David Axelrod: Axe Files Crossover

David Axelrod is a renowned Democratic political strategist, most notably for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. These days, he runs the nonpartisan Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and hosts a hit podcast, The Axe Files, where he interviews major political figures. In this special crossover episode, Katie and Brian turn the tables on "Axe" and get his own story, including his early days in gritty Chicago journalism, his father's death from suicide, and his family's efforts on behalf of his daughter, Lauren, who has epilepsy. Plus, they discuss his former client, Hillary Clinton, and the future of the Democratic party.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi Katie, Hi there, Brian. We should warn listeners that
our podcast today should probably get an R rating. If
you have young children in the room, you may want
to have them listen to something else. Our guest today
is an expert on relationships and sex. In fact, it's
something of a living legend on those topics. For over

(00:28):
twenty five years, Dan Savage has dished out sex advice,
love advice in his syndicated Savage Love column. He's also
written several books about his own family and relationships, dance writing,
and well. Dan himself actually is, by turns withering, empathetic, hilarious,
brutally honest, a little dirty, and always always fearless. And

(00:54):
for Dan, the personal is definitely political. He often writes
about abortion law, contraception, gay rights, HIV and AIDS, and
he's no stranger to taking on politicians as well, most
notably Rick Santorum. And you're gonna have to google that
one because I really am not going to describe it.
We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, from

(01:17):
Dan's childhood to how he became a columnist, his love
affair with Ann Landers, which is fascinating, his It Gets
Better campaign, how he feels about Donald Trump and by
the way, not very kindly, all sorts of things in between.
So here's our conversation with Dan Savage. With all due

(01:42):
respect to the Dosac case. Man, I think you're the
most interesting man in the world. You have done so
many things. Just reading about you, I think, what hasn't
Dan Savage done. You've written books, you've hosted podcasts, you've
led advocacy campaigns. We're going to get into all that
in a moment, but first we want to talk about
your long running advice column called Savage Love. You've been

(02:04):
doing it for twenty five years. When your column first
came out, it was a very new phenomenon, wasn't it
a gay man giving frank sexual and relationship advice to
mostly straight people. Yeah. At first, the idea, you know,
the concept originally was it just gonna be a joke,
and I was gonna do it for six months or
a year, and I was going to treat the straight people,

(02:27):
uh and straight sex with the same contempt and revulsion
that hetersexual straight lady advice comments had always treated gay
people and gay sex with, you know, an landers who
I loved back in the day, the Playboy advisor. These
people would occasionally take a gay question and you know,
hold it with tongs and wrinkled their noses, but then
give a little advice. Uh. And I thought I should

(02:47):
do that to straight people and see how they liked it.
And it turned out that they really liked it. Why
they liked like, how gross is straight sex kind? It
was the first year of it was I can't believe
you would do such a disgusting thing. Your poor mother
must be heartbroken. Here's some advice that's so funny. And
it took off. And I think it was because, you know,
straight people have never been treated this way before. And

(03:08):
it was, you know, humorous if you were straight, to
be treated as if you were powerless, which you weren't.
Um and the advice was I guess good because the
letters started just pouring in, and this kind of joke
advice column under my feet within the first twelve months
became an actual advice column. I'm sure the only person
who could turn you away from being gay was a lands. Now,

(03:29):
what up with that? Dan? How did you become obsessed
with of all people and landers? Instead of by the
way her sister Abby, I grew up in a newspaper house.
My grandfather worked for the Chicago Daily News in Chicago Star,
both now closed unfortunately, And so we got all the
papers when I was a kid living in my grandparents
house of my family, um MultiGen household, and so really

(03:52):
the comics and the advice columns were the entry point
for young you know, for the kids who looked at
the newspapers were spread out over the dining room table. Uh.
And so I just started reading and Landers, and we
were liberals and Dems, So we got the Suntimes after
a while stopped gtting the Tribune, which is where Abby was.
So I grew up reading and who you know, grew

(04:13):
and learned over the years and you know, changed her
position on uh, gay people and a right to exist
and why we exist. But what I was reading in
Anne when I was, you know, eight eleven twelve wasn't
very positive. But that's you know, she was over generation
and we can't judge her through the light of right
this minute. We have to look at her in the
context of them, and she was compassionate in ways that

(04:34):
other UH folks in the culture at that point weren't.
In fact, you bought her desk at an auction. Is
that right? I did? Uh? I got her daughter, Margot
Howard's her daughter, one of the original dear Prudences. It's late.
So she wrote an advice came for many years. And
I called her when I heard about the auction of
a Landers effects and got her permission because I didn't
want it to be spun in the media as if

(04:56):
I was being somehow disrespectful to the memory of a Landers.
You're doing something that might upset her daughter. Uh. And
got Margot's permission. And Margot and I are now friends
and we chat all the time. And so I write
my very dirty, very different sex advice column at the
same desk. Grand Landers wrote her column for forty five years.
We want to give our listeners a feel for your
column and your podcast. So let's go over some of

(05:18):
the signature savage love acronyms and catchphrases. Rapid fire, You ready,
I'm ready? Are your listeners ready? I don't know, I
don't know. I hope. So what's the Campsite rule? The
Campsite rule is that if there's a large age difference
or experience gap between two people who are hooking up
or or friends with benefits or even dating that it

(05:40):
is on the onus is on the older or more
experienced partner to leave the younger or less experienced partner
in better shape than you found them, which is the
rule for when you camp. You should always leave your
campsite in better shape than you found it, and we
should all and it should apply generally like you should
always leave people that you've dated or been with, hopefully
in better shape than you found them. But in this context,

(06:01):
you know the older younger. It means uh, you know,
no sexually transmitted infections, no one planned pregnancies, no needless pain,
no promises that you know you can't fulfill uh and
that you help this person learn and grow while they're
with you, and you don't leave them in worse shape
than you found them. The camp say rule, what about
g G good giving in game? That's what we should

(06:22):
all be for our sex partners, UM good in bed.
You know you want to acquire some skills. A human
means a lot more complicated than a violin, and no
one can play the violin the first time they pick
it up. You gotta practice UH giving, which is sometimes
you give pleasure UH in your indulgent without an expectation
of an immediate return, that everything doesn't have to be
instantly and equally reciprocity in the moment that sometimes you give.

(06:44):
It doesn't have to be good for everybody. Well hopefully
it's not. You want it to be traumatic for anybody
or or unpleasant for anybody. But sometimes you are giving
UM and not getting at that moment and that's okay.
And game means sort of up for anything within reason.
That sex should be an adventure that you two are
on together. UM, and you know it's like good improv.

(07:06):
You never say no in improv. And you want to,
you know, be the person for your partner, particularly if
it's a sexually exclusive relationship, Be the person who makes
things happen for your partner. Be the person they come to, UH,
who's going to welcome their fantasies or interests or kinson
and celebrate them and make that stuff happen dot dot

(07:27):
dot within reason. You know, being G G G good.
Giving a game doesn't mean you do anything that your
partner asks or wants and no, but he gets everything
they want out of a relationship. UM. And sometimes you pay.
It's another thing that to call them the price of
admission is kind of grows out of G G G.
And the price of admission is, you know, the price
you pay to be with somebody. You know, if you're
desperately into sex act X and that's not something that

(07:50):
your partner will ever do, then the price of admission
that you pay to be with that person as you
never get to do that. And what about c posts
that stands for cheating piece of shit? Uh? And do
you have a lot of people call you dan or
write to you and and they are writing about their
c pos Mostly I get letters. When people use the

(08:10):
acronym in a letter to me, they're using it to
describe themselves. Really they you know, they say that I
feel terrible, I'm a CPO s I'm a cheating piece
of ship uh. And talking about non monogamy is not
to tear down people who value monogamy, who want monogamy,
who want a monogamous commitment, creating a universe where people
who don't want monogamy and can't honor a monogamous commitment

(08:31):
can go make commitments to people who also don't want
monogamy and don't want a monogamous commitments. That makes people
who end up in monogamous relationships. That makes those monogamous
relationships safer and stronger, just like not having gay men
mary straight women makes marriage stronger. Not having people who
can't do monogamy making commitments to people who demand monogamy
makes those monogamous commitments that are ultimately made stronger if

(08:53):
the non monogamous and monogamous sort themselves. You're an early
podcast adopter, and I'm curious, what is the podcast offer
you that the column doesn't. Uh, you can really get
into the nuance in a podcast the columns um and
you really have to boil everything down to the nut.
And on a podcast you can. You can digress, and

(09:16):
I can get people on the phone and instead of
it just being here's the letter, here's my response, we
can have a conversation. I can bring in guest experts
and and interview them at great length about an issue
or a problem. Um. It just allows for more. Although now,
because my podcasts have been around for so long, when
I was podcasting so early, people like, oh my god,
you were an early adopter of this new format. You

(09:36):
must be a you know, a genius and you had
such foresight, And it's like no, no, no, no, there
were I call them the tech savvy at risk youth.
There were people that I worked with who are young
and tech savvy, who are like you were going to
start doing this podcast whether you like it or not,
and they kind of forced me to do it. I
was very resistant. What are most of the calls about

(09:59):
so situational ethics? You know? Twenty six years ago when
I started writing Savage Love, half the questions were, you know,
what's about plug? Or where's the swingers club in my area?
Two words I never thought i'd hear on this badcast
and now, and this may be helpful to you, Katie. Now,
butt Plug has a wiki page, so you don't have
to write into me to ask what it is after

(10:21):
you overheard someone talking about one of the bus and
swingers clubs all have their own website, so you don't
need sort of specialized magazines with you know, referrals to
p O boxes to find a swing club and Dallas,
just google Dallas and swingers clubs and they pop right up.
So all the questions I get now with the podcast
and the column are I did this, they did that,
I'm mad about this, they're mad about that. Who's right,

(10:41):
who's wrong? And you have to kind of way in
on these situational ethics, that the situation of ethics of
this problem in this conflict. And it's a lot harder
now to write an advice column than it used to
be because you don't get I used to call them
definitions and referrals. I don't get defined this, what is this?
And I don't get referral questions anymore because the Internet
does that. All I get are this is what happened.

(11:05):
We need a ruling from Solomon about how we're going
to cut this baby in half or whether we should.
When when did you realize you were good at giving
people advice? I mean you were a little bit of
a of an outcast in in high school. You were
the only out gay person in your class. As I
understand it, and so did you did you sort of
always feel a little bit separated from the back. It's

(11:26):
just the way women. I think, I think more about
gender because it impacts them more severely, you know, gender
based discrimination, and people of color think more about race.
I think when you're gay, you think more about sex
because it's what makes you different. It sets you apart
and complicates your life, and you have to be a
little bit more thoughtful about it, and I realized early
in life, and I was rare for gay out of

(11:47):
my generation. I'm fifty two years old. It was rare
for kids to be coming out in high school who
are my age. But I did come out in high
school and instantly became kind of the go to guy
for my straight friends who had relationship problems or sex questions. UM,
because I think they just intuitive that I was thinking
more about these things than they were, because I had

(12:08):
to think more about these things. Uh. And I think
that's true for a lot of gay people. We talked
a lot of gay men, lesbians, uh, even very young
uh and recently out or out in college, and they'll
tell you that they're the person that their friends confide
in about their sex and relationship problems. I think because
you know, they figure, you gave yourself permission not to

(12:28):
be gay, but to be out, and maybe you'll give
them permission to be whoever they actually are and help
them let go of normal, which plagues a lot of people.
You know. I was. I was struck that you came
of age as a gay guy in a conservative Catholic
household and during the height or the depths of the
aids epidemics. I'm just curious how those two experiences shaped

(12:52):
the sort of journalist and columnist you later became. Well,
I got a Catholic education, educated by Jesuits, and you know,
my parents were evangelical Catholics before that was a hip
thing to be, which seems to be now. Um. And
my mother would joke later, you know, after she came
around on the gay thing, which she did pretty quickly

(13:14):
after I came out, that the values that they had
imparted to us, part of sort of their interpretation of
the Catholic tradition was one of the reasons that I
was out to them. And so it kind of blew
back and bit them on the ass because they were
very much about, you know, the importance of being honest
and loving the people in your life and being truthful, uh,

(13:35):
and not being deceitful. And yet I felt myself, you know,
when I was young and Catholic and I thought about
being a priest. I thought about, I could never come out.
It would kill my parents. Um. I thought about, you know,
I'll need to find a woman that I can lie
to for fifty years and marry her. And then that
was just so in conflict with what I had been
taught about right and wrong uh, in Sunday School, at

(13:57):
my Catholic grade school, at my Catholic high school, to
to lie to someone all their life like that, to
mislead someone, and it just forced me to to be out.
It just felt like it grew out of my sort
of education. Even though my faith didn't survive my coming
out and I actually came out before the AIDS epidemic.
I came out in and then uh into that buzz

(14:19):
saw UH and watched a lot of my friends die
in their mid twenties and early thirties, and that was
really rough, and there was you know, there were moments
there at the beginning of the HIV AIDS epidemic where
I watched people that I knew to be gay go
back in the closet um or or renounced their homosexuality

(14:40):
and who were already infected and then died anyway, Uh,
and it it, you know, the AIDS epidemic forced us
to start telling the truth. Um. People were outed because
they you know, suddenly had Carposi sarcoma UM. And it
also forced us to tell the truth about about how

(15:01):
we were having sex. You know, it used to be.
You know, before HIV AIDS, there was the sex that
everybody agreed that everybody ought to be having, even though
everybody kind of knew that everybody wasn't having necessarily that
kind of sex. And what AIDS force was a conversation
about the sex people were actually having, not the sex
that we all agreed people ought to have, which was
the kind of sex that most advice columnists specialized in,

(15:22):
like what you ought to be doing, And it was
different about savage love. When I started, it really did
grow out of my experience in the HIV AIDS epidemic,
um the crisis, the worst years of it was let's
talk about what we're actually doing, because that's where the
risk comes in. As as I'm listening to Dan, I'm
thinking how ironic it is that in some ways the
AIDS epidemic accelerated the acceptance and tolerance in it, certainly

(15:47):
in some quarters of gay people in general. Absolutely, you know,
before the AIDS epidemic, we were just you know, gay
people started coming out on mass after the Stonewall riots
in nine and there was this kind of you know,
bakan knowledge, youthful, exuberant adolescence of the movement where people

(16:08):
were just so thrilled to be out and open and
able to live openly, love openly, and it was just
kind of a party. And that was the you know,
the hedonism that people like Jerry Fallwell pointed to um
and condemned. And then the AIDS epidemics slammed into the
community and you suddenly saw that, you know, we suffered
and died, and we suffered and died and loved and

(16:29):
took care of each other at a time when even
our own families refused to take care of us. Plus
the activism, I think that that grew out of the
AIDS epidemic. I think made a lot more people aware
and exposed to the fact that there were a lot
of gay people in the world, right, and it put

(16:51):
put them front and center in some ways, obviously under
terrible circumstances, but gave them much greater attention. And if
people don't have awareness, obviously it's hard for them to
go from awareness to acceptance. Right. It was a terrible
circumstance in some ways. To borrow a phrase, also our
finest hour, because we didn't collapse. You know, people forget

(17:14):
what was being said that I remember it all very distinctly,
you know, William F. Buckley saying that gay men should
be tattooed on the arm and the buttocks. You had
people talking about mass quarantining of openly gay people on islands.
Um Pat Buchanan floated that in columns that ran in
the Washington Post. It was a perilous moment, and we
did feel like everything, that what little visibility and little

(17:37):
security that we enjoyed, was going to be ripped away
from us. And instead of uh, you know, I mentioned
you know, a few people I knew who went back
into the closet, that's not the reaction that uh, the
overwhelming majority of gay people had. People who were not
out yet came out and came out fighting, and people
who are already out refused to see an inch of
the ground that we had secured for ourselves. And it
really was a war, and it was a war that

(17:58):
we won. It's interesting. Jerry Folwell, whom you mentioned earlier
and other key figures on the religious right, basically said
this was punishment for the sin of being gay. Why
do you think you were able to win that battle
in the public consciousness against all of these figures who
you know, had a lot more history and maybe credibility

(18:19):
among millions of Americans than sort of unknown gay activists,
maybe because it was such a disgusting, despicable comment and observation,
Maybe that they had that going for We did have
that going for us. We also had our secret weapon,
which is that gay people are randomly distributed through the population,
that we are born into straight families, and that was

(18:40):
we were embedded in the heart of straight America. Even
though many of us have been rejected by our families
when we came out and we're exiled from them, we
were still a part of them. And when people got sick,
when people were dying, Uh, when lives are online, it
really like pulled people up short. And some families failed
their queer kids who are suffering their gay relatives or something.

(19:01):
But some families came around, and eventually more and more
of our families came around. I'm old enough to remember
when p flag parents and friends of lesbians and gays
would come up the street at the Pride parade. Everybody
lost their minds. You know, I'm gonna cry talking about
it even now. Uh, people standing a gay amend of
lesbians standing on the side of the street watching the preade.

(19:21):
Go by would see these people, other gays and lesbians
Marsham Street with their parents, their parents who loved them
and were willing to love them publicly in March and
the Pride parade, and everybody would cry when p flag
came down the street because almost no one had that
kind of support from their parents, from their families. It
was so rare. I bet that was incredibly moving. And

(19:42):
you know, I just spent the weekend I was in
the pines in Fire Islands, so as you can imagine,
I was for this show. So my my husband's brother
Tom is gay and he's been with his partner Andy
for twenty plus years, so we always go to see
them for a weekend in the summer at their beautiful

(20:05):
home and Fire Island. And I was just thinking, as
I was watching all these gay couples, how much things
have changed? Dan, And I'm just I think in terms
of social transformations, if you will, or progress, societal progress,
I'm sure it doesn't feel that way for a lot

(20:26):
of gay people. I remember my dad talking who I
think was slightly homophobic, uh, you know, talking about some
gay person who worked in his office, and kind of
in hushed tones, and you know, I think and not
flattering and not a flattering way. And my father was
the most fair minded person I know, but this was
a blind spot for him. But I think culturally it

(20:48):
was so people were so closeted, and then you go
to Fire Island and you see everyone just out and
about and it's just it's just amazing to me how
much things have changed. Amazing. Yeah, oh absolutely. And you
know the P flag point P flag with Marchtown Street
thirty four years ago everyone would sob Now P flag

(21:09):
marches down the streets, priparate. We're all happy to see
P flag, But most of us at the parade, most
of the people there have families that love and support
them now, so it's not as impact. It's not as
emotionally devastating to see people with parents who love them,
because you probably have parents who love you, uh now,
and there's there has been such a change, you know.
I talk frequently about the right wing myth and the
left wing myth when it comes to progress, and the

(21:30):
right wing myth is we can risk no progress if
we give women the vote. Society will collapse, family will
fall apart if we uh you know, pass the civil
rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. Everything's gonna end
if we'd let gay people serve opening in the military.
The military is going to collapse. If we get people
get married, family is going to collapse. It's always, you know,
do this, there will be a catastrohe And that's the
right wing myth, and they're proven wrong again and again

(21:52):
and again and again. There their dire predictions never come
to pass. The left wing myth is there's been no progress,
that we're as racist, as homophobic, as anti semitic, as
transphobic a culture as we have ever been, and that's
demonstrably false. We are not free from racism or sexism,
or homophobia, or transphobia or anti semitism, but we've made

(22:13):
tremendous progress. And on the left we shouldn't. We shouldn't
propagate a myth. It's in some ways as damaging as
that right wing myth that we can risk no progress
because we want to be able to point to the
progress we've made and be able to say, look, we've
done this, We've taken all of these steps, and it
hasn't just you know, the sky hasn't fallen and the
country hasn't fallen, and anything, we've gotten better and stronger, uh,

(22:36):
and more just as a society for having taken these steps.
So the left should always be pointing to the progress
that we've made to argue for more progress, to refute
the right wing myth that we can risk no progress.
And what about the nature versus nurture argument? You know,
it's funny because I thought it was pretty established that
it was nature that people are born gay. But then

(22:59):
other people seem to come out and say, well, it
is a choice. I think Cynthia Nixon not that long ago,
didn't she create some controversy about that and it was
a choice. Yeah, And I'm just curious about your take
on that. Well, it shouldn't matter. The people who say
it's a choice are arguing that gay people, queer people
shouldn't have any civil rights, be allowed to marry, be

(23:21):
allowed to adopt, because they don't have to exist. Um, well,
Mormons don't have to exist. Faith is a choice. That's
why there are street preachers and proselytizers and Jehovah's witnesses
knocking on my door this morning. Religion is a choice.
It's also a protected class, as it should be. Um,
and you're not allowed to discriminate against someone based on
their chosen faith. So there's just this dishonesty at the

(23:43):
heart of the way so many people of faith, it's
usually religious people who make this choice argument about sexual orientation.
They're saying that because this thing is a choice, you
deserve no protections. Um. I experienced my homosexuality as not
a choice at all. Uh. It shouldn't matter whether it
was a voice or not. But certainly for me felt born.
And there is a body of sort of evidence. No,

(24:05):
there's no one gay gene out there, but there are
genetic factors at play. You know. The most famous thing
is the twins studies that show that if an identical
twin is gay, Uh, the other twin is likelier to
be gay, but not automatically gay. So that there are
it seemed to be a multicausal thing. But the way,
you know, most gay people don't, you know, we dread

(24:25):
being gay. When I was thirteen years old and realizing
that I was gay, it was a catastrophe. It wasn't
a choice I made to destroy my life, to you know,
up end my relationship with my parents, to estrange myself
from my siblings and the faith that I had been
raised in to live every day in terror of being
caught or found out or scrutinized in such a way

(24:46):
that I might be outed, and then to police my
behavior and try to act straight, even had sex with
girls like I desperately wanted to be straight. I desperately
wanted to be anything other than gay. That was not
a choice I made to p saw my dad, which
is the argument that a lot of people who don't
know what they're talking about when they talk about homosexuality
like to make. Can I say something about Jerry Fallwell,

(25:09):
who came up a couple of times, Um my dad.
Uh was for Anita Bryant was for Jerry Follows, kind
of a conservative guy. He said things that were anti
gay in front of me when I was ten and
eight that I remembered that just pierced me like kind
of new then. And the argument that the Fallwells and
Brian's used to make was that, Uh, gay people were

(25:29):
a threat to the family because we didn't get married,
because we didn't have children, because we didn't settle down.
We lived for the moment and for pleasure and the
next do orgasm, and that was why we were terrible.
Well that's the only way that we were allowed to live.
We couldn't get married, we couldn't have children. Then once
gay people were freer, there were gay people who wanted
to get married. There were gay people who wanted to

(25:50):
have children and and did marry and did have children
and do and continue to just as there are straight
people who don't want to get married, don't want to
have kids, and don't that. There was nothing gay about
the gay lifestyle that fall well condemned, and nothing straight
about the straight lifestyle. Uh. In the end, there was
something straight about it. And what we see now is
kind of this great cross pollnization where you know, gay

(26:13):
people live as you know, the quote unquote gay lifestyle
until they settled down and then live the straight lifestyle,
and straight people kind of do the same. Like straight
people borrowed a lot from gay culture and just renamed it. Uh.
You know, we used to can I use a swear word? Yeah,
We used to talk about funck buddies, and now straight
people talk about friends with benefits. We used to talk

(26:35):
about tricking, and then straight people called that hooking up.
And there's so much in like young straight life and
culture and young people, young adults straight people's second life.
That's just gay stuff renamed and reappropriated. So we still
marriage from you, You still fun buddies from us, and
I think we're even Yeah, me too, I think we're
definitely even. That. That said, Dan, you know you are

(26:58):
a major proponent of this concept called monogamish, which is
a sort of a modified open marriage concept where you
you don't believe that for a lot of people, lifelong
monogamy is realistic, and so if both partners can consent,
you believe that there there can be extramarital relationships. Can
you talk about that both in concept and also in

(27:21):
practice in your own life? Well, I actually coined the
term monogamist to describe my own, uh life with my husband. Um,
we're not monogamous. When you're a gay couple, particularly gay
couple who are parents, and you're saying you're not monogamous,
people picture uh, you know a degree of promiscuity or
recklessness that just isn't us, um, And so you know,

(27:42):
we were more monogamous than not you. We're mostly overwhelmingly
having sex with each other and occasionally a very special
guest star. So I started saying, like the three of
you are just like you go out off on your own.
I'm getting a little nervous here. Both. The question I
put to Stephen Colbert once that made him have to

(28:04):
stop his show was, you know, he said, I asked
me if I cheated on my husband, And I asked
him if it was cheating if I'm cheating at one
end of a guy while my husband cheats at the
other end of the same guy at the same time.
Are picturing that everybody out there in podcast and we'll
see if that makes Yes, Yeah, we got that. You're
painting quite a picture. But do you also do you
also when you say you're monoga mish, Dan, would you

(28:27):
also have a sexual encounter with a with a guy
and that your husband doesn't know? And he's okay with that?
Because I would not be jiggy with that, Dan, if
my husband wanted to do that. What we do, and
what I think all people who are engaged in ethical
nonmonogamy is we do what we both agree is okay.

(28:50):
You know, when I talk about monogamysh though in the
context of the column or the concept that I that
are promligated like it's been embraced by a lot of
people who are monogamous. But what they you use monogamous
to mean is, of course we're still attracted to other people.
You know, we're told a lie about monogamy and about
long term relationships and love and commitment when we're kids,
which is you know, one day you'll fall in love
and you won't want to have sex with anybody else,

(29:12):
and you will be monogamous. And the truth is, you
grow up, you'll make a monogamous commitment. You'll still want
to have sex with other people, but you're not going
to because you've made a monogamous commitment and you should
honor that commitment. Um. If two people are policing each
other in a monogamous relationship for evidence of what both
should just assume to be true, that's exhausting and it

(29:32):
generates a lot of conflict, like, oh, you looked at
that person. You're attracted your personal trainer. Um, you checked
out the baristas, But well, of course your wife's attracted
to a personal trainer. No one in the whole long
history of personal trainers has ever hired a personal trainer
they didn't want to fuck. It's the question with monogamy
is whether or not I don't want to do that
with my personal trainer names Larissa and I. You're the

(29:54):
exception that proves Earle um By and large broadly speaking generally,
um So, of course you're both attracted to other people,
and if you're making a monogamous commitment, then you don't
sleep with other people. But if why bust each other
and give each other grief for the fact that you
will sometimes perceive your partner to be attracted to someone else.
Of course they're gonna be attracted to someone else. If

(30:15):
you can diffuse that in a in a monogamous relationship
that source of conflict, you're gonna have a more stable
monogamous relationship. I deal with it by just giving my
husband a lot of free passes, knowing that he's not
going to use the free passes, but acknowledging that if
I gave free passes out, those people would be a
part of the free pass system. Yeah, but your free

(30:37):
processor a little bit unrealistic. It's like, oh, yeah, john
if you could convince Gwyneth paltr to sleep with you,
go right ahead. Hey, I'm not going to tell Johnny
you said that, Brian, But here's I was just gonna
ask Dan. You know, you and your husband adopted a son.
I think a lot of people say that it's important
to be monogamous for the sake of the kid and

(30:59):
a stable family unit. Is your son aware of the
fact that you're monogamish, not monogamous, And what effect, if any,
do you think that would have on him? Well, he
doesn't like to hear about his parents sex life anymore
than anyone else wants to hear about their parents sex lives. Uh.
You know, he's read some of the stuff that I've written.
He knows, and we have generally acknowledged it without how

(31:23):
old into details. He's nineteen years old, he's an adult.
Uh So I often say to people, ask the questions,
if your parents were swingers, would you want them to
tell you? Probably not, because there's two different kinds of monogamy.
There's social monogamy and sexual monogamy. And there are people
who are socially monogamous, perceived to be monogamous, who are
not actually monogamous. And I think Terry and I would

(31:44):
be socially monogamous if I hadn't written what I had written,
even I hadn't told these truths, and I felt like
we should tell to de stigmatize and demystify, Uh, non
monogamous relationships. Um, So we don't go into it with
great detail with our kid, nor does he wish to
discuss it with us in any great detail. Uh. Nor
would I want to talk with my parents about their

(32:04):
sex life in any great detail. And if they were not,
all wouldn want to hear about that from them either.
I remember when my parents used to lock their door,
and I would be like gross, because I you know,
every once in a while, my dad would lock the
door and I'd be like that going on in there. Anyway,
on that note, we're going to take a quick break,

(32:26):
and when we come back, Dan, we want to hear
more about your podcast and some of the weird questions
or interesting questions you get about Donald Trump and his
so called commitment to l g b t Q issues
that he talked about on the campaign trail, and your
campaign with your husband, the It Gets Better campaign. So

(32:47):
we're going to talk about all those things right after this,
and now back to our conversation with Dan Savage. Let's
talk about what Donald Trump has done visa v. Gay rights,
and of course the recent transgender band which caught so
many people in the Pentagon by surprise. Um, were you

(33:10):
hopeful that he would be more supportive and what has
your reaction been to some of the moves that he
has made. I wasn't hopeful. Um uh. Donald Trump crawled
into bed with Mike Pence. That was his first big
act as the nominee, was picking Mike Pence, who is
one of the most rapidly anti gay Republican politicians in

(33:31):
the country. Mike penncey redirected funds from HIV prevention education
to X gay therapies, including shock treatments. Rather than educating
you so you don't contract HIV, We're going to electrocute
the gay out of you. That's Mike Pence's platform on
gay rights. And Trump picked Pence to be his running mate. Uh.
Trump allowed um, Tony what's his face from Family Research

(33:55):
Council Perkins from the SPLC certified anti gay hate group
Family Research Council to basically right the Republican platform again. Um.
You know. Trump touched a Pride flag at a rally,
and a bunch of right wing gay people, a handful
that exists out there, pointed to that as evidence that
he would be the most pro gay president ever and

(34:17):
then appoints Neil Gorcus to the Supreme Court, who's already
uh issued anti gay rulings when he was involved in
lower courts, And now the transpan which is looks like
it's going to go into force, And when you have
the Justice Department reversing an Obama air interpretation of an
anti gender discrimination statue as covering sexual orientation, and the

(34:39):
DJ now weighing in and say oh, no, no no, no,
no it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, and inserting itself
into a lawsuit that it did not need to insert
itself into into a litigation it wasn't involved in, like
aggressively going after gay rights. So yeah, I didn't look
at Trump and think, oh, this is going to be
a sunny new era of Republican pro gay anything. It
was more of the same. Having said that, though he

(35:01):
did tweet out in two thousand and sixteen, thank you
to the LGBT community. I will fight for you while
Hillary brings in more people who that will he should
have said, who will threaten your freedoms and beliefs, And
even at the r n C he said, as your president,
I will do everything in my power to protect our
LGBT citizens. From the violence and oppression of a hateful

(35:22):
foreign ideology. Yeah, the keyword there is foreign ideology. We're
not going to get thrown off towers by ISIS in
the United States while Donald Trump is president, but he
is not going to protect us from a domestic hateful ideology.
He's going to empower domestic haters of LGBT people as
he has. Yeah, he was trying to make the political

(35:43):
argument that he's tougher on ISIS, or he was tougher
on ISIS than Hillary and therefore gay people should vote
for him. And you know, I don't think that was
a very successful political pitch, but it came across his
hypocrisy as he made this decision to ban trans people
from the military without even consulting the generals who would
have to oversee and implement that policy. The scariest thing

(36:06):
about that announcement he made on Twitter about banning trans
people from military without consulting his generals was that that
was three tweets, and the first tweet ended without the
announcement about what the hell he was talking about, And
there were nine minutes between that first tweet and the
second tweet where the Pentagon thought that the Trump might
be announcing an attack on North Korea. And you know

(36:30):
the North Koreans are monitoring Trump's Twitter feed, so they
might have thought the same thing. We have a dangerous
lunatic in the office of the president right now and
paralleling us all not just where people. How many trans
people are actually in the military. I've seen the numbers
really very wildly. They do not all people who are
trans or out. So we're going to have perhaps witch
hunts like they used to do for closeted people in

(36:52):
the military, for closet gaze and lesbians and bifox in
the military. But there are reportedly thousands although like you,
of the numbers I've seen very widely, but reportedly thousands
of trans people already serving in the military without incident,
without it being a problem. The Pentagon supports allowing trans
people to serve openly and continuing to serve openly in

(37:13):
the military. So you you started a project called I
T m f A. Do you want to say what
that stands for? It stands for, Well, first, we have
to know that. Uh. In my advice column, I frequently
use the acronym d T m f A because so
many people right in and the advice they need is
to dump the motherfucker already. They're like in a terrible

(37:34):
relationship and they're asking for help, and the only help
they need is the push to dump. And so sometimes
I use that shorthand to save space in my column.
D T. M F A. And you're trying to give
the nation similar advice exactly. It stands for impeach the
motherfucker already. And we've sold thousands and thousands of T shirts, mugs,
very tasteful of pel pins that you can wear on
a tasteful suit if you're going on the cable news

(37:55):
program to talk about the President UH and other merch
and donated whole bunch of money to Plan Parenthood, the
International Refugee Assistance Project, and the a C l U.
All proceeds go to those three organizations. And you've raised
over a hundred thousand dollars. Is that we sold a
lot more than a hundred thousand dollars. That's what we
were able to donate after buying the merch, shipping the merch,
paying the taxes, a hundred thousand dollars to those organizations.

(38:17):
We're getting ready to make another big donation to those
organizations based on sales since that donation. Um, And what's
fun about I t m f A is, as you know,
you wear the T shirt I t m f A
and people look at you or the red hat that
has I t m f A on it instead of
make America Great Again, and people say what is I
t m f A stand for? And then you get
to tell them, And at that moment it's like it's
like the sorting hat in Harry Powder. You're gonna know

(38:39):
whether you're talking to a good person or a bad
person in my opinion, because they lie there, laugh and
think that's hilarious and want the T shirt themselves, or
they'll luf off and on. It's interesting you just said
that because there are a lot of people, a few
million in fact, who voted for Barack Obama in and
then voted for Donald Trump in. Are you saying that
they're all bad people, that the sixty two million people

(39:02):
who voted for Donald Trump were all bad people? Or
is there some shift that needs to happen in the
society where the Democrats or commentators like you need to
make a stronger case to those people about why and
how Donald Trump is bad for them. Yes, I agree
that They're not all in the basket of deplorables. I
think there definitely are some who are in the basket

(39:22):
of deplorables. That statement Hilary made that was just so
problematic for her, in such a burden for her, is
really kind of true. You know, in politics, you can't
win over everyone. You have to work at the margins.
And there are people who support for Trump was marginal
and conditional. You've seen his poll numbers dropping. You've seen
a lot of people even in the base, the GOP
base and his base, regret their support for him, including

(39:43):
one of his highest profile queer supporters, who's Peter Teal,
the Silicon Valley investor billionaire uh now thinks that the
Trump administration is incompetent in a disaster. Thinks now what
we all could see coming plainly before he was elected. So, yeah,
you want to work on reaching those folks. And you
know the message I think the Democrats need to send

(40:04):
us that the Republicans are lying to you about cause
and effect. They're pointing to the fact that people of
color it's not legal to discriminate against them anymore. That
you know, women are empowered in the workforce, and gender
discrimination is wrong that like there's all these openly gay
people around, and you know, there's more people causing more Mexicans,
there's more immigrants, and they say, look at these things,

(40:24):
this is why you don't have a living wage job,
and actually those things, you know, there's correlation perhaps there,
but there's not causation. You have a living wage job
because we've destroyed the union movement, because we've shredded the
social safety net, because we don't invest in schools and
communities and transportation and housing the way we once did.

(40:45):
That's that's why it's tougher for you. That's why college
is primitively expensive for your kids now. It's not because
gay people are open. That didn't cause that to happen.
It's not because there are more Mexicans now than there
were thirty forty years ago. What the problem now is
that there's not a union. The problem now is that
we've shredded that social safety net, that we've done away

(41:07):
with living wage jobs, but that we don't that the
rich don't pay their fair share, and then we invest
that money into programs that benefit anyone. That's the cause
of your misery, not these those people, whether you're talking
about people of color or queer people or trans people
or whoever the scapegoat of the moment is that they're
pointing to. You know, I have to point out, though,

(41:28):
I thought it was interesting, Dan, that you launched this
I T M F A campaign during George W. Bush's
presidency and which and he, the president Bush must seem
like Nelson Mandela at this point in time to you,
you know, in retrospect, you know, Bush launched you know,
a disastrous war and tank the economy. Uh. We got

(41:51):
out of the Bush era alive, Uh, most of us,
not all of us. And he also got reelected in
part on an attack on gay people in gay marriage
in particulars. That's true. So now we can look back
on the Bush air thinking, well, it didn't kill us.
Right now in the middle of the you know, out
the beginning of the Trump hopefully not era, hopefully the
Trump twenty four months, Uh, he might get us all killed.

(42:16):
And it's a little bit you know, you want to
like return to the president who you know, in retrospect
didn't get us all killed, but might have at the
time Gondness all killed. How realistic do you think it
is that Donald Trump will be impeached. If Donald Trump
or Hillary Clinton, he would have been impeached twenty three
times already. H If Chelsea Clinton was filling in for

(42:36):
Hillary uh in an official capacity in any way, there
would be no end of screaming and yelling, complaining, um,
the corruption, hypocrisy, the double standards UH are are appalling.
So you know, realistically, he's probably not going to get
impeached as long as Paul Ryan is sitting there and
a Speaker of the House. I'm hopeful that the Dems

(42:57):
can take at least the House and hopefully the House
in the Senate. Uh in. But if the Democrats do
take the House in, do you really want Donald Trump
to be impeached? Given what you just said about Mike Pence?
People ask that question a lot, like, oh my god.
But if we impeach him, then it's Pence. And my
feeling is as awful as I think Pence is. Pence
oscillates in a predictable band of Republican awfulness, whereas Trump,

(43:21):
you don't know what's going to happen next, and it's
a bit of an existential terror living with that man
in the Oval office. You're highly critical, obviously of Republicans.
But you also get annoyed by liberal Democrats. What do
you think they get wrong? And why are they why
do they seem to be struggling, you know, and having
a bit of an identity crisis. Democrats are just so

(43:43):
bad at messaging. You know, the word goes down from
some you know, the Republican death star, that we're going
to call these partial birth abortions, that we're gonna call
them death taxes, and we're gonna talk about a death
panel and or fake news, and then every Republican marches
in lockstep, every Republican as behind whatever the message is,
until even liberals can't think of uh, that abortion procedure

(44:08):
without thinking partial birth abortion, or can't think of estate
taxes without thinking death taxes, and Democrats can't seem to
uh make that same sort of effort. Democrats can't seem
to unite, for instance. And this isn't my idea of
suggested years ago by a Republican operative who walked away
from the right wing movement because he was so disgusted
by what he had witnessed and his name escapes me,

(44:30):
because marijuana is legally here where I live, and he
he said, why are you calling them entitlements. We don't
like people who are entitled. No one's entitled to anything, right,
that's the American myth. You have to make it happen
for yourself. What they are is and what you should
be calling them are earned benefits, Social Security, medicare earned benefits.

(44:51):
You paid in. You earned this, not you're entitled to it.
And this has been floating around now for like a
dozen years, this advice. And yet every time you see
a Democrat on television talking about Social Security, it's entitlement, entitlement, entitlement, entitlement.
Even though that's it's right wing rhetoric to call it
an entitlement, it undermines social security. Every time a Democrat
lets the word entitlement fall out of their mounds and

(45:13):
you see it on I think single pair is not
a term that Democrats should embrace. And Democrats are just
terrible messaging. So what should it be? Universal healthcare? Everyone
is pro universe, everyone's pro healthcare. When you hear single pair,
And what the what the ours will do when already
are doing, is they'll say to an individual voter, you
know who they mean when they say a single pair,
they mean you you're going to be paying for their

(45:35):
healthcare for those people. So they really need sort of
new branding, don't they. They need to hire a consultant
to come up with better terminology. I think he's talking
about kind of like a Frank Lence for the left.
Frank was a guest on this show, and he's of
course famous for coming up with words and catch phrases
that Republicans can use to defend and promote their ideas,

(45:58):
and the Dems desperately need more. And I think there's
an example in gay marriage when it comes to messaging. Um.
You know, even advocates of of same sex marriage, advocates
of marriage equality like me and other folks who you know,
pushed the movement, Mary bon Otto and Evan Wolfson and
Andrew Sullivan a lot. Everyone was using gay marriage, gay marriage,
and then there was this shift on a dime one

(46:19):
day where everyone started using marriage equality because gay marriage
put gay first gay for a lot of straight people,
who are the people we are trying to convince is
a negative. It conjures up negative mental images of frankly,
of gay sex, gay marriage. It's like gay sex marriage,
this is butt sucker marriage. And that made people uncomfortable
because not everyone is for gay or that's okay with

(46:41):
gay sex. And then marriage equality, everyone's for marriage, everyone's
for equality, universal health care not single payer, because everyone's
for the universe and everyone's for health. That's so interesting,
isn't it? How much that changed the perception and ergo
the progression of of gay marriage or marriage equality, right,
and that happened a dime where everyone started using marriage quality.

(47:02):
Why twelve years after uh this, I think kind of
seminal op ed was written about. Stop calling them entitlements,
call them earned benefits. Our Democrats still going on CNN
and MSNBC sometimes even Fox and saying and having the
word entitlement come out of their mouths. It's political malpractice
at this point, speaking of Fox, does your dad still
watch Fox News only twenty four hours a day so

(47:26):
he's limited himself. That must be a fun dinner table conversation.
I mean, because you do. It's it's amazing to me.
You watch the different networks and it's like a parallel universe,
it is. You get a completely different perspective given who
you're watching right now. Do you have a hard time
even discussing things with him? Yeah, we don't talk about politics.

(47:49):
We can't we we we don't have the same language,
we don't live in the same universe. And you know,
my dad, like I think a lot of people exist
in kind of hermetically sealed right in universe. Although he
claims he's an independent, and yet he only votes for
Republicans and U except says, fact, a lot of the
crap that is shoveled out out of the television screen

(48:13):
every day by Fox News and Hannity and all the
lying liars over there, how can we ever come together
if people are getting their worldview from two such disparate places.
I mean, I think we're probably overblowing the number of
people who watch cable news, which is not that many.
You know. I think sometimes if you watch it, you
feel like everybody is. But it seems to me that

(48:34):
it's it's only I think, exacerbating this divide in the country.
It is. And but but we're never going to bring
everybody together. There was never a moment where we were
were all together, um and there never will be. You know,
what you want to do is as symbol a majority,
and sometimes that means looking at the people you can't
persuade and not not trying to persuade the unpersuadable, is

(48:56):
not not expending that effort. Uh. And to not fast
effort on those who cannot be persuaded, you have to
first be able to identify accurately those people who cannot
be persuaded, and identify accurately those people who can be moved.
And maybe the people you cited earlier who voted for
Obama eight years ago or four years ago and voted

(49:16):
for Trump this year, that those are the people that
Dems should be really digging into and figuring out how
to speak to and how to what language and what
sort of words and phrases that best encapsulate and communicate
Democratic policies which are better for those people, uh, will
work and to bring them around. But the hardcore Donald

(49:40):
Trump can do no wrong. Dear leader Dan, you were
introduced to many Americans through the It Gets Better project,
which you started in with your husband, and the idea
was to have adult submit videos assuring gay teenagers that
they can go on to you know, have good lives
even after being bullied as teens or feeling bad about

(50:01):
themselves for being gay. How did how did this idea
come about? Well, there was this kid in Indiana named
Billy Lucas who killed himself. Uh and he it's a
it's a horrible story, but you know, he was very
brutally bullied all through middle school in high school, never
came out to anybody, may not have been gay, but
was perceived to be gay. And after he died, a

(50:22):
Facebook memorial page was created for him by his family.
Were the same kids who had been bullying him uh
in school went They went to that page to say
they were glad he was dead and to call him
faggot one last time in front of his grieving parents.
And I wrote about that, and I was just so furious,
as we're all the commenters except one who wrote a
comment on my blog on the thing I wrote about

(50:44):
Billy's death and that Facebook page where she said I
wished I had known you, Billy, and being able to
tell you it makes me cry. I've been able to
tell you that things get better. Rest in peace. And
that really leapt out at me, because things do get better,
often on the personal level, on the macro level, for
the queer community, things have gotten much better, and we

(51:04):
need to be able to share that with kids. And
I just was thinking about things get better. And you know,
particularly the kids who have parents would never allow them
to talk to a queer adult or go to an
LGBT youth support group or join the g s A
in their school. Those kids need to hear from queer
adults about how it gets better, um and how to
make it better for themselves, what we did to make
it better for ourselves, And we wouldn't get permission to

(51:28):
talk to those kids, right, And it just occurred to
me that, oh, there's the Internet, there's YouTube, there's Twitter
and Facebook. We don't need permission to talk to those
kids anymore. That there are queer kids out there who
can't get to a queer youth support group, but we
can bring the queer youth support group and the adult
perspective to them using these new tools. Because when you
think about you know, people have said to me, you know,

(51:49):
it's not just gay kids who are bullied, like absolutely true.
The kid is bullied at school because of his race
or her faith or his class goes home to parents
with the same race, faith, class that they can open
up to and expect support. A kid who's queer or
gender nonconforming or gay goes home to parents who aren't queer,

(52:09):
and sometimes disastrously are there. We're the worst bullies in
their lives are bullying them too, and they have no
one to turn to. You know, a kid of a
kid who's uh, you know, an African American kid goes
home to his parents and can talk about what he's encountered,
what he's seen. The parents will share with their kid
how they navigate living in a society with the plague

(52:33):
by systemic racism, how you know, how they survive. And
the kid who's gay goes home to parents who can't
impart that, who can't share that. Even if the kids
openly gay and the parents are supportive, they don't know
how to illuminate that path. And what the Gets Better
campaign did was it allowed LGBT adults to share what
they learned navigating that often all by themselves, um with

(52:57):
queer kids who are just starting out, who are just
figuring out who they are, and also straight people who
are were supportive of or are supportive of the community.
They participated as well. You had people like Stephen Colbert,
for example, in Janet Jackson and all sorts of people,
Barack Obama, Barack Obama exactly, and Joe Biden. They all

(53:19):
contributed videos to this effort, which was really, I I imagine,
also very important. It was important, you know, for my money, Uh,
I think the most important videos are the videos by
LGBT folks that no one's ever heard of, not celebrities,
not famous. There was one by a lesbian dairy farmer
in Vermont talking about even living in this world community,

(53:40):
how it got better for her, and how she's loved
and accepted by her family and uh and her community,
and that's really important. What wasn't great about the videos
from straight folks? Uh? You know, as re Kline from
Box made a really wonderful it gets Better video was
an important message for a lot of young queer kids
who are being bullied by their families and by every

(54:00):
straight person that they know. Is the message that there
are straight people out there in the world who will
love and accept you for who you are. You may
not know any of them right now, but they're out there,
you know. I hate to end things on a pessimistic note,
but I can't help but wonder, which makes me sound
very much like Carrie Bradshaw. But with all the things

(54:21):
that are going on in the country and some of
the things that the Trump administration has done so far.
Are you concerned about the strides that have been made
and about going backwards and about some of the members
of these communities who are going to really suffer as
a result. I am, I'm very concerned. But you know,

(54:44):
circling back to when we were talking about HIV AIDS,
things were dark and things looked really dire, and there
was you know, we've made progress, but then that was
halted in some places reversed, uh, and then we got
into the fight and that fight and having to defend
what we'd already uh secured. Um, that fight made it

(55:06):
better in the end. That fight wound up creating more
progress and more forward momentum. So right now there's a
fight on and people have to jump in and get engaged.
But that's how it gets better because you got out
there and fought. That's how the Act up generation made
it better for the generations of where people who have

(55:27):
come after by engaging in the fight, by defending ourselves
and fighting for what we know to be right. So
this is galvanized the community in a way exactly. You know,
the we talked about the transpan and it's being used
politically by this Republican administration. George Bush, like Brand said,
George Bush too thousand and four helped get reelected by

(55:48):
running anti game marriage initiatives in eleven states that passed
in each and every state, and a decade later, we
have marriage equality in part, not despite those campaigns, but
because of them, because the anti marriage campaign force us
to have an ongoing conversation about marriage rights and about
gay relationships and straight relationships, and about love. And even

(56:10):
though we lost those sort of snapshots in time in
two thousand and four, we were winning the argument. The
more we had the fight, the more we had the argument,
the more the needle moved in the direction of justice
and fairness toward us. And we're having that fight now
about trans rights. You know, their weaponizing anti trans bigotry
at this moment. They may win at this moment, but

(56:30):
the conversation they're starting and the fight that we are
now in is going to move the needle in the
direction of progress and justice ultimately and in the end. Well,
Dan Savage has been such a pleasure to talk to
you about so many different things. We really appreciate your
coming on the podcast, and you know, I look forward
to talking to you in the future. It was my pleasure.

(56:50):
Thank you so much. A huge thank you to our
podcast team are indemfatigable podcast team, our producer Gianna Palmer,
our production assistant Nor Richie, our audio engineer, Ryan Connor
in l A and Shared O'Connell, who mixes the show. Hi, Jared,
he's just waiting at me now. Plus Alison Bresnick on

(57:12):
Keys just kidding, Alison Bresnik on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook,
everything social and Emily Beena on snares I mean, who
keeps things moving at Katie Kirk Media, Mark Phillips, By
the way, thank you for writing our terrific theme music.
I still think it's extremely catchy. I give it a

(57:32):
ninety five for dancing. Katie and I are the executive
producers of this show, and as we keep reminding you,
you can email us at comments at currect podcast dot
com or you can leave us a voicemail at nine
to nine, two to four, four, six, three seven. We
really love hearing from our listeners, good, bad, and ugly,
well maybe not ugly, but you know, constructive criticism, nice feedback,

(57:56):
all of it. We appreciate it, and we really do
make this show free you not for the money, so
thank you for that's for Dave. Sure. If you can't
get enough of us, I'm Katie Curic on Twitter and Instagram,
Katie dot Curic on Snapchat. You can find me on
Facebook as well. Brian meanwhile, is at Twitter at Goldsmith b.
So here's the part where we appeal to the better

(58:18):
angels of your nature, just like Abraham Lincoln. Won't you
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thank you very very much for listening, and we'll talk
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