Episode 957 - Charles Demers
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:What the fuckocrats?
Marc:what the fuck publicans whatever few of you are left listening i don't know how's it going i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf how you holding up i know i know not great many of you i know myself included it was rough going rough going this weekend rough going this year rough going the last couple
Marc:But I do want to say I want to say a couple of things.
Marc:First, I'd like to talk about a thing I'm doing that is.
Marc:Well, it should be uplifting.
Marc:It should be spiritually comforting on some level.
Marc:I'm doing I'm hosting a great event.
Marc:I think it's not a political event, but it's a music event.
Marc:And I just wanted to draw a little attention to it.
Marc:It's called Across the Great Divide.
Marc:And it's a benefit concert for the American Music Association and the Blues Foundation.
Marc:It's going to be here in Los Angeles at the Ace Theater on October 19th.
Marc:I'm hosting it.
Marc:And performing that night will be John Prine, Bob Weir, Lucinda Williams, Doyle Bramhall II, Shamika Copeland, Larkin Poe, Joe Louis Walker.
Marc:Tash Neal, maybe some special guests, and Jimmy Vivino, my old buddy from the Conan Show, the amazing guitar player and band leader, will be the music director and band leader of the event, and you can still get tickets for that.
Marc:You can just go to acehotel.com and click on the calendar there and get tickets.
Marc:It's going to be a fun event, and who knows, maybe Jimmy will let me play in number.
Marc:That said, today on my show, on this show that you're listening to now, I have sort of a I would like to consider a special guest because I don't get many guys down here from Canada.
Marc:And Charlie Demers is a comedian, social activist and writer.
Marc:who I've worked with many times.
Marc:And a lot of you may not know him, but he's a sweet guy.
Marc:He's a smart guy, politically engaged guy and a very funny guy.
Marc:He's opened for me many times up in Canada and we've shared meals.
Marc:And he's just one of the lovely people that I've met in my life doing this job.
Marc:You might know him, actually, because he is a
Marc:He's actually if you have kids, you've probably heard him as a voice on stuff like My Little Pony and Beat Bugs.
Marc:But today he's actually promoting his book.
Marc:It's a comedic crime novel called Property Values, and it comes out on October 16th.
Marc:And you can preorder it now.
Marc:It's a great book.
Marc:It's a it's a smart book.
Marc:So look forward to that conversation I'm going to have with Charlie Demers in just a few minutes.
Marc:I just wanted to get that up front because some of you it's interesting.
Marc:I get emails and feedback from a lot of people over the years.
Marc:You know, my my interviews with guests that people all know and that draw people in that may not have listened to show or one thing.
Marc:But a lot of people have told me over the years that my interviews with people they've never heard of are generally better interviews.
Marc:And look, I have my own opinions and I'm not I don't think they're they're better necessarily.
Marc:But I think what makes them interesting is that people.
Marc:like yourself out there, listen to the show and you're like, I don't know this guy.
Marc:Am I going to listen?
Marc:And those of you who are into the show and not just into celebrity, you'll end up hearing these cats you've never heard or these women that you've never heard.
Marc:And I do think women can be cats too.
Marc:I'm very sensitive to my language right now at this moment in history, but, uh,
Marc:But some people tend to enjoy the unknown people to them better than the largely known people.
Marc:So I don't know why I'm giving all this setup.
Marc:I'm just a big fan of Charlie.
Marc:And I was happy he was down here for doing some book promotion and meeting with people because he's one of the good ones.
Marc:He's one of the good guys in this racket of comedy.
Marc:So onward.
Marc:I'd like to thank everybody who came down to the intimate shows at Dynasty Typewriter here in Los Angeles.
Marc:Great venue.
Marc:And on Thursday night, we had a pretty freeform show.
Marc:A lot of the stuff I've been working on, trying to put together, but it was about an hour and 40 minutes.
Marc:And a lot of it was new stuff.
Marc:I had a lot of freedom of mind, which I like to do and I like to have in a small environment.
Marc:But Saturday was a little rough.
Marc:Saturday was a little rough, folks.
Marc:I will not deny that.
Marc:Saturday night, that was the day that all women in this country were psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually assaulted by the confirmation of
Marc:of judge brett kavanaugh that you know the trauma that is real that comes from something like that action on behalf of this senate and this president is trauma and it's trauma to a large group of people but mostly women but you know all of us
Marc:Now, there are obviously two sides to this, and I still am fascinated at how close it is, that there is sort of an almost 50-50 divide on how people feel about what's going on in this country, and I am baffled by that.
Marc:And I don't need any feedback from right-wing people about, you know, the reason you're baffled is because you're whatever.
Marc:There's a hyper-nationalistic shit show going on in this country, and it seems almost unresolvable, but the bottom line is that on Saturday...
Marc:all women in this country were psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and within the laws of this country and how they work, assaulted.
Marc:And that's insanely traumatic and can create a lot of hopelessness, a lot of anger, a lot of frustration.
Marc:But the issue becomes sort of like, well, how do we move through that?
Marc:How do you stay engaged and take action?
Marc:And obviously, we're all hoping the voting works.
Marc:And when I say I hope the voting works, I hope that people get out.
Marc:I hope that all of you are getting registered.
Marc:You do need to register to vote.
Marc:And I also hope that it works just on a bureaucratic and technological level, that it's not going to be fucked with because this government that we have has done nothing to protect that on purpose.
Marc:Obviously, having performed on Saturday night,
Marc:They were my crowd.
Marc:They came to see me and mostly grownups.
Marc:It was 10 o'clock at night.
Marc:But when my buddy Ryan Singer went on stage, I could hear the type of laughter that was happening.
Marc:I know that kind of laughter.
Marc:I know the laughter that I experienced working in New York City in the weeks and months after 9-11.
Marc:There was a laughter on behalf of people.
Marc:People didn't know what to do with themselves, so they come out and they want relief.
Marc:It's not even that they want distraction.
Marc:They want connection and they want some sort of reprieve.
Marc:They don't want to get lost.
Marc:They don't want to run away, but they just want a break.
Marc:They want an engaged break.
Marc:human emotional break from, you know, what seems like a dire and hopeless situation, which it does seem like that.
Marc:And I could hear the quality of laughter, that type of laughter, the laughter of trauma, you know, comes in spurts.
Marc:It's like it's almost a desperate reflex to to find some sort of relief.
Marc:And I could feel it Saturday night.
Marc:And I had to address conversationally in between bits my own sort of sadness and frustration at what's happening.
Marc:But somehow or another, we have to go on.
Marc:We have to keep living.
Marc:And we have to do what we can do.
Marc:You do what's in front of you.
Marc:And you also make plans to do whatever action you can to correct the course or at least give it your best shot.
Marc:to make our way through this fucking dark period.
Marc:No one knows what's gonna happen, and there's no real way to console yourself.
Marc:I mean, countries have fallen.
Marc:We've seen it in my lifetime all around the world.
Marc:Things shift, places become shitholes, places become tyrannical disasters, dictatorial disasters, fucking banana republics, and we always thought we were above that.
Marc:And we always thought that that America, you know, given that we were given a certain amount of freedom to sort of live the lives we want to do and make a way for ourselves, that there is a it's not so much entitlement.
Marc:But I can't fault people that got too comfortable in the sense that that's sort of one of the reasons we live here, one of the reasons we we love this country.
Marc:But I do think a lot of us got over the eight years of of Obama.
Marc:There was a kind of what were we doing?
Marc:You know, just working on me, you know, being mindful, getting our core tight.
Marc:But, you know, now, you know, now we are where we are and I'm not blaming anybody.
Marc:You know, that's just why not experience relief and excitement and progress?
Marc:Well, now it's all been shattered and we have to figure out how to reengage and not crumble into ourselves.
Marc:And allow and turn that anger inward, as they say, which is what depression is.
Marc:And now there is plenty of evidence for what we assume the future will be.
Marc:That's real anger that you should feel.
Marc:And if you do turn that on yourself, you will get depressed and apathetic and crumble.
Marc:So don't start drinking again.
Marc:Don't stay in bed all day.
Marc:Live your life.
Marc:Take care of the people that are in your life.
Marc:Do the right thing by them.
Marc:And then, you know, take the actions that we can, however you're able to do it with the time you have to try to do your civic duty and do what's right.
Marc:So.
Marc:Take care of yourselves and stay strong.
Marc:Stay focused.
Marc:You know, process the grief, process the anger, but don't internalize it.
Marc:Don't give yourself cancer and don't take yourself out of the game.
Marc:And don't drink if you're sober.
Marc:okay and vote could you so charlie demers this is a a special conversation because he's a canadian comic but he's also a canadian activist and in canada there's still the ability to have an active political dialogue and social dialogue around things that uh you know many people don't even know the definition of or certainly the application of in this country like socialism class differences you know indigenous peoples so
Marc:It was a very well-rounded and great conversation.
Marc:He's a great guy.
Marc:And his new book is a crime novel that is politically informed.
Marc:It's called Property Values.
Marc:It comes out on October 16th.
Marc:You can pre-order it now.
Marc:And this is me talking to Canadian comedian Charlie Damaris.
Marc:These are my big problems.
Marc:I mean, I aspire to them.
Marc:Yeah, that and my diet, which I don't want to bring up again because you've told me that you're tired of people half your size.
Guest:Yeah, well, I said a third, but that's very kind of you.
Marc:Well, they're watching their weight, these guys you were staying with?
Guest:I just... I mean, there's... You know, fat is one of those problems where when people talk about it... Yeah.
Guest:And they'll... Like, you... Someone who is just objectively much... Yeah.
Guest:Like, they're standing there.
Guest:They know that you're a fat guy and they're, like, a regular-sized guy.
Guest:And then they'll talk... Yeah.
Guest:About how fat they are.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And how... Like, just with that feeling of...
Guest:disgust at themselves right and and uh you know like graham clark has a joke about like when it when a beautiful person says like oh i look like i'm such a mess and he's like well you must think i'm a monster like if you are worried about so yeah i'm in a like you know trader joe's yesterday with um yeah thin young friend who's counting the uh he goes oh five grams of sugar in this um
Guest:Fat-free yogurt.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because five grams of sugar, that's up there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, I got to stay a whole week with them.
Marc:So, what are you going to do?
Marc:I mean, I don't know if it implies that you're a monster, but it does imply that your friends are self-involved.
Marc:I mean, that's a possibility.
Guest:I mean, I think it's, I think, taking a certain amount of... Like, I do try to eat...
Guest:Healthy when I can.
Guest:I'm more of a, it's more of a binge problem than a eating bad food problem.
Marc:Really?
Marc:I've always wondered that, but it's hard to breach the topic with the people.
Guest:You've always wondered that about me?
Marc:Well, just about people who are a little heavier in general.
Marc:Well, I mean, we went out to eat and you weren't holding back.
Marc:No.
Yeah.
Marc:That's kind of you to remind me.
Marc:From what I recall, there was blueberry gastrique involved.
Guest:There was a blueberry gastrique, a famous- What was the name of that place?
Guest:Argo, the Argo Cafe.
Guest:I mean, this could be the death knell, because everybody keeps worried about the secret's going to get out about the Argo, and it'll just be overrun.
Guest:It was almost on- You mean the Argo Cafe in Vancouver?
Guest:Ontario in second.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah, there was a blueberry gastrique.
Guest:Duck, I think.
Guest:Was it duck?
Guest:It was a duck confit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I always get the duck.
Guest:I mean, and when you're eating duck at lunch, I mean, I was at the Argo a few weeks ago with a friend who is high up at an animation studio that's close by Atomic Cartoons.
Guest:They're like a couple blocks away from the Argo.
Guest:And we went over and there's a lunch specials board.
Guest:And we got brisket, which was served on gnocchi.
Guest:Brisket and gnocchi, that's the end of your day.
Guest:Like it's not a lunch.
Guest:It's like afternoon canceled.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then those are the moments when you have a problem.
Guest:But no, I would say like on the whole, I tend to eat...
Guest:But fairly healthy things in unhealthy amounts would be, I would think, the tendency.
Marc:The brisket on gnocchi, I'm still hung up on that.
Marc:I used to work at a deli and they used to make a sandwich.
Marc:If you could call it a sandwich, it was basically brisket in between two potato pancakes.
Yeah.
Guest:I just nearly did a spit tank all over your setup.
Marc:Yeah, and I think there's like gravy involved.
Marc:You know, just sort of like crazy.
Marc:I mean- It sounds so good.
Marc:Yeah, I've been on a sugar detox.
Marc:Once I get into a diet thing, I've gotten emaciated in my life and thought like, this is amazing.
Marc:And people are saying, are you sick?
Marc:You look sick.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You get older, you get gaunt.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But what's the process?
Marc:So you consider yourself heavy.
Guest:I mean, you're being very sweet about it.
Guest:I mean, I'm a very fat man.
Guest:So I'm the second generation in my family that I know of.
Guest:So my mom...
Guest:Both my mom and I were very young when we lost a parent.
Guest:So my mom lost her dad when she was seven and my mom died when I was 10.
Guest:She had cancer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we both, I guess, and I've heard this, there's a great Canadian writer named Paul Quarrington who talked about when his...
Guest:mom died in his mid-teens like then he just spun off into booze and drugs really because that's what you do with the but if you're 10 or 7 you don't necessarily you don't think oh i'm gonna and so so i've often wondered start shooting dope exactly yeah so maybe if i'd been 20 when that had happened i'd be a heroin addict and thin and thin
Marc:And instead I got on the gastrique.
Marc:I got right on the gastrique.
Marc:I guess that makes sense.
Marc:You know, that's sort of like the kind of comforting, like strange attempts at self parenting when when you lose a parent or they're detached or whatever, like because you sort of left to your own devices emotionally to feel good.
Guest:I have been told that there is a like orphaned among obese men, like some sort of orphaning or quasi orphaning.
Guest:It is kind of overrepresented that it does tend to be like, you know, I mean, when my daughter was born and I would watch her, you know, nursing at my wife's breast, it occurred to me that like,
Guest:You're struck by this feeling of like every feeling of safety and security and comfort that she's ever going to have in her life is going to be essentially like a metaphor for what she's literally feeling right now.
Guest:And so you can definitely understand it, how putting stuff into your mouth, feeling yourself.
Guest:It is kind of- It's very satisfying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's a surrogate kind of parenting.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then when you're not eating, it's just you're panicking.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I get that with, I notice that about myself in terms of doing those things to feel better.
Marc:There's nothing better than just shoveling food into your face, really.
Marc:I mean, and I've done a lot of drugs.
Marc:I mean, there's nothing more satisfying than just eating.
Marc:And when I'm not eating or I'm not fidgeting with something or I'm not engaged, like I was smoking a cigar when you walk up here, they're just like, if I'm not on my phone, if I'm just sitting there, I got about 10 good minutes with that.
Guest:I thought you were going to say seconds.
Guest:I mean, minutes is like, I feel like, isn't that normal?
Marc:Can people sit for longer than that?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I think so.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:But like, I can sit for longer, but the thoughts aren't going to be great.
Marc:No.
Marc:No.
Marc:It's going to go downhill.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's interesting that you can tag it to that.
Marc:So she died when you were 10?
Guest:I was 10.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She got very sick when I was five.
Guest:And so she would be in and out of the hospital.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, sometimes it'd be six weeks at a time.
Guest:Sometimes there'd be kind of a warning.
Guest:You'd go to school and then come home.
Guest:And, you know, during the day, mom had had to go to the hospital and maybe she was going to be there for weeks.
Guest:And, you know, it's one of those things where, I mean, it was an early political lesson because it was laid out to me in pretty clear language for a little kid that like...
Guest:If we lived in a different country, this could have wiped us off.
Guest:I mean, essentially, it's the kind of thing where if we'd been in the States, I would have had all the emotional trauma, but also my family would have been just economically wiped off the mat.
Marc:If they didn't have the insurance, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And so it's almost it's a political education, but there's something also sort of like indoctrinating about it.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Canada is the best.
Guest:I mean, these kinds of moments do keep coming up in my, you know, the prime minister who.
Guest:legislated official multiculturalism in the 70s, Pierre Trudeau.
Guest:That's what led to my mother-in-law moving from Chicago to Toronto.
Guest:She's from Hong Kong.
Guest:And on my wedding night, my mother-in-law was quite into her cups and she demanded that I acknowledge that Pierre Trudeau was responsible for my marriage.
Guest:That if it weren't for Pierre Trudeau,
Guest:Trudeau Sr.
Guest:Trudeau Sr.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Justin's dad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That I would not have met the love of my life.
Marc:Now she's doing it to you.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:That's what I'm saying.
Marc:Canada's her best.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, believe me, dude.
Marc:I mean, I think I talked to you right when Trump was elected and I was looking.
Marc:I talked to you and then you gave me the bad news that like, yeah, they're going to slap 15% on anything you buy in Vancouver now.
Guest:They're not going to happen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, the thing with Canada in general is there's a tendency towards smugness because we're... So it's like Canada's like the me, the 300-pound dude who... But the older brother is like...
Guest:is like strung out on meth and so it's like you're just a fat guy so you don't have to deal with your own problem conjoined twin yeah it's strung out on meth because canada is like canada's got horrible problems with inequality and racism and environmental devastation all these kinds of you know there are there are huge parts of the country on on um you know indigenous reserves where you can't drink the water that comes out of the sink yeah
Guest:But every night, and we all watch American television, we watch American movies, and you turn on CNN and there's some guy, some senator from wherever saying, we're presenting the bill, we're going to use Mexican babies as snowshoes.
Guest:And you're like, yeah, well, compared to that dude, it doesn't seem as nuts.
Guest:But it's a real problem because people put off dealing with Canada's very real problems.
Marc:I mean, I've always assumed, and I might be wrong, that there's something about being able to live with some self-respect because you can get sick and not be afraid that it does change the disposition on almost a genetic level.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, that there's sort of a comfort that what I find when I go to Canada, I may be romanticizing because I've gone both ways.
Marc:I've gone up there and thought, you know, this is the most boring place in the world.
Marc:And then after Trump, I've gone up thinking like, this is the way life should be up here.
Marc:Well, boring is good in some way.
Marc:No, I think that's true.
Marc:I think that it feels like there's that whatever component...
Marc:that socialism on whatever level may bring is a lack of the insane kind of greedy competition that is at the core of almost every transaction, both emotional and financial in this country.
Guest:I mean, yeah, but we have those guys too, but they have to be passive aggressive about it.
Guest:So there is, to a certain extent, there is a kind of honesty to at least a money grubber in the United States.
Guest:It doesn't feel like they have to hide it.
Guest:It doesn't feel like... I was in Beverly Hills earlier today, and there's guys driving around in a Ferrari.
Yeah.
Guest:And I mean, as a Canadian, I just think like even a rich Canadian would be embarrassed to be that on the nose, like to drive a Ferrari in Beverly Hills.
Guest:But there's an honesty to that at least where you know what you're dealing with.
Guest:And I think Canadian racism is much more passive aggressive.
Guest:Canadian greed is much more passive aggressive.
Guest:It's just...
Guest:And I don't want to say that it's... I really wouldn't want to come across as saying things are just as bad.
Marc:So you're saying they don't use the N-word, they just give a condescending look?
Guest:Some of them use the N-word, but yeah, definitely condescending looks.
Guest:Although now, I mean, in the age of social media, you get to see now every little explosion of...
Guest:So there was a small town coffee donut shop confrontation that went viral recently from small town Canada.
Guest:There's definitely some ugliness.
Guest:I mean, there's some really good parts.
Marc:Well, that's the other problem with the type of shameless ugliness that's going on now here is that it kind of somehow or another gives some kind of zeitgeist-ian free pass to monsters everywhere.
Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's like I remember Slavoj Žižek during the George W. Bush torture stuff, talking about philosophically the important distinction between a society where we know torture is happening, but we pretend it isn't versus the guys just go, yeah, no, we torture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You want to see a picture?
Guest:Exactly.
Exactly.
Guest:And that there is a there's an important that desire for the hypocrisy actually does play a slightly civilizing role of just like wanting to pretend that you're not doing.
Marc:Well, yeah, didn't denial is an important part of civilization.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's an important component.
Marc:I don't think that's true.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But into at least pretending you're civilized for the most part.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, what we're living in now is some sort of strange mixture of insane, constant barrage of lying and yet the most transparent government that we've had in years.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because of the persistence of the press and just because of the shameless behavior.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Of these craven monsters.
Guest:But that was the terrifying thing.
Guest:And in a way, that was where a situation in Canada kind of preceded the American version, which was what we had with Mayor Rob Ford.
Guest:In Toronto?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was the first time somebody said, well, what if I just didn't resign in disgrace?
Yeah.
Guest:Like, what if I just, I know you're saying I have to.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I don't legally have to.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And if it's just, you know, that I'm being governed by social norms, what if I just.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's the same thing of like, what if I just don't mind if you call me racist?
Marc:Well, that's the fucked up thing is like, you know, I've been doing that bit on stage or talking about it.
Marc:So there are no rules, apparently.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There was just an understanding laid down by a certain continuity of presidential behavior, but nothing was written down.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I say like, I think it's time we make notes.
Marc:We should make notes and people should write some shit down.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:If we survive this.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Norms.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We just assumed that people would behave properly.
Marc:Why would anyone assume that?
Guest:Well, the other thing is that feeling of like when your guy gets in.
Guest:So there was an immense concentration of executive power during the Obama years, too, that was a continuation of what was happening under George W. Bush.
Guest:But because people felt like, well, this is one of our guys, this is a good guy, it's okay, and what could go wrong?
Marc:Well, yeah, I guess it was always the assumption constitutionally.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That that these these people, these leaders would put the nation into some sort of priority around, you know, how people are treated, respect for the law and respect for the actual system of government.
Marc:But once the government over time got turned out to be just as like as P.G.
Marc:O'Rourke said, a parliament of whores, you know, that they don't give a fuck.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:About the country.
Guest:Really.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the one thing I will give Canada is I feel like the lies that we tell are at least the good lot.
Guest:Like, so there is this idea of like Canada is not, we don't conquer countries.
Guest:We're a peacekeeping country.
Guest:All of that is bullshit, but at least it's nice that that's what people want to believe about the country.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it is kind of, you know, the lies that a civilization tells itself, they are important.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The other thing you risk, and you're probably more lefty than I am, I don't know.
Marc:I consider myself a lefty to a degree.
Marc:But there's an idealism to progressiveness that is almost unattainable.
Marc:And what we're dealing with in this country, I think, a bit is that we don't have a real...
Marc:leftist movement that has any traction governmentally.
Marc:So when you get real leftist thoughts and ideas, you get people that are to the right of the leftist, but still within the same party-ish, who are like, you're gonna fuck this up.
Marc:We got nothing but monsters in 48% of the country that just wanna, they wanna steamroll all of it.
Marc:So if we're gonna have this problem amongst ourselves, how are we gonna move forward?
Marc:And then there's always a negotiation, which implies that denial that you're talking about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think the problem is that the left and the center often have to work together, but the left understands the anger that's on the right.
Guest:And then the center just doesn't understand anger.
Guest:They think that anger always has to be ugly.
Guest:And I think people on the left and people on the right, they- Way right.
Guest:Way right.
Guest:Yeah, at least they get that something's wrong and that being angry about the situation is a natural human.
Guest:Now, the question is, do you take that in a really ugly way?
Marc:racist misogynist like how does that anchor come out sure because there are ways for anger to come out that can be really beautiful and and can actually make things yeah transcendent yeah or at least uh you know uh you know trend transgressive culturally but uh elevating yeah yeah so so like okay so you're you're you're being told as your mother is dying um
Marc:that uh you're better than americans because uh at least we still have a house yeah so my dad would say you may have lost your mother but always keep your smug sense of self-righteousness no one can take that from you but i think the point i was going to make and oddly i'm going to get back to it in terms of seeing your own daughter it is right yeah nursing is that this idea of primal union
Marc:The idea that, you know, there is a period in a child's life where they are in true symbiotic relationships with the mother to the point where like this is something I learned psychologically that that at some point you have to actually disrupt that on purpose.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In order for that person to have a sense of self.
Marc:So if that isn't actively, like if you continue the symbiotic dynamic through codependency as the child ages, you're going to get somebody that's going to be in need of self-parenting and it's going to end up a bad thing.
Marc:That's really interesting.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:And it just makes you feel like too much love or not enough love.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're going to end up fucked.
Guest:Like it's so hard to... I always tend towards the slightly sappier... Too much love?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I think it's a matter of...
Marc:Like if I look back at my life, just an ability to be firm and have identifiable values and not buckle to pouting.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:You know, you might be serving that purpose.
Guest:No, but that's the thing, too, is like when you as a parent, I mean, the discipline that you give is a form of love and saying no to your kid is a form of love.
Marc:You just got to sell them on that.
Guest:I mean, you don't really.
Guest:They're much smaller than you and they can't reach these things on their own.
Guest:And she'll figure that out down the line.
Guest:How old is she?
Guest:She's four.
Guest:So, I mean, right now it's just peak.
Guest:Just everything's adorable.
Guest:Everything's hilarious.
Guest:She's just this little person.
Guest:She just like...
Guest:where there's just every day there's some two weeks ago she says uh because my father-in-law was in town she was you know she's figuring out you know who's got penises who has vulvas and then you know she says to me she says uh she's figuring that out what because everyone's naked oh yeah well this is the other thing about canada that you guys don't realize um so she so she's a lot of nude partying parenting nude yeah
Guest:She says to me, she says, Daddy, do you have a penis?
Guest:I said, yes.
Guest:She goes, do you have an ugly penis?
Guest:Like, that's the follow-up?
Guest:Like, she's got a sub-question.
Guest:What's she using as her gauge?
Marc:I mean, you might want to ask that question.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Guest:I mean, then it was-
Guest:But it's a constant, like, I remember her walking in on me in the bathroom when she was much younger.
Guest:And she just points, she points at Mike Rogers and says, that your vulva there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, just kind of.
Guest:You're making chitchat.
Guest:But that whole thing is very different for me because, like I said, I lost my mom when I was 10.
Guest:I was in a house with, it was me, my brother, my dad.
Guest:So the whole feminine side of the world was like, and now I should qualify that by saying both my dad and my brother
Guest:are gay.
Guest:It was not a macho house by any stretch.
Guest:They're both gay?
Guest:They're both gay.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:I mean, if you could see me, you'd know how hard it is to stay straight 18 years in a house with this.
Guest:No, it's, yeah, they're both gay.
Guest:How'd that happen?
Guest:Well, I don't think there are any rules.
Marc:I mean, was your dad gay when he was married?
Guest:He was.
Guest:So my dad's from Montreal.
Guest:Oh, that explains it.
Guest:It's not gay.
Guest:It's European.
Guest:He's a Quebecois, francophone, French speaker.
Guest:In the 70s, he hitchhiked out to Vancouver.
Guest:He's about 20 years old.
Guest:And he writes a letter back to my grandmother in Montreal coming out of the closet to her.
Guest:It wasn't a general coming out, but he let her know.
Marc:Was Vancouver a groovier place at the time?
Guest:Yeah, I think it was a combination of... He was hitchhiking with his buddy who had a sister who was working as a nurse in Vancouver.
Guest:I think it's a really attractive place for a lot of French Canadians because it's...
Guest:Vancouver is almost totally outside of the historic English, French antagonism.
Guest:It almost seems Swedish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's an Asian city in a lot of ways.
Guest:It's a Pacific city.
Marc:I guess the Swedish element, it just looks new architecturally.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:Everything is sort of uniform in some way.
Guest:Vancouver and Chicago had the similar thing of they both had fires early in the history of the city and had to decide how they would rebuild.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Chicago was like, we're just going to make this the most magical architectural place on earth.
Guest:And Vancouver was like, we're going to make the most forgettable buildings anyone's ever seen.
Marc:We're just going to take it all from the same set of plans.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just in case it all burns down again.
Guest:But yeah, he ended up in Vancouver.
Guest:Vancouver did, as it does today, have a pretty thriving gay scene.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then he met my mother.
Guest:They were working together.
Guest:He met my mother.
Guest:Doing what?
Guest:They were working dispatch, which they were taking like emergency calls.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they met, they fell in love, and he wrote, my dad wrote another letter back to my grandmother saying, I've met a woman, I've fallen in love.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they were together until my mother died in 1991.
Guest:And then all through my teens, I thought that my dad was like one of those Sicilian widows who just like enters a period of mourning that just lasts the rest of his life because he never moved on.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Romantically.
Marc:Well, no, he did.
Marc:No, I know, but you thought that, but there was nothing, no action, no boyfriends.
Guest:I mean, he would have friends who would come over.
Marc:Did they seem like they were having a better time than most men?
Marc:There's no flags, no rainbow flags.
Guest:I think even in those days, it was not that long ago, but 20 years ago, 25 years ago, the worst thing in the world you could think of was your dad was gay.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:At least to your friends.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:As a teenage boy.
Guest:And so I had an idea that he was gay when I was about 13, and I just pushed it down to a place where I couldn't see it.
Guest:So he then came out to us when I was like 20.
Guest:And by then I was totally fine with it, obviously, politically and not at all...
Guest:The only thing that was messed up was that I realized in retrospect that I had built up a whole false idea of how to properly grieve and mourn, which was to just like stop your whole life dead in its tracks.
Guest:Like you never move on because I thought.
Guest:Oh, so you thought you were emotionally aping your death.
Guest:Well, yeah, because he was, to me, he was this hero who had never replaced his love.
Marc:So how did you manifest that as a kid?
Marc:I mean, what was your version of it?
Guest:I mean, it's a good question.
Guest:I think it's still sort of playing out now.
Guest:I'm in my, um, I'm, I'm going to be, I'm 38.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was 10 years old when my mother died and I've like only recently started to like get beyond like the trauma of that at like, even at like just a basic physical level.
Guest:Like it's, uh, it's been, it's stuck with me a really long time.
Marc:And that's the feeling of loss.
Guest:The feeling of loss, the feeling of just visceral anger of having had that taken away.
Marc:Yeah, the injustice of it.
Guest:The feeling of just being able to kind of start crying kind of at the drop of a hat.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:That feeling of if you think about it or something hits you the wrong way, you start.
Guest:It never became a scar.
Guest:It was always scabbed over.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Never fully healed.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the scab would come off occasionally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think part of that was that I thought that you kept that connection with that person alive by basically never moving on.
Marc:That's interesting because we're sort of talking about, or I was anyways, about the sense of primal union needing to be sort of...
Marc:disrupted.
Guest:But disrupted in a managed way as opposed to that kind of like wrenching.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I think that it seems that the grief should have been as well.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, the grief disrupted.
Guest:That's a really interesting thing.
Marc:That's what I mean, that what you're holding onto is this strange kind of the symbiotic hold of her death.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:Right?
Marc:So that it just never goes away because there's like anger, bitterness, all the stages.
Yeah.
Guest:But they're all things that you're feeling that are passions that you're feeling for this person.
Guest:And so as long as you have them, I think the term is called wounded attachments.
Guest:The idea is like, as long as you're still destroyed by it, it's like that connection is still alive.
Marc:So you have all this self-awareness around it.
Marc:Have you got any help for it?
Guest:Um, I've gotten help for like other, you know, I've, I've been in therapy for a long time, but I was mostly dealing with, um, uh, upset.
Guest:I had obsessive compulsive disorder and various anxiety disorders.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:It's all from the same source, I bet.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:But with cognitive behavioral therapy, you basically kind of deal with- Stop doing that.
Guest:Stop doing those things, essentially, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But haven't necessarily driven exactly at the- Right, the source.
Guest:Like the kind of the sort of nuclear center.
Guest:Becoming a father myself, like becoming a father, becoming a parent, I should say, I think helped because there is that understanding of like-
Guest:once you once you are a parent you know that if your kid ever lost you yeah they would they would devastate you to think that they would never move on and have a happy life right that you would not want for them to throw themselves on right funeral pyre which is like what maybe a 10 year old boy right for life thing to do well that's interesting that the what's he had anxiety and ocd
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because OCD is basically a compulsive desire for control, right?
Marc:For some sort of system.
Guest:So the subset of OCD that I have is a version called primary obsessions, obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is essentially intrusive thoughts.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Like the morbid ones?
Guest:Yeah, which are almost always there like some way of, it's basically about thinking violations of your moral code.
Guest:So like some people have, like if you're religious, you might have blasphemous intrusive thoughts.
Guest:And actually all my first thoughts were blasphemous.
Guest:Why'd you grow up Catholic?
Guest:Anglican, which is like, in the States they call that Episcopalian.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Which is basically, it's like diet Catholicism.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's like not quite Protestantism, not quite Catholicism.
Guest:And I was about maybe five, six years old, and I would have the phrase, I hate you, God, would run through my head.
Guest:And I think, no, no, I don't hate you.
Guest:I love you.
Guest:I love God.
Guest:And you'd have these intrusive thoughts.
Guest:That was before your mom passed away.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So, yeah, this kind of stuff is all kind of part of it's hardwired or chemical.
Marc:Well, no, but it seems like in my mind, given what I know about you and what we do for a living, I'm like, so you found a good outlet for them.
Marc:Pretty well, yeah.
Marc:The intrusive thoughts are sort of like, no, might as well just say that one.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Get paid if I say that one.
Guest:Well, one of the things that I did love about stand-up when the intrusive thoughts were really bad, and I've actually had really good success in treating these.
Guest:I got an amazing psychologist.
Marc:What is the fundamental treatment?
Guest:Cognitive behavioral therapy.
Marc:You get it and you're like, no.
Guest:Yeah, you just sit with the anxiety for a while.
Guest:Of having the thought?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a great book out there called Overcoming Obsessive Thoughts, and it kind of lays out the basic sort of CBT approach to treating OCD.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But one of the things that I, like early on in stand-up, I just, I loved that the exigencies of doing a show, like that whole show must go on thing, is that it leaves no time for rumination.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You can't go back over a moment and pour over it while you're on stage.
Marc:Oh, you do that too?
Marc:Oh.
Marc:Because that's not intrusive thought.
Marc:That's another thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that's, I have that really bad.
Marc:But they're both kind of, it just seems they're both...
Marc:What's interesting, and I'm not psychoanalyzing, but it's interesting is they both seem like just sort of ingrained opportunities to beat the shit out of yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which, you know, I think, you know, and I have done some kind of, you know, self-administered Freudianism of like, look, you know, you lose your mom.
Guest:Who's your mom in most cases?
Guest:I know this isn't everybody's experience of having a mother, but in most cases, your mother is the person who, if you blew up a plane, she's the one to go, I know we can sort this out.
Guest:I love you.
Guest:Your mother is the place that you know that you're loved, you know that you're good.
Marc:Supposed to, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, supposed to.
Guest:That's the ideal situation.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So if you don't have that...
Guest:And comedy, of course, is also a place where you get to go up on stage and have people who sit in the dark tell you that you're good.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And also that thing I was talking about before is that the sort of self-parenting you put in place, it's got no...
Marc:It's got no, you know, cap to it.
Marc:So, you know, it's most likely, you know, just to you mean you're going to be incredibly judgmental of yourself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, because you don't know what you're doing.
Marc:And a lot of times what I read about children who are uncomfortable for whatever reason, when they're when they're too young to to know better, they just assume that their parents are great.
Marc:So whatever it is must be their fault.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So then you're on top of yourself like that.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:You know, I feel weird.
Marc:They're great because they're my parents.
Marc:It must be me.
Guest:I've always had such a deep envy of people who go into situations where something's wrong.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And their immediate instinct is like, what have the other people in this situation done to make this wrong?
Guest:Because mine is just like, well, obviously I fucked this up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The city's on fire.
Marc:What did I do?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:How did this connect to me?
Marc:Yeah, it's like it's double-edged sword.
Marc:It's problematic in the thinking, but it's also incredibly self-centered.
Marc:Totally narcissistic.
Marc:So, okay, so your dad comes out when you're 20, but what about your brother?
Guest:He came out just before that.
Guest:My dad was waiting for my brother to come out.
Guest:I think my dad thought it would put undue pressure.
Guest:But your dad knew?
Guest:Everybody knew that my brother was gay.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Before.
Guest:All the kids at school, all the kids.
Guest:Yeah, no, like, so it was not a hidden thing with my brother.
Guest:He was a...
Guest:But did your brother and your dad know?
Guest:Did your brother know about your dad?
Guest:That's a good question.
Guest:I mean, I think my brother sort of... He had a better sense than I did.
Guest:Is he older or younger?
Guest:He's younger.
Guest:So my brother's three years younger, but only feels that way recently.
Guest:So I feel like...
Guest:he and I ran in different directions from the trauma of our mother's death.
Guest:So I was 10, he was 7, and the next day I was 18 years old and he was like 3.
Guest:So my aunt and my grandmother, we lived in the house with them and my brother really...
Guest:My mother had asked my aunt basically to be our mom forward.
Guest:And I wasn't so much able to take her up on that.
Guest:What's been amazing is I've been able to take her up on that as being a grandparent to my daughter.
Guest:And their relationship is incredible.
Guest:But my brother really, he was a very young seven and I became a very, very old 10.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You fought.
Guest:So we were like, and then my dad had become a teacher.
Guest:He had worked dispatch and he was a suit salesman when I was a kid.
Guest:And then as my mother was dying, the two of them sort of figured, what could he do?
Guest:Where he'd have enough money to raise the two of us and he'd have the same holidays as us.
Guest:So he became a teacher.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:Of what?
Guest:So at the time, it was fairly easy, especially if you were a francophone in parts of the country that didn't have a lot of French speakers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because we had just started as a country the French immersion program where you could send your kids to school to learn French.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, so they, especially in places like Vancouver where they, there were no Francophones.
Guest:It was like, if you had a, if you had a university degree and you could come and, and, uh, learn how to teach, get a teaching certificate, um, you could get a job pretty easily.
Marc:So he went back to school.
Guest:So he went back to school, and then he discovered this, like, it was like a vocation for him.
Guest:I mean, it was like this, it was a passion.
Guest:And he went back, he did a master's in education, and so while he was doing that, I was about...
Guest:11 12 and i was you know making dinner for my brother and i and we were in this weird kind of i'm half your parent and i'm half your brother and and uh so i think that put a lot of stress on the situation plus we were a house where there were two gay men in the closet and one uh guy with obsessive compulsive disorder who didn't know what it was and two old ladies upstairs and
Guest:No, by that time we were living on our own.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my aunt would kill me if I didn't say that she wasn't an old lady.
Guest:My granny was old, but no, my aunt was very beautiful.
Guest:So yeah, it was already a house where each of us was in our own little closets and all dealing with some sort of post-trauma and
Guest:We're a very close family.
Guest:My brother and I are still... When I get off the phone with my brother, we say, I love you.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:You're so tight and probably out of complete necessity, but it is kind of interesting that you're all maintaining something.
Marc:I wouldn't say a lie.
Marc:No, but you're...
Guest:You are.
Guest:You're dissembling.
Guest:There is something that you don't feel that everybody else in the house is ready to hear.
Guest:I wonder if there was a shame component to it all.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I mean, if there was for me, I can't speak for my brother on that one.
Guest:I mean, I know that-
Guest:He was right on the cusp of attitudes really shifting in urban centers at least in North America.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So he kind of lucked out.
Guest:I think he did in some ways.
Guest:He would have been even luckier if he'd gone to school maybe five years later than he did.
Guest:So I think it was hell for him.
Guest:And I think that was a big part of why he didn't want to go to...
Guest:college, university.
Guest:And so he, like my dad, went back later in life and learned his trade.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:What does he do?
Guest:He's a horticulturalist.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:So he works at the- I think he told me that.
Guest:Yeah, he works at the botanical gardens at the University of British Columbia.
Marc:Oh, yeah, he told me to go see a plant there.
Marc:Wasn't there one of those death plants there or something?
Guest:I mean, it's incredible.
Guest:It's gorgeous.
Guest:And so he does-
Guest:You know, he posts these photos all day.
Guest:He just spends his whole day with beauty.
Guest:I mean, yeah, it's gorgeous.
Marc:So what do you think provoked you?
Marc:Like, you know, what was your position, you know, carrying these intrusive thoughts and anxiety and obsessive compulsion and the bitterness over your mother and, you know, and having the responsibility that you had because of her absence?
Marc:I mean, so what's your high school life like?
Marc:I mean, you know, how do you define yourself in that world?
Marc:Yeah, I mean, it was an interesting time.
Guest:Black trench coat?
Guest:No, not quite.
Guest:I went, again, like I broke in the other direction from that of like by 15, I was getting pretty politically active.
Guest:You were?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How did that start?
Guest:On the left.
Guest:So I had an English teacher who was just one of these teachers that people tell you about who just-
Marc:The Republicans are trying to fire all them here.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And her name was Marlena Morgan.
Guest:She died this past fall, and I spoke at her funeral, and she was my debate coach, and she was my English teacher.
Guest:And she had this program where she introduced us to Chomsky and Orwell and all this.
Guest:And
Guest:You know, she let me write these funny stories.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, she really nurtured the comedy side of it.
Guest:That you could do it in front of the class?
Guest:I don't remember reading them out in front of the class.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was one point where I performed one of the soliloquies from Hamlet.
Guest:That was a kind of turning point.
Guest:Was she an English teacher?
Guest:What did you say?
Guest:She was an English teacher, yeah.
Guest:But it ended up being kind of like almost civics, English, like- How it all fits together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and so I started getting involved politically, and then when I was about 16 years old, I actually joined up with a little Trotskyist socialist, fairly kind of- Going all the way.
Guest:Somewhat cultish situation, where I was like- Were you the youngest?
Guest:Among them.
Guest:I had a few friends from high school who joined with me and we were like, so basically what it was is like, there was like, there was an adult party and then we were like in the youth auxiliary and the youth auxiliary was like a pretty cool place.
Marc:Now, what are the tenets of a Trotsky culture?
Guest:So, Trotskyism is just basically like communism, but without apologizing for the tyranny of the Soviet Union, basically.
Guest:So, it was like we were for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but we also didn't think that the USSR was good.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:So basically it's sort of like that happened, it was bad, it got away from us, but we're pure.
Marc:We're going to do it right this time.
Guest:Yeah, when we do it, it's going to be good.
Guest:And there was this communist newspaper that was published in New York, and we sold it on weekends, and I occasionally got to write for it.
Marc:The Workers' Party, what was it?
Guest:So in the States, the party's called the Socialist Workers' Party.
Guest:Right, I remember that paper.
Guest:The newspaper's called The Militant.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I would- Aggravated old hippies used to sell it in street corners in New York.
Guest:Well, and the reason they were aggravated was because they started as hippies.
Guest:But in the early 1970s, the party did something called the turn to industry, which was basically we've got all these college kids who've joined the party to fight the Vietnam War.
Guest:But socialism can only be built by the working class.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they made all these kids go get factory jobs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so you had all of these teachers and whatever, go get jobs in aerospace.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And so when I finished high school, I wasn't going to go to university.
Guest:I went and got a job in a factory where I could sell the newspaper.
Guest:I could work with my fellow workers, my comrades, fomenting revolution.
Guest:I mean, it was not totally clear.
Guest:Well, I worked in a plant that made lighting fixtures, so I'm pretty sure we made ... If you're ever in the SeaTac airport, you're probably walking under something that I loaded onto a truck.
Guest:So thank you later, I'll give you that.
Marc:For the people.
Marc:For the people, exactly.
Marc:So they didn't have any political arm that had any traction.
Marc:So it was sort of an idealistic thing that if you just hand out these newspapers and get everybody working those type of jobs, that maybe a leader would pop up that would do some form of unionizing that would provoke the next wave.
Guest:I really don't think it was very well thought through.
Guest:Which makes it more of a cult than a movement.
Guest:Exactly, and it was shabby enough that even as an 18-year-old, I kind of went like, okay, well, I think this- You took the gig.
Guest:I would say that as a 16-year-old, a 17-year-old, those weekends, they were probably pretty good for my intellectual development.
Marc:What did you do on the weekends?
Guest:Friday nights, there would be what was called the militant labor forum.
Guest:So there would be someone would give a presentation on what was going on in Yugoslavia or Palestine or whatever.
Guest:There'd be study sessions on the Sundays.
Marc:So it's interesting.
Marc:So you're dealing, you're engaging with world politics from a very specific point of view.
Marc:Very specific.
Marc:The the the presentation was relatively true, you know, that, you know, the solutions may have been a little extreme or or or not quite practical, but the conflicts that were being discussed were probably real.
Guest:I mean, I feel like I got a pretty good understanding of, for instance, what was going on in the Middle East.
Guest:Or I got a pretty good understanding of like... You know, I remember we were doing anti-war organizing around the bombing of Serbia in 1998.
Guest:And I feel like the line that we had...
Guest:was not against the bombing, but also the Albanians should have some sort of self-determination there.
Guest:I mean, I feel like that was a relatively non-lunatic position, but it was not in a healthy...
Guest:There was no kind of connection to real people, like what people were actually going through.
Guest:I mean, one of the things- Really, the guys at the light factory?
Guest:Well, so this is the thing.
Guest:Like when you're at the light factory, for the first three months of your employment, you're on probation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So during those times, nobody knows that you're there with the other communists.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:So you hear from the actual workers in the factory what they really think of these guys who sell the newspaper outside of the factory, which is that they think they're fucking nuts.
Guest:And then as an 18-year-old, it's hard to...
Guest:You're going, well, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I get that.
Guest:I get that you, like, where the best case scenario is kind of a condescending, like, that person, you know, they've got good intentions.
Guest:That's the best case scenario.
Guest:And the worst case scenario is like, oh, Jesus, those fucking nuts again.
Marc:So that's funny.
Marc:So the people that you're there to commiserate with and inspire are just sort of like, we just want to do our job.
Marc:I don't know what that guy wants.
Marc:He's a nutbag with the paper.
Guest:Well, the other thing is they're all looking at you, an 18-year-old kid, and they've got 18-year-old kids at home that they won't let...
Marc:do this kind of work because they want better life yeah yeah so they're like why are you not like you're 18 years old go to school like go like go to like um and what what is the socialist component in the government of of canada you know in terms of these workplaces i mean isn't everybody what what what are the benefits of that i mean what do you work you're almost you're working against a culture that is more socialized than most
Guest:I mean, in a way, that's true.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was, again, I think it was a good stuff.
Guest:It introduced me, for instance, to a much more sort of sympathetic understanding of the fight for indigenous sovereignty in Canada.
Guest:And so I think for a lot of people, I would say I was about 15 years ahead of...
Guest:most sort of mainstream non-Indigenous Canadians in terms of wrapping my head around sovereignty issues.
Guest:There were elements of it that were, I don't want to just write the whole thing off, but it was definitely goofy and it was definitely cultish.
Guest:Right, but also it was a good experience.
Guest:I think it was a good, all in all, having gotten out of it, it was a good experience.
Guest:So what, did you end up going to school?
Guest:I went to school, yeah.
Guest:You quit the light factory?
Guest:I quit the light factory.
Guest:I got a job at a video arcade at the mall.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:Which I unionized.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I couldn't quite leave the communism behind.
Guest:So you're a success.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we never got a first contract, but we did unionize.
Guest:But I was doing that, and I was getting a degree in- Got a little organizer experience?
Guest:In history.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:The other thing that, and I guess kind of led me back into comedy, was I was writing on the school paper.
Guest:In college?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So when did you first try stand-up?
Guest:The summer after I finished school.
Guest:So I was 24 the first time I did stand up.
Marc:But you'd been writing.
Marc:I've been writing.
Marc:Satirical and funny pieces.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So are some of those early essays in that one book of essays?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:The early writings of Charlie Demers?
Guest:No, those have not been unearthed yet.
Guest:Hopefully they don't get it.
Guest:I mean, I don't know how many of those I'd be proud of to see today.
Guest:I mean, I'd be proud of the kid who wrote them, I guess, right?
Guest:I'm saying your name right, Demers.
Marc:Demers, right?
Marc:Demers.
Guest:Demers?
Guest:Yeah, it's a- I just realized.
Guest:Yeah, no, no, no problem.
Guest:Demers is a more French kind of- So in French, we would say Demers.
Guest:Demers.
Guest:Which is only in Quebecois French.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:The French from France- So in America, we say Demers.
Marc:Demers, yeah.
Marc:And you say Demers.
Marc:Demers, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that's another incredible thing, watching from Canada, the way Americans pronounce French words.
Guest:I mean, Brett Favre is just a total mindfuck for a French-Canadian child to be like, what do you mean, Favre?
Guest:What is it?
Guest:Favre.
Guest:but like it's like the r doesn't even come before the v it's like you've you've actually your pronunciation is reordering the letters and is um but then like yeah lake punch a train like it's uh yeah there is something charming about say that right american
Guest:It gets better.
Guest:But Punch the Train, it does feel right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No, I mean, that's our magic down here.
Marc:We'll just level everything.
Guest:It was an amazing thing for me when I was in school and taking an African-American history class and learning about W.E.B.
Guest:Du Bois.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And the hardest thing to wrap my head around was that it wasn't Dubois.
Right.
Guest:His name was Du Bois.
Guest:He pronounced it Du Bois.
Guest:It's Du Bois.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that took like months.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Du Bois.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:No.
Marc:Off the woods.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you're writing for the paper in college?
Marc:I'm writing for the newspaper.
Marc:So you're finding a voice, you know?
Marc:Definitely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And finding a way to be political in a way that was outward facing.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:It didn't seem like early on you got a scope of the world and it wasn't kind of just some exercise that a college kid does.
Marc:You knew how and what to get involved in.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it was when you're writing and then ultimately with comedy, you're having to put your thoughts together.
Guest:in ways that they can't be solipsistic.
Guest:They have to resonate with other people in some way or another.
Guest:Otherwise, you'll fail.
Marc:Or have a very small audience of you, the other guy you're laughing with.
Guest:Precisely, yeah.
Guest:And then he'll figure out a way to split from you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah, I was writing for the school paper, and then after school, started a website with some friends who had been on the paper.
Guest:We'd all graduated, and that was right before I started doing stand-up.
Guest:And I was writing a lot more of these kind of funny pieces, funny essays, and really being reminded of how important it was for me
Guest:growing up to be funny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To be a funny guy, to be, to like, and so I tried.
Marc:Yeah, because you got, you know, I imagine it was a relief from the intrusive thoughts.
Guest:I mean, it was, did you resist when people, like, were people always telling you, you got to try stand up and were you like, no, no, I'm funny with my friends.
Marc:No, because I
Marc:When I was like, I'm 54, so it was not, you know, it was not as an accessible, like there wasn't like a mic at the coffee place.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, when I was, when I was coming up, you know, like, if you like, if you want to do standup, people are like, how do you even start?
Marc:What do you do?
Marc:Like it was not.
Marc:What part of the country do you have to live in?
Marc:Right.
Marc:It was not even a conversation, you know, it was an obsession I had and, you know, and I had no idea how to start it.
Marc:I mean, I think your generation was sort of like you could, there were open mics around and shit.
Guest:Yeah, definitely.
Guest:And so I went down to one and Cliff Nesteroff, who's been on the podcast, was up ahead of me.
Guest:The very intense, maniacal Cliff Nesteroff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was doing a bit about this... The words he used were the squeegee anarchist who had just introduced Noam Chomsky at a big anti-war rally in Vancouver.
Guest:He's making fun of this guy and what an idiot he was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was me who had introduced Chomsky.
Guest:So this is my first night ever doing standup.
Guest:And there's this guy on stage telling a joke about me.
Marc:And he's such a snot.
Marc:I can't imagine that the tone had anything remotely embracing about it.
Guest:So he goes, buddy, you're introducing Noam Chomsky, not Whitesnake.
Guest:That was the punchline.
Guest:So then I went up on stage and I opened.
Guest:I said, that was me.
Guest:I introduced Noam Chomsky.
Guest:I didn't realize that I'd done anything inappropriate.
Guest:But now I'm starting to get an idea of why my family was so mad at me after my grandfather's eulogy.
Guest:Got a laugh?
Guest:Yeah, got a laugh.
Guest:You're on your way.
Guest:It was just such a fun time in the Vancouver scene.
Guest:That was the point when Zach Galifianakis was living in Vancouver because he was filming this now forgotten show, True Calling.
Guest:And so he would do stand-up every week at that spot, the place that I went down to.
Guest:What was it called?
Guest:It was called the El Coquel.
Guest:It's now part of an organic grocery store.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yelko Cal was a Salvadoran restaurant, and I've said this before.
Guest:It was a restaurant.
Guest:It was like somebody had set up a simulation in which to train future food inspectors.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because it had inception-like levels.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there'd be buckets on the floor-
Guest:capturing rainwater and you'd be like i don't think it's sanitary for the restaurant cat to be drinking from that bucket uh but that was the it was the cat it was the heart of the like what was then kind of self-identifying as the alt comedy scenes in vancouver and so the second time i ever did stand-up
Guest:Zach Galifianakis is in the audience and comes out to me and is chatting afterwards about the set.
Guest:Zach is such a good guy.
Guest:It was a time when you felt like you were doing something so exciting.
Marc:Well, that's interesting that just by virtue of Zach being stranded in Vancouver, he helped define the alternative comedy scene a bit.
Guest:place absolutely the other person residency spending a fair amount of time in Vancouver at the time was Robin Williams yeah and so he would come through and he did the other sort of independent night that was happening in town which was run by Brent but at the urban well actually by that time he was no longer running it but Robin Williams would come and do a set and
Guest:And then for the next three months, every room in town was just on fire with crowds because there was a chance Rob Williams was going to drop in.
Guest:Right, right, yeah.
Guest:And he was another one who was just like, he was- Generous.
Guest:Very generous.
Marc:Yeah, very sweet guy.
Marc:And yeah, yeah, generous to a fault, I think.
Guest:We did a show, you know, I was doing, I was part of a comedy duo.
Guest:I was working with a guy named Paul Bay, who's terrific.
Guest:He does, he actually does these sort of scripted podcasts, The Big Loop and the Black Tapes podcast.
Guest:Just brilliant guy.
Guest:And we were comedy partners.
Guest:And he, somebody asked, you know, Robin was at the back of the room.
Guest:We were up on stage.
Guest:He said, you should watch these guys.
Marc:And... And you hear that, like, Robin would laugh when no one else was like, whoo, whoo.
Guest:We came off stage and he goes up and says, oh, you know, that's the future of comedy, you know, a white guy and an Asian guy working together.
Guest:And afterwards, we said to him, like, listen, don't be angry if you see, you know, that quote.
Guest:Out of context, you know, future of comedy, Rob Williams on promotional materials.
Guest:And he goes, he goes, future of comedy, future of comedy.
Guest:Just like lets us know that it's, I mean, I literally sometimes, sometimes people still throw that in an intro for me.
Marc:I like doing a corporate coming up on stage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Future of comedy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When he's with the other guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Let's see how he does on his own.
Marc:That's a great story, though.
Marc:So you got your history degree and you started doing comedy after college, but you kept involved with politics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's still a very big part of my life.
Guest:I mean, my wife and I met at a political conference.
Guest:But you don't identify as a communist anymore.
Guest:I identify as a socialist.
Guest:I don't identify as a communist.
Guest:I mean, I would identify as a Marxist in my general approach to history or economics where it doesn't make sense.
Guest:I just don't abide it.
Guest:But I would describe myself as a socialist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which you can do in polite company now again in North America.
Guest:And so did you work in government?
Guest:No.
Guest:Never did?
Guest:No.
Guest:I've done some work for... I've written... The closest I've come to it is I've written jokes for socialist politicians in Canada who were like... So there was a guy named Adrian Dix who is now the minister of health in British Columbia.
Guest:But he was running to be the premier, which is essentially just like governor.
Guest:And I was his joke writer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How'd you do?
Guest:I mean, so the first jokes I wrote for him, like the first speech that I wrote jokes for, the three of the jokes made it into the column of the biggest political pundit in BC.
Guest:So they were pretty happy with the work.
Guest:I mean, he lost the election.
Guest:Don't blame yourself.
Guest:No, I try not to.
Guest:That one goddamn joke, Charlie.
Guest:He was running against this right-wing politician who had, she said she was going to introduce something called Free Enterprise Fridays.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I had Adrian say that he was going to preempt that with theoretical Marxism Thursdays.
Guest:And he delivered that joke at the Vancouver Board of Trade and it made it into the papers.
Marc:Got a good laugh?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, yeah, because I noticed that like when we worked together the first time that, you know, you're definitely politically informed and, you know, you're connected to to the Canadian people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, I can't remember when we first met, though.
Marc:Like, I like I know you did a lot of the debaters, but I feel like we do remember where we first met.
Guest:I'm trying to remember where it was.
Guest:I think it was... You came up and did the Vancouver Festival.
Guest:Oh, yeah, early on.
Guest:And my sketch partner, Paul, was a huge, huge fan of yours.
Guest:Partly because of the Air America stuff, and then partly because he was...
Guest:He actually said this to me last night, because he's in LA right now, and so we were talking last night, and he said, you know, I wonder if you'd remember the depressed Korean-Canadian comedian who asked him how to make divorce funny, because he was going through a divorce himself.
Guest:In Canada?
Guest:In Canada, so this was in Vancouver.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I feel like that's where we first met, but the real sort of memory that I have, and I hope this isn't too schlocky, is
Guest:Is I, in 2009, I did Just for Laughs for the first time.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And the homegrown competition is the Canadian version of the New Faces.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had lost the competition.
Guest:And it was in Toronto that year.
Guest:And then we went to Montreal.
Yeah.
Guest:And my wife was with me, but she was flying back.
Guest:And so she was in Montreal, and we're walking through the streets of downtown Montreal.
Guest:And I'm talking to her, and I'm saying, I don't know what I'm doing.
Guest:You feel so tiny at that festival.
Marc:It's the worst.
Marc:I feel tiny when I go now.
Guest:I don't even go anymore.
Guest:And it was just such a depressing thing.
Guest:And I'm walking down the street with her an hour or two before she's leaving for the airport.
Guest:And you were getting interviewed.
Guest:uh on the side of the road and and i'm literally i'm in the middle of telling her how you know i might as well not exist at this festival and you go hey it's charlie right how's it going man and i like it was this epiphany because one i mean american comics with a few notable exceptions yeah so zach's definitely one yeah rory scovill is another one yeah andy kindler
Guest:American comics tend to very quickly forget Canadian comics who they've worked with or with whom they were once peers.
Guest:Their careers move a lot faster than ours because there's a lot more industry.
Guest:There's a lot more.
Guest:And I think some people make the mistake of thinking that means that all the talent is here as well.
Guest:And so there is, you know, Margaret Atwood once described the U.S.-American border as like a one-way mirror.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And so there is that feeling of like, oh, nobody's ever going to remember me.
Guest:And so it meant so much to me to have you say hello.
Guest:Like just a human kind of.
Guest:And so I always kind of think of that as like, I mean, although by definition, it can't be the first place we met because you were recognizing me.
Guest:No, because I think we did a show at Yucks.
Marc:It's possible.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Cause I said, uh, you know, and this was right after, you know, the podcast and everything had really landed.
Guest:And I said, you know, this guy, um, uh, we all thought he was great, but you know, he was, and the way it came out was like, he wasn't really going anywhere.
Guest:We all knew he was funny.
Guest:And now here he is.
Guest:Um, he's succeeded.
Guest:Uh, but it's like, uh, could you have been hosting?
Guest:I was, I was emceeing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was hosting and I, um, but it was like that, uh,
Guest:You know, the line about you in the David Rakoff essay from Aspen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where he's like, you know, in the old days, a guy like Marc Maron could have made it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was like, I was like the happy version of that.
Guest:Like, we all thought.
Marc:I know why I knew you.
Marc:Because your jokes are good.
Marc:And, you know, it struck me.
Marc:You know, I mean, that's why I remembered your name.
Marc:So let's just talk about, like, you know, all the books.
Marc:I have Vancouver Special.
Marc:Oh, right on.
Marc:You know, which you sent.
Marc:And that's like sort of a unique sort of overview of the city.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So what it was is in the kind of lead up to the 2010 Olympics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Arsenal Pulp, which is kind of a, you know, punk rock kind of publisher.
Guest:They're an independent publisher.
Guest:They put out a lot of cool stuff.
Guest:And it's definitely not the kind of...
Guest:airport coffee table books.
Guest:But they wanted to put out kind of a beautiful design object that had these, and actually the first time I was at, just for laughs, I was also coming up against the deadline for the book, which was another reason why I was so down.
Guest:Vancouver Special and my first novel, The Prescription Errors, those both came out in 2009 within about six weeks of each other just by kind of accident.
Marc:And what was the angle of Vancouver Special?
Guest:Vancouver Special is like essays about the city divided up by sections of neighborhoods, people, and culture.
Guest:Great.
Guest:And yeah, I mean, I come from... Vancouver's one of those places... It's one of those cities that everybody's from someplace else.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:They're either from someplace else in the country or they're from someplace else in the world.
Guest:And I'm a fourth generation Vancouverite.
Guest:Both of my...
Guest:When I would pick up my daughter from her first daycare, we would walk home through the school grounds of her great-grandfather's elementary school, which is a very rare experience in Vancouver.
Guest:So wait, your family goes all the way back?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But your father came from Montreal?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So like my dad came from Montreal in the mid-70s, but on my mom's side, we've been in Vancouver for almost 100 years.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And so it's this city that just completely is kind of
Guest:percolated through me and you're fascinated with the history of it definitely yeah and then the so the prescription errors that you know that's your first novel the prescription errors was a novel about comedy and mental illness and it's essentially it tells kind of the stories of it's
Guest:So it's primarily the story of a guy with obsessive compulsive disorder who is working through the trauma of having lost his mind.
Guest:This sounds like a very unique story.
Guest:Where did this come from, Charlie?
Guest:I can't.
Guest:He has magical powers.
Guest:He's very thin though.
Guest:It's about a guy with six pack abs and no mom.
Guest:So he's essentially, he's trying to rid himself of the trauma of having lost his mother by immersing himself in this long study of medical technology.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's told alongside the story of a guy who is a sound alike who replaces a beloved cartoon actor who is in a car wreck.
Guest:And so it's basically their two stories kind of intermingled.
Marc:Interesting.
Marc:And, okay, so the new one, you did a book of essays as well.
Guest:Yeah, I did a book of essays called The Horrors, which is a book of humor essays, basically about, I tried to write something funny about a horrible subject for every letter of the alphabet.
Guest:Oh, good.
Marc:Yeah, it's almost like your take on Shel Silverstein's ABC.
Marc:Something like that.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Or like the Edward Crumb.
Guest:No, Edward Gorey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, definitely.
Guest:So the sort of childlike construction, but with a and I was sort of writing that darkness of an adult.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Backloaded into the child's point of view.
Guest:Yeah, and I was writing that one at more or less the same time as I was writing The Dad Dialogues, which is a book that I co-wrote with my friend George Bowering, who was the first Poet Laureate of Canada.
Guest:He's in his 80s.
Guest:He's kind of a major literary figure in Canada.
Guest:And over the course of the first year of my daughter's life, he and I would write letters to each other every two weeks or so about fatherhood.
Guest:And he was working from his journals of when his daughter Thea was born in 1971.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And what ends up happening over the course of the book as well is that during that year, it looked like my father was going to die of lymphoma.
Guest:He's okay now, but it was very touch and go.
Guest:And so it kind of becomes about George's life as a father, my beginning life as a father, and- Your dad's illness.
Guest:The possibility of losing my own.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:What was it called?
Guest:The dad dialogues.
Marc:Oh, and that's available too.
Marc:That is, yeah.
Marc:So the new book, Property Values, it seems like the culmination of all your points of view and angles.
Marc:How are you going to fight the good fight in an engaging, sellable way?
Marc:Definitely.
Guest:Right?
Guest:I mean, that's 100% the thinking behind it.
Guest:I mean, a big part of it was...
Guest:I looked at my, Paul, who I mentioned earlier, I looked at his podcast and it was just one of these things where you're watching a friend have enormous success doing something that leaves- The worst, right?
Marc:They're fucking horrible.
Guest:What's the Gore Vidal thing of like, it's not enough for me to succeed.
Guest:I need my friends to fail.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I looked at what Paul was doing, and he was just having this tremendous success with a project that just used every muscle he'd ever been working the entire time I knew him.
Guest:And I just like, this is the using every single bit of...
Guest:And it inspired me to ask, if I were to do something equivalently, if somebody were to say that used every bit that he has been developing, what would it look like?
Guest:And I knew it would be a crime story because of this sort of lifelong fascination I've had with crime.
Guest:organized crime.
Guest:I knew hopefully it would be funny.
Guest:I knew it would be political.
Guest:And so property values, it's a crime story that's set in the world of sort of Vancouver's crazy housing market.
Guest:Which is not unlike California.
Guest:No, it's very much a California story.
Marc:Escalated.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:So Vancouver and San Francisco are almost identical in that respect.
Guest:Everybody's getting priced out who actually lives in the city.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you can't run a functional city anymore because no one who does working class labor can afford to live there.
Guest:And so Property Values is about a group of friends who one of them can't afford to stay in the house where he grew up.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so they stage a drive-by shooting in order to lower the asking price.
Guest:And that decision- But no one gets killed in that first one.
Guest:Nobody gets killed in the first- No, the guy's inside, his friends shoot up the house and they stage this whole kind of pantomime.
Guest:But then it draws the attention of- The real gang.
Guest:The real gangsters.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And they get sort of drawn into this escalating sort of comedy of errors.
Guest:And I just feel really happy.
Guest:Like you say, you spend your whole kind of life trying to put these somewhat esoteric ideas into a...
Guest:into a shape that everyone can have fun with and process and like that it's actually something that uh um that hopefully can resonate and and it's it's out in canada now it's out in canada and uh the you know the reason i'm i'm i'm down in california is it's been uh it's been optioned and i've been hired to write the screenplay with my buddy uh ryan knight and yeah it's a and so it's it's good story it's a dream that's great yeah
Marc:That's a great story.
Marc:Well, I hope that that process yields something other than frustration.
Marc:I'm hoping the kind of dramatic weight loss that'll get me a TMZ.
Marc:Good.
Marc:There's also something I wanted to show you before we wrap up here is that my business partner and producer sent me a picture of his son, Owen, with the character-
Marc:With that little toy animal that you're the voice of, some sort of snail, right?
Guest:So this is Walter Walrus.
Marc:Brendan says, I was looking at his credits and saw that he's the voice of that slug thing, which is one of my son's favorites.
Guest:Oh, that's very sweet.
Guest:Yeah, I am the voice of Walter the Slug on the Netflix series Beat Bugs.
Guest:Yeah, well, Owen's a big fan.
Guest:Oh, well, and that toy is amazing because you can't get them in Canada because the deal for the toys is with Target, and we don't have Target in Canada.
Guest:So I was in Duluth last summer visiting with my wife's family, and I go into the Duluth Target and buy a whole shopping cart full of these giant blue slugs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:so i felt like i owed an explanation to the um to the woman at the cash register i was like so this is um i'm this guy's voice on the cartoon and you know i didn't i should have started thinking about but like that instantly made me the biggest celebrity to ever come through the duluth i thought you were gonna say that obviously made me to her a lunatic like a crazy person who's claiming to talk for a toy maybe she was just like that's very sweet
Guest:It was this incredible moment where I'm going through the store with my daughter, and she's in the shopping cart, and we're looking for the toys.
Guest:We know that they're there, but we don't know exactly where, and then we find this wall of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was like in a movie where we looked at the shelves, we looked at each other, we looked back at the shelves, and then we both just cracked up.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Because she understood, even at like, what, three and a half, I guess, at the time, that this was completely surreal.
Marc:That's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Good moment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I hope she remembers it.
Marc:Reminder.
Marc:I do every day.
Marc:Great talking to you, Charlie.
Guest:So much fun.
Guest:Thanks so much for having me.
Marc:See that?
Marc:What a nice, decent, intelligent conversation.
Marc:Obviously between two like-minded people, but nonetheless the freedom of thought that is available politically in Canada is, we have it here.
Marc:But it is not a cultural norm, that's for sure.
Marc:So Charlie's book, as I said earlier, Property Values, comes out on October 16th.
Marc:You can pre-order it now.
Marc:Again, a lot of attention for my new Echo Pedal, a gift from the brilliant, tall Wilkenfeld.
Marc:It's an Echoplex delay.
Marc:I believe Echoplex was an old-timey box that MXR has recreated in their smaller format, but I have been getting a lot of people asking, a lot of guitar players asking, and that's what this sound is, and I'll do a little bit of it in my limited scope of guitar playing.
Marc:I do seem to be quite into this pedal, and I'm plowing it through.
Marc:directly into the old 58 Deluxe.
Marc:So, you know, all that dirt you're hearing around the edges, that ain't the Echoplex.
Marc:That's old dirty tubes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
guitar solo
Guest:Boomer lives.