Author Philipp Meyer on Channeling History, Philosophy and Failure into Art

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1:30Welcome 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, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:23Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. So you know about the Painted Porch. We've talked about it a bunch of times. Well, the Painted Porch has expanded in a cool way. We built out a podcast studio. For most of the pandemic, we did the podcast remotely and that was cool, but there is always something special about doing it in person. So we built out this amazing studio here in Bastrop and you are going to listen today to the very first in-person episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. By the way, we also launched a new YouTube channel where you can watch these episodes, youtube.com slash Daily Stoic Podcast.

3:07If you've been following us on YouTube, this is another channel to add. You can watch these episodes. I think there's obviously something there to watch as well. There'll be clips on social as well. But as I was thinking about who I wanted to bring out in the first episode, as we were finishing up the studio, I was in Florida. I was at the Barnes & Noble in Destin. And I came across this book called The Sun, which I have raved about on the podcast before and in the reading list email by this writer, Philip Meyer. And it's this epic Western. I think it's better than Yellowstone. It certainly came before Yellowstone.

3:46It's set in Texas. It captures a whole swath, multi-generations, not just of the family, but of American history and Texas history. And it's just brilliantly written. It's riveting on every page. And I thought, man, I want to meet this guy. This is a great fucking book. And so I reached out to another podcast guest, S.C. Gwynn, who I thought might know Philip. He did. I read Philip's other book, American Rust, which I loved. Both of these have been turned into television series, one on AMC, one on Showtime. And I said, Hey, do you know, Philip, would you connect us? And he did. And it turned out Philip and I had a ton in common.

4:30Both love Texas, both outdoors people, both love writing. And he came out and had the first conversation and it was an awesome conversation. He was great. He was very patient as we worked out some of the kinks, but I think you're really going to like this episode. You will love both these books. Philip signed a bunch of copies. So those are in the Painted Porch. I'll link to them in today's show notes if you want a signed copy of American Rust or The Sun. But look, I won't belabor the intro on this conversation. Listen to it, as you're doing right now. I think it's worth watching. Stay tuned for clips on social.

5:06The new YouTube channel is youtube.com slash Daily Stoic Podcast. Follow the other channel, too. You can see it there. Um, when, when, as I was thinking back on our intro, we, we sort of opened, we're talking about the sort of great tragedy battle of American history against, uh, between the native first peoples and the settlers and the pioneers and the pilgrims. Um, it's a, when I say it is a great tragedy, it is a great tragedy. It's more than a great tragedy. It's also a great crime. So I don't know, I don't remember exactly how we opened the conversation, but I don't want anyone to think that I am not very well aware of that.

5:48And actually, I'm talking in the justice book that I'm writing now, you know, how a powerful group or country or individual treats those that it ultimately comes to have power over, how it honors its commitments to people who don't have the mechanisms to necessarily enforce those commitments. This says a lot, if not everything, about who those people are. Seneca talks about clemency, obviously, in his famous essay. One of the analogies I make in the Justice book is the treatment of America and its indigenous people versus this brief moment after the Second World War where America is the only nuclear power and it offers to turn those nuclear weapons or explores even handing those nuclear weapons over to the UN.

6:42It does not unilaterally use that power, except in the moment to end the Second World War. Restraint, dignity, respect, decency, humanity. These are not themes you will find necessarily in the sun, but I think that's the moral lesson in the book. And I just didn't want any sort of, as we were getting set on the show, as we were talking about, I didn't want anyone to misconstrue my comments. But here is my interview with the great novelist Philip Meyer, author of American Rust and the Sun, two books I've absolutely raved about. And I think you will absolutely adore listening to. Here we go.

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9:13Yeah, you're the very first, so thank you for coming. Great, thanks, man. And then this, this was a barbershop. Yeah. And it had been a barbershop since it opened in the 1800s. Yeah, Bastrop's one of the older towns in Texas. Yes. I think – well, they call it the oldest historic town in Texas. No, I didn't know that. It's not actually that, but 1830s, I think. Yep. And yeah, this – like so the three buildings, this one and then the bookstore and the record store, they were all built around the 1880s. But this one, when it was opened, it was a barbershop. Right. And it was a barbershop up until we did not kick anyone out.

9:52The owner, John, this was John's barbershop. He had been in. I was talking to him. I go like, how long have you been in here? He's like, oh, like I think I opened this place in like 69. So he'd been in here for 50 years. Wow. And then he passed away. And then we were like, what do we do with the space? I don't – I wasn't ready to carry on the tradition of being a barber. there were no there were no there were no takers yeah uh and so here here we are now it's a podcast studio no but but it is a it is a historic town and that's i mean like the first first page i folded in here i was like oh shit this book is based i picked up your book randomly at a barnes and noble in destine florida and um i'm reading it and then it's like bastard like but your book was set partly in like a very historic Bastrop.

10:44Like when this was like a frontier town, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why did you choose Bastrop? It was just historically correct. Yeah. I mean, I think we think of like the, of the West as being, you know, cowboys, Native Americans. But the line of settlement was always changing. Yeah. Basically, it was constantly changing. So the line of settlement for probably 200 years was where I-95 is on the East Coast. So, and then it gradually kind of moved West. And the weird thing about America, at least as far as we know, is it really was settled by, I want to call it settled, conquered, whatever you want to, however you want to think about it, by like citizens.

11:24It wasn't really settled by an army. Yes. There weren't really many military actions. At the very end, there were, you know what I mean? Sure. Like the Sioux and stuff. And so Bastrop was just an area that, because of the river, got settled pretty early here. The Spanish had kind of pushed up through Latin America and Mexico. And then they got to modern-day Texas and even northern Mexico. And they just kind of couldn't hold on to it because the Native American tribes were a little too tough. Yeah, in your book and then in Sam Quinn's book, you sort of realize obviously what America did to the first peoples is a sort of abomination.

12:03But then you kind of realize as you really dig into it, it wasn't America that did it so much as it was Americans. Like individual people, now the spirit that, you know, innovates or creates things, that energy was just towards going out into unexplored lands or dangerous lands. Exactly. And they were a lot – so it was a policy in that it was – it wasn't disagreed with or it wasn't stopped. But at the same time, it wasn't – yeah, it wasn't the army pushing the frontier outwards. Yeah, it was. Or the state itself. But individuals. Correct. And it was mostly poor people. Yeah. Because it was dangerous to do.

12:49So it was mostly not – I mean there are areas where you have like some very wealthy – you know, the equivalent of a tech billionaire now trying to settle some area, but usually it's people who are very poor because it's very dangerous. It's insane. It was like bringing your family to live in like the worst neighborhood, you know, that exists now in like Syria or something. And people got killed. And the land is cheap for a reason. The original, because you're going to die. Yeah. And your family's going to die. And what you saw in Bastrop was that poor folks moved here, quote unquote, settled the land.

13:24and once it was safe, you had the sort of upper class moved in and they always used lawyers and they would challenge the title. They'd be like, oh, what's up? You've been here for 20 years with your family. There's an issue with how the deed was written. You made a mistake when you signed this. So your title's not valid and worth taking it. And that happened across the West, basically. You'd have working class, economically lower class people move to an area. up, the area would become safe, and then you had, like, basically the wealthy would come in and, like, build a big plantation out of it.

14:00It's funny because I was reading in the New York Times today, there's a piece on South Congress. Yeah. And they're basically describing a, obviously, much less violent version of the same phenomenon, which is, it was a terrible, dangerous neighborhood in Austin. Yeah. There was, like, a gang of bank robbers that operated out of South Congress. You know, it was run down. It was terrible. and a bunch of people moved in, interesting shopkeepers, restaurateurs, entrepreneurs, et cetera. And then it became cool and popular. And now your rent is up. The process of gentrification, which we call it today, is actually a pretty timeless thing that goes way, way back.

14:41And have you read Olmstead's book, A Journey Through Texas? Yeah, that's a very good book. There's a passage in it where he goes like, he's quote someone who's like, Austin's too expensive these days. Like in the 1850s, you know, and you're just like, people just have been doing the same thing in the same places for basically thousands of years. I'm correct. Yeah. And even, even the Native Americans, if you look at Texas, the history we have before Anglos come here is most, is written down by mostly Spanish missionaries. We've got about 300 years. We know that when the Apaches came in, they pretty much wiped out all the other local native tribes brutally.

15:24And then the Spanish were afraid of them. And then the Apaches started to get scared and no one really knew why, because I mean the Spanish were like a little, they were very religious. They were probably kind of some of the worst of the colonists. They would make everyone convert to Catholicism. The Spanish were really not that great. It was the French had a lighter touch. They didn't make people convert. They tended to intermarry, yada, yada. And so the Spanish start reporting, hey, these Apache are really scared of something. They're scared of the Comanche. Comanche come in and wipe out the Apache in this area.

15:57So this kind of process just happens again and again. And you look at North Texas and the Panhandle. There are these tons of old stone ruins that are at least 2 ,000 years old. They date back to the time of Christ. There's tons of pottery up there. We don't know what were those people doing, who wiped them out. Yeah. Because those are civilizations that don't exist anymore. Sure. So, I mean, the history of human exists, really of all human beings, is like one civilization getting wiped out by another, by another, by another, or just dissipating because the resources run out. I'm just working on this project for someone, and we were sort of looking at this kind of rhythm of events because, you know, we think us humans are so sort of central to these things, and we're not.

16:39And we were looking at the, you know what a bristlecone pine is? And like there are bristlecone pines that saw, that lived through all of it, right? There's like the oldest tree in the world is in Southern California and it's like 5 ,000 years old. And you're just like this tree, you know, it's still, it's probably like this tall. Like because they grow so slow and so twisted. They got to grow at high altitudes. Super high altitudes. They basically only grow where there's nothing else because they don't want to compete for resources. They grow slow. They're ugly. They get twisted by the wind. But, you know, it's like, yeah, we're thinking of like human history as being central.

17:18But then there's also these sort of, what do they call them, witness trees. You know, like the idea that rise and falls of not just like native peoples and then white people and then, you know, the six flags of Texas or whatever. But it's also just like multiple waves and generations of native peoples that were doing the same thing to each other. Absolutely. This is what humans do. It's what humans do. Yeah. And it's hard to figure out like morally how do you process that. Okay. People of European descent, they had better technology. They won the war. The data is pretty good that they were not any more brutal.

17:56I mean that the tactics really weren't any different. There were more of them. We weren't susceptible to diseases because all of our ancestors had been wiped out by those diseases so many times. What happened here, it's not like Europeans had never gone through that. They also watched millions of people die, wither on the vine, helpless to stop it. I mean, if you look at like the Neanderthals, as I understand this, were kind of the first group of homo sapiens to leave Africa 500 ,000 years ago. They settle Europe completely. They settle most of the northern hemisphere. And then there's a second wave 450 ,000 years later that are our ancestors who go and wipe them out, even though they're basically like cousins, more or less.

18:46And this is just something that's been happening forever, literally for a million years. No, it is an interesting question. At what point are civilizations morally culpable? And then at what point do you judge the past, not judge the past? It is tricky. I mean, I think the – just so people don't think we're sort of this nihilistic, like nothing – I think the problem – to me, where you hold sort of the settlers accountable is that they violated their own standards. Yeah. You know what I mean? They said, you know, they would pass treaty after treaty and then not abide by – Correct. You know, I think it's – but that is the interesting clash of the civilizations is like one sort of had a set of moral principles that it had developed over, you know, since the Enlightenment or whatever.

19:38I guess some of this is even pre-Enlightenment. But you have this sort of Western civilization principles. Yep. And then it comes here. And they have their own set of principles. But they can't really communicate with each other as to where these things are in conflict with each other. They're trying to pass treaties or make arrangements and they're just – they just exist in totally different conceptions of reality. Even down to like I'm negotiating with you for ownership of a piece of land which the person on the other side of the transaction doesn't believe that they even own or that it can be owned.

20:11Right. Yeah. Yeah. This is – it's a big problem. And if you're trying to figure out like the morality of it, it may be just that in the end, there's a part of us that just wants to hate the winners, which is kind of reasonable. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. And there's a part of us that especially in this – in our culture, we want to root for the underdog, which is – that's kind of reasonable. Yeah. Um, and it just isn't the, the, the, when you study Native American history, you have to get super granular because like every area had 50, 200, 5 ,000 different tribes, bands, language groups.

20:50And when you start talking about Native Americans broadly, I mean, it's freaking nuts. It's like probably less accurate than talking about Europeans and Asians as if they were sort of culturally identical, you know, the West. I mean, yeah, it's pretty tough to figure out. You can sort of look at individual actions and judge them. That's where you can say this thing that was done was wrong. This breaking of this treaty was wrong. But it's tougher to figure out who's responsible other than giant historical forces, you know? Well, that's what's interesting, I think, about the book and a lot of those characters, which I think the son is really a look at those kinds of people.

21:34Because you could take the colonel and put him in different eras. That person has always existed. Today he would be a tech baron, a disruptor of some – like so you realize that even if you come down and say that the overall historical force was unquestionable or unstoppable, Right. There's still these individuals inside that. Yeah. And those individuals were psychopaths or insatiably ambitious or impossible to satisfy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what put – like, you know, as you said, it wasn't the normal people who were happy with what they had. Yeah. That headed out towards – Yeah. I've even realized that living out in the country myself.

22:17You realize like, why am I in this like argument with my neighbor? And then you go, oh, we both chose to live out here because we didn't want neighbors and we're not good at dealing with neighbors. Right? And so you realize like just the – it selects for a type of person that is naturally going to have trouble, you know, dealing with X, Y, or Z or applying ordinary logic because that's not how they operate. Yeah. And like who accumulates a ranch that's 50 sections or whatever it was in the book where you're like, that's not – That's not a normal person. Yes. Yeah. And it's not – it's like who becomes a billionaire?

22:58You can become a billionaire quickly now in certain ways. Usually it's not normal people because most people have values other than making money. They have a value of family and friends and having meaningful experiences. And most people, if they get to some certain – they make 20 million bucks, which is a huge amount of money. they say this is enough yes i'm gonna hang out with my family and friends and i'm gonna spend this money yes and i'm gonna enjoy my life but there's another type of person who's like why am i gonna stop here yes and well i think or they think that if i make more money i'm gonna be happier something's usually missing from their psyche to um yeah the stoics talk about how like being under your own power is the most is the greatest form of power and you realize how many powerful people actually are not that.

23:43There's something in them that will never be satisfied, that never has enough, that can't accept this or that. And those are the, like you think, you mentioned Elon Musk, like, right, why didn't he stop after the first company, the second company, the third company? Because that's not who he is. And you realize that that evolutionarily makes sense. That's what propelled us across oceans and took grave risks. You don't get there if you're like, this is good enough, but the bug is a feature. Correct. That's, yeah, and I think there's some, this may be an old cliche now, but something that most, if you look at almost all American presidents, a lot of them either had, or at least recently had either like very strong domineering fathers or they had no father at all.

24:26Yeah. There's a healthy relationship with your parents is not necessarily a feature of people who become president. Yes. And you're like, why is that? Okay. Well, because you have a need. inside you that will never be filled. And you think maybe my dad will approve of me if I just get elected president. I was like, nope. I was just writing about this for something recently. It's like, okay, it's, I think it's interesting how casually we try to convince our kids that they should be president, right? We're like, you should be president. And then you go, what you're telling your kid is that there is a one most powerful person in the world and they deserve to be that person.

25:01What you're skipping over is the enormous weight of that. and the fact that pretty much all of literature is a warning against that from the Greeks down, you know, it's that it is a terrible burden and it usually warps or changes the person fundamentally, right? And so we're just like, yeah, you should do that instead of like what most art is like. I think the sun, for instance, ultimately you're not like, I'd love to be in that family. You're like, you know, that's not the family that you want to be in. And they seem rich. There's this great line from Seneca that says, poverty isn't having too little, it's wanting more.

25:43Yeah. We're not being glib about actual poverty, but the point is you could be very rich, but if you need more, you could have, if you, as the character does in this book, you could have an enormous ranch. But if what you covet is your neighbor's ranch, you don't have an enormous ranch. It's not big enough. Yeah. And that's pretty typical. Like you're saying these people who were, I mean, who in some ways drive innovation, you know, the feature. And then the bug side of it is that whatever they get, they're never going to be happy. Yes. Like nothing is going to make folks who have that mindset happy.

26:17They'll never be satisfied. This is why Tom Brady can't retire. He switches teams. Like you're on the greatest team in the history of sports. Why does he leave? You know, there's something about him that wants more and more. Yeah. And then, you know, you could judge that choice, but it's what propels him to another team. and then he wins again. So you're like, ah, you see why this works. But this is also why he can't retire after that. I mean, what's he going to do? This is his identity. He spent his entire adult life chasing something. And I've noticed, yeah, I sort of spent my entire adult life up to my late 30s going after one thing, being a writer.

26:52And once I got it, I was suddenly like not quite sure what to do. And then finally I was like, I guess I'm just going to keep doing this. So I actually tried to join the military. I tried to join the special forces. I sort of started looking around for some other thing. And I think that there's just something, once you have a sort of goal, what if your identity is that I'm going to chase this goal and then you never quite get it because it's very hard to be a writer, you know, whatever. When you suddenly get it, you find that, oh shit, I thought that like, I thought it would fix me. I thought it would fix me.

27:26Yeah. Maybe part of my motivation is that I actually just liked having a goal I couldn't get. Yeah. Yeah. And for Tom Brady, I guess it's a little bit different, but. Tiger Woods is a fascinating example of this. He's the greatest golfer in the world. Yeah. The reason he's not great now, you put aside the addiction stuff, the scandals, he hurt his knees jumping out of airplanes because he decided he wanted to be a Navy SEAL in his 30s because his father was a Green Beret in Vietnam. And there's some part of him that thinks being the greatest athlete maybe ever the most dominant force in the history of your sport was somehow not enough yeah and he was jumping out of airplanes and i guess he was doing some drill where they like he would pay these people that help train him and practice do some drill where they kick through a door and they're you know clearing a room yeah and somebody kicked him in the leg and he screwed up like that was that he didn't it's very hard to hurt yourself playing golf yeah You can get repetitive injuries from golf.

28:25He doesn't have repetitive injuries from golf. He has repetitive injuries from this void he was trying to fill with things more exciting than being the indisputed champion of what he did. Yeah, that I didn't know. It actually makes me feel better about my own silly choices. Yeah, because right when the sun was sold, before it came out, I tried very hard to get into the Green Berets. Really? Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, I, I, the only reason I didn't is that my, my, I was 36, so I needed an age waiver. Yeah. But by like one year, my packet went to the Pentagon and it was turned down, but everything else was in line.

29:01I'd done all the early physical stuff. What did you think that would do for you? Like, what, what do you think you wanted from it? I don't know. I mean, I, there's a part of me, this program to serve in a way, and people, people, you know, either have this or you don't. I mean, I've been an EMT a bunch of times. I've been a volunteer firefighter at two different places. I'd work in an orderly in a trauma center. So there's a part of me that was kind of programmed for service in some way, and this felt like an extension of that, but it clearly was not. I could have just been an EMT again. Yeah, this was something different.

29:30But there was something that I wanted, something I needed to challenge. I worried I'd tick the box in some way maybe, I don't know. But was this before the book came out? It was right before the book came out. But American Rust had already come out. It had, and it had done very well, and I was happy. But somehow, even when Russ came out, I was like, shit, I tried to do this for 15 years. I finally accomplished my goal, and I guess I'll do it again. Yeah. And then there was a part of me that once I knew the sun was going to be a good success or guessed it was going to be, it was like, I guess I have to be a Green Beret, you know?

30:10Like what's left in the world. Yeah, yeah, sure. Which, I mean, is silly in a certain way. And then instead I went to Hollywood, basically, and tried to make TV shows and stuff.

30:24Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought, this isn't going to work. Stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

31:09We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

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32:30Well, it is interesting because I was thinking about that. Like, if I'm getting my MFA at Texas, like you did, or I'm at Iowa or something, I could imagine hearing your story if I didn't know anything about it and just being like, fuck that guy. because you publish two novels. They're both huge successes. One gets nominated for a Pulitzer. They're on all sorts of lists. Right, right. Like just out of the gate, you basically hit two home runs. Right. That's not supposed to happen. And then I think most people who want to do things are jealous of the people who are doing that thing. Yeah, for sure.

33:04But you never actually, like, it of course wasn't that simple. I can't imagine you just, those were the first two things you ever wrote. I had two unpublished novels. Yeah, and I spent all my 20s, yeah I wrote one long terrible novel that gave to all my friends no one could read it was very long it was unreadable and then I wrote another book you know I was working on Wall Street and I quit that job to finish my second book unpublished book um and that book was better but pretty bad and then I ended up moving back into my parents basement you know because I was like I thought I really wanted to write but I apparently wasn't good at it I didn't publish anything and I spent 10 years doing this, 10 years of thinking of myself as a writer.

33:45And then, so the American Russ is my third, I mean, I always thought of it as my third novel, even though it was my first published book. Yeah. And there's a million unpublished short stories. Yeah, man, it is, what I saw was that I kept on failing. Like what I saw about my career early on was like, all I did was fail. That, that's how, that was my impression of it. And then after 15 years I had, And, you know, American Realist Publish did well. And then five or four years later, The Sun Company also does well. But yeah, I mean, I thought I was a martyr too. I was like, I've worked super hard.

34:18I've all these failures. And then as soon as you become a professional, you start meeting other people who do the same work. And you're like, oh shit, how many unpublished books do you have? And everyone you meet has like a couple unpublished books often. Yeah, or they're 60 and they're just trying to break through or their last book sold 60 copies. Like I imagine there is... You know, we look at people and go overnight success. It's always more complicated than that. Man, it's very rare. A friend of mine, Taya O 'Brett, who's a brilliant writer, she actually did write a book in her early 20s.

34:50It was amazing. It's called The Tiger's Wife. It's a great book. It's a huge bestseller, you know. And I don't know how she did it. But that's the only person I know who actually had that kind of huge success. I guess there's Brett Easton Ellis, right? Yeah, that's true. But yeah, I think people think that's how it goes. Like even my first book came out when I was 25. But I'd written online every day for six years, basically. Wow. So like when people think like, oh, that's, you know. You are very young. You're right. You have the resume of like a 50-year-old. But I started earlier. Like, you know, I started a little earlier.

35:33And then it's funny. Like it's like that first, that I just got a Rosie statement last year for that first book. It earned out then. So like, so it took almost, it took 10 years to earn out. So like, you're like, oh, I did well. Like, you know, when I got a check when I was 25, I'm like, this is amazing. But the math would have been like$20 ,000 a year for 10 years if I hadn't kept writing. So you get your breaks and then I think what matters is what do you, what do you do with them? Because the breaks can come early. They can come late. But what matters is like, what do you do with them? Yeah.

36:08I mean, I had a hard transition after the sun. I mean, I thought that you were supposed to – I committed to a bunch of stuff I probably shouldn't have. Instead of – Like what? I mean, I decided I was going to go make TV shows. And so I decided I was going to like, okay, how do I write and produce and be the creator of a TV show? Which my friends and I, we managed to pull off. We turned the sun into a show for AMC. Ran a couple seasons. Also white people. Like not only did you do two great books that sold well, but then they both got turned into things, which also isn't supposed to happen. It's not supposed to happen.

36:40Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, yeah, I've been very lucky. But that period I think of as a – in order for me to get the sun to be a show, there's a way to do it in which I was sort of careful and cautious and went in as like the low person, the totem pole, and then also would have been able to leave and go back to writing books quite easily. And then there was a way to do it in which I was like, I will have like as much control as possible, which was like what I tried to do, which was sort of rational, sort of silly at the same time because I had a thing I really loved. And so, yeah, I ended up living in L.A.

37:20and it's a weird life. I mean, you've spent a bunch of time out there and you're around a bunch of celebrities and people are telling you good things about yourself. and that for me at that time was probably not that healthy. I probably needed to be alone in a cabin writing my third book and instead I'm sort of in this industry, which I was, thank you, universe, very lucky at the end, but it was not, I think it may connect to like, you know, trying to join the military when I was 30. Yeah, I imagine if your first choice was join the military, your second option is you go to Hollywood to try to turn things into things.

37:57That would have been hard because what I have found about that world, obviously the finished products are, there's some garbage, but you're like, that's amazing. You're like, how does this happen? But like, and it might've taken 10 years, but there was probably like two years of work in the 10 years. Right. And so like, if you're, what's amazing about writing and why I think it's such honest work is it's like, if you sit down and do it, you get finished stuff out of the outside. You control it. Even your unpublished novels, you could publish them if you wanted, right? Right. I did this book about Peter Thiel and this sort of weird lawsuit he had.

38:37Anyways, that was optioned in 2017. Yeah. And it may go into production this year, which is – so six years, which is pretty fast. That's pretty fast. But I have published like four books since then. Right. Right? Like so if I look at it as like – it's not like what do you do all day. But it's a world where I think it's very easy to develop really bad habits because you need other people's approval to let you do stuff. Yeah. Right? That's crucial to understand. It's bad for your soul. Yeah. And everything's done by committee. If there's something that can be done with one person, it is sort of – it makes sense because it costs so much money to make a show.

39:17Yeah. $50 million is a cheap TV show. Yeah. And so a lot of other people's careers are on the line. Right. It's your project. It's my project in our minds. But in fact, if it goes sideways, there are 10 people who are going to lose their jobs. You know what I mean? Whereas we just retreat to Bastrop or Austin. And that is something that I think as we, people like us go in from the outside, we really just don't get. You're more like, why is this, why is this stuff not happening quicker with people? And the answer is that a lot of people have to take a lot of risks to put your project, my project on the air.

39:48Yeah. And I think like if you're someone who thrives and like I show up, I do the work, work comes out of the other side. that's a very that you can get not it's not even vertigo you can just get you can you can develop it's like it's like retiring from sports you had this thing you did every day and now you're just like oh i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do a little bit of this i'm gonna do a little and it's like you're you're not gonna do any of it because you don't have the structure to keep you honest i feel like yeah yeah that's that's definitely true um everyone in hollywood i mean yeah everyone has 10 projects going because one goes every year or something like this the other thing as a writer I mean, for you, me, or anyone else, we get to succeed or fail on our own terms.

40:26And that is something that is kind of an amazing luxury. If something goes really well, it's kind of because you did it. If something goes badly, it's kind of because you messed it up. And that is an unbelievable luxury that most people don't get. And I didn't realize how amazing that was until I get out to Hollywood and you realize whether this is good or bad is not going to be because of me. You know, there's a million other people involved and I don't. That's something actors have to figure out, which is how can you find satisfaction and fulfillment in the role when you're not the director of said role, you're not the producer of said role, you're not the marketing team of said role, you're not the financier, and you also don't determine when it comes out, how it comes out, how it does, how the other actors did.

41:12Even the editor has probably way more say than any individual actor. you know, I mean. So how can you love the work of it even, you know, and you don't even necessarily get to choose what work you do. There's an, there's an honesty to that to be like, no, my five seconds on camera, that's all I'm going to focus on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very tough. I mean, the actors, I think, I mean, all of us, you know, I mean, you had very early, early success and in hindsight, I had early success as well. And I think, you know, mostly when I think about my life, I think about like all the work that I do.

41:43And I'll see, you know, I work seven days a week. And, um, but with actors and someone, we kind of get to forge our own destiny in a way. Now you don't get to be really famous, you know, really cause our writers as much, but actors, you got to be picked. Everything you do, someone has to, someone's picking you. You know, you're not really like generating the material and you know, you're not, the material's not coming out of your mind and, and ending up on the table. It's, it's, you're sitting in a room and hoping someone picks you. Although the Stoics would say that's actually a better metaphor for life, Right?

42:13Because we think we have more control over our destiny than we do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then in real life, we are kind of all actors in a play. Where you were born. Yeah, absolutely. That's true. Are you short or tall? Is your famous family? Not like there's all these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, what are you living in a time of peace or not? Sure, right. All these things. And then really what it comes down is this tiny scope of options that are actually available to us. Right. And do we show up and like play the hell out of that role? Or are we sitting around going like, why aren't they giving me better parts?

42:48I wish I was born here. Do you show up and make the most of what, you know, the little bit of leeway the actor or the director gave you? Or would you prefer to sit in the audience and complain? Yeah. I mean, it is your call. And those things are habits too. Yeah. I mean, those are habits. If you assume that to some extent other people's rules don't always apply to you and that there are these social constructs that maybe if you work really hard, you can kind of get around. I have a GED, but I ended up going to an Ivy League school many, many years later as a transfer student, kind of through the back door only.

43:35and if I had assumed I had to apply three times in a row and get rejected and kind of embarrass myself a bunch of times but if I had assumed that what everyone told me was true which is like if you drop out of high school you're going to ruin your life and then you're done forever you're screwed I definitely wouldn't be here when I first started making adult decisions the first adult decision I made was to like I hate school and I'm going to drop out And I worked five years. I had a grown-up job. I was just a bike mechanic, yeah, but I had adult responsibilities. I was able to leave my parents' house.

44:12I basically felt like a grown-up, even though it was not something most people would consider super challenging work maybe, but I found meaning in it, you know? Yeah, it's tricky, right? Because it's like there's things that are not in our control, there's things that are in our control, and then there's these things that we can sort of have some maneuverability about. And if you're someone who's like, everything's fixed, you know, everything is, you know, I was born here, so I can't, this is the ceiling for me, that becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's also more complicated than you can be anything you put your mind to, right?

44:43Right, exactly. And so how do you find a person – how do you become a person that is able to sort of seize the small amount of agency that you have and get the most out of it while simultaneously being a person who accepts reality on reality's terms? That's the balance. And it's hard because there's an amount of delusion required to think. I mean, on one hand, when you're like going after something that's difficult, you are maybe looking at your prior, at the things you've accomplished or even if they're small. And you're leveraging them, you know, into thinking, I'm going to do this much bigger thing.

45:20On the other hand, there's a little bit of delusion in which you're like, I'm going to do this thing. I have no data that says I can do it. I have no data that says I can write a book or be a pro baseball player or be, you know, whatever. There's no data. How do you know you can do something that you've never done before? And there's an egotistical place where you do that, a delusion that you're saying. There's also like confidence, right? And then there's also the belief that you can't do it, which is also self-realizing. Yeah. I mean, the way to be sure that you can't do something is to not try.

45:55And I remember when someone explained this to me, I was like 19. So little cliche, obviously, but it really is true. Yeah. I think it was when I was working in the basement of the bike shop and I was thinking maybe I should go to college. I didn't know. I was kind of lost. And some kind of mentors I had were like, they were the ones who suggested I apply to these Ivy League colleges. I was like, that's nuts. A GED, a terrible academic rep. I mean, that makes no sense. Sure. And I remember one lady told me, yeah, you definitely won't get in if you don't apply. You actually do have to apply. You miss 100 % of the shots you don't take.

46:24Yeah, exactly. And that shit is true. I mean, it's a total cliche, but it's totally true. It's very annoying when you think you're like, oh, the person who's going to stop me most of the time is me, mostly. Yes. Or it may be impossible, but until you try, you don't actually know that. You have a hypothesis and then you have to be willing to sort of prove or disprove that hypothesis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like with a book, like I think though, like if you're like, of course I can write a book and of course it will be amazing because I'm amazing. you're probably not you're probably not going to be the person that does the work that has the self-awareness or the honesty to get it to where it's needs to be right like if you're if you're the person who thinks you have the minus touch or your shit doesn't stink or whatever you know expression you want to use for it yeah you're you're gonna you may produce a first draft of something yeah but it will be unreadable yeah i mean the number of times you must i've seen that so many times with talented folks who were not talented folks yeah it is both i i thought i mean when i was coming up i thought that talent was going to be like the that was like why people made it and now i see man it is not it is how much drive do you have how much can you how much failure can your ego take how how good is your like you know reality function of looking like this is what i want to happen this is what is actually actually might happen yes and then can can you disconnect your ego from your work enough to do a second, third, 200th draft?

48:02Yeah. You know, how many times can you decide that like, I'm just going to try again. Oops, I failed. I'm going to keep going. Yeah. I think Gatsby was rejected like four times, you know, and then failed commercially. Yeah. So you have to imagine you have to have, you have to have a strong sense of like, this is really good. Yeah. But also there's a lot of people who are terrible who have a strong sense. Yeah. So you have to have a strong sense that's really good, and you also have to be really good. And those come from very different places. One comes from the work. One comes from what you wish to be true or what your mother whispered in your ear or whatever when you were little.

48:42It's a tension. I remember when I was like, I quit this corporate job. I moved across the country. I was going to write this book. And I was like, I'm not even going to shop at first. I'm just going to write a book and see if it sells. which in nonfiction is like 90, 95 % of books sell on proposal. In your world, you write the novel and then you see if anyone wants it. In my world, you're like, this is my plan for the book. And then you sell it like a business plan. Okay. And your publisher is like your investor in it. It's like a different, it's a very different model. But so I was like, you know what?

49:12I'm going to put all my money into, I'm going to put all my chips in. I'm going to go write this book and I'm going to see if it's good. and like how did I think back it's like how did I how and why did I think I could do that that's crazy and then the fact that I did do it doesn't make it any less crazy so what you know was I was I coming from a place of delusion and ego and I you know the clock just happened the broken clock hackman to be right or was i basing it on evidence that i had from how i had done hard things in the past yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and what do you think it was i mean i'd like to think it's the latter one it's probably i mean i think there's always like there's a reason that ego is they don't talk about ego being the enemy of plumbers yeah right it's it's you know it's it's Although I'm sure it is, but like it's, I think in the more ambitious professions, and I'm not meaning to say that a plumber is not ambitious.

50:13In the things that – the inherently public-facing professions that an audience or the in-crowd validates, there is – the people that are attracted to that I think have by definition more challenges with ego than – right? Like, you know, it's not like the publishing industry goes around and finds the most unassuming, quietest introvert who's typing away in their office and says, we choose you. You should be amazing. It's the people who seek it out. Right, of course. Just like power is almost always given to people who want power, who happen to almost always be the worst ones for it. Like I think ego is a part of it, but I think I went in thinking, you know, I don't quit.

51:05Yeah. You know, I ask questions. Yeah. I have trained, like I was a research assistant for a long time. So I learned how, but like I had some sense of like how books worked. Right, right, right, right, right. And I had some sense of, because of my marketing background, I had a sense of how books sell also. Right. So I feel like I had a – there's a great rule actually. I heard it from Peter Thiel. He was saying these like, I only invest in things where I believe I have a secret edge. He's like, what do I know that other people don't know? Right. And if you don't have that, not that everything is insider trading, but if you don't believe you have some advantage, you're probably not going to win.

51:43Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like I believed I knew enough about how it worked and that I wouldn't quit until I got what I wanted. Right. That that made me confident that I could do it. I didn't know for certain I could do it, but I felt like it was a good enough bet. I guess I was similar. Yeah. I think, yeah, like my great luck was that I'd done a bunch of sort of difficult things kind of early in life basically. and that I knew that those involved like multiple big failures when I tried my hardest. Yes. And I knew that I survived all those things. Yeah. They hadn't killed me. And I presumed I could just do it again, which turned out to be right.

52:26But I mean, I was off by 10 years. I quit this job at the investment bank when I was 28, when I was a derivatives trader. And I thought within a few years, I would have like a big success. And a few years later, I was like broke, live in my parents' basement. Yeah. The book had been rejected by like every agent. You know? And I had accomplished nothing as I saw it. But there's some part of you – I guess it's like figuring out like which part of those – of the ego or like self-confidence is good and which part is bad. Because they're pretty tightly wound. Yes. I mean at least for – yeah, they touch.

53:03Yes. Well, I think about like – you know, you look at some super egotistical like performer or musician or whatever. It's not that ego means they won't be successful. I think it puts a ceiling on what they're capable of doing. And almost always, when they're actually doing the thing, the ego is missing. It has to be. Or the thing won't be good. It has to be. Yeah, your ego cannot be present when you're making art. Like, it just can't be. Yeah, in the way that like alcohol can take the edge off a social interaction. Ego can put you in positions that maybe you have no business being in. Right. That if you really thought about it, if you really looked down over the edge, you'd be like, this isn't for me.

53:52Yeah. So ego can be advantageous in that sense. But to actually do the thing, I think it has to come from a place of humility and craft and process and unrelenting standards that you're constantly not sure you're reaching up to. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, art is always a performance for an audience. And that's something that when you're a struggling young artist, you don't always get that. and there's kind of a tension between, am I doing this for me? Yes. Am I doing this for the audience? The answer is always both. But the answer is like, the audience comes first, dumbass. Yeah. You know, like, because otherwise, why is someone going to read your book?

54:31Why are they going to listen to your podcast? And the answer is like, because you understand that this is actually for a viewership or a listenership. When we listen to music, we don't listen to a practice session. Yeah. We listen to finished music. And so that transition, I think for most artists is when you realize you're like, oh shit. everything is for the audience. And I have to find the balance between doing things that I care about that other people are interested in reading about or they want to hear about. And that is a tough, that, I mean, that for me took 10 years to figure out. Really?

55:06Yeah. I just didn't, yeah, I just didn't get, I just didn't get it. Which is why I have two unpublished books, you know, but I just didn't get it. But has it been hard for you with the success of the first two books to – has that made it harder or easier to do the third one, which I've heard a little bit about? The third – yeah, the third one hopefully will be finished by the end of this year. I think – I became very good at ignoring what other people said about me for all my teens and 20s. Because if I'd listened to what people said, like, oh yeah, you're from this neighborhood, you drop high school dropout, your future is this.

55:47I got pretty good at ignoring that stuff, which was a very lucky skill to develop early in life. And I think I didn't, I think up until my late thirties, I just didn't, I didn't like to read my reviews. I didn't want to, I don't want to hear about it. I just don't want to hear anything. I don't want to hear anything. And then... And when Russ came out, I moved to the middle of nowhere. I bought a house in way upstate New York. I got away from some of my friends. I just didn't want to hear anything about the book. I didn't want to think about the book. I didn't want to think about my – Did it more bad?

56:22No. Well, this might be my own weakness, but I can't – if I let in the good stuff, I have to let in the bad stuff. It was easier for me just to keep the door tightly shut. And then I think with the sun, I ended up moving to New York and L.A. And all of a sudden, I was like a guy in this world. And that was not good for me. I mean, whatever part, the unhealthy part of the ego, that was really not so good. So I think in the last few years, this is a long-winded way of saying it was harder after having two successful books because – only because I – instead of like moving to Alaska, when this book came out, I should have moved to Alaska or Montana.

57:02I should have just escaped the world. and instead I went to like kind of the belly of the entertainment beast where people sort of – most of my normal friends don't really give a shit that I'm a writer. I mean they just couldn't care less. I think scene is very dangerous. It's very dangerous. That is what it is. That's what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like – it's not that you want none of it but it's you don't want – it's like look, you shouldn't buy foods that you don't want to eat, right, that are bad for you to eat Because if it's in your pantry, you'll eat it. Yeah. And it's like the further you are away from the scene, the less likely you are to just encounter it on a normal Tuesday.

57:41Yeah. Because you're 500 miles away. Yeah. You know? And you also – like I have found one of the benefits of moving to Texas with me is like I think we're all envious people. Sure. But like if I'm not – like the impulse of – like I just hear less about what other people are doing. Yeah. Right? Oh, my God. That's huge. And I have to sort of cultivate my internet habits accordingly also. Like I don't want to know about – like I wish everyone the best. The more I know about what they're doing, the more that triggers a thing in me that's not healthy. Yeah. And – That's right. That's exactly right.

58:19It takes me away from the thing I should be doing. Yeah. And I think when you hear like young writers moving to New York or moving to LA, all I think is like danger, danger, danger. that you think this is going to help you. It's not going to help you. You actually need to live in Toledo where you're the only writer, even if you don't get the, just the sense that like once in a while you get a pat on the back from the world. You know what I mean? We all need a little bit of that. Well, also I think like, you know, where, what your economic base is. Like, you know, if you're in New York, you have to make a certain amount of money from your thing.

58:49Correct. To be able to keep doing the thing. Yeah. Whereas, you know, it's 50 % less, let's say, in the middle of nowhere, Texas or Toledo or whatever. For sure, yeah. And so you, you, like, look, it'd be easier to be a writer if we all had trust funds, right? Yeah. But we don't. Yeah. So how do you create a world in which you have some semblance of economic freedom? Yeah. So you can have more artistic or entrepreneurial freedom. Yeah. And I think, like, like, so my first book was about marketing and it did well. And then I went to my publisher and I was like, I'd like to write this book of, about ancient philosophy.

59:24and they were like, here's half what you got for the last one, you know? And so, but like I was in a position, you know, living where I lived and also being young, whatever. But I was in a position to say like, whatever, right? Sure. But if I was living in New York City then, that would have been, I would have had less runway, right? And I think sometimes people do the thing to be in the scene and then it becomes, their life revolves around operating in the scene, not operating in the writing or the craft routine, which, you know, you want as much space and freedom as possible in. Yeah. And it's mental space.

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1:02:57I was curious about the epigraphs in American Rust, which I thought were really interesting. You have Kierkegaard and you have Camus. Yeah, I was going through a kind of existentialist philosopher phase, you know. And I think the book is an intense book. I'm not – is it dark? I'm not really sure. But it was – the book is sort of about these kids I grew up with basically in Baltimore. I just moved it all to Pittsburgh because it was an easier way to tell a story. But the – both Kierkegaard and Camus were kind of optimistic people in some way. I mean, Camus got some districts of darkness in him, but basically it's like the point of life is to be happy if you can.

1:03:37You know, there's – Meeting is what you create. Meeting is what you create. Yeah. And there's more to admire in humanity than there is to despise. Maybe only by an inch. Yeah. You know, but there is. And if you don't look at life that way, you're kind of in trouble. Yeah. You know, one of my favorite novels is Walker Percy. Which one? Which of his novels? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I think, I mean, The Movie Goer is basically about Kierkegaard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like Lancelot's actually probably my favorite. Okay. There's a bunch of stoics in The Movie Goer too. But, you know, this idea of the search, the search for meaning, the battle against despair, that strikes me as weirdly not common enough of a theme in novels.

1:04:19I almost think the modern novel seems to take as a given that everything is meaningless, everything sucks. It does, yeah. There's no – like it's a rejection of likable characters almost entirely. Very often, yeah. I mean, and a lot of early novels too are like a rejection of meaning, a rejection of anything that might sound sentimental. You know, everything has to be sort of like ironic basically. Yeah, it's – life is tough even if you're born into America in the 21st century. You know what I mean? And I think maybe it's just tough because we're meant to be fighting all the time. We have sort of still caveman brains and we don't live in a caveman world.

1:05:04And how do you adjust – how do you adjust to that? All of our needs are more or less provided for, which of course is very good in some ways. Not strictly true for everyone, but more so than – Yeah, more so than probably ever in history. More so than the people at the beginning of the science. For sure. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a lot wrong with the world right now, but I think, you know, median human age is longer than it's ever been. Fewer people die by violence even than 100 years ago. The human race is kind of doing okay despite the fact that, you know, the world's heating up and et cetera, et cetera.

1:05:38And how do you process this? I studied this period for this new book I'm writing. I studied this period around the beginning of the machine age. And as machines begin to become like a larger force in human life, both in terms of buildings becoming gigantic, but also like electricity coming in widely, that is the beginning of the age of anxiety. If you look at when like modern psychology begins, it is absolutely when folks start going a little bit nuts because there are these machines are suddenly removing our centrality and all the things we had to, we don't have to work as hard to live in as we used to.

1:06:17I mean, I had a taste of this because I read American Rust and then this chat GBT thing came out, the artificial intelligence engine. And so I had it right because I do this email every day, the Daily Stoic email. And I was like, write a Daily Stoic email about replaceability. Yeah. And it did B minus job, you know? Wow. Like, so what I do, right? Like the thing that I do that I am like, I'm the only person in the world that can do this thing. this computer engine that has existed for five fucking minutes, you know, does a half decent job. And you go, oh, this is what it's like. You know, this is what it's like to be insert blue collar profession from a long chain of insert blue collar professions.

1:07:00And then we don't need you anymore. Yeah. And what that takes out of a person, also the spiral it can send a person into. I mean, to me, the response to it is like, okay, how do I figure out how to use this thing? How do I get improved by this thing? You know, how do I not stick my head in the sand about said thing? So I'm not saying that, you know, everyone's a sort of a helpless victim, but it is interesting to see. Everyone wants to think that they're exempt from these inexorable laws or trends. And it's like also this is also what human beings have been doing to each other for centuries is finding ways to replace ourselves or replace people who are not us from things that they thought they were.

1:07:42Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, right. Whether it's people limiting jobs in a factory because it makes you a little more money or makes you a little more immune to strikes or the factory over here. Right. I mean, yeah, that is what people do. I mean, that is all that's also the worst side of us. I mean so what do you think is going to happen with this I don't know I don't know I kind of focus on how bad it does certain things but that's in a way is me putting my head in the sand about it I think yeah I mean I think the people who figure out how to how to use the tools to their advantage or to figure out okay what is if it can now do X well it can't what are the first off I still had to edit this thing right I ended up sending it out to the list as an experiment to sort of make this met a point that everyone and everything is replaceable, right?

1:08:29Like, if you think you're indispensable, life will remind you that that's not the case. But I was thinking about, well, first off, the idea of using the computer to do X is inherently an artistic statement, right? It's like, I'm going to flip the urinal upside down and all of a sudden it's a piece of art, right? So how does one come to use technology to still do the fundamentally human thing that is expression but then also what are the tasks that right now take me a lot of time that something like this could help me get better at. And I think I always go towards like, I mean, I think just generally in business, it's like, what are the things that only you can do?

1:09:10And then how do you delegate those other things? And then like all technologies, you know, I'm sure there were writers who used to go into old libraries and pour over the books themselves. And now that's fixed by a search. and the ones who rejected the search as an option, you know, didn't make the leap. And then this thing will exist. And how do you make the leap? Right. I don't know. But yeah, yeah. But I wonder is what, at some point something is lost a little bit. I mean, I want to believe that it's lost. Like what you lose when you use a search engine is, I mean, you probably remember this a little bit, but is the accidental discovery of reading a book.

1:09:50Sure. You come across a ton of stuff when you have to actually flip through a book, yourself. You learn, your mind goes in different places. And when you, um, punch something to do a search engine, like you, you, um, you don't learn that stuff. And I, I mean, I sort of lived through that transition and, and I remember thinking like, I don't want to use Google. I don't want to use search engines because it clearly is, it is worse. Like you, like you get it quicker, You get the answer quicker, but instead of getting like 20 associated answers and pieces of knowledge, you get like you're just the one thing.

1:10:27You find what you're looking for most of the time, but you don't find what you didn't know. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know, but you just realize – it's like we think these things are always going to happen to other people. Yeah. But it will happen to you also. I mean death is the great example of this, right? Yeah. It's like we know other people die. We know other people are susceptible to things. We feel sorry for them and their families. And then we're like, but not here. I'm the exception to the rule. And it's like, it's coming for you too, man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is true.

1:10:58Even I mean, I worked in this trauma center when I was from age 19 to 21. And I saw a couple of people die every night, sometimes 10, sometimes two, by either car accidents, gunshot wounds, stabbings, whatever. And I remember that very clearly the first person I watched die who seemed super old. He must have been 35, you know, and it was like a drunk driving accident. And even so, that did not stop me from riding my motorcycle like a maniac. I mean, even though I, yeah, I was like, was moving dead bodies around at night sometimes who were alive when they came in and now were dead. It didn't affect my behavior as much as it should have.

1:11:36You know, I just was like, well, that's, that's that guy, even though he's like my age. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So, I don't know. Maybe we're just. Right. The bell tolls for the. The bell tolls for like these 30 people. Yeah. Okay. Wow. That's good. That can't be me. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, we don't want to think about it because I think we understand that if we think about it, it will have to change our behavior. Yeah. So we just kind of – it's like we – it's in our mind but we – there's a wall there that prevents it from – and this is probably why sometimes when people do like psychedelics or whatever, those sort of artificial barriers we've had in our mind where we have the idea but we've not actually let it sink into the consciousness.

1:12:16Right. That's why that gets unlocked. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or we have the – you know, you have some breakthrough when you're reading or meditating or whatever. Or you – like there's a difference between knowing the thing and knowing a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you knew just as everyone knows eventually you're going to die. Yeah. But like it's not until you get some – it breaks down some of the defenses that you go, oh, yes, I am them and they are me. Yeah. This is – yeah. I mean this is definitely going to happen. And you have like – if you're lucky, you have 30 years left, 40 years left.

1:12:51but you have a, the clock is ticking. I mean, the clock is ticking like every day. Yes. But yeah, the thing that protects us from despair because we don't think about it also keeps us from making good decisions sometimes. You know, I was thinking of a version of that. Right after I read the book, after I read The Sun, there's this brilliant scene at the end where the, what is she, the fourth generation, the woman, she's like flying on a private plane or whatever and she's like, my kids don't want money. I don't need any more money. All I care about is this ranch. And yet here I am doing all these things that are not that ranch to get more money.

1:13:28Yeah. Right? And I was thinking about how, like, we know in the way that absolute power corrupts absolutely. We know that money above a certain point tends to cause problems for people. You know, like we see the family who's torn apart, you know, dealing with the estate. We see the kids that are spoiled. You know, we see the people who thought it would fix things and it doesn't. So we know that, right? Yeah. And then what do we all do? Like we go to Hollywood to make more money. Yeah. We start a company that grinds us into dust to get this huge payday. Yeah. You know, we know it won't do the thing for us.

1:14:09And yet it's the thing we do. We work the hardest to get. Like we know it could be a generational curse, but we're like, I'm doing this for my family. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. It's got to be some like, you know, it's got to be from the – for most of human existence, the resources were very limited. Your resources were literally limited to what you could carry in your pockets, right? Or in a sack. That was it. That was for a million years. And so the idea that there is an unlimited resource, which is just this abstract thing called money, which doesn't actually exist in the real world. You think a dollar is real?

1:14:48It's not real. It's only because the only reason I'm going to take your dollar is that I'm convinced that the dollar will buy me something. But the moment I begin to believe that, your dollar has no meaning. And I think we're just not programmed for access to unlimited resources or even large amounts of resources at all. Our minds can't process it. Like that idea is too new. It's only – I mean money is only – Sapiens probably talked about this, that book. But how old is it? 5 ,000 years old? Abundance is a thing that we can't wrap our heads around. You know what I mean? That we struggle with. And have you ever been to like a Brazilian steakhouse?

1:15:28Yeah. You eat a bunch. You're like stuffed. Yeah. And it's even different to me than a buffet. A buffet, there's like I'm going to go up and get more food. Yeah. Right? So there's some point where you're like, I'm full. I don't want it anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is definitely past the point you're full. But the Brazilian steakhouse, they're walking around. You're stuffed. You're getting the meat sweats. Yeah. And then the guy comes around with the sword and he's like, you want this? And you're like, yeah. Okay. You're like, you have more. You not only have had enough, you are feeling the effects of having too much.

1:16:01Already. But it requires willpower, more willpower than you have to be like, I'm cutting myself off here. Yeah. And we struggle to do that. All the characters in this book, every time they got more, it was worse for them. And yet they can't stop. Well, I mean, we're programmed for basically what is like a Plains Indian Native American lifestyle. We're programmed to like – you just can't store that much food. Yeah. You can't really own the land. Like the land you own is the land you can hold by force more or less. And even if you have like a very – February was called like the month of crying babies or something for many of the plains tribes because that was when your winter meat had maybe run out if the hunting was bad and when nothing was growing yet.

1:16:54Sure. And so even if you were the strongest tribe with the most competent men and women, it didn't matter. Because in February, little kids might start dying and old people might start dying no matter how good you are basically. And that is what we're programmed for. We're not programmed for meat to be like carried around on a tray to us. That's something that only like, you know, a tiny percentage of the human race should have access to. This is what the emperors knew about, but everyone else throughout history has – Absolutely. And so, yeah, how do you learn those habits, right? It's like you can learn the habits of like saving and scrimping and accumulating.

1:17:30But then the habit of like I have more than I need. What should I do with it? That's like – that's a skill set that – yeah, for all of human history like – But wasn't a skill set you had to develop. It just – because nothing – there was never going to be enough of anything. Yes. You know what I mean? There was no money. It didn't exist. And there wasn't enough food. Yes. You couldn't store food for more than a few weeks anyway. Yeah. So – Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a skill set that like – it's like the call for that skill set is like 100 years old. I mean – Yes. For most of us anyway. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

1:18:02And something can break in your brain that makes it even harder to get there. Yeah. You know what I mean? Depending on how you grew up, when you grew up, the values you got or yeah, you're just a particularly insatiable person as, you know, I think the great characters of literature. are there to remind us. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, yeah. The character was like, I'm good. You know, that doesn't make for a great – It's not interesting. Yeah. Yeah, which is funny because when you're creating books, I often have to remind myself that sometimes the more realistic a character is, the more they are like the average woman or man.

1:18:39It may not be – Where do you go? Where do you go? There's nowhere to go. So you sort of write about the extremes. You want them to be realistic extremes, but you write about the extremes. Yeah, right. Right. Average is boring. Or – well, I think about it. It's like the most successful people – there are so many successful people out there who are successful but don't need you to know who they are. Yeah. Right? And so – You Google them. They scrub the internet of their presence. Right. And so like we tend to think of – our image of the successful person is the person who relentlessly courts attention, who's never satisfied.

1:19:19Yeah. You know, the person who does a couple of good books and then is like, I'm good. You know, that person, that's not a – by definition, doesn't have the recognition or, you know, celebrity. They get it very late. I mean, look at Cormac McCarthy who wrote for, geez, 30 years, 40 years. I mean, did one interview. He wrote from the 50s until the 90s until he finally had success. It was kind of like living in cheap places, Knoxville, El Paso. Now he's super old. I mean, I love his work. I don't know him personally. but that I think for a long time early in my career anyway I thought, wow, probably the Hemingway path or the Joan Didion path is safer in which you're sort of obviously courting some attention and you're cultivating an image you're like the cool person for this time and I thought that was in some way the safer way but it isn't it's not safe because I think you were, at least for me you were you need to be a very particular type of person.

1:20:26I think to be able to put up a wall in your mind in which you can do the work in the morning and sell the work in the evening. And there's some people who naturally have it. I don't think a lot of artists naturally have it. Maybe not many humans naturally have it. I struggle with it. Even if I'm doing book tour, I can't write. So if I'm on tour, I can't write. I can try to think intelligently about what I've done maybe, but it's very hard for me to create stuff. Interesting. And that's not everyone. I know Ian McEwen talks about, you know, English novelists. He talks about, he writes on Booktour all the time.

1:21:02Yeah. I have no idea how. You know, he had a great quote. He's like, I'm a salesman also. No shit. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He's like, I don't just paint. I have to sell the paints. So I had some quote about this in one of the books I wrote, but he's really good. He's like, yeah, I got to go on the road and sell this thing. Like that's my job. I wonder – yeah. And he also – I mean he – most – I feel like – a lot of novels anyway, you talk about like there's something in book tour that shuts down that creative flow or energy. But clearly not for everyone. I think a big chunk of that has also been it's actually just a luxury of the industry that everyone's taking for granted.

1:21:42So for most of the history of the novel, like they didn't make any money and only rich people could do them or it was accidental or it became popular after their death or whatever, right? But then for like 150, 200 years of like the modern novel, the publishing industry had published a handful of titles every year and then they could like make a book a success or not. Right, right, right, right, right. Like in nonfiction, the publisher is like, we don't sell the book. We're paying you to sell the book. Wow. Right? Wow. There's no – I don't think I really knew that. There's no prizes. You know, there's no like – you're not – I've done 14 books.

1:22:25I forget. But I've done, let's say, more than 10 books. You actually don't remember how many books you've read. I've had one reviewed in the New York Times. So, like, there's not a space and it's my worst selling book. So like the point being that typically nonfiction, you know, there's not a media industry about – there's not a media like discovery surfacing mechanism for it. And then there's also not even – although there's a bookstore here, but like there's not even like a model now where bookstores can like make or break a book, right? Right, right. Yeah. But fiction is still that – like fiction is still like it came out.

1:23:06the right people said things about it, got the right media attention, it was nominated for the right awards. Right. Like it functions more like the award movies in Hollywood function, which is there's a thing and you do a set of things and maybe you get it, maybe you don't. Right. But so the novelist has had the luxury of, you know, I don't touch any of that. Right, absolutely. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Whereas most other musicians don't have that luxury. Or, you know, they're like, no, I go on the road and I sell this thing, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. So I think there's a – I get it because nobody likes doing it.

1:23:52Yeah. But I think – I got really good advice early in my career that like if you're not willing to get behind it, what are you saying to the reader? Right. You're not saying you're pure. You're saying this sucks. Right, right, right. You know, you're saying this isn't this important. Or you're saying you don't care about them, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm just saying, like, by not – if you were like, no, like, the world depends on this getting out, you would do the stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone else will take care of it. There's a certain amount of, like, I could take it or leave it-ness to it that I think is – It's right, which is – it's a luxury.

1:24:25And it's just because that's the way the literary world has functioned for 100 years or maybe longer. Yes. But – a best-selling novelist in the world right now, Colleen Hoover, is like selling the shit out of these books. Yeah. She had like eight of the top 25 best-selling books in 2022. And was she self-tublished? All TikTok. All TikTok. I think, and Instagram and social media. I think it started, I think maybe she self-published some, and now she's on a couple different publishers. But like, yeah, I think there is this belief that there's something sort of nasty or impure about like doing it.

1:25:00Well, if you're given the option not to do it, then you get to have an opinion about it. But if you're not given the option, then you don't get to have an opinion about it. Yeah, I've just come to see them both as... Nonfiction's easier because there's ideas in the works that you can go, that you care about independently of whether someone reads the book or not. Right. I mean, that's why you can sell it on a proposal. Yes. Because the execution is crucial, but the ideas are something that you can easily talk about. Yeah, how many people talk about the ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's books that have never read Malcolm Gladwell's books, right?

1:25:35Half the world. Probably, yeah. So, like, you have the ability to go out and talk about the thing, whereas, like, in a novel, you're like, what's this big? Like, it exists inside the universe that you've created. Yeah, and the execution is quite important. And, you know, you and I have given the task to write the exact same novel. Those books may have no – Yeah. If they – you know, write a book about Texas. Write a book about Texas. You could even get quite specific and the execution would be totally different. You know what's an interesting thing as we wrap up to talk about the artificial intelligence thing?

1:26:06So I have this habit and I've heard lots of writers do it. But like sometimes when I'm stuck, but also just generally when I find stuff I like, I will type up the writing of other great writers. Yeah. So like when I fold pages, I did it on your book and then I'll either do it by hand, but a lot of times I'll do it on my computer. I'll just type up that paragraph. I want to feel that through me, right? And so sometimes I do it in Gmail. I'll just send it as an email to myself to like print later, right? And so Gmail has artificial intelligence in it. You know, you're like, hey, let's meet Tuesday.

1:26:40And then it suggests to you like, sure, that sounds great, right? Or when I'm typing, I'm like, hey, do you want to get together this? And then it'll fly. It's like, do you want to say evening? It can like complete your thoughts. Or so it thinks based on millions and trillions of human interactions that have been recorded in text, the engine is able to sense where it thinks the sentence is going. Right, right, right. So if I sit down and I write a Hemingway sentence, which is, I think we all agree as a society is a great sentence. Yeah. If artificial intelligence really was great, it should know the end of that sentence.

1:27:13It should know the end of that sentence, not just because Hemingway's work is functioning in the engine, but also just like, we all agree that's what we're going for. Right. Right. And it never can. Wow. And so what strikes me is that all great innovation is fundamentally doing a thing that's never existed before. Yeah. So artificial intelligence, data, et cetera, can tell you what people typically do in your situation or perhaps could do in your situation. But if your situation is fundamentally new or you're trying to do something new or different, you're in uncharted territory and thus it can't help you.

1:27:54And so to me, that imperative means that if you want to continue operating in a world where that is operating also, you have to go towards what is uniquely human and groundbreaking, not rehashing. And even art itself, even kids understand that an original piece of art – and this could be also in nonfiction. An original piece of thinking is fundamentally much better than a copy. Yes. The original painting, it doesn't matter how good of a copy of the Mona Lisa you make, it's still a copy. It actually has no artistic value more or less. One has 100 percent and the other has none. And so that – and again, that's something even that kids understand pretty well.

1:28:42Like we know, oh, you just copied that, right? And we understand it for ideas too. So yeah, maybe this thing just pushes us all a little bit harder. Yeah, the choice to paint her is an artistic choice. The choice to leave this in and not that, right, is an artistic choice. The choice to light it a certain way. Those are all the choices that are uniquely human. There's literally like a million artistic choices in any painting, any piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction, any piece of philosophy. like it's the amount of things you know when you start to finish a book the amount of things you realize you've had to leave out sure and the books always get narrow i always have a sense of narrowing when i get near the end of the project i'm like shit i want to see these yeah i have a huge stack of things that i thought would go in exactly yeah now they're not yep and now they're not going in and there's always a little bit of melancholy feels i'm getting close to the end because i'm like man i thought it was going to hold all this actually just going to hold this which is still a lot that's still fine sure but mostly i become aware of the things that it can't really hold, you know.

1:29:43And yeah, maybe that's something to... When understanding that that is actually what you do. Like, of course you decide what, like, of course you also wrote all the words. But there's some level of that that's even just channeling. But it's that you may, that your job is actually to make choices about what goes in and what doesn't, to go this way or that way. And that fundamentally that's what's valuable, you know, Not like how well the words are strung together necessarily, but like the first choice was what is it about? And then the next choice was when is it? You know, like you make all these critical artistic decisions in what you do that like really can't be replaced.

1:30:27Yeah, especially by a machine that is just averaging them maybe, you know. Yeah. But it may be true that this replaces a lot of – I don't know, man. I try to want to be a lawyer right now. Yeah, or like if your job is writing for the Associated Press, the market went up two points today because X, Y, and Z, that's very replaceable because you're not even making it up. It's just like this is what – You're collating data. Yes, exactly. And so if you want to be a writer, you have to come up with something that isn't collating random data but where there are choices involved. Right, right, right. And understanding that is going to the thing – what are the things that can't be replaced?

1:31:15Yeah. And going towards that is probably ultimately what matters. Yeah. It's going to be a weird 10 years. Yeah. We're in for some strange times. Well, dude, thank you very much. This was awesome. I loved the books. Yeah. Appreciate it.

1:31:38Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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