Laughing through Life with The King of Humor | Dave Barry

27:01And, and I did, you know, I went talk with him and, you know, he was still a drunk at the time and they're very good at deflecting and denying. And that's what he did. He was a very smart guy. And I was his kid and what, you know, I wasn't going to, that, that, that relationship wasn't going to change just because I was concerned. But in the end, you know, when he got through all that and recovered, you know, he, he brought it up. that's a part of his recovery, part of the 12 steps where you go and make amends to the extent that you can with the people you hurt along the way. And so I was totally, I mean, that's right where I was when I was writing this scene about Phil and his daughter.

27:39I was thinking about me and my dad. And so that was, I don't think I've ever felt that emotional writing anything as I did writing that scene. Do you think that's a function of I mean, you've been writing for decades. Like since, when did you start as a columnist? Like in the 70s, right? During the American Civil War. I feel like. No, a long time. Early 70s. And do you feel, like I feel like lately, like for instance, your last book, Lessons with Lucy, you're very reflective in that. Do you think now in your writing, there's this more reflective component? I mean, you're always sharp and observational and, you know, reflective.

28:21but I feel like now you're, you're taking it another level. Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I hope I don't get serious cause that's not really what I'm supposed to be. And that's what I'm thinking. No, you can get serious all you want. No, no. I mean, in my writing, I don't want to get that serious. I don't mind getting serious and discussing about it, discussing it with you. But, but yeah, you're right. I think I'm just, it's partly, I think, be just getting older, you, you tend to, to be more reflective, but also I've just reached the point in my career, I've been writing so long that I am secure enough.

28:56I'll never be secure. I don't think anybody who does humor for a living is ever secure, but that, you know, I'm secure enough that I don't feel like I have to always every second be amusing, that I'm allowed a little bit of space to say, this is what I actually think, you know, and this is how I actually feel, not just the facade of this is what I think is funny about this. So yeah, I think I've become more reflective. Although I cannot express this enough, I don't ever want to be just a reflective. I want to write, I want people to laugh when they read what I write. I still want that. I think though, this is where this security comes in.

29:32And you mentioned no one's ever fully secure in the humor business. You're always asking like, was that funny? You know, even speaking of Seinfeld, his last book, the title was something like, is this good? Or I forget the exact title now, but it's sort of like even him questioning. Yeah, like they all do. like they all do. Yeah. But I'm wondering if you can be secure in the fact that you are just a naturally funny person and a skilled funny person. You've been doing this for a long time. And so that you could write about, I feel you could write about anything and Dave Barry, the humorist is going to come through.

30:05Yes. I mean, I agree with you that I have developed a skill over the years where I can make almost anything funny or at least serviceably funny, professionally funny, if not necessarily inspiredly funny. But yeah, I mean, was that really a question or you're just saying? No, I think I'm just saying that because it makes me think of like stand-ups, like let's say Chris Rock's recent special where he talks about the slap hurt around the world or even Louis C.K.'s recent specials where he was canceled and out of, you know, seemed like out of the business and then he comes back and he's able to talk about it, but still the humor shines through.

30:47Yeah. Yeah, where you don't feel quite as obligated to just have a joke that comes out of nowhere. It can be coming from you, be part of you. And yeah, I think that evolves over time. But when you're my age, that's kind of what you are. And I am this guy who's been doing this forever and I have this certain voice and I can't really get out of it if I wanted to. Which is fine. So you've written like 50 books about, let's say, about two-thirds nonfiction, one-third fiction. I don't know the exact number. I didn't count them or anything. Something like that, yeah. And for some people, they take five, six, ten years writing their magnum opus book and whatever.

31:29And how long did it take you to write Swamp Story? About, I'd say, nine months. Nine months? Yeah. If I'd done nothing else and I'm just really focused on it, it would have been maybe four or five months. Yeah, and I think that is the correct amount of time to write a book, actually. Like six years, you change as a person. Sometimes that's too wrong. You're preaching to the choir here. I'm a newspaper guy. My wife's a sports writer. She writes like 10 stories a day, it feels. She just came back from the NCAA, and I'm watching her sitting way up in the stands, and I'm watching her down there with the ball in the air.

32:04And we still, if it goes in, it's one story, and if it misses, it's another story. And she's got to turn that story in in three minutes. You know, and I watch her do that. I've watched her do that for years now. She's just an amazing writer. She can do that. I could never do it. So that is like, I see her do that. I wrote for many years for newspapers. Then I wrote columns. And, you know, I always had something to do. So that's the mindset I come from, the journalism mindset where it's not the end of the world. You got to get it. You got to write it. You got to get it in there. Now you take a little more time with a book, obviously a lot more time really but it's still in the end you're just writing words and you're going to turn them in so that's the that's the mindset i come from i know a lot of novelists i'm in a rock band of authors and some of them are quite serious novels who take years to decide what their next book's going to be and then yeah you know sometimes years to research it and so on and i don't disrespect that that's just where they come from and you know they write a different kind a book than I do, I guess.

33:10I could not possibly take that long to write anything. I would feel like I'd written it 40 times by the time I was done. I one time was on a panel. One of the members of this band is Stephen King. And I was once on a panel with Stephen and everybody else in the panel besides Stephen. And I was only nonfiction guy, Stephen, everybody else was a novelist and Stephen. And they all were talking about their process, their process, their process. And there's nothing that serious novelists like to talk about more than their process. And it's, you know, very involved in philosophical. And it finally comes to Stephen and goes, he goes, let's do the math.

33:48You can write 2000 words a day. That's not hard. 2000 words. Anybody here, we can all write 2000 words a day, 2000 words a day, five days a week is 10 ,000 words a week. Okay. A hundred thousand words is 10 weeks. That's how long it could take. And everybody's going. And it's, if it had been to some schmo saying that, you know, that'd be one thing, but it's Stephen King who sold more books than everybody else up there combined. Basically, I loved him for that. You know, he, he was basically saying, no, you can, you can make it as long and short as you want. But in the end, there's no particular mystical reason why it has to take forever if, you know, and then he said, Hey, let's say you only write a thousand words a day.

34:26How hard is that? You know, anyway, the point he was making is let's not mysticize this process too much here. We're just writers. We're just cranking out words, telling stories. Well, like think about it from like, also from the point of view of a newspaper writer, you're used to writing, let's say 500 publishable words a day. So like you write a five to 700 word column, it's publishable. So that means that gives you confidence that every day, it's not just like you wrote for the day and you're going to rewrite it later. Like that's going to be out there for for everyone to see. And to his point, it's just math after that.

35:01Like, yes, exactly. You can write a book fast. And then, and then of course there's, there's drafts and revisions. So that might take the additional amount of time. You know, it's not like a second draft or third draft, like Swamp Story, I'm assuming went through 10 revisions of some sort or more, but like, I don't know if you've read how many of Stephen King's books you've read, but he's also a prolific writer. And I remember one of his shorter novels, because he says a hundred thousand words is a novel. That's, a big novel to read, but like one of his shorter ones is the longest walk. He wrote that under the name, uh, Richard Bachman.

35:33And it's like, he takes a simple concept, which is a hunger games, ish sort of concept. He throws in a bunch of kids into this world, gives them backstories. And then the concept plays itself out. Like, so it's, so it's not as he sort of puts it, it's not that complicated and it becomes a great book. Like that was a great, one of his great Richard Bachman books. And, you know, I feel like, I feel like that's what you need. And you need that confidence that these words are publishable, which you get from the newspaper process. Yeah. And the other thing is, it's a good gig. Novel writing, book writing in general, if you're reasonably successful, you can do one every couple of years and get away with it.

36:13And financially, you can then when you're not writing, you can go around and talk about writing and people will pay you to do that. And it's a wonderful, you know, some people, they hardly ever write anymore. They just go around, talk about writing and their process. And, you know, people love to hear that stuff. it's it's an easy gig we i think we have to we know a lot of writers have made it like they they need to make it seem really much more complicated and difficult than it is to justify how little they do nothing so um again i say that's when i out in the newspaper world where i come from you're paid to produce so you produce and you don't think about it in terms of art or whatever.

36:54Yeah. And also you don't have to be a perfectionist. Like I asked one time, I asked this one musician once on, on the podcast, do you ever feel bad when you make a bad song and put it on YouTube and it doesn't get any views? And he said, no, because it didn't get any views. So nobody saw it. So I could go on to the next one and people, if they watch that, then everything's good. Yeah.

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38:12Everybody does have a process. Like you described, okay, so I had this thing, this element, this element. You put it all together, throw in a thriller story, throw in a love story, because there are components that make something a thriller. Like somebody's chasing someone else and at some point the hero or Rowan is at the mercy of the killer or whatever. So there's like elements that are in every romance and every thriller and so on. So you can make use of those elements and then you write your novel. Yes. Yeah, it's that simple, folks. Well, then it takes the decades of experience it's like being, being funny and humorous and so on.

38:51Is there any, the details are where it gets, which gets tricky, but yeah. Yeah. Like when you first started writing columns, like what, what happened? Did you submit some, cause I don't know this story. I don't know if we talked about it. Did you just start writing some humorous columns, submit them in and they said, oh, this is guys really funny. Let's, let's go with this. Like what happened? Well, I always want, I mean, I, I always wanted to write humor. Even when I was a kid, that's what I wanted to do. I just never thought I would be able to make a living doing it. So I never thought of it as a career.

39:21I just thought something I like to do. I love to read humorists. I was, you know, I love Mad Magazine when I was a kid. Even like Art Buckwall when I was a guy. I like humor. Buckwall did all the Washington, D.C. Exactly. Art Buckwall was kind of the dean of humor columnists when I was growing up and syndicated in a million newspapers. So when I was in college, I wrote humor columns for the college paper, Haverford College. And I thought they were funny and my friends thought they were funny. Years later, I went to a reunion and somebody had the idea. This is after I had become a well-known humor writer.

40:00I went to like my 25th or 30th reunion at Haverford College. and somebody had the idea of blowing up my columns from the Haverford newspaper, student newspaper, and putting them around the gym where there was a dance that night for the reunion. And I went over and reading them and like, they were not funny to me. I didn't get any of the jokes. It was like all in jokes from college. So anyway. Now, how often does that happen? Like if you read stuff you wrote 10 years ago, do you think, oh my God. I'll generally know. I mean, if it's since I became a newspaper columnist, for the most part, I will still say, yeah, that was okay.

40:41Sometimes I'll say, yeah. And sometimes I'll think it was better than I realized at the time, you know. But this was the college, you know, the 60s, a lot of marijuana humor. I didn't, you know, I didn't remember why I was writing what I was writing. But I could recognize kind of the style, the goofy style, but not the jokes I wasn't getting. So then when I got out of college, I got a job in a newspaper, a little daily newspaper in Pennsylvania called the Daily Local News in Westchester, Pennsylvania. And I was a reporter. I didn't think about being a columnist because nobody's going to hire me to be a columnist.

41:14The Daily Local News didn't have humor columnists. But I was a general assignment reporter. I covered fires and meetings and, you know, wrote obituaries and all the stuff you do. But because it was a little paper, you could, if you want, write a column. They had a little thing called AdLib or something like that, where you could write a little column on the op-ed page. And I started right away, and I always wrote a humor column. And it was actually successful. People liked it at the Daily Local News. The readers liked it. So I kept doing it. And then I ended up leaving there and going to the Associated Press.

41:53And I left the Associated Press and got a job teaching effective writing seminars at businesses. and for a reason i was just unhappy at the associated press and because the press feels like kind of bland like it's just kind of oh god i used to call it the word army like they did not they did not value creativity at all i think or humor at the associated press you know the associated press is like if you can correctly abbreviate u.s third district court of appeals in a approved ap style that is right then you're writing baby so it was you know it's as bland as it could be because what you're writing is supposed to be something that every newspaper is willing to publish.

42:31So there cannot be any hint of anything funny or original, spicy, whatever, just couldn't be. That's, you know, they ground that out of us. I hated it. Quit and took this job teaching effective writing seminars for business people. So now I'm out of journalism altogether, but I'm still have friends at the Daily Local News in Westchester, Pennsylvania. So I start writing longhand in hotels and in airports all the time, traveling around the country, teaching effective writing, all this free time and nothing to do. So I start writing longhand on a legal pad, humor columns and submitting to the daily local news where I started out.

43:10And they started running them every week for$23 and 50 cents. That's what they paid me per column to write these. So now we're in the mid seventies and I've got this column that's appearing in this little paper in Pennsylvania. And people like it. It's, you know, it's getting a response. It's pretty much what I ended up writing the rest of my life. But what were you writing in those first columns? You know, I would do what I do now. I would make pair, do parodies of whatever TV commercials I thought were stupid or, or like, you know, I wrote a column about writing, you know, 10 speed bikes and why they were, you know, why people would choose something.

43:45So that, that incredibly uncomfortable writing about driving anything, you know, whatever daily life stuff that, you know, the kind of column I write now, but just kind of with the faux authoritative, goofy style that I, that I, you know, mocking newspapers because I used to work at one and mock the authority, you know, always as the authority who in fact knows absolutely nothing. Anyway, I finally got up the courage to try to see if any other newspapers would be interested in those columns, which are then just in this one paper in Westchester, Pennsylvania. and I started Xeroxing them and sending them around to other papers and I got a lot of rejections but then slowly but surely some people started using them and then the Philadelphia Inquirer which is right next door which is a big serious paper an editor there liked Saul liked him and asked me to write something for the Inquirer magazine and I did and that's really how I started go I got going I wrote a long piece about the birth of my son who is now 43 years old by natural childbirth I made fun of natural childbirth and it it it good for the equivalent of viral back then every newspaper editor in a country was also having children by natural childbirth that was the boomers were taking over the newspaper business and so that that ran a whole bunch of so all of a sudden not all of a sudden because it took this was a matter of years But when it started to accelerate, it really accelerated fast.

45:15And now a bunch of newspapers, they were saying, hey, we saw your piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Do you have any others? And I started Xeroxing more and more. And then I suddenly got offered jobs from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald. This is in 1983. And I took the job at the Miami Herald. and that's how I got started. That's how I became a newspaper columnist. How do then things become syndicated? Well, I had a little syndicate that this guy had signed me up when I was in maybe 25, 30 newspapers. But then when I went to the Miami Herald, Knight Ritter Corporation, which owns the Miami Herald and many other newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and many other newspapers, then they syndicated my column and went out.

46:06And then within a couple of years, It was in 500 newspapers. So it exploded from there. And what's funny, I got a call from Art Buchwald. And the truth is, I was a threat to him. I was replacing my column. I'm the young hotshot now in the 80s. And Art's the grand old man who's been around Washington since the 50s, essentially. And I'm thinking like, oh, he's going to hate me. He's going to hate me because there were situations where his column was being dropped and mine was being picked up in some place. I'm not saying that that was universal, but that had happened. It was happening in some places.

46:47So, you know, I think he probably knew who I was. And he calls me up and he's like, I'm coming to Miami. I want to meet you. And he comes down and he was just the sweetest, most wonderful, most supportive guy. and we became really good friends for the rest of his life. So I went from this guy I used to read when I was a kid who was my mother's favorite writer to suddenly now he's my friend and we're going out to lunch and stuff. I mean, that's an exciting thing, I think, about growing up in a craft is that you start to meet others in the craft. There's a lot of basis for friendship, but one of those basis is that they go through what you go through.

47:34So they're columnists, they're writers, they're humorists. They, they, you know, and I think what's similar between you and Art Buchwald is he really staked out Washington DC and you really kind of staked out Florida. Like there's not, there's not many states or locations where like, no one says, Oh, this guy's a great Oklahoma writer, but, and even with Stephen King, even though every book has Maine in it, you know, no one says, Oh, he's a great main author, but you really have like staked out Florida. You and Carl, he has, I don't know how to say that. Carl Hyasson. Hyasson, yeah. He's more on the thriller murder style, but you guys have staked out Florida.

48:13Like if you read Carl Hyasson, you know there's going to be, you know, cocaine in Florida in the book. Yeah, and snakes. Yeah, well, Carl is a very good friend of mine, but, and you're right. He and I, and we've talked about this a million times, how lucky we are. We live in this state. And Carl's line, it's a great line, is you don't need an imagination to be a novelist in Florida. You just need a subscription to the Miami Herald because any story and his stories are all based in reality. I mean, he knows what he's writing about, Carl. He just loves Florida stories. Sooner or later, they percolate in his brain law and they all become part of a Carl Hiaasen novel.

49:00But yeah, we, we have, this state is, and it's, there have been a lot of Florida writers. There still are a lot of, just people like to write about this state because people kind of believe anything you say about Florida. And there's usually the reason they do is that because it's really kind of always believable. Yeah. And why, why is that? Why does, and I'm sure you asked this a million times. I am. What makes Florida different from Tennessee? Because Tennessee is pretty crazy too. And every state's got its own craziness. But Florida seems particularly insane. Every state does have craziness.

49:34But Florida is where the real crazy people end up. A lot of states have homegrown lunatics and weirdos. Florida has the pros. The people who turn pro come to Florida to commit acts of weirdness just to be here. There's a vibe. If you cannot find your community here, you know, weird community here, then it doesn't exist. There are so many Floridas there, you know, you start at the bottom. Key West is like completely different from the middle part of the Florida Keys, which is completely different from the Miami, which is completely different from Boca, which is completely different from Palm Beach, which is completely different from Orlando, which is completely different from Tampa.

50:15And all of those places are kind of strange, but they're all like in this same state that has no actual identity beyond weird communities. Yeah, and then you have the Everglades where it's just, like you say - It's nothing like anything else around. It's nothing like, you know, we're 20 miles, right now where I'm sitting, I'm 20 miles from the Everglades. Nothing like, you know, where I am is out there. Nothing like out there is where I am. It's, you know, like other states, like, you know, people will say, I'm from Texas. You know, Texas is New York, whatever. You know, even people from New Jersey will express pride.

50:50people from Georgia, nobody from Florida ever expresses pride. You know, when people say your state is really messed up and we go, yeah, it is a weird place down history. No, you won't hear Floridians defend it. You know, we'll just kind of go along with whatever you want to say about us. It's like God lifted up the Northern United States and everybody who couldn't hang on rolled down to Florida. Yeah. And then some of them rolled all the way to the end to Key West, which is like Florida's Florida. Yeah, there is no place like this. I've traveled extensively in the United States and there is no state like this one.

51:29And I still wonder why is it? I think it's because, well, A, like I think about my choices. I was in New York all my life and then I moved to Florida for about, I stayed there for about a year, year and a half, but it seemed like a natural place to go. Like I was gonna choose warmer weather. So now my choices are, you know, somewhere in the South or California, because New Yorkers go to California and New Yorkers go to Florida. Not lately. Not lately. Lately, they just come here. Nobody goes to California. No, I agree. The neighborhood I'm in right now, it's New Yorkers and Californians. That's who's moved in here.

52:04And not a few, a lot, anyway. Yeah, and they don't think to go to Oklahoma, for instance, or, I don't know, Alabama. No one says, you know, now's the time. I always wanted to move to Birmingham. Nothing wrong with Birmingham, but nobody from New York moves there. But they moved to Miami, and I lived in Key Biscayne, which, as you were saying, the names of the cities, each city in Florida has its own kind of like character and complexion. And same with Key Biscayne. It's like there's just one culture there, and it's different than the culture. Yeah, Key Biscayne is very different from Miami, right across the causeway.

52:44It's a completely different. Yeah. And we don't have any unity. And the other thing is it keeps changing. It just reinvents itself. Every community reinvents itself, you know, every few years. So it's just not, it's never in any kind of stasis here. And there's always weird stories too. Like, like when I go to Keep This Game, people are like, oh, the last person who lived in your house, they had to leave it at like one in the morning. They just packed up and everything was gone the next day. and so like there's always a story every place in florida yeah so it's interesting you have a lot of material to draw from now in terms of the internet like and you mentioned how if you know in the 70s you write this column about natural childbirth and it goes quote unquote viral which is really like an internet kind of word and you refer to the internet a lot in your novel swamp story where this thing that happens goes viral even though everybody agrees including the people who like the story on the internet.

53:45Everybody agrees it's totally stupid. Well, that was one of the points I wanted to make about the whole thing was, and it took me a while, and I credit my daughter for kind of educating me on this because she's a smart person and she's reasonably cynical because her dad is a humor calmist. And she's very media savvy. And I'm thinking like, well, don't people think this is stupid? And she goes, yeah, people think it's stupid. but that's part of the charm of it. But the self-awareness of the people on TikTok, it's much more sophisticated than I think we old folk think it is. Their understanding of what's going on is very meta.

54:27And there's so many references to other things, to other things, to other, you know, TikTok, to other TikTok. So like when I created this phenomenon in the book, that this becomes this wildly popular thing, and it's just unbelievably stupid. But the whole point was the stupidity is what made people love it because they could they could bounce off that and use that. And everybody could sort of immediately connect to what the original stupid thing was. I like that. The idea that it's this this living, growing thing out there, TikTok, this mass consciousness that I wasn't. I'm not really part of it, not really aware of it, but it's huge and it's a significant part of the lives of a great many young people.

55:10And that's why I just want to involve that in the... Have you spent time on TikTok, like just scrolling mindlessly? Yes. It's amazing. It's great. Yes. And I keep telling, I have this discussion with my wife who's not into TikTok particularly, except for like every now and then she gets curated TikToks from our daughter, Sophie, that the level of creativity, considering what they're working with, just a phone and a few seconds, it's amazing to me sometimes. Yeah. There's a lot of idiocy and just a lot of narcissism and, you know, just stupid. But in there is quite a bit of brilliance too, just like if you find it.

55:50This is self-indulgent, but our daughter discovered this one. I think it's actually maybe Instagram. I'm not sure. Instagram. They overlap now though. They overlap, yeah. But it's this woman. All she does is comment on recipes. It's TikTok. TikTok, my wife tells me. There are these people who put horrible recipes on YouTube. I mean, just disgusting, but they don't mean them. They don't, they're, they mean it quite sincerely. There's usually a great deal of cheese involved and baking of cheese, you know? And there's a woman and she just looks at this and deadpan talks about what they're doing. And it's wonderfully funny.

56:26I mean, it's brilliantly funny. It's performance comedy, but it's just so well done. And she's just putting it out there. Like, I never heard of this woman. She, you can't go buy her DVDs or anything, but it's really good. It's very, I mean, I'm a professional humorist. This woman is really good at what she's doing. And there's a lot like her out there. And it's just so strange that this can happen now. That woman, there's no way that could happen 25 years ago, 30 years ago. I know. And now all you need is a phone. And if you're just the right kind of creative person, you can do an amazing amount with that phone.

57:04To your point, it still requires skill. like she's funny she's doing it in this deadpan style you know the woman you're describing and and she's able to to pull it off and a lot of people where there's this tinge of narcissism and ego they can't pull it off yes you need this level of self-awareness and skill and you know there's a fine line i guess anyway my wife just told me that woman has three million followers so she's probably making a you know a decent way yeah if she has sponsors uh you know tiktok i think is harder to monetize than some other media, but, but yeah, but that's just the thing.

57:38Now you could be, you know, 40 years ago, say if you were syndicated in a hundred newspapers, you were making a great living, but now she needs 3 million followers and it's still questionable if she's making a living, we don't know. We have to, we would have to know her. We'd have to think about it. But like, I always feel now if, if like Peter Parker existed now and became Spider-Man, he would be huge on tiktok like you want to be you want to be a superhero because i feel like there are superheroes on tiktok like my tiktok feed there's all these kids doing like quadruple jumps in the air or jumping off mountains and doing parkour and they have superpowers these kids on tiktok now and yes so it's a new thing and i'm wondering what changes for writers like on the one hand tiktok you know you're always competing for people's attention tiktok wins in many cases.

58:30And so to what extent have you felt that writing is maybe harder to break out than like, would your article about childbirth be quote unquote viral in today's world? No, no. The kind of thing I do, humor essays and longer form humor, I don't think there's much of a market for it now. It's just much easier. If you want to write, you kind of have to go now to movies and TV. And fortunately, there's a lot of good comedy shows and all the streaming services and so on. There's a need for that content. And I think that's where people like me, the me's of today, that's where they're going. I don't think, they're obviously not going to newspapers because they're dead.

59:20I mean, dead and gone. And so it's that, or TikTok, a lot of people, you know trying as you say it's like a crapshoot to monetize it but um what i do now i don't think i mean newspapers are interesting because think about like the ap the associated press which let's say most articles in a newspaper are ap style like this is what happened this is when it happened this is why it happened and so on that all now could be written by ai just in the past month, we've seen AI be able to do it better because the AI can write in the style of a journalist and it will know more facts. And so you have to sort of be either a humorist or an investigative journalist to survive in, let's say, next year's newspaper world.

1:00:07Once newspapers start to really realize the capabilities of AI, where are the newspapers a year from now? I don't know, man. And I wish I did know because that's, you know, my, not only does my wife work for newspaper, but many of my friends do. And my son works for a newspaper. But it's not at all clear where they're going to be a year from now, except they're not going to be in print anymore. The real trend is no more printed, no more newspaper. You know, it's going to be on your phone now. What's going to happen to the people who only want to read it in print? You know, the older folks, they're just, I don't know.

1:00:43I don't know where they're going to get their news. and the people who read it on their phones don't read it the same way, you know. How the newspapers will make enough money when they're only digital is a big question that nobody has a good answer to. I think you probably have to be, you have to do something. Like one thing AI can't do is it can't have a unique human experience. Like it can't go out and find the skunk ape shack. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't, yeah. And I guess I should say, well, eventually it'll learn to do that. Eventually it'll learn to do humor. But I will say so far, like a lot of people, when ChatGPT came out, what was it, a month or two ago?

1:01:27Yeah. 90 million people sent me the same email. Hi, I told ChatGPT to write a humor column Dave Barry style. And sometimes we would give it a topic and sometimes they wouldn't. But I ended up reading many. I never had to ask chat GPT myself because everyone did it for me. And I read all these humor columns written in my style and they weren't funny. Right, there's still a little bit of a generic feel to it. Like you feel like - No, yeah, it's like, it kind of like it was a lot of setups for jokes and a lot of lines that sound like they came from jokes, but they weren't actual jokes. They didn't actually have, they weren't funny.

1:02:00They were just like, like funny. They were humoroid, but they weren't humor. You know what I would love to see, but maybe this is just particular to me. I'd love to see you take those Chappie T versions of your columns and you rewrite them to be your column. And then we see, you know, before, after. So that kind of, that would be almost like an interesting lesson in writing to see the difference between the two. It'll be like, it'll be like this song about John Henry, the steel driving man. And he, he goes up against the steam driving thing and he, he, uh, he beats it, but then he dies of a heart attack.

1:02:33That's, that's what'll happen. And I'll go up against ChatGP and I'll be under so much pressure to be funnier than I'll die. Thanks a lot, James. Yeah, and I can see it if you publish this book. It would be split between five-star reviews and one-star reviews. Like the one-star reviews will all say, oh, the ChatGPT was funnier. Yeah. What does your wife think? What's a year from now in sports journalism when ChatGPT is up to date to the minute? Well, I don't think it's ready to replace sports journalists. but the overall economics of newspapers now is that sports reporters traditionally were the people who traveled the most for newspapers.

1:03:14You know, your team, if you covered the, you know, the Major League Baseball team, you went to 81 road games. And they don't do that anymore. Very few newspapers can send sports reporters on the road anymore. So more and more it's, you know, The reporters have to do everything by Zoom or don't do it at all. I don't think AI is replacing sports writers yet, but it will. It'll replace games, wrap-ups, and stuff like that. Where it really is already coming to play is real estate, where it's just a matter of this house and this address for this price and it sold last time for this. Those stories, you don't need a human being to write those.

1:03:55Crime stories, you don't need a human. financial stories. You don't think so? I mean, like, I could just see, like, horrendous mistakes being made on a crime story if you're not a human being. You don't know what's, you know, like, you could be very insensitive. Although humans are very insensitive, too. Like, there's all the... Michelle tells me, my wife tells me, they're using them for sports previews now, and they're terrible. They're terrible. Yeah, I could believe that. But now, bear in mind, she's a sports writer, so she... This team with this record. This team with this record, displaying this team with this record, you know.

1:04:27Yeah. You're right, though. It's going to get better. It's going to get better. And newspapers will have to cope with that. But the problem isn't that. The problem isn't producing the content. It's problem is getting somebody to pay for the content. That's where we're really struggling in the newspaper business. And I don't know if ChatGPT has anything to do with that. People aren't reading the news the way they used to. Young people don't read newspapers the way old people read newspapers. They're not as interested. No, it's true. And I guess the way newspapers deal with though is by cutting costs they're not going to raise revenues but they're going to cut costs and they could do that with chat gpt you know every paper in the country except for like really every paper is laying off even the big papers laying off people small papers they've laid off people to the point where a lot of them don't exist anymore but yeah it's that's cutting costs is where we're going so far nobody's come up with a revenue raising mechanism yet well i I wonder if lawyers, for instance, who deal with parking tickets, they can now use AI for everything from writing the letters to the courts, to responding to them, to knowing which part of the law the police did not follow.

1:05:39And so lawyers are rapidly using AI for everything. Yeah, if you're talking about bureaucracies, yeah, because they exist on just cranking out BS in huge quantities, pro forma stuff. And AI is perfect for that. Now, what's next for you? You're obviously going to continue writing, right? So what's the next book? I can tell you. I actually am writing, and I always say this with fear that I'll sound pompous. I'm writing my memoir. Memoirs are big now in the publishing world. People who have not really lived long lives at all, I've written sometimes more than one. But I talked about this a lot with my editor, Simon & Schuster, Priscilla Payton, we, she kind of talked me into it that, that, that, um, I've had a kind of long, interesting career, met a whole lot of people, had a whole lot of experiences and I'm going to, I'm in it.

1:06:35I'm writing it now. I'm right. Dredging up my entire life here. I think it'd be great. Like, when is that going to be out? I don't know. I do. I have to finish it by the end of this year. So I'm, I'm into it pretty far. Uh, well, not pretty far, but I'm into it and I don't know when they'll actually publish it. But this, but this leads to the kind of last question I wanted to have for you, which is that you've had this long career and you've met so many people in person and that you've become friends with. Like, you know, you mentioned Stephen King, Alan Swybel, and I'm sure there's a, you know, Art Buchwald, there's a billion people, Carl Heisen, there's a billion people in between.

1:07:13And do you think we're losing that a little bit? Like here, You and I are talking on Zoom. Almost all my conversations with people now are via Zoom. And while that's great, we wouldn't talk otherwise probably. I wonder if that kind of dumbs down all interactions a little bit or just mutes slightly all interactions a little bit. So in the future, people won't have the interactions you've had with people like Stephen King and Art Buchwald and so on. Well, I mean, that was largely a function of COVID that we don't, that we didn't for the last few years, but I feel like I've gotten back to seeing people in person.

1:07:50I agree with you that it's better, way, way, way better in person. For one thing, the last time I was, I was interviewed by you, I was there in person and you concluded the interview by giving me a bill of Iraqi currency with Saddam Hussein on it. Now we're not going to be able to do that this time. And I'm kind of, I'm disappointed to me. Right. I could have given you my Fidel Castro dollar. Oh, gee. No, not. I live in Miami and my mother-in-law escaped from Cuba. So I would not be allowed to have that, possess that. But I agree if your point is that it's better to see people in person. I could not agree with you more.

1:08:29I mean, yes. I wonder how people will write if all day long, all their experiences are just in their home. Oh yeah. That's yeah. You got to have presumably, although people more and more seem to just write about what's happening online, and live their lives that way. Well, Dave Barry, once again, Swamp Story, great novel, so much fun reading it. It was really just a pleasure to read. I hope you keep writing novels as well, but now I'm really excited about your memoir. By the way, did Art Buchwald ever write a memoir? I don't think he did. He did. No, he wrote a couple, because different phases of his life, but yeah, and he wrote, I'll never forget, he inscribed his book to me is, is he wrote this book called I'll always have Paris.

1:09:15He had the best job in the world. He was the Paris correspondent for the Herald Tribune. And all he did was whenever like Marilyn Monroe would go to Paris, Art Buchwald would show her around and they all, you know, he had entree to all the big restaurants over there. So he just met everybody. Every American person of note went to Paris. Art Buchwald would take them and they became friends for life. But his inscription to me was, to Dave, who missed it all.

1:09:47Anyway, he wrote a couple of memoirs. You're inspiring me because I enjoyed his books a lot. And I'm going to write a good one, too, I think. Anyway, and I'll come and talk to you about it if I can. Well, I really enjoy your books a lot. I'm super excited now that you said you were writing a memoir. So until next time, Dave, I really appreciate it. And once again, Swamp Story, great job, great novel. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's my pleasure, James, always is. Thank you.