Latest / Not Right Now / We're Gonna Be the Woke Family

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We're Gonna Be the Woke Family · 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.
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• 1:15
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• 1:44
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• 1:54
  [upbeat music] You have kids and they're six months old, and you're like, "We're gonna be the woke family," and you're like, "They don't know they have hands or feet."
• 2:03
  [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- Mom, what's a coup during morning carpool?
• 2:18
  Air quality alerts, and yes, you do have to wear deodorant. 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.
• 2:31
  And I'm Quinn Emmett from Important Not Important. You can find details on anything we talk about in the show notes or at our website, notrightnow.show..show.
• 2:41
  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.
• 2:50
  And reminder, you can send questions or feedback to questionsatnotrightnow.show.
• 2:55
  [upbeat music] We overcompensate yelling at our son with giving him things, so hopefully he'll like us more in the end. But he- Right. He won't. Yeah.
• 3:11
  But h- for his birthday, he wanted a sliding glove, and it's just so funny. It just looks so dumb, but he's excited about it. It looks so dumb.
• 3:17
  It feels like one of those things, I feel like happened while I w- like, uh, you know the majors, they try stuff out. They wear 67 pieces of armor now, but the ball's going like 99.
• 3:28
  You know, it's fair when you're up to bat. Good for them. Or like how at one point the NBA tried, like, full-on leggings to keep their muscles warm, and they finally said, "We're not, we're not doing that."
• 3:40
  I feel like the sliding glove so- happened sometime, for the youth sports, sometime in between the many years from when I stopped to now 'cause every kid does it, and my kid, same thing. They're like, "Can I get one?"
• 3:50
  I'm like, "M- mechanically, you can, but- [laughs]... out of your green light account 'cause, like- Mm-hmm... you don't even know how to slide feet first.
• 3:57
  Like, why would I buy you a glove when you're just gonna smash your fucking face in sliding headfirst? But it also reminds me, so my kids currently swim for the same swim coach I had. It's great. I cry all the time.
• 4:07
  Uh-huh. And he's great. I remember at one point watching when they started swimming, you know, four or five years ago, and in breaststroke now, when you push off the wall, you can do exactly one butterfly kick. Uh-huh.
• 4:21
  Just one kick. Mm-hmm. And that was, like, a real no-no when we were growing up. That was, like, the thing you got disqualified for. And so
• 4:30
  I looked at him aghast, like, on the sideline at one meet, and I was like, "How long... Since when can kids do that?" And he goes, "18 years." Yeah. It's been 18 fucking years, and you're just like, "Oh, Jesus Christ."
• 4:40
  [laughs] I learned that. So he got a sliding glove for his birthday.
• 4:43
  W- we've been just on a hellacious tear purging as much as we can from the house, and besides this just full movement to do that, we're trying to institute even more, like, a one thing in the door- Oh, wow...
• 4:57
  seven things out the fucking door. This was a birthday, so obviously you weren't gonna push a Gestapo policy like that.
• 5:04
  But is there anything like that, like, to keep the house from becoming full of just constant new shit? No. I have decided I can do one of two things.
• 5:13
  I can, uh, work my job and take care of my life and, like, myself to the best as I can, or I can monitor this shit like I'm running a warehouse, and I'm not.
• 5:23
  But I think that if you do make a effort to keep your kids off screens, like, to the extent that you do, you have to give in to a bunch of shit coming in. You seem better than this.
• 5:32
  You seem to have more control over this than I do.
• 5:34
  But I think that if it's to the benefit of playing s- like, sports, which James does, and it is sort of like his, one of his ADHD superpowers where he can concentrate and do something good with it instead of just, like, playing whatever, Roblox, then we're like, "Fine, take it.
• 5:49
  You're fine with it." Also, it's played against sports, so I guess in my mind I'm like someday, if he doesn't wear it to death, like, this one can have a new life. So sports stuff doesn't mean as much to me.
• 5:58
  I would be more mad if they were into, like-Squishmallow stuffed animals. Like, they don't ask for that kind of stuff Girl, the number of Squishmallows that went out the door very reluctantly this weekend.
• 6:06
  God fucking- Mm... Jesus Christ. [laughs] It's just like little balls of fucking cancer. Everyone's like, "But they're so squishy." And I'm like, "They shouldn't be. They fucking-" No... "shouldn't be."
• 6:15
  [laughs] No, but you're right. It's, you know, we have some friends, and their kids are very busy, and sometimes I'm like, "W- like, why?" It's so much. It's exhausting the amount of stuff they do.
• 6:29
  And my friend recently was like, "Yeah, but every single one of those things, they can't be doing screens when they're on them, so I'm fine to fucking drive them around to whatever." I was like, "That makes sense."
• 6:39
  And it's so funny. I was looking on eBay for a used full-size xylophone for- Mm-hmm... my oldest.
• 6:44
  [laughs] And I was like, it seems ridiculous, but I'm like, it's something he's into that is not a fucking screen, so like, why not? You know? [laughs] That's his sliding glove. It's a full-sized xylophone.
• 6:53
  You know what? And I'm happy for you that's a task then that you get to work on. 'Cause like, I bet that's kind of fun to tell people that you're [laughs] in the market for. Like, that's a good story. Yeah.
• 7:02
  Like, where's the guy opening his trench coat on the street with a full-sized xylophone for me? Yeah. You should- Um... be able to hear him coming, but I guess- You would think so. [laughs] You would think so.
• 7:10
  But it also reminds me, we also cleaned out the car, which, you know- Thank you for reminding me... I mean, for them, you know, what a catastrophe. It's like asking them to give up their friends- [laughs]...
• 7:20
  you know, for murder. But every time, "Where's my baseball hat?" I do look in the car. It's not in the car. "Okay. Where's your water bottle?" "I don't know." "Well, there's four in the backseat of the car."
• 7:30
  "Well, those aren't mine." "Well, you sit-" Ugh... "in the same seat every fucking time, and they're gross and moldy." And they're like, "Well, I'll just use them." I'm like, "You can't.
• 7:36
  You'll get sick, and then it's my problem." Has someone done the history of the water bottle and how that got mainstreamed?
• 7:41
  Like, I do remember sports, like a Gatorade water bottle with the one really long straw, and I think it might have been even communal. It might belong to the team, but nobody brought their own water from home ever.
• 7:53
  Like, when I- D- Dana and I talk about this all the time. Do you remember just drinking water? No. [laughs] No. Just skim milk. If I go 20 minutes without drinking from this, I'm like, "Well, this is it. It's cancer.
• 8:04
  I'm dying." The car thing, yeah, I need to take care of that.
• 8:07
  I like to keep snacks in the car so that the kids are never busy and/or sometimes I have something to hand people who are, like, panhandling, and I don't have small bill, but I'll be like, "Here's some snacks." Mm-hmm.
• 8:18
  And I got a guy saying that he's gluten-free [laughs] when I tried to give him popcorn.
• 8:21
  And I could have been like, "I know popcorn is gluten-free," but I was like, "It's a red light turning green, and I'm not gonna argue with you. Sorry." But anyway.
• 8:29
  By the way, this flows right into our charitable stuff, you know? Yeah, seriously.
• 8:33
  No, I was laughing 'cause l- yesterday, I got home from Orange Theory at 9:30, and my older one, he's 12, he'll be 13 in August, set up, like, what, what had been, like, a lemonade stand, except that he set up a target range.
• 8:46
  So when you sent the picture, I was like, oh, a lemonade stand, until I looked closer. Yeah. No, it was a shooting range. So back up even further, like, of course I am a long-time...
• 8:56
  I've given probably at least four digits worth of numbers to every town. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, I'm sure I've, like, donated, you know, like, crying lib tard limousine- Mm-hmm... you know, no guns kind of idiot.
• 9:07
  Come shoot me, I deserve it. Mm-hmm. But also, our neighbor is police and FBI, and I know that they have at least four- Good... gun safes in the house. Minimum. So I've... I rely on them, honestly.
• 9:16
  But Paul, we let him shoot at a ch- target booth in Mexico City when we were there our last day. He had been feeling really sick. He wanted to, I don't know, vibes felt right. It was okay.
• 9:26
  So anyway, no-gun house helps that, like, we have this dog that would chew up, I'm sure, the bullets.
• 9:32
  Anyway, Paul goes to this school rummage sale, which, you know, he volunteered at, and the kids get first pick of the stuff, which drives me crazy, and he brought home two, you know, Uzi-sized Nerf guns.
• 9:44
  So already, like, the shipping, like, traffic flow is like, I can't get in the way of it because it's not, it has nothing to do with me. This, he got this from a school that I chose, that I paid for him to go to. No.
• 9:56
  And he was volunteering at it in the service of volunteerism. So at what point do you step in there and say, "Put that back. Go get a," you know, what's the opposite of a gun?
• 10:05
  You know, what could he pick out that he would possibly want? Like, a dream catcher? So anyway, ah. And then he uses his own money to order some Amazon, like, bullets. Yeah. You know, and he has this thing set up.
• 10:18
  And so on the one hand, I'm torn because, PS, not regarding gun safety or setting up targets or anything like that, he is first born.
• 10:27
  He's not very online, so he's, I feel like, very kind of naive and innocent for his age, so I kind of- It's great. I know, and my heart is, like, sort of breaking. At the same time, I think it's hilarious and adorable.
• 10:38
  I sent you this picture where his handwriting is, like, 7.5 font, and he has the handwriting of a four-year-old- Mm-hmm... 'cause he was raised during COVID.
• 10:46
  And I kinda saw it, and just I'm like, well, I forced him to make his own fun. If he were like most of his friends, he'd probably be online right now doing something- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... you know?
• 10:54
  And so he's doing this kind of, like, babyish thing that has somewhat toxic shade to it. [upbeat music] I'm gonna tell you a little story here.
• 11:03
  When the iPhone first came out 2007, one of the first apps I tried to convince a coworker to help me develop was what I was calling, and people were calling, a read it later app.
• 11:14
  And that's 'cause we worked all day at ESPN, and we used to print up all the old ESPN Page 2 columns we loved, and then we would go and hide and read them on the company toilet.
• 11:25
  Wouldn't it have been great, though, is what I said, if we could just do that on our new touchscreen phones instead of printing them up?
• 11:32
  Anyways, 150 years later, I have tried every read it later app, all of them, migrating my archives over and over. But a couple years ago, I found Reader from the creators of Readwise and never looked back. It's so good.
• 11:48
  It's so fast. It's so smart. It works in my browser to save articles and read them and highlight them. It works on my phone and my iPad. I put it on my phone, on my home screen, instead of social media stuff. It's great.
• 12:00
  Reader can save it all. And because they also built Readwise, all the highlighting and syncing is flawless.Text to speech? Sure. Ghostreader GPT so you can ask questions of your stuff? Sure.
• 12:13
  Here's how you can try it for free, and Readwise too. Right now, they're offering you guys, my listeners, two free months of Readwise and Reader when you sign up instead of just one month.
• 12:23
  So when you sign up, you get them both. The link to sign up and get that extra month is in the show notes, of course, and it's right here. It's readwise.io/quinn, Q-U-I-N-N. That's readwise.io/quinn.
• 12:38
  Again, it's right there in your show notes. It really is the future of reading. I can't recommend it enough. Probably the most essential thing I use every day. Check out Reader today.
• 12:50
  And I don't know, I gotta pick the battles, I felt like.
• 12:52
  But anyway, it was just, just an interesting example of yet again, when you have your own values or your own ideas of what you wanna put out in the world, and then your kid, like, strangely doesn't care about that, you know?
• 13:02
  But true to the pod, when we were talking with Lindsay last week, I jokingly, flippantly said something along the lines of kids who do charity work or volunteer, that's like, more about the parent than the kid.
• 13:14
  And then I l- looked back on that, and I was like, that's not really true. And I say that probably thinking about myself. Mm-hmm.
• 13:20
  And I'm, like, mad at myself for not setting up a system, but I felt bad, and I was like, I don't really think I believe that.
• 13:25
  But we've been making notes on this literally since one of our first Sharing Notes About episodes, and it was, the original note, main thought was when your kids aren't as woke as you hoped, and that all ties in, and one of the original notes is, "Where did I go wrong?
• 13:40
  Is this about me?" Backing up from all that- Yeah...
• 13:43
  it's like, I had this conversation with my oldest, 'cause I'd been marinating on this for a while because when we were in LA, I was constantly like, "Guys, there's 20 kids in your elementary school that do not have a place to sleep at night, and that's only a small percentage of the large economically disadvantaged folks in, in just your school, of this enormous school district."
• 14:03
  So constantly trying to find ways and places for them to directly perform charitable acts of some kind, some sort of service. And we don't do church, 'cause wh- whole, whole other thing, but it's hard to find.
• 14:18
  And when you think about it, obviously it's hard to find for fucking safety reasons. Like, kids can't just show up like Jimmy Carter and start building houses, right?
• 14:25
  And they're not gonna let them package meals like they don't wash their hands at home. They can't- Uh-uh... get everyone else fucking sick.
• 14:30
  But it was frustrating, and then you look into, y- or you go, well, okay, so there's Scouts, right? And there's some church stuff, so those are options. We just didn't have...
• 14:38
  I would've loved for him to do Scouts, but I was aware that they were gonna eventually, if not soon, have to make some choices, you know? But Scouts is great. I loved it until I got kicked out.
• 14:47
  It was, like, a meeting to move up. I don't know. They told me I had to answer yes to do I believe in God. And I said- Oh... "I'm not doing that." Yeah. And I was, whatever, 14, but we were all fucking pagan atheist.
• 14:59
  My dad, he was a religion major just like I was, and so I just grew up, like, reading all the books, man, into the whole thing. I was like, "Look, I can t- talk to you about some of this stuff."
• 15:08
  I ended up being a religious studies major. But I was like, "I'm not doing the thing," and they were like, "Well, you're out." Which I don't think they do that shit anymore, but anyways, yeah.
• 15:17
  So but you can do tremendous service with that stuff, and it's a way to get engaged earlier, obviously. I always felt like that was gonna be more, less about me than did my five-year-old make a donation this year?
• 15:30
  [laughs] So one, one of the things we started doing, not unlike your son's shooting range, was lemonade stands. Oh. Because one of my favorite organizations is Alex's Lemonade Stand, started by- Mm...
• 15:41
  a young girl named Alex who eventually died of pediatric cancer, and her parents end up running this organization. I've had her dad, Jay, on the show a few times.
• 15:48
  We became close, and one of the things kids can do is you have a lemonade stand, and you raise money for pediatric cancer.
• 15:54
  They do two things, pediatric cancer research, and they pay travel funds for families who have to travel for trials or treatment, whatever. It's wonderful. Mm.
• 16:03
  You know, one of those organizations that shouldn't have to exist, but in the meantime, let's do it.
• 16:08
  And so that, we found that was a great way for them to get involved, and they got to count the money and do all that stuff. But again, there is always that question, right? Is this about me? And is it enough?
• 16:19
  And do they fucking care at all? Oh. And the conversation I had at one point, and again, he's
• 16:26
  12, and I tried to put myself back into shoes, sixth grade going on seventh grade is, how much room do you have for that stuff at that age? Uh-uh. Uh-uh. I don't remember paying attention at all to the outside world.
• 16:36
  I was consumed by how my facial hair looked, and girls- [laughs]... and sports, and maybe my grades. I don't know. That's kinda where it is, is I'm just trying to have a little empathy there, I guess, as far as- Yeah.
• 16:46
  Well, sure. I mean, it gets complicated pretty early, right?
• 16:49
  Like, I forgot exactly which kid it was or what amount, but one of them found a penny on the ground and said, "I wanna give this to the next homeless person I see."
• 16:57
  And that was an interesting conversation because, like, how dare- Tell me about it... I don't even remember.
• 17:02
  I mean, they were pretty little, so I was like, what a great instinct to, like a beautiful thing, but also, you know, it's hard to explain to someone, like, that is not, that's not ni- that's not gonna be nice- That's actually insulting...
• 17:13
  to the next person they find. Right. But a child can't understand that. Mm-mm.
• 17:17
  And, you know, you're also cognizant of b- being like, I don't want to, like, act like I'm out here trying to get a, you know, an award because I want it to be seen that my child is giving this person some cash, you know?
• 17:29
  So just little things like that is hard enough to handle. You do have to, and I imagine in Chicago too, and you've got in here about your Catholic school enforced volunteerism. Yes. But also it's that.
• 17:39
  They, like s- have a penny. I mean, you know, again, like, we more or less left LA right when the pandemic started, and my kids were young enough then, but homelessness is everywhere.
• 17:48
  There were at one point, I think it was, like, 25,000 people on the streets, 6,000 of which were vets. And, you know, to nip this argument in the bud, everyone says, "Well, it's Los Angeles, California.
• 17:57
  Homeless people go there 'cause it's warmer." Untrue. They become homeless and in poverty in California. But it was inescapable. Walking to the farmers market, walking to school, all that stuff.
• 18:08
  Mm.The conversations kind of started very early out of- Yeah... necessity. You know, why is that person under a blanket on the streets? Well, everything is unaffordable. Mm. They don't have healthcare.
• 18:19
  You know, the main driver of poverty is health bills, all this different shit. But like you said, like when do kids actually grasp the idea of giving back? Yeah. I don't know.
• 18:31
  I mean, I think it starts very small and local, obviously, like sharing, 'cause it makes them...
• 18:35
  And even sometimes if it just feels good to be identified as good, which doesn't apply to every kid, but some kids, they like the little halo feeling of being caught being good.
• 18:44
  Our last school, for better or for worse, the principal had these caught being kind moments, so you'd get like a big boost and be on the Instagram and like whatever.
• 18:53
  So in that case, you're almost like, okay, so you're getting rewarded for that. And then also, like we do various things, this and that here at home. Obviously, like Steve and I, I ran a reading series for a long time.
• 19:04
  We would donate all the extra money to this literacy group and, you know, do this and that, fundraising, and on the one hand you feel gross to come home and be like, "Guess what I did today?
• 19:14
  I raised blank amount of money." But also- Right... I'm proud of that shit, like when I can do it, 'cause like for me it's not just like
• 19:21
  I feel good about helping, but also like the work that I put into it and the network I have.
• 19:26
  And I do want the kids, I guess sometimes to know, 'cause like to them, everything I do is on this computer that I'm talking to you on. Uh-huh.
• 19:32
  And that includes recording the podcast, earning a living, talking to my friends, reading gossip, like- Yeah...
• 19:38
  watching TV shows, and so I'm sure they'll never really understand what it takes to like ask people to help raise money for the Trevor Project, you know, a fundraiser and do it.
• 19:47
  But I guess I want them to know that's kind of how I do spend my time, but you know, I don't know if they're like, "Wow, great. I wanna be like that." [laughs] It is hard, right?
• 19:55
  Because again, it's not like you're not taking them every Sunday to a soup kitchen, which is another thing again, like I tried to do and they're like, "No, your kids are four. Fuck off." Yeah, right.
• 20:04
  "Please don't bring your fucking kids here." Please don't bring your tiny child to the soup kitchen. Yeah, your disgusting child here. [laughs] And that's another thing. I did this for Evil Witches a long time.
• 20:12
  Someone wrote me a really good question about h- talking to kids with fo- about folks who may have drug issues or mental illness issues, which is not the same thing as homelessness.
• 20:21
  There can be crossover, but r- you know, do not wanna paint with too wide a brush. But that is also very hard to do that on the fly and do it in a way that is accurate and compassionate, and sometimes it's scary.
• 20:32
  You know, sometimes we all have I feel like a moment or two and you're like, "Don't know how to explain that to a kid," but yeah, it is just way more [laughs] complicated than we would like to think, which is... Yeah.
• 20:44
  It always is, and that's why I get yelled at by them for, you know, turning everything into a catastrophe and start to pull the string.
• 20:50
  They'll say one thing and I'm like, "And that's why 9/11," and they're like, "Fuck, man. All right." Yeah. "Never mind." And then I'm like, oh, they're not gonna tell me shit anymore.
• 20:57
  They're not gonna tell me a funny joke their friends have that they think is funny, but it turns out it's because of a suicide bomber or whatever, you know? Oh, did I say this? Did I send this to you?
• 21:07
  Paul sent me some TikTok of some guys making some phrase that like may have been culturally insensitive or was just like jibber jabber. I couldn't tell.
• 21:17
  And they were just throwing two liter bottles of pop on the floor of different locations, seeing if they would explode or not.
• 21:23
  And on the one hand, I was like, Paul, like he's trying to show me something that he thinks is funny and sweet. And also on the other hand, I'm like, I said, "If you...
• 21:31
  If I ever catch you make, doing something like this for content, I will take your phone away and I'll spank you in public." But again, these two cross things where you're like, I wanna encourage him sharing with me.
• 21:40
  Also, the things that he wants to share can be absolute garbage, but how do I, you know, steer him from that without just being like, "Don't ever show me what you like"? I try to throw in stuff like,
• 21:51
  we laughed at the same dumb kind of things, like even worse, but here are some things we've learned since, and also you grew up, this and this. I'm like, so I don't fault you for wanting to do it.
• 22:01
  H- however, here's the reason why you can't do that or whatever it might be. But again, like that's the other side of the charitable child, right? The woke child. But- [laughs] The charitable child.
• 22:13
  It sounds like- Yeah... the world's like least interesting book.
• 22:16
  [laughs] But you know, it's like D- Dana and I talk about w- again, when we're purging and whatever, and we had the whole episode on just the plastic and all that shit, and you're like- Yeah...
• 22:25
  am I really throwing this away? Should we make them give it away? And she's like, "What fucking mom is gonna be excited when their child, when they go to whatever restore, and it's a pile of shit? Who wants more?
• 22:36
  No one wants more of that. That's not helpful. It's not useful." Yeah. Just because I'm bummed that it's gonna go in a fucking landfill, but at the same time, so we got rid of a lot of books.
• 22:44
  That was helpful, and I tell them, and I say, "You're coming to library with me. We're giving these away. You're coming to your school. You're gonna talk to your librarian. Here's a list of the books.
• 22:51
  You take them to her and say, 'Do you want these books?'" I'm trying to- Mm.... things that they grasp, you know, quite literally.
• 22:58
  But yeah, the rest of it's hard, but again, like I come back to the what do they have room for without being
• 23:04
  super privileged about it because, you know, I wrote a whole thing that was quite angry, called The Disconnect, about how and why the youths are so angry. Part of that is because
• 23:17
  whether they don't have room for it because of yearbook or girls or boys or everything, they're more connected than anyone's ever been. So they're more aware of everything all the time immediately.
• 23:28
  They look up and go, "No one's fucking doing anything about this?" Or worse. Uh-huh. So they're furious about it. But that comes back to that question then of again, like how did you phrase it?
• 23:40
  Like when do they grasp the idea and the- Mm... concept and I guess the utility of being charitable in some way, you know? And it's gotta start somewhere, I guess. There's gotta be some lacking.
• 23:53
  A- again, for us, it's been trying to give away things that they- Yeah... cherish. Not just extra stuff, but like, "Hey, you're done with this and you got a lot of value out of it. Someone else can use this thing."
• 24:05
  Mm-hmm. Even if they're not directly giving it to that child or that person, but-Yeah, I don't know. It's a hard one.
• 24:11
  And of course, again, you have kids and you're like, they're six months old, and you're like, "We're gonna be the fucking woke family." And you're like, they don't know they have hands or feet. Right. Exactly.
• 24:19
  We're gonna go take them down to the, like, recycling, you know. And that's the other thing is, [laughs] like, the thing...
• 24:23
  Like, I hope you go through this as well, you know, despite all your good intentions of the, like, where you carefully sort, you know, you sort, sort, recycle, recycle, and then you hit maximum,
• 24:34
  like, I don't know, like, DEFCON 5, and you're like, "Fuck all this," and then you throw everything, like, right in the garbage, you know? Totally. Or you set it on fire with the gas.
• 24:41
  Just the most, "Fuck it, I'm just going to the landfill. I don't give a shit." And then [laughs] Yeah, 100%. That happened literally last night when one of my children...
• 24:52
  I sat there, I was like, "You know what I'm gonna do tonight? Sunday night, I'm tired. I think I have the ingredients to make, like, plant-based chicken parm." Mm. Like, plant-based nuggets.
• 25:04
  We use the Quorn ones, which are amazing. Q-U-O-R-N. I th- they're out of somewhere in Europe. Terrible packaging, great product.
• 25:11
  And we use the Daiya mozzarella, shredded mozzarella that actually melts pretty well, and Parmesan, 'cause fuck it, and some red sauce. And so I'm making this and, you know, I'm not reinventing the fucking wheel.
• 25:21
  I've made more complicated things they hated before. One of them walks up, again, a whole day spending my weekend on this, just walks up, looks at it, and goes, "I'm not gonna eat that."
• 25:30
  [laughs] I was halfway through making it and I was like, "Child." And again, you know, we're wrestling with the, don't be food phobic, don't make them do this- Mm-hmm... and this.
• 25:39
  Like, whatever works, and that's why we do the share plate, all this. And yet, in that moment, I was like, "Now you're gonna eat it." Yeah.
• 25:46
  "And now I am gonna take that recycling bag that I was gonna make sure goes in the right bin, and I'm gonna dump it all over the fucking front yard." Like, it just- Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm. [laughs] I'm sorry. Did they eat it?
• 25:56
  I mean- Fuck, no... all the bites of it They had crackers for dinner, and I just sat- How was it?... there doing...
• 25:59
  In fact, Dana made me take the dog for a walk in the middle of dinner, 'cause she was like, "This isn't going great for anybody involved." I also wanna know how it turned out. It was fine. It was good. It's chicken parm.
• 26:08
  It's, like, one of the greatest meals ever, you know? It's so fucking basic. I know. I've never made chicken parm with, like, real chicken or not chicken, so I tip my hat to your ambition. But- I just...
• 26:17
  No, there's no ambition. It's, like, I happen to have ingredients for it, and it's not that fucking difficult. But again, "I'm not gonna eat that." Oh, well. Yeah. No, it's... No.
• 26:26
  It's, no- You're not gonna have a bent tomorrow when you get home from school.
• 26:29
  Yeah, exa- it's if your child is working on an essay and they're halfway through it and they've been laboring on it, and you're like, "This isn't gonna be good.
• 26:34
  I'm not gonna show up to your parent-teacher conference for this." Well, one nice thing about Catholic school is that we outsource all teachings of values basically- Mm... to our kids. Not all, of course. Great.
• 26:45
  In fact, we actually try to undo some of what... Actually, to be fair, our school, the, we're, we're not undoing them very much.
• 26:51
  But for Paul's grade, I don't think he did it last year, maybe he did it, but as a student, you have to fill quota of volunteer hours.
• 26:57
  And I don't know what happens if you don't get it, but you have to do a certain amount of community hours and family hours, which I think is a good way of making sure that you don't just get, you know, babysit your brother for three nights and there you go.
• 27:10
  So that was nice, 'cause that made him do it, and we figured out, of course, the labor, I mean, if I hadn't assigned this to Steve, I'm sure he would've taken on, but, like, it fell on me, of course, to find the volunteer opportunities that, like, worked for us, 'cause you can't just roll up to the library and be like, "Here I am," you know?
• 27:25
  Yeah. And he thought for a little bit that maybe he would be an altar server at church, but I don't think he understood that you have to, like, train for that.
• 27:31
  The commitment, you can't just, like, drop in and be done at 15 hours. Mm-hmm. So we made some lunches, like sack lunches, for connections for the homeless.
• 27:39
  And there's a thing, there's a group called, it has a horrible name, and it's called Feed My Starving Children, and you go and you, like, make these food...
• 27:48
  It's like a Christian food bank organization, and you go and fill up these bags that they ship off to God knows where, honestly.
• 27:55
  But, you know, it's kind of fun, and then you watch a video about who this helps, and I forget what else he did. Like, he might... Some- his friends worked at a soup kitchen.
• 28:03
  So it was nice 'cause he got pushed into, I think, like, doing some more advanced sort of helping, and he learned that it can be actually really fun to volunteer with your friends.
• 28:12
  Of course, he's maximum age where doing anything with your friends is, is a way to goof around- Mm-hmm... so he turns anything into fun. But I like that. I think that's, like, a good...
• 28:20
  I'm, like, the, I'm glad that kinda came with all the things that they keep on top of him. Thank you for providing some kind of structure for us to be on top of him for this. So, like, your kids were- I think it's great.
• 28:30
  And, uh- Yeah... no, and the best part about that is them being like, "No, you have to do it. This is not, like, an optional, we would like your kids to do. It's part of their fucking curriculum." Yeah. You know?
• 28:39
  And that is great, 'cause then you're like, you gotta figure...
• 28:41
  And per your note of, of course, it fell on me to figure out, like, what the fuck works for our family, yet another, you know, Jenga piece or Tetris piece to slide into the puzzle. Two things.
• 28:52
  One, I think I messaged you that I got, I'm such a calendar freak, and yet I had my child miss his baseball game this weekend, which was great.
• 28:59
  And i- in 10 minutes he was like telling my wife, "Oh, I don't want Dad to feel bad." I'm like, "No, it can't be about making me feel better. That's not the whole thing." But anyways. I don't know.
• 29:07
  I feel like sometimes you're just like, you know what? Everyone gets an L sometimes. And I don't know, you just gotta be as gentle on it as you would be just anyone like yourself. Yeah. Because you're- No, 100%.
• 29:18
  No one's worse at the treat yourself the way you wanna be treated. I wake up and I'm like, "Look at you, rickety fucking asshole." [laughs] It's not great.
• 29:25
  But anyways, on the scheduling, I did wanna make a note, and this is, again, like a little note from my day job. You mentioned you can't just show up for a lot of volunteering, and that's actually- Oh...
• 29:34
  really true a lot of the time. These places are so underfunded and short-staffed, you'd think that showing up would be really helpful.
• 29:42
  But in fact, on the administrative side, like, they are so coordinated with who does what and what room they have to manage people. And again, verify, like, if it's Habitat for Humanity, do you have tools?
• 29:54
  Are they in good shape? Are you gonna get hurt? There's so much stuff.
• 29:56
  But also, especially for, like, during disaster stuff, you know, really pay attention to what they're saying about, one, who can show up and who cannot. And if they say, "Don't come," don't fucking come.
• 30:06
  But also, two, pay attention to what they're saying.
• 30:09
  Again, usually groups that have existed on the ground before this disaster.Not to say the GoFundMes and stuff that pop up aren't great and necessary, but there's usually groups that know what they're doing, they know the neighborhoods, et cetera, et cetera.
• 30:21
  If they're like, "Look, we have enough toys. Please stop sending toys even though you think it'll make t- kids feel good.
• 30:28
  What they probably need is, one, money, but two, underwear, socks, diapers, bottles, all that kind of stuff." And be specific about that and find out what they actually need, and don't just drop it off.
• 30:39
  Make a time and make sure because, again, like you wanna think, "We'll be the family that's just gonna show up and do this," but that's not super helpful to the people who work there who make $15,000 a year.
• 30:50
  You know, don't be the jerk that shows up to dump a bunch of stuff off at, again, like a restore or whatever it is where you're like half of it's like a maybe. You know? Yeah. Right.
• 30:58
  A dog peed on it one time and you think it's gonna be fine. That doesn't fucking help any. They can't use it. It's just gonna take up their time, you know? Yeah. But there are a lot of awesome things that people can do.
• 31:07
  It's hard to find for kids, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's weird. I wanted to ask you this.
• 31:13
  I kind of have two questions based on one, but I have been finding myself, and part of it is just the kids' nature of their school, like spending a lot more time volunteering at the school because they just really pull you in and ask you to, like, in a way that I respect actually.
• 31:25
  It doesn't-- They don't guilt-trip you. They don't... I don't think they make working parents feel bad. They just certainly have no [chuckles]... They never let up, and that's fine.
• 31:32
  And, you know, and that's good for my kids, but then I feel a little guilty that it's not serving the broader community. I'll put that guilt on the guilt pile for, you know, when I sort through all that.
• 31:41
  But I was just talking to a friend of mine yesterday who, like, usually does a lot of work with the League of Women Voters, and she's just kinda taking a knee right now, and she's trying...
• 31:49
  And I think a lot of people right now who normally do a lot of activating, especially right now, it feels like people don't know where to best put their energy.
• 31:56
  I know that's what your whole newsletter is about, but do you feel like it's fair for people to, if they have a choice, to volunteer closer to home or kind of figure out what's going on?
• 32:04
  Or if someone is like, "I wanna do something right now, but I want to use my time really well and not spin my wheels mental health-wise," what are you telling them to check into or do?
• 32:14
  I mean, you know, there's a few different answers to that, and it's a really good question 'cause everybody is, like, i- it's an... It's a lot, you know?
• 32:21
  The shortest, easiest answer is wouldn't it be nice to optionally show up for things, to be able to optionally show up when increasing number of folks, like, don't have an option for that?
• 32:31
  And if even if they did need to show up to fight for union or hours or better pay or time off for food or whatever it might be, they can't 'cause they can't get off their hourly job, and they're already on the fence 'cause their kid was sick one day last week and they were like, "Well, too fucking bad."
• 32:43
  So what we try to really do with the app, which is, like, really this become, like, the most focused thing, 'cause here's the thing.
• 32:52
  So many people don't have time or energy or life force to read a newsletter or listen to a podcast for an hour about anything, even if it's, like, a cool new thing. They're like, "Here's the deal.
• 33:03
  I'm spinning out," or, "I really wanna apply myself. I need to do this as quickly and efficiently as I can." And I've been there.
• 33:09
  Again, I wrote a whole thing about I didn't know why I needed to make an app, and it turns out, like, yeah, I get it. I didn't know what the fuck to do.
• 33:15
  And the good news is there's a lot of really great places, and they're really defined in what they need and how to do it, whether you're donating abroad to something like against malaria, which is something you'll probably never interact with, but it is the most effective organization on planet Earth for...
• 33:36
  I think it's, you know, 20 bucks, something like that. You will basically save a life, essentially, with a treated bed net. You will never see that child. You're never gonna wor- interact with them.
• 33:44
  Maybe if you travel over there, you'll get your shots. There is a disconnect, for sure, doing it from afar, but it is about as measurable of an impact if you make. If you're like, "Look,
• 33:56
  I'm, I'm struggling to show up any other way right now," and that's okay because, one, it's extremely effective and super fucked up that those kids have to deal with it, something we'll never even have to think about.
• 34:08
  And two, it's not super... And again, this feels a little privileged, but I wanna phrase this
• 34:16
  constructively, which is it's not really helpful, again, to the other people that are doing the work for you to show up and not be, I don't wanna say your best self, but, like, productive of being there or become a wrench in some way, even if you don't want to be.
• 34:30
  Uh-huh. Then, then they have to manage you, and that's taking the room of, again, someone else who could be doing this work, whatever it might be.
• 34:36
  But there's a lot of different ways, and again, you can donate, and you can do that locally. So I went to a meeting the other night. They're trying to build a new library in town to replace the old one, which is great.
• 34:45
  A lot of memories there. It doesn't support the population, and it's just enough to kinda show up and realize, like, you don't have to say anything. You can look at the plans and be like, "Okay, they're putting in ramps.
• 34:57
  Great." That helps. Uh-huh.
• 34:59
  Most people who show up to stuff are fighting against it and not for good, 'cause they're usually boomers, and they don't want the neighborhood character ruined, or they've been disincentivized on Facebook by somebody.
• 35:10
  If you show up and just, again, look over that stuff or ask, "Hey, just wanna make sure there's gonna be, like, more programs and rooms for tutoring." Uh-huh.
• 35:17
  Just asking that question doesn't require a lot, and I know it's a lot to go to a meeting and things like that. But those are things you can do locally that can make a real difference that, again, like, really won't
• 35:28
  burn you out in whatever capacity. So the guy who builds our app, Connor, who's been a very good friend for a very long time, and his wife, Katie, amazing screenwriter. They're both parents.
• 35:41
  Before they were parents, every Sunday, they went and read books to kids with cancer at LA's Children Hospital. And on the one hand, you're like, well, you're o- obviously up there and, like, the
• 35:54
  statistically best people I know, but n- know that's not an easy thing to do. Uh-huh. And that's gonna take it out of you, you know?
• 36:03
  And if you are able to do that, like when my sister-in-law worked in hospice, and she's like, "It's beautiful," and you're like, "Yeah, that's one way to phrase it. I would drink every night."
• 36:11
  You gotta know you and what you're able to show up.To do. Mm-hmm.
• 36:15
  And truthfully, if it's, you know, if you like kids, whether you have kids or not, or you're older, and it's volunteering at your kid's school, that's super helpful because any relief you can provide teachers in administrative tasks i- is amazing to them.
• 36:27
  Mm. It frankly doesn't matter as long as they're telling you what they need. Can I give a shout-out to- Yeah... a piece of advice to anyone listening who has kids who are young, elementary school age, or about to be.
• 36:37
  The best job ever, I think, for volunteering at a school is to be the mystery reader. Mm-hmm.
• 36:42
  Your school might have another name for it, but all you do is show up at your kid's school without them knowing with a couple of books, and you read a book to the classroom, and you feel- Yeah... like Beyonce. Yeah.
• 36:50
  And, like, you feel so famous, and the kids are so excited, and you feel like such... You feel so good. The teacher gets 20 minutes to- Teacher gets-... whatever... 20 fucking minutes.
• 37:00
  [laughs] And what did that take from you? So the other cheat code. So I have a few, like, again, I love all my children equally.
• 37:06
  Once we've really researched and, like, curated things and put them in the app or recommend them in the newsletter, whatever it might be, they're good until we r- review them again and, and make sure.
• 37:14
  But I have a few that are, like, my go-tos for, one, I just throw money at them, but also because they're so specific in what they do, and they're helpful. One of my favorites is Donors Choose. Mm.
• 37:26
  Which could be a little more specific in its name, but basically it is teachers saying, "We need these specific supplies. Can you contribute towards them? Here's what we would do."
• 37:36
  And then again, we just talked about this, there's this very understandable but semi-annoying argument of is it charity if you're looking forward to the thanks, right? Mm. And some- or the certificate.
• 37:47
  Man, if you're showing up, I don't care. If you're cutting a check, I don't care if it came from oil. If it's going towards one of the things we recommend, we'll take your bad money. Donors Choose,
• 37:57
  you buy some classroom materials, whatever they're asking. If they need these books to replace these ones or tattered or one computer, whatever it might be.
• 38:03
  Or s- they'll get bouncy ball chairs for kids with ADHD, whatever it is. You will often, not always, get at some undetermined time a package in the mail, and it is handwritten thank you notes from these children.
• 38:19
  Oh, wow. And it's like the greatest fucking feeling- [laughs]... on the planet. And so yeah, you're not going and showing up at the school. You're not Santa Claus showing up with a bunch of shit, and you're not- Yeah...
• 38:31
  Kids Against Malaria. But man, it is a cheat code. It really is. And they have matching days and st- you can find ones in your area, or you can say, "No, I wanna donate to Detroit" or whatever it is. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 38:43
  You know? It's wonderful.
• 38:45
  So again, there's plenty of things like that that are so easy and so effective it seems like cheating even if you feel a little disconnected, but yeah, if you wanna show up, there's ways to do it that don't burn you out.
• 38:54
  People need food. Yeah. [upbeat music] Hey, I have three kids. They eat so much. We try to eat real food. We try to cook when we can.
• 39:08
  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.
• 39:20
  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.
• 39:35
  Way less waste, less smell, way less garbage, which by the way, saves you money. No leaky bags.
• 39:42
  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.
• 39:58
  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.
• 40:05
  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.
• 40:13
  Look, you can get $75 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.
• 40:24
  It is mill.com/lp/important-not-important. That is [laughs] mill.com/lp/important-not-important. I couldn't remember that, so we put it in the show notes.
• 40:42
  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.
• 40:52
  [upbeat music] You know, there's really great organizations you can host if you're up for it, or you're good at planning shit, uh, but you wanna do it on your own, not, like, through a school or whatever.
• 41:03
  There's organizations that just do, like, food events. You can turn it into a community event, hire a fucking band. Do it- Mm... make it fun.
• 41:08
  Just because, like you said, just 'cause your kid can make it fun doesn't mean, like, it's not great. That's awesome. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It doesn't have to be brutal all the time. So I'm doing this Evil Witches.
• 41:19
  I'm doing some research for a future issue, and I don't know.
• 41:22
  It's just been in my brain for several years, honestly, and I don't know what shape it's gonna take, but I just, I always think about the, obviously it's good luck, and it's obviously privilege, but also just like it's really interesting from an organizational standpoint how some schools, obviously ones with more money and parents who have time, have parent organizations that are very organized and can delegate and can meet.
• 41:43
  And so I'm doing a thing about h- the downside of that is parents who end up becoming an expert in something that they never wanted to, like building codes, for instance. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 41:52
  Or, you know, special needs teaching, you know, different- Mm... like, needs, things like that. And yeah.
• 41:59
  And I guess it's just such a strange idea of school volunteer because as a parent, you feel so tapped out, like, that it can't possibly feel like you're giving back.
• 42:09
  Basically you feel, it feels like you're just giving of yourself, and, and then at the same time you're like, "Well, is this, who is this really helping?" Like, it's helping my kid, obviously, and the school community.
• 42:17
  But it can get very-It's an interesting pathway from parents who can, like, barely hang on to, you know, the daycare pickups and the diapers and things like that, and then you get, like, an ounce of bandwidth, and you kinda get shoved into maybe this sort of administrative role.
• 42:31
  And it is like a pr- again, it's like a privilege to do this for work for free, but also the- if you don't have someone who can do this, I don't know how to explain it. I just- No, you're making complete sense. Mm-hmm.
• 42:42
  It's, you're like, "I am already done. I'm a shell of a human, and I haven't even... We got through dinner, but I haven't even done bedtime," which, guess what?
• 42:53
  Wonderful, horrific, and then I gotta get on and make the spreadsheet that everyone asks questions about or someone changes or this or that, and then you gotta go by their rules and the precedents.
• 43:01
  "Well, we've always done it this way with the past fucking treasurer," and it's, oh, it kills you.
• 43:06
  I fully empathize with all of it, but I do try to come back to, again, coming from the LA school system, and here we're, we're... I mean, kids are struggling everywhere, you know? But that was particularly tough. Often,
• 43:20
  if they don't actually fill those roles, it won't happen, and they won't have... You know, our school, which is one of the very few, like, really good public schools in LA, elementary school.
• 43:29
  You know, the parents as a whole paid for science, English, music, art, all that. If they don't raise that money, the kids do not have art. They do not have science. They do not have that. They had a part-time nurse.
• 43:42
  You know, like, it does, in a way, it's a little what you're signing up for. I, some of the private school stuff is insane, where they're like, "Well, it goes towards our endowment for this." I'm like, "I'm out, dude."
• 43:51
  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 43:52
  But if you're like, "They need 200,000 total dollars on the year to cover these programs to pay extra head start teachers," especially right now, whatever it is, and you happen to be good at accounting or organizing or whatever the thing is,
• 44:06
  it probably won't actually happen, because that happens all of the time. Yeah.
• 44:12
  And so as much as we've got STEM and all this, you'll have kids that just, a lot of schools are switching to, like, pamphlets instead of books now, because they don't have the books, they can't afford the books, the teachers don't have time, this and that.
• 44:23
  M- it's not happening. So I get it, but also, the last thing I ever wanna do is put more on teachers, so many of whom, by the way, are, like, going home to children. Holy shit. Oh, yeah. Can you f- Yeah.
• 44:33
  Are you fucking kidding me? Oh, yeah, and they're looking forward to a summer job, like at Target or something like that, 'cause, you know. Right, and then the parents are like, "Why didn't you email me?
• 44:40
  It's 9:00 at night. I've reached out to you." Yeah. And I get pretty, indignant is probably not the word I would use, but it's up there. Yeah, for sure. I've been doing some work in the consulting area.
• 44:53
  Like, I write bios for this consulting firm.
• 44:54
  So, uh, the idea of organization and organizational change, and the fact that someone can make six figures easily to go into organizations and be like, "Here's how you guys are gonna run better," w- and schools are kind of expected to do that sui gener- ge- generes?
• 45:09
  What's the phrase? Of its own? Sui generis? Is that the- I don't know. I don't speak Spanish, Claire. Come on. Uh [laughs] Let's go. That's good. Come on, Baxter.
• 45:17
  Anyway, they, I just think about how you just take it, I guess when you're a kid, maybe when you're a certain kind of kid and you're used to, like, a certain white collar world, you're used to it, and you feel like adults will somehow know how to form a committee and lead a committee, you know?
• 45:29
  And you assume that someone will understand how to lead a meeting. Mm-hmm. And all this stuff that you're like, that is so insane that what a weird- It's like discovering that your parents are people.
• 45:38
  You're just like, "Oh." Like, everyone is fucking barely holding it together. Yeah, most people cannot write, cannot organize a meeting, don't know their way around accounting. Like, it's not great. Yeah.
• 45:49
  No, I was on a school board during COVID, and that was very way out of my, like, pay grade, of determining the path of a school during COVID and are we opening this up and what's the story?
• 45:59
  You know, like, it was terrifying to me, and I was like, you know, it's like that thing of just realizing no one's in charge. I guess someone was in charge, and they're like, "Am I? Is it me?" The adults aren't coming.
• 46:08
  We're the adults. Oh. Well. Don't- But it goes back to our conversation about them letting you take a baby home from the hospital, right? 'Cause you're looking around- Yeah... and you're like, "Who? They're letting me?
• 46:14
  What are you fucking talking about?" Yeah. It's like my buddy- Yeah... who's the captain on a submarine. Every five, 10 years or whatever, they'll call me or our other best friend, and we're like, "So I don't know."
• 46:26
  Yeah. [laughs] Like, the things we know. But it does matter, and frankly, for other volunteering, and this is less for kids, except for the age thing and are they morons? Are they gonna pay attention?
• 46:34
  Are they gonna be helpful? Are they not gonna make it harder? Is... There are certain things you're gonna be qualified to do and certain things you can't.
• 46:40
  Like you, Claire, can probably not go travel and participate with Doctors Without Borders. The, it's in the name. You didn't make the cut. I'm sorry. It's not Doctors and Claire Without Borders.
• 46:52
  [laughs] Yeah, Doctors and Claire Without Bo- [laughs] Borders. Right. Not great. You can contribute to them.
• 46:57
  But this was my origin story, was before my buddy died of cancer, my cousin got diagnosed with leukemia, and I was like, "What do I do?" Wow. I was 23? 20- 22, 23, 24, something like that. Still in pretty good shape. And
• 47:14
  I was like, "First of all, what the fuck is blood cancer? Like, how does that..." I always imagined a tumor. Like, all these things you don't- Yeah... pay attention to, right?
• 47:20
  And learned about it, and I was like, "What do I do? I don't know what to do. I wanna help." But for someone who is always, like, an- annoyingly sort of
• 47:29
  talented at various sports and things came easily, when someone's like, "It's blood cancer," and you're like, "How does that even start? What are you talking... I have no idea what to do with this." Yeah.
• 47:36
  There's an organization, so one of the primary organizations working with researchers in blood cancers is the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I was like, "Okay, that's great," but again, like, I don't have much money.
• 47:47
  Like, I'm barely making overtime at my job. What do I do? They have a fundraising arm called Team in Training. Mm-hmm.
• 47:53
  Been around forever, and you just sign up for a race, and you train with a bunch of other awesome people who have signed up for another reason. You raise money.
• 48:01
  They have some talks sometimes with both current patients and people who are in remission and researchers who are like, "Here is where I'm going to put that $10,000 to use.
• 48:12
  This is the work I'm working on and why it's a hard nut to crack." And I was like, "Oh, I can sweat. Like, I can fucking do that."
• 48:19
  You are qualified to do more things than you think, and a lot of organizations-Build themselves around that on purpose. Because there's people who can do that, and they can channel that, and you just go and fundraise.
• 48:31
  Great. They'll take the money. They, you know, great. It helps. Another example that I did a few times was with, God, I'm totally blanking on the name. They used to have them at Equinox. It's for rare cancers.
• 48:40
  There's a bunch of people showed up on, on the fucking SoulCycle bikes, and you biked and biked and you raised- Oh, Cycle for Survival? Cycle for Survival. It's great.
• 48:47
  They, it, I think a couple years ago they had it, like, live in Times Square. Okay. So you get to train, you get to have fun, you get to tell people.
• 48:53
  Does it seem, like, glorious, and you take pictures, and there's a backdrop and all that? Sure.
• 48:56
  But if you raise $100,000 for rare cancers or pediatric cancers, which get this much compared to federal funding, that is actually gonna move the needle, and you can feel really good about that.
• 49:08
  So our kids are, uh, roughly at the same age, like late middle school-ish. So are your kids, are they engaged either any of them on any particular organizations or causes? Like they don't...
• 49:19
  Are they familiar with any groups like them? They're really involved in school stuff. Most of that's kind of stuff they just don't qualify for yet, which again is understandable. Mm-hmm. They're morons, right?
• 49:27
  In their best moments, they're unpredictable morons. Mm-hmm. Why would you want them around a hammer or a stove or anything like that? If, whatever your intentions are, please don't make it worse.
• 49:36
  My daughter wants to start working with one of the animal groups in town. You know, you can like volunteer at the vet and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Great. You know, you're just moving papers around. Who cares?
• 49:46
  She does after school stuff where she helps the teachers. Again, they're just like, "Can you take these boxes to this other classroom?" That seems dumb, and the girls are like, "Oh, I'm, you know, I'm killing it."
• 49:54
  Well- But save that teacher 10 fucking minutes, who's already staying after school, by the way. Yeah. That kind of stuff matters. Their sports teams are starting to get involved in things like that.
• 50:02
  We're gonna do one of those package up meals events, and again, try to make it a big community thing. Mm-hmm. And I'm gonna say to them, like, "You're in charge.
• 50:09
  You guys have to figure this out, when it is, invite people, all this," and put as much on them as I can.
• 50:15
  To a really great new organization started, we discovered, we discovered, the privileged among us discovered that a bunch of kids in the school system were showing up to school with dirty clothes on. Mm-hmm.
• 50:25
  And one, felt terrible, and two, could get bullied for it, which is, again, makes flames come out of my face. And so a kid, really cool, started an organization to raise money for laundry machines at the schools. Oh.
• 50:37
  And it's, we took them. We're like, "Guess what? We're going to that. You're playing the bingo. You're doing all the things." Mm-hmm. "Put some of your money towards it."
• 50:43
  Because those are kids they interact with every day, you know? Yeah. So yes and no is the answer. Mm-hmm. We're gonna keep making room for that stuff.
• 50:50
  But it's, again, you have to recognize, like, who your kids are, what age they are, what they're capable of. But then I do- Yeah... encourage you to really make room for it.
• 50:57
  'Cause you, as you know, man, if they don't grow up with a soccer ball on their feet, they're probably not gonna be a soccer player. If you don't- [laughs]... you know, push this stuff in some way- No...
• 51:04
  whether it's about you or about them, flies by. Then you're just- Yeah... an American. Yeah. No. It's interesting out there for sure. We do, I mean, we did connections for the homeless- Mm-hmm...
• 51:14
  making lunches for them here. And then, I mean, it's so dumb, but I do explain to them the connection, like that we do Ronald McDonald, like round up at McDonald's.
• 51:22
  And they're like, you, and you, they round, you know, if your bill is $2.83, they round up to three. Sure. And they're like, "What is that?"
• 51:27
  And I tell them, "It's a place for kids like you who might be sick and can't go home and you have to stay near the hospital, you know."
• 51:32
  But I had through a conversation with Paul about how when I was a kid, Ronald McDonald used to be in the Evanston Fourth July parade every year, and that was a big deal.
• 51:40
  And then we somehow ended up in the conversation about what if Ronald McDonald got assassinated at the Fourth of July parade. I don't remember how this ended up. We were having a good laugh.
• 51:49
  But, God, [laughs] you can only have with your 12-year-old, and you're like, "We've been through some shit together, man. We like to have a good time." Oh, yeah. [laughs] Where's the Zapruder film on that?
• 51:57
  You know, like the as- [laughs] who was the second gunman- Oh, yeah... on the grassy knoll- Was it Snare? Yeah... that took down Ronald McDonald. Anyway. That's incredible.
• 52:04
  But I mean, uh, that's one good way of feeling like not like a bad mom for going to, to McDonald's.
• 52:09
  But no, it does make me laugh, 'cause there are school fundraisers, but they are so, again, it'll be like $2, which finding $2 in this day and age is like task, and it'll be like $2 for homeless animals or something like that.
• 52:21
  And you're like, remember this happened like right after the California wildfires, and I'm not normally this person, but I was like, "I don't have time to worry about the Illinois homeless pets while I'm thinking about the California homeless people."
• 52:32
  But- Totally get it. Yeah, totally get it. Good news is there's gonna be some people who do care about that stuff and are gonna do it no matter what.
• 52:38
  But you know, there are critically ignored things, but again, it's like
• 52:42
  what we really try to focus on with the app, especially in what I try to model where I can, knowing that I came from a place of I don't know flashcards, I don't know how to help these people, right? Mm-hmm.
• 52:51
  When my buddy was dying, I was like, "I don't know what to do." So I ran again. We did a fundraiser for Livestrong. Mm-hmm. Did it save him? No. Did it help some other people? I hope so. You know? Yeah.
• 53:00
  But again, like knowing your real house, how do you like to show up? How do your kids like to show up about things? Mm-hmm. Who are they? What do they like to do? You know? Is it art, and they bring it to the hospital?
• 53:10
  Hey, man, it's, that's something. Like let them hang it up. You know, that, that stuff, it does add up, and I do believe it plants a seed.
• 53:20
  After our conversation with Lindsay last week as well, I think about how my mentality towards money, I guess when you boil down to it, if you have enough to think of it this way and you're not living dollar per dollar, it is a little bit like what you described with your kids, is you work hard t- and you wanna save some, and you wanna spend some, and you wanna give some away.
• 53:38
  And as a kid, again, they were very... My son is finding, you know, he wants to go to the 7-Eleven, and he wants to make a shooting range.
• 53:45
  But if he does see my neighbor, this happened one time, he offered to help her carry her groceries to the car, and I, she told me about that. That's how I found out. And I was like, "Okay, that's a good boy." You know?
• 53:56
  Yeah. Like, I'll take the, the Nerf gun- Yeah... for the helping the neighbor- Totally... kinda. 100%. You know?
• 54:01
  But it's also if you don't have the bandwidth for it or resources in any capacity, but looking around your everyday life and the things you may have time-wise, bandwidth-wise, resources-wise, that your kids not necessarily take for granted, but can touch and feel, that's someone else probably cannot.
• 54:18
  Clothes they grew out of, if you don't know, if you don't have a younger sibling or something, yeah, that, that, that stuff adds up. Canned food, they'll always take that kind of stuff.
• 54:26
  The laundry thing was really specific, 'cause we, you know- Mm-hmm... you and I have talked about my kids being mad that, like, their fucking pants aren't clean, and I'm like, "Guess what?
• 54:32
  Now some of your friends- Yeah... have no clean clothes, and so you're gonna contribute some money to that." Mm-hmm. 'Cause go fuck yourself. Try not to phrase it that way.
• 54:40
  But that's how I feel some of the times, and that's, you know-Again, when they say, "I'm not gonna eat that," instantly.
• 54:47
  Or when my kid doesn't wanna do the thing, like cleaning up after himself, and then I start on my, get on my bike of, "Should I clean up after you then? Is that fair?" You know. Mm-hmm. That kinda, you know. No, fully.
• 54:58
  Yeah. Look, I told one of them, I don't know, somebody this weekend, I think we were talking about the laundry thing, and we had just gotten a new washer and dryer because my dryer just took three cycles.
• 55:09
  And again, like, lucky to have that stuff, lucky to be able to get a new one, all that stuff. And, you know,
• 55:15
  there's a Tony Morrison quote that is applicable to a lot of things, but I think is easy for kids to understand if you apply it to something, again, that they can touch and feel, and it just reminded me.
• 55:25
  I said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else." Mm. And if you possibly have any bandwidth there, any extra bandwidth to do that with whatever, then use it. Don't let it go to waste, you know? Yeah.
• 55:36
  And I think there's a way to do that. Did your kids end up doing scouting, by the way, or y- that stopped with you? No. I, I really... We went on a couple hikes with a local group, and it seemed great.
• 55:46
  The people all seemed great. I was just ins- it was on me. It was instantly doing the math of, "Okay.
• 55:50
  Well, then it means on Sunday night we gotta go to this place, and I know they're gonna still wanna do this thing, and then-" Yeah..."they wanna do this." And it just kinda passed us by.
• 55:58
  But we have a few friends who do it who love it, man. They love it. Yeah. Plus, uh, I don't even think they're called Boy Scouts anymore. Scouts and Girl Scouts, which also seems great.
• 56:05
  Yeah, I would, I would recommend it highly. I'm bummed we didn't do it, but we have no time. Yeah. No, you can't do everything.
• 56:12
  And if you're on the sports, like, thing, like, you can't also add in, there's no night meetings, and, you know, anything like that.
• 56:18
  And truly, I am also writing thank you notes for the teacher bonus fundraiser thing, so I couldn't take them to a meeting if I wanted to.
• 56:25
  We try to really help people connect locally with things, is you have to alwa- it's like the whole thing of everyone's looking at me, thinking about me, and they're just thinking about themselves.
• 56:34
  Most people in businesses are so redlining it, borderline, whatever it is all the time. They won't have the operational awareness to, to even know that some of these things are possible or an option.
• 56:52
  There's a really cool group, app service group out there called, I think it's called Good to Go. Ooh. And they just build networks of unused food from restaurants. And
• 57:03
  if you know anything about restaurants, they're barely above water at all times. Yeah. The best ones, your favorite restaurant is barely fucking making it, right? It's probably a front for something.
• 57:12
  They don't have the time to figure this stuff out. But if you start by not being a dick and just, like, bringing them a flyer or something, or talking to somebody, popping in, don't ask for extra time, "Hey,
• 57:24
  we'd love to see this happen. Let me know if I can help. I can bring more information. Do you guys even have extra food? What you're ordering like?" They're not gonna have time. Mm. Go back a couple times.
• 57:32
  Just say, "Can I help? Can I do something, you know-" Yeah..."about this?" Because if you make it not a super heavy lift for them- Mm...they then get to be like, "Hey, we participate in this thing."
• 57:42
  Great, but you could be a part of that, and there's probably a bunch of places you can do it. Yeah. One place that I donated a long time ago, and it took me...
• 57:49
  This is good use of my time when I had more time to do this, but the prison in Illinois, women's prison, was looking for books.
• 57:55
  And so if you are someone who is, you know, offloading a bunch of books from your parents' house who are downsizing, prisons often need books.
• 58:01
  Of course, [chuckles] I learned that they need paper covers only for one thing, and I'm sure there's a ton of other.
• 58:06
  But that, you know, you think of folks that you're like, you know, when you're trying to, like, actually not just dump the books at the box, you know, and, uh- Yeah...or in the little free library, and you're like, "This is just..."
• 58:17
  I know secretly, deep down, I like to think I'm getting, I'm helping other people, but I'm really just helping myself by getting rid of a little task. Yes and no.
• 58:24
  I'm gonna go over really quick a list of the places, and this is no means, like... I guess it is. Like, it's my job to do a lot of this stuff, and these are the ones I've chosen.
• 58:33
  We have a certain budget, which I don't need to get into, but these are the places I'm actively donating to on a recurring basis right now.
• 58:40
  I'm gonna pick a few of these because they usually do one thing very specifically, and it's usually, like, a core need, and I promise, like, I have done the work to know that these are good places.
• 58:53
  And so this is gonna vary a little bit. So up there with Against Malaria is a group called Giving Directly, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It just gives people cash, and it is wildly effective.
• 59:07
  There's all kinds of white papers on it, things like that. Cannot recommend enough. I put in the show notes they have a conversation with one of their founders from a few years ago. They work mostly in Africa.
• 59:15
  During COVID, they did some work in the US. It is proven over and over again, because here's the thing. Sometime people need water. Sometimes people need a roof. Sometimes people need food.
• 59:25
  Sometimes different people need different things. What you're giving them is agency to take care of what they need on an ongoing basis, and then maybe pull a leg up and actually start a business, whatever it might be.
• 59:36
  Give Directly is fantastic. Food Forward in Southern California does a really great job. Again, seems super intuitive.
• 59:43
  They go and harvest food off of all the fucking public and private fruit trees that people never deal with, and they bring and donate truly, like, millions of pounds of food a day, it's really wild, of food, again, that's not packaged.
• 59:57
  It's nutritious. No one was gonna eat it. Doesn't cost anything. That's amazing. You can also volunteer with them. Here's a segment that I really love, which is a new breed of really specific nonprofit journalism.
• 1:00:09
  The 19th covers women's issues. They are fantastic in what they do. They do absolutely essential work. ProPublica does the same thing.
• 1:00:18
  The Markup does really great work on your private data and all the people that are stealing it and buying it. Capital B has a national newsroom and a couple local ones.
• 1:00:28
  They do Black news in and by and of those communities. There's a few others like that. Hot Bread Kitchen in Brooklyn. I think they're still in Brooklyn.
• 1:00:37
  They train immigrant women to be cooks and bakers so they can have jobs and get a real visa. They're fantastic. And once a year, if you donate enough, you get invited up there and get to eat food.
• 1:00:47
  It's pretty great.Obviously ACLU, NAACP, stuff like that right now. Planned Parenthood obviously. Boys & Girls Club still does amazing work. Again, another place, Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition.
• 1:01:00
  It's what it sounds like. They're giving people food. So there's a lot of things like that. That's not the list by any stretch, but find places that do one thing. When they get too broad or they get too big,
• 1:01:11
  it becomes pretty hard to hold up. I would choose any of these over, for example, the Red Cross. Wonderful history, been to the museum, it's great.
• 1:01:19
  It becomes hard to be efficient and economical at that size, versus places that do one thing. Black Girls Code, it's exactly what it sounds like, and they spend their money very well. So you get the idea.
• 1:01:30
  There's ways for things, whether how you like to show up, what you're skilled in, or things you just kinda give a shit about but maybe you didn't realize. Yeah.
• 1:01:37
  And if, but if someone's listening to this and they just literally just had a baby or their kids, don't beat yourself up if you're not there yet. I think like- Oh my God, please no...
• 1:01:43
  every year you're meant with as you go along.
• 1:01:45
  And I think there's, especially, I don't know, I, it took me a while to give myself the permission to take the, like, energy I needed to parent and stop pretending like I was, had all the same faculties and wasn't just me plus one child.
• 1:01:58
  So like- No... I don't know. Don't feel guilty if you are a new parent or in a hard s- situation and it seems like people are involved and, you know, you're just trying to leave the house with clean hair if possible.
• 1:02:09
  So, you know, it's to your ability if you can. It is to your ability. It truly is.
• 1:02:14
  You know, one of the things we're building into the app is the ability to donate within the app, and we have this option to be able to tell how much you contributed.
• 1:02:22
  And we're not doing that because all that matters is, like, you just literally donated a dollar a month to something, 'cause it makes you f- feel like you're doing something. And frankly, for, like, most people,
• 1:02:33
  that goes a long way, man. Mm. 'Cause it, it's hard. And you also don't wanna make yourself feel like shit you're not doing something. Take a fucking minute. It's hard. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah.
• 1:02:41
  That's the whole point of this podcast is fucking [laughs] not right now, you know? Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Even Bill Gates is gonna be done giving his money away apparently. I don't understand. Yeah, he's backing out.
• 1:02:50
  How is he... How is that possible? What happens then if he's just gonna spend all the money and then be done, and then just, like, chill? Is that his plan with the foundation?
• 1:02:59
  Well, it's, I think he said 2045, and at that point he's probably not with us anymore. He's not a spring chicken. They've already dec- determined what they're giving their kids.
• 1:03:10
  I don't know how that went, went on with their divorce stuff. She's doing something different now, and she's great. Say whatever you want about them, but yeah, they were given a lot.
• 1:03:18
  So yeah, I think that's the idea is here's the timeframe, what do we have to do? Yeah. So whatever you care about, whatever you're into- Mm... however you like or are capable of showing up at all, there's a way to do it.
• 1:03:29
  Or take a minute. Yeah. You know, bringing lunch to the teachers or coffee counts a lot. Mm-hmm. It counts a lot. Or taking some food to the food pantry.
• 1:03:40
  I mean, the, like, actual food pantry, not the, I mean, like, the little free one where no one, you don't have to talk to anyone or actually put, like, actual pants on. Great. You know? Just put it in there. Don't care.
• 1:03:47
  You don't- Yeah... no one cares how you dress. Doesn't matter. Yeah. Doesn't matter. Yeah. And your kids won't care, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard. Again, how do you get kids so it's not just about you?
• 1:03:57
  I don't know, man. I guess just doing it, making it a part of your family's life in whatever way you're capable of. Yeah. I think, like, for those who have little kids and are like, "Can you get your kid to volunteer?"
• 1:04:06
  I think it's more about just keep teaching empathy and thinking about, like, other folks.
• 1:04:12
  I remember, like, when there's a really bad storm out, I would try to get the boys to be like, "Aren't you glad you don't live in a tent next to Lake Shore Drive right now?
• 1:04:18
  Aren't you glad we have this nice house that has stood all this time and hasn't gotten blown over?" So trying to think of... And of course they don't wanna listen to me.
• 1:04:25
  I mean, when did you ever tell your parents, like, "Good pool" Go fuck yourself. Yeah. Bitch. All they're thinking the whole time is- Keep-... "I'm gonna let her keep talking, but Jesus." Yeah. Yeah. My whole life. Yeah.
• 1:04:36
  I really can recommend, and maybe we'll do it, so Alex's Lemonade Stand, again, one of my favorite organizations. Mm-hmm. They're based out of Philly.
• 1:04:43
  They always have a time of the year called Lemonade Days, and you can have lemonade stands all year, but this is when they kinda make a concerted effort.
• 1:04:49
  Maybe we'll do something around there, 'cause my kids and I have been dying to bring it back here. And they'll... You can get, you know, gear for your lemonade stand, branded cups, all that kinda stuff. It's really fun.
• 1:04:58
  And again, you're just... And we can have a totally separate four-hour podcast about this. Mm-hmm. But probably on most days of the week, my argument why there isn't a God is kids' cancer. And
• 1:05:11
  if you're doing it outta anger because it shouldn't exist, or empathy or whatever it might be, or, "Hey, I hope my kids fucking never need this someday," it's also just super... Who doesn't love a lemonade stand?
• 1:05:21
  Also, you get- Yeah... to make people feel like shit when they just drive by and they don't offer money. That's... [laughs] It's fun. Oh, man. Your kids get to get involved. It's great.
• 1:05:27
  We had this, uh, an, an administrator at our kids' last school who certainly pushed the boundaries for the, for any of the parents of making you wonder what is useful woke versus what is performative woke, and I'll just leave it at that.
• 1:05:42
  Mm. But I do remember there was a day last year where she very proudly had the kids leave class and go stand outside on the very busy street, 'cause it was, like, the day against hate, I believe.
• 1:05:53
  So you could go, the children would stand outside and, like, wave to cars and hold peace signs.
• 1:05:59
  And the mo- well, number one anecdote the kids came rushing home so excited to tell us from that day was not about all the peace they had spread or what they had learned about peace, but was the old bitch who gave them a middle finger driving down the street.
• 1:06:13
  They were so amped. That was so exciting. And I was like, "That's what happens when you try to make it about yourself and-" Ah. "... you know, put it on the Instagram."
• 1:06:22
  So the kids learned a valuable lesson that day, which is driving by giving someone the bird is pretty fucking fun.
• 1:06:29
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