The Drunk Father

Darkness in the family. It happens. How do we move forward as people and as parents when there are violent, traumatic experiences lurking back there in our early life? Friend of the pod, dad, author, and charming devil Daniel Magariel (ONE OF THE BOYS, Scribner 2017 & WALK THE DARKNESS DOWN, Bloombury 2023) is here to enlighten and delight us with harrowing tales of an addict father, how trauma can be channeled into autobiographical art, and how literary craft might just be a moral endeavor. PODRE: it's certainly cheaper than therapy.

Get a copy of Daniel Magariel's luminous debut novel ONE OF THE BOYS here or here, and pre-order his second novel WALK THE DARKNESS DOWN here. He tweets at @danielmagariel.

Then head over to podrepod.com for more information about the show and to sign up for email updates so you never miss an episode or that moment in the near future when we blast out the special patented PODRE secret instructions for how to be the perfect dad.

New episodes every Monday.

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Transcript

Julian: Hello citizens. Let's talk about dad. What do you think we should talk about?

Chris: What do you want to talk about?

Julian: I don't know.

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning. But what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.

Julian: I'm Julian. Remember? Julian? What? What is it? Julian? Help me think. Oh yeah, Julian Isaiah Benz-Brunt. And I call him dad, but you can call him Chris Brunt.

Chris: Say my name. Say my name.

Julian: Chris Brunt. But I am also a better singer.

Chris: Yeah, you are a better singer. Pull up a chair, man. Tell me about your brother. What's your brother like?

Julian: He is good and he will come up soon. I got to say you are a very fun people to listen to my podcast. Very fun.

Chris: We love our audience.

Julian: Yes, we love you.

Chris: We appreciate you.

Julian: We really appreciate you for watching this. We appreciate only you.

Chris: Only you.

Julian: Only you.

Chris: Who are some of your favorite musicians, Julian? Who do you like? Whose music do you like?

Julian: The Beastie Boys and the Strokes.

Chris: Oh yeah.

Julian: Anybody else? Tell me your favorite music.

Chris: Yeah, tell us your favorite music so.

Julian: You can send any paper planes that you ever want.

Chris: Yeah, we accept paper planes. Also Twitter.

Julian: Yeah, we definitely accept Twitter. And we always will accept a letter. Email, an email, anything.

Chris: Maybe we should get like a PO box 

Julian: And we are going to get... 

Chris: Send money.

Chris: My guest today is Danny Magariel. Novelist, professor at Columbia University, husband, father, all around mensch and a good friend of mine. His first novel, One of the Boys, is a tour de force autobiographical tale of growing up in a dysfunctional family with a deeply problematic family member. In this case, a brilliant but narcissistic crack addicted father who inflicts several different kinds of trauma on his children. Called gripping and heartfelt by The New York Times, it's thrilling and gorgeously written and it's available now. His second novel, Walk the Darkness Down, will be out this summer from Bloomsbury. We're going to talk about both novels and the real life model for that unforgettable father character and a lot more. In just a minute.

But first, a little bit of The Unauthorized Autobiography of Chris Brunt. That's next.

I grew up around some ****. Not as much as some people. Not as much as my guest today, Danny Magariel. Maybe not even as much as you, whoever's listening. I'm not doing the Suffering Olympics here, but I did grow up around some ****. There were people in my family who were violent, who were addicts. There were guns when there shouldn't have been guns. There were those red and blue lights out the window sometimes, mostly there was a lot of noise. That's what I remember most, noise and the fear. Growing up in that environment didn't turn me into a tough guy. Unfortunately. What I did was I got mouthy, I got secretive, I learned how to deceive others and myself. I got really into art and culture. And music and books and living in my head. A little later, I got really into drugs and alcohol too. You all know that story. But I never lost that panicky feeling that, oh, ****, this is getting very dangerous. People are about to get hurt. Someone should do something. Someone not me. I'm really good at ****'* going down. See you. I ******* disappear. Hop into my car, drive away, reenter my more carefully curated world, the worlds I've tried to build for myself elsewhere, far from home. There was one night when growing up when I couldn't do that. I'm going to tell this story, and the person I'm talking about probably has no memory of it because of the state they were in when it happened. But I've definitely never forgotten it. I'm telling the story now because I've always had the sense that there's something essential in it for me. Like it's a key that unlocks something about who I am, that's vitally important. And if I tell the story right, if nothing is left in shadow, I'll finally hear it. And whatever that is, I need to hear it. Like I discussed with Keith Gessen, being a parent is in part a journey of self discovery, of self analysis. And leaving things in the shadows doesn't just affect me anymore. I have my own family now, and they need and deserve a version of me that isn't plagued by old nightmares. So here goes. One night I was a teenager, and I came home, parked my car out front and walked up to the garage. We had one of those automatic garage doors where you punch in the code on the side and the whole garage door opens really slowly, really loudly. And as the door opened, I saw that the lights were on in the garage. And I saw someone was inside and it was a family member. And I looked down at his hand and I saw that he was holding a gun. It was a big gun. It was a .45 handgun. And I could tell by the look on his face that he was in a very, very, very bad frame of mind. And I wanted to just kind of back up slowly, walk back down the driveway and get in my car and leave. But. He reached back and slapped the button that closed the garage door and it began to close behind me. And after all that noise, the garage door was closed and it was silent and it was just the two of us inside. I said, what's going on? He's kind of breathing funny, heaving with this sort of inner turmoil, and he was really ******* drunk. He said, I'm going to kill her. I said, who? I was worried that whoever that who was lived at our house. But he said, he's going to go kill a girlfriend. I said, oh, don't do that. Why? What's going on? And he proceeded to tell me why he was so angry. He basically felt like he was being harassed by this person, and he had no choice but to go murder her. I'm panicking now, having that oh, **** feeling, but I don't know if I'm afraid for for that person or for him or for me. I think probably all of the above. I kind of felt like anything was possible that night. I said, let's talk about this. He got really close to me and sort of reiterated his plans. And now I'm just thinking, whoa, I just got to slow him down. I just got to keep him talking, and I got to get out of this ******* garage. So I kind of almost like we were dancing. I would take one small step so that I could turn my body, and he would turn his body. And now finally, we're facing in the opposite directions, and I can reach over to that same button that he pushed to close the door, and I can open it. And I said, look, look, we better smoke a few cigarettes before we make any big decisions. And he says, okay. So I hit the button, and the door opens. And now at least we're outside again. At least we're not in that enclosed space together. But he's still holding the gun. He's still mad. We go out into the driveway and light up a couple of smokes, and he's talking and talking and talking about how much he hates this person, about what they've done to him. And somewhere in there, the conversation shifts. Somewhere in there, he's not talking about her anymore. He's talking about other family members and what they've done to him and how he thinks they feel about him. And it's scary, and it's brutal. And all the while, I'm still just trying to placate him. I'm just trying to say whatever I can think of to disarm. I'm saying, no, you got it all wrong. Everything's fine. Everything's going to be fine. But the conversation finally comes around to me and how he feels about me and how he thinks I feel about him. And at this point, he's gotten really close to me with his body, and I'm just watching that gun in his hand as he puts his arm around me. And he pulls me in close. And. I try to turn it into like I'm help holding him up, you know, I'm helping him keep his balance because he's so ******* drunk. But then he tightens his grip with his arm. He says to me, you think you're better than me? I said no. No. And now he's turned the embrace into a headlock, and he's pulling me down, and I'm bending at the shoulders, looking at the gun, and he says, they all think you're better than me. I'm a piece of ****. You think I'm a piece of ****? And I'm saying no. No. As I feel the gun touch my head, and he's holding it there, and he holds it there for a while. And I don't know what is going to happen. I know that I shouldn't move, shouldn't struggle, and shouldn't speak. I just held my hands out, you know, like I was trying to keep my balance. He pressed it, and then finally he let go. I backed away and just started talking, talking, just trying to get this over with, trying to get him away from that gun. The madness of that moment finally broken. It's funny, when I look back on it, I didn't say something like, hey, what the ****? But I think I was in just a state of pure concentration to survive this encounter. And what seemed right to me was to make him feel like he had other options than hurting anybody that night. So that's what I tried to do. I tried to convince him, persuade him that he had all of these great options in front of him that didn't involve any violence. I remember him getting one more cigarette and kind of holding onto it awkwardly, and it really lost his equilibrium by then. I wouldn't stand it up straight, kind of swaying. And I said, Listen, why don't you let me hold on to that gun tonight, just for tonight. Eventually, I got it from him. He kind of left it sitting out there for me to take in, and I assume just went in, collapsed, passed out. So I took the gun and I hid it. Morning came. I got the **** out of there. We've never spoken about that night, me and this family member, ever. And years later, when I told my parents this story, they didn't believe me. I mean, they knew it was true. They had to know similar incidents had happened to them, probably even worse **** with this exact same family member. So they knew it was true, but they couldn't bring themselves to admit to me that they knew the story was true. That didn't happen. You're exaggerating. Don't say that. This, by the way, is the actual definition of gaslighting. I tell you a story, you know that it's true. You know that I know that it's true, and yet you say right into my face that it's false. The cost of admitting the story is true is too high. To admit that into our shared reality would be to admit its obvious consequential interpretation, which would be that a lot of **** has to change around here. We need to change dramatically. And that came with too high a cost. It's much easier to just go, Nah, that didn't happen. You're exaggerating. Years go by and you think, Am I exaggerating? People often talk about gaslighting like it's this malevolent tactic motivated purely by the desire to harm you, to make you feel crazy just for the hell of it. But in this case, and I think in many cases it's a defensive tactic. It sure as hell can feel evil, can feel like malicious intent is behind it. But there's a desire underneath that to preserve and protect the self and the sense of reality that is under threat. I've talked to people who are victims of assault, especially sexual assault. And I think that that dynamic plays out in a lot of families or in workplaces. Don't come to me with the truth about this person. We can't proceed if you say that **** out loud. We take this on as the new true narrative. We're dead. It's the plot of every Greek tragedy. All of which are about family secrets, by the way. Things too terrible, too unspeakable to admit. And in the covering up, in the denial of them in the gaslighting, the stage is set for even more nightmarish horrors to unfold. In every family that I've ever been close enough to, to have this level of inside knowledge, this dynamic has played out. It seems to be as common as families themselves. So how do I make sure this never happens in the family that I've started? How do I make sure that one day I'm not gaslighting my own kids? Because more than the events themselves, and I've only told you about one, there were many. But more than the events themselves, it was the gaslighting that really tore relationships apart in my family. It was the unwillingness to confront reality, the truth of what had happened, that ******* enraged me to the point of estrangement from some of these people I can forgive a gun to my head quicker than I can forgive you telling me there was no gun to my head. And I came very close to not airing this episode for reasons that by now should be obvious. The last thing I want to do on this podcast is hurt anyone. But there is a kind of terrible inevitability to doing work like this. Autobiographical work. Suffice to say, the last thing you want is a writer in your family. Telling all your ****. So look, I want to say that my parents loved me deeply. Both of them did the very best they possibly could in some pretty wild situations. Faced down some impossible and harrowing choices. What's also true is that sometimes those choices left me vulnerable, left all of us vulnerable, unsafe. So if there is a key in this story for me, it's to be able to tell it without shame or bitterness. To arrive at a place where I don't hold these events or thereaft aftermaths against anyone anymore. Not even against the person who nearly murdered me. Because I understand the pressure these people were under and that they were doing the best they could. But the second half of it is I make **** sure that my home, the one I live in now with my spouse and my two little boys, is a place where no one is afraid to tell the truth. Or hear the truth. Is a place where no one's safety is part of the bargain is a place where nobody ever feels as alone and afraid and. Out of options. As we did. That night. 

Chris: Why did I miss your wedding?

Daniel: I don't know.

Chris: Was I having a kid? I was probably having a kid that's usually I've missed a lot of weddings because I keep having kids.

Daniel: I was being a dad and a husband.

Chris: I've missed most of my best friend's weddings because my wife was in labor at the time, which has only happened twice. But it's like that's for whatever reason. Everyone I know got married those two weekends.

Daniel Yeah.

Chris: Well, Danny, I've been spending a lot of time with you in the form of your debut novel, One of the Boys, over the last week. And I've already told you this. I texted you what a marvelous ******* book it is, man. I remember reading it the first time, and I read it straight through because I literally couldn't put it down. I read it all the way through. And this time I was kind of taking my time a bit more because I was thinking so much about the choices you made to write an autobiographical novel and sort of wondering what that may have meant for you. At the time and what it means for you now, but also just kind of taking my time to look at the way you crafted this thing because it's so well crafted and it works so well to just kind of push the reader through on this kind of collision course with the character's destiny. And there's so much raw feeling and there's so much vulnerability, especially in the narrator. And I admire it so much, man. I loved, loved, loved getting to read this book again, and I'm so excited for your next one.

Daniel: Thanks, Chris. That's nice. One of the Boys feels a bit like ancient history just because I've been engrossed in the sophomore effort. But the second book is called Walk the Darkness Down.

Chris: Yeah.

Daniel: It comes out July of 2023, and it'll be at your local bookstores and online, et cetera.

Chris: We're going to talk first today about One of the Boys and its connection to your own life, your own family. One of the Boys, published in what, Danny? 2017 by Scribner. Every review of the book kind of begins with the father character, right? Like the unforgettable portrait here's the kind of chaotic energy at the heart of this novel. And you feel that in chapter one, right? Like, as soon as he steps on stage, you feel like the show is beginning. It made me think of an inside joke that you and I developed, just the phrase, the eagle has landed. The eagle has landed. Tell us what that meant and where it came from and why it's so darkly ******* funny.

Daniel: My father always seemed to speak in script form. He had just lines that just sort of, like, encompassed whatever it was he was trying. And most of them actually came from his influences, like films. Right?

Chris: Catchphrases.

Daniel: Catchphrases from films. So the eagle is land is always when something has been delivered. I hate to say I have other friends, Chris, but I have another friend who also has one just like that. I call him Hal isms because my father's name is Hal. You can use that.

Chris: It's interesting you don't name him in the novel.

Daniel: I don't. I don't name any of anyone.

Chris: There is nameless novel.

Daniel: Part of it is like when you're dealing with autobiographical material and you're also trying to be a fiction writer, it's this balance of figuring out how to use this material from your own life, but also how to make it alive and fresh and just like something other than you and your own experiences. And so when I first started, in some ways, I feel like I was very lucky to have had a ****** up childhood because I had the material for my first book, I knew what it was always going to be about. So I actually spent, like 15 years learning to write with the same material over and over, just trying it in different voices, trying it in different point of views, trying it in different tenses, trying it with different pacing.

Chris: But there was never any doubt that these were the stories. These are the characters. This is the world. This is where the writing begins.

Daniel: This is where the writing begins. Exactly. So I didn't know how the sequence of the story was going to unfold, necessarily.

Chris: I want to go back to the real life inspiration here. And the eagle has landed.

Daniel: So he has other ones too. Chris recently, he and I, we go through periods in which I sort of, like, welcome him back into my life. And then he does something like, horribly offensive, like I call my in laws and ask for money. Or most recently? Basically, he's like, I'm moving to Cape May, New Jersey. And I'm like, no, you're not. Which is where I live now, right? And he's in Kansas City. He's like, well, I want to be close to my family. I'm like, well, dad, we don't want to be close to you. And most because everything he touches can. He's my father, so obviously there's a strong affinity for him. There always will be. But part of loving someone is also knowing who they are and knowing that I don't necessarily want him to be super close to my family. So basically, he reverts back with an email like, okay, I won't move close to you, but please wire $25,000 to this account to seal the deal.

Chris: And he's dead serious. He's dead serious. And I'm like, he blackmails you over his own presence, right? If you don't send me 25 grand.

Daniel: I'm showing up at your doorstep, and I'm your problem.

Chris: I'm your problem.

Daniel: I'm your problem.

Chris: And that's a real threat, right?

Daniel: And he's always done this specifically with me. And so I have an older brother and younger sister, and part of the way he's always manipulated is he just has, like, radio silence for everyone else and just, like, locks it on one of us. And so what I did was I just democratized the whole thing. I replied and added my brother and my sister and my wife and my brother in law and just, hey, guys, I'm responding to my father here in this email telling him that I cannot be blackmailed.

Chris: It's very lawyerly of you, right? Like, bringing in witnesses, putting it all in writing. Here's what's happened and here's what I'm going to do about it.

Daniel: And he reverts back, which is this crazy email where he's just like, I can't believe you told everybody here. And he leans into my brother, who's done nothing, by the way. He's just like, why is he on here? He's still trying to figure out his latent homosexuality and his suicidal ideations, and I'm going to outlive him. And I'm just like, oh, my God.

Chris: Wow. Yeah.

Daniel: And then he comes at me and.

Chris: Hold on, I'm going to outlive him. He says this about his son eldest.

Daniel: Yeah, in One of the Boy, there's this obsession with the first born, and my father always had that. And so for him to just dismiss his first born with a single line.

Chris: Is that that sort of like sort of sentimental, kind of like biblical notion?

Daniel: That he's the patriarch, the whole thing, right? And he responds and he starts talking about my wife, and he's like, where do you come from? A putrid drop? Where will you return worms and weeds? And then he's like, I will rise again is what he basically said. And then he comes after me. He dismisses my brother with a single line. He goes straight up like Old Testament vengeful god, like the Book of Job.

Chris: Where did you come from? Like, answering his own questions.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. A putrid drop. And then he comes after me and it's like old Western masculine gunslinger mentality. And he's just like he goes, Son, you're a liar, a cheat, and a horse thief. Hold on, did my dad just call me a horse thief?

Chris: And meant it? Meant it?

Daniel: He's like, and you spent five years writing a book that was 40 pages. So my response back was just like, my book is way longer than 40 pages. That was the whole response back.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I'm holding it in my hands right now and it's clearly well over 160 pages. Danny, so he's off by a factor of four.

Daniel: You should check out the big print version.

Chris: Is this not the big print version? But I mean, that insult, right? That little dig is a pretty ******* smart one on his part, right? I mean, to sort of take this incredible achievement of yours. Every person who wants to be a writer, there's nothing more precious than sort of the idea of the debut. There's probably nothing that would be more vulnerable about and, of course, what your parents think of it or how they feel about it, or how they feel about you as a writer. I don't know anyone that writes that isn't in some way really vulnerable to that. For him to zero in on that I mean, to literally, in the most literal way possible, minimize the the most important professional artistic achievement of your life is dastardly.

Daniel: It is. It's monstrous. But I know the man so well so that I can't be wounded by the precision of his arrows. And part of it is that some of the material that's explored in this book, some of the real stuff that actually happened, right? Like, he refuses despite his sobriety now he refuses to be honest about it. He has his own counternarrative where he is still the savior of the family, despite the fact that he lost everything due to a crack cocaine addiction and became horribly abusive and terribly manipulative. My brother hadn't spoken to him in ten years.

Chris: Became, or always was right? I mean, it seems like that behavior certainly predated you guys and predated New Mexico.

Daniel: It did. It certainly escalated. And you know how drugs can just make the they can bring out the monster. One of the things what's strange about my father is that the further he got into drugs, the more he got into spirituality.

Chris: I find he was so ******* fascinating.

Daniel: He would go on, like, days long binges, and they would be punctuated by us going to synagogue and sitting there, like, on Yom Kippur and just, like, all day long. I mean, that hangover must have been.

Chris: Nasty, but was he hungover or was he literally high on crack cocaine?

Daniel: No, he would not. Occasionally he would be high on crack cocaine, but usually those fears were separate.

Chris: Well, that sequence isn't that rare, then, that you binge, and then as you are trying to get sober or clean up, you might go on a kind of spirituality jag. But it does seem it's different with him, right? How is it different?

Daniel: They were happening in the same week every week.

Chris: This wasn't a long term process.

Daniel: Two days we don't see our father, and then the next day we're like, we're putting on to fill in at the synagogue in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then we go back home, and we lose him for two more days.

Chris: It's part of that grandiosity of his that he's going to speak to God one way or another, whether it's through a crackpipe or just sitting in synagogue and interpreting for the Lord.

Daniel: That was a big part of it, without question. But I also think that there's a sensitivity to my father, and there was, I think, at core, a desire to do right by his children. And this was a way that he could keep us in this place of worship, of care, of responsibility. The synagogue is a safe place. This is what I'm doing for my children.

Chris: Well, the novel begins with him driving you guys from your mother's house in Kansas out to New Mexico to start a new life with him. And he's casting this as this great sort of masculine adventure. You're going out west, you're going to be these kind of cowboy figures. But it's also very spiritual in its sort of symbolism. Right? He's chasing the great spirit, this kind of like pseudo indigenous spirituality that he's kind of conjuring for you guys. And he's sort of presenting himself as the medium for that. So it does seem like he had some sense of himself as that kind of father who's going to sort of put you two in touch with the ultimate reality. I can see him dragging you to synagogue when he's still coming down and it all being of a piece for him.

Daniel: And in order to do that, he had to vilify my mother to a degree. That why the book is called One of the Boys. It's because there's this pact that he created. I mean, my sister is not included in the novel. I remember she read the book and she's like that was one of my questions.

Chris: What your siblings thought about? But especially her, right? Because she's just sort of excised.

Daniel: And this is one of the ways where fiction is different from real life. Like actually just putting all of sort of the feminine, maternal mystique into one figure. I e the mother and all the.

Chris: Misogyny directed and all the misogyny directed.

Daniel: At a single place. It just became a cleaner and more powerful story.

Chris: That's exactly it. Cleaner and more powerful. It just loads the whole ******* book with this charge. And there's nothing to get in the way of it. There's no b plot. It's just all one direction. And it makes it like opening up a fire hydrant, right? That kind of force, I will say, and I think it's probably the longest you and I have ever talked without talking about me at all, which is.

Daniel: I'm trying to figure out why I'm enjoying this conversation.

Chris: It's weird, right? It's weird. It doesn't feel quite right. I've begun an autobiographical novel this summer, and I've actually given myself a sister in this book that I didn't have in real life. So in that way, once again, I'm sort of, through my own life and experiences just trying to kind of correct your shortcomings and sins, frankly, as a man and as a person.

Daniel: Natasha is a great name for that character. And she might look a lot like me, minus the beard.

Chris: All right, so there's something else I want to get back to here, which is the idea of humor, because The Eagle Has Landed was a joke. And I've never met your. Father, I think, for very good reason. You never brought him around. We were never going to visit him or anything. He's been a very literary character, from my point of view, for our entire by now, very long and very wonderful friendship. And yet I've read this novel, I've talked to you intimately at length about your childhood, and, I mean, I have some sense of how difficult it was, how painful, how traumatic your life has been as a result of this man and the kind of father that he was and continues to be. And yet there's this hilarious way that you talk about him, the way that you tell stories about him as a sort of comic figure. You said earlier that his arrows, no matter how precise, can't wound you anymore. And is humor a part of that? Is that a necessary part of that?

Daniel: I don't think my father is very funny, really, as a person, as a character. I feel like, in some ways, but you actually have to take the step. The way we talk about him is hilarious, but the man himself is not very funny.

Chris: Is it because he's so ******* terrifying or because he doesn't have a sense of humor?

Daniel: I think he tries to have a sense of humor, but the jokes don't land, which is hilarious because the joke.

Chris: Is on him, right?

Daniel: That joke is on him. And that's you need that measure of distance. You have to understand that character and these scenarios, because in the book, he's always sort of teetering on the edge of disaster in these different environments for the boys and for me as well, right? Experiencing those things. It was always just horror, right? It's like, oh, God, how bad can this get, right?

Chris: And he always ups the Annie. There's always ups some kind of moment of chaotic genius where you think, well, this is bad, but holy ****, it's about to get a lot worse.

Daniel: You need that measure of distance in order to appreciate just how hilarious that instinct is. Because it's like the great comics always find a way to escalate in the most uncomfortable ways. I think the way that we recast him and that I recast him, he's a character.

Chris: The preposterous instinct for saying the most ridiculous, grandiose thing in the moment, that for him, evades it's a little bit. Like the British office character, his genius for evading responsibility and accountability in any moment, no matter how blatantly this **** is his fault. And you capture that in the novel, right? Like, he creates these horrific scenarios where you and your brother I say you I mean, the protagonist and his elder brother are in very serious danger. And we're readers watching two children, essentially teenage boys, get put into these dangerous, abusive, scary situations, and we feel frightened for them. And then here's the father figure who will escalate the situation, make it he will turn the screw so that it's so much worse while saying something that lets himself off the hook or pins it all on one of his two boys or some outside figure who he wants to vilify, whether it's the mother or the basketball coach or the bartender. And it's that genius for always. Like, how did he do that? It's a kind of a magic trick of evading the most in your face responsibility that a person has, which is to care for their children and protect them. It's not as funny in the book as it is when you and I are ******* around, right? Like, it's still darkly funny, right?

Daniel: And just the extent to which this character is willing to dilute himself, he believes these excuses. He believes them. And so when my father looks at me and says, you're a liar, a cheat and a horse thief, he's not making a joke. He doesn't see the humor in that. He's articulating something very specific in his mind. And it's catastrophic when he's Moses with his staff, picking apart my wife and his eldest son. He doesn't see the joke. He's actually channeling these models in his mind.

Chris: But, Danny, that would. Break a lot of people. What you've been through with him, what your siblings have been through with him, would destroy a lot of people. And you have evolved two very clear ways, very effective ways of not being broken by this. One is like being able to laugh about him with your loved ones and sort of getting that comic distance, which is a way of sort of, I think, protecting yourself from its seriousness. But then, at the same time channeling this and converting this into art which is totally earnest and dramatic and serious and heartfelt and vulnerable and in a way that lets other people experience these emotions in a way that is powerful and valuable to them.

Daniel: I think it took a long time for the humor to be there, and certainly it's a defense mechanism in lots of ways. Having to tell my father he couldn't move near us was really difficult, and I had to really think about that. I mean, I dismissed it casually in the opening of the conversation. But the reality is that he's still my father. I know he's probably going through a hard time, and he always says this to me. He's like, you're the only one I love. Which is insane. But I feel that because what he does is he makes me into the last string right before the whole freaking thing breaks.

Chris: Manipulative and again, it's that grandiosity. He loves those huge, absolute pronouncements, right? And they're very seductive. And I do realize that we've completely conflated your real life father, the human being, with the character in this novel. But I think we can't help but.

Daniel: Do that to some extent, especially in the first, I'd say, half of the book. He's basically that man. My father never got as bad. He got sober pretty quickly when bad things happened. When the cops showed up at his door, he got sober. I'd long moved out of the house at that point. We were back from New Mexico.

Chris: Well, I want to get back to that because it really gets into something complicated about the autobiographical novel and what fiction can do with one's real life story. But this notion that the seductiveness of the way that he puts these sort of toxic expectations on people. There's a moment where he says to the brothers, says, look at your brother, and you look at your brother and he says, you're his brother for life.

Daniel: You're his last line of defense.

Chris: You're his last line of defense. And I ******* love that. I've said something very similar to that. To my oldest about his brother, except I didn't say it as well. And when I read that line, I thought, I mean, there's a part of me that sort of had my guard down, and I thought, okay, that's the way to say that.

Daniel: You should model your parenting after the yeah, that. 

Chris: I kind of was in that moment. I was like, There we go. That's who we're emulating.

Daniel: That's one of those moments in the book where I think the facade falls away and I think the father has a moment of clarity where he sees his boys going after each other and the bond of the boys is breaking. And part of him, I think, recognizes that maybe he had something to do with that, and part maybe he doesn't, but he sees the union of the boys falling apart, and he sits them down and he tells them to protect each other. But what's amazing to me about when that line came out because you don't necessarily understand how lines operate throughout an entire book, especially when you're halfway through. But that became like a prescription for the boys to save each other from the man who uttered those lines.

Chris: Yeah, it knows dramatic irony, right, that he doesn't know, as he's saying that, that they're each other's last line of defense, for sure, but not against the outside world. Against him. Against him. And he's totally oblivious to the resonance of that, which is what makes it. Like, one of the most killer lines of the book. How did he get this way? Man let's back up a little bit. What happened to this guy, man?

Chris: Where did he come from? And how does he turn into this figure, this larger than life, terrifying biblical maniac who is also capable of these outpourings of love?

Daniel: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the earliest stories I know of my father are ones where he's just like he sounds like a spoiled brat. I hate to say it, but it's like his dad was a butcher. His mother stayed at home. 

Chris: Is he from Kansas City?

Daniel: Kansas City. I think his father ruled the house with an iron fist. I think he'd go after his wife as well. My dad moved to Arizona when he was younger, and he's just like, I'm going to live out here. And then his mom missed him so much that when his dad said, I would like you to move back to Kansas City, he's like, okay, buy me a convertible. This man was a butcher.

Chris: Bribe and then bribe me back into.

Daniel: The family, bribe me back.

Chris: So then my dad that transactional way of being in a family of like, what's in it from me? And you have to kind of buy my loyalty out of this. That's familiar.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. And the other story I've heard my whole life, and this is something that it's almost like a point of pride. He got super drunk one night, came back to his house in Westport Kansas City, and apparently he claimed that neo Nazis had moved next door, and they knew that he was Jewish, and they'd broken his air conditioner. So my father goes upstairs and he grabs his old Air Force rifle. Rifle, because he's actually kicked out of the Air Force. And I don't know the origin of that. I don't know how he got kicked.

Chris: Out, but probably drinking may have been involved there.

Speaker C: Maybe.

Daniel: Probably. And she shoots, like, six libraries into his neighbor's house, and then he passes out and he wakes up with just, like, a whole SWAT team around his house. And the cover of the Kansas City Star the next day. And I found the article when I did some digging. Main Street Sniper and just my father and a beer that looks like mine just being escorted out of his house.

Speaker C: Wow. Yeah.

Chris: First of all, was anybody hurt or wounded?

Daniel: No one was hurt. I guess a piece of wood splintered and hit somebody.

Chris: And was there any indication that they were actually Neo Nazis? Or was this just like a family of six with, like, blonde hair?

Daniel: There's nothing to indicate that they were anti Semites.

Chris: All the seeds are there. I mean, the kind of likely either alcohol or maybe, I don't know at that point, drug induced psychosis to decide the kind of mania to decide that you're under siege by neo Nazis and the only thing left to do is to open fire. The audacity of telling that story, your version of it, even when there's, like, the ******* Kansas City Star is telling you that these were not neo Nazis. These were just your neighbors. And to continue to be sort of to trumpet that and be proud of it and make it part of your personal legend, I mean, it was all right. There was a young man that's him.

Daniel: Here's the wrinkle in the story. My mother, who's 13 years younger than my father was, so he must have been 28 at the time that that happened. So she was 15. She was in high school, living like, five blocks away and so she, as a high school kid, would walk by that house, be like, oh, ****, that's where the Main Street Sniper. So when they first went on a date, he was still living in that house. And she walked in and she went on a date with the Main Street Sniper. She knew who it was, and something about it drew her. I don't understand. I've asked her, did you ever bring this up to him? And she said yes. On the first date, he brought it up to me, but in an apologetic way, not in I fired five bullets into my neighbor's house eight years ago.

Chris: You think that was maybe? Yeah, maybe. Kind of in a like, I'm really dark and sinister, and you seem to find that attractive.

Daniel: But also, I'm not without remorse. Yeah, I can be sensitive.

Chris: I was going through a hard time.

Daniel: I make mistakes. Love me. I'm vulnerable.

Chris: Are there changes over time whether is there a period where things are kind of okay or where he's okay or you guys are okay and then things get bad, or has it just been kind of one long sort of nightmarish block of this experience?

Daniel: Listen, I think sobriety was a big thing for him.

Chris: Is that a clean break? Did he get clean and stayed clean?

Daniel: From my understanding, yes. But certainly, like, these delusions of grandeur are symptomatic of something. But I do believe he's maintained his sobriety, but it hasn't changed sort of the character of the man. I remember when I first moved to Syracuse, I had this little puppy, Otis.

Chris: Otis!

Daniel: Otis. I just got him, and within days of moving there, my dad decided to come visit and check out Syracuse. It was the only time he went up there, and Otis got really sick, and I was broke. My stipend hadn't started. I hadn't had a job for a month because I was relocating, and I needed, like, $600 for the Urge Center. And my dad was just like, yeah, I'll do it, but it's going to be, like, 5% vig. And I'm just like, My dog is dying.

Chris: Five points a week.

Daniel: You're going to charge me interest on a $500 loan to save the dog? He's just like, yeah, so it's **** like that. How do you make sense?

Chris: I mean, at least he didn't try to operate on the dog, which I feel like was probably, like, his plan B, right? Like, I'll take care of this son. You go out for the day.

Daniel: It's that kind of thing. But there are also times where I'll have a conversation with him and I'll start talking about my brother or something, and you hear the sadness come into his voice, and he's wondering whether his son still loves him, and you can feel it. Some of that's probably manipulation, but I think that he's always been so uncomfortable with vulnerability that he uses his own even to, like, manipulate himself in ways you know, like, to to paint a portrait of himself, you know, himself as a victim.

Chris: Mary, you know, I talked to Mary Karr about writing The Liars Club, that she wasn't able to really write about anybody, that she didn't, at the bottom of her heart, love. And I thought that was an interesting I'd never heard anyone quite say it. That way, about writing autobiographically or writing memoir, that there is a kind of baseline or a sort of prerequisite. Otherwise you're writing a kind of caricature or you're writing out of a sense of resentment that it's going to come through somehow, and the character is going to fall flat. So I guess that's my question to you. Do you agree with that notion?

Daniel: I think it's absolutely the case. I think you have to love pretty much every character, right? And in some ways, you have to like them too.

Chris: If it's based on a real person. Can you love the character you create but not the person it's based on?

Daniel: I don't know. That's an interesting question. I do think that there's a disassociation that happens when a character lands on the page, because there are constraints there. But I also think that writing a novel is like putting a few planets in orbit around the sun. And one of the orbits that one of the boys that I threw in is just this adoration for their father. And I think in novels, specifically, you need to return to these sort of motifs, these sentiments, these ideas, and build on them. And I think that the undoing of the boys in the book and the undoing of my relationship with my father aren't so dissimilar in the sense that you recognize that no matter what you do, love love isn't enough. Love is never enough. This glorification of love, as this sort of, like, eternal balm is wrong. I can love my father as much as I could be filled with love for him, and I have been for periods of my life. And what does that do to change anything in our relationship other than maybe hurt me by making me continue to return to hope or to see the potential for change or to let myself be manipulated? So I do think, at the core, love is essential because it allows you to see truth. It allows you to see people honestly. And at the same time, I think when you disassociate from the love, when you recognize that that's just a part of the picture, then something far more powerful happens because love can exist independently of judgment.

Chris: Wow. Yeah. I mean, it makes me think of, like, when you're teaching and you're teaching undergrads, and you get the sort of student stories that are clearly autobiographical, and you get those students who are sort of writing through their pain, their trauma, and they're writing with an axe to grind.

Daniel: Right.

Chris: And they want to make sure that everyone knows that this character is a ******* monster. There's just no redeeming them, right? And very rarely does that seem to work, right? Like, very rarely is that character compelling or even believable. And we're sitting at the front of the table and we're thinking like, well, surely this person has some qualities that are not reprehensible or that we're not repelled by. And the writer is like, no, they don't, because they're not ready to see the real human model that way. They don't have that distance or that detachment from their own pain.

Daniel: And it's a shame because all it does is create this loop in which you repeat it, you repeat your own suffering, and it consumes your identity.

Chris: So is that prior to the art? Then, the sort of facing down your own trauma?

Daniel: I think the art helps you face it down because, as you said, you can't just put a monster on the page and let it live. It becomes two dimensional. And so it's actually learning to texture these characters with compassion or with vulnerability. That's when you start to see the page come to life. And in that way, that's starting to.

Chris: Sound a lot like our teacher, George Saunders, right? The thousand passes through the manuscript, right through the story or through the novel, where what you're really doing is sort of an exercise in empathy, where you're looking at these characters who may be ridiculous, maybe malignant, but you're looking for some new dimension to their humanity each time you go through. And every time you add that, it actually makes the story deeper and more true because human beings are ******* complex and we kind of have these infinite dimensions. But in that way, yeah, it's sort of combining this sort of therapeutic notion of working through one's own suffering, one's own trauma with a very aesthetic process of trying to make a work of art better or truer or more meaningful.

Daniel: It's beautifully said. What happens is it almost becomes like an aspirational model for life, where you see this beauty and this compassion, this exercise and all of that really work on the page at a certain point. At some point, you spend enough time with it and it's come to life in a way where you want to model that behavior. You can do that. You can do that as a human, right? You can actually look out into the world and see that guy who just gave me the finger, and I want to get so mad at him. He just told me to f you and my kids in the car. And then I'm just like, hey, my kids in the car. And he's like, well, **** him too. I'm just like, how are you so angry right now? And I want to scream at him. And then you take that moment and it probably happens an hour later, and you're like, God, that guy must be going through it. What's his life look like?

Chris: Because it's iterative, right? I mean, George's whole thing is that this is why we don't publish first drafts. Because in the first draft and the second draft and the 10th draft and the 100th draft, that guy's still a ******* *******. He's still just a monster. But on the 101st draft, you realize that his kid has bone disease or whatever. I mean, that's a kind of Wallace example, right? Maybe the person is a **** in traffic because their child is very sick and they're trying to get to the hospital. But the hard part about daily life as a human being is that we don't get the chance in the moment for this kind of iterative process of revision. We just react.

Daniel: That's true. But I think the iterative is about behavior, right? It's like if you're working on changing your behavior, then actually the lens through which you see the world is iterative you might not be your best self on Tuesday, but if you pay attention to a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, eventually you might actually come forth with your best self. It's one of the things that's so refreshing to being around someone like George Saunders is that 

Chris: I thought you were going to say me because it's such an AA notion, right? The kind of progress, not perfection. One day at a time. Today is all we get, 24 hours. We just try to make a little bit of progress today. But yeah, go ahead, go talk about George. It's fine.

Daniel: No, you needed to talk about yourself. I know it's been a while.

Chris: Boy, it's been flashing red for a while now.

Daniel: But yes, like in AA, you're around people who you're just constantly amazed by their ability to see your best self, and it's totally refreshing.

Chris: That's George. That's George. George to the degree of like it's eerie. And I don't you know, when I was his student and he was sort of patting me on the head and telling me nice things every day, I was like, are you ******* with me? Why are you the only person who says these things to me? And he's like, because I see you. And I'm like, yeah, you've been conned by me somehow. It's the only possible explanation that might.

Daniel: Probably true in your case.

Chris: Yeah, probably. But he does. Yeah, that's what's special about him, is that he's quicker than others to sort of see that beauty or see just that value.

Daniel: But I think part of that is the practice of writing. I think it's a form of meditation.

Chris: And Buddhism, his writing and his Buddhism.

Daniel: Right.

Chris: Mindfulness you don't need as many revisions. If you're mindful, if you're ******* paying attention, right?

Daniel: If you're focused on your art in that way, and you spend enough time writing with that in mind, just looking for the texture and the layers and the full 3D understanding of your characters. And I think you spend more time in life doing that and you're quicker to that instinct.

Chris: It strikes me, and obviously, I haven't read your second novel yet. I'm waiting with bated breath for the chance to do that. But your first novel is I mean, if you'll forgive me for sort of reducing it to this, but it's sort of here's the book where the writer works through their sort of worst trauma, and out of that makes the work of art. Is there something to the idea that in your second novel, you're working through maybe your greatest fear? Something that you're sort of looking forward and thinking, god, this could be the worst thing that could happen to me. At this point in my life? You are the father of a beautiful two year old son, correct?

Daniel: Two and a half.

Chris: And somehow still the husband to a woman who's just far, far superior to you in every way. And I can say that because it's also true for me. You have a great marriage, you have a great family, you've built this wonderful life for yourself, and you're writing a novel where that all is destroyed and. Taken away from a guy. So has that occurred to you or do you reject that interpretation?

Daniel: I will say that I started this book before Lawrence was even conceived. And so I will say that had I known that all that was going to happen, I probably would have picked something else to write about, if that's even possible, because you're compelled to write the things you're compelled to write. I think mostly what interested me about this second book was about the maintenance of a marriage.

Chris: Yeah.

Daniel: And I think that works in terms of a projection of fear. I want to spend the rest of my life with Justine and working through some of the ways in which that when you're in a marriage we've been married for seven years now and you have a young child, the conversations just become the same over and over and over again. And sometimes it's really hard to figure out what you really want to say because most of the time you're like, I'm talked out, I don't want to do any more logistics today.

Chris: I find that the difficulty with communication over the long term, of course, they're your stressful times, your inflection points where you're not communicating well because you're just both frazzled or angry or fearful about what's going on with your kid and you just kind of aren't your best selves. But the more kind of banal and I think, corrosive effect of children on a marriage is that you forget to talk about anything else. They monopolize your conversations. You used to kind of at the end of the day, you meet on the couch in your bedroom or wherever, or in the kitchen and talk about all kinds of ****. And now there's that kind of magnetic force of you have to talk about the kids because there's things going on with them that need discussion. I've noticed it a few times where one of us will begin a conversation that is extracurricular right. That is not about our children, and give it 20 seconds and someone's brought up one of our kids, and it just gets way laid into yet another discussion about that. And I think it is important to be mindful of that, that we have to make sure our relationship continues to sort of exist and prosper in other fields beyond just us as parents. Right. That we're still two people. We're still two adults who are interested in one another and what each other think it can be hard to do.

Daniel: I mean, one of the most sort of, like, optimistic and yet also corrosive side effects to having a child in my household is that my wife and I don't fight anymore, which is like fighting is okay. Fighting is good. Sometimes you work through stuff.

Chris: Yeah. Because of the audience. Because of the audience of Laurence?

Daniel: Not just the audience. It's actually just the love of the shared project where we're just not angry with each other because we're just like we only have one child. I feel like if you have multiple children, maybe it's a little bit more chaotic, but we're really just, like, bottlenecking down into this beautiful boy, and it's like we just love being around him and he likes being around us. To be a father right now feels like I endure a little death every day because that day is gone. 

Chris: Un petit mort.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. 

Chris: I bet you endure a couple more than just one a day. Danny knowing you as well as I.

Daniel: Do, but he's I just I'm just sad that that the day is gone because he's just getting older, and I just loved this day.

Chris: That's very familiar to me. And I'm sort of warmly nostalgic for the first couple of years of being parents to an only child, where you're both just kind of constantly hovering over him in adoration like it's some ******* Renaissance painting, and you're both just like, look at the glory. It's shooting from his eyes. Yeah. It is a glide path. I think it can be right outside calamities notwithstanding, and other kinds of difficulties. Like, you got a healthy kid and you have a healthy marriage, and those first couple of years are really beautiful. And then you have the second one. Danny, then you have the second one. You got to have the second one. So you can look back at this period as warmly nostalgic as I do.

Daniel: Were you a second child?

Chris: I was yeah.

Daniel: I was a second child.

Chris: There you go.

Daniel: Where would the world be without second children?

Chris: Well, but see, I think there's and I was talking to another guest about about this. I think there's a big difference between being two of two and two of three, because what you are, Daniel, is the middle child, and that's. A whole different species from what I am.

Daniel: But I'm the second son. I think it's a White Stripes song, so I'm good.

Chris: Yeah. Well, the second child, if you're two of two, then what you are is the second and third combined. You're a hybrid, right? You're the baby and the middle child. You're the sort of conciliator and the precious one. Whereas you, I think, would probably just be the conciliator. You're just the mediator, you're the referee. But I'm a little bit more complex than that.

Daniel: Yeah, well, I'm not interested in complexity. I'm interested in just intensity.

Chris: All right, last question for you, Danny, is that I think a lot on this podcast about kind of pop psych notion of unparenting yourself, right? As you're learning how to be a parent, you're also confronted with the ways that you were parented and the ways that you grew up being warped and warping yourself to accommodate the difficulties of your family of origin, right? Whether they came from your parents or your siblings or your circumstances or wherever the **** they came from. You had to grow up in a certain way. And you're hardwired at some point for family relation. And I didn't think about that for most of my twenty s and in the beginning of my 30s because it wasn't relevant to what was going on in my life. But when I had a kid and when my kids started to grow and then I had another and I'm really kind of seeing how I am naturally as a father, my kind of intrinsic behaviors and my reflexes and just all of that hardwired ****. I have to also kind of recognize the aspects of that that are a product of my own childhood, my own my own upbringing, my own parents. Does that ever come into play for you? Do you ever think about the relationship between your childhood and Lawrence's childhood that you are trying to curate and guide and protect?

Daniel: Yes. Part of that is trying to treat my marriage like it's precious, remembering that it's precious because my father's married three times, my mother's been married multiple times, and they were never unified in our house. And that division became a kind of scorecard that I still have in my mind, even with my wife. I'm just like, I'm keeping score. And it's not a good characteristic. And I didn't realize that until I had a child. Right. Oh, well, I was with him all day. What were you doing? You're going to be with him tomorrow.

Chris: But on some level, Danny, you did. Realize it because the opening scene of your novel is so brilliant. The way you introduce this character of your father is as the comforter to his boys as he's able to and in one fell swoop be there for them after a violent episode of abuse that their mother doles out to be there for them and at the same time to sort of villainize her and manipulate them into this bond with him. Right. This sort of machiavellian opportunity that he sees to say, you poor boys. Oh, she did this to you. Come here.

Daniel: Right.

Chris: You saw that on some level as.

Daniel: But drawing the link between you as you're saying, the link is so direct, and sometimes a child is the thing that makes you hyper aware of that. So I think part of being, obviously a good father is also being a good husband and trying to create the dynamic of a safe and loving home. The expectation that men are still supposed to be disciplinarians in ways I always have trouble with that because I feel ill equipped. The ways that I was taught that one should be disciplined is not the way that I want to discipline. And so while I'm never physical with my son, of course, but there are times where the expectation is on me to handle some misbehavior, and all of a sudden I find my voice, like, bellowing through the house. And it's just fear. I'm trying to instill fear in ways that the echoes come back into me. And I still remember what it feels like to be terrified of my father.

Chris: Of course.

Daniel: And to hear that voice, it echoes in every direction.

Chris: Do you think you guys will have a second or third or fourth?

Daniel: Definitely not a third or a fourth. I think it's important for Justine that for a sibling, it feels less critical to me that he have a sibling. He's got dad. He's got mom.

Chris: Yeah.

Daniel: He'll have some friends. But I think we're going to have a second child. Can I ask, do you love Nico as much as you love Julian?

Chris: Between you and me? No, of course. And they're wildly different people. They're wildly different people. I mean, having a second kid is number one. It's where the real psychodrama begins.

Speaker C: Right.

Chris: Because it's not so kind of unified in the way that you and Justine are sort of, again, like, pouring your attention and affection on this one human being who's just sort of this perfect little angel. Once you have two, there's an interaction there. And so those deep rooted familial dynamics start to play out in more uncontrolled ways. I have two boys. They're both super rambunctious. One more than the other so far. The older one is more of a handful than the little one.

Daniel: He's got two handfuls, but he's not just one.

Chris: Yeah, he's a couple of handfuls. He's come a long way from that one night in Brooklyn where he got. To hang out with you.

Daniel: Yeah. So I find myself I was really relating to what you're saying about hearing your voice echo through the house, and that for me, is in the context of separating them or saving them from dive bombing off the couch or the top of the stairs. There's just so much more minute by minute opportunities for chaos and destruction. And injury. When you have two, you do find yourself in that role of disciplinarian so much more. It's just messier and more chaotic.

Chris: Sure. It's great, man. It's great. Do it. Do it. Get that nice girl pregnant again.

Daniel: I'll send her a text right now.

Chris: What are you doing?

Daniel: Chris said it's time. 

Chris: No, man. You guys got to do what feels right. And, in other words, what she wants. It's her call. Danny. 

Daniel: I'm learning a lot.

Chris: All right, brother. Thank you for hanging out today, man.

Daniel: Thanks for having me, Chris. And would you get that novel done, please? Because the world would like to see it. Yeah.

Chris: Oh, you mean the new one? Yeah, I'll get the new one.

Daniel: New one?

Chris: Yeah, One of the Boys. Danny, I'm still, to this day, so very ******* proud of you, my good friend, for writing this beautiful book that everyone needs to buy and read and cherish, and I'm so excited for Walk the Darkness Down, July 2023. Danny Magariel. Go get it.

Daniel: Thanks, Chris.

Chris: All right, buddy.

Daniel: Good to see you.

Julian: No, I'm not done. Okay, for my last trick, ladies and gentlemen, do you see anything in that?

Grandpa: I don't see anything in that hat. It's an empty hat.

Chris: Well, that hat has absolutely nothing in it.

Julian: Watch. 

Grandpa: It's a rabbit out of the hat!

Chris: Very good.

Grandpa: Bravo.

Chris: Bravo.

Grandpa: Bravo. Good show.

Chris: Isn't Danny great? I tell you what, that's one of my favorite people on planet Earth. Danny, if you're listening, go have another kid and write another book and invite me over for dinner. That's all for PODRE. I hope you enjoyed the show. I hope it helps you reflect, mull, ponder, contemplate the ways in which we can become the sort of people who won't be the cause of anyone's trauma, especially our kids. I hope you'll spread the news about PODRE far and wide, but especially on those little rating and comment features wherever you're downloading us. And most of all, I hope you'll. Join us next time when I'll be talking to the philosopher and heavyweight in the world of podcasting, the host of Very Bad Wizards and my friend, Tamler Sommers. Be there. Do it. Come along. Hurry up. Please. It's time. PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt. Original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Special thanks to Brad, Franco and Julian and Nico, Benz-Brunt.