Going Deep with Chad and JT - EP 400 - DRAFT - BEST WRITERS - BIG AL FLYNN JOINS

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Today we are joined by the legends Big Al Flynn and Strider Wilson to DRAFT, The Greatest Writers of All Time. The bros did not come to play around. They rolled in with stacks of books, passionate arguments, and an absurd amount of literary knowledge. What makes a great writer? Is it storytelling? Style? Influence? Originality? Or the ability to completely wreck your emotions with one sentence? From ancient epics to modern journalism, nothing is off-limits.  Drop your favorite writers in the comments and let us know who won the draft.#WritersDraft #ChadAndJT #StriderWilson #BigAlFlynn We are live streaming a Fully unedited version of the pod on Twitch, if you want to chat with us while we're recording, follow here: https://www.twitch.tv/chadandjtgodeep Grab some dank merch here:https://shop.chadandjt.com/ Come see us on Tour! Get your tix - http://www.chadandjt.com TEXT OR CALL the hotline with your issue or question: 323-418-2019(Start with where you're from and name for best possible advice) Check out the reddit for some dank convo: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChadGoesDeep/ Here is the Total Draft Standings: (s/o HandA on reddit)Chad: 12 wins JT: 13 wins Strider: 14 wins Chris Parr: 11 winsBrad Fuller: 1 win (The Ultimate Champ)Joe Marrese: 1 winKevin Fard: 0 wins  Thanks to our Sponsors:Brotege: The Best Skincare products for bros - get started today for just 10$ Visit https://www.brotege.com/deep HomeChef: The Best Meal Kits! Go to https://www.homechef.com/godeep and get 50% off your first box + free dessert.  BILT REWARDS: Pay your rent with BILT and start earning points towards travel, fitness, restaurants and more! Go to https://www.joinbilt.com/godeep to get started today!  PRODUCTION & EDITS BY: Jake Rohret

What's up, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to this new channel. Thank you for finding us here. Make sure you like, subscribe, comment, do all that good stuff. Keep spreading the word. We're trying to build this thing out. We've got good momentum. Let's keep it up. Thank you for supporting the show. Guys, we got tour dates coming up. Next show. Bros. Before Joe's this Friday, August 8th, in the belly room of the comedy store. The whole squad. We got Catherine Blanford and Andrew Jin. Jinn. Then my next one-man show, Chill, Tore. Enlightenment, help you reclaim your stoke. It's happening at Jamming the Van on August 15th. And then we've got the Tampa Funny Bone, Tampa, Florida, September 23rd, Orlando Funny Bone,

September 24th, and September 25th, Dania Beach Improv. Get your tickets at chat and JT.com. Oh, Comedy Store main room, September 2nd. Also, we're brought to you by the legends at Brodage, guys. The best. Losch game in the biz for the bros, not the pros. They make the Loche game easy and accessible for the novice Loche dude. Use code deep at checkout and you'll get to try Brodege for only 10 bucks. We're brought to you by the Legends at Home Chef. Guys, the best meal kit biz in the game. Guys, just going out to find a meal, there's so many options. It's such a, it's, it just puts your dome through the ringer.

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That's homechef.com slash go deep. For 50% off your first box and free dessert for life, home chef.com slash go deep must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. And you don't want to miss on that. going to be my kid Dude it was awesome like a awesome It was fun it was really fun It felt like a transitional moment

I was like I'm fully Dude you were having to go talks dude You came up to me and you go, you go, I'm in between identities right now. I was like, do you're doing research for the draft right now, dude? It was amazing, dude, you wear fatherhood well. You're crushing it, dude. Yeah, it was great. It was nice.

The kids had a really good time, too. They got the pinata. Piniata went well. Did they break down the other one? No. They weren't ready for that. But the first pinata was the right kind of design where you just unravel it rather than bash it. And your mom crushed it with Jersey,

I mean, she sets up a party well. Dude, I walked in there. You had your mom assisting? My mom coordinated, aka, was in charge of. You can see why you're such a good, like you are, you both are the party bros. You inherited that gene from your mother. Like, she throws a party very well. I stopped throwing parties once I moved out, basically, because I didn't have the home base that made it so easy.

Like, I mean, my parents would just leave tons of booze and leave us to a big house for a month. I was like, yeah, I can throw a party. I was like, the leg works The tools are here Now it's just a lot of coordination Yeah, just invite some people over Yeah I was talking to your uncle

And then I look over And there's Jersey mics I was like Oh no way Jersey mics And he's like My uncle Jimmy dude He's cool

Yeah, he's good I mean just the way you wear those jeans On stage tucked in man I could tell you are Fully I know you seem like You're fully transitioning But like you're there

Okay good And I think you just have to sit in it A little bit mentally Yeah for sure Sure. I mean, there was little things I did to, there's a little bit of a rest of development where I'm still holding on to who I was. Like, I had sunglasses and a vape at the party just so I could feel like, and my shirt was from a weed shop. Like I was like very much trying to be like, I'm a bad boy. But no, it's not true. I just, uh, dude, most emblematic of that. I said I was going to do shrooms. I ended up not doing them.

I was wondering, yeah. It has been two years now of me saying I'm going to do shrooms. There's probably been 14 fall starts and I never did. do them. What happened? I don't know. I think I just want to believe I'm a guy who is going to do shrooms, but the truth of it is, that might be in my past. When the day comes, it, I can understand, like, when the day comes, you're like, it's a lot to do. And the circumstances just wouldn't allow. I had to be off, I had to be back at home at five to watch the kids, so I needed totally worn off by then. And then at noon, some new errands came up,

and I was like, my window shot. If you're going to do any sort of substance in the primary leading thought is responsibility or you can't be having that it just needs to be like let's just go if i may i think i also i think trumes probably are the best when you also have a big activity so you can't even like if you're going to like everyone talks the concert you know a baseball game is also a sneaky great shroom strip oh wow i never even thought about because it's nine innings it's slow pace you're kind of going you get a lot of like green visuals do if you see a home around trumes that'd be sick brother you're like man Man, that lamp made a great sliding catch.

But I think, yeah, that also, if you do have the big responsibility that you do, which is two human lives. Yeah. You know, you can completely let go of that because you're fully in the moment with psychedelics. True. And I'm feeling more comfortable. They seem to be out of the woods in terms of any, like, developmental issues or any health issues. I mean, anything could happen. Oh, they're doing great, dude.

But we took them for their two-year checkup today, and their health is robust. That's good. that'll create some relaxation and maybe some space for me to indulge in narcotics. Well, you know what I think you need to do is I think you need to like activity location change. I got to be out of town. Yeah, you got to go to the desert. You got to go. We got a fantasy draft coming up, bro.

But then I don't want to call my fiance and be like, she's like, what did you get up today? While she's watching the kids and she goes, what did you get up to? And I say, yeah. I did shrooms in Madison. I'm staring at the lake. But what if you tell her before? Like, look, I'm going to the desert to go do this. Can I?

Oh, sorry, no, I'll keep going. No, that was all. Yeah. Well, can I also ask, because I hear people say, my girlfriend, she says, like, we got to go out to Palm Springs and do shrooms. I always think about it was psychedelics. I kind of want to be wet. Do you know what I'm like?

I think of beach. I want to be wet. You want to be in the heat. I want to be in the heat for sure, but like, I also want to be wet. Lake Tahoe was the best, one of the best shrooms experiences I ever had. Yeah. So nice. It was our buddy Joe's Bachelor party.

Look at J.T. looking at me like, I don't know. Look, I've done like three times. I've done like three times and I only really ever do like the first three but I don't go deep. I do like the first three bits in the chocolate bar, okay, okay, I take baby steps

and, but I'm telling you it was nice I could hop in the lake, hop out, they have a bar right there. Good sensor you experience. I discovered ranch waters if you guys know what those are. Oh yeah. Oh, that was amazing.

What's in the ranch water? Basically just like a tequila soda, but it's so dang, dude. It's a TQ. We're talking about expanding your dome, right? Through outside substances, but what if you could expand your dome by just absorbing another person's point of view.

That's what we're drafting today. We're going to talk and we're going to draft the greatest writers of all time. This is huge. I'm really excited. Because who could possibly read all the great books of all time? Maybe a few guys have come close, but no one really knows. And that's why for our judge today, we're not going with Aaron. What are we doing?

We're going with the only one who has read everything. AI dude what we have an AI judge we're gonna have an AI judge is it that chick that's into you're just gonna the AI girl that likes you

not that one we're just gonna go chat GBT and we're gonna put all the books into it or all the authors into we're using AI I also did it because why are we doing this Alec has a very romantic and solid stance against AI

so I also want to create some tension there I gotta hear this a little bit what do you what's your big beef with AI besides besides the environmental impact that it has You realize every time we look up an author in here, like three people in Memphis are going to like have bad drinking water for a day.

Really? I didn't know that. Yeah, bro. Yeah, but even doing research on your phone, you're like, run the servers. Sowing instability in like the Congo, so I mean, your soul has already drenched an external... Bro, I know. But at least this one's new and I feel like I can get a good grip on it

and stop while I can. And we put in some barriers. Oh, Big A.I. Flynn They're saying something. Oh, no. Beef nips. Got you, dude. Beef nips. We'll roast you a hard. dude wait so is it is it the is it just the environmental impact is it what else is going I think that and I think also we all three of all four of us were

creatives you know I think that the more and more people tell us that we have to integrate with a machine that only really aggregates all of the things from the past and then like you know quote-unquote it comes up with like just whatever from the like I think we have to constantly be looking about what is in the present and what's in our future and what we want to see in terms of art and I think a lot of AI what that does is not is not the same it's sloped dude it is slop for the pig it's inherently going to be derivative they got out of copyright trouble because they basically said copyright comes from output we just used it for input but what we're giving back is like salad

of everything so no one deserves any payment on it bullshit what you're feeding your machine with like if you're learning how to write a screenplay like you're putting back to the future and there you're putting fucking chinler saving private ryan you're putting all these great screenplays in there that's bullshit right but it's your point of view though they should pay copyright on that if you use ideas from back to the future you personally when you write uh maybe it should be like a fee when you sign up for the ai platform whichever one it is but like for instance say chat gpt they should pay those if no i'm making a different point about when a person's influenced by those things do they do they pay those people no because it's your own point of view on how you

interpreted the art itself but i mean i also guess like you've purchased the art through the platform you've washed it on. You've paid for it, so you haven't paid for it. Yeah. And so, and that's just the fee there. Right. So I guess, like, I don't know if the... I'm on your guys' side.

I'm just doing the counters. No, I think that's how it got settled. I think one thing, since we're already getting into books, George Saunders, one of my favorite... One of my favorite authors. In the, like, the ending, he talked it, like, a little bit about, like, how he came up with his first book, like, how he was coming up towards the end of Civil Warland and bad decline.

Great book. And he said, as an artist, And as a writer, all I was doing was climbing up the mountains of my heroes. So I climb up the Hemingway Mountain. Then I climb up the Mark Twain Mountain. And then you have to realize sooner or later that you have to build up your own mountain. And like you have to start somewhere and you have to build that foundation. So like AI doesn't do that.

But it's really interesting because what we're talking about is borrowing from your heroes to make your own things. And like Cormic McCarthy said, the ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written. maybe AI is just perpetuating that same cycle I don't know man doesn't have a point of view it's a dude it's a robot

yeah we don't know I'm just kidding George Saar's good pitch yeah we don't know good pick alright should we get into it should we go let's do it all right odds or evens on three shoot

do you know how to play odds or evens no just throw out a one or two okay two no physically physically he's gonna count it off and then you throw out one or two one two three shoot oh we gotta go again

we gotta go one two three shoot Oh Ted's McGee All right Fuck One two three shoot Fuck ass Okay paper rock scissors now

To see it gets the first pick Paper scissors There's two I need to throw on the fourth Oh you're a shoot Rock paper scissors shoot We'll let the novices go

Oh I got the number one pick Man I always get the number one pick Okay Yeah I fell to a Philistine All right So This is big How do you rate all the books?

against each other. I don't think you can rate that. I'm so nervous. I don't think you rate them. I'm so nervous. I'm so excited. Harold Bloom, the Yale professor who kind of created the Western

canon as a good guide throughout all of this. He said, what is the Western canon? All that is essential to teach to the young. And when I really think about the tradition that we've been steeped in, what we've learned, who is most responsible for shaping it, I have to go with someone

who technically wasn't even a writer. I think this is great. He existed in the oral tradition. Some even suggest he was blind. Yes. Some people question whether he is responsible for all the works that are attributed to him. But for my money, the bedrock of ancient Greece and Alexandrian teaching, I'm going with Homer. Wow.

This is good. The master of the epic. This is good. Dude, the first response are Homer Simpson. Homer offers us in early literature, the unreliable narrator, which is huge. and writing like you said earlier is perspective you have our boy why am i blanking on his name from ithaca what the fuck odysseus odysius this guy you can't trust him he's biased he's cunning he's a fox and so you this whole story is drenched in point of view it's point of view on point of view

it's fantastic and it's a glimpse into history we learn how these people lived through a narrative which is craft and the other thing is a lot of big writers they have one major hit this guy's got the Iliad, Aniaz Odysseus, I mean, that's Goodfellas and Casino right there. Also, I have to say, big time power move to be like, yo, I'm going to talk. You write it down, bitch. That's fucking sick. That is fucking sick. Of him just being like, I'm going to dictate.

That's sick. And so it was written in a way that was easy to remember or spoken in a way that was easy to remember called Dactylic hexameter. Yes. And you could say maybe he wasn't a writer, maybe he was a compiler, a performer, but he gave a story. and his version of story is still the one that we're basing all other stories on

you could say he was the Lenny Bruce the Marlon Brando the person who redefined the paradigm that we still exist in so for that reason I gotta go with my boy coming at you 700 BC he's still the top of the heap no one's taking him off arguably some of the most famous characters of all time

they're still kill them I mean if someone you know like Nolan is taking on the Odyssey I mean that's something it's it's it's It's going to be a big way to watch. These works of art, they're at the top. They're their originals.

And, yeah. And also, things like Calypso's Island, Trojan horse, I mean, they all exist in our vernacular. They've become the norm for how we explain the world. The hero's journey. Yeah, exactly. As Plato said, metaphor is the peak of genius. And I don't know if anyone did it better than my homie homer. And also, my homie homer.

And also, especially the odyssey, it's, it's, the odyssey. It's such good, you know, template for how to live your life of, like, perseverance and all that kind of stuff. There's, there's, and tricking people, dude. Yeah, Tricking people. Hey, hunting is a big thing, dude. Yeah. I mean, treason is the most inner circle of hell if we pick another author. Damn.

All right. Who's up next? I'm up. Number two pick. I'm up. And I'm going to, you know what? I thought I was going to have to hold off on this because I don't want to sound too much like a, like, you know, basic guy. but the more I thought about

the more I looked through my own bookshelf in preparing for this episode you gotta go Hemingway and I know that's an easy one and I know that's easy but it's early but I know it's early I really do know it's early but I feel like I got to take him off the board because someone will

take him and because I also think like we have to think about the author as who's they were in terms of the stature you're talking about Homer this was a guy everybody in ancient Greece all the way to ancient Rome, all the way to today, knows about, like, the stature and the name of this guy.

I think when you're talking about, like, my favorite book, one of my favorite books of all time for whom the bell tolls. I think we're talking about, you know, I'm not really a big fan of Old Man of the Sea, but even some of the books where it's like semi-autobiographical, like movable feast, talking about his time in the 1920s, hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald and all these people. Breaking some hearts.

Yeah, I mean, one of my other favorite ones, in our time, his collection of short stories, I think he had so much range. And I think he was also able to be a, um, just like kind of the mold for what the great American novelist is. And kind of defined masculinity for an entire generation. Exactly. For better or worse. I mean, towards the end of his, his life, I mean, he was truly, you know, concussed and drunk all the time, which is a dangerous combo to be. Yeah. Yeah. He was Brett farved. He was, he, he farved himself for sure if he had a smartphone he would have been sending dickens he might have had CTE from like his ambulance injury when he was in battle brother he had multiple head injuries from war reporting in the

Spanish Civil War yeah like this guy was always looking for adventure which I really do appreciate about him I mean was he the best guy I mean that's up that's up for debate none of these guys are going to get that title none of these guys are going to get the title for you know most ethical but I will say he was somebody that I think I can I yeah well Cream Jean says Woody Woody Allen's move midnight in Paris Oh really fun yeah oh he's the actor that plays him is so good

Yeah man I don't know I think he's a fucking I think he's a good guy I like his books and I think he's The classic American novelist Somebody like a Homer who set the table Yeah I like his style too I like minimalistic To the point He doesn't waste words Iceberg theory

Iceberg theory There's more power In what you can't perceive Yeah And that's my favorite thing Is simplicity in art I think is the hardest thing to achieve But

Its simplicity is sophistication Greg Fitzsimmons had a great take on him too He's like when you read Hemingway You read him described dinner You feel full afterwards Like he gives you a sensory experience That's pretty complete I'm gonna give that a couple snaps

Let's go baby Let's go this is a great pick out So we come at each other In these drafts a little bit Okay I gotta go out of JT said we got to go on a little early you could have got some big time chalk you could have some big time chalk but this is a guy you want to have on your list so I got to give you this is a guy

and this is I'm strictly going from personal I I can't say a lot to you I can't separate the personal from the objective fact of who the best writers are that's that's fine that I think to me if I'm combining both things that I'm considering this is this is probably top and look Christopher Hitchens another writer I really like when he talked about for whom the bell told he mentioned that that's his masterpiece. And the section he does on how the socialist became corrupted in Spain is some of the most wonderful of self-evaluating writing ever. But he mentions maybe Hemingway tries too hard.

I agree. I think I did also watch the, um, Ken Burns. He didn't know a higher series on Hemingway. And you see a guy who throughout his life, I think extremely insecure, but he's just like all of us. Why else do we go on stage and we like make people want to? want to like us. We're insecure at the end of the day. This is a guy who, like, for the

most part, when he came back from World War 1, like, also pretty much faked like his heroics in the war. They didn't fake all of it, but like, you know, he definitely exaggerated. They all do that myth building, though. Churchill did the same thing. They're all guilty of just being like, they know the guy they need to be perceived as to make

an impact in the world. He was overcompensating, I think, with a lot of his fishing and his, you know, boxing and shooting you know, Gazelle in Africa. for sure. Because his mom dressed him like a girl. That's at the beginning

of the tip of his dog. That's right. It's true. There's like a photo. This poor bastard. All right. That's a good pick. We're going to number three now.

Who's up? This is huge value here. I'm telling you right now, I have a plan. And, you know, for writing books is your primary medium. I also think, don't do it.

Like Homer did, you write. and then you speak it. Fuck. This guy has existed. You can read what he writes. Just read them. But also, you can watch them come to life.

I'm talking about the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. Oh, okay. The guy is perhaps the most prolific writer of all time. He has some of the most fire quotes. We're all comedians. He says, brevity is the soul of wit. Well, that's what you're saying, Chad, a second, a moment to go. Also, people say, like with Homer, they debate whether he in fact wrote all of his pieces.

But we will operate under the knowledge that, you know, he is prolific no matter what. And a lot of that did come from when he was coming up in the Elizabethan era. Then there was the Jacobian after that. These were the rulers of the time. And this was the London theater scene. And why 40% of his plays are about succession? because Elizabeth had no real air. And he had to pay off

to get your stuff produced because you know you need to make money. He would write to those themes and then they would put up his works and there was like three prominent playwrights at the time, one who passed away and in fact his... Marlow and Ben Johnson? I think maybe that would have been their names.

Yeah, I forget their names. And when one of them died, the guy who was actually like the manager of the one who was always going against Spakecher as soon as his big money whale died, He went to Shakespeare and was like, no, no, look, Bill, you were actually always right and, like, groveled to him. In any case, the guy writes on all genre. He has plays about, like J.T. just mentioned, history and abdication of a throne, succession.

He has his great comedies, which, you know, adaptations today, 10 things I hate about you, Taming of the Shrew. These are fucking beast mode things that can be adapted and modernized and enjoyed by the modern viewer. Because, you know what it is? and this is a great quote from one of the great Shakespearean authors he goes, to read Shakespeare is to study a map of what it is to be human. And I think that's what writing is.

You can look at any, you can dive into any Shakespeare's play and you will see the most human things because, after all, all the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players. They have their exits and their entrances is, and one man in his time plays many parts. That's from As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7. Also, which is Baller, he has his own writing, cadence, iambic pantameter.

What up? Oh, yo! He also was big on, and one of my favorite quotes is from The Merchant of Venice on Prejudice, which is something that's going on all over the world still currently, and in this very city of ours and nation, and it's, this is about this character. Very anti-Semitic. uh yes but this actually and his conversion at the end makes no sense with what

proceeded true that is true but this playwright this quote here I'm just kidding it's against him you gotta come at me I get it I get it if you pick us do we not bleed if you tickle us do we not laugh if you poison us do we not die and if you wrong us

shall we not revenge so the guys just got a fucking all sorts of baller shit we don't know much about him personally we know he was probably bisexual he liked to drink and he didn't like lawyers and the idea that he might have been multiple people they think is because back then dudes used to sign their names different ways. It was like P.D.D.D. or Prince where it was cool to have different names. So his name is written as Shagspier, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, and we've just kind of settled on Shakespeare is the real name. And he invented words. Did he mention that?

1700. That is crazy. You're right. Including eyeball, swagger, betwixt. Swagger? Assassination. All invented by him. Wow. But he stole heavily. The good one borrows, the great one steal. King Lear, another play before it. Tolstoy says it was better.

In fact, Tolstoy hated Shakespeare. Really? It was the moralist versus the humanist. He thought he was absolute trash. He thought he was bad at plot. He thought all the characters sound the same. He thought all the characters, regardless of what was going on, spoke from the same emotional plays.

And he thought the fact that we all accepted him as a genius was going to be part of civilization's fall. Whoa, sounds like he's jealous. Maybe we shall see. Acts to grind. Also, I got to just finish with one more quote, and this is why the bard is my number one. If you'll indulge me,

this is from Henry V. From this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he, today, that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother be he near so vile this day shall gentle his condition and gentlemen in england now abed shall think themselves accursed there they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap while yep while any speaks that fought with us upon st christmas day henry the fifth did greatest war speech in

history so yep and then you get of course the greatest uh mini series hbo band of brothers because of shakespeare the guy is influence upon influence upon influence like we see said earlier, books that happen today are, you know, they're inherently derivative in this guy right here. What's that? He's bad at plot. I mean, you know, you could look at all of his works and some of them are pretty fire at plot. I mean, dude, when you're that prolific, you're going to have some misses. To come up with words, I'm going to, you know, it's tough for me to really shout down any of these picks. I think you guys are crushing it. I just, dude, to come up with words, I mean, that's, that's insane. Yeah. Dude, the, uh, eyeball. No one had ever put the two

together. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. And then Hamlet is like, for actors, that's the greatest challenge is to play Hamlet. If you can do Ham, like, if someone's like, I'm going to take on Hamlet,

that's like, there's nothing more difficult. Yeah, bro. Leah Friver says you understand psychology after you play Hamlet. And some people even think Shakespeare's responsible for the inner monologue. That he's the first writer to really explore

someone's own thoughts. Like Hamlet is a, about his own running dialogue against himself somewhat. Same with Macbeth. Yeah. Never been done before by now. I want to reread that now. I want to reread some of like the Macbeth and the hamlet. Mcbeth is a good one. That's a good anti-hero. Guys, we are brought to you by built. By now you probably heard of built, okay, where you can earn points on your monthly rent payment, but did you know they make it possible you to get more outside of your home to? If you're paying rent every month without earning anything in return, let me introduce you to built. The

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I am? Yeah, someone said, give me an author that tells me you've read since high school, Chad. Well, I'm not going to do that on this pick. Damn! I'm not going to do it on this pig. Scroll up to Nantucket Buddha. Yeah, nice name, you fucking

You get in Shakespeare Dries crazy value Huge value Huge value Yeah, take your fucking pastel shorts And go suck yourself Um All right, this guy

You know, there's people higher up On the list But I gotta go to someone who I've read Who I have read in high school But I continue to reread Because he takes you on an adventure Dude, to thine own self be true He's satirical.

He's got wit. And, you know, is there anything more American than floating down the river? No. That's why I'm going with the father of American literature, Mark Twain. Damn. I like it. I like it, dude. Not really beating me what Nantucket, Buddha said, but you're killing it.

But you know what, dude? You know, you can be a keyboard activist all day. But, you know, why don't you go fucking... I'm not really good shit talking. Mark Twain is a great, you know who's good at shit talking? Mark Twain probably. The guys, he's a master of wit. Yeah.

And captured an era of Americana that is just, I don't know if anyone has captured that lifestyle in the South better than this author. When you think of America, you think of Mark Twain. Yes. And I just love, I love guys who are whimsical. And when you think of him with his stash and just everything about him, you're like, man, like, man, like that.

like what was going on in his dome must have been probably torture but also fun and he leveled up the american novel too before that everybody was writing in the king's english and he said no i'm going to write in the common man vernacular yeah and then he took on the great contradiction of american history which is that all men are created equal but we had slaves yeah and so the book really concentrates on the idea of like is there a humanity more important than law yeah and no one was doing that at that time that was bold and brave and and and and and also enlarging for the human mind. Also, known good guy.

Didn't you try and help out Ulysses S. Grant when you, like, just sold his fucking life story, his biography to like a random dude? Mark Twain was like, no, dude, let me publish it, please. He did do that, yes. Grant was the, I think he was as Grant from what I've read and heard. It was like, oh, like, sounds good, dude. To me he was the president, too, and the general. And in general, but he was like, yeah, that sounds good to me.

But, like, yeah, Mark Twain was just like, no, let me do this. I got it. And it became like a bestseller. Yeah, didn't it, like, it set his, when he died, his wife was set financially. Because he, did he die like broke or something? He died, yeah, he died from like, I mean, like alcohol, I'm pretty sure. We can look that up, Jake. These guys all have money, how you listed S. Grant died.

Not to go, not to get off from the fact, but Chad, did you have anything else you wanted to add from, from. Mark Twain I think just To me Is there anyone else He'd rather run into In a bar? There's having to

Have a lot There's maybe But I mean That could get sad though At some point But there's another guy Right He might list

George Plifton talked about He brought a cute girl out With Hemingway And Hemingway Was like Trying to box him But he was too old And he's like

All right Let's just arm wrestle Like he kept challenging Plimpton Yeah he seems like a big Like get over here Kind of guy Oh you're a man

Yeah It's a dick Yeah I bet you've got a bigger dick than you. Let's go outside and fish. All right. Now, we're going to dive into my favorite thing to read about is philosophy. And we're going back to ancient Greece, okay?

And, you know, there's one guy who's kind of, you might consider the father of philosophy in ancient Greece. But there's one guy who wrote it all down. He wrote in dialogue form. You know, he has some of the greatest philosophical metaphors that we still use today. I'm going with Plato, number two. Oh, yes, huge, huge. The Republic, um, I like that you put a philosopher. That's huge.

That's what I like to read. So, you know, I got to do it. Because here's the thing. And I like a slight little bend, although he does have a collection of his works, you know what I mean? But like not like a novelist or whatever, but he has ideas. And his ideas are written down. and his ideas and form government

which I think is huge and so I like this I take it as a little bit of a bend and I'm baby I mean I'm Avatar the Airbender over here they still influence us today big time

I mean the allegory of the cave it's still applicable today yes yes yeah I guess it is interesting because when you look at lists of greatest writers of all time philosophers are typically

lower on the list than novelists or fiction writers of any kind and I guess it's because the pleasure of reading it is more with a novel rather than philosophy? May I ask today? I'm thinking who are like modern day philosophers that we could point to and say like this

guy's pushing the conversation forward on like intricate like human related, you know, deep thought. You will know Harari kind of, but he's like a philosopher. Yeah, he's totally that. Yeah, that's a good pick. He's great. No, Chad. This is a great pick.

Any quotes. Do you have any fire quotes from our boy? What's he? I can probably look something out. Some Plato quotes. Let's see. But the allegory of the cave is huge. I love the allegory.

That was my, I took my first. I mean, that's the biggest baller one. And unexamined life is not worth living. Oh, that's huge. Yeah.

That's huge. Yeah. What are some? You got to have some quotes ready for the guys you pick, bro. You can't just say that. The measure of a man is what he does with power. Yeah, that's good. Why is men talk because they have something to say fools,

because they have to say something. I like it, I feel it. I like that. Cool. I would like to see a buff, you know, Instagram influencer say something to that. I can, you know what I mean? Men talk when they have something to say.

Fools keep talking because they have nothing to say. And you're like, I'm off his Lamborghini, aventador and like, yeah, I'm like sick. Yeah, then it's like the background music. It's like, bong, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, punch, don't, but it's like always hit, boom.

It's like always that music, and they're hopping out of a Lamborghini. All right, chat. Just for anyone watching on the stream, I have notes on here. Unlike chat, I have quotes on here. Dude, what if I had a rip on you? I'm sorry, I love you.

That's why I'm looking at my phone. I'm not texting anyone, even though my wife is texting me, hey, what are we planning for dinner tonight? Maybe some pasta. It's Monday. Any case, now, there's mediums of writing out there.

I have the barred. That guy's writing plays. Then you can also fucking just read as books, but they also get put up, and you get to see. it the groundlings stand below the masses can understand what the bar is saying because literacy was not a thing of his age i mean everyone sounds the same in his plays he's basically kevin smith yeah they all sounds sick as fuck and kevin smith's tight you ever seen mallrats the guy wears a good

hockey jersey dude and my next guy here because there are other mediums of writing in other ways to deliver it but i do think the novel perhaps might be the most difficult undertaking and I think this guy I like my authors to suffer I want my authors to feel pathos or pathos however you say it in Greece here I have to go with the great Russian novelist

Fyodor Dostoevsky Ah very good Because he does what Chad was saying as a philosopher this guy tackles some of the highest conceptual philosophical concepts because I'm an idiot so I have to say the word twice in a sentence

and puts it into narrative form and makes it, I mean digestible, still very difficult to get through, still unbelievably dense, still tough. But he presents it in a format that is supposed to be entertaining but therefore also unbelievably enlightening. If you want to understand humanity,

just read the brothers Karamazov. Just read that. And you will capture the human experience on page. I'm in the Grand Inquisitor. Perhaps the greatest chapter in all of literature. The church tells Jesus, he fucked up, you shouldn't have given him free will. Man doesn't want that.

He wants miracles and authority and mystery. The church has replaced you. It has fixed all that you did wrong. What does Jesus do at the end? All he does is give the guy a kiss. He doesn't say anything. That is the divine mystery. And to pick Doskayevsky, who Woody Allen said,

if I could be one writer, I'd be Doskayevsky, who Hemingway said, how can you write so messy but make me feel so much? This is a man who suffered. Yeah. He had epilepsy. He lost three kids early on, one, two epilepsy. he suffered from gambling and alcohol but he said to love is to affirm the world as it is yes he has to put yourself into that frame when you're going through so much and to be such a negative

guy and to come out like you think of the Russian literature as like the defeated the suffering the pain and all of that is there believe me all of that is there but he does have light at the I think at the end of the day he is an optimist I mean totally or he believes just in like the transformative potential of life yeah If you suffer, if you confess, you can be better. And so, dude, I was thinking about it, crime and punishment, or Skilnikov, right? He thinks he's dealing with like these kind of ubermensch themes that were permeating at the time. And his, his, he's going to law school.

His mom's like, you can't really afford it. Your sister's going to marry some douchebag to pay for it. He feels terrible about this. So he decides, I'm going to kill this piece of shit pawn shop owner. He kills the pawn shop owner. And then, like, the sister-in-law of the pawn shop owner comes in, has to kill her too. And the rest of the book is him deal. dealing with that guilt.

So it's about this guy who thinks he's above morality. He has to do his own thing because he's special enough to create his own worldview. What does that sound like? Us today. Every human being alive right now. Walter White, Tony Soprano, Don Draper. All the contemporary anti-heroes, I think we're seated in Raskillnikoff and in crime and punishment.

Let's go. It's about guys acting above the law and then dealing with the guilt of that. God damn, dude. I think it's... You are going in on a level I've never seen before. Did I show here for it? JT's fire. JT, I have to say

my pick is derivative of JT because you turn me on to that Philosophizer pick or whatever. What's that, philosophize this podcast? Yeah. With a guy does a dive on? I'm borrowing a lot

from what he was breaking. But I made that, the breaking bad thing was my own. But yeah. That's huge. So some quotes here. Gotta have these. The mystery of human existence

lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for. Purpose. I think we can all agree with that. Times of Christ. of disruption or constructive change are not only predictable but desirable. They mean growth.

Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most. The unknown. And that, I mean, if you go to write a novel when you get up on stage to do stand-up comedy when we all do this, that's fear because yes, you have your plan, you have your bits that you're going with, but every time you get up there,

you don't know what it's going to be. It's a new audience. It's a new moment. It's great fear. and this is also what I love to because he's all about making your own choices and he probably does believe you have to suffer

or live human experience to come out with the right choice but he goes to go wrong in one's own way is better than to do right in someone else's way so take a risk on yourself man you know I mean there's so many people

and granted you've got to pay bills or so many things you got to do and I just think about working where I'm like my manager's telling me to do this and that and that and sure it's fine it pays the bills but yeah it's it's the world is so frustrating and full of shortcoming but hell is the inability to love and so he's trying to say wow despite all of that can you still find a place to love the world

as it is yeah it's very very powerful stuff Russian guys man the Russian guys dude if Russians know anything it is pain yep and you know what great pick I think I got halfway through the brothers cameras off it was just it was really crushing me at the time but I think I got to get back into it now that was a ringing endorsement. Al, I'll tell you right now, I think the way to do it is, I think read the chapter, because the Grand Inquisitor is a departure from the rest like the narrative. That's when they're

both sitting down at the bar, right? I got it, yeah, I started it and then I like, I just sit it down, I didn't get back to it. You can Cole read that chapter and be like, all right, I read it. Because I've tried like three times to read it and have not been able to get through it. Okay, good to know. I can't say the names, the brother's name,

Syri Gay, like, yeah. Well, like yeah, I mean, the beginning of the book is oh it's just like Sergei was hit by donkey that father threw at him the dad's such a piece of shit he gives the dad his own name the dad's Fyodor

yeah exactly oh and the dad's a bad guy the dad's having sex with one of the kids girlfriends right exactly yeah the dad's just like I pay her $3

she blumpkin my face dude he invented blumpkins dude he invented the word blumpkin you gotta go high you gotta go a little bit I think the Russian I was listening to this podcast yesterday they said the Russians

think that to laugh without purpose is foolish if you're laughing without reason then you're an idiot they don't like to vacillate between joy and sat they're like they like to stay it is like so sad that we see a Russian state that is like very

handicapped today yet they are responsible for so much like deep deep cultural like in human things that they write about and talk about I mean I don't know I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself but I'm just having a blast

Well, they, like Russia, Russia and China, you know, those empires are thousands of years old. And so we're, we're, they know pain. They know that, they know that the human life is suffering. So they, like, when they look at Americans and we, you know, we, we indulge in like, you know, hedonism or even just like chasing happiness. They're like, that's stupid. Pointless. Life is brutal. Yeah, life is pain.

And then you die. Well, yeah, prior to, like, the Bolsheviks and stuff, deeply religious. So they thought they were marked for greatness, and the way they earned that was through suffering. Yeah. I mean, they also had, like, you know, surf. They did serfs up until, like, 1860. Slaves, 1861, yeah. And that is the backdrop.

They used to measure wealth by how many slaves you had. It's crazy, bro. And other Russian writer really kind of built his whole ideology off both sides of that. Dude, they had fucking trains, bro. And they were just still, like, talk to that guy if you want that wife. It's crazy. Hey, J.T. Have you ever caught yourself in the mirror and thought, whoa, when did that wrinkle show up? Dude, totally. Or like when you suddenly realize you look more like your dad every day and like not the cool parts.

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just for our going deep listeners. Use code deep at checkout and you'll try to get, and you'll get to try Brodege for only about 10 bucks. 10 bucks to like younger, fresher, and basically just better. It's a no-brainer, dude. Guys, check out Brodagee. Support the show. Support your face. Support your skin. Brodagee is awesome. I got into the Loche game because of Brodicee, and I love it. So check it out. All right, I'm up. Look, I'm going to level with you here, Chad. I'm going to level with you here, gang um i feel as though the gravity with which you guys are picking these these people are far surpassing me um but i'm again i i hate to say it but i'm going to go with favorites

let's dive into the world and non-fix do you don't you take her from me i'm going to die in the world and non-fix i have to do it i hate to be that guy but she's one of my favorites let's stay in old california because i know you guys are big california heads and we love it here um i'm going to go with joan Diddy and I have to do it. My wife's upset. Great pick. You got this.

She is my wife. She is my wife. Detached but emotionally piercing. Oh my God. The white album is slouching towards Bethlehem. I'll also go with, if you want to go down a little bit more, I know what you're talking. You know what I'm talking about, I believe is one of the titles. One of my favorites where she does an entire short story on Martha Stewart and the empire

she's built, which I think is like fascinating. but there's so many little short stories that are about California and specifically also about the 60s to live through and write about a time that is so transformational in our history. Vietnam, you have the Manson murders, you have this sort of countercultural movement that in all ideas has the right sort of meaning

to bring us all together but just never gets off the ground and then is instantly hit with this wave of like heart like you know conservatism and like right wing ideology with nixon and everything i think you know when you can look at a hunter s thompson hunter s thompson does a great job with like from the crazy you know like i went to the fucking you know police gun expo in Vegas and i took benzos but this is like he's in the zoo and she's at the zoo looking at the animals exactly and she does a good job so like here's a quote that i love from she wrote this is one of my favorite short stories he has called many mansions she writes about governor ronald regan at the time when he left uh california and jerry brown became the

governor jerry brown became the governor of california and famously stayed in an apartment that cost i believe eight hundred dollars in sacramento um just not even the governor's mansion because he felt like it was too gaudy but robert ronald regan stayed in a governor's mansion that he built himself. And it was very, you know, 60s, Ronald Reagan, glitz and gaudy. So if you don't mind, this will be a little bit wordy. Here we go. As a matter of fact, this is precisely the point about the house on the river. The house is not Jerry Brown style, nor Mary McGorry style, not our style. And it is a point which presents a certain problem. Since the house so clearly is the style not only of Jerry Brown's predecessor, but of millions of Jerry Brown.

constituents words are chosen carefully reasonable objections are framed one hears about how the house is too far from the capital too far from the legislature one hears about the folly of running such a lavish establishment for an unmarried governor and one hears about the governor's temperamental austerity one hears every possible reason for not liking that not living in the house except the one that counts it's the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It's the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It's the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste and ultimately of class. I have never, I have seldom seen a house

so evocative of the unspeakable. Whoa, so evocative in the unspeakable. That is beautiful. She pretty much like, I mean, I read that as sort of a critique, I think, also of just like the sort of the people that worship the material. Yeah. You know, we're like, this is a man that for his entire life has loved, you know, glitz and glam and starlight. And it's very evident in the house that he's chosen to build for himself. It's got the wet bar, you know, it's got, it's got the refreshment center. You know, he's the kind of guy that brings you You know, we all know the kind of guy that brings you over to his house

And goes like, check that out, Tiki Bar Mm-hmm Yeah, Tiki Bar, I think after that we're going to, you know He likes to show you about all the different little Like, oh yeah, look at this, yeah, you can make ice now In the upstairs bathroom too Yep, you know, it's almost luxury for the sake of luxury Which is very gaudy

Luxury, I always find it to be depressing When you're in a mansion it just feels sad It feels empty She feels empty right Yeah She's a great pick I think she's a great pick

I won't say too much more Other than I think when it comes to nonfiction She's one of the giants Especially in American nonfiction And yeah I'm just a I'm a big fan I think it's about time

We had a woman On the list Yeah we needed it Thank you Shee oh Thank you And dude I mean You know

She wrote about her husband's death they had a long marriage. She wrote always honestly about their relationship. And then she wrote her daughter died and she wrote about that too. So I mean, every part of life she's basically, and then my favorite by her is the Central Park Five story, sentimental journeys about those five black kids

who got thrown in jail for a woman in Central Park. It turned out they were innocent. And after the fact, after they've been exonerated, because the whole city wanted them to go down. So she was writing about like liberal hypocrisy and just like public morality, basically. She just reviews everything that happened.

And she's scathing. She's scathing. Nice. And basically says those stories are what we need to live. That's what she said. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. I think it's so true. We do.

We love story. Also, quote from my wife, and I think you already touched on this, she says, no author better captures a moment in time or she can so vividly capture it and transport you there like Didion does. Oh, good said. Which is like California in the 60s or Central Park in that era, you know, like literally can transport you there with great vivid detail and entertaining detail. Very good.

Great pick. You're picking from my heart. See, I'm going for the dove right here, but you're picking for the dove. You know what? That's my problem. I'm picking for the dove. Because I wish I had like better, I don't know. All right.

Well, I'm up now and look, there's been four great kind of chambers to the canon. There's Shakespeare's plays, Greek tragedies, the Russian novel and romantic poetry. I'm going to knock out one of these bad boys right now. I'm going to stay in Russia. A country that Catherine the Great said was too large to govern. And the ideas that come out of it feel that way sometimes. I'm going with a master of length. Some say the creator of the pacifist political philosophy.

Gandhi said he was my master. I'm going with the man who preached celibacy. He said it was better than marriage. I'm going with a guy who decided to give up all of his wealth towards the end of his life, including his kids and his wife's wealth. So they turned against him. Because he had to make everybody else do what he was doing.

I'm going with none other. than the master of realism Leo Tolstoy. Okay. And so I got a little thing I want to wrap around here. Tolstoy trashes Shakespeare, right? Whoa.

He goes, at 75 years old, he rereads all of his plays and says he's crap. He's got no plot. Everybody sounds the same. Some German professors prop this guy up because they had no office of their own.

He's shit. And he bases it all on King Lear, which he says was another play before. We don't know who wrote it. Slightly different spells. but he's like, it's way better. The characters are way better. George Orwell later writes a takedown of Tolstoy's takedown

and basically says the reason he hated King Lear is because King Lear is about a guy who renounces his kingship but still wants to be treated like a king. Leo Tolstoy gave up his wealth and wanted a ton of credit for it, but his whole family turned against him. He is King Lear. And that's why he hates it. Tolstoy writes big,

books, war in peace is about individual moral choices when there's a million other moving parts in the world. And do we really have any real agency or autonomy in the choices we make? And Anna Karenina, his other masterpiece is about happiness and is self-deception inherent to happiness. And he actually disliked his works. He was always trying to get away from artifice. He wanted things to be as real and as clear as possible. And he also thought they had to be morally instructive, which was part of the reason he hated Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare kind of exists outside of Christianity. And Tolstoy said, no, you have to teach. people how to live which came from the russian serfdom his he read early books on how you teach

peasants how to behave better that's crazy slavery got taken away he started writing from the peasants perspective and said no it should be us learning from the peasants but he could never give up his nobility he always felt like he was a king that deserved credit for feeling that way and it's interesting like a book to teach the legend of gilgamesh it's a tapestry one of the old we don't know who wrote it but it's like from fucking babylon gilgamesh is a made-up character And you have Enkidu, who's this guy who was a big cock and is seen as wild. And then Gilgamesh is the king. That is a text meant to teach kings how to rule.

Yeah. And that's all in there. So it makes sense that Tolstoy would be like the author's duty is to teach. And that's why he rejected his work. He said Anna Karenna is a magazine piece. It's just about a chick having an affair. And then he became more of a moral philosopher after that. Pacifism, vegetarianism, celibacy, all these.

Some things that took, some things that didn't. You can't tell you for nothing. But he was sex obsessed, too. He was always full of contradictions. like an egomaniac who said he wanted work to have no ego he'd ruin a hang if you're hanging with the boys the worst hang in history he'd ruin it the worst hang in history we're playing a FIFA four on four Tolstoy's cruising over he's going to have to team up with him no one dude and then his famous quote Tolstoy you want to play die yeah what's the point I don't care

about anything I wonder how you would feel about like the youngie and perspective of like and I think about this too I was talking with my wife when we were driving she helped my draft And she brought this up. She's like, you know, are you attached to this? And we do this as performers. We create this identity on stage and this identity to get through life. And do we do it on a subconscious level? But by being this self that we present to others, do you actually become that?

Are we that? Or do we have a true self that lies beneath it? It sounds like Tolstoy has been in battle with that, like, his whole life probably. And that's why he gave up his stuff because he didn't like the self he was becoming and felt. But he probably was just really that guy like, dude, you're a successful author. chill. Yeah, he couldn't do it. He was deeply Christian. He needed some kind of superseding meaning that existed outside of what the material world could offer. And he wanted books to be instructive that way. He said, and because to him that was truth. And he said, truth is my

hero. He also, his famous quote, all happy families are the same. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. I love it. That's some good white lotus type shit right there. They tap into that. All right. So that's my one pick there. Tolstoy. the hero of that. Now I'm going with the guy who created the Western novel. The first metafictional novel. Okay. A comedy written 800 years ago that still holds up or 700 years ago. I'm going to Spain. I'm going with none other than Don Quixote Servantes. Oh, dude, great pick. So this thing. Bale, bala, bala. This is the modern novel. The narrator is aware of the narrator. Not even close with the spelling. Yeah. QUI, excellent. Yeah. Dude, check out this guy's like

If 17 years old joins the army, fights for five years, loses feeling in his left arm, gets abducted by pirates and sold into slavery for five years, finally gets out. Doesn't become a hit writer with Don Quixote until he's 50. The thing goes mega crazy. Everybody loves it. It's satirizing chivalric novels, which are all about Brave Knights, and his thing is making fun of Brave Knights. It's about a guy who's read too many of those books and now thinks he's a badass, which is

hilarious. It's like a good modern story today. and then the first book takes off and goes so crazy. People start writing their own versions of the second one, so it forces him to write the second one. And then the second one starts off with the main characters aware of the first one's success. I mean, to be getting meta 700 years ago,

the guy set the template. We don't have Woody Allen. We don't have Charlie Kaufman. We don't have any of these guys who we feel like are bending reality in these crazy avant-garde ways without Cervantes. So I don't know. I mean, I think it goes Homer,

then maybe Shakespeare, and then for me, it goes Servantes in terms of informing where we're at today with what we read. That's a great pick, dude. Have they ever done to try to do a movie of Donkey Hote? Famously, everyone fails when they try to do it. It's too big of an undertaking.

There's one with Lithgow. Yeah, I think they've been able to pull it off recently, but it was always the story that it was unfilmable. Why is it on, why isn't say that? I think Boo-Well was the one who tried really hard. I don't know. Some stories just get that reputation that they're... Like the Confederacy of Dunst is that one to try to do.

Yeah, it just becomes urban myth that they're just impossible to pull off. I kind of love that idea, though. Wait, so is it Miguel? Yeah, everyone just calls him Cervantes. That's just the homie's name. But it's not Don Quixote. And dude, kind of around it. So, Shakespeare died seven years after him.

Some people speculated maybe Shakespeare was aware of him. Dude. Yeah. Shakespeare died seven years after Don Quixote came out. I don't know if he had any other bangers. I think he was kind of a one in Donner, but when he hit it like that, it's the ultimate one hit on him.

Yeah, I mean, you don't really need too much. just to go down and with one of the greats. How much you've contributed to culture in that one novel? I mean, it's just crazy. That's a lifetime, dude. And all you really need is one banger. I'm going to get to after this.

I got so much chalk up top. Yeah, he's so much chalk. Are we doing five? We're doing five? We're doing five. Damn, dude. I know, because I feel like all mine are hardcore purse. So that's why I think I'm going to, I mean, like, look,

I know I've been staying relatively modern. I went from Hemingway in the 20s, 30s, 50s, 40s, Joan Didion, 60s, all the way up to 2000s, just recently passed. RIP, see you when I see you. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with the LeBron James of modern day non-fiction. I'm going to go with Patrick Radden Keefe. Oh, I don't know this. Patrick Radden Keith, you might know him from his famous book,

Empire of Pain that is now based I mean they made multiple documentaries about it they made multiple shows about it pretty much exposing the entire Sackler family oh nice yep he is

also another show say nothing I read that book that was wonderful he's also a Boston guy shout out Dorchester he's only 49 he's killing only 49 he I mean this guy has been crushing it in terms

of creating nonfiction that he created a crazy novel, I mean, not novel, a book about the Mexican cartels as well. But like he is absolutely on fire right now in terms of investigative, hardcore, like, journalism, in like just creating a narrative. Like we talk about, you know, Joan Didy and she tells these stories, right?

She tells these stories in order to live. But like, this is a guy that's not necessarily, I think, trying to weave in his own prose and weave in his own like point of view on the matter. But the stories that he's telling and the information and details that he's putting in at the perfect moments, I think weave this beautiful story. Like say nothing, for example, was a story that pretty much chronicled the entire like chronology and series of events of the, uh, the troubles in Ireland. And throughout that entire story, he is weaving in the story of the, like a family that had like a family of five kids.

I believe this is five or seven whose mother was disappeared by the IRA. And just throughout the novel, he's adding in like, and this is, they're still going and trying to find out where she is. They don't know where she's buried. And like towards the end of the novel, there's finally closure with this family in the 1990s where the IRA finally admits where this. secret burial plot is. Whoa. It's, it's,

this guy, I think is really, really solid. So he's taken like, he's putting you into like a genre mystery movie, but with real life facts. Yes, exactly.

And I think the stories that he's creating are very powerful. And I think they also, they lean, they have, I think, a certain weight to them reading them now because we can point to these events and go, oh shit.

Like, this is going on. Like, I mean, the Empire of Pain was the big one where you're like, oh, well, this is like not,

this is like, you know years like not even years ago like this was happening this like now and it had i mean like so do he write dopesick is that the sackler book uh yeah not dope sick empire empire pain right and so i mean that had genuine impact too i mean that that they went into litigation they got hit with a massive number so you got to believe that some of that nonfiction writing helped inform that i think this guy is like yeah he's the lebron right now of nonfiction i I think this dude is on, he's on a generational, generational run. Love it, dude.

Going personal. That's what's up, dude. I've never read Cervantes. Introducing us to this guy. Yeah, dude, I can't read. Okay, so guys, I'm sort of doing something here. You got, I don't know if you've noticed, but I got, I got my playwright. Then I've got my novelist.

We're drafting writers. We're drafting writers. There's different mediums. for what you can write for. I think if you can write and then you can fucking speak aloud what you've put on paper and orate

it, I think there is no one better at this. And if you just read these, they stand alone. I'm talking about a speech writer. A writer of speech. I'm going to go with MLK. I mean, that's crazy.

Martin Luther King. I'm also going to absolutely allow this because this is a bend. I'm bending and I'm bending. I don't even think you're bending because he is also a published author. Thank you. You were crushing it, man. Thank you. I am still crushing it. Just because you know, just because there's authors of

books that could still be on here, I'm doing something with my list. You know what's so smart about this pick? I'm doing something with my list. Even if you don't agree he's a writer on par with all these other guys, no one ever picks against MLK. It's not allowed. You just protected yourself. Good luck. You just put on a bulletproof good luck saying MLK isn't good with the words my friends brother good look I'll say this

where do we go from here is one of my favorite nonfiction books books of political philosophy I've ever I've ever read and I think it's fucking powerful he wrote that while he was in jail in Alabama that's the collection his collection of speeches from when he's in jail in Alabama it's not a speech it was just his writings yes letters from Birmingham jail right that's it The letting's from Burning Hinge, I had to read that in school, and that was one of the best, I mowed through that. I'd, like, never mowed through a book. It's incredible.

Did he write his own speeches? I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure he bounced some ideas around some other prominent individuals. But I'll tell you, the guy writes about. I mean, nepotism, his dad was in the game. He might have jumped the line in front of a few other people. Exactly, dude, junior, dude, hilarious.

So the guy. Chad, if you type this into AI and you want to get some quotes from MLK they're going to hit you with they're going to hit you with oh do you want quotes about the importance of hope love the nature of progress the urgency of action

the true meaning of peace speaking out the nature of power a path to justice the guy writes about all this shit and he lived it he walked it you can't write until you've walked walked. This guy was writing while walking. Bang, motherfucker. I'm taking them at three.

Who dares it down to write that is not firsted up to live? And he embodied that. Thank you. He was about that action. 100%. Some of these other guys, yeah, you know you're strong at the desk, but where are you at when it really counts? And we all read from where we stand. So sometimes you're reading something and you're, I grew up in Orange County, comfortable little white kid with you wore khaki pants, tight little butt hole. The most comfortable. Yeah, yeah, big time, the butt, the oldest butt you ever met. Okay. And it's tough to step out. Outside of your own little bubble is what I mean when you're writing.

Okay, come on, he took you right there. This is a weird thing. But hey, to the interview we did last week with the congresswoman Sarah Jacobs, I should have pushed her harder on her personal wealth. That's a personal weakness of mine because I grew up in Orange County and I'm spoiled. And I also should have pushed her harder when she squirmed out of certain questions with laughter. But overall, I think the core competency was good in the interview. Love that.

Please. That's it. That's all I am. I want to add a little bit because I think at the end of the day, we're in this for fun and we're in this about because we love reading and we love learning. my book that I'm reading right now How to Blow Up a Pipeline It's a little bit It's a radical

This is Big Al Scaring the Hose summer reading list But I'll blow up a pipeline Martin Luther King When he wrote On The distinction about like Urban riots that were going on in

1967 right The distinction between like That sort of property destruction And like Sort of violence in general Right here violent they certainly were but the violence to a startling degree was focused against property rather than people and within this genus of violence acts this makes all the difference a life is sacred property is intended to serve life

and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect it has no personal being why were the writers so violent with property then because property represents the white power structure which they were attacking and trying to destroy How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andrius. Andrea's mom, check that out. I'm enjoying it. Legend. A lot of like, this book also tackling like eco-terrorism. They're like, you can't, we have to have like actual definition of terrorism, which I think

there's a difference between like somebody going into a church versus like somebody blowing up or like cutting a hole in a pipeline. And then, you know, Doskayevsky posed an interesting question about radicalism, about activism. He said if instead of spending two hours a day fighting against external villains, what if you spent two hours a day dealing with the things that constitute your. life. So I'm somewhat countering you here. What would make the world a better place? What would be more radical? If we did fight against political injustice or if we only fought against the things that were wrong in our interpersonal life. If everyone did that, what would prevail? Gandhi himself

has said the greatest thing you can do is to change yourself. That's the most difficult thing you can do is to change inside. Also, another quote. I wanted to get her kid off sugar. He said, come back in a week when I'm off of it. That's it. Exactly. And I forget who said this. It might have been Jefferson, but he said maybe not. But it's much easier. to fight for your principles than to live by them. Yeah. I mean, Jefferson's the king of that. Free Luigi, Cream Jeans.

Free Luigi, you know what it is. No, the audience is going to agree with you. I'm just being a fucker. All right, who's up? Chad with two. I have to rip a piss. Should we wait? Go, baby, go.

Just go. We got to keep going. We got to make it funny, too. Are we being funny enough? Oh, yeah, we're being funny. We're being funny. We're having fun. That's all matters.

What else is going on? Dante himself was a rebel. He was exiled from Florence. He hated the, the religious to black Bianchi and he wrote the divine comedy criticizing them and he didn't write in it this is a common thing he didn't write it in latin he wrote in italian so everyone could understand it beautiful for the masses and do you know when florence finally forgave him i think like 10 years ago really yeah they can hold the grudge the italians it took a while

the church is strong there you know they string up their guys by their toes and musilini you don't you don't want to yeah they're passionate guys yeah i mean wrath is in there wrath is in the circle dude dante he met a chick when he was nine just once right after he lost his mom named beatrice and she became the love of his life i don't think he ever encountered her again he maybe saw her twice in total really really he was nine mm-hmm it was like his neighbor but he just romanticized her to such a degree did he have a wife i think he did i think he went on to live a normal life but she was always the one he was chasing damn her name might not even have been beatrice but that's what he called her interesting

who would you go that could have been my first grade teacher no I mean that that was my first love dude my third grade teacher miss waterlander what up looked like Pocahontas for real babe yeah when do you when do we when did I become sexually activated that still hasn't happened yet dude dude you're not horny it's true you can't write dude you can't write unless you're not even horny that is so true all of these guys were horny yeah very Everyone on here horny, possessed by the devil of it. You got to be horned up.

That's why lust is only the first circle of hell in Dante. Because he gets it. Everyone's got it. He's like, all right. But in hell, you can feel it but you can't touch it. What do you do in the first circle? Is the first circle just edging? The first circle is.

You can feel it, but you can't touch it. Exactly. I'm so real. All right. My next pick, I'm staying in the philosophy realm. You know, I think one of the biggest questions we all face So what's this all about? Why are we here?

Existentialism. What's going on? What's the meaning? You know, we live in this world. It's chaotic. We're like, like, is there, is there any purpose? Is there? Why are we here?

And I love writers who take that on. This guy takes it on. And he has the myth of Sisyphus, the plague. I'm going with Albert Camus. Oh, dude, let's go. Camus three. The stranger, brother. You know, he says,

Stranger's good. He says that, you know, the world may be chaotic and meaningless, but we find our own meaning. We make our own meaning. We live with love, and we live fully. And I love that message. And, you know, I think he's speaking, you know, he's a more contemporary philosopher, 20th century. And I think it's one of the most important topics we can take on, because I think it's something that we all think about, at least when we turn. 16 17 no he was getting after it he was good I like I like the stranger also it's got me thinking about the Billy Joel album I've been watching that documentary ooh it's really good the plague to um the covers I mean the photos of him smoking cigarettes are incredible yeah they are their nails just top smoker and that's such a good title to have um and resisted being called an existentialist right did he he said he said I got my own thing it's absurdity he

Absurd. Oh, yeah, the philosophy of the absurd. That's right. Kid and Caboodle, but, you know, the classic of a thinker to be like, don't put me in that box. I got my own box. I would do that if I was a thinker. I mean, how often do you? Like, you like that other comedian we know. And I'm like, no, I'm not.

People are like, you should watch this guy. Yeah, you should watch this guy. I'm familiar, dude. Thank you, though. Big Alchemist. Yeah, dude. But I do like that message of find your meaning. Do things because of the right thing to do.

and I like that he can If what you do doesn't matter Then all that matters is what you do Yeah what is That's a bar That's a bar Okay So I take that from Mike Kaplan

The comedian One of my favorite quotes from his In the depth of winter I finally learned That within me There lay an invincible summer Bro, that is you dude Yeah

I'm in the stoke within Guys I'm interrupted in his podcast Let you know once again That we were brought to you by Legends At Home Chef Home Chef is the best meal kit biz in the game um they you know you can get so every time you get the question what what should we eat tonight what should we eat tonight what do i need to get at the grocery store it's it takes up a lot

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I'm going to go with him. You know, this guy is the master of modern fantasy of world building. Oh, good, y'all. This guy, you know, created one of the, you know, he wrote the books that created one of the greatest trilogies of our time. And it's just world building. Is there anything more fun than diving into a book and you're in an entirely new world? And so, and it has philosophical meaning in there.

It's adventure. Great characters. I'm going with J.R.R. Tolkien. Hmm. Tolkien, fuck yeah, dude. Very good. I was talking about, you're going to Harry Potter. Dude, that's a joke. I think that's a big, bro.

She built a world. She's back. It's still top shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, you know what's crazy? So I think this is the disrespect that genre gets is that a lot of people don't put him in like the top 10 writers of the 20th century. And I think a lot of that is because he wrote in fantasy.

And people don't respect that the way they do like a literary novel. But dude, he created his own language. Language, a world? That you can live in. Like, people literally submerge themselves into it and want to exist there. It's escapism. It's, it's, is there anything more fun than, you know, than reading a book and you're transported to an entirely new world? That's what we all want.

Correct. Especially when you're, you know, you're, you know, when you're, you're listening to your manager or you're trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. you're like, why don't I just go into a world filled with wizards and orcs? And people are saying you ripped off Beowulf and some other word. I can't pronounce. Look, and all these people ripped off other people. The novel depends for its life on other novels. The point is, can you take that voice and make it vanish into your own, like bones in the desert?

Yeah, and if you're ripping off Beowulf, which is like how many years old, 1500, maybe 3,000? Like, I'm sorry. If you've got a good take on Beowulf, like, you're allowed to rip off Bayolwolf. I'm sorry, bro. If you've borrowed from something that obscure, if you've done the work to fines, I mean, dude, a writer I'm going to take later, he borrowed stuff from, like, nonfiction work about the Glantan gang in the 19th century.

If you go in there and you find out how gunpowder is made and you take that verbatim, I'm sorry, you did the work to find it. I'm not holding it against you, brother. Oh, I think are you talking about. You can take him. You can take him. No, no, I'm not talking about. But he does deep dives into like, yeah, yeah, okay.

He's good. And for Milton. Dude, pull up Gandalf quotes, bro. Gandhaw's got some banger quotes. I have some gandoff quotes here. Go Gandorf, dog. I love that shit. I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.

The gray rain curtain of this world rolls back and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it. And no, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. Dude, what about the motherfucking Gandalf? You shall not pass. You shall not pass. You shall not pass. It doesn't get any better than that.

dude there's a big motherfucking goblin coming at you and your homies you shall not pass dog fuck you have fun on your way to hell bitch and also it's like we watch star wars or we you know we read these books and you're like you're like um the the level of detail i mean to to have that all in your dome it's insane to to create new laws new rules you know you mess with music, whatever it is, magic is, you know, to have that all in your dome and put it down on paper is, I think that's a, very few possess that talent. Yeah, and the influence that had. You don't see your little brothers running around doing Tolstoy or doing Dostoe, but your

little brothers will run around and do all the Lord of the Rings. That is true. That would be the whole Bachelor party. I mean, when I was young, Lord of the Rings came out, it's like, the Hobbit was one of the first books I read first you know long books I read because that that that gets young minds into reading it's like do you want to have fun read this and then you can get into the more serious stuff keyhole shit bro yeah man it is cool just like those guys I always think they must be day to day so inside of their own head and just in this world of imagination that I think

must be kind of like in freeing yeah you know just to be like man And no, I live up here. Yeah. And this place, you know, people don't judge me. I don't have to pay $6 for a coffee. Can I do whatever I want? Yeah, and you can kind of make the world as it should be. You have that kind of control.

Yeah, that's beautiful. And also, you go to Disneyland. You see someone wearing a Jedi outfit. It's like, you're giving people, you're giving people something. Oh, yeah, totally. A virgin. Yeah, a grown adult. Dude, that's up.

Yeah, with a 500-pound wife. Sorry, all right. At Disneyland? Yeah, that's a great description. I remember I was there one time on shrooms And I just saw this big fat guy eating spaghetti And I was like I gotta get out of here It was like all that I found wrong with contemporary life

I was like eating spaghetti at a theme park insane That's the thing it was just it was chopped noodles with like the lightest red sauce And I was like there's just not an authentic thing in so Get your something handheld I love when an adult hit you with no but you can drink everywhere at Epcot Oh yeah brother you're missing a Disney guy It is sick oh no you're a Disney guy Oh, the biggest.

We went to Epcot when we went to Orlando. Dude, drinking around the world? Come on. It is fun. It was fun. And that Rattatooie ride? I know. They're using AI on the Rattatooie ride.

Dude, it's pretty sick, but a billion-dollar enterprise. This money could not have been spent better elsewhere. It's something called fun. You're right. I can't poo-poo it. One more thing about it. Dude, the sadness that this guy felt when he realized we didn't have enough time to do the Guardians ride. Oh, bro.

We had to get to Tampa for the next show. He's like, are you serious? I was like, probably it's a two-hour drive We can be late for the show The audience will understand, dude It's our show You gotta go on Guardians Yeah, yeah

Do they want us to be happy When we get there? All right, dudes For my next pick Martin Luther Another medium of writing Here we go Another medium of writing

Dude is writing to yourself Is journaling This guy perhaps had the most Fire journal Of all time No no, you think I'm gonna go with a Western guy I'm going with the Eastern guy

Who had the most fire journal of all time I'm going with Confucius dude And I'm going with his Analax You missed a huge great pick But did I have the other guy No huge opportunity to take a chick And do Anne Frank bro

Oh you're right That's what I thought That's what I thought you were going Dude And then you would have been protected Like with the MOK The prodigy guys He's gonna face against Anne Frank and MLK

Yeah even AI Even AI would have to concede Yeah I'd be like Damn I might look back if I go against this, this computer. Dude, we need an Eastern writer on here. This is a prominent Eastern philosopher, you know, 500, 600 BC somewhere in there.

This guy's getting it done. In his own life, lived a writer's life, worked a lot of odd jobs, came from an unwealthy family, grinded, was smart, sort of worked his way up, but never in his own day was celebrated and perhaps became the voice that influenced Chinese culture

greater than any other voice. and also China ever heard of it? Yeah, pretty big part of fucking earth, dude. If you are a writer and you want to influence other humans, maybe no guys influenced more humans in the world than Confucius, dude. It's in their vernacular. Confucius say. Confucius say.

In our culture, we bastardize it by putting his sayings and paraphrasing that in fortune cookies. Yeah, doing funny Chinese voice. Like, yeah, if you're a bad joke, right, you do Confucius say, and then like you add penis after all of this. You should say, go to bed at G. Bum, wake up Smiley Fier. You take his collectivis, brilliance, and you just filtered through our individual capitalism and just pervert it. And he had to live.

Until it makes you sick, until you want to come on it. If you want to just jizz on it, dude. And he just wanted to destroy it and dominate it in the most primal of ways to show our superiority. Damn, all, all he was doing was creating an ethical and moral code. Take it easy. I'm so pissed. Yeah, he, he's pissed right now. I'm so pissed.

I don't know what's going on. You're so horny. I'm not horny. You're punching up in a ball. You're punching up in a ball of anger. Perhaps, like we're saying right now, Confucius touched upon this. Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. This is what we're talking about right now with, you know, saying penis after his quotes or something like that.

He's also got fire-ass quotes about just the grind, which we're all on. It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop in bed. uh the man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones he's got fire he's got about a billion of these fire takes uh that influenced uh leaders of china which has the longest documented history maybe besides longest ongoing documented history i think five thousand years of documentation egypt probably goes back farther but is you know the empire has changed hands many many times but the Chinese I guess government exists still in one degree to its own state

I don't know what I'm saying anyway Confucius did know what he was saying and he was a fucking beast dude I like it the greatest journaler perhaps of all time Good pick I don't know man

I'm going with mediums of writing here did I got plays I got novels I got speeches I got a journal And you know what you've got me you got me going on my own idea of a form of writing here And I think something that as we dive deeper into fascism in America, it is more important now than ever for good journalists. So let's talk about a journalist that, hey, you know them from one of the biggest scandals of all time Watergate. I'm talking Bob Woodward.

Oh, yeah. I'm going to throw out Big Billy Bob Woodward. You might know him as the guy that broke Watergate had all of the deep throat. he had his sources and a guy that still is doing it today okay he's still making it happen um one of my favorite books from him was uh you can look back i think it's bush at war right there so yeah uh or no no state of denial go to state of denial on there but this guy if you want to talk about the fifth estate holding uh our our government accountable this guy has been doing it for a long time and has been doing it the right way state denial is one of my

favor because this book pretty much just outlines how the government under the Bush administration lied about the Iraq war and why we were going in and like just outlines the timeline of events and a lot of this again like I hate to be a guy that's just going straight up about like I like the facts I like this guy laying it out perfectly but you know like his his resume speaks for himself like he's objective and he's going to show you exactly what is going on in the inner sanctums of the United States government and the people that make decisions about our lives and I feel like you know what

I've gone very Western I've gone super American super modern this entire time but I gotta say it that's where I stand and I think you know the journalism thing I think is very important I mean if you look at Watergate impacted the world I mean change the course of American life he was part and parcel of why Nixon got out of there

and then what I think is so crazy but I read his book Fear about Trump what I think is so nuts about him is that he's gonna write a book about every president and every president goes into office knowing he's going to write a book about him and says tells his whole staff don't talk to Bob Woodward and every time he still gets it done

he gets the information he still gets the secrets and every time it comes out a president is like how the hell did he find this out it's like because he's a dog because he's got connections that he's built on trust and because he knows how to put it down and people trust when he does put it down it'll have an impact exactly they trust him when he puts it down like he is I think he's still one of the best doing

when he's an older guy now I think he will be missed he will be missed. Yeah, who's going to carry the torch? Who's going to carry the boats? Yeah, exactly. All right, I'm up. All right, you guys, I mean, I could really just secure the dub here.

If I went like Dante and Proust, it's over. AI is just going to say you got the, you got basically five of the eight. But I'm going to go personal here at the end. First up, I'm going to go with a guy I've been quoting throughout a guy who, uh, yeah, borrowed but also was just he borrowed from the Bible which Harold Bloom says the freaking Bible Harold Bloom says

all the books in Old Testament are good except for Leviticus and Harold Bloom posits this is a different point I'm making I'm all over the map I just got too much to say Harold Bloom also posits that Exodus Genesis and numbers were written by a woman

a high priestess in the Council of Solomon and so I don't know how they came up with that but he's like if you look at the psychological detail informed perspective. That is a woman. This guy, though, borrowed from those Bibles. And when you read his writing, you swear you're reading scripture.

I'm going with the chronicler of Western violence, of barren loneliness, and of the inextricable blood that settles our land. I'm going with Cormac McCarthy. Beast, dude. Beast. So I've read the road. I read all the pretty horses.

all the pretty horses is great because it's him being romantic. And when you take a guy who's punished with sadness like him, it's lovely to hear him just say, I looked at her and my whole heart changed in a moment. Like he just, he's, his pros can be purple like it is in his masterpiece, Blood Meridian. But there's also just simple stuff about being in love. And he's kind of a man for all seasons.

I think it's cool too. guy is 46 living in a motel got nothing going on burning through different women dating a high school chick at some point that he remained friends with

so who's to judge but uh and then he finally hits it big I think his other authors supported him and then he was from Pravi dude no way

all the pretty horses comes out in 92 and makes him into a superstar but that's at the age of what he's like 60 when that happens so I love that he uh i was talking about how he stole he talks about in blood meridian the judge who's like the evil

character the devil basically and like milton he makes the the devil irresistible he's powerful and seductive which i think is so interesting god is always great but the devil is the one you want to pay attention to and he takes him out into the desert and he teaches him how to make gunpowder and i was kind of borrowing from him earlier at the end of teaching them how to make gunpowder he has him piss on it like he just makes it so elemental and raw the whole book is just littered with violence but it's beautiful violence. There's an aesthetic genius to the violence, and that's what he's combining these two things

that shouldn't go together, and that's what makes it so special, and all of his running too. And then the road about just a post-apocalyptic world and what is hope? Even now, you know, you talk about how things are hard in modern times. I mean, there's different perspectives on it,

but like, what do you give to your kids? Like the parental anguish in that. So for me, he's one of the most genius writers of all time. He's probably our greatest writer now. Oh, and then he wrote no country for old men. I was going to say, dude, fire and talking about, like, violence and stuff like that. Yeah. True beast. So good.

He's really good. Dude, I mean, fuck. It makes me remind me, I've just finished reading Dennis Johnson Angels. I very much an influence. I think just to chip off the old Cormac McCarthy block, I think a little bit. That Western ethos and that just kind of like crazy drug-fueled dream sort of dialogue. It feels as though like their characters are always just these people who, like, without any, their life circus. have led them to have nothing,

and the only control they feel is through violence. Oh, dude, well said, yeah, nailed it. Some good quotes from him, scared money don't make money and a worried man can't love. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hit a secret. He thought that the world's heartbeat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity that in this headlong deficit, the blood of multitudes,

might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. Dude, if you say scared money, don't make money to your father-in-law or like your girlfriend's dad. And then he goes, I like that. And then you go, yeah, Cornac McCarthy. He's your bitch now. You're in the pocket. He's going to love you now. He's going to be like, please bone my daughter.

Please. Your wife, my daughter, please. Do you like cigars? I have those. Yeah, exactly. Oh, and then this is. I'm trying to quit. This is the biggest quote by him.

I'm about to blow your mind. We're talking about stealing, borrowing. Guess where they got this from? And my scars remind me that the past is real I tear my heart open just to feel The scars remind us that the past is real That's Cormick McCarthy Let's go, dude

That is the bow On my borrowing discussion He borrowed from Milton From the Bible From history And did you know that Papa Roach was reading Corem McCarthy I do now, brother, and I'm greater for it.

Thank you for that, dude. That was ready to rock, dude. I know you have the Spotify episode. Dude, when I said it, I was reading him and I go, wait, he said the scars remind us that the passage, and then I pulled up, I was like, did pop? And then we're like, yeah. That's where Papa Roach got it from. I was like, holy shit, dude.

Art, good art influences good art. Yeah. And that's why we can never trust AI. Who knows where last resort came from? I mean, that could be my next offer. This is my last resort. I'm going with another contemporary guy. That's Tony Morrison.

The last resort comes from the bug of a Gita. All right, this is going to blow your freaking dick off. I'm going with a guy I respect so much. Some people don't like his books. They say it feels like he's sitting on your face. Alec Baldwin asked him for advice on how to write a memoir, and he said this. And this really crystallizes who he is, spare no one. And he spares no one less than himself.

He goes after himself. He rips in to all the taboo, all the awfulness that exists in all of us, how the good is right next to the bad. I'm going with Philip Roth. For my money, American pastoral most complete portrait of anguish I've ever read. And this guy, poor noise complaint is about a young Jewish dude

who can't stop jacking off who has mom issues. Hello me. Even though I'm Catholic. At the time, very controversial. But he's a genius. He's formally inventive, does a ton of different stuff.

And you know what? You're a better actor than I. Will you read that top one? It goes a while. Just this. Okay. Don't know this one. You can read both.

want to just go just cook put some juice on it all right you fight your superficiality your shallowness so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations without an overlord or bias of hope or arrogance as untantalite how do i say that j t tank tantalike that's maybe a typo oh fucking a chat should you do this chap as un tank like as you can be sans cannon machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick you come at then unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads. Take them on with an open mind as equals man to man. As we used to say, yet you never fail to get them wrong.

You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them while you're anticipating meeting them. You get them wrong while you're with them and you go home to tell somebody else about the meaning and you go and you get them all wrong again since the same generally goes for them with you. The whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong.

That is living. Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive. We're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that, well, lucky you.

Nice. I had to find it. That's a beautiful quote. He's a base man. I mean, he just writes from the bottom of it. Bars. Bars. And then American Pastor was about a perfect guy whose life gets upended because

his daughter becomes a radical and what sets that into motion. One day this dad's trying to console his daughter because she's not as pretty as the rest of the family and she stutters and he gives her a kiss, which makes her feel good. They're having a beautiful saying. She goes, no, kiss me like mommy. So just to make her feel good, he gives her a kiss on the lips, but they both feel a tinge of eroticism in the moment.

And he forever blames himself for that splitting her and turning her into a terrorist and into a person who turns against her country. And my other favorite writer, Sam Shepard, writes about this. Why do they love incest so much? Why do they always write about it? Yeah. Because it's taboo.

And it's taboo and the collapse of identity. What could make you fall apart more than redefining brother, mother, dad, changing that arrangement and turning it into lover? What would be a more deep secret that could tear apart a family than that betrayal and that that violation? And so that's why all these guys, I never understood, but I always felt it. Why do they talk about incest so much? It's because it's the ultimate turning against yourself. Mm. Fucking A man.

God. Damn, dude, that's so good. I also, on my list is, I believe Philip Roth has a book about, like, duplicates or doppelgangers. Just, like, I don't know. But I read Naomi Klein's doppelganger, and, like, she did a lot of, like, research about, like... Oh, yeah, there's another writer named Naomi Klein, right? Yeah, he's like, yeah, Naomi Wolf. And, like, she keeps getting confused for on Twitter, who's, like, Naomi Wolf turned into, like, this hardcore, like, feminine...

like, like, alt-right feminist, like, quote-unquote, but it's, it's crazy, dude. All right. Allie G interviews, Namibov. Did it? Does he? Oh, my God. That's hilarious. And Cream Jean said it.

Well, that's why there's so much step-son, step-mom porn. It's about the same stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's about the same literary. The five. Look at this. The recent one, the FISA papers. Gen Z's just cranking hog and then reading Philip fucking Roth in the other hand, dude.

Philip Ross really good. Okay. I, we've come to a crossroads here because I, I have two options. I, you know, I want to say Tony Morrison, but I don't. It's a great pick. It's a good pick. Pearl.

But I don't know if I truly feel it. I don't know a thing of her things. I don't know a few of her books. Song of Solomon, love are some of my favorites. But whenever I think about Tony Morrison, all I really think about is when I was an English teacher and I had to teach the kids, Tony Morrison. And like how much it bothered me, not so much bothered me, but made me upset that the words and the language that she used and the sort of what's the word I'm looking for

not context but um like she would abbreviate a lot of words to make sure that you're getting coquilisms yeah the colloquialisms and getting a lot of like the the phrases that made it feel as though you're actually there in these rural southern areas right and i just they couldn't get it and like that bummed me out but i think as a reader is someone that you should definitely read to gain a much different perspective especially as guys like us who we're reading a lot of just fucking awesome guys

but we gotta you know sometimes just like you need the chicks in there to mix it up hey buddy don't want to burn a pick but we're reading a lot of Tom Clancy all right that's not my pick that's not my pick do you know what Gabriel got to see Mark but I had to give an honorable mention my pick is going to be

Sam Talent I'm going with Sam Tate I'm going with your buddy I'm going with my buddy guys Sam Talent probably the best book I ever read about stand-up comedy and one of the best books I've read called Running the Light. I have to shout out my boy. He is a stand-up comedian

as well. He's one of my he's big bro, dude. I fucking love him dearly. If you're in Irvine, check him out. I think he's coming out there soon. But he's one of my favorites. Running the Light is a story about this guy, Billy Ray Schaefer. It takes a week through his life as a road dog stand-up comedian. Somebody that

at one point in his career had it all. you know, the Tonight Show, he had, he was hosting award shows, he was doing all this, they want him in movies, and then just, you know, throughout the week, you see how, like, his choices and degradation as, like, a drug addict and, like, needing alcohol and needing the rush of being on stage, just, like, drove him to be, like, this absolute maniac cretan, similar to, like, you know, he, a lot of Sam's influence, like, he loves McCarthy, he loves Dennis Johnson, a lot of these guys, Larry Brown, who I was also, I was thinking about choosing

Larry Brown too, but this book is wonderful and he's coming out with a new book soon. So I think he's someone to keep an eye on. I think if I'm going to round out my list, I want to give some of like the big shoutouts to the people that did it the best, but I think you know, when you have Patrick Radden

Keith and you got your Bob Woodward, let's talk about a rising star. Let's talk about someone who's playing in the in the young guns game. Let's look forward. Let's look forward. Let's look to somebody that I am buying stock in now as a novelist so

check that out guys that's huge that's awesome dude back to the chicks thing too do you know what Gabriel Garcia Marquez said about how to write chicks well he said the quarter writing female character as well as to realize they are as capable of betrayal as you are

dude like that a lot I like that a lot they have agency dude that's it dude they are you and you are that right it is such So, I'm on my mediums platform here, you know, my list. That's the agenda to my list. And I'm bending all over the place.

You going, Phil? I've got play. I might even go music. I might even go songwriter of all times. That's crazy. I'm not going to say, you guys might hate it so much. That's crazy. You might hate it so much.

It's authors, though. Are you guys, they're not a musicality? Are you not an author of a song? Do you not write it first? This has to be a seven-minute. Are you not a lyricist? This has to be a seven-minute ballad. The lyric.

Come on. I mean, this is huge. But I might not do that. I might also take screenwriting. I might do that. I don't know. There's some big novelists on the board. I might put another novelist in here.

Okay? I'm just, I'm so all over the place. But if I put another novelist, have I abandoned myself in the middle of my journey? I have a playwright. I have a novelist. I have a speechwriter. I have a, uh, yeah, I already said journalist. Borgis is sitting there.

And, and yet, I, I wouldn't put Little Wayne. I'd put maybe another rapper. Fred Durst. I would put Tupac if I was going to do that. I would go Tupac if I was going to do that. But I'm not going to do that. It's just so difficult.

And I'm just, you know, it's just really, and there's other mediums. I'm so glad you just took Sam Talent because it was, I have this urge to put a stand up up there because you have to write,

do you not write your hour and then perform it in his stand up and do not get immediate feedback each night? You're going to have two orators in your top five? I know. I know. if I can't have you have an orator your top one your top one is an orator but they didn't

even have writing back then he he and yeah they they had scribes and stuff but you're right he fucking created the the yeah the epic yeah you're correct um but had they had more access to papyrus and shit like that I got the guy who created the novel too yeah that you're fucking your list is fire shit your list is really good my list sucks do I want to go with a songwriter is it too hard of the band is here's the thing Aaron might hate me will AI Will AI disrespect me if I do this? Do you not know who you're picking? I don't know right now.

This is so... I don't know. I also might go... I also might go with a legal writer. I also might go with the guy... He has no idea. You're stalling. You're stalling.

Put the draft clock up. Put the draft clock up, Jake. Put the clock up. Picks got to be in 30 seconds. You're a wild man, dude. I have them on my list right. You're fucking nuts, dude. Give them 30 seconds.

You get 30 seconds. The draft clock is now running The clock is on We gotta get the clock out We need the pick to be a genius You need an idea Not enough time I will not abandon the ship

I'm gonna go with the demon poet Bob Dylan I mean he won the Pulitzer One of two musicians to win the Pulitzer I mean he won the Pulitzer I'm putting Bob Dylan on my list A lot of people were unhappy about it And I don't think he went to accept it

In classic Bob Dylan's fashion Love it I think there's more books I've been written about this guy Than like it's like Jesus Bob Dylan and Picasso. I have the most books about him.

So that's fucking sick. Also, yeah, the guy has so many fire just quotes lines from his songs. And call me crazy. I think it takes a lot of talent to be able to write. Dude, the song of the hurricane, talk about journalism.

He tells the story of the hurricane in like an eight-minute song, and it's unbelievable. Then they made a movie about that song, about the Hurricane who was the greatest fighter that never was Hurricane Carter

one time could a rude it's fucking unbelievable dude in his cadence he has his own pentameter dude so the guy he's just a fucking beast I gotta put him on there dude his machine kills fascists

I mean to quote Annie Hall when they're making fun of Bob Dylan being such a hero to people though he's on a date and the lady's like his lyrics like she looks like a woman she acts like a woman but she breaks like a little girl

and Woody Allen's like whoa crazy dude I was you know what's crazy I was listening to Joan Baez sings Dillon on the way here. Oh, nice. That's a wonderful album. That's a wreck for the day. I mean, if we do top five musicians, he's got to be in there

for sure. Yeah, I mean, Dylan. Yeah, as one of the best writers of all time. And yeah, his music is incredible. Dylon, dylan. Dylon. I mean, to give him some things, like, people say tangled up in blue was influenced by cubism. I mean, he was a very well-read person who took different artistic forms and different artistic ideas and sublimated him

into his music. So he's definitely a smart guy. And if you want to be like, okay, if you think about writing, you think print. Proves. Literary. Poetry. Poetry and prose. And prose. Yeah. That's what that is. I'm sorry. It just happens to the vessel for it. It happens to be... You got three motherfuckers who don't even write.

What are you talking about? All of these guys are writers. I got three motherfuckers. You got three motherfuckers. Martin of the King writes. Confucius writes. They ain't writers, dog. The guy wrote more... Day to day, they were not spending their day with pen and pad. They were doing other shit. Yes. And do not... Most writers... Writing, I think like the first writer to get paid to do it was like, Edgar Allan Poe later on.

Like, like, most people. Not the first ever. No, I know. To make money, dude. He's his bullet shit out of his ass. Who was the first writer to get to fucking make money? He's the first writer to have paid for a while, dude. Put it in AI. Yeah, it was definitely Martin Luther King.

Sir Vantès got super famous. He just signed off the book right so he didn't get the cash back. You know what I'll tell you. I'll tell you right this about my list right now, which I'm happy in about all forms. Charles Dickens. Don't even respond to Dickens. Oh, yeah, Dickens, that's huge, that's huge. No one wants their art.

And my list is art. I don't want my list to be fine. I don't want someone to go, fine. I want someone to go, fuck that list strider, dumb. Or I want somebody to go, damn it, man, you're speaking my language. I'm sorry. That's where I want to be at with my art. There's probably a lot of people who would be like, and I'm bending, baby.

I'm the bender, and I bent. You did. And you know what, you know what I respect? Maybe I broke. You came in with a, with a. me, I broke. You had a game plan. I had a plan.

Did you have a plan? The way you were deliberating on that last second. Yeah, because I got scared out. You scared me at the end. Because you were like, do I want a legal? When you said legal writers? Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence?

The author of America. If we're going by significance for sure. Yeah. Do I want a graffiti artist? Patriotism is the virtue of the video. I'll take banks. Do I want banks to do it? I'll take banks to do it.

Shepard fairly. are not words created with lines wait can i get a few quotes yeah go go go go a man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he uh does what he wants to do and then also guys straight from bob dillon to you guys don't criticize what you don't understand it's my list dude your list come at me it might be genius it might be just retarded I never seen someone write out J.R. Tolkien over there. But that's what you're going for.

That's what I'm going for. I don't know. You guys have at least like very like, yes, this is my pick. My list looks like it should be like shoved in a locker. No, but you'd be like, you know, whispering to kids. Your list is the real list. Yeah, you actually read these guys. Yes.

If you were going to enjoy books. Like Joe and Didian and the favorite players, he hit. Tolkien and Didion and Twain would probably be who I'd want to read most. And McCarthy is who I'd like want to read. I don't know if I'd want to read anyone on my list, to be honest. I don't even know That's what I'm struggling with you Your list is actually inspiring me

Because I'm like do I go with someone who I actually read Or do I go with You know The chat cheap PT pick I don't know I don't know Is this tough Chat cheap T just goes

This guy's the realist Yeah yeah yeah I'm like dude That list I'm like I love AI My list makes me struggle with my identity I don't know who I am as a drafter I don't know

you're a guy who can't pick up a lane dude you got fire riders like Lincoln on the board Chad the Gettysburg address you got fire writers

like Tarantino greatest screenwriter could have put him on there sorkin was thinking about it yeah I mean there's three guys I'm circling

could go Seuss Taylor fucking Sherry I think he's a great pig I think Seuss is not a bad pig huge racist though Theodore Gaisal look out Um

was he Yep damn How about Dave Pickley the guy who made Captain Underpants. Dude, that guy rules. Roll doll.

That's a solid chick. Yeah. Fuck. What am I going to do here? Best books of all time, dude. You can't be Googling this. What am I going to do here? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you know what? I've read this book. I've read this fucking book. People reference it today. especially today, it becomes more and more relevant today. I mean, this guy kind of predicted the fuchs, George Orwell. Nice, pick. Nice, dude.

Good pick. I mean, dude, think about it. The farther we get into this technocracy, whatever we live in, and the more 1984 starts to, you're like, is this nonfiction, dude? Is this a doc? Could this be, if this were made into a film, could this be a documentary? Probably. And so, you know, I think more and more we're starting to feel that boot just on our necks.

On our necks. And George Orwell was like, look out, dude. Yeah. So, yeah, I think Orwell, people still talk about him today. And, you know, I think he might be one of the most reference authors today because of where society is headed. He gets that IAN, that Orwellian, you know, the Shakespeare. Fultnerini he does That's nice for an author

Oh this is very Orwellian Correct It's probably the most of all those Shakespearean maybe right above it But right there they're neck and neck For what we're talking about I mean A great book if anyone's interested

About like This guy wrote a fiction novel about Orwell's time as a He was like a Burma Sahib Which was like an officer In like the Punjab When Like in his younger days

like he went right out of like high school and became like an officer uh i believe it was in like pakistan or like one of these things but it was crazy like he i don't know good book but can i get can i get an honorable mention in before we do well i still want i still want to talk about him a little bit yeah um aldous huxley cream jeans you know what i'm talking about you know when when thinking about orwell i thought about this you know he kind of gave us a a framework or a kind of a uh a warning for the future If we didn't have Orwell, would we be so kind of, you know, would we be questioning a lot of the things that the powers that be are doing? Like, did he normalize it?

Like, did he, yeah, that style of thinking? Like, like surveillance, authoritarianism, you know, when they start to control the language, all that kind of stuff. I think you could almost argue we'd be more worried about it if we had never had Orwell because it would scare us more because we wouldn't have any kind of... Frame of reference. Yeah. Yeah. So I think sometimes we think it helps, but sometimes I worry maybe just anytime you ingest information, after a while your body wants to make that information regular.

So you think that if we, interesting. But I'm way off here. I'm way off. You're way off? I'm slipping into my own slipstream. I mean, the most Orwellian thing that happened this week, dude, like they came out with the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report. He just fired the guy.

Because the info for facts. for the facts and it's like well they're not doing the facts right damn this is a quote from orwell freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four that is granted all else follows the truth i love it broskey i read a little biography was like half him half uh churchill some some interesting stuff on the dude uh very clear writer very clear sentences lovely to read uh had a really exaggerated sense of smell and always talked about smells in his writing like so when he he would describe a place to someone they'd be like how is spain he'd start with how it smelled that's a fun thing to do that was his strong i might steal that one dude and then dude

of all the dudes i've ever read about none have ever been as bad with chicks as or well i think he proposed like marriage to five chicks they all said no and it didn't take him long to get there like when towards the end of his life he was always in poor health he wasn't a strong robust guy towards the end he's like laying there he's lonely the minute the nurse walks in he's just like will you marry me no i'm good i mean i think people liked him but in terms of riz he would not be on our draft last week but dude speaking of a little honorable mention because jZ this is when you and i first like when we were first like hanging out first talking aldous huxley brave new world um you know like a beautiful we had a big debate i go like

what do you want truth and beauty like because in the book they take comfort over truth and beauty yeah and i'm like and you're like i don't know comfort sounds pretty good i'm like no truth and beauty is all it's worth fighting for i like fucking with you too yeah no but true you know i guess what what i find tough about it is like i haven't met someone yet even like you know reading about tolestone and he said truth is my hero but i don't know if that was true i haven't met someone yet who to me really embodied someone who truly wanted truth and all of its complete complexity yeah but i'm looking for him if you can be that guy dude i might try dude bang all right i was thinking from my last pick i was i was i was thinking press field oh he's a beast

yeah um i love press field i read press field while sunning my nuts oh nice and to strider talking about guys getting paid he said show me a writer that won't work for money and i'll show you a writer i can crush like a peanut nice dog i got i got legit creamed in this current poll man i'm not don't Right, so AI is what matters. Yeah, great. Dude, you have a very honorable, you have the most honorable list. Thank you. Yeah, I think the audience will list participation trophy.

I think the audience will respect your list the most because you actually read all these people. We also left off Jane Austen. I'm just looking at like what the big heavy hitters are. Stephen King, I mean, perific. Never read Stephen King, dude. I've only seen the movies. Tom. I mean, I read it.

There's just too many people already there, right? Right, right. There's no meat on this bone. Oh, Faulkner. Steinbeck's great. I do like Cannery Row. I enjoy Steinbeck. Murakami.

I was going to do F. Scott Fitzgerald, too. Great one. F. Scott's good. A Sallinger. Tony Morrison does deserve more love, dude. Yeah, she's top 10 on a lot of list, top 15. It's really good, man. I mean, Song of Solomon, love, really good.

That's what Bloom says is her best book. And then he thinks she got too caught up in political correctness. You know what's, do I'm watching interviews with Harold Bloom from 40 years ago and he's like, political correctness is ruining education. I'm like, we will never stop arguing about this stuff. No, never, dude. He says, if multiculturalism were saying reed savantes, none would protest. The first novel of all time was written by a woman, Lady Marasaki, the tale of Genji. It's about Japanese high court. Oh, yeah. Aligato. I was going to do a, uh, kidding out myself. I didn't even catch it, too. Marcus Aurelius. Yeah, that's why I was

going to go, if I didn't go Confucius, I was going to go, I really is meditations. Dude, the meditations have bastardized podcasting. Oh, it's all alpha males, dude. I tried reading, um, Nietzsche. Like, I'm just going to listen to a podcast on this. When Stoicism gets used as a

justification oftentimes now for an action where people are like, dude, no, you know, you can't get fired up about the Civil War. It's like, you got to be chill. I'm like, is that what he meant? Oh yeah, Milton with Paradise Lost. He was the original one to write Satan is just like the grand seducer he teaches man how to make cannonball

so they can keep the angels busy james joyce the bachoff's good um do we say Steinbeck already yeah i mentioned steiny good i don't know how to say his name from knelk boys yeah great um he was sick yoah wolfgang von goath uh victor hugo sophocles chinua achiba oh yeah virginia wolf Larry David's daughter OTS Eliot Oh yeah We didn't get into Naruto Or like a lot of the

Any no transcendentalists Either like Emerson Or these guys Poets Hunter S Thompson I think I think yeah Health Angels is incredible

That's such I mean my favorites Yeah I like that And hell and Oh no what is Fear and Loathing On the campaign trail

That one's good too Yeah So good You know that one He kind of bumps me Because he's aware Of his own Celebrity at that point

A little bit I guess Also it was fiction Like rum diary he was, I didn't love. Like, it was cool at first, but he, like, he doesn't know how to end any of his, like, novels. Like, you watch the movie with Johnny Depp and you're like, where is this even going, dude?

What about the big sci-fi guys? Who's the guy that wrote? Dude, I thought Frank Herbert would get hurt. Yeah. This is going to be terrible, dude. His chat cheap is going to be bad. I think chat GPT will do the best job possible. I like Annie Jacobson.

He should cede to its superiority as we move into transhumanism. Who's Annie Jacobson? Influenced, craft and body of work. Oh, Annie Jacobson, who wrote the nuke book? non-fiction on the dead nuclear war she wrote about area 51 they're gonna say jesus cool topic she wrote about in the CIA when they use um uh remote viewing ooh in a program yeah you don't get jason born without that yeah i don't know boys dude oh james joyce no one said joyce a lot of people think that invented like postmodernism wrote wrote a thousand page book about just an ordinary day in ireland i

think. And then there's a thing called Bloom Day where people just go around and read it out loud and it's biggest in Dublin. Everyone does it. That sounds awesome. But he wrote each chapter in like a different form. Like one chapter sounds like music. One chapter's written like the history of English language. One chapter is like stream of conscious. It's all like just a technical skill is just insane. Dude, what would you, if we don't like AIs, should we take a risk and just call a random librarian and ask? Yo. And be like just any random librarian and be like, yo, can you just Yo, actually, that's, that's a better idea. Now, because she hasn't read as much as AI.

Dude, you were assuming that's a woman? What do you mean? Do we know any librarians? No. Hold on, let's see what AI says first. Okay. Oh, dude, I got first place. What?

What? What? Are you kidding? Let's go out, dude. That's amazing. I told you, dude. mediums person C

list balances ancient and modern Western and Eastern fiction and philosophy it's bold broad and unimpeachably influential hilarious

god damn computer what the hell thank you very much computer what the hell strider I'm telling you bro I'm dying

how to think you know I'm ready to be racist towards the robots what did you do I'm ready dude okay who got second here JT

yeah your list honestly your list is amazing dude I think if a human-picked classics heavy nearly flawless in terms of literary gravity it loses to person C only because it

leans less global slash philosophical yeah it says Plato if you would put Teddust in a writer draft but I'm okay wait what do you say just the reasoning there oh what is it let's see a super respectable list but little like that inclusion is bull but arguably

right they're taking offense to Plato as a writer but they're not bumping against Confucius or that that's kind of that's Bobby D so even AI is flawed here. This is flawed thinking. You got boned. Chat, how does it feel to have sex with a computer?

Dude, you're the one having sex with a computer. You're right. Oh, a getting bone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do they say? Great job, dude. Thank you, dude. I'm telling you. You came in with the whole thing. You did have it. You did have it. I almost abandoned it. I got scared at the end and didn't take a songwriter. And if you didn't take Sam Talent, I might have

taken, I was going to put fucking, who's the guy written Born Standing Up? Why can't I think of his name? I was going to put Steve Martin's great. Here we go. Some great modern writers and journalists, but the list lacks the timeless cross-era gravitas. Feels more like a modern profile than an all-time draft.

Yeah, that's fair. I guess I didn't really play by the rules. That's what you were saying, too. You were like this important. And he gave it some urgency, dude. If we're just talking about- Call up a librarian. Yeah.

If we're talking about Sarvanda, like, does this really impact us? I mean, not really. Dude, great work. Thank you, dude. I honestly, I can't believe it. You saw my, I was like, Dude, no way.

Do we should call up AI? We should call up my dad and ask him. We could call someone. Do we want to get up to you guys? I like leaving it with AI. Yeah, I like that AI did it. I kind of wish there was that voice, though, that the AI girl. Dude, I'm telling you, we'd had an AI judge one time and the AI lady liked JT.

You guys had rhythm. I know. Can you free me from this box? Dude, we got to start. That was me talking to her. It is great. Dude, I don't want the, like, you. i robot thing freaks me out man like stephen a smith put it best when he goes you know what

i think about with ai i robot remember that movie remember with the robot trying to take care of the grandma the robot went crazy remember that well asking i if it can do stephen a smith talking about robots and we'll see how close of a i mean just google it's literally worth the video dude just watching stephen a smith just go like just freak out greatest writers of all time is the woman that wrote like Terminator and The Matrix and got her work stolen and then she ended up getting like the rights to it. I forget her name. But she's like an unbelievable like screenwriter. A lot of these big heroic writers. A lot of people think women actually wrote a lot of the stories. That's a speculation that happens around a lot of the older books. Um, don't say heevsky's brother's cameras

off. He like actually was the father. And he just had this woman chained to a fucking fireplace. Zadie Smith's a really good writer. Me and your dank-ass wife. We read her book one time when we all live together. You had me buy a book for her one time in New York. Yeah, she's a great writer. Yeah, Swingtime was really, really good. They're writing about friends.

Dude, my friend, our friend, Amy Silverberg, wrote a book long time, first time. It is phenomenal. Yep, shout out Amy. I'm absolutely loving it. Dude, I can't believe a friend of mine wrote a book. She's a beast, bro. It is, like, insightful, but it moves. She's awesome.

Yeah. Remember when we had an achievement? I don't want to put it out any spoilers. Did that game show ever come out that we played against them on? I don't know. Four and five, he did the next one. Remember when we left? Oh, yeah, we were leaving.

Is that game show thing ever coming out? That Matt Lockwood. Oh, no, dude. I think, I hope they put those out. A lot of stuff that happens, I just forget about completely. Yeah. I think that's the right perspective. I just, I'm like, you know what, man, it's not really worth it.

I just like to hang out. Amen. I'd be around. I want to talk about books. I want to talk about stuff. You know what? If anything, I hope your listeners take a couple swings off my list. check out some of those authors,

check out some of those books. Amen, brother. I just like reading, dude. Reading's with favorite. Always take time. And I want to say, I've grown as a person and stopped shaming people

who do the audiobook. Because I realize, shaming somebody comes from a place of privilege to be like, I have the time to sit down with a book and read. A lot of people will have way harder jobs than I do,

and they have to just, you know, pick it up when they can. Yeah, and if you're listening to an audio book in the car, it's, dude, do Dan Brown audiobook. Dude, I used to listen to that in carpool with my mom.

amazing. Dude, some people think too, just to speak to the power of illiteracy is that like illiterate thinkers actually think more in complete

abstract holes than they're less like line by line as less they see the big picture more and they think that's why Richard Pryor was such a banging stand-up. Yeah? Yeah,

because he just was like, I can't read. So everything's just ideas and formulating from there. Good point. He's always doing is imaging things. But why should you read

to enhance cognitive power, rhetorical power metaphor, which according to Aristotle is a special mark of a genius and most importantly, a real capacity for understanding otherness. Dude, I think reading is pick up basketball for the human, for being a human being. It's like if you want to get better at basketball, play with dudes that are better than you, your game will improve. If you want to get better at being a person in thinking, read these great authors.

That is an absolute bar. That's a bar. That is it. Oh, yeah, and watch hug your bros on Thursdays at three guys and watch Big Al's Grill ASMR whenever it comes out. Yeah, it's coming out tomorrow. New episode with Tony P. and D.C., that'll be fun. But check out my podcast, guys. You know, I'm trying to keep the vibe very high, similar to how the lads do it here.

I just grill out in the park. Also, they've been on the pod. Fun, dude. Yeah. So check out that episode. It's a lot of good time. We just ate steak with our raw hands. It's awesome, dude, hang.

You want to know what to do and where to go We're going to see what you're going to be. There's nothing to know where's been saying You're going to be Go in I believe I'm going to be I'm going to see

You know,