My Brother, My Brother And Me - MBMBaM 311: Amber Is The Color of Our Energy

Episode Date: July 11, 2016

Welcome to the 311th episode of My Brother, My Brother and Me! We're going to celebrate this special occasion by talking about our favorite Reggae-Nu Metal fusion band, and also by chatting with LEGENDARY AUTHOR AND MASTER OF THE QUILL Patrick Rothfuss about dad stuff! It's quite a mish-mash of conversation topics. Suggested talking points: 311, Sneaky Pics, Human Pets, McElroy Monikers, Baby Holding, Shitty Gandalf, Pee-Wee LARPing, Childhood Horror

The McElroy brothers are not experts, and their advice should never be followed. Travis insists he's a sexpert, but if there's a degree on his wall, I haven't seen it. Also, this show isn't for kids, which I mentioned only so the babies out there will know how cool they are for listening. What's up, you cool baby? It's a new place, and the girls, do you want it? Just say, hey, I want it. Just say, hey, I want it. Hello everybody, and welcome to my brother and my brother meeting. Vice-chair from the Montanera. I'm your oldest brother, Justin McElroy. I'm your minimalist brother, Travis of McElroy. I'm your sweet baby brother, Griffin McElroy. And Amber is the color of our energy. We made it.

Guys, we did it. I knew that this would come around the bend. Now I see. Now we've finally done it. This is the one we got. Travis, look at the email you sent out about the show notes, and you tell me what we done. Now see, I tried to do a 7-Eleven branded episode, and you said no, but 3-Eleven? 7-Eleven happens every year. I mean, that's optimistic, but like, we'll probably get another one of those. This only happens once. It's 3-Eleven, the episode. All right. Well, now I'm just like taking the email full of questions and all the Yahoo answers I found and throwing them right in the dumpster, and I'm shutting the dumpster and calling the dumpster company to come take it away. Well, this is all of your 3-Eleven-related

Yahoo answers questions. Yeah. Well, there are a few of those. Yeah. What other songs did 3-Eleven do? All mixed up. Was that them? That was one of their hits, right? Yeah. Let's establish some parameters before we get too deep on this. What's their main number? 3-Eleven. I know that Amber is the color of their energy. Whoa. I think they did Bubbly Toes. Okay. They did Bubbly Toes. Now, a lot of people say, Justin, how do you identify a real artist? Can you judge by their music? No, you can't. Can you judge by their look? No, you can't. What you can judge by is whether or not that they have sponsored a NASCAR stock car as 3-Eleven for Jeb Burton in 2015. If you're looking for it,

look between the logos of Dr. Pepper and Maxim Magazine, and right there you'll find the logo for the band 3-Eleven. Oh my God. Couldn't really afford a lot of car space, huh? No, not a big car space on that one. Can you pay to have somebody else's logo put onto a NASCAR? Yeah, it's kind of like how you can put by somebody's name on a star. By the way, I did buy a name for a star, and I named it 3-Eleven. You guys know which star? The Sun. The Sun is named 3-Eleven. It was crazy. I was on the Star Registry website, and I picked a star, and I was like, let's just try the Sun. Nobody damn thought of it first. So now the Sun's name 3-Eleven, please only refer to it as that, and it's appropriate because it is the only source

of light and heat in my life. Do you think it's possible that Jeb Burton was looking at his car, and he's like, all right, you guys put whatever you want on here. This one's for Jeb. Just fucking slap him in 3-Eleven. That was just a sticker he picked up at a concert. That was not a sponsorship in any way. Could we pay to have 3-Eleven sponsor every car in NASCAR a little bit so that no matter what car wins, it's the 3-Eleven car? Do you guys know about the rumor that 3-Eleven was a racist name for a band? Learning about this from Yahu answers, because the letter K is the 11th letter of the alphabet, and so 3Ks would be KKK, and it doesn't necessarily seem to sort of align with the message of most of the band 3-Eleven songs, which are mostly

just sort of about chill beach vibes. Are they? For the most part, yes. The actual origin of it. Wait, can I guess? Yeah, please. See if I know this. Is 3-Eleven the police code for smoking lead? No, it is the police code for indecent exposure. You see a man named P-Nut. They were skinny dipping in a hot pool. Peter Nutt got arrested. He was cuffed naked and taken home to his parents. There he was issued for a citation for a code 3-Eleven. We thought this was funny, so we took it as our band name. After the humor of the name wore off, you mean like 15 minutes later, we still kept it because we liked that it was just abstract and did not define us in any way. I mean, that's true. I have basically no impressions about 3-Eleven as a band. I have no

concepts of that. I do want to give them their proper zone. I want to give them some credit. According to Wikipedia, their music is a blend of rock, reggae, hip-hop, and funk. So God bless them because somebody had to read that and say, hmm, okay, good. Let's make a CD out of it. Let's take a CD out of that. Yeah, here's some money. Here's some money. We have a ton of it, apparently. It's the 90s. We don't know what to do with money. We're children, tickling ourselves with razors. Fucking peanut was like, but I want to make a reggae CD. And fucking Zach was like, nah, man, all rock for me. And he lowered his shades and started smoking. You got your rock in my reggae. You got your reggae in my rock.

So there are other genres that they've been classified as are alternative rock, reggae rock, rap rock, funk rock, alternative metal, and new metal. Alternative and new metal. Both of the metal is great. Whatever you're doing. You guys heard the story about how Amber came about, right? One of their dads had a cold and he was trying to sneeze and he went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, shoot. Like that was crazy. Can you do that at games? Like, yeah, sure. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, shoot. They just fucking recorded it, put that down on the track, put some reggae over it, baby. 311 has a Caribbean cruise. No. Yep. No. It's called 311 Caribbean cruises. It's a partner between 311 and Jonathan Colton.

They had Tom Green, Doug Benson, Less Than Jake, Revolution, X, this actually sounds not bad. I would probably get on this cruise. This sounds all right now that I'm listening to it. What if they're really cool? They're probably pretty. Here's what I think. I actually believe this in my heart. I think that if you have had a big hit or two and then you've managed to have any level of consistency and can still maintain a career from music after that, you're probably a pretty decent human being. Not only that. I feel like that's the only thing that propels you through. It may be naive, but I feel the exact same thing, Justin. I bet people might turn their nose up and say like a Dave Matthews or a Sublime or a 311, but I bet if you

got the chance to chill with those dudes, it's probably chill as fuck. They'll still smoke you the fuck out for sure, Travis. Yes, agreed. They'll also show you the drawings that they're like kids did. You know what I mean? They're just people. They seem like reggae rock funk stars. You know that all of their iPhone lock screens are like pictures of sweet pandas and stuff? Before I unlock this to show you some of my kids pictures, did you check this panda? Check out this chill fuck panda. I have to imagine if you grow up and you come out of Nebraska and your whole thing is we're going to do a reggae rock band. You probably, I mean, you at least have some thick skin, I think. Right. You at least could take some heat.

We're going to do some reggae new metal. Nebraska, are you ready, Nebraska? To reggae new metal rock? Yeah. So what kind of music, I guess? What kind of music are you guys into? We're into a very steep uphill climb for many years with very little recognition is what we're kind of all about. This band started in 1988 AD, the year of our life. No. Are you telling me that we are careening towards 30 years of 311? Happy 30th anniversary 311. Wow. You're my favorite band. 1988. This band was born the year after me. I remember the first time I heard 311, I was five. It changed my life. I just drank it in. Let's do some advice, I think, for people. Oh, we have a special guest this episode.

Should we talk about that? Just like set it up and then hit that ball right in the hole later? Yeah, that sounds good. Joining us to be a guest, Bert, and I know you're listening, it's going like, wait, another person's going to be on the show. Yeah, we used to do that. It's been like two years, but we have a fantastic author, fantastic person, Patrick Rothfuss, is going to be on the show a bit later. But for now, let's do our thing. All right, here's our first question. Today on the train, I caught a woman taking a picture of me with her phone. Oh, boy. The weird thing is that after we made eye contact, she simply smiled and continued taking pictures. Oh my God. The phone wasn't even muted and I could hear the shutter

noise of each picture. I thought that she might be taking selfies, but she followed me with her camera even after I moved a few rows down in the train. So my question is, what the fuck should I have done? Sincerely, Tom Cruise. Well, okay, so that one is. That one's pretty obvious. Okay. Shutter shy in San Francisco, by the way. Without discussing it, I want each of us to say why we think this woman was taking pictures of this person. Okay. Kind of a choose your adventure. I love it. Yeah. Justin Goh. Art. Griffin. Maybe they looked like one of their friends and they wanted to like text him a good picture of their face, but they kept like looking away or something. Or alternate. Second guess, just I want to hedge my bets. She's a pervert.

Oh, see, I was going to say pervert. Okay. You're going to end up taped to a wall with colored yarn stretching between you and pictures of weapons and I don't know, maybe the Pope. Who knows? What if you get a, you're going to get a parcel, not through the postal service, because that leaves a trail. It's just going to show up on your door and there's going to be a note that says, I believe this should be to your specifications and it'll be a very tasteful suit jacket. I knew from the moment I saw you, I want to embroider you with my suitoring. Alternative explanation. It is your great, great grandchild from the future. Travel back to capture pictures of the day that your whole life changed.

Yesterday, I was at a pool party and a man showed up who was very drunk and he looked egg exactly like till death do us blart and worst idea of all time. A podcaster, Guy Montgomery, the whole like eggs, like a hundo percent DNA code splice, like I wouldn't have been so fucking excited until I realized it wasn't him. I know. And I got a pool party and Guy Montgomery shows up. So I tried to, I thought in my head like, it would be fun if I snapped a pic of this dude and like sent a picture over Twitter to Guy Montgomery. I bet he'd really enjoy that. Only the guy was wearing a speedo and he was really partying hard and I worried like the

photog sesh on that would be a little on that situation. Hey, stand up for me, bud. Hey, get out of the pool and just like stand, towel off, bud. And just like, no, no, but that dick away. Hey, can you tooch? Can you tooch your boots a bit and smize your thighs? And now our interaction is over and I don't want you to speak to me anymore. Yeah, I don't actually know you if you could stop, please. That's the problem is that this woman, I feel like there's an unswoken law in society. That if you're sneaking a peek, whether it's a picture or just like the scope in someone out

of the corner of your eye, once you are caught, that exchange is done, right? Well, you can only get so wet. You know what I mean? That's what I'm saying, but I'm saying that this is like a level of chaos in society that I'm not willing to accept. Oh, no, it's don't get me wrong. It's 24 seven purge out there, Travi. Okay, because like I saw you do it. Like I know you're doing it. I'm looking at you while you're doing it and you're continuing to do it. You're just my only recourse, which is to notice you has been weakened has failed. Yeah. So now what am I supposed to do? Confront you? What? I mean, that's the other thing is like you didn't say stop, right? Like you didn't say,

hey, cut it out. Can you stop? I'm going to have to confiscate that. And then muting not muting it is really thing. I wanted to touch on this real quick Griffin. I want to make a push in 2016 if we can do nothing else. Can we fucking cheese it with the camera noise when you take a pic? I believe that that has never been used to any purpose other than blowing up your spot. Can you think of a time you've ever been happy that that fucker went off? Or is it like constantly your spot getting blown up every single time? Even before phones, we were using digital cameras. When was the last time a camera made that noise? Yeah, that's a good point. It doesn't make that noise. I was in a toilet stall doing

my thing in there, having my fun. And I saw something very funny on my cell phone that I was looking at. And so I did a screen grab only when you do a screen grab. It makes the camera noise. Thanks, Apple. Thank you, Apple. So for the optics on that, or I guess the audio from my neighbor in the other bathroom stall, so I was to have a little photo session in there, a little photo session. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you may have told this story before. I don't think I have, Travis. Or maybe it's multiple times. Does this have any multiple times? I like to save my phone memories, my internet memories that I have with my Twitter pals. Last night, I was looking up

how to fight a gym in Pokemon Go and I screenshotted the instructions and Teresa heard the camera go and said, oh, what are you taking a screenshot of? And I, you would have thought I was taking a screenshot of how to kill someone because I was like, oh, just directions something. It's nothing. We have a neighborhood Facebook group that's actually been very helpful for certain stuff and a nice little community bonding thing. And people have been talking about Pokemon Go like all the time. Apparently, all my neighbors are just going out for late night Zubat sessions. Is that that new exercise down at the gym? Yeah, but it's all adults. It is not children. And I'm wondering if we can sort of take Pokemon

Go away from children. So I feel a little bit more comfortable running around catching my EVs and stuff. I took Charlie out this morning to go look for Pokemon and she was so excited and I put on her shoes and we just went out walking and just looking for Pokemon. I told her that's what we're doing, looking for Pokemon. And we walked for like 10 minutes without spotting a single Pokemon. Every 15 seconds, she's looking up at me like, well, any Pokemon yet, old man? I was sold a few of the goods. The answer is no. I've never been more fucking humiliated as a dad. What like, what more embarrassing thing is there like, no, I'm just waiting. I'm hoping Mimosa is going to drop me a Pokemon down here. Me and my baby

girl are going to catch it. I'm really sorry, sweetheart. I just pretended because she's a baby. We saw a squirrel and I was like, oh, come on. We got one. We got one. That sounds like she's going to talk in a therapy session about when she's like 22. That's more beauty. That's like, but this is the fuck thing that I'm saying to you. I was looking for digital imaginary Pokemon in my that only exists in my phone. And I and one of my daughter and I were like traipse around the neighborhood. I saw a squirrel. I was like, oh, fuck that. Get out of here. Get out of here. Unless you can use quick attack. Get the fuck out. You guys want to have some candy?

How about a Yahoo? Yeah, let me give this a hoodie. Oops. I opened up the best credit cards of 2016. I opened up an ad. Well, all right, compare cards. It's the city simplicity. No late fees at wait a minute. These are that's a great deal. I'm gonna get a great deal. You can get $1,000 instantly just for signing up. Holy shit. I just got somebody just gave me emailed me a thousand bucks. Man, the internet is attached. You see those ads and you think like this is this is they're trying to grift me. But no, they just got another thousand. That's too though. This is by Yahoo Answers user. They're anonymous. Let's call them Purvis asks. Oh, it was sent in by level 9,000. Thank you, Drew by Yahoo Answers.

Drew also just sold me a Nintendo 64. So I appreciate Drew. Wow, really? Yeah. Any carts? Any hot carts? I got the Ocarina time. Oh, nice. Gold or regular gray. Just regular. I remember my gold version that Justin gave to his ex-girlfriend. That was fun and cool. Anyway, was that the same day that you erased my Final Fantasy 7 game? Yeah, it's a circle of life. The circle of being a shitty brother. This anonymous user who I have named Purvis asks, why don't pets need jobs but humans do? Good question. Why don't pets need jobs? People tell me to get a job, but why can't I be like a pet dog and sit around all day relaxing? That's another question that we need to circle back to.

Can anyone explain why pets are excused? I mostly sit around playing video games or browsing the internet. I get called useless for not working, but my pet dog gets called a durable. You never call a pet useless to society. Why not? Aren't pets useless to society? Oh yeah, they give humans comfort, but so do I. I give my parents comfort and I get called mama's boy or childish. Why do pets get rewarded for doing things humans get shamed for? Update. I know it sounds kind of silly, but I'm serious. Update 2. I know some pets do have jobs like police dogs or service pets, but most pets don't really do anything except eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and have fun. Simple life. This is okay. I want to draw one quick point of order.

Your career aspiration is to be a pet. I am doubting you're bringing your parents a lot of comfort on the daily. Maybe some light snuggling or maybe you got them a cold drink, but on the bigger existential level, I bet you're providing the absolute opposite of comfort to your business. That's an excellent point, Justin. Are you putting in the comfort work that a dog does every damn day? Those dogs are not being comforting 10% of the time. Can we all agree that this is the prologue to a TLC show? Hello, I am a man pet. Yes. It was just one day I was sitting there and I just realized this is what I aspire to. Why do pets get to have all the relaxation fun? Now I live my life as a comfort dog. Is there a career opportunity there?

If I ate food, if I ate the same food every meal, and it was relatively inexpensive, like a kibble, but not a kibble because that's gross, but like Luna bars. If I just ate Luna bars every meal and you knew just like, we need to get a 36 pack of Luna bars. This will keep Griffin for a week. And then I was just like, roll up. You'd feed me a Luna bar three times a day. And I was just like roll up on the couch and just like put my belly on you. And that's it. Like I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't work. I would just eat my Luna bars. I would go to, first of all, oh my god, I would beat the shit out of a dog. First of all, I've been one. So I know like the tactics. Second of all, like if you tell me like, shut the fuck up, we're trying to sleep. I'd be like, oh, that's

cool. That's cool. That's cool. I'm just going to get myself one more Luna bar, an extra one, because I've been a real good boy today. And I'm also going to go to sleep. This is a good point, because the thing I like best about my dog is that she is both there and often non-intrusive to my life. So she's like, they're hanging out. So I know there's like another living being accompanying me through this journey we call life at all times when I am home. But also, she's not like asking me questions or trying to talk to me while I'm playing video games. If I could have that in a human being, just like pay someone to like just hang out and keep me safe and bark when someone tries to break into my home. But also like, they don't need anything from me

other than for me to occasionally be like, who's a good boy? And then I'm back to overwhelm. See, I can do that too. Like all I need are my Luna bars. And you tell me that I'm looking great today. I don't know how to break this to you guys, but there are human beings in this situation. And they're called babies. Okay. Babies are in this situation. We have all of us experience the exact scenario that is being discussed here. And we decided, okay, I've had my fill. I want to get my own Luna bars. I want to go get a job. It's it's baffling in hindsight. We've all made terrible mistakes to this point. Sick. Yeah, it was sick. It was awesome. Like, yeah, it was great. We were all human pets at one point. Jesus, Justin, you've blown the lid off of this because I can remember

a time when I was like 16, 17, 18. And all I wanted to do was get out there on my own and own my own way and earn it for myself. Like that was some trophy. It was like a lie that had been taught to me for 18 years that like, I that what I really needed to do was get out from under my parents' wing. Now all I want to do is get back under there. If dad could just take care of me forever, while I played video games, they didn't have to do shit. I work a hard life podcasting. It's exhausting. This is the important thing, though. You can't play video games. You have to watch like what dad's watching. I guess that's true because Buttercup doesn't get to play video games. But the thing is dad's always watching like Star Trek Deep Space Nine. And now I'm like,

yes, feed me my Luna bars and let's go on a deep space adventure nine. It's got her knife deep space adventure together. That's fucking that's oh man. Is it too late to become an adult baby? I would need to do some research to figure out where the circles operate that I can really ingratiate myself because I feel like I would need to earn a little bit of credit. So the next time I rolled up like whoa Griffin, you're kind of you kind of look like an adult baby right now. I can I can be like, yes, I've been a member of this circle for a while now. Respect. You have to slow slope into adult baby. You can't just go from like wearing, you know, a button up and khakis to diaper. Yeah, you got to like maybe you start

wearing a pacifier on a ribbon around your neck. Well, that seems people are like, huh? Okay. Yeah, that's probably a better option. But I don't know what the first step is. I don't I wonder what the supply and demand optics are right now on like adult team like adult babies. Like is there a lot of positions sitting open or is it very competitive? Do you think? Well, let me check on Craigslist real quick. Oh, God. Oh, God, it's so competitive. Holy shit. Anything but that. What you need three years experience just to apply for this adult team baby? How am I supposed to get the experience of a baby? Wait a minute, I do have three years experience being a baby. I have at least seven. It took me a while to get over the hump. You know what I'm,

I wasn't body trained until seven. That's not true. That's just a goo for the podcast. That's a goo for the podcast. That was six. So we were very excited. I'm going to jump in here. Take a little break from the old questions. We're going to do a pre a pre money's own money's own real quick. Yes, a pre promo promo. If you've ever played the game monikers or know of the game monikers, you know that it is the extremely fun and exciting. It's one of our favorite games, one of our favorite party games. And we are partnering with them to do my brother, my brother, me slash macroi collection of monikers cards, specifically relating to the macroi's and macroi family of shows. Here is here is a 30 second run down on

monikers. If you haven't played it, it's really, really fun. You do your team draws cards and then you look at your card and you have to guess, you make your teammates guess what the card says just by talking about it. That's first round. Second round use the same batch of cards, which you can only say a single word and you have to get your team to guess it. And then the third round, you just can use actions, no words at all to make them guess the word. And whoever gets the most cards after three rounds wins. And the cards are weighted with extra points for more difficult ones and easier ones are worth less points. It's fucking great. It's a super, super fun game. And it's we're really excited because we have just to give you an idea,

I'm going to read through a few. We've got like specific bit man ones like Bramble Pelt, corn cob boy, Griffin's ghost who wants his internet history deleted, King Nugget, it's that Torsi, etc. We've also got general ones that people who don't listen to the show could do like regular size cop, Aguila or Mr. Belvedere or a haunted dollar, Austin Powers, etc. And then we have ones related to some of the other shows in the McRoy family of podcasts, like Adventure Zone, Sawbone, Shmanners, Trans Like These Bunker Buddies, Rose Buddies, and then about people involved with each of those shows. So there's a ton of cards, I think like 112, something like that and all. And we have written the card text for every single

one we wrote ourselves, which was a significant expenditure of energy. But it was really fun to do because we've never done anything like that before. So that was cool. Now here's the deal with it. This is an expansion of monikers. The base game of monikers, if you have it, you can buy this expansion and it costs you 10 bucks. And then you can get the whole expansion in a cool looking package and what all. If you don't have monikers already, you can go to McRoyCollection.com, McRoyCollection.com singular. And that's actually where you can preorder the expansion as well. But if you go to McRoyCollection.com, you can preorder the card set and also a set of monikers. So you'll have everything you need to start playing. You can also play it standalone. It's

more fun with more cards. And the base set has like a ton of cards and is really fun. And we should have to be clear. We're only selling this at preorder at this point. Once the preorder is done, there won't be more orders after that. We don't have plans to sell it. Right now, we don't have plans to sell it as a standalone thing after the preorder. The preorder is going to be the only way. We may do a second run way down the road or something like that. But for the like, you will not be able to like, at least the plan currently, you will not be able to order these. There will be 30 days of preordering. And then that's it. And they should be in before Christmas by the holidays. So like

November, possibly October, but definitely, you know, by the by the holiday shopping season, you should have them in your hot little hands. Go to McRoyCollection.com. And at the very least, check out the amazing art that's going to be at the box. It makes me very happy every time I look at it. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's worth it just to look at that. McRoyCollection.com. Preorder that, you have 30 days. We'll try to remind you a couple times. Oh, one other thing, a portion of sales from this are going to go to an organization called Grow Huntington that actually is an urban farm that is spinning up here in Huntington to assist people who are in drug addiction recovery and are using farming as sort of a therapy to help them with that. And that's a really cool

organization here in Huntington. And we're a portion of every sale goes to them. So you're helping out a good cause too. Let's go to that music. We're sponsored in part this week by Casper. We've talked about Casper before, then we've got amazing mattresses. My wife and I sleep on one and I can't imagine ever going back to any other form of mattress other than I used to sleep on those old like crappy spring mattress things that dug into you and made sleeping a chore. Casper makes sleeping a dream. And that's a blurb that they can put on the box like video games. It's a very, it's kind of a confusing blurb because like Casper makes sleeping a dream. That's a fucking pull quote, Griffin. That's amazing.

Are you kidding me? It's clever. It's witty. Okay. It doesn't matter. Just doesn't mean it's really great. And they have a risk free trial and return policy. You can sleep on a Casper mattress for a hundred days. And then if you don't like it, there's painless returns and free delivery. So I highly recommend it. And I wouldn't just say that because they are sponsoring the show. I would say that if anybody asked me because it's my favorite mattress I've ever slept on in my entire life. And because you are my brother, my brother and me listener, you can get $50 off towards any mattress, which are already a great deal. And you're going to find them cheaper than at any of those, you know, big mattress stores because they cut down on their overhead. They save you money

and we're going to save you money. $50 towards any mattress. Go to casper.com slash my brother and use the promo code my brother all one word a checkout terms and conditions apply. I want to tell you about Club W. Here's my tagline for them as long as we're generating these. Wine is fine. It's pretty good. So Club W, what they do is they will send you wine and they're going to figure out what kind of wine is going to be good for your special snowflake of a tongue and all the different buds on there. You fill out a quick little questionnaire and then based on that they figure out what kind of wine you like and then they send it to you. Right now Club W is offering listeners $20 off your first order when you go to clubw.com slash my brother and it

gets better. You don't have to pay for shipping. They'll pay for your shipping on orders of four bottles or more. And of course you're going to order four bottles. What's the point getting like I'm going to order one bottle off the inner hopes it's all gone. I watched a single episode of The Bachelorette and I drank all my wine. Dang it. Because I needed it. I needed it to get through this show. I was just going to say that that's not because I don't like The Bachelorette. It's just an extreme intense show. I just wanted to make that clear. No, yeah. You need something. I don't want another fish gate happening. Just take something off your to-do list. Go to clubw.com slash my brother. Get $20 off your first order right now. That's clubw.com slash my brother.

I got a personal message for us. It's from McDrunk who says, hi guys. Thanks for the goose. Now this is a short message so I want to make sure you actually get every word right because it's actually hey guys. Hey guys. Thanks for the goose. There were six words and you blew one. You did screw up one of them. That's like an 18.6 percent repeating. But since the message is to us we've already consumed it. Like the fact I mean it's there. Oh, you're right. We shouldn't have read this out loud. This was just for us. This is a private message. This is a $100 DM that was sent to us by McDrunk. Honestly, we should put a breathalyzer on the jumbo truck. Oh my god. It would cut the number down by at least 70 percent.

Especially when you consider that we're sold out six months in advance. Yeah. McDrunk probably bought this in January. They've probably been dreading this moment for half a year. Yeah. Hey good. Congratulations on the confrontation of your darkest demons. I have a message. Another one from for AJCluck and it is from DMoney. And it says, for the McRoy brothers, thank you for making my favorite person laugh with your internet chit chat. You are blessed to have his precious Canadian ears listening every week. I thank you very much for AJ. You are the absolute coolest. Thanks for being my best friend. Happy fake Valentine's Day. Oh yeah. 7-Eleven. The fake Valentine's Day every year.

That or we beefed it on the timing. So maybe the baddest we've ever beefed. Yeah. We're like at the inverse. We're very, very far off. It's hate day. What's the opposite of Valentine's Day? Six months later. Here's some butt chocolates. I don't even know what those are. Here's some nails. Here's some cigarette butts in a nice decorative heart shaped box. So good for all that. For both of you. AJ and DMoney. May you live happily ever after, I guess. Hey guys. This is Adam Conover. You may know me from my true TV show, Adam Ruins Everything. Well, guess what? Now we're doing a podcast version right here on Maximum Fun. What we do is we take all the interesting, fascinating experts that we talk to for just a couple minutes on the

show and we sit with them for an entire podcast, really going deep and getting into the fascinating details of their work. Find Adam Ruins Everything wherever you get your podcasts or at MaximumFun.org. We are now going to share with you our interview with guestpert Patrick Rothfuss. Even if you aren't familiar with his work, I think you're really going to enjoy it. There's a lot of interesting discussion about parenthood and creating stories and he's just a really cool fella and we really enjoy talking with him and I think you're going to enjoy that. But we will be back with you right after that interview, which is... Take it away, us from four days ago. I'm very excited ladies and gentlemen to introduce our guest, our special guestpert on this episode. I have been a fan for

many, many years of his work to the point where my friends and I would have conspiracy theory level discussions on what we thought was going on in the stories and I know that that is not uncommon. We are joined this week by... I'm going to say at this point, I'm just going to go ahead and say legendary author Patrick Rothfuss, author of The King Killer Chronicles and regular fixture on the Dungeons and the Dragons Wizards of the Coast podcast, acquisitions incorporated member, just general kind of cool internet nerd dude. Welcome Patrick. Hey there. I'm sorry to try to feel the need to label you like that. Geez. I like to know who my people are at any given. It makes me feel safer. I will say I am more comfortable with internet nerd than legendary

fantasy author. Now, legendary makes me feel like a little bit of a collectible master of the quill. Patrick, a quick Google of you according to Google, you are influenced by and these are the only two it says William Shakespeare and George R. R. Martin. So does that about sum it up? You know, just those two? If I was, yeah, that's pretty much those are the only two things I've ever read. She's bad boys together. See what happens. You got your George R. R. Martin in my Shakespeare. You got your Shakespeare in my George R. R. Martin. Yeah, pretty much just the histories of Shakespeare and and only the second and the fourth Martin books. Did it make as much sense as if you just read them from the beginning? I wonder what metric, what weird fucking Google

thing pulled up those as my influences. Like how the hell did that happen? It does say, I will say it says come more. Also, Judy Bloom. Yeah. Patrick, we have a big list of questions here. Travis, you curated these. How many, how many, how many jerks did we get asking about both three and did you put those jerks in the garbage? I did. I threw those jerks right away. I burned them off the internet like a wart. So we won't have to worry about that anymore. All the questions we asked you some topics you felt comfortable giving advice on and you said storytelling and parenting. So we've got an interesting grab bag of those two sets. Let's start off. We've had to start like putting those like expertise areas out there because I think we had like Elizabeth Gilbert,

author of Eat, Pray, Love on on the show. Dear friend of the family and everybody's like, my garbage disposal is broken. How do I fix it? Oh man, I really missed out. Now, why did we in turn go ahead and ask her that question? That's a fine. I mean, we could have at any point stepped in and not done that. But listen, there were a lot of steps in that process that we fucked up. We did bad. We get that. We get that now. And now Elizabeth Gilbert won't talk to us anymore. I understand that we did bad. But here's the first question. I've never held a baby and me and my wife are trying to conceive. I'm genuinely worried that I'm going to hold the baby wrong. What would be the best way to hold a newborn in your opinion? That's from Nathan and Yukon

and like two of the three brothers on this show right now. Yeah, also, yes. Oh, are you like gearing up for for babying? Travis and I are both and with our respective lives. We are both expecting we're not expecting with each other in some sort of weird incestuous junior situation. It's a it's worth noting, Patrick, before you hop in, I do have a two year old so they could have fucking asked me at any point. But that's fine. We'll wait for it. We're a legendary word Smith. Patrick, we're off this on the show and he'll tell you how to hold a baby. We're grown as adults. And sometimes it's really disheartening and kind of embarrassing to go. How do I hold a tiny human? So how do you is I will say, actually, I'm going to come to your

defense. There's not generally speaking, there's not a community of guys talking about being dads. Culturally, women get together. It's valued in the culture. Women feel free to ask these questions, share information. But it's not a typical dude thing. Now, what I've discovered is that geek dudes, we like to do everything to the best of our ability and we like to mine for data. And so we're an interesting subsection of the population. And so there is a lot of like geek dad talk. But anyway, with with holding a baby and here, I'm sorry, this will be irritatingly frank advice, which is kind of boring. But the most important thing is to get in there because the baby is going to get born. You're going to be freaked out.

And you're going to be thinking exactly what everybody thinks they're going to be like, oh, no, I'm going to fuck it up. It's it's this is such a like essential part of it. But this is one area in which, like, I think we have it not great off. And that is that parenting books and like baby books aimed at dudes are almost invariably the fucking pits, like without any useful information whatsoever, the stuff in these books is like, make sure to build yourself a man cave that the babies are allowed in that you put all your football trophies and dude, you're getting a dad the book that I read and encouraged you. It's that you probably have a hard time connecting with your unborn baby. And it suggested drawing football plays on your pregnant wife's stomach

and explaining them to the fetus to encourage some sort of basic human connection. And I'm like, and I'm like, which bones in there do I need to not touch because they're crazy baby bones and they're super weak. And if I touch it while holding it wrong, like I lose. Well, I think what Patrick is saying, if I might paraphrase, there's no wrong way to hold a baby. Well, no, no, actually what I will say, and as you will quickly learn, I lack the ability to make simple declarative statements. Every every question that I respond to, if not everything that I fucking say, ends up being a little story. So here's the story. I'm in the delivery room. I've been on team baby. I've been minding my position, right? Because in the delivery room, you are not the fucking

captain of the ship. And you are not the first mate. And you're just you're like way down. You're the poor orphan that stowed away in the in the basement of the ship, hiding in a hiding in a discarded gin barrel, hoping you're not discovered. Just trying to get to the new world. At best, you're some sort of bosen, you know, like and so baby gets born. And I have an amazing midwife there who's helping out, which is a whole different story, you know, because the first thing is you got to cut the umbilical cord and she goes and she hands me the scissors. And I'm like, I'm like, oh no, I'm fine. This has been a great experience. I'm full of all sorts of motions. But like, you know how to do this.

And I'm a fucking idiot. So how about you use the surgical implement and I will just stand here. And she and she handed it to me and she goes, do it. And so I did it, you know, and I'm like, okay, I did it. She was right about my capabilities. I could do this. First thing, of course, you get the baby on the mom's chest. So the baby gets skin to skin contact. Super important. And then after a little bit, I did get a chance. And what I said was, oh, no, no, that's okay, let's get a bunch of that skin to skin. Let's leave the baby on the mom. But all I was doing was like, I don't know, I don't want to do it wrong. That's the fear. And so she said, do it. And she puts the baby in my arms. And I'm super careful. And that's how I started doing it. And

the more you do it, the better you get at it. But you can't start getting good at it until you start. And so you got to start like fucking hour one, get in there, hold it. And then you'll start, you'll be a fucking pro inside a three months, you'll learn the upside down, you'll learn the leg over the top, you'll learn the backwards, you'll learn if you lie them on the left hand side, they fart better. Yeah. What really does that work for adults too? See, skin to skin was your was your first mistake, Patrick. You got to go skin to football. I had my baby on a football. The moment she was born, she was lying on a football just to get that connection between her and football, which I love so much. I was of course referring to a pig skin.

Fantastic. Very good. Naturally. It's good. You could do the skin to skin as a dad too. Don't be afraid guys. Take that shirt off, get some skin to skin going. It's good. No matter what the doctor or midwife says. Yeah. I mean, not right away. You can do skin to skin for a long time. Yeah. And honestly, I mean, here's your interesting science fact. If you put the baby on the mom, if the baby is too hot, the skin to skin contact, the mom's body will regulate the baby's body temperature. That's crazy. It is. This is why we've survived as a species. The baby's too cold. The mama actually heats up and warms up the baby. But here's the tricky bit. If the baby is too hot, the mom's body cools down to bring the baby's body temperature down.

What? Yeah. Yeah. What does my body do? You get half of that, okay? You're not Wolverine. You don't get the full suite of powers, but you're like Dazzler, right? Okay. Where if you have the baby on your chest, skin to skin, if the baby is too cold, a dad's body will warm up and warm up the baby, but you don't get the other side where you can cool it down. Dazz aren't cool. You heard it here first. Well, I think we all knew that already. Can I read one off this list? Yes. We got a bunch. I really only hear about the stuff that's interesting to me. That's a pro interviewer tip that I learned from Barbara Walters, is the one who does the interviews. I've been slowly building a world for use in DMing,

or maybe try my hand at writing short stories. When it comes to creating a world from scratch, what was your first step, or maybe baseline, i.e. geography, religion, world events, Brian? Oh, I'm sorry. Brian is the person who asked that. You got to get a good Brian in there, and then you sort of spiral out from there. I think a lot of people are looking for a recipe, which is very understandable. You want to do a good job at this thing, and so you're like, how do you make a good fantasy world? What happens a lot of times is people look to the classics. You look to Tolkien, because Granddaddy Tolkien has this, his shadow is long over the fantasy world. People look at that, and they go, okay, you need a bunch of poetry,

you need a bunch of fake languages, you need mythology, you need a big history that goes back 5000 years. But here's the thing. That's not what makes a good fantasy world, or a good world of whatever sort you're creating. What made that good is that Tolkien was a huge geek for all of those things. He studied the Norse eddas, and he was a linguistics nut, and he loved history. And so, of course, all of those things that he was super passionate about informed the world that he was creating. But odds are, you are not all of those things. So, if you try to follow Tolkien's recipe, you're just not going to know as much about those things, and you won't be as excited about them, and that passion won't show up in the world you're making.

So, generally speaking, I mean, in my world, there's a lot about economy, and about coinage, and money. And that's because I'm kind of a geek for that stuff. There's a lot about like religion and philosophy, because I'm kind of a geek for that. Some sociology and psychology, a lot of hard science, because I was almost a chemical engineer. Those things, you know, are what kind of make the cornerstones of my world. But nobody ever says, where's all your elf poetry, Rothfuss, because you need that. Yeah. Well, at least not to your face. Not to my face, right? Whenever I start a new, reading a new fantasy series, I'm always impressed that it always seems like they put so much thought into how magic works in their specific world.

Is that a good, because that's one of my favorite things about the King Keller Chronicles is like the explanation of sympathy and like how magic works specifically in the world you've created. Is that a good base point for a fantasy writer, or is that something that comes out of the world you've built? It definitely has a big impact on the world. And if you are interested in it, and if you like it, then absolutely you should do that. It's really interesting to note that Tolkien doesn't do any of that. You know, and like those books are fairly successful. And, but think about it, like what do you know about what Gandalf can do? He can blow a smoke ring and then put a ship in it, I think.

Right. Well, that's not magic. Like look at any Vapetrix compilation video that's like goes viral on Facebook and like people are doing way crazier shit than that now. But like he like actually Gandalf is kind of crap in terms of the magic department. You look at the Hobbit, what does he do? He like makes a couple of like flashes and sets pine cones on fire. Big deal. I could do that. But you know, there's no big magic system there. You may have just ruined those books for me because I'm thinking back at like all this stuff like, wait, he turned gray and then he turned white. What did, why? Why did he do this? Why did this happen? Yeah. He not, he had a, there was a big monster coming at him. And the bow wrong,

you know, he did. He knocked himself off a bridge. He broke a bridge he was on. Good job. Good magic, bud. Good magic. Get your shit together, Gandalf. Geez. Yeah. Do something. Hey, Patrick, I understand starting a fantasy world with what I like, but what if I only like garbage? I can't very well build a fantasy world about discontinued cereals, which is the only thing I'm interested in. You know, I would argue that I would, I would love, I would, it may be not a fantasy world, but I could see a dystopian future. Yeah. Or that's the currency. Yeah. It's three, three, three crunch berries to a, to a Boo Berry. I can't tell if Justin's joking or not. Cause we've been taught the, the three of us with our

dad, we do a Dungeons and Dragons podcast that I DM. And we've talked about like when my campaign is over us taking turns trying the DM mantle on it. And Justin, you seemed to prickle at the thought of, of, of building a fantasy world. I'm wondering how much truth there is to you. It's infinite truth. Griffin, it's 100% true. I feel like I don't have a creative bone in my body as far as that stuff goes. I, I just don't have, you know, not every, the world needs farmers to Griffin, not everybody. Justin's too busy working the land to get in there and make up a D&D campaign. Watch, watch me, watch me bridge this guys. This is the best segue I've ever performed in my life.

I really want to back that up my two boys cause I got one who's six, one who's two. And I tell little stories with, with the older boy and a lot of them are, you know, you could call them collaborative storytelling, but what I'm really doing is I'm role playing without the dice, you know, and I put them in a situation and I say, you find a cave and, you go into the cave and what do you do? And then he gives answers and I, I tell the story. And I always kind of was hoping that he would take off more and more and tell the stories himself, but he doesn't like that. He likes being the character in the world. Now my littler boy, who's only two and a half, you give him the slightest starting point and he will like launch

into telling a story. My daughter is almost two. Currently she's only interested in ingesting Pee Wee's Playhouse. So the, the pretending in our house currently is 100% Pee Wee's Playhouse themed. I portray Terry and Captain Carl when I can find the hat. My wife is cowboy Curtis and my daughter is Pee Wee sometimes and also Miss Yvonne when I feel like going to find the dress that she has to wear to be Miss Yvonne. So yeah, it's great. It's, it's actually like makes my life super weird because sometimes I walk in my room to talk to my wife and my wife's not there. Cowboy Curtis. So I got to talk through. Sounds like you already started a really cool DM session, Justin. Yeah.

We have a question here from Andy. Do we have a responsibility as parents to sometimes deliberately frighten our children with scary stories, movies, video games, et cetera. That's a great question. And I'm so torn to give like some really bad advice here. I don't think there's good advice to be had. Yeah, man. I'm not going to lie to you. There's a huge amount of delight to be gained by terrifying your child. You know, like especially if you're in a bit of a mood or they're being like a little bit of a dick, that will happen. I mean, we love our kids, right? But they can still be dicks. Well, I love my brothers and their dicks all the time.

And he spooks us. He sends me pictures of ghosts like every day. And so here's a great example of maybe I can show you the good and the bad. You know, we're all in bed. Sarah still sleeps with the boys. I don't because I'm huge and the bed isn't big enough. And so we're all in bed. We've been reading some stories. It's time for sleep. And Sarah, you know, says to the older boy, says to Oot, okay, you know, go pee. It's time for bed. And, you know, it's nighttime. And it's really easy to forget as an adult how terrifying the dark is, you know. And he's like, he's like, come with me, come with me. And I'm like, you know,

it's down the hallway. You can turn the lights on. You can do it. And it's important for him to get over this a little bit. Sarah has worked out a compromise where she'll let him go, but she'll tell him a story so he can hear her voice. And that's reassuring. And it gives him enough so that he can go and turn on the lights and be brave and to practice being brave. And so he goes, will you tell me a story? And I go, and I go, sure. And so he starts to go and he's, I hear his little feet going off and go, once upon a time, there was a little boy and he lived in a house with a thousand ghosts made of bone. And I hear him go, go, ah, and like then doop, doop, doop, doop, doop, doop,

like his feet as he's running back into the room and he jumps onto the bed. And I laugh and he's like, dad, and it's okay. You know, this was a play. It's play we're doing. And so then I go, okay, I'm sorry. And he, so he gets up and he starts going again. And he goes, he goes, no bones in this story. And I go, okay, I'll tell you a story with no bones. And I go, okay, once upon a time, there was a boy and there was a ghost that ate pee and it was on the floor and it lived near the toilet and he comes running back, you know. And it turns into this big joke. He keeps going and I keep telling him a story about a pee ghost that lives in the floor and it would come up when he pees in the toilet and it's going to get his pee.

Just want to, just want to say real quick that ghosts that eat pee, you are completely on brand right now, Patrick Ruffus, for the Mibin Bam sort of milieu. And so, and then finally, I've told too many of these stories. I legitimately freaked him out. And then he says, and then he's like, he's just not going to do it anymore. And Sarah's like, okay, you, you fuck this up. Go. You know, you have to walk him to the bathroom now. I'm not getting out of bed because you've made a mess of this. So I go and we go into the bathroom and he pees. This has been fun. This has been a ton of fun. It's playful. And I'm in the bedroom, I'm in the bathroom standing behind him. And it occurs to me how hysterical it would be

to like just do a little like, you know, and maybe grab him a little bit, maybe tickle him a little bit. I have the foresight to not do this while he is peeing, right? Because I don't want to clean that up. He finishes peeing. And then I just, again, very gently, because I know my boy, and he can get spooked pretty easy. He's very gentle. And so I do just a little one. I get down and I get like my fingers on his rib. It's, and I go, but instead of him just having a little jump and a squeak, he screams bloody murder and completely curls up into a ball. And I'm like, I failed. I've really failed as a dad. And Sarah's like, what the actual hell is going on in there? And so I pick him up and I'm like, I sit down on the floor with him and I'm like,

oh my sweetie, I am so sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought that would be funny and it wasn't funny. And, and he's like, that was not, you know, he's like, that was dad. That was super scared. I'm like, I'm so sorry. That was not fair. I shouldn't have done that. And, you know, he hugs me and we go back in and I'm at this point, I'm like, he's going to remember this. And when I'm in the hospital as an old man, this is the memory he's going to flash back to, you know, this is going to put you in a home because, you know, because I betrayed his trust here. But we get back and I'm thinking I'm the worst dad ever. And the next day it's I'm still, it's still dwelling on it. And I bring it, I go, you know, I am super sorry that I did that. You know, I want you to know I won't do

that. And he goes, I go, I thought it would be funny. He goes, you know, dad, it was a little bit funny. Oh, that's a cool kid, man. I would not have let you out. I would have seen how many Nintendo 64 cartridges I could have shook out of that situation. Yeah, I think it's super important to be just honest with them. And if, you know, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to use them as a confessional, but I think it's really helpful when you screw up, if you say, boy, I just made a big mistake and I'm so sorry, you know, modeling that behavior for them is really helpful, I think. The tricky thing I feel like is you don't know which of those little spooky goofs is going to like get deep in their brain and then be a thing. Which is going to be the phobia

scare. Right, like, we got Christmas 1996, McRoy household got a Sony PlayStation. What's up? Best Christmas ever. Except the games that we got were Resident Evil and Blood Omen Legacy of Kane. So like, nine-year-old Griffin was like, cool. I'm just going to like, I know I have the first bed time, so I'm just going to probably just like chill and sit at the top of the stairs while I can still see the light coming from the first floor hallway and just like the comforting voices of my family before I go to bed and we'll definitely be like, you know, eviscerated or eaten. I still remember why do all of our fears center around video games? I remember the American Final Fantasy III with Palom and Porum turned to stone to stop walls from crushing you. Spoilers.

Yes, spoilers, sorry. And like, that was my fear until I was like 18 that I would be crushed by walls or turned to stone. Travis, that was that was American Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy IV, in Japan. Sorry. Sorry, guys. Want to get ahead of the tweets. Just want to get ahead of the tweets. Justin, do you want to talk about your phobia or another question? No, I've detailed my phobia as an excruciating. Justin's afraid of fiction. Yeah, I'm afraid of creativity. Burn it from the earth, I say. I want to do this last question. Can you guys do what I do? Okay. How do you balance working on so many projects from home and raising two kids? I know two of the brothers McRoy are expecting and the other already has

little ones. So I feel it's a discussion everyone could weigh in on. That's from Mish. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, so here's all the time we have everybody. Thanks so much, Patrick, for joining us. Very good discussion. How about this? I knew I would be okay on this podcast because my true specialty is giving really bad advice that once you hear it, you're like, oh, shit, anything I do will be better than what Rothfuss suggested. Hey, watch out. There's only enough room for one of us in this town. And so, you know, I still remember when my older boy, when he was, you know, maybe 18 months, which again is this golden time, because they're just full of joy

and wonder and love. And I came home from working on book two, and I see him sitting on the floor like naked, just like this pink pudgy, like ball of raw joy. And he's found a plastic hanger, and he's moving it. You know, he's like using it and he's hitting the floor and he looks up at me, and he's like, and he moves this hanger, and he's like, he's looking at me thinking, holy man, dad, did you know that you could like move a hanger, you know, and he's full of joy and excitement over like just banging a hanger around. And I'm like, I am missing this, you know? And like, for the rest of my life, I would regret putting in these 16 hour days to try to get book two done, because my child was here having this, like, and I'm never going to get this back,

I'm never going to get another chance. And, and like, I will, I'll feel bad about it forever. Now, that's not to say that I didn't get some good times and I didn't spend time. But I tell you, nobody on their deathbed thinks, boy, I wish I would have spent more time at work. Sure. Although book two is real good. It is pretty good, turned out pretty good. I guess, I guess, thanks. Thank you. Thanks. You know, everybody always says that about no one on their deathbed. I bet there was one guy who had like just the sickest job, that it was, he was like, he was just like the captain of

parties or something. He was like, I was, I spent more time at work. I hated my house. The guy who invented like the show biz pizza company is just going to be like, nice, did it, did it, crushed it. Well, but what if there's people on their deathbed to think, think, Tagga wish Wathis had finished book three. Now that, that I actually believe. Yeah. The, but no, the, I think the important thing, and actually I was talking to Sanderson, Sanderson's way better at this, not only because he writes 18 times faster than I do.

Um, but we were talking and he's like, yep, he goes, and how's this for gross? He says, he says, yep, I, he goes, I keep it to 10 hours of writing a day because 10 hours, and I, I promise myself that I stop and I go home and then I spend time with my family. I'm like, you know, 10 hours of writing in a row. It's like, ah, you know, I put a lid on it there. And then after the kids are in bed, I can always come back and write more. Makes it sound so easy. It's, it's weird because it doesn't, there's not a, I'll be like completely frank about this as long as we're just getting into it. Um, the first year that my daughter

was alive, I was really bad at this. I mean, I, I things had really started to pick up with the show and I suddenly had a full plate. I mean, it was like full, you would think that that's like horse apples considering what I do for a living, but like the, the stuff got busy and the, and the, the thought I would have a lot of the time is, well, she's with people who are caring for her. So she's fine. And the crappy thing about finding balance like that is, they, like they will spend time with somebody. Like there, there will be people to fill the gap there. If you're not like they're putting in the hours and actually like investing the, the time into it. And like they, I think one of the last realizations you have

in, in the process of maturing into a full blown adult is that the, the time that you do have is, is precious. And like that was, it actually took me, I think a year after Charlie was born to really like absorb that lesson and really, and really make that a part of my, my day to day existence. And I still don't think I'm great at it. I get to the end of a lot of days thinking that I haven't done either particularly well, but I don't guess that's not particularly helpful advice. Well, you know, it's, and I'll, I'll chime in there as well. For me, it's bad enough if you work too long and you don't get in, then you don't get home and you only get, you know, to spend two hours. I remember at one point, just to maybe make you feel better about yourself. I remember at one point

saying like resolving to myself that I would spend at least two hours a day with my kid. And of course that resolution by itself is an extraordinarily like sad thing because it implies that I was not spending two hours a day with my kid, which is ridiculous. You know, it'd be one thing if we were starving to death and I was a coal miner, but you know, different things shake you in different ways. And it's kind of a shame. A lot of ways you don't learn how to do something right until you screw it up or until you see somebody else screw it up. And that's, I feel that the service I provide to the entire world is screwing things up very visibly so other people can learn from my mistakes. And you're a real hero. I was going to, it was one of my first

San Diego Comic-Cons and I went and it's a long con and there's a day of travel on either side and I'd spent other trips away, but they were much shorter. I get on the phone and I hear him in his tiny piping voice and he's just started to talk and he goes, daddy, I go, hey, sweet baby, how are you? And he goes, daddy, daddy, hold you in my arms. Now, see the only, I would do, I would, I would pull a move like that if I was a child, but again, only to get some like guilt Nintendo 64 games out of it upon my father's return. When he said, hold you in my arms, I knew he was expressing that to me, but it wasn't his own phrase. I knew that phrase came from Corderoi, the book, the kid's book, because you know, the Corderoi is looking for an

owner. He's trying to find his button and the little girl picks him up and, you know, and holds Corderoi in her arms. And so he was thinking of that book and somebody bigger holding him and taking him to a place. And it wasn't that I felt he was ripping something else off, it's that I knew the context for this little phrase he was using. So yeah, I guess that's kind of the overarching thing is it's kind of get in there and do it and know that you'll goof it up and it's okay. And you'll get better at it, be smart. And it's like a muscle, you know, you will not be the most patient in the world, parent in the world at first. But if you don't practice being patient, you're not going to get better at it. See, this is why I got to have a second one,

because I would love to get it right. I mean, I really think you could stick the really crush it with a sec. The first one's like, okay, well, I mean, look at what our parents did. Yeah, well, yeah, took them, took them, took them three, three to really nail it. But as long as we can all agree that the second is better than the first, I think in a lot of ways you can, you can overcorrect on the second one. Sure. Right. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. You know, thank you so much. I will, I will say I've had a ton of fun. I can talk about being a parent for days. But you know, if I feel like I've kind of betrayed some of the, the, the underlying, you know, the brand of the podcast here, I would love to come back at some point

and talk about like some stuff that I'm really bad at and give bad advice. Great. Oh, sure. What was those areas of un-expertise look like? What are we dating? Okay. And maybe I could give some really bad dating advice. Pretty much anything socially interacting with other human beings. Oh, shit, dude, you're going to be a total fit in on this podcast. It's gonna be perfect. Patrick, obviously, sometimes when we ask guests on the show, where can people find your work? Like for you, the answer is like bookstores and Amazon. You also have a podcast. I don't think we've talked about it called unattended consequences that you do with Max Timkin from Cards Against Humanity.

Anything else that people can, can find that you do on, on internet? One big thing that I do is it's sort of, you know, on again, off again, I run a charity called World Builders. We raise money for various charitable causes, primarily Heifer International, but also, you know, a charity called First Book, which gets books into the hands of little kids who have maybe never owned a book in their life, or we did some stuff for the Syrian refugees. World Builders, you know, we do a bunch of different stuff. You can find them on worldbuilders.org. We've raised, I think, maybe $5 million for various charities over the last couple of years. We rally geeks who want to make the world a better place, and we help make that happen,

and we sell cool merch and giveaway books and games and stuff. So, cool. Great. So, yeah, Patrick, thank you for joining us. Thank you for doing the show. Thank you for maybe once in 311 episodes offering some real sincere good advice. Much appreciated. Thanks so much for having me, guys. Thanks for breaking the streak. Thanks for, thanks for putting up with me. This has been such a treat. Let's wrap up here real quick. Some things we need to talk about. We are doing live shows in Boston this next weekend. Live Adventure Zone and Live Mabin Band. We need questions, both if you're going to be in the audience in Boston and want to ask advice. Send that, send that into, what's

our email address even? Nobody's quite sure, huh? mbmbamatmaximumfund.org. Tricky to remember, huh? Could also use some yahoo's. So, any my yahoo soldiers to come out in full force. Again, we're doing a moniker's expansion. Go to macroecollection.com. We're doing a pre-order for 30 days. You can get the expansion for 10 bucks or a collection with the expansion in the base game for 35. Again, macroecollection.com. I want to say, if you're looking for other shows to check out, check out all the other amazing shows on maximumfund.org. There's a ton on there that you're going to like. We also do a couple shows that are a little more independent. One of my favorite podcasts in the world that I look forward to and listen to every week,

even if I don't have time for anything else. I make time for it is Rose Buddies with Griffin and Rachel, where they watch and recap The Bachelorette and The Bachelorette. It is no joke, one of my favorite things that exist in the world right now. So, I encourage everyone to check it out. I also do a show with my friend Tybee called Enterobang, where we talk about the things in the world that are frustrating us and frustrating you. Every fifth episode is an audience submitted topics episode and we just did one. There's a lot of frustrating stuff going on in the world right now. We're just trying to build a safe place for discussion in podcast form. So, check that out called Enterobang. Also, you guys have put out a new episode of The Monster Factory recently

and I thoroughly enjoyed and I want everyone to go check that out too. Griffin and Justin do probably the funniest thing on the internet called Monster Factory on YouTube through their website Polygon, where they create just the most abhorrent characters through character creation engines in video games and it's pretty much everyone's favorite thing on the internet. So, go check that out. Thank you Travis. Thanks again to Patrick Rothfuss for being our guest this week and thanks to John Roderick in the Long Winters for these for our theme song instead of part drop, the album Putting the Days to Bend. It's a wonderful album. You can find it wherever albums are sold. Is that it? Oh, oh, oh. We're gonna be at Max Funcon East. If you haven't picked up your tickets

yet, go get those. We want to see you there. We want to hang out with you in the scary shining hotel in the Pogonos Mountains. You get to hang out with like all the magroys and I think the Smurls as well. It's gonna be a crazy fun time hanging out in the mountains. Come see us hang out. It's gonna be great. We really want you there. I think you can go to maxfuncon.com for all the information. Well, we should make it clear we're doing not in Boom Bam. We're doing Adventure Zone there, so. Yep. Come hang out. Last Yahoo time, this one's sent by Zoe Kinski, Thank you, Zoe. It's by Yahoo Answers User. RG778SX, who asks, How many people agree that Smash Mouth at the end of rat race was a crummy way to end a classic

comedy? I've gripped a macaroy. This is my brother, my brother, my kiss you dad's score on the list. New to Maximum Fun, the Beef and Dairy Network podcast. The number one podcast for those involved or just interested in the production of beef animals and dairy herds. All sponsored by Grey's X, the latest grass replacement pellet from Mitchell's. If it's not Mitchell's, get back in the truck. Find us at maximumfun.org or on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast from. And if it's not clear, this is a comedy podcast. Beef out.