 2: a job in England with that interest you? And she said,
Speaker 2: I would love that. So she came and stayed in
Speaker 2: our house for I don't know, four months when we
Speaker 2: were away, so you know, it's it's And then we've
Speaker 2: had some friends who just have had financial problems and
Speaker 2: they've stayed in like in the apartment in Paris. You know,
Speaker 2: one person stayed there for two years. You know another
Speaker 2: person stayed there for six months. So I don't know,
Speaker 2: that's part of the reason to have them, you know,
Speaker 2: so that you could set somebody up.
Speaker 1: You know, Okay, you keep referencing you as your boyfriend.
Speaker 1: Although I've been married once before. I've been with my
Speaker 1: girlfriend for eighteen years and we're not married. Why don't
Speaker 1: you marry you?
Speaker 2: I don't want to be the kind of gay guy
Speaker 2: who's like, this is my husband, Brad. I just don't
Speaker 2: want to. I wanted gay marriage. I wanted gay marriage
Speaker 2: to become legal, and then I wanted no gay person
Speaker 2: to act on it. I thought that would have been
Speaker 2: perfect for every one of them, to say, you know why,
Speaker 2: you'd take that marriage and shove it up your ass.
Speaker 2: That's what I wanted. So I just don't. I just
Speaker 2: don't want to be married. I mean, I don't want to.
Speaker 2: I don't ever want to use the word my husband.
Speaker 1: You know, okay, from growing up, have you always been
Speaker 1: kind of a contrary, Like if the mainstream is one thing,
Speaker 1: you're saying, no, I'm evaluating I'm the opposite.
Speaker 2: No, no, But I just I don't know. I did
Speaker 2: feel that way about Marri. I know it's different for
Speaker 2: young people today. I mean I never grew up thinking
Speaker 2: that I would get married one day, Like it was
Speaker 2: never a dream of mine to get married. But now
Speaker 2: you meet young gay people and marriage has been legal
Speaker 2: since they were you know, when they're late teens and
Speaker 2: they're talking about kids. You know, I mean some in
Speaker 2: my age, like growing up the way I did, you
Speaker 2: could never get your hands on a child, you know, like,
Speaker 2: no way you could get your hands on a child.
Speaker 2: That makes me sound like a betaphile, but there's no
Speaker 2: way you could be allowed to adopt the child, or
Speaker 2: you know, probably if your sister died and left you
Speaker 2: her child, and once the authorities found out you were gay,
Speaker 2: they'd come and take it away. So it just wasn't
Speaker 2: ever a part of my thing. Like I never dreamed
Speaker 2: of getting married, and I never dreamed of having kid.
Speaker 2: I just I never Maybe if I were twenty, it
Speaker 2: would be different, but no, I don't need it.
Speaker 1: So you're growing up in North Carolina. What was your
Speaker 1: experience growing up being gay in that environment? I mean, now,
Speaker 1: having such fame and notoriety, it's a different game in
Speaker 1: fifty years of gone by. But what was it like
Speaker 1: back then?
Speaker 2: Well, there weren't any books in the library about it.
Speaker 2: I don't mean in the school library. I mean, of
Speaker 2: course they weren't in the school library, but they weren't
Speaker 2: in a public library either. So I thought, I really
Speaker 2: thought I was the only gay person in the world.
Speaker 2: I mean, there was nobody to talk to about it.
Speaker 2: I just thought I was the only one. And then,
Speaker 2: very ironically, I was at the library. My mother took
Speaker 2: me to the library one Saturday because I had a
Speaker 2: book report due, and I walked into the men's room
Speaker 2: and there were two men having sex in the bathroom,
Speaker 2: and I thought, oh, it's not just me, there's those
Speaker 2: two guys too. And I learned it at the live
Speaker 2: which is what's just funny to me. But you know,
Speaker 2: I'm fine. I mean, this is something I guess when
Speaker 2: I read a book, I would, you know, I would
Speaker 2: relate to the characters because they were human and I
Speaker 2: was human, right, now, I feel like so many people
Speaker 2: they need a mirror, right. It has to be a
Speaker 2: book where the character's gay, and the character's American and
Speaker 2: the character lives in England. You know, people want to
Speaker 2: they don't. They can't relate unless they're looking into a mirror, right,
Speaker 2: But I don't know. I kind of feel fortunate to
Speaker 2: have come up in a time where again I could
Speaker 2: relate to a book or a movie or anything, because
Speaker 2: I'm human and they were human as well. There's something about,
Speaker 2: you know, like now everything's about inclusion. There's something about
Speaker 2: that that almost embarrasses me. You know, Like I'm doing
Speaker 2: this duo lingo to learn German, and the sentences are like,
Speaker 2: you know, a man will say that's my husband over there,
Speaker 2: or my grandmother has a new girlfriend, or my aunt's
Speaker 2: wife is a lawyer, and I guess that's supposed to
Speaker 2: make me feel included and stuff. But I never felt unincluded.
Speaker 2: When I was in high school and I was studying Spanish,
Speaker 2: you know, they didn't teach us to say I am
Speaker 2: in the closet or Carlos is my type. But I
Speaker 2: just figured if I wanted to make that sentence, they
Speaker 2: gave me the building blocks and I could make them.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know it's a different world. Now. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying you know now a kid, you know, you
Speaker 2: didn't be really dumb to think you're the only gay
Speaker 2: person in the world. You know, you have the evidence
Speaker 2: on television and pretty much everywhere you turn, and that
Speaker 2: you know there's something to be said for that. But
Speaker 2: I'm just saying it didn't. It didn't destroy me to
Speaker 2: not have that.
Speaker 1: Okay, you were in high school. How did you fit
Speaker 1: in or not fit in? In high school? Were you
Speaker 1: a member of the group, were you an outcast? What
Speaker 1: did it look like?
Speaker 2: Oh? I think I was most like most kids, you know,
Speaker 2: you you're kind of lost and then you find your people.
Speaker 2: And I found mine in the tenth grade or eleventh
Speaker 2: grade one in the drama club. You know, it never
Speaker 2: occurred to me to do drama. And when I look back,
Speaker 2: every guy in the drama club was just as gay
Speaker 2: as it could be. But you didn't know it, you know,
Speaker 2: like because I still thought I was the only one.
Speaker 2: But but I don't, you know it was it was
Speaker 2: really I just woke up when I found the drama club.
Speaker 2: I just I'm not a good actor, never was but
Speaker 2: they were a really fun group of people, and I
Speaker 2: just felt like I had a lot in common with them,
Speaker 2: and they were funny, and they didn't they didn't you know,
Speaker 2: we did obnoxious things like wear top hats to the airport,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, I see kids like that now
Speaker 2: and I think, oh my god, that's so obnoxious. But
Speaker 2: at the same time I have to think, like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, I hope they're having a good time. I
Speaker 2: know them.
Speaker 1: Okay, when did you know you were gay?
Speaker 2: Come? I don't know, Like, there wasn't a word for it,
Speaker 2: but I just knew that I didn't fit in, you know,
Speaker 2: that something was wrong. I'm not wrong. Well, yeah, it
Speaker 2: felt wrong to me. You know. I wasn't interested in sports.
Speaker 2: I didn't like being around boys. I preferred the company
Speaker 2: of girls. I didn't I just I felt a difference
Speaker 2: between me and boys. And again I didn't have a
Speaker 2: name for it, but I figured that out by the
Speaker 2: time I was like, I don't know, seven, but I wasn't,
Speaker 2: you know. And then when I was became like fourteen
Speaker 2: or thirteen, you know, and then you start getting attracted
Speaker 2: to people, and then you feel, you know, then you're
Speaker 2: pretty sure of it. You know, when you when you're
Speaker 2: I had a woman come up a while ago and
Speaker 2: say she had an eight year old son, and she said,
Speaker 2: my eight year old is gay. And I thought, really,
Speaker 2: I mean that seems a little bit early to me,
Speaker 2: you know too. I mean maybe he felt different, but
Speaker 2: I don't know that at eight years old, you are
Speaker 2: physically you know, you don't get an erection. You're not
Speaker 2: turned on by someone at the age of eight.
Speaker 1: So when did you know you want me to be
Speaker 1: a writer?
Speaker 2: I dropped out of college and then I was picking
Speaker 2: apples in a little town in Oregon, and I was
Speaker 2: by myself, and there was a library there, and I
Speaker 2: just didn't have any friends or anything. So I started
Speaker 2: going to the library and reading. And then I just
Speaker 2: noticed how moved I was by what I read in books.
Speaker 2: And I was doing visual artwork, but I wasn't ever
Speaker 2: really very good at it. I mean I was disciplined,
Speaker 2: but I wasn't good at it. And then I just
Speaker 2: noticed again, books were, you know, just I would read
Speaker 2: something in a book and I would memorize it, and
Speaker 2: I would when then when I was at work in
Speaker 2: the canning factory or out picking apples, I could turn
Speaker 2: it over and over in my mind, and it's a
Speaker 2: pleasure it would bring me to recite something to myself.
Speaker 2: And I started keeping a diary, and then I remember,
Speaker 2: and then I secretly thought, like, wow, it would be
Speaker 2: great to be a writer. But I would look at
Speaker 2: what I wrote and it sucked. And then I would think, well,
Speaker 2: of course it sucks. I just I just started six
Speaker 2: months ago. Of course it's going to suck. And then
Speaker 2: a year later I thought, well, I just started a
Speaker 2: year ago, of course it's going to suck. And then
Speaker 2: three years ago, I three years later, I thought, it
Speaker 2: still sucks, you know. But you know that makes sense.
Speaker 2: So I never put a timer on it. You know,
Speaker 2: I never said to myself, I need to publish a book.
Speaker 2: Why I'm twenty By the time I'm twenty seve and
Speaker 2: I'm giving up. It wasn't that. I just figured I
Speaker 2: just work at it every day and very slowly I'd
Speaker 2: get better. And I just completely kept it to myself
Speaker 2: for seven years. I never showed anybody anything i'd written,
Speaker 2: because it sucked, you know. And then I went back
Speaker 2: to college. I had dropped out, so I went back
Speaker 2: to college and I took a writing class and started
Speaker 2: writing more than a diary, you know, started writing short stories,
Speaker 2: and uh, and I chose the right place to go
Speaker 2: to college because it was I went to the school
Speaker 2: at the Art Institute of Chicago, and they didn't have
Speaker 2: a writing program, but they had some you had, they
Speaker 2: had some people teaching creative writing, and and there were
Speaker 2: really good people, and they had so much to give,
Speaker 2: and nobody really wanted it, you know, but I did.
Speaker 2: So they gave me all their attention and they gave
Speaker 2: me all of their knowledge, like there was nobody else
Speaker 2: asking for it, just me, and and it was really
Speaker 2: the right It was just the right place for me.
Speaker 2: Like I feel like if I had gone to the
Speaker 2: Iowa Writers Workshop, I would have sunk, you know, I
Speaker 2: would have I wouldn't have been strong enough. And I
Speaker 2: didn't I don't know that I wouldn't have gotten in
Speaker 2: the first place, but I don't think I would have
Speaker 2: been able to. This was a good environment for me
Speaker 2: because there really wasn't any well, competition is not the
Speaker 2: right word. It was like it was like I had
Speaker 2: my own It was like I had my own private teachers,
Speaker 2: and they really responded to what I wrote.
Speaker 1: A writer is born were the taught.
Speaker 2: I don't know that you can teach writing. I had
Speaker 2: a student I taught for a brief while at the
Speaker 2: Art School of the Art Institute. I was never qualified
Speaker 2: to teach, but a teacher back down at the last minute.
Speaker 2: And so two years after I graduated, I was thirty,
Speaker 2: I think my old teacher called me and said, there's
Speaker 2: this creative writing class and there's two classes, and we
Speaker 2: don't have anyone to teach. Will you come and do it?
Speaker 2: And like I said, I wasn't qualified. You know, I
Speaker 2: never went to graduate school. I don't know. I don't
Speaker 2: really know how to fix my own I know how
Speaker 2: to fix my own stuff, but I don't know how
Speaker 2: to fix other people's. But I had one student, and
Speaker 2: it was really clear that she was talented. And the
Speaker 2: difference is that she read. She read a lot, and
Speaker 2: she was disciplined, and so I could be her cheerleader
Speaker 2: and I could suggest things for her to read, and
Speaker 2: I could read everything she ever gave me and get
Speaker 2: back to her as soon as I possibly could. That's
Speaker 2: the best I could do. And anyway, her first book
Speaker 2: came out a year and a half ago, and I've
Speaker 2: never felt that. I never felt well, I guess I've
Speaker 2: always felt proud of my sister Amy, you know, and
Speaker 2: I felt proud of Hugh. But anyway, I felt so proud.
Speaker 2: It was such a it was such a wonderful feeling,
Speaker 2: you know, to to watch somebody come into her own
Speaker 2: like that and create something that was so magnificent and
Speaker 2: just I guess, I guess it was the only time
Speaker 2: I'd ever mentored anybody. You know. Somebody came up to
Speaker 2: me at a book signing once and said, will you be
Speaker 2: my mentor? And I said, well, it doesn't really work
Speaker 2: that way, you know. I mean, it's a beautiful thing
Speaker 2: when it works out, but it has to be organic.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the Iowa Writers' School. A lot
Speaker 1: of that is about adopting a literary style. They talk
Speaker 1: about rewriting as opposed to writing. What's your view on
Speaker 1: writing like that?
Speaker 2: It just takes a while to find your style, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, you start off and you imitate
Speaker 2: other people, and then there comes a point where you think,
Speaker 2: all right, I'm never going to be that person. But
Speaker 2: what have I got right?
Speaker 1: What what do.
Speaker 2: I have that nobody else has? Or stop trying to
Speaker 2: be somebody or not, and stop being ashamed of what
Speaker 2: you've got. I remember I was. I had asked my
Speaker 2: students one time to write something about their lives, and everybody,
Speaker 2: well not the majority of the students wrote, you know,
Speaker 2: made it sound like they were raised by wolves, you know.
Speaker 2: And I realized they were ashamed of their lives. And
Speaker 2: they were ashamed of their lives because they were middle
Speaker 2: class and they grew up in the suburbs, and they
Speaker 2: felt that their life was inherently uninteresting. And I thought, wow,
Speaker 2: that's really sad. You know. It used to be poor
Speaker 2: people who were ashamed of their lives, you know, and
Speaker 2: then it became wealthy people and middle class people. But
Speaker 2: I thought, I thought, well, I didn't want to be like,
Speaker 2: there's nothing extraordinary about my life, but I I didn't
Speaker 2: want to be ashamed of it, you know. I didn't
Speaker 2: want to to feel like it. I mean, what an
Speaker 2: awful feeling to just think that your life there's no value,
Speaker 2: or that you have none of your stories are worth telling.
Speaker 2: But I again, I think that had to do with
Speaker 2: just not putting a timer on things, and even because
Speaker 2: I did find my voice eventually, but if I had
Speaker 2: put a timer on things and said, well, if I don't,
Speaker 2: you know, if I don't get something published by this age,
Speaker 2: then it's all over. You know. It takes some people
Speaker 2: longer than others, you know, to not find out who
Speaker 2: they are, but just allow themselves to be themselves.
Speaker 1: You know, are you ever even at this lead date?
Speaker 1: Like I saw you a few months ago, you were
Speaker 1: talking about your relationship with your father. You're peening your
Speaker 1: father somewhat negatively, and then you said, but you're alive
Speaker 1: and he's dead. Are you ever self conscious? Are you
Speaker 1: ever self conscious about about revealing information and how people
Speaker 1: will judge you as a result thereof?
Speaker 2: I usually feel that the more honest you can be,
Speaker 2: the more people will relate to you. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: you can usually tell when someone's thinking it, when somebody's
Speaker 2: faking like a h when somebody's oh, just kind of
Speaker 2: spouting bullshit. You know, you can usually tell and if
Speaker 2: somebody is being honest about something, even if it's not like,
Speaker 2: there's a way that somebody could get up there and
Speaker 2: just be honest about something that's really pretty brutal or
Speaker 2: something that even that I don't believe in, But there'd
Speaker 2: be a way that maybe I could relate to it,
Speaker 2: maybe just because they're being honest about it, you know,
Speaker 2: Like if I think about it, like if one of
Speaker 2: those January sixth people right could tell me a story
Speaker 2: about that day. But if they were, I don't know
Speaker 2: if they were if they were honest about it, and
Speaker 2: if they were, I don't know if there was some
Speaker 2: way I could connect to them about it, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess that's the thing. I like, we we live
Speaker 2: in we're in the country right now. I'm in the countryside, right,
Speaker 2: I'm in West Sussex, and we have a pastor behind
Speaker 2: our house, and there's a shepherd we know. That a
Speaker 2: great sentence. There's a shepherd we know, and he was
Speaker 2: looking for someone's place to put his rams, and so
Speaker 2: we said, well, we have a pasture behind our house
Speaker 2: and we have these rams who have been living in
Speaker 2: our backyard. And rams are assholes, right. So I wanted
Speaker 2: to write about the rams, but I wanted someone who's
Speaker 2: never seen a ram to be able to relate to it, right.
Speaker 2: So that's when I sit down to write about it,
Speaker 2: I think, Okay, how can I approach this in a
Speaker 2: way that somebody who's has no relationships with rams? Could connect.
Speaker 2: And I don't know. I wrote this essay. It's the
Speaker 2: New Yorker just bought it. I'm going to read it
Speaker 2: on tour next week and I'll see if it works.
Speaker 2: But I think I found a way that it could
Speaker 2: everyone could. I don't know, yeh, connect with it?
Speaker 1: Okay. When you're walking lead at night? Is that when
Speaker 1: your ideas come to you spontaneously? When do your ideas
Speaker 1: come to you? And how do they come to you?
Speaker 2: Usually they usually come to me at my desk, you know,
Speaker 2: I just get up and I go right to my desk.
Speaker 2: I don't like to write on my feet because then
Speaker 2: I don't know. I sit at my desk and I'm
Speaker 2: just kind of forcing something. But where I like for
Speaker 2: it to just be organic and come out of I mean,
Speaker 2: I have a list of story ideas, and so I
Speaker 2: sometimes I turn to that, but I don't want to
Speaker 2: get ahead of myself. Right Like I was with my
Speaker 2: friend Dawn in Montrose, Colorado, which is just a very flats,
Speaker 2: really hot.
Speaker 1: A little bit slow. I've been to Montrose, Colorado, which
Speaker 1: of course you fly into if you want to go
Speaker 1: to tell your ride, and it's south of Grand Junction.
Speaker 1: What would you doing in Montrose, Colorado.
Speaker 2: I had a show and tell your ride, but I
Speaker 2: had to leave early the next morning. So I was
Speaker 2: staying in Montrose at a hotel. It was like a
Speaker 2: four minute walk from the airport, right. And the thing
Speaker 2: is I found when you when you go on tour,
Speaker 2: if you're staying like at a four Seasons, you know
Speaker 2: you're not going to get a story out of it, right,
Speaker 2: But if you're staying at a hotel, well you can
Speaker 2: walk to the airport. They're usually going to leave with
Speaker 2: the story. So I did, but I put that on
Speaker 2: my story list and was trying to think of a
Speaker 2: way to h and then sometimes something happens, like I
Speaker 2: was in Australia and something happened and our flight got
Speaker 2: delayed and delayed and delayed, and I wrote the entire
Speaker 2: essay right there on the airport, you know, the thing
Speaker 2: that had happened the day before. I mean, it needed
Speaker 2: to be rewritten like a dozen times, but I got
Speaker 2: the first draft out usually, you know, and I'm like everybody,
Speaker 2: you know, every every now and then I think like, okay,
Speaker 2: that's it, there's nothing more. I reached the bottom of
Speaker 2: the barrel, and that's it. But then I find when
Speaker 2: I read something really good, all kinds of ideas come
Speaker 2: to me. Not you know, It's like if I'm reading
Speaker 2: a book about, you know, somebody with COVID. That doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that I think, oh, I'll write about COVID too,
Speaker 2: But it can just make me look at the world
Speaker 2: with fresh eyes. Again. That's what it does. It takes
Speaker 2: my eyes out of my head, it washes them, and
Speaker 2: it pops them back in and then for a brief time,
Speaker 2: everything looks new and interesting to me.
Speaker 1: Can you be just as inspired staying home for a
Speaker 1: month reading as you would be going on the road
Speaker 1: and interacting with others for a month?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, like the story I just wrote, the essay
Speaker 2: I just wrote about the rams, you know, ah, yeah,
Speaker 2: very much.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you this, if you were to
Speaker 1: just read, would you have enough ideas? Or is it
Speaker 1: everyday life interacting with other elements, animate or inanimate that
Speaker 1: inspire you.
Speaker 2: It's a combination of the two. You know, it's reading
Speaker 2: and it's living. It's going out into the world and
Speaker 2: having things happen. And again, it's not like massive things
Speaker 2: happen to me. But I don't know, I just I
Speaker 2: like to kind of make something out of nothing.
Speaker 1: Or take the micro and expand it. But so when
Speaker 1: you sit down every day, are you usually working on
Speaker 1: something you started or are you starting something? What do
Speaker 1: you do when you literally sit down?
Speaker 2: Well, I sit down every morning, and first thing I
Speaker 2: do is I write in my diary, and then I
Speaker 2: turned to whatever it is and I'm working on. And
Speaker 2: then sometimes, like yesterday, I had to make a hard
Speaker 2: choice and I abandoned something. You know, I thought, well,
Speaker 2: maybe in a year I can come back to it
Speaker 2: and get it to work, but I'm not. It just
Speaker 2: felt like I'd already written it, you know, so I
Speaker 2: turned to something else.
Speaker 1: Is the process that you lay it all down quickly
Speaker 1: and we write it or do you eke it out
Speaker 1: sentenced by sentence? How does it come?
Speaker 2: Oh? I don't know. Like today I probably wrote three
Speaker 2: pages on something I started, and then you know, I'll
Speaker 2: expand on it tomorrow. I'm going to love to be
Speaker 2: finished with it in a week, but I don't know
Speaker 2: that that's gonna happen. It'll just come in its own time.
Speaker 2: It's hard to write things whole cloth when I'm on tour,
Speaker 2: Like I start a tour next week, so I'm going
Speaker 2: to I don't know, forty two cities or something. But
Speaker 2: I can rewrite when I'm traveling, so I have a
Speaker 2: lot to rewrite.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have this great success. You were on the road.
Speaker 1: Many people who have household names success which you do have, say,
Speaker 1: oh no, it just happened to me. But most of
Speaker 1: these people were driven. They needed it. So why are
Speaker 1: you so successful? Being talented is not enough.
Speaker 2: No, But I was always on fire, you know, like
Speaker 2: when I was doing visual art, it was the same thing.
Speaker 2: I was just on fire, had blinders on, nothing else.
Speaker 2: You know, everybody else is going to the party. I'm
Speaker 2: staying home and working. I've just always been that way,
Speaker 2: Like I just a kind of a laser focus. And
Speaker 2: also I'm you know, I have some obsessive compulsive stuff
Speaker 2: going on, and so it was always very easy for
Speaker 2: me to do the exact same thing at the exact
Speaker 2: same time every day.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit more about the OCD. I
Speaker 1: get that, But like, are you locking the door twenty times?
Speaker 1: Are your order?
Speaker 2: It used to be? I mean I used to lock
Speaker 2: the door twenty times, and then it when I was
Speaker 2: a kid, it was just like really bad. But then
Speaker 2: when I got older. You know, I'd written something about
Speaker 2: it one time and I had said, how you know,
Speaker 2: it seemed to get my life thing to get better
Speaker 2: when I started smoking. And then someone called and said, no,
Speaker 2: that makes sense. You know that nicotine can can be
Speaker 2: a way to self medicate for that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: But then I quit smoking, and I thought everyone everything
Speaker 2: would come roaring back, but it didn't. Now I'm more
Speaker 2: like I'm a prisoner of a Yeah, I'm a prisoner.
Speaker 2: Like I got a fit bit, you know, and so
Speaker 2: that's why I go out after midnight. I forgot a
Speaker 2: fit bit. So then I started walking between fifteen and
Speaker 2: twenty miles a day when I'm in Sussex, right, so
Speaker 2: I have to do that. Then I have to do
Speaker 2: duo lingo. But it's not just I have to do it,
Speaker 2: like I have to be like in the top three.
Speaker 2: And so that's hours and hours and hours and hours
Speaker 2: and hours that I have to do that. And I
Speaker 2: have to do my own work, and then I have
Speaker 2: to swim a certain distance every day and I have
Speaker 2: to Uh, it's it's a lot on my little schedule,
Speaker 2: Like there really not enough hours in the day, and
Speaker 2: I never know when something else is gonna pop up.
Speaker 2: One time it was feeding spiders. And I'm telling you
Speaker 2: I fed spiders. This was in France, and we had
Speaker 2: lots of spiders in our house, and I was feeding
Speaker 2: spiders for hours every day, right and monitoring them.
Speaker 1: No, wait, a little bit more, a little slow, a
Speaker 1: little more granular. So you see a spider in the house,
Speaker 1: you think they're hungry. What's going on there?
Speaker 2: There was a spider, a Taganaria gigantia, who lives in
Speaker 2: They live in a horizontal sheet web.
Speaker 1: And how big a spider is that? And I think
Speaker 1: I know what a horizontal web is, but tell me.
Speaker 2: The size of an unshelled peanut. It's a pretty big,
Speaker 2: black brown you know. Horizontal seat web, It's just a
Speaker 2: flat web, right, with a little funnel that it goes
Speaker 2: into that it lives in. And they can be pretty
Speaker 2: big those. So it was in the corner. We had
Speaker 2: a casement window. It was in France, so it was
Speaker 2: an old casement window. So there was a there was
Speaker 2: a it was built at the bottom of the window
Speaker 2: so I couldn't open the window because I would destroy
Speaker 2: the web. Right, So, and I heard a fly buzz
Speaker 2: and then I heard it buzz differently, and I stood
Speaker 2: up and I went over to the window and I
Speaker 2: saw the had gotten a fly. It was dragging it
Speaker 2: into its little home, right, And I thought, I want
Speaker 2: to see that again. So I caught a fly in
Speaker 2: a jar and then I shook the jar up so
Speaker 2: the flylight would hit its head, you know, and get
Speaker 2: knocked out. And then I poured it into a web,
Speaker 2: and then when it came to the spider came out
Speaker 2: and took it right. And we had so many spiders
Speaker 2: in our house, and then we had outbuildings, so it
Speaker 2: was easy to feed forty spiders a day, right, so
Speaker 2: all day long, I mean, and we kept our door
Speaker 2: open so the house was for flies. So that wasn't
Speaker 2: hard to do. But you know, flies can eat like
Speaker 2: I mean, spiders can eat like once a week and
Speaker 2: they're okay. But spiders got so fat, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean. It just wasn't good for him. But I
Speaker 2: just kept doing it. And then I went on tour,
Speaker 2: and of course I didn't have my spiders, and then
Speaker 2: I went back to France and then it was winter
Speaker 2: so we didn't have flies. And I don't know, there's
Speaker 2: a flimsy kind of a spider that you don't want,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't think twice about, but it would devour all
Speaker 2: the other spiders. So by the time I got home,
Speaker 2: there was nothing left but the flimsy spiders. And the
Speaker 2: next summer I did it all over again. And it
Speaker 2: wasn't until I moved to England that I stopped with that.
Speaker 2: But I never know when something's going to come along.
Speaker 2: It's like a hobby, but it's just taken too far.
Speaker 1: But is it a compulsion more than a hobby.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a compulsion.
Speaker 1: So the compulsion cannot be broken by you. It has
Speaker 1: to be like a very distinct thing, like you leave
Speaker 1: town or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't. I can't like the duo lingo thing.
Speaker 2: It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Just a little bit. There's a chart you say being
Speaker 1: in the top three.
Speaker 2: Explain that there's a competitive aspect to do a lingo,
Speaker 2: which I didn't realize.
Speaker 1: It's a lot I told you told me in my
Speaker 1: audience A little bit more about dual linger.
Speaker 2: It's a language learning app, right, So you choose what
Speaker 2: language you want, and I started off with Japanese and
Speaker 2: it will teach you the alphabet and then it will
Speaker 2: give you a sentence in Japanese. You have to translate
Speaker 2: right from a menu of words below, or it'll give
Speaker 2: you sEH, It'll give you a sentence in English, and
Speaker 2: then you have to construct it in Japanese translated into Japanese.
Speaker 2: And I had studied some Japanese before, but I'd never
Speaker 2: really learned to read, so it was good for that.
Speaker 2: And then I branched out, and then I started doing
Speaker 2: the German as well, right, And then I discovered one
Speaker 2: day that there was there were leagues I just hadn't no, right,
Speaker 2: So there's like the Obsidian League and the Pearl League,
Speaker 2: and I would get these congratulations, Oh, you're in the
Speaker 2: Pearl League, and I thought, so that feels good. And
Speaker 2: then the highest is the Diamond League. Right, so you
Speaker 2: get these extra points on dual lingo and a normal
Speaker 2: person might get, oh, I don't know, forty extra points
Speaker 2: a day, and I'll be getting like four thousand extra
Speaker 2: points a day. So it was like it was a
Speaker 2: big part of my day. It's a huge part of
Speaker 2: my day. And I can't even say that that It
Speaker 2: wasn't even about learning anymore. It just became I've never
Speaker 2: played a video game in my life. But that's I
Speaker 2: think what it became was me was a video game.
Speaker 2: Today when I walked to the village today, we live
Speaker 2: on the edge of what's essentially Downton Abbey, and I
Speaker 2: can there's this massive, massive tudor. It's not a castle,
Speaker 2: it's just a pile, you know, It's just it's on
Speaker 2: thousands of acres of land. And it's also a deer
Speaker 2: park and there's right away in England. So I cut
Speaker 2: across the grounds and this is the time of year
Speaker 2: when the stags stand underneath trees and cough to attract
Speaker 2: females like I never thought deer made any noise at all,
Speaker 2: but they it is cough. It is unspeakably beautiful and
Speaker 2: it's fall and the temperature has changed and the air
Speaker 2: feels different. And I'm leaving tomorrow to start my tour.
Speaker 2: And I walked across the param house twice today doing
Speaker 2: dual lingo as I walked right doing it on my
Speaker 2: iPad so I could rack up four thousand extra points.
Speaker 2: And I'm so mad at myself because I stopped at
Speaker 2: one point. It's so beautiful that every day I notice
Speaker 2: how beautiful it is. Every day I think what a
Speaker 2: kind of a world is this that I get to
Speaker 2: live amongst such beauty? Right? And I didn't do it
Speaker 2: because I was doing this stupid duo lingo and I'm
Speaker 2: competing against people I don't even know who they are.
Speaker 2: They're like twenty five of them from all over the world.
Speaker 2: Everyone has a nickname, right, it doesn't matter at all? Right,
Speaker 2: And I don't. I can't. I can't. It's like a trap.
Speaker 2: I man, I can't get out of it. And Hughes said,
Speaker 2: has just stop doing it? But I can't.
Speaker 1: Okay, just for one second. You're in the competition with
Speaker 1: duo lingo. But the main goal of duo lingo is
Speaker 1: to learn the language. Right, have you learned the language?
Speaker 1: Racking up all these extra points?
Speaker 2: There's only well, see, the way to rack up the
Speaker 2: extra points is to do these practice because you get
Speaker 2: more points doing the practice thing. So, but I was
Speaker 2: in Germany a week ago. I was there on a
Speaker 2: book tour, and I talk to German all the time.
Speaker 2: I and people said, oh my god, I didn't know
Speaker 2: you spoke German. And they said, oh my god, your
Speaker 2: German is perfect. Now my German is not perfect. They
Speaker 2: were just being nice, but and I would overhear people
Speaker 2: talking and maybe I would understand one word out of
Speaker 2: every twenty. But then, you know, so it's easy to
Speaker 2: give up. But then you think, well, one word out
Speaker 2: of every twenty is better than one word out of
Speaker 2: every fifty or one word out of every hundred. You know,
Speaker 2: so keep at it and and you'll get better.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you're at home. Let's say one day it's
Speaker 1: really raining, terrible weather, you're driven, you have to walk anyway.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, that rain, and that happens a
Speaker 2: lot here. No, they didn't stop anything.
Speaker 1: What would it take for you not to go out
Speaker 1: on your walk?
Speaker 2: One night, I was out after midnight and the police
Speaker 2: stopped me, and there was somebody who I don't understand
Speaker 2: if it was somebody who ran away from home or
Speaker 2: they were looking for the police. And there were helicopters overhead, right,
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was somebody who had wandered
Speaker 2: away from their home or run away from home. They
Speaker 2: wouldn't tell me, right, but they just said, you can't
Speaker 2: be out here, and they put me in the police
Speaker 2: car and drove me home. And the second they were gone,
Speaker 2: I went out to get you in the other direction,
Speaker 2: and I just thought, well, if I see the police
Speaker 2: car coming, I'll just run into the woods. You know.
Speaker 1: Let's say I was in your house and I locked
Speaker 1: all the doors and I said, you cannot leave today.
Speaker 1: What would be going on inside your mind?
Speaker 2: Uh? Well, how I would overpower you? Because like even
Speaker 2: the pandemic, that didn't stop me, you know. But it
Speaker 2: would have been different if I'd been in Paris, because
Speaker 2: in France you had to have a document to go out.
Speaker 2: You had to and the police would check your documents.
Speaker 2: I guess you downloaded it and you have to put
Speaker 2: the time you leave and all that stuff. So that
Speaker 2: would have been a hardship for me. But I would
Speaker 2: have just left the country that that had been the thing,
Speaker 2: and I would have gone to a place where they
Speaker 2: didn't have They weren't quite so strict.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess, are you tortured by this? It's one
Speaker 1: thing to do it. It's another thing to say I
Speaker 1: have to do it or I just won't feel right.
Speaker 2: No, un tortured, Yeah, no, it becomes It's it's like
Speaker 2: I really admire people who have hobbies.
Speaker 1: You do know that there's therapy for this? Now? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if I said I could get you with a therapist
Speaker 1: such that you would not be tortured. Is that something
Speaker 1: you would be thumbs up or thumbs down about.
Speaker 2: I'd be thumbs down because I feel like the things
Speaker 2: that I do are good things to do. Right, It's
Speaker 2: good to walk, It's good to walk.
Speaker 1: Okay, all that rationalization is good. But the question is
Speaker 1: to what degree are you tortured? To what degree does
Speaker 1: it interfere with you living your regular life?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm always I always think like I can handle this,
Speaker 2: but see, then what happens is that I go on tour, right,
Speaker 2: and then on tour you don't have control. You know,
Speaker 2: you're out of your You're out of your environment.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So sometimes it'll happen that a plane will be delayed
Speaker 2: or canceled, and then my agent will call and say
Speaker 2: we've sent a car and a car is going to
Speaker 2: take you seven hours to somewhere, right, And I'm like
Speaker 2: seven hours. I can't get my steps in. If I'm
Speaker 2: in a car for seven hours, right, what am I
Speaker 2: going to do? So what I do in that situation
Speaker 2: is I get I mean, so in case that should happen,
Speaker 2: I would never leave my hotel in the morning with
Speaker 2: no steps right, so I would have gotten up. If
Speaker 2: it means getting up at five o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 2: I'll get up at five o'clock the monay it means
Speaker 2: getting about four o'clock in the morning, I get up
Speaker 2: at four o'clock in the morning right, just on the
Speaker 2: off chance that that might happen. And then one time
Speaker 2: I was thrown into a car for eight hours and
Speaker 2: I hadn't met the minimum right number of steps I need.
Speaker 2: And so I was signing this young woman's book and
Speaker 2: I said, what are you going to do now? She said,
Speaker 2: now nothing, I'm not doing anything. And I think she
Speaker 2: thought I was going to ask her out to dinner.
Speaker 2: And I said, great, I'll give you twenty dollars to
Speaker 2: go out and walk two miles. And I put my
Speaker 2: Apple watch on her and I gave her twenty dollars,
Speaker 2: and I had her walk for me.
Speaker 1: Well, a little bit slower. Why does her walk work
Speaker 1: because it's on your watch and therefore it's part of
Speaker 1: the chart I gave him.
Speaker 2: I put my watch on her wrist, so and I
Speaker 2: sent her out to walk for.
Speaker 1: I understand what you did, but you're saying it's more
Speaker 1: about the number on your watch than what's going on
Speaker 1: inside you as a human being.
Speaker 2: Well, no, because we have some French friends who are
Speaker 2: staying right now with us, and they went to the
Speaker 2: village and back today and when they left, I thought, fuck,
Speaker 2: I should have given him my watch, you know, to wear,
Speaker 2: because that would have been an extra six miles. But no,
Speaker 2: that's different because they weren't six miles that I would
Speaker 2: have earned, you know what I mean, Like, I'm in
Speaker 2: my environment, I'll earn the miles, I'll earn the steps.
Speaker 1: Okay, Now, so somebody has to earn the miles. Generally speaking,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be you. You want it to be you,
Speaker 1: But if it's someone else, that would be okay.
Speaker 2: Because I have When I look at my watch, it
Speaker 2: tells me that I have a perfect record for one thousand,
Speaker 2: seven hundred and seventy nine days. Right, I've had a
Speaker 2: perfect record on my Apple Watch. I cannot lose that
Speaker 2: perfect record.
Speaker 1: Just so I know how many steps is that?
Speaker 2: Oh a set to I have to walk like ten
Speaker 2: thousand steps a day, which is nothing. That's like depend
Speaker 2: It's just like four and a half miles.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, let's get into it for a minute. I
Speaker 1: had a fit bit, and the accuracy of the step
Speaker 1: count on the fit bit was completely different from what
Speaker 1: it was on the phone. I mean, there are certain
Speaker 1: times I'll be hiking in the mountains and I know
Speaker 1: the altitude difference and the phone does not register it,
Speaker 1: whereas the fit bit did. Are you just locked into
Speaker 1: the equipment or do you ever think about, well, it's
Speaker 1: this accurate.
Speaker 2: Well, for a long time I had a fit bit
Speaker 2: and an Apple Watch, and I wore them both. But
Speaker 2: then I thought I was too old to have two
Speaker 2: things on my wrist, so I just have the Apple Watch.
Speaker 2: Now they were close enough, you know, I felt like
Speaker 2: the two things were pretty close. I've never used my
Speaker 2: phone to check my steps. I've never done that.
Speaker 1: Well, you can look on her in the health app.
Speaker 1: I find it wildly inaccurate. So what about the swimming, Although.
Speaker 2: My record is I walked forty two miles in a day.
Speaker 1: You know, we are not young people by the standards
Speaker 1: of human life. You walk that much, does your body hurt?
Speaker 2: Yeah? It hurt for days afterwards. Forty two miles was like,
Speaker 2: that's a really long walk. I started at midnight. I
Speaker 2: did it with a friend of mine and we came
Speaker 2: back at six in the morning, and we rested for
Speaker 2: three hours, and we went out again, came home for lunch,
Speaker 2: went out again, came home for dinner. Uh yeah, that
Speaker 2: was a real accomplishment.
Speaker 1: Well, most sports industries, court and I've had plenty of
Speaker 1: talk to the doctors, are from over use. So as
Speaker 1: we sit here now, since you've been walking using the
Speaker 1: same muscles, et cetera, how's your body right now?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's pretty good. I mean, my poor boyfriend, Hugh,
Speaker 2: he's got like, you know, sciatica, and you know, his
Speaker 2: hip bothers him, and I just feel bad for him.
Speaker 2: I don't really have anything like that, you know, I
Speaker 2: don't have anything that's that troubles me. And then he
Speaker 2: had a pool put in and so then it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, gonna have to swim.
Speaker 1: How many laps a day?
Speaker 2: Oh, not that, you know, not that many laps, like,
Speaker 2: you know, just it's a lap pool. But before I
Speaker 2: was caught in this swimming thing and then that because
Speaker 2: swim is really boring to me, And then I would
Speaker 2: swim a mile every time I went to the pool,
Speaker 2: and that's so boring to me. So now it's like
Speaker 2: just a quarter of a mile. It's not that much,
Speaker 2: but it's still something I have to do.
Speaker 1: And how much is this exercises about? We control body image.
Speaker 2: I eat a lot of food, Like I can eat
Speaker 2: anybody under the table. I will eat as long as
Speaker 2: there's food on the table. I will eat your food.
Speaker 2: I will eat the person next to you, I'll eat
Speaker 2: their food. I'll say, are you going to finish that?
Speaker 2: And so it's I just have to exercise a lot
Speaker 2: if I'm going to continue to eat the way that
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 1: And were you always insatiable or eating well available?
Speaker 2: And it's funny, my bro he eats the same way
Speaker 2: I do, and it's shocking to watch him eat, you know,
Speaker 2: but we eat the same way. I don't know if
Speaker 2: it was six kids and you're just always convinced there's
Speaker 2: not going to be enough food and you have to
Speaker 2: really you eat with your handguarding your plate, you know,
Speaker 2: corraling your plate, and you just shovel it in and
Speaker 2: then you fight for seconds. And we weren't poor, you know,
Speaker 2: it was you know, let's say all the chicken was gone, well,
Speaker 2: there would still be stuff. You could make a sandwich
Speaker 2: or you could you know, make yourself a pancake or something.
Speaker 2: It wasn't off limits, you know, the kitchen wasn't off
Speaker 2: limits to you. But I don't know, am I other
Speaker 2: people in my family don't eat that way, but just
Speaker 2: my brother and me.
Speaker 1: And does it matter what kind of food it is.
Speaker 1: It could be junk food, it could be gourmet food,
Speaker 1: just as long as it's no I'm.
Speaker 2: Not a big I'm not a big junk food person,
Speaker 2: and I'm not a food snob. I mean, he was
Speaker 2: a really good cook, uh but and I don't like it,
Speaker 2: you know. I don't want to come home at two
Speaker 2: thirty in the morning after a walk, and I don't
Speaker 2: want to sit there in front of the refrigerator and
Speaker 2: eat cheese. You know. That doesn't make me feel good
Speaker 2: about myself. I bought all these crazy outfits to wear
Speaker 2: on tour, and they're really expensive, you know. And I
Speaker 2: would just feel like such a loser if I was
Speaker 2: too big to fit into him, you know. So that's
Speaker 2: a lot of it right there. I gotta I have
Speaker 2: to do this so I can fit into like a
Speaker 2: backless floor length sport coach. Just crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: When did this clothing obsession begin?
Speaker 2: I always when I started reading out Loud. I was
Speaker 2: living in Chicago, and I would go to other people's readings,
Speaker 2: and you know, people would usually I wasn't the only
Speaker 2: one on the bill. Maybe they'd be like three or
Speaker 2: four people on the belt, and I would just notice
Speaker 2: people would get up there and they would be wearing
Speaker 2: you know, they would just looked like they were mowing
Speaker 2: their lawn. And then thought, oh fuck, I have that
Speaker 2: show to do tonight. But I always got dressed up
Speaker 2: because just so the audience would know you made an effort,
Speaker 2: you know that you that if nothing else, you know,
Speaker 2: you're going to try something new, and maybe it wouldn't work,
Speaker 2: but you took it seriously enough to put a tie
Speaker 2: on right, And and then it just got more abstract,
Speaker 2: you know, as the years passed, Like I always you know,
Speaker 2: I used to wear a jacket a tie, and then
Speaker 2: a jacket and a tie, and then oh now, I
Speaker 2: mean I just bought a jacket that doesn't have any arms.
Speaker 2: It's not a cape. It's just a jacket that doesn't
Speaker 2: have any arms. We're just like wearing a bell. We
Speaker 2: just want to find that come to Girlson. It's a
Speaker 2: it's a Japanese designer Ray Kawakuba, who has a company
Speaker 2: called Come to Girlson And it's like a plaid bell
Speaker 2: right that I'm gonna wear on stage. And then I
Speaker 2: also got for this tour. It's like a black sport
Speaker 2: coat that's cut off at the bottom of the ribcage
Speaker 2: with scissors. But then in the back it's like one
Speaker 2: of those pillows that people use on lanes, you know,
Speaker 2: Tho's neck fellows is sewn into the back, so you
Speaker 2: have a hump back and this abbreviated jacket with it,
Speaker 2: and all I do is think about what I'm going
Speaker 2: to pair it with. You know.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know a musician goes on the road, he
Speaker 1: literally brings a wardrobe trunk. How many outfits do you
Speaker 1: bring on the road and how do you decide what
Speaker 1: to bring and how do you carry them?
Speaker 2: I just bring, you know, last year I started bringing
Speaker 2: two suitcases, well a suitcase and then a Duffel bag.
Speaker 2: And you know, there's no turning back once you add
Speaker 2: that second bag, there's no turning back. So now I'm
Speaker 2: a two bag person. But I'm just gonna Usually I
Speaker 2: just bring one sport coat to wear on stage, but
Speaker 2: I'll just have two this time. But one doesn't have
Speaker 2: any arms and the other one's cut off in the middle.
Speaker 2: They're only taking up as much room as well as
Speaker 2: and then you know theaters usually have washes and dryers,
Speaker 2: you know, big theaters, right, So I don't need to
Speaker 2: bring that many shirts, and maybe I'll bring, like I
Speaker 2: don't know, three pairs of shoes, you know, a pair
Speaker 2: of sneakers from when I go walking or go to
Speaker 2: the fitness center. And then two pairs of a pair
Speaker 2: of airport shoes and a pair of because sometimes you know,
Speaker 2: your luggage gets lost and you don't want to show
Speaker 2: up at the theater looking like a slob, you know,
Speaker 2: so you need that extra pair of shoes and you
Speaker 2: need airport clothes, right.
Speaker 1: Okay, the musicians, the super successful ones, there is a
Speaker 1: very thin elite that they'll locate in one town and
Speaker 1: fly out for each gig. But most of the others,
Speaker 1: just one step down, have all given up flying to
Speaker 1: be in the bus because the bus leaves when the
Speaker 1: gig is over and it arrives, you're not waiting in
Speaker 1: the airport, et cetera. Is that something you ever thought about?
Speaker 2: Something they've talked to me about a boss, And but
Speaker 2: The thing about a boss is, let's say you get
Speaker 2: on the bus and then you go to the hotel
Speaker 2: the next morning.
Speaker 1: That's what you do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, I'd be willing to give
Speaker 2: it a try for a while and see, you know,
Speaker 2: I'd give it an honest try. But what if you're
Speaker 2: just going like four hours.
Speaker 1: Well, the nature of the bus is the bus is
Speaker 1: got all your amenities and has space, so it leaves
Speaker 1: when the gig is over. You don't burn all that time.
Speaker 1: You don't have to wear a schedule. So if you
Speaker 1: were sleeping when you get to the destination, you continue
Speaker 1: to sleep. If you're up, check into the hotel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let me go one step willing to try it, let's
Speaker 1: go one step further. You are you know you have
Speaker 1: one of the best gigs of all time. Maybe you
Speaker 1: travel with a microphone at most. Okay, and you ever
Speaker 1: hire a plane fly private from gig to gig.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, one time I was doing a show
Speaker 2: in Santa Barbara and I was flying out of Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 2: and the plane was delayed, delayed, delayed, then canceled. So
Speaker 2: my agent called and said, I've gotten you a I
Speaker 2: booked you a private plane, get your luggage back. You're
Speaker 2: going next door to the airport. There's a And it
Speaker 2: turns out that next door to every big airport right
Speaker 2: there's it's called a clubhouse. Then there's no security. You
Speaker 2: don't have to turn anything off, you don't have to
Speaker 2: fasten your seat belt, you don't have to do anything
Speaker 2: you don't want to do. And the first time I
Speaker 2: flew private, I thought, why didn't I do this every day?
Speaker 2: And then I found out it was ten thousand dollars
Speaker 2: and I had to pay for it, And I said,
Speaker 2: how was that fair? You know, like the theater, if
Speaker 2: I'd had to cancel the show, they would have to
Speaker 2: refund all that money. And my agent's still getting a cut, right,
Speaker 2: so how is it that I have to pay the
Speaker 2: ten thousand dollars? Anyway, we wounded up splitting it three ways,
Speaker 2: so every now and then that'll happen. You know that
Speaker 2: I have to take a private plane, but I'd never
Speaker 2: have asked for one, or I've never you know, it's
Speaker 2: enough already to have people say, aren't you ashamed of
Speaker 2: yourself for flying on airplanes? And I think, well, the
Speaker 2: plane wouldn't be The plane is going to New York,
Speaker 2: whether I'm monitored or not. But a private plane that's
Speaker 2: a little bit different because it's not going to New York.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not going to Cleveland, whether or not
Speaker 2: you're on, if you're not honored, it's not going to Cleveland,
Speaker 2: although you.
Speaker 1: Know are There are these new airlines like JSX in
Speaker 1: the West, which hold like twenty to forty people. But
Speaker 1: it's like flying private. I mean, you have to get there,
Speaker 1: but you only have to get there twenty minutes before.
Speaker 1: There's no security. Yeah, google it JSX, but they don't
Speaker 1: fly absolutely everywhere you have to be going where they're flying.
Speaker 2: Wow JSX, Yeah, huh, I'll fuck it.
Speaker 1: And it can be mine, you know it can. At
Speaker 1: some times I had to fly to Denver and they
Speaker 1: fly to Bloomfield as opposed to da which is east
Speaker 1: of Denver by a significant amount whatever, it ended up
Speaker 1: being cheaper because it turns out if you rent a
Speaker 1: car in the suburbs, it's actually cheaper than renting the
Speaker 1: car at the airport.
Speaker 2: Oh, I never learned to drive.
Speaker 1: You never. Let's let's wait, let's go back just a
Speaker 1: chapter before that. What do people not understand about the
Speaker 1: rest of the world, you're a world traveler, you live
Speaker 1: in the UK, have a house in Paris, et cetera.
Speaker 1: We have a very closed minded, ethnocentric population and they
Speaker 1: hear socialism and they run away. What do people not
Speaker 1: understand about life and the rest of the world.
Speaker 2: Uh, oh gosh, there's so much they don't understand, you know.
Speaker 2: Like one thing, Americans I think tend to feel like
Speaker 2: like when it comes to it's an outdated term. But
Speaker 2: like when I was in Germany in Italy last week
Speaker 2: on book tours, every question was about political correctness, which
Speaker 2: is an outdated term in the United States. Not sure
Speaker 2: what it's been replaced by, but I know that it
Speaker 2: feels outdated. Americans think that that the only ones in
Speaker 2: the world who are have undergone a sea change in
Speaker 2: terms of language and behaviors, and it's happening everywhere. You know,
Speaker 2: Americans believe that they have the best healthcare in the world,
Speaker 2: which is not even not even in the top ten.
Speaker 2: You know. I just always feel like everyone should just
Speaker 2: get out more. You know. When I lived in Paris,
Speaker 2: one time I flew back to New York and there
Speaker 2: were these students on the plane and they kissed the
Speaker 2: ground when they got off the plane, and I thought,
Speaker 2: because you couldn't get a big gulp what I mean, like,
Speaker 2: how how bad was France? You know? But it's true
Speaker 2: you can't get a big gulp and carry it into
Speaker 2: a store. People would be like, no, you can't do
Speaker 2: that here. I just don't always interested like the free
Speaker 2: items that so many people in America are concerned with,
Speaker 2: you know, like I need to be free to bring
Speaker 2: a gun to Starbucks, which is just not but here
Speaker 2: you're free to send your kid to school and not
Speaker 2: worry that your kid's going to get shot up, you know.
Speaker 2: So they're they're trade offs, right. There was an artarticle
Speaker 2: in the New York Times a couple of days ago,
Speaker 2: and it was about in Korea, if you're a senior citizen,
Speaker 2: you get to ride the subway for free, right, And
Speaker 2: so it was people in Seoul riding the subway and
Speaker 2: it was so delicious to read the comments, you know,
Speaker 2: and it was in the New York Times. So the
Speaker 2: comments aren't like you're a fat, no you are, you know,
Speaker 2: they're thoughtful comments. But everyone was the same thing, like
Speaker 2: they couldn't imagine riding the subway for pleasure, and what
Speaker 2: they saw a sparkling, clean subway. You know, nobody playing music, nobody,
Speaker 2: nobody's sleeping, nobody stretched out, nobody eating. Like the rest
Speaker 2: of the world has a whole lot to recommend it,
Speaker 2: you know, really does. I just feel like it would
Speaker 2: just do everybody some good to just get out and
Speaker 2: just see what's going on in other places.
Speaker 1: Okay, for me, the more exotic the place, the more
Speaker 1: I'm into it. I mean, England is great, but they
Speaker 1: speak English. I once went on a business trip about
Speaker 1: ten years ago to Colombia and everybody who was around
Speaker 1: me they'd had a family member shot and killed. And
Speaker 1: it was just a fascinating place. So where have been
Speaker 1: the more fascinating places that you have been?
Speaker 2: Law? India, Uh, Vietnam. I'm going to Pakistan in a
Speaker 2: few months. That should be pretty interesting. Uh, Brazil was Uh, China.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm with you, like, you know, when you've
Speaker 2: got uh, it's nice to have nothing to hold on
Speaker 2: to and you have to look at the people around
Speaker 2: you and just do what they do. And I'm always
Speaker 2: surprised by that when I traveled with other people and
Speaker 2: that they don't do that. And then I'd say, like,
Speaker 2: do you not notice that nobody is standing side by
Speaker 2: side on the escalator, like if you've not looked around
Speaker 2: and noticed that. The first time I went to Tokyo,
Speaker 2: I got off the the Narita Express in the middle
Speaker 2: of town and I lit a cigarette, and then I
Speaker 2: looked around and I noticed nobody was smoking. So I
Speaker 2: put the cigarette out, and I noticed there were no
Speaker 2: cigarette butts on the street, and I thought, we'll just
Speaker 2: put it in trash can, and I noticed there were
Speaker 2: no trash cans, so I put it in the cuff
Speaker 2: of my pants right and then threw it away when
Speaker 2: I got to my hotel. But I love when you're
Speaker 2: in a situation like that and you just don't know
Speaker 2: the rules, and it just makes you super observant. It's
Speaker 2: a gift to have to be observant like that.
Speaker 1: And where have you not been that you want to go?
Speaker 2: I've been to Africa except for Northern Africa. But I
Speaker 2: was on a plane one day and there was a
Speaker 2: I was flying from Paris to Lisbon, and there was
Speaker 2: a fellow in the window seat, and then an empty seat,
Speaker 2: and then me, and at one point the fellow in
Speaker 2: the window seat put a plastic bag of euro coins
Speaker 2: on the seat, the empty seat, And I said, is
Speaker 2: that sixty eight dollars worth of euro change? And he said,
Speaker 2: that is exactly sixty eight dollars worth of euro change.
Speaker 2: And he is a doctor, this guy, and he buys
Speaker 2: change on the internet, right, buy let's say one hundred
Speaker 2: dollars worth of change for ninety dollars, right. So he
Speaker 2: buys change and then he goes on vacation with it.
Speaker 2: But the bill will come and help. It's like he
Speaker 2: pays for a bill with twenty p and fifty p
Speaker 2: a one pound coins, right, So it was just so
Speaker 2: funny to me. Anyway, he is that turned out to
Speaker 2: be a doctor, and he travels around the world and
Speaker 2: he he does a lot of things for free, like
Speaker 2: maxillo facial surgeons, you know, like if somebody is born
Speaker 2: with and so he said, why don't you come with me?
Speaker 2: He said, because I always wanted to go to Lagos, Nigeria.
Speaker 2: You can't really go there on vacation, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, you can't go on I don't want to
Speaker 2: go on vacation to a place where they don't have
Speaker 2: a word for vacation, you know. So but this way
Speaker 2: I could go, and I could I don't know, hold
Speaker 2: somebody down while he makes him a new nose or something,
Speaker 2: you know. And I thought, oh, that'd be the perfect
Speaker 2: way to go, because I'd like to. I'd like to.
Speaker 2: I mean, India was interesting to me, just the everybody
Speaker 2: was super sweet. But I always wanted to go to
Speaker 2: India and leave when I got thirsty, you know. But
Speaker 2: and so's I stayed three days. But the thing is
Speaker 2: when you stay for a shorter period of time, then
Speaker 2: you just see, you just notice the thing. Anyone would notice,
Speaker 2: you know, who was there. It would be like you'd
Speaker 2: go to Paris and someone said, what Paris like their
Speaker 2: dog shit everywhere. It's like, yeah, you know, if you
Speaker 2: stay longer, you get beyond that. But I didn't stay
Speaker 2: long enough to get beyond that in India. But there
Speaker 2: was shocking to see just the juxtaposition of wealth and
Speaker 2: extreme poverty.
Speaker 1: Where were you in India?
Speaker 2: In Mumbai? No.
Speaker 1: I was in Mumbai for about a week, and you
Speaker 1: saw the extreme poverty. But the other thing was I
Speaker 1: was just stunned how educated the average person was. You
Speaker 1: know that we would go for these meetings. These are
Speaker 1: all people in the entertainment business. They all had graduate degrees.
Speaker 1: It was just, you know, much more than you would
Speaker 1: see in the US, as they say, yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: want to drink the water. The funniest thing though, I
Speaker 1: was in a hotel. There's two. There's the main hotel
Speaker 1: where they have the bombing, and they have an outpost
Speaker 1: on the other end of town, which where I was standing,
Speaker 1: and I called up an uber and it was an
Speaker 1: Uber X. It looked like a Fred Flintstone car. Like
Speaker 1: the guy was using his feet together and there's a
Speaker 1: gate for security. Whatever. This guy pulls up in this car.
Speaker 1: They give me a look like they're ready to eject
Speaker 1: this guy. I didn't realize if you're in Mumbai, you
Speaker 1: get the best Uber available, which is still like nothing.
Speaker 1: So you love a good hotel, we're a couple of
Speaker 1: the great hotels you've been to.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, well, I just stated this. Four Seasons in
Speaker 2: Tokyo that was amazing. Usually we stayed in an apartment there,
Speaker 2: but the apartment was available. But this four Seasons had
Speaker 2: a service where they would take you it was right
Speaker 2: now to the Tokyo train station, like and they would
Speaker 2: take you, walk you to Tokyo station and put you
Speaker 2: on the Narrita Express, which I don't need them to
Speaker 2: do that. I mean, I've taken it so many times.
Speaker 2: But if you'd never been to Japan before, it would
Speaker 2: be really great, you know, because there's you have an
Speaker 2: assigned seat on the train and assigned car, and if
Speaker 2: you've never been before, it might be too confusing. I mean,
Speaker 2: it would be confusing and you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 2: find your h see. But it's a service they offer
Speaker 2: that they take you there and put you on the train,
Speaker 2: And I think what I like too is that you
Speaker 2: just absolutely do not tip in Japan, you know, so
Speaker 2: it was kind of nice to have that burden lifted.
Speaker 2: So you weren't always thinking, oh is that enough? Should I?
Speaker 2: You know, should I have given more money? Should I?
Speaker 2: Like I was in I had just shown Copenhagen and
Speaker 2: I stayed at the oh gosh, what was the name
Speaker 2: of it. It was like like everybody was waiting for
Speaker 2: Deposh Mode was staying there, so there were people outside
Speaker 2: waiting for them to come out, and the next day
Speaker 2: there was like some big rap star staying there. It
Speaker 2: was like it was almost like being first class on
Speaker 2: an international flight, like like business is good enough, you know,
Speaker 2: what I mean, like first class sometimes is like just
Speaker 2: they didn't want to bother you. See, you wind up
Speaker 2: having to ask for everything, and if you're a timid person,
Speaker 2: it just, you know what I mean, you just think, oh,
Speaker 2: just put me back in business class. And that hotel
Speaker 2: was like that. Sometimes when it's so you know, so grand,
Speaker 2: you just feel well, uncomfortable. I suppose would be the word.
Speaker 2: I love the gosh I used to. I always loved
Speaker 2: that built Moore in Santa Barbara, and oh yeah, it's
Speaker 2: right on the beach. But there's some kind of labor
Speaker 2: dispute or something and it's closed now.
Speaker 1: There was I haven't kept up with that. I know
Speaker 1: there was a labor dispute.
Speaker 2: But it's just sitting there empty. Now. I've never found
Speaker 2: my hotel in Los Angeles. I mean I go there
Speaker 2: a lot, and I've stayed in a million places, but
Speaker 2: I've never found.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay. So if I say you're going someplace, it
Speaker 1: can go to the Four Seasons, and we know every
Speaker 1: four Seasons is not physically identical, although they are very similar.
Speaker 1: Or I could say you can go to the one
Speaker 1: off special hotel rated as well. But you're listening to
Speaker 1: the travel agent. It's not like you're talking to five
Speaker 1: people who went there. Which one are you going to choose?
Speaker 2: Wait, my choices? Are you telling me to go somewhere?
Speaker 1: No, you're going somewhere. You got to choose a hotel.
Speaker 1: It could be the Four Seasons, my known quantity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or a uh. I'm probably gonna go with the
Speaker 2: Four Seasons. I'm not proud of myself for saying that,
Speaker 2: but it's all about a pillow to me. You know
Speaker 2: about a really soft pillow in the Four Seasons. I
Speaker 2: know what the pillows and sheets are like, and they're
Speaker 2: really it feels really good to be between those sheets
Speaker 2: with your head on that pillow. I remember being with
Speaker 2: my dad one time and we were driving from Illinois
Speaker 2: to Tennessee and every place he stopped was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, Like it was McDonald's and it was
Speaker 2: everything was a chain, and I said, why are we
Speaker 2: doing this? And he said, because yeah, I know what
Speaker 2: you're gonna get. And then I remember because we passed
Speaker 2: all these great places and he wouldn't stop at any
Speaker 2: of them. So I hate being that way with you know,
Speaker 2: to say, oh, I'll stay at the Four Seasons rather
Speaker 2: than the one off hotel that we like. Do you
Speaker 2: go to Portland, Oregon? Very often?
Speaker 1: No? I've been there, but not often.
Speaker 2: Okay, because I used to stay at the Heathmen, and
Speaker 2: then someone said, oh, you have to stay at the Nines. Right,
Speaker 2: that's where the basketball players stay. But the Nines is
Speaker 2: used to be a department store. So unless you have
Speaker 2: one of the windows facing the street, you're in an
Speaker 2: interior courtyards. You know, you look out the window and
Speaker 2: you see the restaurant. You know. I can't stand that
Speaker 2: kind of a thing.
Speaker 1: No, No, it's like that big hotel in Nashville.
Speaker 2: Well, I like the Hermitage in Nashville.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Andrew the one convention hotel where everything looks
Speaker 1: in on a courtyard. It's very very weird. But whatever
Speaker 1: they do.
Speaker 2: Well, see, I like the Hermitage. And then they opened
Speaker 2: a four seat Seasons in Nashville. And then I think, well,
Speaker 2: I don't want to be disloyal to the Hermitage. And
Speaker 2: the Hermitage has really nice sheets, you know, so I
Speaker 2: think that's the situation where I would remain loyal to them. Right.
Speaker 2: But in Portland, the Heathman then got sold and we
Speaker 2: just went right down the tubes the Nines. But then
Speaker 2: they opened a Ritz Carlton, and I can't wait to
Speaker 2: stay there because I don't feel a need to be
Speaker 2: loyal to those other places, because they both let me down.
Speaker 1: I'd hate to be elitist like this. But isn't the
Speaker 1: four seasons more dependable than the rich Carleton?
Speaker 2: Yeah? It is right, But I always stay at the
Speaker 2: Ritz Carlton in Chicago always, and I'm never not interested
Speaker 2: in trying any other hotel there. I mean I have
Speaker 2: before I found them. It's Carlton, but I think because
Speaker 2: they can keep staff, you know, So I don't know,
Speaker 2: I just really I just like everything about it, and
Speaker 2: I like the restaurant, and I like the and I
Speaker 2: know that sounds you know, I know what that sounds like.
Speaker 2: But I'm never the one paining for my room. If
Speaker 2: someone else is paying for your room, why don't you
Speaker 2: get the best room in twn?
Speaker 1: Exactly?
Speaker 2: And then if I'm going to forty two cities in
Speaker 2: forty four days, I can do that. I can go
Speaker 2: to forty two cities in forty four days. But being
Speaker 2: in a nice hotel just makes it easier.
Speaker 1: You know, you got to ask for it. Otherwise they'll
Speaker 1: give you. You learn that over time. It's built in
Speaker 1: if you ask, and it makes such a difference. It's
Speaker 1: really cool.
Speaker 2: One thing I learned a long time ago on a
Speaker 2: book tour, right, Because sometimes you go on a book
Speaker 2: tour and the publicist will say the bookstore recommended this hotel.
Speaker 2: I'm like, no, now, new, new, new.
Speaker 1: Never.
Speaker 2: They make it sound like the like, what I need
Speaker 2: is something within walking distance. I said, no, I don't
Speaker 2: want walking distance. I want a nice hotel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the whole I was in Toronto last week, the
Speaker 1: same thing you wanted. First of all, Toronto is not
Speaker 1: that big. They put me in a hotel. God, worst
Speaker 1: hotel I stayedd in years. But uh, if you're in
Speaker 1: the hotel, will you venture out for food or you
Speaker 1: a room service kind of guy.
Speaker 2: I don't like room service because it's your room, but
Speaker 2: then somebody comes into it, and then it they violated
Speaker 2: your space, even though and it's crazy to say that
Speaker 2: because it's not really yours, but it just feels like. So.
Speaker 2: I usually eat dinner while I signed books.
Speaker 1: Is that part of your contract? Part of your deal?
Speaker 1: They serve your dinner?
Speaker 2: Well, otherwise, by the time I get back to the hotel.
Speaker 2: It's midnight or one, and it's going to take an
Speaker 2: hour for the food to come. And then when I'm
Speaker 2: on tour, I just go back to the room and
Speaker 2: go right to bed. So I eat did it while
Speaker 2: I signed books and they bring me menus and I
Speaker 2: choose something. I'm not a big you know, I'm not
Speaker 2: a snob about food, but I can't be anything I
Speaker 2: eat with my hands because I have just signed books.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're legendarily will stay there until the last
Speaker 1: person is there, and you talk to those people. If
Speaker 1: you're talking for hours a night to the guests, be
Speaker 1: I know that you want people to tell you jokes,
Speaker 1: et cetera. How many times do you have an A
Speaker 1: level experience talking to all those people?
Speaker 2: If I'm lucky, I'm lucky twice a week. When I
Speaker 2: say a level, I mean like they just told me
Speaker 2: a story and it's like unbelievable. And I don't mean
Speaker 2: they were saving it up to tell me, right, I
Speaker 2: mean we got to talking and then I learned something
Speaker 2: that's like wow, you know that just blows my mind.
Speaker 1: Tell me a couple of those.
Speaker 2: A woman she said, oh, you have the same My
Speaker 2: father was just like yours. She said, he just never
Speaker 2: liked me. And when she was young, she was sitting
Speaker 2: on a fence and there was a German shepherd on
Speaker 2: the other side of it, and it came and it
Speaker 2: bit her hand and it bit through her hand right, so,
Speaker 2: and her father said, you know, this is all your
Speaker 2: fault and took her to the hospital and was yelling
Speaker 2: at her the whole time. And then he said, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm going back to that house. And she thought, oh,
Speaker 2: that's going to go and cause some real trouble. Her
Speaker 2: father went and bought one of the puppies. It turned
Speaker 2: out the dog that bit her had puppies. He bought
Speaker 2: one of the puppies and brought it home, so the
Speaker 2: girl had to raise it. Isn't that isn't that like
Speaker 2: that's a level story. That's that's really good.
Speaker 1: Wow? Yeah, okay, do you do this to get the
Speaker 1: love of your father that you didn't get?
Speaker 2: Uh? Oh, I don't know. I mean, I think everybody
Speaker 2: who maybe not everybody, but I mean I think usually
Speaker 2: people who perform or whatever are trying to fill some hole,
Speaker 2: you know, and it's maybe it's a different hole for everybody.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 2: I don't know. When I was young, I just wanted
Speaker 2: to I wanted to walk into a room and have
Speaker 2: people say that damn and just I was just going
Speaker 2: to die if that didn't happen, you know, I'm just
Speaker 2: gonna die if I didn't. Then when I was in school,
Speaker 2: I part school, I would I would just think, like,
Speaker 2: give me a sign, Like somebody in this room is
Speaker 2: going to make it. Just give me a sign, you know,
Speaker 2: like let me know who it is. And I think,
Speaker 2: like most people. I remember there was this guy when
Speaker 2: I lived in Chicago, when he was really he was
Speaker 2: a boy. He was an alcoholic, you know, go to
Speaker 2: a do a reading and then afterwards punch somebody in
Speaker 2: the face and then be found passed out on the
Speaker 2: street the next day. And he was super good looking.
Speaker 2: And I remember thinking, Oh, he's going to be famous,
Speaker 2: And then I thought, why it's just said he's his
Speaker 2: writing's not good. He's just good looking and he looks
Speaker 2: good passed out, you know. So I think we all
Speaker 2: tend to put our bets on that person. You know,
Speaker 2: we're gonna we're gonna put our money on you know,
Speaker 2: really super good looking person or a super popular person
Speaker 2: or but it's not always that person, you know. Uh,
Speaker 2: And I remember thinking like, well, then it could be me.
Speaker 2: If it's not always that person, it can be me,
Speaker 2: you know. And you know it's just a midget celebrity.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not an everyone in the world knows
Speaker 2: who I am. But enough I just have enough people
Speaker 2: know who I am to fill a theater. I'm happy, okay,
Speaker 2: And again it could be more. You know, I'm a publisher.
Speaker 2: What we say, we need to take this to the
Speaker 2: next level, and I would say, no, we don't. Let's
Speaker 2: say I have a really good audience, and one of
Speaker 2: the things they like about me is that I've never
Speaker 2: treated them like they're not good enough, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 2: you're a good starter, audience, but I can do better
Speaker 2: than you. I can't do better than them, I really can't.
Speaker 2: And I don't know that those other people would be
Speaker 2: loyal the way that these people are.
Speaker 1: However, the nature of being an artist is you always
Speaker 1: want your work to reach more people. Now, live is
Speaker 1: one thing, in book is another. But let's just talk
Speaker 1: about the book side. Do you have a desire always
Speaker 1: to reach a larger populace?
Speaker 2: Uh? Well, I think my books except for the first
Speaker 2: book and then a book of fiction that I wrote,
Speaker 2: my first and second book, and a book of fiction
Speaker 2: I wrote. So ten of my books have been number
Speaker 2: one on the New York Times bestseller list, right, so
Speaker 2: that doesn't you know, me doesn't get better than that. Now,
Speaker 2: if a book didn't reach number one, I'd be pretty meserable. Now,
Speaker 2: I figure when I talk about a bigger audience, I
Speaker 2: mean it's hard because well, there's an audience that pays
Speaker 2: for stuff, and then there's an audience, do you know
Speaker 2: what I mean? And now paying for something's a choice, right,
Speaker 2: you feel benevolent if you paid for something, Right, you're
Speaker 2: the big man because you paid two dollars for a
Speaker 2: song instead of just getting it for free. Right. And
Speaker 2: it's easy to get my books for free. And now
Speaker 2: there's some kind of a national library where you can
Speaker 2: get the audio books for free, you know. So really
Speaker 2: the only so if you look at book sales, right,
Speaker 2: those are down, but they're not down, I don't know
Speaker 2: because fewer people are reading my books. It's just fewer
Speaker 2: people are paying for my books, right, Yeah, And that's
Speaker 2: like that, It's like that for everybody now.
Speaker 1: And where do you stand on the digital versus print divide.
Speaker 2: Uh, I don't I understand that a lot of people.
Speaker 2: I'd like, I'm not a person who needs to hold
Speaker 2: onto books, you know, So I get books. I buy
Speaker 2: digital books, you know, every now and then. I mean,
Speaker 2: if a friend has a book out, I buy the audiobook,
Speaker 2: I buy the physical book, and usually I buy the
Speaker 2: digital book as well, because if I want to quote,
Speaker 2: you know, quote long passages, that's easy to do with
Speaker 2: that with the digital book, and then email little passages
Speaker 2: to yourself. I mean, I'll go all out, you know,
Speaker 2: if it's uh God, I want that person to have sales.
Speaker 2: I want those sales to register. I want I want
Speaker 2: success for that person.
Speaker 1: You're a very competitive person, though you have a unique act.
Speaker 1: Who is in your league? I know you're suey generous,
Speaker 1: but when you think about people who read live, do
Speaker 1: you say I'm the bests or anybody else to say, well,
Speaker 1: that person's competition.
Speaker 2: I don't know who else does it really well? Neil
Speaker 2: Neil Gaiman, I think. I mean, I have a lecture agent,
Speaker 2: and he has other clients, you know, but I don't
Speaker 2: think they work. They don't work like I do. They
Speaker 2: don't go to one hundred cities a year. Now, sometimes
Speaker 2: they don't go to one hundred cities a year because
Speaker 2: you know, Zadi Smith could go to one hundred cities
Speaker 2: a year, but she doesn't want to. She's got a family,
Speaker 2: she doesn't want to leave them. She doesn'tay it. You know,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of people who don't do it
Speaker 2: because they don't enjoy it. I enjoy it, and uh
Speaker 2: one Garrison Keeler. He I mean he would have his show,
Speaker 2: but also he would go out and just read and
Speaker 2: recite things from you know, recite poetry and read things
Speaker 2: from books. But I don't really know who else does it? Really?
Speaker 2: I mean, who goes on a reading tour?
Speaker 1: I don't. There is nobody else. And you have to
Speaker 1: be credited for building this unique business, both the business
Speaker 1: itself and the art upon which it's based. But what
Speaker 1: we've established here is there's a gamification in your life
Speaker 1: and there's a ladder. Now, maybe the fact that this
Speaker 1: is separate works in you say, I'm unique if you
Speaker 1: want what I'm delivered and you can only get it
Speaker 1: from me, and I have a status, But it's always
Speaker 1: in the overall sphere. I mean, you've established with duo
Speaker 1: lingo and all these other things. Where you are on
Speaker 1: the ladder, where you are in the landscape is very
Speaker 1: important to you.
Speaker 2: I guess it is. I mean, I don't feel competitive
Speaker 2: with other writers. I don't feel competitive, like, no, I don't.
Speaker 2: I feel like I celebrate them because I think my
Speaker 2: boyfriend Hugh, his French is perfect. Right, So if someone
Speaker 2: speaks lousy French, Hugh says, no, their French is good,
Speaker 2: because he's confident enough to feel that about people, you know.
Speaker 2: So I don't feel I don't feel what's the word,
Speaker 2: uncomfident about what I have. I don't feel like it's threatened.
Speaker 2: I don't feel like I mean, I feel like I'm
Speaker 2: in a pretty good place with it. And so that
Speaker 2: allows me, I think, to feel generous towards my fellow writers.
Speaker 2: I I don't feel like I I don't know. I know,
Speaker 2: I don't feel competitive, I guess because what we're doing
Speaker 2: is so different. And then also it's not like if
Speaker 2: you look at the best seller list, it's like a
Speaker 2: little lot of really shitty books on the bestself, you
Speaker 2: know what I mean. So it doesn't mean that my
Speaker 2: book is good, right if it's number one, And if
Speaker 2: I look at what's around me, like that's really you
Speaker 2: know what I mean, Like Tucker Carlson's number two. So
Speaker 2: it's not like it's rewarding, wonderful writing. So it doesn't
Speaker 2: It's just a sales that's just about sales. I'm not.
Speaker 3: I but does it make sense because I said Sam,
Speaker 3: I mean I'm I mean, I'm driven.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's the same as competitive.
Speaker 1: Well, you're definitely driven. I mean, I don't need to
Speaker 1: psychoanalyze you. I'm not a professional anyway, but you do
Speaker 1: have the situation with dual lingo for let's go back
Speaker 1: the other way. People who are don't have your level
Speaker 1: of success have no idea how hard it is to
Speaker 1: be that successful. They have no idea of the drive,
Speaker 1: They have no idea of the constant focus and what
Speaker 1: the sacrifices are. So the people who reach an iconic level,
Speaker 1: which you have, okay, there is something inside them that
Speaker 1: made them iconic. They may be talented enough to be iconic,
Speaker 1: but there was something inside as you say, you mean
Speaker 1: you said it. He let somebody talk long enough. You
Speaker 1: wanted to be the person to say, oh that's little
Speaker 1: David over here, Yeah, we'd come. He play he's the guy.
Speaker 1: And if you didn't have that, I think, as you said,
Speaker 1: you said, if your book wasn't number one, you'd be
Speaker 1: greatly disappointed. Where someone could call you up and say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this week, this politician put out a book. They only
Speaker 1: sold ten thousand, and they gave away a certain number
Speaker 1: for free. You would say, no, it has to be
Speaker 1: number one, not because of any honey, I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: no one's going to give me an award or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's an internal thing, and I would think if it
Speaker 1: wasn't number one, as you said, you go into a tailspin.
Speaker 1: I don't know how long that tailspin lasts two days,
Speaker 1: two months, whatever, and you're going to say, fuck this,
Speaker 1: I'm going to show him next time.
Speaker 2: Well, because everybody's waiting, you know, nothing lasts forever, you know,
Speaker 2: so I'm always waiting to get to the theater and they'll
Speaker 2: be like, oh, we had to cancel the show. You know,
Speaker 2: well the only twenty tickets sold. I mean, it's going
Speaker 2: to happen, and I'm just always waiting for it, right,
Speaker 2: But I don't want it to be my fault. I mean,
Speaker 2: it could be my fault because people are tired of me.
Speaker 2: But I don't want it to be my fault because
Speaker 2: it was lazy, you know what I mean, I don't
Speaker 2: want it to be my fault movement. I got out
Speaker 2: there and thought, like, I'll just read something old or
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter, you know, it's just it's just a kipsie.
Speaker 2: It doesn't really mean any difference. I don't ever, I
Speaker 2: don't ever, I don't know. I read an interview with
Speaker 2: Tony Bennett or it was a Terry Gross interviewed Tony Bennett, right,
Speaker 2: and it was so beautiful to hear him talk about
Speaker 2: his audience and just talk about uh, just the gratitude
Speaker 2: and respect that he had. You know, it was a
Speaker 2: really I'm going to say that's old fashioned thing, but
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't think it is. I mean, I
Speaker 2: know that there are acts who will get up there
Speaker 2: and just if they're contracted for forty minutes, they will
Speaker 2: only do forty minutes and not one second later. And
Speaker 2: I know there are people who show up at the
Speaker 2: theater and you know, they watch basketball games in the hotel,
Speaker 2: you know, in the backstage while the audience waits an hour,
Speaker 2: two hours, you know, but you know, I'm sure Bonnie
Speaker 2: Rait gives everything she's got to be. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: plenty of plenty of people out there who.
Speaker 1: Just well, let's go the other extreme, because you're talking
Speaker 1: about the person, the person who's phoning it in. Then
Speaker 1: we have people like Bruce Springsteen. When I say about
Speaker 1: Bruce Springsteen, I have no problem with Bruce Springsteen, I
Speaker 1: just hate his audience. These people become prisoners of the audience,
Speaker 1: like he split up from the Eastreet Band. This is
Speaker 1: thirty years ago now, and everybody got all this negative blowback.
Speaker 1: If Bruce Springsteen were to come out and play for
Speaker 1: an hour and a half, people would go say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, you're letting us down. He was charging one
Speaker 1: hundred dollars and people said that was too much, So
Speaker 1: you can ultimately, you know, this is an interesting thing.
Speaker 1: This is we're talking about musicians. Neil Young has survived
Speaker 1: by constantly decimating his audience, saying I'm not going to
Speaker 1: give you what you're looking for. Okay. You know you're
Speaker 1: different in terms of writing because most writers don't have
Speaker 1: this profile. Zadie Smith has a new book, but White
Speaker 1: Teeth was the first book huge footprint in America. Now.
Speaker 1: Zadie Smith is from the UK, but in America your
Speaker 1: level of reach is probably three or four times that
Speaker 1: of Zadie Smith. It's a whole completely different league. As
Speaker 1: I say, you are an entertainer in addition to being
Speaker 1: a writer, and that makes all the You know, this
Speaker 1: is the opposite of what's his name, Pinchon. You don't
Speaker 1: know where he lives and he's just ekeing out a book.
Speaker 1: You are very accessible. You are working it even though
Speaker 1: you're not singing songs. You're doing something traditional that many
Speaker 1: people do live, which makes it both fascinating and I'm
Speaker 1: sure you feeling you're walking that tightrope. You can't say, well,
Speaker 1: this person does it. Their audience is steady. That person
Speaker 1: ever started. Oh, in Cleveland, business is pretty good. But
Speaker 1: every time you go out, it's just you. The nature
Speaker 1: of writing is private. But let me just put it
Speaker 1: another way, and you mentioned it going to Germany next week.
Speaker 1: To what degree is the audience in your mind when
Speaker 1: you write?
Speaker 2: Uh? Very much. I mean I'm thinking, I'm thinking when
Speaker 2: I'm writing something, I think, oh, that's been a long contince.
Speaker 2: I've had any dialogue that's going to be boring to
Speaker 2: an audience, you know, or gosh, that's a lot of
Speaker 2: information right there. I should break that up into smaller
Speaker 2: portions because that's going to be boring to an audience.
Speaker 2: Or oh, I could do this is my voice when
Speaker 2: I read this out loud? Or that'll be fun. It
Speaker 2: would be more fun to do it, then I should.
Speaker 2: What if I whispered that? So I think about it
Speaker 2: a lot. I'm going to think about the performative aspect
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 1: Well what about the reverse? You say, this is what
Speaker 1: I want to do, but I know I'm going to
Speaker 1: lose the audience a little bit, orclosing the audience.
Speaker 2: Uh, well, you know, just thinking about that because I
Speaker 2: was writing something about my friend Dawn, one of my
Speaker 2: oldest friends.
Speaker 1: Does she live in Montrose?
Speaker 2: No, No, she came with She comes with me on
Speaker 2: tour sometimes. Okay, we both hate dogs. Nothing will it
Speaker 2: cause you to lose an audience more? I'm you hate dogs?
Speaker 2: People you just feel them leaving you, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean? Like you could say you hate children, not
Speaker 2: a problem, right. Uh, you say you hate Catholics, they'll
Speaker 2: find a way to forgive you. But if you hate dogs,
Speaker 2: oh my goodness. So just thinking about putting that in
Speaker 2: this essay, that I'm writing that done dogs, and I
Speaker 2: thought I just thought about it, you know, because really
Speaker 2: people get so upset when you don't like dogs, so.
Speaker 1: You got to put it in or leave it out.
Speaker 2: Ah, I don't know, I don't know. I think I
Speaker 2: mean Don really, Don hates dogs so much that she
Speaker 2: will like cross the street if she sees one coming.
Speaker 2: Like she's very She's the kind of person who doesn't
Speaker 2: like cigarette smoke but goes like this. You know, it's
Speaker 2: kind of overkill, right, you know, you can just sort
Speaker 2: of quietly hate a dog. You know, you don't need
Speaker 2: to make a big show about it. And I've often
Speaker 2: pointed that out to her. But I would love to
Speaker 2: get on an airplane and not have a full sized
Speaker 2: dog sitting next to me on the airplane. I'd love that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but you know, what you're act is such
Speaker 1: that you're breaking taboos all along. But you're just saying
Speaker 1: dogs is the third rail?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about woke it politically incorrect. You tell
Speaker 1: phenomenal jokes. The joke you said about you know, the
Speaker 1: size of a woman's vagina whatever, I've told that a
Speaker 1: million times, That the one about the railroad. I've heard
Speaker 1: that a friend of mine tells that whatever. But by
Speaker 1: traditional standards, many people would say these are off color,
Speaker 1: politically incorrect. How come you get away with it when
Speaker 1: no one else can?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know, I mean, but those jokes are
Speaker 2: nothing to me, I mean are not. I don't you know.
Speaker 2: Someone told me that I didn't write them. I'm just
Speaker 2: repeating them. But I can see how that doesn't make
Speaker 2: any difference if you're in front of an audience. But gosh,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, I know there are jokes
Speaker 2: I wouldn't tell on stage. You know that are just
Speaker 2: racist jokes. I mean, that's the whole point out them,
Speaker 2: is that they're racist jokes. That's not going to work
Speaker 2: in front of an audience now. But I wouldn't have
Speaker 2: read those on stage ten years ago either. I mean,
Speaker 2: I might read them at a dinner party. But well, like,
Speaker 2: there was a joke that somebody told me that I
Speaker 2: repeated on stage. And a woman calls her husband very
Speaker 2: upset because their son has just had sex with this
Speaker 2: teacher and been expelled from school, and she's devastated. But
Speaker 2: the father goes and buys his son a brand new
Speaker 2: bicycle and presents it to him and says, I just
Speaker 2: want you to know I'm kind of proud of you.
Speaker 2: And the kid looks at the bike and says, maybe
Speaker 2: i'll ride it later after my ass stops hurting, And
Speaker 2: then the audience.
Speaker 1: That's fantastic.
Speaker 2: The audience usually groans, and I'm like, why didn't you
Speaker 2: groan when you heard the kid had sex with this teacher?
Speaker 2: Why do you only groan when you find out if
Speaker 2: it's a male teacher. I love that kind of a
Speaker 2: joke because because it's true. Why do you grown? Why
Speaker 2: do you only grow when you learn it was a
Speaker 2: man you know? Well?
Speaker 1: But just to stay on the theme, if a straight
Speaker 1: guy told some of these jokes, I think that there
Speaker 1: would be noise. I think there would be blowback. Really, oh,
Speaker 1: I thought about this a lot. Absolutely, you're saying I'm
Speaker 1: the other, therefore I can get away with it. This
Speaker 1: is part of my persona I don't even know.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Definitely, definitely. The only problem is your lack of you
Speaker 1: was so far not hit a major third rail. Not
Speaker 1: that that's your general act, but the fact that you
Speaker 1: don't seem to under you don't see that some straight
Speaker 1: Guys by Dad problems makes you wonder whether you whether
Speaker 1: there's some third rail lurking out there. But okay, if
Speaker 1: you say you sold the story to the New Yorker,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's going to be printed, to what
Speaker 1: degree do you start getting anxious feeling knowing the stories
Speaker 1: come out then it does come out. How much feedback
Speaker 1: do you get in your inbox or in the phone
Speaker 1: call whatever?
Speaker 2: Not much? Not so much. I mean maybe a couple
Speaker 2: of friends will say, oh, I saw your essay in
Speaker 2: the New Yorker, But I mean I don't I'm not
Speaker 2: on social media. I don't know what goes on.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm talking more. Okay, you write an essay, let's
Speaker 1: just use for the sake of discussion. It's not going
Speaker 1: to be well, how long is usually the lag time?
Speaker 2: What do you mean the time between you and.
Speaker 1: You finished something and it hits print.
Speaker 2: Oh well, gosh, my agent gave this to the magazine
Speaker 2: like three weeks ago, and then we just heard a
Speaker 2: couple of days ago they're taking it. And so I've
Speaker 2: done the first rewrite, and then you know, the fact
Speaker 2: checkers will call. So today I wrote to the Shepherd
Speaker 2: and just sent him the essay and said, did I
Speaker 2: get anything wrong here? You know? And are you okay
Speaker 2: with the fact checker calling you from the New Yorker?
Speaker 1: So when it's going to be published, do you get spilkissed?
Speaker 1: Do you get up tight now that it's going to
Speaker 1: hit the world at large?
Speaker 2: No? I mean no, I'm excited. I mean I think
Speaker 2: it's a pretty good essay.
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, when I write something and then
Speaker 1: people could read it, there's an emotional process and then
Speaker 1: a cool down. But each to his own. Let me
Speaker 1: ask you another, just one final question here? What do
Speaker 1: you do with all the money.
Speaker 2: I buy a house?
Speaker 1: If I were to ask you, and I'm not going
Speaker 1: to ask you how much money you have, would you
Speaker 1: have any idea?
Speaker 2: I don't really know much.
Speaker 1: Do you ever say I would like to buy something,
Speaker 1: but maybe I can't afford it.
Speaker 2: Well, like we were just talking about there's a house
Speaker 2: near us that came up for sale, and we were
Speaker 2: talking about, we'd like to buy it for this young
Speaker 2: couple we know, you know, and then they could with
Speaker 2: the understanding they could kind of check in on us
Speaker 2: when we're older and we're you know, we're thinking, well,
Speaker 2: what if they get a divorce, what if this? What
Speaker 2: if that? But uh, I don't know, I'm not uh
Speaker 2: And I'd buy art a lot, you know, like paintings
Speaker 2: that are really expensive that I never thought I would
Speaker 2: be able to do or And you're crazy if you
Speaker 2: think of it as an investment, because what twenty year
Speaker 2: old on the street today wants to buy a Picasso pain?
Speaker 2: You know they're they're you know.
Speaker 1: Art has become detached from the art itself and it's
Speaker 1: become a trading item. You sit here and talk about
Speaker 1: devaluation of Picasso. I'm not sure. I don't agree with that.
Speaker 1: Picasso's one thing, It's forever.
Speaker 2: But what I'm saying is you better like it. You know,
Speaker 2: if you're buying something, you better like it. So that's
Speaker 2: my attitude. You know. I'm not thinking will I get
Speaker 2: my money back? Or will it increase in value? I'm
Speaker 2: just thinking, oh, do I love it enough? And the
Speaker 2: answer is often yes.
Speaker 1: And have you made it to the mountaintop or is
Speaker 1: there a peak in the distance that you want to climb.
Speaker 2: I've made it to the mountaintop, So.
Speaker 1: What keeps you going? Now?
Speaker 2: I love it. I really like what I do. I
Speaker 2: find it incredibly rewarding. I feel I'm at my best
Speaker 2: when I'm on tour. I will be really, really sad
Speaker 2: when I can't do it anymore.
Speaker 1: How much of the enjoyment is writing the piece as
Speaker 1: opposed to performing live?
Speaker 2: Thirty writing it seventy percent performing at live.
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow, that's very interesting. Okay. I want to thank
Speaker 1: you so much for taking the time, David, to speaking
Speaker 1: with me, and my audience certainly learned certain things about
Speaker 1: you that I did not know. I'll be thinking as
Speaker 1: someone who has their own issues with OCD. I found
Speaker 1: that very interesting.
Speaker 2: I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for having.
Speaker 1: Me right and I just have to comment. You know,
Speaker 1: I was aware of you and you were off. I'm
Speaker 1: not really a big NPR person, although I've subscribed to
Speaker 1: The New Yorker forever, but my girlfriend about fifteen years
Speaker 1: ago said, we had to see you at UCLA. And
Speaker 1: once someone sees you, they're closed. I mean, theoretically, someone
Speaker 1: could be at your gig and leave within the first
Speaker 1: two minutes, but if you're there for two minutes, you're
Speaker 1: there till the end. It's you know, it's a unique act.
Speaker 1: No one can sit there and say, hey, I've seen
Speaker 1: this before, and I think one of the most interesting
Speaker 1: things I say, and this goes back to the woke thing,
Speaker 1: is you say the unsayable that we all know. It's
Speaker 1: like your point about the middle class. I believe everybody
Speaker 1: has a story, at least one story, the story of
Speaker 1: their life. And when you're going on about your father
Speaker 1: on this recent tour, we all have you know, it's
Speaker 1: Kiaraskiro with our parents at best. So for someone to say, hey,
Speaker 1: this is my experience. We all live in a very
Speaker 1: lonely world and we're looking to identify and you're providing
Speaker 1: a service to all these people who don't feel connected.
Speaker 1: Forget the people who are just saying I subscribe to
Speaker 1: the New Yorker. I hear you on Terry Grows, I'm
Speaker 1: a fan. There's an essence there. And the great thing
Speaker 1: about it is you're not pandering in the process, because
Speaker 1: many people are. You continue to chart your own course,
Speaker 1: which is just a long winded way to say, if
Speaker 1: David is in your town, you must go. You must go.
Speaker 1: Everybody will be talking about it. You'll live on the story.
Speaker 1: You know. You can watch a movie then say where
Speaker 1: are we going to dinner? That but if you go
Speaker 1: to see David you'll be talking about it for at
Speaker 1: least a week, so thanks again for taking the time.
Speaker 1: Thanks Bob, till next time. This is Bob Left Sense