Chuck Klosterman on Writing, Being Wrong, and The Nineties

Ryan talks to author Chuck Klosterman about his new book The Nineties, the inevitability of being wrong, the value of simplicity, and more. Chuck Klosterman is a NYT bestselling author and culture critic. His books include Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; But What If We’re Wrong?; and Chuck Klosterman X, and two novels Downtown Owl and The Visible Man. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, ESPN, and more. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, appeared as himself in the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. In his most recent book, The Nineties, Chuck examines the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality of one of the most defining decades of modern American consciousness. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Go to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now. Sunday can help you grow a beautiful lawn without the guesswork OR nasty chemicals. F​​ull-season plans start at just $129, and you can get 20% off at checkout when you visit GETSUNDAY. COM/STOIC. As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Chuck Klosterman: Website, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Speaker 00

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is a beautiful day here in Austin, Texas. I just took my kids for their daily nap walk. I did about three miles this morning on our walk before breakfast. And then my wife was working here at the bookstore, the painting porch rearranged with furniture and stuff. So I took the kids for their nap walk, and we did another three and a half or so miles. But it's just that temperature before it's too hot in Texas. And so we are very much enjoying the spring.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  And I wrote this email for Daily Dad about the beauty of spring, but also the sense that another, every time you get to spring, it means another year has passed, which means another year, you don't get your kids at two, another year, you don't get your kids at age five. And so there is a kind of a bittersweetness to spring that I suppose my guest last week, Susan Cain, would have appreciated. But anyways, my guest this week is one of my all-time favorite writers. I have read many, many of his books. And I reached out through his publisher, who actually was the editor and publisher of the book that I wrote with Chris Bosh, Letters to a Young Athlete.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  And I said, could you please find a way to have me, to let me have Chuck Klosterman on, who's just one of my favorite thinkers and writers about music, about history, about pop culture, about sports? He's just... One of the most unique writers out there with a really unique voice, but I think it's not the voice, like the style is interesting, but that's not what makes Chuck Klosterman great. What makes Chuck Klosterman great is the perspective, the view, the uniqueness of the take that he has on pretty much every issue. And that's what makes him compelling and I think one of the best writers there in the world. And I will give you this interview with Chuck Klosterman, New York Times bestselling author many times over.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  His books include Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, But What If We're Wrong, one of my absolute favorites, we carry it here at The Painted Porch. Chuck Klosterman, ex, two novels, Downtown Owl and The Visible Man. He's written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, ESPN and more. He was the ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, has appeared as himself in the documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits. He was an original founder of Grantland with Bill Simmons. He's been in many 30 for 30s on ESPN, but his most recent book, The 90s, I quite enjoyed. My wife's book club here in Bastrop, Texas, part of the bookstore, is all reading it. So I've been seeing, it's been pretty funny to see in this small town, all these people carrying around this book.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  It's got a very iconic cover, but it's just a great book. And of course, the 90s are the decade I came alive. I was born in 87, so my earliest memories are of the early 90s. And as always, Klosterman just has an absolutely fascinating way to think about it, digest it, talk about it. Look, if you're looking for a definitive history of the 90s, a boring ass book like that, don't read this. If you're looking for the 90s as an excuse to explore a bunch of angles and perspectives and quirks and events and all of the things I think history is supposed to be there for, well, then this is a great book. And honestly, I wish I had another hour or two with him and I do hope to have him on

• 4:24Speaker 00

  because as soon as I finish, I was like, oh man, I have like a thousand other questions. So here is my interview with the one and only Chuck Klosterman. You can check out his new book, The 90s, absolute must read, carry it in the painted porch. So click the link in the page below and you can go to chuckklostermanauthor.com for his website and follow him @Cklosterman on Twitter. Enjoy.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  In the book, though, this is one thing that jumped out at me because they do appear once in the book, but only very briefly. So you, one of your definitions of the 90s is the release of Nevermind and the end of, and then, and then 9/11. That's like sort of a signpost of it. Could one, as a metal fan, also date the 90s as the release of Iron Maiden's Fear the Dark, the sort of last great 80s Iron Maiden album, although it's like 92, and then Bruce Dickinson returning to the band in 2000? And then, isn't it weird that there are no good Iron Maiden albums in the 90s, effectively, that this is this weird wash period?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's not what I anticipated you were gonna ask me about. I will say this.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Bet not.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  The Bruce Dickinson solo record with the song Tattooed Millionaire on it, that's a real good song. And that, in many ways, it, it actually sort of philosophically fits in to what was happening or would happen with grunge, in a way. Because what he's really talking about in a lot of ways are like guys on the Sunset Strip in the 80s who were like, you know, like Pre-Boy Floyd or whatever, these bands that like started with their look and then kind of became a band later. So even though it doesn't have any grunge elements to it, it sort of fits into the grunge sort of world. To, to, I guess you could frame the 80s around this aspect of Iron Maiden's career, although it's, it would be confusing to some, because I don't think many people associate Iron

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Maiden having a great 90s, you know?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Well, that's what I'm saying. They're conspicuously absent in the 90s.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, well, they was, but that was something that happened to a lot of bands from the 80s, where there was this, this wide-scale shift, sort of particularly in the way music was covered. That like, a lot of the groups in the 80s that had been huge, the music media did feel an obligation to sort of cover these out of sort of their commercial success, but also kind of showing their kind of distaste for, their discomfort with these bands that they did not see as artistically relevant. You know, it seemed odd that they, that they were massive and groups like R.E.M. were, you know, still kind of seen as like college rock or whatever. And then this shift happened. With Nevermind, where now the bands, the kind of band they had traditionally sort of

• 7:12Speaker 01

  supported was now as big as any band in the world. So they could kind of bury these other groups, even though a lot of them continued to have a surprisingly high degree of success. I mean, I always use Bon Jovi as the example of this. Almost every story about Bon Jovi in the 90s is about how they're over and this kind of remnant of the past and like it's almost embarrassing that they're still doing this. But they were still extraordinarily successful. I remember one weekend when I was working in the Beacon Journal, U2 was playing and Bon Jovi was playing the next night at Gondorina. And we had to choose kind of to cover one. And we selected U2 because PJ Harvey was opening and it seemed

• 7:55Speaker 01

  like just like the more meaningful thing. But U2 and PJ Harvey did not sell out Gondorina. Bon Jovi did with zero coverage, you know? And we just sort of acted like it wasn't that strange. It was like, well, this is how it is. I, Iron Maiden probably, it would be very, especially internationally, I would guess that they made more money in the 90s gross than they did in the 80s from their international touring success. But, you know, partially because of inflation, but also because they played continuously, you know? There, there, there is a lot of these things in the 90s that were really extensions of the 80s that were sort of forgotten for ideological reasons, even though they were

• 8:40Speaker 01

  still happening and still sort of having like a more success than the things that we thought were important. But I mean, like, you know, like I, I mentioned in the book, it's like, you know, Courtney Love is a real 90s figure. Okay. She's an essential part of thinking about the 90s. But for every record she sold, Shania Twain sold 14 roughly. And we don't really think, we don't think of Shania Twain as this 90s figure. In the same way, we don't really think of Garth Brooks as this 90 figure, 90s figure, even though we know that was one of the, you know, were the beast, these monster artists kind of, but they don't fit sort of the 90s caricature. So we just sort of act like, well, that was also happening, but not really.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  That is what's weird about Iron Maiden, who I love, is that, you know, they were sort of never popular, and yet they've sold like 100 million albums. Like, how is that possible? And yet to have a period in the 90s where they were sort of even less relevant, but kept going. And I think it's that the international thing that you mentioned is part of it. But then also this idea of there being these enormous subcultures, which the size of a subculture in the 90s would be mass culture today. The numbers that a subculture might do in the 90s would be a mass market event today.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, and also, using Iron Maiden as this example, it's like they had an interestingly bifurcated fanbase. Because on one hand, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, early Metallica, all these groups were seen as like the more serious version of metal, for more serious hard rock people. So if you, they kind of looked at bands like Motley Crue and Best of Pussycat and stuff, it's like, that's fake, this is the real thing. But then on the other end of that sort of axis were the people who liked Iron Maiden t-shirts and would wear like an Eddie t-shirt to, you know, to like a Veruca Salt show or something like that, you know.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  There was also, there was just like this, like, they had so many key signifiers of metal. Like, the things about them sort of became a way to sort of, I don't know, for like the dilettantes version of being into metal, because it was the most visually metal. But it was that middle chunk, it was like, well, you know, the music is like, it's not really what we're into, it's not really poppy enough, it was like, so, but they had like the most serious people and the most casual people.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Well, and that a subculture then would be more than just a thing you stream on the internet because you like it, but it also affects how you dress, you know, where you live, how you act, you know, that this, that a subculture then was so much, so much more inclusive and holistic than just like a thing you follow on Instagram.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, like, it was, there was a lot more, sort of, I guess, commodification of subcultures, because, you know, it's like if you were into, say, again, maybe an easier example would be goth music, okay? Unless you were, you know, an unusually rich 14-year-old, it's like, there's only so many records you could buy, and there was only so many pairs of black pants you can purchase, and there was only, you know, so it's like, once you sort of made those investments, it kind of stopped you from sort of having the kind of more kind of Catholic view of this. It's like, well, you know, my budget allows me to buy Sisters

• 12:14Speaker 01

  of Mercy, The Cure, and, you know, Nine Inch Nails, or whatever, and these two t-shirts and this poster. So I'm almost in this subculture by default. It's like, these are the things that I have, these are the things that sort of express my identity, you know, because when you're young, that's what you use these things for. And if you're limited to those items, that is the subculture you're part of, and you're going to gravitate toward people who have similar things, you know? Whereas now, because the way, you know, all subcultures are now kind of internet-based, it's much less limiting. Like, you know, and in a way

• 12:53Speaker 01

  that seems better. Like, it seems better that, that, you know, it's very, it's easy for a young person to have myriad interests that have, you know, no relationship, that they could have an Iron Maiden song and a Shania Twain song, you know, on their computer right next to each other. And yet, I do think that it also kind of erodes how important those things feel to the person. Because when, you know, you have this limitation, and you, is all you had, you know, I, I've mentioned this in a million interviews, but like, there was a long period of my life where I had six, and then seven cassettes. That's all I had.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  You know, and I would play them over and over again, and I would read the liner notes over and over again. And I was obviously getting things out of that music that the artists themselves were not putting into it. Because I was injecting basically my entire experience into, you know, Kiss Animal Eyes, and then hearing things from that cassette that there's no way that could have been there. But I feel really lucky I had that experience. I mean, certainly, if you would have given me the choice as an eighth grader, would you rather have these six cassettes or 60,000 songs? I would have said, give me the 60,000 songs. But I think I would be a totally different person if that had happened.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  I have been on a million podcasts over the years, and I've met the hosts of most of the big shows. And I would say one of my favorite people, and one of my favorite shows to go on, is The Jordan Harbinger Show. And I've known Jordan forever. I was just going back through my phone, and I found a text between him, him and I trying to link up at some talk I was giving in LA in 2012, when my first book came out. But The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the oldest and biggest podcasts out there. In 2018, Apple rated it one of its best podcasts. And he's had everyone you can imagine on the show, hostage negotiators from the FBI, mobsters, art forgers. And the interviews are great, because he

• 14:59Speaker 00

  has put in his hours, and he knows his stuff. I enjoy The Jordan Harbinger Show. I think you will as well. There's a lot to like. You can check it out at jordanharbinger.com/start for some episode recommendations. Or you can search for The Jordan Harbinger Show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And maybe start with my episodes, or Robert Greene's episode, and tell Jordan that I sent you his way.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Well, scarcity creates value. Not always the right value or values, but but abundance doesn't create the the connection the way that scarcity does.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, and it, it, uh, it.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I think it makes it more likely that these sort of secondary things become kind of closer to the person's identity, although there's a lot, a lot of things in society now that would suggest that I'm sort of wrong for, for thinking this. I mean, like this idea of like, you know, you hear about people saying parasocial relationships with TV characters now. Are you familiar with this, this idea that they, there's an individual on a television show, which they seem absolutely as a real person and that, that they've completely invested in how that character is sort of, uh, plays into the arc of the show and all of these things. You know, I, I, I think that that was always possible, uh, but

• 16:30Speaker 01

  people did not do that as much in the past as they do now. And it might be because it was seen as sort of something you would almost be, not maybe ashamed of, but would view as a weird aspect of your personality, like.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  But wasn't it also technically impossible, right? Because like you couldn't, you couldn't, you could only watch Seinfeld when it was on. You know, I remember when the Seinfeld DVDs came out in the 2000s and realizing how many episodes I had missed. One, because I'm a little younger than that demographic, but have even, even in reruns, it was like, oh, there's episodes that they're not playing in reruns or they've cut it in reruns in syndication and, and realizing that, oh, this is the first time it's literally been accessible by people to, to, to watch it at the level that you could have a parasocial relationship with the character.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  That's very interesting. I guess I thought about, I, I, I, I thought you were going to go in a different way. This is what I thought you were going to say. The thing is, is like, to me, a parasocial relationship essentially means you're thinking about the thing even when you're not experiencing it. So you're, you know, using Seinfeld as an example, you're, you know, you relate to Elaine. So you're thinking about Elaine even when you're not watching Seinfeld. The difference is in the past.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  That was basically the extent of that parasocial relationship. You thinking about it, maybe having one friend to talk to. Whereas now you could find a community of people who have, who would share this same sort of potentially unhealthy relationship with a fictional character. And your unhealthiness can almost kind of, you know, ricochet off each other. And you can actually start feeling normal. Like suddenly you can normalize the idea of being

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  uncomfortably obsessed with something. So I would have thought it was that, that the internet, but particularly social media, which sort of allows this to thrive, where in the past, the thing you're talking about, you just had to think about it, you know?

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm on Reddit, I follow like the subreddit about The Office. And they make this joke about like, have you watched The Office versus do you watch The Office? Because to those people, it's still on. Do you know what I mean? Like the universe is still, it's like this parallel universe that is, that continues to this day on this kind of infinite loop. Whereas a show in the 90s, it ran once and then yes, it ran in syndication, but you couldn't inject it into your veins or immerse yourself in the metaverse of the show on demand, the way that you can. So I just wonder if technology changes our relationship with the characters and with the groups or the bands in that way.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Like even let's say you get into a band today, maybe you actually have more information about them than you ever have before. But, but like, I don't know, maybe you get it out of your system faster or I don't know. It's, it is, I wonder how technology interplays with our ability, with our, with our relationship with the art.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Well, I, a huge part of it, I think, because, okay, the example you just used, right? So to me, if, if, let's say I decided that, uh, that I was, became obsessed with the band like Tame Impala and I just wanted to learn everything about them. I could get out of this podcast and do that really easily. Where in the past, before we got to this sort of shift, um, the, the amount of work one had to do to learn new things about bands was much harder. I mean, it was like, you know, there were, there were things everybody knew about Van Halen and then These things that if you were an obsessive person, you would look to find out.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And if other people liked Van Halen, they might actually come to you and want to know these things that you would learn. You became almost like the Wikipedia entry for the band. And I think that that made that knowledge feel more valuable. One thing that I've often noted was that like, okay, so when I worked in newspapers in the 90s, both in Fargo and in Akron, there was a common thing where there would be somebody at the newspaper whose job it seemed was mainly to remember odd things. Like it would be somebody on the copy desk and like you would go to this person, it was usually an older guy. In Akron, it was this guy named Mickey Porter, who's dead now.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  But like you'd be like, oh, hey, you know, there's this movie. And it was like, there was a Beach Boy in it. And at one point, the film dissolves and there's cars. And he'd be like, oh, that's Tulane Blacktop. And you'd be like, yes, that's what it is. Okay. I always sort of imagined I would become that person. As I got older, I would be the person who just kind of remembered all these things. But there's no need for that person anymore. The need for that is gone. Like, we have now a collective way to figure these things out. And it was, I do think one of the underrated things about how the internet has changed the way people live is that it has, to a degree, eroded the importance of memory, which when

• 21:47Speaker 01

  I was young, was essentially the core of being smart. A smart person was the person who remembered the most and knew the most. And if you were having a conversation about, you know, the 1970 Kent State shootings, if they knew the most, they were the person you listened to, sort of. And that has sort of been moved away. It's like, it almost seems, I think, to a certain kind of young person... Sort of idiotic to remember things. I mean, why would you, you know, it's hard to convince my son in a way. It's like to remember, you know, you got to learn the state capitals. But I can already tell as an eight year old, he knows I can find that in a second. So, you know, I don't, I don't like that. But I, the main reason I don't like it is just because it's different.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  And I can't say it's worse, might be better, but I don't like it.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  No, I think it's worse in some ways because if, if memorization or, or a knowledge of the, the facts themselves is not the thing that people are competing on, which is at least somewhat based in objective reality. We live in a world now where the competition, the scarcity is who has the hottest take on said issue or said fact. Right? So who has the most unusual point of view or controversial point of view? Or just plain insane point of view? So it's this sort of constant moving of the Overton window by like whoever is the most shameless or weird or fastest to the story. I, I think, you know, if the medium is the message in the nineties was the, the, or Postman talks about this.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  If the nineties was filtered through television, this, this era is Twitter, i- is filtered through the social media mechanism, which I think is a worse mechanism for what it elicits from people.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I mean, how much, how much rote memorization did you do growing up? Was that a part of your elementary school education?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  What are things that you had to memorize?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, state capitals, multiplication tables. I mean, I even like, you know, I was probably one of the last groups of kids that we did a lot of cursive writing. You know, like there was, it was preparing for a world in which computers were not.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  A guarantee, there was the computer room in the house, right? Or their computer laboratory in the school. It wasn't an integrated part of our existence. So I think I was one of the last generations where these were like separate bifurcated things. And, and then the generation after where those things are merged, suddenly what one is required to learn and how one is required to learn it changes.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it is interesting things. Okay, so I'm born in seventy two, most of my schooling was in the eighties. Okay, so we had to memorize the Gettysburg Address. We had to memorize the preamble to the Constitution. And because I was Catholic, I had to memorize like a shitload of prayers, right? Okay, that's about it. Even by the, even in the eighties, the idea was already sort of like, well, rote memorization, that's not really, you know, that's not critical thinking, you know what I'm saying? Then I read Bob Dylan's memoir and he said something just really fascinating, which is he's like, the reason he wrote, he writes such long songs with so many verses is purely for sort of like the, the, the, almost the practice or, or the requirement of memorization.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  And that he really sees the idea of memorizing things almost without any context as like a meaningful thing in itself, because that's like a almost a, a, a mental muscle or something one has to do. I, I do wonder, it's like, you know, there seems, it does seem sensible in some ways to get away from just memorizing lists of things, you know, isotopes in chemistry or whatever. It seemed odd that we had to memorize that stuff. But I bet it is valuable.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  I think it's just totally gone.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  When, when, I'm always jealous when you read biographies of, of people like the greats from the mid nineteen hundreds, eighteen hundreds, just the sheer amount of poems they had memorized that they could sort of pull, pull at a moment's notice is always sort of like, what? How? You know, it's like, I, I, I couldn't, I don't know if I could give you a, more than a couple verses of a couple of the most famous, almost cliche poems, but you know, you just have Churchill riffing, you know, some. 20 verses of a Kipling poem off the top of his head.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I know, yeah. I mean, I remember when I was at one age, I was like, I'm gonna remember, I'm gonna memorize this Robert Frost poem about stopping on the woods on like a winter evening. You know, because what these are, I think I know, it's also in the village. So I just remembered that I was like, I, at the time, I was like, at some point, I'm just gonna break out this poem and just say it somehow casually. I don't think it ever happened. Maybe this is the first time that I'm doing this podcast now. But yes, you're right. It seems like there was a period where that was a real common thing, where people just memorized poems, you know, and it's, you know, it's like you see an old movie and someone's like quoting Shakespeare or whatever, and you're like, that would never happen. And you're like, maybe it would actually. Maybe they would have did that.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Well, I have another 90s music question for you. What I liked about the book was the idea that there was, the boundaries of these generations are more porous than we think. But one song that stands out to me that I don't think of as a 90s song, but essentially is like, and you wouldn't, a normal person, I could just ask, but you probably know exactly when it's come out. Like, like, when do people think Freefallen by Tom Petty came out? You know, like, that song doesn't feel closer to Nevermind to me than to Fortunate Son. But it came out in 1989. That feels like a song that's been here for, I don't know. It feels like it's almost like as old as rock and roll itself.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  That's an interesting thing because, you know, Freefallen had a kind of memorable video. And by having a memorable video that's, that places it kind of within a certain window of time. Basically, it has to be in the middle of the 80s to the middle of the 90s. Basically, that's when videos like that were made.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  So, so, okay, can I ask how old you are?

• 28:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was born in eighty-seven.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  So eighty-seven, so, so in, in, maybe to you, I guess, in a way, it was sort of like when you started getting really interested in music, this is a pre-existing song in the same way something off Abbey Road would seem pre-existing. I guess that's always part of it, you know?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  That, you know, time feels different when you're that age. I mean, you know, I'm six years older than my wife, okay? It very rarely does it, does that six years ever kind of come into play, except, say, we talk about the first Oasis record, when I covered that as a journalist, working in the newspaper, and she was in high school. Then it seems weird. And I was like, I shouldn't be dating this person, she's too young for me, or whatever, you know? So, so like, but, but now, if we move six years into the future, so we move up to, you know, ninety, I guess that'd be like, you know, two thousand or whatever, something, a song from that period, it would seem almost like we had the exact same experience.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Tom Petty, though, you know, he always did seem a little bit older than he was, even to his peers. I mean, like, he was in the Traveling Wheelbarrows, and they were all seemed like remnants of a, of a much earlier time. I mean, the sixties, Jeff Lynne, to a degree, the seventies, you know, Ro Orbison, you could say, almost as a fifties person, you know? So he, he did seem older than he was. He looked older. He had sort of the sentiments and the mentality of an older person. You know, so that is interesting to me. I mean, I'm not, I'm not surprised that, that, that it feels that way to you, you know?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  It just feels like such a timeless song. It just doesn't feel like it has anything to do with the, the period. Even when you watch the music video, it's a very eighties, early nineties music video. And like, the first time, I probably heard the song a thousand times before I ever saw the music video, because I, I never would have watched it on TV as a kid. It, it's like, oh, this is like, the beginning of MTV, that's what this video is coming out. But the song, like, if you told me that it was popular during the Vietnam War, I'd been like, oh, that makes sense. Like, but it is weird how time, right before you, and then probably whatever time you sort of stopped caring about popular culture, it all just feels part of one amorphous, indefinite period.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Well, the other thing is like Free Falling is a pretty simple song and simplicity is the key to transcending time. I mean, like there are, you know, you listen to an early Beatles record, it sounds like kind of the early, you know, foundational period of rock. If you listen to their later records, they sound like, you know, you know, the apex of what was happening in music at that time. But if you listen to Rubber Soul and Revolver, I used to notice this in the 90s, that it was like, boy, this music seems so similar to what's happening in indie rock right now, or like with Oasis, I guess, or a lot of these things. And, you know, there are just certain times when somebody will hit on something

• 31:22Speaker 01

  without much ornamentation, like it's as straightforward as it can be. And those are the things that seem to become harder to place on the trajectory of time, because they kind of, simplicity kind of fits in anywhere. Whereas like, you know, a lot of, say, the earlier Tom Petty records, I mean, they sound like the time they were made in. I mean, like the way the drums sound and like the, the sort of like the, you know, it's, there's a real kind of crispness to the recording and there's kind of almost a clinical nature, the things are real separate, the instruments are real separate, more so than like that, you know, that record does, that song at least, could have come out at a lot of different times.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  No, that's a really interesting point. So if I'm trying to find my one connection in this conversation to ancient philosophy, as opposed to just nerding out about music, which is really what I wanted to do. What's fascinating, I don't know if you've ever read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, but what's surreal about this work, compared against essentially all other works of ancient philosophy, is that a normal person can just sit down and read it and make sense of what he's talking about, because Marcus Aurelius was writing a simple diary to himself, right? There was no intention of it being published. So none of the conventions of the time, none of the conventions of philosophy, none of this

• 32:41Speaker 00

  is infiltrating or influencing the work. It's just highly specific, but therefore you know. Universal, kind of in the way that really great comedy is timeless if it's based in the individual experience as opposed to making fun of what's happening in the world right now. Like Jerry Seinfeld's airplane bits don't work as well as the sort of, you know, other banal observations about the human experience. So you're right, I think simplicity is what allows something to stand the test of time because it's been boiled down to whatever the essence of the thing that's trying to be expressed.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know, like the second book I wrote was Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, and that was a lot about the 90s too. And when the book came out, the things that people gravitated to the most, it seemed like, or that's how it felt at the time. I would use sort of specific cultural examples that to the person felt shockingly recent, that they were like reading something in a book that is something that to them was like a new idea, you know. But of course, 20 years later, those are the things that make the book seem the least sort of, like, they're the things that kind of knock people out of the present, you know. And it seems like, well, this, some of these ideas, even if they're not necessarily,

• 34:04Speaker 01

  you can say, I guess, dated in a pejorative way, but just more so, it's like, oh, this, this reminds me that this is something from the past, you know. Whereas when I would just be talking about my life in that book, that seems to have the same resonance now as it did then.

• 34:21Speaker 00

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• 35:03Speaker 00

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• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like the proper nouns are sort of like an instant connection. It's like a shortcut, but there's like an expiration date on it, you know, because you you think Harvey Weinstein is the producer that people will always be talking about in in as the dominant producer. And then suddenly events change and now it has a very different perception.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  But it but there's two sides of it, I guess. Like, one thing like Kurt Vonnegut argued was that people would always say it at say in like a creative writing class or workshop, they'd be like, don't talk about technology. Don't talk about popular culture. Do not dead like that's a kind of a cheap form of writing. And what he said is that if you don't write about technology and you don't write about culture when you're writing fiction, it's going to end up like these Victorian novels where they don't talk about sex. And all anybody thinks about when they read those books are is this actually about sex? He's like, if you remove this constantly, if you remove technology from your book, all it's going to do is make people go like, well, how much of this is actually just a

• 36:33Speaker 01

  manifestation of what was happening with the telephone? It's not. Or what was happening with cell phones or whatever, you know? So I always do put that in my books. Not, I mean, I did anyways. I should I was gonna say like, not because of this. I did it anyways. And then I was real happy to find this quote, because it kind of made me like, oh, I'm doing it right. But you know, it's like a

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Okay, so my final music question, because I remember you talk about this in the book, I think, the idea of like, an album coming out, it being a big deal, there being, it's sort of critical reception mattering, the sort of speculation about what's in it. The last album that I remember that happening for was one I read your review of before it came out, which is you wrote a review of Metallica's St. Anger, which I remember coming out, I remember, you know, not having access to it until it was released, but I remember, I also, and I looked it up before we talked, I would not have dated it to 2003, I think

• 37:35Speaker 00

  I would have thought it was earlier, but that album sticks out at me as being not quite a 90s album, although Metallica was an 80s band, but they really hit it big in the 90s. What always has struck me about your review of that album, you said something like, "It's good for bands to experiment, but, and we should encourage it," but then what do you do when the experiment is awful, like when it goes bad? And that, I think you qualified it as one of the worst albums from a great band ever.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Because you're not talking about my review of the Lulu record, right? The Metallica?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  I might be conflating the two of them in my head, but I know I've read both of them, yes.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  St. Anger was the record that came out along with the movie Some Kind of Monster, the documentary about Metallica. Okay, so in many ways, that was a 90s record, because it took years to make that, and James Hetfield went away.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Right, interesting, sure, sure, sure.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  So like, in a little bit, that's why I like, I think in some ways, like Chinese Democracy is the last 90s record, because he was working on that all through the 90s.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  When did that even come out? It's like 2008, 2009? When did it come out?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it became a really, the worst possible time for, if it had come out 10 years earlier, or even 10 years later, the interest would have been much different. It really was kind of a later period. The record that Metallica made with Lou Reed, which I just, you know, I probably, maybe, if I went back and listened to the record again, maybe it would seem better to me, but one of the things that struck me about that at the time was... Throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s, I had just been endlessly told, and everybody had been endlessly told, that the biggest detriment to the musician, the rock musician,

• 39:28Speaker 01

  was the music industry. The music industry limited them, did not let them kind of pursue what their own sort of kind of wild fantasy wanted. You know, sometimes it did with like Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac. You'd let a band go in the studio for three years of just a bunch of money and cocaine, just let them do it. But for the most part, there was this idea that the music industry was dictating how long the song needs to be. This needs to be three and a half minutes. There needs to be a video. There needs to be a hook to this, you know, all these things. And that record that Metallica made with Lou Reed sort of shows what happens when those obstructions are removed, which is now because the stakes are different. There's less money on the line. There's less of an investment

• 40:10Speaker 01

  by the label and less potential money to be made. That there's no idea that you need to tour behind this. You actually now do have the freedom, if you're Metallica, to do whatever you want. What you want to do might be great for you artistically, but as a product for people, not good. You know, like that's like, they would, they would have never done that in 1993. Like, somebody would have said to them, hey, you know, it's like, you can do this if you want. It's a really interesting project, but you know, if you just do your normal songs about nuclear holocaust, that kind of like, you know, these kind of thrash prog songs, you know, you'll sell 27 million records and you can tour the world and stuff. And you know, let's do that. Let's get Bob Rock in here and do

• 40:53Speaker 01

  that, you know. So that's, that was interesting, you know, like, like, everything that, that, everything that's supposed to make things better, also make things worse, even if it does get better. Some things are going to be worse all the time. It's like, nothing is a solely net positive. I just, I really believe that.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  But I'm actually remembering what you said in the St. Anger review now, which is what I've thought about. You said, "Almost every good band has a bad album, but even those bad albums have some or at least one good song." And I think what's unique about St. Anger, which I remember being so mad about when I listened to for the first time, is there's almost nothing in it that has stuck as part of the catalog. Like even, you know, Atlantic City is on the best of Bruce Springsteen, even though most of the rest of the album isn't kind of in the Bruce Springsteen catalog. There's always like something that sticks.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  It's rare and terrifying, I think, to have a complete miss like that.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Well, it is a little bit rare because the thing is, if you become, you know, if you like a band, you like their best work. If you love a band, and if you really love a band, you tend to be very interested in their worst work. And if you really want to understand what the group is like or what the artist is like, a lot of times it's in like, you know, I'm a huge Kiss fan, right? So like Music from the Elder to me is by far their most interesting record.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  With, I keep mentioning Oasis, but like when I talked to Neil Gallagher, I wanted to talk about Be Here Now. I wanted to talk, you know, the failures sort of are what sort of allow you to understand what someone is really like. Now with Metallica, it doesn't really seem like that with St. Anger, partially, I think, because maybe the documentary that came with it is like the way to do that. Like maybe that in some ways can be seen as their artistic failure, even if it was kind of personally satisfying. The load records they made from the middle 90s, they seemed real bad to me when they came out. I think if I listen to them now, I think that I would be fine.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Like even if I didn't love the music, I would find it very interesting because it's always interesting when somebody achieves at a level of success that forces them to ask the question, well...

• 43:27Speaker 01

  How come this didn't make me happy? Like, how come I have the thing that my life is devoted to and yet I'm still fundamentally the same person? Which happens to almost every artist in almost every idiom. That, you know, whether they're a director, a musician, a writer, that at one point you just think, you know, early on, you want to write the book that you want to write, you know? And then you're like, well, I hope this book is successful. And as these things happen, there is this unconscious idea, maybe, that once these things are achieved, like, you will sort of unlock the way you want to feel about it. But that's not how it happens. And you got to ask these weird questions, like, well, now what do I do? And I think that you can see this a few times in Metallica's career.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, the funny thing about that documentary is that I think it's one of the best music documentaries ever made. It's fascinating. And I remember the big controversial thing about that documentary was that they hired, like, a psychologist to work with the band. And in retrospect, how ahead of its time that was. Now, every sports team, every person, every special forces unit, every hedge, I mean, there's a, that person is a character on the show Billions. Like, the hedge fund has a psychologist that works with the people to get the best performance out of them. I remember people really turning up their nose at them, thinking how strange that was,

• 44:51Speaker 00

  and then what a sort of accepted part of performance and sort of elite organizations that has become. But it was shocking to see in a documentary about a band.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Well, that acceptance thing you're saying, you could maybe argue that Metallica is the reason that happened to some degree. Because, like, that guy, he had worked with Rage Against the Machine. He had worked with, at the time, at the St. Louis Rams, I guess, the L.A. Rams now, but, you know? So, these things were happening, but... It was, I don't know, like, again, I don't think that necessarily, like, it wasn't necessarily an embarrassing thing to go see a therapist, but for a group like Metallica, it seemed very antithetical to what their fanbase sort of saw Metallica as, which is a group who did not need to talk about how they felt. It's like there, like, there was a sort of

• 45:49Speaker 01

  a straight ahead sort of vision of it's like, you know, don't tread on me, like, this is, like, we, the people you think we are, are the people we are. Within the band, the big controversy about that movie was the section of the film where Lars Ulrich sells all his art at, like, a Christie's auction for eight million bucks or whatever. And the other guys in the band were like, "Don't put this in there." It's like, you make, you know, if people don't like us, they're gonna hate this. And his argument was kind of like, "Well, I'm a person who collects art. I collect high-end art. This is how much money it costs to buy a painting at Christie's or whatever." So it was this idea that, like, I did a story

• 46:33Speaker 01

  for the New York Times Magazine about Metallica with this movie. And I'll say this, it was like, it was a great experience to interview them after this therapy. Because I had interviewed James Hetfield in the 90s, just kind of like, he was touring through Fargo, so I interviewed him. And he was a jerk, and uncooperative, and, you know, didn't want to be doing it, didn't want to, you know, all those things. I talked to him again after this therapy, he's a totally different person, because he had just been conditioned to hear a question and then just really sort of think like, "Well, what does this question mean to me? Okay, so I'm gonna answer what the question means to myself." That was really effective

• 47:17Speaker 01

  for interviewing. I don't know if they're still like that. It would be interesting to see if in any ways they've sort of drifted back. But from that period, when that movie was coming out, they were ready to emote.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Well, what I think haunts me about that album, and I think it, I don't know how old I would have been in, so I was like 16 years old when that album came out. So as a heavy metal fan, for a band, for a heavy metal album to have no guitar solos on it, it was like, what the fuck is this? How could you do this? Right? But I, I think what's haunted me creatively about it is like, you want artists to question the assumptions of the industry that they're in, or the form that they're in. And so the idea that we're gonna do a heavy metal, a heavy metal album, we're not gonna have guitar solos. On paper, that sounds like, sort of to go to your Lulu point, the kind of decision you want people to be thinking about. That's how boundaries get pushed. That's how the status quo gets

• 48:14Speaker 00

  changed. And then for it just to fail so catastrophically and not work, it's sort of like, I don't know, it's, it's both humbling and a little like terrifying to me.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so because I was doing a story on that band at the time that film was coming out, I think I saw the film three times. And there's a scene in this film, you'll remember it, where they're telling Kirk Hammett, the guitar player, we're not gonna have guitar solos. And he's sort of like, you don't want to have guitar solos because you think it'll sound dated. But if we don't put guitar solos on this, it'll be dated to this specific time. And every time that he, that happened, all three screenings, the crowd laughed, kind of. They was like, this is like Spinal Tap now. He sounds like Nigel Tufnell or whatever. He was completely correct. He was absolutely correct. You know, like, that it really shows a kind of repressant thinking from him. But he's basically saying, it's

• 49:06Speaker 01

  like, if we always use guitar solos, we don't on this record because that's unpopular right now. All it's gonna do is remind people that this is when the record came out. And he's right. You know, so now the question becomes like this simplicity thing we were talking about. For Metallica, I suppose, crafting songs without guitar solos was actually a less simple way to do it. Because it's outside of the way they'd always done things in the past. And perhaps if they had made that record the same way they had, you know, made Master of Puppets, or The Black Record, or any of those things, maybe when you listen to it, it would have, it wouldn't have felt the way it did to you.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  That's interesting. Well, you know, I think it's about, sometimes you realize that there are conventions or practices that are there for a reason. Like, I heard this expression that traditions are solutions to problems that we've forgotten about, right? And I remember I worked on this movie early in my career, and the person making the movie was like, you know what I hate? I hate movie trailers where all the good lines from the movie are in the trailer. So they made this movie trailer where they didn't put the best lines from the movie in the movie trailer. And he was thinking, you know, he's questioning this obnoxious, like, showbiz assumption. Well, it turns out, the movie flops horrendously

• 50:31Speaker 00

  because people watch the trailer and they're like, this movie looks like it sucks, right? Because it doesn't have any good lines in the trailer. And so sometimes, I think, we forget that the convention, as oppressive or annoying, or in some ways cliché as it might seem, is actually there for a really good reason. You kick it out, you've actually kicked out a leg of the stool that you didn't know was supporting more weight.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see. I think like what you're describing is, I think, a real common thing that happens, which, that a change is made, not because the person had an idea for what would be a better way to do it, but just a removal from the thing they don't think they like. I had a book come out in 2016, But What If We're Wrong? Okay, so we're making the audio...

• 51:19Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks. But I'm doing an audiobook for this, right? And I'm like, well, you know, I don't, like all people, I don't like the sound of my own voice. And I think that in some ways, that it, I would have been better off if I'd have never, ever spoken public in some ways, because people would just inject their own voice into the writing. But anyways, we're doing the audiobook, and they want me to do it. But I'm like, you know what? I don't, I don't want to do this. I don't, I don't like the way that is. Let's get a British woman to do it, because I love the sound of the way a British woman speaks, you know? And she did a great job, and yet...

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Anytime I've seen anyone write or discuss the audio version of that book, they have complained about the British woman reading it. And they're sort of, and they're like, it just, you know, it seems, and I didn't make that change because I thought, oh, it'd be great to do it this way. I didn't want to do something, so I kind of swapped that in. So like, I won't make that mistake again.

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• 53:26Speaker 00

  Well, I loved that book, and that was a question I wanted to ask you. So I actually have two questions. I'll do the easier one first. So what I love about that book and all your books is that you always have a very unique point of view on things, and you're often exploring things that maybe one wouldn't think that you would explore to understand that thing. So when you're writing the 90s, obviously, you talk about a lot of the big moments in the 90s, but then you also seize upon some moments that maybe one wouldn't think would be banner moments in the history of the 90s. So you sort of cultivated this ability to think about things differently, and that's the premise of what if we're wrong? You're sort of thinking about things that we take for granted. Tyler Cowen has this interesting question, and I loved you on his podcast. But he's sort of like, how do you practice what you do?

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Like, he's like, a musician plays their scales. Like, how do you get better at what you do? What's your version of playing scales? How have you? How does one cultivate that ability? And I, obviously, some of it's natural. But how have you gotten better at it specifically over the course of your career?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Hmm. Well,

• 54:36Speaker 01

  my honest answer kind of is like, it does seem like a natural thing. I mean, I don't know if that's arrogant to say that. I'm not sure. But it doesn't, it doesn't seem like something that I need to try or focus on. But, you know, I do think that, you know, just like the natural maturation process of becoming, you know, an older person helps because you, you learn new things along the way, you know? And also, you know, I suppose that having had so much of my life, or my, at least the career part of my life in public, and having so many people respond to it,

• 55:20Speaker 01

  that it probably does make you a little, like, the natural thing I'm talking about? Now it seems natural for me to think about my work and how it will be received as I write it, which I don't know if I, if I used to be that way. And, you know, even as I say this out loud, like, I don't, I don't love that. Like, I think, I think that it would be, in some ways, better if I was able to sort of not think about anyone else when I'm writing. But

• 56:00Speaker 01

  You know, it's a strange thing. It's like when I was younger, I couldn't write as well as I do now, and I wasn't as smart as I am now. Not that I'm brilliant now, but I was even dumber then, right? The thing was, the thing was, I didn't care about other people in the same way. And I just went for it. Like, I just, I didn't think to myself, kind of like,

• 56:27Speaker 01

  how can this work? How could this be misinterpreted? Which now is something that I'm almost just obsessed by when I'm working. It's like, how, not how will this be taken by someone who understands it, but what's gonna happen when someone misinterprets this? I didn't care about that when I was young. So now I'm better at writing. I've, like, structurally, for sure. You know, my writing is tighter. It's, there's less fat on it and all that stuff, you know? I'm aged, I'm a smarter person. If I could somehow combine, sort of,

• 57:00Speaker 01

  my emotional intelligence, or maybe my lack of emotional intelligence when I was young, with the person I am now, it would be ideal. But it's strange. It's like, as one thing improves, the other thing disappears. Now I'm much-

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Are you talking about self-consciousness? Is that, is that the vulnerability you're talking about?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Consciousness is the thing that kills art. It really does. It's like, you know, and, and yet, the process of being alive and trying to think critically about the world pushes your consciousness forward. Like, I'm more conscious of reality now than I have ever been in my life. And there is a detriment to that, though, in terms of being creative. Because it's just, you, you have to,

• 57:47Speaker 01

  you, you, you, you almost need to, to, sort of-

• 57:53Speaker 01

  I don't know, just, I don't, I don't want to misdescribe this or something, but it was like, it seems as though that the more I think about what something means, the less able I am to kind of comfortably illustrate that to other people. If that makes any sense.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  Well, I've noticed this, I've found that as I've written more books, each one is a little longer than the one that came before it. And I don't think it's that I'm getting long-winded or self-indulgent. Like, I do feel like I try to edit and I try to catch myself and I try not to get egotistical or, you know, like the sort of cliche of a windbag writer. But I found that like, when I go back and read some of my early work, I was letting myself get away with certainty or simplicity that like now I would never, I would just cringe at saying such a complex thing in so few words

• 58:56Speaker 00

  without the necessary qualifications or support or side notes.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  I mean, Tony, that's, it's a weird reality. People like polemics. They prefer, the consumer prefers to have someone whose opinions are almost too strong. Like, that the person just seems inflexibly certain about this. And for me now, like, I don't trust people who are like that. And I am very nervous to do that myself. So when I write this book, the 90s, it's a really interesting deal. Like, I felt that in many ways, I was almost like a pitcher only throwing fastballs and changeups. I was just coming straight down the middle. I was looking, I was trying to completely remove myself from the book.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  And in the sense that nobody would, I thought to myself or tried, that nobody would read the book and be like, well, this is his experience. You know, that was the books I wrote 20 years ago. This was, you know, trying to be like, well, I'm trying to just sort of be as balanced as possible. And as a response, as a result. It's almost like people think I was secretly doing it, or like I was trying to fool people or trick people, like I'm, like I'm actually trying to, to impose my personal worldview because I'm not saying it, you know? It's like, because I'm not transparently saying this happened to me, or this is what I liked, I must be in some way secretly trying to convince people that this is what I believe and what I think.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  It's just, it's, it's a tough, I don't want to say it's a no-win proposition, maybe it's like a completely understandable deal, but it's odd, the less I put myself into things I write seems to have no impact on how much people think I'm in it.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Well, I think it is a no-win proposition. I wrote this book about Peter Thiel and his lawsuit to destroy Gawker. And so it was like my book about media. So there was this, I had to like get off Twitter and I was like, I don't want, I was just like, didn't want to think about those people, like the, the people who I knew would read the book and have really strong opinions about it and tweet about it. And yet, when I look back and I'm most, the things I regret most about the book are the moments where I was thinking about what people would think I was writing, like where, it's not that I pulled my punches, but I was self-conscious. I was like, well, this will play this way, so I should do it this way. And so I, I, I, I regret those moments and those people fucking hated the book anyway.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  And then the people who liked the book didn't even notice that any of that was happening.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And what always ends up happening, and this is why I say self-consciousness is such a problem, is that it's, it, it, what it does is that it makes the person think like, well, okay, how can I mitigate this? And very often, the attempt at mitigation amplifies it. So I have this big section in the 90s book about Nirvana and grunge. And then there's a short essay kind of afterwards about Tupac Shakur. And now I have a footnote there where I sort of describe how I can understand how it can be perceived that, you know, I'm writing about this kind of, you know, this white guy from the kind of the, the kind of eroding world of rock. And then, and then I read about this hip hop guy from the rising world of rap, you know?

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  And yet one is smaller than the other. And I kind of, kind of just kind of described why though that I did this and like my thinking was. And that has actually made people more aware of it. That it would have been better if I, it would have been better if I just, now, part of me, my natural inclination is always to do stuff like that because I, I always feel as though, um, uh, like, I, if I, if, if I'm thinking of something, it means it's informing when I'm writing and I, I want, you know, the, the, that kind of self-conscious or self-awareness seems in the moment like the thing, the right thing to do, you know, and then it usually

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  is not. So I, I, you know, I, I don't know what to do sometimes, except just keep trying and keep failing.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  I have two more questions. Do you have time?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Sure. I've got plenty of time.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right. So to go back to being wrong and then I'll close with, with the nineties. But what, one of the things I took from that book that I just thought about the last two years is invariably there will be some things from the, and I guess this also goes to self-consciousness. There's going to be some things from the pandemic, uh, that, uh, turn out to have been totally wrong, right? That we just got completely wrong. Um, have you thought about what those things would be? And is it, it must be so tricky because let's, let's say us to use a, a Rove reference, the, um, uh, us in the reality-based community that generally have taken the science for what it is, who sort of listen to the instructions, we took the,

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  the pandemic seriously, not, and I'm not referring to the sort of conspiracy theorists or the deniers. You're sort of taking it, but then there has to be a part of you that also knows if, if the history is, repeats itself as it, as it always does, at least one or two of these big things will turn out to have been incorrect or based on, you know, insufficient information or it's more complicated. Applying your mind, what do you think that might be? Or have you thought about what that might be?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Well, I have thought about that and it's, it is hard to, to know because I think that because the science was consistently changing, um, there was sort of, you know, we, we hear this phrase, you know, with an abundance of caution or whatever. It's like, like the idea of taking the safer route was always perceived as being the, the like, the better of the two moods. Always like, you know, um, what I guess, I, I don't know if we'll ever know the answer to this, um, but I do wonder if prior to the vaccine, uh, if most of what was done,

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  um, ultimately had zero impact on the number of, of fatalities and, um, you know, and that it was kind of like, it was like the best sort of guess. But you know, I remember the, when it first happened and they were like, do not let kids play on outdoor equipment. It can live on steel for nine days or whatever. And it was like, even at the time, I was like, yeah, I suppose that there is some lab where in a perfect situation that kept, I just, it doesn't seem possible. I mean, I live in Portland, Oregon, it rains all the fucking time here. Like, there's no way, if, if COVID is all over this jungle gym, there's like, there's no way I'm not gonna get it. Okay. Like, you know, and I never did get it, or at least I didn't know. If I did, I didn't know.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Um, like I, I, in terms of like, big things, I just, I, I, I, I think that we may find out eventually is that, um, maybe the detriment to what it did to kids' education for that year is actually going to be greater than the detriment, uh, if the illness had passed through them. I, I also sometimes wonder if it like, what if it had been like 1918? And that would, that was our, this was our limits of, of, of sort of communication, technology and stuff like that. Would it have just sort of like? Just flew through the entire world populace and all of the things that happened

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  in the course of 18 months would have happened in two months. And it would have been really the same ultimate sort of effect, but it would have happened much faster. And that would have meant we would have returned to life faster, but that's not going to make that much difference. I mean, you have any thoughts on this? I'm curious.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think that would make sense because if you look at Omicron and you know, it's significant, it looks like the deadliness of the virus is going down, plus the treatments are getting better. You know, you're still getting thousands of deaths a day, right? So like, imagine if that level of spread was two years earlier and it all happened at the same time, what a catastr- like, like the hospital systems never ended up fully getting overwhelmed. They got close, but never got overwhelmed. But if that had happened in March and April two years ago, what the world would have looked like? I don't know if you can imagine.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, it's because the risk was like, you know, was so high and it was like, you know, and it was so unknown. It's hard to, to sort of, you know, I mean, it's easy to look back on these things and be like, well, I guess we shouldn't have done that. But it was like, no one really knew what was going on. And I, I think about a little bit about like with Y2K, when I read about that in the book, how during that period, you know, there was this, there was this constant discussions like, well, it's overrated. Oh no, it's huge. No, it's not going to happen. And then it didn't really happen. And some people said that, you know, well, this proves it was never going to happen. But then a lot of people are like, well, no, if we had not done all these steps, there, it would have really been a cataclysm.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  But yet there were, you know, like, like South Korea didn't do anything and they seem to have the exact same effect as everybody else, like for Y2K. I don't know what the right answer is.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's this kind of weird thing. Was it Keith? Someone who said like, the mark of genius is to be able to hold conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. And I think that that has sort of separated like the intelligent from the really stupid during the pandemic, which is the like, hey, we're probably wrong about a lot of stuff in what we're thinking about. And yet, it's the best information we have, so we should probably follow it. Do you know what I mean? Like, the ability to go like, hey, mate, you know, like, it seems people struggle with, like, masks probably work, so you should wear one versus, you know, they've been wrong about this, so they're definitely wrong about this, so I'm just not going to do it.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Do you know what, like, we've struggled with the ability to do that.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  It is. It's, you know, I always sort of went along with what the conventional thinking was the whole time, and I still do. It's like, whatever one's doing is sort of what I'm doing too, I guess. You know, now, does it seem like, does it seem possible to me that some of the most outlandish, maybe not the most outlandish ideas, but some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories that exist, not just about COVID, but about many things, could eventually prove to seem more reasonable than unreasonable? Absolutely. But you can't factor that into your worldview. Like, the fact that something

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  could possibly be true, you have to go with what is most likely to be true, even if you concede that sometimes you're going to be completely wrong about that. Like, you know, if it, if it turns, you know, it would be crazy if it turned out that 20 years from now, like, everybody who got the Moderna vaccine, you know, spontaneously had some insane thing happen to them. Like, that would be crazy, right? Like, is it completely impossible? I suppose it's not completely impossible, but it wouldn't stop me from getting the vaccine. I mean, I just, you know, you can't factor in every possibility as a reason not to do something, you know?

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like this, it's like when you study history, you realize that we're wrong about pretty much, we've been wrong about big things consistently throughout history. But if that informs your current worldview, you end up as like an idiot or a nihilist or something in between. It's like this weird thing where you have to like, accept that you're likely to be wrong. But if you throw out everything, you're definitely going to be wrong about a lot of things also.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, you know, it's, it's hard. It's just, it's, it's, it's interesting when the problem is small. It's real uncomfortable when the problem is big like this, you know? It's like when, if we're talking about small issues, you know, like it's, it's, it's fun to sort of speculate on this. And then when it's a real kind of truly sort of omnipresent thing like that, it's just, huh, I don't know. I don't know what the, I don't know what the proper reaction is, you know?

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

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• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  Well, so to go back to the book, which again I loved, you sort of marked the end of the 90s with 9/11 and you had this interesting sort of media analysis. You're looking at like the headlines of all the different newspapers the day before 9/11. And it was like, if my memory of what you were saying was that like, we all existed in these little individual, like, the people in Cleveland lived in Cleveland and they were focused on the news in Cleveland. And I grew up in Sacramento and I remember listening to morning radio in Sacramento about what was happening. And then 9/11 happened and then it's like suddenly we're all in the same boat. Like you look at the papers on

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  9/12, they all have the same headlines effectively, which is a weird sort of paradox of the 90s, which is that 90s were a mass culture generation. And then 9/11 was a mass culture event that unified everything into this sort of global singular news story. And yet, the time that came after is we all live in these fractured groups where we don't like, we don't even agree on reality, right? To go back to what we're just talking about in the pandemic, like you, it's this weird, I'm not sure what came out of it, but the unity of whatever, like, we're all following the same news and living in the same universe, that seems not to have held.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you know, I like, it's, someone could almost write an entire book just on the period right after 9/11 and what you're talking about right now. That would be a completely reasonable thing to write a 500-page book about, you know. So, so, yeah, the day before 9/11, like, I was looking at various newspapers across the country. And, you know, it wasn't that they were just covering local news. They were covering national news, but they had different ideas of what would be interesting to people, like, Detroit, the Detroit paper had something about Jimmy Hoffa. And like the Hawaii paper in Honolulu had something about the children's sex trade. And, and, you know, there was, you know, different places had, oh, there was one newspaper had stories about KFC moving into China. So even national stories, there was more of this idea that,

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  You could kind of pick and choose. Pick what make like we're here at this newspaper. We have a staff or we're here at the local news channel. What do we think is sort of important? And we kind of weigh this in this individual way. 9/11 happens and then all the news is the same for everyone, at least for a short window of time. Everyone's interest, everyone's talking about the same thing. Okay. And then we kind of move out of that period. And over time, what has happened is that culture has become more splintered. Right? So you'd think that you'd think that the result would be that these little localized pockets would have even more sort of a kind of unique or capricious ideas. But that's not what happens when culture splinters.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  When culture splinters, in order to cover it from a media perspective, you have to look for the handful of things that still seem to have residence across all borders. I mean, we talked about music earlier in this conversation. This is an easy example of this. Like now, if you want to cover pop music and you want to write about an artist that you feel that most people who see this will have some kind of relationship to, the number is increasingly small. It's like Taylor Swift, Kanye West. Ten people. Exactly. Okay. Because as things have been broken up into this, you know, to this huge spectrum of possibilities,

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  to connect with more than a small pocket of people, you have to, you know, just direct all your focus on whatever seems like the most universal. It's why the last episode of Game of Thrones, despite being watched by less people than an average episode of Seinfeld, felt like a bigger deal culturally than the finale of Seinfeld. Now, granted, the finale of Seinfeld was a big deal. It was like on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. It was on the cover of lots of magazines. Everyone's segment. But for the finale of Game of Thrones, it was discussed basically for a year before it happened. And the responses to it were still going on three months later because they felt, well, this is something most people know about. And it just is strange.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  It is like the more you break something up, the more essential the biggest chunk becomes.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  Well, it's like you think about the job of the person who has to pick who's going to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show, the number of artists that they can choose from is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because who is possibly going to appeal to 50 million people? There's not many acts that that fit that criteria anymore. Whereas in the 90s, there were probably many acts you could choose.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, although it's a little different in the sense that this, I mean, the Super Bowl halftime show is always used as this example. And like we were talking about Metallica earlier, it would seem to make a lot of sense for Metallica to play that show. But the idea, I think, is that the kind of person who loves football and is watching football anyways, probably also likes Metallica. So you don't really need to get that person. You're looking for the person who would never watch football otherwise. So that's why a lot of things like, well, Lady Gaga do it or whatever. Like, Lady Gaga did not seem to have like a natural relationship to the NFL. But you're, you know, the, the Super Bowl now has become this completely like, you know, this bizarre thing where I

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  covered the Super Bowl when it was in Detroit at Ford Field. And, you know, I'm there for the whole week and there's all this crazy stuff going on that's just kind of ancillary to the game. There's all these kids things. There's all these family things. There's all these musical events. And then finally on Sunday, like a football game happens. That seems exactly like any other football game when you're watching it. But everything else is different, you know?

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it's, it's like the need, you need things that have a draw now because nobody has, like you talked about this in the, in the book, like, people used to watch things because they were on, right? So the scarcity created a natural attraction. Whereas now you need things that bring, it's, it's, it's like the television form of virality. You need things that are going to draw people in or create conversation or make it bigger than it would be on its own. Because the thing itself doesn't have the power that it would have in a different technological and cultural environment.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  I mean, television was the most popular thing in America from basically 1950 on to the 20th century. And yet, it

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  It mattered less, it was what you watched when there was nothing else to do. Like you weren't going to a movie, you weren't going out, so you're gonna stay home and watch television. It was the best option when there was no other option, which was a lot of the time. Now, that thinking is kinda gone because I don't think that there is a belief anymore that people are ever in a situation where they have nothing to do. They can just look at their phone. Like people, like when you're waiting in line at the bank, if you still do it, you are not necessarily bored. You're looking on, whatever. So I think now the idea with television is that it's gotta have, it's gotta be offering people, frankly, the illusion

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  that what they are seeing is so important that they need to be engaged with it. It's not an optional thing anymore. You can't, you know, like I'm watching Severance right now, and there's this sense that you can't kinda casually watch the show. It's like either you're all the way in, or you're not in at all, you know? And that has really both elevated the content of television, but made the experience very, very different. Like, the meaning of what the television is now is different than what it used to be. And that's partially related to the content, but more to the experience.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the, I've been, as I watch those shows, and I've kind of just gone back to watching reruns of stuff that I like because I'm finding that it's all about, are the last 10 minutes interesting enough? Or do they create enough tension that you will let the autoplay feature roll the next episode? Right? So instead of like, hey, it's over at 30 minutes, come back next week. It's more like you're just a slave of this one feature,

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  which is trying to get you to binge-watch said show, and get to a point where you've invested enough hours in it that you want to make those hours pay off in some way.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Well, and to a degree now, because television got better, I think there's an unconscious idea that television, the experience of watching a TV show, is now more like the experience to watching a film. You saw this with the end of The Sopranos and really with the end of Lost, where was this idea that if this show doesn't sort of like, sort of tie together what the entire show has been about in a way that is satisfying, the show has failed. And this is, I mean, from now, it's a normal way to think, but it's incredibly new thinking. I mean, like, a TV show, like, say, WKRP in Cincinnati, the last episode of that show is like any other episode of the show. It's just the last one. They don't, there's no, there's no idea that we have to figure

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  out what these, like, are we going to imagine these characters living on forward, you know? Or like, like, or the end of the TV show Newhart, where it ends up that the entire show was a dream and he was actually still on the Bob Newhart Show. If someone did that with a television show now, there would be outrage that this thing that they had experienced in love was actually false, that somehow that, that, you know, like, if, if it turned out that, like, Tony Soprano woke up in the last episode and actually he was a normal garbage man who had dreamed that he had been this mafioso, people would have lost their fucking mind. Because it's like, they, because they watch these shows, Mad Men was the clearest example of this. I don't know if you watch Mad Men, but late in that

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  show, the character of Joan makes this kind of, this, this interesting decision, where it's like, she sleeps with a guy in order to get an account for the, for Jaguar cars. So she, you know, she, she has sex with this guy in order to get this account. And this show would run for quite a while when this had happened. So people who love that show were like, Joan would never do that. That is not how she would act. That's, you know, okay, well, first of all, if you go back and see the first episode of Mad Men, she totally would have. That person totally would have. But second of all, it's a fictional character. She does what the script says, okay? Like, whatever she, it's, it's, it's a bizarre thing in fiction. Like, in nonfiction and in life, we expect people to make decisions

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  they would never normally make all the time. Every friend you have has done something in their life that to you was a complete- Out of character. Yes, but in fiction, you can't do that. There can be no accents. I mean, that's why writing fiction is so much harder than writing nonfiction, because when you're writing fiction, everything has to fit together perfectly, even though we all know in life it never does.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was a, there was a story I saw a couple of years ago. I guess there was some moment in the office where John Krasinski's character was going to have an affair.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  And, and he refused to do it. He was like, my character wouldn't do it. And you can imagine the, what would have happened had he, had he done that, because those characters are effectively real to us, to people. And for one of them to betray the other, even in a fictional way, is unconscionable to the audience.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't even think, you know, I'm sure what he said is my character would never do that. But I think that's an understanding of the audience will not accept my character doing that. Like, you know, the audience for this show will not-

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  The actor won't ruin my career by doing it.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Yes. It will, it will change the way people think of every previous episode, where, you know, in the, in the, in the past, the idea of like a, of, I, I think there was often, you know, a desire for actors and actresses to have their character maybe kind of, you know, go bad or whatever, you know, become something different. And now it's like, no, we don't, we don't, we don't want that, you know?

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  Have you read Fahrenheit 451 at all since high school?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Not since high school.

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  You should reread it. I, I reread it for this thing that I did somewhat recently. And like, first off, it has a very, I, I had interpreted the book as, originally as a kid, that it was about government censorship, right? That like, the government's like, we don't want you to have access to these subversive ideas. Actually, it's more subtle. It's more about not wanting to offend people, like it wanted everyone to get along. But then the other part of it, which haunts me sometimes is, is, you know, the idea if I, she has like the wall of television on her, on her, the screen, it's like her entire wall of her house is those television screens, Montag's wife, and she's like-

• 1:26:09Speaker 00

  Like basically addicted to these stories, which is this sort of ongoing kind of fictional reality show. And then doesn't she have like, I think she has like headphones in like little white pods. It's, it's fucking trippy to think that actually Bradbury is almost perfectly describing the moment we're in. Put aside the political correctness, but just the, the thing you, you opened with the idea of this parasocial relationship that we have where these people are real to us and they, and, and we need them to do a certain thing almost as a numbing mechanism. So we don't have to exist in the chaos and unpleasantness of reality itself.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  I think it's really cool that you say that when you were a kid, you had this, you imagine what it was about because this is kind of an embarrassing thing to admit, but I will admit it. I think for a, a, a large chunk of my life, maybe until I was in college,

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  I rarely recognized subtext. I only recognized text. Like I would read books just as text, right? And here's what I have found. My memory of books that I read in sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th grade is still super high. Like I can still like, that like, I can remember specific scenes from like Richard Wright's Black Boy, whatever, in this kind of vivid way. And now it's like, I read only for subtext. And as a consequence, even if I kind of get the idea, the rest of it just kind of evaporates away. I'm reading Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads right now and it's great. And I've already forgotten parts of the beginning of the book

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  because all I'm reading it for is sort of like his take on faith. And like, does he have a real belief on what faith is? And like, is he the right person to be describing this? And do these characters seem realistic? And if they don't seem realistic, is that is on purpose? And yet the actual mechanics of the story, I think I'm not, I'm not absorbing the way like, you know, my favorite book of all time probably is Animal Farm. And it's really funny to me to think that the first time I read that, I must've read it only as text. Like, I was just reading about the animals and the problems the animals were having. And it's like, this is an interesting problem, you know? Because I didn't know anything about Russia or whatever, and I read that book.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, so I, I, but I wonder if the reason that I can still kind of like, like, I feel if someone gave me a quiz on that book right now, I'd do pretty well. Oh, like, I'm like, like, like, like, what happened?

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  And yet, if I read that book now, I'd be like, this is an allegory. Think about other things, think like, like, you know, think about, think about what it means. Like, you know?

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  Well, no, that kind of goes, it's like the flip side of self-consciousness, where instead of just being present and experiencing it, you're already asking yourself, what does it mean? Are they doing a good job? You know, it's like, you're, you're breaking the fourth wall yourself or something.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  And there's something about being a kid who doesn't understand any of that. So you're just actually fully immersively in the experience, and you can kind of only do that one time.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. And then when it's gone, it never comes back.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then I'm sure, being a critic, you're having to fine tune your ability to not do that, to think about all those other things. So that probably does suck a little bit out of it, too.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, maybe, maybe I'm being too broad. Maybe I was getting subtext from it, but it wasn't in this conscious way now, where, where now I just, anything I read or watch, even music I listen to, if I'm listening to the lyrics, to me, it's sort of like, what is the meaning of this that is not obvious? And yet, maybe what I need to do is focus more on the part that is obvious, like the straightforward part, you know?

• 1:30:03Speaker 00

  I love that. Well, man, this is so awesome. I'm a huge fan, and I love the new book, and I love What If We're Wrong? And I also love I Wear the Black Hat. I thought that was a great book, too.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. I appreciate you having me on.

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

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