Timothy Denevi on the Power of Reading and Learning from the Past (Part 2)

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1:54Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:44Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Last week, I brought you part one of my conversation with Timothy Denevieve, who wrote this awesome book called Freak Kingdom, Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism. One book that I absolutely adore, Carrying in the Painted Porch. We don't carry a lot of sort of current events, like books that don't fit in clear categories. And this is one, and I really think you should read it. He's written for the Paris Review, the New York Magazine, Literary Hub. I read this great piece he wrote about Joan Didion, who, by the way, you've listened to the podcast more than once.

3:19You've already picked up on this. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan. And so it's cool for him to sit on the table, which is Joan Didion's table, to sit in the chair in my office where I'm sitting in as I'm reading to you right now. I really liked this book. Again, when I rave about books, I'm really raving about books. Like, I took some notes when I was writing this book. I was like, this book is better written than it should be. Like, Tim is an academic. He's a professor at George Mason. and a lot of books written by professors, they're factually correct. The scholarly work is important, but they're not great at writing.

3:49And you can tell this dude has been schooled in creative writing. He knows what he's talking about. And it was just a really awesome conversation. I think you're going to enjoy part two. If you haven't checked out Freak Kingdom, you absolutely should. I'll link to it in today's show notes, but go ahead and check it out. And here's my conversation on Hunter S. Thompson, America, and what we can learn from the past political moments about the moment we're in right now.

4:18I don't know what's happening to the Western mind, but I will say the literal relationship to fact, especially in the last 10 years, is mind-blowing to me. We don't just have to go back to the 60s and the idea of exaggeration and art, and all of these different emotional versus other types of truth. I wrote a lot about the historical Jesus and Gospels, that idea that you could keep two things in the human mind at once. That, of course, this is exaggerated to prove a point. And still, this is a narrative that feels true or I want. It doesn't have to be either or. And our either or moment blows my mind right now.

5:02And then at least hypocrisy, which is what Thompson was talking about so much then, but which is really dangerous because it's – my fiancé will say, like, we're not thinking well. Like, we're not thinking well if everything has to be a dichotomy or a black and white yes or no situation. And that response is similar to what you're talking about to what I think is going wrong right now. And I just think Thompson was so good and so many of those. I mean, what does Conrad say? like life is short and art is long and success is very far off yeah you know that this is something that's been practiced and engaged for so many thousands of years by so many people and to take not just our lens right now and map it on to the more recent american past or whatever but to think that it's always been this way and we're not in a conversation with the technology that's all around us you know the voices of people that are long gone to me is mind-blowing um and i i think we're getting stupider because of that and i sound so old it kind of blows my mind but we need to think I don't know how we're going to think better if we can only think in yes or no.

6:01I mean, I think if you watch the tape of Hunter S. Thompson at the Kentucky Derby and then you read the story, you'd be like, oh, you made the entire thing up. But that's not what that story is about. And the same, if you actually, what could you verify from those trips to Las Vegas? Probably more of it is not true than is true. But the book's not about what happened in Las Vegas. the book is about the high water mark of the 60s it's all about that observation it's about the the the essence and the vibe and the feeling that he's trying to capture um and what new journalism was was a kind of emerging of fiction and non-fiction exactly and comedy does that now too and you're yeah you're missing the point if you try to be this sort of strict literate like Like there's a difference between the irony then of simultaneously being a culture where you have someone like Trump who is objectively a liar.

7:02But people accept it because they want it to be true or because it feel like like to have literally the most dishonest person to ever hold the office. simultaneously be popular with a large segment of the population because he is a truth teller is this weird double standard where like the people that we should be hearing the emotional truth from we hold literally we hold to the standard of literalness and then the people who are actual officials or scientists except who we need to be holding to a literal standard we allow to get off with, well, they're telling me what I want to hear. It's a very strange situation.

7:45And I mean, it reminds me of in kind of a tangential way, but you know, the passage in Didion's The White Album where she's with Jim Morrison. And you know how she writes about it? She goes to the recording session, they're waiting for Jim Morrison. He shows up, he doesn't talk to anybody. He's like, should we do this? And they're like, we can't. And Didion's like, I don't even knowing whose favor the conversation you know was determined in real life what happened evie babbitts her friend talks about this who had dated morrison brought her there she was flirting with jim morrison he was throwing the matches at her it was such a different reality than how she um articulated it that piece's emotional truth is mind-blowing i love that passage about how she captures what the doors are expected to be what they are yeah they're like should we go they're like making like trap they're supposed to be this revolutionary artistic you know whatever group and they're just like, should we drive back from West Covina today?

8:37Yeah, exactly. It's just this, it's so, she presents them as so pedantic and ordinary that it essentially like flays them. Yeah. And yeah, why is she doing that? That's, I guess, a different question. But yeah, the idea that it could have happened very differently. And then still, everything's true there. She had a fact checker. She just chose to leave out certain other parts. And I think she did a very nice job of capturing what we thought a rock band was. Yeah. Leather pants. Yeah. Sex and death, you know. And then the kind of everyday nature of it and that, you know, is like four co-workers or whatever.

9:09Yeah, exactly. And there's like, they're eating like boiled eggs out of a paper bag, you know, like she's counting the number of buttons on the control panel. But even then she's narrowing from reality, all the different things that did happen that night into her version of what she wants to say. And nothing is untrue about that. It's just think of all she leaves out to get there. And I think we are even struggling to understand that in terms of subjectivity and nonfiction and truth in the present right now. Well, I actually, the epigraph is, to trust me, I'm lying, is the James Adgey quote, where it's basically saying that fundamentally, journalism is a form of lying because you're taking disparate events and coordinating them to tell a story that you want to tell.

9:50And you're leaving things out. And then there's that famous, what's her name? Janet Malcolm thing about how fundamentally, journalism is also this act of aggression and hostility. Didion talks about this too, where you're like, you and the source have an adversarial relationship and you're just looking for where you're going to bury the knife. And if you don't put the knife in, it's only because you're using them in some ways to get up to someone else or something else or they fit your... And so, yeah, we don't see journalism that way because, again, coming out of the 60s, we see it as this inherently noble pursuit it speaks truth to power brings out presidents which it does i was telling um hassan that i was saying like obviously post writing trust me i'm lying i have this relationship where i see clearly the importance of journalism i mean uh especially when you have sort of a neo-fascistic movement you have disinformation and misinformation where real lives are hanging the balance.

10:59And at the same time, when I watch stories like what happened to him, where I watch, so miss the boat on other things, you go, oh yeah, you're like, you are also part of the problem. You're like the, I don't know what the alternative is, but like you're complicit in the whole system too. And you are as much a vehicle for untruth as you are truth. Exactly. I think Barry Weiss's response to the, has been amazing that Israel, uh palestine conflict we got to that topic very quickly but uh the way that she's covering um that ever since um and since early october has been brilliant and as a way to cut through um what's inhibiting or the failures of major journalistic outlets right now yeah in dealing with i mean sending reporters out talking to people on the ground she with her podcast and with the free press has done an amazing job so that's kind of the more i mean in a tough time saving lives a brilliant way, I think, of dealing with it right now.

11:54Well, and then that, there is no such thing as a perfect messenger, right? So like, I know Barry, I like Barry. I think she's carried water for the wrong people quite often. And then there are moments where she really nails it, right? And I think you could make the same point about 100 stops there. A lot of great, it's like, sometimes they get it right and sometimes they don't, right? And some, you sort of, that's why you have to have this broad group of people you get your information from you can't just oh i just read this you know the dumbest people i know just get their news from the television do you know what i mean like you go oh okay this is a problem and that's it's so hard though because i wish my father would watch cbs news you know like instead it's on facebook like i think that you're right i i think that we've also lost the idea of getting news of getting an information in perspective by a 400 page book yeah written 40 50 years so that's why i loved your book so like i have found like okay the best book i read during covid was um john m barry's book the great influenza right so you're reading about the spanish flu and you're like okay here's everything that's true right the best way i understood trump was uh sinclair lewis's uh it can't happen here and i feel like your book actually which comes which basically the generation right after that book like you're talking about no longer does the fascist movement look like Mussolini or Hitler.

13:22It's figured out how to dress better. It's figured out how to co-opt certain kinds of speech and language. It's less, it's more velvet glove, you know, than, than iron fist. But Hunter S. Thompson is writing about the exact same things that are happening right now. The same types of politicians, like my understanding of the civil rights movement and has changed how when I look at some of these governors, like when I look at the governor of Texas, when I look at DeSantis, I understand them now through the lens of George Wallace or this certain kind of Southern governor, same with some of the senators.

14:04But you're like, oh, this this is a type of person, just like there's types of movies. This is a type of person. And this person has something that resonates with large groups of people for long periods of time. you have to understand the game that they are playing um and you have to take that very seriously and i i found that people don't have the historical basis to do that so they just look at oh desantis doesn't like the people that i like or whatever and and you're not getting the game that he's playing and how dangerous it actually is and where where it inevitably ends up where it leads to.

14:39And the inherent fragility to our system that we kind of take for granted. How it can be co-opted in the ways you're exactly talking about. I always think about how George Wallace Thompson wrote about this. He was running for president in 1972 on an independent platform. Will be shot eventually in only Maryland, but this is when he's still kind of ramping up. there's other candidates, other Democratic candidates going to Florida, trying to win. You have Muskie taking the whistle stop tour, you know, down, trying to coordinate everything perfectly. And George Wallace just goes to a NASCAR event.

15:16He has 300 ,000 people in the audience. He speaks beforehand and he is reaching everyone. He is getting the free publicity and the exposure that the other candidates are paying everything they have and positioning themselves to somehow reach and instead are just getting further away from the voters that they want. He understands where the people are and what they want to hear. And yeah, right. And if you don't have the conscience that protects you, it's a problem. So you need politicians who are astute, artists who are astute, critics who are astute to understand what's happening and to not just let it happen and report on it as it's happening.

15:58You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck. That's the sound of no crowds, no alerts, no distractions, and no telling what you'll find next. You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota trucks. You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in.

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17:25and thanks to the donors that sponsor this research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax-deductible donation to their recommended funds. And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code TheDailyStoic to donate or find out more. Exactly. And I thought about that a lot when it was whatever our present day moment is, it's not any more difficult than all the ones from the repeated past, going back thousands and thousands of years.

18:08And it's not more singular, but it is, like all those other moments, it's its own version. And when I was in a bad media diet where I still am, I'm sure, outrage was generating what I was reading in the New York Times, what I was reading in the New Yorker. Well, I find the writer that's expressing the emotion I feel right now. Please, Adam Gopnik, say what I feel. I realized going just back into the past, even a few generations, to try to look at the same issues and the same human conflicts that we're seeing now was a way to kind of access both the present and what I was trying to say or think about the present in a better way.

18:49Well, the idea, the economics of a book are fundamentally different than the economics of media, right? Like a book is designed, the newspaper story you read or the online article is designed to be replaced immediately by the next thing the next day, or now on the internet, the next tweet five minutes later. a book because it takes so long to do by definition has to have a little more staying power right it has to have it has to continue to be true for longer has to have a larger view normally and then i think this is the most important part it's fundamentally different about what we would call journalism is that you pay for it individually right not even there's a problem with, as they say, if it's free, you're the product that's being sold.

19:36But an article inside a package of other information is different than this, which is designed to be self-sufficient and self-justifying. You buy this, you read it, it is worth what you paid for it. That is a different value proposition with a different set of incentives. And people don't really think about the incentives that are operating under the information that they're consuming and how those incentives are warping and changing that information. And if you can't see that, then you fall prey to that bias. Just like people spend too much time on Twitter, get their brain warped. People watch too much news, TV, get their brain warped.

20:20If you're only reading books, you also can live in this world where there's only these big truths and not real events happening on the ground. So you need a balance. But I think fundamentally, it's better to go back further. It's better to read things that are older. It's better to read things where the significance of the partisanship has gone away. Right. So when you're reading about Hunter S. Thompson and his judgments on Nixon, even if you're a Republican, you don't give a shit that Nixon is a Republican. Do you know what I mean? It's so long ago. And he's not going to come back. It's like, oh no, he's going to come back and take over.

20:59You're just thinking of him and whether his judgments of that person's character or flaws or decisions were right or wrong. The greatest biographer of all time is Plutarch, right? Plutarch is writing not whether, and he admits, he goes, I don't know if all this stuff is true or not. And he's like, and I'm not going to tell you exactly where they were born, what they lived, how this happened. He's like, because an action or a word or an anecdote is more revealing about the essence of what's true than anything else. And so when you read about Alexander the Great, or when you read about the Catiline conspiracy, you know, you're thinking, oh, this is what human beings do.

21:39This is bad. This is why, you know, this or that. Well, the same thing is happening right now on January 6th or whatever. And then you're able to go, okay, what my party is saying I should think here, or this outlet is saying, you're able to get to the historical essence and the timelessness of that, which is really ultimately what matters. Yeah. I mean, I had read the Catalonian orations probably 25 years ago, some of the first Latin. I was like trying to find the verb and the tense, but still Cicero like indicting Catiline. And I didn't think of it again. I mean, 25 years later until after January 6th, I had been there reporting and I remember the Catalonian orations.

22:19I'm not going to tell you that. I remember the devices and I remember the stakes in a way that I had forgotten, you know, the way that that came back. It kind of blew my mind. Well, yeah, you have this guy who feels entitled and like he's earned it and that he should be in charge. And then somebody else wins. And then he's he even though he couldn't be close, he couldn't be further from the mob or the population. He stirs them up and six them on the establishment. And then, you know, then there's also interestingly enough in there, I've kind of kind of the overreaction of Cicero. Like Cicero wants this to be the crisis of his lifetime.

23:02And the irony is it's not. It's not minor, but it's the it was probably never going to work. and in his overreaction to it ironically sets up his lack of credibility when he really could have been necessary when the republic is overthrown you know just a few years later and so like we previously would have had a culture where everyone read that when they were learning latin and then they didn't learn latin so you don't read it and then you go why if it's not about learning Latin. Why would we study this? It's a long time ago. It's old, dead, white guys, whatever. And then we don't have the shared cultural consciousness to be able to draw, like to understand why we have the norms that we have, why we have the words that we have.

23:54How many people even know that the riot at the Capitol is named after Capitoline Hill? You know what I mean? And that the center, all these words come from a thing. And if you don't understand that the significance of each one of the things don't matter and you can end up in a place where it's all kind of emptied of significance and then the stakes which are quite high don't feel as high as they are you know i was on a panel um last week at the university of virginia um called the canonical canonical in the band it's about the canon and banned books you know and i i one thing i thought about talking with the phantom poet they were great the canon's a living thing we think of the canon as this old thing that needs to be rejected or accepted but and this is a more you know recent um experience the canon is something we're constantly responding to and saying like was cicero as good as we thought you know like was thucydides complicit or correct like and i think even going back to herodotus look at how he hedges his bets when he says i don't know if this is true but yeah you know and the way that um not just in terms of rhetoric, but in terms of honesty, truth, and art, all these different voices for over thousands of years, of course, there's gaps.

25:06Of course, people have been left out, have tried to articulate their experience, is one of the most valuable things humanity has today are all these voices through a technology of the book that still are here. And my students sometimes will, and my students are great creative writing MFA students. Again, the idea that it's harmful or wrong or will be bad for you to read somebody else's perspective or point of view from the past, or you should shrug it off because, you know, they were a terrible tyrant or what have you. Like what the canon offers us is a conversation to respond to. And I think that's what's missing today, you know?

25:43Well, there's even this sense like that the Greeks and the Romans were all these old dead white guys, right? And like, even in the case of the Stoics, Seneca's born in Spain, right epictetus is a slave marcus aurelius is an emperor that's an incredible swath of diversity just in those three characters right zeno um some people think he might have been african or had some african blood in him and so you have this actually incredibly diverse group diverse not just in terms of of race or origin but also in experience which is a stand-in for the larger sense of diversity. So it's so close-minded to say that.

26:23And then there, of course, like, it was largely male-centric, but like, it was only in, when I really studied, I go, Brutus's wife is Cato's daughter. And so, and there's this, even in the Shakespeare play and in Plutarch, you get this interesting interplay between Brutus and his wife. His wife, we have, we make Brutus the main character, but if you were presenting that today, you would show Brutus almost certainly as somewhat cowardly and vacillating. And it's his wife who steals him with courage and sort of puts him to it. And so actually, it's not like, it's not that there weren't women involved.

27:08It's just, just in how we've talked about it. And so it is the canon and our understanding of history in the story can be changed without even adding anything new. It's just what are you emphasizing and how, like Plutarch renders Portia Cato as a not heroic figure, but you could just as easily reimagine that, which is by the way, what they were doing, that there's a thousand plays about Hercules and a thousand plays about all the, you know, Oedipus. Every generation, they were just rewriting the same, in the same way that we make and remake the Marvel movies. And even just the early Marvel movies versus now, they're more diverse.

27:48You know, there's women have greater roles. They're tackling the issues of the day. That's what the classics were. The problem was we just stopped at some point and we said, this is it. It's baked. And in fact, it's never been baked. And it's always been possible to reimagine and add. And just it's really an anachronism that we see them all the same in the same way that we see all white people today as the same. When a generation ago here in America, Italian people didn't feel white. That's why they put up statues of Columbus. They were trying to celebrate one of their guys, you know? Which again, it's interesting how that experience is literally incomprehensible to us.

28:33We can't see, we see Columbus as a racist figure, which you know as a figure of colonialism but in 1922 if you're an italian immigrant you see representation in columbus and you could be whiter yeah if you if you could identify with columbus it was a way to pass within society or just be proud of something in yourself exactly i know one thing i try to do in my writing in my perspective which i'm as guilty as anybody but How do we not map this American moment and its recent history onto all of the conflicts and problems we see in the world now and also in the past? I mean, how do we not bring our idea of power, identity, culture, gender, which we have a different way of talking about it now than we did even 20 years ago, 40 years ago, to these moments from 4 ,000, 2 ,000, 3 ,000 years ago?

29:30I love the podcast, The Rest is History, the two British guys that do it. I mean, I just love it because they are able to say, you know, I don't think you understood what was happening, you know, when Nero's first wife died. And then he forced the slave to become a eunuch, you know, that he named after that. To bring our current perspective onto that, it may be insightful right now. But there's also a logic there that's like a relic been lost to time that we have to work to understand, again, through the writings that exist and through the engagement we're still offered by, again, the technology of writing.

30:00Well, these labels and these ideas don't always hold true. So like I remember in Ron Chernow's biography of Grant, which I'm fascinated by Grant. I've read pretty much everything I've ever written on Grant. And Chernow talks about him repeatedly as an alcoholic, which he may or may not have been. But certainly Grant did not know he was an alcoholic because that wasn't a thing. Yes. Right? That's our language now. Yeah. And so the conceit is inherently problematic, right? So Grant might be drinking, might not be drinking, but the sense that he is addicted to a thing and he can't stop doing the thing is a modern conception, right?

30:37Another version of this is there are these students at Brown University every couple of years. They protest this statue of Marcus Aurelius that's on campus because Marcus Aurelius was an imperialist or a colonizer. And he literally, literally that is true. That's what Rome was, like the imperial empire. But first off, it's a fundamentally different form of colonization. And second of all, it was 2000 years ago, right? And the idea that you're going to take a label about a thing we're struggling with now and project it backwards is problematic. It doesn't mean that there's not interesting thinking to be done about how did Rome conceive of its role as an imperial country.

31:28And what's fascinating is that they had all the same debates that we had now. The idea was an enterprising politician would get assigned to one of the colonies, which they would proceed to loot. right but not everyone thought that was fair or a good idea and there was lots of criticism even of that at the time and so to reduce it as as this singular thing that everyone was on board with that we now say is bad is to miss actually the more timeless thing that's happening which is there are sort of uh good incentives bad incentives uh good actors and bad actors within a society and society and the way history judges a group depends on how that battle plays out and in fact that same battle is playing out now so to dismiss the romans as imperialists is i think academic and somewhat pointless it's it's better to go where are we like them why did the good guys win or lose and what lessons can we take from that uh in in in the same way that we have to like, it's a slightly different discussion with, I think, you know, monuments to Confederates or the lost cause, because that is an ongoing myth that is, that was, those were put up to wage a certain kind of intellectual warfare to prop up a system that continues to exist to this day.

33:00And there's a difference between that happening in a museum as a historical artifact and as a civic monument that you pay to upkeep now. But like you, you can't, you can't just reduce it as this all one or the other thing. You have to understand what's happening, why it's happening. And, and to not be able to do that is to me, the sign of a weak mind and a self-righteous mind that is actually incapable of making the world better. And it makes me sad because that used to be a starting point. We all got things wrong. or like oh rome is an imperialist power it's like okay well now read everything that you can and use your current day lens yeah to come to a new opinion but that's a way to not have to do that or not have to keep engaging it's the end of the conversation yeah instead of the beginning of a conversation you know and i i see liberal arts education as you know spending four years reading other people's perspectives and within fiction or non-fiction or poetry going into their perspective and seeing the world for however long you're reading as somebody different than yourself And then you come back out into your perspective and you can't see the world the same way.

34:06You expand through looking at the world via these stories that other people have left. And I just always remember, I don't know if it's a conservative and liberal thing, but at the 2016 convention, I was writing about it. And this is the fear of outside information. like we have to remember on both sides like especially the liberal side the more information you have the more time you spend seeing through somebody else's mind whether it's an emperor from 2000 years ago you know um whether it's whoever it is then coming back to yours you can do again what i think is the hardest thing and this isn't just in writing but in life to understand or try to see what's necessary from what's not you know and i i just i think that we're so lucky to have had a conversation going on for so long to have all you know like i i was walking through your bookstore and i saw the peloponnesian war yeah you know one of my favorite books and i again i don't know i only make two nuclear war jokes a semester that's my my limit with my students but i think i've already reached it but you know in the last 10 years before the president and how we um kind of slant it that hadn't been as large a conversation nuclear war is in the past but But that conversation between Sparta and Athens and whether to aggressively go on the Athenian part and invade and what could happen, what the consequences could be, still feels as relevant and evident.

35:29And not like a piece or not, but I always think of Syracuse, you know, and sending the fleet to Syracuse. And it was so awful that when people came back, the few survivors of the fleet, to tell the Athenians what had happened, they wouldn't believe them, that the whole fleet could be gone. They were executed for even saying it. Well, when General Mattis was secretary of defense, he assigned a history of the Peloponnesian War as a book for people to read because what they call it, the Thucydides trap, the idea of an ascendant and a dominant power and an ascended power. And China and America would maybe talk about which one is ascendant, which one's dominant, which is ironic.

36:05But the idea of how these clashes play out. So instead of, you know, obviously the state and the Defense Department have access to the latest cables, latest studies, greatest intelligence. And here they are reading a 2 ,500-year-old book about a war fought by ships that had oars, you know, to give you a sense of how long ago it was. The ships would clash and then the men would jump off and fight each other with swords, like as if it was the ground. That's how long ago this was. And yet the same things are happening. I'm just writing about this in the book I'm doing now, the Melian Dialogue or Melian Dialogue.

36:48Like the most famous passage in the history of the Peloponnesian War is basically Athens going to this little proxy client state and going, might makes right. The strong do what they can and the weak struggle as they must. Right. As today we talk about, you know, systemic racism and structural problems and intersection. That is the same discussion. Right. It's it's it's. And but how many people that throw these buds buzzwords around could actually connect it to some sort of classical understanding of that, some real insight into human nature that goes back far enough that you're not thinking Republican, Democrat, white, black, America, whatever.

37:31It's taking it back far enough that you can see what humans do and how a lot of the systems we developed, the stories we tell, the institutions we build were designed to counteract those impulses. Yes. Right. Like the UN being one such invention. Right. Or treaties being another invention or the Geneva. We've we've invented stuff to deal with things. And sometimes we forget the source of that insight or that hard won lesson. And so to not have that historical basis is just an enormous liability. So people talk about STEM and how we need to learn math, whatever. whatever but if you don't have an understanding of how humans work and how they've always worked what good is your ability to build really good rockets or whatever i mean i couldn't agree more and i you know it goes back like i guess to two ways one is um there's such a human element to all of this writing too when you you you talk about seneca a lot like i'll never forget um his practicing death essay you know when he's talking about um is it tuberculosis or asthma he's had a really bad attack he's like i am practicing death yeah you know and reading that the first time that was you know it's a letter i think and it's i read it in latin and then i read it again in a translation the latin's like having done done you know with all the participles but then the translation john to god it's a great translation goes i am practicing death yeah you know and that's the first line as the as the translation comes off and so even within you know these larger issues those moments of human you know suffering and and perspective how is that not going to make somebody a better writer today to read that you know and and i guess the second thing is like with thompson exactly what you're talking about these different structures he understood their inventedness and their fragility yeah you know and and if if somebody gets enough power especially in the post-war world with nuclear weapons where you have to make a decision in five minutes whether to respond you know we're dealing with um stakes that the human mind can't really you know conceptualize i think that's the susan sontag quote is like we can understand the death of a person.

39:40We can't understand the death of a species. Yeah. You know, of us, of humankind. Well, I mean, even in the pandemic, it's clear people have real trouble thinking about the effect of their decisions on other people. Right. And so, of course, we're going to struggle with bigger, you know, tragedy of the commons issues like the environment or public trust or You know, that's going to be if we can't just go, hey, I have this or I might have this. I'm going to stay home or I'm going to get this vaccine or I'm going to wear this mask or whatever it is. Or that the whole reason that governments exist is to bind people together to solve problems like that.

40:31because instant groups of people can't self-organize quickly enough or voluntarily enough. That's what it's all there for. And so if you can't do that, and in meditations, Mark Stabilis is going, there's two types of plagues. There's a plague that can destroy your life and a plague that can destroy your character. He was writing that during the Antonine Plague, He would have understood how these extreme, difficult, disorienting, scary events fuck with people and bring out the worst in some people and the best in other people. And yet none of these problems or issues are new. And all of the great literature is about this.

41:13I forget, I was reading one of the Greek players. It might have been Euripides or it might have been Aeschylus. but it's like i'm reading this play and i go oh it's like about somebody getting revenge and then this jury gets set up and you go oh this is the invention of juries exactly like some somebody came up with that they were like hey somebody gets wrong they try to get justice by themselves they end up hurting themselves and other people in the process so let's come up with a system that solves that and you're like this is a play it's not art but it's it's a play designed to try to solve this problem that is clearly fundamental to societies which is groups of people living together and that that's what all this stuff is and it was all invented at some point didn't like wasn't given to us invented it i think then three or 2500 years later on the night that um martin luther king is shot bobby kennedy you know who was a philistine for most of his life but after his very public tragedy began to read the greeks began to read i have the book in the book story he has um edith edith what's her name no it's morton i don't know so is it some edith something and she wrote this book called the greek way which is a sample survey course of all the greek plays and that's where he gets what does he say we drop by drop we suffer unto truth or something like that he quotes she had made it like monotheistic like yeah even in our sleep um you know pain or suffering you know drop by drop comes onto the heart until you know through the awful grace of god you know we arrive at understanding yes basically we learn through pain and suffering and he was saying i've learned through pain and suffering the loss of my brother you're now mourning martin luther king rioting anger pain whatever won't do any won't solve this we gotta come together and then i think the irony then you know 50 years later his son is clearly motivated by some profound grievance and i maybe got kicked in the head by a horse or something or you know like something something broke inside that person and he is now a vehicle for a more modern version of those same things which is now you don't have to a group doesn't have to get together and burn down buildings and whatever.

43:29You can just spread like a virus, bad, destructive ideas that tear at the fabric of society and what underpins the modern health system. And it's just as destructive. And there's a great book on immunity by Yula Biss. And it was the first time reading it. She's a nonfiction writer. It was the first time I began to understand she articulated that immunity is not about you. It's about how the participation, and she had been writing it while she was pregnant in the 2010s, and a great writer had gone to Iowa. And it was the first time I stepped back and realized those systems you talk about, it's about your participation in them, not to protect you, but so all of us can come together and get a different outcome than we used to get individually.

44:16We have this understanding of America being about liberty, which it is, but there's liberty and then there's responsibility and they were seen that the idea was government would create liberty and then philosophy and uh culture would create virtue and these two things have to uh coexist or operate together for the package to work um washington orders the vaccination of his troops against smallpox when like one in four people died from the vaccine like when it was so But they're just, even in that early moment, wrestling with individual versus collective. And how do these things come together? And so, again, when you can read about the ethics of this issue 300 years ago, it helps inform how you think about it now.

45:12There's this super moving thing that Benjamin Franklin writes about his decision not to vaccinate his son. and he dies and it tears apart his marriage and his life um not to get on a vaccine tangent but the point is almost none of the issues are new they're struggling we're struggling with them in the same way just the names and dates and places and characters they change but the the problems stay the same you know and and that's that's just kind of what's always been happening and i you you've written about this a lot too but you talked about it a little bit um just now where bad information, really virulent information is like a virus.

45:53And this goes back to anti-Semitism, the elders of Zion. It's a way of thinking, you know, that actually infects the way the rest of your mind thinks. There's a great book, Wasteland, about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot that came out recently. There's a biography of the poem, The Wasteland. And you just saw Ezra Pound's mind deteriorating with like, not syphilis, but anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It is really interesting. I was talking to someone about this recently. I was saying that antisemitism may be the oldest virus. And it's this thing that's in, I mean, it infects the Romans, different emperors at different times, different leaders at different times.

46:30And then, yeah, these different tropes or different ideas, like the elders of the protocol of Zion, what's it called? It's not that old, right? No. And it's like Russian propaganda. It's just this thing, this horrible thing that someone puts out in the world and then it can't be eradicated. And you can be immunized against it with information and understanding, but it's just going around. But if you lack the firewalls for it, it can, my metaphors are getting very mixed here, but if you lack the different, you know, suddenly it can go big or small. And yeah, there are these certain viruses. And I've watched it happen with people I know, even people or fans of mine where it's like you can kind of see it.

47:15Like, you know, like you follow people on Instagram and then it's like, oh, I haven't seen a picture of their spouse in a while. And then it's like announcing they're separated and then announcing they're divorced. You kind of sense, you're like, oh, you kind of keep this mental tab. Like, you know where they are in that transition, right? And you kind of go, okay, they just retweeted something from Elon Musk. And then, you know, now they're talking about trans women in sports. And you kind of watch this. It's like this evolution. You know, the metaphor they use is about taking the red pill, but it's actually not a thing.

47:57And you get it. you don't actually, there's this latency period where it's kind of working on you and you don't understand it. And maybe it was escapable, maybe it wasn't. But I'm very fascinated with the way that these kind of idea viruses get into a person and how they change. I mean, Elon Musk is, on the one hand anti-semitism goes way back to his grandfather who fled to south africa precisely because he was an anti-semite and thought there should be like an apartheid regime in south africa like he didn't go there and there was apartheid he was like this is this is our chance you know um so there's this predisposition towards it clearly in that family and then you kind of watch like towards conspiratorial thinking, right?

48:51And then you watch as his information diet changes and his place in the world change. And then maybe it's criticized here, there. And then all of a sudden who he was five years ago, I read the first bio, the Ashley Vance bio, and then I read Walter Eisenstein. It's the same person, but it's not the same person. He's been fundamentally changed and remade by the information that he's consuming. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of HelloFresh, right? They're the number one meal kit in America. They make home cooking easier with chef-crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door.

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51:58But I know you will. Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at 8sleep.com slash daily stoic. It's terrifying, too, because you talk about it. Imagine as immunity or a set system and then it comes through. I think of Steve Bannon, like, I'll go to CPAC and write about what's going on there. And this year I saw him at his private party and I know he's read everything. but I know it's not an immunity to the conspiracies. But I asked him. Everybody's there. They want to be him, which is very strange. That's like the podcaster.

52:32So how do I do my podcast? How do I be a Steve Bannon? So I was just, what's your favorite George Orwell? Because I know he's talked about it. And he said homage to Catalonia. I'm like, that's my favorite George Orwell. But you then realize that may have been it a long time ago. Now he's mapping a completely different narrative onto that that even exists now with some of it there. and so if that was part of his immunity or anybody's immunity is reading other people's perspectives what happens when the virus goes so far that now every pre-existing thing can just be like taken apart piecemeal to prove what you already feel or believe and that was kind of terrifying or you can have this almost kind of schizophrenic where you you you know all this stuff but that gets in the way of what you want to do like you're not even seeing yourself as the person who's doing what you're yeah you know what i mean like you're doing you're you can't what's that question are we the baddies you know like you can't even ask that question anymore yeah because something has happened or your self-interest is dependent on you kind of not understanding it's a it's a weird but the idea that yeah this is this is what happens to catalan you know what i mean like 2200 years ago or 2100 years ago whatever it is this guy you know he's probably has these dinner parties and they go you'd be way better man you know and he grew up with his parents telling him how great he was and then he goes well i bet i could you know he's just looking at it at pieces in the chessboard and not going am i burning this whole thing down just for me you know i i just think it's it's tough when we um you know it gets back to part of our censorship talks too like i teach shooting an elephant today you know by george orwell i i of homage to Catalonia I there's parts um of it where he's talking about what Orwell's talking about what he was like as a colonial administrator and how he knew colonialism was wrong but it's a lot like Thompson he was caught up in enforcing it so he shows how it destroys him sure as a way to argue against it which Thompson does a very good job of too but you know the talk of editing parts of Orwell now right you know instead of dealing with some of the you know like language that he has in it to me is mind-blowing like within our present and just scrambles that goody or batty argument immediately you know and and it's to me really dangerous because it's like the example you gave with roosevelt it's tinkering with um something so essential information that is essential to us like you know his perspective so i don't know you know i think about our current media situation i it freaks me out a lot when and this gets back to the canon and banned books it freaks me out a lot when we're going beyond our online like fights with each other and there's the idea that because our lens is the latest and the most important, we now can begin to take out certain passages of Orwell or edit them.

55:19And I mean, I don't think that's any way inherent to the present, but I do think so much is magnified right now by the way that we wake up in the morning and become accustomed to communicating with our phones or with everybody else. Yes. I noticed this the other day. So I was reading my kids. I was telling them the story of the odyssey and uh you know i told him the story of um cyclops i'm forgetting his name but uh you know odysseus says you know uh what's his name is polyphemus yeah polyphemus uh you know he says what's your name and he says no man and then so they go hey who poked out my eyes no man no no man picked out my and my kids just lose their mind like this is the funniest joke and now they do they do all this anytime they do anything wrong you know i go like who punched your brother and i go no man punched my brother you know like they're they're just they're just playing with this language in a way that someone almost 3 ,000 years ago or more was playing with language is incredible, right?

56:12And so we could be celebrating with sort of timelessness and the uniquely humanness of all of that. And so there's, yeah, there are these things that sort of ring true and good. And then there's the same kind of dark urges that tyrants and dictators and populists and demagogues have also been playing up. And you have to understand both of those, right? What makes Lincoln so great is this understanding of biblical language and story, right? King draws on the same ideas. And then, yeah, what people are throwing out today, of course, it's not going to resonate. Like you're not drawn, you don't have the underlying understanding or information to make this more than what it is and to really speak to that part of people that you have to bring out to get them to do things.

57:10It's, yeah, it's like, it's exactly what Hunter S. Thompson is saying that just like our energy will prevail alone or the righteousness of our cause will prevail alone. And it's so much, so much more than that. Yeah. I mean, I think of when I was like, Again, 18, my whole Latin class Jesuit high school bellarmen in California was the first six books of the Aeneid. And so translating that, and I'll never forget, there's a passage where, you know, Virgil's writing, and there's a lot of different backgrounds to what's going on. But in the epic poem, you know, and someday Rome won't exist anymore either.

57:44It's stepping back. It's a fact. There'll be a day. America does not exist. but being an 18 year old boy with my boy brain and sitting back and looking around and being like this country is not going to exist someday too sure you know and having that realization the presentness yeah of our lives the instantaneousness of our lives it doesn't just make us you know focused on our phones or screens or who said something it makes us blind in the way humans want to be to very clear facts that this country these people were all going to die someday anyways as the stoics will tell you they're already dead but you know better than anybody but this country itself just in the way romas is going to be gone and whatever an 18 year old boy's brain is it is malleable you can give it good writing and good perspectives and those magnets they're not going to hurt you know and so i i've always remembered that moment of looking up and stepping back from the book one to think why is virgil putting it in there he's writing to Augustus, right?

58:40And he's trying to get that to him. And so like the, just even the, it's heightened by the sense of like, well, what's the author trying to do here? What's the message that they're delivering, right? To see Meditations as a book being written in a plague, right? Or to see, you know, I think it's Euripides is writing as a veteran of this horrible war and trying to process, the trauma of what he went through, you know, Seneca's plays being his inability to outwardly criticize Nero and the regime and having to sublimate it in fiction. Shakespeare basically makes one overt mention of current day issues and it basically nearly ends his life.

59:25And so the rest of Shakespeare is all about Greece and Rome and things hundreds of years in the past because that's the only way he can speak to it. The benefit though is that it also speaks to us and it disarms. It gets underneath our resistance. Who are you to tell me about this or that? And so to understand, yeah, that's what art is supposed to do is to touch us in these places. and when you're banning it because it's politically incorrect or not diverse enough or whatever, you're missing actually what it is, the truth of how representative it is, and the fact that the point is that there really is only one human experience.

1:00:11I did a political writing class. I teach graduate students, but this was undergraduates during the pandemic. So we read a lot of Thompson. We read a lot of Didion. We read James Baldwin. We read a lot of different writers from the 20th century. And what I wanted my students to see was look at how they're doing exactly what you said. Even in these really political instances at a convention, taking and dramatizing the moment so the reader can do the work to come and arrive at their own conclusion. An op-ed is the opposite of art. An op-ed is the answer. You know, I love the line from Claudia Rankine, Claudia Rankine quotes it, but, you know, art are the questions like we arrive at after we've gone through all the answers.

1:00:57Yeah. You know, and like I'm probably manglia, but this idea that in that class they needed to dramatize or write a story about maybe something political in Washington, D.C. And these, I don't usually teach undergrad, they were undergraduates, all op-eds. Yeah. and I'd be like well where did you see this kind of writing earlier in our examples maybe like well John Didion says we tell ourselves stories in order to live yeah so I'm like did you miss the rest of that essay that's all dramatized to make the reader do work yeah to engage it the same way Shakespeare had to move around something and tell that story in a different way and say how you know I think through my scene is like Virgil had to reach somehow he had to reach Augustus yes and if he just told Augustus in op-ed fashion these are you get exiled or worse yes or worse You're exactly right.

1:01:39And I think a lot of students want to arrive at op-eds now as somehow the purest form of the expression they want, where that's the starting place maybe to figure out what you think or feel. And now put the messiness of humanity and the world around you into a story that might articulate it where the reader can do work and not just be given an answer. Yeah, to think that it's harder to do, but it ultimately reaches more people because the defense is down. Hunter S. Thompson is writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, not about drugs, but about the American dream. That to me, Hell's Angels is captured by the quote.

1:02:13He says, myths and legends die hard in America because they prove to us that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final. It's a it's a the Hells Angels were a revolt against the corporatization and the, you know, the the the buzz cut, you know, button down sort of world that had come out of the Second World War. But Thompson is basically Thompson isn't celebrating them. He's saying that the cure is maybe worse than the disease. These are these he shows them, you know, doing a gang rape. Right. I think there's all this criticism now about the the new Michael Lewis book about Sam Bankman Freed.

1:02:57It's like he fillets this dude. He present there's a quote in the book where he goes, I don't think I have a soul. Right. You know, like Lewis's job as the journalist is to present the story as it happens. If he's going, this dude sucks. Fuck this dude. You don't read the book. It's the work of the book is how do you get someone to read from start to finish about an unlikable person and capture attention along the way. And like it's funny with my stuff on ancient philosophy, you know, people go, oh, this is just self-help. And I go, yes, that's the point. Like if writing about ancient philosophy was enough to get people to read ancient philosophy, I wouldn't have to do it.

1:03:44Like the ancient philosophers did ancient philosophy. The problem is we now exist in a world where the vast majority of people can't read ancient philosophy or have no interest in ancient philosophy. So by taking self-help, which people pick up when they walk through the airport or somebody buys for someone who's going through something, and I use it as an entry point into ancient philosophy, I'm doing precisely that kind of jiu-jitsu. And people don't like that because they want to speak only to people like them, which is this sort of 1 % sliver who really likes the original stuff or could take the full factual breakdown.

1:04:21And that's not where most people are. And that's not where opinions are changed and worlds are opened up. It's much more like if you just wrote a book about Richard Nixon, for instance, and corrupt politics in the middle of the 20th century, you know, that's going to sell less copies than doing that through a lens of Hunter S. Thompson, who has a different reputation. Right. And so that the art of it is they think you're doing one thing and really you're doing another thing. And that's what the ancients were doing, too. And I don't know why we don't think that to make art they were dealing with the same wagers and stakes.

1:04:57You know, when at every move even more so than we are. And had to not just like that idea of getting the reader to do work or that metaphor of jujitsu, you're exactly right. But that, you know, if they made one more mention than they did, their lives are over. You know, that they're no longer. And we've talked a lot in the 20th and 21st century about this in a kind of global way. But it always blows my mind that the historical conversation, or when we talk about it in a historical sense, that gets left off. well yeah it's like there's two forms of death one like you are too on the nose and the emperor cuts off your head the other you're too on the nose you're too luxury you're too boring you're too factual and the reader cuts off your head because they say i don't want to read this anymore and you think plutarch is going you think you want to read about alexander the great because you think he's a hero let me present to you why he was great in many ways but ultimately a tragic case.

1:05:59And maybe you totally missed the point. You're Napoleon, you read it and you're like, fuck, I love Alexander the Great. But if you're somebody who can be persuaded, you're seeing the more nuanced picture. This is why he writes parallel lives. So it's Cato and Caesar, how they're contrasting with each other, right? And he's comparing them without saying who's better, but it's obvious who's better, right? And they have the artfulness of having to persuade the audience who will kill you if you're boring and then speak truth to power without threatening truth to power this is also machiavelli is the most tragic example of this machiavelli is writing a book to the people who tortured him like machiavellian is a republican in the sense that he did not think there should be a prince and he's having to write about how princes get power.

1:06:56As a historian, he's writing about this. And he's having to find a way to both say, this is how it works, but also this probably isn't how it should work without tipping off the people who have already tied him to the rack and spun him around, you know? And the subtlety to which he's doing it. And then today we're like, oh, that's very Machiavellian. Like, dude, this dude was threading a fucking needle with his life on the line. And you're missing the way that this can both be read from both perspectives and has this kind of dual lesson in it. And I think Hunter S. Thompson is doing that in his own way.

1:07:39It's fun and ridiculous and excess. And it's also this profound sadness and indictment ultimately of the same culture. culture it's just the tragedy of he gets hooked on the stuff yeah he can't get out his son his son wrote a great book called stories i tell myself one thompson and so i tried to end with nixon leaving but those years after are really tough because it's the way we understand alcoholism now coupled with how thompson would take dexedrine yeah and there was a price to be paid later and And his son writes about getting hooked on the stuff. I mean, he was drinking a 750-milliliter bottle of Jack Daniels every day starting when he woke up.

1:08:20And it just dissolved him from the inside out in his mind too. And so you're right. Like that's – he is seen in this kind of extreme way and he would present himself that way. But eventually it became – he became the caricature he would promote. And that happened later. And it wasn't through tons of acid or drug, which are, you know, whatever, but it was just through alcoholism, you know, and it was eventually, you know, speed and cocaine and all these different things. But he was just dissolving his body with that. And I think that that gets lost. And I think one of the hardest questions is how much do you internalize in both your writing and your sensitivity, you know, the tumult around you?

1:09:02Yeah. You know, like think of Didion, like having her panic attacks and, you know, passing out and going into a psychiatric treatment facility in the summer of 1968. And her great line is, in retrospect, I don't think nausea, you know, or, you know, bouts of dizziness were entirely the wrong reaction to the summer of 1968. And the same with Thompson. You know, how much do you internalize that tumult and danger around you? And what's the line where then that becomes too much? you've not been able to express your perspective on it because of your proximity or sensitivity to it yeah the toxicity of the people he's around he absorbs it he doesn't have a mechanism for filtering it and processing and he kind of turns against him himself yeah and he just runs he burned very brightly i mean james salter's a fascinating comparison because salter wrote until he was 85 86 90 was still writing his next book when he when he passed away um and and And Thompson, you know, from what I've seen, there were still brilliant pieces later, never really wrote in the same way as he did when he was younger and healthier.

1:10:05No, there's a F. Scott Fitzgerald-ness to it. Yeah. I think when Dorothy Parker looked at his corpse and just said, you poor son of a bitch, you know, and that's like, that's Thomas Thompson. It is, you know, except there's a kind of terrifying sense of doom that imagine if Fitzgerald lived those next 30 years with that kind of - But as a shell of a person. Like he didn't successfully kill himself earlier, which is what Fitzgerald did. Yes. You know, with alcohol. Yeah. Exactly right. And I, you know, I think art doesn't have to be seen as self-destructive. Yeah. But to think that somehow, and again, this goes back to baseball, I would think of Barry Bonds, a player I enjoyed watching growing up, you know, and he was very difficult with the media.

1:10:45He was very guarded. To think that his success, his incredible ability, and then also love the issues of steroids, to think that his uniqueness is somehow separate from his personality and who he is is mind-blowing in the way we often separate writers from their work. I mean, it's been a conversation that's going on a long time. I think it's just another form of reduction that we have now. And Thompson, he wasn't a good writer because he was an alcoholic, but there was a terrible, terrible wager going on that he didn't even know what side he was coming down on. you know and and i there's no one right answer to it it's i find it to be you know that it gets back to that um i quoted it earlier with that line from conrad it's like life is short art is long and success is really far off that's not a good thing no no no it's not heartening you know it's like oh my book will eventually be it's like no there are a lot of things that could go wrong at any moment and i you know how could somebody's athletic brilliance be separate from the way they see the world you know and especially the wager barry bonds made then of course they're going to do anything it takes to be able to express that yeah it's like almost a form of like body dysmorphia where it's like i have this thing that has to get out the world has to see me the way i see myself and uh i'll turn myself into whatever kind of art monster i have to be to be able to do it or steroid monster.

1:12:11Right. You know, it's, it's, it's, and then there's the moral argument too, where it's like, Mark McGuire wasn't a better hitter than Barry Bonds, but on steroids, he was succeeding more. Why should that person be able to do it when I'm the one who has more talent and I'm not rising, you know, going up to that level? Well, this was awesome. I love the book and thanks so much for doing this. I really enjoyed talking.

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