The Daily Stoic - Timothy Denevi on the Power of Reading and Learning from the Past (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

Ryan speaks with assistant professor and MFA program at George Mason University, Timothy Denevi The economics of a book being different than the media, How much do you internalize the tumult and danger around you as a journalist, Fundamentally journalism is a form of lying and an act of aggression and his book Freak Kingdom · Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I told this story before, but the first Airbnb I stayed in was 15 years ago. I was looking for places to live when I wanted to be a writer and we stayed at this house, I think outside Phoenix. And then when I bought my first house here in Austin, I would rent it out when South by Southwest or F-1 or all these events. My wife and I would go out of town and we'd rent it and it helped pay for the mortgage and it supported me while I was a writer. You've probably had the same experience.

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something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down,

be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Last week I brought you part one of my conversation with Timothy Deniviv, who wrote this awesome book called Freak Kingdom, Hunter S. Thompson's Manic, Tenure, Crusade against American Fascism. One book that I absolutely adore, carrying it in the painted porch. We don't carry a lot of sort of current events like books that don't fit in clear categories. And this is one and I really think you should read it. He's written for the Paris

Review, the New York magazine, literary hub. I read this great piece he wrote about Joan Didian, who by the way, you've listened to the podcast more than once you've already picked up on this. I'm a huge Joan Didian fan, and so it's cool for him to sit on the table, which is Joan Didian's table who's sitting in the chair in my office,

where I'm sitting in as I'm reading to you right now. I really liked this book. Again, when I rave about books, I'm really raving about books. I took some notes when I was writing this book, I was like, this book again. When I rave about books, I'm really raving about books. I took some notes when I was writing this book, I was like, this book is better written than it should be. Like Tim is an academic, he's a professor at George Mason. And a lot of books written by professors,

they're factually correct. The scholarly work is important, but they're not great at writing. And you can tell this dude has been schooled in creative writing, he knows what he's talking about. And it was just a really awesome conversation. I think you're going to enjoy part two. If you haven't checked out Freak Kingdom,

you absolutely should. I'll link to it in today's show notes. But go ahead and check it out. And here's my conversation on Hunter S. Thompson, America. And what we can learn from the past political moments about the moment we're in right now. I don't know what's happening to the Western mind, but I will say the literal relationship

to fact, especially in the last 10 years as mind blowing to me, we don't just have to go back to the 60s and the idea of exaggeration and art, you know, and all of these different emotional verses, you know, other types of truth. I wrote a lot about the historical Jesus and gospels, and that idea that you could keep two things in the human mind at once, that of course this is exaggerated to prove a point,

and still this is an narrative that feels true or I want you know It doesn't have to be either or and I are are there or moment? blows my mind right now, you know, and then I mean at least hypocrisy Which is what Thompson was talking about so much then but which is really dangerous because it's my my my fiancee We'll say like we're not thinking well like we're not thinking well of everything has to be a dichotomy or a black and white Yes or no situation and that response is similar what you're talking about to To what I think is going wrong right now, you know, and I I just think Thompson was so good and so many of those I mean what is what is a carman say like?

Life is short and art is long and success is very far off Yeah, you know that this is something that's been practiced and engaged for so many thousands of years by so many people. And to take not just our lens right now and map it onto the more recent American past or whatever, but to think that it's always been this way. And we're not in a conversation with the technology

that's all around us. You know, the voices of people that are long gone to me is mind blowing. And I think we're getting stupider because of that. And I sound so old, it kind of blows my mind, but we need to think, is mind blowing. And I think we're getting stupider because of that. And I sound so old, it kind of blows my mind, but we need to think, I don't know how we're going to think better if we can only think in yes or no.

I mean, I think if you watch the tape of Hunter S. Thompson at the Conduckey Derby, and then you read the story, you'd be like, oh, you made the entire thing up. But that's not what that story is about. He's in the same, if you actually, what could you verify from those trips to Las Vegas? Probably more of it is not true than is true. But the book's not about what happened in Las Vegas.

The book is about the high water mark of the 60s. It's all about that observation. It's about the essence and the vibe and the feeling that he's trying to capture. And what new journalism was was a kind of emerging of fiction and non-fiction. And comedy does that now too. And yeah, you're missing the point if you try to be

this sort of strict literate. Like, there's a difference between the irony then of simultaneously being a culture where you have someone like Trump who is objectively a liar, but people accept it because they want it to be true or because it feel like to have literally the most dishonest person to ever hold the office, simultaneously be popular with a large segment of the population

because he is a truth teller, is this weird double standard where the people that we should be hearing, the emotional truth from, we hold literally, we hold to the standard of literalness. And then the people who are actual officials or scientists, who we need to be holding to a literal standard, we allow to get off with, well, they're telling me what I want to hear. It's a very strange situation.

And I mean, it reminds me of kind of a gentle way, but you know, the passage in Didian's The White Album where she's with Jim Morrison. Yeah. You know, and you know how she writes about it, it's, she goes the recording session, where she's with Jim Morrison. You know how she writes about it, she goes the recording session, they're waiting for Jim Morrison. He shows up, he doesn't talk to anybody. You know, he's like, should we do this?

And they're like, we can't. And Didian's like, I don't even know in whose favorite conversation was determined. In real life, what happened, Evie Babet's her friend talks about those who dated Morrison, brought her there. She was flirting with Tim Morrison. He was throwing the matches at her.

It was such a different reality than how she articulated it. That piece of emotional truth is mind blowing. I love that passage about how she captures what the doors are expected to be, what they are. Yeah, they're like, should we go, they're like making like trap. They're supposed to be this revolutionary artistic, you know, whatever group and there's like,

should we drive back from Westco? You know, exactly. It's just this, it's so, she presents them as so pedantic and ordinary that it essentially like, flares them. Yeah. And yeah, why is she doing that?

That's like, that's a different question. But yeah, the idea that it could have happened very differently. Exactly. And then still, everything's true there. She had a fact checker. She just chose to leave out certain other parts. And I think she did a very nice job of capturing

what we thought a rock band was, and other pants, sex and death, and then the kind of everyday nature of it. And that, you know, is like four co-workers or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And there's like, they're eating like boiled eggs out of a paper bag. You know, like, she's counting the number of buttons on the control panel.

But even then, she's narrowing from reality all the different things that did happen that night into her version of what she wants to say. And nothing is untrue about that. It's just think of all she leaves out to get there. And I think we are even struggling to understand that in terms of subjectivity and nonfiction and truth in the present right now. Well, I actually, the epigraph is to Trustman Lying is that James Adgey quote,

where he's basically saying that fundamentally journalism is a form of lying, because you're taking disparate events and coordinating them to tell a story that you want to tell. And you're leaving things out, and then there's that famous what's your name, that Janet Malcolm think about how fundamentally journalism to tell. And you're leaving things out and then there's that famous, what's your name, that Janet Malcolm thing about how fundamentally journalism is also this act of aggression

and hostility. Did he talk about this too, where you're like, you and the source have an adversarial relationship and you're just looking for where you're going to bury the knife. Yeah. And if you don't put the knife in, it's only because you're using them in some ways to get up to someone else or something else or they fit your, and so, yeah, we don't see journalism that way because again, coming out of the 60s, we see it as this inherently noble pursuit is, speaks truth to power, brings out presidents which it does. I was telling Haas and that I was saying like obviously post writing trust me. I'm lying. I have this relationship where I see clearly the importance of journalism. I mean, especially when you have sort of a neo-fascistic movement, you have disinformation, you have misinformation, where real lives are hanging the balance.

And at the same time when I watch stories like what happened to him or I watch, so miss the boat on other things, you go, oh yeah, you're like, you are also part of the problem. You're like, you're like, the, I don't know what the alternative is, but like, you're a complicit in the whole system too. And you are as much a vehicle for untruth as you are true. Exactly. I think Barry Weiss' response to the, it's been amazing that Israel

Palestine conflicts. We got to that topic very quickly, but the way that she's covering, that ever since, since early October, has been brilliant and has a way to cut through what's inhibiting or the failures of major journalistic outlets right now, and dealing with, I mean, sending reports out, talking to people on the ground, she, with her podcasted and with the FreedBest has done an amazing job.

So that's kind of the more, I mean, in a tough time saving lives a brilliant way, I think of dealing with it right now. Well, and then that, there is no such thing as a perfect messenger, right? So like, I know Barry, I like Barry, I think she's carried water for the wrong people quite often, and then their moments

where she really nails it, right? And I think you could make the same point about hundreds of times there, a lot of great. And it's like, sometimes they get it right and sometimes they don't, right? And some, you sort of, that's why you have to have this broad group of people you get your information from.

You can't just, oh, I just read this, you know? The dumbest people I know just get their news from the television. Do you know what I mean? And you go, okay, this is a problem. And that's, it's so hard though, because I wish my father would watch CBS news, you know, like instead, it's on Facebook. Like I think that you're right. I think that we've also lost the idea of getting news, of getting an information and perspective by a foreign

page book. Yeah. Written for you. So that's why I loved your book. So I have found, the best book I read during COVID was John Embarry's book, The Great Influenza. So you're reading about the Spanish flu, and you're like, OK, here's everything that's true. The best way I understood Trump was Sinclair Lewis's, it can't happen here. And I feel like your book actually, which basically

the generation right after that book, like you're talking about no longer, does the fascist movement look like Hussolini or Hitler? It's figure out how to dress better. It's figured out how to co-opt certain kinds of speech and language, it's more velvet glove, you know, than iron fist. But Hunter Sampson is writing about the exact same things that are happening right now, the same

types of politicians, like my understanding of the civil rights movement and has changed how, when I look at some of these governors, like when I look at the governor of Texas, when I look at DeSantis, I understand them now through the lens of George Wallace or this certain kind of Southern governor, same with some of the senators, but you're like, oh, this is a type of person, just like there's types of movies, this is a type of person.

And this person has something that resonates with large groups of people for long periods of time. You have to understand the game that they are playing. And you have to take that very seriously. And I found that people don't have the historical basis to do that. So they just look at, oh, DeSantis doesn't like the people that I like, or or whatever. And you're not getting the game that he's playing and how dangerous it actually is and where it inevitably ends up. Where it leads to. Yeah. And the inherent like fragility to our system

that we kind of take for granted. You know, how can be co-opted, very, be co-opted in the ways you're exactly talking about. I mean, I always think about how George Wallace Thompson wrote about this, you know, is running for President in 1972 on an independent platform. We'll be shot eventually in only Maryland, but this is when he's still kind of ramping up. There's other candidates, other Democratic candidates going to Florida, trying to win. I mean, you have Muskie taking the whistle stop tour, you know, down trying to coordinate

everything perfectly. And George Wallace just goes to an Ask car event. He has 300,000 people in the audience. He speaks beforehand and he is reaching everyone. He is getting the free publicity and the exposure that the other candidates are paying everything they have and positioning themselves to somehow reach and instead are just getting further away from the voters that they want. Yeah, he understands where the people are and what they want to hear. Yeah. And yeah, right. And if you don't have the conscience that protects you, it's a problem.

So you need politicians who are astute, an artist who are astute, critics who are astute to understand what's happening and to not just let it happen and report on it as it's happening. Everyone leaves the legacy. I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together. For some, the shadow falls across decades, even centuries. I do not. I do not. It is unacceptable to have figures like roads glorified.

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Brighten and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever you get your podcasts. Exactly, and I thought about that a lot when it was whatever our present day moment is, it's not any more difficult than all the ones from the repeated past, going 9,000,000, thousand, thousand, thousand years. And it's not more singular, but it is, you know, like all those other moments, it's its own version. And when I was in a bad media diet where I still am,

I'm sure outrage was generating what I was written in the New York Times, what I was reading in the New Yorker. Well, I find the writer that's expressing the emotion I feel right now, please Adam Gopnik, like saying what I feel, I realized like going just back into the past, even the few generations, to try to look at the same issues, and the same human conflicts that we're seeing now

was a way to kind of access both the present and what I was trying to say to think about the present in a better way. Well, the economics of a book are fundamentally different than the economics of media, right? Like a book is designed, the newspaper story you read or the online article is designed to be replaced immediately by the next thing the next day, we're now on the internet, the next tweet five minutes later.

A book because it takes so long to do by definition, has to have a little more staying power, right? It has to have, It has to continue to be true for longer, has to have a larger view normally. And then I think this is the most important part that's fundamentally different about what we would call journalism, is that you pay for it individually. Right? Not even there's a problem with, like, as they say, if it's free, you're the product that's being sold. But an article inside a package of other information, right, is different than this, which is designed to be self-sufficient and self-justifying. Like, you buy this, you read it, it is worth what you paid for it. That is a different value proposition with a different set of incentives.

And people don't really think about the incentives that are operating under the information that they're consuming. And how those incentives are working and changing that information. And if you can't see that, then you fall prey to that bias. Just like people spend too much time on Twitter, get their brain work, people watch too much news, Twitter, get their brain work, people watch too much news, TV, get their brain work. If you're only reading books, you also can live in this world where there's only these big truths and not real events happening on the ground.

So you need a balance, but I think fundamentally, it's better to go back further, it's better to read things that are older, it's better to read things where the significance of the partisanship has gone away. Right? So when you're reading about, um, um, Hunter S. Thompson and his judgments on Nixon, even if you're a Republican, you don't give a shit that Nixon is a Republican. Do you know what I mean?

It's so long ago. And he's not going to come back. It's like, oh no, he's going to come back and take over. It's too hard. You're just thinking of him and whether his judgments of that person's character or flaws or decisions were right or wrong. The greatest biographer of all time is Plutarch.

Plutarch is writing not whether, and he admits, he goes, I don't know if all this stuff is true or not. And he's like, and I'm not going to tell you exactly where they were born, what they lived, how this happened. He's like, because an action or a word or an anecdote is more revealing about the essence of what's true than anything else. And so when you read about Alexander the Great, or when you read about the Catalan conspiracy, you know, you're thinking, oh, this is what human beings

do. This is bad. This is why this or that. Well, the same thing is happening right now on January 6th or whatever. And then you're able to go, okay, what my party is saying I should think here or this outlet is saying, you're able to get to the historical essence and the timelessness of that, which is really ultimately what matters.

Yeah. I had read the Catalonian orations, probably 25 years ago, some of the first Latin, I was trying to find the verb and the text, but still, Cicero, like an indyting Cataline. And I didn't think of it again. I mean, 25 years later, until after January 6, I had had been there reporting, and I remember the candle that he had in the iterations. I'm not going to tell you that I remember the devices, and I remember the stakes in a way that I forgot, and the way that that came back, it kind of blew my mind. Yeah, you have this guy who feels entitled, and like he's earned it, and that he should be in charge, and then somebody else wins. And then he's, he, even though he couldn't be close,

he couldn't be further from the mob or the, the population, he stirs them up and six them on the establishment. And then, you know, then there's also interestingly enough in there, I've kind of, the kind of the overreaction of sister, like sister wants this to be the crisis of his lifetime, and the irony is it's not minor, but it's the, it was probably never going to work. And in his overreaction to it, ironically sets up

his lack of credibility when he really could have been necessary when the Republic is overthrown, you know, just a few years later. And so like, we previously would have had a culture where everyone read that when they were learning Latin. And then they didn't learn Latin, so you don't read it. And then you go, why, if it's not about learning Latin, why would we study this in so long? How am I going to go?

It's old dead white guys, whatever. And then we don't have the shared cultural consciousness to be able to draw, like, to understand why we have the norms that we have, why we have the words that we have. Like, how many people even know that it's the riot at the capital is named after capital line Hill? You know what I mean?

And that the Senate, all these words come from the thing, and if you don't understand that, the significance of each one of the things don't matter, and you can end up in a place where it's all kind of emptied of significance, and then the stakes, which are quite high, don't feel as high as they are. You know, I was on a panel last week at the University of Virginia called the Canonical in the Band, sort of about the Canon and Band books. You know, and I, one thing I thought about talking with the phenopoeia, they were great.

The Canon's a living thing. We think of the Canon as this old thing that needs to be rejected or accepted, but and this is a more recent experience. The Canon is something we're constantly responding to and saying like was, is this where I was good as we thought? You know, like was Thucydides complicit or correct? Like I think even going back to Herodotus, look at how he hedges his bets. When he says, I don't know if this is true, but,

you know, and the way that, not just in terms of rhetoric, but in terms of honesty, truth, and art, all these different voices for over thousands of years. Of course, there's gaps. Of course, people have been left out. I've tried to articulate their experience. Is one of the most valuable things humanity has today, or all these voices

through a technology of the book that still are here? And my students sometimes will, and my students are great creative writing. I'm a face students. Again, the idea that it's harmful or wrong or it will be bad for you to read somebody else's perspective or point of view from the past or you should shrug it off because you know they were a terrible tyrant or what have you like what the canon offers us is were a terrible tyrant or what have you, like what the canon offers us is, a conversation to respond to. Yeah. And I think that's what's missing today, you know?

Well, there's even this sense like that the Greeks and the Romans were all these old dead white guys, right? And like even in the case of the Stoics, Seneca's born in Spain, right? Epic Titus is a slave, Marcus Rios is an emperor. That's an incredible swath of diversity, just in those three characters. Xeno, some people think he might have been African or had some African blood in him.

And so you have this actually, incredibly diverse group, diverse not just in terms of race or origin, but also in experience, which is a stand-in for the larger sense of diversity. So it's so close-minded to say that. And then there, of course, it was largely male-centric, but it was only, when I really studied it, I go, Brutus' wife is Cato's daughter. And so, and there's this, even in the Shakespeare play, and in Plutarch, you get this interesting interplay between Brutus and his wife. It's wife, we make Brutus the main character. But if you were presenting that today, you would show Brutus almost certainly as somewhat cowardly and vacillated and it's

his wife who steals him with courage and sort of puts him to it. And so actually, it's not like, it's not that there weren't women involved. It's just just in how we've talked about it. And so it is the canon and our understanding of history and the story can be changed. Without even adding anything new, it's just what are you emphasizing? Plutarch renders Portia Cato as a not heroic figure, but you could just as easily re-imagine that, which is by the way what they were doing, that there's a thousand plays about Hercules and a thousand plays about all the, you know, edipistsists, every generation they were just rewriting the same in the same way

that we make and remake the Marvel movies. And even just the early Marvel movies, first now, they're more diverse, you know, there's women have greater roles, they're tackling the issues of the day. That's what the classics were. The problem was we just stopped at some point and And we said, this is it's baked. And in fact, it's never been baked. And it's always been possible to reimagine and add. And just, it's really an inachronism that we see them

all the same in the same way that we see all white people today as the same. When a generation ago here in America, Italian people didn't feel white. That's why they put up statues of Columbus. They were trying to celebrate what a bear gots, which again, it's interesting how that experience is literally incomprehensible to us.

We can't see, we see Columbus as a racist figure, which, you know, as a figure of colonialism, but in 1922, if you're an Italian immigrant, you see representation in Columbus. And you could be wider. Yeah. If you could identify with Columbus, it was a way to pass within society. Or do you just be proud of something in yourself? Exactly. I know one thing I try to do in my writing and my perspective, which I'm as guilty as anybody, but how do we not map this American moment

and its recent history on to all of the conflicts and problems we see in the world now and also in the past? I mean, how do we not bring our idea of power, identity, culture, gender, which we have a different way of talking about it now than we did even 20 years ago, 40 years ago, to these moments from 4,000, 2,000, 3,000 years ago. I love the podcast, the rest is history, the two British guys that do it. I just love it because they are able to say, I don't think you understood what was happening when Nero's first wife died, and then he forced the slave to become a unique,

you know how that he named after that? So to bring our current perspective onto that, it may be insightful right now, but there's also a logic there that's like a relic been lost to time that we have to work to understand again through the writings that exist and through the engagement we're still offered by, again, the technology of writing. Well, and these labels and these ideas don't always hold true. So, like, I remember in Ron

Chernow's biography of Grant, which I'm fascinated by Grant, I've read pretty much everything I've ever written on Grant, and Chernow talks about him repeatedly as an alcoholic, which he may or may not have been, but certainly Grant did not know he was an alcoholic, because that wasn't a thing. Right. I'm talking about language now. Yeah, and so the conceit is inherently problematic. Right.

So Grant might be drinking, might not be drinking, but the sense that he is addicted to a thing and he can't stop doing the thing is a modern conception. Yes. Another version of this is, there are these students at Brown University every couple years, they protest the statue of Marcus Aurelius that's on campus because Marcus Aurelius was an imperialist or a colonizer. And he literally, literally that is true, that's what Rome was, like the Imperial Empire.

But first of it's a fundamentally different form of colonization, and Second of all, it was 2000 years ago. Right? And the idea that you're going to take a label about a thing we're struggling with now and project it backwards is problematic. It doesn't mean that that's not interesting, that there's that interesting thinking to be done

about how did Rome conceive of its role as an imperial country. And what's fascinating is that they had all the same debates that we had now. The idea was you, an enterprise and politician would get assigned to one of the colonies, which they would proceed to loot, right? But not everyone thought that was fair or a good idea. And there was lots of criticism, even of that at the time. And so

to reduce it as as this singular thing that everyone was on board with that we now say is bad is to miss actually the more timeless thing that's was on board with that we now say is bad is to miss actually the more timeless thing that's happening, which is there are sort of good incentives, bad incentives, good actors and bad actors within a society. And society in the way history judges a group depends on how that battle plays out. And in fact that same battle is playing out now. So to dismiss the Romans as imperialists is, I think, academic and somewhat pointless, it's better to go where are we like them? Why did the good guys win or lose? And what lessons can we take from

that? In the same way that we have to look like. It's a slightly different discussion with, I think, you know, monuments to Confederates or the lost cause because that is an ongoing myth that is that was those those were put up to wage a certain kind of intellectual warfare to prop up a system that continues to exist to this day. And there's a difference between that happening in a museum as a historical artifact and as a civic monument that you pay to upkeep now. But like you can't just reduce it as this all one or the other thing. You have to understand what's happening, why it's happening, and to not be able to do that

is to me the sign of a weak mind. And a self-righteous mind that is actually incapable of making the world better. And it makes me sad because that used to be a starting point. We all got things wrong. We're like, oh, Rome is an imperial. As far as the care will now read everything that you can and use your current day lens to come to a new opinion, but that's a way to not have to do that or not have

to keep engaging. It's the end of the conversation, it's the beginning of a conversation. You know, and I see liberal arts education as, you know, spending four years reading other people's perspectives and within fiction or nonfiction or poetry, going into their perspective and seeing the world for however long you're reading is somebody different than yourself. And then you come back out into your perspective and you can't see the world the same way. You know, you expand through looking at the world via these stories that other people have left. And I just always remember, I don't know if it's conservative and liberal thing, but like, at the 2016 convention, I was writing about it, and this is the fear of outside

information. Like, we have to remember on both sides, like, especially the liberal side, the more information you have, the more time you spend seeing through somebody else's mind, whether it's an emperor from 2000 years ago, you know, whether it's whoever it is, then coming back to yours, you can do again what I think is the hardest thing. And this isn't just in running what in life, to understand or try to see what's necessary from what's not. You know, and I just, I think that we're so lucky to have how to conversation going on for so long, to have all, you know, like I was walking through your bookstore and I saw the Peloponnesian War.

Yeah. You know, one of my favorite books and I, again, I don't know, I only make two nuclear war jokes a semester. That's my limit with my students, and I think I've already reached it. But, you know, in the last 10 years before the president, how we kind of slanted, that hadn't been as large a conversation nuclear war as in the past, but that conversation between Sparta and Athens and whether to aggressively go

on the Athenian part and invade and what could happen with the consequences could be still feels as relevant and other. And not like a piece or not, but I always think a Syracuse, you know, and sending the fleet to Syracuse. And it was so awful that when people came back, the few survivors of the fleet to tell the Athenians what was so awful that when people came back, the few survivors of the fleet to tell the Athenians what had happened, they wouldn't believe them, that

the whole fleet could be gone. They were executed for even saying it. Well, when General Mattis was Secretary of Defense, he assigned a history of the Peloponnesian war as a book for people to read, because what they call it, the Thucydides trap. The idea of an ascended and a dominant power and an ascended power. And China and America would maybe talk about which one is ascended, which one's dominant, which is ironic. But the idea of how these clashes play out. So instead of, you know, obviously the state in the defense department have access to the latest cables, latest studies, greatest intelligence.

And here they are reading a 2,500 year old book about a war fought by ships that had oars, you know, to give you a sense of how long ago it was, the ships would clash and then the men would jump off and fight each other with swords, like as if it was the ground. That's how long ago this was. with swords like as if it was the ground. That's how long ago this was. And yet the same things are happening. I'm just writing about this in the book I'm doing now, the, the, the, the Melian dialogue or Melian dialogue, like the most famous passage in the, the history of the Public Judicial War is basically Athens going to this little proxy client state and going might makes right is the strong do what they can and the weak struggle as they must, right? As today we talk about systemic racism and structural problems and intersection. That is the

same discussion, right? But how many people that throw these buzzwords around could actually connect it to some sort of classical understanding of that, some real insight into human nature that goes back far enough that you're not thinking Republican Democrat, white, black, America, whatever, it's, it's taking it back far enough. You can see what humans do. And how a lot of the systems we developed, the stories we tell, the institutions we build were designed to counteract those impulses. Yes. Right?

Like the UN being one such invention, right? Or treaties being another invention, or the Geneva can weave, we've invented stuff to deal with things. And sometimes we forget the source of that insight or that hard one lesson. And so to not have that historical basis is just an enormous liability. So people talk about STEM and how you need to learn math or whatever.

But if you don't have an understanding of how humans work and how they've always worked, what whatever. But if you don't have an understanding of how humans work and how they've always worked, what good is your ability to build really good rockets or whatever? I mean, I couldn't agree more. And I, you know, it goes back, like, I guess the two ways. One is there's such a human element to all of this running,

too. You talk about Sena Kalat, like I'll never forget his practicing death essay, you know, when he's talking about, is it tuberculosis or asthma? He's really had a really bad attack. He's like, I am practicing death. You know, and reading that the first time, that was, you know, into the letter, I think.

And it's, I read it in the Latin, and then I read it again in a translation, the Latin's like, having done, done, you know, with all the partitions, but then the translation, John DeGotta, it's a great translation, he goes, I am practicing death. You know, and that's the first line as the translation comes off. And so even within, you know, these larger issues, those moments of human, you know, suffering and perspective, how is that not going to make somebody a better writer today to read that, you know? And I guess the second thing is like with Thompson, exactly what you're talking about these different structures. He understood

their inventiveness and their fragility. And if somebody gets enough power, especially in the post-war world with nuclear weapons, or we have to make a decision in five minutes, whether to respond, we're dealing with stakes that the human mind can't really conceptualize. I think that's the Susan Sontag quote is like we can understand the death of a person human mind can't really conceptualize. I think that's the Susan Sonntag quote is like, we can understand the death of a person. We can't understand the death of a species. Yeah, you know of us, some of them of humankind.

Well, I mean, even in the pandemic, it's clear people have real trouble thinking about the effect of their decisions on other people, right? And so of course we're going to struggle with bigger, the effect of their decisions on other people, right? And so of course, we're gonna struggle with bigger, you know, tragedy of the common issues, like the environment or public trust or what, you know, that's gonna be, if we can't just go, hey, I have this or I might have this.

So I'm going to stay home or I'm going to get this vaccine or I'm going to wear this mask or whatever it is or that the whole reason that governments exist is to bind people together to solve problems like that because instant groups of people can't self-organize quickly enough or voluntarily enough. That's what it's all there for. So if you can't do that, and in meditations, Marx's realist is going, there's two types of plagues. There's a plague that can destroy your life and a plague that can destroy your character. He was writing that during the Antonin plague, he would have understood

how these extreme, difficult, disorienting, scary events fuck with people and bring out the worst in some people and the best in other people. And yet none of these problems or issues are new and all of the great literature is about this. I forget I was reading one of the Greek players. It might have been Euripides, It might have been Eskilis. But it's like, I'm reading this play and I go, oh, it's like about somebody getting revenge and then this jerk gets set up and you go, oh, this is the invention of juries.

Exactly. Somebody came up with that. They were like, hey, somebody gets wrong. They try to get justice by themselves. They end up hurting themselves and other people in the process. So let's come up with a system that solves that. And you're like, this is a play. It's not art, but it's a play designed to try to solve this problem that is clearly

fundamental to societies, which is groups of people living together. And that that's what all this stuff is. And it was all invented at some point. It didn't like, wasn't given to us invented it Think then three or twenty five hundred years later on the night that Martin Luther King is shot Bobby Kennedy, you know who was a Philistine for most of his life But after his very public tragedy began to read the Greeks began to read I have a book in the book sir. He has

Edith Edith what's her name? Roman? No, it's Wharton. I don't know. Edith's something. And she wrote this book called The Greek Way, which is a sample survey course of all the Greek plays.

And that's where he gets, what does he say? Drop by drop, we suffer onto truth or something like that. He once she had made it mon monotheistic, like even in our sleep, you know, pain or suffering, you know, drop by drop comes onto the heart. Yes. Still, you know, through the awful grace of God, you know, we arrive at understanding. Yes. Basically we learn through pain and suffering and he was saying, I've learned through pain

and suffering the loss of my brother. You're now morning Martin Luther King, rioting anger, pain, whatever won't do and it won't solve this, we've got to come together. And then I think the irony then, you know, 50 years later, his son is clearly motivated by some profound grievance and maybe got kicked in the head by a horse or something, or something broke inside that person. And he is now a vehicle for a more modern version of those same things, which is now you don't have to, a group doesn't have to get together

and burn down buildings and whatever. You can just spread like a virus, bad destructive ideas that tear at the fabric of society and what underpins the modern health system, and it's just as destructive. And there's a great book on immunity by Yulebis, and it was the first time reading it. She's a nonfiction writer. It was the first time I began to understand she articulated that immunity is not about you. Yeah, I know it's about how the participation, and she had been writing it while she was pregnant in the 2010s.

You know, and she'd a great writer had gone to Iowa. And it was the first time I stepped back and realized like the systems you talk about. It's about your participation in them, not to protect you, but so all of us can come together and get a different outcome than we used to get individually. We have this understanding of America being about liberty, which it is, but there's liberty and then there's responsibility. And they were seen that the idea was government would create liberty and then philosophy and culture would create virtue.

And these two things have to coexist or operate together for the package to work. Washington orders the vaccination of his troops against smallpox when like one in four people died from the vaccine. Like when it was so, but it's, they're just even in that early moment, wrestling with individual versus collective. And how do these things come together? And so again, when you can read about the ethics of this issue 300 years ago,

it helps inform how you think about it now. There's this super moving thing that Benjamin Franklin writes about, his decision not to vaccinate his son and he dies and he tears apart his marriage in his life, not to get on a vaccine tangent. But the point is almost none of the issues are new. They're struggling with them in the same way of just the names and dates and places and characters, they change, but the problems stay the same. And that's just kind of what's always been happening. And you've read about this a lot too, but you talked about it a little bit just now.

We're bad information, really virulent information, is like a virus. And this goes back to anti-semitism, the elders' desire. And it's a way of thinking. You know that actually infects the world, the rest of your mind, things. There's a great book, Wasteland, about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot that came out recently as a biography of the poem, The Wasteland. And you just saw Ezra Pound's mind deteriorating with like not syphilis, but anti-semitic conspiracy theories. It is really interesting, like the way I was talking to someone about this recently, I was saying that anti-Semitism

may be the oldest virus. Like, and it's this thing that's in, I mean, it affects the Romans, different emperors at different times, different leaders at different times. And then yeah, these different tropes are different, like the elders of the protocol of not design and what's it called? It's not that old, right?

No. And it's like Russian propaganda. It's just this thing, this horrible thing that someone puts out in the world and then it can't be eradicated. And you can be immunized against it with information and understanding, but it's just going around effect.

But if you lack the firewalls for it, it can, my metaphors are getting very mixed here, but if you lack the different, you know, something it can go big or small. And yeah, there are these certain viruses. And I've watched it, I've watched it happen with people I know, even people are fans of mine where it's like, you can kind of see it.

Like, you know, like you follow people on Instagram, and then it's like, oh can kind of see it. Like, you know, okay, you know, like you follow people on Instagram and then it's like, oh, I haven't seen a picture of their spouse in a while. And then, then it's like, announcing they're separated. And then announcing that you kind of sensed, you're like, oh, you kind of keep this mental tab like, you know where they are in that transition, right? And you kind of go, okay, they just retweeted something from Elon Musk and then, you know, now they're talking about trans women in sports and you can kind of watch this. It's like this evolution, you know, the

metaphor they use is about taking the red pill, but it's actually not a thing and you get it. You don't actually, there's this latency period where it's kind of working on you and you don't understand it. And maybe it was as capable, maybe it wasn't, but I'm very fascinated with the way that these kind of idea viruses get into a person and how they change.

I mean, Elon Musk is on the one hand anti-Semitism goes way back to his grandfather who fled to South Africa precisely because he was an anti-Semite and thought there should be like an apartheid regime in South Africa. Like, he didn't go there and there was a part that he was like, this is this is our chance, you know. So there's this predisposition towards it clearly in that family. And then you kind of watch like towards conspiratorial thinking, right? And then you watch as his information diet changes and his place in the world, and then maybe it's

criticized here there. And then maybe it's criticized here there, and then all of a sudden, who he was five years ago, I read the first bio, the Ashley Vance bio, he almost never thought Walter has. It's the same person, but it's not the same person. He's been fundamentally changed and remade by the information that he's consuming. What a life these celebrities lead.

Imagine walking the red carpet, the cameras in your face, the designer clothes, the worst dress list, big house, the world constantly peering in, the bursting bank account, the people trying to get the grubby mitts on it. What's he all about? I'm just saying, being really, really famous. It's not always easy. I'm Emily Lloyd-Saini and I'm Anna Lyong-Rofi. And we're the hosts of Terribly Famous from Wondery, the podcast which tells the stories of our favorite celebrities from their perspective. Each season we show you what it's really like being famous by taking you inside the life of a British icon.

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that it comes through. I think as Steve Bannon, like, oh, go to the CPAC and write about what's going on there. And this year I saw him in his private party and I know he's read everything. Yeah, I know it's not an immunity to the conspiracies. You know, but I asked him. I was, you know, everybody's there. They want to be him, which is very strange.

So that's like the podcast. So they're like, how do I do my podcast? How do I be a Steve Bannon? So I was, you know, what's your favorite George Orwell? Yes. I know he's talked about it. And so I was, you know, what's your favorite George Orwell? Yes. I know he's talked about it. And he said, oh, my, it's a Catalonia. I'm like, that's my favorite.

George Orwell. But, but you then realize that may have been it a long time ago. Now he's mapping it completely different narrative onto that that even exists now with some of it there. And so if that was part of his immunity or anybody's immunity is reading other people's perspectives, what happens when the virus goes so far that now every pre-existing thing can just be like take it apart Peace mail to prove sure what you already feel or believe and that's kind of terrifying to me You can have this almost kind of skits of frenic where you you you know all this stuff

But that gets in the way of what you want to do like you're not not even seeing yourself as the person who's doing what you're, you know what I mean? Like you're doing, you're, you can't, what's that question? Are we the baddies? You know, like you can't even ask that question anymore. You know, because something has happened or your self interest is dependent on you kind of not understanding it's a, it's a weird, but the idea that, yeah, this is, this is what happens to

Catalan. You know what I mean? Like 20, 200 years or 2100 years ago, whatever it is, this guy, you know, he's probably has these dinner parties and they go, you'd be way better, man, you know, and he grew up with his parents telling him how great he was. And then he goes, well, I bet I could, you know, he's just looking at it in pieces in the chess board and not going, am I burning this whole thing down just for me, you know? I just think it's tough when we, you know, it gets back to part of our censorship talks too,

like I teach shooting an elephant today, you know, by George Roy Will, I love him much to Catalonia. There's parts of it where he's talking about what Orwell's talking about what it was like as a colonial administrator and how he knew colonialism was wrong, but it's a lot like Thompson, he was caught up in enforcing it, so he shows out it destroys him as a way to argue against it, which Thompson does a very good job of too, but the talk of editing parts of Orwell now, instead of dealing with some of the language that he has in it,

to me is mind-blowing within our present, and just scrambles that goody or bady argument immediately. And it's to me really dangerous, because it's like the example you get with Roosevelt, it's tinkering with something so essential, information that is essential to us, his perspective. So I don't know, I think about our current media situation. It freaks me out a lot when, and this goes back to the canon

and band books, freaks me out a lot when we're going beyond our online fights with each other. And there's the idea that because our lens is the latest and the most important, we now can begin to take out certain passages of war well, and I mean I don't think that's any way inherent to the present, but I do think so much is magnified right now by the way that we wake up in the morning and become accustomed to communicating with our phones or with everybody else. Yes, I noticed that as I was reading my kids, I was telling them the story of the Odyssey

and I told them the story of Cyclops and forgetting his name, but Odysseus says, Paulie Fremont's. What's his name? Paulie Fremont's. Yeah, Paulie Fremont. He says, what's your name? And he says, no man.

And then so they go, hey, who broke down my eyes? No man picked down my, and my kids just lose their mind. Like, this is the funniest joke. And now they do all this. Anytime they do anything wrong, I go, who punch your brother? And I go, no man picked out my, and my kids just lose their mind. Like this is the funniest joke, and now they do all, they do all this, anytime they do anything wrong, you know, go like who punch your brother? And I go, no man punch my brother. You know, like they're just, they're just playing

with this language in a way that someone almost 3000 years ago or more was playing with language is incredible, right? And so we could be celebrating this sort of timelessness and the uniquely humaneness of all of that. And so there's, yeah, there are these things that sort of ring true and good. And then there's the same kind of dark urges that tyrants and dictators and populists and demagogues

have also been playing off. And you have to understand both of those, right? What makes Lincoln so great is his understanding of biblical language and story, right? This king draws on the same ideas. And then, yeah, what people are throwing out today, of course, it's not gonna resonate. Like, you're not drawn, you don't have the underlying understanding or information to make this more than what it is.

And to really speak to that part of people that you have to bring out to get them to do things. It's, yeah, it's like it's exactly what Hunter has to say that just like our energy will prevail alone, or the righteousness of our cause will prevail alone. And it's so much so much more than that. Yeah, I mean, I think of when I was like, again, 18, my whole Latin class Jesuit, um, high school bellarm in in California was, um, the first six books of the in the year. And so translating that, and I'll never forget, there's a passage where, virtual's writing, and there's a lot of different backgrounds of what's going on, but in the epic poem, you know, in some day, Rome won't exist anywhere either, it's stepping back. And it's a fact, there really a day America does not exist, but being an 18-year-old boy with my boy brain and sitting back and looking around and being like, this country's not going to exist someday too. Sure. You know, And having that realization, the presentness

of our lives, the instantaneousness of our lives, it doesn't just make us focused on our phones or screens or who said something. It makes us blind and the way humans want to be to very clear facts that this country, these people were all gonna die someday. Anyways, as the still ex will tell you, they are already dead, but you know what I mean? But this country itself, if you're all gonna die someday. Anyways, as the still ex will tell you, they are already dead,

but you know better than anybody, but this country itself, personally, Rome was just gonna be gone. And whatever an 18 year old boys' brain is, it is malleable. You can give it good writing and good perspectives, and those magnets, they're not gonna hurt. You know, and so I've always remembered that moment

of looking up and stepping back from the book. One to think why is Virgil putting it in there? He's writing to Augustus, right? And he's trying to get that to him. And so like just even the, it's heightened by the sense of like, what's the author trying to do here? What's the message that they're delivering, right?

To see meditations as a book being written in a plague, right? Or to see, you know, I think it's your rippity is writing as a veteran of this horrible war and trying to process the trauma of what he went through, you know, Seneca's plays being his inability to outwardly criticize Nero and the regime and having to sublimate it in fiction. Shakespeare basically makes one over mention of current day issues and it basically nearly ends his life. And so the rest of Shakespeare is all about Greece and Rome and things hundreds of years in the past because that's the only way he can speak to it.

The benefit though is that it also speaks to us and it disarms. It gets underneath our resistance. Who are you to tell me about this or that? And to understand yet, that's what art is supposed to do, is to touch us in these places. And when you're banning it, because it's politically incorrect or not diverse enough or whatever, you're missing actually what it is. The truth of how representative it is. And the fact that the point is that there really is only one human experience.

Yeah. I did a political writing class. I teach graduates, but this writers from the 20th century. And what I wanted my students to see was, look at how they're doing exactly what you said. Even in these really like political instances that are convention, taking and dramatizing the moment so the reader can do the work to come and arrive

at their own conclusion. And op-ed is the opposite of art. You know, and op-ed is the opposite. And I was like, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. instances at a convention, taking and dramatizing the moment so the reader can do the work to come and arrive at their own conclusion. And op-ed is the opposite of art. You know, and op-ed is the answer. You know, I love the line from Clotter Ranking, Clotter Ranking Quadset, but, you know, art are the questions like we arrive at after we've gone through all the answers. You know, and like, I'm probably mangling it,

but this idea that in that class, they needed to dramatize or write a story about maybe something political in Washington, D.C. And these, I don't usually teach undergraduates, they were undergraduates, all op-eds. Yeah. And I'd be like, well, where did you see this kind of writing earlier in our examples?

Maybe like, well, John Didian says we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Yeah, so I've been like, did you miss the rest of that essay? That's all dramatized to make the reader do work to engage it the same way. Shakespeare had to move around something and tell that story in a different way and say how, you know, I think through my scene is like, Virgil had to reach somehow. He had to reach Augustus.

Yes. And if he just told Augustus in op-ed fashion, he's like, oh, that's how they're worse. Yes, or worse. You're exactly right. he had to reach Augustus and if he just told Augustus in op-ed fashion. Is that how you get excited? Are you going to find out what it was? Yes, or worse. You're exactly right. I think a lot of students want to arrive at op-eds now as somehow the purest form of the expression they want. Or that's the starting place maybe to figure out what you think or feel.

And now put the messiness of humanity and the world around you into a story that might articulate it where the reader can do work and not just be given an answer. Yeah, to think that it's harder to do, but it ultimately reaches more people because the defense is now. A hundred of Stompson is writing, Fear and Loving in Las Vegas, not about drugs, but about the American dream. That, to me, Hell's Angels is captured by the Quares as myths and legends die hard in America because they proved to us that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final. It's a, the Hell's Angels were a revolt against

the corporatization and the, you know, the buzz cut, you know, button down sort of world that had come out of the Second World War, but Thompson is basically, Thompson isn't celebrating them. He's saying that the curates may be worse than the disease. These are, these, he shows them, you know, doing a gang rape, right? I think there's all this criticism now about the, the new Michael Lewis book about Sam Bankman Fried. It's like, he full lays this dude. He present. There's a quote in the book where he goes, I don't think I have a soul, right? You know, like Lewis's job as the journalist is to present

the story as it happens. If he's going this dude sucks, fuck this dude, you don't read the book. It's the work of the book is how do you get someone to read from start to finish about an unlikable person and capture attention along the way. And like it's funny with my stuff on inch philosophy, you know, people go, oh, this is just self-help. And I go, yes, that's the point.

Like if writing about ancient philosophy was enough to get people to read ancient philosophy, I wouldn't have to do it. Like the ancient philosophers did ancient philosophy. The problem is we now exist in the world where the vast majority of people can't read ancient philosophy or have no interest in ancient philosophy. So by taking self-help, which people pick up

and they walk through the airport, or somebody buys for someone who's going through something, and I use it as an entry point into ancient philosophy, I'm doing that precisely that kind of jiu-jitsu. And people don't like that because they want to speak only to people like them, which is this sort of 1% sliver who really likes the original stuff or could take the full factual break down.

And that's not where most people are. And that's not where opinions are changed and worlds are opened up. It's much more like if you just wrote a book about Richard Nixon, for instance, and corrupt politics in the middle of the 20th century, you know, that's going to sell less copies than doing that through a lens of Hunter S. Thompson who has a different reputation, right? And so that, the art of it is, they think you're doing one thing and really you're doing another thing. And that's what the ancients were doing, too.

Yeah. And I don't know why we don't think that to make art, they were dealing with the same wagers and stakes. When it every move, even more so than we are. It had to, not just like the idea of getting the reader to do work or not a four of digits who you're exactly right, but that if they made one more mention than they did, their lives are over, you know, that they're no longer. And we've talked a lot in the 20th and 21st century about this in a kind of global way, but it always blows my mind that the historical conversation, or when we talk about it in the historical sense, that gets left off.

Well, yeah, it's like, there's two forms of death. One, like you are two on the nose and the emperor cuts off your head. The other, you're two on the nose, you're two luxury, you're two boring, you're two factual. And the reader cuts off your head because they say, I don't wanna read this anymore. And you think Plutarch is going, you think you wanna read about Alexander the Great because you think he's a hero.

Let me present to you why he was great in many ways, but ultimately a tragic case. And maybe you totally missed the point. You're Napoleon, you read it, and you like, fuck, I love Alexander the Great. But if you're somebody who can be persuaded, you're seeing the more nuanced picture. This is why he's, he writes parallel lives. So it's, it's Kato and Caesar, how they're contrasting with each other. Right? And he's comparing them without saying who's better, but it's obvious who's better. Right? And they have the artfulness of having to persuade the audience who will kill you if you're boring and then speak truth to power without threatening truth to power. This is also Machiavelli is the most tragic example of this.

Machiavelli is writing a book to the people who tortured him. Like Machiavelli is a Republican in the sense that he did not think there should be a prince and he's having to write about how princes get power, as a historian, he's writing about this and he's having to find a how princes get power, a store as a historian is writing about this, and he's having to find a way to both say, this is how it works, but also this probably isn't how

it should work without tipping off the people who have already tied him to the rack and spun him around. You know, and the subtlety to which he's doing it. And then today we're like, oh, that's very Machiavellian. Like, dude, this dude was threatening a fucking needle with his life on the line. And you're missing the way that this can both be read from both perspectives and has this kind of dual lesson in it. And I think, Honourous Thompson is doing that in his own way. It's fun and ridiculous and excess. And it's also

this profound sadness and indictment ultimately of the same culture. It's just the tragedy of he gets hooked on the stuff. You can't get out. His son wrote a great book called Stories. I tell myself one Thompson. And so I tried to end with Nixon leaving, but those years after are really tough because it's, the way we understand alcoholism now, coupled with how Thompson would take Dex to drain. And there was a price to be paid later.

And his son writes about getting hooked on the stuff. I mean, he was drinking a 750, a 750-minute-liter bottle of Jack Daniels every day starting when he woke up and it just dissolved him from the inside out and his mind too. You know, and so you're right. Like, he's seen in this kind of extreme way and he would present himself that way, but eventually, he became the caricature. He would promote, you know, and that happened later. And it wasn't through tons of acid or drug, which are whatever, but it was just through alcoholism.

And it was eventually speed and cocaine and all these different things, but he was just dissolving his body with that. And I think that that gets lost. And I think one of the hardest questions is, how much do you internalize in both your writing and your sensitivity, the tumult around you? Yeah.

You know, like think of Didian, like having her panic attacks and passing out and going into a psychiatric treatment facility in the summer of 1968, and her great-lite is, in retrospect, I don't think nausea, or, you know, Bounds of Business were entirely the wrong reaction to the story in 1968. And the same with Thompson, how much do you internalize that tumult and danger around you?

And what's the line with them that becomes too much? You're not been able to express your perspective on it because of your proximity or sensitivity to it. Yeah, the toxicity of the people he's around, he absorbs and doesn't have a mechanism for filtering it in process, and it kind of turns against himself. Yeah, and he just runs, he burned very bright.

I mean, team solters that fascinating comparison because Solter wrote until he was 85, 86, 90, was still writing his next book when he passed away. And Thompson, you know, from what I've seen, there were still brilliant pieces later, never really wrote in the same way as he did when he was younger at healthier. No, there's a F-Scott Fitzgeraldness to it.

Yeah, I think with Dorothy Parker looked at his course and just said, you pour some of a bit, you know, and that's like that's Thunder of Sompson. It is, you know, except there's a kind of terrifying sense of doom that imagine if Fitzgerald lived those next 30 years with that kind of a man. But as a shell of a person, like he didn't successfully kill himself earlier,

which is what Fitzgerald did. Yes, you know, without going out exactly right. And I, you know, I think art doesn't have to be seen as self-destructive, but to think that somehow, and again, this goes back to baseball, I would think of Barry Bonds, a player I enjoyed watching, growing up, you know, and he was very difficult with the media. He was very guarded to think that his success, his incredible ability, and then also love the issues.

To think that his uniqueness is somehow separate from his personality and who he is, is mind blowing and the way we often separate writers from their work. I mean, it's been a conversation that's going on a long time. I think it's just another form of reduction that we have now. You know, and Tom someone's, he wasn't a good writer because he was an alcoholic, but there is a terrible, terrible wager going on that he didn't even know what side he was coming down on. You know, and there's no one right answer to it. I find it to be, you know, that it gets back to that. I quoted it earlier with that line from Conrad. It's like life is short, art is long, and success is really far off. That's not a good thing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, No, no, no, no. That's not heartening, you know? It's like all my book will eventually be written.

It's like, no, there are a lot of things that could go wrong at any moment. And I, you know, how could somebody's athletic brilliance be separate from the way they see the world? You know, and especially the way your Barry Vaughan's made then to avoid- Yeah, and of course they're gonna do anything it takes to be able to express that.

Yeah. It's like almost a form of like body dysmorphia. But it's like, I have this thing. It has to get out. The world has to see me the way I see myself. And I'll turn myself into whatever kind of art monster I have to be to be able to do it. Or a steroid monster. Right. You know, it's, it's, it's, and then there's the moral argument too. It's like Mark McGuire wasn't a better hitter than Barry Vaughn's, but on steroids, he was succeeding more.

Why should that person be able to do it when I'm the one who has more talent and I'm not rising, you know, going up to that level? Well, this was awesome. I love the book and thanks so much for doing this. I really enjoy talking. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show.

We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. Tomorrow sounds like hydrogen being added to natural gas to make it more sustainable. It sounds like solar panels generating thousands of megawatts. And it sounds like carbon being captured and stored, keeping it out of our atmosphere.

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