Mark Oppenheimer: When I go to Long Beach Island in August, will you come surf with me?

David Litt: Yeah, come hang out, or I’ll come down there, or you come up here to Asbury Park.

MO: Or I can come up there. I’ll let you know.

DL: We’ll meet halfway and surf with Matt, he’s kind of between us two.

MO: Now, I’ve never surfed before, you understand? You have to put yourself back in the Kook newbie.

DL: I’ll tell you what Matt told me the first time we went surfing together, which is, “It’s only drowning.” So I assume you will find that as reassuring as I do.

MO: I’m Mark Oppenheimer. I’m the editor-in-chief of Arc Magazine on the web at arcmag.org, and I’m the host of the podcast Arc: The podcast. We are products of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

It’s my great honor this week to be interviewing David Litt, whom I’ve met a few times before. One time he and I were guest storytellers on the Moth together. We did a big theater in Connecticut and of course he killed it. He was super funny. He was a speech writer and a joke writer for President Barack Obama and wrote a memoir of his years working in the Obama White House. So he’s a professional funny guy, and I’m just a scribbler. I think people remember his work from The Moth that night, not mine. We met one other time and had drinks and he’s a major dude. His new memoir is called “It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground.”

Now, a few things I want to say about my conversation with David Lit. The first is that it goes pretty deep and we end up talking about depression and about spirituality and about political polarization, but the book itself is super light in the best way. It goes down super smooth. It’s hilarious, it’s a lot of fun. I’m not joking when I say that I, a fairly slow reader, read it in two days. I mean, it’s just a great book.

The other thing I’ll say is I might not be very trustworthy on that count because I love books about surfing. This is a weird fact about me. I think it started about 10 years ago, which was around the time that I had knee surgery on my second knee, I had torn menisci one in each knee. And so at some point it became clear that my future as a runner was going to come to an end. That I wasn’t going to be running lots of miles forever, which was my main sport since I ran cross country and track in high school. So I had to find something else.

And the other thing was I read William Finnegan’s book “Barbarian Days.” Now William Finnegan is a New Yorker staff writer, a journalist who writes about really bleak stuff. He writes about racism and war and poverty, international conflict, white supremacy, drug trade, et cetera. And yet for the first few decades of his life, starting when he was just a little tyke, he was an obsessive surfer and a great one, and he, in fact, discovered some surf breaks, some waves that nobody had ever found before in the history of the planet. I mean, he was a pioneering surfer and his memoir of surfing called “Barbarian Days.”

I don’t know why I read it. I don’t know how it occurred to me to read it, but it quickly became one of my two, or three, favorite books of all time. I’ve now reread it a few times and I’m not somebody who rereads books. I don’t have the attention span, and I’m sort of impatient to read stuff that I haven’t read before. So I don’t go back and reread, but I’ve reread “Barbarian Days” a few times and that set me off on this weird kick of reading surf literature. And so I can now recommend for you books about the intersection of surfing and Buddhism like “Saltwater Buddha,” which is a great book by Jaimal Yogis. I can recommend surf noir crime novels like books by Kem Nunn or Patrick Coleman. I can talk to you about books on the history of surfing. It’s become a weird sort of subspecialty of mine and in the background, I think, is the hope that someday I too will become a surfer.

Now, one of the things that William Finnegan says in “Barbarian Days,” and he said this to me when I interviewed him one time, is if you haven’t started surfing by the time you’re an adolescent, by 12 or 13, don’t even bother. You’ll never be that good. Which is kind of mean advice. It really, it hurt me when he actually said that to my face in an interview, even though I’d already read that that was something he believed.

But David Litt started surfing at 35, and if you read his book, “It’s Only Drowning,” you’ll discover he got pretty good pretty fast. I mean, he got good enough to have a lot of fun with it. So in some ways, David Lit gives me hope and he’s also just a super sweet and funny and interesting guy. And if ever there’s someone who’s going to help me make the transition from reader of surf lit into actual writer of surfboards and waves, I think it’s David Litt and I think this interview, which touches on religion, and politics, and other issues of interest to Arc Magazine, it’s one of my favorites yet. Here I am talking to David Litt.
As much as there is to ponder about this book, I bet we can do it in 45 minutes.

DL: Well, we could do the full Joe Rogan, three hour experience. You never know.

MO: Are you on Rogan? Are you going to be on Rogan?

DL: I would love to. I think we pitched him. We’ll see. Rogan is not a super meta guy. He doesn’t like to talk about Joe Rogan. And so I think it’s one of the many things where if and when the book is a breakout phenomenon, then maybe, but I would that it’s not an immediate thing we’ll do.

MO: He’s a not unimportant character in this book.

DL: No, it’s weird. I felt like Barack Obama was a character in my first book, even though he was not in a ton of the book, but the idea of Obama, and even more so with this book because Joe Rogan does not make any actual appearances. The idea of Joe Rogan is extremely important and it’s something that I also think it’s not just important in the book, Joe Rogan and what he represents, both good and bad or neutral and bad, loom large over I would say almost all of American society right now. And most of us don’t know it because it’s happening in a niche or in a bubble that many, many people don’t engage with. And so it’s a really interesting canary in the coal mine for what is happening more broadly too.

MO: I actually really like where this is going, so I’m going to do something unusual, which is I’m just going to sum up everything up to this moment and I want to keep talking about Joe Rogan.

DL: Yeah, let’s do it.

MO: David Litt, you were a speechwriter for Barack Obama, you wrote a memoir of that experience, and then another book about democracy afterwards. Your third book is “It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground,” which basically details how surfing with your brother-in-law lifted you out of a COVID era malaise and onto the waves, if I may mix the metaphorical and the literal.

DL: We can use the D word. I was depressed post-COVID, and now I am not, which is good.

MO: I actually wasn’t trying to avoid the D word. It’s funny you did say it in the book and I should have just walked right into it. You were depressed, were you on meds?

DL: I wondered if I should have been, and looking back, I wonder if I should have been. And the reason I brought it up, by the way, is for me it was really hard to write not somebody who in theory, like many things in life, in theory, I don’t feel any stigma around mental illness in practice. When it came to talking about my own mental health, I said, I don’t know that I want to admit this. And even using the word admit is pretty loaded.

So I got depressed, not really during peak pandemic, but right after. It was kind of when the variants showed up and we all went back inside and there was the sense of this isn’t stopping. And it wasn’t just the pandemic, it was Trump and January 6th, it was Putin, and everything happening abroad. And you asked if I’d been on medication. I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know if I should have been.

The thing that really did help, that took me longer to do than it should have, was joining Zoom therapy and talking to someone. And that’s something where I feel like I didn’t know this at the time, but the really insidious thing about depression is if you’re able to get help, then you are less depressed than you would otherwise be. And so it’s this awful catch-22 where it’s like, you know you need something, but if you had the wherewithal to do the something, you would already be on your way to fixing the problem. And so that is, it gave me, hopefully I don’t ever experience that again, but it certainly gave me a level of empathy for anyone who’s going through it now or has.

MO: Certainly it’s a level of empathy I could use. I’ve never been depressed clinically. I mean I’ve had blue days who hasn’t. But it’s one of the things I think about when I think about my own thriving in life is I was given a kind of chemical disposition that I just don’t go down and stay down. And lots of people in my life around me have had depression, and I’ve seen what it does to people. I mean, I’ve never been close to anyone with suicidal ideation level depression or unremitting years long, but people for whom it’s very much part of the fabric of their lives. And it just never touched me. And I worry if, not that I want it I’m not saying that, I’m not saying give me a dose of that, but certainly there’s a piece of empathy that’s missing because I’ve never been there. Had you been there before, or was this the first time?

DL: No, and by the way, this is a great way to start talking about a fun surf memoir that is largely–

MO: No, the book is so much fun. It’s all surfing and Joe Rogan.

DL: But let’s start with some darkness, I’m into it.

And I also think it’s how I wanted to start the book because I think it’s where for me, it’s what led me to surfing. And it’s also, I think of memoirs as the story of change. You have to start in one place and end in another, and it has to be true. And for me, I could have started this story a few months later, or a year later, but I don’t think that would’ve captured the full change because so much of the story is really about how I fell back in love with life and surfing helped me do that, and my crazy brother-in-law of all people helped me do that.

MO: Your crazy, Joe Rogan loving brother-in-law to just kind of finish the circle there.

DL: Right, exactly. The last person I ever would’ve said, “Oh, Matt, my brother-in-law, is going to be the guy who helps me rediscover joy and a sense of appreciation and wonder in these crazy times that we’re living in.” Of course, it’ll be my brother-in-law who’s covered in tattoos, and didn’t get vaccinated, and drives a pickup truck, and in every single way is not like me. That was a bit of a surprise.

Well, let’s go back to the darkness for a second. The thing I will say about, and again, I don’t want to claim things that were worse than they were. I think I experienced what a lot of people go through for big chunks of their lives for a few months. And I will say during that time I was like, I would never wish this on anyone. And the reason that I did not understand, you were saying this, and I will say, you’re really lucky that you’re wired where that’s just not where you go. My wife is like that.

MO: And it’s not to say I wont. I think there’s somebody very close to me I’m thinking about who encountered depression for the first time in his fifties, and I’m 50, and has had a couple other episodes once every few years since, and it came out of nowhere. It’s fifties, so I could, but so far no. I’m super lucky. I’m super lucky.

DL: Yeah, and the thing you were talking about empathy, and I think to some extent you can mostly figure it out. The one thing that I felt like living through it, I was like, “Oh, I had not realized this.” I think I say this in the book where it felt static and frantic, right? On one hand it was like, I got to get out of this. And on the other hand it was like, I don’t want to do anything. And that complete cognitive dissonance and that feeling of being trapped, but at the same time you can see around you, you know you’re not, but you are.

That was really, really rough and I wasn’t surprised that it was rough, but all experiences, I was surprised by the specifics of why it was so painful. And so one of the reasons I did want to talk about that in the book, even though it is mostly a fun book, was to, I think it is important that somebody, if you’re wired in, I would say the way that I am and many people are, not prone to depression, but it’s a possibility, it can happen in life if you’re going through something like that.

I did want people to be able to have one more thing where you can look at it and say, “Okay, he lived with it. I’m not alone in this.” And that feeling of being alone was really hard.

MO: I think you handled it deftly. You have a few pages on it and then the book gets into what the book’s about which is surfing with your brother-in-law. Before we get to your brother-in-law and starting to surf with him, because I don’t know where else I would plug this in, so I want to ask it now.

Dude, crazy family dynamic. You’re married to Jackie, who’s a fellow kind of intellectual Washington Beltway nerd and her brother. I don’t know many families where the delta between two siblings, is there a third sibling?

DL: No, just two.

MO: Where like the difference in vibe, in affect, in mojo, is so profound. I mean, just getting what I got about her from the book and that her brother, younger brother is this inked up electrician, doesn’t read books, listens to podcasts, unvaccinated, kind of the anti-cerebral, all about embodied hard labor, hard surfing, goes to France and wonders where you can find chicken fingers. I don’t mean to caricature him because the book is actually a really sensitive portrait of him, but that must have been crazy when you met, you were dating Jackie and you met. She must’ve been like, when you meet my brother, you have to understand he’s not what you think he’s going to be.

DL: Well, weirdly, Jackie and I were 25 when we met and Matt was 22.

MO: Okay.

DL: So I think I was so focused on just trying to make a good impression on my girlfriend’s parents that I kind of didn’t notice. I was like, oh, there’s this guy, right? He’s wearing a cutoff shirt and walking into the kitchen to blend a protein shake and then disappearing. He’s also a pretty private person, so I think he wasn’t in my face. I wasn’t in his face. So it took a little while where we sort of got to know each other and the better we got to know each other, the more we realized we had literally nothing in common. It wasn’t that we disliked each other.

And I do think this is, I think, a subtext of the book. I grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan, went to New York private school, then I went to Yale. And in each of those places, and I don’t say this in a sense of self-recrimination, but it’s just the truth, most of the kids I went to high school and college with did not come from middle class families. They mostly didn’t.
MO: Meaning they came from upper class families.

DL: Whatever privilege is this was largely that, not exclusively, but largely. I do think that part of what you’re describing where how are these siblings so different is much more common with friends of mine who didn’t grow up going to New York City private school where that is a more common thing. And part of the book really is about trying to understand the bubble in which you live and trying to understand the world beyond it. But I also think without the sense of liberal guilt and shame that comes with that, we’re all living in bubbles. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with living in a bubble. I think it’s inevitable. But the question really to me is how can you live your life in a way where you can get outside your own bubble a little bit and learn about the world from people that are deeply not like you?

MO: It’s interesting because I was born, when I was born, we lived, my parents lived at 35 West 90th on the Upper West Side. When I was 21 months, 22 months old, they moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, which is a working class town, and I went to school with working class people till high school, and then I went to schools more like yours, and in the case of college, yours. I mean, I do think that growing up in Springfield, even though my friendship circle was curated by who my parents were friends with, and their kind of people in western Massachusetts, kind of liberal eggheads, when I met people in college who had come up through whatever Horace Mann, or Collegiate, or Dalton, or I don’t know which school you went to.

DL: Dalton. Yeah.

MO: Thank you. Thank you. There we go. I felt I’d nailed that.

DL: Yeah, it’s a type.

MO: I was shocked, I was shocked–I’m not saying this is you–but I knew some people who I don’t think had ever met a poor person who wasn’t their own domestic. I mean, there had been scholarship kids at their schools, but they had never been in a non-rich vibe. Then in the summers they went to the Hamptons, or summer camps. It was astonishing to me, and I’m somebody who comes from privilege. The levels of insularity can be pretty great.

DL: Yeah, to me, the saving grace of New York, at least in the context that we’re talking about, the saving grace of being in a upper class bubble in New York is that you are surrounded by all kinds of people, whether or not you want to be. So I do think, again, there’s ways to have this sense of there’s a world outside of this. And the other thing I will say is that is also true of most people who arrive at college. They have their own experience. It’s funny when we’re talking about this, we started off, and assuming we don’t edit very strategically, you’re going to have listeners being like, this funny book doesn’t seem very funny.
But I think that we talked about sort of shame or stigma around depression, and weirdly, there’s this stigma around discussing privilege where I feel like, and sometimes I’ll even say I’m part of the problem, and I think that can clearly be true, but I think more than that, it’s about this sense of can you see beyond your own circle? And we’re all living through no matter what bubble we’re in, and no matter what our background is, that’s the challenge for all of us. I think that’s a universal thing. I do think that people who, again, if you’re going to high school at Dalton, or another New York private school, there’s a higher risk that you sort of say. So I do think you have more of a responsibility to not be a jerk about it.

MO: One thing that’s happened though is the rich people have become more politically uniform. I mean, it used to be that if you’d gone to Dalton, half of your friends or more would’ve been Republicans. It would’ve been like 60-40 something. When I was at Yale, Yale was a place that was like 70-30 Democrat, but it wasn’t 90-10 or 95.

DL: That’s interesting.

MO: So there was more diversity. In a lot of ways, I mean, I knew plenty of conservatives in my private school childhood. In fact, it was probably about, I think we took a poll. I was a freshman in ’88, and I think the student council did, or the school newspaper did poll, and this was New England Prep School. It was like, are you voting for Bush or Dukakis? And it was basically 50-50.
DL: Right. Although then again, considering how the country voted, that’s still pretty to the left of the country as a whole, but yeah.

MO: Yeah, yeah. But slightly and not wildly.

DL: Yeah.

MO: Okay. So you’re depressed–I’ll just say, one more tangent, which is speaking of privilege, I’ve thought sometimes about the people who’ve had the most charmed lives of anyone I’ve known, and you and I don’t know each other well, we’ve met a couple times and I’ve thought, your ascent, your level of success, if what one wants to do is work with words is almost unparalleled. Like you were working with words for Obama at a very young age and you were publishing books at a very young age, and if depression were purely a product of bad circumstances, if doing well in life inoculated you against depression, my feeling is David Litt would be the least likely to be depressed people among many certainly writers whom I know.

DL: Well, here’s a kind of personal thing that I’ll say from inside myself. It doesn’t feel that way.

MO: Of course.

DL: But then I always look at people who I say, okay, well you’ve had an even more charmed existence, so you must feel totally fine. I just assume that, and part of the book weirdly, is about realizing that that’s not how the world works. That as much as it feels to me just against everything I am, you have to figure out how to take your sense of courage and joy from inside you, not from external sources. And one of the other things I will say as we get into this surf memoir largely said in New Jersey, something I love about Springsteen is how candid he is. He just said this in an interview the other day where he was like, sometimes it’s tough being inside my head.

I think he actually said it more harshly than that about himself. And he writes about that in his own book. And I feel like that’s one of the things where we all, I think are inclined, especially people who are ambitious to say, “Oh, if only my ambition was realized, then I’d be whatever the thing is that’s driving me that I don’t like would be changed.” And I am not always immune to that, but I now know in part because of the surfing experience that that’s just not how it works. You can achieve a thing, you cannot achieve a thing, and it’s great to achieve stuff, but it doesn’t change who you are. Someone I work with frequently and is a mentor and sometimes just says, “You take yourself with you.”

MO: Yeah, wherever you go, there you are.

DL: Yeah, exactly. Same thing. And then there’s also, I think about this a lot. There’s this SNL sketch, and I’m 90 percent sure my friend Alison Gates, who I did improv with in college, and she’s hilarious, and she wrote the sketch for Adam Sandler where he’s a tour guide, and it was also a Jersey thing, by the way. A tour guide from New Jersey offers tours to Italy, but with the caveat of you’ll still be you when you get to Italy. If you’re married just in happy at home, you are not going to be happy in your marriage in Italy. And I think about that all the time too, because I think it’s just such a succinct way of explaining the trap that so many of us fall into. The thing that you’re trying to fix, or change, or whatever we want to call it, you’re not going to change it through success. That’s not anti-success. It’s just saying you have to know what the right remedy is for the right problem.

MO: The way I always think about this is Robin Williams, who brought so much joy and seemed so joyful, killed himself. I mean, that haunts me, right? There’s this guy, he was like the premier joy bringer of my childhood, and couldn’t find his own happiness. Before it gets too dark–

DL: That ship may have sailed, but sure, go ahead.

MO: Let’s just go to that. You were depressed, you were living in Jersey during the pandemic. How did you decide to start surfing with your brother-in-law?

DL: So you used the word decide, which is really flattering, I don’t think I would call it that. You retrospectively go back and you say, what was I thinking? Particularly because when you start surfing at age 35, which is what I did, and you don’t really have a ton of natural talent, which I don’t, it turns out you spend a lot of time saying, what was I thinking or What am I thinking? And I think for me, a lot of it did have to do with Matt, my brother-in-law. So we’ve talked a little bit about our many differences, but we could just go on and on and on. Like Matt listens to death metal, and I listened to Steven Sondheim. Matt once threw out his back training to become an ultimate fighter, and I once threw out my back lifting a bag of cat litte. There is no way in which the things Matt does are things I would do, except he’s really into surfing.

And I think at this moment, immediately post pandemic 2021, I was really struggling. Matt was doing really well. He just seemed to be coping with everything so much better than I was. I wasn’t like, I want to be him, but I was like, he knows something I don’t, which I had never thought before. And I definitely wasn’t getting a tattoo. That was not going to happen. I wasn’t going to buy a pickup truck because I would bump into stuff with my pickup truck if I had one, that would go poorly. But surfing, I felt like in the back recesses of my mind, I was like, yeah, I could see myself surfing. I bet I’d look cool. I was wrong about the looking cool part, but I was right that I could eventually start surfing. And so I walked into a surf shop in Asbury Park about a half mile from our house here, and I said, “Do you know anyone who can teach me to surf?” And the woman behind the counter said, “I could?” And I was at a point in my life where I ignored the question mark in that sentence and said, “Great, sign me up.”

MO: So then she took you out, you did a lesson or two with her as I recall, and that’s how you got on a board for the first time. Then how did you end up deciding that you could surf with your brother-in-law who was already quite a good surfer by that point?

DL: Originally, I didn’t tell Matt that I had started surfing and didn’t want to tell him because I was worried he would judge me or roll his eyes or just in general look down on my rather pathetic surfing at the time. And it’s an interesting, we’re talking about this where I would say in 90% of our lives, basically all of them on land, if you had to say which of you belongs to the elites or the establishment between me and Matt, it’s not a difficult choice. I don’t self-identify that way, but you would identify me that way, way more than you would him. No question in the water when it comes to surfing, Matt is the elites, and I am most definitely not. I’m a have not. And I was worried about the idea that he might sort of say, what are you even trying to do joining this club?
And then I got hooked on surfing. I stuck with it for a month or two, which I think that was the hardest part in some ways because it was a month of just nonstop failure with no success to balance it out in any way. But then after that, I started to say, Hey, I’m into this and I want to try to do something a little bit crazy because I can feel myself becoming a better person. The better I get at surfing, what would it mean to become a much better surfer? Maybe that would make me a much better person. And the goal I set was I want to get to the north shore of Hawaii, which is one of the most dangerous places in the sport, and I want to surf an overhead wave. So not the biggest wave out there, but one that is consequential, a serious wave.

MO: Overhead is taller than you?

DL: Overhead is taller than you. And I just want to point out, when you’re lying on a surfboard, you are on the ground. So imagine lying face first on the ground, looking up at someone your height. That’s a tall person. I don’t care how tall you are, that’s a big wave it turns out. And so I set this goal and I said, I need somebody to help me get there, because if I didn’t have a partner in the water, if I was just paddling out alone, that would be really deeply dangerous. Not to mention I had to work my way up. And so I said, all right, well, I need a surfer in my life who I trust and whose judgment I think aligns with mine and whose instincts I can turn to. And I didn’t know anyone like that, but I did know one other surfer who was not a surf instructor, who I was paying for lessons. The only civilian surfer I knew was Matt. And so I at some point worked up the courage to say, Hey, did you know I’ve been surfing? And he was like, alright, well let’s paddle out sometime. And then after a couple of harrowing starts, we kept with it.

MO: And the book is, in some ways, a chronicle of the relationship you guys have. My sense is, and you may even say this, you never became close, you never had easy conversation, but you grew in admiration for each other. Am I summarizing that fairly?

DL: Well, it’s interesting. My initial reaction was, “No, what are you talking about?” But I think some of that is also what’s happened since in the year and a half since the events of the book were done. So in a way, the journey that I went on as a writer was realizing this isn’t really a surfing book, it’s a friendship book, but surfing is the plot. And what has happened since has sort of confirmed that I was worried that the sort of book research, so to speak, which is us going surfing would end and then I would say, “Okay, well now we don’t really have an excuse to spend time together.” And this not only feels fake, but also this friendship that I’m really happy to have made starts to fizzle with nothing to hold it together.

Kind of the opposite weirdly, where without the pressure of, oh, I have to write about this, I have to record a voice memo after a conversation or after a surf session. We just had more fun this morning. Literally before, maybe an hour before we started talking, Matt texted me and was like, “Hey, check out my new board.” And he just picked up a new surfboard and it was like, alright, sweet. So, and it’s not the sense of like, oh, is this going to go in the book? Is it not going to go in the book? It’s just like, all right, nice. This is cool.

MO: You still surf together, the two of you?

DL: We do. We haven’t been out in a little bit because I’ve been talking about surfing much more than surfing, but the other day I was doing my book talk in DC for the launch, and Matt that day was like, “Hey, you want to go out? Waves are looking pretty good.” I was like, “Oh, crap. Got to do the opposite of surfing, which is put on a blazer and talk about surfing.” But absolutely, and we’re hoping to get back to the North Shore this fall. I keep saying this partly just to commit to it.

MO: Right. If you say it, it shall be. Has he read it yet? One of the funny things about the book is that you make the point that when you offer to let him read it, he said, “No, I’m cool,” which says volumes about him because someone like me or you who lives through words and books, the idea that a book would go out principally about one of us that we wouldn’t want to read in advance of publication is probably unthinkable. And he just says, “No, I’m cool. Let the book come out.”

DL: Yeah. It’s funny, we were on a trip in Spain and I was like, “I can show you the book if you want to see it before when I can still make changes.” And he was like, “No, I don’t want to see it if I’m an asshole, just say I was an asshole.” I was like, “I’m not going to say you’re an asshole, a) because I don’t think you’re an asshole and also b) because we’re going to see each other at a lot of Thanksgivings. We are family.” But also because in my view, and this is just how I think about this as a writer as well as what’s fair play is I was like, if there’s an idiot or an asshole in this book, I want it to be me. And I will say several conservative reviewers think I did an excellent job on that front.

MO: Is that right? I haven’t read the reviews, I just read the book before I talked to you. I didn’t want to pollute myself. But are reviewers in conservative publications saying he’s proven himself to be the sort of closed-minded, woke ninny that we think liberals are?

DL: Well, I don’t want to overstate the case. It’s not like they are conservatives for the most part are talking about the Middle East or the budget or–

MO: Mamdani.

DL: Yeah, Mamdani, right? I am not the Mamdani of surf memoirs yet.

But no, back in March there was a review, a very early review that came out in the Washington Examiner, which is kind of sort of right wing newspaper, that basically was like, David is a sort of smug jerk, but his brother-in-law’s cool. And so I sent that to Matt and Matt was like, “Oh, this is awesome.” And he was like, “Man, my dad’s going to love this.” And I was like, Oh no.”
But I think because I also think that part of it, we can get more into it, but I think part of it is, again, this is a story about change. And I would say I don’t agree with the idea that I’m a terrible smug jerk. It would be strange if I was like, yeah, totally. But I do think I was more smug and more judgmental and felt I had less to learn from others three years ago when I started surfing than I am today.

So I think to an extent, it’s not that I totally disagree, it’s that I feel like maybe you didn’t get to the end of the book when I read a review like that. But I also think that’s just at the risk of going on a little too long about this. I think part of it is some people I genuinely think are going to read this book and say, this is a story of a heroic, awesome electrician from Brick, New Jersey and his annoying liberal brother-in-law. And some people who I are more aligned with me might read it as saying, “Hey, this is a story about this brave former Obama speech writer and this crazy Joe Rogan loving brother-in-law of his.” But I think that what matters to me as a writer is that no matter where you start closer at the end to saying, “Oh, actually this is a story about the two of them.” That’s the whole point.

MO: When we come back for part two of my interview with David Lit, there will be more on how surfing can help us overcome polarization, help us see the humanity in people with whom we don’t necessarily agree politically.

But before we get to that, I want to encourage you to sign up for our podcast, subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. If you do, I have a present for you. The present is you will get future episodes, so you won’t miss my episodes with writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, with Catholic feminist Leah Libresco Sargeant, with meditation, mindfulness, and life well-worth living guru Oliver Burkeman, who of course has a plummy British accent, so that’s worth the price of admission alone. Paul Kingsnorth, the Christian environmentalist or reformed environmentalist, I’m not sure what you want to call him, He’s his own thing entirely. I’ll be talking with the other Mark Oppenheimer, the South African barrister, Mark Oppenheimer. I’ll be talking with interfaith activist Manu Meel.

So much good stuff that will come your way for free, for no charge if you subscribe to us on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube over at arcmag.org, the print, or virtual print, or pixelated version of our magazine. We have some great stuff up lately.
The piece that I think you just have to go read is my colleague Tazeen Ali’s piece, “Zohran Mamdani and the Making of a ‘Muslim Menace.'” This piece just posted, so it was so timely, it posted the Tuesday morning of the Democratic mayoral primary, which Mamdani ended up winning, surprising pretty much everyone except Mamdani and his tens of thousands of obsessive, door knocking followers.

We also have a piece on why everyone hates white liberals. It’s by the political scientist, Kevin Schultz, and it’s from his new book of the same name. So lots of great stuff, lots of fun stuff, and a graphic design interface at arcmag.org that was partially inspired by surfing magazines of the mid to late twentieth century. So go over to arcmag.org. It ties in nicely with my conversation with David Litt to which we now return.

So it’s interesting because I’ve never spent as much time with somebody who is, I’ve spent lots of time with people who are politically different from me. I have right wingers in my family. I’ve never spent as much time in my adult life in the past, say 10 years, with someone as culturally different from me as your brother-in-law is. But what’s interesting is I always suspect that Obama types, let’s say like center-left cosmopolitan types, kind of secretly know that we’re full of shit about certain things, that some of the people who are temperamentally and culturally more different from us, let’s not say conservative because as you made the point, he doesn’t even vote. And some of them are not politically oriented. But that’s the whole point that I thought we all kind of secretly, if you get a drink in us was like, yeah, they understood that we should have opened schools way before we did during COVID, they understand that the science isn’t settled on certain things we think the science has settled on.

I thought we all had a kind of grudging respect for the fact that they had skepticism in areas where we had groupthink. Your book made me think, and maybe this was a literary conceit that actually no, you were the guy who thought that the Democratic party talking points were all correct until he shook you out of that smugness. But I can’t believe that was true. You kind of already know that there were ways he was leading his life in ways that put him in touch with certain truths more than people who lived their entire lives in D.C.

DL: Alright, so this was a long question with a lot of interesting parts.

MO: Yeah, sorry.

DL: So no, no, I’m going to try to address them, but we might have to do a couple rounds. And I do the general theme of this is enjoyable book, but let’s talk about all of the darkness or all of the challenge, which is fine. And in my life I’ve basically always either been the funny person in a serious room, or the serious person in a funny room. So I’m used to this.
MO: Right. And so caveat, the book has many tasty waves. It’s really a fun, it’s a delightful book.

DL: I feel the need to be like, don’t worry, you will finish this on a day at the beach and enjoy it.

MO: You totally will. I finished this in two days.

DL: Yeah, I know. And for me, as an author, I don’t know how you feel about this, but I always feel like if somebody’s like, “I finished your book really quickly,” or “It was an easy read,” I’m like, that’s a compliment because it means I worked really hard. That’s what I want to hear. Really hard to make the book easy to read.

MO: It should go down smooth.

DL: Exactly. But to get back to your question, let’s start with the first, I think really astute point. There are a bunch of them in that question. There’s politically different and culturally different, and also those things are becoming more similar.
I said in the book that it felt like Matt and I were drafted into opposite sides of the culture wars. Now that was always true to some extent. He was always listening to death metal. I was always listening to Sondheim, but that didn’t mean something politically until Trump started running. And then again in 2020 with the pandemic where it felt like, oh, the fact that he owns a pickup truck for work and I own two computer monitors for work everything about us and we’re in opposition. And that opposition is partisan somehow, even though he does not register to vote.

The other thing I’ll add about that is there was a lot of conversation among Democrats this last election of if people who weren’t registered, if just everyone had gone out and voted, that was the problem that Harris lost because of low turnout. There was some low turnout among Democrats in certain places. But I will tell you, as somebody who is thinking about my friend and brother-in-law who is not registered to vote, if everyone registered to vote, there are a lot of people who would not have voted for Kamala Harris. And so it’s not the idea that it’s just Democrats not voting, it just doesn’t hold up. So I think that even among non-voters, there is a political dynamic.

Alright, so then to continue our chain of astute ideas in this question–

MO: My least articulate question ever. You lent order to my mess of a question.

DL: No, not at all. But this idea of you brought up opening the schools, I’ll be totally honest. If you had asked me in the spring of 2021, I would have said essentially the teachers are not going to be, they’re just not going to go to work. You’re not going to be able to get teachers to go to work and put themselves at risk with all these kids. And so you can open the schools, but what’s going to happen? I’m not sure I was wrong about that, where I do think I was wrong in saying we don’t treat this as a crisis, that the fact that these kids aren’t in school. We have got to figure out a way to find a solution that is not Zoom school because Zoom school is really damaging, and the isolation that I was feeling that was so hard on me, and I think a lot of other people, that was happening to kids and we didn’t take it seriously enough.

And so I do think that was a problem. I don’t think I noticed it for two reasons. So one is I think vaccination took over everything. And so it became this question of if you don’t believe in the vaccine, which I do think not getting the vaccine I don’t think was a good choice, I think I made the right choice in getting the vaccine. I think that science absolutely supports that. It became this sense of therefore everything you say must be suspect. And so you had a lot of people who were like, I’m taking ivermectin for COVID, which is silly and we should reopen the schools. Which in retrospect, there was a really good point behind that. And so part of what the book is about is how do you respect some opinions? You have to respect every person. You don’t have to respect all of their opinions, but someone can say a lot of things where you’re like, no, that’s wrong.

And still say something you can learn a lot from. I think it’s that idea of saying, Nope, we don’t listen to you because you are wrong about big things that I think it’s not just harmful in terms of friendships and our family dynamics and whatever. It also is just bad if you care about democracy and policy. You want to learn from everyone wherever you can. And so even if someone says nine things that are not very helpful and then the 10th is really helpful, great, let’s use that. So that I think is something that I learned. And the last thing I’ll say about this is COVID. I think in this really weird and sad way, and I do think a lot of this is because of Trump, COVID really hardened our hearts on all sides. And I saw this happening with Matt and some of his, and he would talk about his coworkers and friends too.

And I mean to use, when I say hardened our hearts, I’ll apply that purely to me. I don’t know that would seem mean to say to him without talking to him. But I do think that I retreated into my intellectual bubble and Matt retreated or was pushed by people like me who were being a little standoffish to him or however you want to call it, into his, where I think listening to Joe Rogan became more important when there’s not other people around because we’re all not spending time with each other. And also when he’d go to work, everyone at work felt the same way he did about vaccines pretty much almost everybody. And when I went to work over Zoom, I never worked with someone who wasn’t vaccinated. And so there was this sense of all of us became more inclined to say, no, no, no, my bubble’s right, that bubble’s wrong. There’s no value in crossing the streams. And that’s where I think I learned a lot. So that was my 10 minute answer to your question, but I think there was just so much to unpack there. So thank you for indulging.

MO: One of the passages I like most in the book, it’s near the end, is when you talk about how you had always felt there was something uncool, or untoward, or wrong about being too joyful when the world is burning. And that surfing, I’m paraphrasing here, gave you permission, I mean, I think had Matt said, were you talking about climate change? And you would say, “Dude, they’re going to be storms all the time.” And Matt said, “Yeah, the surfing will be amazing.”

DL: He said, more or less, that. Well, I said, “Imagine if we had category five hurricanes slamming into the Jersey coast all year long.” And Matt was like, “That’d be great.” And I was like, “Okay, well we came at this from different angles. But sure.”

MO: I confess that although I temperamentally and politically closer to you than I am to your brother-in-law, I am somebody who tends to very easily sort of block out world historical crises if they’re more than five miles from me and really just enjoy what’s in front of me. And I thought I understand his reaction totally. I’m not a surfer yet, but I get it. But that was hard for you, and I know a lot of people who have a hard time feeling entitled to their own joy when there’s suffering anywhere or when there’s mass suffering in the news. And why do you think, was it knowing Matt or was it surfing that gave you permission to feel a little bit better about your own joy, even though stuff seemed to be going to hell around you?

DL: So the weird thing about surfing that I did not know, I mean there’s a lot I didn’t know about surfing, beginning with everything about surfing, but one of the things I did not know was that a lot of really good waves in one place start with tragedy someplace else, particularly on the east coast, because hurricane season is our best serving season. Maybe the winter when the noster come in. But I’m going to say hurricane season and hurricanes often we’re talking about really genuinely awful and devastating hurricanes. And then we’re hoping in Jersey that by the time they get up here, you get good waves. It feels like dancing to the fiddle while Rome is burning, right? I mean, it is a really strange thing for me. It was more about balance where it was like, this is still fun. It doesn’t mean that I can’t care about everything else.

That was not fun, and it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care about those things, but not enjoying it doesn’t make the bad stuff go away. It just makes my own life less complete. And I think that’s a lesson that people like me have really struggled with. And I think I see it a lot, particularly because of social media, we can witness unlimited amounts of tragedy. And I think there is a sense that we actually have a moral obligation to witness all the tragedy we can get into our eyes and into our brains. And I think if that’s how you want to spend your time, I genuinely am not against that. I think some people can handle it.

MO: That sounds horrible.

DL: Well, I think most people wouldn’t want to do that, right? But it’s the sense of I don’t want to do this, but I have to do it to be a good person. I don’t think it makes you a good person to witness more tragedy. I do think it makes you a good person to do stuff. I think it’s very important that we don’t say as a surfer, I’m not like, oh, I surf so I don’t care about climate change. I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s saying I have a connection to nature that I didn’t have before. I actually care more about it because I understand how important it is to protect and how much is left to protect. And instead of doom scrolling, maybe I’ll spend the doom scrolling time surfing, and then I will still spend some time trying to work on something climate related. And so I think it’s that balance, right? But I think it’s that idea of we have to binge the world’s most depressing information nonstop to be good citizens of the world. I think it’s the opposite. You have to do stuff, whatever you can do where none of us can fix it all, but you should be part of the solution and you should have some fun in your life when you can.

MO: I got off social media, I always say seven years ago, but it’s probably eight or nine years ago now, because I’ve been saying seven years for a few years now, I of course did that performative thing where I announced on social media course getting on social media, which I didn’t have a lot of Twitter followers. I don’t think anyone in the Twitterverse cared–

DL: Elon didn’t retweet and just say, “Hmm…”

MO: Elon did not retweet it. Mark Zuckerberg did not start a Chan Zuckerberg philanthropic initiative to bring me back. But on Facebook, there were definitely people who I was reasonably close to whose mode of keeping up with me was Facebook. And I thought I should say something, bye, and I think I said, if you don’t have my number but you want it, here’s my email, I’m open to phone calls. I even said, if you write me letters on paper, I’ll write back. I’ll respond to your faxes, telegraphs, whatever.

Actually, it was on Twitter that somebody I didn’t know wrote to me and said he was just livid. And he said that this is where you learn about the people who are suffering. This is where you see the fullness of the world. So great, you’re going to retreat into your own little privileged bubble with your healthy wife and healthy children and your retirement account, he presumed all these true things about me. But I mean, he was offended that I was declining to participate in his doom scrolling world. He felt ethical. People are not at liberty to look away. And for him getting off social media was looking away. I mean, I could have responded. I still read the paper, which I think is I important.

I mean, and to me, I don’t know. Now I’m talking more about me than about you.

DL: That’s okay.

MO: I get so mad when I say to people,”How are you?” And they say, “Well, you know what? With the world, I’m–.” Like, no, I actually wanted to know how are you? And if what you’re saying is I’m depressed because I’m incapable of being happy when there’s war in the Middle East, you can say that and I’ll have compassion. And I understand that to some extent. And I have family there. I get it. But the answer isn’t well as if the presumptive answer is we’re all suffering all the time. I have good days. And I dunno, just–

DL: It’s interesting. I mean, I feel like I don’t agree with the person who kind of accosted you on Twitter to say, how come you’re leaving social media? You have an obligation to doom scroll. I don’t fully agree with what or I would tweak or my own approach, I guess would be slightly different to what you said as well. Because, so first of all, I think the idea that Twitter or social media in general is where we should get most of our information. I mean, that is true, but it doesn’t make it good. And I think it doesn’t mean opting out of it is bad. And particularly if you’re saying, okay, I’m going to find news and understand what’s going on in the world and be a citizen of the world in some way in other ways, probably substantially more productive ways. And I think, by the way, what happened to Twitter proved you? If you want to jump back on really quickly just to be like I told you so to that one guy, go for it.

MO: I’m good. I’ll take your word for it. I’m good.

DL: I dunno. That’s very mature of you. But then the other thing I would say is when people ask me how it’s going, or when I ask people, I do think there’s a little bit of that caveat. And I hope that we reach a time when that is less true. Sometimes I will ask people, how’s it going other than all the stuff I am genuinely curious in how things are going. And also I do think that the state of the world affects us or affects most of us. And I think that’s okay and actually important where, for example, I went to one of the No Kings protests a couple weeks ago. Did I have to do that? Of course not. No one has to do that. And did I do it? I wanted to, not entirely, right? It’s a Saturday. There’s other things I could do on a Saturday.

But I also think that it is important to spend some of your time trying to think about how to improve the world around you. And that means in some way being affected by the world around you. Now, where I think it goes too far is when you ask someone or someone asks me, I’ll make it on myself because I still do sometimes they say, how’s it going? And you say, ah, the Middle East, as though the Middle East, how it’s going that I think is, it’s not just going too far. It actually distracts from any of the many things you could do to help make the world better in a small way. I can’t fix the Middle East if I could and I was on your podcast instead. I think that would be a real problem. But since I can’t, I’m happy to be here. And so because of that–

MO: My podcast is bringing peace to the Middle East right now.

DL: Even better.

MO: We’re doing it. It’s all working. It’s all working for you.

DL: But I think that’s the point, right? Is how do you improve things in a small way? And I think we all have that responsibility as people who are lucky enough to be alive. And we also have a responsibility not to be constantly bummed out by the world in ways that actually keep us from fulfilling that obligation. And also, you only get to live once. You might as well enjoy it to the extent you can, which for many of us fortunately remains pretty high. The last thing I’ll say about this too, and this is a big thing I learned about politics from surfing with Matt, is if you’re bummed out all the time, there’s a large group of Americans who are like, oh, I don’t want to be part of that. Right? It’s not fun. And so I do think that while I feel strongly that we’re in a moment of existential crisis for our country and our planet, I really do feel that way.

I also think that for Democrats to win elections, you have to win over at least some voters who say, nah, that’s overblown. And to do that, you can’t just be sort of walking around with a sad trombone all the time. And I learned something interesting, so as on Fox and Friends to talk about the book, because one of the hosts is a surfer and he wanted to talk about surfing. And obviously the two of us don’t. We follow each other on Twitter now. So I can tell you from his Twitter feed, we don’t agree politically and that’s okay. So as in the green room, and I’ve spent more time in the Fox News building, not a lot, but more time than I ever imagined I would, and a lot of Fox, the evenings tend to be like, “Our Democrats hiring immigrants to murder your kids.”

But the day side tends to be a mix of conservative leaning news, but also we have fun tends to be the ethos. There’s the “and friends” part of Fox and Friends. And I do think that’s why it’s appealing to so many people, including people who are not conservative, that they say, well, this seems fun, right? It’s at the Fox News Building in New York, they’re doing a concert series this summer. And I was like, “Yeah, that’s cool.” Even though I really dislike Fox News as an institution, and I think what it’s doing to the country is harmful, I think Democrats can learn from how that institution managed to win over so many people who didn’t think of themselves as political.

MO: I’m going to go on a limb, and I don’t mean to, you’re my guest and I want to be hospitable, and you sell more books than I do, and you’ve written a book–

DL: This windup makes me worried. All right, what’s coming next?

MO: No, but is just that I think you’re on a journey towards being more pro-fun than you’re even willing to admit right now. I hope so. I actually don’t think that “How are yous” should be caveated. And I think it’s okay that I feel great most days and I think that your position is a little uncomfortable with my position and I don’t want to linger on that. I just want to say my prediction for you is that you get more profu as you get older or I dunno, you talked to the book about having kids, I dunno if you have kids, but you don’t in the book.

DL: We don’t at the moment.

MO: But I’ll just say part of my, I feel like I want, if I am mopey all the time, I’d feel like a bad dad.

DL: That’s true.

MO: You’re not mopey all the time. I don’t want to put you, I’m not talking about a straw man. Not you.

DL: No, you’re a hundred percent right.

MO: But I feel like if my kids say is life good, I’m be like, life’s amazing. And I do feel like, I mean, I think I voted Republican once maybe for Bill Weld, and I dunno it’s hard for me to see voting for the climate denying Republican party that exists now. But I understand why people don’t want to hang with the bummed out Democrat. I mean this is part of Mamdani’s thing is he seemed like he was having a good time.

DL: Right? Yeah. I mean I think he was having more fun than most Democratic candidates are comfortable having the other, and compared to Andrew Cuomo, who was not exactly a barrel of laughs, and I will also say I think Democrats have a huge–are you hearing my dog barking at us?

MO: We’re pro-dog. We’re pro-dog. We’re not going to edit out your dog.

DL: Alright. So I think that part of what we’re talking about though, and this is I think Democrats have a big opportunity, which is Trump unfortunately can be fun, right? Again, this is not, my experience has not made me more open to Trump, if anything the opposite. But I do think we have to be willing to acknowledge what he’s good at. And one of the things he has been good at is fun. He started a dance craze. I don’t know how, but he did. And so, okay. But on the other hand, Trump these days is like a dark, dark–

MO: Yeah, it’s not so fun.

DL: It’s weird. And honestly, when we’re all worried about Biden’s age or we were, I think age might have something to do with it, then you have Steven Miller and JD Vance who are the least fun two people possibly on the planet ever.

MO: Ever.

DL: And so I do think that Democrats have a moment to be the party of fun again. And I think Mamdani showed that. But the other thing that I would say, you’re talking about kind of the journey that I may be on, who knows, is we’re talking about this kind of journey toward fun. So number one, I think some of it is accepting who you are within limits, right? It sounds to me, we’ve talked about this, you are wired in a way where things kind of just, I don’t mean this in a jealous way, letting stuff roll off your back is not as hard for you as it is for someone like me. And it’s probably harder for somebody else who might be listening to this.

MO: And I’ll say, I’ll caveat, there’s a shallowness in that it’s, it’s not all virtuous. There’s stuff I don’t see or feel or whatever. Go ahead.

DL: What I’m saying is putting aside the virtue of whatever, it’s more just self-acceptance and saying, “I just don’t see–” weirdly, I am out there talking about the value of being chill, which is ironic. Ask my wife if you want to know just how ironic.
But I think the value of being more chill, being the most chill version of you is high. The value of feeling guilty because you’re not as chill as somebody who’s genuinely chill is low. So that’s one thing I would say. The other thing I’ll say, and this didn’t go in the book because it’s not at all related to my own surfing journey, but I learned a lot from this. There’s a surf influencer, and I don’t remember her name. I think it’s Tina. And somebody asked her about filming YouTube surf videos and what she learned. And she said, when you film surf YouTube videos, even when the day sucks, you have to be like, the waves are so great today.

I’m having such a good time. This is awesome. And she was like, the weird thing is, originally I did that because the audience doesn’t want to hear you complain. But the weird thing is that sometimes when you say it enough, you start to be like, yeah, today’s awesome. I’m having a great time. And I think about that sometimes, and I probably should think about it even more of, there are moments when we don’t have a choice and life just sucks a little bit. That’s life. But there are a lot of moments and more than we thought where we do have a choice. And I think choosing to tell ourselves a more fun story in those moments, no matter how you’re wired, is great. And I hope that’s one thing that when someone who’s listening now finishes the book, I hope you feel like you are a little bit more empowered or more courageous about doing that.

MO: And I should say that one of the things my wife would tell you about me is that I get by just lying to myself all the time, that my stories are totally bogus, but that enables me, even on very dark days, like it’s awesome out here. The book is a great surf journey. It’s like there’s Hawaii, there’s Spain, you don’t get to Navarez, you’re not in Portugal. That would be really, but it’s amazing and it’s so much fun.

Okay, I’m going to add, there’s six questions to get however long you want to take for each. This is a bespoke question for you. If I want to start surfing, should I, and what’s my first move? It’s just going to a surf shop and getting a board.

DL: Yes, you should go to a surf shop. You can try to go someplace where you can sign up for lessons, which not all surf shops will do. And the biggest thing I would say is depending on your age, just have a sense of your expectations. If you want to look awesome on a surfboard, be seven or eight when you’re starting. If you want to have a cool experience where you will learn stuff about yourself, great. Do it.

MO: Well, I mean, as you pointed it out, William Finnegan said, if you’re over 14, don’t bother.

DL: Yeah.

MO: You said, screw you with that. Okay. So now here’s the normal lightning round. Do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

DL: I feel like I’m agnostic, not in the old school where agnostic is starting to mean ambivalent. I mean agnostic in what it actually means, which is that I think there is something bigger than us and I don’t really understand what it is or claim to or that sort of thing.

MO: Where does your income come from? How do you support yourself financially? What’s the breakdown?

DL: Most of my income comes from writing speeches for other people, write for private clients. And then some of it comes from books. And at times some of it has come from TV and film writing as well.

MO: If you could have any other career that if you had decided young enough to do it would’ve been possible. So not being Aquaman or an Olympic sprinter, but something you might’ve been able to do, had you made different choices, what would it be?

DL: Well, I always thought I was going to go into comedy, like full-time comedy. I did standup in high school, and so I wish that I had had the guts temperamentally to really give it a shot, which now I’m like, I don’t want to do that. I think it’s not a good time to start out doing something like that. But I think in my twenties it would’ve been interesting if I had had the kind of courage to fail for as long as you need to fail to become a successful standup.

MO: What’s your biggest regret or what’s a big regret?

DL: I think I regret how much time I have wasted worrying. I can point to how much time I wasted this morning. I spent 15 minutes worrying about something and it almost feels like you’re just shortening your life for no reason. So again, I feel like the book made me worry less or it’s about how I learned to worry less, but that’s certainly a journey I’m still on and it’s just like it takes up too much time. It’s not productive for all of us.

MO: Even superficial lightweights like me.

Can you name a song that invokes for you an intense feeling of nostalgia?

DL: Yeah, I mean anything by the new pornographers. They’re kind of core albums. That was my college music. So I feel like we all have the college music since you’ve been gone does the same thing. It’s kind of peak millennial college party and everybody says that the music they listened to at the parties in college was the best. But no, my generation’s correct about that.

MO: Okay, two more, but one’s a three parter. Can you recommend something to watch, something to read and something to listen to?

DL: Okay. These are not necessarily timely.

MO: Whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be.

DL: Great. Something to watch. My wife and I are addicted to “Death in Paradise,” which is a British crime show about a sort of stodgy detective on a Caribbean island. We used to have goldfish. We named all of our goldfish after characters. Sadly they’re all dead, but fitting for a murder mystery.

Something to read. I just started a book, so maybe it’s terrible and don’t read it, but I think it’s going to be good. And it’s called “The Spinach King” and it’s by a guy named John Seabrook who writes for the New Yorker and his family, I guess, or his grandfather was like a produce tycoon in New Jersey. And he does this reported book about his own family and the kind of rise and fall of his grandfather. And I’m pretty excited to dig into that one.

And then something to listen to. It’s also going to be a book, but it’s something I listen to on audio book. I’m a big murder mystery person. That’s my escapism. And I listen–

MO: Hence the Mick Herron on the bookshelf behind you.

DL: Yeah. And I feel like even that is not quite cozy. I go super cozy.

And so something that I would listen to is I listened to the audio book of the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series, which is Tony Horowitz, who’s a great mystery writer. He wrote a detective series in which the detective is Hawthorne, and then the writer, Anthony Horowitz, sort of semi biographical is the Watson. And it’s great. It’s really, really good. And also with just really well done audiobook.

I’m going to add one other too. Rachel McAdams, reading “Anne of Green Gables” is fantastic. It’s so good. And that’s one where the performance is makes listening to that completely different than reading the book, which is also a great experience.
MO: And then bonus question, when I go to Long Beach Island in August, will you come surf with me?

DL: Yeah, come hang out.

MO: Alright.

DL: I’ll come down there. Or you come up here at Asbury Park or I can come up there. I’ll let you know. We’ll meet halfway and surf with Matt, he’s kind of between.

MO: So, I’ve never surfed before. You understand? So I’m going to, I mean, you have to put yourself back in the kook newbie.
DL: Well, I’ll tell you what Matt told me the first time we went surfing together, which is it’s only drowning. So I assume you’ll find that as reassuring as I did.

MO: David Litt of the Upper West Side, Asbury Park, who divides his time between Asbury Park, Washington, and probably visiting his parents in New York. The book is, “Its Only Drowning.” Really Good to hang out. Thanks.

DL: Yeah, so good to see you.

MO: Hey, some fun religious holidays coming up. Well, not really fun actually, anti-fun in Judaism. They are about to start celebrating what’s called the three weeks. Now, during those three weeks, which commemorate the destructions of the temples as well as many other tragedies in Jewish history, you are not supposed to cut your hair if you’re a man. You don’t shave, you don’t get married, you don’t buy fancy clothing, you don’t go to entertainment or fun parties. You basically just, you sit around and mope. So listen, this is just a warning to you if you want to get married to someone Jewish or you are Jewish and you want to be doing it right according to the sages, you got to rush and do it before July 13th, or you’ll have to wait until mid August to do it. But those three weeks, no weddings for you. And you can see this in the New York Times wedding pages. You can see that the number of Jewish weddings drops precipitously during the three weeks every summer. So that’s Jewish holiday time.

Over in the Catholic tradition. A lot of Saints Days are coming up because there always are some Saints days. But I want to focus on Staint Kateri Tekakwitha, who was the first native American canonized by the Catholic church. She was born in 1656 and died in 1680. And she was known for her love for and care of, not just natives, but also the Christians who were colonizing them. She was capacious in her love. And we celebrate the Feast of St. Kateri on Monday, July 14th, just one day after the Jews start the three weeks. So I’m actually going to give you a rabbinic dispensation permission, a header to start your three weeks a day late so that you can celebrate St. Kateri. How about that? You heard it here. You heard it here. From Rabbi Mark.

First, some celebrity birthdays, July 1st, Dan Aykroyd turns 72, Missy Elliot turns 53 the next day. Margot Robbie, known as Barbie, turns 34. The day after that, Tom Cruise turns 63 and he doesn’t look a day over 57, and July 8th, Mike Raki, who plays Larry the Cucumber in Veggie Tales, he co-created Veggie Tales, and then also is the Voice of Larry the Cucumber. This is actually very important to Christian animation fans for reasons I don’t understand, but my research tells me big deal for Christian animation fans, Mike Raki turns 59, and then July 9th, Tom Hanks, America’s what President? God, I don’t know. Turns 68.

The podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppnheimer. I’d love feedback right to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman. Audio Consulting by Robert Scaramuccia. Intern help by Caroline Coffey. And the team over the Danforth Center includes Debra Kennard, Abram Van Engen, and Mark Valeri. Our music is by Love Canon and our web design is by Cause + Effect online at causexeffect.com. Until next time, hanging 10. Enjoying some tasty waves. I’m Mark.