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.

• 4:21Speaker 0

  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, Beyonce.

• 4:45Speaker 1

  Alright, so in the book, though, this is 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 uh 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 of 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 0

  Well, uh, that's not what I anticipated you were gonna ask me

• 5:31Speaker 1

  about. I will say this. I bet not. But

• 5:33Speaker 0

  the Bruce Dickinson uh solo record with the song Tattooed Millionaire on it, that's a real good song. And that in many ways, it uh 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 in the Sunset Strip in the 80s who were like, you know, a you know, like pre-boy Floyd or whatever, these bands that like started with their look and then kind of became a band later. Um so even though it doesn't have any grunge elements to it, it sort of fits into the grunge sort of world. I guess you could frame the 80s around um this aspect of Iron Maiden's career, although it's it would be confusing to sometimes I don't think many people associate Iron Maiden having a great 90s, you know.

• 6:22Speaker 0

  Um, I should be

• 6:23Speaker 1

  saying they're conspicuously absent in the 90s. Well,

• 6:27Speaker 0

  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, um, sort of as 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, um, you know, it seemed odd that they were massive and groups like REM 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 supported, um, was now as big as any band in the world.

• 7:16Speaker 0

  So they could kind of bury these other groups, even though a lot of them continued to have uh a surprisingly high degree of success. I mean, I I always use Bon Jovi as the example of this. Almost every story about Bon Jovi in the 90s is about how they were 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, you two was playing, and uh Bon Jovi was playing the next night at Gundarina, and we had to choose to kind of cover one. And we selected you two because PJ Harvey was opening, and it seemed like just like the more meaningful thing. Um, but you two and PJ Harvey did not sell out Gundarina.

• 8:02Speaker 0

  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. Um I I uh 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. Uh 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 still happening and still sort of having uh like uh uh more success than the things that we thought were important. I mean, like, you know, like a I I mentioned in the book, it's like you know, Courtney Love is a real 90s figure, okay?

• 8:52Speaker 0

  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 of you 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 that was when the tape, you know, were the 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 1

  That 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 a hundred million albums. Like, how is that possible? And and yeah, to have a period in the 90s where they were sort of even less relevant but kept going. And I think 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, a mass market event today.

• 10:03Speaker 0

  Well, I mean, and also you like uh using Iron Maiden as this example, it's like they had an interestingly bifurcated fan base. Because on one hand, Iron Maiden, you know, 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 Carew and Faster Pussycat and stuff, it's like that's that's fake. This is the real thing. But then on the other end of that uh sort of access were the people who liked Iron Maiden t-shirts and would wear like an Eddie t-shirt to, you know, uh to like a Verucca Salt show or something like that, you know. Um, there was also there was this 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 dilettance version of being into metal, because it was the most visually metal.

• 10:57Speaker 0

  Um, but it was that that middle chunk, it was like, well, 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.

• 11:09Speaker 0

  slash daily email.

• 11:11Speaker 1

  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 so much more inclusive and holistic than just like a thing you follow on Instagram.

• 11:32Speaker 0

  Yeah, well, I mean, like it was there was a lot more sort of, I guess, uh commodification of subcultures. Because, you know, it's like if you were into say, like maybe an easier example would be got music, okay. Unless you were, you know, uh uh 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, um, it it kind of uh uh stopped you from sort of having uh the kind of more kind of Catholic view of this. It's like, well, uh, you know, my budget allows me to buy Sisters of Mercy and the Cure and you know, uh 90 nails or whatever, and these two t-shirts and this poster.

• 12:20Speaker 0

  So I'm almost in the 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. Um and uh if if if you're limited to those items, that is the subculture you're part of, and you're gonna gravitate toward people who have similar things, you know. Whereas now, because the way you know all subcultures are now kind of internet-based, uh it it's it's much less limiting. Like, you know, and in a way that seems better. Like it seems better that that uh 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.

• 13:09Speaker 0

  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, 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 kiss animal eyes, and then hearing things from that cassette that there's no way they could have been there.

• 13:56Speaker 0

  But uh I 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.

• 15:24Speaker 1

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

• 15:37Speaker 0

  You know, and it it uh it I think it makes it more likely that these sort of secondary things uh 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 thinking this. I mean, like this idea of like, you know, you hear about people saying parasocial relationships with TV characters

• 16:07Speaker 1

  now. You're

• 16:08Speaker 0

  familiar with this, this idea that they there's an individual on a television show, which they seemed absolutely as a real person, and that uh that they've completely invested in how that character is sort of uh uh plays into the arc of the show and all of these things. And you know, I I think that that was always possible, uh, but 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 1

  if you were 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. Uh 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 watch it at the level that you could have a parasocial relationship with a character.

• 17:24Speaker 0

  Uh that's very interesting. I guess I thought about I I I thought you were going to go in a different way, because 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's 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, 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 would share the same sort of potentially unhealthy relationship with a fictional character, and your unhealthiness can almost kind of you know ricochet off each other.

• 18:12Speaker 0

  And you can actually start feeling normal. Like suddenly you can normalize the idea of being sure uncomfortably obsessed with something. So I 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 1

  Yeah, I mean, I I'm uh 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 can that continues to this day on this kind of infinite loop. Where a show in the 90s, it 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't. So I just wonder if technology changes our relationship with the characters and with the groups or the bands in that way. Like, even let's say you get into a band today, um, 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 I don't know.

• 19:28Speaker 1

  It's it is we I wonder how technology interplays with our ability with our with our relationship with the art.

• 19:36Speaker 0

  Well, it I a huge part of it, I think, because okay, the example you just used, right? So to me, if if if let's say I decided that uh that I was become obsessed with the band like Tame and Paula, 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 there 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 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. And and if other people liked Van Halen, they might actually come to you and want to know these things that you know you became almost like uh the Wikipedia entry for the band.

• 20:27Speaker 0

  And I think that that made that knowledge feel more valuable. Um one thing that I I've I've often uh noted was that like, okay, so when I worked in newspapers in the 90s, uh 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 in the copy desk, and like you would go to this person, it was usually an older guy uh in Akron, it was this guy named Mickey Porter, who's dead now. But like you'd be like, oh, hey, you know, there's this movie, and uh it was like there was a beach boy in it, and at one point the the film dissolves and there's cars, and he'd be like, oh, that's two-lane blacktop. And you'd be like, yes, that's what it is.

• 21:14Speaker 0

  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. Um it was I I do think one of the underrated um things about how the internet has changed the way people live, uh, is that it has to a degree eroded the importance of memory, which when 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.

• 22:00Speaker 0

  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 gotta 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, uh, I I don't I don't like that, but I main reason I don't like it is just because it's different. I can't say it's worse, it might be better, but I don't like it, you know.

• 22:35Speaker 1

  No, I think it's worse in some ways because if if memorization or or uh 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 play 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 90s was the the or Postman talks about this, if the 90s was filtered through television, this uh era is Twitter is filtered through the social media mechanism, which I think is a worse mechanism for what it elicits from people.

• 23:34Speaker 0

  Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, uh, you know, I mean, how much how much roast memorization did you do growing up? Was that a part of your elementary school education, your junior high? What are things that you had to memorize?

• 23:48Speaker 1

  Yeah, I mean, state capitals, multiplication tables. I mean, I even like, you know, I 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 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 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 0

  I mean, it is an interesting things. Okay, so I'm born in 72. Most of my schooling was in the 80s. Okay. So we had to memorize the Gettysburg Address. We had to memorize the preamble of the Constitution. And because I was Catholic, I had to memorize like a shitload of prayers, right? Okay. But that's about it. Even by the even in the 80s, the idea was already sort of like, well, rote memorization, that's not really, you know, that's not critical thinking, you know, 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 almost the practice or or the requirement of memorization.

• 25:16Speaker 0

  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 like a mental muscle or something one has to do. I uh I do wonder, it's like, you know, it there seems it does seem sensible in some ways to get away from just memorizing lists of things, you know, isotopes and chemistry or whatever, it seemed odd that we had to memorize that stuff. Um, but I bet it is valuable. Yeah, like it's totally gone.

• 25:47Speaker 1

  I think

• 25:47Speaker 0

  it's just totally gone.

• 25:49Speaker 1

  When when I'm always jealous when you read biographies of people like the greats from the mid-1900s, 1800s, just the sheer amount of uh poems they had memorized, that they could sort of pull at a moment's notice is always sort of like, what? How? You know, it's like I 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 in your shit. I know, yeah. I mean,

• 26:22Speaker 0

  I I remember when I was in 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, whose woodies are I think I know is also 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, and I don't think it ever happened. Maybe this is the first time that I'm doing this podcast now. Um 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 um it's you know, it's like you you see an old movie and someone's like quoting Shakespeare or whatever, and you're like, that would never happen. And then you're like, well, maybe it would actually. Maybe they would have did that the other.

• 27:07Speaker 1

  Well, I have another 90s music question for you. Is uh what I liked about the book was the idea that there was the boundaries of these generations are 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 free fallen by Tom Petty came out? You know, like that song doesn't feel closer to never mind to me than to uh Fortunate Sun. 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 0

  That's an interesting thing because you know, free falling 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. Um so like how okay, can I ask how old you are? Yeah, I was born in 87. So 87. So in to maybe to you, I guess in a way, it was sort of like when you started getting really interested in the 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. Um that, you know, time feels different when you're that age. I mean, you know, I'm six years older than my wife, okay.

• 28:39Speaker 0

  Um, it very rarely does it 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. Then I just like I shouldn't be dating this person, yeah. She's too young for me or whatever, you know. Um, so like, but but now if we move six years into the future, so we move up to you know, you know, 90, I guess that'd be like, you know, 2000 or whatever, a something, a song from that period. Um, it would seem almost like we had the exact same experience. Uh 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 Wheelbury's, and they were all seemed like remnants of a of a much earlier time.

• 29:29Speaker 0

  I mean, the 60s, Jeff Lynn to a degree of the 70s, you know, we're obish Orbison, you could say almost as a 50s person, you know. Um, 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. Um, you know, uh, so that that is interesting to me. I mean, I'm not, I'm not surprised that that it feels that way to

• 29:52Speaker 1

  you, you know. 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 80s, early 90s music video. And like the first time I probably heard the song a thousand times before I ever saw the music video, because uh I I never would have watched it on TV as a kid. If 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 stop caring about popular culture, it all just feels part of one amorphous uh indefinite period.

• 30:38Speaker 0

  Well, the other thing is like free falling, it's 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, um, they sound like uh, 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 without much ornamentation, like it's it's as straightforward as it can be.

• 31:24Speaker 0

  And those are the things that seem to become harder to place on the trajectory of time because they kind of because 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 drum sound and like the the sort of like the you know, it's uh 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. Um, more so than like that, you know, that record does that song at least could have come out at a lot of different times. Yeah.

• 32:02Speaker 1

  No, that's a really interesting point. So if I'm trying to find my one connection in this conversation to uh 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 Mark Surelius's Meditations, but what's surreal about this work uh uh 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 uh is in infiltrating or influencing the work.

• 32:48Speaker 1

  It's just highly specific, but therefore 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, uh other banal observations about the human experience. Uh 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 0

  Well, you know, I like the second book I wrote was Sex Drugs and Coco Puffs, and that was a lot about the 90s too. And then when the book came out, um, the things that people gravitated to the most, it seemed like, or that's how it'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. Um, but of course, 20 years later, those are the things that make the book seem uh the least uh sort of uh 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 you can say, I guess data read the pejorative way, but just more so it's like, oh, this this reminds me that this is something from the past, you know.

• 34:12Speaker 0

  Uh, whereas when I would just be talking about my life in that book, that seems to have the same. Residents now as it did then, you know.

• 35:28Speaker 1

  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 a in as the dominant producer, and then suddenly events change, and now uh it it has a very different perception.

• 35:50Speaker 0

  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 uh in like a um uh a creative writing class or workshop, they'd be like, don't talk about technology, don't talk about popular culture, do not 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 gonna 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 manifestation of what was happening with the telephone at the time or what was happening with cell phones or whatever, you know.

• 36:37Speaker 0

  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 then it kind of made me like, oh, I'm doing it right. But you know, it's like

• 36:50Speaker 1

  a

• 36:51Speaker 0

  sure.

• 36:52Speaker 1

  Okay, so so and uh my final music question, because I remember you you talk about this in 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, uh, the sort of speculation about what's in it. Um 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. Um, which I remember coming out, uh, I remember, you know, it, 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 I would have thought it was earlier.

• 37:37Speaker 1

  But that album sticks out at me as being not quite a 90s album, although Metallica was an 80s band, but it was 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 uh, and 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 quit you you qualified it as one of the worst albums from a great band ever. Oh,

• 38:09Speaker 0

  because you're not talking about my review of the Lulu record, right? The Metallica Legion. I might I

• 38:14Speaker 1

  might be conflating the two of them in my head, but uh I've no I've read both of them. Yes. Saint

• 38:19Speaker 0

  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 Headfield went away interesting to uh so like like in a little bit, that's why like I think in some ways like Chinese democracy is the last 90s record because he was working on that all sure. Okay.

• 38:44Speaker 1

  When did that even come out? This is like 2008, 2009. When did it come out?

• 38:47Speaker 0

  Yeah, it became out really at the worst possible time for it if he'd if he 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 the nature period. The record that Metallica made with with Lou Reed, uh, which I just you know, I probably maybe it if I went back and and and listened to the record again, maybe it would seem better to me. But one of the things that that that struck me about that at the time was throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s, uh, I had just been endlessly told, uh, and everybody had been endlessly told that the biggest detriment to the musician, the rock musician was the music industry, that the music industry limited them, did not let them kind of pursue um 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.

• 39:43Speaker 0

  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 by the label and less potential money to be made. Um, 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.

• 40:30Speaker 0

  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 and 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 that, you know. Um, so that's that was an interesting, you know, like

• 40:57Speaker 1

  yeah,

• 40:57Speaker 0

  everything that that everything that's supposed to make things better also make things worse, even if it does get better. Some things are gonna be worse all of a sudden, like nothing is a solely net positive. I just I really believe that.

• 41:12Speaker 1

  But I'm I'm actually remembering what you said in the St. Anger review now, which is what Chuck was, which is which is what I've thought about. Is 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 Saint 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, right? Like even uh, you know, um uh Atlantic City is on uh the best of Bruce Springsteen, even though most of the rest of the album isn't kind of uh in the Bruce Springsteen catalog. There's always like something that sticks. It's it's rare and terrifying, I think, to have a complete miss like that.

• 42:00Speaker 0

  Well, it is it is a little bit rare because the thing is if you become, you know, if you like a band, uh you like their best work. If you love a band, um, and if you really love the band, you tend to be very interested in their worst work. And if you 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 like, I'm a I'm a huge KISS fan, right? So like music from the Elder to me is by far their most interesting record. You know, uh with I keep mentioning Oasis, but like when I talked to Noel Gallagher, I wanted to talk about be here now. I wanted to talk, you know, you you the failures sort of are what sort of allow you to understand what someone is really like.

• 42:45Speaker 0

  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, I I they seemed real bad to me when they came out. I think if I listen to them now, um, I think that I would be fine, like even if I didn't love the music, I would find it very interesting because it's always interesting when somebody achieves it a level of success that forces them to ask the question, well, how come this didn't make me happy? Like, how come? How can I have the thing that I 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 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.

• 43:51Speaker 0

  And as these things happen, uh there is this unconscious idea, maybe that once these things are achieved, uh, like you will sort of unlock the way you want to feel about it. But that's not how it happens. Then 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.

• 44:13Speaker 1

  Yeah, I don't the funny thing about that documentary is that I think it's one of the best music documentaries ever made. It's fascinating. Um, 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 at every hedge fund. 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, and then what a sort of accepted part of performance and uh sort of elite uh organizations that has become.

• 45:02Speaker 1

  But it was shocking to see in a documentary about a band.

• 45:06Speaker 0

  Well, the 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, well, at the St. Louis Rams, I guess of the LA Rams now, but you know, so these things were happening, but uh it was uh I I don't know, like I can't, I don't think that necessary like it wasn't necessarily an embarrassing thing to go see a therapist, but for a group like Metallica, um, it seemed very antithetical to what their fan base sort of saw Metallica as, which is a group who did not need to talk about how they felt. It's like they're like there was a sort of a um a straight-ahead sort of vision of it's like, you know, don't tread on me, like this is like we the per the people you think we are are the people we are.

• 45:58Speaker 0

  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 like eight million bucks or whatever. Um and the other guys in the band were like, don't put this in there. It's like it's you make you know, if people don't like us, they're gonna hate this. And his argument was kind of like, well, I 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 for the New York Times magazine about Metallica with this movie. And I'll 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, uh, just kind of like he was touring through Fargo, so I interviewed him, and he was a jerk.

• 46:50Speaker 0

  And uncooperative, and you know, didn't 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, well, well, what does this question mean to me? Okay, so I'm gonna answer what the question means to myself. Uh that that was really effective for interviewing. I don't know if they're still like that. I 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 1

  Well, what what I think haunts me about that album, and I think it it I don't know how old I would have been in uh 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. Uh 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 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 changed.

• 48:16Speaker 1

  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 uh terrifying to me.

• 48:25Speaker 0

  Well, okay, so because I was doing a story uh 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 Tuffnall or whatever. So he was completely correct. He was absolutely correct. You know, you know, it like that it really shows a kind of a prescient thinking for him, but he's basically saying it's like if we always use but guitar souls, we don't on this record because that's unpopular right now.

• 49:15Speaker 0

  All it's gonna do is remind people that this is when the record came out, and he's right. You know, so um now the question becomes like the 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 1

  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 uh I heard this expression that traditions are uh solutions to problems that we've forgotten about, right? And uh I remember I worked on this movie uh early in my career, and and the 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. Um and he was thinking, you know, he's questioning this obnoxious like showbiz assumption. Well, it turns out the movie flops horrendously because people watch the trailer and they're like, this movie looks like it sucks, right?

• 50:36Speaker 1

  Because it doesn't have any good lines in the trailer. And so sometimes you I think we forget that the convention, as oppressive or annoying or in some ways cliche as it might seem, is actually there for really good reason. You kick out, you kick it out. You've actually kicked out a an a leg of the stool that you didn't know was supporting more weight.

• 50:57Speaker 0

  Yeah, I see. I think like what you're describing is uh like a 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. Um I had a book come out in 2016, um, but what if we're wrong? Okay. So we're making the audio. Yeah, thanks. Well, uh, but we're I'm doing an audio book 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 uh I think that in some ways that it it it it I would have been better off if I'd never ever spoken public in some ways because people would just inject their own voice into the writing. But anyway, if we're doing the audiobook and they want me to do it, but I'm like, you know what?

• 51:45Speaker 0

  I I don't I don't want to do this because 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 of a person speaks, you know. Um and she did a great job, and yet 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 and they're like, it just you know, it it it seems it seems, and and there, 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 swap that in. Uh so like I won't make

• 53:24Speaker 1

  that mistake again. Well, I loved that book, and that was a question I wanted to ask you. So I actually have two questions. Uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 just sort of thinking about things that we take for granted. Tyler Cowan has this interesting question, and I loved you on his podcast, but he's sort of like, how do you practice what you do?

• 54:13Speaker 1

  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 0

  Hmm. Well my honest answer kind of is like it it does seem like a natural thing. I that's I don't know if that's it'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 I do think that uh, you know, just like the natural maturation process of becoming uh uh 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 that it probably does uh make you uh a little uh like the natural thing I'm talking about.

• 55:22Speaker 0

  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 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 it I think that it would be in some ways better if uh I was able to sort of not think about anyone else when I'm writing, but you know, it just 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. Um 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.

• 56:11Speaker 0

  And I just went for it. Like I just I I didn't think to myself kind of like um uh how can this work, how could this be? Misinterpreted, which now is something that I am 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. Um, you know, my writing is tighter, it's there's less fat on it and all that stuff, you know. I'm age, so I'm a smarter person. If I could somehow combine sort of my emotional intelligence, or maybe my um the my lack of emotional intelligence when I was young with the person I am now, it would be ideal.

• 57:07Speaker 0

  But it's strange. It's like as one thing improves, the other thing disappears. Are you talking

• 57:14Speaker 1

  about self-consciousness? Is that is that the vulnerability you're talking about? Consciousness is the thing

• 57:20Speaker 0

  that kills art. It really does. It's like, you know, and um 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 uh you have to uh uh you you you you almost need to sort of I don't know just I I don't I don't I I don't want to misdescribe this or something, but it was like it it seems as though that uh the more um I think about what something means, the less able I am to kind of comfortably illustrate that to other people, if that makes sense.

• 58:16Speaker 0

  Well,

• 58:17Speaker 1

  I've I've noticed this uh 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 without the necessary qualifications or support or side notes.

• 59:02Speaker 0

  I mean, that's like the it's a weird reality. People like polemics. They they they 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 uh for me now, like I 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 is 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 the book, and in the sense that nobody would, I I thought to myself or tried, but nobody would read the book and be like, well, this is his experience.

• 59:52Speaker 0

  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. Uh it's just it's it's a tough that I I don't want to say it's a no-win proposition. Maybe it's like a completely understandable deal, but uh it's odd.

• 1:00:40Speaker 0

  The less I put myself into things I write seems to have no impact on how much people think I'm in it.

• 1:00:48Speaker 1

  Well, I think it is a no-win proposition. I I wrote this book about Peter Thiel uh and his lawsuit to destroy Gawker. And so it's 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 I was 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 I would, 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 regret those moments, and those people fucking hated the book anyway, and then the people who liked the book didn't even notice that any of that was happening.

• 1:01:36Speaker 0

  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 it 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 um 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 the you know, this white guy from the kind of the the uh kind of eroding world of rock. And then and then I read about this a hip-hop guy from the rising world of rap, you know, uh, and yet one is smaller than the other, and I kind of kind of just trying to describe why though that I did this and like what thinking was, uh, and that has actually made people more aware of it.

• 1:02:34Speaker 0

  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 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 the that kind of self-consciousness or self-awareness seems in the moment like the thing, the right thing to do, you know, uh, and then it usually is not. So I I you know, I I don't know what to do sometimes except just keep trying and keep failing, you know.

• 1:03:14Speaker 1

  All right. So uh to go back to being wrong, and then I'll close with with the 90s. 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 pan, and I guess this also goes to self-consciousness. There's gonna 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 use a uh a rove reference, the um uh us in the reality-based community that generally have taken the science for what it is, you sort of listen to the instructions we took the the pandemic seriously, not and I'm not referring to the sort of conspiracy theorists or the deniers.

• 1:04:03Speaker 1

  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 0

  Well, I I have thought about that, and it's it is hard to know because I think that because the science was consistently changing, um, there was sort of, you know, you we'd hear this phrase, you know, with an abundance of caution or whatever. It's like like the idea of taking the the safer route was always perceived as being the the like the better of the two moves. Always like, you know, um what I guess that 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 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 them when it first happened, and they were like, do not let kids play on outdoor equipment.

• 1:05:20Speaker 0

  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 it kept, but 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 the if 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 it. Um, like I I in terms of like big things, I just I I I think that what we may find out eventually is that um maybe the detriment to what it did to kids' education for that year is actually gonna be greater than the detriment uh if the illness had passed through them.

• 1:06:12Speaker 0

  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 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 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, I you do you have any thoughts on this? I'm curious.

• 1:06:54Speaker 1

  Yeah, I don't think that would make sense. Because if you look at Omicron and 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 catastrophic. Like the hospital systems never ended up fully getting overwhelmed. It got close, but that never did happen. 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

• 1:07:34Speaker 0

  imagine. The risk was like, you know, was so high. And it was like, you know, and it was so unknown. It's hard 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 uh 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 that there was this constant discussion, like, well, it's overrated. Oh no, it's huge. No, it's not gonna happen. And then it didn't really happen. And some people said that, you know, well, this proves it was never gonna happen. Um, 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. And but yet there were, you know, like South Korea didn't do anything, and they seem to have the exact same effect as everybody else.

• 1:08:25Speaker 0

  I uh for Y2K. I don't know what the right answer is.

• 1:08:28Speaker 1

  Well, it's this kind of weird thing. I was it Keith, someone who said like the 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 uh, you know, uh they've been wrong about this, so they're definitely wrong about this, so I'm just not gonna do it. Do you know what? Like we've struggled with the ability to to do that.

• 1:09:16Speaker 0

  It is, it's it's uh, you know, I I always sort of went along with what the conventional thinking was the whole time. And I still do. It's like if what everyone's doing is sort of what I'm doing too, I guess. Um, you know, it now does it seem pot, 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, um, 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 could possibly be true, you have to go with what is most likely to be true, even if you concede that sometimes you're gonna be completely wrong about that.

• 1:10:05Speaker 0

  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 uh the Moderna vaccine, uh 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 1

  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 world view, you end up as like an idiot or a nihilist or some something in between. It's like this weird thing where you have to like accept that uh 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 0

  Yeah, I you know, it's it's hard. It's just it's 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 if we're talking about small issues, you know, uh, 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 just huh, I don't know. I don't know what I don't I don't know what the proper

• 1:11:36Speaker 1

  reaction is,

• 1:11:37Speaker 0

  you know.

• 1:12:43Speaker 1

  Well, so so to to go back to to the book, which again uh I loved you you sort of marked um the the end of uh the 90s with 9-11, and you you had this interesting sort of media analysis, you're looking at like the headlines of all the different newspapers uh the day before 9-11. And it was like if my memory of what you were saying was that like uh 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 would 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 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 uh 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?

• 1:13:53Speaker 1

  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 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 0

  Well, yeah, you know, I 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 yeah, that's 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 uh paper in Honolulu had something about the children's sex trade, and and you know, there was uh you know, different places had uh there was one newspaper had stories about KFC moving into China. So even national stories, there was more this idea that um you could kind of uh kind of pick and choose.

• 1:14:57Speaker 0

  Pick pick what would make like we're we're here at this newspaper, we have a staff, uh, or we're here at the local news channel. What do we think is sort of important? And we 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

• 1:15:19Speaker 1

  period.

• 1:15:20Speaker 0

  Um, 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. 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.

• 1:16:09Speaker 0

  It's like Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Beyonce, exactly. Okay, because as things have been broken up into this, you know, to this huge spectrum of possibilities to connect with more than a small pocket of people, you have to you know, just direct all your focus on the 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 in the cover of lots of magazines, everyone was talking about, but for the the finale of Game of Thrones 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.

• 1:17:07Speaker 0

  Um it just is strange. It is like the the the more you break something up, the more essential the biggest chunk becomes.

• 1:17:16Speaker 1

  Well, it's like you think about the job of the person who has to pick who's gonna 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.

• 1:17:40Speaker 0

  Well, yeah. Although it's it's a little different in the sense that this I mean the Super Bowl halftime show is always used as this example, and they're 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 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 love, 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 uh I covered the Super Bowl when it was in Detroit at Fort 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.

• 1:18:31Speaker 0

  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

• 1:18:44Speaker 1

  else is different, you know. 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 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 gonna draw people in or create conversation or make it bigger than it would be on its own, uh, because the thing itself doesn't have the power that it would have in a different technological and cultural environment.

• 1:19:26Speaker 0

  I mean, television was the most popular thing in America from basically 1950 on to the 20th century. Um, and yet it 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 on and watch television. It was the best option when there was no other option, which was a lot of the time. Um now uh that thinking is kind of 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 are looking on your phone or whatever.

• 1:20:12Speaker 0

  So I think now the idea with television is that it's gotta have it's gotta be offering people frankly the illusion 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 kind of casually watch this show. It's like either you're all the way in or you're not in at all, you know. Um, and that has really both elevated the content of television, um, but made the experience uh 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 1

  Yeah, I think the and I was I've been as I watch those shows, and I've 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. Um so instead of like, hey, it's over at 30 minutes, come back next week, it's more like you're just the slave of this one feature uh 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 0

  Well, and to a degree now, because television got better, um, 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. Whereas this idea that if this show doesn't um sort of uh like sort of tie together uh what the entire show has been about in a way that is satisfying, the show has failed. Um and this is I mean, from now it's 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 out what these people are like, are we going to imagine these characters living on forward, you know, or like like or the end of the TV show New Heart, where it ends up that the entire show was a dream and he was actually still on the Bob Muhart show.

• 1:22:38Speaker 0

  If someone did that with a television show now, there would be outrage that this thing that they had experienced and loved 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. I the Mad Men was the clearest example of this. I don't know if you watch Mad Men, but late in that 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 uh 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.

• 1:23:24Speaker 0

  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 this bizarre thing in

• 1:23:45Speaker 1

  fiction.

• 1:23:45Speaker 0

  Like in nonfiction and in life, we expect people to make decisions they would never normally make all the time. Every friend you have has done something in their life that to you was a complete. Yes, but in fiction, you can't do that. There can be no accidents. 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 1

  Yeah, there was uh there was a story I saw a couple years ago where I guess there was some moment in the office where John Krasinski's character was going to have an affair. Yes. Uh, 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. Um, because those characters are effectively real to us, uh, to people, and for one of them to betray the other, even in a fictional way is unconscionable to the audience.

• 1:24:46Speaker 0

  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. I

• 1:24:58Speaker 1

  won't ruin my

• 1:24:58Speaker 0

  career by doing

• 1:24:59Speaker 1

  it.

• 1:25:00Speaker 0

  Yes, so it will change the way people think of every previous episode. Where, you know, in the in the uh in the past, the idea of like a of 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.

• 1:25:23Speaker 1

  Have you read uh Fahrenheit 451 at all since high school? Not since high school. 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 uh 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 you know, the idea if I she has like the wall of television on her on her uh the screen, that it's like her entire wall of her house is those television screens, uh, Montaug's wife, and she's like basically addicted to these stories, which is this sort of ongoing kind of fictional reality show.

• 1:26:15Speaker 1

  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 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.

• 1:26:48Speaker 0

  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 um, this is kind of an embarrassing thing to admit, but I will admit it. Um I think for uh a large chunk of my life, maybe until I was in college, I rarely recognize subtext. I only recognize text. Like I would read books just as text, right? And here's what I have found though. My memory of books that I read in sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth grade is still super high. Like I can still like that, like I can remember specific scenes from like Richard Wright's Black Boy or 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. It just kind of evaporates away.

• 1:27:34Speaker 0

  I'm reading Jonathan Franson's Crossroads right now. And it's great. And I've already forgotten parts of the beginning of the book. 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 it on 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 have 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.

• 1:28:26Speaker 0

  Like, you know, it's like, so I I uh, but I wonder if the reason that I can still kind of like I feel if someone gave me a quiz on that book right now, I'd do pretty well. Oh, like I'm like a like what happened in this scene. And yet, um, if I read that book now, I'd be like, this is an allegory. Think about other things. Think about like, you know, think about think about what it means. Like, you

• 1:28:49Speaker 1

  know.

• 1:28:50Speaker 0

  Well,

• 1:28:50Speaker 1

  no, that kind of goes, it's like a 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. Yes. 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 0

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

• 1:29:24Speaker 1

  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 0

  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 now I just anything I read or watch, even music I listen to, if I'm listening to the lyrics. Uh 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.

• 1:30:02Speaker 1

  I love

• 1:30:03Speaker 0

  that.

• 1:30:03Speaker 1

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

• 1:30:13Speaker 0

  I

• 1:30:14Speaker 1

  appreciate

• 1:30:14Speaker 0

  you having me on.

• 1:30:15Speaker 1

  All right, well, cool. Oh, I forgot to tell you, I have a I have a Bo Jackson story for you. If you have two seconds, okay.

• 1:30:21Speaker 0

  Let's let me

• 53:51Speaker 1

  loved you in that in the in the 30s-30. So the day before my first son was born, I was at this dinner. I got invited to a dinner at Lance Armstrong's house, and Bo Jackson was there, and I was sitting next to Bo Jackson, and I I said something like, Hey, I might have to leave, like my wife could go into labor at any moment. And Bo Jackson goes, Have you thought of a name? And I was like, I think so, but I'm not sure. And he was like, Well, Bo's a nice name. And uh I wonder if I if I should have named my if I should have if I deprived my son of a lifetime of cool stories by not naming him after Bo at Bo Jackson's suggestion.

• 54:30Speaker 0

  Well, you know, Bo's not Bo Jackson's name. Bo is short for nickname Boar because he killed a boar when he was a little kid with a rock. So they started calling him Boar, and then it got shortened to Bo. So it's like what he's basically saying is name your kid after a name that is not mine, name it after the name I got for killing a dog a pig, you know. It's like, you know. That's like a weird thing on his part, you know.

• 54:11Speaker 1

  It is. I thought Bo Holiday is just a weird name, so I I couldn't, I couldn't do it. Uh he sounds like a baseball player, though.

• 55:04Speaker 0

  Bo Holiday does sound

• 55:05Speaker 1

  like

• 54:22Speaker 0

  a baseball player.

• 54:23Speaker 1

  That does. That's a baseball. That's a very southern name. That's a so that's a nice southern name.