You're listening ad-free on Amazon music.

Just a reminder that Big M. Little Mood with Daniel M. Lavery happens twice a week.

Slate Plus members get an additional mini-episode or Little Big Mood every Friday.

Sign up now to listen at slate.com slash mood. Hello and welcome back to Big New Little Mood.

I'm your host, Danny Lavery, and with me in the studio this week is Ben Roy, a Denver-based comedian,

whose latest comedy special is called Hyena.

Ben, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

And, yeah, I'm always stoked when the word heavy is thrown around. So I for it I am too yeah this is not a balanced episode where we've got like kind of a bigger thing a smaller thing something in the middle it's it's kind of all heavy but with that being said none of these problems I think are totally insurmountable and I think that without making ourselves responsible for fixing anyone's

problems in a single afternoon, I do think that we're going to be able to be useful. And I'm

especially excited. I think our first question, it went in a direction I wasn't expecting. Like the way

that it started, it was sort of setting up like, my brother's the golden child. And usually questions

like that are about like,

how do I deal with my own irritation or resentment or feeling interpolated or misinterpreted?

And in this case, it's a little bit like, I think everyone else is being too hard on him.

Right, right. And I kind of love that. I believed the letter writer when they said that. I didn't think they were trying to, like, cover up for sort of subterranean feelings of jealousy. And I thought that was, like, genuinely pretty cool. Right. So the subject here is Workerby. My family have always, quote, worried about my brother's education, work ethic, and career. He was the golden boy who partied too hard and coasted too

often to predictable results. Turns out you can get by without planning or meeting deadlines as long

as you're charming and brilliant. It's been hard feeling like the worker bee mechanic to his big shot

surgeon, but he's also my brother and I love him. I couldn't be him even if you gave me a

ladder and a teleprompter, which helps it from feeling like a competition. What I don't understand

is why our family seemed to resent that he's doing well. I can't visit our parents without someone,

sometimes them, telling me how they don't think he deserves his success and he'll come undone

...