Poured Over: Will Schwalbe on We Should Not Be Friends

By Miwa Messer / March 4, 2023 at 6:00 am

“How do you spot a ‘we should not be friends’ friendship? It’s when someone shows you who they are, and you like it.”

Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club, tells us how an unexpected friendship with a polar-opposite grew into a lifelong journey through love, losses and triumphs. Schwalbe and Chris Maxey, former Navy SEAL and founder of the Island School, join us to talk about meeting through a Yale secret society, the importance of vulnerability, what they learned about themselves and each other through telling this story and more live at Barnes & Noble Union Square with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books (episode)
We Should Not Be Friends by Will Schwalbe
The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
The Rediscovery of North America by Barry Lopez

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays with occasional Saturdays here and on your favorite podcast app.  

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
Okay, hello New York but— There we go. Now we can start, now we can start. I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over. I just want to remind everyone tonight that we are taping the show live. And you know if you’ve been to Union Square before with Will you have possibly heard me say, you know, I don’t know if I actually need to introduce Will because I’m pretty sure everyone knows Will, but I’m going to do it anyway because it’s fun. Editor, writer, best selling author, everyone remembers End of Your Life Book Club. He is currently an editor at Macmillan and obviously the new book, We Should Not Be Friends. And the “we should not be friends” in question is the man blowing on the conch, who I’m going to endeavor to remember to call “Maxey” during the event, but I don’t know you well enough to call you by your last name so I might flip back and forth. Will likes to say he’s a New Englander, I am a New Englander by birth and sometimes I slide into these— I will try not to say wicked too much tonight. I make no promises. Anyway, so, Chris Maxey is the founder of the Island School and I know I have lots of Island School parents. Yeah, thank you. He’s also a classmate of Will’s from Yale. And he’s also a former Navy SEAL, which I thought you had to be taller. Okay, anyway, so some of you may have had a chance to sneak home and read We Should Not Be Friends last night after it came out, but we’re going to endeavor to stay spoiler free in this conversation, because I think a lot of you have not had a chance to read it yet. And there is a lot even if you have known these two men for 40 years, and I know some of you have, you don’t know the story all the way and I’m going to ask Will to set it up and then I’m going to ask Chris to maybe fill in some gaps.

Will Schwalbe

All right, excellent. Thank you so much. Miwa. And before I set it up, I just have to say I’m wicked pleased to be here at Barnes and Noble, which has been so supportive of me over the years. This is really home and Miwa, you in particular have been just amazing. And we go way back.

We do. I was trying to figure out actually when we were in the greenroom, how long we’ve known each other, and I really don’t know.

A long time. And I should say that Miwa and I should be friends, so I’m very glad we are. So, to set up this book, when I was a junior at Yale, I had really decided that I had met absolutely everybody that I needed to know and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I had a year ahead of me spending time with all of these wonderful people that I had already met. Then along came a friend who was a year ahead of me who I’d known from St. Paul School, he did a curious thing, he invited me to lunch with a couple friends of his and that wasn’t curious, but over the course of the lunch, he asked me all sorts of questions about myself. And I was just delighted to talk about myself, and I thought it was the most marvelous lunch and I had entertained this bunch of seniors and it was just terrific. And sometime after that he came by and he said, I’m sure you could guess that that was some kind of interview, right? And I said, yes, I was too embarrassed to admit that, no, I just thought everybody should ask me questions about myself over lunch. It turned out that he wanted to tap me, and that’s the Yale term for asked me to join a secret society and it was a secret society whose reason for being was to bring together the 15 most different kids at Yale, force them to have dinner twice a week, for a year, and encourage them to do what we called an “audit”, which was tell one another our life story, the entire thing, over the course of anywhere from four to six hours. And reluctantly, I decided to do this thing. Most of the other kids I thought, wow, these are different people. These are people I hadn’t met before, but I can really see becoming friends with these people. But there was one kid who I thought, now we should not be friends— and that was Chris Maxey.

Okay, Maxey. What’s your version of that?

Chris Maxey

It makes me want to give this guy a big hug.

We’re gonna get to the hugging part later. Yeah, yeah, I promise.

I was really excited to meet Will and felt like this was going to be a journey that was going to kind of change me in certain ways and I knew right away that it was going to be a long road to work up to literally being able to hug this guy and feel like we could go through this journey together.

Okay, I can see that.

Yeah, I mean to give you a little bit of a visual I had just come back from Los Angeles. I was then incredibly enraptured with the artist who was then still known as Prince. I was also fascinated with the locks of Adam and who was another popular new romantic musician of the time. So, I gotten a New Haven hairdresser to shave the sides of my head and perm it down the middle and I wore a turquoise blue jean jacket, and a leather armband that doubled as a wallet that had studs on it. So that’s how I arrived at the hall. And there was Maxey, who was the ultimate jock preppy. I was bookish and reserved. Maxey was bouncing around the hall, throwing people beers, giving people bear hugs. I thought “Nah.” Is that how you recall it, Maxey?

I was tooting my own horn back then even. Yeah, it was Singer, it was the Sing Man, that called me over and said, “Hey, I want you to meet this, this crazy kid who looks like Prince.” And it was it was an awkward first handshake. Those kinds of tough first meetings turn out to be the journeys that mean the most, you know, really? It’s true.

Alright, I am going to tease Will for a second, though, because that is my job tonight. But dude, you published the group chat? In a book? You published that? Oh, you know what I’m talking about. The group chat. Will, Will, you published to the group chat? But in all seriousness, when did you decide to write this book? And when did you get his buy in? Because you kind of need his buy in.

I needed his buy in. And the process was, we became dear friends, and you can read about how we did it in the book. And in all seriousness, is a guy I admire just tremendously. And I was always encouraging Maxey, to write a book and saying, “You gotta write a book about your life, you got to write how you went on this journey, about the Island School, about becoming a kind of warrior for the sea, all of this stuff.” And Maxey is a very good writer and he wanted to do it and sent me sort of bits and bobs and pieces but couldn’t really get around to it. So, at one point, he said, “Do you know anyone who could help me do this?” And then I thought, I want to help him do it. I want to do this; this would be really fun. And then I started to think now, I want to write a biography of Maxey. I thought that would be cool. So, my absolutely extraordinary longtime publisher, was a legendary figure in the business named Sonny Mehta. The editor who worked with him on my last book was another legend in the business, Dan Frank. And I sent this idea to them through my agent, and there was silence. So, they asked me out to lunch. And one of the things about Sonny was he was very famous, among many other things, for these unbelievably long conversational silences. I was told, never step on one of Sonny’s silences, which is hard for me because I talk to fill air space. You’ll notice Maxey actually thinks before he talks, not me— I talk first. So, we got to the end of lunch, and I told him, “I want to do this book about Maxey.” And I told him about the Island School, all this stuff. And at the end of the lunch, there was this endlessly long silence and then finally, Sonny said very softly. “I think the book you want to do is about your friendship with Chris Maxey.” And I thought of instantly said, “yeah, that’s, that’s the book I want to do.” So, I called Maxey, and told him the plan and as I recall, you were all in from day one.

What made you say yes,

I didn’t really feel like I knew what I was getting into. A lot of the stories came from a journal that I forgot about, and Will was able to dig back into my mind at that time and put it down on paper and it was it was kind of scary. Reading about what I was thinking, about what scared me what, what was important. And as I’ve read through it, I was both embarrassed and proud and a lot of emotions in between.

So, Barbara Jones, are you here? Oh, there you are. I have everyone’s question. At what point in the writing process did you think of the title?

Thanks, Barbara. That’s a good question. Quite late. So, I had written the entire first draft of the book and I had sent it to Dan Frank, we had a different, I can’t remember what the title was. And then just one day, I thought, “we should not be friends”. And that just popped into my head, and I don’t know why that popped into my head. It didn’t feel right. And then I ran it by Dan, and he liked it, but he didn’t think it was right. And then a couple of days later, I said, it has to go with a subtitle, the story of a friendship. And then Dan said, yes, that’s it. And then it was the only title. I also should say, I’ve had success, I think, with titles that are off putting. People begged me to change the title of The End of Your Life Book Club and an author who’s a dear friend who will go nameless, in London called me when it was way too late. And she just said, I just have to say you’re making a terrible mistake. Just one quick thing, I have to tell this story, after The End of Your Life Book Club came out, I got a very angry email from a reader who said, I was furious reading this book, he said, I knew it was going to be about a book club. But I didn’t know it was going to be about the end of someone’s life. And it was all I could do not to write back and say….

I’m also going to jump out for a second and say, I was at the time the director of the Discover Great New Writers program, and we slid it in and I didn’t have a problem with the title. I don’t know what that says about me. But I did not have a problem with that title in the least. Dani Shapiro, are you here? Hi. Did we answer your question about when Will sort of decided to write the book, I sort of feel like we did. But were you looking for more than that?

Audience

Well, I mean, in my experience, these kinds of things come in layers. What was there a glimmer earlier?

Yeah. And I just I do have to sort of complete the shout out to Dani Shapiro, who is not just a dear friend, and not just one of my favorite writers in the world, and not just someone who very kindly gave a blurb to this book, but is also the author of Signal Fires, which is a stunning novel, that you all must find, read and sell— just for the record. So was there a glimmer of it? I think that on my first visit to Eleuthera with David Singer, who is here and was one of our fellow people in this secret society, I noticed just something extraordinary about this Island School and I started taking very, very detailed notes. And I took tremendously detailed notes that trip of what I did every day, what everyone had said, which sea creatures terrified me. I must have known that I wanted to use it for something, but I had no idea what I wanted to use it for. It was only very late though I want to circle back to something Maxey said, Maxey had already shared endlessly with me about his life. His wife, Pam, who has become a dear friend over the years had done the same. Maxey had given me carte blanche to use whatever I wanted from their lives. It was only very late that he said to me, you know, I hadn’t realized I kept a journal. But I have this journal of everything that I thought about for my entire last two years at Yale and beyond. And here it is, how did you discover that rediscover your journal?

In a deep cavern of the house when Pam was telling me to throw stuff out? It was in a box somewhere.

And it was your sister who encouraged you to keep a journal.

Yeah Lizzy, she said, when you’re struggling write down your thoughts. And I listened and started to do that. And again, I was really surprised because I said, “did I really say this to you?” And he said, “no, you didn’t say it, but you wrote it in journal.” So, there’s some truth that comes out of doing something like that.

Yeah, one of the things that was very important from our process from the beginning, we did a lot of remembering together. But I did say at the end, the manuscript goes to you and Pam, you can take out anything you like, you can kill the whole project because a friendship is more important than any book and the two of you read it and I don’t think you changed a single word. Do you recall anything you took out?

I think I asked you to say we weren’t drunk all the time.

I, you know, it’s in keeping with the spirit of the times, Maxey. It was the 80s, you had some stuff to get out of your system.

Actually, if you can believe it, Miwa, we did actually tone the drinking way down. The first draft of this book had so much more alcohol in it. And yet, I thought we had toned it way, way, way down and it’s being published a month from now in the UK. And the UK editor said that the most overused phrase in the book is “after many beers, comma.”

It may say something about where I went to school, and I didn’t go to Yale. But still… You were young. But I want to talk about one sort of slightly serious thing, because you do both of you are very open and vulnerable in this book in a way that the New Englander might have to hand back his New England credentials, because we don’t do that. But no, I do want to talk about this because also, I mean, men, we don’t often give you the language to talk about these things. Maxey is actually much more evolved about this stuff, frankly, than you are. I mean, much more generous with hugs much faster to say, I love you. And here you are, you know, being Henry James in the corner.

Yeah, you want to talk about that, Maxey?

Well, it’s true today. I mean, I saw Will in the restaurant, we had lunch with some of our old buddies, and he’s got his hand out in front of him and I had to, like, just push through that and give him a hug. And it’s, it’s not a varsity hug. You don’t get a varsity hug from him. You know what I’m talking about? He won’t really give you his whole body. He doesn’t do that— kind of get away from me.

I think one of the things that’s evolved, is that the Maxey clan, Pam and his kids now I think, have decided to torture me similarly.

It’s not torture. It’s not torture, Will. It’s not torture. It means people like you. Turn the robot off for two seconds, which is actually something my dude says to me frequently, so I feel very free using it with you.

But it’s true. I mean, one of the things that has really been fun about this journey is Maxey is a more evolved human being than I am and more open, more loving. He’s got these— he’s much more out there. That’s one of the things about our journey. I’ve learned a lot from him on that, as well as so many other fronts.

Yeah, we have a very strong matriarchal culture in our family. That goes right down to my three daughters who beat me up every day.

So, Ben Loenen, wants to know if writing this book has made you a better friend.

Thanks, Ben. Ben may have to be the judge of that. Ben is also a friend, not as far back as Ben’s a bit younger, but far back. Yes, writing the book has made me a better friend. It caused me to think very deeply about friendship. And one of the takeaways from it for me, in terms of friendship, is I always prided myself on really being there for my friends. And I’m proud of it, I think I have been when a friend was in trouble or in need or needed to talk about something going on in that friend’s life, I would be there for them. But I had a habit of keeping my problems, my thoughts, my concerns, my crises to myself. And I would either handle them by myself or with my husband, or with a very small circle, I wouldn’t share them with a wider group of friends. And I came to realize that that was selfish. There is one very, again, no spoilers, dramatic medical incident in this that involves the gentleman to my right and he let me be there for him. He let me visit him in the hospital. He let me meet him at home a couple of days after the operation and help him around and get him a glass of water and take my arm. And I realized that was a gift and that was a gift he gave me that I hadn’t always given to others. So, in that sense, yes, it made me a better friend. I’m teachable.

And not just in Latin and Greek and editing and all that kind of stuff. The messy human stuff

I’m getting there, I’m still a New Englander but I’m getting there.

We can learn. How was the process of writing something so personal, did you feel comfortable, nervous or excited?

To answer that question I have to say, when I first showed the book to a couple people, one of their first reactions was, oh, it’s really brave of you to put that all out there. And excuse my language. I thought, holy crap, I didn’t realize it was brave. I thought I just put it down there. And still, I’m very touched when people think that I put it all out there. But despite my saying that I don’t always share my troubles with friends. I do feel like my life is an open book and there’s nothing, almost nothing in here that I haven’t told people.

Can I just confess, I have not read the email book. I know, it’s a really important book. I know, it got him on the Colbert Report. I live under the tyranny of email, like many of us, and I just couldn’t do it. But End of Your Life Book Club is a really important book, whether you’ve lost someone or not, it’s just it’s a really important book, and the way you handle grief and everything else, I felt like you had put so much out in that book that I was not expecting. And also possibly stuff that you didn’t even think you were putting out. And then Books for Living, you know, feels like it’s kind of like Will’s stepping back, right. But if you really read those essays, once again, there’s all this Will, right out there. And I’m thinking, how’s he going to top that? And then I get this galley and it’s like, oh, how are we going to do this show? Obviously, we figured out how to do that. But how does it feel for you, Maxey? Because I mean, honestly, you’re still you’re a private person. You’re a private person. So, you’re what we call in the book businesses civilian, which I realized I just said that to a Navy SEAL. But those of us who are in the business, you know, I can see the heads nodding in the background.

I don’t know, I think this is this is kind of the beginning. With so many friends and supporters out in a physical space like this. I think it’s something we’re going to have to navigate. Yeah. And I’d say we, you know, I think my family and I and, and Will, and so far, it feels it feels good.

Okay, you talked about well, recreating everything from your diary and Maxey’s diary, and also consulting some other folks who were in your circle as well. I mean, you’re not just walking around going, hey, this sounds right. Liv Ryan is wondering if you did research on internal biases, while you were working on this, and if any of that informed what’s in the book.

22:28

So I’ve read, Liv Ryan is another fabulous publishing figure to who is definitely up and coming so I’m delighted to get a question from Liv. So certainly, over the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about internal biases, reading about internal biases. And I’m sure it informed either my writing of this or my editing of this book, I do hope that our story can become a kind of teaching tool on internal biases, because I was this out gay kid in 1984. When we graduated, there was certainly a ton of prejudice against gay people. And that time, and definitely when I met Maxey, he had some prejudices, and some biases. But the irony was, I was way more biased against Maxey than he was against me. And then I made a lot of assumptions based on things like how we dressed or what sports he played, or the way he bounced around the house, or the fact that “think fast” was always followed by a beer flying at someone’s head. And I really love reexamining those and love interrogating them. And I hope the book will help other people interrogate those internal biases. That’s my hope.

Okay, I’ve got two questions that are sort of siblings, but from different people. So I’m going to ask them at the same time, and we can play with them. So Lisa Cap is asking what’s the secret to the success of a long term friendship. And there’s a second piece to that, but that’s a different piece that we’re going to come back to and then Ruth Franklin is asking, do you have any suggestions for how to maintain friendships through different stages of life? We’ve all been there Right? We’re all living in an unprecedented time, right? Like we’ve all— the last three years have been weird. They continue to be weird. So, let’s talk friendship. Let’s talk about the work that goes into friendship and work is not a dirty word. In this case, friendships need to be coddled you have moments in this book where I’m like, how are you still friends? You didn’t talk to each other for a while.

I’m gonna let you handle this one first, Maxey.

I love the quote that starts the book and the word forgiveness and the idea that the friendships, relationships are roller coasters. And there’s times when it feels good, and you feel supported. And there’s times when it’s not good. And I think the key is being able to realize that during those, those tough times when it’s not good that you need forgiveness, when I’m in the next room, yelling at people and calling them homos, and Will’s sitting there going, I thought that guy was my friend. You know, he had to fight through that, and find a way to forgive me, and I thank him for that.

It’s one, well, I don’t want to, I don’t want to spoil anything. So I’ll just hint at it. One of the remarkable things about that incident was that you had reflected very deeply on that at the time. And I was only to find that out decades later. But I also feel, to me, that’s one of the emblematic stories in the book, because forgiveness is what it’s all about. And this incredible experience we had of having dinner, twice a week, for a year, to never miss, allowed us to be ourselves, allowed us to say stupid things, allowed us to piss each other off sometimes, or eventually just allowed us really to be ourselves. So, we could get to know each other in a very real way. And that’s got to be the essential ingredient is friends or people you can be yourself with, and who love you both for it and in spite of it. And today was a remarkable day, because my math is not good. But of the 14 of us, seven of us had lunch today in New York City and they’re here and we’ve all been here for one another. Maxey and me is a kind of paradigm of this. But that experience of just being able to be ourselves and having to see each other no matter how much we ticked each other off. To me, that’s the basis of a friendship. And because of that, we could go a decade without seeing each other and we could pick up right where we left off.

We’re trotting dangerously close to John Hughes movie territory. Bob Miller actually is asking a question that I’ve been thinking about. And actually, I’m glad I get to use a dude to ask this question. Do you think that male friendships are more difficult to sustain than female friendships?

27:35

Again, Maxey, you start with this one.

I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t feel like there’s a gender divide. I feel like it’s about personalities. You know, there’s a recent article about how much growth opportunity there is just to have friendships, across different beliefs and, you know, different lifestyles, and that that’s where you start to gain perspective and think about ideas and life in different ways. And so I would not dive into the gender. I mean, you know, my wife and I laugh all the time, because during football season, that’s sacred time, and I’m wanting to go out in the boat at sunset, and she’s like, it’s Monday night. We’re watching football. So you know, I, you know, the gender thing, flip flops for me all the time.

I do think there’s something years ago, when I was at William Morrow, we published Deborah Tannen, who’s a wonderful linguist and she wrote that there’s nothing biological about the difference between women and men’s friendship, but that women in our society are often taught that your friends are people you tell things to and boys are taught that your friends are people you do things with. And I do think there is some truth to how that has stuck with us. Some of our dynamic is, Maxey does like you know, let’s go freediving, let’s go on the boat, let’s do this, let’s do that. And I’m more, let’s sit in the living room and have a beer. And so, I think there’s also another aspect to it, which is to quote the comedian John Mulaney. who said, your father doesn’t have friends. Your father may think he has friends, but those are actually just the husbands of your mother’s friends. I’m hoping this book too, will get people to talk a little bit more about male friendship, whatever that means to people as well as just friendship across all different boundaries, gender being one of them.

Chris Tyler wants to know; can you spot the signs of a “we should not be friends friendship” early on?

30:14

It’s very important to me to qualify the title of this book, because I actually don’t believe we can be friends with everyone. I don’t think it’s possible. I think we can be friends with everyone who shares our values. And that a far, far broader group of people share our values than we might think. And so spotting a “we should not be friends” friendship, I think is when someone who you think is nothing like you behaves in a way that causes you to think this person shares my values. And as soon as you see that, then it’s our we should be friends and one of the early signs with Maxey and I’m going to I’m going to make you recite this was when Maxey was doing his audit, this thing where we tell each other our lives, Maxey told me about the Maxey code. Do you want to explain the Maxey code?

You should have warned me about that. Because it could come in a lot of factors. I think the code that we live by is tied to integrity more than anything else. Just you know, earn and you know, owning when you make mistakes and being honest with yourself, and especially the good people around you.

Yeah, but you also told me I think your mother had told you like, look, people in the eye, shake their hand all of these rules, clean the plates, like what were some of the rules you grew up with?

Good manners. Finish everything on your plate. Look people in the eye.

Yeah. When Maxey told me the Maxey code, I started to think maybe this guy, maybe I had misjudged this guy. Maybe he isn’t who I thought he was. So how do you spot a “we should not be friends” friendship. It’s when someone shows you who they are, and you like it.

And believe them, oh, wow, someone shows you who they are— believe them. I’m gonna get back to Lisa for a second. What’s something new that each of you learned about the other while you were doing—but new. It has to be new that you learned while you’re working on this book. Don’t make that face? Will, I know you learned something.

What did I learn about each other? When working on the book?

I can make it wider and say what do you learn about yourself if you if you’re really stretching?

So well. This is something I learned from one of our conversations down when I was in Eleuthera, which was, I was talking to Pam about your favorite book. And then it turned out it was in the diary. And it was at the time The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone, and I thought, wow, I would not have guessed that. What was that about?

Circuit boy strikes again?

Do you want to tell the circuit boy story? It’s pretty good.

No, we got to save that for the book.

It’s in the book, I promise. It’s in the book.

My learning has come through books. I love the way Will in, in all his sharing writes about his favorite friends, which are oftentimes books. That’s his querencia. Yeah, you know, and he says that to me, I feel like I really learned that, you know, like, my, my querencia is going out and being in the ocean. And his querencia oftentimes is being on a couch with a with a great book, Pam and I were sailing when we read End of Life Book Club, and it brought us in touch with books, and this amazing friend in ways that are really, really awesome.

You want to explain querencia?

34:03

Sure, querencia is a term that we first talked about, and in a treatise by Barry Lopez called Rediscovery of North America. And it’s, it’s derived from the Spanish verb querer, which is to, you know, love a place and be comfortable and confident in a place and we get everybody in our community to think about finding that. And it’s oftentimes defined as a physical space. And I think that’s one of the things is Will’s helped me realize is it doesn’t have to be a physical space. It doesn’t have to be a free dive on a reef or a place under a beautiful banyan tree. It can be really a place in your mind when you’re thinking and sharing and reading.

There’s a question that Chris Maxey dropped into the Eventbrite, and I’ve been dying to ask it but the thing is, If you know me in real life, you know, I swear a lot. And this is the one place I don’t like reliably when we’re taping, this is the one place I don’t swear. So, Chris, I’m going to ask you to ask the question I have in front of me, if you want me to pass you this page, I can pass you this page. It’s kind of an excellent question. But you have to ask it.

You know, I think I kind of shared and know the answer. And yeah, I really would love to hear we’ll talk about when like, when the moment was that he stopped seeing me as a complete…

It’s eight now? I think it was 7:45. Now, no. You thought you teed that one up? It was very early on. And this is a story from the book, but it’s one of my favorite stories. And it’s pretty early on. So I feel like I can tell it. We went on this retreat, 14 of us. Who were brothers and sisters in the secret society. An alum gave us a beautiful house who he must have been out of his mind to give a beautiful house for the weekend and 14 Yale seniors, but he did. And we had a really nice time, we started to let down our guard a bit, we were drinking, we were drinking more, we were drinking even more. Shocker. And I just woke up with this awful hangover, this pounding hangover. We’re in the kitchen. And the Mr. Coffee machine’s there, desperate for a cup of coffee. So I short stopped it, you know, pulled the pitcher out in my glass, put it back, I was just thinking out loud about how I just didn’t know if I could make it back to New Haven, Connecticut in the back of this car, this tiny car some of us had driven up with the windows closed, I thought I might be sick to my stomach. And that would be embarrassing. And I must have verbalized this and Maxey, who had come to the retreat on his motorcycle, insisted that I ride back with him on the back of the motorcycle. And the more I tried to get out of this, the more it was clear that I wasn’t, wasn’t getting out of this. He was going to insist that I go back to New Haven, which was like an hour and a half on the highway. I have to add to that when we arrived, Maxey had regaled us with a story about how he had almost wiped out and killed himself on the way up. But there was something really sweet about it. And even at the time, I recognized that this was an olive branch that he recognized that we came from different places that I was maybe a little distrustful of him. And it was just a very sweet thing to do. And it formed the start of our friendship. And even then, I knew nah, this guy, this is a good guy. You need the book. All right.

Thank you, Will Schwalbe, Thank you, Chris Maxey. Thank you, audience.