The Boys of How Long Gone on Catch, Cartier, and Drake’s Book of Poems

On a sweaty, scorching hot Tuesday evening in Manhattan, we headed uptown for a special one-night-only event at the glamorous and somewhat unlikely Café Carlyle. Chris Black and Jason Stewart, hosts of the bi-coastal, hilarious, and semi-ironically elitist podcast How Long Gone gathered friends, family, lovers, and, of course, press for an intimate night of laughter and gossip. And though the boys usually don’t record their live events, Interview got the exclusive on their conversation, in which they were joined by First Ladies of the pod Naomi Fry and Brynn Wallner to shoot the shit about watches, Housewives, anti-aging regimens, flying first-class, and Drake’s new book of poems. Read on below for an abridged version of How Long Gone at The Carlyle, a Rosewood Hotel.

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JASON STEWART: What the fuck is up? I’m Jason. That’s Chris.

CHRIS BLACK: Hi, guys.

STEWART: How Long Gone is here.

BLACK: Nice to see you all. I’m just really happy to be here.

STEWART: Yeah, good to see you too, man. Some of you, I don’t know how you got in here.

BLACK: This was supposed to be a tight list.

STEWART: So we don’t have any guests on this show, because you guys are all friends. And we’re not recording this for the podcast by the way, so this is all kind of unplugged. People don’t want to hear about another fucking author.

BLACK: We don’t want to hear another guy that works at The New Yorker.

STEWART: Another bass player from a band from 1997. So we’ve been listening, and we are going to do tonight’s show with no guests. They all canceled.

BLACK: Well, this is a strike, guys. You know how it is.

STEWART: Before we were talking about how we’re a podcast, so it doesn’t matter. But now the strike is literally affecting us.

BLACK: It’s finally affecting me. I only care about things when they affect me personally.

STEWART: Do you think Chris will shut up now that it affects him?

BLACK: We were talking to another guest, a fellow musician, but he’s got his own shows this week in New York. Drake is doing a few nights at Barclays.

STEWART: He really wanted to come.

BLACK: He was expressing interest in the scene in New York. Like, the scene of poetry readings.

STEWART: Dimes Square vibes.

BLACK: Yeah. You guys get together in nasty little bars and read your bad poetry to each other. And he said that he wanted to participate in that, but he couldn’t be here. 

STEWART: I gathered some of his best pages. 

BLACK: [Reading from Drake’s new book of poetry, Titles Ruin Everything] “She’s coming through to meet my career. I invited her over to experience her pictures.”

STEWART: You know those movies where the creepy guy in high school invites the girl over, and he has 11,000 photos of her on the wall? Drake is the type of person who would do something like that.

BLACK: One-hundred percent.

STEWART: So the seed is being planted, but he’s watching her. Which is very Drakean, right?

BLACK: He’d be watching. [Reading] “You can bring all your baggage home to me.” That feels pretty good, honestly. That’s toxic. But it’s all toxic. That’s fine.

STEWART: But also fellas, if you like a woman with baggage because you have baggage, make some noise.

BLACK: Make some noise. All the fellas in here are fucked up. If you listen to How Long Gone, you’re a twisted cat.

STEWART: Something wrong upstairs.

BLACK: Alright. [Reading] “You love to get pretty for people who don’t know the truth about you.” That’s good shit, too. That’s bars. Because he’s saying she likes to get pretty for strangers, but maybe she’s not so pretty with him. Emotionally, not physically. I would never comment on a woman’s look. Y’all know that.

STEWART: Please keep talking.

BLACK: [Reading] “Oh, how smooth life would go if you knew what you pretend to know.”

STEWART: Okay. I flagged that one. Naomi Fry, I know you’re here somewhere. Doesn’t that sound like a Jim Morrison lyric?

BLACK: That does sound Jim Morrison-esque. Do you think Drake knows who Jim Morrison is?

STEWART: Hell no.

BLACK: I don’t think so either. Oh, shit. “There are two types of women in this world. Women who like giving head and women who I don’t like.”

STEWART: So now this is where it starts feeling less great and more Tedros.

BLACK: It is feeling Tedros. Now keep that in mind as we keep moving through it. [Reading] “Swimming in regret is not cardio.”

STEWART: Actually, that’s something that you would say.

BLACK: That is something I would say. You guys are all sighing. You would much rather be seeing Drake right now at Barclay’s Center than this shit. So you guys can all shut the fuck up.

STEWART: When we were getting guests for the show, we had pipe dreams where we were like, “Do we get Sarah Jessica Parker?” And we actually got close-ish, until the guild got us.

BLACK: Every person that you would want to be here tonight is on vacation because that’s what rich people do in the summer. They don’t stay in New York. And that’s why I’m feeling really poor right now, and I hope you guys are as well. I was walking down the street this morning and I was like, “I’ve worked too hard.”

STEWART: I felt quite the opposite. Now that I’m above 75th St., life is kind of different.

BLACK: Jason’s changed. Jason feels like a new man because he went to Ralph’s coffee this morning, which is Starbucks with merch.

STEWART: There were two dogs with four leashes. Each dog had a regular civilian leash and also a rock climber’s leash. And each of these people had the rock climber’s belt buckle thing full of powder dust.

BLACK: LeBron powder.

STEWART: Bad place. It was bad. But I was walking around this neighborhood and staying here at this beautiful hotel. My wife is treating me differently now.

BLACK: His wife is treating him differently. He’s got the Rolex on now. He traded in the Nissan truck for the Mercedes. Because sometimes Jason feels uncomfortable in high-end situations. He gets a little bit of imposter syndrome. On his honeymoon, he kept telling me, “I felt a little uncomfortable at this place or that place.” But do you feel okay here?

STEWART: No, no. Here is worse.

BLACK: Worse?

STEWART: Because when I’m in Rome and in a hotel that costs this much money, they’re like, “I don’t know what that fucking guy does.” But here, they know. I was thinking earlier, imposter syndrome is when you think that you don’t belong in a place where you actually belong. What is it called when you know you don’t belong? When it’s confirmed?

BLACK: I think it’s our job to come up with a proper term for that.

STEWART: When you don’t belong somewhere because of your class?

BLACK: Well, all these people in this room, some of you guys are rich from your parents and stuff, but I think that overall— 

STEWART: Mostly media types.

BLACK: Yeah, you guys make $35,000 a year. My point is that New York is a hard place to live. It beats you down. It’s disgusting. It smells.

STEWART: Roaches and rats.

BLACK: It’s hot. You get to see all these hot people with no bras on. We all going to Casa Cipriani. You want to cosplay like you have that kind of money. And most people here are like that. That’s why they’re paying $27 for the martini.

STEWART: I don’t know. It feels uncomfortable.

BLACK: I’m sure you guys are all aware of this, but the Real Housewives of New York… make some noise for them.

STEWART: Should we have somebody who knows about the subject come up to guide us? Because it is a blind spot for me, to be frank with you.

STEWART: I didn’t mean Naomi, but if the shoe fits.

BLACK: Well, Naomi can talk about anything.

NAOMI FRY: You got me.

STEWART: Sup, girl. We haven’t done this since Boston, huh? Remember we had sushi before?

BLACK: God, that was dark.

STEWART: Boston, not a good show. Not a big podcast. There were rumors that we were going to get beat up after the show for talking too negatively about Boston as a joke.

BLACK: Not funny. But I’m sorry to digress. On Real Housewives of New York, there was this thing that happened where there was a dinner planned last minute.

FRY: There was a last-minute dinner for a large group.

BLACK: As you guys know—I’m sure we’ve got some Resy power users in the building—it can be tough in New York to get a hot table for seven on a Friday night. Not all of us can text somebody at Corner Bar.

FRY: It’s absolutely not easy.

STEWART: Especially with that rowdy bunch. Cameras and all.

BLACK: So what they had to do on the show was have Erin, I believe that’s her name— 

FRY: Erin is her name. Say her name.

BLACK: Israeli local Erin.

FRY: Yeah, she’s beautiful.

STEWART: Israeli local?

BLACK: Local to New York.

FRY: No, I believe she hails from Miami. But the parents are definitely Israeli, and when I heard they were Israeli, as an Israeli native, I screamed because nobody warned me.

BLACK: Because of the representation?

FRY: Yeah, representation matters.

BLACK: I feel like that sometimes when I see white guys on TV. So I get it.

STEWART: What else makes you scream at the TV while we’re talking about it, friend?

FRY: Whenever I see Andy [Cohen], I scream.

BLACK: Is Andy here? We invited him. I’m assuming he did not come.

FRY: He’s too rich to be here.

BLACK: He’s too rich to be here. I’m sorry, we’re getting off-topic. So it looks like a couple of the cast members who were supposed to go to this dinner had gone to Casa Cipriani. And they kept bleeping out the name of the restaurant where they got the last-minute reservation that no one wanted to go to.  They were shitting on it. Like, “It’s a nasty restaurant. What loser would go there?” They kept bleeping it out. So of course I went online. And from what I can put together, they were talking about Catch.

FRY: They were talking about Catch. They kept saying, “It’s not 2012.” Erin kept saying, “Why does it matter where we go? It just matters that we’re all together.” She was exactly the opposite of Chris Black.

BLACK: I love getting together with friends and family to break bread. What are you talking about?

STEWART: Would you go anywhere, Chris?

BLACK: Funny you say that.

STEWART: Long John Silvers? Dallas Barbecue?

BLACK: No, but Jason and I have in the last six months been to Catch.

FRY: Oh.

BLACK: And Catch is good.

STEWART: We got to walk through the back of house. Check under the rug. You know what I mean? The only problem was half of the dishes had dry ice involved. But once you get past that, they do a nice program.

BLACK: Honestly, it’s great. I didn’t pay.

STEWART: It was kind of like when you combine Hillstone and Hooters in energy vibes.

FRY: When you’re at Catch, you’re family.

BLACK: Exactly. Did somebody pay for us or did we not get a bill?

FRY: When you live the kind of life that you guys live, who knows?

BLACK: It’s tough to say. I’ve been dealing with a personal thing that I wanted to talk about to you guys about.

STEWART: It’s another one of these.

BLACK: I would never use Ozempic. I think it’s fine.

STEWART: You don’t need Ozempic.

BLACK: I don’t need Ozempic, but I went to the gay doctor. You guys know about gay doctors? 

STEWART: It’s where Chris goes to zhuzh from the neck down.

BLACK: Yeah, it’s like Drybar for your body. So basically there’s a friend of mine who you guys all probably know, Nick Wooster. He posted a shirtless selfie on his 63rd birthday where he looked like he was cut from stone. His body looked incredible, and I just turned 40. Okay, 41. But I started thinking about this, and he’s always talked to me about this doctor that he goes to stave off aging.

FRY: You want to share what the name of the doctor is, because I think this is key.

BLACK: Dr. Mike.

FRY: It’s Dr. Mike?

STEWART: Dr. Mike?

BLACK: So I went to see Dr. Mike. It was a virtual appointment.

STEWART: So you Zoomed him from Miami.

BLACK: I Zoomed him from Miami, and then he sends a concierge nurse to your house to take your blood. So I was very nervous because I’m not good at that stuff. So I had to lie down. She was very nice. She took my blood and then a week later, he runs the panels, and we get on another Zoom so he can tell me what was wrong with me.

FRY: What did Dr. Mike say?

STEWART: Dick too big.

BLACK: Dr. Mike said, “Bro, I don’t even know what to do about that.”

STEWART: Sorry.

BLACK: “You’re good, but there’s a lot of stuff here that should be higher.” There are levels here that should be higher, blah blah. And I’m like, “Whatever you say Doc, I’ll do whatever you tell me to.”

FRY: This reminds me. When JFK—

BLACK: I like where this is going. Continue.

FRY: Yeah, JFK. He had this doctor, Dr. Max, much like Dr. Mike. And he would allegedly shoot up JFK and Jackie with speed to sort of get them—

STEWART: Speedy?

BLACK: Yeah, we know what speed does, especially if it’s injected.

FRY: And this is what propped up the Kennedy administration.

BLACK: So the Chris Black administration, the How Long Gone administration, is being propped up now as well. So I thought I was in the clear, and he was like, “All right, my guy’s going to get in touch with you. Here’s the list of all the stuff I’m going to mail you.” And it’s like this list of pills and supplements, and all this shit. I see at the bottom, there’s a thing in a vial.

STEWART: Trigger warning.

BLACK: And he’s, he’s like, “You’re fine with needles?” I’m like, “I’m not great with needles.”

STEWART: You don’t love them.

BLACK: So basically, I have to shoot myself in the ass with peptides every night before bed.

FRY: Is Alex [Murray] participating?

STEWART: [To Alex] Have you ever done the stick and poke on Chris?

BLACK: She can’t even watch. She has to leave the room.

STEWART: You don’t like needles, you don’t like blood, or you don’t like his white ass? We can only imagine how white it is.

BLACK: White people in the room, right?

STEWART: So how long have you been on these peps?

BLACK: It’s been three-and-a-half weeks.

FRY: Do you feel a marked difference?

BLACK: I’m not getting sinking spells anymore. Like an afternoon nap, don’t need it. Also, my joints feel amazing. My elbow is moving, my wrist is moving. Everything’s greased.

STEWART: Wow. So you’re greased up. And that’s it?

FRY: Jason, are you ready to reach out to Dr. Mike?

STEWART: Well we had fitness guru, Kirsty Godso on our podcast for two hours. And she was talking about a doctor that does her blood work. And I was like, you know what? I’ll hit you up once I get my insurance. And now that I have medical insurance, I sent him an email last week. I was like, “Yo, I’m ready for my blood work, let’s rock it.” And no response. 

FRY: It just cycles out.

STEWART: Chris, what’s the total fee?

BLACK: Come on, let’s not do that.

STEWART: We want to know the total fee. Is this per month? Per six months? Per year? Contract?

BLACK: It’s an initial consultation, and then this is my concierge doctor. I can text or call at any time. There’s a nutritionist. There’s also a fitness instructor as well to give advice on that angle.

STEWART: Oh, that’s nice.

BLACK: So all in with three months of supplies… $7K.

STEWART: That’s not bad for the price of health.

FRY: Is this the sort of thing where you call up the doctor at 3:00 AM sobbing?

BLACK: I think it’s more like I call him to schedule a Zoom during business hours. I think if there’s an emergency if a needle breaks off in my white ass, I could probably call him.

STEWART: What’s the emergency going to be like? My gains aren’t good? 

BLACK: I thought I’d be skinnier.

STEWART: It’s an emergency.

BLACK: Brynn’s here? Oh Brynn, let’s go.

STEWART: The First Lady of How Long Gone.

BLACK: Come on out.

STEWART: Enchanté.

BLACK: Brynn, how are you? Brynn’s wearing only the finest Brandy Melville tonight.

BRYNN WALLNER: No Brandy tonight.

STEWART: Have you been to the Brandy Cafe yet?

WALLNER: In L.A.?

STEWART: It’s at the Grove.

BLACK: Hold on. Because I found out that Aritzia in SoHO has a full-service coffee shop for the guys that are waiting.

WALLNER: Oh, like the boyfriend club?

BLACK: Yeah. If I’m sitting there while babe tries on—

WALLNER: Your girl would never go to Aritzia, though.

BLACK: No, she probably wouldn’t. She would go there to competitively shop.

STEWART: She wouldn’t be caught dead there.

BLACK: But you’re telling me Brandy Melville has a restaurant?

WALLNER: Well in L.A., but I’ve never been. Have you?

STEWART: I haven’t been, but Mikey, a friend of the show, has been a few times. He said that it’s surprisingly satisfactory. As a grown man, I don’t know if I can go unless I bring my child or something.

WALLNER: Coming soon? We need to carry on the legacy.

BLACK: You should look into his legacy a little bit before you suggest that.

STEWART: Do you think I’d be a good daddy?

WALLNER: Baby Jeans.

BLACK: Have you ever had stickers on your laptop?

WALLNER: In 2015 I did.

STEWART: This is actually a good question. This is better than sick talk or anything like that.

WALLNER: I think I had a Fade to Mind sticker.

BLACK: I figured Brynn would have a Santa Cruz skateboard. Glossier.

WALLNER: Never Glossier. I don’t wear makeup.

STEWART: Brynn, you are all the way that bitch.

BLACK: Do you know why people choose to come on this stage and just absolutely lose their minds?

WALLNER: Am I losing my mind? Losing my mind would be like showing the Parades [underwear].

STEWART: Showing the Parades?

WALLNER: The Swarovski Crystal Parades. I’m in business class now.

STEWART: This bitch has one watch and she acts brand new.

BLACK: Brynn got one Cartier watch for free.

WALLNER: Wrist check.

BLACK: So when you say you’re in business class, I guess the question I like to ask is, everybody’s in business class when one of these watch brands is paying for you to go to Switzerland.

WALLNER: Don’t wake me up for breakfast.

STEWART: Don’t wake me up for breakfast.

WALLNER: Honestly, they feed you way too much on the flight.

STEWART: They set you up on those influencer trips, don’t they? Brynn, how cold is the silverware? It’s so cold, right?

WALLNER: And the towels, they’re hot.

BLACK: It’s so cute that you guys just discovered first-class. Go on. 

WALLNER: Chris, I’m not rich enough for that. I’ve never flown first. I don’t know what that’s like. Although I am going to Dubai Watch Week.

BLACK: Thank you so much for joining us.

WALLNER: Do you actually want me to leave?

BLACK: No. Brynn, thank you for joining us.

WALLNER: Thank you.

BLACK: Guys, we really appreciate you coming to How Long Gone at the Carlyle tonight. Thank you to all of our guests for being such good sports.

WALLNER: We have this room until midnight so feel free to hang out.

BLACK: Yeah, you guys can keep partying if you want.

STEWART: We will continue to kiki. Chris’s room is 1225, if you guys have coke.