The Daily Stoic - The Art and Obsession of Writing with Rich Cohen

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

After more than a dozen books and decades writing for publications like Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, Rich Cohen knows how a great story can change the way we see both the past and ourselves. In today’s episode, Rich and Ryan trade stories about the books and writers that shaped them, the ambition behind creative work, how discarded material influences a finished book, the myths that can take over a writer’s life, and more. Rich Cohen is a bestselling author, journalist, and screenwriter. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the co-creator, with Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Terence Winter, of the HBO series Vinyl.👉 Follow Rich Cohen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/author.richcohen/?hl=en📚Grab signed copies of Rich Cohen’s books at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=rich+cohen*Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/murder-in-the-dollhouse-the-jennifer-dulos-story-signed?_pos=1&_sid=c4cdd41b4&_ss=rMonsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/monsters-the-1985-chicago-bears-and-the-wild-heart-of-football-signed?_pos=5&_sid=c4cdd41b4&_ss=rThe Fish That Ate the Whale: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/fish-that-ate-the-whale-the-life-and-times-of-americas-banana-king-signed?_pos=3&_sid=c4cdd41b4&_ss=rPee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/pee-wees-confessions-of-a-hockey-parent-signed?_pos=4&_sid=c4cdd41b4&_ss=r📕 Pick up a copy of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/moviegoer?_pos=1&_sid=bbe80a52c&_ss=r🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the reasons people think that they're not introspective people in the past is because it's hard to accept the reality of somebody that's not alive right now. It's just very hard to make them anything but kind of a character in your mind and not real. Most of the people in the past thought that they were doing the right thing. Yes. So in order to judge them, it's not just that you're having more information and everything. You have to believe that you are doing the right thing right now. Rich is one of my favorite writers, so I was honored to have him on the show. He has just brought to life things that I didn't know about, things that I didn't know I wanted.

He had this book called Tough Jews that I love. His father is fascinating who we wrote a book about called The Adventures of Herbie Cohen, who wrote that book about negotiation. He wrote a book about youth hockey. He wrote a book about the Rolling Stones. He wrote a book about the Jewish resistance in World War II. He created this show with Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger called Vinyl on HBO. That's also incredible.

I guess what I'm saying is this is one of my favorite authors. I've gotten so many stories from his books. I've learned so much from his books, and I just loved this conversation. We dove into history and memory and writing and parenting and sports and grief. Great conversation. I think you're really going to like it. Let's get into it. So I was thinking about a conversation you and I had like 10 years ago when I was working on obstacle.

I just read The Fish That Eat the Whale. But we were talking about Zimurie, who was a fascinating figure, and you said something that I've been thinking about, which is like, you thought, that he thought he would be appreciated by future generations. Yeah. Like they all thought history would judge them kindly or the future would be grateful to them. And of course, the exact opposite is true.

How do you think about that? I think that the people that try to stretch themselves and go further than their time warrants or that it's typical for their time, then get blamed a lot of times. Because they're the ones we remember. Yeah. So out of the millions and millions and millions and millions of people that lived in the past, there's only a couple of names that survived. Right.

And a lot of times, you know, you'll find people that get blamed for the, even their very awkward reaching across lines that people haven't reached across. They left a record and they get blamed for their prejudices and for being stuck in their time. I think that Zimuri basically entered, if you think about it, there was a football game going on and he entered the game. He didn't really think about the rules of the game. if the game was moral, immoral. He just was trying to compete in the game.

Yeah. The irony is that he started his own company that competed with United Fruit and was a much better company, a more moral, a cleaner company. But because of his success, he was ultimately forced to merge with United Fruit. And then he took on the legacy of this other company, which really wasn't his legacy. Yeah. And that company itself has its own interesting past, which is more complicated. Everywhere you look, it's more complicated than you think, you know.

But have you seen that clip what you know Mark Andreessen is, the venture capitalist? The clip, he's on a podcast, and they're talking about introspection. You've seen this? The guy's like, you know, I've read all these biographies. None of the figures were introspective in any way. And Mark Andreessen, obviously very successful, sort of larger than life figure goes, I'm not introspective at all. I don't, I never look inward.

I never look back. I only look forward. And they're sort of, I think what they're trying to make the argument of, and it's not historically without basis, which is that like to be a great success, to be a, world mover to do huge things, you can't get caught up in these niceties about thinking about other people, thinking about moral questions. Like, I think they're trying to say that today's generation is too conscientious and deliberative and not sort of bold and swaggering and ambitious enough.

I'm not sure that's true, but it's an interesting argument that someone like Zimari falls right in the middle of because he didn't strike me as a particularly introspective figure. the thing about introspection is at least no evidence. Yes. You know what I mean? So you're judging based on what somebody did, not what they, what they're thinking, which is a problem you always run into with nonfiction, which is I really don't really know what this person was thinking. There's no way to know. So you look for little hints of introspection. So the amount of charity Zimuri did, he set up this free school in South America. He's, he did, that shows a level of introspection. Plus, I think he saw himself one way. Yeah. You know, he was a member kind of of FDR's cabinet and all

this stuff. And he saw himself as kind of with the good guys. And the values, he lived long enough that the values all changed. And all the things he did were suddenly judged not so good. So I think of him like a guy that's holding a hand of cards all night. And suddenly at dawn, all the cards change meaning. Suddenly the aces and the jacks are now like the twos and the threes. And the twos and the threes are like the aces and jacks. And it all turned around on him at the very end of his life. And it confused him. But one thing about people today, and this is what always drives me nuts, which is most of the people in the past thought that they were doing the right thing. Yes. So in order to judge them, it's not just that you're having more information and everything.

You have to believe that you are doing the right thing right now. You have to believe that what you're doing, the things you're not even thinking of won't be judged very harshly in 30 or 40 years by your grandkids. And the fact is we don't, you try your best, but you don't really know how you're going to be judged. And it takes an incredible lack of humility and a sense of certainty to judge people about their actions, a lot of people about their actions in the past who were born into a particular time, lived in that particular time. And if they're lucky, they lived a long time, you know, live long enough to see that some of the things they thought were good were not going to look good in the long run. Do you really think they were always doing their best, though?

I was just reading this fascinating essay about Thomas Jefferson. And, you know, obviously Thomas Jefferson says all this world-shattering and changing ideas about how we're all created equal. And he condemns slavery and he understands the sort of moral rod of it. But they're sort of looking at some of the things that had been omitted from the history that actually was much more involved in running these slave plantations that people thought. And that the sort of big breakthrough for him, the pivot point and the change of his views, the essay is arguing, is when he starts to calculate the rate of return on the birth of business. new slaves. And that this becomes, it's like the Upton Sinclair thing, it becomes very hard to understand something that your salary depends on you not understanding. It's like, he basically goes, he thinks slavery as this dying institution, this financially sort of inefficient industry,

but then he starts to realize, oh, I'm making like a 4% return of year just on the birth of new slaves. Right. And that it's this calculation that ultimately gets in the way of him doing what say Washington is able to do. So I don't know if it's true that they were all, that everyone was always doing their best in the past. Well, you're talking about slavery, which is, I just mean generally. There's some things that are universal and they're always evil.

Slavery, I would think, would be one of them. I think what's interesting about Thomas Jefferson was, I think he was really introspective and he was a genius. Yeah. And he was smart enough to know that what he was doing was not defensible and would not be defended after his death. He understood all that. And he wasn't willing to pay the price.

So he was hoping that they were on a downward slope where it would slowly fade away. Would solve itself. Right. And that would allow him to escape and live his life the way he wanted to live and the way he wanted to live it. Almost, you know, for his own sanity,

maybe it would been better to be a little stupider than he was. But he's sort of, you know, stupid people have the advantage of that. So I think that, you know, he's a really unique case because he's sort of made America what America is. And built into that is the fact that he knew that he was engaged in something, an evil. Yeah, it is funny that the argument that they weren't introspective.

because actually when you really dig into the lives of the people, you find that they were quite introspective. There's all sorts of things that we sort of assume were cut and dried, but actually they went back and forth on, they tortured themselves without. And then also it seems like a silly argument to me because like when I look at the flaws of those people, when I look at the most indefensible or the most egregious things they did, I see that as part and parcel of whatever that not that trait of not being introspective was. It's like if they could have thought a little bit more, it probably would have been better. I mean, I think one of the reasons people think that they're not introspective people in the past is because it's hard to accept the reality of somebody that's not alive right now. It's just very hard to make them anything but kind of a character in your mind and not real. Yeah. And what I meant by, you know, right now, I assume that Jefferson was involved in very evil behavior and knew it.

Yeah. And I think that the same is true today. Sure. You just don't know what, you know, it's not, whatever it is, the people are kind of letting themselves off the hook now. Yeah. By sort of, sort of relegating it all to the past. Like now we have it figured out and now we got our heads on right. I just think that you run into this problem where it's very hard to understand what people

were thinking in the past and what was going on. But I do think that people are basically the same. Yeah. And there might be some outliers. So I wrote this book, Murder in the Dollhouse, about this guy, Fodis Dulos, who killed his wife. I think that I came across him. I didn't understand him at all. Like, he was an outlier, like a murderer.

But mostly, like, 99% of people are basically the same. If you put him in the same situation, they behave the same way that the other people in that situation did. And as a writer, I think my whole premise is based on that, which is if I kind of feel something, most other people are going to feel the same way. If they were in my shoes, they'd feel the same way. And if I was in their shoes, I'd feel the same way.

And that's also true with people like Sam Zimurray, even though he was incredibly talented, ambitious, smart, had a lot of energy, did all these things. He still, at the end of the day, wanted to do the right thing. And he still felt at some level that he wasn't doing the right thing, which is why he turned. tried to make it right. Yes. You know, by a charity and everything else he did. And those things are appreciated. I mean, people are still benefiting from them. And I assume that with Thomas Jefferson,

at some level, he was operating the same way. Yeah, I mean, that's what is so remarkable about philosophy and art and music is how they manage to capture emotional states or human experiences that reach across centuries or generations. And you're like, oh, I feel the exact same way. Because the fundamental problems haven't changed. They're still the same problems. Yeah. Still the same fear, still the same hopes. People have not changed.

Right. Not in 2,000 years, maybe in 10,000 or 20,000. But even you look at cave paintings and you're like, there's something sort of fundamentally expressive about that. What this does is it gives you like a degree of humility. Yeah. Which is it's like Ecclesiastes. Yeah.

That's my stoics, you know, which is all these problems that you have now, people have had not once before, but in new. several times before until it disappears, until the event horizon, you know, and what you're dealing with has been dealt with and will be forgotten and we'll be dealt with again and again and again. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe the only thing we can do is practice a little introspection and try to share some of those lessons. I mean, some of the things are ones you can only learn from experience. But I think often you look at the sort of larger than life lives and you sort of go, okay, like, at that level, if it doesn't solve it, you know, at that level, if it doesn't fill the hole or, you know, make them feel secure or good, like, why am I thinking that if I just accomplish enough or achieve enough or make my mark like deep enough, it'll do it for me?

Right. Because that's why sports are a good model. Have you ever played sports, which is you don't play sports thinking you're going to change the game. You're going to change the rules of the game. You're going to solve the game and there will be no more reason to play a game. You're just thinking of that particular game and your particular teammates and that you want to do as well as you can. Mostly your first motivation is not to make a fool of yourself and to prove that you belong in the game, you know? And then if you get ambitious, you want to be good at the game. And that's basically what we got is, you know what I feel like. My father just turned 93. You're making me think of my father. And he gave this, I taped it.

He gave a little, he must have prepared it. But he said this thing. He said that he sees his kids. and his grandkids as ambassadors he sends into the future past his death. Yeah. And I think that there's something that's the best you can do. I mean, that was, he doesn't really, he's 93. He hasn't said a lot of things that I haven't heard before, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I hadn't heard him say that before. And it was, it's inspiring to think like you do what you can do, what is in your power to do, you try to do the best you can and don't really worry about. Well, there's like different levels of that sort of multi-generational impact that people try to have and then there's this for people trying to sort of bend the world to their will, trying to, you know, sort of make their dent in the universe. The irony is how often those people like neglect the ambassadors that they're sending to the future that live at home. Yeah, well,

maybe don't think of them that way. Right, right. You know, I mean, it's like, I, I once wanted to write a book just about little brothers, a little, because I'm a little brother. Yeah. And when you're a little brother, you have humility, usually. I mean, you can become very angry, I guess, but little brothers because when you arrive, it's already happening. The game is underway, you know, and so much of what your personality becomes depends on your birth order. Yeah. So when you're a little brother, you have to figure out, or a little sister, I guess, the youngest sibling, have to figure out how to fit in an existing paradigm.

Yeah. It gives you, like, a lot of humility and realizes that you're not inventing new tools. You're working with tools that are already there. I thought about a line from one of your books two weeks ago. It was my son's, like, second to last the cross game. You have that great scene in Peewees where you, like, go up to the coach and you're like, hey, my son needs more playing time or what's going on. And the coach is like, hey, let me ask you a question.

Is he having fun? And then you're like, yeah. And he's like, what the fuck do you care? Right. You know? And my son had like basically played like 40 seconds in this whole game. Right. I was going to go up to him and be like, it's okay.

Like, it's cool. And like before I could even say anything to like console him, he's like, hey, can I do lacrosse again next year. And I was like, I mean, sure. Like, I thought you were going to be upset. And like, you didn't even know. I don't think, I don't think it computed for him that it wasn't good, like that it didn't go well. And then so you just think about like, that is our, our sort of ambassador of the future is like our children, obviously, but then it's also these little lessons, hard one or otherwise. And we're either paying them forward in books or in art or in conversations. That is the, we don't learn a lot. And we don't learn a lot. And we

don't change, but like there are little things here or there. Well, to me, the big lesson for peewees was, so I've seen crazy sports parents. Yeah. I judge them harshly. I make fun of them. I mock them. And I don't like them. Yeah.

And then when my kid showed a little bit of talent for hockey, I became one of them immediately, instantly. Yeah. And I couldn't. It was like a possession. It was like a kind of rabies of the soul. That's the big, which is when it's your kid, it's so deep. And when your kid does something well, there's nothing.

like it, man. It's like nothing. So it's the point is that just because you understand these things doesn't mean you won't spare yourself or others while going through them. And only later do you gain a little bit of perspective only because it's not happening. And I assume if it happened again, I would act the same way again. I would try not to. But it was like a big check on me, which is what I was valuing, which was not what my kid was valuing. My kid was valuing the experience. A lot of these even NHL players, when they're interviewed, they say their best moment in pro hockey was. Actually, there was a book about this guy, Derek Bougard, who played for the Rangers, a really good book, forgetting the name of it. And he became a fighter in the NHL and he got

CTE and he's a tragic story. But in the book, he says that his favorite moment in all of hockey playing in the NHL and everything was just driving to the games of his father. Wow. That was it. Yeah. You know, and there was a really funny, which is, it's just sort of encapsulated, which is there was a really funny meme or whatever going around among kids, my kids age, which is, it showed you how kids view the game like it was, It was a kid tweeted basically when you've driven three hours to a hockey tournament and you suddenly realize you forgot your hockey bag and have to tell your father. Yeah. You know.

And that was actually retweeted by a bunch of guys in the NHL and stuff because everyone had that, you know, experiences having to buy all new equipment or something like that or borrow a bunch of equipment at the rink. So, but that's what they're thinking about. I think about that one all the time that like is attributed to the sandlot and it feels so true, but it's actually not in the movie the sandlot. It's quoting the movie, it's not real, but it says, like, you know, at some point, there was the last time that you went outside with all your friends to play baseball, and none of you realized it. Yeah. And, like, that's more what your kids are thinking about, like, because they still like it.

They're still having fun with it. They're thinking about it as this thing they like to do, and our instinct is to sort of professionalize it or to raise the stakes of it. Well, it's funny, because the funest I ever had playing sports was an adult league softball team I played just with my friends. No coaches. We won the championship. And we got really bad.

We won the championship. Then we went to college. Everybody came back, whatever they were, overweight, on drugs, not paying attention. And we went from a great team to a horrible team. And I got, everyone said I should make my father the coach. Okay, because my father looks a lot like, or looked a lot like Walter Mathau in the bad news bears here. So they call them, you know, butter maker, boiler maker. And my father took it super seriously and attempted to do.

all this, and we couldn't explain to him, this is a joke, man. Like, you've just made us like, you're having us run wind sprints. And you probably think of that memory as well. Like, it's probably time you enjoy getting to spend together. Oh, yeah. It's really, really, really funny. My friends, I'll talk about it. He had us doing very advanced shifts that they now use computer models for it because

he grew up with the Ted Williams shift, you know. And we're like, I'm not going to do it because I think it looks, I'm not putting the shortstop in right field. He's like, why it'll work? I'm like, because it looks stupid and we'll be made fun of. That's another huge motivation in life, which is just not to get made fun of. So it's another great thing for me in a book is in the Tom Wolfe book, The Right Stuff, where he's got the astronauts sitting upside down in the capsule waiting for the blast off,

and everybody's wondering what he's thinking. And all attention's focused on this guy. And they say what he's thinking is, I don't want to screw the pooch, man. Just don't let me fuck up. Dude, I just read this Tom Wolfe thing for the book I'm researching right now. He wrote this weird sort of very new journalism piece about these two aircraft carrier, pilots flying over Vietnam. It's called like Nick and Charlie go jousting or something. It's so incredible. I think I've heard of it. I mean, I'm sort of a Tom Wolfe fanatic. It's weird that I've

never read it. It must have been running some like New York in New York magazine. Yeah, some weird magazine that you never heard of. And there's some reason probably why he didn't anthologize it. I know, but it was really good. It was like exactly what I needed. But do you watch the Man in Full TV show? I watched part of it. Wow. That's so mad. Yeah. I was so mad. Yeah. Well, it's really hard. because the better the book is usually the worst the movie is going to be because so much of what makes a book good is the voice. Yeah. And there's no way to get the voice. So they try to other ways to get the voice and they can't figure out what's missing.

It's why there's never been a good movie of On the Road. There will never be a good movie of the Great Gatsby because they're all about the voice. And when you're a reader, you get hypnotized by the voice of the writer. The rhythms of the speech and the descriptions and yeah. The books that make good movies are dependent on plus. If you have a clever plot or something like that. Or if they take a classic and kind of completely rip it up and start over. So we'll see about the Odyssey this summer, I guess.

But the Odyssey is different anyway. But it's also got an incredible plot. Right. That's right. I'm saying the Odyssey is different. It's not about the – it can't be about the voice because it's been translated and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Tom Wolfe, no one's figured out. I guess the movie, the right stuff is pretty good.

Yeah. But again, it's because it's a very action-packed story. Right. And because Philip Kaufman, who was a director, who was a great director, underrated director, I think. And he understood that what he could do was just about images. So he has an image at the beginning of that, you know, movie where you have Sam Shepard, like the coolest guy of all time, riding through, it could be a Western, it could be a John Ford movie, riding on a horse through the brush, you know, could be John Wayne in the searchers. And he comes over a rise and there's the plane that's going to break the sound barrier just with the flames coming out of the tail. And it's this moment of the cowboy and the rocket.

you realize it's the same guys and it's the same moment of every era just it's it's the archetypes just on a new horse right and the pilot is the cowboy yes right on an and and and that's all registers subconsciously in a moment with an image and that's what movies can do and so that's why I think that that was actually a good movie you think they'll ever make a good movie of uh confederacy of dunces no I don't think so for the same reason it's it's the voice and what I always really loved is that I go back to again and again and again for sustenance is Walker percy so How could you ever make a good movie, a good movie of the moviegoer? Yeah, that would, that's like some adaptation level, like, movie of a thing.

It's got to be something completely different. It's all internal and it's all the voice and it's all the detachment that he feels from his own life. He is a detached person. Well, Confederacy of Dunds is funny. So you could potentially get to the dialogue and the absurdity. You know, you have the hot dog vendor eating all the hot dogs making fun of everyone. A comedic actor could probably make hay of that. in a good way.

Like, I think you could probably do it, but making a good movie of the movie goer might be genuinely impossible because it is, yeah, it's about the alienation, it's about the weirdness, it's about the aimlessness. And there's not a good movie

of the catcher in the wry either for the same reason. And I sometimes say that Walker Percy's, the moviegoer is catcher in the rye for adults. Yeah. Well, they're very,

I'd say they're both for adults, you know? Yeah. But I'm just, it's instead of being a 17-year-old who's alienated. It's a 31-year-old who's alienated. Yeah. And by the way, I'm just making me think like maybe the best that I think of at the top of my head, movie adaption is no country for old men, which I understand was written originally as a script,

I think. And then he adapted it the other way. That's why there's another really great book by James Salter called Solo Faces. You ever read that book? I am on a huge James Salter kick right now. And I was just thinking when you were talking about great books that got butchered, he wrote, did you read The Hunters? Yes. And that was a Robert Mitcham movie. Yeah. It's like not about there's, there's nothing from the book in the movie other than it's about fighter pilots and Korea. Like it. Because they want the IP and they can sort of slap this thing underneath it. Yeah. And, um. But solo faces started as a, as a screenplay for Robert Redford and he rejected it. Right. And it's great, man. It's, I had a really good friend growing up who died really

young and he kind of had gone off and lived that kind of life. Yeah. And I never really knew what happened to him after like early 20s. He died like in his early 30s. Yeah. And I felt like reading that book, I was reading about his life, which is a power of that, of his writing and his voice. I loved the hunters.

I loved Burning the Days, which I think was an incredible memoir. And then I just read Light Years, which is the one about like a marriage falling apart. I haven't, I don't know if I've actually read solo faces. Well, his famous book, you know, is a sport in a pastime. Yeah. Which is very dirty. Yeah. Yeah.

Somebody came up to me once at the gym and I was reading it. I just was like on page one. And they started talking about it. Like later I had to rethink what that conversation was really about. Yeah. That's like not a book you should be reading in public. I didn't know. Yeah, yeah.

I was in my 20s and I was at the gym. Yeah, reading it. But, you know, and also his short stories. Yeah. I think somebody, when I turned like 22 or 23, somebody gave me his book of short stories, dusk. Yeah. which there's this thing that old European novels have,

like, I mean like the Camus era that capture something about how strange it is to be in a city that you don't live in, that I've never read an American novel capture it in the same way until James Sauter. So he clearly must have been hugely influenced by those books. Yeah.

You know, so when you read Dusk, like the story like American Express or something, just what it's like to be young and in a place that you have no reason for being. Yeah. Yeah, I thought what I was rereading the Hunters, I thought of it as like, these fighter pilots, it's the same story.

Like these guys are just desperate to make their mark. They all want to make ace. They're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. They're a cowboy. They're an athlete. They're just whatever that thing is that you think, if I just achieve some semblance of immortality, I will matter. I will be the best in the world like this thing.

I think he just captures that sort of timeless human drive. But it's always fascinating when someone does it in like a profession or a domain that you don't expect to see that. Yeah. And he changes how you see the world. Yeah. I mean, you can't really see. And it's really about competition. It's like the same as sports.

And the fact that he himself was like this pilot adds to it. But he was very introspective, probably so introspective that it inhibited his career in the Air Force, which is ultimately he left the Air Force. And I think that it is good sometimes for certain things to be not so introspective, to be, it's a huge advantage to be a little dumb. And I say that as somebody who considers himself a little dumb. It takes me a little long to get things. I'm a little slow about a lot of things. I have to reverse engineer them to understand what's happening. Sometimes somebody, I'm talking about this morning, sometimes if somebody were to come up to me and say, nice to see you and shake my hand but stab me in the back with the left hand, I will come away thinking, oh, it was nice to be.

to see him. That is a nice person. He said, nice to see me. It'll take me years to realize I've been shanked. Yeah. That's funny. I thought the interesting part of Burning the Days is where he talks about because he flew with Buzz Aldrin and Ed White when they land on the moon and they go into space. He's like fucking pissed. And you go, oh, yes. From the outside, these are selfless public servants who are motivated by duty and honor and country and they are, but they also want to be the best in the world. And the people they're flying with are their buddies and their wingmen and their compatriots. And then they're also competition to be number one on the call sheet. Everybody's in that situation where the person you're friends with is also your competition. And if that person

succeeds, you don't succeed. And when they succeed, you have to pretend like you're happy for them. Yes. You know, and that's just something that we've learned to do. And especially in a book like James Seltres because it's about the Cold War and what's good for the West and good for America. So there's this other level of self-sacrifice, but he feels like he's made a terrible mistake. Yeah. Because he was on the path. Yeah. You know, I have a friend, when my son was playing hockey, I have a friend who said, oh, so he's on the path.

He was a very, this guy's a great hockey player. And I'm like, what freaking path, you know? And he's like talking about the NHL path, which my son was never on. I've never known anybody on, but just that he kind of saw it that way. which is, what's the goal here? Yeah. You know? Yeah.

The goal is, in the case of me and all the people I know, adult hockey on Tuesday nights, that's the goal. Yeah. Right. But so there are people that see the goal as the goal. But it is interesting how much in common the people on the path, whether they're trying to be a fighter pilot or a Navy SEAL or a professional basketball player or, you know, a billionaire or a senator. Like, the path is the path, is the path. and all these kind of elite domains. It's not just like the same path,

but it's the same personality type in there too. Yeah. And I'm a writer, so I don't have that. I don't understand that. I'm fascinated by it. It's human nature, you know? But of course you have. In that league, as a magazine writer and as an author,

and it probably is a TV writer also. It's very kind of you to say that. Thank you very much. It's very true. I mean, that's the funny thing is it doesn't feel that way, sometimes to the person. But all you have to think about is like how many people would literally kill someone to have what you have,

and that's a sense of where you are on the path. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, I mean, thank you. That's, I mean, but I, but I'm not, I'm so focused on, you know, what, what a great story is and watching these other people. I do, I guess there have been times where I think about like where I am in the whole blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But I also know that the writers from 20 years ago that were considered great are forgotten and the writers that were forgotten are considered great. And one of the great examples for me is like the painter Chardin who he, when he painted his little scenes, they were kept like in people's kitchens so they could look at food while they ate, you know? Yeah. And in the main rooms in the museums were the giant pictures of Napoleon on horseback. Yeah.

And now you go to like the Met in New York and it's reverse, man. Those big giant paintings in Napoleon are out by the elevators and the Chardin paintings are in the main room. Yeah. And so you can't really know in the long. run, how any of it's going to turn out. Well, also, it doesn't make a fucking difference to either of those painters. No.

Because they're both, like, it evened out for both of them. And the fact that one is now here and one is here is totally irrelevant to either of them. So you think would you rather be successful in the long run or have a much better life? And you think probably the much better life. Or would you just, what it ultimately comes down to is like who, who enjoyed doing the thing the most and didn't torture themselves so fucking much? Like Salter, who were just talking about, was like a great writer. And, you know, maybe at his peak, although he didn't make some money from some movie stuff, was considered a writer's writer.

But you do get the sense that he felt somewhat tortured and inadequate as a writer. Like, I'm not sure he always had the best time. Right. Yes. And so. By the way, I knew somebody, a person that was involved in his career who was kind of making fun of his lack of success, which is unbelievable. Right. But then the fact that he's been slowly subsequently vindicated and that it starts rising, again, it doesn't matter. Like, he's not able to, you can't dine out on your posthous thing.

This is how I always think about it. Like, think about it like a band. Yeah. Okay. What do most people want from a new record, although records aren't the thing they were when they want a slightly different version of the record they already like. Yeah. Okay. So if you come to them with something new, they're going to freaking hate it.

Yeah. until they learn how to listen to it, the record itself has to teach the people how to listen to it. So the best records usually get hammered by most critics and they don't sell. They sell over a period of 20 years as people figure out how to listen to them.

It's hard to be ahead of your time. It means that you're not of the time. Right. Which is now. And all of that, you'll get resistance from everybody, from agents, from editors who don't want you to do this thing

whereas you know that this is the thing you've got to do. Right. So it takes a like a lot confidence to do that and James Salter did that for years you know and he finally at the end of his life he started to be recognized like you say and by then he was old yeah you know he wanted what he wanted when he was young which was to be an ace he writes about being an ace shooting down three migs five five migs sorry messed it up and he did he didn't get it yeah one and a half yeah in korea

yes and then when he became a writer he wanted the same thing yeah you know and again he shot down one and a half mix. Totally. Totally. Except that's really fucking hard. Like as time passes, in a way, you're just like, you did it. You were in the league. Right.

You know, like you were one of a small number of people to ever do this thing. Obviously, what he couldn't anticipate is almost no one shoots down planes anymore. That's not how, like, by the time Vietnam comes along, planes don't fight each other in the air anymore. It's just not, it's not. I know. Well, that's the other thing, which is the language that you live your life in becomes unintelligible to the generations that follow. Yes.

You know, so like a lot of my career was about magazine writing and a kind of magazine writing that doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's writing. It's writing is writing. But like the Tom Wolfe stories, where would he write those? Some of them he would sell here and there. It'd be fucking TikTok videos. Yeah.

So we're like looking at his accomplishment. But to people that are growing up now, it doesn't. even make sense. It's like a different language. Yeah. And look, that happens not just in sort of art or whatever. Like I was the director of marketing at American Apparel, which was at one point a very cool job. And I thought, I thought at that time when I was walking away to be a writer, I would be like, well, it's like, hey, I was the whatever at Apple. Or like, now people don't, the company doesn't even exist. It went bankrupt twice. It has no, like, and it might come back around as like a sort of a retro company at some point in the future. But like, if you think that, that, that, that,

this thing is going to have staying power or matter. Like, you're... The meaning changes. So, like, you're making me think of, like, my father, go back to my father. He was a pretty high-level executive at Sears. Yeah. You say people that now, they're like, they have this idea of this old, tired store at the mall. It's like Kmart or something.

Yeah. But at the time, you're like, no, Sears was like... Sears gave Muddy Waters his first guitar, man. You could order a house from Sears. Sears was like Amazon. It's like, yeah, being an executive at Open AI, right? Yeah, yeah. It was a big company in the world.

Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. And then it, so there's a ticking clock on all this stuff. And to attach your value or your identity to it is a fragile thing. Well, it's funny because there's like one of the things that made me want to be a writer was, it was all about that voice, was freshman year in high school. In a class I got, I think, a dean. Okay. So that class, which is English, tended up making me want to be a writer. Yeah.

Because she had, we had to read a book of short stories. And I read the Hemingway story in our time. And from the first line of that story, it was like made you feel something different than you ever felt before. The lesson in that story is the guy says you should never love anything you can lose. Okay, but that's what life is.

I mean, there's no way that you can lose everything. But what you fell in love with, the way those words worked and the feeling it evokes, like magazines can go away. But that's the doing the thing can't. That's what I mean. It's like if you look back and you're like, hey, I'm proud of the things I wrote. I'm proud of my growth as a writer.

I'm proud of who I was in this industry or whatever. Then you can have a pretty good go of it. Right. But if you're like, no, no, no, I need to be one of the guys. I need to have won the great prizes. I need to get the best slots. That's something you can lose. Yeah.

But by the way, so like if you're like have a slightly less optimistic turn of mind, you worry that people now aren't reading. Okay? So, and it's not just like my career, who cares about my career. It's really bad because the kind of illiterate mind is a different kind of mind. You process the world differently. It's like slow cooked food, man. You need to take time for things to register to understand them to see them.

And it's scary that the people that ultimately will judge are people that don't really, you're doing something that they're never going to notice because they're not reading other. It's like when you're writing, you're trying to be like the best writer there is. You have the great advantage of you don't need school or any of that because it's all available to you in books. Right. And you find the writers that speak to you and you're basically operating on a sentence level. That's the whole thing. Yeah.

And then you're being read by people who don't know about a sentence or care about a sentence or you're going to speak, you know what I mean? And that's the point is like it has to light you up. And then, you know, if a fraction of the audience appreciates everything that goes into, it great if the rest of the people just appreciate the final product. Great. I'm struck by this, and I don't want to come back to the moviegoer, but I'm also struck by the devaluing of not just writing and really good writing, but the thinking that goes into really good writing. And I've been talking about this is probably too much for people. But it's like, like, what we're talking about here is obviously interesting. And I think we've spent some time thinking about it clearly. But like,

this is nothing compared to what you and I might sit down and write about this exact topic. Like, I think people go like, oh, I heard them talking about this on a podcast. There's also an audio book about those are the same thing. Yeah. And it's like, no, no, like Joan Didion on this great line that she said writing is a hostile act. That like you're having to like, you're like mounting this invasion. You're like attacking this other person and trying to replace their thinking and their narrative and their sense of the world with the ones you made up. Genius.

Do you know this was her table? No. Yeah, this is the table. She put her to road at this table. What's his name? Could have died at this table. John Gregory. Done?

Yeah. I always think of that scene where you just collapses at the very scary. Yeah. But yes, what I'd say is like people have an idea, I think, that you think of something. You have an idea. Yeah. And then you write it. Yes.

But in fact, all the thinking happens while you're writing. It doesn't make sense until you write. It's like a different part of your brain turns on. Yeah. And you have access to a different part of your brain, which is when we're talking about ambition and career and all that doesn't get to that, which is the main thing, which is the actual writing itself, it's like... It's otherworldly.

It's this magical thing, but then also that's step one of the process. And then the other process, like in music of the producing and the re-recording and the mixing and all the stuff that goes into it at, like, these books are not first drafts of these books. These are like so many drafts down the road. And so that refining and that improving and rereading it and rereading it and re-reading it and realizing, oh, I missed this or I made this assumption here, like how much thinking and craft and deliberation goes into what the finished product of a thing that you've read. Also, like, just speaking of Joan Didion's hostile act, okay, which is to put it at a very personal

level. Yeah. So, and this goes back to James Salter too, which is he said, I think in his last book, he has a quote from himself, which is weird. That's weird. Slightly, slight Van Glorre. Not a quote if you're quoting yourself, just saying again. Like, I don't, I don't, I, I, bothers me. Well, I remember once when I got, when I was a kid, I got the John Cougar Melanchamp record, Scarecrow. And he had a quote on the dust jacket that said, there's nothing more sad nor beautiful than watching generations change hands. And it said, John Cougar, Melanchamp. Yeah, just you don't need that second part. It's yours. So, but

anyway, he said, only that which is written down has a chance to last, something like that. Yeah. Which is, by the way, he doesn't say it will last. He says it has a chance to last. But like I wrote my third book was about growing up and my best friend growing up. and all that. It's a memoir about growing up. And you realize that as you're writing it, you're basically taking a bunch of memories and replacing them.

Yeah. Because writing is never the same. It's just a translation of what you feel. And that's what I'm going to remember. So when you write something down, you kind of freeze it and you lose everything else in a way. You preserve, but you also destroy without really meaning to.

So it's like a very serious, you know, thing. And that's what you can even replace people's memories of their own lives. And that's, I think, what you say, so you write about your, father, he reads it. Yeah. That's what he remembers as happening.

Yeah. You know, except maybe not my father, who's a helpfully hostile reader. But, you know, there's different versions. But you can see that there's, it's a very intense thing where you kind of save, preserve, and destroy while preserving, which is probably maybe what all preservation is too. Well, that's a rather famous line. You know, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. People think that's like this beautiful meditation on the role of creativity and art in humanity.

And she's saying, no, no, we fucking lie to ourselves so we can live with ourselves. I mean, that seems obviously what she's talking about, which is you have to, see, the whole idea like now about sort of, let's say, destroying the American myth. Yeah. Okay. If you destroy the American myth, which I happen to love and grew up with and everything else, it's not like it's replaced by the truth. No.

It's just replaced by another myth, which might but not be helpful, actually. Yeah. I mean, the myth that we have, there's some things about it are helpful. the myth that we'd replace it with might be less true and might be unhelpful. Yeah. You know, so you got to be careful about destroying a myth kind of thing. It's like taking someone's legs out. Well, I've said this also before, but I think a city we both love, which is New Orleans,

you take down the Robert Lee statue. Yeah. Great. Now there's just a column there for eight years or however long it's been. Like, it's like, you know what it's like, you know, remember those stories, create your own story, you're on it. Create your own statue. Imagine your own statue.

I imagine my friend Mark on that statue being celebrating the time he drank 17 shots at Fat Harry's. But I mean, that would be better than an empty like deciding, hey, we're going to turn this into an art like actually we're going to say, I want you to envision your own thing there. That is replacing it.

The problem is what we do with these myths. We have this tendency in American culture to point someone out as shitty or hypocritical or contradictory or whatever. And then they destroy the myth. of Lance Armstrong, and then they have to go so far down the list to find the actual winner that they're just like, nobody won the tour to France. Right.

And so then you're like, okay, but now who are we supposed to say was the greatest in that era? And there you need, I mean, that's in the Bible, you know, when David, King David gives his eulogy for Saul and his son Jonathan, he says, oh, how the mighty have fallen. It's about these mighty figures of your, you need them. and they make life kind of interesting. You know, but if you think about, I'm a little older than you, I'm a bunch older than you, maybe.

And I grew up, I was born in 1968, so I grew up with the constant threat of the permanent record. Okay, the permanent record was, you do this in this class. Your file. Yeah, it's going in your permanent record. And I always expected someday I would find my permanent record

when, say, in third grade, rather than engage in cleanup, he jumped out the window and ran home, which I did. You know, or he threw a firework in the, whatever. So, and then I got older and I realized that, oh, the permanent record's a lie, man. There's no permanent record. I'm free.

I'm absolutely free. Right. And then now, because of all the technology, there's a freaking permanent record. There actually is a permanent record. And it's kind of, you got to be able to forget, you know? You got to be able to, like, leave your past behind you. Even like Hemingway, going back to Hemingway, Hemingway wrote his first book about people in Michigan near Traverse City,

Potosky, Michigan, where he spent his summers, like kind of a rich kid spending his summers at a country cottage. And he took all those stories and he wrote them up. And he was so hated that he couldn't go back to Potosky for like 50 years. Now Patosky has a bookstore just with his books, but he couldn't go back. And he would not have done that in the age of Facebook or Instagram or anything because he would have heard from all those people. Yeah. You know what I mean? No, no, totally. I also think, I think about this with my kids, like how many things I got temporarily in into when I was younger. Yeah.

And there wasn't an algorithm keeping a record of what I liked and then feeding me more of that thing over and over and over again until that became who I, like, like, I do also gives you a completely distorted view of the world. Yeah, yeah, of course. But I just even mean like it's hard to go down rabbit holes and then entirely abandon them. Yeah. In a world where the algorithm is incentivized to, and so stupid in a way, that it can't understand that you have fleeting and changing interests.

I mean, basically, there should be a button you can press it. It forgets everything about it. Yeah, like, term limits on the... Yeah, just like forget everything you know about me. Yeah, yeah, I want to start. I don't like... I don't like what I like. I'd like to start over, you know?

So, like, a year ago, I hurt my foot. And I was searching for stuff about I could do about my foot. And now I'm like, I'd like to see a movie about what's a good Western I could say? They go, well, someone with your foot condition. Exactly, yeah. No, and like, you at least have a whole lifetime of experience. But if you're like 17, these things, that's like 40% of what it knows about you is that period where you got really into Goss music or something. And now it's like it won't let you grow out of something.

No, it's, it's crippling. All right. So why is the movie goer one of the greatest novels ever written? Well, I'll give you my experience with Walker Percy, which was I went to Tulane. And I had like a bit of culture shock when I first got there. just as simple as the way things smelled, the way things looked, the lack of, you know,

I loved in Chicago when it was time to put on your jean jacket and that was gone. Yeah. There were drunken people roaming around on the street. That was unusual.

I was just completely, like where am I? What's going on? It's another world. Yeah. And I found at the Tulane bookstore for whatever reason, no one,

I picked up the book by Walker Percy Lance a lot, which is, you know, and it blew me away. Like, it's what writing is for, which is it named and described, things I had felt, but I had never articulated.

And it gave me a way to understand what was happening in the world in my life and where I was. And then I read everything by Walker Percy and the moviegoer is sort of the book. And I think it's that. I mean, it's good that I came upon it. Like, I didn't get the Grand Canyon, the first run out. I got like some smaller feature, which was Lance a lot. Because that's what he does, which is he takes something you feel, but have never put into words and think you're the only one who feels it. Yeah.

And he puts it in language so you can understand, one, you're not alone, you're not unusual, and two, you can understand what's happening. And it gives you the sense that only books can do this, which is he can take the incoheate, you know, and actually put it in words, make it a real thing. And that's what to me, what Walker Percy did. And I just recently read that book again. And of course, like a great book, I pick up a million things that I didn't even notice the first time around. even though I've not the first time around, the fifth time around.

I don't think the first handful of times I saw him so much as a veteran struggling to readjust to normal modern life. Yeah. Like I didn't, I didn't sort of see the PTSD. I mean, he's a Korean, there's a Don Draper element to him that you don't really think about. But that was common. Yes. So like my father was during the Korean War and everything.

That was just, that was something everybody did. Right. But that doesn't mean it wasn't incredibly. No, no, it was. It was. It was. It was. presented as just life.

Yeah. Whereas now it's very notable because it's unusual. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, I don't know what the percentage of people who went into the, it was a huge. It was a pretty basically part of life. So, I mean, I think that, and then terminology, PTSD and the way you would treat it. Sure. And there were, you know, just a lot of people that had gone through this big experience when they were young and they were trying to deal with it.

Yeah. Trying to recover from it or whatever you want to say. Even when I was a kid, the movies, I was talking about this, every movie had like a Vietnam veteran character who was just wandering around the fringes, scaring the crap out of kids. They were scared about backfires and just a weirdo. Yeah, and by the way, so it seemed like the Vietnam War

was ancient history to me. Yeah. You know, but it wasn't really. No. I mean, in 1978, when I was 10, that was just a few years before. Sure. But it was sort of quickly covered over.

You know, we moved into a different era, and it wasn't really talked about. And the only hint of it you got was these movies. I'm thinking of the movie specifically The Rivers Edge, which scared the crap on me. I don't know if you remember that movie with... No. Oh, I'm not even going to describe it, but it's Crispin Glover and Keanu Reeves, and I saw it when I was a kid and it scared the crap out of me. Obviously, the idea of certification in the novel is like one of my favorites. I remember I read that book about.

So, like, he's in a movie theater and like when he things from his actual life appear in the movie. Like, I think the scene is he's in that movie theater, and then that movie theater is in the movie that they were watching. Like, I remember I read that of that certification thing was so funny. I was like, oh, that is a great thing. Like, there is something, like, you go to New York and people are like, I want to go on the sex in the city tour. Like, I want to see, like, the establishing shots from a movie, from a TV show that I liked. Even though it's like, I could go to museums, I could see historical buildings. We want to see the stuff that we've seen on TV.

Well, you remind me of a couple things. One is when my son, who's now an adult, was like, four, we went into the supermarket and there was some product, like a Clorox type product, and he went crazy as if he'd seen like George Harrison or something. He's like, they're from a commercial. Yeah, he'd seen it on TV. It was like a celebrity to him. The other thing is I grew up in a Glenco, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. And John Hughes filmed all those movies there and said I feel like at my high school, which was Neutriar High School in Winnetka. And so that was our like our life, man. Our life was made valid by the fact that the Glencoe Beach was in Ferris Bueller.

And the Home Alone House was in Winnetka and all, and Neutcher West was in Uncle Buck, you know. So I understood it. It made us feel seen like it was real. I remember I read this in Walker Percy's The Movie Goer. I was like, oh, that's such an interesting concept. And then I'm watching the first season of True Detective. And my storage unit in New Orleans is like the storage unit they go to where he has all this stuff. And I'm like, this is it.

And it's like, it should, like, I have no attachment. to this storage unit in Shelmet or whatever. And I'm just like, there it is. So there's something about like a novel that captures or explains a thing that didn't have a name before. Yeah. And you're just like, that's fucking. Yeah.

It's got a couple little things like that. And he's good. There's other, there are other. The everydayness. He says that word. The everydayness. And you're like, yeah, that is. I'm stuck in the everydayness of life.

Yeah. And I think, no, I think it's probably not that book. It might be Confederacy Dunds that gave me a lifelong fear of buses where I spent a lot of time. Because in the fact that in the moviegoer, he loves his car because it's basically resistant to malaise. Yes. Yes. Yeah, totally. You know, so, and I always think about that when I, you know, get anything, which is this thing going to be covered in malaise in a couple of years. You know, what's it going to look like on a Sunday afternoon? Yeah.

And that's like a very Walker Percy. He's got a line in there in one of his, but might not, I don't think it's in the moviegoer. He says, how do you make it through a Wednesday? Yeah. It's, and it's weird to have this person, I think one of the other thing that's about that book is like it feels so modern like it's so capturing perfectly the modern moment and then you're like checking and you're like 1962 or whatever dude i'll tell you i had this experience in college it just shows how stupid i am it was a introductory philosophy class and we read a kirkagard book called like on the current situation or the i forget it's something like that and it's like 60 70 pages and i just i just connected to it very deeply and he asked us to guess when it was written

And I didn't, and I said I thought it was written like maybe five, six years ago. Right. That's incredible. I mean, when that happens, that's like, I mean, that's my experience. You read Marx's releases meditations. You're like, this cannot be from a God king 2,000 years ago. Like, how could he possibly? Because we think so much of what we are dealing with has to do with whatever the current technology is or the current political scene or the current this or that.

But it's not. Yeah. All that stuff's just an expression of the deep thing, which doesn't change, you know? The malaise. The everydayness, the alienation. Walker Percy had another thing I love where he's talking about reentry, that life is about reentry. Yeah, yes.

And like, I think about that every time I'm like coming out of a book. Yeah. Like reentry into normal life where I'm no longer living in this fantasy world. Well, I think that Walker Percy thought that his books would change the world in some way. Yeah, you saw himself as this kind of philosopher evangelist. I think he was depressed that it didn't have the impact he thought it did, but it did. Yeah. Because that's the thing about a book.

Look at me and you are here sitting. He died. I remember when he died because I was in college. Yeah. I actually got a book signed by him. Because he was at Loyola when you were doing. The book, Thanato's syndrome came out and it stood in line at the bookstore that's not there anymore. I forget what it's called in New Orleans.

And he signed it. And he was, you know, whatever. But I think he thought that he would, you know, he would become the national figure. He would change the world and all this stuff. And he didn't see that happen, but it did. Yeah. It just happened inside the brains and the heads and the sensibilities of thousands and thousands and thousands of people who he helped figure out how to get through life. Yeah, to go to our point about competition, I got to imagine when he surprise wins the National Book Award, Shelby Foote was both happy and fucking pissed.

Right. And then when Shelby Foote became a celebrity in a way that Walker Percy never was through the Ken Burner. documentary, probably the exact same feeling. Well, do you know the story? You must know the story about how he won the National Book Award. Yeah, wasn't it A.J. Liebling, like, gave it to his wife or something? Yeah, well, what, uh, Gene Stafford, I think. I think what happened is, is Leibling was writing the book about Earl Long in Louisiana.

He was writing a New Yorker article. So he said, I want to read everything to his publisher. Give me everything you have. Yeah. About New Orleans. And the moviegoer had just come out published by Knoff. Yeah. And so they gave him that book.

And Knoff didn't really like the book. I don't think. Well, they let him go. Yeah. And by the way, this summer, I bought a first edition of the moviegoer published by Knav. I'm never like into, like, I don't save things. I don't, there were too many great things I had that were destroyed by somebody in my family or given way by my mom for me to think I'm not going to start collecting things now.

It's too late. I've already lost. I had a complete uncut sheet of 1974 tops baseball cards from the factory and that got given away. So I'm like, I lost that. There's no point, man. But I did. It was very excited to get this first. edition of this Knaf.

But anyway, he read it and he basically said, this really has nothing to do with what I'm writing about, but this is a great book. Yeah. And he gave it to his wife, and he won the National Book Award, even though he hadn't been nominated. Right. Okay. Which is, by the way, similar to Hemingway.

I don't know if you know this story about Hemingway, which is Hemingway, one of his stories was published and they gave it the best American short stories, like the best story of the year, like in 1920, whatever, even though it wasn't nominated, it wasn't listed, because it was so. It was so freaking great. And the story with Hemingway is he had all these short stories. And his wife at the time, you know this story? She lost him all?

She lost him on the train, which he always thought was intentional. It was some kind of Freudian attempt to kill him. Yeah. You know, the only story that survives from that earlier batch, it's like an earlier era. It's like the ancient aliens, man. The only one to survive was the one that won Best American Short Stories because it was out with, you know, being considered. I told that story in when I up. the obstacles away because there's this great letter that Hemingway writes to Ezra Pound after.

And he's like, I know you're going to tell me it's all for the best, whatever. And he's like, and I know, but I'm not there yet. Yeah. And I think that's such a great way of putting it because, like, you do know that the devastating breakup or the bankruptcy or the what you know, this is what humans do. We're going to derive meaning from this. We're going to learn from it. It's going to be, in retrospect, part of the trajectory that we couldn't have anticipated. but in the moment, you're like, don't tell me this is all for the best.

Well, it's interesting because I think the story that survived is my old man, which is about a jockey's son telling the story of his father's decline. And it's different. It's not as severe.

It's not as harsh, you know, and that's editing. But another, I don't know, you've had this experience where you lose something and you've got to rewrite it. And it is good because basically that's editing,

you know, and what, What's kind of really freaky and also reassuring and also a little bit depressing is sometimes you rewrite something and you find the original and it's pretty close to the same. Yes. I had a weird similar experience. So I read Fish Lady the way it when it came out, this hardcover. And then I reread it a couple years ago.

And I was going through, it was fascinating to me to see how I marked several of the same passages. Yeah. And took an almost identical note. Yeah. It makes you feel like a machine. Or just like, but it's not like I remembered that that passage was meaningful to me. It's just it struck me, the same note hit me.

But it's reassuring because you know it's real. Yes. It's not just because you had a big lunch. You know what I mean? Or whatever, you're hung over or something. There's something real about it. And same with the writing. So like one example, I mentioned on the road earlier, a book that I really like and is often derided, but I really like it.

By the way, one of the great audiobooks of all time is David Caradie. reading on the road. I know if you ever. So, but anyway, the thing is always, Truman Capote famously said, that's not writing, it's typing. Because he would say he just wrote in one draft and all that.

But if you read about Jack Kerouac, he kept writing the same stories over and over again. And every time he wrote him, he was honing him. That was all, those were rewrites. Well, the myth is that he wrote that in 24 hours on some drug binge or whatever. But it was actually like, yeah,

meticulously edited and rewritten for like months and months and months. after. But even before he wrote that version, he'd written those stories. Oh, and somebody who writes the same stories again and again and again. I know that every time you go back over the same ground, you kind of like, the story becomes tighter and you hone it and you realize what about it makes it work. Yeah. And that thing, by the way, that he wrote the books famously on kind of computer paper and it's like a holy scroll. Yeah. Actually, one of the weirdest story assignments I ever had for a magazine was to write about Jim Ursay. Remember Jim Ursay? He owned the cults.

He died just a couple of years ago. He's a drug addict and... Yeah, he's the only guy ever interviewed who fell asleep while he was talking. Creating a very awkward social situation. I'm like, what do I do? Do I wake him up? Do I quietly leave, you know?

So, or just wait. Right. Anyway, he bought that scroll. Oh. Yeah, he was a weird collector of stuff. Yeah, and he would hire like musicians, like big deal musicians to come to a studio to play with him and he would record. I mean, he was kind of nuts.

Yeah. And he was another guy who went to my... same high school and his father's super interesting because his father is the one who moved the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in the middle of the night. Anyway, he got to see that scroll, which is amazing because it's at the University of Indiana along with like a first folio of Shakespeare and an early edition of the Bible. It's a crazy collection that he gave it to, but it makes you think like there is something about the physical object that we kind of lose when everything's on computers. Right. You know, so we're talking about ambition. So the nature of Jack Kerouac's

ambition is captured somehow in the mania of that scroll. And the fact that he did, I always heard, took a lot of Benzadrine to write a bunch of stories he'd been telling for years and years and years. And the Benzodrine was about the art. Right. You know what I mean? And I always think about it like, you can't really cheat in art. Like you would test him, give him a drug test if you were in the major leagues and say

those home runs don't count. But they count. Yes. Even if he took all the Benzadrine or. or whatever in the world, the home runs still count in the book. Yeah. Yeah, there's, uh, there, there is something too about, was it, was it, uh, Hemingway where he, he wrote this book and then he just like cut the first like two chapters?

Yeah. Is that in, well, the sun ulcer rises? No, that's, um, yeah, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, it's funny because my, my friend David Lipski, who's a really great writer. Yeah. He always talks about that, which is he opened the sun or rises with a joke. about the boxer, I think Benny Leonard. And he had Fitzgerald read it.

And Fitzgerald said, oh, that's an old joke. Everybody knows. Get rid of that joke. So he cut the beginning. Yeah. So it has this very stark modernist beginning, which hadn't been the beginning. And then Hemingway found out later

that he had heard the joke from the same person Fitzgerald heard the joke from. Wasn't an old joke, which they both had the same friend. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. But there's something about like that, that's all gone, and yet it's there.

It's there. It's under it. And there's something powerful about that. I mean, that's his idea about the iceberg and all that, which he put it. But it's true that, like, for me, I don't know how you write your books, but my first drafts are like, like the first draft of the fish that ate the whale was probably like 130,000 words. And the book is probably like 65,000 words. Yeah. So that's the kind of thing where it's good to be a little stupid because I've done that with basically every book I've ever written, except for the first couple books, maybe.

If you're aware of that at the time, you realize half of what I'm working, I'm throwing out. Yeah. So all today's effort is just nothing. I'm throwing it all out. But of course, you can't think of that when you're writing or you go freaking nuts. But the truth is it's like censoring people for stuff they say online. Okay, which is maybe they shouldn't be saying it online. But you got to go through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff.

Like you have nine bad ideas and one good idea. And then in the book, you just go with the good idea and get rid of the bad ideas. You have to write all the boring parts to get to the end. interesting parts. No, it's right. You can't think about it because I'm on the project I'm working on now. It's like, oh, I want to say this. And then so that requires, I don't know, a week of research and find all this stuff. And then I'm trying not to think about the fact that my editor is probably going to tell me to cut it at some point. And like, I have to remember, though, it's not actually lost. Like, even if this paragraph gets distilled down into three words, that's a tag on the end of a sentence or whatever, I earned it. And it is there informing my understanding of the subject and the person and all that. Well, ideally, for me, if it's working, you want to be right on the edge. Yeah. Okay.

But the only way to find the edge is to go over the edge as Towns Van Zant taught us. I don't know if you know that story, but do you know that story? No. Which is he wanted that he was on a balcony at a party and he wanted to see how far he could lean back without falling off the balcony. And he realized the only way to really know is to fall off the balcony, which he then did. I was thinking there's a great passage in Hunter S. Thompson's that Hells Angels where he says something very similar about going over the edge on a motorcycle. Oh, yeah. I remember.

I just read that recently too. So basically, what I try to do is, like, because you get those people in your head, like your editor or imaginary editor, what's going to. So I, each day, I try to write something that I think will make my wife guffaw or recoil in disgust. Yeah. You know, try to get a reaction, you know, like get red on the mood ring. Yeah. So it's just a good exercise as a way to keep pushing yourself to what is uncomfortable to say. Yeah.

You know, and the idea is, you know, most of the writing happens in the rewriting anyway. Yeah. So I think the weird thing about a writer is it's like you're like a sculptor, but you got to like create the block of marble and then carve the statue out of what you created. But the first whole part of it is creating the block of marble. Right. I ended up putting in this paragraph of writing about this fighter pilot and I was like, I found every single pilot from his graduating class that died in an accident and how they died. And so that was like a lot. I had to go through newspaper.

article after a newspaper article and read obituaries and find their gravestones. I'm writing all this stuff. And it's like, I'm imagining this on the page, just getting an X through it. Yeah. And yet, I'm informed by the fact that this guy would have been aware of this graveyard of these ghosts following him. Right. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, but so a couple things. One is that kind of thing could be great. Yeah. I mean, it could be great. It's like, do you ever read the Ian Fraser book family. No. It's a great book.

He's a great writer. He's one of the best writers. And he's got this whole chapter, which was excerpted, I think, in the Atlantic, where he goes through every kid in every house on a street that he grew up in and says what happened to them. Wow. And it's like a x-ray of a society, of an American society. It's like, you know, so that could be like that.

I'm saying, like, don't be so quick to throw it out because it could be. It's like, when you're talking about the fates of a lot of different people, you're talking about a picture of a whole generation. Yeah. The second thing is this is like a danger when you're a nonfiction writer and you're doing research and you find something really cool. Yes. It's very hard to cut. I'm going through that right now. Yeah. So it's like you're like the dog with the bone. You want to show everybody the bone you got. And it's really hard to cut, man, because it's like I got something no one else got. Yeah. And now I'm just going to act like that didn't happen. It's like when I'm watching a lot of

NHL right now. And you see an incredible play, but nothing results from it. You're like, that's just gone. Yeah. There's no statistical record. They're not going to show. showed in a highlight, but it's the best pass I've seen all season. And that's kind of like the research that you end up cutting. That's 10 pages that you cut down to a sentence. And that's why I think about that Hemingway thing, because he does. He just cuts the chapter's whole cloth. But none of the other chapters could have been written without those chapters.

It's not like he wrote the book, then he wrote two prologue chapters and then cut two prologue chapters. It's like that's the scaffolding, and then you remove the scaffolding in the building's stands. I mean, all that's still there. It's like the ghost of it is still there. Exactly. And even if you don't read it, you can still feel it.

And that's what I mean, like, you got to go through the bad to get to the good. Like, not that it's bad, but that, you know, behind the story that you're reading is this other story that you feel. Yes. And a lot of times you're writing sentences in support of or the culmination of sentences that you've cut. So literally, it's there in the sentence structure. You can feel it. Right. I mean, that's all like the nitty gritty of it.

And it's really interesting. I really believe in, if you can take a 120,000 word book and cut it to 60,000 words, ideally whatever power was in that is concentrated. There's no fat. There's nothing extraneous. And it's all concentrated. Yeah. So I think there was a Hemingway quote because you're talking about Hemingway where he talked about wanting to concentrate everything,

boil it down to as few sentences as possible. And he said the only writer that he'd read that was better at that than him was Isaac Babel. And that's another huge writer for me, which is like Red Cavalry stories. And if you ever read any of that stuff, it's so freaking intense. Have you looked at the alternate endings for a farewell to arms? No, I've heard about them. I bought a copy of that book in an airport in Norway that, like, they were clearly trying to, like, add stuff. So they just, they included all the different paragraphs that he did in, like, different,

there was like ending number. It's got like 30 endings. It's like ending number one, two, three. And you realize just how many directions. he tried to get this thing. That was published after he died because he would have just never stopped vomiting. Yeah, but you can tell like it's it's like he's riffing all these different notes and trying it. And then he goes with one that's really good.

But some of them are close to being as good or better. Out of the ending is so great. Yeah. But I think that more. Like you can tell how he boiled it down to the essence and all this other stuff is there. Right. But it wouldn't be there had he not tried these other ways in. I mean, okay, first of all, you make me.

me think of two, he keep me think of two things. For some reason, everything you say makes me think of two things. I'm like Jimmy two times. Yeah. So the first is, again, Ian Frazier, he writes about, and I think his story about Brooklyn, he writes about seeing a page of a book on the beach, like at Coney Island or something, and he picks it up, and it's a page from Anna Karenina. Yeah. And just a random page, and he writes that in a great book, every page is great. Okay, so I always heard, you'll see how this is connected, that the movie Breathless, you know, the John Luca Darden movie. Yeah.

It's a great movie, French New Wave. And he turned it in, and it was kind of semi-conventional. And it was like, let's say, three hours long or something. This story might not be true, but it's what I'm using it because it's useful as a writer to think about. So the studio said this story, it has to be 120 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever. And you have to cut. And he couldn't do it. He just couldn't bring him.

He couldn't do it. So he gave it to an editor friend and said, you make the cuts. And the editor cut at random. I'll take 10 minutes off here, 10 minutes off here. And it became, this movie's famous for its jump cuts. Scenes start with no explanation. They start in the middle. And it turns out to be this kind of revolution in how movies are told.

Yeah. And it works because the movie's so great that every page is great, like Anna Karinina. You could pick Anna Karinna up at random and start reading it. And you wouldn't really need much more than that, you know? So my point is that Hemingway, like in cutting the beginning of Sun Alser Rising, even if he started five pages after that, it would have been great. Right, right.

And probably still be great even if you left the two pages. Yeah. It would have been a very funny joke about Benny Leonard. Yeah. The joke, which I heard is, how do you beat Benny Leonard? He's such a smart fighter. And the guy says, yeah, he's such a smart fighter. He's thinking all the time and all the time he's thinking,

I'm hitting him in the face. Yeah, also, though, there is something powerful about, like, there's something about Hemming, way where you think, and I found this on anything that you do that short, the reader thinks that they're reading quickly and they finish it in one sitting or two sittings or whatever because it's so fucking good. And it's because it's short. Do you know what I mean? Like they're like, oh, I burned through that book. It was incredible. And it's like, you burned through that book because it's half the length of a normal book. That's why you finish it on an

airplane because it was finishable on an airplane. Like, and so there is something just powerful about being shortened to the point. Yeah, well, that's that first story in another country, which, by the way, that book begins. This was a sentence. The first sentence got me, it's something like, I'm quoting from my memory, in the fall, the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. Okay, that's freaking Walker Percy. Yeah. That's detachment. That means the entire society is engaged in a war, and he's been injured out of it. And they've been going to it over and over and over again, and now he's not. Right. He's with the, he's with a few other people who are, and by the way, another thing, Hemingway is another person who's a prisoner of his myth, which is people have this

idea about what he is, and it's not what he is at all. Like, it's not what his writing is at all. And in that story, the soldiers about how all the other soldiers were war heroes. And he was a pretend war hero. And when they figured out he was a pretend war hero, like his medals were a joke. He had all these medals, but all they said was he showed up, basically. And there's another guy, the only guy he can be friends with is a guy who was injured before he got to see battle. So he doesn't know if he would be a hero or not. not so he could be friends of them. So, but it's, it's super, super interesting. And you also mentioned Hunter Thompson, who I think I did the last interview with Hunter Thompson. Did you know that?

No. So, you know, I was at Rolling Stone and Hunter had left Rolling Stone. He was in a kind of a fight with Jan Wenner who owned Rolling Stone. And Hunter was writing for Vanity Fair, which I also was writing for. Yeah. And Jan, I always saw, wanted to get Hunter in the magazine one way or the other. So he asked me to go out and profile Hunter as he is today. So I went out to Woody Creek, I wanted to Aspen. And Hunter was sort of like suspicious because Jan had sent me. I always think it's like, in Apococles now, he's like, you're a messenger boy sent by a grossly clerk to collect the bill, you know?

But I spent like about a week with him and it was not long before he killed himself. I felt like this was a guy that the myth of him had become so great that it prevented him from functioning. Yeah. You know, because he felt like he wasn't selfish enough. He felt like he kind of had to entertain people. And Hemingley writes about this too, about people showing up in Cuba and wanting him to be Hemingway and demanding he go out and get drunk with them and go fishing with them and he just needed to write.

Yeah. You know, and I really felt that that way about Hunter, too. So my point is that when you get down to what makes Hunter great, it's great. Yeah. He was a great, great writer. Yeah. His writing has been obscured by all the sort of fans who want something else from him, which is drugs or something. I always thought the drugs were a weird way to give him complete liberty in writing nonfiction. Well, I think the drugs ultimately destroy him and the work. I'm forgetting the name of a habit in there, that did. Did you read that Tim Devaney book about Hunter Sompson? It's about him as a political thinker, like a political journalist. And then you're like, when you think about him as the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas guy, not the guy writing the best, most insightful political commentary,

both sort of about America as a whole and the current political landscape of that era. Right. And that he was an astute sort of observer and critic of fascism, the American version of fascism. And then you think back and you're like, oh yeah, where does he go in, like, not only as Fear and Loving in Las Vegas about sort of the emptiness of the American dream, but he goes to that FBI convention. And he's like sort of perfectly caricaturizing that sort of figure of American authority in that time. Those are the

people that are, you know, the stooges of Jay Edgar Hoover and spying on Martin Luther King Jr. And, you know, and he had the magazine that he could write that led me. do whatever he wanted. And that's sort of the sadness about the death of magazines in some way. But the thing is like Hunter Thompson, like you're saying, the drugs kind of destroyed him. He felt like he had to deliver Hunter Thompson. Yeah. So like a lot of his great things, there's like the first two pages are all the Hunter Thompson stuff. And then he just gets into writing. Yes. And that's where cutting like the jump cuts is good. Like the cut the first three pages or whatever. Yeah. For me, the book that I like, the first book is the best, which is the Hells Angels.

Incredible book. And incredible. And it's, so you see. where Tom Wolf must have been hugely influenced by him because they were shared work, they shared material. He gave Tom Wolfe all the stuff, the reporting that became electric Kulet acid test. He gave him the tapes to the Hells Angels and at Ken Kesey's house. I did reread that recently. They asked me if I would write a forward to it and I was like, no. I was like, I'm not remotely qualified to write a forward to a Tom, Tom Wolf, a book that seemed insane. But rereading that, it just made, because I know a lot of the people in the sort of psychedelic space now.

Yeah. But now it's like all official and it's about research and healing or whatever. And you're just like, this is the same fucking bullshit clown show as it was, you know, then. Yeah. The book held up amazingly well. But no, there's a sentence in Hells Angels where he goes, myths and legends die hard in America because they prove to the average person that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet

final. Uh-huh. And then you're like, oh, that's, first off, an incredible line. And then it explains like, why are the Hells Angels famous? Why do tough Jews? Why do we hold up the mafia? Like, why do we drug dealers and the storylines and the arcs and the characters we love in rap music? Like, these are horrible people doing horrible things that if they were in your neighborhood or you knew them, you'd be like.

Or you were sitting next to them on a six hour flight. Yeah, you would want nothing to do with them. These are bad people doing bad things. But from a distance, you know, why do they feel? Why did we celebrate those, you know, John Dillinger and stuff? It's because it's like, oh, there's an untraditional path. Right. Well, it's because they represent kind of an underground.

Yeah. Which is everybody's kind of broken into the system and there's no other way and here's another way. Yeah. And it sort of suggests just knowing it's going on gives you a sense at a distance, like you say, of kind of freedom. Yeah. That somebody's not doing it that way. Yeah. It's beautiful from far away if you look close.

Yeah. It's, also a lot of the gangsters, like, because you mentioned tough Jews, they were really, they wanted to stand. They're all about the status quo because they're getting rich off the status quo. Yeah. It's interesting, like the hell's angels, because that's more pure. Yeah. Because that's not, I mean, it becomes a money-making thing, but it starts out as like, and it's, again, a PTSD thing.

Yeah. Which is all these guys that come back from World War II, I think, originally. And they don't, they're not quite ready to be Don Draper or whatever. They're not ready to have a nine to five job. Well, before that, World War I. It's the same, like, watch Boardwalk Empire and you're like, oh, it's the same. Well, that's Hemingway, too. I mean, that's the whole thing.

It's all, they're all veterans trying to get over. over what happened. So, but I think like the Hunter S. Thompson is and the Tom Wolfe is they just, they're kind of opposed to whatever's happening. Yeah. Which gives them a way to get some distance and to recognize it. So like to me, like the idea of being a writer, the whole idea is to be outside and to see it from a distance and describe it. And so much of like a lot of writing now feels like it's all about being inside. Yeah. Which is exactly where you don't want to be, man. Is it like it's much easier life, better way to be inside. But you got to try to get outside and by the way

you write about things and you think you have one opinion and then you write about them and your opinion changes by writing about them yeah if you want to go next door I got something I want to show you some books up