‘American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed’ with Isaac Fitzgerald | Jeselnik Book Club

Anthony is joined by ‘Dirtbag, Massachusetts’ author and 'Today' correspondent Isaac Fitzgerald to discuss his new memoir, ‘American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.’ The guys explore Isaac’s journey following in the footsteps of Johnny Appleseed, separating legend from fact, and the case for nonfiction. They also discuss why the book is a love letter to Isaac’s mom and what makes it “a grief memoir in reverse.” (00:42) Introduction(17:13) Chapter 1: 'Dirtbag, Massachusetts'(30:38) Chapter 2: The Case for Nonfiction(40:30) Chapter 3: ‘American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed’(59:04) Chapter 4: JBC Gauntlet(1:17:00) Chapter 5: One Additional Question (1:24:06) - Acknowledgments: Isaac's Gift and Praising JBC(1:28:14) - To Be Continued: 'The Trees' Book Review and Mailbag Email me your thoughts/questions about our next book club selection, 'The Trees,' by October 26 at [email protected]. Join Jeselnik Book Club: anthonyjeselnik.com/the-jeselnik-book-club Tour dates: anthonyjeselnik.com/tour Save the Jeselnik Book Club audiobooks playlist: open.spotify.com/playlist/…?si=… Host: Anthony JeselnikGuest: Isaac FitzgeraldSupervising Producer: Magdalena MunaoTalent Booker: Paige GarbariniCreative Producer: Daniel ComerTechnical Director: Chris WohlersSet Design: Jonathan Ratliff and Gitu MehraEditor: Matt PevicSocial: Keith FujimotoAdditional Production Supervision: Jack Wilson (edited) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Anthony Jeselnik?

  Hey, Anthony Jeselnik here. Welcome to this edition of Jeselnik Book Club. I believe this is episode four.

• 0:25Anthony Jeselnik?

  I have promised you guys that I'm only gonna have guests on that are either friends or writers that I admire. Today, I have both. Both a friend and a writer that I admire. And now it's time for the introduction.

• 0:44Anthony Jeselnik?

  Isaac Fitzgerald, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for coming to me, for coming out here. You're doing me a favor. It is an honor that you would be so supportive of the book club. You've been supportive of not just the book club, but I think of me as a reader. You have been inside information for me.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Your man on the inside.

• 1:03Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes, I think we met. I had, and I've never had this experience before, but I read your, your first book, and not your first real book. I'm gonna go ahead and say. There's like children's books.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how I feel about it too.

• 1:16Anthony Jeselnik?

  Books about tattoos and shit. But like, I heard about Dirtbag Massachusetts, read about it in a magazine or newspaper. Was like, oh, that's extremely my shit. And I'm not normally like a memoir guy, but the way it was described, I was like, I gotta read this. Read it in, I believe, a day, maybe 48 hours. And then I started texting friends. And it's rare that I, listen, I read a lot of books, but it's rare that I'm so confident about how much I love a book, that I start texting friends to tell them, you gotta read this. And it was mostly like in order of how much they drank. You know, that I was like, you've gotta read this book. And my friends kept texting me back, almost to a man. I know that guy. And I was like, what the fuck? How am I the only person who doesn't know him?

• 1:57Anthony Jeselnik?

  I started promoting Dirtbag Massachusetts on my podcast. And then we got in touch, became friends. You came to see me at Carnegie Hall.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:08Anthony Jeselnik?

  And I was not invited to your wedding.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Sorry about that part.

• 2:11Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's okay.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, to be, to be fair, basically, the wedding was just me, my wife, and like two people on a beach. Then there was a party, but the party was like not, I didn't think people would fly cross-country.

• 2:22Anthony Jeselnik?

  I don't get invited to weddings ever, and that's okay.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  I think people think you're busy.

• 2:26Anthony Jeselnik?

  I think people think I would ruin the wedding.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's.

• 2:29Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, I'm okay with that. But congratulations on the marriage. Last time, when I met your, she wasn't a fiance at the time.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  No, no, just girlfriend.

• 2:37Anthony Jeselnik?

  Just a long-term girlfriend, but she's lovely. She was great, I think. Did you get to meet my parents at that party?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  I got to meet your parents. I wanna say a couple of things about everything you just said. One, one of my favorite stories is that you read the book, started texting people that you loved it. And one of those responses was the great comedian Kyle Kenehan.

• 2:53Anthony Jeselnik?

  Kyle Kenehan, yeah, he was the first guy I texted.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  And, which again, how much, how much, exactly. And he texted back, I have a matching tattoo with that guy. Which is true, which is true. Which is way before, like way back in the day, he and I were just kinda scumbags together. And we were together on a Thanksgiving, and we got a matching tattoo together. But I met your parents at that Carnegie Hall show. It was a fantastic show. The biggest compliment I can give you back, cause that was so much love, and I appreciate it, is that my wife, incredible reader, so smart about literature, great, great book person, does not love stand-up comedy. It's not her favorite art form. I adore it, and she kinda tolerates my love of it. But she absolutely loved your show, ate up all your shit afterwards.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  She was like, if more of it was like this, I would really like it. And I love it when people find the thing they like in the genre that's maybe not for them most of the time. It's one of my favorite things.

• 3:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes, when you like, hey, I don't, that's not my thing. K-pop is not for me. And then you hear a song, and you're like, oh, okay. That's a banger, yeah, I appreciate that. Tell your wife I said thank you.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  What did it mean for your parents to see at Carnegie Hall? Was that?

• 4:04Anthony Jeselnik?

  They were beyond thrilled. They loved it. They were telling the cab driver, you know, our son's at Carnegie Hall, that's why we're in town. It was like, the whole time I was in New York that week, I loved when people would ask me, what are you here for? Are you doing a show? Where are you performing? And I remember the last time, I was like buying a sweater in a store. And I was about to leave, and they were like, oh, were you here to perform? Where were you? And I knew this is the last time I get to say I was at Carnegie Hall of that week.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Were the sweater persons, was the sweater person like nice? Or were they like?

• 4:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  They were like, I'll have to Google you. They had no idea who I was.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  They didn't give you the sweater for free?

• 4:39Anthony Jeselnik?

  No, no, they were just like, oh, you're performing where? Thinking I would say like, you know, Caroline's or something. But it was fun to say Carnegie Hall. But that was a great time.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:47Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, it, it, thinking, talking about recommending a book to Kyle Kenehan, like, again, not only is it rare that I will recommend books to friends, but I have never recommended a book to Kyle Kenehan. I love Kyle. We don't even text. Like, I'm surprised I had his number, but I was like, he's gotta read this book. This was a book that really hit me. In a way, like, there are some people who should read this. And recommending books, I don't know if you feel this way, you recommend so many great books to me. It almost feels like someone passes you the aux.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:18Anthony Jeselnik?

  Is that how you say that?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 5:21Anthony Jeselnik?

  A U X?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And it's pressure.

• 5:23Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, cause you're like, this song better be a banger. And then whatever's next, you start sweating. But recommending books can be tough. But this was such an easy recommendation, and everyone who read it loved it. I'm still surprised that people will ignore my recommendation. I'll say, you've gotta read, I'll say, Ant Kind by Charlie Kaufman is the funniest book I've ever read in my life, by a mile. And people will be like, mhm.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And then not pick it up.

• 5:46Anthony Jeselnik?

  Anthony Jeselnik, like, you're not gonna take my recommendation for the funniest book of all time? They like, won't even think about it.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  See, that's wild to me. But I'm glad, like with Dirtbag, to keep the aux metaphor going. I view this, it's an essay collection, right? So it's more of a mixtape? So each essay stands alone? So if it's not for you, you don't have to get that invested in it, which I think takes some of that pressure off. But if you were to recommend, like, if you were to say, this book is the funniest, and it's by Charlie Kaufman, like, of course, that's gonna be one of the funniest books you ever read. If you recommend that to somebody, you've had friends who are just like, oh, I haven't gotten around to it yet?

• 6:21Anthony Jeselnik?

  Not even, not even that, just like, mhm. Like, as if, like, they're not gonna read it? They're not gonna remember that I recommended it? They don't care?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  That's why.

• 6:30Anthony Jeselnik?

  That I recommended, yes.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  This is the thing, people need to like, take this stuff a little bit more seriously, especially as we live in a world where like, everything is like algorithm recommendations? Like, take, if a friend who's very good at what they does, what they do, recommends a book to you that's in that same format? Like, you gotta check that out. Can I ask real quick, how did that book come into your life?

• 6:49Anthony Jeselnik?

  I just heard Charlie Kaufman wrote a novel, and was like, oh, cool.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Can I be real? I have not heard of that.

• 6:54Anthony Jeselnik?

  You didn't know he wrote a novel?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I'm learning it right now.

• 6:56Anthony Jeselnik?

  He wrote, Charlie Kaufman wrote a novel called Ant Kind, and it is a blistering takedown of, there is a film critic for The New Yorker who hates Charlie Kaufman. And he's very.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Wait, this is all real?

• 7:10Anthony Jeselnik?

  This is, this is a real person. He like hates Charlie Kaufman. He's got this kinda pretentious beard, and he's, he'll like, watch movies backwards. He'll like turn the TV upside down and watch the movie that way. Like, he's such a weird guy. And pretentious in a way you almost want film critics to be, but hates Charlie Kaufman. Charlie Kaufman makes this guy.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  That seems like the kinda critic that would love Charlie Kaufman.

• 7:29Anthony Jeselnik?

  I know.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Watching TVs, like watching movies upside down?

• 7:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  Okay, okay. And he hates Charlie Kaufman. Charlie Kaufman just makes this guy a very thinly veiled version of him. And he's almost like Looney Tunes, where just horrible things are happening to him. And he humiliates this guy over the course of like 700 pages. And I am.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  It's long too?

• 7:48Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's so long. The last 300 pages, it's like a Charlie Kaufman movie, where the last 300 pages are like, almost nonsense. But it is so fucking funny, that I'm like dying laughing reading this book. And anyone who's read it will agree with everything I just said. But just the fact that he would go after this guy, he would feel such like, it, like a harmless animosity? You know, it's clearly doesn't like bother him, but he just wanted to embarrass this guy, and took it out in a, in a, in a book form.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Well, because he also felt hurt. Can I, can I, do you know when in Charlie Kaufman's career he wrote it? Cause that's an interesting thing too, right? Like, obviously, his comedy career overshadows his career as a person that wrote this novel.

• 8:28Anthony Jeselnik?

  It was like around the pandemic, or?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  I did not know about this at all.

• 8:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, it was, I read it, it was like, it was right when the election was happening between Trump and Biden.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  And I was like, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get an Airbnb and just read this book.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  So we're talking like post-adaptation? We're talking post?

• 8:46Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's 2021.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:48Anthony Jeselnik?

  2020, yeah. Uh, but it's incredible. But I agree with you that more people should take my opinion seriously, almost as gospel, and just do whatever I say, whether it's book-related or not.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  No control issues here at all.

• 9:02Anthony Jeselnik?

  How do you know me?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  So, I was always like, again, a huge stand-up fan, buddies with Kyle going way, way back. Came to so many of your specials, and just absolutely adored what you did. Like, just thought the ways in which.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  I mean, to talk about Kyle real quick, like, little known fact about Kyle Kanane. He got his start, he was at community college in a creative writing program. And he was outside of Chicago and he was trying to write short stories. And he liked it when everyone gathered to read his work if they would laugh. And so he got to a point where he was putting so many jokes in his stuff that his professor basically was like, maybe you should go to open mics, like, maybe it's more about that for you, right? And so, and that changed his life. And then he pursued comedy in such a strong way. And in that same way, like, I love narrative comedy. Kyle will tell very long stories during his, his standup, right?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  You have that exact same narrative arc, but so quickly.

• 10:12Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And it's just something I've always deeply admired about your comedy. And so I was a fan for a long time and I'll never forget. I was driving from New York to Chicago to do an event where like 20 people were gonna be there. It was for Dirtbag. And I started, my phone started buzzing a bunch and they were like, Jeselnik just mentioned you. And not so much you, they, Jeselnik just mentioned Dirtbag Massachusetts on his podcast. And from that moment on, it wasn't in Chicago because it had just happened. But I had a bunch of other events in the Midwest, like, all over the country. And more and more men, young men, started showing up in my signing lines.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  And they were like, I heard about you. What was the abbreviation of your old podcast?

• 11:00Anthony Jeselnik?

  J R V P.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:02Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  And they would just say it to me, as if it was like, like, as if we're in a very, very weird Fight Club. Like, it was like, and they would just mention it to me. And it became clear to me that you were reaching a group of people that weren't mostly readers. Like, that was the other, they were like, I haven't read a book in a year, but I got this. And I loved that, again, because this book is like so many short essays. I was like, this is gonna be a good thing for them to get into because it's not too overwhelming. And so that's, that meant so much to me. And at that point, I reached out to you just to say thank you. And I was really, like, I was just like overwhelmed by how you took that community and like, touched it.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And so then when you canceled your last podcast, there was this part of me that's like, hey, what you were doing was amazing. And then, of course, you were like, well, I'm gonna do this book club thing. That worked out perfectly, but I'm so glad you're back to talking about books. I'm so, like, I think it's important for people, um, kind of outside of the literary sphere. Although I say that carefully, because I would argue, your, your form of writing is very literary in its way. Like, I, it's, you're not putting it in a book, but there is such a writing component to standup. But to, to be able to reach that larger group of people and to say, hey, here's a book that's worth your time, I think is so, so important. And, but it is, to get back to that aux cord, uh, uh, metaphor, it's a lot, it's a lot of responsibility, too.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Because you, you put up like two or three stinkers, people start to lose.

• 12:32Anthony Jeselnik?

  Even one, yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  They said, well, maybe not one, come on. Because they, you gotta, some people, you know, it's, uh, it's my favorite line from Wayne's World. Uh, Led Zeppelin didn't make music everybody loved. They left that to the Bee Gees. You know, you can, you can, you, you're gonna have some books that you love that maybe other people don't love. But if you, if you recommend a bunch that people don't connect with, that's gonna be tough.

• 12:53Anthony Jeselnik?

  I think if it's like, you definitely took a big swing and people didn't like it, then I think it's okay. You know, but I'm always like, oh, how did people react to this? Uh, what do they like? And I also, I'm, I'm cautious of chasing success. Where like, you know, Kurt Vonnegut, like, when I picked that, it was like a big one. And I'm like, I don't, I could just keep going down the Vonnegut train.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 13:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  Or pick old classics, but I don't wanna be that show. So I've gotta keep making, taking chances.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Which I loved it, when you did Jenny, right? Like, like, um.

• 13:21Anthony Jeselnik?

  Jenny O'Phill?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, that was fantastic. Real, real quick, I do wanna ask, one self-aggrandizing question.

• 13:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Please.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  What did you like about Dirtbag?

• 13:30Anthony Jeselnik?

  I just loved.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Because like, that's, that was a big thing for you to shout it out like that. And then, like, I know you were in the habit of, of commenting on books on that podcast, but.

• 13:39Anthony Jeselnik?

  I mean, I'm gonna put you off on that because we got a whole chapter on Dirtbag. And I will tell you everything, but last thing I will say during the introduction.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:47Anthony Jeselnik?

  Because we do structure this like a book.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Even though.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Oh, we're still in the prologue, my bad, my bad, my bad, my bad.

• 13:53Anthony Jeselnik?

  I will say that you are the reason, uh, that I decided to do a weekly podcast with The Ringer. That I was gonna be like, maybe it's just monthly, maybe I just keep doing it in my living room. But I interviewed you at Skylight Books, I'm representing it right now. Uh, you asked me to come interview you and we had so much fun.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:10Anthony Jeselnik?

  And had such a great time that I was like, oh, I would do this every week with different authors. And, uh, be able to do it and have a good time. Like, it wasn't stressful, it was just like, and you were happy. Like, I had a good time and if you had been like, hey, man, what the fuck? I'm trying to sell books and you were just dicking around, I would have been like, oh no, I'm bad at this. But you were like, this is great, I've never done one like this.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  No, you were fantastic. I, I, I'm sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but I just wanna say, I felt like that night, you invented a new type of book event, which, let me fucking tell you, am I allowed to swear on this?

• 14:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Okay. Let me fucking tell you, was long overdue. Book events can so often just be stagnant, just be five to seven questions. Oftentimes, the person interviewing is just trying to prove how much they've read the book or how smart. Like, you took it and made it your own format in such a beautiful way. I've never been at a book event that was nonstop laughter from front, front to, front to back. The crowd was loving it the whole time. But also, you still got the points of the book across. Like, you still were able to convey what the book was about, what you liked about the book, what you maybe didn't like totally love about the book.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  I mean, so it's a, we'll get to what the book's about later in the, whatever, chapter four. But I remember you being at one point, at what point did you realize Johnny Appleseed wasn't enough to fill a book? And the room was dying. And I was dying too because of the, the, the pinpoint accuracy of the question. Because I, at one point, I did realize, oh, I can't just do history here. I'm gonna have to weave myself back into it. So that whole night, I would call it a literary roast. And again, I, I, I hope you're giving people a heads up before they come on the podcast. You might get some people, but like.

• 16:02Anthony Jeselnik?

  A little bit.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  You made, you made it so interesting, and I'll never forget. I, I texted you afterwards, I was like, thank you, thank you. Also, you left, it was so beautiful how you left. So many of your fans were there, you, you'd publicized it. And I think people were excited to meet you, but you actually had a gig that night. And you literally stood up at the end of it and you said, well, I need to go somewhere where people are fucking actually paying me.

• 16:21Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  And you walked offstage, right down the middle, right out of the store, into a car, and you were gone. And I got to sign, because that's, nobody knew what else to do, so they bought the books, which was so meaningful to me. I sat there and signed, signed, signed, signed. And then I texted you afterward, thank you so much for doing that, that was incredible. And you did text me back, you said, people have been asking me to do an authors podcast. I think I maybe now know how it can work. And that was awesome.

• 16:46Anthony Jeselnik?

  Thank you. Uh, I remember, uh, it was my pleasure. I just remember you saying, it was like a literary roast. And I was like, oh no, that's just how I talk. Like, that was just, I wasn't trying to roast you at all, I was like, this is just how I talk to people. Uh, but that was a great introduction.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  God bless your close friends who deal with it every day.

• 17:06Anthony Jeselnik?

  I don't have a lot of close friends. But let's get to.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:11Anthony Jeselnik?

  Chapter one.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Chapter one.

• 17:14Anthony Jeselnik?

  All right, chapter one, I wanna talk again more about Dirtbag Massachusetts. Isaac, so we don't get sued by lawyers all over the country, if not the world. Would you describe the cover of Dirtbag Massachusetts if they hold this book up?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  The cover of Dirtbag Massachusetts looks like a punk rock flyer that you might find pinned up on a corkboard at the front of a bar. Or a woodcut that you might find in like a Catholic, Catholic worker socialist homeless shelter. And it's crossed hands, the hand is cut off, there are three dripping droplets. And underneath is fire, as if to say hell. And it is, I would argue, uh, almost like a caution sign yellow. And it says Dirtbag Massachusetts, a confessional, my name. And then, very, very lucky me, it says a revelation, small print, by Marlon James.

• 18:02Anthony Jeselnik?

  I love it. I love, I love the, the author, the blurbs that are taken out. They're just like, make it sound really great, but like, you don't know what, it, it means nothing. I don't, I, some, some book companies have gotten, they're like, we're not gonna do blurbs anymore. And they're like, we kinda still want a recognizable name. Um, I love this book, you asked me earlier what I responded to so much about it. Uh, I, again, it's the writing. For me, because I read so many different books, so many different kinds. And the ones that I love, it just has to be good, if not great, writing. And I always tell people that writing that is easy to read is hard to do. So it was a book that didn't feel like, this could have been Tucker Maxx. You know what I mean?

• 18:45Anthony Jeselnik?

  It could have been like, these are stories of me getting drunk. And I read that and that was like, it just, it was bad writing. It's just, it's not good, I don't believe these stories. But the stories had, you know, they were, you were vulnerable and there was a soulfulness to it. And it's about you like just getting, you know, fucked up, having these adventures. Uh, at one point, you're a porn star.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  True.

• 19:07Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, actually, we wanna show you a clip and tell me.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  No, shut the, oh my God, holy shit.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Anthony, I almost just died. Do you know how many friends have looked? Do you know how many friends have scoured the internet? And now that you're funded, now that you're funded, I thought you might have actually done it.

• 19:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  I didn't tell you when we were doing that, but that was

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 19:34Anthony Jeselnik?

  Your fear, your genuine fear.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  You're gonna, maybe you cut me saying this, but my butthole just got zero dark thirty. That, that thing just got wow.

• 19:43Anthony Jeselnik?

  This would be your social media clip. No, of course not.

• 19:48Anthony Jeselnik?

  But, uh, but no, that was, your reaction was everything I've hoped for and more.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Sure, I'm very red. Sorry, keep going.

• 19:55Anthony Jeselnik?

  That was amazing.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 19:56Anthony Jeselnik?

  Again, you're a, you are a, you're a porn star for a little while. You, uh, star, you say is not the word.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, star's, star's not the word.

• 20:03Anthony Jeselnik?

  You work in pornography.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  There are other people who are actual stars. I was an actor for a while.

• 20:08Anthony Jeselnik?

  But you're, you work in these bars and you make the bar sound so romantic. And someone who went to college in New Orleans, like I have my favorite bars, but you're in San Francisco. And these places you work and you talk about these different characters who are real people. But you just give everyone, like I was just, you made everyone fascinating. And then there are parts of the book, and I always think about this when I'm reading, especially nonfiction. But even fiction, it's like that one detail that stays with you forever. And the one in your book, and there's, I mean, there's several, but the one that really like just got me, and not even like in the heart, but just in the brain, is when you are, you have your motorcycle adventure.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:48Anthony Jeselnik?

  Where you buy a motorcycle and you go to get motorcycle insurance.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:51Anthony Jeselnik?

  And the guy says it's gonna be two hundred and fifty bucks, and you're like, a month, and he's like, a year. And you're like, why so cheap? And he's like, because if you get in an accident on a motorcycle, chances are I don't have to pay anything because you're gonna be dead.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  And he was also like, you're under twenty-five, so the chances of that are likely.

• 21:06Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, and I was like, and then just never forgot that, that like, oh, don't ride motorcycles. And, and just motorcycle insurance is cheap because they know they're not gonna have to pay anybody because you're gonna be dead. That, that always stuck with me. Uh, and there's just so much of the book that has stuck with me that I just knew this, as soon as I read it, I knew that I could get friends who would be into it too, who it, it's got a different version of me. You just had this, again, like a dirtbag life. Being raised, being in the Catholic church a little bit, like being raised Catholic, being around that was fascinating to me.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Again, New Orleans, Catholic and drinking.

• 21:44Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes, and so just a lot of it kind of, I just felt like this is a alternate history version of me that hit me, and I thought it would be good for anyone. Anyone I knew who liked to party and had a good time. But you also were a disciplined writer. You had the story about your, you know, your friend, you worked in the bar. When you go, you went to the concert with his camera.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:05Anthony Jeselnik?

  Took a bunch of pictures. Like, I just related to so much of that.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Jeff with one F.

• 22:09Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, and the heartbreak of losing friends, uh, throughout, that I was just, I wanted more. Like, I couldn't wait for a sequel to this. And, and the, one of the biggest things about this book, and I'll say whatever you want about it, was the overriding fear of what your parents would think, of you exposing this part of your life. You know, of you exposing, uh, just the drinking and the debauchery. And not just for your parents to see.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  And the childhood abuse, yeah.

• 22:37Anthony Jeselnik?

  But for the world to see. You know, it's not like, the parents aren't so much like, oh, you're telling us about this, but you're telling the world about us. Where my parents, as a comedian, are, my parents are very happy that I, my jokes are all made up.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Their fear in the beginning was that I would be one of those comics who's like, so my childhood wasn't like, and then just nitpicking all kinds of bullshit.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:58Anthony Jeselnik?

  And my parents and I get along very well. Uh, and, and so they were happy that they didn't have to deal with that. So I was like, fascinated.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Can I jump in for a moment here?

• 23:07Anthony Jeselnik?

  Please.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  You, and, and I remember meeting them at Carnegie Hall and asking them about this. Which was kind of bold, now that I'm thinking about it, that it's just like, hi, nice to meet you. How did you feel? Because there was a time when, especially as you're getting your start, people don't know that what you're doing is a character.

• 23:24Anthony Jeselnik?

  I had no idea.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And, and, and you've, and you've, and there's been moments where your fandom maybe almost is too in love with the character and not really in on the joke. But how did your parents feel about being interpreted that way? You have so many jokes about them being awful, or terrible, or psychopathic.

• 23:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Was there ever a time when mom or dad was like?

• 23:46Anthony Jeselnik?

  In the beginning, I had a joke with my mom having an affair. And someone would be like, oh, like, and I was already, I was on TV and successful enough.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  This is like post the first rose?

• 23:57Anthony Jeselnik?

  Post or right before it. You know, I would be on like Kimmel or something.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:01Anthony Jeselnik?

  And someone would ask my mom, like, I didn't know you had an affair. And she's like, I didn't, he's making all this up. And then kind of like the more known I became, the more obvious it became. And every hour, I kind of reset everything. Where people die and get resurrected in the next hour. You know, my parents get divorced and remarried, and then they're back together. And now, like, they were in Philadelphia last weekend, and they're at the show, and I finished telling my jokes about them, these awful jokes. Uh, and then I introduced them. They stand up, they turn the lights on, they wave to everybody. My parents love to meet fans after, and I'm like, they're celebrating their fifty-first wedding anniversary.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Oh my lord.

• 24:35Anthony Jeselnik?

  In December. You know, like, we've, we've got five kids, they've got a bunch of grandkids now that

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Are they still in Pittsburgh?

• 24:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:43Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah. Yeah. But I, again, I love Dirtbag. I know we wanna get to other things, but is there anything you wanna say? Like, has Dirtbag, I mean, it changed your life?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  It changed my life.

• 24:53Anthony Jeselnik?

  I assume.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:54Anthony Jeselnik?

  Do you have any regrets? Anything you would have changed? Anything you look forward to? Almost like course correcting in the future when it comes to this book?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Well, so yeah, I, I have, um, I mean, that, that is what kind of leads into American Rambler. So, it's, it's tough. When you make art, you have to just make the art that you wanna make, right? But it's so easy to let intrusive thoughts get into your head. It's so, I mean, the thing I think about, if I'm being honest, and it's such a basic, simple bit, but it's something I think about a lot, and, and it's not lost on me that I was born and raised in New England and grew up in Boston, and that Adam Sandler is from New Hampshire. But, and on one of his early albums, he has this bit that's just, they're all gonna laugh at you. And it's this like very high pitched voice saying they're all gonna laugh at you, they're all gonna laugh at you.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And it's very easy to have that in your head, which, not in a positive way, they're all gonna laugh at you, but in, if you try, people are going to mock you, people are going to make fun of you, people are going to, uh, be cruel towards your ambitions and think you're gonna fall short of it. And as a writer, it's very easy to maybe have voices like that, or anybody that makes any type of art, that there's going to be this, they're all gonna laugh at you, uh, aspect to it. So, I could see a world where I kept working on that book for the rest of my life. I could see a world where I try, oh, it shouldn't be an essay collection. I gotta figure out a way to tie it all together and make it a book.

• 26:22Anthony Jeselnik?

  Let's make it a novel.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  I gotta do this, I gotta do that. There's, oh no, wait, I need to protect the people in my life. Let me fictionalize it, and maybe that will make it easier, right? But I am so happy that I allowed it to just be free when it, when it was maybe, you know, I, again, you can always rearrange furniture on the deck of the Titanic. You can always tweak something, you can always tighten, tighten something. Again, it's something I admire in your art, how you clearly take the time to really tighten every single joke to like almost a, a, a wild degree.

• 27:00Anthony Jeselnik?

  But at some point, I have, like, I've got a deadline of, hey, the show's at eight o'clock.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:04Anthony Jeselnik?

  You know, I've been working on these jokes, I'm gonna go try it now. Whereas a writer, you can sit there, again, you can let it just sit there forever.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:10Anthony Jeselnik?

  And always be fiddling.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Right. So with that in mind, I finished the book. I was way past deadline anyways. Uh, but I don't have an actual show where there's like a start time, so publishing's a little more forgiving in that case.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  I knew I didn't wanna allow my parents to influence any changes on the book, but I also knew I wanted them to have it before the book went out into the world. So after I was done with final edits, after it was what they call in the business locked, I then sent a copy of it to my mother and my father. And my father's response was fantastic. He's of Irish-American descent, he's a very funny guy, and he just wrote back, not reading it,

• 27:52Speaker 01

  I probably shouldn't have given you so much Bukowski to read as a kid, which is a true statement. Like, I, like, nine years old, shouldn't have been reading Bukowski. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a lot of shit probably went over my head. But my mother was a voracious reader, and she sat there, and she read it in a single night. And she wrote me back a really meaningful letter. She said, I'm so sorry, which I didn't even know I was hoping to hear. She said, I had no idea you were carrying this. Which showed me what a good job I had done of hiding the hurt, of hiding the pain of my childhood. And in a way, like, again, I grew up on the East Coast, I moved to San Francisco, I was trying to get as far as I possibly could to try and go find a place where I could, I could deal with some of this stuff.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  It's called Dirtbag Massachusetts. It starts in New England, it ends in New England, but it's very sneakily about California. That was an important line. But another part of that, don't get me wrong, she's still a mom. She had a follow-up letter later that was like, and here are three hundred things we could change, if we still have time. But, but she genuinely had a line that said, what about all the canoeing, what about all the camping trips? And in Dirtbag, there's a line where I say, how would you feel if somebody took all of your worst decisions, all of your worst choices, all of your worst moments, and twenty-five years later put them in a book?

• 29:11Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And especially when books are important to you, which they, they were so important to both my parents. What about all the canoeing, what about the camping trips? That was the start of my next book. I was like, I'm going to try and figure out a way. I have cherry picked some of the worst moments of my family. How do I make this family more complex by showing some of the good side too? Because I think that's when we're at our best, when we're not just looking at the negative, or just looking at the positive, but when something comes together to make a full three-dimensional picture. And so that's what kind of kicked off the next book. So to answer your question, do I have any regrets about Dirtbag? Don't get me wrong, I always like hit a line every once in a while where I'm like, oof. There's a barbershop essay in there that I'm like very proud of still to this day, but also some of it, I'm a little bit like, alright buddy,

• 29:54Speaker 01

  like, you're taking yourself a little too seriously. But again, I'm like, I, I feel the same, I, I see this in comedy conversations. I love how much there's in, literature and comedy have so much in common. I see this all the time, so many comedians who say, I would never take back a joke. I would never take, you know, I, I, I regret it, it's stupid, I get that it falls flat, or it sucks for this or that reason, but, and that's how I feel about Dirtbag. Even the, even the parts that maybe hit my ear like a tin now, it was of a time, it was what I was doing, and overall, I'm still really proud of the art that I made.

• 30:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Cool. I mean, great explanation, and I love how that leads into, uh, American Rambler, which we're here to talk about after chapter two.

• 30:38Anthony Jeselnik?

  All right, chapter two.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  You're good at this.

• 30:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  Part of this, like the mission statement of Justin and the book club, well before it became The Ringer, well before it became anything, even when I was recommending books.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Corporate.

• 30:49Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes, before I started getting paid for it and getting guests on the show. And getting my dog out of the room, was to get men to read more literature. I've always been way more a literature guy than a nonfiction guy. I still obviously enjoy nonfiction. I'm a big audiobook in the car and it's gotta be a nonfiction guy. But when I say to people, and I've been getting more press, saying, hey, I'm trying to get men to read literature. Like, a lot of guys will say, I only read serious books. And they usually mean like fucking some financial bullshit. But, but they're like, I wanna read facts, nonfiction.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Things I can learn from.

• 31:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes, and so they take me arguing for literature as you learn just as much, if not more. I mean, I take more from a character, more empathy from situations. And it's nice to put yourself, it's like if you, I was like, if you wanna kill your wife, read a book about a guy who kills his wife and you probably won't wanna kill your wife anymore. You know what I mean? Like, you just put yourself in their shoes, see the good and the bad.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Just that's where you started. There are so many other options.

• 31:58Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's a good, it's a good, it's a good metaphor.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  To exercise, but yeah, it's a way of exercising something.

• 32:04Anthony Jeselnik?

  Or just that you walk a mile in someone's, you live alternate lives. And I think that's almost a superpower. It's like you have this in your mind where you've lived a million lifetimes because you've read all these different books and read these different characters' lives that you don't get from nonfiction. But I'm not knocking nonfiction. I think nonfiction, reading is reading, putting words in your head is good for you. It's meditative, whatever you're doing. Um, what do you think about that? What do you think about fiction versus nonfiction? Because you write nonfiction.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:34Anthony Jeselnik?

  But you obviously read a ton of fiction. You're always recommending novels to me.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:39Anthony Jeselnik?

  How do you feel about that argument?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  So something has occurred to, so, so yeah, just a little background on me for those that don't know, or like, who is Anthony talking to? I, for over 10 years, I've gone on the Today Show and I've recommended books.

• 32:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  That's right.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  So I also.

• 32:51Anthony Jeselnik?

  Wanted to bring that up.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Hand the aux cord off to people. And there is a high pressure moment to that. And I'm talking to a very large audience, right? Um, but I am a big believer, as you are, that you can just recommend the things that you love. And that's why I love putting things, like again, even like that is that, we didn't, the, the second part of our relationship is then you meet my now-wife and she has great taste. And you guys have kind of a similar taste, which is kind of dark, skewed literary, skewed fiction. And we all just kinda started sharing recommendations with each other, which is so, so fantastic. But to defend nonfiction for a moment, and I, defend is probably not the right word. But to, to stick up for, well, that's not right either.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  But, but to praise nonfiction for a minute.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I had a great moment with my brother. So my brother's my half-brother, he's my mom's kid, he's in New Hampshire. Great dude, also loves comedy, runs some great burrito restaurants. He's the burrito king of New Hampshire, one might argue. He's an awesome dude. But he, I'm still his little brother. I'm just his little half-brother. He doesn't really understand what I do. He has no idea why you're talking to me, up until very recently. Like, he knows I'm friends with people, he listens to like, you know, to Spotify comedy stuff. Like, he like, that's, and he's like, some of these people know my brother, but I don't quite know how or why. And he doesn't examine it too much.

• 34:22Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Um, but I did an event for Rambler with this wonderful author, Peter Orner, which if I could give you one quick recommendation there, Maggie Brown and others, stories.

• 34:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  That's, okay. Maggie Brown and others is the title of the book.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then stories, in which I swear to you, Peter Orner's such a good writer. Some of these, you'll love it as a comedian, especially like somebody who condenses things down. Some of the stories are just a page long.

• 34:46Anthony Jeselnik?

  Love it.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  There's so many stories in that book. This book has flown under the radar for far too long. It's so, so good. And he is, I genuinely think it's a little bit of his F you to the publishing industry because they're always like, short story collections don't sell. He's like, oh, really? Let me give you like the most short stories in one book I possibly can. It's so good. But Peter Orner is very smart. He interviews me about American Rambler. And he said something similar that you said about Dirtbag, which he's like, you are so good at taking normal people, everyday people, and putting them on a pedestal and putting them under a light in which they become fascinating and showing that every single person on the planet, in a way, is fascinating. My brother and I, we had a beer afterwards, just one, and then we drove back to his house.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  And on the way home, and I like to think it wasn't just that beer, he said, up until this point, I did not understand what you do. I did not get it. When I think of nonfiction, I think I'm learning something. And I think so many people feel that way about nonfiction. They think exactly what you just said, a finance book, a history book. This is a way for me to ingest information. He was like, I never thought about it as art. I never thought about it as like making a sculpture or painting a painting. But he was like, your conversation with Peter makes me now respect what you do more. And that was such a meaningful moment for me to have with him, for him to share that with me.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  But also it made me kind of realize, like, I'd never really thought about this. Like, for me, books are books, right? I, there's a line in American Rambler, I say, books are books. Especially when you're a kid, you don't know the difference between fiction and nonfiction. You're just reading the stuff you like, right? Like, on the road, Jack Kerouac, fiction, technically, but like, he lived a lot of that. It was based on his journals. And so for me, what I love about nonfiction is the bumpers. What I love about nonfiction is there is something reining in my wild thoughts.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  I have to stay within the parameters of what actually happened. And how do I make what actually happened interesting, or sad, or entertaining, or funny? And it brings me back to the fact that you have such incredible jokes that seem based in reality, but they are fiction. But so many times, people try to think that they are autofiction. They think you're gonna be

• 37:21Speaker 01

  a murderer, or whatever they think about, yeah.

• 37:24Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Whereas, again, like Kyle's, to come back to Kyle, Canine, his stories are often nonfiction. They're things that happened to him in his real life. And both are such valid art forms. And I just think, especially in the literary world and the publishing world, fiction can sometimes be really held up to this, this extra tier of esteem. And nonfiction, you can get there, especially if it's like good journalism or stuff. But what I love is anyone that can take a normal story and carve it into something interesting. And that's, I'll, I'll leave it at this, Mark Twain, one of this country's most incredible writers, most incredible humorists.

• 38:03Anthony Jeselnik?

  Never heard of him.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Would often take stories that people told in the bar, he would buy them a couple of drinks. That story's now mine, and then he would fictionalize it. Because that, even fiction, that's what I love about it. It is still based in nonfiction. So to me, nonfiction's kind of the heart.

• 38:22Anthony Jeselnik?

  And you would agree that, I mean, just reading in general, whatever it is. I always say like the back of a shampoo bottle is, has value in it, in just putting words in your head. I always say the show isn't competing with the movies and TV as much as like doom scrolling.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:36Anthony Jeselnik?

  That like, read a book, whatever you want to read, whatever floats your boat, do it. By promoting literature, and again, I think literature's underrepresented from the, for, for male readers, but I don't have a problem with nonfiction. But some people take it as like an attack.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  No, no, and, and, and again, there's so many different layers of what nonfiction can be. But yeah, if I could say, the thing I love about reading is it is an unassailable technology. I remember when, early 2000s, everyone was going, they, oh, books are over, it's over. E-readers are coming and we're gonna put videos in the e-readers and this and that. And don't get me wrong, there's so much entertainment grabbing for our attention at this point. But nothing beats looking at a word and that word going in your brain and then the picture that that shows in your brain. Like, that's, I, I write very sparsely in my writing. Because no matter how good a job I do at describing a bar, I'm just gonna say a bar

• 39:36Speaker 01

  and you're gonna instantaneously think of some bar from your past.

• 39:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  I do the same thing with my jokes, is I've got, it's gotta be bare bones. If I talk too much, because again, jokes are lies. And it's like when someone's lying to you and they get too much detail. And you're like, oh, this motherfucker's lying. Where if you're just like, sorry, I'm late, you know, traffic, you're like, okay. But if like, trap, this guy cut in front of me and then a manhole cover, you're like, oh, you're lying to me. That you have to just leave it, keep it sparse and let it all be in your imagination. That, like, again, I would think that, that, uh, the importance of literature to me versus a movie is that you're watching the movie, but the book you're like, it's, you're experiencing, it's in your head that is much more vivid than any film could ever be.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  That's, it's a collaborative art project. It's a collaborative art project.

• 40:23Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes, you have to do part of the work. I love it. Uh, you know what it's time for? Chapter three.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 40:34Anthony Jeselnik?

  Chapter three, uh, let's get into uh, your newest book, your latest book. I hope it's not your last book, but I wouldn't be surprised if you were like, you know what? This is it for me. We're talking American Rambler. This came out, what, at the beginning of the year, March?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  May, May.

• 40:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Came out in May, the much anticipated follow-up to uh, to uh, to Dirtbag Massachusetts. Would you describe the cover so we don't get sued?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yes, uh, I'm still touring on this book right now, which is why I had to come here from Detroit. The cover is a pair of beat up Doc Martin boots standing on top of a log and it says, American Rambler. And then below that is a map of basically where Johnny Appleseed walked. And I myself walked, drove and kind of bummed around following in his footsteps.

• 41:25Anthony Jeselnik?

  I didn't realize you were wearing Doc Martens on uh, did you, was those the actual boots? No.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  No, that is, that is what we caught, that is what we caught. I will say a fun story about that cover real quick is it's designed by Chip Kidd, who's the same guy that designed the cover of Jurassic Park.

• 41:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  Okay.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  And if you want a fun story about that, it's Jurassic Park is the skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They loved it so much that they then used it for the movie, right?

• 41:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Uh, and he has spoken publicly about this, but he told me this story too. I'm not sharing anything out of school though, but uh, he just traced it real quick out of a book because he was trying to get like an extra week or two and just walked into a meeting. It was like, ah, you guys aren't gonna like this, but like, just, I'm working on it. Give me a week or two and everyone loved it so much, it became a piece of American iconic.

• 42:08Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's like the Nike swoosh of the cinema world that's uh,

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Did that happen very quickly?

• 42:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, she did it in like a second and they were like, why are we paying you? And she said, because I went to fucking art school and I know what I'm doing.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:19Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, that's uh, that's great. I, I mean, I think about this book because I've been talking to you for the years in between Dirtbag's publication and American Rambler's release, or I even got a copy, I think months in advance. You were, I was lucky enough that you sent me one.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Lucky enough slash I was bending your arm. Please read.

• 42:39Anthony Jeselnik?

  I couldn't wait to read because I kept asking you, hey, I want to know what your parents thought. Like I am, when I finished Dirtbag Massachusetts, I looked up, I looked you up online and I saw that you were doing a reading at Skylight Books with Emily St. John Mandel that night. And I almost drove over there thinking, maybe I can get there in time and I can ask this question of, you seem preoccupied with your parents' thoughts about what, what is contained in this book. How's that working out? I needed to know this. So whenever I would see you, I would be like, oh, hey, I forgot to ask like, how do your parents feel now? And you're like, it's in the next book.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:15Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's in the next book. So I thought the next book was going to be like, coming to terms with being a public figure. And then when I saw fucking On the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, I was like, are you shitting me? Like, there's no way, this has gotta be something else. There's gotta be more to this. And then I start reading it and I'm like, you're just talking about Johnny Appleseed for a little while. And I'm like, you are kidding me. And then it got deeper and it becomes something much, much more like, how much of Johnny Appleseed was just a template? Like, you almost had too much, too many feelings to be able to just spit it out where you needed some sort of compass.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:55Anthony Jeselnik?

  And the Johnny Appleseed became the compass.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:58Anthony Jeselnik?

  Because again, you've gotta know before you put pen to paper that no one gives a fuck. That like, no one's like, oh, Johnny Appleseed, like finally someone's, someone's taken lid off this guy. Like I, you're like, he's a real person. I'm like, who gives a shit? We would have had apple trees no matter what, but I did, I enjoyed the book. Uh, and it really, it did feel like you were working through something.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, with the book. And then again, I, we talked about this at Skylight Books.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  I don't want to give a spoiler away for the end of the book, but you are welcome to uh, if you,

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, you are too. I'm all for it. Like, it's an event that happens.

• 44:43Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'll tell you my experience of reading this book.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  You could tell the joke you said to me on the phone.

• 44:48Anthony Jeselnik?

  I don't even remember what the joke, I make a lot of jokes.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Tell your experience and then if you don't hit it.

• 44:52Anthony Jeselnik?

  So I'm reading this book and you are, you were literally, you, you decide you're gonna follow the trail on foot. It's disastrous almost from the beginning, like things have been paved over. They don't really care about Johnny Appleseed enough to actually have any sort of like path or plan. That you get a pamphlet every once in a while and your parents are supportive of this journey. They're helping you. Uh, you were talking to them, you give, you call them on the phone from the road. You're doing different things and you were meeting people around the country. You were almost filling out this book and going through an internal monologue about your life and your relationships with people. And at the end of the book, uh, your mother dies by suicide.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 45:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, it, it hit me in a way that no book really has it dealt with suicide because if it, if you, if, if this happens, if this incident happens before you write the book, it's a different book, but it's clear because you're talking to her throughout the book, that this was not planned. That this is not a, you didn't write this book to deal with this incident. It is a true haymaker out of fucking nowhere that I was, I mean, the audacity to even have it in the book was shocking to me. And I, I did laugh out loud at the thought of your, giving it to a friend who's like, I don't want to read about Johnny Appleseed, getting halfway through and then just writing like, great book lol. And like not, that like, it really was a test to see if someone wrote it.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, somebody read it, somebody read it.

• 46:20Anthony Jeselnik?

  Powerful. Um, and gave the book an entire new dimension. There's no way you could have predicted, uh, and was just a brutal gut punch to me. I can't imagine what it was like uh, for you.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm, I, I can talk about that in a moment, but I want to start with your joke.

• 46:37Anthony Jeselnik?

  Please.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Which is, uh, I sent it to you, you read it, we talked on the phone afterwards. And at that time, you were preparing to launch like the official book club. So that was the premise. We were gonna just talk about what's it gonna look like as you launch this book club. And then I was like, and you read the book, you're like, I read it, you were telling me about it. And then you, it's almost like you couldn't help yourself. And it was, I want you to know, I want you to know how much this moment meant to me. I am, at that point, my mother killed herself in February of 2024. So we're in under two years at this point, but humor is part of dealing with grief.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Not for everybody, but it certainly is for me.

• 47:24Anthony Jeselnik?

  True.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  And it truly was like you couldn't help yourself because you said, reading Dirtbag Massachusetts the whole time, all I wondered was what did your parents think about this book? Then I got to the end of American Rambler and now I know.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  And I laughed, I laughed for, it was, it was almost like a release for me. It was such a wonderful moment. Um, again, obviously that is not the full story.

• 47:58Anthony Jeselnik?

  Sure.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  But that is the small joke that can kind of be taken out of this incredibly complex situation. But to, to answer your question, I love, I, I get in my own way sometimes. I love hiding things. I love making people work for things and I love, um, like even the opening of this podcast was hard for me. You were so complimentary and that can be really difficult for me. It's not something that I'm great at, um, receiving compliments. I've been working on it, but there's a real part of my spirit that is like, oh, I'm undeserving of this. No, please move on, right?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  And so in Dirtbag, I hint at family violence, I hint at mental health issues, I hint at allowed childhood. I don't describe what happened until the very end of the book. People have to get through the book to really understand what's going on. And that was without a Johnny Appleseed kind of facade in front of that. That was just my first memoir slash essay collection. But I'll never forget, uh, you know, you, you, part of the beauty of putting a book out into the world is you get to hear people's responses to it. In that same way we were just talking about. It's a, it's a collaborative art form. People are creating these movies in their heads and some people love them and some people don't and that's okay.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  But I'll never forget, somebody wrote about Dirtbag, probably on Goodreads, just something, some, some authors are like, I never read Goodreads, no way. I love it. I love negative feedback. I love positive feedback. I just love information. And somebody wrote a wonderful review where they were like,

• 49:40Speaker 01

  If I'd known at the beginning of the book what I knew by the end of the book, I wouldn't have thought this guy was such an asshole. And that was part of what I was trying to accomplish with Dirtbag. It was like, hey, just because somebody's a little messed up, know that they're maybe dealing with something. So to move that to American Rambler, my friend Ada Calhoun, who's a great writer, a great poet, I'm sorry, who's a great writer who wrote a great memoir called Also a Poet about her father. But anyways, she called American Rambler a grief memoir in reverse.

• 50:17Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's a great way to put it.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  And that's exactly right, because every other book like this, the mother's suicide is chapter one.

• 50:24Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's the inciting incident.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  It is the opening.

• 50:26Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's the reason for the book.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  It's the reason that I go and try to wander around and live outside and grapple with everything. But what's clear to me, maybe for some readers it is, maybe for some readers isn't, if you get to the end of the book, one, you can restart it immediately. It's broken up into four seasons. It's spring, it's summer, it's fall, and then there's an epilogue winter. And then you can move right back into spring. And the idea of it for me was I was grappling with all this stuff because I knew it was coming. I just didn't know it was coming. And I think that's something that so many people who deal with suicide in their lives can understand.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  And so the Johnny Appleseed of it all, just real quick, was a container. You're absolutely right. It's a scaffolding to hold the story on. I had an idea, again, I was talking to my, at the time girlfriend, now wife. I was like, I'm just gonna write about this murder that happened in this bar. And she was like, you mean the one you wrote about already in Dirtbag? I was like, yeah, but longer. And she was like, is there anything else? Is there any kind of, and walking had been such a big part of my life. And she was like, is there any famous walker from history that you're interested? And I, without, I was like, Johnny Appleseed didn't miss a beat. I grew up where he was born. And she said, that's not a real guy. And that starts the whole thing in my mind. That's not, that part's not even in the book.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  But Appleseed is such a great way to look at legends versus facts, memories, the way we view things. And it was my way of getting into what was true about my family and both the negative, but also the positive. What is true about this country? The negative, but also the positive. It was an excuse to go look at the country at an eye level. And I, my dad, when I told him I was gonna do this, he's like, you're gonna get shot.

• 52:16Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  But actually, I just found like a lot of really nice people. Not people that I agree with on most things, probably, but still people that were willing to like, I didn't, I slept outside, I stayed on strangers' couches, but basically put up with me. But yeah, that, and support me in different ways. But this book, to me, if I could sum it up in one way, and I think it is, in a way, it's a love letter to my mom. It's, it is the camping, it is the canoeing trips. It is the parts of our relationship I wish I had almost shared more with. But also, it's me arguing with her after she's died. To say the world's not such a bad place. Things aren't as bad as you think they are. And if I could sum up the thesis of the book into one thing,

• 52:58Speaker 01

  it's walking away from isolation and towards community.

• 53:03Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And again, I think, I think what you, like, I think that's ballparks. I think that's bars. I think that's churches. And I think that's comedy. I think when people gather, we are at our best when we come together and we share space. You make people from all different walks of life laugh.

• 53:20Anthony Jeselnik?

  That's right.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And you don't need to subscribe to one way of thinking to enjoy being in that group, but.

• 53:26Anthony Jeselnik?

  All different walks.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Walks.

• 53:29Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, and I, I love everything you just said there. I liked it, talking about like, moving through civilization to community.

• 53:37Anthony Jeselnik?

  The biggest barriers for me in the book, like, not as a reader, but just when I, it's not just having to go all these miles. Like, you go from walking it to driving it. You know what I mean? But the first time I ran into a highway, first time I had to climb a fence, you know, with barbed wire on it, this journey would have been over. That you really have to get through modern day technology to do this. That I think just the way that you were able to circumvent things and pass through them was, was fascinating. Made the book much more interesting than I thought it was going to be when I saw Johnny Appleseed.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  I, I, no, and I, I just need to say, I love that you're acknowledging that. Because in a way, I think I was almost putting up this like, I mean, it even says on the cover, it says, walking the trail of Johnny Appleseed. Even that's a little bit of bullshit.

• 54:26Anthony Jeselnik?

  I couldn't believe it when I saw it. Like, again, I didn't know what it was. I assumed more, more Dirtbag Massachusetts stories. So I was like, holy shit, what is this? Because you were confident sending it to me. You weren't like, oh, hey, I'm gonna send this to you, it's a little different. You were just like, here's the new one. I answer these questions you've had, and you do. That I just, it was like a bit of a Trojan horse that I thought it was done wonderfully. Otherwise, you would not be on the show. I would have Kyle Kenehan on talking about Dirtbag Massachusetts.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Which you should tip him some boy.

• 54:57Anthony Jeselnik?

  But I'm happy to, to have. So thank you for, thank you for discussing what is unfathomable, unfathomable to me.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:05Anthony Jeselnik?

  But you are, you were so good doing it at Skylight Books. You were so, and again, I don't wanna spoil the end of the book because it was such a gut punch for me as a reader, but no one's gonna.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  No, no, this is, no one's scared. This is, this is what my, I'll, I'll share two quick things. Well, my dad said to me is what she did was a wheel.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  And there are many spokes to that wheel. And you could take away so many, so many of those spokes, and the wheel would still be there. So there's no, like, that's, it is the unfathomable. I bring that up because you're absolutely right. There is no getting at, there's no truly understanding, there's no amount of investigation I can do. And I'm sure, don't get me wrong, that will be part of the next book. But it will be an endless attempt to try and, try and figure out what that is. But the other thing I will say, and I've, I've described it as dropping an emotional cinder block at the very end of the book. And again, much better is Ada saying it's a grief memoir in reverse. But in a way, it is, it's, I don't wanna say punchline, but there is a structure of a joke there. There is a, I play with tension.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  I open, Dirtbag Massachusetts, the first line is, my parents are married when they had me, just to different people. Boom, I've got you. Now I can talk for a little while, because you wanna figure out what the hell I'm talking about, right? There's tension there. With this one, I, I tried to do that exact same, just a bit of tension to keep you carrying through, to try and actually be interested in what the hell is this all about? Why is this guy walking around figuring out this guy from the 1700s, 1800s? And, and I hope, I hope it connects when that all lands at the end.

• 56:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  Sure, and even to go back to, you know, fiction versus nonfiction. If you put this at the end of a novel, it's the worst piece of shit you've ever read. So to see it in nonfiction, where you're like, oh, I believe this, I know this is true, made it so much more powerful that, yes, like, you know, if it wasn't a fact, you wouldn't believe it. If that, I know, I'm sure I'm saying.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, I think you're absolutely, can I, can I ask you real quick about this? Because you famously love books with brutal endings.

• 57:08Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  So did this, was this book like a fore for you? And then it became, I'm sorry, that's a fucked up way to put it, but.

• 57:15Anthony Jeselnik?

  It was, I'm reading this for a friend. I'm interested in, again, I loved Dirtbag so much that you bought a lot of goodwill. And I'm, so I'm like, okay, I'm reading this. And I'm so glad I did not put it down. I could have put this down at two chapters to go and been like, you know, great job, Isaac, you know, good luck with everything.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  And there, there are moments that you're gonna love. I'm sure you loved Dakota, I'm sure you, yeah.

• 57:36Anthony Jeselnik?

  Of course, I enjoyed the characters. And again, I read a lot just to put words in my head, to put these characters in my head. Maybe I wrote jokes based on this. Reading is never a waste of time. But I did not see it coming. And when I say like, I will finish any book just to see if maybe there's some like amazing, and this was like incredible to me and such a haymaker that I was so glad that I took the extra time. I'm so glad you didn't give me a heads up or say, you know, you gotta finish it. But I think it was like, putting the work in, felt like I had earned,

• 58:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  earned your mom's death. And so I, it was just made the book more powerful. This is why it feels so strange telling the viewer right now what happens. But I think it's still worth reading just to get, again, what did you call it? An emotional.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  An emotional cinder block.

• 58:29Anthony Jeselnik?

  And, and what's the thing in reverse?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry, Ada Calhoun called it a grief memoir in reverse.

• 58:35Anthony Jeselnik?

  A grief memoir in reverse. Like, I've read, there's nothing I've read that's like it. It seems almost like cheating. Like, I wouldn't have believed it if I did not know you and know the story. And the book would have started differently. It just happened, this just happened to happen in the middle of it that I just thought was incredible. And, and like nothing else I've, I've read this year. So again, very different from Dirtbag Massachusetts, just as funny.

• 59:01Anthony Jeselnik?

  And now it's time for chapter four.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Keep going.

• 59:09Anthony Jeselnik?

  Chapter four, we are going into the Jesselink Book Club Gauntlet.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'm gonna give you some, I'm gonna give you some quick ones.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 59:15Anthony Jeselnik?

  Answer it and we can discuss, but just like first thought, uh, give me your opinion. Uh, this is a, a big one. We're gonna asking everyone this. The end of reading is here.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Disagree. Disagree by a mile. It's insane. That's an insane, it's, again, it's a perfect technology. People read all the time. We are at our most literate of any time in human history. Book sales are actually doing fantastic. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand there are people that'll then push back on that and they'll say, but what are people reading? You're acting like in the nineteen hundreds, people weren't reading weird pamphlets about like all sorts of cock and Amy bullshit back then either. Like, it is, like, again, I love what you're saying. It's about putting words in your head and people ask me on the road all the time, especially like, how do I get my children interested in reading? Just let them read what they want. It's the same thing. Let them find the comedy that's a little bit more dangerous. Let them find the books that like, I, I, I didn't

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  grow up reading James Joyce as much as my father really tried, but like, no, it was Stephen King. It was, it was anything that had titties and violence in it. Like, that was a wonderful thing for me. And then they'll, they'll get to Finnegan's wake later. Like, just let it, let it be, but reading is not over.

• 1:00:26Anthony Jeselnik?

  No, I, I agree with you. I do worry about like the younger generation that's like with the, the pads and who's like grown up with.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  There's a lot of video, video out there is crazy. We can carry television in our pockets now.

• 1:00:38Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, and we're saying this on a podcast, but I think reading will always have value.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  I don't think reading is over. I agree that the end of reading is not here.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:00:46Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, if you don't understand a word in a book, you should look it up.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:51Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'm the same. I never, I never, I just like, I think I know, I'm gonna assume.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Anthony Jeselnik?

  Maybe I'm wrong and I like figured it out later, but I never look up a word.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  It's how, it's called reading comprehension, baby. Like, assume, assume that you're figuring it out.

• 1:01:05Anthony Jeselnik?

  And I will mispronounce words a lot that I know full well what they mean, but I have only read them.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Anthony Jeselnik?

  So I'll say the word, just be totally wrong and I'm happy with that. I'm fine.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Let me tell you about.

• 1:01:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  I said it right.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  You know the word albeit?

• 1:01:16Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  A-L-B-E-I-T. I didn't know what that word meant forever. But I heard it a million times, cause I thought it was I apostrophe L-L space B-E space I-T.

• 1:01:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Albeit. And it was, I never knew what that word meant. And I was probably well into my twenties before I put those two together.

• 1:01:35Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'll be sure. Um, there are some books that children should not read until they're older.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:01:41Anthony Jeselnik?

  Totally agree. I, there were books, I read American Psycho when I was like twelve, because I read about the controversy and was like, oh, I need to, like, the more controversial, the more I wanted to read it when I was a kid.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:51Anthony Jeselnik?

  My grandmother would talk about reading Gone with the Wind in the bathroom under a candlelight because it had the word damn in it. And she just like, wanted to get to that damn, that I think there's something valuable in, uh, misbehaving by reading.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Anthony Jeselnik?

  I think there's nothing better.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Make it not homework. You're abs, you're absolutely right. Make it punk rock, make it interesting, make it inflammatory.

• 1:02:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  Mm-hmm. Uh, the book is always better than the movie.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Not always the case.

• 1:02:18Anthony Jeselnik?

  Give me an example.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Mostly, almost always the case. Mostly, almost always the case, but I'm sorry. Uh, Children of the Corn is based on a short story. It's a great short story. I'm not knocking my man Stephen King. But they made that movie much, it's much more terrifying to see those children on screen being like, he wants you too, Malachi.

• 1:02:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  I don't, I mean, I, I don't think the book is always better than the movie. I think a lot of times because the movie will sand off the edges.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:47Anthony Jeselnik?

  Well, one of the reasons I love books so much more than movies is they can, they, they can kill everybody. They don't have the budget, they don't have the actor's ego to deal with. But I agree that, that sometimes the movie is, uh, better than book, especially with horror. They can really, uh, they can really nail it.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  The book is often better than, almost always better than the movie, but I, I, listen, I'll say this about one, it's controversial, it's one of my favorite books on the planet. I love Chuck Palahniuk. But what the adaptation of Fight Club became, I would argue is on par with, if not better than the book, just a totally different art form.

• 1:03:21Anthony Jeselnik?

  I loved the film Fight Club, and again, the, the cult around it has become so exhausting that you almost like can't.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's your, it's your problem too that you've run into. Chuck has talked about this.

• 1:03:30Anthony Jeselnik?

  Of course.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  He didn't mean it to be taken seriously, but twelve-year-old me was punching all my friends.

• 1:03:35Anthony Jeselnik?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Part of the problem.

• 1:03:37Anthony Jeselnik?

  Reading the book after you see the movie is like a wonderful one-two punch that kind of fills in the blanks. But I agree, the movie is, uh, I would rather, I'd rather we watch, re-watch the movie than, uh, reread the book.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Anthony Jeselnik?

  Memoirs are fiction.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  No. Disagree.

• 1:03:53Anthony Jeselnik?

  Really?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'm surprised, like, you don't, cause I mean, again, like, you don't lie a little bit.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  No, this is, this is why I'm gonna say this. I, I hear you a hundred percent. Memoirs are different than journalistic integrity.

• 1:04:05Anthony Jeselnik?

  Hmm.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  For sure. But I'm actually gonna go to my mom. I'm gonna go to my mom on this. And it's one of the things that she gifted me in that letter when she read Dirtbag. Because my mother was a huge reader and she really loved books. And she loved literary fiction, but she loved nonfiction too. And she really got it. And what she said was, "The truth, like what happened, is a hunk of wood. But I understand that the sculpture I carve out of that hunk of wood will look a lot different than the sculpture you carve out of that hunk of wood." And so to me, that means, don't get me wrong, memoir is art.

• 1:04:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Mm-hmm. Oh, sure.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  It is, you are choosing what you're putting in and what you're leaving out. But I do not believe that it is fiction. And I, I, kind of a great little moment of that, which I can say is, uh, another thing to think about. I, I talk in the book about walking next to my dad a lot. When I was a kid, my father was this great walker. That's another part of this book. Kids have little legs. So it's much harder, right, to keep up with the adult who is walking with very, very long legs. Well, my mother understood that that was true of my childhood. When you're thirty-four, thirty-five, and you and your husband have domestic issues, maybe even for four or five years, it's a rough patch.

• 1:05:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  But you have such a larger, larger landscape. You have such a larger, um, canvas. That's, it's taking up such a smaller part of you. When you're eight, four or five years is everything.

• 1:05:45Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And so, and so that is, I would say that the wood, the wood is the truth, but the sculptures are gonna be different and you're gonna be changed by how you are viewing those time periods. And I think that's, so I do, I think memoir is not fiction, but you think it's fiction?

• 1:06:01Anthony Jeselnik?

  No, I'm just throwing out, I'm just throwing out statements that are just generic statements.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:06Anthony Jeselnik?

  I don't read enough memoirs to, uh, to have a strong opinion. I think that, I think memoirs are different, depending on what the goal of the memoir is. Uh, I think some can be, it's like your version of events. I think more like documentaries that people make, that produce themselves are fiction than a memoir. I think like the book, if you're writing it down, the truth comes out.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  Where if you're filming it, you can fudge things and lie a little bit.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  And, and listen, I'll say this too. There's something to be said for fiction and nonfiction can both get at the truth. Uh, A Million Little Pieces was originally sold as a memoir.

• 1:06:43Anthony Jeselnik?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  James Fry.

• 1:06:44Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Then famously, he gets busted. He's been telling a bunch of tall tales. I still think that's a great book about addiction. I still think it's a fantastic book.

• 1:06:54Anthony Jeselnik?

  But I think it's irresponsible to claim that you can walk into a crack house and walk back out again. Uh, you know, just out of rehab, because you have this superpower, that that's what bothered me about, and again, people did not return that book. People did not care that it was, that it turned out to be, uh, fiction and not a memoir.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, but I do think he, he had, he had, it's irresponsible to sell that to addicts as like, "You can cure your drug addiction just through sheer force of will like I did."

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  I think that's right.

• 1:07:23Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, even though I doubt people tried to walk into crack houses to, to grab their girlfriend and, uh, and.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Who wasn't really their girlfriend.

• 1:07:32Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  It was actually very polite to the police when they showed up. Sorry.

• 1:07:35Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah. The best thing an author can do for book sales is die.

• 1:07:45Anthony Jeselnik?

  This one came from our producer.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Uh, top three.

• 1:07:55Anthony Jeselnik?

  See, I disagree. I disagree completely because I think if an author dies, it makes you sad. And you don't want to read their work. Like, I was going through. Uh, one year I was like, I'm gonna read all of Kurt Vonnegut's books that I haven't read yet.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:09Anthony Jeselnik?

  And he died in the middle of that and it made me stop.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Cause you were bummed.

• 1:08:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  I was just bummed. Yeah, I was bummed about it. That, I think it's like for an artist, I get like a painter or photographer, if they die, their work goes up in value.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:21Anthony Jeselnik?

  But I think as an author, I think it makes you almost not want to read their books. I would say like, one of the best things you can do is uh, either date like a famous person.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Oof.

• 1:08:32Anthony Jeselnik?

  Or, uh, or, or come on, uh, come on Justin like book club. I think that's way better.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  That will absolutely help some sales. I, listen, this is what I'll say. Marlon James, The Disappears, getting Dwight Garner to call your book the best book of who knows how many years and maybe thus far this century, that will help as well.

• 1:08:51Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yes.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  You can have, you can have moments that will help. Uh, real quick, a movie is also helpful. I'll never forget.

• 1:08:58Anthony Jeselnik?

  That's true.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  I was, I was lucky enough to talk to Daniel Handler once, uh, of a series of unfortunate events. And I was like, man, Jim Carrey lined up that book, that movie came out, by the way, same year as the first Harry Potter. And I was like, man, how did it feel to then no other ones after that? And of course, then there was a Netflix series that works out for him just fine. But he just turned to me and he just said, the world's worst movie is still the best advertisement a book's ever gonna get.

• 1:09:23Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  So, but I, I'm gonna, listen, I'm gonna say that maybe there's something tied up. Maybe you have a fear of death or something that's maybe stopping you from the Vonnegut. I'm just gonna say.

• 1:09:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  I've gone back to Vonnegut after.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Like, sales do go up.

• 1:09:34Anthony Jeselnik?

  They might go up a little. I think people might go and, and, and buy it, but I don't think they read it right away. Like, I just think it kind of, it, for me, anyway, it doesn't make me wanna run out and buy someone's book. Maybe I buy it and save it and read it later on. There are, there have been authors who've died where I'm like, oh, I'd like, it almost puts them in the news.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  They become more in the zeitgeist. Yeah.

• 1:09:52Anthony Jeselnik?

  And then you pick it up, but you don't wanna read it right away. There's something there. You should be allowed to judge someone by their bookshelf.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  No. That's, this is gonna be beautiful. This is, this will be the thing where we disagree.

• 1:10:05Anthony Jeselnik?

  I know. Again, these are not my, these are just things for discussion, but I, cause I get things on my bookshelf. People send me shit.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Anthony Jeselnik?

  That just ends up on the bookshelf.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Anthony Jeselnik?

  And so it's, I don't have a very curated bookshelf. That I'll get like some AI self-publish thing that's like sitting there that I have no idea. I haven't read every book on my shelf because I get sent so much.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Anthony Jeselnik?

  That, or I had, I used to have a copy of, um, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  It was, uh, one of the best nonfiction books ever. And it wa, people would walk into my apartment and th, they just see the swastika immediately. That I like had to, I had to fucking get rid of the book. I'm like, it is one of the greatest books of all time, but it's just swastika and you can't miss it.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  That, uh, that I don't judge, I don't judge people on the bookshelf. Um, it depends.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Somebody's coming back to your house to hook up and then they see your copy of Mouse, but they don't know what Mouse is about?

• 1:10:59Anthony Jeselnik?

  Exactly. Exactly. Um, but I, if, if you walk into someone's house and they've got like four books. You know, I may, I might judge what those four books are, you know? Uh, but again, I also, I don't, I, I agree with you that I, I, I don't think you should judge people totally. But if you walked in and it's all self-help.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I, there's gonna be scenarios, but this is, John Waters very famously said, if you walk into somebody's apartment and there's no books, don't fuck them. Right? And I love that. And it's a great quote and you put it on your college wall and I love John Waters and I have many stories about him. I've met him. He's fantastic. But I am somebody who gives away my books.

• 1:11:38Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  I gift books. So if somebody comes to my house and looks at my bookshelf and judges me, like, there's a lot of gaps. But it's because I am so happy. Like, I really believe books as an art form are meant to be handed off once you are finished with them.

• 1:11:59Anthony Jeselnik?

  Agree.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  And, and then if you wanna return to it, you get to go get it again somewhere else.

• 1:12:03Anthony Jeselnik?

  And with writers, sometimes you're doing, you know, research and I read a lot on my Kindle. So it's like, this book I'm raving about, maybe I don't have.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:10Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, but again, yeah, I give a lot of things away at the same time or get things. Um, I think we'd agree on that. Uh, authors should be allowed to fight one Goodreads reviewer per book.

• 1:12:23Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'm not on Goodreads. I don't really know much about it, but.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  You have to be very careful. Listen, this is what I'll say, very official. Is there a camera? Can I look directly in the camera?

• 1:12:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  I believe that one.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  I've, I've, I've glanced at a couple, which this, uh, here, there we go.

• 1:12:36Anthony Jeselnik?

  There you go.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Goodreads is a place for readers. If authors wanna go there and see what people are saying, that's okay, but they should not interact. They should not respond. And they certainly, certainly shouldn't have any animosity. You let yourself into that space. So that's what I would say.

• 1:12:57Anthony Jeselnik?

  I agree with this totally about comments across the board on anything, on my comedy, on the book club, whatever. Like, you watched this show. Thank you. Do what you want now. And I always say this, if no one hates you, no one loves you either. That people will defend you in the comments that like, it's okay. And I think it's like, it's weird. I've never left a comment in my life.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Anthony Jeselnik?

  Or rarely.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20Anthony Jeselnik?

  That, uh, to leave like a negative comment, and I know Goodreads can be particularly vicious. But I agree, like, Goodreads is not for the author.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Let people go and argue about the book.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Anthony Jeselnik?

  I want divisive art.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'm happy to have a book, like, to have something be divisive amongst people. You need the negative comments and people will defend you. You don't need to get in there. It's always a bad look.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  To get involved, but if you could.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Fight one?

• 1:13:44Anthony Jeselnik?

  Just put, like, just sucker punch, walk them by. They don't even know it's you.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I wouldn't sucker punch. That's, that, that was gonna be my end.

• 1:13:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Okay.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Is I say what I'm saying and at the same time, oh yeah, if one person was, was down to, like, absolutely. And this book is, is a perfect example. Some people read it and they're like, it's not the history that I want it to be. Some people read it and they say, wait, I wanted more memoir, you know? So I would love to like square up, absolutely. Just one, if they're game two and it's just for fun and it's one person per book and they're elected out of their community, that sounds absolutely fantastic. Uh, my favorite Goodreads story is a review of Dirtbag, which you talked about the motorcycle essay.

• 1:14:24Anthony Jeselnik?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Uh, which is called Maybe I Could Die This Way. It's also about suicide. It's about suicidal ideation. It's before my mom.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  One star review.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Just a brutal line. Just, just something so insightful that I'd never thought of before. And it just said, all you need to know about the man that wrote this book was that he once got blackout drunk, rode a motorcycle home from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. And the next morning, instead of giving up alcohol, gave away his bike.

• 1:14:58Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  And I never had that thought. Like, I, that had never even occurred. I was like, that is a perfect read.

• 1:15:05Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Of all the mistakes I was making in my life at that moment. And I asked them if they put it on the soft cover and they said no.

• 1:15:11Anthony Jeselnik?

  Oh, no?

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:12Anthony Jeselnik?

  That would be, I would love, I would love more bad reviews on, uh, on books. That would be great. Uh, last one, adults should be embarrassed to read young adult fiction.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. Come on, come on. Some of your favorite books are young adult fiction. They just don't call it that.

• 1:15:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  Name one.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  J.D. Salinger.

• 1:15:34Anthony Jeselnik?

  You think that's one of my favorite books?

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Oh, there it is. Fuck.

• 1:15:37Anthony Jeselnik?

  I mean, it's a little annoying. Like, I listen, I don't think anyone should be shamed for reading anything.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  But I will eventually, occasionally pick up a book, like a light science fiction and be, and by the writing, I know, like, oh, I fucked up.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  And I will put that down. Harry Potter, I, if you wanna read it to bond with your kids.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Anthony Jeselnik?

  Or you don't like trans people, go ahead and read your Harry Potter. Um, I tried to read the first couple ones on the road years and years ago and I got into three and then was like, I can't anymore.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Second one's real bad too.

• 1:16:07Anthony Jeselnik?

  But, uh, but I, again, I, I think people should read whatever they want. Some people, if you enjoy it, I guess. I, well, this is a tie. This is like in between, like a.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  This is interesting to me cause I like it. Cause I would argue you are.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  What's the word I'm, you proselytize. You proselytize for many different things. But I would argue, one of the things you proselytize for is for adults to be adults. Is that fair to say? Like, I think you, like, you tell jokes that are dark and edgy and hard-hitting. And your idea is like, if you don't like it, like, stop being a bit, like, just be an adult, be in this room, get that this is a joke. So I would argue that the, I, that makes sense. Like, you are like, these books, the books that I look forward to are adult. And they are written well and there's thought in them and they are for adults. And I can see how you're not ready to just read a book about a dragon fucking a fairy, that it's not for you.

• 1:17:09Anthony Jeselnik?

  If it's a dragon fucking a fairy, I think that's adult. That's like adult fantasy. If they're just like friends. You know, then maybe it's young adult.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:17:19Anthony Jeselnik?

  And now, that was the JBC Gauntlet. Great job.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:17:22Anthony Jeselnik?

  You nailed it. Uh, we didn't agree on everything. Uh, and again, these aren't my opinions. These are just like, um, you know, statements to, uh, discuss.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  But now it's time for chapter five.

• 1:17:36Anthony Jeselnik?

  Additional question.

• 1:17:39Anthony Jeselnik?

  Additional question for you. You've gotten, you have talked about getting deeper into Christianity recently. Is that as fun as it sounds?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  I was realizing halfway through this talk, I was like, we're not talking about God at all.

• 1:17:55Anthony Jeselnik?

  There's gonna be a lot of episodes of Jethson and Book Club, but we don't talk about God at all.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  We don't talk about God.

• 1:18:04Anthony Jeselnik?

  We don't have to get into it.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no, no.

• 1:18:05Anthony Jeselnik?

  Is it as fun? Is it as fun as it sounds?

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  I was waiting for this.

• 1:18:12Anthony Jeselnik?

  And listen, I, I'm, but I don't want to interrupt your thought. I am a hardcore.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Christian.

• 1:18:17Anthony Jeselnik?

  Apathiest. Was raised Catholic, rejected, hard apathiest, where I don't care if there's a God.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:23Anthony Jeselnik?

  Like, I'm not making fun of you.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  No, no, I know.

• 1:18:25Anthony Jeselnik?

  Surprised at the pivot.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, I don't know if this is always in you, but you've gotten more into it lately. Uh, is it fun?

• 1:18:34Anthony Jeselnik?

  Is it a good time?

• 1:18:37Anthony Jeselnik?

  You having a blast?

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Ripping it up. Just me and the, me and the old JC.

• 1:18:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  Let me, let me say this real quick.

• 1:18:45Anthony Jeselnik?

  Please, this is not, this is not meant to be a long answer.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Also raised Catholic.

• 1:18:49Anthony Jeselnik?

  Sure.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  And woo, we had a tough run last couple of decades. So one can argue losing faith in the institution is

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  a completely understandable thing.

• 1:19:02Anthony Jeselnik?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  Right. But to answer your question, yeah, listen, I was talking to this guy. I, that's another thing somebody has said about this book, about American Ramblers. Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a coming of age story, and it is. American Rambler is a coming of middle age story. I'm grappling with different things. And one of the things I grappled with is the ways in which my parents have affected me after spending a lifetime of trying to pretend like I wasn't the product of them. And they loved walking. I've gotten into walking. They loved books. Clearly, books has become a center point in my life. And they were both very religious. I would argue a pretty interesting type of spirituality. And that's why I think I'm laughing, because you're saying Christianity.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  But I would argue spirituality has come back in my life, and I was talking to the sky a lot more than I used to be. And it took me a minute to admit to myself that I am praying. You're absolutely right. I am praying. And as far as if it's fun or not,

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  what I, what I can say is that it is a way to communicate with the universe that I find incredibly fulfilling. And that has meant a lot to me.

• 1:20:22Anthony Jeselnik?

  So you, you, you would call it spirituality, certainly not, and I was saying Christianity as opposed to Catholicism. It's certainly not Catholicism you're referring to.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:20:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  You wouldn't even call it Christianity. You would just say spirituality. You're talking to someone, and the more you talk to them, you think it's Jesus.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  I think, I think there's a, a life force in all things. And the, and, and, and I'm gonna, I will be pro-church here for a second. I was raised in a community, I was inner-city Boston, but then I moved to the middle of nowhere Massachusetts.

• 1:20:52Anthony Jeselnik?

  I get, I get, I get that sense of community in the middle of nowhere, is you get up every Sunday and you go to meet everybody in the town square.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  And you look them in the eye.

• 1:21:00Anthony Jeselnik?

  Sure.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  And I just think that's better for us. We, we sing, we give thanks, and we're in the same room together. It's a lot harder to view other people as an asshole. And I think that's helpful.

• 1:21:11Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah, religious people are so not judgmental that I get it. I get it. Um, one additional question. I want to talk hand tattoos.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:19Anthony Jeselnik?

  You've got cool tattoos. I love seeing you on the Today Show. Not that I've ever fucking watched the Today Show.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:21:26Anthony Jeselnik?

  But I've seen pictures of you smiling, holding up a book, talking books on the Today Show.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Sometimes pretty risky Ted books, yeah.

• 1:21:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, that, do you pick the books or do they say, hey, you want?

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  No, no, no, they, they are very, very awesome about how much they let me talk about anything.

• 1:21:41Anthony Jeselnik?

  We'll have to have you back on and talk more about how you got that job. I'm fascinated by it.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:45Anthony Jeselnik?

  I want a hand tattoo so bad. And like, you look like you came out of the womb with those fucking hand tattoos on. You know what I mean? Like, they fit you. I feel like it might be a little wrong for me. Talk me out of a hand tattoo.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Uh, I can do that in two seconds.

• 1:22:00Anthony Jeselnik?

  Go for it.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Look at me. I'm like an eighty-seven Subaru. I'm just like, I've got so many bumper stickers on me, like, what's one more? Look at you.

• 1:22:12Anthony Jeselnik?

  Sure, I keep, I keep the tattoos up here. I keep them hidden.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Oh, you have some?

• 1:22:17Anthony Jeselnik?

  Oh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I've got way more than you would think. I'm, I'm in the arms and in the chest, but I keep them.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  We're like opposite.

• 1:22:24Anthony Jeselnik?

  If I was in a t-shirt, you would be able to see parts of them. But I've got a lot of tattoos. I just, I'm obsessed with the hand.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  You would be surprised by how few.

• 1:22:35Anthony Jeselnik?

  You keep them all down here on the arm?

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  I keep them in a lot of visible places, like on the neck.

• 1:22:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  My wife had to talk me out of getting the face.

• 1:22:42Anthony Jeselnik?

  Ooh.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so we've, no, I'm sorry, if you've already gotten bumper stickers, no, I'm not gonna talk you out of it. Get a hand tattoo.

• 1:22:47Anthony Jeselnik?

  Okay.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  What do you want?

• 1:22:49Anthony Jeselnik?

  I want a, I want a peregrine falcon mid-dive, right here, on my, uh, I hope I'm pronouncing it right. If I'm mispronouncing it, I'm so embarrassed.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Anthony Jeselnik?

  But I was rereading our, our friend, uh, Nana's, uh, um, Chingan All Stars, to do the foreword, and they talk about, I'm a peregrine falcon mid-dive, and I was like, that is, I, I don't have a bird tattoo yet, and I always liked the bird on the hand, but that mid-dive, I think.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  You should, you should like a super, like, like a fine line?

• 1:23:20Anthony Jeselnik?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Dude, dude, I'm sorry, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the wrong person to talk to about it.

• 1:23:24Anthony Jeselnik?

  You're the right, you're the perfect person. I didn't think you were really gonna talk me out, uh, but I, you may have talked me in.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  I think you gotta do it.

• 1:23:31Anthony Jeselnik?

  Like, right where you have your crown, I would get that falcon.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Anthony Jeselnik?

  I can't do the fingers. My, I got skinny fingers, but, uh, but maybe, maybe one day.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  And also, there's worse things from Nana's book you could get tattooed on you, so that one sounds great.

• 1:23:43Anthony Jeselnik?

  I was so close to suck my dick, America, like, so close, that I, and I was just like, I'll get arrested at some point, and this will come back to bite me, that I got bracelets made, that I wear all the time, uh, but I, I really thought about that tattoo hard. My whole foreword for his book is about that, basically.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:24:00Anthony Jeselnik?

  And now it's time for acknowledgements.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to say, the end of the book, thank you to you.

• 1:24:09Anthony Jeselnik?

  I need you to, like, pause for a second, so we can just have acknowledgements come across this.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Okay, sorry.

• 1:24:14Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'm fucking with you. You can do, you can do, uh, whatever. Acknowledgements, like, recommend me a book, uh, plug whatever you wanna plug, or just give thanks to me.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Very Christian of you. Love to give thanks, love to give thanks. Uh, no, acknowledgements real quick. Uh, my wife, my agent, my editor, amazing, they helped make this happen, to shout out a couple of books, uh, you know John Darnell's Wolf and White Van? I think you, you've had it as a book club pick, but I was trying to think of, like, brutal books that, that you might enjoy on my way over here, and that was like one that was, that was very much in the forefront of my mind.

• 1:24:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  I've read a bunch of his, that's a great one.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  He's so, he's so, I mean, talk about somebody who, who writes so well for music, but then it's translated into another genre, like, he's just like, so, so amazing. Marlon James, The Disappears, fantastic. Emily St. John Mandell, we don't need to talk about, we have that bond. Although I'm interested, you love The Glass Hotel, that's your favorite one of hers, right?

• 1:25:09Anthony Jeselnik?

  It was, and then rereading it, we just did the episode, it aired, it aired today, and after reading it, it made me like her other stuff more, like, it didn't make me like Glass Hotel less.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Anthony Jeselnik?

  It made me appreciate See of Tranquility.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Anthony Jeselnik?

  Made me appreciate Exit Party, and I think whatever first book you read of hers will be your favorite.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Anthony Jeselnik?

  And that was Station Eleven.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, there's just like passages in that that will stick with me forever, but I love Exit Party.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Anthony Jeselnik?

  And I think that's an absolute, uh, absolute banger.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  She's crushing. She's absolutely crushing. Um, and then, yeah, I just wanna say, I really appreciate what you're doing for books. I'm not, I'm, this is, this is cheesy, this is blowing smoke, this is bigging you up too much, I don't give a shit.

• 1:25:47Anthony Jeselnik?

  Please.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  I'm really proud that you're using your platform to do this, and what I really wanna acknowledge is that you are a real fucking reader. You read so much. I would argue probably this year that I've just had, I've been on the road so much, you're reading more than me right now. Like, you read, and it's something that I can see, like, there, like, it's not bullshit, this is something that you care deeply about. And publishing is such a fast, I mean, that's another thing I could come on to talk about, like, how the publishing industry works, and how wild and kinda off-kilter it is. So to have somebody with your platform, with your reach, with your connections to so many fans, um, that are actually gonna take your book seriously,

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  because there are other people out in the world who are just like, yeah, read this book, but like, that's kinda it. But like, you are having real, genuine discussions about the work that you love, and it's not just, oh, hey, this other person that my agent represents has a book coming out, so let me do it. Like, you are talking about old books, you are talking about new books. And I just deeply, deeply appreciate what you are doing, and I'm stoked that you're here at The Ringer.

• 1:26:54Anthony Jeselnik?

  Thank you.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Like, I love that you have corporate support, so I wanted to bring you a gift.

• 1:26:57Anthony Jeselnik?

  Please. Um, I accept, I accept tribute.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  I don't know if you have one of these, but it's a Ringer tote.

• 1:27:04Anthony Jeselnik?

  A Ringer tote? I don't have the tote yet.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  You see, so I, I figured, I talked to Bill, he sent me a tote.

• 1:27:10Anthony Jeselnik?

  It's part of my Ringer collection.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  And, and, and there you go. I don't, I'm sure you don't have one of those.

• 1:27:14Anthony Jeselnik?

  Listen, I have one, I think it's right next to me, but I don't have one to take home.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  See, there you go.

• 1:27:19Anthony Jeselnik?

  This, I can use this as an asset.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  You can steal that one, you can take it. But also, I wanted something for you to remember me by.

• 1:27:27Anthony Jeselnik?

  That is an incredible likeness.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  It's like me in like, three years.

• 1:27:32Anthony Jeselnik?

  I was gonna say, three years ago.

• 1:27:35Anthony Jeselnik?

  But this is good. I think, I think, this was you if you like, if your wife made you buy nicer hats.

• 1:27:44Anthony Jeselnik?

  I think would be great. So that's gonna go on the bookshelf for sure.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  She hates this hat so much.

• 1:27:48Anthony Jeselnik?

  Thank you. She does?

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Oh, she hates it.

• 1:27:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  You keep it, you keep it sharp.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm trying.

• 1:27:53Anthony Jeselnik?

  You keep it, was that, was that custom fitted?

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:27:57Anthony Jeselnik?

  I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take the, I'm gonna take the gnome, I'm gonna take the mug home in the tote bag. We need, we're gonna have Jethson and Book Club tote bags for sure.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 1:28:07Anthony Jeselnik?

  Um, that was acknowledgements, and now it's time for To Be Continued. Isaac, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for coming out here, uh, off-schedule, and sitting down with me and talking to me. Again, you were instrumental in the formation of this book club. I, uh, I appreciate so much our talks about, about literature, about books. You have turned me on to books, uh, Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, that was all you.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:28:34Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, Marlon James, you got me an advance copy, and that book is like, uh, just the banger of bangers.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  So good.

• 1:28:40Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, I appreciate all the help you've given us with this book club, in setting up people.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Do you know Paul Beatty, The Sellout?

• 1:28:46Anthony Jeselnik?

  I have not read it yet, I know it.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  That's the next, that's the next one I'll get you. Sorry, keep going.

• 1:28:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Thank you. But again, like, you are, you're on like, ground zero of Jethson and Book Club, you're welcome here anytime. I will, I'd use you as a resource, and I am, I am proud that we are friends, and the next time you get married, I expect to be there. Uh, I cannot wait for that.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  I'll let you officiate. It'll be horrible.

• 1:29:08Anthony Jeselnik?

  Next week, next, I, I've, I've not officiated a wedding yet, and I'm like fearing the day, because people have asked, and I'm like, oh, this would have gone so, so badly if I do, if what was in my head, anyway. Uh, next week, uh, To Be Continued, next week, we are doing our review and mailbag on The Trees by Percival Everett. It is the end of the month. Again, uh, if you're watching this, get your questions in by October twenty-sixth to [email protected], and we will see you at the end of the month with my recap and mailbag for The Trees by Percival Everett. Uh, again, thank you to Isaac Fitzgerald.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, brother.

• 1:29:50Anthony Jeselnik?

  Thanks for watching, and remember, uh, TV is bad, movies are bad, give me something else that's bad.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Uh, TikTok, small-form quibi, whatever that shit is.

• 1:30:01Anthony Jeselnik?

  TikTok, TikTok book reviewers, short-form videos where they like hold the books backwards, and then make you sit and watch for five minutes to find out what books they're talking about.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  They're just playing the algorithm. They're just playing the algorithm.

• 1:30:13Anthony Jeselnik?

  Uh, books are good, read your books, enjoy your books. Thank you for watching. See you next week.