Timothy Denevi on Hunter S Thompson and the Art of Journalism

The more information you have the more time you spend seeing through somebody else's mind whether it's an emperor from 2,000 years ago then coming back to yours you can try to see what's necessary from what's [Music] [Laughter] not well I love your book thank you yeah that's uh it's nice you to say I uh you know I always especially appreciate it When a fellow Westerner you know enjoys uh enjoys where are you from I'm Los gatus but my family's from Sacramento the Italians yeah we all from uh the other side of the river where in

Sacramento so my mom says we my grandfather's or great-grandfather's house was um I think it was the other side of the so I'm writing about Joan didan now is the other side of the tracks of her house and I got to go back and figure out like East West And all that but you know that's um I I lived there a little bit as a child too um you know before coming back to the San Jose area where my family is now you want some Jon didan trivia yes this is her table did you get

it in the MH oh my God where do you think it was at the Franklin Avenue house or do you think she cuz she took everything everywhere you know she took her piano yeah like all those places this is beautiful yeah you got to get that cup off that you're Exactly right she would tell me to do that no there's a coaster if you want it uh um no I got the table and I've seen pictures of a different dining room table that these chairs are at oh wow but I've never seen a picture of

her at the table so I don't know where it was in her house she was she always took that for she went to Brentwood after Malibu and Malibu was after Franklin Avenue right and then I have uh her chair like it was like a writing chair And uh I had that that's what I sit at every day that's amazing you want to see it when we go I do definitely yes yes I want I desperately wanted the desk uh which was like a piece of Sacramento history was like from her family uh but $60,000 seemed

like a lot of money for a desk a lot of money Fork I agree with you on that on that end uh I think my wife would have killed me and so would the bank um yeah I'm I'm as a Sacramento when I weirdly didn't have a Relationship with John didan like I don't think I knew she was from Sacramento until I mean I guess I vaguely understood it in some of the books but at like at no point growing up in Sacramento was it ever discusted that one of the greatest writers of the 20th

century was from that town you're exactly right it wasn't until you know even the 2010s when she finally began to be identified in kind of a proud way Yeah like before that she was derogatory about and protective of it but in the city you know with Thompson they've done the same thing it was later when the city began to celebrate her like how Louisville began to celebrate him but you're right I didn't I knew her but I always identified her with Los Angeles interesting yeah and then the other writer that I am I'm slightly more

fanboyish about than didan is um John fonte I just read uh uh Brotherhood of The great oh really it's about Roseville yeah he his his wife's family was from Roseville I've never seen another writer capture the northern Italian experience the northern Italian immigrant experience better than him have you read any of the other ones no I'm going to read uh uh the in the dust ask the dust I have that in the story one of the great novels of all time uh crazy story which we us should talk about um but he has a bunch

maybe 1933 was a bad year The road to Los Angeles he has a couple books about his journey he's he's seen as an LA writer but he's from Colorado and so it's just a weird it's such a interesting snapshot to American give the Italian-American experience Colorado to La then Northern California it's uh it but as someone who loved books I just think what would it have done to me earlier to know that there were people who did this in the place that I was from I Sacramento is not a literary or Artistic City in its

own self- Reckoning so that it wasn't I I went to UC Riverside it wasn't until I got to Riverside that I met Susan Strait The novelist and she she was the first Professor I met on campus cuz she taught this honor seminar that we had to take in the summer before we started cool and like they assigned us to read her book and I was like a person wrote this like from where I'm from yeah but I wasn't no like a person wrote this about the place That they're from and that place is not New

York or Paris or London this is a p this is a writer writing about an offthe map Place Riverside in L Empire that's and is doing it at a high level and then is just this is her job and that like all these light bulbs went off for me yeah I love it William S royan yeah so royan wrote about the Central Valley like I just when I read him was living in Honolulu I was like you can write about the bear you know not the San Francisco or the you know La type Noir story

but just about where we're from and the physicality of it yes and that that thing can shape you and if it's interesting to you you can make it interesting to the the reader listener whatever um yeah uh fonte I'll tell you about asid dust so fonte I did this piece about this a couple years ago but so fonte he writes ass the dust it's supposed to Be his breakthrough novel and he publishes it with this small publisher called stack pole and Suns comes out like 33 something like that anyways is it 33 I forget what

year comes out maybe later maybe it's like 38 I think it's 38 and that same year stackpole which was also was more of a military publisher they did a lot of books in military history they published an unauthorized edition of minec comp oh wow Hitler Being then like it'd be like if Putin had written a book and they they felt like people should read it and they also felt like [ __ ] Putin no royalties for you so they translate into English and they don't it's not an authorized Edition oh wow hmh hton Mifflin still

a publisher today had the American rights they and Hitler's literary agency and Hitler himself Sue stackpole and Suns and win in federal court enforcing a murderous dictators Copyright in America and the the The Legend it's true and not true but the legend is aidus sells out its first printing or is selling through its first printing in a good clip it would have been a huge book this distracts the publisher sucks up its marketing budget which they spend on legal fees which they then lose and and ask the dust is then forgotten until yeah 1970 whatever

when Charles Bukowski Discovers the lone surviving copy in the Los Angeles Public Library wow I didn't know that story it's incredible the book is so good is that what you would recommend for someone who read Brotherhood of the grape and is looking for something to read by fonte I think so it's it's definitely his magnum opus um his short stories are good um he wrote this book full of life um which was his most popular book it wasn't a popular book but it gets turned into a Big movie that basically pays for everything that's he

he once so basically what happens is once as the dusk uh is destroyed he is sort of heartbroken and then just becomes a well-paid but little known screenwriter he has a nice house in Malibu paid paid for by movies that were never made and was a frustrated novelist and sort of a drunk and and a you know tortured dude as a result of this Experience um and uh he he writes a CLE he wrote one more Bandini novel before ask the dust I'm forgetting what it's called I've read all of them and then after um

after and this is way nerdier than people listen to but uh after um uh Bukowski rediscovers ask the dust as fonte is dying of diabetes they're like chopping off his limbs as blind he dictates to his wife the sequel of dreams from Bunker Hill how's that cuz That's done it's not done written out he told his wife the novel while he was it's good it's really good um I think you would like 1933 was a bad year year cuz it's it's about it's about fonte as a kid it's it's the youth Italian American experience but

as the dust is fascinating in that so basically the premise of as the dust is Artur obini a delusional narcissistic aspiring writer who you can't help but relate to as a Writer um falls in love with this Mexican girl who works at a diner in Bunker Hill and she's racist towards him and he's racist towards her and like you don't like you don't think of like the American racism experience is primarily a black white story as we understand it I feel like and then so to see two characters get it from two angles that are

less discussed and then the interplay between Each other is fascinating yeah that's fascinating yeah cuz he has this self-hatred and she has this self-hatred and then they're in this sort of abusive toxic relationship which is sort of metap metaphorical for the toxic relation ship that every aspiring artist has with Los Angeles and I I don't think I understood how colorism worked within like the Italian immigrant Community too where the one generation earlier darker Italians and you're ashamed of that the One generation next and I think we map on our own kind of um you know

uh General American Experience a lot of that gets lost so that's sound fascinating that it was interplayed out between both of them every day I send out one stoic inspired email to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world world if you want more stoic wisdom in your inbox you can sign up at Daily stoic.com it's totally free can unsubscribe at any time we'd love to Have you daily.com [Music] well there's also I think this is in Brotherhood of the grape there's a new world old world in it which I saw my grandfather was

an immigrant from Yugoslavia and my grandmother was from Germany and so but she sort of assimilated and he he was more like yeah making wine in his basement kind of a guy and you know what I mean and like I could see how it Played out for my like I've talked about this before but my parents my mom didn't doesn't identify as anything but an American cuz she's white and you know was born here whereas for him he was an immigr right and so I think Inon to have parents from Italy in that like who

came his parents would have been born probably in the 1800s to come to America like there's this you know fonte loves baseball he's like and and so obviously Uh in the Black American Experience it's different because you're stamped with this thing passing is so much harder and so these are all these are all themes that I of course missed when I read as the dusk at like 20 but now I think about quite a bit yeah but they're also so integral uh things I miss growing up in California that are integral to the way I

kind of look at it now and understand his tensions that when you're a kid you sense something um maybe a Little off or people may be struggling or angry or resentful um within different communities within different um cities but I I think it's hard to even remember that post-war space and even that in in between the war space that like fonte wrote about and that really defined LA and San Francisco and we just kind of got trickled down you know all these like years and generations later well my my parents spent a lot of time

in saso when I was Growing up we they they would they had this little boat that we would go to and and so they would take us out and we would go to like Angel Island and to like uh Ellis Island is a is a integral part of the new yor of New York's understanding of itself and its identity and thus America the idea that there was an immigration Hub on the west coast of the United States totally lost California doesn't see it like California feels like the end of the Line not like the beginning

of not the entry point into America yeah and I the dagio story you know like they're all fishermen they're all Northern Italians and the climate so similar yeah in Northern California you know and so their whole family migrated out there um my denevi family too kind of at the same time and it it's such a strange thing to be so far away from where they were to still be trying to practice the same family skills fishing and within an Environment that's similar but radically different when I think font's father and then the character in the

book is like a brick layer he's a stonemason so he's old world stonemason technique that it's like you would have you and I would have seen those houses yeah you know that those that that generation of people built and that's their sort of version of the American dream um yeah the other the other one that I got is I write about Harvey Milk in the book I'm doing Now like and and I read this interesting biography and he spends a big time talking about why San Francisco was uh a gay Hub and I I just

thought it was like you know like these things are just too generous it just happen yeah and he's talking about how actually it was to send boys to Europe or to send boys to the Pacific in World War II they would take him from all over the country and then put them on trains and get him there and then the ones who they Realized Were Gay the Navy did not allow onto the ships you know that this is basically like an ex these are these are this is the Refuge of discriminatory uh Navy policies and

you just what I didn't think about that and you realize how these little decisions start just the Genesis of a community and then um like yeah I ended up in Sacramento because there was a big Slovenian community in San Francisco so my grandfather came over from Europe and And you know lands on the east coast and just makes his way towards his people and you know then somehow I end up in Sacramento like these and and didan I mean didan ends up in Sacramento because of the [ __ ] daer part I know so she

would have been looking at us as the new people like she did she was like a Seventh Generation or something yeah and I I think she always was seeing out ahead of her in an interesting way you know my family would be looking up Towards her you know it would be on the other side of the tracks would be trying to be more white after coming over as Italians and she knew all the communities there but she I think from a young age her gaze was outward you know toward New York toward other places and

then I mean the Donna party is such a horrific story what a what a creation myth for your family that you're one of the ones that survived like you know and all of that well and then by the time I Grew up in Sacramento I don't know about you but like all the as as this happened in basically all the American cities this is also what dreams of Bunker Hill and Fon is writing about like you don't think when you think downtown Los Angeles you don't think big Victorian Mansions which is what was Bunker Hill

gets raised and it becomes these skyscrapers and to think like when I was a kid the houses in the in the 40s or the 30 like the the blocks Of houses that the people like didan grew up in that was all an abandoned downtown like that was not safe not nice everyone who had money the dream would be to move to the suburbs yes and I grew up in a nice suburb of Sacramento like like and that was like where the the athletes lived and like everyone was trying to get out whereas to didan the

the whole center of gravity would have been these areas that by the time these other Generations are here it's like You're not even getting the the language of it and the the the symbolism of it because the dream has moved from a big house downtown to a big house big track house in the subs like Auburn or somewhere like that outside and we forget the way that the floods worked as you know on that town to have that Higher Ground downtown you know meant that that house would be there know 30 40 and we don't

realize 70 years why that survived the floods it's the best Real estate and that's where they built that big Victorian Mansion you know and now we were was playing in an adult baseball tournament recreational fatherson tournament actually with the Italians and um we played a Sacramento team so I'm playing first base and I was asking you know what's the flood situation like now and he said really since ' 86 they haven't had you know or it's not happening in the same way so the entire logic of the city and what I When I think of

a relic I think of something that exists now where narrative no longer makes sense in the present well Sacramento is a weird town in the sense that it's a river town but it's a river town from San Francis like you don't go oh the the people went around South America landed in San Francisco and then took boats from San Francisco to Sacramento the whole that none of that sentence makes any sense to people you know for the gold rush like That's when this was happening so none of that makes any sense anymore and so yeah

growing up where I like it's not until I read didan that I really understood Sacramento as a river place my only memory of the of two one was river rafting you know in the summer sometimes you uh but but I remember a couple times in my childhood a whale would swim up the American river and and you'd be like what that doesn't make sense How could a whale get from the Ocean to here and then how could the river be deep because the you were so disconnected from water like I didn't live any near there

that wasn't you know the the purpose of that had gone the only time I would see it would be like on TV when they were showing that bridge and during a King's game or something you know what I mean like it it's just um the yeah the the the the reason the city exists is no longer why the city exists yes but everything that Represents that original reason yes continues in our present without the explanations that we might have understood you know 40 50 70 years ago so one more author since you mentioned Auburn Ambrose

beerus who I thought a lot about as I was reading your book wow uh Ambrose beerus being I think and Hunter S Thompson both being two authors that I think are proof of the idea that what what is it like a cynic is a is a spurned idealist you know um he lived in Auburn for a long time and I didn't find that out until later um but but the I he was a San Francisco guy he mov but I that that when I think of Hunter Thompson I was thinking of of Ambrose bear in

that my understanding of Hunter S Thompson is the wild partying Hunter S Thompson I didn't until I read your book get my sense of him as the sort of political idealist who basically has his heartbroken over and over again and then just decides ironically to do what he Talks about in uh Fear and Loathing which is uh make a beast of yourself to getting to get rid of the pain of being a man yeah you know and I I think that again probably with you too we got the trickle down effect of the 1960s growing

up many of our teachers may have been at San Francisco State yeah you know or on the the West Coast barricades during all of that um University of California upheaval um just the political upheaval of the 60s and I I hadn't understood him That way either so it it took me a while to um kind of get back into his writing when I was in my 20s and trying to be a writer myself and seeing just how diligent and careful he was which is not what we think of when we hear him um into um

as a journalist as a journalist like a lot of my students I teach writing will try to start at Hunter Thompson you know and they have to understand he took 15 years as a serious journalist playing the game learning how To do the investigative reporting and the um you know lead paragraph you know General journalistic writing before he then responded against it and found his own form yeah it's like you watch Patrick Mahomes and you see him throwing these sideways passes and scrambling and doing and you don't realize that's not him not learning The Playbook

that's having him that's him Having learned the Playbook and played in the system for since he was a kid all the way up and Then there is this element of Mastery where you get to throw it away and improvise and and exist on Instinct and intuition and yeah if you see Hunter Thom or other writers as uh unorganized and uh stream of Consciousness and undisciplined you're missing all of the discipline and order that built them up into the point where they could either do that on purpose or be so talented that they could get away

with it yeah I mean creativity I used to Think it was the blank page and then to something but it really is that response to a system you know and and seeing what other people don't when they look at that and I mean Mahomes coming from a baseball background a lot of quarterbacks do but how rare that he could Implement um that kind of off balance you know um response and I love that show on Netflix because the creativity of the camera angle close to him where you see the decision making I mean that that

reminds me when I think of writing creativity again it's not going from nothing to something it's looking at what already is there and trying to see what other people don't and create something new from that yes and and that you have to have the core Mastery of language and word choice and res all the all the ingredients that then can come together in a new way but yeah you don't you don't see hunteress Thompson as trying at all and that is That is a sign of Mastery I think but but um it yeah he was

so good first and he learned all the basics first and then he threw away everything else yeah and I I think that's hard to do too because it's a risk sure you know he wasn't doing it the artistic explanation be like well I had to do this I would have been in no other place you know like art is that expression of you know not being able to conform to whatever but with Thompson he He needed to make money as a journalist and so he still as someone using the first person having political opinions using

a more hybridized space using found information within his text he was taking a risk and at the time there happened to be Publications that found it thrilling and he had a method to that man a careful method but he may not have made the money he was trying to make and be able to support his family by choosing not to Write the standard objective you know um reportage story yeah and also it's there's a certain survivorship bias right you know these writers by their handful of big pieces and you don't see but they published and

it's there in the archives just a bunch of boring articles about regular events in the news right like like uh and then ultimately once they become so successful they could stop doing those things and keep them out of their collections when they put Them together later yeah but it's like you know didan was writing like a weekly column for like look magazine or whatever it is yeah like and probably 85% of them are totally unremarkable uninteresting indistinguishable from the other crap that was being published by other people at that time and then it's like to

go to your baseball metaphor it's like there's a lot of misses there's a lot of singles and then you remember the person for a couple of key Home runs or grand slams or you know pinch big moments but there there's thousands of bats between those two things that's exactly right and they often I think of didan and Thomson I think of Thompson with um Kentucky Derby is decate and depraved which is what began to set him apart in our kind of cultural conversation one of the things and then didon with slouching towards Bethlehem she had

no idea if she'd gotten that right when she went for like A month to San Francisco and she had the Cinematic kind of narration and then with those really beautiful essayistic parts that came in like you know Cold Spring and San Francisco 1967 neither of them thought like I made it those are the pieces that are going to you know suddenly rise to the top of the national conversation they weren't sure and both in in a kind of fascinating way did so even their big hits or home runs at the time they weren't sure that

they'd done Them the way they hoped and I I it's also hard to separate how big they were in the moment and they were big writers and the fact that for the next 40 years those books sold 50 to 150,000 copies or whatever it is right like like that that um that new non or non-fiction Classics section at every bookstore it's it's not that the books were ever The Da Vinci Code or some massive you know pop sensation it was more just that they stuck around and they were rediscovered By generation after generation after generation

and that that that there's and actually it would take a while for it to really have the resonance that it did because you don't see it as a Coming of Age classic until multiple Generations have come of age to it exactly and I think they were both really good at looking how the media was talking about an event like hippies or Hills angels and seeing when they saw that up close what was going on how Wrong the media narrative in time or life or look was and that lasts today in a really nice way I

think yeah yeah uh you don't see them as contrarians but effectively both Hell's Angels Incredible Book and dian's uh couple books of essays there were really counterprogramming not not weirdly like like counterprogramming to popular culture but there's also weirdly something conservative about Them do you know what I mean like hun Thompson is ultimately indicting the Hell's Angels he's just understanding why they're popular exactly and didan is it's like did dian's inner Sacramento in um is going like these people don't know the answer there's a 5-year-old on acid like somebody help these children yeah right she's

not going oh look at these hippies with their long hair she's actually understanding them and dismissing and and arguing against them And judging them for different reasons but but it's resonating ultimately ultimately they're both indictments of American culture in that time and the promise I mean that's why even when I'm working on the didan stuff now reading her a lot I I I still I'm always remembering you know it's in fear and lothing Thompson's um it's the wave speech but the failure of the 60s where just that sense that your um inevitable energy would Prevail

and that you'd win And that the movement would naturally reach its goals but without the hard you know um daily application such change demands and that the other side the mean and militaristic forces wouldn't in their power and planning defeat defeat you and your idealism in that and I think both saw the promise and the failures on a tactical level of the um counterculture movement in the 1960s in a really clear manner I think about that Hunters Thompson speech all the time for People who haven't read fear and loing Las Vegas maybe you've seen the

movie you think it's this book about debauchery and partying and craziness when really it's this sort of Elegy and and sad meditation on the failure of all the idealism of the 60s he he says you look outside inside your hotel room in Las Vegas and you see the high Watermark of the 1960s you know the death of Martin Luther King the assassination of Robert uh F Kennedy both kennedies uh You see and he's like this is where it peaked and now we're here yeah in Las Vegas doing what we do and and so there's some

irony that the book would become popular and people would be doing the Las Vegas version not the hey change is really hard political organization is really hard good meets against implacable evil and even if you win the cultural battle if you don't mop up the other stuff exactly right um it it it doesn't Stick and then and he's making a beast of himself in sort of the depressing realization that yeah it the bad guys won yeah you know and that that I think we still see it today I mean many of them are gone but

so many of those key players when they were young then are still fighting the same battles in their 70s and ' 80s now I mean we we I for a long time thought it was a new conversation based on the 60s many of our political arguments now but the more I read about it maybe I'm just getting older the more I realize it's the same conversation we've really been having yeah and it's depressing and heartening and scary but we've really been fighting those same battles you know and it's it what makes me crazy is when

the younger generation now in their 20s um or whatever don't really through either a lack of reading or because Tik Tok can't capture it again I'm sounding very old don't Realize how that conversation has evolved but is is still continuing well it's weird given those two books which are laments of the failures of the 60s culturally we took this lesson from those that change is brought about by organizing marching and writing music and art and that's fundamentally not what the Civil Rights Movement was or how it worked and uniquely the Civil Rights Movement was centered

around marching because marching was illegal Yes right Mar they they only got together in groups and marched because it was illegal and then they would Clash with the police and the police would show how bankrupt uh their Authority was uh and and the the the mask would slip right well Marching for the most part is not illegal anymore and so the idea that you just have to get a large group of people together and that will send a message to the people in power you know Kennedy was on the side of the Civil Rights march

for the most part and even he looks at the March on Washington and just sort of like okay that doesn't solve the legislative issue that we have the Civil Rights Movement worked because fundamentally It ultimately changed public opinion by the overreaction to the in interest but like yeah we took this message from it because ultimately they did Prevail in the long run to a degree that like hey the way to bring about change is to change your profile Picture on social media to sign a petition right to call your representatives um which isn't it at

all I agree and I I I love when Thompson writes about the 60s and with protest he said you know the powers that be at first they had to respond but it was illegal to March bu Connor whether he wanted to or not the police chief he had to respond to that act and he as a person in power could have his power at least undermined or Even taken away from him by the end of the 60s and the start of the 70s Thompson RS about how Nixon doesn't care how many people march he's like

you're marching it's not going to change my position and that terrifies Thompson because then he realizes one like in Chicago you can just which you know daily on the other side just beat the [ __ ] out of the protesters right or two you can't affect National change like that as a group anymore it has to be More on the community or local level and for him it was a shock cuz he believed that too enough people get together yes enough people go in the right direction yeah you know their energy will prevail and by

you know 68 into 72 you just his realization that oh my God they're insulated from that the people in power doesn't matter that's not going to work on them well also I feel like you capture this well in the book Hunter Thompson has this sort of big picture Realization and then he has this small picture realization of just running for local office and he sees how rigged the system is how hard it is to win even though like I wouldn't vote for an Thompson he's a drug adct he's a crazy person but I I think

he gets this he gets this point he gets he he unlike a lot of cultural critics artists writers organizers has actual firsthand experience in how entrenched interests protect their power protect themselves Push away uh potential disruptors co-opt potential organizers or change agents and so he has this sense of oh okay he so he understands what Nixon's doing at the local and the national level and and the Nix and like figures are doing at this level and so it really is kind of just astute understanding of what's Happening rooted in his understand of History psychology local

politics whatever um that again is masked by the fact that he has his reputation of being A wild man badass um when there's really not just aute cultural commentary but like very relevant yes and modern uh information that black lives matter could use or whatever your group is yeah yeah and I what I think is um fascinating too is I when it comes to a successful politician you know one of the skills is to be a good vote counter and whether that's in the Senate to know how many you have whether that's when you're running

for speaker to know how Many you have before you do it Bobby Kennedy when he was his brothers like um you know rad man was a great boat counter you know at the nomination um process and Thompson and ask when he was running for mayor or he had his friends um you know running for positions in the city council he was an excellent boat counter and he knew how many votes were out there he knew how many he needed to get so he writes about it um often comically he often Dramatizes his bewilderment sure so

well yeah you know but he's writing about that now at a desk um you know days weeks months later and the hymn on the page you know the him that's kind of a buffoon or acting or being excessive um you know that himm was also the one that understood when to challenge and when to pull back and how to move against an aspen um an an elite like powerful group that wanted and eventually would succeed in um you know developing this gorgeous Place just so they can make more and more and more money now the

billionaires my friends in Aspen sa plac the millionaires but back then you know and he was another favorite writer of mine is James Suter love and so he was an aspen um resident and worked with Thompson yeah on that I mean he's a lot like fonte where he spent a period of his life writing screen nobody you know made movies from but made enough money off it and he told me he regretted that More than anything because a book is something that lasts you know it's a technology did you get to meet James alter yeah

I spent I spent some time with him it was really nice in 201 um4 yeah he's a he's another incredible novelist that I guess you wouldn't make anymore is sort of a figure of the 20th century where he's got this re I mean he's one of the great fighter P like a great fighter pilot like not like he was in the army or like in the but like was An elite fighter pilot like a Top Gun level fighter pilot yes and and so he has this kind of first love which is that and this second

love which is writing and yeah his his his novels are incredible I mean that gets to Mastery too he shot down two migs in Korea yeah you know he was a professional you know he's a that they would go I always remember how he writes about going to Morocco to do target practice where they Trail this giant Target and shoot with Paint I mean just the daily level of practice and skill it takes to Not Crash a jet or to be able to shoot another jet down it is still mind-blowing and he in his writing

I think communicates that beautifully but he was also ended up an aspen and completely different person than Thompson was still trying to make the immediate control your immediate surroundings in politics better you know and worked with them yeah so i' I've gotten to know a number of fighter Pilots because my books have sort of made their way through the military and and starting to get the sense that oh like a Navy SEAL fighter pilot author actor hedge fund Trader that these are all kind of these Elite professions that are more the same than they are

different the level of Mastery self-control you know sort of compulsion you know the ambition require that they're they're they're all speaking a language Or on a wavelength that they understand and uh sort of like recognizes like do you know what I mean or game recognizes game like um so for Salter to move from the fighter pilot world to the writing world and and sort of see them as this I I always love that about him yeah me too he's so great uh also not super appreciated kind of after his death was maybe rediscovered a little

bit but like a writer's writer but I think again we get one version of him you know he's Writing about sex you know he's writing about New York I mean I think he wrote about about fighting about fighter pilots about flying better than anybody I've read but he was also right when Joan didan was you know living on Franklin Avenue he was friends with Roman Roman and uh plan he would with them when go to treatments um he was part of that world too and I think that gets lost also when we talk about him

he's a WR writer's writer he Taught at the workshop in Iowa his sentences are beautiful but I think for someone to last it has to go beyond just that craft he has to have been I think he captured something that we're still trying to figure out about what post-war America was like and it could be his white Jewish like background and experience but even beyond that I I think it was coming out of the army that um you know shared sense of skill and Mastery and then falling out and Like so many people in the

1960s not knowing where to go or what to do he didn't want to be a businessman in that sense he didn't want to um you know live the life of many of the people that he saw around him but he still struggled and wasn't sure yeah you get this sense he goes to West Point it's this culture that he loves this sort of discipline order structure old world values and the virtues and then to leave the army and being in the 6 you're like who are these People right like what is this about I think

that's also what makes Tom Wolf's writing so good is Tom Wolf is clearly a character from The Generation before but then he's writing about kiny and you know uh like he's writing about they're they're they're a part of it but they're apart from it and since they it the reason they're not in it is what makes them able to write about it right like so they're they're kind of Outsider so they're able make fun of it and they see It differently um and and then that so you you have to have just a just slightly

different Vision than everyone else in your time or you are just a part of the the you're just participating in the culture rather than documenting the culture exactly I you know I think the hardest thing in writing um is to understand what's necessary from what's not and what you're trying to compose and that little Bit of an outsider perspective can help so much you know what can what's something only I could say about this as opposed to what does everyone else think about this you have to have this you know his take on astronauts is

different his take on you know the the Mary pranksters is different like and the same same goes like nobody else would have saw uh the Hell's Angels the way that Hunter S Thompson saw them which is both Sort of more heroic in some ways than people anticipated and then also much darker much more disturbing you know um the trending towards something almost nihilistic um and same with didan you know everyone else would have been going to Woodstock and here she is sort of just talking about this is horrible yeah I mean Los Angeles in 68

I done a lot of research into Bobby Kennedy's death you know that last week I mean James Balden Was there trying to write uh a screenplay for Malcolm X didan was there you know all these writers I I think that as a western are we I don't know what how you feel but San Francisco is kind of the city it's the culture you know it's the physical capital for me you know sorry Sacramento but it's the physical capital of of California but at that time so much of the nation not through the Hollywood sense but

the cultural sense was I thought I think now Being defined by um that Los Angeles space and scene and so many writers from all over the world were there when everything was going on and think of James Baldwin I mean when Martin Luther King was killed he was there when Bobby Kennedy was killed he was there he got on to Palm Springs to try to get the uh screenplay done you know on Malcolm X and I think all in their different ways and from their different perspectives of Brilliance were feeling something that Had always been

unraveling and was now on the surface or was breaking and wrong and we were kind of getting these fragmented point of views from everyone about what was happening in the larger sense America right yeah the center will not hold it's San Francisco and La they're sort of both sensing this stuff's not working it's not adding up um and then California kind of being this island uh which people don't see it as that but This kind of Island from the rest of America is sort of maybe spending them a little bit and allowing them to see

it differently I don't know I think you're right and we forget today how long it took news to get to California it took the New York you didn't get the New York Times delivered in the same easy way in the 60s you didn't get the same newscasts at the same time before satellites in the you know late 60s you had to plan the event like it's election Day we're going to set a satellite up or you know I'm thinking of Hawaii cnia was fur from the East Coast you know in terms of the way communication

and information worked in the 1960s than it is now yeah right and even yeah the California Connection to Hawaii I think is kind of Forgotten and just that yeah California is looking I think America tends to look towards Europe but California there's this understanding of the East being a part of it right and Even even like all the stuff about the China Lobby and all this stuff back then there was just this people were like no the center of gravity is this way and you're missing you're totally missing the picture and it was great because

then writers had I mean one thing I missed today there it still exists really well but long form great long form pieces if you're not doing something that's so topical it has to come out the next day in the New York Times these writers could do this great long form you're not jetting down to Washington on the train to take you know cover this event you're having to think about what it means and what it represents and even yeah even the times like Hollywood operates on such a different timeline than every other bit of media

because a movie takes so long to get made so yeah you're you're just operating on a a slightly longer View and I think that gives that's something We missed today the ability not just to mle over it but creatively try it different Avenues and aspects formally that we began to see you know and they they didn't when you're not working on such a topical issue you can take more chances sometimes you're not as rushed do you think with James Stalter and and Hunter Thompson what's interesting about both of them hunterson obviously much more so almost

to the point of character but these were both really talented People who also had these sort of like Secret Lives or addictions or compulsions and so that's what's fascinating about Hunter S Thompson is he's this sort of critic of the excesses of American culture and the Ambitions and the Egos and the uh the insatiability of someone like Nixon as if he is not himself is not hooked on a different drop exactly and I with James halter I mean as a bisexual man you know coming out of the military he that was Something that he um

you know wasn't writing a memoir about you know in 1960 he was writing about sex and he was writing about differences in power and he was writing about the danger of it but also the kind of um Beauty and and Rush of it too and I think he would it was so informed that writing um by the thing that he couldn't necessarily write about and be I Thompson's not you know the way Thompson does it I think I think a lot of it goes back to his Louisville Experience too feeling as an outsider there things

you have to be quiet about you're not part of the family structure there the families that run Louisville then that could get you out of trouble if you get in it you have to be more circumspect we think of him as this author that will say anything or do anything but he understood the power structures around him and was always looking for ways to indict them you know um and I think relying on his Own um issues with alcohol addiction with um um amphetamine um you know seeing in these insatiable politicians like you said you

know what he's thinking about a lot in his own life on an everyday way well the the the the big fallacy of Hunter S Thompson is that he's this disruptive center of attention Life Of The Party Guy which he is in his writing but you're not getting press passes and traveling on the presidential plane or In the motor he's obviously in the event some exceptions much more lowkey and self-controlled and blending into the background or he wouldn't be able to observe the things that he Ober and I think a good chunk of his writing is

like what he wished he had said or what you could have said um what needed to be said and not what he was literally able able to do as a journalist exactly what he's trying to be invisible um a good comparison I Think today and there's not that many but is a a Jordan klepper um from The Daily Show so you'll see in moments when he's at January 6th or CPAC you know the funny interactions like really um you know where he's more he's inserting himself more but all write I write about CPAC and some

of these other right-wing um events um he is spending 90% of the time listening yeah nodding his head you know he's not arguing back he's doing the grunt work to get all the Perspectives and information he can before some of those moments will come up and Thompson I bet at those scenes when he was reporting from the presidential primaries you know when he was um you know sent to do a job he was invisible like that 90 95 98% of the time too until he got too famous to be later it it's funny you brought

that up right because we talking about Hunter Thompson being the guy that sort of throws out the rules but it's based on An understanding Mastery I think when people see Jordan clipper you think he's just walking around owning people owning people making fun of them to their face actually the art of what he does first off he's probably not doing it 90% of the time you're only seeing a snippet of what gets filmed and the Art of what he's doing is you're not even noticing that you're being owned and made to to be a fool

but that yeah just the sheer amount of those events that he's been to Over the years he knows how to blend in he knows how to sense who the people are and it's only for 12 seconds on camera that it gets wild and then he's probably out it's before you even notice it exactly um yeah when he guest hosted The Daily Show he had me on he' read my stuff and uh yeah he's awesome that's great there yeah but people probably think that's a fun rockus uh disruptive put middle finger in your Face gig and

almost certainly to one get access to the people you need to get access to and to not be lynched by the mob yeah you have to have a very Artful fluid ability to do that yeah you know the best and THS would do this we think of him as inditing everybody else but he allows people to indict themselves by by speaking what they think is the correct perspective and the audience then sees how far away they are from reality often and what they're saying and clippard Does a great job of that and Thompson talk to

everybody you know we forget that too he read everybody so many I think Young Writers today too they um will see maybe writing they disagree with whether culturally personally identity wise politically as um being something they don't need to read because they don't agree with it and you know only a generation earlier and even us growing up you had to read everybody you could take them down and Destroy Them you can do whatever you want but you had to read what you don't agree with you had to talk to the people at the event who

you don't agree with and listen yeah you know and and they will reveal their positions as they articulate themselves to you well you have to be able to do that so you can not get conned right like so I was telling you about the the the stack p and Suns publishing minec comp so when stackpool and Suns uh they published Their Edition which was the the full edition of mine comp but hh's Edition had a lot of the real bad stuff taken out W that's why partly why Hitler uh was seen the way that he

was in America so so when when hmh publishes their addition of of mcom they one of the the guys sends it to FDR who' recently become president and uh FDR you you can see this copy I talk about in the piece that I wrote um writes back I think a letter maybe in the margins but he's Like live it because he had read minec conf in German uh right like he'd actually read it and he was like this is not what is actually happening here it's much worse than you said so FDR had this understanding

of the facts not just the the facts on the ground but the full unpleasantness of the facts because he engaged with the material as opposed to seeing it from far away and I think you make a good point about Hunter Thompson which is like Hunter Thompson Isn't looking at Nixon let's say or McGovern or uh McGovern no um uh who's the bad one um Humphrey no no no the the the conservative that that from Arizona um oh goldw gold water he's looking he's not looking at those guys the way some people today look at Trump

which is like they read about him in an article they see the tweets like he knew everyone in the campaigns he interviewed interviewed the candidates direct his horror and Terror and disgust at them was based on Having gotten up close and personal with it and understanding What It Is What It represented and what the full end game was which you have to do you can't you can't pretend it doesn't exist or just be holier than thou about it and self-righteous you have to you have to know what they're doing and more you have to know

how they do it yes and you wrote about this in um one of your first books where you talk about media Manipulation you know and he would watch you know um Nixon completely stage or create an event and get the um version of Nixon Nixon wanteded to everybody and he'd watch his entire national press pool just report it due to fle outraged him he had to up close and see the press's failure yes to um become anything more than a messaging system for the Nixon that Nixon wanted people to see um and that that outraged

him and and he was great at kind of articulating How easily that was to do that yeah and so so yeah what's dis what's disruptive and courageous and brave about Thompson is it's not that he's saying this to Nixon's face which would have gotten quickly kicked out of said pressible but it's that he's saying the things that everyone else who's watching is thinking but not saying yes and and so laundering out yes you know because of their objectivity or their deadline that they need to make right but they're being Manipulated right and that's what he's

trying to they're being manipulated and they are manipulating exactly and that it's a symbiotic relationship it pay it pays off for them well and he really captured which again you have to that kind of I also think of Conrad with language you're just outside of it English but you're within it and so I love Joseph Conrad's Pros as an outsider I think Thompson has that Outsider within the system and he didn't want to Burn it down which I think is interesting in the 60s where you had Oscar aosta you know a civil rights attorney who

was throwing firebombs yeah you know and then you have their letters are great you know Thompson's like wants to live within the system Costa Wants To Burn It Down and so Thompson wasn't you know radical in that you know we also see him I think more radical now like he said he had more of a conservative small C strain in him but he was outraged that Um his colleagues who he was both a part of a not um would just keep perpetuating what was going on for their own benefit and for the benefit of others

one of the things I thought about from your book more recently who I I know I'm you know the comedian Hassen minhaj yes um he's from he's from Davis Sacramento is kid oh yeah um but you know you think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas you go okay I understand it's not literally true because it's the Recollections of a Person who is obviously not fully there because they're so high but I think his reputation would be fundament hun Thompson's reputation the reputation of that book would be fundamentally different if we said well this was actually

three trips as you point out in the book and the FBI conference you were at it happened totally differently you like sort of go basically that book is emotionally true and factually untrue which is sort of the distinction he was Making in his comedy that like look the large events of this are true and things did happen to me but I've you know amped up the veillance here and I've done this here and people are like you made it all up you're you know like he he took this major hit about and probably lost uh

hosting with The Daily Show around it and I'm from my understanding of and also art I'm like what are you people talking about and it's interesting the way that Not only do we is it unfair but it's this interesting way that we sort of throw the baby out of the bath water out with the bath water where we get we to go actually none of the things none of the underlying indictments are true either which of course could not be further from the truth like everything he's saying is true his personal relationship with it in

is more or less in some spheres but you're missing what the point of art is I I don't I don't I don't know what's happening to the Western mind but I will say the literal um relationship to fact especially in the last 10 years is 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 versus um you know other types of truth I I wrote a lot about um the um um historical Jesus and gospels um that idea

that you could Keep two things in the human mind at once that of course this is exaggerated to prove a point um and still this is a narrative that feels true or I want you it doesn't have to be either or and I are either or moment um it blows my mind right now you know and then I mean it lead to hypocrisy which is what Thomson was talking about so much then but which is really dangerous because it's my my my f will say like we're not thinking well like we're not thinking well if

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 um to what I think's 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 does uh Conrad say like life is shorten art is long and success is very far off 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 on to 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 um and I 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 hun S Thompson at the Kentucky 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 he's and the same if you if you actually what could you verify from those trips to Las Vegas probably more of it is not true than is true yeah but the book's not about what happened in Las Vegas the the book is about the high water mark of the 60s It's all about that observation it's about the the the essence

and the vibe and the feeling that he's trying to capture um and what new journalism was was a kind of a merging of fiction and non-fiction exactly and comedy does that now too and you're yeah you're missing the point if you you try to be this sort of strict liter like there's a difference between the irony then of simultaneously being a culture where uh 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 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 like the people that we should be hearing the emotional truth from we hold literally we we hold to the standard of Literalness and then the people who are actual officials or scientist except 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 it reminds me of

in kind of a tangential way but you know the passage in dian's The White Album where she's with uh Jim Morrison yeah you know and you know how she writes about it it's she goes to 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 you know and they're like we can't and dian's like I don't even know in whose favor the conversation you know was determined in real life what happened Eevee babbetts her friend talks about this who had dated

Morrison brought her there she was flirting with Jim Morrison he was throwing the matches at her it was such a different reality than how She um articulated it that piece's 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 tra they're supposed to be this revolutionary artistic you know whatever group and they're just like should we drive back from West CO tonight know it's just this it's so she presents them as so pedantic and

ordinary that it essentially like Flays them and yeah why is she doing that that's I guess a different question but yeah the idea that it could have happened very differently exactly um 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 leather pants Sex and Death you know and then the kind of everyday nature of it and that you know was 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 um control panel but even then she's narrow 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 I think we are even struggling to understand that in terms of subjectivity And non-fiction and Truth present right now well I I actually this is the epigraph is um

to trust m liing is the James Agy quote where it's basically saying that fundamentally journalism is a form of lying because you're taking disperate events and coordinating them to tell a story that you want to tell and and you're leaving things out and then there's that famous what's her name the journal Janet Malcolm thing about how fundamentally journalism is also This act of aggression and hostility didan talks about this too where you're like you're 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 it speaks truth to power it brings out presidence which it does I was telling um H that I was saying like obviously postwriting trust me I'm lying I have this relationship where I see clearly the importance of journalis I mean uh especially when you have

sort of a Neo fascistic movement you have disinformation and misinformation where real lives are hang in the balance and at the same time when I watch stories Like what happened to him where 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 complicit in the whole system too and you are as much a vehicle for untruth as you are truth exactly I think Barry Weiss's response to the has been

amazing the Israel uh Palestine conflict we got to that topic very quickly but uh the way That she's covering um that ever since um and since early October has been brilliant and as a way to cut through um what's inhibiting or the failures of major journalistic outlets right now in dealing with I mean sending reporters out talking to people on the ground she with her podcast and with the has done an amazing job that's kind of the more 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 I know Barry I like Barry I think she's carried water for the wrong people quite often and then there are moments where she really Nails it right and I think you could make the same point about Hunter stop a lot of great it's like there 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 like you go oh 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 I think that we've also lost the idea of getting news of getting an information in perspective by a 400 page book you know written 40 50 years so that's why I loved your book so like I have

found like okay the best book I read during covid was um John M Barry's book the great influenza oh wow right so you're reading about the Spanish flu and you're like okay here's everything that's true right the best way I understood Trump was uh Sinclair Lewis's uh it can't happen here and I feel like your book actually which come which is basically the generation right after that book like you're talking About no longer does the fascist movement look like molini 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 less it's more velvet glove you know than than iron fist but Hunter Thompson 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 uh has changed how when I look at some of these Governors like when I look at the governor of Texas when I look at Dan santis 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 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 are playing Um and you have to take that very seriously and I I found that people don't have the historical basis to do that so they just look at oh Dan santis doesn't like the people that I like or whatever and and you're not getting the game that he's playing and how dangerous it actually

is and where where it inevitably ends up where it leads to yeah and the inherent like um fragility to our system that we kind of take for granted you know how can be Cooper Very be coopted in the ways you're exactly talking about I mean I always think about how George Wallace Thompson wrote about this um you know was running for uh president 1972 on an independent platform um will be shot eventually in only Maryland but this is when he's still kind of ramping up there's other candidates other Democratic candidates um going to Florida trying

to win um you have musky taking the Whistle Stop tour you know down trying to coordinate Everything perfectly and George Wallace just goes to an Nascar event has 300 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 if you

don't have the conscience that protects you it's a problem so you you need politicians who are astute and artists 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 exactly and I you know I thought about that a lot when I mean it was whatever our present day moment is it's not anymore difficult than all the ones from the repeated past you know Going back thousands and thousands of years um 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 a diet where I still am I'm sure you know outrage was generating what I was reading the New York Times what I was reading the New Yorker or well I find the writer that's expressing the emotion I feel right now like you know please Adam gnik like say what I feel I I realized like going just Back into the past even a few generations to to try to look at the same issues and and the same um you know human

conflicts that we're seeing now was a way to kind of access both the present and what I was trying to say think about the Pres in a better way well the idea of the the economics of a book are fundamentally different than the economics of media right like a book is designed uh the newspaper story you read or the online article whatever is Designed to be replaced immediately by the next thing the next day or now on the internet the next tweet five minutes later a book because it takes so long to do it by

definition has to have a little more stay power right it has to have it it has to continue to be true for longer has to have a larger view normally and then I think this 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 warping 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 warped people watch too much news TV get their brain warped um 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 yes right so when you're reading about um Hunter Thompson and his judgments on Nixon even if you're a republican you don't give a [ __ ] 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 you're just 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 right plutar is writing not whether and he admits he goes I don't know if all this stuff is true or not and 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 a 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 Cataline conspiracy oh yeah you know you're thinking um oh this is what human beings do this is bad this is why you know 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 what my party is saying I Should think here or what this Outlet is saying all you're able to get to the the historical

Essence and the timelessness of that um which is really ultimately what matters yeah I mean I I had read the Catalan orations probably 25 years ago some of the first Latin I was like trying to find the verb in the tense but still um Cicero like inditing Cataline and I didn't think of it again I mean 25 years later until after January 6 I had been there reporting and I I remember The calinan ntion I'm not going to tell you that I remember the devices and I remember the stakes in a way that I had

forgotten you know the way that that came back it kind of blew my mind well 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 popul he stirs them up and scks them on the Establishment and then you know then there's also interestingly enough in there I've come kind of the overreaction of cisero like cisero wants this to be the crisis of

his lifetime and the irony is it's not it's it it's not minor but it's the 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 the Latin why would

we study this it's a long time ago it's old dead white guys whatever and then we don't have the shared Cal Consciousness to be able to draw like to understand why we have the Norms that we have why we have the the words that we have like how many people even know that it's the the riot at the capital is named after Capitol line hill you know what I mean and that this Center 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 state Which are quite High don't feel as high as they are you know I was on a panel um last week at the University of Virginia um called the can canonical and the band is about the Canon and band books you know and I I I one thing I thought about talking with the fop 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 you know recent um experience the Canon is something we're constantly Responding to and saying like was thiso as good as we thought you know like was thusi complicit or correct like and 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 um 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 have tried to articulate their Experience um is one of the most valuable things Humanity has today 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 MFA students again the idea that it's harmful or wrong or will be um 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 um were a terrible Tyrant or what have you like what what The Canon

offers us is um a conversation to respond to yeah and and I I think that's what's missing today you know well there's even this sense like like that the Greeks and the Romans were all these old dead white guys right and like even in the case of the stoics you know sen is born in Spain right epicus is a slave Marcus aelius is an emperor that's an incredible swath of diversity just in those three characters right Zeno um some people think he might have been African or had some African blood in him and and so

you have this actually um incredibly diverse group diverse not just in terms of uh of race or origin but also in experience which is a standin for the larger sense of diversity so it's so closed-minded to say that um and then there of course like it was largely male Centric but like it it was only in when I really studied I go um brutus's wife is Ko's daughter and so And and there's this even in the Shakespeare play and in Plutarch you get this interesting interplay between Brutus and his wife his wife we have we

we make Brutus the main character but if you were presenting that today you would show Brutus almost certainly as somewhat cowardly and vacillating 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 it the Canon and our understanding of history and the story can be changed it without even adding anything new it's just what are you emphasizing and H like Plutarch renders uh uh um

porao as as a not heroic figure but you could just as easily reimagine 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 edus 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 versus 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 is we just stopped at some

point and we said this is it it's baked and in fact it's never been baked and it's always been possible to reimagine and add and just in it it's really an anachronism that we See them them all the same 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 of their guys you know which again is it's interesting how that that experience is literally in comprehensible to us

we can't see we see Columbus as a racist figure which you know as a figure of col iism but in 1922 if you're an Italian immigrant you see representation in Columbus yes and you could be wider yeah if you if you could identify with Columbus it was a way to pass within Society or just be proud of something in yourself exactly I you know I one thing I try to do in my writing in my perspective which I'm as guilty as anybody but we how do we not map This American moment and its recent history

onto 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 um Power identity culture um gender which um we we have 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 mean I just love it because they are able to say you know I don't think

you understood what was happening you know when um Nero's first wife died And then he may he forced the slave to become a unic you know that he named after that like 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 the these these labels and these ideas don't always hold True so like um

I remember in Ron chernow's biography of Grant which I'm fascinated by Grant I've read pretty much everything I've written on Grant and Chau 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 yes right that's our language now yeah and so so the 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 a thing is a modern

conception right uh another another version of this is there are these students at Brown University every couple years they protest this 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 the like the the the Imperial Empire but first of it's a fundamentally different form of colonization and second of all it was 2,000 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 an interest there's not 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 enterprising politician would get assigned to uh uh 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 Happening which is there are sort of uh good incentives bad incentives uh 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 it's better to go where we like them yes why did the good guys win or lose and what

lessons can we take From that uh in in in the same way that we have to like it's a slightly different discussion with I think um you know monuments to Confederates or uh the Lost Cause because that is an ongoing myth that is be 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 you can't it's 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 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 imperialist power it's like okay well 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 instead of the beginning of a conversation you know and I I I see liberal arts education as you know spending four years reading other people's perspectives and within fiction or non-fiction or poetry going into their perspective and seeing the world for However long you're reading as 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 um looking um 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 and liberal thing but like at at the 2016 convention I was writing about it and this the fear of outside information like we have to Remember on both sides like especially liberal side the more information you have the more time you spend seeing through somebody else's mind whether it's an emperor from 2,000 years ago you know um whether it's whoever it is then coming back to yours you can

do again what I I think is the hardest thing and this isn't just in writing but in life to understand or try to see what's necessary from what's not you know and I I just I think that we're so lucky to Have had a conversation going on for so long to have all you know like I I was walking through your bookstore and I saw the pelian war you know one of my favorite books and I again I don't know I I only make two nuclear war jokes a semester that's my my limit with my

students but I think I've already reached it but you know in the last 10 years before the president how we um kind of slant it 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 um and what could happen what the consequences could be still feels as relevant in E and not like a piece or not but I always think of 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 had happened they wouldn't believe him that the whole Fleet could be gone they were executed for even saying it well when when uh General Mattis was Secretary of Defense he assigned a history of the Peloponnesian War as a book for people to read because the what they call it the um the FUSD trap the idea of an Ascend and a dominant power and an ascended power and China and America would maybe talk about which one is ascendant which one's dominant uh

which is ironic but um the idea of how these Clashes play out so instead of you know obviously the state and the defense department have access to the latest cables latest studies greatest intelligence and here they are reading a 2500 year old book about a war fought by ships that had ores you know to give you a sense of how long ago it was um the 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 um

and yet The same things are happening um I'm just writing about this in uh the book I'm doing now the the the was it the melan dialogue or milon dialogue like the most famous passage in the the history of the pelian 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 you know systemic RAC ISM and structural problems and intersection That is the same discussion right it's it's it's and but

how many people that throw these Buzz 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 con we've we've invented

stuff to deal with things and sometimes we forget the the source of that Insight or that hard one lesson and so to to not have that historical basis it's just an enormous liability so people talk about stem and how we need to learn math 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 to two ways one is um there's such a

human element to all of this wunning too like when you you you talk about Sena a lot like I'll never forget um his practicing death essay you know when he's talking about um is it tuberculos or asthma he's he had a really bad attack he's like I Am practicing death you know and reading that the first time that was you know it's a letter I think and it it's I read it in Latin and then I read it again in a translation the latin's like having done done you know with all the participles but then

the translation John to God it's a great translation goes I am practicing death you know and that's the first line as the as the translation comes off and so even within you know these larger issues those Moments of human you know suffering and and perspective how is that not going to make somebody a better writer today to read that you know and 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 yeah you know and and if if somebody gets enough

power especially in the post-war world with nuclear weapons where you have to make a decision in five minutes Whether to respond you know we're dealing with um Stakes that the human mind can't really you know conceptualize I think that's the Susan s 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 of 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 you know tragedy of the commons issues like the environment or public trust or what you know that's going to be if if we can't just go hey I have this or I might have this I'm going to stay home or I'm going to get this uh vaccine or I'm going to wear this mask or whatever it is or that the the whole reason that governments exist is to bind people together to solve problems like that yes um because inst groups of people can't Self-organize quickly enough or voluntarily enough it like

that's what it's all there for so if you can't do that and to in meditations Marcus 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 antonine plague he would have understood how these extreme difficult disorienting scary events [ __ ] with people and and bring Out the worst in some people and the best in other people and and none of these problems or issues are new and all of the great literature is about this I I

forget I was reading one of the the Greek play it might have been ues it might have been escalus but it's like I'm reading this play and I go oh it's like about somebody getting revenge and then this jury gets set up and you go oh this is the invention of juries exact like some somebody came up with that They were like hey somebody gets wronged 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 solves that and you're like this

is a play it's not art but it's 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 didn't like Wasn't given to us invented it think then three or 2 200 years later on the night that um Martin Luther King has shot Bobby Kennedy you know who was a Philistine for most most of his life but after his very public tragedy began to read the Greeks began to

read um I have the book in the bookstore he has um Edith Edith what's her name Perman no Edith Wharton I don't know is it some Edith 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 what does he say we drop by drop we suffer onto truth or something like that he quote she had made it like monotheistic like even in our sleep um you know pain or suffering you know drop by drop comes onto the heart until

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 mourning Martin Luther King rioting anger pain whatever won't do any won't solve this we 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 like maybe you got kicked in the head by a horse or something or you know like something 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 and what underpins the Modern Health System and it's just as destructive and there's a great book um you put on immunity by ulip bis and it was the first time reading it she's a um non-fiction writer it was the first time um

I began to Understand she articulated that immunity is not about you you know it's about how the how the participation and she had been writing it while she was pregnant in the 2010s you know and and um she a great writer had gone to Iowa and it was the first time I stepped back and realized like this 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 us 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 there were seen the the idea was government would create Liberty and then philosophy and uh culture would create virtue and these two things have to uh coexist or operate together for the package to work um Washington orders the vaccination of his troops against small pox when like one in four people died from the vaccine like when it was so but But it's it they're 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 um there's this super moving thing that Benjamin Franklin writes about his decision not to vaccinate his son and he dies and it tears apart his marriage and his life um not to get on a Vaccine tangent but the the point is almost none of the issues are new they're struggling we're struggling with them in the same way just the names and dates and places and characters they change but the the problems stay the

same you know and and that's that's just kind of what's always been happening and I you you've written about this a lot too but you talked about it a little bit um just now where bad information really virulent information is like a virus and This goes back to anti-Semitism the Elders of Zion it's a way of thinking you know that actually infects the way the rest of your mind thinks there's a great book wasteland about um Ezra pound and TS Elliott that came out recently is a biography of the poem The Wasteland and just saw

Ezra pound's mind deteriorating with like not civilist but anti-semitic conspiracy theories it's 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 yeah like and it's this thing that's in I mean it infects the Romans different Emperors at different times different leaders at different times and and then yeah these different tropes or different like the the Elders of the protocol of not Zion or what's it called uh it's it's not that old right no it and it's like Russian propaganda yeah

it's just this thing this horrible thing that someone puts out in the world And then it it can't be eradicated and and you can be immunized against it with information and understanding but it's just going around effect and but if you lack the firewalls for it it can can my metaphors are getting very mixed here but if you lack the different you know sudden it can go big or small and yeah there there are these certain viruses and I've 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 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 the you kind of sense 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

like you can kind of watch this it's it's like this Evolution you know the 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 un the there's this latency period where it's kind of working on you and you don't understand it and maybe it was escapable maybe it wasn't but I I'm I'm very fascinated with the way that yeah these kind of idea Viruses get into a person and how they 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 in anti-semite and thought there should be like an apartheid regime in South Africa like he didn't go there there was a part he was like this is this is our chance you know um 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 change and then maybe he gets criticized here there and then all of a

sudden who he was five years ago I read the the first bio the Ashley Vance bio of and then I read that Walter I 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 consumed it's Terrifying too because you talk about it imagine as immunity or a set system and then it comes through I think as Steve Bannon like I'll go to CPAC and write about what's going on there and I this year I I saw him at his private party and I know he's

read everything but I know it it's not an immunity to the conspiracies you know again but I asked him I was you know everybody's there they want to be him which is very strange that's like the podcaster so Like how do I do my podcast how do I be Steve and so I was you know what's your favorite George Orwell I know he's talked about it and he saidage to Catalonia I'm like that's my favorite George but but you then realize that may have been it a long time ago now he's mapping a 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 taken apart peace meal to prove what you already feel or believe and that was kind of terrifying to me or you can have this almost kind of schizophrenic where you you you know all the stuff but that gets in the way of what you want to do like you're not even seeing

yourself as the person who's doing what you're yeah 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 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 Cataline you know what I mean like 2200 years ago 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 at pieces in the chessboard and not going am I burning this whole thing down just for me you know um never questions it yeah I I I just think it's it's tough when we um you know it gets back to part of our censorship talks too like I teach shooting an elephant today you know by George Orwell I I love much to

Catalonia I there's Parts um of it where he's talking about what or is 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 how it destroys him as a way to argue against it which Thompson does a very good job but you know ofs ofwell inad of with of you know language that he it to me is is mind-blowing like Within our pres and just scrambles that goody or baddy argument immediately you know

and and it's to me really dangerous because it's like the example you gave with Roosevelt it's tinkering with um something so essential information that is essential to us like you know his perspective so I don't know you know I think about our our current media situation I it freaks me out a lot when and this gets back to the Canon and band books it freaks me out a lot when we're Going beyond our online like 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 warwell or edit them and I mean I I I 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 yeah and And also like we used to the the reason for these I I I noticed this the other I was reading my kids uh I was telling them the story of The Odyssey and uh you know

I told them the story of um Cyclops I'm forgetting his name but uh you know odys say po uh what's his name is polyus yeah poly uh you know he says what's your name and he says no man and then so they go hey who poked out my eyes no man no no man picked out my and my kids just Lose their mind like this is the funniest joke and now they do they do all this anytime they do anything wrong you know I go like who punched your brother and they go no man punched

my brother you know like they're they're just they're just playing with this language in a way that someone almost 3,000 years ago or more was playing with language is incredible right and so we could be celebrating the sort of timelessness and and the the uniquely Humanness of all of that and so there's there 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 uh dictators and populists and demagogues have also been playing up 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 what people are throwing Out today of course it's not going to resonate like you're not drawn you don't have the 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 Thompson is saying 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 Beller in California was um the first six books of the anad and so Translating that and I'll never forget there's a passage where and you know Virgil's writing and there's a lot of different backgrounds of what's going on but in the epic poem you know and someday Rome won't exist anymore either and stepping back it's it's a

fact there will be 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 is not going to exist someday too you know and having that realization the presentness yeah of Our Lives the the instantaneousness of Our Lives it doesn't just make us you know focused on our phones or screens or who said something it makes us blind in the way humans want to be to very clear facts that this country these people were all Going to die someday anyways as

the stoics will tell you they're already dead but you know better than anybody but this country itself just in the way Romos is going to be gone and whatever an 18-year-old boy's brain is it is malleable you can give it good writing and and good perspectives and those magnets they're not going to hurt you know and so I I've always remembered that moment of looking up and stepping back from the book when 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 the 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 in a plague right or to see you know uh is I think it's Ides is writing as a veteran of this horrible war and trying to process the trauma of what he went through you know senica's Plays being his inability to outwardly criticized Nero and the regime and having to sublimate it in fiction Shakespeare basically makes one overt 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 to you who are you to tell me about this or that and and and sort of understand yeah that's what art is supposed to do is to touch Us in these places and when you yeah 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 it how representative it is and the fact that the point is that There really is only one Human Experience yeah I did a um political writing class um I teach graduate students but this was undergraduates during the pandemic so we read a lot of Thompson we read a lot of didan we read um James Baldwin we read um you know a lot of different 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 um 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 opet is the opposite of art you know and opet is the answer you know I love the line from [Music] um Claudia ranking Claudia rank King quotes it but you know um you know art um are the um questions like we arrive at after um we've gone through all the answers yeah 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 DC and these I don't usually teach undergradu 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 they'd be like well John didan says we tell ourselves stories in order to live so I'm 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 sh had to move around something and tell that

story in a different way and say how you know I think through my scen as like Virgil had to reach somehow he had to reach Augustus and if he just told Augustus in oped fashion how you get exiled or Worse yes or Worse you're exactly right and I I think I think a lot of students want to arrive at opets now as as somehow the purest form of the expression they want where 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 articul where the reader can do work and not just be given an answer yeah to to think that it's it's harder to do but It ultimately reaches more people because the defense Hunter Thompson is writing fear and lothing in Las Vegas not about drugs but about the American dream that Uh to me Hell's Angels is captured by the quot he says myths and legends Die Hard In America because they prove to us that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final it's a it's a the Hell's Angels

were a a revolt against the corporatization and the you know the the the buzzcut 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 Cure is maybe worse than The disease these are these these he shows them you know uh doing a gang rape right I think there's all this criticism now about the the new Michael Lewis book about Sam bankman freed and it's like he fets 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 he if he's going this dude sucks [ __ ] this dude you don't read the Book it's the the work of the book is how do you get somebody 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 um ancient 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 a 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 when they walk through the airport or somebody buys for someone who's going through something and I use it as an entry point into uh ancient philosophy I'm doing that precisely that kind of Jiu-Jitsu and people 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 could could take the full factual breakdown and that's not where most people are and that's not where opinions are changed and worlds are opened up it's 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 and so that the art of it is is they think you're doing one thing and really you're doing another thing and that's when 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 yes and Stakes you know when at every move even more so than we are and you know and had to not just like that idea of um you know um getting the Reader to do work or that metaphor of Jiu-Jitsu you're exactly right but that you

know if they made one more mention than they did yeah their lives are over you know that they're they're no longer and we've talked a lot in the 20th 21st century about this in a kind of global way but I it always blows my mind that the historical conversation or when we talk about it in the historical sense that gets left off to well yeah it's Like there's two forms of death one like you are too on the nose and the emperor cuts off your head the other you're too on the nose you're too lexury

you're too boring it's you factual and the reader cuts off your head cuz they say I don't want to read this anymore and you think plutar is going you think you want to read about Alexander the Great cuz you think he's a hero let me present to you why he was great and many ways but ultimately a tragic case and maybe you Totally missed the point you're Napoleon you read it and you're like [ __ ] 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 he writes parallel lives so it's it's KO and Caesar how they're contrasting with each other right and he's he's comparing them without saying who's better but it's obvious who's better right and 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 makavelli is the most tragic example of this Maki is writing a book to the people who tortured him like Maki ellan 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 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 and that that the subtlety to which he's doing it and then today we're like oh that's very mocky of alian like dude this dude was threading a [ __ ] needle

with his life on the line and you're missing the way that this can both be be read from both perspectives and has this kind of dual Lesson in it and I think honores Thompson is doing that in his own way it's fun and ridiculous and excess then 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 he can't get out his his son wrote a great book called stories I I tell myself ju 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 dexadrin and there was a price to be paid later and his son writes about getting hooked on the stuff I mean he was drinking up 750 750ml bottle of Jack Daniels every day starting when he woke up and it just dissolved him from the inside out in his mind too yeah you know and so you're right like that's he is seen in this kind of extreme way and he would present himself that way but eventually

it Became um 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 you know whatever but it was it was just through alcoholism you know and it was eventually you know speed and cocaine and all these different things but he was just dissolving his body with that and I I I think that that that gets lost um and I think one of the hardest questions is how much do you internalize in both your Writing and your sensitivity you know the tumult around

you yeah you know like think of didan like having her panic attacks and you know passing out and going into a psychiatric treatment um facility in the summer of 1968 and her great line is in retrospect I don't think nausea you know or um you know bouts of dizziness were entirely the wrong reaction to the summer 1968 and the same with Thompson you know how much do you internalize that tumml and danger Around you um and and what's the line where then that becomes too much you're not then 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 it he doesn't have a a mechanism for filtering it and processing and he kind of turns against him himself yeah and he just runs he burned very brightly I mean James Suter is a fascinating comparison Because Salter wrote until he was 85 86 90 was still writing his next book when he when he passed away um and 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 yeah when he was younger and healthier no it's there's a F Scott Fitzgerald this to it yeah I think with Dorothy Parker looked at his corpse and just said you poor son of a [ __ ] you know and that's like that's thers Thompson 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 but as a shell of a person like like he didn't successfully kill himself earlier which is what Fitzgerald did yes you know with alcohol yeah

exactly right and I you know I think art doesn't have to be seen as self-destructive yeah but to think that somehow and again this goes back to baseball I would think of Barry Bond 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 with st 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 Thompson was he wasn't a good writer because he was an alcoholic but there was a terrible terrible wager going on that he didn't even know what side he was coming down on you know and and I there's no one right answer to it it's I find it to be you know that it gets back to that um I quoted it earlier about that line from Conrad it's like life is short

and art is long and success is really far off that's not a good thing no no no that's not Heartening you know it's like oh 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 brilliant be separate from the way they see the world you know and especially the wager Berry bonds made then of course they're going to do anything it takes to be able to express that yeah it's like almost a form of like body

dysmorphia where it's like I have this thing I has to get out The world has to see me the way I see myself yeah and uh I'll turn myself into whatever kind of art monster I have to be to be able to do it or a steroid monster you know it's it's it's and then there's the moral argument to where it's like Mark Maguire wasn't a better hitter than Barry Bonds 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've really enjoyed talking