Joe Gleason on Joe Box, Edy Show Joe, Home Planet, and the Power of Smiling

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

OK! Here's what is cooking today: If you've been reading my Screen Memories columns, then you know that I am a huge fan of Joe Box, the off-the-rails game show and Pod About List spinoff hosted by Ridgewood-based comedy guy Joe Gleason. Joe Box is quite simply one of the funniest things going right now, and I'd also put Joe's semi-regular visual podcast Edy Show Joe, which he co-hosts with friend-of-the-newsletter Edy Modica, in the same...box. It was Edy herself who helped bring Joe and I together (thank you again, Edy!), as I was highly interested to dive ten thousand meters deep into Joe's mind when it came to the ins and outs of Joe Box as well as the various things that make him tick and tock in general. We linked up last week in Ridgewood for an hour-plus conversation that was at turns hilarious, mutually relatable, and very revealing; at the end of our chat, Joe himself was recognized by a fan in the coffee shop, which just goes to show (goes to Joe?) that the cult of Joe Box is indeed growing by the day. I'm very happy to bring this interview to you here today, check it out:

Let's start with the Joe Gleason origin story.
I grew up in New York—parents divorced, two houses.

When did they get divorced?
When I was two. Pretty early. I played baseball as a kid. I was big into baseball for a while. I've always liked New York, because I feel like I could go anywhere and have a good head on my shoulders with knowing how to get around stuff. We'd do fights in the Astor Place Kmart.

Wow, I actually forgot about the Astor Place Kmart until you just brought it up. I've lived here since graduating from NYU in 2009, and I used to go there all the time. When it closed down, I was like, "Even though I haven't been in this space in years, I guess I'll miss it."
They were like paring it down slowly. It used to be an incredible space. So we overlap a good amount, because 2009 is fifth or sixth grade for me. That's when I started trekking and doing my own thing. As a city kid, that's the age in which you start to feel emboldened and go around on my own. But yeah, I played baseball, I was on a travel team and had to go to the gym to work out for it and whatever. I didn't really like doing it. I liked doing goofy stuff more while being on the baseball team, if that makes sense.

It does. You didn't have semi-pro aspirations or anything?
I wasn't that good. I was tall, so, hypothetically, with someone who's shaped like me, that's a guy who could pitch well. But I was a guy who wasn't that good, but was tall wide-shouldered. I loved doing school projects. I was a fan of any time I got to do a little presentation.

When I was in high school, I was in remedial science, and our teacher was like, "We're just gonna make PowerPoints every week." It was clear that he favored funny PowerPoints, so it became this escalating dare to make something that's loaded with jokes and then one slide about, like, mitochondria.
Yeah, you can tell pretty early on in the school year whether the teacher's gonna let that slide. I was big into making the first presentation a song with a video or whatever. Then, when you get a C on that, you're like, "Okay, I guess this teacher is not gonna be wowed by my charm and creativity." I was often going through life trying to charm my way out of getting in trouble.

How often did you get in trouble?
There was always one class that I was just bad in. I was a "Should apply himself more" type of kid. There was also just a thing where sometimes you're like, "I guess it's just this one older guy that didn't like me that much. That's not that big of a deal." Then you're like, "I'm going to test the limits of how much I can push this. I don't think I'm going to be a guy who gets into physics at any point." And if my physics teacher didn't like me—that's no harm, no foul.

Where did you go to school in proximity to your two houses?
My mom was Lower East Side, and my dad lived in Chelsea, by MSG. I went to school on the East River. It was a fun, a nice place to grow up. You can figure out what type of shit you like doing a lot easier than in other places, where your choices are "doing drugs" or "not doing drugs."

And you went in the latter direction, I assume.
I had my little dabbles. But I wasn't diving in on the drug front.

You talked about the instinct to evade trouble by winning people over, which is something I feel like I hear from a lot of people who work in comedy. What did you find funny from an early age that guided you to where you're at now?
In the baseball setting, I was definitely the weird kid who prided myself on being, I guess, myself. I liked saying stuff that people found funny. It almost wasn't even intentional. We went to Florida for a baseball tournament, and one time I hung back and went to the gas station down the street and bought 10 big glass bottles of chocolate milk. I wasn't trying to do that because it was a funny thing to do. It was just genuinely a more exciting and interesting thing than going to Long John Silver's with the guys.

Where did you go to college?
Emerson. Pretty much everyone who's in my little crew—or, at least, the Pod About List guys—we all met in college and had our own little bubble.

What did you study?
Film. For the first couple years out of college, I thought I was gonna be more behind the camera, making stuff. I did the sketch stuff with [Alex Forrest] for Home Planet, and Joe Box was definitely an effort to have a front-facing Joe show, just because it's fun to not just be behind the scenes.

What drove you to go to school for film? Because it sounds like your adolescence was fairly sports-focused, whether you liked it or not.
I mean, I did like making videos.

Were you a YouTuber?
I had a couple different YouTube things. I had a pretty good Juan Ponce de León
explorers project in fourth grade. It was my first all-nighter. Me and my mom stayed up and made it. The most fun thing to do is to make stuff.

What were some things you were into that sparked your creativity, in terms of comedy and elsewhere?
I was a big Always Sunny fan as a kid. I had a torrent of all the SNL digital shorts.
There was NBC Thursday night thing—30 Rock, The Office. Watching Seinfeld with my dad, the laugh track was nice, because I was like, "Oh, that's supposed to be funny." I was a big Kramer guy.

I mean, when you're a kid, Kramer's the funniest.
Yeah, it's the most accessible "big crazy guy does funny thing." I've held on to "big crazy guy does funny thing" as a highlight of what comedy can be. When you're younger, you see someone like Kramer, and you're like, "I hope someone like this is in my life." Then you get older and you're like, "If my closest friends came in my apartment like that right now, I would be very concerned almost immediately." If my neighbor did that, I would feel even worse.

I actually have a neighbor who tried to burst into my apartment.
Kramer-style or more subdued?

He's pretty eccentric—
He's a Kramer.

He's a Kramer, yeah. He showed up to my apartment at 10:45 at night, while my wife was literally getting ready to bed in the bathroom, and he just comes in and is like, "I need you to give me ear medication." And then he braces himself against the wall and hands me his medication. I was like, "Jesus Christ, man. We know each other, but not this well."
You're not "applied medication" friends.

Honestly, we kind of are at this point.
Well, that's your fault for doing it the first time.

I know.
Once you do it once, you become the easy go-to.

It's also the fact that I'm the only one who's always home in our building. One time, he stepped in a bunch of broken glass and texted the building group chat, "Can anybody help me out with something?" I go downstairs, and he hands me a tweezers and a bottle of alcohol, and he's like, "I need you to remove a bunch of glass from my foot." I had to get down on my knees and pull shards of glass out of his foot while he was wincing throughout. But you know what? There's no other time where that type of thing was gonna happen.
That's how I feel about going to a funeral, too. When something's weird, it's like, "Okay, this is the only weekend that this weird thing's ever gonna happen." So, you gotta dive in and experience this guy's foot. It also would probably be a worse place if we didn't have the people who are like, "Hey man, my foot is covered in glass. You need to come here right now."

You mentioned Always Sunny before. Have you watched the more recent seasons?
"No" is the short answer. It seems like it's the type of thing where, once everyone else has other better things to do, the cohesiveness of it all dropped—like, when people are looking like actors. I remember they did one where they go to Ireland, and the first scene outside in Ireland is very specifically Culver City. I was like, "I don't want to watch this if they're just walking around Culver City."

I will say, the Ireland episodes are pretty good. The way they end is surprisingly touching as well.
People like those. I probably could've given it more, but also, the older I get, the less I want to watch a new show that's coming out. I've hit the legacy TV tentpoles pretty hard. I put 30 Rock on my phone when I wash dishes, to deactivate my brain with a thing I've heard 10 times before. I can really enter the zone of washing dishes.

So you don't have a dishwasher.
[Points to himself] It's me. But I'm good.

Elaborate when you say "I'm good." What does that mean to you?
Washing it is going to take a longer time, but there are going to be dishes without a spot. If someone is staying over and they wash a couple dishes, I end up pulling them off the drying rack. I'm a "Scrub under the plate" guy. I scrub the silverware handles, too—and I'll tell you right now, I'm going home after this. I got some dishes to get to, and I'm pretty excited for it.

Are you somebody who takes to cleaning in general?
I'm someone who says I take to cleaning all the time, and then I don't. I need to be more proactive on the cleaning front. But my girlfriend's gone 9-to-5, Monday through Friday, and I work from home. So if it's cleaner than it was in the morning, I can pat myself on the back and chalk that up to a little victory. A thing I've learned from my girlfriend is, apparently when you say "I'm going to clean the house today," it checks off the thing in your brain that you've cleaned the house already. So you get the little dopamine release of, "I'm amazing at cleaning and I'm awesome," and then you can do four dishes instead of doing your whole house. "I said I'd clean, and I cleaned some of it, so everything's good." The same thing applies to screenplays. You're like, "Yeah, I'm writing this great screenplay."

I've had a similar approach when it comes to book proposals. I was even about to say, "I'm working on a book proposal"—but I have not worked on any sort of book proposal. I have an idea for a book. But in my head, I'm like, "Yeah, this book is really coming together."
It's sort of evil, what your brain can do to you.

Let's talk about Home Planet. I loved what you and Alex did with that, and obviously the cast of collaborators are Joe Box regulars as well. Talk me through yours and Alex's friendship.
We met in college during freshman year, and then we were all in the same sketch group. Alex and I definitely locked in on each other. I always prided myself on being able to understand how to zoom out and actually put something together. I thought that was the thing I was good at. I know how to edit, I know how to film stuff and make it look okay, and I can do shitty little scores. Alex is good at generating a bunch of stuff, so it was this nice, easy marriage where he can write and come up with shit. We also both find the same things funny that aren't actually funny. "A guy who's in love with Marilyn Monroe" is an easy one, as well as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson doing anything. We just had to have a good shorthand on how to make things in a way that's fun.

A fair amount of Home Planet videos zero in on types of person, which is a super tough tightrope walk to balance. You don't want to veer into generalization, and if there's an over-characterization, that can sometimes be potentially repellent. But something like the waitress sketch with Mera Caufield is impressive to me. In a lot of other comedians' hands, going into these sort of characterizations would probably cross some sort of line into being kind of offensive, or just hurtful towards people's general way of being. But even though you guys don't pull any punches, it's still funny without feeling disrespectful.
"Look at this crazy, weird guy" is always a main comedy thing. But the thing that we both find funny is, "This guy is really weird because he's like this"—like when you have a crazy guy who works at Home Depot, or Mera being this waitress who's clearly terrible and doesn't care about her job. When you're like, "This is what's actually important to this person," it's unlocked what is funny.

My favorite one is when Pierce and Cameron are at the mall, and they turn out to be a teacher and a student. It's two emo kids who are acting out, which is a really broad, simple thing—"Oh my God, the world is so fucked up," blah blah blah—and then you find out they love each other. It's a fucked up relationship that they have, but they do have that bond. Nothing is coming between this friendship, even if both of the parents and the school would both really want that.

It also seems like an acknowledgment that everybody's weird. Maybe the weirdest thing a person can do is insist that they're not weird.
Which I do a lot.

Would you characterize yourself as weird?
I definitely try to go through my life in a normal way. Since I started Joe Box and started putting myself out there more, I've defaulted to trying to act as normal and naturally as possible—and the uptick in people saying that I'm a weird maniac or whatever has definitely gone up considerably.

Let's talk more about you getting in front of the camera. With the Home Planet stuff, you're definitely more behind the scenes. Since the first Joe Box during the Pod About List special, you've become more of a personality, which can come with its own insecurities.
A woman once told me that all I need to do is smile and I can get through anything in life—which was nice. It was an older woman that I'd never met before. I don't know if that's true, but I'll stick with that.

When I did [Joe Box on] the Pod About List special, people who watched their show liked it enough that it felt like a reasonable thing to branch off and do. I also like doing stuff in a controlled environment, where I can figure out what we're gonna do and establish what the boundaries of it are. I had a lot less fun when I had to play my own game.

You're talking about the "PierceBox" episode.
Yeah, that one wasn't a comfortable thing. But when I'm hosting it, it's a comfortable, easy thing.

Why was it uncomfortable for you?
Because I like knowing what the logistics are. I was also having to think about stuff during it. "Is this working? Is this coming together?"

So if one of your friends did kind of something similar in terms of pulling people in for participatory elements, that'd be something that you'd feel less comfortable doing.
Well, if it was someone else's thing, I think it'd be totally fine. It's more because it's still my little thing, so I had to think more than I normally had to think.

In order to try to make money now, you need to have something that's coming out steady—something where, when you go somewhere on the internet, you know what you're looking at. I love a lot of the Home Planet stuff, but the problem with that was, if you're a brand new person who opens this and you see a cinematic short-form sketch, it's not easy to get that it's these two guys who make these sketches. If you want to do those sketches, you need to play video games on streams or whatever. I don't know how that works. So this Joe TV thing is just where all the Joe shit goes.

I was thinking about what I [watch] on my phone. I [watch] bullshit most of the time. I don't care about what I'm watching—I just want to watch something that catches me for however long. So I have this little game show thing that I walked backwards into, and if I keep doing it, I can make something that's good bullshit that I care about. It's formulaic and super-structured. There's a million funny game shows throughout history. Before TV, they were doing it on the radio. But when you do it, it's going to be your own. I guess I just needed a structure to put myself out there.

Have you ever been a Dropout person?
Not until I started doing this, because there's similarities. I also watched some Taskmaster while I was washing dishes. I didn't know who any of the people were, and by the end of the season, you're like, "These are these five people, and this is why they're all funny." I was like, oh, "That has legs in terms of being a panel show."

You're putting out these Joe Box episodes pretty regularly. Are you doing this full-time?
I still do editing for digital marketing, but I'm getting considerably worse at hitting deadlines the more I'm doing Joe Box.

Let's talk about what goes into planning a season of Joe Box, right down to the casting.
There are people who I know I'd like to have on. I should go to shows more and figure out who is funny. But I love it when someone like Felipe comes back, and he's in it and he completely knows what it is. There's no learning curve, we're just playing. I really like the rules, and I like when people are just like, "Got it, I'm gonna play a jelly bean here."

It is really fun to watch somebody like Ivy Wolk get thrown into Joe Box and have to slowly make sense of it. By episode two or three, she knows what she's doing—engaging in the disrespect, so to speak.
Yeah, they really get it when they start being mean to me. I have Patrick behind the camera, and he's pretty much there to laugh and be another target for jokes to come in. Austin, who edits all the episodes, is he most instrumental to the show. He's crushing it. Once you have the group, it just becomes a "when to meet" booking thing. That's my least favorite part of it. And then you end up doing it at 8 p.m., it runs late, and then you're wandering home.

So you don't have a regular shooting schedule.
It probably should be more concrete, but it's creative people who all are doing different things. This season, we've had to do Wednesday nights, which is not the greatest time. You're coming off of a full day of working or living, and then you're hopping into it. But that's also what you gotta do. You can't not play the Tournament of Champions.

It does seem like there's a benefit to capturing people when they're most exhausted and they really have to force creativity and ingenuity. The synapses start firing in a specific way.
The whole show is, "You have to write a paper that you haven't written at 11 p.m. the night before." Even tomorrow, we're doing the finale—and I got none of it. I know what we're doing, sort of, but I have to figure out what we're doing. This one's getting crunched because I'm going to L.A. for Joe Box L.A, which is going to be nine contestants, three episodes. The winner of each of the three episodes goes to the finale on the fourth episode. That's going to be all in three days—which is the opposite of "Once a week, whenever it works out." I'd love to not have to do the logistics. I would love to—

Have somebody be your booker.
Yeah, and also just know people, because I don't know enough people. I love just doing it with my friends. People like when new people—people that they like—appear on the show. But it's also really fun to just have three of my closest friends, and we're gonna do stupid shit for an hour. There's a low-stakes aspect to that.

So you're gonna film an entire season in L.A.
Yeah. The place we're gonna shoot just fell through. I didn't realize how lucky I have it, that I have this dedicated [space]. That's another big reason why it's so easy to jump into this new venture. I know who's on it, I know who's there, I know where we're doing it.

Have there been any instances where you've asked people to do Joe Box and, for whatever reason, they didn't?
No, but that's more because I haven't reached out that hard. There have been people who were going to be on it, and then they had a thing last-minute and had to drop out and not do it, which is totally reasonable. Edy, I didn't know before she did Joe Box. She just commented on the videos that we were doing or Instagram. Now, she's a close friend—and a Hall-of-Famer, for a reason. When people express interest and I know them—or they're funny—then it becomes easier. But the logistics are all over the place. It's not a particularly large operation that we're running here.

What was the moment in which you noticed that people were paying attention to Joe Box?
I was very lucky that there were some people who liked Pod About List and that Joe Box was on it. It wasn't like I was starting from scratch in terms of people who were watching it. But the first tournament of champions was when it felt like we'd reached a place. Also, someone made Joebox.report, which quantizes all the stats. That was a big thing, because I'm a sports guy. Being able to find who has the most beans per game, who's the best at wit, who's the most respectful—when people are engaging with it like that, it's a check mark that I can keep doing this and try to build it, and hopefully quit my job at some point.

When you inaugurated Rachel into the Hall of Fame, you said it was because of how many beans she's amassed across the entire show so far.
It was more that, after "Second Chances," I felt like I should've inaugurated Mera and Rachel. Also, I like that, just like in actual sports, the Hall of Fame is this thing that almost doesn't make sense.

In terms of virality, Caleb's "Untitled" from the "Second Chances" season was a pretty big moment.
Yeah, people liked that one.

Do you think breaking out clips like that has been growing the audience?
With Home Planet, we learned that when you make a two-minute video and you're putting that on YouTube and Instagram and Twitter, you're just putting the same thing everywhere. You put something up on Instagram and you're like, "Fuck, no one cares about this one, but I thought this was a good one." I think Joe Box allowed me to stop caring about what I was putting up. I know that each little clip I put up on my Instagram is technically an advertisement to get people to try to watch it. So if one doesn't do well, who cares? It's just one clip from a big, 45-minute thing. It is crazy to me that anyone is watching any of it, especially anyone that isn't directly from the Pod About List audience. That feels strange to me. But it's also been nice for my brain to not be fretting about what I'm putting up.

Has there been anything that's surprised you in terms of what people have gravitated towards in the breakout clips?
I mean, I think I'm lucky that people seem to like watching a guy eat a poop sandwich or whatever. That's something I feel like I'm uniquely qualified to do—taking a big bite of goop-y soup or whatever. I just try to not think about anything, especially when I'm in this little sprint of finishing the Tournament of Champions, then L.A., and then whatever comes after that. As much as I can not reflect on anything is...it's like doing the dishes, just a pure flow state. Because it's easy to get hung up on shit when something doesn't [work].

The Joepothecary clip did pretty well.
Well, that's a secret to the internet. If you do something stupid that would kill you, or if you say something that's wrong—just a factual inaccuracy—people are gonna be like, "Actually, it's blah blah blah." One time, Rachel put MSG in something, and people were like, "Actually, MSG is not bad for you."

There were a fair amount of mentions on Twitter regarding the Joepothecary clip that were like, "This is unsafe, and you could die from this."
When I took the edibles [during "Smokebox"], that was another one on Twitter where people were like, "Five edibles? That's nothing. I do a hundred edibles, you idiot. Fuck you." And it's like, "Alright, man." The internet now is a thing where I don't have fun—and I think people like Joe Box because it's a little bit old-school. The show's gonna have its faults and flaws, because it's me doing the judgments on things. I love when people are like, "So-and-so got fucking robbed in this episode." I'm like, "Okay, you care enough about this to think that." Those judgments can go one way or another—a truth to what a good play is, or a bad play.

I want to talk about the "Speak Joe Evil" round specifically. To me, one of the best parts of Joe Box to me is the tension you create when you're putting something forth that the contestants really don't like. It results in some of the funniest moments on the show. If I was watching a normal game show and everybody was struggling to play the game, I'd be frustrated. But when these moments happen on Joe Box, they're some of the best stuff that you guys are doing.
I definitely know that ["Speak Joe Evil"] is not a great game. No one likes doing it. It's a game that is considerably less fun to watch when it's played well. Eventually, people [on "Joe Box Legends") figured out that pointing was the best strategy, which is not good television. But there's something about having something that's just nonsense. I pride myself on being good at Charades, and for some reason, I sit down in that chair and I cannot, for the life of me, do anything.

Do you think that's maybe because you're doing it on camera?
When I'm doing Joe Box, I sort of become an idiot.

Well, with "Speak Joe Evil" specifically, you are playing the game. You yourself said before that you didn't feel comfortable playing "PierceBox."
Definitely. When I did the edibles, it was like the first time where I was like, "Oh my God, I'm just doing bullshit. I'm standing in front of these cameras, and they're filming nonstop." When I went home after, I was like, "This is the last episode of the show. It doesn't work. Why would I ever do this again? Which would honestly be pretty cool just to be like, 'You know what? I'm done.'" That was the 50-milligram thought.

I have to say, I still can't believe you took 50 milligrams like that. If I took 50 milligrams at this point in my life, I would probably almost immediately be like, "I have to walk over to Wyckoff and go to the hospital."
I was supposed to clean up afterwards, and Alex and Patrick were just still hanging out. I kept being like, "Was that even good? Did that make any sense?" I asked Patrick, "Is this all I'm talking about?" He was like, "Yes," and I was like, "Got it. I'm gonna go home now."

I feel like a real key component is that you're participating in stuff to an extent that it's not required—always taking the extra bites. Even with "Precision Gulpers," you're drinking that stuff, even though you know what's in it! As a viewer, it dissolves any notion that there might be an air of smugness coming from the host. You're putting yourself on the same plane, which is great—but the contestants are often saying, "Don't do this!" Talk to me about throwing yourself in there.
One, I think it's funny. I like eating stuff. I chew plastic when I'm at home. It would almost feel like bullshit if I was making people drink disgusting stuff and plugging my nose when I smell it. There's also a bit of punishing myself. I think it's funny to take a sip of dirty water or pick up something off the ground. There was a video of a guy, after the Cavs won in 2016, he's at the parade, and they're holding him back until he finally breaks free, picks up a piece of shit, and eats it. There's nothing funnier than when people are like, "Hey man, I really don't think you should do that"—and they're like, "I'm gonna do it anyway." A cheeky bite of something nasty is fun. I don't know that I'm gonna enter the poop-eating era. I don't think YouTube would let me show that.

Do you ever feel physically ill while doing these things?
I mean, I'm a big guy. If you wanted to medicate a horse, you'd have to give him a lot more medicine than a human. So, probably unfairly to my own body, I view myself in the same light of, "I think I can handle a little bit more." You're gonna need a few more poppers and a few more things of Viagra to really kill me. I did not think that I was gonna die. But we haven't hit the vomit plane yet.

There was the shrimp-off, though.
Yeah. That was crazy.

What was going through your mind during the shrimp-off?
Flow state. I genuinely trained to make that work. I had to get used to shrimp. I had to plan it out.

Have you eaten shrimp since?
I can't. I try to every now and then, and it's just like, "Ugh." Shrimp was once a quaint little thing. I could sometimes eat a fun shrimp cocktail. Before five pounds of shrimp, you see one and you're like, "Oh, that's good." It's a fun appetizer. But there's a quality to a shrimp that's just disgusting to me at this point. The little body—the fact that there's nothing else except the white—is strange to me. I'll talk to my girlfriend about it sometimes, and she's like, "Please stop talking." She never wants to hear about the shrimp-off ever again. She was leaving for work and I was dethawing shrimp in the sink to do a trial run. She was like, "This is stupid."

You guys have been together for a long time.
Yeah, 11 years.

Tell me about what makes the relationship work.
We just like hanging out. The relationship from high school, when we met, is a completely different thing than it is now. It's been able to flex and grow, and each little section of it is a different relationship. I do think that there's something nice about having a person that you just want to hang out with. I take great solace in knowing what my life is, and what I need to do and who I need to care about. I like having the "What are we doing for dinner tonight?" conversation. If I was alone, I would—not atrophy, but I think I 'd forget to eat and eat cheese for every single meal. Because that's the one thing I have in the fridge. I feel very lucky to have someone that I love and care about—and I forget that other people don't have that. But it's a good constant to have in your life.

I want to go back to a specific element about the shrimp-off, which was the playlist that you made. Across a lot of your stuff, you've revealed aspects of your own musical taste in general. Talk to me about what you gravitate towards musically.
I'm a fan of music. I don't think I'm necessarily very good at listening [to music]. I don't really listen to albums. I would never want to go to a concert.

At all?
It's not how I'd like to spend my time. But I feel like I have a diverse musical taste. The Macklemores and the Jack Johnsons of the world seem to be what people highlight—and I'll go to bat for them. I've definitely made a life of digging my heels in on something that people find to be wrong. But you know what? I would say I have an eclectic mix of things that have slowly been recommended to me by Spotify over the last 10 years of my life.

You also have Edy Show Joe, and what makes that work is that the two of you provide excellent foils for each other in terms of conversation. Talk to me about what makes that work.
We are very different, but we're similar in a certain way. We just think differently. Edy will want to really dive in on the hip area of a person, and I want nothing to do with that conversation—and I'll care a lot about the uniform of a certain team. But then we'll both care about this stupid thing way too much.

What I really appreciate about Edy is that she's no-bullshit. She's not putting on airs or trying to be someone different, and that makes doing those shows really easily. We can just have a conversation, and it will devolve into all these fun, different, stupid little sidebars. It's very easy to flow from one thing to another—even when she wants to talk about icky stuff and I don't.

Is that something you two of you are going to just keep doing?
We're talking about how often to do it, because we have a lot of fun. We're talking about going to an escape room together and filming it. So we'll definitely do more. I don't know how frequently, and I don't know what it will look like, but it definitely is a thing I would like to do more of.