Olivia Nuzzi Knows She Messed Up

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2:58Welcome 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.

3:49the biggest political media scandal of our time since everybody's talking about it journalist olivia nuzzi had to resign from her job at new york magazine because it was revealed that she was having an affair with rfk jr hey it's ryan holiday welcome to another episode of the daily stoic podcast i know a thing or two about falling under the sway of people that you look back and you go, what? That's insane. What was I thinking? I look back on my early 20s and I'm proud of some of it and I'm not proud of other parts of it. I talk about some of it. I don't talk about some of it. You know about some of it.

4:38Maybe you don't know about some of it. I wrote about a bunch of it in Trust Trust Me Online, which came out back in 2012 as sort of an expose and a tell-all slash memoir about my ride through the media and marketing and PR system in the sort of mid-aughts, web 2.0, bloggy world. It was crazy. I screwed up. I look back and I go, what was I doing working for some of these people? What was driving me? I mean, in retrospect, this stuff becomes clear, right? I was clearly imprinting on some of these figures that were powerful and successful and controversial, and they seemed confident, they seemed smart, they had like an energy that I went to like a moth to the flame.

5:28Dub Charney being one, a guy who was brilliant and provocative and creative and a genius in many ways, and then tragic and flawed and dark and ultimately quite a scary figure in other ways. I remember towards the end, you know, when he was fired by the board of directors and there were these investigations. I remember, you know, life was threatened. I remember checking my car for bugs. It was a crazy period. I would just go, how did I get here? What happened? What was I thinking? And, you know, it's not just like it was inexplicable. Like it had consequences for people. I did things that I shouldn't have done.

6:12I talk about this in Courageous Calling, actually, like where I got asked to do this thing that was not just illegal, but like morally repugnant. And I didn't do it, but I didn't exactly resign in protest. And I didn't because I was scared. I didn't because I didn't want to lose my salary. I didn't want to get fired. Like in retrospect, it's obvious. Like why would you want to keep a job that not doing something illegal could get you fired from? But when you're twisted up in it, when you're in the moment, when you have made compromises along the way, when you've turned your eyes away from things along the way, when you've said things publicly, you get twisted up.

6:51You get upside down. You get in over your head. So do I regret that period of my life? I mean, yeah. I also obviously understand that it was formative. It shaped me. I wouldn't be here if that hadn't happened. So I guess I'm just saying it's complicated and something I'm still dealing with in processing my own role in it, what I did, what was done to me, what I should have done differently, what I learned, what I took out of it, which is basically all that you can do in life. and we all have our own versions of that, is not an excuse, it's an explanation. And I say all this to segue to today's guest, who I've known for a while.

7:33I appeared in one of her stories once because someone she was writing about had read. Trust me, I'm lying. And, you know, we've gone back and forth every once in a while. I'm a big fan of her writing. And you've probably read some of her pieces too. I mean, her pieces drove the news cycle many instances over the last decade or so. When Donald Trump first met Olivia Nuzzi, as she writes in her new book, American Canto, she says, Trump looked me up and down and said, very young, very beautiful. And then the same person, when she wrote a piece that he didn't like, tweeted that the reporter was a shaky and unattractive whack job known as tough but dumb as a rock, who actually wrote a decent story about me a long time ago.

8:22Her name is Olivia Nuzzi. I guess what I'm saying, if you have no idea who this person is, is that she's been on a wild ride. ride. Here in the Daily Soap Podcast, we don't usually talk about the events of the news. We don't break news. We don't talk about scandal or gossip. We talk about ancient philosophy. We talk about timeless lessons. We talk about being a person in the world. If you know anything about Olivia's story, you know, well, she got herself into some trouble. In fact, she was supposed to record this like a week ago, but she was in the middle of parting ways with Vanity Fair, the second sort of shoe to drop in a series of shoes to drop in the last year or so.

9:13She talks about all of this in her book, American Canto, which I will read the first sentence in the back cover. It says, a mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade as Donald Trump has risen to dominance from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole. Olivia Nuzzi spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014 when the political landscape began to reconfigure itself around a singular personality whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next 10 years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials and government in blockbuster feature stories that drove the national conversation, propelled her to the heights of her profession.

10:01Then in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Newsy her job and reputation. Amid a full-blown tabloid frenzy, Newsy went quiet, drove West, and spent the next year in self-imposed exile at the edge of the country, where she wrote this searing and astonishingly clear-eyed account of what she and we have experienced over the last decade. I will say this book is actually very good. I thought the reviews did it a complete disservice. I don't know what exactly is motivating some of those reviewers and writers. I don't know what exactly people wanted, but I thought as a piece of writing, I say this as a person who has written books, written a book about media and their own role in it, and as a person who owns a bookstore and loves this genre of writing, I think it's actually a fantastic book.

10:53I think it's worth reading, like so many of her articles are worth reading. I'll give you a couple of famous ones. I examined Donald Trump's ear and his soul at Mar-a-Lago, the conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden. And then the one that ultimately led to the events that we will be speaking about directly and indirectly in today's interview, the mind-bending politics of RFK Jr.'s spoiler campaign. So look, if you know about the story or don't know about the story, let me tell you sort of what to expect in this interview. I'm not holding her feet to the fire. I am not interrogating her. I'm not that interested in the specifics and the gossip or the did this happen and what about this and why didn't you do this?

11:39I am just interested in what it is like to be a person on one side of something like this. What happens when what the Stokes would call the passions overwhelm your faculties, your values, your decision-making process, and you get yourself into real trouble? What happens when, again, another ancient term, you unleash the furies of the public's sense of injustice upon yourself, right? What does it feel like to be publicly shamed? What does it feel like to lose your perch at the top of your profession, both deservedly and undeservedly for things you did do and things you didn't do. We talk about the difference between guilt and shame.

12:25We talk about who leans in and who leans out in situations like this. How you learn to trust yourself when you have a pattern of behavior or thinking that does not serve you well, that gets you into trouble. I don't know how much more I need to introduce this. I think it's a great interview. I think the book is great. As I said, she signed a bunch of copies. We have them at The Painted Porch. You can go back and read some of her writing. She's worth following on social media. On Instagram, she's at Olivia Nuzi X. Paradoxically, Twitter, she's at Olivia Nuzi. And thank you to Olivia for coming out.

13:01She didn't have to do this interview. She didn't have to reschedule this interview when her life blew up like a second or third time. But she came out to Austin to do it. Then we walked around the painted porch. The video of that bookstore walkthrough posted up on YouTube here probably tomorrow, maybe. I'm glad this happened. Seems like she's doing better than I would have expected. So that's good to hear. For people who are following very closely, who are angry or worked up about it, I would say I get it. I'm pretty, as I say in the interview, pretty understanding of people who get themselves into situations like this.

13:37Because I've been there at least a little bit myself. But also, like, there's no one who is less of a big fan of the other person involved in this than me. I mean, I think he's one of the chief villains of our time. I think he's done unimaginable harm. I shudder for young children, not just here in America, but in the developed world, the sort of just found me wrong and dangerous and deranged things he has done to not just like the medical system, but the public good that is public health. and the public good that is our information about public health. So I am not a fan. In fact, I will say, just a little inside baseball, back in February of 2024, somebody asked me if I wanted to come to this like dinner he was at with a bunch of other podcasters and maybe he'd come on the show.

14:25And I said, thanks for the note. Hope you're doing well. I could not in good conscience attend, let alone donate money in support of someone who has spread so much utterly untrue and dangerous nonsense for so long. I wish Mr. Kennedy nothing but failure and shame because at this point, obscurity is too much to hope for. So if I can separate my feelings about that to the human being that was involved in all this and have this conversation, I think you should be able to do that as well. And I feel like I learned a lot. I enjoyed the book. And as always, I will keep reading what Olivia is writing because she is a great writer and I hope she keeps doing it.

15:04And she signed a bunch of copies of American Canto, which we have at The Painted Porch. I will link to that in today's show notes, or you can swing by the store on Historic Main Street here in Bastrop, Texas to grab it. I grabbed mine at the Seattle airport flying back from my talk there. I guess this was Thursday. She was going to do it on Friday. Had to cancel last minute. We moved it to Saturday, and then this stuff with Vanity Fair happened, so we canceled it. I wasn't honestly totally sure if it was going to get rescheduled, but I was pleasantly surprised when she popped up at The Painted Porch here on following Thursday.

15:42So that would be, I guess, two days from now if you're listening to this on Saturday when it comes out. Again, grab signed copies of American Conto from The Painted Porch or wherever you get the book. She read the audiobook, which I'm sure is a great listen. And let's just get into it.

15:59Okay, I have a book for you. I thought about as I was reading the book, I'm going to walk you through the bookstore and pick out some. Yeah. This is actually my copy. But I wondered, have you read By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down and Wept? No, I haven't. Do you know about this book? No. Okay. So I was thinking of books that might be interesting to you. Elizabeth Smart? Elizabeth Smart? No, no, not that Elizabeth Smart. Oh. Okay. This is a woman. She's in the 40s. Okay. She falls in love with this poet. Uh-huh. Did it end well? Well, she falls in love with this poet. And a love is an understatement for this.

16:27She falls in love with this married poet. Okay. They have four kids. All right. Her family disowns her. She is, I think, deported at one point for like moral turpitude. He continues the other family. She's a famous... What made you think of me? She's a famous copywriter. She's like, you know, this would be like if Peggy fell in love with Don Draper. Okay. This really happened. And then she wrote this kind of like fever dream of a novel about it. I don't know if it's time. Where she, yeah, she doesn't mention the person's name. She doesn't mention the specifics of it, but it's this beautiful novel about a torrid, life-ruining love affair.

17:10I can't relate to that at all. I'm sure you can't relate to at all. I can't relate to that. Her parents have the book banned in Canada, where she's from. At one point, I mean, she's so infatuated with this person. He's in London. She's in America. World War II is happening. And she crosses the Atlantic to go be with him, even though she's risking being killed by a German U-boat. I like that she's deported. Yes. She's either deported or it's like a violation of the Mann Act, like you can't travel. It's just craziness across the board. Well, I look forward to reading about this foreign experience.

17:47Thank you. But it's a beautifully written book. It's like the source material is torrid and life-ruining. but the art that comes out of it is beautiful but also remains totally mystifying the reason i thought of you and then the reason i was going to ask you about it is like she's writing what happened but i'm wondering as she's writing what does it make any sense to her right like do you did you have that experience like could you look back at the events of the last couple years and you recognize that person and there's a logic to it or you're just like it's an out-of-body experience I wouldn't say there's a logic to it, but there's an illogic to it, I guess.

18:29Does that make sense? No. Tell me. I mean, it's not like I think, oh, boy, what happened? It's not like I fainted in a field of poppies and woke up on the wrong coast or something. But I can look back and see the suspension of certain critical faculties. And that makes sense to me, but it doesn't make sense. Yes. Right? Yes, totally. Yeah. Well, there is. I think people think that your life can be heading in the wrong direction. And then you have this sudden epiphany and then you realize you're heading in the wrong direction. Then you change everything. And it's usually much more gradual. And then even the exiting out of it is gradual.

19:10And then the coming to terms with what happened and why it happened and where it could have gone differently. That's gradual, too. Well, I felt really grateful for the, I think I write at one point that I felt like the hand of God came and like swatted me off the path that I was on. And I felt grateful for that. Like it was abrupt and unpleasant. And, you know, it was not a smooth landing. It was like being ejected from a moving vehicle. But I was grateful for it. I'm grateful for it now because I thought, well, if that hadn't have happened, because it struck me that you don't just wake up one morning and make a huge mistake, right?

19:47Yes. Like necessarily there are many minor or imperceptible mistakes that lead to just like a misaligned worldview, right? Or just a misshapen path that you're on. And I look back and when I talk about kind of seeing the suspension of critical faculties, I see my dismissing that or dismissing discomfort in my daily life, right? Like dismissing thinking that it was possible and that there would be no penalty for like pushing aside things that I didn't want to deal with. And all of that seemed to sort of accumulate into circumstances or conditions that made an enormous mistake possible. There's another moment in fiction that I thought of when I was reading your book.

20:29And then I also thought about in my own life because I have some experience going down a path that I'm like, what was I thinking? And I missed it. Like, I missed it when I read it in high school. I missed it when I read it a bunch of times. But in Gatsby, there's this moment where Gatsby comes to Nick when he's trying to get in his good graces. And he says, like, hey, like, I know you don't make a ton of money doing what you do. I had maybe this business opportunity you could help me with. And Caraway says, like, only later did I realize that that was potentially a pivotal moment in my life. That basically Gatsby was trying to draw him into his world.

21:04And Caraway sort of dismisses it out of hand because he's not interested in it. But he doesn't, that was his chance to enter the underworld. Right. Right. And you don't, like, the moments where you don't do it or you do it don't seem significant in the moment. You're not like, I'm gambling everything on this. Because they all feel like small little decisions. Yeah. And I think I, you know, I was like this improbable success in the straight world. Right. And a lot of my success came from the fact that I didn't play by rules. Right. And I was willing to walk into spaces where maybe I shouldn't have been or, you know, use my wits or whims to acclimate myself to environments.

21:48And when you're rewarded for that over and over again, I think it kind of, I guess it created a sort of feedback loop where I write about Icarus. And someone was asking me about it, like some journalist at the New York Times, I think recently, and their interpretation, which I felt said more about. this person has often interpretations often do was that I was talking about being close to like other people's power, right? Circling too close to other people's power. But to me, it was just like I had a misunderstanding of my own power, right? And my own ability to know. I was so used to being right.

22:24Yes. And taking risks and those risks paying off rather than blowing up. And people deferring to me, right? Like I got this job at New York Magazine when I think it was like 23 or 24, and I was their first Washington correspondent. And I had never been a Washington correspondent, never covered a White House. And luckily, the guy in the White House had never been there before either, right? And there were some great things about having a fresh perspective, but there were also perilous things about that, right? But it's a collaborative environment where there are photographers who've been there since like the Carter administration.

22:55You could say, is that normal? And they're like, oh yeah, this always happens. Or no, this has never happened before. But I was used to, you know, I'd say, what do I do about this to like my editor-in-chief? And he'd be like, I don't know, you figure it out. And I'd be like, okay. And then I would figure it out. And I was correct most of the time. Right. And I got, I think it contributed to just this incorrect view that I didn't have to police my own judgments. Right. Right. Or I didn't have to just second guess myself as it related to my calculations about right and wrong and whether or not a risk was a good one or whether or not there was a when I was acting out of ego or fear or selfishness or whatever.

23:37And I think that kind of accumulates into this misconfigured worldview. When you're not exactly surrounded by people for whom strong black and white moral judgments and rectitude is a big priority. I imagine it's destabilizing being around other people who are also not just bending the rules, but questioning why there are rules at all. Or just ignoring. It's not even like questioning the rules. It's just rejecting the premise of the rules. That's what I mean. Right? Yeah. And I've said this before, but it's like Trump's lawlessness, that lawlessness animates the whole spirit of the place, whatever place that may be.

24:17Right. And you feel like in order, it's like every cop needs a criminal. You have to kind of get inside the mind and the lawlessness inspires lawlessness. And yeah, I mean, a lot of the book is about perception, right? And it's about the distortion of reality. And I was trying to accurately reflect the phantasmagory, right? And what it just has felt like to be here and from my vantage point, right? Yes. I had a moment like that. So for people who are listening, they don't know who I am. I worked for a bunch of controversial people over the years. And this was a messy, exciting period in my early and mid-20s.

24:57And like, I remember I read this book, again, another work of fiction, which I do think sometimes fiction gets to the truth of it more than nonfiction can. but uh bud schulberg who wrote on the waterfront with this book called the harder they fall which is about a boxing promoter and a press agent like so the the boxing promoter is corrupt it's affiliated with the mob and he's this press agent who's formerly a journalist now he's this press agent he's sort of in this morally dubious space and to spoil the ending it's an amazing book but it's not really spoiling at some point he says and he keeps he's really good at what he does You know, he's good at placing stories and creating this narrative.

25:38They're building this fighter up so it can take a fall. And he says towards the end, you know, I told myself that I could deal in filth and not become the thing that I touched. When I look back on my own story, I feel like I read that and that's what changed the trajectory of my life. That I was like, I got to get out of this. Right. And then I remember I was talking to Tim Miller, who interviewed you. Loved him. Yeah, he's great. And we were talking about this because we wrote similar sort of confessional books. And I was like, well, let me go see when I read that book. Yeah. And I read that book in 2009.

26:12So I, like many years, I understood the information. I understood what I was playing with. And then I didn't do anything about it. So we can know the information. We can even know that we're walking a tightrope or that we're playing with fire, whatever you want to use. And then it can take us a while to wake up to it. I think you can understand something intellectually, though. and it takes a long time to absorb it like energetically and spiritually but you wrote that book you were what like 25 when you wrote that book yeah right yeah and i reread it when i was writing this and i had talked to you about some of what i was writing because i was worried it's too strong a word but like i was trying to sort out the puzzle of like how do i deal without feeling like i'm shirking responsibility yeah with things that i was a part of that were kind of just had rotten values or, right?

26:59Or how do I describe those things without it feeling like I'm putting blame on anybody else, right? Or on systems or something. And it was really, it was important for me to reread that book because I remember reading it years ago and thinking like, man, this guy's crazy, you know? Because it's a really, it's aggressive. It's not the right word, but it's like a, it's a machine gun of a story, right? It's like it's really effective because it's narrow and you're not trying to you're not throat clearing. Right. You're not. It's like the opposite of how I write in some ways. Right. And I just I found it very instructive to kind of be confronted with with that on the other side of my mistake.

27:39Well, I didn't have any literary abilities. No, it's well done. It's well done. But I mean, you wrote like a real book about your experience. And that was to me, I didn't I don't think I had the capacity then or the sense that anyone was interested in it. I was just trying to kind of go like, this is all the things that I've seen. Isn't this fucked up? Yeah. I mean, there's an urgency to the style, right? I guess that's what I was trying to describe. Yeah. Is that something you wrestled with? Like, because I know I did with the book where you're like, I'm indicting a system which I am also a part of.

28:08And there's kind of a that's a tricky position to be in. I wrote this profile. It was like my favorite piece I ever did at New York Magazine. It was about an anonymous Republican and one of the many anonymous Republicans who would kind of shit talk Donald Trump during the first Trump administration, but was a part of the system. Right. And part of that story, and it was part of what informed the choices I made in this book. But part of the story was about how I think I say something to the effect of like the press provides the alibi as it prosecutes the case. Right. Like it was selfishly in my immediate interests to rely on people such as that.

28:46Even though every time I would rely on an anonymous person such as that, I was further kind of cementing that system of anonymous contradiction with on-the-record behavior or decisions and helping to perpetuate this system that's bad for people, right? and probably bad for American society and was getting worse. And it's not something I wrestled with necessarily with this book, but like I wanted to make sure that none of my decisions, I had rules for myself for surviving spiritually, like a scandal and public shaming. Yeah. And among the rules were just, you know, everything has to be from love, not for love.

29:29Right. I could never use anyone as a human shield. I could never spare myself and harm someone else. My first order was to have dignity amid my big indignity or honor amid my dishonor or handle my ethics scandal ethically. Right. And I wanted to make sure I wasn't making any decisions on the page that conflicted with those principles or that anything that was coming from fear or coming from ego. And just, you know, like the classic showing, not telling. Right. I mean, that's sort of was the standard the whole way through.

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32:19I heard you say that somewhere that you were trying to get through a dishonorable thing honorably. What does that mean to you? I mean, I was thinking a lot about honor. Yeah. Right? Like, when you're being, you know, rightfully, in that case, ridiculed, you're prompted a lot to think about what you did wrong. Yeah. And to assess what you did wrong, to assess what went wrong. And I think there's something very interesting about a crisis, like a public drama, right? Where everyone gets kind of distilled to their essential, like the lawyers are their most lawyer-y. The press people are their most press people-y.

32:53and I felt like my impulse to not sort of judge anyone by their worst behavior kept running into conflict with the fact that I felt like well it's like um people who drink if you're uh if you drink and you're like an angry mean drunk that always scares me about people because I think oh that probably is revealing something essential to their character yes that otherwise is you know not accessible or that they're able to kind of keep a lid on and I I don't think it's a small thing, right? And I guess it's the same under the kind of external stress of a scandal or of public crisis, where I just felt like I was experiencing a lot of people making selfish decisions that were dishonest and like just screwed up.

33:40But I didn't want to do that. And it was a lot of me like having to assess really quickly, okay, I'm going to accept this short-term discomfort or short-term pain rather than eternal suffering, right? And it's actually easy to do that. It's interesting that you would respond that way because I think the fundamental innovation, if you want to call it that, of this moment in culture is that people have figured out that if you dispense with honor or shame, it's actually a hack for getting out of scandals and triumphing over them. Like if you just, you throw out any sense of personal accountability, if you refuse to cast a stone at yourself, if you just pretend it didn't happen, actually, a lot of the mechanisms that we have as a society for holding people accountable for things, because most of what is a scandal is not actually illegal.

34:31You can kind of survive. And that's, I mean, there's always been shameless people, but that's kind of a new phenomenon. No, I mean, shamelessness like animates public life in America now in a way that I think it feels It's not new, but it feels like an exaggeration from how I remember it, you know, in the Bush era or something of my youth. But a lot of people told me, like, just keep going, basically. Like, these guys don't care. You shouldn't care either. You should just take whatever assignment to go cover the end of the election. And it was an attractive thought. I was like, oh, like, could I just I could just pretend this didn't happen.

35:07And then, like, my insistence that it doesn't matter will eventually, like, manifest. Yeah, there's not an appendage on Jeffrey Toobin columns in the New York Times. Well, I don't think there should be. I'm just saying, like, there are people who things happen and they just keep doing what they're doing. But unlike with Toobin, like, I really I did something wrong. Right. Those ethics rules are really important. They exist for a reason. And I ran afoul of those rules. And in that way, I hurt the whole industry. And I took that seriously, the kind of like public part of what I had done wrong. And then privately, like morally, spiritually, I took it really seriously.

35:40It just seemed like this. it was a big deal yeah like it wasn't even if people were like oh who cares and you know the few people who were expressing something like that you let yourself down i cared yeah i cared i did something wrong and i knew better and i didn't do better right and like that struck me as like well it struck me right and it just seemed like a like um something i needed to take seriously and i just i couldn't really i couldn't really like entertain this notion that i would just continue on and continue to, for a second I was like, okay, yeah, maybe I will go cover the end of the election for like Greed and Carter or whatever.

36:17And I just like, it would front of the main rule of like, I had to be able to live with myself. Right. Where does that come from? Because that, that, where does that sense come from? Where did you learn that or where did you pick that up? You think? I don't know. Do you think I'm just, is that an innate sense? Is that something that you get taught? Is that a religious connotation? Because it is, it's something that is clearly absent and i'm just wondering how we lost it or i don't know it's interesting my brother and i were extremely different like he's just really he's more type a like he was always in sports and he's a more disciplined person in a lot of ways like a lot of overt ways and our in a lot of ways our parents were not very disciplined people right like they struggled with addiction my mother struggled with, had mental illness and they both died young and they were sort of wildly irresponsible in a lot of ways.

37:11Right. But they were really good people and they were really like in ways that I couldn't have appreciated at the time that each of them died. Like I, I think most girls who were like, who really valorized their father, I assumed when he died, I kind of assumed I was grading him on the curve, you know, like, and I wasn't going to interrogate it too hard. I just kind of thought like in one part of my brain, very tiny voice, like I'm probably overstating things. Right. But that's OK. And I didn't really know very many people. You know, he died when I was, I think, 21, 22. And then as time went on, the more people I met and the more that I just like was on this planet, the more I came around to feeling like, oh, no, he was remarkable in all the ways that I thought and in ways that I didn't know enough to appreciate.

37:55And the way that they both were disciplined was like they were both really hard workers. And they were both, there was a certain honesty to the, just to the way that they lived in the way that they tried their best to like be here. Right. And I guess, so I see that with my brother too, where like for him, you know, it manifests more as just like, you know, personal responsibility and like he does Ironman competitions and like, but I think I see sort of the same quality in the both of us. And like, you have to just deal with, with the world as it is. Yeah. And you can't kind of you can't wish your way out of misfortune.

38:33Right. Yeah. I mean, that's what I would think. But I don't not everyone ascribes to that, clearly. No, but I mean, is that your problem? No, it's not my problem. But it's just it's an interesting when that was a widely held societal belief. It acts as a check. And it's weirdly that's actually the fourth estate, not journalism, like one's sense of shame or honor or reputation or one's ability to be like, yeah, I guess I did fuck up. Right. That's actually what journalism was invoking, because the idea that like, hey, if I get caught, that will look bad. And I care about whether I look bad. Right.

39:07As opposed to I only care if people who like me like me or whatever. And so like there's a playbook now. Right. It's like you fuck up or you're you sense a bad story is coming. It's like you call this like the Russell Brand playbook, like just become a right winger or get right. Or conversely, if you're a right winger, you're like actually become a never trumper. Like you can switch sides and then that side will forgive all your transgressions provided you hate the other side. And this is kind of like immunity clause you can evoke, right, or invoke. And so what journalism used to do would be the disinfectant, but the disinfectant had to care.

39:46You had to care if you looked bad in this report. And when that goes away, or if that isn't a thing people care about, we keep throwing the exposés in the articles and then we're wondering why it's not working. And it's like, it's not working because they just decided that it doesn't work anymore. Yeah. I mean, it's astonishing. And it's also like when I, you know, I found myself in this just due to my own error, right? This completely bizarre world of like sources familiar and like, you know, narratives forming and persisting kind of contorting just into utter delusion. And if you don't participate in that economy, you know, it's a law enforcement cliche.

40:28If you're not a source, you're a target. Yeah. Right. And one of my rules is like knowing that you refuse to be a source anyway. Like because it's like, you know, if you don't play, you can't lose. You can't win either, but you really can't lose. Actually, you can definitely lose. Right. But nothing real. Right. Like I sure. But you can't lose anything that didn't belong to you. Right. You can lose the media narrative, which is not yours to control anyway. But you you win whatever the sort of sense of honor or limitation standards you set for yourself. Yeah. And I just had to like, one of the things I just always instill would remind myself is like any, what's fake is ephemeral.

41:03Like I have to believe that. Right. And if I don't waste this opportunity of this rapturous crack up of my life, if I don't waste the opportunity to kind of, to assess it honestly and to like figure out how to proceed better, then I will be able to correct those things with time. Yes. But I can't. I just won't participate in the kind of 3D chess warfare that would be required to win a public narrative. And like also it's just in public. There's no justice in public narrative. There's poetic justice in public narrative, but there's no such thing as justice in public narrative. Yeah. And when you look at the people who, quote unquote, get away with it, I guess the moral question would be, did they actually get away with it or did they inflict some sort of greater injury upon themselves, which is they lost the opportunity to reform, to change, to understand, to grow.

41:55That's what I mean by suffering, right? Like that to me, that type of suffering is way too high a price to pay to avoid the short term pain. Yeah. What's interesting to me about all that, and I found this as I was reading the book, the book is very restrained. That's what I would say. Like you choose not to use certain names. You don't you have rules that you set for yourself, right? What you would do and wouldn't do. You're just saying. I'm thinking. So there's like a restrainedness to it. But it's a restrained person writing about a moment or a person who was so fundamentally unrestrained. And that contrast is interesting.

42:29And I wonder if you've thought about that at all. Yeah. I mean, I write about it a little bit, right, where it's just like when your privacy is violated, there emerges this expectation that you're going to further violate your privacy. right that like you must bear everything in order to uh receive some sort of absolution but there were aspects of it i mean it was because at first i was like i'm never going to talk about this i'm never going to write about this like i have nothing of use to share about that experience but i'm always writing right and then i'm out you know in la like at the edge of the country watching the end of the campaign.

43:07And it was just my necessary context, right, for like the literal vantage point and the philosophical, intellectual vantage point from which I'm synthesizing what became the Trump era, this 10-year period, right, in which extraordinary things happen, right? He gets elected in the first place. There are two impeachments. He's never been there before. It shows. He's booted from office. It's part of what he says is not an insurrection. others disagree um he it becomes a felon he's shot at right like it just and then he's elected again it's like this epic insane story and i felt i always felt like i have to see this thing through yeah like i didn't know when i agreed to cover it i didn't know that it was never gonna end right like i was this i was like the cub reporter and he was the unserious assignment and so when I was asked to cover it I was thrilled because he was a familiar character and I felt like I understood something of his psychology he's from Queens he's from the periphery of New York and that kind of to me I was too I grew up in New Jersey that explained a lot of I thought the way he operated yeah and then it just never ended right and it was like this ensemble that kept getting no one ever left the ensemble right it kept getting bigger and bigger and more unwieldy and I just felt like I was being crushed under the weight of it.

44:27And a lot of people that I covered round one with were like, I'm not doing that again. And I thought like, I have to, you know, I actually have to do it again because I have to see this through. I don't like the context that I possess is important. And there's something important about people having a fresh perspective too. And I do value that, but it's also important for people who've been here and know these characters to be here and so i was intent on doing that and then all of a sudden and in some ways i felt like i was at the height of my powers too and i had this kind of new perspective on him and i felt like useful in a way i hadn't in a while and i had a lot i wanted to explore and report out and assess and then i couldn't right right because of my own error and it just felt like if i was going to write about any of that, any of the last 10 years, the ways in which my personal life and personal story collided with that distortion of reality seemed like really important context for any reader.

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47:42I'm not trying to let you off the hook, but I'm curious what you think about this. This is something I thought of when I was reading the book. I do agree you were at the height of your powers. I loved reading your stuff, and you're very, very good at it. Thank you. When someone is at the height of their powers, we make exceptions for—not even exceptions. We have certain expectations for people who are great, whether it's sports, finance or whatever, like music. We understand there's kind of a crazy and a chaos that follows. Like we don't expect somebody who's putting up 30 points a night in the NBA or selling a million records a month to be like orderly and have it all together and have this strict.

48:21Like we just sort of expect like scandal and craziness follows. And then there's something about our reaction to what you did, your story, that it's not a double standard, but it is like a, I'm just wondering if there's something about writing or journalism that we're like, no, no, no, no. Talent must go hand in hand with having it together personally. That we're not as surprised when we find out an NBA player has, is cheating or is doing this or that. You know what I mean? Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. I mean, there aren't that many rules for journalists. So, you know, it's like, it's not hard to not run afoul of those rules.

49:04Right. And I just like did. So I understood last year, I completely understood. And I found a lot of value, frankly, in like reading the criticism and absorbing the discourse around it. And even when people were being extraordinarily uncharitable or unkind, often they had something interesting to say. And sometimes I agree, this more recent chaos that has subsumed the publication of this book is harder for me to take because I felt like, wait, I just did that. like i just did i did the i did the the public ridicule i i fucked up and i felt like i handled that right like yeah and i tried really hard to not make any mistakes and how i handled my mistake and why is this happening again you know and i hit this wall and then i kind of came around to as a coping mechanism thinking that like okay maybe i was operating under this delusion that because I had done the right thing, that I had input good, that I should like extract some sort of good.

50:10And it doesn't work that way. Of course, they appreciate that you're on the same team. Of course, it doesn't work that way. Right. Like it's and you must do good anyway. And it was it was important, I think, to be reminded of that. Yeah. And I think that's the problem, right? People are going, hey, if I don't do the right thing, I can get away with it. But if I do the right thing, it's still going to suck. And so we want karma to be real and we want things to be fair and just. And the reality is like, you can do the wrong thing and get away with it. That happens all the time. And you can do the right thing and still be criticized and not appreciated or not forgiven.

50:50That's just how life is. Yeah, but I guess it's like, get away with it. In what sense, though, right? Because it's like I... Keep your money, keep your platform. Yeah, but at what cost, right? Sure, sure. I agree. I think the reason why I'm not crushed is because I'm not carrying any shame about my efforts to wriggle out of... Is there a difference between guilt and shame? Do you feel guilt about what happened? Clearly, you're holding yourself responsible. You brought a Catholic here today to talk about this. Well, it's like I thought a lot about the distinction between shame and embarrassment.

51:28OK. Like, I think shame is really important. And I know that's shocking for a Catholic to think shame is really important. I grew Catholic. But I think shame is important. I think embarrassment is about ego. Because you want people to think about you a certain way. And it's about public perception, right? Shame to me is an interior experience. And embarrassment is more about an exterior experience. And I think shame can be really important if you have done something shameful. Like you should feel shame. You should, you know, sit with that and figure that out. But embarrassment to me, like none of this has been embarrassing to me because my value for this book or for myself as a human being is not derived from the public perception.

52:16Right. But in terms of guilt and shame, I don't know. That's interesting. What do you think? I don't know. I mean, if in the sense you're using shame, which is like, here are my standards and I feel X because I fell short of those standards or I feel pride because I lived up to those standards, then maybe we're using the words interchangeably. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's good to be hard on yourself. I guess guilt implies fault. Like, right. You found guilty. You're not found shamed. Yes. Right. You experience shame in a way that maybe you don't experience guilt. Right. But it's funny that we call it a public shaming.

52:54Not a public guilting. Or public embarrassment. But like, so you're saying it's good, but then obviously the thing we do to other people is not good. No. Yeah. No, certainly not. And like the, was it John Ronson? Oh, such a good book. Such a good book. Yes. But that's a totally different thing, right? Like that, I think I consider that more public humiliation. Yes. than public shame. But I guess it's private shame, public shame or different things. Well, it's hard because we talk about cancel culture as this thing that we went too far with. It's obviously bad. And I would agree with that. At the same time, society does need some mechanism other than the law to say like, this is not what we do.

53:32And there's consequences for doing the thing we don't do. Like, I think that's been the remarkable feature of the Trump age that it's like, hey, you can hit your wife on camera and still run a, you know, a professional fighting league. And the irony of also like you run a sport where people just slap each other back and forth. It's like a remarkable thing, right? Like, or you can say horrible racist things in a chat and then not lose your job over the, like there has to be some kind of accountability for it. It's not that you should be eternally damned or sent to prison or into exile, But society does have to have some mechanism by which we go like, here's the line.

54:16When you go over the line, there's consequences for doing that, don't you think? Yeah. I mean, I think like I guess it just happens in a slower, invisible way in social situations, right? Where it's like if you're just if you're unpleasant on balance, eventually you're not going to be invited to the gathering, right? Like your social circle winnows and winnows. But it does seem like just the attention economy, the kind of rotten values of that are that people who are loud and simplistic, that wins, nuance loses. Right. But I always just feel like, OK, the loudest people are probably not who I'm trying to talk to anyway.

54:54Yeah. Right. Like I'm trying to talk to the smartest person in the room. And to me, that's the most open minded person, the person most interested in and capable of holding nuance and just the most curious person. right someone who matches my curiosity like i always think about michael pollan who for me is like the north star and what he so among things that he's so remarkable at he's a great he's a hospitable guide right like he as a narrator you take his hand and you're reading and he's bringing you on this journey whether it's you know through his garden or you know into the poppy plant and out into uh consciousness he's got this book about consciousness coming out next year that i'm so excited for i don't know him by the way i'm just like a huge fan of the work but i like that i always think about that where it's like he is not condescending he's assuming he's assuming that you're here for good faith reasons yes and that you that he has something to tell you that you're going to find valuable and like that is the gold standard for me right so yeah i just it's like you live in a world where you can get caught on camera accepting a bag of cash whether that's legal or not whether they'll be recently uh who's the who's the like the immigration czar or whatever right a scene yeah and like the legal system will catch up with that at some point or not but that that should hopefully but but the point is like i think we're we're grappling with the society in which the public revelation of that fact does not end anything.

56:28It has zero effect. It's like doctors are prescribing antibiotics and they're just not working. And we're just wrestling with antibiotic resistance at a cultural level. Right. And then the question is like, what's incumbent on those doctors to stop and think, well, wait, are we overprescribing antibiotics? Right. Or should we be more thoughtful in our prescriptions for whatever is ailing our patients. That way we avoid a situation where everyone is antibiotic resistant. And then we have superbugs. Right. And so I think when the answer to everything is public shame and cancellation, I mean, our whole system was set up in a consensus reality where there was a definition of value or a shared understanding of value when there were authorities and there was public trust Right.

57:21And even as the institutions were being built, there was like a good faith that they were being built in good faith. Right. And that like it's what is a high crime and misdemeanor? It's open to interpretation. But, you know, why is there no law preventing the bulldozing of the East Wing? It's like, well, they didn't think about that. Right. Nobody thought about that. I mean, there was no East Wing then, but, you know, it's like. Yes. Well, the founders believed that the system, that the system, the final check on the system was the idea of personal virtue. Right. Like, I think Adam says something like they'll go through the system like a whale through a net.

57:55And so we had it's interesting that they knew that, that that that we were vulnerable to the superbugs or the antibiotic resistant man on horseback, so to speak. And but they just expected that would never happen. I mean, if you can keep it part of a republic, it's overlooked, I think, right? And it's sort of to grandiosely tie it back to my personal error. It goes back to maybe noticing on one level the suspension of certain critical faculties or letting things slide with myself and thinking that I didn't need to judge myself in real time for minor things. And then that creates a situation where you make a big mistake.

58:39And I feel like in general, there's a kind of, I don't know, part of it's like, we just don't have a, we don't have a formal mechanisms for, maybe it's like the collapse of institutions and the collapse of the family, right? The liberal institutions, the family unit are in theory like the midpoint before we get to law enforcement, justice departments involved. Right. Like and if those checks aren't in place, broadly speaking, you can't count on them. Then I guess it's like what you're talking about, where there's no penalty in real time for misbehavior. If I was talking to you in 21 or 22, could you have articulated these sort of values very clearly?

59:24And then there's a period where you sort of you override them or forget them? Or is it more like you've come to understand them in the wreckage of what happened? That's interesting. But I mean, I don't think I was consciously thinking about it. Right. So maybe on I could have had some sort of like eggheaded intellectual conversation about it. But also in that period, it's like it was everything was sort of hazy. And, you know, I was still covering Donald Trump. I was covering the pandemic in the end of that first term. And and then it didn't really end. And right. There are all these challenges and trying to kind of make sense of like what that even was.

1:00:10And then it's like this lithium fire that like the embers of it just spark up again. Right. And like it, I was thinking really very little about my own behavior where I fit in and my character fit in in this kind of broad corruption of character.

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1:02:42I use in the intro of Trust Me, I'm Lying, I was fooling around with that word disintegrated. Like we feel like it disintegrated in the air, right? It fell apart. But like, if you think about disintegrating meaning not integrated. I was like, that's what I had my beliefs. I had my values. I was studying this philosophy, which now I've sort of dedicated my life to. And then I had my sort of day-to-day work behavior. And those two things were not integrated. It's not that they were compartmentalized. They were just not, they were operating independently of each other. And like the reason they were not integrated is that there's a lot of cognitive dissonance between the two.

1:03:21If they were integrated, then you have to wrestle with the contradiction between what you think your character is and your day-to-day actions. And so you keep them apart from each other. And you just, I mean, being busy is a wonderful way to keep them from integrating with each other. Right. And like, that's one of the things I write about a little bit about being a reporter. It's like, I'm someone who really only has a flight instinct and you can just own almost anything. As a political reporter, the stakes are built in. You never have to wonder, like, am I, is what I'm doing, does it matter, right?

1:03:55It matters in a really overt way, even in like small little episodes. And the gift of that is tremendous. Like, the few times I've ever been assigned a story about something else, I've always hit this point where I'm like, wait, but I need this story to be about the universe and mankind. Yeah, you need stakes. And I need it to be life or death here. And this, you know, actor or this is not immediately high stakes in a way that I'm used to. And that is sort of like a gift in the same way that like the great engine for these characters running for office. That's a gift, too, for a writer. And there's something, too, about maybe this is what drew you to in the first place.

1:04:39by looking and judging other people, you don't have as, you're putting energy outwards that might otherwise go inwards. Totally. Yeah. And I mean, I write about, it's like when I started writing, it was really like the height of the personal essay boom for young women writers. It was like the, maybe it was like the tail end of the era of like XO Jane, but there was just a lot of that diaristic writing about young female experience and sexuality. I just could not have cared less about that stuff. Like, I just thought the stakes were so low. And I don't care. You know, I care about things that are going to affect other people and the arrogance of thinking that you want to be in charge of anyone else's existence at like a scale greater than like a dinner party.

1:05:28I should be the most powerful man in the world. Right, right. I should affect your life or the lives of people that you love. And I've got it. Right. That to me was just an astonishing premise for anything. I couldn't believe that anyone could think that way. And it was endlessly interesting to me. But isn't it funny? And it allowed me to just completely turn away. That seems like there's a sickness to that, right? But how often does the artist go like, isn't there a sickness in going, the world wants to hear what I have to say? Totally. Totally. And they are similar impulses of different scales and whatever.

1:06:01Yeah. It's more like, I think it's like immediate effect or like less perceptible or just less overt, maybe slower burn effect, right? with. I do, I mean, I think that's part of why it's been interesting how all right I've been with like really negative assessments of this book. And on the one hand, it's just I anticipated, you know, that there just might be unpleasant reaction, just the premise alone. Right. But the other part is just like, it's a choice to be a public facing person. It's a choice to create work and submit it for like public consideration. And so you really can't be all that broken up when like the public face is slapped, right?

1:06:44Yeah, you control what you write. You don't control what people think about what you write. But that's still nicer when they like it. Yeah, I mean, like one day I hope to experience that again. But it's like you assume the risk that it's going to be unpleasant. And it's still a privilege to do it, right? And it's not a great tragedy. Okay, so I have a question. So you have, there's a section in here, which you've talked about before. But let me, as I wrote a note on it, I would be curious what you think. You said, it was determined the only way for me to survive such a public relations crisis.

1:07:16Tell all, spare no detail, spare my job and my life as it was. This was the offer on the table. You could write your way out of it. The man for whom I worked told me, I did not consider this. Have you read Molly Bloom's book? Do you know who that is? Oh, Aaron Sorkin made a movie about her. But she was that famous. She ran those underground poker games in L.A., in New York City, that all these famous and important people. Is that the Kevin Spacey movie? No, that's a different gambling movie. But she's an Olympic level skier. She loses, she blows out her knee and applies her skills to doing something that you're not supposed to do, right?

1:07:52It's illegal. No one's dying, but it's not right. And she becomes quite wealthy and successful running these underground poker games. And eventually she gets caught, as everyone eventually does. and basically the FBI comes to her and says, look, you can keep your illicit gains if you tell us who was involved in what you did. And she famously gives up the money rather than tell people what she did. Now, one argument is like, you're not doing it because you don't want those people to come after you. But in both the book and the movie, and I've gotten to know her a little bit, she just felt like it was the wrong thing to do.

1:08:27I did the crime, I'll do the time. That was my view of it. Now, I'm always interested when people take certain moral stands that I don't totally understand. Like you might go, hey, you're all criminals. Yeah. Or all committing a crime. And why wouldn't you say it? And I think people might say to you, like, this is I thought that was interesting because this is a central argument of the book is that the conceit of the book, which is that you don't spare yourself, but you don't really talk about anyone. You talk about other people, but you don't name other people and you don't. It's obvious who they are.

1:08:58I'm sure you have receipts that you did not show. Right. And that's a moral choice you're making. I'm curious what you think of her moral choice and then how you think about your own choice. The two things I was thinking when you were talking about her, the first is just, I guess it's like it would be a sort of reverse entrapment, right, for her to do that. But... Reverse entrapment, what do you mean? I mean, like, she's the one who created the environment in which these people engaged in this illegal activity, right? But some of them are bad people. This would be the argument. I understand her feeling like that's not right.

1:09:37But then also, I know I'm thinking about like Tony Soprano, right? And like the pilot to The Soprano is one of the great pilots. And, you know, he says something to the effect of, you know, people used to go into their time. right and i it's interesting i i get it i do i get that and it's also like using others as a human shield that type of thing right like why that feels so wrong and it's um to me though it's at the time that i was faced with that uh ultimatum right i was in this conference room in lower manhattan i thought that i was going to be talking about something completely different And then all of a sudden I'm faced with this being confronted over this affair.

1:10:24And the ultimatum was basically like sell out yourself and the other party here. And then you're forgiven, basically, right? That's your penance for this error. And at the time it was like, I didn't even know what, I couldn't have synthesized my experience. Like my experience was ongoing and there were all these other factors too, right? Just in terms of like my, the security violation and the way it was colliding with my work absent the confrontation from my employer. And then just the betrayal that I experienced that was sort of in process, but had not yet fully occurred, both from the person I call the politician, obviously he's the health secretary now, or from the person I call the man I did not marry.

1:11:18Right. But I like I didn't even know really what to tell at that moment in time, like write a tell all and say, like, what exactly? You know, and and there was no good set of facts. There was no like version of events in which I was some sort of victim or in which something had happened to me. Right. And so there's a version of the book you could have written that I think generally would have been more redemptive. I just mean across the board. And then talking about the book separately. I mean, I just kind of felt like I shared what felt like it was mine to tell, right? And what felt like necessary context for what had occurred both with me and my character, right?

1:11:58And the dynamics of that relationship, right? So like, I don't talk, for instance, much about the man I did not marry. I don't write about why I needed to leave that relationship. I might be able to guess at this point, but there's some clues. Yeah. But that, to me, there's no public purpose for that, right? That would have just been about me and my own, like, soothing myself somehow. It could make you more sympathetic. Yeah, but who cares, right? I mean, people, I'm walking you through what people would say or think, right? Like, what the motivated reasoning of people who might make the other choice would be.

1:12:35Yeah, I mean, I think the version that would have been much more satisfying, which is nothing, I would never have considered doing it, would have been you know like chapters with people's names in which i you know on such and such date i met so and so and um and this is what they did and and here's why i am now condemning their their character but i just didn't feel that way also like i wasn't angry at anybody else and even now like i'm not angry at anyone else i'm not angry at the person that i you know did not marry And I was not angry at him last year and, you know, wasn't angry at the health secretary for personal reasons.

1:13:17And I think like being able to make the distinction between I disapprove of that person's actions where I'm dismayed or disturbed by something that someone has done. But I can kind of like isolate that and assess that for what it is at its appropriate size. And it doesn't have to destroy me or affect my decisions and how I conduct myself in a book or in conversation. To me, that's really important. And I just never, I felt like I had a lot to say about the last 10 years. And I had kind of, I felt a sort of urgency. And I also just, I didn't have a job for the first time, right? Like you're someone who knows about stillness, obviously.

1:13:58There's some forced stillness. Yeah, stillness is important to you. And I had really never, I had avoided it at all costs. Right. I sensed that your life was chaotic and busy as a way of not wrestling with or dealing with things that some of which probably appear in the book and some of which you're probably still wrestling with and will always be yeah um but i also it was like you know the kind of the hamster wheel of the trump administration the first trump administration that busyness and the kind of like righteous um feeling around it that there is something sort of addictive is the wrong word but really attractive about that and really um and then it's like it's this linear thing and everything else is organized around it.

1:14:42Yeah. Having a task. And like I, someone who likes to have a caper, you've got to have between one and three capers at all times to be happy. But that constant motion was a really good way to avoid, you know, looking too critically at myself and my surroundings and questioning, you know, it was easier for me to flee. And then all of a sudden, I have nowhere to go. I have nothing in particular to do. I have no real responsibilities. And I found I didn't really have a choice other than to figure out. But we're remarkably good at finding things to like the other option is you double down on craziness and dysfunction and bad choices like you also could have done that.

1:15:30Yeah. What would that have looked like? Sure. It would have been explosive. I don't have the imagination for it, I don't think. It's funny because patterns are clear retroactively, right? Like, I think about some of the people that I worked for and with, Dove Charney being one. And so that's why I'm reluctant to sort of judge other people for their attractions or their time and other people's orbit. Because in retrospect, it makes very little sense to me. But in the moment, it not just made sense. It was, like, exciting and exhilarating. And I thought I was doing mostly good stuff. And I remember one time I was talking to my aunt and she was like, it's interesting that you and your sister both ended up working for like this certain personality type.

1:16:13My sister at one point had a boss not that dissimilar to mine. And I was like, yeah, whoa, what does that say? Like, here I am thinking I'm making rational or self-interested career decisions. And then I'm like, actually in this Freudian psychodrama, for instance. And then and then I'm like, wow, I wish I had like there's probably no amount of pointing that out would have prevented me from doing it. But it's so it's so obvious in retrospect that it's just like, well, what's that? Have you thought about that for you? Oh, yeah. And even like over the last we were talking about the kind of present chaos externally.

1:16:49And I was thinking like, OK, why am I back here? Because it does feel like all of a sudden I'm back here. The one common variable in all these situations is you. Yeah, right. It's like I am the common denominator and I walked through the door and I was back at the welcome mat and it was sort of disorienting. And I was thinking, well, what did I not learn last time? What do I need to learn this time? Because whether you think there's some sort of divine organization to all of this or it's an accident of the universe, wherever you fall along those lines, like materialist, metaphysical, I just...

1:17:27it struck me that it was a loop, right? And so why am I at the start of the track again? And I theoretically, I should know better how to be here this time. Are you like, I want to get off this ride? At first, yes. At first I was like, I did not, like, I didn't sign up for a round trip. But then now I'm kind of like, wait, why am I back on this? How did I get on this ride again? And do I like the ride? Sure. Like, what do I not understand about how the ride works? Like, I'm more, I guess, on balance, I'm more curious about what's happening than I am devastated by it. And I have to assume or there needs to be for my survival, some utility.

1:18:13Right. And I felt like the whole time with the scandal around the affair that it was like, again, if I didn't waste the opportunity of the public shaming and the private shame, that it would be like my new capacity for empathy, if that makes any sense. It felt like this kind of wrecking ball had hit me in the chest and that the size of the blast radius would be my new capacity for empathy if I did not react from ego or from fear. Yeah. Yeah. And that it would make me better at what I do and it would make me a better chronicler of people if I let it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. If you have any sort of history of making bad decisions or definitely people in recovery deal with this where you're like, how do I trust my self, my instincts going forward when the one thing I know is that I shouldn't trust my instincts or what I'm attracted to or what I feel inclined to do?

1:19:08I need a conservatorship, right? And so what does my judgment count for then? If I could admit that there are some serious gaps here, how do I regain trust with myself, right? And I guess part of like working through those things and assessing, you know, there's a lot in this book that I reveal that like does not, that nobody knew about that makes me look terrible. Right. Like, and I felt part of it just felt like that was my penance for having made mistakes. And, you know, if I lied, I put it in the book and like I explained that I lied and or I just did something like totally boneheaded. that was wrong in retrospect right but for me it was less about like um it was like i think i i thought it didn't matter a lot of those things in real time in real time yeah like it felt so peripheral and so um private yeah right it's just hilarious now that we're talking about it here but like it just didn't feel important and then part of like the realization was just like no of like every little thing matters so much.

1:20:16Yeah. Right? Like everything that happens here matters. And every choice I make matters. And whether or not I can appreciate it in the moment or whether or not it ever looks that way, in retrospect, every little decision I make could be kind of like the flap of the wing that knocks you off your path or puts you onto a better path. Right? And that realization was a really important part of the process. Yeah, I find that the excuses and rationalizations that made sense in the moment, they don't age well. So you tell yourself it doesn't matter. You tell yourself no one's looking. You tell yourself everybody does it, whatever it is.

1:20:52And then, you know, if you get caught a year later, that's bad. The harder thing I found is like, what if you never get caught? Right. And you obviously talk about some stuff in the book, but I think there's this line from Epictetus, one of the stoics. He says, you know, whenever you find yourself criticized or attacked by someone, tell yourself, if they really knew me, they'd say something much worse. And like, oftentimes you're not caught for the worst thing that you've ever done. Or they're not able to ever fully understand what happened. So there's this part of you that just doesn't know what to do with the things that you told yourself didn't matter.

1:21:27And maybe they didn't matter, but they matter to you and you carry them with you. Yeah. Also, I mean, there just was very little conscious thought about a lot of it. Like I fell in love with someone as unbelievable as the facts of it may seem to a lot of people, which I understand. Like there was no real rational thought process around it. Like I just loved someone and cared about them and suspended certain critical faculties the way that people do when they're caught up in how they feel about someone else. And that's not to say that there's no free will involved in any of that, not to activate the free will doesn't exist crowd.

1:22:06But do you think it exists? Yeah, I think I don't know what we're doing here if it doesn't. I know you want it to exist, right? It's hard to be a stoic. It doesn't exist. But like, how open are you to the idea that it doesn't? Some philosophers said once, and it's kind of how I try to live my life, which is to assume that you have free will and nobody else does. So it's like all your choices of great moral consequence. And then everyone else's choice, they didn't have a say in it. And there's a kind of not pity, but an understanding and an empathy for like it couldn't have gone any other way, which is kind of what I took out of my Grand Central Station.

1:22:42I sat down wet. And even your book, which is you go like, man, love is like a hell of a drug. It's blinding. It can be deranging. And sometimes it's for the best. And other times, you know, I'm glad that didn't happen to me. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, that's kind of that's kind of how I try to think about it. Obviously, there's different scandals where it's like the person is sort of overtly, I don't know, the person is victimizing another person. When it's less that and more just like an error in judgment or an overwhelming of one's facilities, I tend to be a little bit like there, but for the grace of God, go I.

1:23:23Yeah, I mean, I felt like, I guess I felt a little liberated to write of his character as I experienced it and as I kind of watched it progress or devolve, right? And because he had maligned me and lied about my character, right? And so I felt like I owed him fairness and I owed myself affording him fairness. Right. But on balance, the public interest in offering my context for what occurred and where it fit within this broader story of this 10 year period of Trump's rise to dominance and like the distortion of reality that outweighed any like any feelings of, oh, well, I can't do that. You know, I can't do that.

1:24:09And like, because I was no longer violating the contract had been violated. Right. Like, and that doesn't mean that I felt like I had, you know, there were no rules and I didn't have to abide by my own code of honor around it. But I did feel like I had total freedom to sort out exactly what I felt like was useful for this story and for explaining, explaining what had happened and who he was to me and how I saw him. Right. And it's a weird story. It is weird. It's a weird all the way around. It's a weird story. Yeah. There was a scandal in the Truman administration and he had some sort of old cronies that, you know, did some stuff.

1:24:53There's this famous exchange between him and Secretary of State Dean Ackerson who says like, you know, Mr. President, I think you've been loyal to people who have not been loyal to you. And there's something about that that strikes us as very unfair. And then I've come to go like loyalty is not supposed to be a two way street. No, I mean, that's how on balance. You know, one of the things I kept coming back to was like my standards for myself are not affected by other people's standards for themselves or for others or for, you know, what they might be willing to tolerate from me. Right. Like what what is justified is not the same as what is right.

1:25:28And, you know, the definition of having a principle is that it's unaffected by external stimuli. right like your behavior is not going to change like how i feel about you know x matter and that was like an important guiding principle for this and just for this entire era of my life no one ever talks about young cronies yeah that's true because usually they're they're somebody you go way back with yeah yeah that's true well we apply like um we attach terms related to age in funny ways. Like you always hear about ancient grains or like a young coconut. So much of this is marketing to get people to care about one thing or see it differently than another thing.

1:26:12And I mean, I don't mean marketing so much as like it's coming from corporate interest, but there is just this endless amount. Everything is covered in euphemisms and qualifying and hedging. And that's part of, I think, wisdom is the ability to kind of strip those things out and be able to see them for what they are. Right. Yeah. I know. I've been thinking a lot in preparing to come here, thinking a lot about Marcus Aurelius, obviously. Right. And part of what was interesting about writing through the experience of the affair was just like, okay, were my feelings ever real if he was never real?

1:26:49Yeah. Right. And I still don't have a satisfying answer for that. Right. Like, but I felt like I had to kind of document with as much integrity as possible, like what it was and what it felt like and what, you know, I was experiencing at the time and what it looked like at the time. And like, I'm sure my feelings about it and my assessments will be really different in five years or 10 years, you know, or God willing, 25 years or something. But it was interesting. But I also, it's like, if we judge Aurelius over like who he was privately to himself, right? Right. And we do broadly. Right. Like I do.

1:27:27You seem to. Right. It's I'm I'm not going to weigh whatever rumors or legend about his personal life and taste for vengeance. Right. Right. Also, a lot of people think he was like repeatedly cheated on by his wife. And I go like, is that a real thing or is that a 2000 year old rumor? Exactly. Right. It's tough. And so it's like, I'm not going to weigh that against the body of evidence about his character or his intentions that we have. Right. What about Commodus? His son sucks. Oh, yeah. And he does give him the. But a lot of great people have less great children. Why is that? And are you really great if your legacy, your most direct.

1:28:06I'm just profiling your...

1:28:10One of the, like, if your legacy, your most direct legacy, if that's someone who's... Are you responsible? Are your kids a reflection of you and your character? It's like yes and no. It's complicated. I don't know. I mean, you have kids, right? No, no, I'm saying it's a yes and no. It's both, right? How? Well, I mean, obviously, they're learning their values from you. And if you're a horrendous hypocrite, that will have some effect on them. And at the same time, they're their own people who make their own choices. And like, you know, we obviously we both hold parents responsible for their actions, their kids, and then understand their kids are doing their own thing.

1:28:47Yeah. It's a tricky business. It's tricky business is what I'm saying. And it's like it strikes me just like anecdotally in my mind. There's like really conflicting in like our courts of law. Right. Like sometimes the parents are responsible for a child's crime. Yes. And sometimes they're not. And it's interesting. I mean, one of Donald Trump's great, one of the only cases for him having a good character was always like, well, his kids seem to love him and are in his life and are not dead or in jail. Right. Like early on, that was like a. Yeah, Hillary says this in the debate. I thought it was one of the dumbest things that she ever said, but okay.

1:29:25Right. It's like, how bad could this guy be if his kids are all functioning and seem like at least moderately and sometimes extremely employed? Yeah. And I never found that super compelling as it related to him. So is the inverse that compelling? Right. Maybe not. I think you said one, so it's just like great men are often really busy. Yes, they're just gone a lot. If your dad was, if you're like, why is that kid the way that they are? You'd be like, well, his dad was president, empire, billionaire, whatever. You'd be like, that explains it. You know, good or bad. Yeah. Although it's like, I also just really believe in how powerful individual choices are.

1:30:01Right. And like, and I really believe that like what happens privately within a context between two people or within a family or a classroom or a big institution very well may change the course of human history. Right. It has. And so it's hard to kind of reconcile those two ideas. No, it is.

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1:33:05I've had this unique experience of not just going through some of the stuff myself, but then because I wrote a book about it's kind of about media scandals. And then also I wrote this book about stoicism. Like weirdly, I get calls from people when their life blows up. Right. And so I called yours was like hey i'm writing a book do you have any advice yours wasn't like what do i do i've gotten some like oh i'm very worried about this this person is calling me at whether they deserve it or not yeah like they're a leaf blowing in the wind and this could go in a bad direction i've just talked to people who are in the middle of these public shamings and we could talk about it a bunch of different ways but one of the things i have found interesting is the kind of support network that pops up.

1:33:47Like James Fry is interesting. He is like taking it upon himself to reach out to people who are in the middle of those things. I think it's part of his recovery. He's just like, hey, I know what it feels like to know that the world thinks you're a piece of shit and is rooting for this to get worse for you. Right. And and like so I've been fascinated by like in the moments where that's happening, the people that lean in and the people that go away. I imagine you learned a little bit about that. Yeah. I mean, this one was interesting. There are some people who, it's like grief, where some people are just really frightened and don't know what to say and don't want to think about it because it's just scary.

1:34:29It's like, wait, but my whole existence is about denying mortality. Like, I can't come near you right now. And that I don't fault anyone for ever. It's just like, you know, you can't, like, people aren't accountable for their limitations, I don't think. And no one really surprised me. I mean, some people have had really good advice. Some of the advice is kind of infuriating in its own way, but they mean well. And so you can't, you know, judge it, I don't think. But, you know, someone had said to me early, early on, like, you don't have a constituency, so this is going to be really hard. And I was like, what do you mean?

1:35:02It was like, oh, well, you're not aligned with the right wing or the left wing and various factions within those factions hate you. And also, I would say your audience is intermediated by a publication as opposed to like. Totally. Right. Yeah. And I like that. Yeah. You know, like I like a barrier and I like some distance and there's a lot of space in the book. And I think maybe in some way it was like, to me, it just feels like kind of the charitable thing to do for a reader. And like, I don't want to tell anyone how to think, but it's also maybe a way for me to like fabricate some space for myself too, right?

1:35:40Like this goes in both directions. um but the lack of that was interesting and people who've really who've been through it or who've been through it i found that like sometimes people who are public people in some capacity and understand something of being publicly shamed still it's not like um not everyone's reached like total i don't know what the term for it would be like the point at which they kind of like turn the dial from am to fm like the break right the the carlin break or the dylan break like the point at which like they just baseline like don't believe a lot of what they read or it infects their like just that distrust sparked by their own experience and the distortions related to it or their perceived distortions related to it creates this more general distress like my brother on the phone earlier was saying to me like reading certain things about me in the press and something in particular today, I guess.

1:36:39He was like, it's just making me like have less faith in general with what I read because I know so like viscerally that this is so untrue. Do you know about the gale amnesia effect? No. So the gale amnesia effect, I'm probably mispronouncing it, but it's basically like when you read an article or you watch something from the press about something you know a lot about, you see all the problems and, you know, inaccuracies and insufficiencies. and then you turn to its coverage of the Middle East or the stock market or whatever the thing you don't know about is, and you're like, sure, that seems true.

1:37:14The amnesia effect is our willingness to see how terribly wrong it is or unfair or biased or the weaknesses in the area that we have the expertise. And then we conveniently forget that elsewhere or with time we forget it elsewhere. You could argue AI has a similar effect where it's like, if you ask it something you really know about, It's woefully insufficient. But then you're like, here, plan my vacation. Right, right, right. Yeah, it's interesting. I think, you know, I write in the book about how in this time period, this 10-year period, it's like anything seemed possible. And like on the one hand, that is a literal inspirational slogan.

1:37:49Anything's possible. But it also landed as a threat, right? It was like anything could be believed. Sure. Because anything was possible. And there were no boundaries all of a sudden. Yeah. Because there are no standards. Because there's no consensus. Because we're not living in a consensus reality. And there's no consistency either. It's wildly. Because consistency requires boundaries and consensus. And there has to be some shared understanding of value. And those things no longer exist. Right. And that is fascinating to me. Right. And that's sort of what I have personal responsibility for it.

1:38:21And like I have free will, I think. Yeah. But like I, nevertheless, it was in that environment and assessing all of that closely in which I made a mistake. Right. And that was interesting to me. The reason I was asking about who reached out is not that I'm not looking for names, but there's a beautiful scene in Oscar Wilde's book, De Profundus, where he talks about this moment he's being transferred from one prison to another. He's, you know, his life is ruined over, you know, what we would now say are, you know, nobody's business. But at the time, you know, everything is taken from his wife, his family, his money, his reputation.

1:38:58And he's being transferred from this one prison to another. And a friend, something Robertson, I'm forgetting his name, his friend, he walks down the hall and his friend's just standing there. And he just kind of like smiles and nods his head. And he says, like, in this moment, there's that is everything that Jesus was supposed to represent. Like that is the Christian tradition there that like in your darkest, most abject public humiliation, the person who says like, I see you and I haven't forsaken you. And I do think obviously public shaming is bad and inexcusable. And we can't do so much about it as a society, but we can as individuals decide to be that person when someone we know is going through something like that.

1:39:43I mean, I feel like I've been really fortunate in a million different ways. And that's one of them. Like I, someone asked me recently, like, oh, like, did you lose a lot of friends during? I was like, no, what? Right? Like, I was shocked by the question that I thought, like, oh, wow, like my great fortune that it didn't even occur to me that people with whom I'm, I'm consider myself really close friends, that there might be any doubt. Right? Like, and I thought that was, it was like a, I felt stupid and then just so lucky that it hadn't even. Yeah, I think that's more unusual than you think it is.

1:40:16I mean, I guess, you know, or it's just like my friends know how stupid I am. Right? Like, what? Were there people that in the moment were like, what are you doing? Like before it happened? Like, like I sometimes go like, I wish someone would have told me. And then. Nobody knew. It was a secret. But did they see a direction you were going? Like, I just think about moments and I go, I wish someone told me. And then they're like, we did try to tell you. I also was just making myself scared. you know and it's like i think when you're keeping any kind of secret you you keep a lot of other secrets right in in the process and like because our secrets yeah and something i i mean something i write about in the book because my mother and like the dynamics of the house that i grew up in on the one hand they're like honest people and on the other hand we're all sort of keeping living in this weird within this weird secret of her mental illness and her alcoholism and it was a lot of my existence was about the upkeep of lies right to to protect her and protect i don't know what but i was spending i just remember being exhausting right but there's something sort of comforting about that too and it's like oh with you know my replicating this pattern of like falling back into a dynamic such as that and like seem so right and i i think i write about like to my mind there is this um there's this sort of like paradise within the privacy of a lie and in preparing to roll out this book i remember i was meeting with a pr person i was anticipating a crisis and um yeah really it's quite a prediction yeah and um they said something to the effect of like oh well like you want to fix i assume you want to fix your like google results it's a lot of you know crazy stuff in there and i was like i kind of felt terrified by the notion of that because there's a sort of anonymity in having a lot of bullshit about you out there, right?

1:42:08Like there's a, in some ways that's much less scary to me at this point than like this, right? Or, um, yeah, I don't know. It's, I can't remember what the question was. No, I just, I wonder sometimes when I know people that are like twisting in the wind, what the obligation is, you know, like, Like, because it's obviously there's a spectrum, right? There's like, they're totally innocent and they don't deserve this. And then there's the like, they really did it to themselves. And then there's the, bro, I think there was a time to stop emailing Epstein. Okay. You know, like there's the broad spectrum of like how you decide to deal with someone who is in the hot seat.

1:42:54Yeah. Although, I was going to say something about Epstein. But I changed the narrative. Yeah, same territory. I wanted to change the narrative, so I wanted to talk about Israel and Jeffrey Epstein. That's okay. But I, you know, I don't know. I kind of think it's like grief, though, where it's like my view is that whatever private judgments I may have about anyone's behavior, you can always be a human being. Yes. Right? And that doesn't mean that you have to defend them either privately or publicly, but I'm going to be a human being first. Right. And form criticisms once I have enough information.

1:43:32But usually there's nothing close to a complete set of facts available. Right. When someone's first, you know, in a public shaming. And that's, you know, usually been my point of view about it. And sometimes I'll get like a message and I'll think like, oh, I guess it looks that bad, huh? But like, I guess. What did you say? Like when Monica Lewinsky is checking in on you, that's that. But, you know, it's interesting because so many people have brought her up to me and she's so lovely. And like, I'm just, I really am just like awed by her ability to come out of that with just all of this kindness and grace intact and all of this empathy.

1:44:11And because you could see very easily how it could have gone another way. But I felt very much like, OK, well, because people keep mentioning her to me and it's like, well, what happened to her happened to her. Right. Her prefrontal cortex is not developed. Like there is an enormous power imbalance. Whatever else was true about that, like it happened to her. Yeah. And I happened to me. Right. So it feels very different. It does. Although I would say looking back on, you know, a couple centuries of scandals, it is very rare to find one historically contemporary where you look back and you go, we were not hard enough on that woman.

1:44:49Like, yeah, we always need a witch to burn. And but also like I can withstand burning. It's all right by me. You know? Yeah, that makes sense. That's a rule I try to think about as a person when I'm four. I go like, how is this now that we have some distance on any number of them? Are we like that that instinct, whatever that is in the human tribe does not age. It does not age well. It ages like not typically. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. We're consistent about something. yes yeah conversely it's not so true the other direction we often do let certain men off with a slap on the wrist and then come to regret it you know we're like i mean look generally probably public shamings are not good but i would just say like when you look at things that we get upset about we're usually like yeah we were too too hard not to yeah i mean the kind of like sexual fervor animating the the public discourse is is interesting and that just sort of feels like okay I'm in a very old story here, right?

1:45:51Like I am it right now in this story or I'm back, I guess, for like season two. And that's interesting. And it doesn't, even though it feels violating, it doesn't feel personal because it's not right. It has almost nothing to do with me, like an actual facts of anything. But that, you know, I don't know. I kind of, I get it and I'm interested enough in it to, again, like to not be cowering about it. And, I mean, it's complicated because it's like, I get why, you know, I get why it's a tough one for people to process. And I also, I'm orbiting pretty close to Earth, right? Like, I'm a nearer villain to, like, treat like a piñata versus, like, anyone, like, in the federal government.

1:46:37Or, you know, it's just, it's easier to do that. Right. Like one of the people that sort of went through the both books for me that it was always like Billy Bush read both of my books. Like back to back the Stoes is one of them in the media ones. And you go, yeah, like in retrospect, we sort of came down on the dude who didn't do the thing. Yeah. But he's a translator for it. Like he is the middleman and I was the middlewoman. Like translating these people, like the great privilege of what you do is as a journalist, It's like you go places and you step in rooms and talk to people who are of interest and consequence to the general public.

1:47:18But most of the general public doesn't have the time, interest, desire, ability to go and do that. And you must report back like for them. And you've got to be thinking about like, well, what do they need to know? Right. And it's a privilege to do that. And I, you know, fucked up in such a way that I put that kind of contract in doubt. And so I understood the last time last year, like I understood the kind of, you know, general. Well, access is a tricky thing, right? Because I'll say maintaining the access, using the access, knowing when to make the break, when to when to do what Janet Malcolm says is the sort of dishonor.

1:47:58Like when do you when do you when do when is the betrayal? Well, I always think about Janet Malcolm and I always reread The Journalist of the Murderer. And, but I also think of, I think it's Jean-Marie Laskus who said, when I report, I fall in love. When I sit down to write, I get divorced. And I never have felt that way. Like, I don't, I always felt like if, I think it's like really the gay to least model. If the subject is surprised, that means I have failed in some way. But I like to argue. And like, if I disagree with someone's philosophy or something or something they've stated, like, I want to talk about it because I want to understand the nature of the disagreement and like why they feel that way.

1:48:34And that's what to me, what the access is for. But also it's like, as much as this was about my mistake within the context of this election, it was this isolated thing where I just fell in love with the wrong person. Right. And so it wasn't like a broad. My work has never been in doubt. Right. Like for whatever it's worth, it may be not much like, you know, the magazine I was working for, New York Magazine, like, you know, had some scary law firm like conduct their review of it. And like, it's not like my broad coverage and like the 10 year period that we're talking about here has ever been in doubt.

1:49:07Right. Like nothing's ever been retracted. Like there's no. So that's been a little frustrating just seeing kind of like the trust and respect are fragile things. Right. In retrospect, do you see that you have a tendency to compartmentalize? Like, that's kind of what I noticed. It's like, you love this person, but what this person is doing, not just to you, but like their actual stated sort of like policy goals. Like, those seem to be, again, disintegrated or even like some of the people that you're like talking to in the book, after it's all happening, I'm like, oh, okay. Like, I don't know. It seems.

1:49:43Yeah. Is that the journalist part of you that is able to like? Probably. Yeah. Probably. But also it's like, I mean, parsing this is probably stupid, but for whatever it's worth, like in the period of time that we're talking about, it's not as if, you know, this was like a kind of peripheral third party effort. Certainly he was not under the impression that it was going to end up how it ended up for a very long time, nor was I, nor was anyone else. And it wasn't as if we sat around and talked about the MMR vaccine. Right. Right. So. But his negative impact on the world predates and would exist without becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services.

1:50:26On vaccines, I understand what you're talking about. But then it's also like and part of this is, you know, operating under the delusion of just like wanting to assume the best of someone that you love. Right. But it's like I do see that, you know, on the environment, on just Monsanto alone. Right. Right. Like those are big, important things that like I valued and like I thought were admirable. Right. And I also just like I think because I was so good at compartmentalizing, like my job is to talk to people with whom I have, in most cases, enormous differences. Right. And to be able to have a productive human conversation and try and understand something of them as a human being, understand their psychology.

1:51:06You can't really go into that just with judgment. You can hold your disagreements and those don't go away. But like if you're just sitting there vibrating with contempt because of the differences of opinion, it's never going to work. And I got really used to that. Right. And I think it made it much easier to kind of like just focus on the human being and discount the rest. But I also like I wasn't sure for like, you know, what we didn't talk. You know, we talked about music and poetry and, you know. Yeah. And this sounds more judgy than it is, but it's like that expression, your mind's so open, your brain fell out.

1:51:40Like, no, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. But it's also just like that, you know, it's not a rational thing to fall in love in general. This is perhaps particularly irrational. Yes. But like it's going to end in some sort of immense pain. Right. And so no matter what the premise is or the premise of just like counting on another human being, all these things are baseline irrational, but also essential to the human experience. Right. Yes. No. Well, I don't know where to land this thing. I don't know where if I missed anything. I think I didn't. No, no, no. I'm just being general. You want to go check out some books?

1:52:17I would love to. Okay, we're going to the bookstore.

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