[upbeat music] Welcome to the show. As most of you know, I co-host another show with the fabulous Claire Zulkey. It's called Not Right Now, and it's about parenting in these times.
It's great, and you should listen. Please. Anyways, a couple weeks ago, we had a great guest on that show, a community organizer and dad named Garrett Bux.
It was mostly focused around, of course, his experience as a dad these days.
But Willow listened and thought it would be great to re-share it here because at the same time as obviously being a dad, he's pretty publicly answered the most important question more than once, including a pretty big pivot in the middle.
And I appreciate the work he's doing today on the local level and across the country. So enjoy.
[upbeat music] He was getting made fun of because he asked whether the Epstein files were on the shared Google Drive of the class, 'cause he doesn't know what they are.
I have not talked to them about the Epstein files, 'cause I just, I just don't have it in me. [upbeat music] Welcome to Not Right Now, the podcast about parenting through all of this.
We'll be talking about/crashing out over topics like- Reproductive rights and who left this granola bar wrapper in their pocket before laundry and/or stuffed into the couch or just on the floor, and I'm asking who left it even though I know exactly who left it.
Digital footprints and actual muddy footprints all over the floor and hand prints on the glass. It's not an advice show. It's a you're not alone, and you're also not crazy for screaming in the shower kinda show.
I'm Claire Zulkey from Evil Witches. And I'm Quinn Emmett from Important Not Important. You can find details on anything we talk about in the show notes or at our website, notrightnow.show..show.
And if you like what you hear today, please share it with a parent who needs it or who might laugh and tell their kids to be quiet, and then drop us a nice little five-star review.
And reminder, you can send questions or feedback to questions@notrightnow.show. [upbeat music] Hey. We have another guest this week.
Pretty excited. His name is Garrett Bux. He is a writer and organizer based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Garrett thinks a bunch about why building community is our only hope, R2-D2.
He runs trainings with people from across the world through an organization called the Barn Raisers Project that he started, trying to teach people how to host gatherings that make the world kinder and more livable.
He writes a newsletter called The White Pages and wrote a book called The Right Kind of White.
It is about a lifetime spent trying to prove that he was better than [laughs] other white people and how doing so was not helpful. I think you'd like his newsletter.
I think you'll like this conversation and hear him talk about doing all that and being a parent at the same time. [upbeat music] Nice to talk to you, Garrett.
You've been on my mind because I have been very slowly working on an Evil Witches issue about witches who weightlift, and one of the women I spoke with said that she s- formed a weightlifting club in Iowa City because you had said something along the lines of, "If you want a club, start it.
Do- Danielle?... be what you wanna see." Yeah, that was Danielle. She's such a cool lady, and um- Danielle rules. Yeah. Yeah.
So anyway, I did not expect you to cross over into the weightlifting, or ladies weightlifting world, but here you are. I have a, I am a woman, a women's weightlifting influencer. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome, though.
That's gonna be a cool issue. Yeah. Yes.
It's been so long, 'cause s- I was sorta surprised by how many people put up their hands to, to be interviewed, and, like, I don't know how you do your newsletters, and maybe we'll get into it, but, you know, six interviews for one newsletter issue is a lot.
So it's been a long time, like, boiling it down and, you know, getting it down to the best parts. But Danielle's really cool. Yeah. D- that, you are doing more work with interviewees than I ever do for my newsletter.
[laughs] That's impressive. Yeah. So I was telling Quinn about you, and I was like, you guys have similar ideological DNA as do-gooder dads.
And so I'm curious to hear you guys sort of exchange trade secrets but also explore what sets you off as a dad. Tell us how old your kids are. They're soon to be 13 in May, and nine. Okay. All right. Okay.
We have similar here. In the same boat house. Yeah. I'm 13, 12, and 10? 10? Sure. Right on. Yeah. And yours, Claire? 13 and 10.
And I wanna give you guys a little anecdote about, I was telling Quinn last night, my husband is also a good guy, really strives to be a good dad, which sometimes I find a mystery 'cause I don't see why.
And I feel like you're wasting your time, these kids don't deserve a good dad.
But he took our kids out for dinner last night after a school basketball game, and our younger kid, who has ADHD and kind of has more of a spicy personality, was being wiggly and bratty at dinner.
And Steve took his lemonade away from him and said, "If you... Like, you can't finish this until you settle down and, you know, eat some food and whatever."
So James went off in the corner with some crayons and was working his shit out, and then he came back to the table and ate dinner.
And Steve looked at the paper, and it was a drawing of a middle finger and the word dad afterward. [laughs] That's really good. I know. And I wasn't there. I think if I had been there, I would've not laughed about it.
But Steve was laughing about it, so it was okay. But I was like, I would buy a shirt that just had the middle finger emoji dad on it. But anyway- God, that's fucking great... that's how we're doing over here.
Th- that, that reminds me of my friend Cameron, who's from North Carolina, and, you know, the pre-tech boom North Carolina. You know, very much North Carolina Southern roots.
And so he, growing up, I think he was probably around 13 or so, there was a note that his dad has saved that says, "Daddy, you are an asshole.
Love, Cameron."And I'm like, "I just didn't know that you could end a note without saying love at the end of it." [laughs] Right. Obligatory. That's amazing. So who...
That's some real classic just throw the sugar in the, in the medicine. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
You guys are both, like, do-gooder men in the world, and I wanna know if your sons, es- especially, and daughters, if they see you as such or they also send you those little drive-by hate mail. They don't fucking care.
I mean, I l- it's easy to say that. I think half the time. Depends on the day. Most of the time they don't care. Sometimes, great, and I guess they care. I don't know. You know, they're like, "You have a website, right?"
I'm like, "Yeah, that's it." But everything Claire for me, like everything as it should be, like, pales in comparison to my wife. Though I did tell you how our youngest told Dana he wished she was a janitor.
He told his teacher he wished she was a janitor. So when, when you say pales in comparison, that means, like, that your kids would give the preference to your wife over you, like, that Mom gets the praise?
Or what do you mean? Oh, yeah. So my wife's a screenwriter, and she's r- Yeah... done a bunch of really awesome work, and she just did the Wicked movies. She's been working on them since 2020, so half of their lives.
All they kinda know is, like, this whole thing- Yeah... especially the past few years. So, you know, when I'm like, "I've talked to a scientist.
We think we have figured out how to give everybody water," they're like, "Great, but is there merch? Because if there's not-" It's good point. At least I have merch. It's not Wicked merch. Right. I have merch.
They don't care. They don't care. I did, the only merch which is not affiliated with me is I'm a big fan of the, uh, the artist, the gentleman who does the Effin Birds stuff.
I don't know if you've ever seen that account. It's fantastic. I r- The F-F I-N Birds. It's a really lovely pencil drawing of a bird with some sort of phrase on it.
And I have a green T-shirt, and it's a really lovely bird. And it says, "Don't be a racist piece of shit," on it. Yeah. And I wore it to my kid's school, and the teachers were like, "Okay.
Of course we agree, however, like, maybe we could wear or cover a part of it. I, I don't know." I was like, "I don't know what to tell you. Like, I don't ha- rules." Right, right, right. Yeah.
Garren, what, how do your kids approach you? You know, 'cause I feel like you are y- like a good guy in good standing online.
And do they see it that way, or are you just, like, the guy who makes them go to bed and eat dinner and all those kind of, you know, tedious dad things?
Well, I'm always interested, like, when I hear, like, actual famous people that their kids be like, "I am not impressed," you know. I'm glad your kids are legitimately actually impressed by Wicked, right? Uh-huh.
That seems, like, legitimate, right? But sometimes you hear from s- interviews with actual celebrities be like, "Oh, my kid doesn't care that I'm in this movie or that," et cetera, right? I think that my kids have...
[laughs] I don't know if it feels paternalistic, but I think my kids have an appropriate level of respect for the level of w- like, the level to which I walk in the world, right? Like- Sure...
that they know that nothing I have done is actually the kind of thing that if they were to explain to their friends would be impressive to their friends. But they are like,
"Garren, I don't know who Priya Parker is, but it seems like you're excited that she liked your essay," right? Uh-huh. That, that, that, that's a, I think that's incredibly appropriate level of cool. Sure.
You know, good for, uh, essentially applying the same level of I'm excited for you- Mm-hmm... that I apply when, you know, my nine-year-old just picked out a pair of glasses that was very exciting for her. Mm-hmm.
I think that's right for my career right now, which is- Yeah... don't know why that people seem to want to talk to you across the country, but no one actually knows who my dad is. Good for you, Dad. Right? Great.
G- it's ap- It's appropriate, right? There's a little condescension to it, right? Where they're like, "Great work." Oh, totally. Yeah. As there should be, right? No, yeah. 100%. 100%.
Because my, A, you know, I'm not, you know. But B, also because I, I do, you know, writing to people and telling them should host potlucks is a made-up job. Mm-hmm. Why should be impressed at that level?
Whereas, you know, comparatively as we talk about our spouses, right, not only i- are my kids very impressed, very appreciative, and very proud of what my wife does, but it's also very concrete.
My wife is a family doctor. Mm-hmm. My wife is a family doctor in the same- You have to get a degree for that. Mm-hmm. You have to get all sorts of degrees. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Like, there, there's a reason why her job gets us health insurance and my job does not. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. And I think they're also impressed by that. Sure. Right. But, you know, but that's very concrete, right?
That we, she both a, is a doctor and she teaches medical students, so we go to the clinic where my wife practices. That feels like something we can be very proud of.
Her colleagues seem like they're proud of, that they love working with my wife. My kids can feel that. My wife's students seem to like her, right?
All this feels very the actual thing one should be proud in, which is- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm...
every day somebody is directly influenced by a relationship with my wife in a super positive way, sometimes up to that level, right? Sure.
Whereas they should be as impressed as anyone should be that random people in random cities would come in moderate numbers to come see me talk. I think that's all you can ask for. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it.
I'm still not 100% sure what my dad does for work, and I'm 47 years old, so, you know, I think it's important. But yeah, and also doctors have the best stories.
I've been watching The Pitt, like a lot of people, and, like, I've seen some storylines coming down the pike because of things my friend has told me about medical school.
I'm like, "There's gonna be maggots under that cast," you know? Oof. And like- Nope... they have the best stories. Mm-hmm. So that is her. Which is why we do not watch The Pitt in our household. Ah, yeah.
No, I do a lot of Mitch. Because my wife needs escapism. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what does she watch for escapism?
I'm always curious, like, when the people who do, like, the serious jobs, what they watch to, to get away from it all.
Starting in medical school and then carrying on afterwards, we cannot have anyth- she cannot watch anything with more pathos in it than a romantic comedy. Oh.
And even in that genre, if the-Ending is not unequivocally happy- Mm-hmm... then it, even that's too much.
I remember, you know, this is now back in medical school days, but like the ending of 500 Days of Summer was a little bit too ambiguous- Mm-hmm... in terms of happiness.
We need two attractive people, two dumb attractive people unequivocally falling in love at the end. That's what we're going for. But also, who doesn't need that these days? Right, right. Totally, right?
I mean, d- this is the whole heated rivalry thing, right? Like, that's seeing two nice men just be in love and have sex, right? And not much more of a complicated plot than that. Good. That's all we need, right?
And I think as a family, our main form of family escapism is, so my wife has lived a number of different years of her life in Sweden. We have lived there together in Sweden.
We've got a lot of ties to there, and we take the kids back as much as anyone can get overseas, right?
But because of that, and because of my wife's childhood memories in Sweden, we are the most loyal followers of the Sweden preliminary contest to get into the Eurovision Song Contest. Ooh. Wow. Into it.
Which, which is a seven-week process in Sweden that about half the country watches every single event, and then we watch accordingly. So we are in Melodifestivalen season right now, and it's gonna be a good year.
The geopolitics of Eurovision writ large have gotten very complicated. Mm. But the Sweden one, we can just... You know, it is, it, that's exciting because it is a country doing what it does best, that- Mm-hmm...
Sweden appreciative pop music makes very... You know, Sweden wr- wisely learned in the 1970s, oh, if we can do ABBA in a small country- Oh, yeah...
then we could like, just keep going to this same well over and over again, and kind of have made a natural culture of just liking pop music. And so- Yeah... we're, so
romantic comedies in Melodifestivalen is what my wife can do. Yeah. That's pretty great. That's awesome.
No, Sweden is, I'm gonna go see Robyn in September, and this will be like the third or fourth time I've seen her, and I bet, yeah, Sweden is to pop music as like Russia and Canada is to hockey.
So that is a good thing to get into, for sure. I- Always bringing it back to Game Changers, Heated Rivalry, Claire. [laughs] There's always something with you.
It- we've been watching Love Is Blind, or I've been watching Love Is Blind. I say we, me and the internet, but it's kind of funny how the best couples are always the most boring ones, basically.
You know probably who will be happiest 'cause they have the least screen time 'cause there's just not much going on, and they'll sort of like sometimes check in with each other, and there'll be like a little manufactured drama.
But, you know, it, that's how you know they're good is when they give bad online screen time. Something that Quinn and I talk about a little bit sometimes is like when your kid is thir- and are your kids both girls?
Do you have a girl and a boy? A boy and girl. Oldest boy- Okay... younger girl.
We talk sometimes about how older boys in particular will be trolly or like something that we may think is sort of toxic online, and they don't necessarily understand or appreciate when we try to tell them like, "Hey, this thing is bullshit," or, "You think, you should think twice about it."
But then there's also the danger of pushing too hard and being like, "When you watch MrBeast, you're only three clicks away from Andrew Tate, and therefore like a highway to hell," you know?
But as my son Paul has told my husband Steve, he says, "Why do you ruin everything?"
So I'm curious what your touch is like in terms of talk- and also as a for- like a former 13-year-old boy, like what your touch is or your perspective is on being like,
the phrase boys will be boys has been tainted forever, like, as the phrase boy mom. But you know, kids are sort of by nature fuck-ups and idiots, and to touch the third rail a little bit.
So I'm curious like where you go with that when he kind of starts liking something or talking about something that you're like, this may be problematic, but also you're a kid. I'm still waiting for that shoe to drop. Mm.
And so I, I say that not with any sense of we must have done something right or any of the above.
I do think that we are, we have not gotten there in large part because I, not the, you know, not fully accidental, but the luck of friend group and school culture is that it's not a very,
it's not a very large bro-y school culture right now. Oh. And the friend group is not... And so there's an awareness of all that, but there's not been a, there's no desire to watch any kind of dude,
borderline toxic YouTube influencers right now, right? Like when he picks something to watch right now, right now he is watching the, the reality television program, The Ugliest Houses in America, which, you know what?
Right. The only thing toxic about that is that they call the houses ugly.
What I will say, though, is that's really, as you said that, right, like the thing that came to my mind, though, in terms of, you know, wanting to live in a world that is a bit more, I don't know if jocular is the right word, but you know, teasy, trolly, that kind of thing.
I think where that has come up for us is, and my wife recently got like a really empathetic viewpoint into this, is he is still really close to his younger sister. I think that they really value their relationship.
We are lucky for that. We want whatever they are doing to keep that, we wanna just get out of the way- Right... and ride that for as long as possible.
But we have noticed, right, as we, in particular in seventh grade even more than sixth, even more than fifth, that though he will talk to her in a way that is, she rightly identifies, "Stop that.
Stop teasing me," in a way that feels new, right? And then we'll have to be like, "Hey, that was, why'd you go there with your sister?"
And it was really, I've noticed some of this on, I'm generally the carpool parent, right?
But my wife had kind of a more concentrated dose of it because she was-His school, which by the way, this is shout out Milwaukee Public Schools for doing stuff like this with a public title one school.
But they had a class trip up to northern Wisconsin and kind of a no outdoor education winter camping trip, which was super rad.
Is kind of my wife's dream alternate career somehow is doing outdoor education for middle schoolers. So she was, somehow everyone's like, "Oh my God, that must have been hell."
And she's like, "I loved it the entire time." But one of the things that was very, I think, empathy giving for her was realizing that group, both boys and girls, it felt like a podcast basically the entire time.
Like in terms of it, it was nonstop ribbing, it was nonstop teasing, it was nonstop joking. W- never really that crossed the line, but just the lingua franca of the group of middle schoolers.
And y- y- like just realizing back, oh yeah, this was my life too, was nothing but giving each other grief, right? Oh. Did you guys see that SNL skit where they did that with the teenage boys? Y- you mean the podcast?
Yes. Yeah. Snack Homies. Well, well that, well that is the other thing. They also all sound like Snack Homies. And my wife also had the very wise, like kinda linguistic analysis.
We were, we've misunderstood our generation what bruh means. Bruh is not, does not refer to bro as we thought of. Bruh is a part of speech that as she says, it's basically their version of a talking stick. Mm.
That you're not allowed to start a sentence without saying bruh first. And so bruh is simply a part of speech which means- Talk show... I'm about to say something right now. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. Mm-hmm.
But I think it gave her, and then she kinda passes back to me, a lot of empathy of, oh, he has to do an immediate code switch- Mm... when he comes in our house. Mm-hmm.
And meanwhile for my daughter, right, a third grader, and also a girl, right? Like both the gender, but I think even lar- more largely the age group, her friends are not teasing each other all the time, right? Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. And so that would not be a sign of love and respect and friendship and kind of in group comradery. So it's just one of those first moments when they're very clearly actually just speaking different languages. Oh.
And that doesn't mean that we c- sh- have to b- not be like, "You know, that's cool when y- you and your friends do it, but not with your sister."
But it has helped us realize, oh, that's gonna, there's gonna be a lot of going back and forth, right? And I think you asked Claire about, you know, my own growing up. I think that is what kind of it felt.
You know, I was lucky to have really cool role models in who my parents were. Four progressive sensitive parents. My dad in particular, you know, very sensitive, progressive dad.
My brothers were, I have four older brothers, and they were really great role models for that too. And I think not by accident, I think my mom in particular had some really intentional moves that helped with that.
And I never really had a desire, I was never, I knew I was never gonna cut it as like the jockiest guy or the toughest guy or anything like that, so I knew I wasn't able to get fully in there.
But I wanted to have friends, right? Mm-hmm. And I wanted to fit in enough, at least enough for safety and survival, right? [laughs] And I wanted to have friends both with girls, but also with other guys.
And so I do remember that kind of making sense of which of, you know, it's a, these three questions. Which of this do I actually legitimately enjoy versus just what o- other people do?
Of that, which do I enjoy is the version, like, the version I can do with my friends without losing myself? And which is the version I enjoy that I might not be able to? Mm-hmm.
That's har- I mean, I'm still parsing that right now. That's a damn hard thing to parse. That's why I stopped doing anything. Mm. I was just like, I'm not gonna decide anymore.
I just have a lot of empathy for teenage boys, well, you know, teenagers in general. But to do all that while everything in your brain is running haywire and every new biological chemical is getting pumped in
into- Yeah... your body looks weird. Like that sucks. Yeah. Yeah. So- Yeah. It's, I tell my kids all the time, I'm like, "This is why they make movies about it. It's terrible for everyone." Mm-hmm.
Some people, like that's the bar. Some people have it much worse obviously, but it's not great. Like it's not great. No. Every day- Yeah... is existential. Yeah. That is a really good way of looking at it.
I remember I got to study abroad in my junior year of college, which is like a huge privilege, but I remember it wasn't until then, that was the first time I felt like I could be who I want or I can decide who I am without it being reflected back to me by someone else.
You having some kind of external pressure. And even then, still I had its own version of it, but I was like- Wow...
wow, I can be whoever I want here and, you know, this is my oppor- I, I think I must have had a brain, you know, some chemical must have leaked in that made me have that, you know, self-actualization.
But my kid goes to Catholic school, and he's in a very small class, which has got its good sides, but also it's a fishbowl, and, you know, like, he's at the age right now where this one girl, like, talks to him, and he can't tell if she's trolling him or she actually likes him, you know, which I think is healthy and normal, but- Relatable.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And at the same time, uh, he was telling me he's one of the youngest ones in his class, which, you know, it's got its ups and its downs.
But he said that he was getting made fun of 'cause he asked whether the Epstein files were on the shared Google Drive of the class. And so everyone, [laughs] 'cause he doesn't know what they are.
And on the one hand, I was like, that's kind of funny. I have not talked to them about the Epstein files 'cause I just, I don't have, I just don't have it in me.
I'm just telling Quinn, I'm thinking about what kind of jeans I should be wearing. But I was like, you know what? I'm not gonna even go there and explain to you what they are 'cause I don't even know where to begin.
But it is an interesting time to be raising boys. But your son is doing such a favor to your daughter.
Like, she's gonna be such a cool kid having been around this, this boy raising her up to, you know, be around older boys and, you know, he's caring for her.
That's a, I'm sure she won't appreciate it, but, like, he sounds like he's a really nice older brother to her. He is a very nice older brother.
And I was, I, I could appreciate that, that to have, in my case, older brothers who were both very, seemed to be a model for being nice and kind and not jagoffs, but who also introduced me to cool stuff.That's right.
I don't know yet if she's introducing, if he's introducing her to cool stuff. I think your mileage may vary on whether D&D counts or not. Pokemon seems to be as cool as it ever was, and that is completely...
And that is to say, seems like a lot of pictures of weird animals to me. So we'll see if she gets that. But- I couldn't believe that Pokemon had a Super Bowl commercial, by the way.
I was like, "Is Pokemon a brand, like a brand?" You know, Lady Gaga was talking about her favorite... I, I was like, I am, I don't know how old I am anymore. Like, I've lost touch with exactly where I am in culture.
But Garrett, you, did you grow up in like, in Montana? Is that what I- I did. Yeah. Yeah... Okay. And y- are you the youngest of five, or where are you in the- S- I am fifth of six. Okay.
And if you wanna talk gender in parenting, five boys in a row, one girl. Wow. And was your sister, did she give, was she everything then?
Was she like the, you know, the final, like, "Here's the daughter who will finally bring us, you know, all that we want"? I feel like you hear those stories a lot with- That's what my family was.
We were three boys and a girl. Parents were like, "You guys get the fuck out." I mean, that's the joke, right?
It is impossible to like say the lineup of my family without having the natural response be, "Oh, sounds like your parents were trying for a girl and then finally it worked."
And so the actual story though does have a lot to do with gender, but in a different way. That, and again, I'm,
I don't know how to tell this without being like, I am the luckiest guy in the world in terms of the kind of parenting I received, and it really sucked for me to write a memoir because a memoir is supposed to be you look back at what you're not happy about, all your own moves, and then you try to find the root cause and you get to blame your parents.
Right. But like in my case, I had to be like, "Damn it." Oh. "Dan and Jane Bucks ruled, and all the ways that I've messed up was basically just on me." And so one of the... Which I think is very typical for my mom.
So m- around the time that my brothers first started middle school and high school, and actually it was like when the very oldest had started high school, my mom signed us up to be a foster family for infants.
And the move there, one p- piece of that was financial, right? This was a [laughs] five freaking kids, but- Right... on y- or on a, s- you know, mid-level state government employee's salary.
But the other like very explicit reason, and she was like honest about this with my brothers, was, "I am doing this because you are in the most self...
You are about to go into the most selfish stage of your life," not inappropriately. No.
And I think that it's actually gonna be really important for us t- for me to be able to say when you come in from school with everything you're feeling, or you come from cross country practice or whatever, to hand you a baby and say, "I've been holding so and so all day.
My arms are tired. Can you please take this baby?" And so she signed us up in a, as a foster family. I think she also had a sense in addition to financial that she would be pretty good at doing this.
She was correct about that. But it was to make sure that like care was inescapable for my brothers. Yeah. And so we, we chose to become a foster family.
Most of the babies that came into our household would only be there for a few weeks or, you know, s- relatively quick. We had a few older kids as well. That was fun. But then my sister Anna came to us,
and there was a custody battle between her birth mom and her biological paternal grandmother. And the birth mom, Shandy, who we knew, wanted to put her up for adoption. We had a relationship with her.
But while the custody battle was happening, she had to stay in our care for the duration of the court case, which h- you know, took a year, right? Yeah. So Anna was part of our family for the first year of her life.
And so when she was finally put up for adoption, her mom very kindly said, "There's no other place I can imagine- Hmm... Anna being than your family."
So that's to say all the dynamics then from, you know, my sister, shout-out, right? Lots of different dynamics to, to, you know, both the gender dynamic, the age dynamic.
You know, I'm 12 years younger than my oldest brother. My sister's 16 years younger than my oldest brother.
And then also the, a mixed family in terms of biological and adopted kids, which is always its own u- dynamic, et cetera, right? So that is [laughs] the person who needs the shout-out for navigating Buckstown, right?
Yeah. Is 100% my younger sister. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like she got passed around in a lot of pairs of arms at her, at your house. Like she was probably very well cared for and adored. Which- That's right...
'cause I imagine...
I'm being, I'm joking, but I'm, like for some reason I think of like the pioneer woman, and then like, so were you guys all riding horses and coming home and, you know, eating bacon and wrestling and, you know.
I presume, it sounds like it was not the... When you think of a big family of boys at, and girl out in Montana, it's not that kind of, I don't know.
Talk a little bit about, a little bit more about what your family life was like. Yeah. So the hippie-ish version of that, right? Oh. That was very much...
So we lived about a half hour outside of the state capital, Helena, in a town, little town called Clancy.
And so if I want to play up the like stereotypical, you know, I grew up in rural Montana pieces, I could play up those pieces. We had only one neighbor within walking distance of our house.
He was a literal retired gold prospector named Bunchy. Sure he was. Right? So if I wanna play up Bunchy, right, I can, right? We had, you know, we had bears in our yard. We had mountain lions in our yard.
And to, you know, one of, one of our favorite stories is my older brother Nate... Oh, speaking of care for my sister, yes, my sister was well cared for.
And the story may reveal differently that my brother Nate is by far the chillest of us, right? Th- a- most of my siblings are as loud as I am, but Nate is the quiet one. And chillness usually is a virtue.
Sometimes chillness can be, it has a downside, as in the case of this one. My mom is in the kitchen. Nate and Anna, Anna is at that point a toddler, like two or so, are on the back porch.
And Nate's job is to be watching Anna. And Nate nonchalantly walks into the kitchen. It's like, "Hey, Mom, there's a big cat out there." Yeah.My mom immediately sort of was like, "Nate, how big is the big cat?"
"Oh, about the size of a deer." And, "Nate, where is Anna?" "She's out there watching the big cat." And so my mom sprints out. It was about eight feet away from Anna, from my toddler sister, was a mountain lion.
And so shout out to my brother [laughs] Nate again. He got the lecture in appropriate levels of alertness- Yeah... from that. So, so there was that, but you know, it was...
We o- we had chickens, we had ducks and geese, and the chickens came to, came i- you know, 'cause this is Montana, would live in our living room, w- not, would live in our laundry room during the winter.
And so that's the kinda like most stereotypical rural Montana stuff, right, that we have. And also there was a ton of, yes, on the pioneer woman side, there's a ton of making your own everything. Mm.
But less as a statement and more just- 'Cause you had to... if you don't, if you don't bake all your bread, right, those teenagers are going to eat your bread very quickly, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
And so the, the hippie part of it, a lot of making homemade gluten as a protein source. And so same brother Nate, highly celiac now. Oh. And so I get to blame my mom for that.
So you live in Milwaukee, and I'm curious about, first of all, do you ever go off on your kids then for their soft city life when they're like, you know- Mm...
there's not enough candy in the house, or you'll only let me, you know, whatever. And you're like, "In my day, if you wanted sliced bread-" Mountain lions. [laughs] Yeah. You have a mountain lion.
You better know how to hunt a mountain lion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You love your brother. What if he was c- carried off by a wild animal? I'm just curious- Right...
whether you bring that, bring in that perspective of, you know- What Claire is trying to say is we definitely would. Like, we would both lean on that in a very real way. Well, well I need two more. Here's why I don't.
Mm-hmm. Because I am still the victim of that. Because my brothers, you know, the age range is my brothers were all under the age of six at the same time, right? They were all- Oh my God...
four in a row, and then there was a six-year gap, and then there was me. And the highest poverty years of my family were all when my brothers were young.
And then the more middle cla- more solidly middle class years, not surprisingly, corresponded when there were only two mouths to feed left in the house, my sister and I, and not the other. And so
I get so much, "You got a color TV." And also, it, computers were a thing when I was young. Mm. And they're like...
That you had a computer with internet in the house, and we only [laughs] we had to sit in the front lawn in Montana and play a game called Watch the Interstate. Then my brother played a game called I Want That Car.
[laughs] And the way you played I Want That Car was you would watch the interstate, and you'd set a t- a 20-minute timer, and you'd just watch the cars, and the car you wanted was, that was your car for the game, and you could only pick once.
So the only drama of the game was if you pick too soon and a cooler car comes by, that's- You're fucked... that was a big game for my brothers, right? So- Yeah...
so that I had, so that I had actual fun things wa- they would blame me for.
So my children, I would be so much better at doing that, and so much more passionate about doing that, if I still did not identify myself as the victim of that, rather than- Yeah, but why do they have to know that?
Fuck them. For all they know, you almost- Sure... got eaten by the mountain lion.
Well, what I will say right now, there's a huge conflict in our household, though, about what type of community you live in between my son and my daughter. Mm.
And it has to do with my son, y- you know, by seventh grade had very much actually taken, like, a lot of pride in I am a city kid, right? And so, like- Mm...
the diversity of his school, like the, you know, diversity of our neighborhood. Like, all of this is, would be really important to him.
Kind of the grittiness of our neighborhood, the fact that we live a block away from a, a gas station that was abandoned for a long time.
Then they tore that down, and then they've been so slow in building the new one that we've had a new abandoned gas station- Sure... that's been like this for a long time.
Like, that kinda, he's started to be old enough to take pride in that, and he has, now he has speech and debate competitions and robotics competitions against suburban schools.
And so he has started his own perhaps over inflated sense of class warfare and stuff like that. Mm. But is very, very proud, of like, "I live in the city. We're a gritty city," that kinda thing.
You know, a kinda, a very Milwaukeean version of this. Yeah. But then suddenly my third, by my third grader, they had a unit on types of communities. And the, there was presented a s- they had taglines for each type.
City was bright lights, tall buildings, and suburb was house with a yard. Hmm. Hmm. Our house has a yard. So because of that, my sister comes home and is like, "We live in a suburb." And my,
n- nothing has made my son angrier than this. This is the thing he is holding onto. It's his whole identity. So if I were... This may seem like a minor fight.
I have had to mediate this fight alone between them, which when my daughter's like, "Well, everyone in Miss Clara's class agrees our neighborhood is a suburb," and he can't argue against it because she has defined the terms and the terms are correct for her.
So it just literally, I've seen him cartoon style actually pull out his hair at it. So because of this, I cannot play this, I cannot play I had a hard rural childhood with either of them for this reason.
Because for my daughter, she's like, "Well, that's fine. I'm proud to live in a suburb." And my son is, "That's fine. I'm proud to live in the city."
And so we can't even get to the point where I, I, I, I could throw myself into the conflict yet. I'm aspiring towards that eventually. I just- Yeah... thank you for sharing all of that.
I think you could try harder, to be honest. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.
I once wrote, uh, a pilot and very extensive research, and what they call a show bible, for a TV show about the first few years of the Jamestown colony. And one of the very first things you...
And it was gonna be, you know, very much both sided. Turns out, shocker, the colonists, not the good guys.
Good news about that is the very first death of a colonist that I could tell from my research, and one of my best friends down the hall has been an archeologist there for-His entire life
was a colonist went out at night, literally like day two, and got eaten by a fucking cougar. And I lean on that with my kids.
So if you can't lean on your own personal experience exaggerated a little bit, when my kids are out, I'm like, "No, you should go play in the woods.
Everything's great, but just remember four hundred years ago, the first guy got eaten by a cougar, so have a great night." You know, you gotta keep 'em on your toes.
I just think you gotta use whatever you've got available to you. That's true. And that first guy was my younger sister. Mm-hmm. And the cougar was a mountain lion. Yeah. There you go. So, yeah. There you go.
I'm just saying that- Yeah. I-... until they can actually connect the dots, do what you gotta do. That is so cute about your kids.
I live in Evanston, Illinois, and if you are a North Shore person north of here, I live in South Evanston. Yeah. We, like, keep, we keep it real. You know, we keep it pretty gritty.
But if you go south of us, we are, you know, soft tan, suburban North Shore. So it's kind of the best of both worlds where you get to- E- Evanston is the... For that kind of, like, self-identity, Evanston is the perfect.
You have Chicago can look at you and judge you. You can look at Wilmette and judge Chicago. But Evanston, yeah, i- is a great version of that. Yeah. Yeah.
No, Chip, but I wanna talk a little bit about your work because I want you to, in a second, explain what The White Pages is and the right- Yeah... kind of way.
I think it's really interesting and important that a lot of folks might judge your work and say, "Oh, this is like white savior, white guilt-" Sure...
bullshit, like from the, you know, ivory tower," but you're someone who could actually speak to living in a city and also living out in the, [lips smack] you know, in the real America.
So just talk a little bit about what those two experiences have brought to you and, you know, sort of what you say to folks who are like, you know, it is people who don't know what it's like to, you know, live in the wilderness and bootstraps and all that.
Talk a little bit about how that all informs your work. Yeah. I'll try to fit, fit that in well, but yeah, bring me back if I mess up. So, you know, my work lives in two worlds, right?
I have my writing, which is primarily at The White Pages. Just wrote a memoir as well, but you know, right now, day to day lives primarily at my newsletter, The White Pages.
And then I have my organizing work through the Barn Raisers project. And the story of both of those is, you know, you said you'd kinda do good or die before.
I am 100% a kind of both in positive and in negative ways, a trying to be a recovering white do-gooder, right?
That, you know, had this incredible upbringing of parents, I think, who really taught a lesson on how to be socially engaged with the world, how to show up for community.
I grew up in the kind of household where there was always grownups talking and planning at night while I went to bed, right? You know, what is the next thing our community needs? Let's do 'em.
And I'm very grateful for that. I took that, and for a lot of my life, in a pretty self-aggrandizing way, right? Both in terms of strident, self-righteous political yelling, right?
And in terms of set of career choices that I do think were pretty white savior-y, right?
Because I think if I cared about social justice, if I cared about making the world, you know, trying to contribute positively to the world in, in particular as a white guy from Montana, I think it's very easy to view that, A, the work is always in other people's communities, and B, that as a white guy in particular, that I had the full right to do whatever I wanted in other people's communities, right?
So, and that's to say, not to say that my, the steps of my career that I was more on a traditional kind of white do-goodery or even white savior-y tra- track are ones that I'm solely ashamed of or didn't have incredible relationships, or that I might have also done some decent things.
I loved teaching fifth grade on the Navajo Nation, and I was a white guy coming to teach fifth grade on the Navajo Nation. I loved teaching refugees in Chicago. I was also a white guy teaching refugees in Chicago.
I've, you know, started a nonprofit here in Milwaukee. I was also a white guy starting a nonprofit in a majority Black and brown city.
And so no story is neat, but I do think that I was on a path for a long time that felt pretty... I said was a social justice path, but in a lot of ways was pretty damn individualistic.
I had a very predictable come to Jesus moment for white liberals in that I had it in 2016, right? What, like, that, you know, so I had my version of a Trump freak out.
I think my personal version kind of played out on three levels. There was, oh, shoot,
just on a personal level, I've been working this 80-hour a week non- nonprofit job here in s- this city for, you know, a few years now. I have meetings every single day, but I actually don't know people. I don't...
I'm a, I'm isolated. I'm alone. I don't have a community. And to your point, I have kind of cleave ties with the communities that I come from, right? That a- and in particular majority white places I came from.
B, I looked at kind of the field I was in, education reform, and looked at that and said, "We can write a lot of fancy grant reports saying that we're having an impact, but the world basically is still arranged exactly as it was."
And then looked at the Trump thing, and, you know, this was also an era in which I was, you know, getting used to writing online and getting used to writing kind of the kind of anti-racist piece that would be writing, like, white people do better kind of pieces, and getting va- a certain level of validation for also annoying people, I'm sure, but getting a certain level of validation for it.
And it was, I kind of looked around at the whole Trump thing and realized, like, all of this kind of, like, online yelling I'm doing as a white leftist, not only is it not helping, there's no not preventing a political movement that I'm very mad about, but it actually feels like I'm kind of just part of this circular firing squad that, like, I'm a white liberal that gets pissed off at a white conservative.
That white conservative then does something more deliberately to piss me off, and then the cycle continues, and it kind of feels like kind of part of a national hostage situation that I'm not part of the problem.
And so all the work I currently do kind of comes from that kind of moment of realizing, you know-I think there are certain folks, a lot of folks, who come from still more community-minded backgrounds that me having an epiphany on realizing like, holy crap, the solution might be a community.
There's a lot of folks who never lost that, right? That was how they were raised, that was how they were instilled. I lost that and had to find my way back. And-
Well- So White Pages started as a newsletter primarily for the title, right?
Specifically about white people trying to do something other than just yelling at each other, but how to do justice work in a way that actually was more community-minded with the, with my community, with white people, right?
Barn Raisers Project started as a set of trainings I would run to help white folks across the country do that.
Over time, both of those have evolved because while I do think there's a particular story of how, why building true communities is hard for people, white folks in America, while I do think there's a particular story of why it's hard for men in America, I think that we're als- I was increasingly discovering everyone from a wide variety of backgrounds was like, "Actually, I'm isolated and alone and feeling a lack of agency politically, and I want...
If you believe, Garrett, that building community isn't just a nice thing that will make me less lonely, but is actually a stepping stool towards a better world, I need that too."
So now the White Pages is no longer explicitly race focus- like, not just focused about whiteness and that kind of question. It's more about my belief that
focusing our politics first locally and learning the, building a care infrastructure is what's going to then build out towards a broader transformation of society.
The Barn Raisers, you know, trains people how to do that, how to host gatherings. Now I'm known more for talking about potlucks than I am known for anything else.
And that I still call it, uh, the newsletter's still gonna always be The White Pages because the white page is, is a blank sheet. Yeah. And I think in a lot of ways we're starting from a blank sheet right now.
So that is, you know, I think my work is very earnest and optimistic at a time when I think that can rightfully so get called a very privileged thing to believe in.
That believing in people right now is not the easiest thing to do. But I just really don't like the alternative of not believing that we could do better than whatever the hell this mess is. Amen. Amen.
I think that's great. I mean, we're constantly gonna wrestle with all that shit.
And, you know, folks that look like you and I do on the very surface level, one of the things I've rightfully caught shit for is my sort of main podcast.
We've done probably two hundred and fifteen, two hundred and twenty episodes over the past five, six years. Yeah. And at one point we started to ask our guests automatically when we're done, "Hey,
we're trying to really pay attention to the demographics of folks we have on, so this doesn't just turn into the Tim Ferriss Show with like just a circle jerk of white guys."
And we sent out one mass email to all the past guests, basically, "If you're up for it, fill out this quick survey. We'd really appreciate it. You don't have to."
Like 90% of people replied, and now we send it out to each one. And our guests over time are basically like 60% women and- Mm-hmm... almost 50% people of color, basically. Mm-hmm.
And when you merge them together, it's something like 70% not white guys. And I was pretty proud of that because we actually make a concerted effort to do that- Mm-hmm...
and to raise up voices that don't usually get to go on those kind of shows. But it is amazing how, a-and justified how quickly people were like, "What is the point of sharing?
What is the point of sharing that information? Do you want a fucking treat for that?" You know? Mm-hmm. And that's also totally fair. And so now we still do it to keep ourselves on task.
We don't share it as widely on purpose or put it out there and face. I do find that guests who identify as not white guys actually do find some comfort in those numbers in a way to go, "Oh, this is
probably a safer place," if that makes sense. Mm-hmm.
If not like a direct word of mouth recommendation that's helpful, because it's hard when you're just like scrolling through somebody's podcast feed to, like, you really get the gist of it, right?
But I get that, and it's, it is constantly a learning experience of going, how do I do this, right, like you said, in a way that's not like white guys yelling at white guys or just, you know, the same thing.
It's a, like you said, it's a, you can either call it a circle jerk or a firing squad or whatever combination [chuckles] of those it is. Crossing swords in the worst way, not even in the fun way.
And, but at the same time, continue to do the work. And so I can see where you can go, "I am going to teach people how to do potlucks because this is constructive." Yeah. "It does not matter.
I'm gonna keep the name The White Pages, because first of all, like it's a great fucking name." And like you said, we are starting from- And bad for search engine optimization. No, no, not good. Turn this out.
Yeah, yeah. Her phone book still has, uh- Still killing it. Yeah. Fuck. It's gonna get the- Still gonna get- Beat me every time. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what?
If somebody finds me because they were first trying to find a Vietnamese restaurant in their community- Great... and that's why they first started reading me. We'll take it. Great. I- And they end up having a potluck?
I don't have that answer for you. I can't tell you i-if Saigon Taste is good or not. Yeah. But [chuckles] Sure. But I'll lean on it. How would you like to hear about how to bring your community together? Great.
That's right. Yeah. No, I'll evangelize it however works. But yeah, I think the self-awareness, but also...
And you can have whatever frustrations you need to, but to pick yourself back up and go, "I'm gonna transparently just keep sharing this," but also trying to do the thing.
And I'll g- like you said, like, clearly we have to do that because fucking look around. I can't imagine- Yeah...
the breaking news alerts that I would get if I still had notifications in the 40 minutes since we've been talking. So you gotta do something.
Tell us a little bit about the potluck project that you are working on, and then I have a follow-up question that sort of relates back to parenting in the pod.
But talk a little bit about what you have going on that you hope to get done in all 50 states. Yeah. So I just launched this, that I, in 2026, I am helping... I am saying I'm hosting, but I will not be at most of them.
Yeah. 50 gatherings in 50 states. I hope a lot of them are potlucks.
Not all of them will be, because I want it to be right for the gathering in each state.Some of these gatherings are gonna be very tiny, some are gonna be super large.
Some are going to be in existing spaces, some will be in classrooms, some will be in churches and synagogues, in mosques. Some will... You know, we're gonna run the gamut, right?
But the idea is that it's the 250th anniversary of the United States. That is a complicated anniversary.
I think that we're gonna see some commemorations of it that I don't identify with at all, that are gonna be pretty jingoistic, and are probably just about the current administration. But I also think that
if I reflect back on what inspires me about living here, it is a lineage of people who cared really deeply for their neighbors, who were rabble-rousers, who were not...
Who asked the hard questions about who is included and who is not included in this country, but who also actually didn't just ask those theoretically, actually made-- did hospitality work, right? Mm-hmm.
The Underground Railroad is my favorite story in American history, not just because it was radical, not just because it was abolitionist, but it required actually making a bed and a meal for people.
And so that idea of, I'm gonna connect people who are doing a small thing in each of their communities to each other in the 250th anniversary, and the way we're gonna do it is we've got a big box with 50 compartments, and it's gonna start up at our first gathering in Alaska.
Eventually, it's gonna reach to our last gathering in Maine.
Every group can have whatever kind of gathering works for them, but I ask that they have some sort of conversation about what is our commitment to each other locally, and what do you think we can offer a nation of people who care?
Yeah. And they will make that commitment. We'll share that online. Go to jointherelay.org to follow that. But then also they're gonna put something in the box.
And so the box, which will start out empty, will start be- will end up being filled.
And hopefully, if we do this right, every gathering will still feel like their local gathering, but everyone there will also feel, damn it, I'm part of something bigger than myself, and that something is actually brewing, that there is somebody in Hawaii who cares about their neighbors the same way that I do in Oklahoma, the same way that I do in Maine, the same way that I do in Florida.
And so we literally just launched this week the, you know, we call it The Relay, The Interdependence Relay, or if you really like syllables, The Declarations of Interdependence Relay, and I am terrified.
I have learned way more about potentially shipping logistics of a big 50, 50 compartment box than I ever thought I would in my life. Well, if it-- you weren't terrified, then you-- it wouldn't be meaningful.
I mean, just-- which is why I quit most things that terrify me. But I- Mm-hmm... was sort of joking with Quinn. I was looking at it online, and I was like, "I wanna host one of these."
And then I was like, "I can't host one of these." And that ties into- Hey...
one of your-- On your Instagram, you had a post about the things that you pack for kids who come to see you talk, or the parents who bring their kids. And- Yeah.
I, I'll notice, I do not have a Gen Alpha following coming to me independently, right. Yeah. You with your little- Trust me. Yeah. Pied Piper. Thank you very much. Yeah. [laughs] Mm-hmm.
But what do you tell folks-- I mean, I'm-- and this isn't just for me, but, like, parents who are like, "I wish I could bring my kid to a rally, but we have sports practice," or, "I wish I could bring my baby- Mm-hmm...
to a march, but, like, we have nap time," or, "I wish I could host one of these potlucks, but I have aging parents and I'm working and I'm exhausted, and now I feel shitty."
And I'm not necessarily asking for, like, forgiveness or permission- No... but what do you tell folks- Not at all... who are like, "I wanna do more, but also life"? It sucks, right? And so it's not you.
You are not the problem with that, that you're feeling shitty and it doesn't fit in. Social movements in general are barbells. Unfortunately, we've not figured this out.
That they get the highest energy from folks in their early 20s and folks who are retired. It is our cohort that is still actively raising kids. It's not that we stopped caring about the world.
We care of the world with a more intensity. But for all the reasons you named, it's really hard.
I can't solve for the soccer practice part, except to offer more meetings such that I hope that you find the one that doesn't fit around soccer practice. What I can solve for is a problem that pissed me off a lot.
I don't know. When I say solve for, I mean solve for in the microspace of a space I'm hosting. Which is the reason why I am used to seeing some line on the meeting saying childcare is provided.
But my kids will not come to that, because I'll tell them, "Oh, yeah, come to this meeting. Childcare is provided." And they'll be like, "No, it sucks. We, we won't come unless we actually know."
Not that my kids need a full agenda for what the childcare is, but they need a sense, are they planning for my age range? Mm-hmm.
Or is that, like, that there's one person there to hang out with the babies, or something like that. And so- And it's gonna feel like Sunday school. Yeah, totally, right. And but I've got a funny, funny story.
My, my friend, the writer Lydia Kiesling in Portland, when I was visiting just this last trip, was talking about how she has started to bring her kids to her Democratic Socialists of America meeting, DSA, and one time the-- it was just one old grizzled, like, Santa Claus-looking Marxist, or actually looked like Marx, sitting in a side room with her daughter doing coloring pages of Karl Marx.
Incredible. And you know what? They had a great time. It was enough of a plan for that.
But I both will do this and, you know, I, again, to your point earlier, like when it may seem performative or stuff like that, and I always run that risk, but we'll put on social media ahead of time, this is the stuff I'm bringing for kids when I'm coming to a speaking engagement.
This is the toys you can expect to see at the Garrett Fox event.
This is-- My big thing is I make bingo sheets for stuff that I'm probably gonna say during the speech that kids can make fun of me and get my bingo, and then I also had Kinder Eggs as prizes.
But I do-- That was actually, you know, the event I just had in Portland, parents brought their kids that would not have otherwise to that event because the specific-- It was an-- I didn't explain everything.
It was a two-minute Instagram Reel. But there was enough information that, A,They could get their h- kid hyped up, right?
Which part of the battle for us as parents is not just, can I take my kid here, but do I wanna fight the battle [chuckles] of my kid does not wanna go to this thing?
But then B, there was a sense of parent, at leas- I don't know if this guy's games were gonna nail it. My kid may still walk away from the event and be like, "That sucked." But
at least, you know, we don't as human beings want you to solve all of our problems for us. We want at least to be seen, and so it was some scene.
It's not gonna change the world of gatherings, but it's not hard to pack a go bag of stuff for kids at my stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could just pick shit up off Claire's floor.
It's- The- You know, or like the inside of my car. Claire, you know what I realized the other day?
And sorry, do you remember when I sent you a picture of a pair of pants with underwear on them in the back of my car, and you- Yeah... I said, "Do you think they're clean?" And you said, "Not if the underwear's in them."
Do you know they're still in my fucking car? Do you remember how long ago that was? That was like- Yeah... seasons ago, and I opened it and I said, "That's it.
I'm gonna take 'em," and I said, "Nope, still not my fucking job." Anyways, sorry. This is what we usually talk about. No. Not all heroes wear capes. I'm glad. Thank you for that status update.
I am like, people need to know. 100%. I will just keep letting you know, just keep sending you the same picture. You know- Mm-hmm... people take pictures of a tree growing. It's just me- Quarterly updates... of that.
Yeah. I, again, I appreciate you sharing. Again, this, I, I, as much as this show is dedicated to being about commiseration, and mostly it is about shit on the floor and stuff like that, like- Sure...
I, I appreciate the commiseration, and I seek to do it about taking the... Is it performative? Okay.
Because, like, you can look at, I love the meme online where someone's like, "I know you think I became woke, but we all watched Mr. Rogers and shit, and you fucking forgot about it. I did not," basically. No.
But also this idea of, and I don't remember who said, which was just, "Look, you can call it virtue signaling, but what the fuck else are we supposed to be signaling at this point when the rest of the noise is, like, Andrew Tate and, and shit like that?
What would you like me to signal? What would be helpful?" So- Yeah... you can call it surface level what you want, but I'm trying to do the work, you know? Like-
That's how I feel, that's how I feel like Trump, Trump derangement syndrome. Yes, I do have it. Like, of course I do. But what are you doing about it? So that's, I just- Pretty, pretty guy, president. Yeah. Right.
And that's kind of what I tell my kids anymore, where Claire asked me recently, and I keep coming back to this, not that it haunts me, but because I think I was aware of it.
She was like, "What do you not do for fun anymore?" I was like, "I don't even know what the fuck you're talking about." Oh. None of that means anything to me anymore, Claire. But to me, like, my fun is generally, like,
not giving a shit, usually in the best way, about embarrassing my kids, not having any shame. Right. None of these things. It works. Yeah.
'Cause like a guy who grew up with insecurities and this, like, that is my fun, is I will...
They'll be like, "You're not gonna ha-ha, roll down your windows and play, like, Whitney Houston and sing to me while I walk into middle school." It's like, well, now that you fucking mention it, we're doing this, 100%.
Oh, this is a very clear, specific instruction. Yeah. We're, let's go. Like, how slowly- Yeah... can I roll down the window and do it? But I'm also the same way, again, about, like, the virtue shit.
You're like, yeah, I don't care, 'cause I'm also- Yeah... I know I'm also doing the work. So that's all you can fucking do.
The performance part of it is, like, a good point, 'cause I think a lot of that, I wish, I, I know I should take my kid to a rally, and I think deep down you're thinking, not you, I'm thinking of me, the women in my life.
You're thinking, I should have, be photographed at a rally with my child so I could put it on Instagram so people can...
And I, and even though I say that out loud and I sound like I'm being sarcastic, I know it's completely true. But, like- It is, of course... for me, our kids accidentally came to a rally with us.
We happened to be in downtown Evanston, and there was a rally going on, and we walked through it, and it was sort of perfect, 'cause it was very low-key and Evanston.
And it was great to see the kids see the town turn out and see people care so much.
But I'll never also forget that we were walking back from it, and we ran into a friend of mine who has a beautiful daughter about Paul's age, and I was shooting the shit with them briefly, and then we walked away.
And then two weeks later, Paul told me how ashamed he was of me for talking to that girl, and how embarrassing it was. So that's all tangled up in one, you know, one core memory that I hope he'll- Yeah...
remember both those things. And I actually do think that kids learn through action, and I do want my kids to learn the following things about activism right now. A, that they did it, that their parents did it.
B, that quite frequently it was annoying and was silly. And while you were at the protest, you were thinking all sorts of other things about social cues too. I want them to go to these meetings.
And yes, I want there to be childcare at the meetings so it's less boring.
And I want them to know that civic engagement is really boring, and that showing up for a community over and over again, 'cause they're gonna hear my wife and I talk about what we love about the different community spaces like our Quaker meeting or the PTA or this other thing, and they're also gonna hear us talk about
grown-ups who are insane to each other, and, but who we still love and are still showing up for. And somewhere in the middle of this, right?
If the lesson I'm trying to display to my kids is that, A, you should be a civically engaged, activismly inclined, anti-fascist engaged, democracy inclined person, and that will make you feel really good all the time, then I will not actually build folks who are set up...
I would not help raise kids who are set up for that in the long run. Protests are beautiful. Protests are important. Protests are performative. Protests are silly. Protests often leave you feeling, what did I really do?
And protests need to be ones we keep doing even if we feel silly doing them. And somewhere I hope my kids feel all of that with me, right? Mm-hmm. So my kids go to the meetings. They are frequently bored in them.
My kids go to the protests. They a- ask to leave early. And I'm like, "Me too." Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of it. That's funny. That's like church, kind of.
Like, our son, we gave him a little talking to because he's doing confirmation right now. Oh, wow.
And he was talking a lot of shit and being really flippant, and he came home, and my husband and I sort of gave him a little talking to about, "Listen-We don't expect you to love this and talk about how much you love it, but you need to give it a little bit of respect.
And then we accidentally started doing it at Kamala Harris. We are giving you... You are being woven into a fabric of our lives. And I hated myself, but I was like, this is true. And I was like, I don't love...
There's a reason why I don't go to church with you, 'cause like I already went to church and I did that. But there's also a reason why we're doing this, and it is tedious.
Like the- but there's a reason why we're all a part of this.
But I want us to get talk, go- circle back to the Democratic socialist thing, and I'm wondering if all kids should hang out with a Democratic socialist sometime because we have some friends who are DS folks, and they're really nice to our kids, and we went out and had breakfast with them over the holidays.
And our friend, of course, he also has a long white beard. So Paul was learning about communism and the Red Scare at school, so he was scandalized to learn that we are friends with socialists, or with communists.
He was terrified. But our friend Leonard also, to get benefits, is a crossing guard with Chicago Public Schools. Yeah. So on the one hand, he was like completely scandalized we're friends with a communist.
But I was like, "Paul, he is helping children across the street." I was like, "Do you think it's like he is possibly a good guy and he..." You know, it was a lot for him to hold in his little tiny head, that's for sure.
Yeah. That's why I need my fellow socialists to be less annoying, is so that kids can meet us and be like, "Oh, that one's okay. Whatever Joseph McCarthy said in my textbook, that one was okay." Yeah. Yeah.
I have another question for you. Maybe Quinn has some more too, but I know we're closing up on an hour.
But what I'm always curious about newsletter writers, especially people who write about the big heavy shit, or at least sometimes do. Mm-hmm. But you also have kids. Yep. You, I presume they have extracurriculars.
I presume your family eats meals. You may care about things that are, you know, more frivolous as well, like sports or hobbies. Yep.
So talk about your scheduling basically, or how you set your days or weeks up when you are doing your work versus all the other stuff that's not necessarily the white pages or, you know, working on these potlucks or things like that.
Yeah. So I am, I'm the flex parent in my household, right? My, my wife has the job that's real, and I have the job that's made up, right? And so that means that...
And my daughter's school doesn't start until 9:00, which means that some mornings get my son off pretty early, get my wife off pretty early, and then it's me and my daughter hanging out until 9:00.
Then, you know, the biggest challenge is all the micromanagement of myself that I need to do to make sure that at 9:15 when I get back from walking her to school and back, that actually work starts and I don't feel like, "Ah, I worked the first shift getting people out the door today and getting breakfast and lunch and some of that, time to chill for a while."
If I do that successfully, then there is, you know, the decent sized block until, you know, ni- nine start is late, but 4:15 pickup, also pretty darn late, so that's nice.
And then, you know, my, my son, you know, comes back, finds his own way back, and then been pretty damn good this year.
And this was my wife's idea of paying them 25 cents each for successful management of each other, say that you guys are your after childcare for until 6:00 when I turn on again.
So that, that works pretty well for me after I, I set them up with a snack, and then I can go back to work for a couple hours. But that's in a theoretical world in which there are no activities at night. Mm.
And so most nights that theoretically is what I get, but actually I'm either doing the carpool or shuttle or coordinating with the carpool one way or another.
And then the 6:00 to 9:00 is whatever that morass of dinner prep, dinner cleanup, getting people to bed. And then to be honest then, my best work blocks is probably 9:30 to 2:00 AM and on, on a bad night, right?
And 9:30 earlier than that on a good night.
And all of that can be made more efficient by the aforementioned actually starting work when I have the elementary school drop-off is successful and actually starting work when everyone else, my wife included, has gone to bed instead of 15 minutes to an hour of watching videos of people eat food on YouTube.
But on a good night, we get that done and can actually do something I enjoy before falling asleep. On a bad night, that ratio is flipped the wrong direction. But that's a pretty typical day in the life. Yeah.
I understand that feeling of I'm done, or I'm h- done with this bit or, or even like when my husband, my kids are out of town, like the first thing I wanna do is clean even though I know I should do something more productive.
But there's something about claiming your space and like needing to settle into that quiet time. But I love that idea of bribing, excuse me, incentivizing your kids to watch each other.
That is very smart, and I, we need to like include that as a tip for the masses. We hired them. We wrote a contract. They signed the contract. It was a smart move. I deserve no credit for it.
That was my wife's innovation. Yeah. I love it. How much time are you spending on Discord these days? 'Cause I... Discord has been in the news. I know that at least for a while you were running one, one with Liz Lenz.
Do you maintain office hours for that or how does that work for you? No. We'll make sure that I'm checking in every single day.
We're at the point that community is relatively self-moderated at that point, and it never grew so large to be unwieldy, right?
Like, you know, very famously a few years back, Anne Helen Peterson had to step down from having her own Discord. But she was at a level of platform that it was just so large. Yeah, it's interesting.
While new folks do come to that Discord over time, the, it really has just kind of been this core established community that stayed there and it moderates itself.
So I can usually check in about 10-minute increments, which is, you know, both work and I really, I love those people in there, right? So I, it's one more text chain that I'm checking that I enjoy.
And what's interesting is I have that Discord, I also do weekly discussions at my newsletter, which a lot of people do. And it's interesting that both those are available to subscribers, but that some folks...
It's interesting that there are discussion, newsletter discussion thread people, and there are Discord people, and there's a couple who do both-But it's interesting that there's communities who need each of them, and- Mm-hmm...
that I think has its real live applications that I think if you are offering a community space, offering a few different versions of it, that you're going to get the people coming to this type of event versus the people who are coming to this type of event.
And if you offer enough like that, that somebody's gonna be able to fit it, fit it in around soccer practice. I kind of think the same way, right? Mm-hmm.
Right now it feels I would not keep doing it if it was not relatively self-moderatable, and if it was not be legitimately a community that feels like my community that helps feed me, too. So that's what works right now.
I have not paid attention to the platform news, and will be... I hate having to do platform switches. You know what? Every platform, every single platform is problematic from the- Yep... computers built from- Right...
rare earth minerals to paper, except for talking face-to-face, which- Yep... I'm sure we're doing something wrong with that. Quinn, I feel like I've been dominating this conversation.
You wanna, you have any thing that we- It's always better when you dominate it. No, no, I think this is great. Again, you know, I always appreciate when we come back to the fact that, no, you still gotta stop all
of the shipping huge boxes around the country- Mm-hmm... for unknown people to go do school pickup. By the way, and you're lucky if you get to 4:15, right?
I have actually texted Claire a few minutes ago, gotten three calls from my children's school- Oh... while we've been sitting here. Yeah, that's right. I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's fine, but I've got about two minutes.
Oh. Because, but that's the not right now of this, the whole fucking thing, right? Is like, you can try to do your best, like Claire carries the world, like sometimes, and
often, like reluctantly, of like witchy, these incredible witchy moms, this community. And sometimes- Mm-hmm... like you can't even fucking do that, 'cause you're just like, "Well, God damn it. Now I got this thing."
It's like, I always tell people, like my other work, whether you're thinking about, you know, should you get flood insurance? You fucking should. You know?
But also like, why haven't the maps been updated, or you're invested in this climate, whatever the thing is. Or just literally everyone's, "Well, should we have Steve over for dinner 'cause he had a cough last week?"
It's like, I don't know, but your kids like went to school and rubbed piss and snot on each other, so.
Literally yesterday, the big news from third grade was that a boy in my class was gone to the bathroom for a long time, and he came back [laughs] and they're like, "What were you going on to?"
His story checked out, because the pee was in a place that would've been hard for him to self-pee. Sure. He's like, "A kid just walked in and peed on me." Yeah. Um- That's it.
But by the way, someone's getting that fucking phone call, and it's the externalities of what you are exposed to, which is what you fucking sign up for, and same thing when you like get a dog or whatever it is. Totally.
Own a house. Yeah. Whatever it is. A car. But the point is, it's always something. And so the more- Yeah...
we can come back to that, I always do appreciate it, 'cause I do think our listeners are like, "Oh, thank God," you know? That someone else...
It's like when you see other, you're at the playground or whatever, and like other people's kids are being dicks, and you're like, "Oh, sweet Jesus. I'm so happy- Yeah...
it's not just my fucking-" I am grateful for this chat, because I, we got an email about the teacher bonus fund, which I work on, and there's a lot of politics involved in it right now, and I got a long email, had an informal call, then I had a, got a text saying, "Can you chat later?"
And I don't wanna have that conversation. No. So this, I can legitimately say I was busy today. Yeah.
'Cause after this chat, I'll have to have lunch, and then go for a walk, and pick up the kids, and then I'll be too busy. Sorry. Unavailable. But yeah. And then it's bedtime. Yeah, exactly. You're welcome. Yes. Yeah.
You're welcome. Quinn, you should probably return those calls, but Garrett, anything else that we should tell people about where to find you, how to support you, how to- Yeah... get your book? Yeah.
The White Pigeon, well, garrettbucks.com. I have every variety of the suffix on websites. Perfect. Garrettbucks.com will give you links to everything else.
But the writing is, and that includes links to buy the book, which is called The Right Kind of Light, a memoir about becoming, I hope, less of a jerk over time.
Thewhitepages.net is the main place that the writing lives these days. Barnraisersproject.org is the overall site for all the trainings I run, which are all free.
And then if you are interested in becoming part of the Interdependence Relay, jointherelay.org.
But if you cannot remember all that, my name is G-A-R-R-E-T-T Bucks, like the Milwaukee basketball team, garrettbucks.com, and all the links are there. Thank you for coming and chatting with us.
I'm so glad to talk with you in person, instead of just sporadically online. Yeah. Quinn, I hope everything is fine at school. I hope nobody peed on your kid. It's fine. Nobody c- Yeah...
like, there's another parent to call. And if not, I'm, I put four other people on the list. I don't know, remember who it was, but [laughs] it's their problem now.
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