Rats, known for being rodents, famous for being chefs. Nobody thinks much about them,

so let's have some fun. Let's find out why rats are secretly, incredibly fascinating. Hey, hey, folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. My guest today is Josh Gondelman. I know, very exciting. Josh Gondelman. Josh is a wonderful writer. You might have seen his work as headwriter of the show Deezis and Morrow on Showtime or is a writer for last week tonight with John Oliver or in The New Yorker. I'm going to link a couple favorites there of mine, especially one about meeting up in New York City. On top of that, Josh is an author. His latest book is entitled Nice Try, Stories of Best

Intentions and Mixed Results. And then, hey, Josh Gondelman is a stand-up comedian, multiple

great specials out. His latest and greatest is entitled People Pleaser. And it's a really,

really funny hour. You can see it in here at lots of places. I'll have links for that

at siphpod.fun. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like

native-land.c.a. To acknowledge that Josh and I each recorded this on the traditional land of

the Canarsie and Lenape peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much

still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about rats, an incredible

animal in cities and in almost everywhere else. Also, this episode is a special patron pick.

Rats have been a frequent suggestion in the polls at siphpod.fd.fun. Extra thanks to Sarah Stella for being a listener who's

championing those and rooting for those in the polls. And then what happened is a few weeks ago,

I did a live episode of this podcast at a great venue in New York. It's called

caveat. The live episode that we did, it's an entire SIF episode about raccoons. And,

you know, after the show, I got to meet a bunch of you. And I met a bunch of you before, too.

And that was maybe the best part, just an absolute total treat to get to know you, to get to talk to you,

to put names to faces, or faces to names, however that works. Anyway, thank you all so much for

making that so joyful. And one of the folks who came and attended the show is Sarah. Got to meet

Sarah. We also talked about how raccoons as a topic pretty aligned with rats, especially

the city angle that we ended up taking on it in the live show. Also, by the way, do check the

links at siftpod.fun. If you want to see that raccoons live episode, because we recorded it,

it's available video on demand. You can check it out. You can just go ahead. There's links and

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