Latest / Not Right Now / Take The Waters

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Take The Waters · Not Right Now

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey, I have three kids. They eat so much. We try to eat real food. We try to cook when we can.
• 0:10
  We try not to waste too much 'cause it drives me nuts, and it's expensive, and also for obvious climate reasons, which is why the Mill Food Recycler changed our lives a couple years ago.
• 0:23
  It is an odorless, effortless, and fully automated food recycler. Look, we've had this thing front and center in our kitchen for, again, a couple years now it feels like, and it is just such a game changer.
• 0:37
  Way less waste, less smell, way less garbage, which by the way, saves you money. No leaky bags.
• 0:44
  Look, you got peels, bones, stalks, whatever leftovers, dump them in the Mill, and Mill dries and grinds them while you sleep. Again, it doesn't smell, which I don't understand. It's sleek. It's actually sexy.
• 1:00
  Here's a question people ask: How often do you empty it? Good question. It's every three weeks. I don't know, maybe, and there's a bunch of us.
• 1:07
  Plus, there's a little app where you can control it if you want and set a schedule, and it shows you how much food your family keeps out of landfills. A delight.
• 1:15
  Look, you can get seventy-five dollars off right now when you go to our special partner site. I'm gonna read you the link, but you should know it's also in the show notes, and you can just click it.
• 1:26
  It is mill.com/lp/important-not-important. That is mill.com/lp/important-not-important. I couldn't remember that, so we put it in the show notes.
• 1:44
  It's right there for you. Check it out. Huge thanks to Mill for sponsoring our work and doing the right thing, and thanks to all of you listeners for supporting our partners.
• 1:54
  [upbeat music] People catch me talking to myself, and they don't realize, like an iceberg, it's one-tenth of the conversation. The rest of it's inside, and it's crazy pants.
• 2:05
  [upbeat music] Welcome to Not Right Now, the podcast about parenting through all of this. We'll be talking about slash crashing out over topics like...
• 2:20
  Deciding whether you need to fight today for trans rights or for them to please just brush their teeth all the way. Group chat drama during actual global drama.
• 2:28
  Climate anxiety and, "Mom, I'm bored," one second after you walk in the door from a field trip. Book bans and stop reading under the covers, and do I have to read The New York Times just because we subscribe to it?
• 2:41
  It's not an advice show. It's a you're not alone and you're also not crazy for screaming in the shower kinda show. I'm Claire Zulkey from Evil Witches. And I'm Quinn Emmett from Important Not Important.
• 2:53
  You can find details on anything we talk about in the show notes or at our website, notrightnow.show..show.
• 3:00
  And if you like what you hear today, please share it with a parent who needs it or who might laugh and tell their kids to be quiet, and then drop us a nice little five-star review.
• 3:08
  And reminder, you can send questions or feedback to questions@notrightnow.show. [upbeat music] Welcome home, you guys. All the laundry has been done. All the luggage has been put away. Maybe we've discussed this before.
• 3:25
  I'm one of those crazy people. I mean, we pulled into the house at almost 1 a.m., so I guess technically Sunday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning, and I immediately started emptying suitcases and doing laundry.
• 3:40
  I have to look around and be like, "I'm done." I didn't finish the laundry, but I started. Suitcases were emptied. Now the children empty their own, and they've gotta put it in their bin. They gotta bring me the bin.
• 3:48
  But my shit, Dana's shit, empty, gone like it never happened. So I didn't go to bed till, you know, whatever, three thirty. But I got that stuff done. Yeah, we're-- we've been home for three, four days. It's great.
• 3:58
  It's great. We're recovering. Yeah. So, so tell me about the trip. Tell me... I s- you sent me-- I said pictures or it didn't happen, and you sent me one photo. Uh-huh. Pretty meager.
• 4:07
  But yeah, I wanna know what you would do differently, what you would recommend, and the not right now of it, it too, is I'm so curious to hear, like, how you hit the, you know, just the right medium of forcing the kids to appreciate what was happening but also, you know, not nagging them and guilt-tripping them constantly.
• 4:26
  As you know, I'm usually subtle about those kind of things. Well... So I took that right up to Alaska. It was great. Truly wouldn't change a thing. Here's the deal.
• 4:36
  Alaska, even before I got into this stupid career, Alaska's been top of my bucket list forever. And this Alaska and the experience we did blew it out of the water. It was amazing. So for listeners, we did
• 4:54
  essentially a week, six days, six nights or so, on a small boat. I mean, not like a fucking canoe, but not a cruise ship. Five crew, holds 12 passengers. There were only 10. We were five of them.
• 5:07
  Six days, six nights, basically, in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska. And shout out, by the way, to our amazing crew, our captain, Jake, our
• 5:19
  cook, Chef Sven, the naturalists, Savannah and Monica, and the engineer, Jordan. They're all amazing, but also did 12 other jobs on top of all those things. They're amazing. The ship's called the Sea Wolf.
• 5:33
  Can't recommend it enough. A few other friends recommended it to us. It is a 1941 minesweeper that's still alive, still has the original engine, which they let me touch, which is surprising. It's fantastic.
• 5:45
  And basically, every day, in a very low-key way, which was great for us, and I kinda checked ahead of time, but it was great it came through.
• 5:55
  We were offered the opportu-- encouraged, offered the opportunity, depending on how we were feeling and what we were thinking, of-Let's say in the morning shift a very easy...
• 6:07
  I'm not even gonna call it a hike, like a walk for two to four hours through foliage and amazing ecosystems, all of which were pretty different, which is crazy considering how small the actual area is.
• 6:18
  Or in the afternoon or vice versa or whatever, the same tempo of a kayak.
• 6:24
  And that sometimes wasn't available because if we're in an area like the n- more northern parts of the bay, there might be a decent amount of ice around, and if the wind's blowing the wrong way, you can get trapped.
• 6:38
  Doesn't matter what kind, size boat you're in. So they would just be like, "Sorry, we're not doing the kayaks." But you could also opt out of that stuff, which was great for us if we needed to, but we really didn't.
• 6:47
  I think we didn't do 22 things. The other five passengers were all amazing people. If you're listening, I love you, I miss you.
• 6:55
  An older couple in their 70s, another couple about our age who didn't have kids but very quickly adopted mine, which was fucking incredible, and a gentleman who, mid-70s, done a lot of adventuring, rafting, things like that, from Texas, had recently lost his wife and ended up coming by himself, so we all tried to adopt him, which was great.
• 7:15
  It was amazing. My predominant thought was how grateful I am the entire time. And then the second one, uh, I really wanna go back with my guy friends and do it again.
• 7:26
  No cell, no Wi-Fi the entire time, which was incredible. Our oldest, with his first girlfriend, did say that we had, in the first 24 hours, severed him from her. [chuckles] So we dealt with that.
• 7:38
  It got better as it went along. We talked about being able to feel multiple things at a time. Jesus Christ. Yeah. But it was really great. The kids were the perfect age, you know, 12, 11 and 10.
• 7:47
  The crew was amazing with them, the other passengers on the boat.
• 7:50
  The only places they were allowed to go by themselves, again, even at their age, and though they're really good swimmers, doesn't matter, insurance, liability, fucking 35-degree water, was basically like the salon, like small little living room, and the sort of little back deck where we ate.
• 8:04
  Or their room, which was perfect. It was like the basement of the boat, three little bunks down below the little living room.
• 8:12
  Anywhere else they had to wear a life jacket and they have to have an adult, preferably their parent, take them places. And the way to deal with that is to not take them places. Oh.
• 8:22
  And then they can't go, and it's amazing, including they can't get to your room, which is a real win even though we were like two feet away.
• 8:27
  No, we did try to escort them wherever they wanted to go 'cause there, there's, I mean, just, it's not a big boat. Again, it's a tiny little m- minesweeper. It was amazing.
• 8:36
  I mean, if I had done no activities and just rode on the boat and looked at fucking whales and foliage and trees and water- Mm.... I would've called it a great trip. You guys did see whales? I bet we saw...
• 8:53
  Again, not my opinion because it would be wrong.
• 8:56
  The naturalist's opinion, probably between 10 and 20 unique whales, m- mostly humpbacks, though we saw from a distance an orca or two, which means you gotta get the fuck out of there at this point.
• 9:09
  Hundreds of sea lions and sea otters and harbor seals and, I mean, truly the variety and volume of birds.
• 9:18
  You don't see much fish unless you're actually on a kayak in a more shallow area because so much of it is glacier water, which is pretty silty in the top layers. You can't really see through it. So many fucking bears.
• 9:28
  These things, goddamn. And you'd be hiking and you'd be like, "Well, that's fresh bear poop. Time to get in the kayak- I'm out... and go as fast as I can." No, I'm done. "Goodbye." I'm already gone. "Goodbye."
• 9:36
  I'm not doing this. I know I'm going on and on here. Um- No, I want it too.
• 9:38
  So, so just, j- so just some quick context which was really interesting 'cause it, it's about your latter question of like how did I balance shit out. Again, I'll get this wrong. Glacier Bay National Park.
• 9:48
  So Glacier Bay, again, Southeast Alaska, a very small part of Alaska, but really beautiful. So when the first white colonist explorers like really showed up there in the 1700, 1800s, Glacier Bay was all...
• 10:06
  It was one entire glacier. Like there was nowhere to go. So that has now mostly retreated into a bunch of smaller glaciers that other, again, white explorers found over time that are each retreating on their own.
• 10:25
  But what's so interesting if you do that math, when you're s- looking at ecosystems and things like that, especially these relatively un- I'm not gonna say untouched, but not ruined places,
• 10:36
  every forest you're looking at, every shoreline, all these things, only a couple hundred years old.
• 10:41
  It's all n- like in geological and plant timescales, basically new, which is crazy, especially 'cause they're all so different. So you're wrestling with the fact that, and for a lot of that time it's been national park.
• 10:52
  Not, I mean, not a lot, but you know, a third of it. Not a lot of folks have been here, which is really wild and wonderful. Yeah. It's a real snapshot.
• 11:02
  It's easy and correct and incorrect to say, "Well, Indigenous people were there for a long time," and they were, but also we don't know 'cause there was a glacier covering it for so long, which is so crazy, and to so recently.
• 11:13
  Mm. So they've started to find some things, and some things are, they're able to carbon date, but this is a part of Alaska where they're actually... Th- they don't have a ton of data on that stuff.
• 11:25
  It's really interesting. Again, in this very small specific part. So yeah, we saw, I don't know, six to nine different glaciers now, all of which are in various stages of retreat, of course.
• 11:39
  Again, the main ones started retreating well before the industrial age. Not long before, but well before. Obviously we've advanced that quite a bit.
• 11:47
  Again, it's warming about four times as fast up there as it is almost anywhere else. But I really tried for me to not fucking ruin it. Mm. I tried to really...
• 12:01
  And commiserating with the naturalists and everyone who's just as, again, like-Anyone who's a passenger was not cheap, but also the crew wants to be there. You don't do this job unless you wanna be there.
• 12:12
  You don't visit it in the-- because it's such a pain in the ass to get to and pay for it unless you wanna be there.
• 12:17
  So you don't wanna ruin it, but everyone already had a pretty good appreciation for what it was, why it was, and how it's changing. You know, the naturalist, one of them, Monica, had...
• 12:26
  You know, she's been leading tours on that specific boat for 11 years, I think she said. And every time we visited a glacier, she was not afraid to s- she wouldn't say, "Look what climate change has done."
• 12:36
  She'd be like, "When I started coming, here's where it was, and here's where it is now." And when you look at what it is now, which if you'd never been to a glacier up close, it's unreal, man.
• 12:48
  It really, so much of it looks like... Did you see Interstellar? You should watch it. There's a planet that's just covered in ice, and it looks like that. Mm. And because of the volume, it's crazy.
• 12:57
  You just don't run into this sort of thing very often. And then you look and go, "Wait, that much is gone?" Like, where the fuck does it go? And you go, "Oh, that's all this water that we're in- Yeah...
• 13:05
  that we're driving our boat in." So I tried not to, but, you know, I would as usual, like anything, when I buy the kids a bagel, I'm like, "I hope you're grateful." Yeah. So I took that same attitude to that.
• 13:14
  So what did the kids do then, like, for their downtime when you guys weren't sightseeing and stuff? Yeah, for totally.
• 13:18
  So Kindles, but also, again, at any given moment, you could be having a conversation with one-on-one with someone or in this little group, which we all got to know each other very quickly, or with the crew, or some combination of that.
• 13:30
  We're just reading and someone would be like, "Bear." And literally, because it's the point of the boat- Mm...
• 13:37
  the captain just stops, and you just sit in a place for an hour and a half and watch a bear do its thing with binoculars, right?
• 13:43
  Or a whale, which any of the sea life, not only are you not allowed to approach to look for or get closer to, but sh- stay further away, and they were very respectful of that.
• 13:54
  But that doesn't mean they can't suddenly pop up near you. And, you know, some of these animals, because the area is so new- Mm...
• 14:01
  because they restrict it so much, I think it's in the entire bay, I think they said two total cruise ships a day, which is not a lot. Okay. And then six boats our size.
• 14:12
  We would maybe see one other boat a, a day, you know, which is other humans. That's it. That's it. There's a few little camping sites, but pretty rare.
• 14:21
  So the point is, like, just the riding on the fucking boat was a huge part of the experience. And they would say, "Do you wanna go kayaking?"
• 14:27
  We're like, "We're drinking coffee, and it's, like, raining, and there's whales. We're good." [chuckles] Yeah. "We're good." [upbeat music] So we're on a big cleaning streak right now.
• 14:38
  As you can imagine, I'm very annoying about it to my children. But we're trying to dial it down to the essentials at home.
• 14:45
  So whether you're an appliance, a piece of furniture or clothing, whatever, you gotta earn your spot. Everything's got a place.
• 14:54
  Everything has utility, which is hard with kids who constantly bring things into the house and all their stuff. And it's really hard when you're trying to feed them constantly.
• 15:03
  And there are various appliances that are advertised to you that can literally do one thing that honestly can't justify the counter space. But I'll tell you what does.
• 15:16
  It's the Mill Food Recycler, and holy cow, does it ever. It doesn't even go on the counter, by the way. It goes on the floor like a sexy trash can. It plugs into a standard outlet, and voila, no more food waste.
• 15:30
  Got peels, bones, stalks, whatever, leftovers? Put 'em in there, and then while you sleep, the Mill automatically turns on, dries, and grinds them, and it doesn't smell at all. It's crazy. Again, let's rehash.
• 15:43
  Not only does it not stink up the house, or two, cause leaky trash bags, which are disgusting, and three, send leftover food to the landfill to turn into waste and then methane and then rising oceans.
• 15:56
  It actually makes you feel good because it grinds up all of your food waste into these adorable grounds you can use in the garden, you can give to a local farm, you can put 'em right in the green bin.
• 16:08
  You can even ship back to Mill via postal service pickups like it's Netflix in 2003. Anyways, a delight, a game changer. You guys can get $75 off right now when you go to our special site.
• 16:21
  I'm gonna read it to you, but you should know the link is right in the show notes, and you can just smash your finger against it. It's mill.com/lp/important-not-important. Can I remember that? No.
• 16:34
  That's why we put the link right in the show notes.
• 16:36
  So anyways, huge thanks to Mill for doing the right thing and trying to cut down on food waste, most of which comes from our homes, for sponsoring our work, and of course, thanks to you listeners for always supporting our partners.
• 16:50
  [upbeat music] That's awesome.
• 16:52
  So kids did that, and then I also got them, and I'll put the link to this in the show notes, also not cheap, but been on my list for a long time, iPods, like old classic wheel iPods right before the trip because I always yell at them for listening to music on their iPads 'cause they eventually just do 400 other things.
• 17:07
  Sure. And they love music, and they fucking love these things, so. I presume you got the iPods from, like, eBay or something like that. But I would be...
• 17:15
  I feel like I would get them and be like, "My new computer doesn't know how to get the music into the old i- iPod." Um- It's a really good question. It's a guy in Europe. I researched it quite a bit.
• 17:24
  He does refurbished ones, brand-new batteries, which last forever, but also brand-new solid-state hard drives.
• 17:29
  So instead of "A thousand songs in your pocket," still one of the greatest ads of all time, I think I put 3,000 songs on each of theirs, the same 3,000, and it used up 1% of the space or something like that, you know?
• 17:43
  And so basically, it actually does work if you have a Mac. It hooks up to the iTunes, and the Mac will recognize it, and you can only drag over either music you've ripped from CDs or you actually purchased from iTunes.
• 17:57
  But it works very well. Was there any seasickness from anyone? Oliver, the first day for 20 minutes, and we, we brought a lot of non-drowsy Dramamine- Mm-hmm... which is the cheat code.
• 18:08
  Truly, like, little canisters, just keep 'em with you.Kids can take half a one, but now he's huge, he just takes a whole one, and he was good.
• 18:15
  Now- We get the bans 'cause James loves reading in the car, which is relatable- Yeah... but it makes him sick. Did you watch Poop Cruise on the Netflix? I'm not saying you should, but that made me think of you.
• 18:24
  [laughs] No. Okay. I don't know what it is. I'm not interested because of the name, and that's... No, we were g- I'm aware of it. I've had friends run into that sort of thing, if that's what you're talking about.
• 18:34
  No, we were very lucky. It's not what I thought it was. Steve and I watched it. This'll be for one of our future episodes on how you keep the romance alive. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. One of them for us was watching Poop Cruise.
• 18:42
  [laughs] If you are, like, in a bad head space and wanna clear your mind and watch something pretty dumb, that's it. And I presumed, based on the title, that it was one of those, like, norovirus cruises.
• 18:51
  But I don't remember the story, but it was a- a ship, a Carnival Cruise that lost all of its power 'cause they had an, a fire in the engine room. And so all the power is out, and the power controls the toilets.
• 19:01
  There's a lot of things wrong with this doc, and I can go into it, but one of the things that bugged me was that they didn't talk to anyone who had a child younger than 12 years old.
• 19:09
  Again, there's a lot of weaknesses with this doc, but I was like, "I can't believe no one talked about the people with diaper babies" And- What are you talking... Like, that's crazy... you know.
• 19:17
  Yeah, and this, and this- That's our target audience... this cruise should've been four days long, and it ended up being eight days long.
• 19:22
  And at one point, to mollify the guests, they started giving away all the booze, which to me was one of the scariest parts, honestly, more than anything else. But anyway. Can I tell you something? Mm, please.
• 19:32
  You can put this in my advance directive if that happens. Mm-hmm. You can just kill me. I've never been on a cruise, and they were showing footage of it. And I was like, "This is, looks like my nightmare."
• 19:41
  Just 'cause it's so many people- Mm-hmm... in an enclosed space. Mm-hmm. And that's really what gives me the heebie-jeebies. In climate change, we call that externalities. Mm.
• 19:49
  How many things you're exposed to at once, and I'm not doing it. My kids are enough. It's bad enough. I would go down there in their little, like, bunker room- Mm-hmm... and there's a little bathroom in there.
• 19:58
  Claire, you've never been more upset by how bad something smelled. I'm like, "You've been here for 48 fucking hours." I bet. You're like, "What is your problem?"
• 20:06
  Well, and then my other question was like, what did you guys eat? Like, how did they feed you?
• 20:09
  Yeah, so there's a cook on board, and basically fill out these forms ahead of time, and basically s- what you eat, if there are any allergies or restrictions or not, or I guess preferences.
• 20:18
  Lot of fish, crab, which was great, ton of... But they also had a lot of good greens. There was a walk-in freezer below, so they keep things, you know, relatively fresh.
• 20:27
  Yeah, w- again, between the cost and the time to get out there, need to stay at a hotel, or we stayed at bed and breakfast on the way out there.
• 20:36
  Again, from the East Coast, for us, coming from smaller town Virginia, it was four flights to get to the boat, four flights to get home, five people, and then the boat itself. You know, it's a lot. It's not cheap.
• 20:48
  But best money I've ever spent, and I bought my kids, so. Yeah. Tell people who are listening about the packing and how well the kids did packing themselves up. So bad. It was... So the boat was like, "Here's the deal.
• 21:03
  We do the same trip every week to the same place. We provide this rigorously tested list of clothing and gear you should bring and all the things you do not bring."
• 21:19
  And my kids, upon giving each... Of course, I made a list for each of them, three columns. Things you definitely have that we as a family have in our house, in our possession.
• 21:30
  Things we do not have that we might need, like actual rain pants. Like, you might not have, like, rain pants, right? And then what has been packed.
• 21:40
  And as we've talked about, I've, we've tried more and more to be like, "It's your responsibility. You didn't bring your lunch to school? Water bottle? Go fuck yourself."
• 21:48
  This was not the trip to do that, and thank God we caught it in time because when Dana and I went up there the night before, of course, and said, "Okay, you guys did your pack. That's great." I think Henry had two socks.
• 21:58
  They asked you to bring eight pairs just for the boat. Mm-hmm. I think Oliver had an odd number. Charlotte, I think, didn't have any underwear. No one had hats for sun.
• 22:09
  I think Oliver brought a couple T-shirts for Alaska. It was catastrophic. Yeah. Catastrophic. And again, I was like, "Add nothing else that's not on this list, and bring everything that's on this list." Mm-hmm.
• 22:20
  No room for maneuvering on any side. And they said, "I'm not gonna fucking do it." Yeah.
• 22:27
  Yeah, hat math is like water bottle math, where you're like, how is my house full of disgusting baseball hats and yet none of you can find one when you need one or find the one that you need, or no one can fit- Especially not the one they need for their game.
• 22:40
  We fixed it. It was exactly what they needed, 'cause you get stuff dirty- Mm... and wet. Like, wrong week to stop sniffing glue. Yeah. Don't give them the responsibility when it could actually fuck the whole thing up.
• 22:52
  I had on Witches, I started a thread about what are your kids bringing to camp for lunch? And a lot of them said, "Our kids are packing their own lunch."
• 22:58
  And I kind of come from the same place, where I'm like, I could do that, but then their lunch would be five small bags of Fritos and nothing else. So, and I guess that's their problem.
• 23:08
  But also, you know, then I would have to be the one waiting for them to strain on the toilet to, you know, register a meager poop. You know? So y- Screaming while they poop as a stranger- You do... walks in your house.
• 23:19
  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Always, always when the shower is running. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then my last question, or may- Yeah... well, famous last words, last question.
• 23:26
  So for the flights, were you just, you can do screens, like, whatever?
• 23:29
  Or what was your f- getting through the flight situation We made an agreement very quickly that you can use iPads, which, again, they just only really get for Duolingo during the day normally.
• 23:39
  iPads on flights, not on layovers, and we had three layovers in the first day. Rest of the time you could just fucking read a book. Kindles, which I'll stock with whatever, and iPods, or talking to a human.
• 23:53
  And they were pretty good about that. Mm. They're fucking idiots sometimes. I'm like, "If you put your brightness at 100%, it's gonna run out in an hour." And they go, "That's not how it works." Okay. Yeah.
• 24:04
  I said, "Well, I'm not gonna charge it on this plane. I'm not taking all my shit out to do it." And 45 minutes into a flight to a full-on, like, Donner party trip to Alaska, they're like, "My iPad's out of batteries."
• 24:14
  And you're like- Yeah... "I don't know what the fuck to tell you." Yeah. "Sorry." Yeah, I'm just gonna start screaming until somebody fixes this.
• 24:19
  Hmm.So yeah, I- I mean, we try not to ruin it with, "Look at how expensive this is," 'cause they were actually- Right... on pretty good behavior. We did more of that when we got home, and they were mad about- Yeah...
• 24:28
  having to camp for a day, and we were like, "Are you fucking kidding me?" I was wondering if they, like, fell apart at the end.
• 24:33
  'Cause I do feel like my kids often are good through all the hard shit, and then it's at the very end when they all start, you know, falling apart. And it's harmless, but you're all exhausted, so everything feels extra.
• 24:42
  You're all exhausted. It's nobody's fault. I mean, you're fucked up. You've been in, like, dry air all day from the planes and the screens and all that shit. You're coming back, it's 99 degrees outside. Like, it's awful.
• 24:53
  They were pretty good. It's a four-hour time difference, definitely fucked them up for the first few nights. Yeah, yikes. Um, which then fucked us up.
• 25:00
  I wanted to know about the ADHD, like, how that all went, and in terms of the medicating. What was your guys' method with that? Or you're just like, "Let's let it roll and see how it goes"? Did not do that.
• 25:10
  Medicine in the morning. Two different experiences. One, when they're in a kayak and can't fucking go anywhere, it's... What are they gonna do? Right.
• 25:20
  Two, when they're walking in a forest where there's definitely been bears in the past 12 hours, you better make sure you've given that child their fucking medicine.
• 25:28
  'Cause there are definitely times where you're like, "That dude's 100 yards away at a stream, which is exactly what they told us not to do." Like, his odds of dying right now, without a bear in sight, are 90%.
• 25:37
  So that's how that went. Yeah. You guys are amazing parents to give your kids that experience, and take me with you next time. Again, not cheap. Not the most expensive, but not cheap. All included, not the flights.
• 25:50
  But I find it very difficult to believe that anyone could experience that for even 24 or 36 hours and not leave with, beyond appreciation, a resolution to
• 26:08
  protect more places, but also to give more people access to those kinds of places in a, you know, in a leave no trace kind of way. [upbeat music] Hey, it's Quinn.
• 26:20
  So as you might be aware, this whole thing started as a simple, "Hey, here's what you missed" newsletter. And today, we've turned that one little newsletter into this burgeoning media and tech empire, right?
• 26:33
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• 26:44
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• 26:54
  It gives us crazy best-in-class analytics with, like, unlimited ways to review our data. We can run polls and surveys and use custom fields. And also, it integrates with a ton of external tools.
• 27:07
  Their API lets us sync your email user profile to the profile on our app so everything for you is streamlined and in sync, and you don't even see what's going on behind the curtain. It's great.
• 27:18
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• 27:30
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• 27:38
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• 27:46
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• 28:04
  We depend on it every minute of every day. So thanks for supporting our partners. [upbeat music] Let's talk about James' desire for the four free bobbleheads.
• 28:14
  So last week, or two weeks ago, we had a marathon day of events where we went to the Chicago White Sox game, which is an hour drive away, and we bought the tickets and we took my parents, so this is all, you know, very expensive to just do that.
• 28:28
  And we actually got there before the game started, but they were giving away Louie Aparicio bobbleheads, which were in way more demand than I thought they'd be, so they were all gone by the time we got there.
• 28:36
  Which was fine. So we go to the game, come home, and then we go to see Weird Al perform at Rivonia, which is, you guys have Wolf Trap I know in DC, that's like our version of that, an outdoor music place kind of thing.
• 28:48
  And we hired a car to take us to Rivonia, 'cause I didn't wanna deal with schlepping our shit and then getting- Sorry, this is all one day? Yeah, one day. Jesus Christ. Okay. Yeah.
• 28:56
  It actually all went pretty well, aside from me... No, I did yell at James.
• 29:00
  I lost my shit because he was trying to tell me I accidentally closed the door on, in Paul's face, and I was asking a woman what time the show would e- ended, and he was interrupting me like, "Mom, you closed the door in James' face."
• 29:12
  And I snapped at him and I said, "I'm talking to her right now. She's more important than you are right now."
• 29:18
  And then, I don't know if you ever yell at your kids, and then you hear like a small smattering of like giggles from adults in the a- like, who can hear you nearby. So that was the main thing that happened.
• 29:28
  Anyway, but the game was fun. We caught a rare White Sox winner. We saw Nancy Faust, who's the legendary organist to the team.
• 29:35
  She's the reason why you hear Kiss Him Goodbye whenever they take a pitcher out of a baseball game. But yeah, some White Sox game coming up.
• 29:42
  I think they're giving away a selection of pitcher bobbleheads, and James already has like probably 10 bobbleheads that he's gotten from other people or through us over time. And he said, "I wanna go. Let's go to that."
• 29:54
  And it, it's just one of those things, I didn't have the energy. I had a, like a rough mental health day yesterday, and I was like, "I'm just gonna skip this lecture right now."
• 30:01
  But I wanna be like, "Dude, those are free to you, but the tickets alone would cost 300, $400." And this is for a bad team, you know. A bad, unpopular team.
• 30:12
  Not to mention the time going down there, and then you buy all the food and drinks, which is another probably couple hundred dollars. And so yeah, that's all.
• 30:20
  Just that he thinks that that's how you acquire bobbleheads, is by just, you know, the freedom that comes with that.
• 30:27
  So I just, yeah, I didn't have it in me to yell at him about the waste of it all, but that's how he thinks things work. How does a parent explain that to them?Without yelling at them. I don't understand.
• 30:40
  'Cause, uh, th- once you've gotten to that point and it's about something like that, after a day like that... And we did have to have a couple of these conversations when we came back- Mm-hmm...
• 30:50
  about I understand you wanna wait to go to camp until noon, but it starts at 8:00, Mom and Div have jobs, and we did birthday parties in New York and Alaska.
• 30:57
  I'm gonna need you to remember what you have, not just what you don't have. Mm. But it was a version of yelling- Yeah... 'cause I didn't know any other way to get the point across at this point.
• 31:05
  Well, for the record, my family, yelling is any sort of tone or discussion that is negative. I found a new approach, which is to threaten them with a lecture.
• 31:14
  But I'm tired of hearing myself talk like that, and I'm tired of being the bitch, the constant bitch police, like, the killjoy.
• 31:21
  There was something going on, like, where they were asked, I forgot what, but I said, "James, I'm queuing up a talk for you soon coming up about having too much and not having enough."
• 31:30
  And I was like, "Do you wanna hear it now, or do you wanna hear it later?" I'm fucking into this. All right.
• 31:35
  Well, yeah, it's a little, like, appetizer of this is on deck, and we can either queue it up, go for it now, or you can hear what I have to say. But just a little taste, just a little preview. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 31:45
  And give them the choice. Just so you know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, 'cause like for instance, yesterday, I took Paul, our older one, to this outdoor concert across the street. And there's this plumber company that hires...
• 31:56
  My husband was wondering how they are operating, because they hire all of these young hotties to work for them at these concerts and do giveaways, and they were giving pup cups, you know, things of whipped cream for the dogs.
• 32:07
  And then they had, like, goodie bags for kids with who the fuck knows what in it. Definitely plastic water bottles. We just talked about this. And Paul just grabbed it. He's so comfortable with it.
• 32:16
  And I bought him a piece of pizza, bought him a Pepsi. By the way, the opened Pepsi is in the fridge right now- Yeah... along with a Gatorade that's been in there for four weeks. And I said, "What was in that gift bag?"
• 32:27
  And he said, "I don't know." He's like, "I know, I should probably just throw it away." And fortunately for him, was too tired to be like, "Actually, what you should've done was just not fucking taken it."
• 32:34
  But then we could, you know, roll the tape back and be like, well, he could've just not come with me. I don't know. Yeah, but that makes it your fault. Fuck that. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know.
• 32:42
  But- Also, fuck them for giving out gift bags. Goddammit, we did a whole fucking thing on this. The- it's completely- I know... unnecessary in a thousand different ways. I know.
• 32:49
  And I feel bad for this young hottie who works there, 'cause he asked me last week, he's like, "Have you gotten your sewer rodded lately?" And I was like- Excuse me?... "Actually [laughs]
• 32:59
  I need a magnet in a, you know, a curious way." Excuse- Sorry, not in a, "I'll clean your pipes," in a way. [laughs] But I took a lot of pleasure in being like, "Actually, we did get our sewer rodded just last week."
• 33:09
  Mm-hmm. Yeah, you did. And he was like... You know, and he asked me again. He's like, "Do you live in the neighborhood?" And I, it's funny, he, everything sounds like a pickup, but it's- Wait, is it the same guy? Yeah.
• 33:16
  And so he's like this arrogant [laughs] young man on... I know. He sh- looked like... And but I was like, "I talked to you last week, and we did get our sewer rodded." But I was like, "Now I have to come up with a...
• 33:27
  I'm gonna have to, like, put a bunch of hair in the drain or something to have them come over- Mm-hmm... 'cause I feel bad." And so yeah. This is fantastic. I'm so excited- Yeah... about this storyline.
• 33:35
  So what did this, honestly, what did this do to your mental health? Talk to me about that. Which one?
• 33:41
  The, uh, the bobbleheads or the free shit or- You said what this looked like for you yesterday, you're only as happy as your least happy kid.
• 33:47
  Tell me, like, what does that really mean for you, and how you deal or dealt with it, and how you either took that out on them or just left? Yeah. So I mean, just yesterday was one of those days, and you can never tell.
• 33:58
  You're like, did I just not get enough sleep? Maybe am I, like, a little bit sick? Paul was sick on Monday.
• 34:03
  He stayed home from camp, which made James furious because Paul got to do what James always wants to do, which is be on screens all day long. And he, you know, wasn't...
• 34:12
  Just feeling blah, you know, just trying to get through it. And then kids come home from camp. James gets a little bit of screen time. We still knew this was coming.
• 34:21
  Like, none of this was a surprise, but he had to get off to go to baseball, which he ostensibly loves. And he's just the world's biggest asshole.
• 34:29
  Like, I've been talking with another friend, same thing about being treated like a maid or an annoying robot, just, like, talking to you like shit.
• 34:36
  And we were talking about this last night, where you're like, do other parents, do their kids just not talk to them this way?
• 34:44
  Or do I just have this really inconvenient amount of, you know, low tolerance for being treated like shit? I don't know.
• 34:51
  But we immediately were like, we almost kept him home from baseball as a punishment, but we knew that would be, like, punishing ourselves, so Steve took him to the game.
• 34:59
  And every once in a while, it just gets in your head where you're like, at least for me, I don't wanna presume for other people, where you're like, "My kid's a jerk because we made him that way," or, "I'm not able to be sweet and happy enough to help him not be that way," and/or, "I'm too selfish to just take all his shit, and I'm not parenting the way I should, and maybe I was never meant to be a parent, and why am I complaining anyway, 'cause I have everything, and I shouldn't be that way."
• 35:28
  And I often, I just put myself to bed at 8:00 or so. Steve and James were at the baseball game.
• 35:35
  Paul, after he brought home his garbage, his free garbage from the free concert, I gave him more screen time, which I know didn't help anything, but he at least, he has the ability, and truly, like, not every person or every child has this ability to, like, get off screens and not be a jerk.
• 35:49
  Like, it is his superpower. And yeah, I put myself to bed, and then what's kind of ironic is that everyone ends up convening in my bed, like, to talk to me or tell me about the game or to- Oh, God. Go away...
• 36:01
  poop with the dog. Well, you know, in the end, it ends up being kinda nice, where you're like everyone had redeemed themselves a little bit.
• 36:08
  But you know, what didn't help, I guess the irony of it, was that it, I found myself having one of those days where I was just too online, and you end up refreshing the news or refreshing Reddit or refreshing your email, looking for that dopamine hit, and who knows what form that would take.
• 36:25
  Mm-hmm. And [laughs] you know, so I was, like, also mad at myself. I was like, I fall into the exact same trap that, that James does, and I'm no better than he is. And then it just, I don't know.
• 36:33
  I don't know if you get in those days, maybe you're better at ripping yourself away from it.
• 36:37
  Like, you know, how, especially when you have three kids, so that's one more child who's able to drag you down into the abyss with them.I have a few questions. Mm.
• 36:46
  One, why do you let them come in your room and on your bed? You clearly like your kids more.
• 36:50
  And I, I had this tweet a few years ago, it didn't get much play, but I thought it was great, which was, you know that meme, one does not just walk into Mordor?
• 36:59
  Were you allowed to just walk into your fucking parents' room whenever you wanted, like, without knocking, open the door, hang out, like, just explore shit? I definitely dug through their stuff, for sure.
• 37:10
  But, uh- But while they were there? No. When I was little if I had a nightmare or if I felt sick, probably. I, you know, they would definitely... I was not asleep, to be clear. I was in my bed reading, so I was...
• 37:21
  It was, like, office hours. But even during the fucking day. My kids come in, I'm like, "What the fuck are you doing in here?" What...
• 37:25
  They're like, "I don't know, I just thought I'd open this book and move this glass of water and throw this shit on the ground." "Get the fuck out of my room. I have one space in the entire fuck- get the fuck out.
• 37:34
  You don't just walk into Mordor." I- And they don't fucking care I mean- So that's my first thing you should fix- Okay... is- Okay... they gotta get out. Invisible fence. I gave you a door knocker. Mm.
• 37:43
  You can put it on the door, and it's permanent. Yeah. It's always not right now. That's the secret. It's like Gremlins. Yeah. It's always not right now.
• 37:49
  The answer is, yeah, of course I make myself feel awful about all of it. It's hard, right?
• 37:54
  I can put up all these, I was gonna use as my yes right now this great app we might have talked about before called Freedom, been using for 15 years.
• 38:05
  I'll put it on my phone, and it makes it a real pain in the ass to actually sign into something that's blocked, you have to restart your phone and all this shit. So f- the friction is good.
• 38:13
  But even then you find ways around and you find yourself scrolling and shit.
• 38:17
  Does it help, like, again, the kids packing their lunch, if you just put good food in the house, does it actually matter if they pack their lunch? You know, if you've programmed your Instagram feed to just be, like,
• 38:28
  you know, people working out and food, is it that much of a problem? Not particularly, but it doesn't matter what it is, I will immediately do the, "Ugh, I should've been doing this. I should've been doing work." Oh.
• 38:42
  "I should've been doing... lying in the kids' bed while they won't stop fucking moving, trying to fall asleep." It's less, like, comparing myself to them about getting off screens, and more just, like, immediately
• 38:56
  using any moment of, self-care is probably not the word, you know, whatever it is, detaching from reality in any way. I, I can make myself feel like shit about any of it. Mm. 'Cause it is hard to be on the... It's,
• 39:10
  on the face of it, objectively, to come home from this job, or from your job on your fucking computer all day, to walk in another room and open a screen to look at the same shit to relax is insane.
• 39:27
  When you do the math on it, right? What are... You're not d- it's not different, it's just on a smaller screen, and it's the same shit.
• 39:34
  And your kids are in the other room, and yeah, a lot of times they don't wanna fucking see each other. You don't wanna see them, they don't wanna see you, but I don't know, it seems crazy.
• 39:43
  So I guess I'm trying to do books more, read b- I think this is part of the reason I like to read the same books as my kids a lot of the time, at least for home stuff, so we have an excuse, like a vehicle,
• 39:54
  to do leisure things together. I'm also really trying, and I guess it's the same thing, like, I try to give myself a leg to stand on in the arguments about screen time with them.
• 40:04
  If I'm on it all the time, how the fuck am I allowed to yell at them? Yeah. And I love to yell at them about it, so I can't not do that. I- I don't know, man. It sucks.
• 40:12
  I'm in a weird place, like, at least with Evil Witches and some of my other work, is that so much of my work involves being online, I feel like, and trying to see what people are talking about.
• 40:21
  And like I said, Evil Witches began as a Facebook group, and I'm on it much less, which makes me feel weirdly guilty, like I turned my back on the thing that I started. But also, I don't enjoy being on Facebook.
• 40:34
  And then on top of it, I was just listening to this podcast, Celebrity Memoir Book Club, and they were going over this book, Careless People, by Sara Wynnes Williams. Jesus. Do you know that book? Did you read it?
• 40:43
  Oh, I'm aware of it. N- no, I get it. Oh. I got it. It's so upsetting. I got it. Like, it's like you... I knew Mark Zuckerberg was not great.
• 40:51
  Like, I wasn't, I never thought he was a g- and then you're like, "Oh, he's so much worse than I thought he was, and Facebook is so much more insidious than you..."
• 40:57
  And, you know, it makes me wanna, like, completely deactivate my account. But then again, that community is still there and my pictures are still there, and sometimes you need it for journalistic purposes.
• 41:05
  I interviewed a, Emily Gould, who, you know, an OG Gawker editor, about this. Mm-hmm. And she had a good simile.
• 41:12
  She was reticent to use this simile, but I think it works, about comparing it to having an eating disorder, where you do need to be online/to eat food, and then it's so easy to use it in an unhealthy way. You know?
• 41:23
  Like, unlike- Oh, yeah... like alcohol, you can live without alcohol. You can conceivably cut it out of your life. I can't work if I'm not on the internet. So, you know, and so- And I'm not happy about that, to be clear.
• 41:33
  Mm. Like, I don't love that I have to make these trade-offs, but that's where it is, and it fucking sucks.
• 41:38
  Well, and then, well, you were la- asking about the kids coming in my bed, and they're not welcome to come climb in my bed, and they don't. Like, when lights out, bedtime, no one... Like, fortress of solitude.
• 41:48
  But this is not witchy, but sometimes it's, like, kinda nice that they wanna come see me, especially with James. Totally.
• 41:54
  Like, we had such a bad day, and it felt like a bad series of days, where he came in and was much more neutral, positive, telling me about his game, you know.
• 42:03
  And then Paul is gonna be 13 soon, and I'm achingly aware of not a lot of time left where he'll actually wanna spend time.
• 42:09
  Steve is complaining about how Paul babbles so much lately, and goes on these, like, weird tangents and non-sequiturs, and it bugs Steve to shit. And I'm like, "Hey, at least he's talking to us." Yeah.
• 42:19
  Like, I'll take it. Take what you can get. But after all of my bitching and moaning, and I was like, "I'm gonna go in bed and read my book," this book Martyr, really recommend.
• 42:26
  We ended up, like, bonding over some funny, like, Instagram reels, like a dog that was holding a bunch of kibble in its mouth and spit it out, and then this Nathan Fielder clip where he was in a job interview and a seven-year-old was feeding him interview answers.
• 42:39
  And Paul was crying laughing. And it was, like, not to be cheesy, but, like, seeing him smile, like, smile with no reservations- Mm... with no self-consciousness is one of my, like, favorite little things.
• 42:51
  So-The internet taketh and the internet giveth, and yeah, don't have it figured out. [chuckles] No, there's no way to figure it out. It is immense good.
• 43:01
  You know, our friends over at wonderful organization called Our World in Data they do exemplary work could exist without the internet, would be much more difficult and much more difficult for people to amplify their work.
• 43:14
  You know, they did an incredible article about just how many folks in Africa are connected to banking now because of mobile phones, which is something that started 20 years ago, way before we started really banking here, honestly.
• 43:25
  But that's the only way they're banked, and it has changed lives. It's incredible. Wouldn't exist without the data layer. Also, Roblox, you know? Or whatever, like 4chan. It's crazy. And
• 43:36
  Instagram, all that shit can be the same way. I will sometimes... I mean, people catch me talking to myself, and they don't realize, like an iceberg, it's one-tenth of the conversation.
• 43:46
  The rest of it's inside, and it's crazy pants.
• 43:49
  And same thing, I'll find our oldest is really into music and percussion, and there's a couple amazing channels, people playing, like, awesome, and they're playing popular music and this and that.
• 43:57
  I'm like, "I gotta share this with him." And then I'm like... But I'm always telling him to get off and don't do this and this.
• 44:02
  I'll spend half an hour doing that, not showing the video, and then, you know, be mad I didn't go to bed on time. It's not great. Yeah.
• 44:09
  I also wonder, and it's so trendy that I'm em- embarrassed that I even think this sometimes, but I am one of those women of a certain age that I'm like, "Do I have undiagnosed ADHD?" Certain things do add up.
• 44:21
  Or am I just, you know, a person living in this year? But I guess the good side of having a kid with ADHD is like, well, there's no point in me getting diagnosed, 'cause getting medicine is such a pain in the ass.
• 44:30
  I'm just gonna continue grinding it out- Yep... with my bouts of, you know, intense productivity, you know, followed by, like, fallow periods of...
• 44:38
  And you know, where I'll go through and be like, "All I want is to do nothing." And then I'll have a day of doing nothing, and after three hours of it, I'm like, "I hate this," you know? And so I...
• 44:47
  Like, I have all these tabs open right now behind our conversation, and I'm patting myself on the back that I'm talking to you and not reading about how Sofia Vergara and Tom Brady might be dating each other and how Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is gonna be canceled, and this lady from Love is Blind...
• 45:02
  Not Love is Blind, Love Island, who's getting canceled. See, I already know all this stuff. I don't even need to read about it. I'm just catching up. But anyway, yeah, I don't know.
• 45:09
  I don't know what the answer is to this to date. Those are your open tabs. What are your other open tabs right now? Oh No They Didn't, which is a very old-fashioned live journal gossip site, but it still serves it up.
• 45:20
  And I read FOMAA, which is another gossip site that's on Reddit. Every day at lunch, I open up my tabs. It's kind of curated. It's a lot of New York Magazine stuff. I read some RuPaul's Drag Race gossip Reddit.
• 45:32
  And yeah, it's a lot less than it used to be, but that's my downfall, is I'll usually be like, "Ooh, yay, time to catch up on, on my internet," and then I'll be done, and then I'm like, "Well, let's start rolling the dice and seeing what's coming up," you know?
• 45:45
  And, and I always end up on conservative Reddit, 'cause I wanna see what they're saying, and then I- Do you? That is usually... Yeah. Because I have this really bad habit of being like,
• 45:54
  "People can't be saying the worst thing possible, can they?" And then you're always like, "Yeah, they are. They still are, like they have been every single day." Mm-hmm. And yeah, I don't know. They are, they or not.
• 46:03
  Yeah. The only reason I read it is when it gives me satisfaction when Trump pisses off his own people- Mm... and that's, like, when I'm happy. But, like, for instance, they're all talk- Not they're all. Excuse me.
• 46:13
  Let me roll it back.
• 46:14
  There's a lot more posts about the liberals who are allegedly cheering the devastating, horrible, every parent's worst nightmare summer camp floods versus actually talking about how these deaths could've been prevented, you know, and, like, the weather forecasting that was rolled back.
• 46:30
  But again, why do I need to know that? How does that make me better off? So I don't know. I wish I had more self-control, but I don't. I don't say this to brag.
• 46:42
  I say this 'cause I think it's actually crazier because I am the exception to the rule here. I cannot have open more than two tabs at a time, period. Mm. And at the end of the day, end of the session, they gotta go away.
• 46:53
  My two tabs I have open right now, and this is gonna go on the journey of making myself feel like shit about this, there are two New York Times cooking tabs. One is chili crisp and honey-roasted salmon- Oh...
• 47:05
  which sounds amazing, and a cold cucumber avocado salad. Also sounds amazing. They pair together, it's great. I open them and I go, "That's gonna be amazing this weekend."
• 47:15
  And then my next thought is, "You can't make that this... You're at a fucking swim meet the entire weekend, and then Sunday you have 72 chores you've pushed back 'cause you went to Alaska."
• 47:22
  And then the third one is, "When was the last time you cooked anyway?" Like, genuinely- Mm... when was the last time you, like, you fed your children something that required more than taking it out of the refrigerator?
• 47:31
  And four was like, "Are they gonna remember that?" Mm. "What are they gonna say when people ask them, like, 'Did you guys cook? Did you have meals?' Do they remember when I used to cook?" That's how my two tabs go.
• 47:41
  Yeah, no, I make that journey. It's very relatable. First of all... Oh, well, every time I do... What was I doing? I was...
• 47:47
  Paul heard me sighing heavily, which is one of my favorite hobbies, and it was just the, you know, choose your own adventure of your household, where you go down to the basement to get some apples from the fridge, and then you see that the laundry needs to be changed over, but then also you could hang up the, you know, certain wet clothes to air dry.
• 48:02
  That's why I work from home. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I need to do better at that. But yeah, it is the cooking thing. I food shamed my kids. My friend Virginia Solsmith would not appreciate this.
• 48:10
  And they did what you're supposed to do, but I made dinner. I made The New York Times, they had this... And you could eat this. It's a orzo, lemony orzo with garlic breadcrumbs and asparagus.
• 48:20
  And, you know, kids like all this stuff. And they ate a polite amount, which I should be celebrating, but then they immediately went to the Takis, the Trader Joe's Takis in the cupboard. And I was like, "Guys, you know,
• 48:32
  takes a while to make a recipe plan, make a shopping list, go to the store," blah, blah, blah. Fast-forward through, you know, lecture.
• 48:40
  And I'm like, "It's kind of fucking annoying when I make all this food and you, like, are... Why don't you try eating till you're full of the food that I made for you, of the fresh food?" Mm-hmm. You know? But- Mm...
• 48:49
  again, well, I can hear myself. Yeah, I was gonna say. You know? How did they respond to that one? They were like, "Good point, Mother. Thanks," you know? "You're always right." Yeah. It's... I don't know.
• 48:58
  And then you go and you-Again, you go home and open other... Home. You go downstairs, wherever the fuck you are. I drive home, I pack up my laptop. Why am I here? I could laptop anywhere.
• 49:08
  Because I get so much anxiety from being at home.
• 49:10
  And I open other tabs, and they're the same tabs from the night before that I didn't finish, and I try to do it once they're in bed, but a lot of it is once they're in bed, but I could also just be spending...
• 49:23
  Like, they want some alone time. They wanna read. They've been at camp all day, shit like that. But they probably also want to hang out with me, and I've done a little. Could I do more? Do I make myself feel worse?
• 49:31
  Do I have the tabs open? Then do I go up? And then I look up, and it's, you know, 10:30, where I'm eating another cookie. Yeah. So I woke up today, and I was like, "I'm gonna try to do better than I did yesterday."
• 49:41
  And so first of all, I amazingly sent out my Evil Witches without doing my thing where I do, you know, write one sentence and then have a treat by checking Instagram or whatever.
• 49:52
  I pretty much just stayed focused, and I sent it off. I haven't even looked at the comments yet. Mm. Which probably bad Substack behavior. I should be checking in and engaging with my readers, but- Mm... whatever.
• 50:01
  Then, 'cause I, I don't know about you, like, I still have this 9:00 to 5:00 mentality that doesn't serve me at all, but I always still feel like I should get everything important done early so that allegedly I can relax or do my hobbies or spend time with the kids when they get home from school or camp, even though they don't wanna see me.
• 50:18
  Like, I remember how annoying and stupid it was when my parents would be like, "How was school today?" And you're like, "Fine." You know? And they're like, "What do you mean?" You're like, "Shut up."
• 50:25
  That's, you know, that's me now. And they don't wanna see me, and I'm m- mad at them for entering my space. But my brain doesn't wanna...
• 50:32
  S- Steve and I were both saying how ironic it is that you're, like, exhausted at 8:30, 8:00, when it's time for the kids to start going to bed, but then weirdly enough, once they get into bed, you perk up because maybe your brain feels like you have quiet now or I don't know what.
• 50:47
  So anyway, today I decided to, like, kind of do nice things for myself first and see what happens if I save the work for later on. And also PS, it doesn't matter.
• 50:56
  None of the work I'm doing is that important, so I gotta get over myself. Yeah, no, nothing matters. That's the other part of it. Get over it, Kurcz. I know. Like, not to diminish your work.
• 51:03
  I'm diminishing mine- No, it's true... when you talk about it years later. It's, I don't know. I don't know. It's the- Willow and I talk about this all the time.
• 51:09
  In a given week, 100,000 people across the world interact with our stuff. How many people, like, want to? You know? [laughs] Like, how many people are like, "Ah,
• 51:20
  can't wait to, you know, th- th- throw shit against the wall and see if it'll stop the jet stream from fucking breaking," and you're like, "Great." I haven't written an essay in, like, months- Yeah...
• 51:29
  'cause every day Willow goes, "Is this the week?" And I go, "I don't wanna read anything. What the fuck would people wanna read? What's useful to people?" Yeah. I don't know. It's- Not my shit. Yeah. No, it is...
• 51:39
  I mean, part of it is the blessing and the curse of getting to do for a living what you used to do for fun. And so I'm so- Yeah. By the way, don't do that. Don't do that. No. Fucking nightmare. Yeah.
• 51:50
  I'm all dried up inside, you know? Oh. I watch a lot of RuPaul's Drag Race. Oh, amazing.
• 51:53
  And so I know I, I know I don't know much about being a drag queen, but it seems to me that a common philosophy about being a drag queen is that you have to have a certain amount of delusion to be a drag queen.
• 52:03
  You have to believe you're the most beautiful girl in the world- Mm... and be into that. And you have to feel like that way as a writer or a newsletter person.
• 52:10
  You have to pretend, even if it's not true, that someone will be mad at you if you don't send something out, or someone will be mad at me if I don't get them their Not Right Now patron only content.
• 52:19
  You know, if I don't get that set up now, they're gonna be like, "Where is it?" As if- Can I tell you something? The only time people have... Again, so proud of this audience we've developed.
• 52:30
  People with enormous leverage around the world, bartenders, people just trying to change things for the better, help other people. The only time people have said, "Hey, where the fuck is my thing?" is with this podcast.
• 52:41
  It's people literally going like, "Hey, it's Thursday. Like, I need my fix." And I'm like, "Sorry, I was busy trying to stop the hate bill from going, you know... Well, the other hate... No, the other hate bill." Yeah.
• 52:51
  And they're like, "I don't care. I don't care about that. I just want the..." [laughs] Good. Well, that's good. So- But also then I feel bad too, so. Well, you- But that's how I operate. If I don't...
• 53:00
  As Steve jokes that his family motto is, "As long as somebody feels bad," and that's, I've taken that to heart.
• 53:06
  If you're not anxious about how someone feels about you, then you must be asleep or you must be dead or you must have taken too many drugs. Are there too many drugs at this point? I don't know, man. I don't know.
• 53:18
  Did you know I might be going to a Phish concert in two weeks? So I'll let you know. They're coming back here. They did this, like, legendary Hampton concert however old we are 40 fucking years ago. They're coming back.
• 53:29
  It's very exciting. My high school friend Tracy, I introduced her to the band, and she and her husband are, like, people who follow Phish.
• 53:35
  And so I've gotten to go with them and see them, and it's a really special experience when you go and you do take the right substances and you're with the right people, but it is quite like a marathon, you know?
• 53:45
  And it's not like a Paul McCartney show where you're like, "I know this one. This is a bop. Like, I, this two minute song I've known- Yeah... for 40 years." Yeah. Sometimes you're like, "I've never heard this.
• 53:53
  This song is 22 minutes long." Mm-hmm. There's all these rules. Are they alive up there? Yeah. Right.
• 53:58
  And so there's a part of me that's like, I know I would have a lot of fun if I went, but also part of me is like, there's nothing I want more than to not go. So I guess we'll see where the wind blows. Yeah.
• 54:06
  Can, can you go for half an hour, you know? Get like- It's at the United Center, so, which is, like, an hour drive, probably more, no, 90-minute drive minimum with traffic, you know? So I don't know.
• 54:18
  I don't have much in me anymore. Anyway, yeah. Oh, by the way, not, really random tangent. Please, that's what this episode is. So Weird Al got rained out. We had outdoor seats. Mm-hmm.
• 54:27
  Like, a huge storm right on our heads. Slow- I've never seen this in a weather description before, slow-moving. So this, like, rain that was supposed to last 15 minutes ended up being, like, a really severe storm.
• 54:37
  So most people kind of fled indoors, and we ended up watching the concert on a TV, which was probably the boys could enjoy a lot more, 'cause otherwise it's, you don't really have much of a view.
• 54:46
  He's performing Fat again, its entirety, with a full fat suit and, like, face prosthetics. And- Wow. Yeah. And Steve, who is, like, not sensitive about anything normally, he's like, "This ain't age that great. This is...
• 55:01
  I don't know about this one." Wow. Yeah. I didn't know that. That's, uh- And he was doing, yeah, that fat suit thing where sometimes people do where they put on a fat suit and they get, like, extra goofy.
• 55:11
  Like, I feel like Courteney Cox did that on Friends, where you're like, "Ooh, what's going on here?" So yeah, that was odd. It was a-Kind of an interesting choice. Is that, like, extra woke?
• 55:21
  You know, is he commenting on the commenting? Well, I'll tell you this. I told a friend of mine who, she self-identifies as fat.
• 55:28
  I told them about this and she said, "Well, allegedly he's saying it's like a body empowerment anthem now," but she's like, "Try telling that to someone like me who people would sing the song to you as a child."
• 55:37
  So to me I'd say he does not have the right to, you know, claim that as any kind of thing for his own. But whatever. Weirdo. You know, I still love him.
• 55:46
  I know he means mostly well, but it was weird 'cause there were, like, definitely a lot of kids and people there who were like...
• 55:52
  seemed to be neurodivergent, gender queer, like this was their safe space, and I just was, like, thinking about what if there were, like, some fat folks there and they were like, "This didn't sit well with me," and but whatever.
• 56:03
  How often a day do you think to yourself, "I give up. I'm out"? In terms of what? Anything. Everything. Anything. At least once a day. I think about quitting my job mainly. Quitting my Substack, that's a big one.
• 56:17
  Yeah, at least once a day, 'cause you can, 'cause what does it matter? I think about... Yeah. I, I'm reading a book right now where someone takes pills and, you know, ends their life and not... I think about that.
• 56:31
  But you know what? I was thinking of you actually. I was making my bed today and I- Oh, this is a phenomenal segue. Continue... I wis- I whispered, "Sleep," to myself, and I must do that, like, several times a week.
• 56:41
  And not only do I mean sleep, I mean, like, sleep forever, so that- Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you know, it's hard to quantify per day, but, oh, certainly several times a week at least. Yeah.
• 56:51
  And I don't know if it's 'cause everything is a lot and/or I'm so tired, or just, like, my threshold for, like, grit is so much lower than it used to be. Or is it because everything doesn't matter?
• 57:01
  I think it's all the combinations of it, right? Or we have too much and our brains are just, you know, having a tantrum because... I'm like, did they have time? Like, was depression a thing 200 years ago?
• 57:12
  Like, was that a- Well, no, you didn't have anything. You lived till 30 if you're fucking lucky, and- Yeah... well, not 30 years ago. Well, unless you had AIDS. Yeah. I mean, there's a
• 57:23
  economist that's popular online, Noah Smith, I think he's the one who wrote a post recently. It was like, "Here's what it was actually like in 1776," and you're like, "No, I get it.
• 57:31
  It was fucking horrendous," and everyone's like- Yeah... "The Founding Fathers were in the prime of their youth. They're 21." It's like, no, they had six years left, you know? That's it, and they...
• 57:39
  wooden teeth and all the gonorrhea. But I don't know, sometimes it sounds appealing. If you ever read about, I don't know why you would know this, but this is kind of my thing.
• 57:48
  There is a Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and she was named Sisi, and she was, like, known I feel for being, like, the first depressed diva. Mm. She was just, like, known for being depressed. Mm-hmm.
• 57:57
  But also rich and gorgeous, and you know. But you're like, well, what if... What about everyone who worked for Sisi? Were they allowed to be depressed as well? Mm-hmm. The whole time?
• 58:04
  They have to, like, try to keep her going or was this, like, her thing and you enabled it? Yeah. I think all of it. You know, all of the above, you know. But the other thing though too is...
• 58:13
  Sorry, we're going really far afield, but you know, postpartum depression was- From what? From [laughs] the task at hand.
• 58:20
  You know, postpartum depression wasn't s- like studied I feel, except for, like, the last 50 years maybe at most. But yeah, just being a woman was depressing. First of all, no postpartum depression.
• 58:30
  If you made it through childbirth because you, another one, because you didn't have a son, no pain medication. And then any hemorrhaging, which they were like, "Sorry." And then, you know, aging as a woman. Yeah. No.
• 58:42
  We're not talking about that. What does appeal to me though is this idea of she's taken to the waters. Right. Like, she's off to some, like a lake somewhere. To the sanitarium. Yeah. Like, you see...
• 58:52
  Those sanitariums look great. No one talks to you. You're sitting in, like, a Adirondack chair. I love it. No screens. Oh my God. Take the waters, you know, and- Take the waters. Yeah, yeah. That's...
• 59:02
  Oh my God, that is... Send me away. Send me away.
• 59:06
  Well, it's like how I discovered amazing, like, magically when we were in Mexico City how happy I was, and I was like, "All I have to do is not work and eat whatever I want- Mm...
• 59:13
  and only discover things and have money to spend," and you know, and my biggest problem is, you know, how many souvenirs do I buy? So how can we replicate that?
• 59:22
  But I did go today, there's a guy who owns a, maybe I told you about this, he owns a place called Sauna Club, and he has a little portable sauna.
• 59:28
  And so today I went there and I jumped in the lake several times, and I never regret jumping in Lake Michigan. So, like, that definitely helps me out. I need to, like, touch grass, but the water version.
• 59:39
  Is the guy who has Sauna Club and it's a portable sauna the same guy who talks to you at concerts and ask if your sewer's been plugged recently? Rotted my brain, yeah. I'm pulling it all together here. Yeah.
• 59:50
  No, it's really nice. It's very, you know, middle age, where you're like, "Oh, I looked outside and I wasn't on my phone," and you know, start the day off right.
• 59:58
  And I don't even do the science about cold plunges, but, like, they- they- Nobody cares. I don't fucking care. I don't care. It just, like, I'm doing something. Can't you tell how uninflamed I am by the- I can...
• 1:00:09
  you know, by my facial expressions? I can. Yeah. Anyway, so today hopefully I'll be less mad at the kids. I was thinking about, like, I had a Wild Hare.
• 1:00:17
  I was like, "Maybe I'll go get some ice cream," and then I was thinking, like, of course, I was like, "Why are all your f- like, rewards food-related?
• 1:00:23
  Like, why can't you give them some kind of reward that doesn't involve buying them something?" And, you know, anyway, I'll just think about that later and we'll see about the ice cream.
• 1:00:31
  I mentioned going on the conservative Reddit when I'm sad. Another place I go to sometimes is regretful parents, and what makes me laugh is I'll go in there 'cause I'm...
• 1:00:40
  I most sincerely sometimes think, "Was I truly not meant to be a mother?" That's- Mm... like, when I'm in a bad like that. And what's really funny to... It's not funny.
• 1:00:47
  Their feelings are really real, but there's people on there who's like, "I hate my son. Like, he really fucked up my life, and I wasn't meant to do this," and the kid is four weeks old. [laughs] And, and, like- Mm...
• 1:00:59
  I, like, I'm like, "Talk to me when you've been doing this for 10 years, and then you- Mm-hmm... like, gotten to know the kid and really get to realize how much you don't like yourself."
• 1:01:06
  And then you- Or think you don't like him now. Right. Exactly.
• 1:01:09
  I also go to for some reason the rich Reddit because I like to see what rich people are talking about and how they self-identify, and so I can be mad at them.And like this feeling of, "I hate you, but I'm jealous of you," you know, all that kind of stuff.
• 1:01:24
  Do you have anything like that where... You seem like you probably have too much self-control, but are there places that you go when you're feeling dark or weak that you check out that kind of feed that impulse?
• 1:01:35
  You know, a couple years after I got into all this, and again, it's a choice I can undo at any given moment. It is enormous privilege to choose to do it and to conduct it from the perspective and
• 1:01:48
  many bootstraps that I have. But a couple of years into choosing to do this, I remember
• 1:01:53
  Dana came home, and in our old LA house, you'd walk in the front door, like into the living room, and I was under a blanket on the couch in the living room. And she basically was like,
• 1:02:04
  "Either you figure out how to deal with this better or you don't fucking do it. That's where we are." And my version of that has been like, I mean, you know, there's the chaotic good of something like Black Mirror.
• 1:02:16
  You're like, "Oh, this is, you know, this is not gonna turn to 4chan. It's just like a forecast of our future," but it's, it, you know, again, it's still mainstream media. But I couldn't even do that.
• 1:02:25
  I couldn't do, I can't do stressful, can't do anxiety, can't watch The Bear, can't... Like, all this stuff, I'm just like, "I'm out." Every time... What's the animal show I watch?
• 1:02:34
  All Things Great and Small, anytime the stakes are more than like, will this dog lose five pounds or gain five pounds? I'm like, "Dana, I can't do it. No." Mm-hmm. Uh, somebody cries on baking show, I'm like, "What is...
• 1:02:43
  This is not what I signed up for." Mm-hmm. So the answer is no- Okay... I really don't. But what is my fucking version? Like, again, I almost think what I'm doing is just as unhealthy- Mm...
• 1:02:54
  which is literally avoiding everything. Yeah. Like, you know? Which is not great. But at the same time, I'm like, "According to who?
• 1:03:04
  Who tells me I need to, again, choose to expose myself to [scoffs] more existential things every day? I'm good," you know? Yeah. I don't know. Well, you're more noble than I am. I'm- It's not nobility... I've been...
• 1:03:15
  [laughs] And I've always had, like, a bad habit of wanting to know what the worst things people are saying or doing is, and I don't know why that is, or just to make myself mad, and I'm not sure, like, what the point of that is.
• 1:03:26
  Maybe to make myself feel superior.
• 1:03:28
  Like, I just, I asked you if you've been watching that show, Your Friends and Neighbors, this Jon Hamm show, and it takes place in, you know, an enclave of New York, and it's all these rich assholes.
• 1:03:37
  And he loses his job, and they start stealing from them. And but it's kind of subtle where you forget, because he is the protagonist, that he's a bad guy.
• 1:03:45
  But I crave that it is more heavy-handed because I wanna hate these people more. I wanna enjoy hating them more. Like, why are you giving them so much nuance? And, you know.
• 1:03:53
  And the answer should just be I stop watching the show, but I was like, "No, I gotta see this through." One, he's so attractive. Like, you just gotta watch it. It doesn't matter. He's so attractive. Two, I can't do...
• 1:04:03
  And, you know, Dana thinks this is posturing, which, fair, but I can't do the rich people. I can't do Succession, partly because it's like the extreme wealth and also the yelling at people.
• 1:04:12
  People are like, "It's Shakespeare." I'm like, "I'm good." Like, our friend Lorene directed a couple apparently amazing episodes. She's incredible. Lorene directed Hustlers, which I should've... won 12 Academy Awards.
• 1:04:22
  I'm like, "I can't do it." The only version of that I can do is Arrested Development, and it is the same show, except it's not the same show. And one, it's just total comfort food, you know?
• 1:04:35
  But also, those guys, Jason and Will, had on Mitch Hurwitz, the guy who created Arrested Development, on their Smartless podcast pretty early, few years ago.
• 1:04:45
  And there was one point in the podcast, they were talking about, "Could we make this today? Could this get made today?" And the answer is, "No, of course not," right?
• 1:04:52
  But also, you know, Will had a really interesting point 'cause he was like, "It's interesting because no one's cheering for those people." Right. Like, the show is very clearly not cheering for those people.
• 1:05:04
  It is just shining a light on them and their absurdities. There's no version of them being like, "Yeah, Gob should win this time." He's a- Yeah... horrible person.
• 1:05:13
  You know, their version of showing s- sympathy for characters, it's like when "Hello Darkness, my old friend" starts playing over it- Oh, no... and you're like, "But he d- he got, this is, he did this to himself."
• 1:05:22
  You know? Yeah. They're greedy, awful people. I don't want it to be justified in any way. And- Yeah... a- anyways, I don't know. Yeah, I just cut it all out. I can't do it.
• 1:05:29
  My comfort food for hating rich people and is... And again, we are, what is defining rich, I guess, you know, 'cause you're like, well, we- Oh, sure. No, we fucking check that box... like, the fact that we're...
• 1:05:38
  Yeah, exactly. But I will watch Below Deck because it gives me comfort to realize not everyone is an asshole, and unfortunately, like, the best, the most compelling groups are full of, like, assholes or drunks.
• 1:05:47
  But, like, so many people come on, and they're, like, poo-pooing the smaller boats, or, "I wonder what the poor people are doing today," and you realize they all had the same cookie cutter experience, and they're all eating the same frozen food, and they're all, like, sleeping in the same, like, bed that someone had just come in, you know, the night before.
• 1:06:04
  And I find that very satisfying and pleasing in a weird way, that they think they're the shit, and you're like, "You are, you know, just on a conveyor belt." And I like that. Makes me feel superior. No, for sure.
• 1:06:14
  The schadenfreude of it is great, for sure. Yeah, I mean, it's like how we're in this era, and people have written about it and talked about it, but it's really fundamentally true. Well, a couple things are true.
• 1:06:25
  They'll say we have the worst billionaires of all time, right? Which, on a lot of levels, is true, insofar as, like, the number of people they can affect through
• 1:06:38
  their microphone or their actions, the number of people they choose to not affect positively, how they have built most of their wealth directly or indirectly on raping the ecosystems, right? Versus,
• 1:06:55
  again, this is the other hand, the billionaires of old, all fucked up people, and I'm sure if they were online, we would have much different fucking attitudes of them, but they also
• 1:07:06
  made museums and national parks and all this shit and all that stuff because, I don't know, they felt bad or someone told them to, or maybe they wanted to. I don't fucking know. Or they were less distracted.
• 1:07:15
  Um- Tax breaks. T- Right. Yeah, but guess, guess what? I don't fucking care. Yeah. I don't care. I know.
• 1:07:21
  I was just seeing, I don't know if you saw that Trump referred to Anderson Cooper as, like, Allison, you know, some-Homophobic way of cam-handed way.
• 1:07:29
  And I was thinking, I was like, "I bet he hates Anderson Cooper 'cause his family comes from actual money and like even... They, they have a university. Like compare Vanderbilt to Trump University."
• 1:07:39
  But yeah, I, I think that too. The Bezos wedding that was, I think part of it was like, I think why it made, it made everyone mad that it was like all of these people like where is your shame?
• 1:07:48
  Like someone should've felt some shame there and not been there, and that's what's so infuriating. There is again, like we totally qualifies all those things, try to give it back as much as we can.
• 1:08:00
  I built a whole business on it, but it's still... Is it ever enough? No, of course not. At the same time, boy, there's a lot of just...
• 1:08:07
  While we like have firmly based our business on the fact that they're real bad guys, and you should identify them by name and destroy them, there's also just a lot of not good guys. And again, other hand, amazing people.
• 1:08:19
  We work with o- they're great. There are so many amazing people. There's a lot of just like people who are like, "I'm not gonna be a good guy." Yeah. And also fuck those people, you know? Yeah. Just do- Yeah...
• 1:08:27
  something with your time, and if you have anything extra, like Jesus Christ. Yeah. Well, we'll see what our kids turn out to be like, which one of those- Fucking-... they will be... felons.
• 1:08:37
  Can I circle back to something from the top of the call? Tell me about Oliver's girlfriend and how long this has been going on for, and what kind of conversations you guys have had, if any? It's a really good question.
• 1:08:46
  She's very sweet. I don't know. It's, it started in the fall, I guess. So it's, you know, been a little stretch. First one, they're very sweet to each other. I make them talk on the landline as much as I can.
• 1:08:57
  You know, they're wrapped up in each other. They're going to the same school for now, but won't be in high school. So see how that goes. It's sweet. She's a sweetheart. You know, we have conversations like if he...
• 1:09:08
  You know, it's a little like a horse. Don't look it in the eyes. Yeah.
• 1:09:11
  If I ask him questions face to face directly, I think I told you how it like, he just yelled at Dana once because she would just ask him direct question. He's like, "What the fuck?" And she was very harmed by it.
• 1:09:21
  I was like, "You can't approach an animal like that." Like you can't do it.
• 1:09:24
  And so my version of it is right or wrong, and again, like I take the baseball perspective, like if I'm going one for three, I'm getting in the Hall of Fame here, at least to my standards. I will...
• 1:09:34
  He'll hang out in the basement listening to music in the evening,
• 1:09:38
  doing nothing else, playing with Legos, whatever, but mostly just listening to music, and I will just kinda quietly go down and be like, "Hey, what's going on?" I'll just lie on the floor until he starts talking. And
• 1:09:48
  again, one for three he actually starts talking, and one for three of that that something comes up about it. Hmm. Because again, like I'm a carcass. Like he's like, any knowledge you have is Encino Man frozen in time.
• 1:10:02
  Yeah. Like it's not, noth- nothing is valuable. But I did try to make...
• 1:10:06
  Again, it's like the most basic thing, and you can read all these parenting and adolescent books and teen books and how hooking up now is so totally different than dating and all this kind of stuff.
• 1:10:15
  But I just try to base the conversations, if there are any, in I was very straightforward. I will just listen or I will respond. Or, and I know you want this the least, offer some
• 1:10:29
  practical, I don't wanna say like advice, guidance, whatever. I was like, I know that's rare, and you gotta ask for it. I was like, but the goal is to buy more of these. Right. So I will try to do that.
• 1:10:40
  I said, "But you gotta tell me because I'm an idiot who tries to fix everything." That's what guys do, and I check that box for sure too. It goes fine. Well, that's good. But it does bring things up, you know?
• 1:10:49
  This and that. He'll be like, "Is this a nice bracelet she might want?" Oh, that's so cute. Yeah. Okay, thought experiment. My friend, her son is 12, so same age as Oliver, right? Mm-hmm.
• 1:11:00
  He is going into seventh grade, and they go to Martha's Vineyard for a month every summer with her family, and he has some gal pal over there and she said, "What should I do if they ask about a coed sleepover?"
• 1:11:12
  She's like, "I trust them completely, but something doesn't feel right." And I just knee-jerk said no because if you start this now, you can't ever roll it back. Mm-mm.
• 1:11:22
  And also- There's so much you can't put back in the box... I would have his little sister do that as well. Right. And if she wouldn't want...
• 1:11:27
  No, but I'm also Catholic, and I'm prudish, and I, you know, like- Yeah, we know that. No, it's, here's, except for the sewer guy.
• 1:11:34
  I- I have a fairly nuanced perspective on that, and I, I think I've talked about it a little bit, and we've tried to actually...
• 1:11:39
  It's applicable to like media as well, where we've tried to step back from demonizing everything and saying, "This is inappropriate," and saying, "Not appropriate for you yet." Right. For most things.
• 1:11:49
  There's obviously some things that are like n- no. Right. That's before we get to porn and all that stuff, but you know, R-rated movies or books or whatever it might be. And I said, "Here's the deal, man."
• 1:12:01
  And again, my dad, moron, but tried to do a version of this in a much more caveman way. But you're gonna do dumb shit, you're gonna try shit, you're gonna drink, you're gonna smoke, you're gonna hook up,
• 1:12:12
  you're gonna play loud music, whatever the things are. I really don't want you driving around at night. Right. Like, I know you will, but I'd love to minimize it.
• 1:12:20
  And if I'm capable of doing that in any way, I wanna start thinking about that now. I know you're gonna do all those stationary things.
• 1:12:28
  You have great friends, and I actually really like most of their parents, and I trust them. A lot of mar- military parents, things like that that are just wonderful and grounded and more strict than I am.
• 1:12:36
  But we have a little more room for you to do that kind of thing, whatever, inside and outside.
• 1:12:40
  And so I just basically said, "Hey, this, I know this seems like idealistic to you, but what can I do thinking about it now to make this the coolest, like evergreen coolest
• 1:12:53
  place for you and your friends to want to hang out
• 1:12:57
  so that you don't feel like you need to go somewhere else, and you don't feel like you need to be on phones, like again, like watching porn or whatever it is when they're 16?" And he was honest.
• 1:13:06
  He was like, "We fucking love ping pong." He was like, "Let's bring up the game table from D&D."
• 1:13:10
  He's like, "If we can just truly have a snack fridge and a drink fridge and like p- actually play, not we, Switch like whenever we want instead of like my, uh, you know, arcane rules," he's like, "That'd be great."
• 1:13:21
  I was like, "I'll do all that." Wow.
• 1:13:22
  And part of what we're doing in this attic room, and this is coming all the way back to your question, is we're putting in these little like built-in bunks up there in this like teen hangout room'Cause we all had friends stay over.
• 1:13:33
  They stay in the basement. Everyone has crashes. People go... And by the way, a lot of the time that's great.
• 1:13:38
  We don't have a lot of Uber around us, so it's easy to be like, "Well, your friend could take an Uber home instead of drunk driving him or someone else drunk driving." We don't really have that.
• 1:13:46
  It's 15 minutes to get to somebody else's neighborhood, and people are gonna spend the night. They're gonna have shit like that. Would I consciously let, at this age, a coed sleepover? Absolutely not.
• 1:14:00
  Like, seven years ago when they were six, great. Have a great time. Throw seven kids in the room. There's a window, though, where no. There's a window where you wanna say no when they're, like, 16, 17.
• 1:14:11
  They're gonna do it. How do I set that up in, like, the s- safest, however you wanna use that word, way possible? Does that make sense? Well- That's clear to the... anyone else, too, which is I'm not encouraging it.
• 1:14:24
  Yeah. But I don't want you driving somebody home at 3:00 in the morning tired and/or drunk or whatever or doing this or... I don't know, man.
• 1:14:32
  So it's complicated, it's nuanced, but the answer to 12-year-old coed sleepover? No. That's a no. Does any of that make sense? Yeah. No, totally.
• 1:14:42
  I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment for myself, 'cause I just was like, my faster response is no, and what, why would I, where do I go to with...
• 1:14:49
  But also it's easy for me to say 'cause Paul doesn't have girlfriends yet. We'll see about this upcoming year and- I don't think it's like that.
• 1:14:55
  By the way, there's a lot of hand-holding, and that is extreme at this point. Yeah. So I don't think there's anything questionable. Six months, 12 months, like you said, seventh grade, eighth grade, no.
• 1:15:08
  Well, a, a lot of it's not even, like, being worried they're gonna, you know, touch each other's privates. It's more just like, you're not done cooking yet. I don't know. You know what?
• 1:15:18
  Let me not even speculate, 'cause it truly hasn't come up.
• 1:15:20
  And, you know, I think my friend is pleased that her son has a female friend, and I know that I can imagine that feeling and, like, wanting to facilitate that and not wanting to shut that down.
• 1:15:30
  Uh, yeah, anyway, I don't want, I don't wanna speculate, 'cause who knows if that ever, if that comes up, who the kid will be by then and with, what the other person would be like. So I don't know.
• 1:15:40
  And also, let us point out that, too, that this is a very heteronormative conversation as well, so, you know, we're ignoring, like, a huge swath of other permutations.
• 1:15:48
  No, we are with those specific examples, but I think just in generally, like, again, any of my kids could end up being anything. Love it all, support it all, maybe even better if they're queer, more, you know, honestly.
• 1:15:58
  But I just wanna set up n- again, not like a safe space, but you get the idea. Like, it- Yeah... it's fully considered, and we're trying to do it outside, too. Here's a little space.
• 1:16:08
  It's not in the woods, but, like, away from us, but we can see you with five Adirondack chairs. Go smoke your weed when you're 16. Okay, but you're here. Give me the car keys. So I don't know. I don't know.
• 1:16:20
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