Tom Papa is a stand-up comic and writer. He s also the author of a new book called Your Dad Stole My Rake and Other Family Dilemmas, which is a collection of essays written by everyone in your family. In this episode, we talk about how he got started with writing, what it s like to write a book, and what it takes to get a book published. We also talk about the process of writing a book and why he decided to do it, and how to get it published in the first place. And, of course, he talks about why he thinks it s a good book. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Will Witwer. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was done by Ian Dorsch. Music by Jeff Kaale and Christian Blanchard. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplenz Editor: Ben Koppel Additional mixing and mastering by Patrick Muldowney Thank you to John Rocha. Thanks to Mike McLendon for the production of the music for the intro and outro music, and for the mixing and editing, and thanks to the mixing of the sound design, and the mixing, and mastering of the score, and mixing, for our mixing, by Kevin McLeod, for this episode's mixing, mastering and mastering, and background music, for the music, by Matthew McElroy and the editing and mastering and bassist, and our mastering, for all of our mastering and mixing and mixing for the sound effects, by the excellent editing, by our excellent sound design and mastering by our wonderful editor, by the wonderful Jeff Perla, and all of his excellent mastering, . and our thanks to our excellent mixing engineer, and , and our amazing sound engineer, and Bobby Lord, for his excellent sound engineer and sound editor, and his excellent editing and editing assistance, and lighting, and . Thank you so much love, and so much more! thank you for all the feedback and support and support throughout the show and all the hard work, and love, thanks to all of your support, all of the feedback, we really appreciate it's worth it, thank you to the people who helped us get this out there.
00:02:14.000The basic thing is, as a comedian, I've been writing about family and looking at everyone's families for so long, so I'm going to write about all of them.
00:02:20.000So it's moms, dads, cousins, aunts, uncles, all broken down chapters like that.
00:02:26.000So I talk a little bit about my family, and then I just talk about funny essays about just life in general, like going on family vacations.
00:07:06.000This is the first time I've used it for writing stand-up and what's good about it is On the left-hand side, you have all of your different subjects, and you click on each subject, and there'll be a whole column.
00:07:20.000So I had the title, Strange Times, and then the left-hand side.
00:07:24.000This is what it looks like when you're looking at the cork board.
00:07:28.000So the cork board is one aspect of it, where you have these little cards, like index cards, and you set these index cards up, and you write all the different things on the index cards.
00:13:18.000And I travel around kind of like a diner's drive-in kind of thing, but with all baked goods and meeting these amazing people that make the stuff, getting their stories, these families, these Turkish families and Italian families or whatever, and then showing all of this amazing,
00:14:36.000You find that thing that you're really passionate about and turn that into a show rather than some sitcom that you're really not that excited about other than being on television.
00:17:15.000Was talking about his girlfriend, saying that he'd never been happier, didn't know he could be that happy, didn't know someone could make him that happy.
00:20:24.000My friend, Dr. Mark Gordon, actually wrote a paper about long-term anesthesia, like when you're under, not long-term, but long duration for things like Open heart surgery.
00:20:39.000That there's a high instance of depression afterwards and a lot of people coming out of these big time operations where you get anesthesia for long periods of time have significant dips in their hormone levels afterwards.
00:20:56.000It's very, you know, it's not like a free ride getting put under.
00:24:29.000I know a lot of people try to do it with exercise.
00:24:33.000Exercise apparently seems to be as effective or more effective than most SSRIs and anti-depressions.
00:24:40.000I heard that, I don't know if I'm right, but I remember hearing that whatever your body manufactures or secretes when you exercise is similar to what a lot of these drugs have in them.
00:24:52.000Well, you definitely get runner's high, right?
00:25:15.000And just feel, even if it's not identified for me as a high, like smoking weed, my whole rest of my day is better.
00:25:23.000Like, there's a happy little thing going on that's, you know, I'm not flying, but I'm definitely not balled up and anxious the way I was before the run.
00:25:33.000Yeah, that balled up and anxious thing, I have my own theory about that.
00:25:36.000I think the human body has physical requirements.
00:25:38.000And I think if you don't, just because of the design of it, the fact that human beings have lived for thousands and thousands of years either hunting or gathering or running away from danger, your body's like constantly in action back then.
00:26:00.000And I think we have all these requirements and we don't meet them and there's so many people that just sit down all day and that's all they do.
00:26:05.000They walk to sit down and they sit down again and most of their time is sitting down, whether they're watching television or sitting in front of their computer.
00:26:23.000After the Bourdain news, I was traveling outside of Chicago, and it just kind of clicked in my head, like, you know, you're just thinking, whenever you have someone that inspires you, and especially if you're friends, like you were, you know,
00:26:38.000it's just, you can't get it out of your head kind of a thing.
00:26:40.000And your balled-up anxiety is even worse.
00:26:44.000And I just instinctually got in, put on...
00:31:05.000I know it sounds so silly, but anytime I'd walk into a coffee shop or a bakery or something, you'd just see a whole display case filled with stuff.
00:31:34.000They learned it from their grandparents or they just went to school and figured it out and they just hooked them.
00:31:39.000And that, like, it's enough of a big bang explosion of love that they stay in it for like, you know, 10 years and make a business out of it.
00:31:48.000My grandfather used to walk to get bread every day.
00:31:53.000He lived on North 9th Street in Newark, New Jersey, which was at one point in time an Italian community.
00:32:01.000It wasn't when he lived there when he died, but when I was a boy...
00:33:00.000And, you know, there's that thing, like, when someone makes something really good in the community, it changes the community, because people will walk to get it in the morning.
00:33:56.000So you'd know what the fuck they were saying, even if you spoke Italian.
00:34:00.000Like, if you spoke proper Italian and listened to my grandmother and my grandfather yell at each other, you wouldn't know what the fuck they were saying.
00:36:31.000This mentality, like, it could all go away.
00:36:33.000They had seen it, and it was burned into them.
00:36:36.000And, you know, kids today, everyone's, like, fucking leaving food on their plate, and no one's worrying about where it's coming from, and everybody thinks they had a totally different mentality.
00:36:55.000And think about how messed up it is that they go from that, they go from the depression, they get out of it, and then you roll into World War II. Like these people, they dealt with a lot of different levels of stuff that we didn't have to deal with.
00:42:41.000Putting people in camps and not stopping, spreading, telling people, we're coming.
00:42:45.000And they were the most sophisticated in terms of engineering.
00:42:49.000To this day, where do you get all the fucking engineers in terms of automobiles, top-end, Audi, BMW? Those people were making shit for Nazis back then.
00:44:22.000Like, they hung the five slowest Jews every day in front of the rocket factory in Berlin, where Wernher von Braun was making rockets for the Nazis.
00:44:32.000They had these Jews that were slaves that worked as...
00:44:35.000I mean, there's people that were alive today that have those tattoos in their arms that talked about meeting him there and seeing him there.
00:44:42.000And they would hang the slowest workers.
00:47:15.000That color, different wheel, different hubcaps now, but I mean, to a T. My friend Jimmy Lawless had one of those when we were in high school.
00:52:56.000Yeah, I was going to put it at 78. It says that CBs exploded in the 70s when the oil crisis caused the miles per hour on the highways to go down to 55 and truckers started using them to tell each other where the best gas prices were.
00:53:10.000Like a network started of people using CBs.
01:07:33.000You put anything, and the computer, like actually, they showed like a dishwasher, and the guy wanted to manufacture the part that's inside the dishwasher.
01:07:41.000The computer says, no, we can improve on that part, and we're going to alter the shape of it and have it be like this, and then it makes that, and then you use it.
01:18:16.000I was going to say, I did this Spike TV special in 2009, and there was a...
01:18:19.000Do you remember that old commercial with the girl comes home, and her dog starts talking to her, like, Lindsay, I really wish you wouldn't smoke pot.
01:18:28.000You're not the same when you smoke pot, and I miss my friend.
01:19:54.000Isn't it supposed to be like, I'm supposed to be conveying how I feel, and the words are supposed to mirror my thoughts?
01:20:02.000Like, when you have magic words that you can't say, and in this case, with the N-word, it's even crazier, because it's like, some people can say it, you can say it sometimes, sometimes you can't say it.
01:20:16.000Black people can say it, white people can't, but white people can say it if they're in the crowd and they're yelling it out, but as long as there's an A on the end of it.
01:23:14.000But culturally, we have to put our foot down because we're going down this very strange, illogical road where you can just decide what's evil and what's bad, and it doesn't have any bearing on the thought or the intent behind it.
01:28:57.000But then there's just like this little dark underbelly of like hate.
01:29:02.000There really just is good and bad in the world.
01:29:06.000There is good and bad in the world, but there's also people that are just very frustrated and looking to vent that frustration as often as they can on whatever targets they find to be viable.
01:29:17.000It's not like they've carefully considered the issue and carefully considered this person's stance on it.
01:29:23.000For me, one of the big ones was the Roseanne Barr thing, because Roseanne Barr, what she said, seemed racist, right?
01:29:32.000You look at her on the surface, she called that lady something like a cross between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes.
01:29:37.000And like, oh, Jesus, she's calling a black woman an ape.
01:29:39.000She said she didn't even know that woman was black.
01:29:41.000And then you see her photo and you go, oh, okay.
01:29:44.000That woman is very racially ambiguous.
01:30:11.000No one cares that you got a lady who has mental illness, like a history of mental illness, is on a host of different medications, is on Ambien as well, and drinking, and smoking pot.
01:31:08.000And I think when you're in that area and you're spewing hate and you're throwing fireballs and stuff, Whether you have good intent or not, you're in that arena.
01:32:05.000It's like there's this person that has all of this kind of stuff and she's always going up to the line and not crossing it, but maybe sometimes crossing it, and then you do it, you're going to get popped.
01:32:15.000Do you remember when Imus got kicked off the radio for saying about some gals who were athletes?
01:33:35.000I mean, how about hosing people down with fire hoses and sicking dogs on them?
01:33:40.000That was in, if not our lifetime, just before we were born.
01:33:43.000And still today, there's still, you go to certain parts and people are popping stuff off and people, you know, as a white guy, you walk around, you hear people say shit because they think they're safe around you and it's still around.
01:33:56.000They look at you and like, this guy has bread?
01:33:58.000This guy just bakes bread and stays home.
01:35:26.000Your whole day will be taken up with that, with new people jumping into the fray.
01:35:30.000It's like, if you want to have a fistfight with a mob, a mob of people, you can't really do that.
01:35:36.000You can have a discussion with a one-on-one person, but if you fight a whole crowd of people, like that Kendrick Lamar, if that lady was like,"'Fuck you, bitch!' I'll say that word!
01:35:52.000But if she has a discussion with one of those white guys who's doing this boo-boo that was just yelling it at himself, if you put them alone in a room and she said, okay, tell me why what I did was wrong.
01:37:03.000Who's actively saying, I mean, other than like white nationalist groups that everybody pretty much hates other than themselves, who's trying to move it back?
01:37:10.000And then other people who think that maybe that they're being, that it's being reversed and that they're being hated on now when they, you know, white, like young white kid who just wants to have a good time at the concert and is saying, but why are you attacking us?
01:37:25.000Someone put up some things at a school that was criticized by a dean and was taken down.
01:37:29.000They put up these signs that say, it's okay to be white.
01:37:34.000Google that, because this was kind of crazy, that whoever this dean was, or whoever it was that chastised these people, they put up these signs that said, it's okay to be white.
01:38:25.000They sent a letter home to families informing them that the signs were discovered on 10 doors at 5.45am and removed by staff before students arrived for classes.
01:38:34.000We are taking this seriously and are investigating this incident, wrote Renee Johnson, the school's principal.
01:38:40.000Our research so far has indicated this may be a part of a concerted national campaign to foment racial and political tension in our school and community.
01:38:49.000The same flyer was posted in other cities and communities this week.
01:39:14.000When you walk into your school campus, and all of a sudden there's Signs up everywhere that normally there are no signs.
01:39:20.000Well, if they're a white person and they feel like they're being openly racially discriminated against, is it okay to say, hey, it's all right to be white?
01:39:36.000You come in with your little lunch bag and you're going to teach your Spanish class and on your door is a sign that says, okay to be white.
01:39:43.000Your knee-jerk reaction is, what are you doing?
01:39:47.000The flyers appear to be a part of an online campaign that is detailed on the web forum 4chan.
01:41:11.000Unless you're trying to say we can't hate men because men are human and we've got to give everybody a chance and we can't generalize even if men have done horrible things.
01:41:39.000I would much rather live in a world where you go with your grandfather and get a little bread and you come back home and they yell at each other and you make a meal.
01:41:59.000This is people trying to get attention for their work.
01:42:01.000They're trying to get attention for their click-baity little articles and click-baity little things and click-baity little campaigns against people.
01:43:10.000How often does that have to happen with people who are homophobic, who hate gay people, who rally against gay marriage and rally against gay rights, and then you find out that they're really gay?
01:43:56.000I think what I like about what you're saying and how I feel, too, is that we need to be nice to each other.
01:44:02.000This whole idea of this gotcha bullshit and this attacking people for things that don't necessarily make sense without nuance, without the understanding of complexity of human interaction, with no concern for that at all.
01:44:21.000That stuff is just pure foolishness, and it's bad for discourse, it's bad for community, it's bad for the way we communicate with each other.
01:44:31.000It's also a generalization, a gross generalization, which is just the same thing as sexism, it's the same thing as racism, it's the same thing.
01:44:39.000Why can't we hate men is a gross generalization.
01:44:42.000I don't know what the article said, but that statement.
01:51:46.000But what they did, they were constantly inbreeding in the royal families to try to keep the bloodline pure and to try to keep all the money in the family.
01:52:54.000But they were looking for it for five years.
01:52:57.000This guy, this British guy, and this kid named Hussein, who was the, like, he would get water for all the workers.
01:53:07.000He was clearing, like, he had these water pots, and they'd set them into the ground so that people could come scoop water while they were digging and trying to find these.
01:53:15.000Yeah, while they were trying to find this tomb.
01:53:41.000Grave robbers had found every other tomb.
01:53:43.000The tombs were miles away from the pyramids.
01:53:47.000Because, I mean, they probably had tombs in the pyramids that were raided, and then they realized after a while, like, look, we've got to hide these things.
01:55:14.000I had a guy on really recently, Dr. Robert Shock from Boston University, and he's a geologist, and he is one of the first people to propose the idea, one of the first real scholars to propose the idea that the Sphinx is far,
01:55:33.000And that it's not from 2500 BC, but it's from way before that, perhaps maybe 10,000 years old than that, because it has water erosion, all of it, that can only have come from thousands of years of rainfall.
01:55:49.000The implication is, his take on it, which is really interesting, and he really scared the shit out of me and blew my mind, mass coronal ejections, so something from the sun, some gigantic solar flare that created unbelievable havoc on Earth.
01:56:11.000He was talking about Lightning storms that were like the lightning coming down like sheets of rain in a hurricane and that it like just covered parts of the earth with lightning and killed everything and killed off mass Just mass numbers of human beings,
01:58:36.000Well, there's some structures that have been absolutely linked to that time.
01:58:41.000A big one is Gobekli Tepe, which is in Turkey.
01:58:44.000And they have absolutely dated that to 12,000 years ago.
01:58:48.000So what's fascinating about that is they didn't know that people were capable of building these gigantic stone structures 12,000 years ago.
01:58:55.000And they've only uncovered a very small amount of Gobekli Tepe.
01:59:13.000What they think is that there was a big dip, and I forget what his term that he used to describe it, but there was a dark age that was created by these mass ejections,
01:59:31.000and that civilization, particularly in Egypt, had reached a very high level.
01:59:36.000of sophistication when they were capable of building these gigantic stone structures and they had all this amazing architecture and engineering or to move these huge stones and then there was a big die-off and that for thousands of years people essentially were knocked back almost down into the stone age and then regrouped and this but this cataclysmic story this story is in Noah's Ark We're good
02:00:20.000Yeah, but he's pointing to geological evidence, which is fascinating, because at one point in time, around 9000 BC, the Nile Valley was not all sand the way we see it now, but it was a tropical rainforest.
02:00:34.000And so for thousands of years before that, it was torrential downpours and rain.
02:00:39.000That all this was the reason why the Sphinx enclosure has these deep fissures that are indicative of rainfall and water erosion for thousands of years.
02:00:50.000Not just instantaneous flooding from some giant event, but from thousands of years of rainfall.
02:01:00.000The idea is the current established timeline is that the Great Sphinx was created somewhere around the time that they believe the Great Pyramids were created.
02:01:10.000Now, the Great Pyramid, they've done carbon dating that indicates that that was somewhere around 2500 BC. Uh-huh.
02:01:20.000He thinks that that was built over an older site that was from many, many years before that.
02:01:25.000He has all these photos of similar construction methods that they've done where they've taken a really old site from maybe many, many thousands of years ago and put something over that.
02:01:46.000They don't know where that old thing, where it's from.
02:01:49.000So the idea is that this old thing, in Egypt in particular, is a product of an old civilization from many, many, many thousands of years ago.
02:01:58.000So long ago that the distance and the gap between the people who built the pyramids and the people who originally built the Sphinx is far greater.
02:02:09.000Far greater than our distance between us and the people who built the pyramids.
02:02:37.000But they think that at 2500 BC, that represents only the new construction in Egypt, and that before that, if you go to 10,000 BC, and before, there was a whole other civilization there.
02:02:51.000And that this is when, 10,000 plus years ago, this is when these cataclysmic events happened and all these people died off, and much of what they knew back then was lost.
02:05:08.000What's crazy is that these civilizations were able to build up and they get knocked all the way back and then build up a similar way, right?
02:05:15.000If you're talking about the Egypt one, right?
02:05:18.000They came back kind of in a similar way.
02:05:20.000If the pyramids and the Sphinx are that far apart, that there was something in the DNA, in the brain space that was...
02:06:01.000Maybe they just had superior genetics, but it's also what they were showing in this video that I watched in the IMAX thing yesterday was that the area was so unbelievably fertile that there was so much of an opportunity for them to grow food and there were so many animals there for them to hunt and agriculture that they had a chance to sort of establish a civilization because it was such a rich area with natural resources.
02:08:07.000I mean, these fucking statues of the pharaohs are so big that you see these little tiny people walking by and you realize like, oh my god, look at this.
02:08:16.000These people had done something unbelievable.
02:08:19.000The pyramids and the Sphinx, there's so much of that stuff.
02:08:33.000Why were they the only ones at the time?
02:08:35.000I mean, it has to be connected to resources, right?
02:08:37.000Because if you go today, there's parts of the world where people are, you know, some impoverished parts of Africa in particular where they don't have a lot of resources or people are fucked.
02:09:45.000But there must have been a bunch of Elon Musks back in the Egyptian times.
02:09:49.000Well, that's what's amazing, is there's this genius IQ where all the magic happens.
02:09:56.000You know, where the Einsteins live, where those big leaps kind of happen, and everybody else could be really smart, but not to that level where...
02:15:46.000Those are the saddest pictures of all time when you see those Native Americans putting suits and ties and hats and standing there having to take pictures.
02:16:22.000And there's a guy, I think his name was Maul?
02:16:26.000It was this giant Indian guy who's this fucking murderer who'd killed a bunch of the Settlers and he was they would tour with him Wild Bill would tour with this guy and they would do on their their Wild West show they shoot guns and do like pretend to fight each other Well,
02:16:42.000thanks for people was like a recreation of what it must have been like she's when they you know Captured territory from the Native Americans.
02:18:39.000Especially, like you said, having the real guy there who you know could at one point just turn on everybody and start killing the people in the audience.
02:22:29.000Pull up the censoring of Tom Sawyer, or Huckleberry Finn.
02:22:37.000Mark Twain had to build a little writing room out on his lawn so he could smoke his cigars out there because his wife wouldn't let him smoke cigars.
02:22:45.000So he built himself a little shed so he could go sit out there and smoke.
02:23:06.000A new effort to sanitize Huckleberry Finn comes from Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama, who has produced a new edition of Twain's novel that replaces that word with slave.
02:23:20.000It appears in the book more than 200 times.
02:23:26.000Used by Twain as part of his character's vernacular speech and as a reflection of the mid-19th century social attitudes along the Mississippi River.
02:24:17.000Yeah, that whole thing is like a southern ride, and there's all these singing ducks.
02:24:24.000And we went with a guide, and the guide was explaining to us that this was all based on a really racist old thing that you can only get bootleg copies of now.
02:28:45.000Do you think that ultimately, like, this is all going to sort itself out?
02:28:49.000All this political craziness and this kind of shit that this is just a little rough patch of chaos that we get through on our way to establishing a new way of communicating with people, a new way of appreciating each other.
02:29:03.000Even the anti-white racism and anti-male sexism and all this stuff, it's just the wave going this way and then it'll go that way and then it'll settle and Yes, and then we're learning from even these missteps like why can't we hate all men or You know anything like that that we learn from these missteps and the outrage that goes these missteps and we say oh I understand why this woman feels this way She's probably abused by men and dealt with asshole men and asshole bosses and see these people like
02:29:33.000Harvey Weinstein in the mainstream media that have abused and violated and victimized women yeah, and that it It's gonna balance itself out and the only way it does is you have to have outrage and then correction and yeah I mean that's the way history seems to go it seems like you know there's you would think in certain ways like oh we don't have to work that hard to abolish these evils but then evil pops up again and it feels like okay no it's still here we still have to deal with it yeah and you just hope at the end we all end up like Bruno Mars
02:30:04.000we all look like Bruno Mars And everybody's happy because no one knows who white anybody is.
02:31:59.000I'd never realized, because I'd never heard it on a good stereo before, but I had these two speakers, and there's all these layers, and piano tunes, and keys, and there's all this stuff that comes out of...
02:32:11.000When you're sitting in front of good speakers, you hear all the layers to the music, and I'd be like, wow!
02:32:19.000It's like hearing it new all over again.
02:32:55.000There are a lot of artists that have this really crazy kind of unique style, but they don't become accepted from the mainstream, by the mainstream.
02:37:44.000I don't think that's enough to kill Kendrick Lamar's momentum, but he's got too much momentum.
02:37:50.000Yeah, but it was like, okay, I mean, if it got to me, you know, and I try to listen to music, but you know, it's different when you're young and it just hits you from your friends, and I have to like really try and find music now because I have no friends.
02:38:04.000I go to Jamie, and then I have to throw it through a filter.
02:38:08.000I have to throw it through a, yeah, but he wears Yeezy's filter.
02:38:54.000No one ever says, hey folks, you know, we just realized if we keep making movies, you're never going to watch The Godfather, you're never going to watch Taxi Driver, you're never going to watch the classics.
02:39:02.000So we're going to stop making movies for a while and let you fuckers catch up.
02:45:55.000And why do you think that you understand the biological makeup of all these different human beings and that none of them should be taking psychiatric medication?
02:46:03.000That's a crazy thing to say, that you're smarter than all these biologists and medical scientists and all these people that have concocted these SSRIs and different...
02:49:33.000And I know that psychiatry is It's a pseudoscience.
02:49:40.000But Tom, if she said that this particular thing helped her feel better, whether it was the antidepressant or going to a counselor or a psychiatrist, isn't that enough?
02:49:53.000Here we are today, where I talk out against drugs and psychiatric abuses of electric shocking people against their will, of drugging children with them not knowing the effects of these drugs.
02:53:44.000Well, that's an interesting question, right?
02:53:47.000There's people that are considering the ethical implications of making a headless person that you would harvest your organs for.
02:53:54.000Like, say, if Tom Papa decides, I'm going to make a headless Tom Papa, and I'm just going to drink like a fish and scoop the fucking liver out of this asshole...
02:56:59.000They can make them laugh in a goofy way, but when you can make them laugh in a way that you know is really funny, that's like, you know, stand-up funny.
03:01:07.000I think being self-aware of what you really, really want to do as the person, not thinking of it even in terms of work, but looking at yourself enough to know what you're good at and what you enjoy.
03:01:28.000You don't know where it's going to lead, but at least you're heading in the direction where it's stuff you like, and it's stuff you know you have an aptitude for.
03:01:36.000So wherever you end up in that area will be pretty close to happiness.
03:01:41.000Words of wisdom from Tom Papa, author of Your Dad Stole My Rake.
03:01:55.000I read a lot of books on tape, or I have a lot of books written, read to me on tape.
03:02:01.000The real problem is when you know that it's not the author, and you hear someone have some sort of bullshit, half-assed connection to the words they're saying.