Today’s show was supposed to feature
, and we were SO excited to meet her and learn more about both her activism work in Portland and her creative writing work as a novelist. But in classic “I’m fine, everything’s fine” fashion, I gave her the wrong time zone when I sent the start time. So we’re gonna reschedule Tara’s appearance—hopefully for very soon!Instead, today was just me and
— two slightly disgruntled best friends winging it through a Saturday morning that was heavier than usualLawrence opened the show with hard news: his mom’s recent cancer diagnosis. He spoke about moving to Fort Wayne years ago, following a gut feeling that he needed to be there. It was heartbreaking and grounding — a reminder that even in chaos, intuition matters. When he joked he was “not fully gruntled,” we both fell apart laughing and immediately looked up the word. Turns out “gruntled” is real, and it means content. Leave it to us to turn grief into a vocabulary lesson.
From there, we swung into politics (because of course we did): the Seattle mayoral race still too close to call, the Trump administration’s SNAP benefits stunt, and rumors of an airport crisis that could turn Thanksgiving into a general strike. Lawrence, ever the explainer, broke down Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s late-night ruling, assuring us that yes, it’s awful now — but she’s playing chess while everyone else is playing tiddlywinks.
We also shared an update on Feeding America, the national fundraiser that Substack’s Creator Coalition (led by the indefatigable
) is promoting. Every dollar donated provides 13 pounds of food. We’ll be adding donation links to our newsletters this week, but please don’t wait — people are hungry now.Somewhere between politics and philosophy, we veered into personal stuff: pillars wobbling, burnout, and the art of staying creative when the world’s on fire. We wrapped with absurdity (as one does), joking about “Ballard chicken snatching” as a new Depression-era survival skill.
It wasn’t the show we planned — it was raw, weird, and real. And maybe that’s exactly what The Daily Whatever is supposed to be.
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