A Trash-talking, Acid Wasted Golem is Revitalized in Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach

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Announcer (00:06):

You are connected and you are listening to specifically for seniors, the podcast for those in the Remember When Generation.

Announcer (00:17):

Today's Podcast is available everywhere you listen to podcasts and with video at specifically for seniors YouTube channel. Now, here's your host, Dr. Larry Barsh

Larry (00:38):

My guest today on specifically for seniors is Adam Mansbach. Adam is a novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic, and humorist. He's the author of the number One New York Times bestseller, go the F to Sleep, which has been translated into 40 languages named Time Magazine's 2011 thing of the Year, and sold over 3 million copies worldwide. His novels include Rages Back The End of The Jews, which was a winner of the California Book Award and Angry Black White Boy, which is taught, taught at over a hundred schools and was adapted into a prize-winning play in 2008. And his most recent novel, the Golem of Brooklyn Adam's debut, screenplay for the 2016 Netflix original Barry was nominated for an Independent Spirit award and an NAACP image award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times book review, Esquire, the Believer, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and on national public radios, all things Considered the Moth Storytelling Hour and this American Life. Welcome to specifically for seniors. Adam, it's great to have you on. Thank you.

Adam Mansbach (02:12):

Thanks for having me.

Larry (02:14):

Your writing spans many genres and topics, humor, Judaism, racial inequality, novels, poetry off-color, children's books for adults. What's Adam's Adam Mansbach about?

Adam Mansbach (02:33):

Well, <laugh>, what's Adam Mansbach about? I'm about 5 9 1 60 <laugh>. You know, when I think about myself as a writer, I tend to identify first as a novelist because that's the training that I went through endured. And it's also the genre in which I feel ultimately most free. So when an idea occurs to me, my first thought usually is, is this a novel before I think, is it a screenplay? Is it an essay? And for a long time, I primarily wrote novels. It wasn't until more recently that I sort of branched out into screenwriting, into children's books, into humor books. All of that began relatively recently. For the first 10 or 12 years of my career. At any given time, I was just always working on a novel and maybe popping my head up to write a book review now and then, or an essay.

Adam Mansbach (03:38):

But then filmmakers started optioning some of my novels. I started to get to know some of them. I started to work with them on adaptations. And I guess at some point it also occurred to me that even a movie that nobody sees still reaches a broader audience than a novel that everybody reads. So I began to work more in that genre, and I found it rewarding in its own way. With a novel, you can get away with anything that you can get away with digression stories inside of stories flights of fancy, all of that can be folded into a novel. If you have a strong enough architecture, a strong enough narrative, a strong enough narrator, in some cases, a screenplay in many ways is exactly the opposite. There's no wasted motion allowed. Even if you're writing a quirky independent screenplay, you still have to conform to very strict rules around structure, around three act format, around act breaks, around inciting incident by page 10 and first act break by page 27, you're writing literally in a format that is unbreakable.

Adam Mansbach (04:47):

Like if you use a screenwriting program such as Final Draft, which all professional screenwriters do, you can't even change the font. You can't change the margins. All the things that you might have done as a middle school student when your essay was supposed to be five pages and you only had three and a half pages. So you edge the font up from 12 to 14, you move the margins at a little bit. You can't do any of that cutesy stuff. A screenplay is the length that it is, and if it's over 120 pages, a an exec who's reading it might throw it in the garbage pile because it's too long. So there's all of this sense of built-in parameters, and when I started doing that, I found that I really enjoyed that. Well, it was a new set of rules to learn. The same was true when I started writing commercial fiction, supernatural thrillers.

Adam Mansbach (05:36):

You know, every once in a while there's like an appetite in the industry for literary writers to cross over into genre literature. So, you know, 10 years ago or so after Go the to Sleep happened, I had the chance to do that. And again, it was a genre I knew very little about, and I had to figure out the rules, how to do something so propulsive that every chapter ended with a a, a, a cliffhanger or a reversal, had to braid together four or five points of view. Again, these were things I hadn't done before, so I enjoyed figuring them out. I was a poet before I was anything else. And so rhyming has always been a love of mine. I grew up as a rapper and a spoken word artist. So returning to that form always feels like coming home. But again, it's about figuring out how to be creative within a set of rules. If I'm giving myself an assignment by which I have to rhyme every two lines, or I have to write an entire book in an A, b, c, b rhyme scheme, these are fun challenges for me. So I kind of enjoy all of it. I love the fact that I'm able to move between different genres within the world of writing everything from political ads and PSAs to poetry, to screenwriting, to novel. So I don't know. That's that's my attempt at an answer as to what I'm about <laugh>.

Larry (06:59):

What got me interested in talking with you was the article in the Washington Post in September this year. Antisemitism is Rising Time to Seminal 10 foot Tall Crisis Monster. You talked about neo-Nazis marching in Florida. Donald Trump chastising liberal Jews for voting against them. And in the month and a half since then, all hell has broken loose with antisemitism, with TikTok and Elon Musk and the war in Israel, the antisemitism on college campuses. Why antisemitism now? Is it the war in Gaza specifically, or is it a matter of any excuse any time is a good time for antisemitism?

Adam Mansbach (07:53):

Well, it's funny. I mean, I wrote that editorial before the war began. I wrote it and it was published the day that my novel, the Golem of Brooklyn was published. So it was an attempt to sort of tie the book into current events, but I think what you just said is very astute. We're never very far away from the last or the next incident of antisemitism. You know, when I sold the book, my publisher felt that it was so timely that they wanted to rush it out. It took about 10 months to come out rather than 18 or 24, which might be typical for a novel. And my joke was that I didn't have the heart to tell them that, you know, antisemitism would still be around in the spring. So on one hand, yeah, I mean, the praxis and the ideology of white nationalism is very much built on the chassis of antisemitism.

Adam Mansbach (08:47):

It's very, very central to the dissemination and the practice of hate that that, that those groups all engage in that affect. Of course, not only Jews, but black folks, immigrants, gay and trans and lesbian folks a wide swath of people who they consider less than who they consider not fully human or not fully American, or not fully worthy of being vested with the rights and the privileges that they feel they have earned. You know, and it's in many ways for them about the erosion of the white privilege that has carried them for generations that they feel is being challenged now. So they feel like their quality of life has declined because they have to compete with people that they previously did not. But they have also always felt this way. They have always been pining for a time when this unchallenged unexamined version of whiteness was allowed to exist and proliferate and allowed them to be the only stakeholders, the only fully vested, fully realized people in the world.

Adam Mansbach (09:56):

So in that sense, you know, it's nothing new At the same time, as you also said we live in a, an age now where the dissemination of everything moves at a different rate. Social media has thrown everything into kind of a tailspin and a whirlwind. It's hard to separate fact from fiction. It's hard to know the actual impact of an event because it gets filtered through all of this social media hysteria. And it's hard to tell how impactful an event was because once it's been amplified, it can turn into something incredibly different, right? So, you know, for example, and, and, and of course, the people who are trying to publicly make statements about their own antisemitism, their own hatred of all sorts, they, they know this and they take advantage of it. So, you know, a neo-Nazi march in Florida that attracts 14 people might otherwise go unremarked upon.

Adam Mansbach (10:56):

But because it's filmed, because it's shared endlessly, the sense of its importance becomes amplified on both sides. And this is a game that all sides play into to everybody's detriment in some ways. So we have a greater awareness of these threats, but these threats also seem far more dangerous, far scarier, far bigger than they might otherwise. Were we not viewing them through the lens and the matrix of social media? Yeah, when I wrote that piece, I was talking about among other things, the ways in which the Golem, which is a creature from Jewish folklore who I kind of reinvent in this novel, the Golem of Brooklyn. You know, traditionally a Golem is a humanoid creature made of mud or clay, nine, 10 feet tall, brought to life through secret prayers and incantations always by a rabbi or a very learned and religious Jewish man, always at a time of immediate crisis to defend the Jews.

Adam Mansbach (12:00):

But also, and I've been thinking more about this as the last month and a half has unfolded equally important to the myth of the Golem is that as soon as peace is restored, as soon as any semblance of order has been restored, the golden is always deactivated. The golden is never allowed to persist as a perpetual vigilante or an eternal watchman or a nuclear deterrent against antisemitism, because to keep the golden active in that way would also compromise our humanity profoundly. So the Golem exists to protect, but we also have always understood through this mythology and this folklore how inherently dangerous that Golem is, not just to our enemies, but to us, to our own sense of who we are. So we've been wise enough to realize that he can't stay around. Nobody builds a thousand foot Golem, no one builds an army of Golem. The Golem represents power and aggression, and power and aggression is such concentrations that we, the creators of the Golem usually cannot control him. It is a, a a a kind of technology that outpaces our spiritual understanding. So he's dangerous and he must be dispensed with as soon as possible. I've been thinking a lot more about that as we face the realities of war in Gaza.

Larry (13:32):

So the Jewish concept of Tikkun Alom comes into the Golem mythology as well.

Adam Mansbach (13:40):

It certainly does in my book. Yeah. you know, ultimately the characters in my book are faced with a dilemma about how far to allow the Golem to take things in as much as they control the Golem at all, because the Golem in my book has something of a will of his own. He's not created by a rabbi or at a time of crisis. He's created by a guy who is kind of a regular schmuck. He's an art teacher in Brooklyn who happens to be in possession of a large quantity of clay and extremely stoned. And he makes a Golem kind of for no reason at all. And the Golem immediately demands to know where the crisis is. And this is a question that Len, his creator, can't really answer. And we learned that the Golem in my book, this is not the Golem of folklore, but the Golem of my novel is a creature with an ancestral memory.

Adam Mansbach (14:34):

So Len, it turns out, has not made the Golem, but remade him. The Golem is just the latest iteration of this one monster who's existed periodically through all of history, and thus is a creature in possession of an ancestral memory. So he remembers ancient Egypt and fifth century Babylon and 11th century Spain. And all the times he's been brought to life to face various crises or for other reasons, and it's inconceivable to him that he could be brought back when there is no crisis. Eventually, Len and Miri, the other main character in the book show the golden footage of the Charlottesville Tiki Torch 2017, unite the right neo-Nazis. And, and they're like, okay, here's the crisis. These guys, they want to kill the Jews. And the golden is like, great, let's go see them. Where are they? And it turns out there's a rally that's gonna take place in a couple of days time in a town called Wagner, Kentucky, which I made up. Kentucky is real. So they, they make their way

Larry (15:47):

In your mind, in your mind at least

Adam Mansbach (15:49):

<Laugh>. So they make their way toward this rally, and at some point it becomes clear to Mi and Len that the Go's intentions are to slaughter everybody. And so the notion of Tik k Olam comes in because Lenn and Mi, who are very different characters, both Jewish, but from very different parts of the kind of spectrum of the Jewish world, Len is extremely secular, grew up that way, describes himself as observant, only in the sense that he notices things. Mary, on the other hand, grew up in an ultra Orthodox set, which she left at 18 because Mary is a lesbian and she couldn't really be herself in that world. But she retains a very different sense of ritual and practice and what Judaism means, the two of them find themselves grappling with the fact that their only choices really are to either let the Golem run wild and slaughter hundreds of neo-Nazis, in which case they as Jews might be safe, but also they might have acted in such a manner that is so Inc commensurate, so anathema to fundamental Jewish values that in some sense they may no longer be Jewish, or they can kill the, they can unmake the Golem.

Adam Mansbach (17:06):

And Tikkun Alom gets evoked throughout the book in different ways. This idea of repairing the world, which is one of the values that lend who is not religious, but nonetheless has these values that are very important to him, that he considers fundamental to Judaism and to himself. This is one of them. And he's like, MI, we can't let the Golem do this. What about repairing the world? What about Tikun, Olam and Mi is like schmuck? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe this is how we repair the world? And this is kind of this, the crossroads and the, the, the standoff with which the book ends with the two of them unable to agree on what they should do with and about this Golem and facing this kind of moral and spiritual dilemma

Larry (17:54):

At the beginning of the book, the Golem Speaks only Yiddish and learns English by watching Larry David, why <laugh>?

Adam Mansbach (18:04):

Yeah, that's right. Watching Larry, David watching Curb Your Enthusiasm also after ingesting a very large amount of LSD. It's funny 'cause we've been talking about this book for five minutes now, and it occurs to me that anybody listening would not understand that the book is a comedy, that the book is actually like, pretty funny, or at least my intention is for the book to be funny. Because it does deal with sort of serious subject matter. But also, yes, the Golem learns English by watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. When he's first made, he only speaks Yiddish and he's like trashing len's apartment and screaming at him in a language he doesn't understand, which is why Len has to go out and find a translator, which is where Mary comes in because she grew up in this Orthodox set. So she's a native Yiddish speaker. He finds her, she works at the bodega in his neighborhood, and he somehow convinces her to come back to his house to translate for this Golem. 

Larry (18:58):

And the original, the original question he asks

Adam Mansbach (19:03):

That The golden of

Larry (19:04):

Avu Mayem Schmock?

Adam Mansbach (19:07):

<Inaudible> <laugh> of, yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah. The two things that the Golem is really yelling at Len, one in Yiddish, one is, where's the Crisis? The other is, where's my dick? Because Len, in building this golden amount of clay, did not make him a penis. And the Golden is upset about this. It's unclear what the golden exactly would do with a male organ because, you know, his primary job is to like destroy things <laugh>. But yeah, I, you know, why Larry, David, why Curb Your Enthusiasm? I wanted to, I mean, first of all, one of the joys of writing a novel is that you kind of just like go with the, you build an internal logic to your book, and you can't always quantify every decision in like very practical terms. Certain things just kind of make sense to you in the fog and haze of writing a book.

Adam Mansbach (19:59):

And for me, something about having the Golem learn English by watching Curb your enthusiasm just felt right. He needed to learn English. I wasn't gonna write an entire book where the Goli spoke Yiddish and everything he said had to be translated. That would've been totally unwieldy. I also knew that when he learned English, it was gonna be a bit of like a broken English. The Golem always refers to himself as the Golem. He speaks with like a strong kind of you know, eastern European accent. He sounds a little bit the way that Bigfoot might sound. Somebody told me he sounded like Cookie Monster, which hadn't occurred to me. But of course, cookie Monster is a personal hero of mine. So, you know, that makes sense. I also, you know, I wanted to evoke, I mean, this book hopefully exists in a kind of continuum of Jewish humor that is very pointed and incisive and funny and serious at the same time.

Adam Mansbach (20:56):

You know I did a whole book tour for a book I co-wrote with Dave Barry and Alan's y Bell called a Field Guide to the Jewish People. And people always asked us like, well, what is Jewish humor? And my first response was always like, well, first of all, have you ever even heard the term Christian humor? No, you haven't. So let's start there. And you know, in a sense, I think Larry David represents the latest, the modern iteration of a long tradition of using humor to get right to the heart of matters. For me, in most of my work, humor is a very kind of important color on my palette, because if you can disarm people through laughter, you can get them to engage with topics that they might otherwise be afraid to engage with. Topics that are too thorny, too fraught, but something happens, something changes in the body and in the mind when you're laughing and it disarms you and your guard comes down and you're maybe willing to come to the table in different ways.

Adam Mansbach (21:58):

And I think Jewish humor in particular, you know, some of my favorite Jewish jokes, like in the span of one minute, cut straight to the heart of matters, so thorny and complex, that you would have to write an entire novel to get into the meat of it. But a joke can do it immediately. And also, some of those jokes are incredibly divisive. And like you tell 'em in a room full of Jewish folks and half those people will hate the joke, and the other half will be laughing uproariously. One of my favorite Jewish jokes, which I've been telling at a lot of events as an illustration of this point, for example, is a joke that my mother hates so much that she's repeatedly asked me never to tell it again.

Larry (22:36):

I was going to ask you to tell that joke if you would.

Adam Mansbach (22:40):

Joke goes like this, this Jewish guy moves in next door to Rockefeller, and he buys a mansion just as big. He buys a car identical to Rockefeller as he even hires the same gardener to trim the hedges. And one day Rockefeller walks out of his house and he looks over and he sees his neighbor and he shouts over. He's like, Hey, you think you're as good as me, don't you, Jewish guy's like as good as you? I think I'm better than you. And Rockefeller is furious, and he demands to know why. And the guy's like, well, for one thing, I don't live next door to a Jew <laugh>. To me that joke does everything right. There's the redirection of antisemitism back at the antisemite, but there's also this level of self-hatred and, you know, self-recrimination, and I mean, it's, it's all very complicated, right? The existence of this guy is like, in itself this very fraught thing, but in this moment, he's able to crystallize this thing and give Rockefeller this retort that, you know, Rockefeller, the, the joke does not record Rockefeller's response, but we can only imagine that Rockefeller never recovers fully <laugh> from this exchange.

Adam Mansbach (23:52):

Right?

Larry (23:56):

I have a strange question. A little while ago, there were reports of a cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Let's set up a hypothetical cage match. Be <laugh> between the Golem and Elon Musk ground rules. The Golem can't kill. Huh? Who wins? Why?

Adam Mansbach (24:19):

Oh, how, oh, listen, the odds in a cage match like that, I think Vegas would have to put that at about 10 million to one. The Golem is going to beat that immediately. It will be over in about three seconds. The Golem, let's not forget, is a 10 foot tall, 400 pound crisis monster who exists solely to inflict pain, suffering, and damage on those who deserve it. And I can think of very few people who deserve it more <laugh> than Elon Musk. So, yeah, I don't care how much MMA training he does, I don't care how many expensive personal trainers he hires, Elon Musk is taking a quick and brutal loss in that cage match, and I will be front row to watch it.

Larry (25:11):

<Laugh>, what are the dangers of, of not allowing but having a man like Musk in charge of such a powerful, or what was a powerful social media platform?

Adam Mansbach (25:27):

Well, I mean, first of all, I think the risks of having Elon Musk in charge of what may even be a majority of the satellites in the world is a greater risk. I mean, Elon Musk is personally liaising with like the, the, the Ukrainian military. And if he decides to not allow them access to his satellites in the midst of a battle, they are suddenly fighting in a, like a blackout situation. And, you know, that's just the example that happens to be going on in the world right now. But the amount of infrastructure controlled by this one man on a, on a, on a worldwide level because of these satellites, the infrastructure that Tesla controls in terms of like electric vehicle charging stations throughout this country, probably others too, is also like crazy To the point where other electronic car manufacturers, my understanding is have to kind of get him to agree to let them, you know, plug into his stations, like adapt their, you know, plug their adapters into the Tesla chargers so that other forms of electronic vehicles, electric vehicles can be charged.

Adam Mansbach (26:45):

Like that's just on an infrastructure level. And I think in terms of Twitter or X under his leadership, it's turned into an absolute cesspool. It used to be a place that, I mean, you could do any number of things there, right? You could waste unmentionable amounts of time, but you could also, if you desired, use it as a reliable news source because reporters were on there, news organizations were on there, people were verified. That was what I used, you know, I'm a news junkie, and I, I particularly in the Trump years, could hardly tear myself away from the news cycle because we were all living in such a state of perpetual agitation and panic because anything might happen at any moment. And all of those reporters who were once verified are no longer on Twitter or no longer verified because it's become a payment system.

Adam Mansbach (27:57):

So news organizations have been pulling up stakes and leaving. Meanwhile, anybody who wants to pay for verification can do so. But on an ethical journalistic level, journalists and news organizations cannot do that. So whatever existed in terms of a structure that allowed news to be disseminated and conversation to exist on anything representing a reasonable plane, it's all kind of been stripped away. Hate speech has proliferated, controls against hate speech have been systematically stripped away. Musk himself seems primarily concerned with building his own platform, which he's doing largely by engaging with white nationalists and purveyors of various kinds of hate speech he's been weighing in and retweeting and engaging with folks like that. My guess is that Twitter is going to wither and die because it's become just such a show under his leadership. And I hope that happens sooner than later, Frank, frankly. Because I think it's a platform that now the ceiling for it to do good has really come down and the floor for it to do damage and spread misinformation and just be a place where people go to simmer in various forms of hatred and aggression. And it, it, that, that floor has come way up. So it seems like a very untenable place.

Larry (29:35):

I can't let you go without your telling me the backstory of Go the to Sleep,

Adam Mansbach (29:43):

<Laugh>.

Larry (29:43):

I just can't, I can't let you

Adam Mansbach (29:45):

Go. Sure. well go The To Sleep is a book that I wrote when my oldest daughter, Vivian, who's almost 16 now, she was two when I wrote it. Sleeping was not high on her list of priorities. And like most parents, you know, I read an endless series of bored books to her when it was bedtime. Like these books that are all about like cutesy animals, toddling off to sleep, they usually have a certain rhyme scheme. They're all incredibly boring. And it occurred to me one day to kind of mash up or cross-pollinate those kinds of board books with an actual interior monologue of a parent trying to put a kid to bed and failing. And you know, I sat down and I wrote this book in like about 38 minutes. And initially it didn't seem to me like something that was publishable.

Adam Mansbach (30:45):

I thought it was just funny for me and like other parents. But I, I read it at a family gathering and it went over really well, like, you know, 80 year olds and eight year olds all thought it was funny. My agent was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I can't sell this book. So I took it straight to this friend of mine who is an independent publisher named Johnny Temple publisher, was called the Caic Books. They're in Brooklyn. Their motto is Reverse gentrification of the literary world. So you can tell they're like a real, you know, commercial dynamo with a a, a, a motto like that. And Johnny thought it was hilarious too. But the two of us were like, we're we're probably just the only two people who were, you know, the audience for this book. And it took us months to figure out that we should pull the trigger on it.

Adam Mansbach (31:30):

We like walked it into our local bookstore. 'cause We couldn't even figure out stuff like, where would you stock this book? We're like, it doesn't go in the kids section. It has the word on every page. And they loved it. They were like, oh, we'd put it in the parenting section. And Johnny and I were like, oh my God, there's a parenting section which kind of confirms our earlier thesis that we were just parents. So we decided we were gonna publish it. And about six months before it was meant to be published, which would've been October, 2011, so in April of 2011, we had just gotten the page proofs back. I had APDF of the book, and I was supposed to give a reading at a museum in Philly as part of an evening of short performances. This was a very poorly planned evening.

Adam Mansbach (32:14):

There were like 50 of us who were supposed to read for five or 10 minutes. It was like this wild variety show. I went on dead last, so half the Crowd was gone. I went on after a 96 year old tap dancer which <laugh> like you never want to follow a 96 year old not on stage freeway, n never. She had come up with the Ub Blake Orchestra to give you some idea of how old this woman was. UB Blake died in 1980 at the age of like 165. So I read the book and it went over well, but I didn't really think much of it. I just, I went home and went to sleep. But the book's Amazon page had just gone up for pre-orders. And when I woke up in the morning, the book was sitting at like 125 out of all books.

Adam Mansbach (32:59):

This is a very low number as a writer of literary fiction, I'd never seen a number under like five digits in my life. So something clearly was going on. People were pre-ordering this book. And by the end of the week, the book was number one on Amazon, this book that did not exist and was not meant to exist for many more months. So we began frantically rushing the book forward toward publication with the goal of getting it out by June in time for Father's Day. And meanwhile, the book just sat there at number one. And so we started getting media requests. All kinds of stuff started happening, the PDF of the book that we had sent to booksellers because we were afraid that nobody was gonna stock a book called Go The to Sleep that leaked and started ricocheting around the internet and landing in hundreds of thousands of people's mailboxes.

Adam Mansbach (33:44):

And, you know, we were terrified. We thought that meant nobody was gonna buy the book. Turns out it did not really hurt us at all, because you can't show up at a baby shower with like a low resolution printed out, stapled together PDF and be like, we love you so much. It's such a wonderful time, you know? So we managed to get the book out in time for Father's Day. Samuel L. Jackson read the audio book, which dropped the same day, you know, and the book is so short that like everything happened very fast, you know, so like Tuesday, it was like Sam Jackson's gonna read the audio book and then like later Tuesday it was like, it's done. He finished it, it's great. And then like Wednesday, it's like he's gonna read it on the Dave Letterman show tonight. Like everything was just happening very fast.

Adam Mansbach (34:25):

And the book stayed at number one. That whole time at debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. It stayed there for many months. And, you know, I like all kinds of wacky stuff happened. It became everybody's sort of talking point. People were writing editorials about, you know, decrying the vulgarity and other people were like, no, this is a, a, a, a correction to the culture of preciousness around parenting. You know, people in New Zealand wanted to censor the book. All kinds of crazy stuff was happening. Other celebrities ended up reading the book. So, you know, now years later, the list just continues to grow. Like every once in a while I'll be minding my business and my phone will start blowing up and it'll be because like Cardi B is on the Tonight Show, reading the book because she's pregnant and like they gave her the book on the air.

Adam Mansbach (35:15):

Or this summer Ani DeFranco out of the blue read the book on her YouTube channel. You know, it's like the book has kind of taken on this life of its own. Sam Jackson and I have collaborated a bunch of times since then based on everybody's love of his reading of the audiobook. So like, he and I made a couple of political ads. One was an Obama Biden ad in 2012 called Wake the Up in the aftermath of Go The To Sleep. And then during Covid we made APSA called Stay the At Home, which was a fundraiser for Feeding America that he performed on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. So yeah, the book has sort of like found a place in the, in the firmament of, of culture and all these years later still kind of has a life and still sells and you know, people still buy it and bring it to baby showers.

Larry (36:08):

Make a couple of more political ads for this season, which,

Adam Mansbach (36:12):

Oh yeah, I'm, I'm on it. Please. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, Sam and I, you know, we made the Obama ad in 2012, and then in 2020 we made a Biden Harris ad called Same Old, which I wrote and directed and which was a television ad. So in elections where Sam and I collaborate on a political ad, Democrats are undefeated. Sadly, we took 2016 off. So we won't make that mistake again. So we'll figure something out.

Larry (36:40):

We'll be looking forward to it. <Laugh>, this has been great, Adam. Where do you go from here? What's next?

Adam Mansbach (36:49):

Well I've been touring for the Golden of Brooklyn for the past three months. I just got home. I also am part of the Writer's Guild, so I'm newly not on strike. So I think I'll be turning my attention to some TV and film projects that have been on hold while we marched on the picket lines. One of which may be an adaptation of the Golem of Brooklyn, another of which may be my debut as a director, which is a film I wrote and hope to shoot sometime next year called Boom, which is itself an adaptation of a book I wrote called I Had a Brother Once, which is a memoir in verse. So yeah, I'm gonna try to stay busy.

Larry (37:36):

Did we miss anything? Anything else you'd like to talk about

Adam Mansbach (37:39):

<Laugh>? I think we covered a lot of bases.

Larry (37:44):

This has been great, Adam, I am so appreciative of your coming on specifically for seniors. It's been a joy. It's been fun. It's been great meeting you.

Adam Mansbach (37:53):

You too. Thanks so much for having me.

Announcer (37:59):

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