Ding-ding-ding!
Experts on Expert, Sarah Silverman, Jameela Jamil, and Mohonk Mountain House. Huzzah!
I’ve said this before: I don’t really listen to podcasts about big ideas or history or how things are made or what makes the world tick. I just mostly want to hear people I’m already familiar with chatting away about themselves or TV shows or something. I’m not embarrassed about it, it’s just what I enjoy.
Upon reflection, maybe I am a BIT embarrassed about it.
This Sunday, I decided to branch out a little as a favor to my brain.
One of the Armchair Expert spin-offs is called Experts on Expert, described by Dax Shepard on his website thusly:
I’m fascinated by smart people with a unique point of view. On this show, I leverage people’s vague awareness of me as an actor to talk with a bunch of bona fide experts. It’s a soothing mix of brain candy and defensive humor (my response to feeling intellectually outclassed). Join me on a layman’s journey through the Land of Specialists!
See why I like him so much?
I hit play on the episode with Stephen Dubner, known for co-authoring the Freakonomics book series. Dax and Monica just said hello to him and the conversation took off immediately. I chose well!
There’s something called the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, which is succinctly described by Wikipedia as “a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has an increased frequency of occurrence.” Dax and Monica call it a “ding-ding-ding” for short, and a few minutes into the podcast, I hit my first ding-ding-ding when Stephen told a story that took place at Mohonk Mountain House.
I have been lucky enough to go there a few times in my life, always courtesy of my father and his husband, always with my siblings and our families, and always glorious.
You might recognize the exterior from the show Upload, where it stands in for the fancy digital afterlife Lakeview Hotel.
My 15-year-old had just been telling me THAT DAY how much she wanted to go back, and my dad & his husband are there as I write this, so there was my ding-ding-ding!
One of the big topics on the podcast was about our ability (or our resistance) to change, especially as we get older. This has been on my mind a lot lately (and came up in my last post when I was listening to Conan O’Brien and Jane Fonda, ding-ding-ding). I think about my parents and their parents, always interested in trying new things and learning more, and I like to believe they have taught me to do the same.
I’m going to go back and listen to Stephen’s first episode when I get a chance. No time now because it’s Delta Flyers day, plus I just found out that Jameela Jamil has a new podcast. I discovered her on The Good Place, I follow her on Instagram (where she satisfyingly and smartly rails against celebrity diet culture), and I was thrilled when she joined the voice cast of Star Trek: Prodigy.
I also went to see her live a couple of years ago (in the Before Times) as part of a short-lived but great streaming series that filmed right near my old apartment in NYC.
Here’s a clip from that show, where she describes being sick on Emmy weekend:
Her new podcast, Bad Dates with Jameela Jamil, sounds promising.
The first episode has Sean Hayes and Conan O’Brien (ding-ding-ding?) on as guests. Sold!
I did listen to one more episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend this weekend, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
If you’re a Sarah Silverman fan, check out her episode of Alan Alda’s Clear+Vivid. This was waaay back in 2018 and was one of the first episodes of his podcast I listened to.
And in good birthday news, my John Wick rant was completely unnecessary, as the movie I want to see on my birthday is, in fact, playing in my dad’s neighborhood.
Finally: Should I be apologizing (as we Canadians do) for the frequency of this Substack? I suspect I will slow down soon enough, but right now, it is giving me great joy, evidenced by the fact that I’ve had to pee for the last ten minutes and instead I’m still sitting here, typing away.
I find it hard to resist a platform where I can write whatever I want, edit it at any point even after publishing, and throw in Catherine O’Hara gifs.