Latest / Black Ibis Social Club / S2E2: Brad Kelly

Transcript

S2E2: Brad Kelly · Black Ibis Social Club

0:09
SPEAKER_01: This is Alexander Constantine,
0:12
SPEAKER_01: and we have here the ever-entertaining and intelligent Mr.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: Fisto Sobani,
0:16
SPEAKER_01: and you are listening to the Dicenius Review.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: where we discuss novels, film, art, and culture from a perspective outside the mainstream.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: The Review is a Substack podcast,
0:25
SPEAKER_01: but you can listen to us on Spotify,
0:26
SPEAKER_01: YouTube,
0:27
SPEAKER_01: Apple,
0:28
SPEAKER_01: and anywhere else via RSS feed.
0:29
SPEAKER_01: If you enjoy the show, please like, follow, and share this episode with everyone and everyone.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Alright,
0:35
SPEAKER_01: so today I wanted to talk about,
0:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to introduce my guest in a second,
0:41
SPEAKER_01: but what I really want to talk about is podcasts in general,
0:43
SPEAKER_01: podcasts,
0:44
SPEAKER_01: and kind of my relationship to podcasts.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: So I've always had a long commute.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, I've had to drive a
0:54
SPEAKER_01: at least half an hour in most places.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: And that's a very typical thing in Southern California.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: Even when you work 10 miles from home,
1:01
SPEAKER_01: that's a two hour drive in most places in Los Angeles because of the traffic and
1:06
SPEAKER_01: twisty turning streets and the way the infrastructure is set up.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: So ever since I was a young guy and I drove around, I listened to talk radio.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: I used to listen to a lot of morning radio shows on K-Rock
1:24
SPEAKER_01: 98.7, San Diego radio stations used to have a really good talk show.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: Down the line,
1:30
SPEAKER_01: I even got Sirius satellite radio and I listened to some Howard Stern,
1:33
SPEAKER_01: which I found kind of crappy in retrospective.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: But I've always been a big fan of just listening to people have conversations on
1:42
SPEAKER_01: the radio in real time or recorded.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: It's something that cleared my mind and allowed me to focus on a long drive and it just made it better.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: And it also,
1:53
SPEAKER_01: I think,
1:54
SPEAKER_01: really plays into the whole feeling of you can be part of a conversation without
1:59
SPEAKER_01: actually have to personally contribute or without having to feel obligated to have
2:05
SPEAKER_01: to say something interesting,
2:06
SPEAKER_01: but you get the conversation.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: So you get the same kind of pleasure out of it.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: In the more recent years,
2:14
SPEAKER_01: with the advent of easy streamable podcast,
2:17
SPEAKER_01: I started listening to,
2:19
SPEAKER_01: I believe the first podcast I really listened to was the Hardcore History with Dan Carlin.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: And I think the other day on Substack, I asked like, whatever happened to Dan Carlin?
2:31
SPEAKER_01: And people saying he still does record episodes, but I found it was really interesting.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: And when I listened to a lot of Dan Carlin, I lived in Japan and I would
2:40
SPEAKER_01: drive my little Toyota Paso,
2:41
SPEAKER_01: a little four-banger,
2:43
SPEAKER_01: and drive through the toll roads and listen to everything about whether it was his
2:49
SPEAKER_01: Roman Empire stuff or some of his more obscure ones like the Apocalypse and all
2:54
SPEAKER_01: those episodes.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: But in the last few years, I kind of settled on listening to two specific podcasts.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: And I've talked about them on this.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: And once again, my dogs are always barking.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: But I talked about them on this podcast.
3:09
SPEAKER_01: And...
3:12
SPEAKER_01: One second.
3:16
SPEAKER_03: So yeah, there's the dogs.
3:18
SPEAKER_03: Always an exciting time.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Ladies and gentlemen.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: They sound friendly.
3:22
SPEAKER_03: They're super friendly.
3:23
SPEAKER_03: They have no podcast etiquette.
3:24
SPEAKER_03: That's their only problem.
3:27
SPEAKER_03: Ladies and germs, this is Brad Kelly, our podcast host.
3:30
SPEAKER_03: Mr. Alexander will properly introduce this fine young gentleman in just a little bit.
3:37
SPEAKER_03: Ah, here he is.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to edit this.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: I was going to edit this, but I'm not going to.
3:41
SPEAKER_01: Don't edit it.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: Don't edit it.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: Keep it real.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, brother.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: So what I was saying is that the two podcasts that I really got into and I've
3:51
SPEAKER_01: become a faithful listener to,
3:53
SPEAKER_01: the first one is Brett Easton Ellis' podcast.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: It's the Brett Easton Ellis podcast, right?
4:00
SPEAKER_01: And I found that one fantastic.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: And the second one is The Art of Darkness.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I was running down the stairs.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: And The Art of Darkness is probably my favorite podcast of all time.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: And today, one of the former co-hosts of The Art of Darkness, Mr. Brad Kelly, is here to join us.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: And Mr. Brad Kelly is...
4:26
SPEAKER_01: joining us today on The Digital Labyrinth.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: He's an author,
4:28
SPEAKER_01: a podcaster,
4:29
SPEAKER_01: former member of The Art of Darkness,
4:32
SPEAKER_01: and you can find him on x.com at Brad Kelly or bradkelleyesque at slipstack.com.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the show, Brad.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, man.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: This is great.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: I'm really flattered to be put in such esteemed company.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Dan Carlin was big for me, too.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: I haven't listened to him much recently, but yeah, man, some of those World War I episodes and
4:56
SPEAKER_00: the Mongols and even that one about the Anabaptists.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: That's my favorite one.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: Those are great.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's so good.
5:01
SPEAKER_01: That's my favorite one.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: The Monster Rebellion, okay?
5:03
SPEAKER_01: I like all the weird episodes, man.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: I like all the weird episodes.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, same here.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was a great show.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having me, man.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: And it's so cool that so many people, yourself included, have enjoyed Art of Darkness.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's awesome.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: That was the whole goal, and so I guess it's mission accomplished.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a great podcast.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: And once again,
5:24
SPEAKER_01: for listeners at home that are not familiar with The Art of Darkness,
5:29
SPEAKER_01: basically,
5:30
SPEAKER_01: The Art of Darkness is a podcast where they take...
5:35
SPEAKER_01: a artist,
5:36
SPEAKER_01: writer,
5:36
SPEAKER_01: musician,
5:37
SPEAKER_01: filmmaker,
5:38
SPEAKER_01: poet,
5:40
SPEAKER_01: playwright,
5:42
SPEAKER_01: different artistic creators,
5:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm not such a lame word,
5:48
SPEAKER_01: artists,
5:48
SPEAKER_01: right?
5:49
SPEAKER_01: And you guys did a biography on them specifically focused on what made them tick,
5:55
SPEAKER_01: what made them like create the art and what you thought were some of the influences
6:00
SPEAKER_01: upon their art.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: And all of them, all the choices you guys made had, you know, some some darkness in their lives.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, you didn't pick jolly, happy individuals and they're all dead.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: Right.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: That was you guys.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: That was that was our rule.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Just kept things.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: It kept things simple.
6:17
SPEAKER_03: And that's such a good rule.
6:19
SPEAKER_03: These days, because yes, just yes.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: Right, but you know, I always wanted a David Lynch episode, but you know.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: It'll still probably happen.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: Right, well the show is still ongoing.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: I know you stepped down.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: The show continues, yeah.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: You stepped down from it.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: And we're definitely going to talk about Art of Darkness a little bit later,
6:38
SPEAKER_01: but what I really want to talk about is you,
6:39
SPEAKER_01: man.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: So if you want to just introduce yourselves to our listeners,
6:44
SPEAKER_01: kind of just a quick little intro besides what I did.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: yeah yeah sure uh yeah so yeah fiction writer a novelist have a novel out there
6:55
SPEAKER_00: that you can get your hands on called house of sleep i've got another novel i just
6:58
SPEAKER_00: finished hopefully that sees the light of day sometime this year and that's kind of
7:04
SPEAKER_00: um for myself that's i think of myself as sort of a writer first um but uh yeah art
7:11
SPEAKER_00: of darkness podcast spent the last four years doing that and
7:15
SPEAKER_00: despite the fact that I'm not going to be on there anymore that,
7:18
SPEAKER_00: you know,
7:18
SPEAKER_00: we,
7:18
SPEAKER_00: we had a lot of episodes in the bank and they're pretty much evergreen,
7:22
SPEAKER_00: you know,
7:22
SPEAKER_00: it wasn't really a topical show.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: So those episodes will be worth listening to, um, you know, years down the road, I think.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, I've got other, other interests as well.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: Um,
7:34
SPEAKER_00: I,
7:34
SPEAKER_00: I,
7:35
SPEAKER_00: uh,
7:36
SPEAKER_00: I read tarot and,
7:37
SPEAKER_00: and I'm doing some writing on tarot and developing some other material around that.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: Um,
7:43
SPEAKER_00: And, uh, yeah, I don't know beyond that, man.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: I'm, uh, I'm just a dude trying to, uh, express myself.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're doing.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: That's what we're doing here, man.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: That's what we're trying to do.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: Right.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: Even though I cocked up the introduction.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: Not at all, man.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: This is, this is radio.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: It's, it's, it's, uh,
8:03
SPEAKER_01: You know, when I first started, I did a lot of editing.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: I tried to edit a lot of the stuff.
8:09
SPEAKER_01: And then I was like, you know what, man, the hell with that.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm just going to free flow it.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: If my neighbor in an ice cream truck and,
8:16
SPEAKER_01: you know,
8:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm just like,
8:17
SPEAKER_01: you know what,
8:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to roll with it,
8:18
SPEAKER_01: you know?
8:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know if people know Art of Darkness, we basically never edited.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: I would be,
8:27
SPEAKER_00: there's probably 10 minutes of edited Art of Darkness out there out of all the
8:31
SPEAKER_00: episodes we put out.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: That's impressive because it sounds great.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm always like, man, this doesn't sound good.
8:37
SPEAKER_03: The nice part about not editing things is the opportunity to mess with people.
8:41
SPEAKER_03: Because when you stepped away for a moment,
8:43
SPEAKER_03: I specifically paused slightly longer than my instinct wanted simply because I
8:48
SPEAKER_03: wanted to mess with the listener.
8:49
SPEAKER_03: Is there just not going to be any sound at all?
8:52
SPEAKER_03: I hope listeners, if you can give feedback, just if you thought that for like the fear of
8:57
SPEAKER_03: Are they going to do dead air?
8:58
SPEAKER_03: Are they straight up?
8:59
SPEAKER_03: Just fuck it.
9:00
SPEAKER_03: Here you go.
9:01
SPEAKER_03: You got nothing to listen to.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, guys.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: I got to go check my coffee pot.
9:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, deal with it.
9:06
SPEAKER_03: Deal with it.
9:08
SPEAKER_03: Just to check their devotion to the art.
9:12
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
9:13
SPEAKER_03: Are you guys really worthy of us?
9:16
SPEAKER_00: It is funny how short that time is because if I'm listening to something and
9:20
SPEAKER_00: somebody's talking and they take,
9:22
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
9:23
SPEAKER_00: what it is, three seconds, five seconds to like, think about their answer.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: You like, I like check my phone.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, did I lose a connection?
9:30
SPEAKER_00: Like what happened?
9:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
9:31
SPEAKER_03: The maw opens and your soul vanishes into it.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: And it's only been three seconds.
9:35
SPEAKER_03: You're like, Oh yeah.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: It's,
9:38
SPEAKER_03: it's,
9:38
SPEAKER_03: it's kind of funny just how the perception of time,
9:41
SPEAKER_03: the perception of time is just such a fickle thing.
9:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
9:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, I am not a professional audio guy.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: I've never had any formal training in the equipment.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: So everything I do is I've taught myself and I'm slowly adding more and more
10:00
SPEAKER_01: equipment and more interesting stuff to make it more of a professional production.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: and uh sometimes i forget stuff like i think one episode i was like opening like a
10:10
SPEAKER_01: candy bar because i was like starving and then somebody called me out on it they're
10:13
SPEAKER_01: like god damn the crinkling i'm like oh i'm sorry i didn't even think about it i
10:17
SPEAKER_01: didn't realize that this microphone was gonna pick up like my crinkling candy bar
10:21
SPEAKER_01: you know yeah yeah yeah i listened to uh
10:25
SPEAKER_01: One of the other podcasts I listen to regularly while driving is Red Scare.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: Oh my God, I'm getting canceled again for saying this.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: And they're, you know, they're very like non-edited-ish also.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: And they're always like lighting cigarettes or like hitting the bong or something.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: And you can hear like pretty sirens in the background because they're in New York.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: and I think people I think people actually like it like there's there's a threshold
10:50
SPEAKER_00: obviously but I think like a little bit of that stuff I think audiences actually
10:55
SPEAKER_00: like they enjoy it sort of like it kind of adds some texture to the whole thing
11:00
SPEAKER_03: yeah it's kind of reminding me like like sound effects and like the old radio
11:03
SPEAKER_03: dramas like it lets you know like oh yeah if it helps you visualize like I'm
11:07
SPEAKER_03: thinking about the snap of a lighter right now and I'm like man that would be just
11:10
SPEAKER_03: you know the snap of the crack you know
11:13
SPEAKER_03: yeah fucking in that first and it's like okay all right we're it's about to get
11:17
SPEAKER_03: real you know it's just it's shorthand for that so it's you know it's wednesday
11:21
SPEAKER_01: right now and i always we always record this on wednesday afternoons and that's
11:25
SPEAKER_01: because i get kicked i come home from work and fisto gets back you know he gets off
11:30
SPEAKER_01: of work on wednesdays and it's a good time because it's when my daughter goes to
11:34
SPEAKER_01: dance class so i don't have my daughter running around she's six years old and
11:39
SPEAKER_01: she tries her best you know to be downstairs but she has moments of i'm gonna slam
11:43
SPEAKER_01: doors and do that kind of thing unfortunately we've got a new dog and the new dog
11:48
SPEAKER_01: likes to play with the other dog and the cat and this new dog is a giant swiss
11:52
SPEAKER_01: shepherd and you know she's afraid of like everything so like somebody walks by
11:57
SPEAKER_01: outside she freaks out and
11:59
SPEAKER_01: You know, whatever.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: It's all part of the fun.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: But Brad, you're mainly an author, and that's kind of your number one thing.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: And I'm with you on that one.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: I like to think of myself as primarily an author and a podcaster for fun.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: And your first novel is House of Sleep.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: And House of Sleep was a fantastic novel for listeners.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: It's not particularly an easy novel.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to tell you the truth, right?
12:22
SPEAKER_01: It's one that requires a little bit of, I would say...
12:29
SPEAKER_01: it's a level two novel.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: It's not your fun action novel.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: It's got some thinking to it.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: It's a, there's some complexities to it that I really enjoy.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: It's exactly my kind of novel, the kind of novel I enjoy.
12:41
SPEAKER_01: And to give a kind of a brief,
12:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
12:44
SPEAKER_01: overview it,
12:46
SPEAKER_01: the main theme is dreams and the ability to remember dreams and a cult like
12:51
SPEAKER_01: environment and a very interesting,
12:54
SPEAKER_01: uh,
12:55
SPEAKER_01: kind of antagonist cotagonist kind of character named the diving man um but i
13:03
SPEAKER_01: highly recommend it for everybody reading it but what i don't want to do is i don't
13:06
SPEAKER_01: want to talk about it that much and the reason i want to talk about it that much
13:09
SPEAKER_01: because a friend of this podcast uh the guys from book club from hell just did an
13:15
SPEAKER_01: episode with you on it and they spent the entire time talking about it
13:19
SPEAKER_01: So if you listen to this podcast,
13:21
SPEAKER_01: you probably listen to those guys for the most part,
13:24
SPEAKER_01: and we would just be Eskimo brothers at that point talking about the same thing,
13:28
SPEAKER_01: right?
13:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, I appreciate the shout out for it though, man.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: That always definitely helps.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I definitely, I want people to read it or check it out.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: At least go to my website and watch the trailer and get a sense of if you think it's for you or not.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: In fact, the first third of the book is available free in audio as like a podcast.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if you're listening to podcasts normally and you want to just check it out, try that out.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: And if you like it,
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Buy it if you don't shut it off and listen to this podcast instead
14:03
Right.
14:04
SPEAKER_01: So in the kind of in the vein of the art of darkness, basically, you're the subject right now.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: Why?
14:12
SPEAKER_01: Why write?
14:13
SPEAKER_01: Why become an author?
14:15
SPEAKER_01: Why?
14:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is a great question, man.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: And I like I'll be straight up.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: I'll be perfectly honest with you.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: Like, is it for the girls, man?
14:25
SPEAKER_00: Because there's no, no, there's no women.
14:29
SPEAKER_03: Is it for being appreciated in your time and age?
14:31
SPEAKER_03: I'm sure that's not going to happen either, right?
14:33
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't happen either.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I definitely never gotten girls because I'm a writer, ever.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm a happily married man, but I think that would have happened either way, you know?
14:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know, man.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: There's, I guess, a few different things to it.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: One is...
14:57
SPEAKER_00: I have come, I don't know, it's a sort of chicken or egg scenario, but like, I don't know.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: I've realized that my brain works like a novelist's brain.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if I trained it to do that over time, or that's just how it is.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: Like a novel is for me,
15:18
SPEAKER_00: It allows me to channel all of the rabbit holes that my brain wants to go in and
15:26
SPEAKER_00: sort of point it all in a direction.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of like figuring my way out of the labyrinth by writing a novel.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: and so there's that aspect there's a sort of like it's uh not therapy in that like
15:43
SPEAKER_00: oh man i need to like uh process my trauma or something but like this is what my
15:49
SPEAKER_00: brain wants to do and has found this has sort of found this this um this outlet for
15:56
SPEAKER_00: it um the other you know another aspect is like wanting to contribute to
16:03
SPEAKER_00: literature like i was obsessed with books when i was a kid i always wanted to be a
16:08
SPEAKER_00: writer like since i can remember and somehow adding to that you know getting a book
16:14
SPEAKER_00: on a shelf next to other books and and and
16:18
SPEAKER_00: i see all of literature is talking to each other maybe that sounds cheesy but like
16:23
SPEAKER_00: every book is sort of in conversation with every other and like i want to have i
16:27
SPEAKER_00: want to have like a small something to say in that very large conversation that's
16:33
SPEAKER_00: sort of bigger than all of us right um that's definitely part of it and i don't you
16:37
SPEAKER_01: know i don't think that's usually cheesy at all i mean that is something i mean
16:41
SPEAKER_01: that's kind of what
16:42
SPEAKER_01: Cormac McCarthy said right the whole idea of the conversation of you know from the
16:47
SPEAKER_01: past to the present and I know I don't know if you've read The Passenger and Stella
16:52
SPEAKER_01: Mars yeah I think yeah what's his name one of the characters in there talks about
16:57
SPEAKER_01: how you know
16:58
SPEAKER_01: you share if you have books shared in common it's like a bond almost as thick as
17:01
SPEAKER_01: blood or thicker than blood and i think that there is i think that literature as a
17:07
SPEAKER_01: the artistic sphere uh shares a kind of a supernatural kind of you know like
17:15
SPEAKER_01: psychosphere of existence and uh
17:20
SPEAKER_01: A consciousness that goes beyond the actual words on a page themselves,
17:24
SPEAKER_01: whether it's cultural or spiritual or emotional.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that's a great, that's a great answer.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: You know,
17:30
SPEAKER_01: like we,
17:31
SPEAKER_01: you want to be part of that conversation,
17:33
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:33
SPEAKER_01: or contribute to that conversation as you have something to say,
17:36
SPEAKER_01: not to put words in your mouth.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's definitely part of it.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
17:43
SPEAKER_00: I kind of think of the entire creative enterprise,
17:46
SPEAKER_00: not just writing,
17:46
SPEAKER_00: but all the arts,
17:49
SPEAKER_00: as that's sort of the human species dreaming is music and film and books,
17:57
SPEAKER_00: right?
17:58
SPEAKER_00: Whatever function it is that dreaming has for the individual, the arts has for society.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: And...
18:05
SPEAKER_00: uh so you know that that has a lot of uh that that's a big territory that that
18:13
SPEAKER_00: dream space and so i i feel like there's kind of oh i don't quite want to say a
18:18
SPEAKER_00: responsibility but there is almost a responsibility like if you have these ideas
18:22
SPEAKER_00: you should try to and they're trying to get out you should get them out somehow or
18:27
SPEAKER_03: another yeah i think i think i think responsibility is a good word for it you you
18:30
SPEAKER_03: write because you must
18:32
SPEAKER_03: yeah right because you must uh the mountains called so i went you know like yeah if
18:36
SPEAKER_03: you don't do it if you don't do it you're denying who you are and well you know
18:41
SPEAKER_00: good luck with that yeah yeah and it's true like you know and it's interesting
18:46
SPEAKER_00: because i hit this spot in my life i'm in my early 40s now and you know people like
18:51
SPEAKER_00: house of sleep but you know i would have loved my career to have gone even bigger
18:55
SPEAKER_00: than this obviously you know who wouldn't and uh
18:59
SPEAKER_00: you do get to a point where you're like,
19:00
SPEAKER_00: man,
19:00
SPEAKER_00: am I going to spend another four years writing this book for,
19:04
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:05
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
19:05
SPEAKER_00: 50 people,
19:06
SPEAKER_00: 100 people?
19:08
SPEAKER_00: Man, is that, you know, you start kind of
19:11
SPEAKER_00: it does start to weigh on you a little bit.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: Like, is this the right thing?
19:14
SPEAKER_00: Is this the best way to spend my time?
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Should I be using whatever meager skill I have in a more coordinated manner?
19:23
SPEAKER_00: It's,
19:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:23
SPEAKER_00: you start asking yourself these questions,
19:25
SPEAKER_00: but ultimately,
19:26
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:27
SPEAKER_00: ultimately I'm going to do the work one way or the other.
19:31
SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, I mean, there's only one way to find out, right?
19:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah.
19:35
SPEAKER_01: And that's a, that's a, that's a question that,
19:39
SPEAKER_01: I think has crossed all our minds.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: And I want to say all our minds is all of us that have written or are writing or
19:47
SPEAKER_01: are creating is because you look at the,
19:52
SPEAKER_01: the,
19:53
SPEAKER_01: the proclamations of the novel is dead,
19:56
SPEAKER_01: poetry is dead,
19:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
19:58
SPEAKER_01: music is dead or whatever,
20:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:00
SPEAKER_01: and it can be discouraging,
20:02
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:03
SPEAKER_01: it can be like,
20:04
SPEAKER_01: Especially if you are trying to write for money or that kind of stuff.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: And then you have to stop and go, I just have to write, man.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: I just have to.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: I don't have a choice.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: I need to do it.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: It needs to come out.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: And if nobody reads it, that's fine.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: But I still put it down.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: I exercised it from myself.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: And that's a tough one.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: Well, when did you decide to do this?
20:32
SPEAKER_01: Was it something like – you listen to writer interviews and you get somebody like
20:37
SPEAKER_01: Flannery O'Connor that's been writing stuff since she was a little girl and those
20:41
SPEAKER_01: kind of guys.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: Or even recent living authors will tell you like, oh, I started writing when I was in fourth grade.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
20:48
SPEAKER_01: I always told people Dungeons and Dragons stories and then I decided to become blah, blah, blah.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: When did you decide?
20:55
SPEAKER_01: Was it later in life, younger?
20:57
SPEAKER_01: No, man.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: It was young.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: It was quite young.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I couldn't even tell you.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: I don't really have a good memory when I didn't want to write.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: I remember when I was, gosh, probably fourth grade, something like that.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: I remember my mom brought,
21:15
SPEAKER_00: like at her work,
21:16
SPEAKER_00: they had like an old typewriter in a closet or something,
21:18
SPEAKER_00: right?
21:19
SPEAKER_00: This would have been in like, I don't know,
21:21
SPEAKER_00: early,
21:22
SPEAKER_00: very early nineties,
21:23
SPEAKER_00: she brought it home and just,
21:24
SPEAKER_00: I just started banging out these weird little science fiction stories.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: Cause I was obsessed with like the twilight zone.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: Right.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: So,
21:32
SPEAKER_00: um,
21:33
SPEAKER_00: so kind of started then like grade school,
21:36
SPEAKER_00: um,
21:36
SPEAKER_00: and then,
21:37
SPEAKER_00: you know,
21:38
SPEAKER_00: went through various phases and,
21:40
SPEAKER_00: you know,
21:40
SPEAKER_00: got really into like the beats when I was in high school.
21:45
SPEAKER_00: And kind of kept at it.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: Went to college for originally my first degree.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: I got an engineering degree because I was, you know, I understood that like I was never going to.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: It was going to be very difficult to become financially independent if I had just
22:02
SPEAKER_00: got an English degree or something.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Right.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: So kind of went to engineering degree.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Moved out of Michigan,
22:10
SPEAKER_00: where I'm from,
22:11
SPEAKER_00: moved to Idaho,
22:12
SPEAKER_00: and just immediately got a full-time gig,
22:15
SPEAKER_00: but immediately went back to school to take writing workshop classes.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: Just like, I'm going to take fiction classes, poetry classes, screenwriting, whatever they'll let me do.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: After a few years of that, I went and got an MFA at the University of Texas.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, and then just kind of kept pushing at it.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: And it's been, you know, it's been sort of...
22:39
SPEAKER_00: guiding beacon a lot of the choices I've made in my life have been alright if I do
22:46
SPEAKER_00: that am I gonna have time to write okay I gotta do this but how can I sort of
22:51
SPEAKER_00: rearrange that so I have some time to write that's been kind of how I've shaped
22:57
SPEAKER_00: most of my life so yeah it's always been there and I don't have as much to show for
23:05
SPEAKER_00: it as I probably ought to given all that time
23:10
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I've got like probably four or five draft novels.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: They're not finished, but they're written beginning to beginning to end that are just on my hard drive.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: It'll never see the light of day, you know.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: So it took a lot.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: It took, you know, it took writing two or three books to write to write house asleep.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: So I'm slow, I guess.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, and you know what?
23:33
SPEAKER_01: That's perfectly fine.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm a fan of slow, okay?
23:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm slow.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm a slow writer also.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: I'm a slow podcaster.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's all right, man.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: That's all right.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a trend.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the internet wants you to do everything fast.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: It wants everything to be out now.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: So gross.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, there's a certain sense in which you do have to cater to that a little bit, I guess.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: But, like, for me, it was important to, like, not let that overtake everything.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: Right?
24:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, resist that urge to, like, put the thing out right now.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's been important for me.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, and, you know, on that topic, right?
24:18
SPEAKER_01: Like,
24:19
SPEAKER_01: I think that writing,
24:24
SPEAKER_01: for the most part,
24:25
SPEAKER_01: is,
24:26
SPEAKER_01: in my opinion,
24:27
SPEAKER_01: a middle-age or old man's or woman's game to a certain degree.
24:35
SPEAKER_01: Music, for example, there's something about music that is, out of all the art forms...
24:40
SPEAKER_01: is the most raw it somehow speaks to you music is a lot more universal than writing
24:47
SPEAKER_01: you know everybody whether you speak the language or you don't uh can feel a rhythm
24:54
SPEAKER_01: or a beat you know or just just drums it's very primal it's very there's something
24:59
SPEAKER_01: you know a shamanistic quality to it that is universal human and uh you know all
25:06
SPEAKER_01: cultures banged some drums somewhere and sometime and you know
25:11
SPEAKER_01: And I think because of that, because of its raw element, it suits itself to the young man.
25:17
SPEAKER_01: Of course,
25:17
SPEAKER_01: you have fantastic symphonies and great pieces of classical music or even
25:25
SPEAKER_01: contemporary music made by older men and women.
25:29
SPEAKER_01: But for the most part, the window for music tends to be
25:35
SPEAKER_01: teens to you know your 30s you know your late 30s uh you don't really get maybe
25:42
SPEAKER_01: because there's a visual element to it also when it comes to the financial aspect
25:46
SPEAKER_01: of it but i don't know it just seems that like there's there's a raw emotional
25:52
SPEAKER_01: level that gets dulled in an older individual that doesn't come off as well
25:59
SPEAKER_01: But writing, I've noticed, tends to be opposite.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And of course,
26:02
SPEAKER_01: there's fantastic first novels written by,
26:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:05
SPEAKER_01: teenagers or guys right out of high school.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
26:08
SPEAKER_01: I said Brett Easton Ellis wrote Less Than Zero,
26:11
SPEAKER_01: and American Psycho in his early 20s,
26:13
SPEAKER_01: or actually his teens were Less Than Zero.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: But if you open Less Than Zero right now, it reads like a teenager wrote it.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of the novels that are written by younger people,
26:26
SPEAKER_01: I have a hard time connecting to as an older man because I just feel like,
26:31
SPEAKER_01: bro,
26:31
SPEAKER_01: you've never,
26:31
SPEAKER_01: never been anywhere.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: You don't know anything.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: You don't know anything.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: There's a,
26:36
SPEAKER_01: there's a,
26:37
SPEAKER_01: there's a,
26:37
SPEAKER_01: there's a missing element,
26:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:39
SPEAKER_01: and at the same time,
26:40
SPEAKER_01: even reading it sometimes,
26:42
SPEAKER_01: uh,
26:44
SPEAKER_01: a novel has a complete and total different vibe than,
26:47
SPEAKER_01: or different meaning in your thirties than it does in your,
26:51
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:52
SPEAKER_01: your teens or,
26:53
SPEAKER_01: or that.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: One of the, you know, you, you, you guys over at art of darkness did the, uh,
26:59
SPEAKER_01: Oh, my gosh.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: The F. Scott Fitzgerald episode, right?
27:02
SPEAKER_01: And we all know F. Scott from The Great Gatsby.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: And we know The Great Gatsby because it's something that's a mandatory novel in almost all high school.
27:12
SPEAKER_03: The one book you will read.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: It's the one book.
27:14
SPEAKER_03: Whether you like it or not.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: And there's an interesting story why behind it.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure everybody knows that it was assigned to the GIs around World War II.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of where its popularity became such a thing.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: And they all became high school teachers.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: And they all became high school teachers, right?
27:31
SPEAKER_01: When they came home and used a GI Bill to get there.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: But I think one of the reasons that it's a novel that's read in high school is because it's short, right?
27:42
SPEAKER_01: It's a very short novel.
27:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: On a surface level, it's a novel that you can see it kind of appealing to young people.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: But I've always felt that it's – okay, I will add the caveat, right?
27:59
SPEAKER_01: I think that that first chapter in The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest pieces
28:03
SPEAKER_01: of literature written in the 20th century,
28:05
SPEAKER_01: right?
28:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree with that.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: If you have not read it since high school or you've never read it and you're
28:11
SPEAKER_01: interested in literature and the sound of language and the written word –
28:15
SPEAKER_01: open that novel right now and read it because it is a pure masterpiece and it's on
28:20
SPEAKER_01: you know unmatched i think right um but i don't think it's a novel that is intended
28:28
SPEAKER_01: for a teenage boy it is a novel that hits a lot harder when you're you know in your
28:38
SPEAKER_01: 30s or post your initial thing because it's a
28:43
SPEAKER_01: And a teenage boy fresh into adulthood,
28:48
SPEAKER_01: getting ready to go on to his life,
28:50
SPEAKER_01: is just not going to get the kind of nihilistic pessimism that Nick Carraway spits
28:56
SPEAKER_01: out in that novel,
28:57
SPEAKER_01: right?
28:58
SPEAKER_01: Because what he's basically telling you is,
28:59
SPEAKER_01: man,
29:00
SPEAKER_01: no matter what you try,
29:01
SPEAKER_01: class is more important than money and don't be a cuck.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: That's really what he's saying, right?
29:09
SPEAKER_01: And you just don't get that.
29:10
SPEAKER_01: You just don't get that.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: You can sit down.
29:13
SPEAKER_03: Go ahead.
29:14
SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
29:14
SPEAKER_03: It's funny how you're explaining music is kind of a young man's game.
29:18
SPEAKER_03: Therefore, listening is probably also more of a young man's game.
29:22
SPEAKER_03: Because with reading, you don't want to read younger folks because, guys, you haven't done anything.
29:26
SPEAKER_03: Well, as a reader, yeah, it's the same.
29:29
SPEAKER_03: I haven't done anything, so I don't know what to read.
29:31
SPEAKER_03: I read stuff, and yeah, I don't get it either.
29:33
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I haven't read Great Gatsby since high school, fully, completely admit it.
29:37
SPEAKER_03: And I'm thinking to myself,
29:37
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I better pick that back up and take another look through because you're right.
29:40
SPEAKER_03: I'm sure it'll be a complete,
29:41
SPEAKER_03: utter revelation because I've actually done stuff since I was an idiot,
29:46
SPEAKER_03: you know,
29:46
SPEAKER_03: 16 year old.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: There is a there's a threat of pain in The Great Gatsby that a 17 year old.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: I remember that.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I don't think they will struggle to see it.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe that something's wrong.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: right right you know a sophisticated reader probably will at that age but like your
30:03
SPEAKER_00: average you just pick the random kid they're not gonna they're probably not gonna
30:06
SPEAKER_01: see that um but yeah and the teachers don't teach it well and and the reason the
30:11
SPEAKER_01: teachers don't teach it well because ultimately what are you what are you gonna
30:14
SPEAKER_01: tell these kids well this novel is about uh this guy named gaspy that works really
30:19
SPEAKER_01: really hard to get everything but ultimately he's a cuck and uh
30:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the rich people stick together and he's always ostracized.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then he does.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
30:29
SPEAKER_01: And everybody's right.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: And the American dream is fake.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: Congratulations.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I hope you guys enjoy your graduations and good luck in college.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: It's a downer.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: It's a downer novel.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: So they don't,
30:42
SPEAKER_01: bring it up, you know, and it's a very masculine novel.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of,
30:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:46
SPEAKER_01: English teachers tend to be women and they,
30:49
SPEAKER_01: they really,
30:49
SPEAKER_01: I think missed the point of the novel.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: They focus on its surface tendencies.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: It's,
30:53
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:53
SPEAKER_01: it's,
30:53
SPEAKER_01: it's gilded age kind of,
30:56
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:56
SPEAKER_01: the whole art deco vibe,
30:58
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:59
SPEAKER_01: that Lana Del Rey kind of vibe that they've got going in,
31:02
SPEAKER_01: in that,
31:02
SPEAKER_01: in that novel.
31:03
SPEAKER_01: And they missed the point, you know, another novel that I also, that also hit me,
31:09
SPEAKER_01: differently twice that i've read was my favorite novel the brothers karamazov and
31:15
SPEAKER_01: um spoilers fisto if you haven't read he finished it yet come at me come at me come
31:20
SPEAKER_01: at me go for it i don't mind the brothers karamazov was a novel i read for the
31:25
SPEAKER_01: first time as a junior in high school and it was handed to me by my my my i had a
31:31
SPEAKER_01: like a
31:33
SPEAKER_01: Multinational or like literature of the world class I took.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: It was like an elective course, like an AP course.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: And for some reason, everybody in that class was really dumb.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: And the teacher knew they were all dumb.
31:47
SPEAKER_01: And I was the good smart boy.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: So she walked up to me one day.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: She's like, hey, I'm going to give you books.
31:51
SPEAKER_01: And you just read them and come back like in the month, right?
31:54
SPEAKER_01: And the first book she gave me was Jonathan Livingston's Seagull.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you guys ever heard that one.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting, kind of a psychedelic, spiritual, hippie book about a seagull.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: That's basically Seagull Jesus.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: Look it up.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: It's very interesting.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're right.
32:13
SPEAKER_03: Sounds like a very LA thing for you to read.
32:15
SPEAKER_01: She was a very cool teacher, okay?
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it sounds like it.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: And then she handed me The Brothers Karamazov.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: And I read it.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: I just powered through it.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: I loved it.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh my god, I love this book.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: But I really, really identified with Ivan, right?
32:30
SPEAKER_01: The philosopher brother, the middle brother.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: Because I was in my soon-to-be hyper Reddit atheist type phase.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: Reddit didn't exist back then.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: But...
32:39
SPEAKER_01: And I felt like everybody was stupid and wrong and I was right.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: And I, so basically I was a high school boy that was smart, you know, like I was that guy.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: And,
32:49
SPEAKER_01: uh,
32:49
SPEAKER_01: I thought everything was dumb and God was fake and everything spiritually stupid
32:54
SPEAKER_01: and everybody's evil.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: And I pretty much missed the whole part about him getting brain fever and dying.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: But, um, but,
33:01
SPEAKER_01: That's what I identified with.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: And many years later,
33:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm sitting in a C-130 flying across the Pacific,
33:10
SPEAKER_01: and I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov again.
33:12
SPEAKER_01: And now I'm older, I'm a father, and I've seen some shit, done some stuff, right?
33:19
SPEAKER_01: And I'm sitting there going, oh, man.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: i am no longer ivan you know right i am the older brother now that's whose life
33:31
SPEAKER_01: i've lived i didn't live the life of ivan you know i lived the older brother yeah
33:35
SPEAKER_00: what was his name yeah remind me real fast oh well al yosha was the younger one
33:41
SPEAKER_01: right al yosha is the youngest one so it's like the old and uh
33:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to get it right.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: Oh my God.
33:49
SPEAKER_01: I need to pull this up.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: I can't believe I forgot.
33:51
SPEAKER_03: I should probably remember it because I'm actually actively reading it, but I'm.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: Dimitri.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: Dimitri.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: Dimitri.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: It's Dimitri.
33:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: So I'm Dimitri.
34:01
SPEAKER_01: Dimitri,
34:01
SPEAKER_01: the soldier,
34:02
SPEAKER_01: the guy that goes out and he's in love with Grushenka and he goes on his gypsy podcast.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Orgy rampage and blows all his money and then obviously gets accused of killing his father.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he lived a life of kind of debauchery compared to both Ivan and Alyosha, you know.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: And I – Tip off the old block.
34:21
SPEAKER_01: I didn't like him.
34:22
SPEAKER_01: You know, I didn't like him as a teenager.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: I thought he was just a stupid like bro, you know.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: I was like, look at this guy.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: He's an asshole, you know.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: And I ended up being Dimitri for a long time.
34:31
SPEAKER_03: That's probably why you hated him.
34:33
SPEAKER_03: You knew what was going to happen.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: Maybe.
34:35
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I knew, right?
34:35
SPEAKER_01: And then I realized I felt the lure of Grushenka's in my life, you know?
34:42
SPEAKER_01: And I felt the lure of vodka with gypsies in my life, you know?
34:47
SPEAKER_01: And I got it.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, it clicked, right?
34:52
SPEAKER_01: It clicked how...
34:54
SPEAKER_01: the dichotomy between Ivan and Dimitri, you know?
34:57
SPEAKER_01: And of course, now, I wish I was Alyosha, right?
35:01
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: Of course, I don't think you can be Alyosha, you know?
35:06
SPEAKER_01: Only Alyosha is Alyosha, right?
35:08
SPEAKER_01: And it's tough, right?
35:09
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting, but that book hits so much differently as an older man than it does as a teenager.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: And it's just a completely different novel when you reread it.
35:20
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I really feel like...
35:23
SPEAKER_01: the best authors or the ones that have the most say or,
35:27
SPEAKER_01: or the ones that connect with are a little bit older and have,
35:30
SPEAKER_01: have been there,
35:31
SPEAKER_01: you know?
35:32
SPEAKER_01: And you look,
35:34
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:34
SPEAKER_01: you,
35:34
SPEAKER_01: you did the art of darkness and all,
35:36
SPEAKER_01: almost all those people that you guys chose to,
35:39
SPEAKER_01: they did stuff you know i mean they were they're out there they were living life
35:44
SPEAKER_01: you know and the the life that they lived gave them something to say you know even
35:49
SPEAKER_01: if they wrote like about sandworms on arrakis or something like that you know it's
35:56
SPEAKER_01: still their life you know informed the the art and it was critical to the
36:02
SPEAKER_01: foundation you know they
36:04
SPEAKER_01: they spoke a truth.
36:05
SPEAKER_01: They wrote a truth, right?
36:06
SPEAKER_01: That's one thing I took from that show is that all these guys were telling the truth,
36:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
36:09
SPEAKER_01: even when they were not telling the truth.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: For all you Star Trek nerds out there, there's my favorite character in Star Trek is Garrick.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: And there's a great line in Star Trek Deep Space Nine when the very naive young Dr.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: Bashir asks Garrick after their seven years of a relationship,
36:26
SPEAKER_01: when he finds out that Garrick is a obsidian monster
36:30
SPEAKER_01: Obsidian Network, like Spy, or he's been a spy his entire life.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: And he asks him, hey, man, all those stories you've told me, were they all lies?
36:39
SPEAKER_01: Were any of them true?
36:41
SPEAKER_01: And Garrett looks at him and he says...
36:44
SPEAKER_01: everything was true, especially the lies.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: You know?
36:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: The best line.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: Plain, simple Garrick.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: Right.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: And it's such a great line because that's being an author, right?
36:57
SPEAKER_01: Garrick's an author, right?
36:59
SPEAKER_01: Because we lie.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: We're making stuff up, but they're truthful lies.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, man.
37:06
SPEAKER_01: Failed authors are the ones that lie, but they're not truthful lies.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: Right.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: Right.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: No, man, you said you're trying to you're trying to dig.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: You're trying to.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: And as I go on in my writing career,
37:17
SPEAKER_00: my plots and characters and things become more weirder and stranger and like and
37:26
SPEAKER_00: more idiosyncratic.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: But like,
37:28
SPEAKER_00: I actually feel like I'm getting closer to telling true stories than when I was
37:32
SPEAKER_00: trying to do like whatever literary realism I was doing when I started.
37:36
SPEAKER_03: you know yeah yeah it's something something that i've seen and i'm not an author
37:42
SPEAKER_03: i'm a i'm a teacher but this year in class i've made it a point to point out kids
37:47
SPEAKER_03: are myths true no they're not do they have truth in them yes it's made all the
37:53
SPEAKER_03: difference it's been a year to
37:56
SPEAKER_03: And especially like right now we're in the middle of midterms and the midterm that
38:00
SPEAKER_03: I constructed for them,
38:01
SPEAKER_03: it's about making a myth of the class that we've had.
38:05
SPEAKER_03: And I'm seeing kids make leaps of intuition and making leaps of logic that I'm just like, oh, hell yeah.
38:10
SPEAKER_03: That's cool.
38:11
SPEAKER_03: Right into my veins.
38:13
SPEAKER_03: And it's true because it's truthful.
38:16
SPEAKER_03: It's communicating a truth.
38:18
SPEAKER_03: And that's probably the best we can hope for in a lot of ways.
38:20
SPEAKER_03: And that's why so much, you know, literature that does that is just –
38:24
SPEAKER_03: Knocks it out of the park.
38:25
SPEAKER_03: I mean, what else is there to say?
38:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, it is the most human thing.
38:29
SPEAKER_01: And I think, Brad, you touched on it perfectly that creating art is a collective dreaming.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: Because we live in both the material world and we also live in our intellectual, mythical kind of –
38:46
SPEAKER_01: literary fiction world that we live in you know where we have lies like stories and
38:52
SPEAKER_01: myths right lies i guess right that are honestly true it's interesting right now um
39:00
SPEAKER_01: like two months ago so i'm quick quick thing so for for saint patrick's day my wife
39:08
SPEAKER_01: always goes all out with all the stuff we do for our daughter right so for saint
39:13
SPEAKER_01: patrick's day she always like
39:15
SPEAKER_01: the leprechaun comes and brings her a gift.
39:17
SPEAKER_01: It's always like a small gift.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: Right.
39:19
SPEAKER_01: But she always like,
39:20
SPEAKER_01: she always like gets like food coloring and like draws like little shoe prints on
39:26
SPEAKER_01: the ground and stuff.
39:28
SPEAKER_01: And then puts a green food coloring, the toilet bowl downstairs.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: Cause the leprechaun peed in the toilet.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: Right.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: And it's the funniest thing.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: I don't know where she got the idea.
39:38
SPEAKER_01: Probably online somewhere, but it's something that my daughter loves, you know?
39:41
SPEAKER_01: And we obviously do Santa Claus and Christmas and everything.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: And two months ago, my daughter like looks at my wife and she goes, mom, are you the leprechaun?
39:54
SPEAKER_01: And she goes, well, do you want me to tell you the truth or not?
40:02
SPEAKER_01: Right.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: And then my daughter goes, are you the tooth fairy?
40:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because once they identify one, they all fall.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: Easter bunny, tooth fairies, they all go.
40:13
SPEAKER_00: Right, they're all gone, right?
40:15
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, obviously Santa came up next.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: And my wife's like, do you want to know the truth?
40:21
SPEAKER_01: Or do you want me to just say nothing?
40:24
SPEAKER_01: My daughter's like, I'll ask you some other time.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Nice.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Smart girl.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: Good girl.
40:33
SPEAKER_01: So Christmas is around the corner.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: I think they already left.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: Let me look at my car, see if my car is – oh, the car is still here.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: I don't want her to overhear me saying this.
40:41
SPEAKER_01: But Christmas is coming along, and we are doing Santa, and it's the same conversation.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: But I know she knows.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: I know without a doubt that she knows the truth.
40:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:55
SPEAKER_01: But she's choosing to live –
40:59
SPEAKER_01: the other truth you know the more interesting one because ultimately is there a
41:04
SPEAKER_00: santa yes right yeah yeah well this the myth of in this case santa claus it is it's
41:13
SPEAKER_00: the easier to tell narrative that encapsulates the whole like mystery tradition and
41:21
SPEAKER_00: everything else about christmas it's like
41:25
SPEAKER_00: It's like you can say, oh, Santa Claus isn't real.
41:27
SPEAKER_00: And then it's like Christmas makes less sense.
41:29
SPEAKER_00: Then like it's it becomes it's weird.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: It's sort of like and it's a fruitful to do this, I suppose.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: But it's sort of like saying, well, why do we put up a tree?
41:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know.
41:43
SPEAKER_00: Well, we should stop putting up the tree then.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: No, just because you can't articulate it doesn't mean that the tree doesn't mean something.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: And just because Santa Claus isn't quote unquote real doesn't mean that there's
41:56
SPEAKER_00: some kind of important cycle is being enacted by us all kind of pretending that
42:04
SPEAKER_00: Santa Claus exists.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: I see this narrative every Christmas kind of come up on Twitter where people are like,
42:10
SPEAKER_00: do you lie to your kids?
42:11
SPEAKER_00: Why do you lie to your kids about Santa?
42:13
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, that's not a lie.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: You put your kids in front of TV shows that are lies all the time.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: Is that lying to them?
42:20
SPEAKER_01: Is Batman reading or watching a show about Batman a lie?
42:25
SPEAKER_00: Right.
42:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: And it seems like it's a very...
42:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: I will.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: I will lie to my children about Santa so they don't grow up to be an idiot on Twitter.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: Right.
42:37
SPEAKER_01: That's what's happening.
42:39
SPEAKER_01: That's what's happening.
42:40
SPEAKER_01: Joyless de-racinated like atomized asshole, you know?
42:44
SPEAKER_00: Right.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: Right.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: We got to run a, like an ROI analysis on every gift you buy them or something.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
42:50
SPEAKER_03: Like, yes, that, that, yes, that is, that is parenting properly.
42:54
SPEAKER_03: Um, I, I will tell my children all about Santa simply to piss you off, sir.
42:58
SPEAKER_03: right that is out of spite which is the best reason to do anything yeah we're gonna
43:03
SPEAKER_00: start we're gonna start making up other mythical creatures you know just just
43:07
SPEAKER_01: absolutely right but you know it's that and this is like a cheesy thing you talk
43:13
SPEAKER_01: about like egregores and stuff and you got the idea of you know you get the idea of
43:18
SPEAKER_01: batman and is batman real i mean no obviously he's a creation of some writers in dc
43:22
SPEAKER_01: comics back in like the 40s or whatever
43:25
SPEAKER_01: But I know who he is.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: I know what he looks like.
43:27
SPEAKER_01: And I know what his name is.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: And I know what his parents were.
43:29
SPEAKER_01: And I know where he lived.
43:30
SPEAKER_01: And I know more about him than I know about my neighbor next door.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Well,
43:35
SPEAKER_00: and there's,
43:36
SPEAKER_00: from almost an anthropological standpoint,
43:39
SPEAKER_00: there's a reason we keep telling ourselves the Batman story.
43:43
SPEAKER_00: Like, and if you sort of ask yourself that question, like, why are we rebooting Batman?
43:47
SPEAKER_00: And obviously, like, you can say, oh, well, it's, you know, it's bankable IP or whatever, right?
43:51
SPEAKER_00: But, like,
43:53
SPEAKER_00: There is a reason why we keep telling that story.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: And if you ask yourself, okay, why are we doing that?
43:58
SPEAKER_00: And really get into, okay, well, then what is Batman?
44:01
SPEAKER_00: What are the things that make him Batman that if you take him away, he's not Batman anymore?
44:05
SPEAKER_00: Like,
44:06
SPEAKER_00: you really do start getting into something that tells you,
44:08
SPEAKER_00: I think,
44:09
SPEAKER_00: quite a bit about maybe not everybody's psyche,
44:12
SPEAKER_00: but particularly a masculine psyche in the case of Batman,
44:16
SPEAKER_00: right?
44:17
SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, we all want to be billionaires who fight for justice and do the right thing.
44:22
SPEAKER_00: thing and like channel our channel our trauma into something generative that might
44:27
SPEAKER_00: save the world that's what we all want to do right before batman there was zorro
44:33
SPEAKER_03: right right and there was other characters yeah i'm thinking all the way back to
44:36
SPEAKER_03: robin hood robin yeah yeah yeah it's robin hood he's doing it because of the love
44:41
SPEAKER_03: of the king you know he's doing it for the right reasons and he's rich he's rich
44:46
SPEAKER_01: he's aristocrat you know but
44:49
SPEAKER_03: You know what?
44:49
SPEAKER_03: Hold on.
44:50
SPEAKER_03: Hold on.
44:50
SPEAKER_03: You said it.
44:51
SPEAKER_03: Aristocratic.
44:52
SPEAKER_03: It is aristocratic.
44:54
SPEAKER_03: It's how aristocrats are supposed to function.
44:56
SPEAKER_03: In our society where we don't have a functioning aristocracy, Batman is invented.
45:02
SPEAKER_03: And he's doing it in the way that...
45:04
SPEAKER_03: He would have to.
45:05
SPEAKER_03: He has to hide in plain sight.
45:07
SPEAKER_03: He's got to look like, oh, yeah, Bruce Wayne, man.
45:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
45:11
SPEAKER_03: And then go beat wholesale ass on the Joker later.
45:14
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's just how this works.
45:17
SPEAKER_01: The Joker, a force of chaos.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: He's an aristocrat controlling the forces of chaos and the forces of decay in the city.
45:24
SPEAKER_01: It's completely a never-ending, never-winning battle.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: You need me, Batman.
45:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:30
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, we can go about Batman for an entire episode.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: Did not expect that this evening.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: Here we go.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: I like Batman.
45:39
SPEAKER_01: Batman's fantastic.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: Batman's actually the only superhero I like.
45:42
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't think he's a superhero at all.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm not, you know, I've never been a huge superhero guy.
45:46
SPEAKER_01: I've never really liked, I honestly, I will tell you guys the truth.
45:51
SPEAKER_01: The last Marvel movie I've ever seen was the first Iron Man.
45:55
SPEAKER_01: I just don't, I don't like, I'm not one of those guys that's like, Marvel's lame.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: I just don't really care for it.
46:00
SPEAKER_01: You know, it just doesn't, it doesn't appeal to me.
46:03
SPEAKER_01: But Batman,
46:05
SPEAKER_01: ever since I saw like Batman Returns in the theaters as like a seven year old when
46:09
SPEAKER_01: I came out.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: I just watched Batman Returns, by the way, and it still holds up excellent.
46:13
SPEAKER_01: Michelle Pfeiffer-esque Catwoman is freaking – Oh, bro.
46:18
SPEAKER_01: Oh, man.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: When I first watched it, I always cared for Michael Keaton as Batman.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: I still like Michael Keaton as Batman.
46:25
SPEAKER_01: But re-watching Batman Returns, it's Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito's movie.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is.
46:32
SPEAKER_01: That's the two stars of that movie.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: Batman's like, whatever, dude.
46:35
SPEAKER_01: Go out there into your goon cave or whatever.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: He's like the straight man in a comedy.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: You're not really watching for him.
46:44
SPEAKER_03: So is this all safely Team Keaton?
46:47
SPEAKER_01: I'm a Team Keaton guy.
46:49
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
46:49
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
46:51
SPEAKER_03: 100%.
46:52
SPEAKER_01: I don't actually like any of the Nolan Batman movies at all.
46:54
SPEAKER_01: I've seen them all in theaters when they came out.
46:56
SPEAKER_01: I don't love them.
46:57
SPEAKER_01: They're good, but I don't think they're as great as people may.
46:59
SPEAKER_03: They're not the ones I want to watch.
47:00
SPEAKER_03: Like, if I was sitting Mike Child down to show them Batman, I'd throw on the very first Batman.
47:05
SPEAKER_03: Done.
47:06
SPEAKER_03: Jack Nicholson, you know, all that.
47:07
SPEAKER_03: That's what they would see.
47:08
SPEAKER_01: I think the Nolan movies are too straight.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: They're too straight.
47:12
SPEAKER_01: They're too, like, serious and techie.
47:15
SPEAKER_01: They're like a California computer nerd's idea of Batman.
47:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
47:20
SPEAKER_03: You'd probably have to be Keaton.
47:22
SPEAKER_03: Then I would go back to Adam West.
47:24
SPEAKER_03: And then if they still cared, I'd continue on from there.
47:27
SPEAKER_00: Dude, animated series.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: Oh, my God.
47:30
SPEAKER_03: Yes, of course.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: Batman Returns.
47:32
SPEAKER_03: I always forget that because I get in the movie silo and then I forget.
47:35
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
47:36
SPEAKER_03: But, dude, the animated series is excellent.
47:39
SPEAKER_03: Bro, I'm playing the show intro in my mind as we speak.
47:42
SPEAKER_03: I can see the lights of those Zeppelins.
47:45
SPEAKER_03: Like, yeah, dude.
47:46
SPEAKER_03: It's so good.
47:47
SPEAKER_01: The WB logo turns into the Zeppelin.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and they were doing this, like, whole, like...
47:54
SPEAKER_00: i was just saying they were like doing this whole like retro art retro futuristic
47:58
SPEAKER_00: art deco thing that like the aesthetic of it was awesome yeah yeah and when he
48:04
SPEAKER_03: slips in and then the and the two the two robbers turn and it's just like oh my god
48:09
SPEAKER_01: yes
48:11
SPEAKER_01: So some cool – Let's go.
48:13
SPEAKER_01: I think the animated series is like peak Batman when it comes to this little Batman.
48:17
SPEAKER_00: Yes, actually, yes.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: 100%.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: I actually liked the most recent Batman.
48:22
SPEAKER_01: I thought it was pretty good.
48:23
SPEAKER_01: I thought Edward the Vampire was actually pretty good as – Oh, that's right.
48:27
SPEAKER_01: I forgot about that.
48:29
SPEAKER_01: kurt cobain as batman kind of vibe i mean we had the nirvana song as the leitmotif
48:35
SPEAKER_01: throughout the whole movie and i thought it was really well done uh i just didn't
48:38
SPEAKER_01: think that catwoman was good in it uh she was good she's a good ish actress she
48:43
SPEAKER_01: just lacked chemistry with batman that you find it in the michael keaton michelle
48:48
SPEAKER_01: pfeiffer there's a lot of chemistry in that that thing
48:52
SPEAKER_01: But some cool little side facts about the animated series.
48:55
SPEAKER_01: It was drawn on black paper.
48:57
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
48:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: Which is really cool.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: And they invented Harley Quinn.
49:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they did.
49:04
SPEAKER_01: Harley Quinn did not exist in the comic books until she was retro-added after the
49:10
SPEAKER_01: animated series because people liked that character so much.
49:13
SPEAKER_01: They also invented Clayface, I think, which is another kind of... Clayface is awesome.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: Every time I make a Batman movie, I'm like, where the hell is Clayface?
49:22
SPEAKER_00: Where's my boy Clayface?
49:23
SPEAKER_00: He's my favorite villain.
49:25
SPEAKER_01: Now we get the CGI to do.
49:26
SPEAKER_01: We get the CGI to do Clayface.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they can totally do Clayface.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: The Riddler sucks.
49:32
SPEAKER_01: The Riddler is like incel Joker, basically.
49:35
SPEAKER_01: He's not as cool.
49:37
SPEAKER_00: The Riddler is not as smart as he thinks he is.
49:40
SPEAKER_03: Whenever he shows up, that episode or anything with the Riddler, it's always...
49:45
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to do it because I love Batman.
49:47
SPEAKER_03: You're not there for Riddler.
49:49
SPEAKER_03: It's like reading Great Gatsby in high school.
49:51
SPEAKER_03: You're going to have to do it.
49:52
SPEAKER_03: You have to watch the Riddler episodes because some asshole came home from World
49:57
SPEAKER_03: War II and decided that this was a thing.
49:59
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, all right, fine.
50:01
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to do it for the media.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: Brad, welcome to the Dicenius Review where we start with all sorts of points and topics.
50:09
SPEAKER_00: I love this.
50:10
SPEAKER_00: I love this, man.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: What were we on last week?
50:15
SPEAKER_01: We were on about Demolition Man and Terminator 2.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
50:20
SPEAKER_03: There you go.
50:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, talking about the eroticism of Terminator.
50:25
SPEAKER_03: What the hell is wrong with us, bro?
50:27
SPEAKER_03: What is wrong with us?
50:28
SPEAKER_03: The best sex scene in fiction.
50:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the greatest sex scene of the 80s.
50:31
SPEAKER_03: And we're like, Powerys and Sarah Connor in Terminator.
50:35
SPEAKER_01: You know, though...
50:37
SPEAKER_01: You know,
50:37
SPEAKER_01: Lisa,
50:37
SPEAKER_01: though,
50:38
SPEAKER_01: she won levels of esteem in my eyes because right away she knew what scene I was
50:45
SPEAKER_01: talking before I even mentioned it.
50:46
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh, my dogs are, like, fighting, you know.
50:50
SPEAKER_01: Clayface, Clayface.
50:51
SPEAKER_01: Going to a deep dive of how it shows,
50:52
SPEAKER_03: like,
50:53
SPEAKER_03: the humanity of man versus the inhumanity of the machine,
50:57
SPEAKER_03: like,
50:57
SPEAKER_03: as he guns down other machines inside the police station.
51:00
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
51:00
SPEAKER_01: But bum sex in the motel room, the peak of humanity against the machine.
51:04
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
51:05
SPEAKER_03: In the base of the apocalypse.
51:06
SPEAKER_03: Let's go.
51:07
SPEAKER_03: Time to bone.
51:08
SPEAKER_01: So I think we went down a little esoteric kind of topic on writing,
51:12
SPEAKER_01: which brings us to the next question,
51:14
SPEAKER_01: right?
51:14
SPEAKER_01: One of the things you're known for, Brad, is your tarot card.
51:17
SPEAKER_01: I was just...
51:17
SPEAKER_01: just gonna say sure yeah so you are this is the second time we've gone to tarot
51:22
SPEAKER_01: cards on this episode uh when we had the new york goth girl on here we uh we did
51:28
SPEAKER_01: tarot readings and i lost all right on i missed that i missed that one that's cool
51:33
SPEAKER_01: um but um
51:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
51:35
SPEAKER_01: so you're interested,
51:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
51:37
SPEAKER_01: obviously from House of Sleep,
51:38
SPEAKER_01: there's a lot of occult and esoteric,
51:41
SPEAKER_01: you know,
51:41
SPEAKER_01: I would say very,
51:43
SPEAKER_01: you deal with the dreams and everything,
51:44
SPEAKER_01: which is a very Jungian kind of topic.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: And you are into tarot cards.
51:49
SPEAKER_01: I am, yeah.
51:51
SPEAKER_01: You've talked a lot about that on The Art of Darkness.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: Do you want to tell us about – I, too, am into tarot cards, by the way.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: Cool.
52:00
SPEAKER_01: Cool.
52:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: I want to see if we're maybe on the same page.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: What attracts you to tarot cards?
52:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
52:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think it's hard to even – I think –
52:11
SPEAKER_00: Like a lot of things,
52:13
SPEAKER_00: somebody gave me a reading and it was a lot more effective than I anticipated it
52:19
SPEAKER_00: would be.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: Like, I was very skeptical and it was just like, okay, yeah, let's do this.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, by the end of it, I was like, holy shit, what is going on here?
52:27
SPEAKER_00: Like...
52:28
SPEAKER_00: You keep pulling out these damn cards and they're giving me goosebumps.
52:34
SPEAKER_00: So it was a little bit of just like what drew me to it was like I needed to figure out what that was.
52:39
SPEAKER_00: And then I tend to get a little... I can get a little obsessive about things.
52:43
SPEAKER_00: I tend to be like a...
52:46
SPEAKER_00: um all in or nothing kind of person like i'm not good at like hobbies like i can't
52:51
SPEAKER_00: do i can't just do something a little bit and uh sessions only yeah pretty much
52:58
SPEAKER_00: like i literally i don't have i mean i don't have hobbies i like you just like you
53:03
SPEAKER_01: know what i'm really into authors so i'm gonna start a podcast for like four years
53:07
SPEAKER_01: and 300 000 hours
53:09
SPEAKER_00: Right.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: Right.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
53:11
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
53:12
SPEAKER_00: So so I got I just decided like,
53:14
SPEAKER_00: all right,
53:15
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to buy a deck and I buy a book and I'm just kind of see where I go with this.
53:18
SPEAKER_00: And I ended up,
53:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
53:20
SPEAKER_00: spending half an hour to an hour a day for like a year,
53:23
SPEAKER_00: just like figuring this thing out until I could give a reading.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: And it just turns out that it's like.
53:29
SPEAKER_00: The tarot ends up being this weird,
53:32
SPEAKER_00: dynamic,
53:33
SPEAKER_00: ever-evolving repository for,
53:36
SPEAKER_00: like,
53:37
SPEAKER_00: every aspect of Western thought.
53:42
SPEAKER_00: Like,
53:43
SPEAKER_00: it captures elements of the Kabbalah and numerology and Christianity and Egyptian,
53:50
SPEAKER_00: supposed Egyptian thought,
53:52
SPEAKER_00: various esoteric trends.
53:54
SPEAKER_00: And then you can find all kinds of other stuff in it, right?
53:57
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know...
53:59
SPEAKER_00: psychological concepts are all kind of buried in there and um so it's just
54:04
SPEAKER_00: fascinating from that standpoint it's like every card is this um uh endlessly
54:10
SPEAKER_00: unfoldable system of symbols and then when you go take you know you take multiple
54:19
SPEAKER_00: cards and you randomize them and you
54:24
SPEAKER_00: present them in a reading there is a there is a manner in which for me that's a
54:30
SPEAKER_00: sort of like a form of writing I kind of see it as an extension of writing because
54:34
SPEAKER_00: you're taking these elements and you're trying to arrange them into a narrative
54:40
SPEAKER_00: That's,
54:40
SPEAKER_00: you know,
54:40
SPEAKER_00: a little bit less formalized storytelling than if you're sitting down to write a story.
54:45
SPEAKER_00: But nonetheless,
54:47
SPEAKER_00: you're piecing it together into a narrative that makes sense and hopefully is
54:50
SPEAKER_00: meaningful to the person you're presenting it to.
54:53
SPEAKER_00: So...
54:55
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, it's like, you know, I don't know.
54:57
SPEAKER_00: I still have a lot of like questions about the metaphysics of it.
55:04
SPEAKER_00: But the one thing I found out is like it almost always means something.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: Like if you do them for yourself, I do.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: I do give people tarot readings.
55:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to do that more and more and more because I dig it and people seem to
55:16
SPEAKER_00: enjoy it when they have one.
55:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know, man.
55:21
SPEAKER_00: It taps you.
55:22
SPEAKER_00: The more you learn about it, it really taps you.
55:25
SPEAKER_00: You feel like, anyway, you're tapping into...
55:29
SPEAKER_00: almost like this secret pattern of how things work,
55:36
SPEAKER_00: or at least how things work within a human life or within a human conscious experience.
55:42
SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, I'm constantly learning things.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to write a piece right now on the star card.
55:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm sort of gradually, very slowly writing a little thing on each card.
55:54
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, I've done like 13 or 14 of them.
55:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm writing one on the star right now.
55:59
SPEAKER_00: And dude, it's like enter.
56:02
SPEAKER_00: It's like seeped into my life just working on this this piece, like this little 1000 word piece.
56:09
SPEAKER_00: And it's like it literally feels like it's
56:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
56:15
SPEAKER_00: it feels like it's actually working its way into my everyday thinking and what I'm
56:21
SPEAKER_00: noticing about the world and what's happening in my life.
56:25
SPEAKER_00: It's very strange.
56:28
SPEAKER_00: And I'm always drawn to the strange.
56:31
SPEAKER_01: Right.
56:31
SPEAKER_01: And I,
56:32
SPEAKER_01: you know,
56:32
SPEAKER_01: so I think,
56:34
SPEAKER_01: and when you,
56:35
SPEAKER_01: when you mention something like tarot,
56:37
SPEAKER_01: you know,
56:39
SPEAKER_01: right away in,
56:40
SPEAKER_01: in some individuals,
56:41
SPEAKER_01: you're going to get,
56:42
SPEAKER_01: they're going to get red flags.
56:43
SPEAKER_01: Like, oh my God, occultism, you're a Satanist.
56:46
SPEAKER_01: you know yeah and you're like oh ground you know i'm sure that i'm not i'm not that
56:55
SPEAKER_03: guy but my experience of tarot starts with my mother uh growing up and i'm in high
57:01
SPEAKER_03: school and it's mom just leave no i don't want to play with your dumb cards i'm
57:06
SPEAKER_03: gonna hang out with my friends and listen to nirvana and
57:10
SPEAKER_03: Your mom was like a gypsy or something?
57:13
SPEAKER_03: No, my mom is just into stuff.
57:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she's cool.
57:17
SPEAKER_03: I'll probably send her this episode and be like, Mom, check it out.
57:21
SPEAKER_01: You were right.
57:21
SPEAKER_03: I'll let her get the last laugh before she goes.
57:25
SPEAKER_03: My mom was into reading coffee grounds and tea leaves.
57:29
SPEAKER_03: My mom's just an old lady who...
57:34
SPEAKER_03: who knows things.
57:36
SPEAKER_03: That's really kind of the best I'm going to say it.
57:38
SPEAKER_03: Practical magic?
57:40
SPEAKER_01: You know,
57:40
SPEAKER_03: I don't even...
57:41
SPEAKER_03: Deep,
57:42
SPEAKER_03: deep Catholic,
57:44
SPEAKER_03: you know,
57:44
SPEAKER_03: deep Catholic,
57:45
SPEAKER_03: Celtic,
57:46
SPEAKER_03: like,
57:47
SPEAKER_03: yeah,
57:47
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to open that door because I'm afraid of what's going to come out,
57:50
SPEAKER_03: all right?
57:51
SPEAKER_03: She knows things.
57:53
SPEAKER_03: That's...
57:55
SPEAKER_00: all i'm going to say about it but yeah see i've tried to open i've been god i've
58:00
SPEAKER_00: been trying to open all of those doors that's been part of my my life those doors
58:05
SPEAKER_03: are opening up on me i don't even like they're coming at me so that's why i'm just
58:09
SPEAKER_03: kind of like oh god but it you know with the way you described it though you know i
58:13
SPEAKER_03: think of i think of the improv you know to take it back to what we said earlier
58:18
SPEAKER_03: like about music for example
58:20
SPEAKER_03: Music has an improvisational aspect to it.
58:23
SPEAKER_03: And especially in jazz and things like that, you're tying together disparate parts to make a narrative.
58:29
SPEAKER_03: And I find when I teach and study history, I'm doing the same thing.
58:33
SPEAKER_03: There's all these pieces, parts, and I got to try to make sense of it.
58:36
SPEAKER_03: So that way I can speak a myth that it may not be true exactly, but it contains truth in it.
58:42
SPEAKER_03: I mean, isn't that just all humans do?
58:44
SPEAKER_03: We tell stories to make sense of this collective fever dream we're enjoying.
58:47
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
58:49
SPEAKER_01: What I'm about to say is going to upset some people.
58:52
SPEAKER_01: Bring it, yes.
58:52
SPEAKER_01: It's going to upset a subset of writers, musicians.
58:58
SPEAKER_01: I don't think...
59:00
SPEAKER_01: that you can learn how to be a writer.
59:02
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think you can learn how to be a musician, okay?
59:06
SPEAKER_01: Yes, you can learn how to write.
59:08
SPEAKER_01: You can practice writing.
59:10
SPEAKER_01: You can learn how to play guitar, but you can't, there's something
59:15
SPEAKER_01: there's something metaphysical about art okay there's you know you can take a
59:21
SPEAKER_01: hundred children and you can put them through the same exact training as you know
59:28
SPEAKER_01: michelangelo did and they're still not going to make david you know no um because
59:34
SPEAKER_01: there is a divine element in art and
59:38
SPEAKER_01: I will never be the kind of person that says, Oh, I have that divine element.
59:41
SPEAKER_01: Right.
59:42
SPEAKER_01: But I think that,
59:43
SPEAKER_01: that there's a metaphysical,
59:46
SPEAKER_01: and I think a Jungian explanation is kind of the,
59:49
SPEAKER_01: the best I can,
59:50
SPEAKER_01: I can,
59:51
SPEAKER_01: I like to use,
59:51
SPEAKER_01: you know,
59:51
SPEAKER_01: where there's a,
59:52
SPEAKER_01: a,
59:54
SPEAKER_01: like a overall consciousness, universal consciousness, right?
59:59
SPEAKER_01: And of symbols and,
1:00:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:00:01
SPEAKER_01: the semiotic consciousness that artists can,
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: if they're lucky,
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: if God is willing and universe is willing or whatever you believe in,
1:00:11
SPEAKER_01: right?
1:00:12
SPEAKER_01: That for one second, sometimes you can tap into it and you just write.
1:00:18
SPEAKER_01: And every writer or musician I've ever met or anybody,
1:00:22
SPEAKER_01: can tell you at that moment where they're just writing and they don't think about it.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: They're not plotting.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_01: You're not plotting.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: You're not writing.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_01: You just, it just fucking comes out, you know, like it's perfect.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_01: And it's not just writing it.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_01: It's with music too.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_01: You know, I used to play in a band and some of the best stuff we ever wrote, you know,
1:00:42
SPEAKER_01: was during these,
1:00:43
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:00:44
SPEAKER_01: strange moments where,
1:00:45
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:00:45
SPEAKER_01: the ozone was right and the lightning outside was perfect or something like that,
1:00:49
SPEAKER_01: you know?
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: And the barometric pressure was the right thing.
1:00:53
SPEAKER_01: And all five of us were just jamming and something just came out that was,
1:00:57
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:00:57
SPEAKER_01: we didn't even talk about it,
1:00:58
SPEAKER_01: you know?
1:00:59
SPEAKER_01: It just... That's...
1:01:01
SPEAKER_00: That's the ecstatic experience of the whole thing, man.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_00: Like I've definitely had,
1:01:05
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:01:05
SPEAKER_00: a lot of writing process for me is like busy work hoping that that moment happens.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_00: It's just like, I'll just get in this chair and I'll start typing away.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_00: And maybe if I've been a good boy,
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: maybe I'll get that moment for a little while and I'll get to crank out.
1:01:22
SPEAKER_00: you know a hundred words that are that are that are good you know and you go back
1:01:27
SPEAKER_00: and those things usually require the least amount of editing they usually you know
1:01:31
SPEAKER_00: they kind of just you can almost just let them out as they as they came yeah you're
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: right yeah look at you look at like and you know all the training you have your
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: your your education your practice in whatever art you're you're doing
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: that just prepares you to ride the lightning basically.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
1:01:53
SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't mean that the lightning will ever come or it will ever stay.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
1:01:59
SPEAKER_01: Because you can have the best – I always said like somewhere right now in this country –
1:02:06
SPEAKER_01: Somewhere in a basement or in a bedroom somewhere,
1:02:09
SPEAKER_01: the best technical guitar player lives,
1:02:11
SPEAKER_01: and you're never going to meet him,
1:02:13
SPEAKER_01: ever,
1:02:13
SPEAKER_01: because he has everything,
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: and he can play every Jimi Hendrix song and every Tony Iommi or whatever virtuoso
1:02:22
SPEAKER_01: guitar song with his eyes closed,
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: blah,
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: blah,
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: blah,
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: or whatever,
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: but the lightning will never come for him.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_01: I know that's sad, but it's just how it is, you know?
1:02:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_01: And it's the same thing in film,
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: you,
1:02:34
SPEAKER_01: you have,
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: you have these,
1:02:36
SPEAKER_01: these movies with the $500 million budgets or whatever,
1:02:41
SPEAKER_01: and all the greatest stars and the best,
1:02:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:45
SPEAKER_01: equipment and stuff.
1:02:46
SPEAKER_01: And it just,
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: a turd comes out,
1:02:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:48
SPEAKER_01: and sometimes you just have like a hundred grand or something and it's just like a
1:02:52
SPEAKER_01: bunch of dudes.
1:02:53
SPEAKER_01: And for some reason it just,
1:02:54
SPEAKER_01: there's a magic there's something that happens and you get a masterpiece that lives
1:02:59
SPEAKER_03: you literally you literally just described monty python on the holy grail right
1:03:03
SPEAKER_03: that's literally what it was few hundred thousand dollars and a bunch of idiots in
1:03:06
SPEAKER_01: the woods don't worry about it right right and everything comes together i mean
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: true detective season one is a great example you got these two guys that the
1:03:13
SPEAKER_01: director and the writer the showrunner did not like each other at all they argued
1:03:17
SPEAKER_01: the whole time and the right actors were involved and everything just came
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: It came out perfectly, the right environment, the right vibe, and it was just luck.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_01: That's where it can never be recreated.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_01: That's why that own show can never recreate that one season because there was some
1:03:31
SPEAKER_01: kind of something there.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_01: There was like a connection to a higher truth that was connected.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, look how many authors drop one or two fantastic pieces of work into nothing.
1:03:41
SPEAKER_00: And then nothing.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: Or how many bands, you know, or how many, you know, just musicians and stuff.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: It's just nothing.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_01: So I think that tarot cards are a tool, right?
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: They're a semiotic tool and semiotics is the study of symbols.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_01: If you guys are not familiar that allow you to kind of,
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: Think of things that you would not be thinking of and make connections that are
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: already there that you might not feel.
1:04:12
SPEAKER_01: In a way, the cards aren't really doing the fortune telling because it's not fortune telling.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: It's more like analyzing the environment or the situations.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_01: It's not that they do anything specifically.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_01: It's that the symbols are universal to Western civilization.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_01: And they trigger in you, they help you open up that connection to the overall symbolic world, right?
1:04:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:04:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I totally, I definitely agree with that.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:04:41
SPEAKER_00: I now use tarot very lightly for writing in that,
1:04:48
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:04:49
SPEAKER_00: the novel I just finished,
1:04:51
SPEAKER_00: the plot is basically four cards from the major arcana in a row.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: Because...
1:04:57
SPEAKER_00: I came to recognize that that's like, that's a universal pattern.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_00: Those four, everybody has lived that moment, those four cards in one way or another.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_00: And so,
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: okay,
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: like how can I use that,
1:05:09
SPEAKER_00: the sort of causal relationship between those four to like come up with a plot?
1:05:14
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, you know, it actually does work.
1:05:17
Right.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_00: But it's because it is like,
1:05:19
SPEAKER_00: it's this old system and I'm always interested in,
1:05:23
SPEAKER_00: it's kind of goes back to the mythology thing that we were talking about.
1:05:26
SPEAKER_00: It's like,
1:05:28
SPEAKER_00: If a story or a set of art or whatever has survived for hundreds and hundreds and
1:05:34
SPEAKER_00: hundreds of years,
1:05:35
SPEAKER_00: there's a reason for that.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_00: And you might not be able to point your finger exactly why it survived.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_00: And you might even be able to come up with historical context and be like,
1:05:45
SPEAKER_00: well,
1:05:45
SPEAKER_00: that's why it's still around.
1:05:47
SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, it survives because there's something in it that we all want.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_00: Or we all recognize or all resonates with us.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_00: And so you see that.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_00: I see that in the tarot.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh, there's a reason why it's like, you know, the first cards came out in the late 1300s.
1:06:04
SPEAKER_00: And yet we're still on a podcast kind of talking about it.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: It's why we talk about Shakespeare.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_01: Because his plays are filled with a baseline symbolism that is still very pertinent
1:06:20
SPEAKER_01: to today,
1:06:21
SPEAKER_01: from elements like the witches that are almost as old as civilization itself,
1:06:27
SPEAKER_01: the three witches.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_01: There's always threesomes, and things happen specifically in the animal symbology and the storms.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_01: It's there.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_01: It's like you can take that story,
1:06:41
SPEAKER_01: that plot line,
1:06:42
SPEAKER_01: and no symbols,
1:06:44
SPEAKER_01: and you can just change the outfit a million times.
1:06:48
SPEAKER_01: But deep down, you're still hitting the same exact elements that are a universal symbol.
1:06:53
SPEAKER_01: constant you know i mean talk about lightning if there's one individual that you
1:06:58
SPEAKER_01: know rode the lightning his whole career is that guy you know whoever shakespeare
1:07:04
SPEAKER_00: yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah for sure
1:07:09
SPEAKER_03: What you guys are describing makes me think of my school year,
1:07:13
SPEAKER_03: just to bring in a different aspect,
1:07:16
SPEAKER_03: talking about books and art and stuff like that.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_03: And I'm thinking about this year,
1:07:21
SPEAKER_03: my kids have fixated on the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul,
1:07:25
SPEAKER_03: Venice,
1:07:27
SPEAKER_03: and the Great Schism.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_03: and I don't,
1:07:31
SPEAKER_03: and those three things,
1:07:32
SPEAKER_03: like they're all like,
1:07:33
SPEAKER_03: they're all real,
1:07:34
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:07:34
SPEAKER_03: with the midterm we're doing this year,
1:07:35
SPEAKER_03: they're all real excited about those three subjects.
1:07:37
SPEAKER_03: And it's like, why, what's going on?
1:07:41
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know, but those are, those are the great schism is interesting for kids to latch onto.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_00: That's fascinating.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, we, so, so, so I had my kids for the mid, so I teach freshmen and for the midterm this year,
1:07:55
SPEAKER_03: I had them create like a bunch of art and a bunch of I got all this clay and
1:07:58
SPEAKER_03: markers and all kinds of stuff to create things with.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_03: And there are some, you know, they're 14, 15 year olds.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_03: I hardly know what they're doing,
1:08:04
SPEAKER_03: but they there's like there were four or five bits that were made centered on the
1:08:08
SPEAKER_03: great schism.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_03: And I'm just like, why do you guys the great split of the churches into East and West?
1:08:13
SPEAKER_03: And I don't know what that is.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_03: I got to think about that, though, because there's probably something in there.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_03: You know,
1:08:18
SPEAKER_03: talking about symbols,
1:08:19
SPEAKER_03: there's a reason that it resonates,
1:08:20
SPEAKER_03: and a lot of it resonates is because,
1:08:22
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:08:22
SPEAKER_03: we hammered on the Hagia Sophia for a while,
1:08:24
SPEAKER_03: and I went all Oscar Spangler on it about the architects and the souls and,
1:08:28
SPEAKER_03: like,
1:08:28
SPEAKER_03: all this,
1:08:29
SPEAKER_03: and they got that.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_03: Like,
1:08:30
SPEAKER_03: dude,
1:08:30
SPEAKER_03: it's amazing where you show them a picture of that building,
1:08:34
SPEAKER_03: and then I go,
1:08:34
SPEAKER_03: okay,
1:08:34
SPEAKER_03: guys,
1:08:35
SPEAKER_03: so then a thousand years later,
1:08:36
SPEAKER_03: you get the Cologne Cathedral,
1:08:38
SPEAKER_03: and you also get St.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_03: Basil's, and they're like, what?
1:08:41
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_01: Do you know why they're fixated on this schism?
1:08:47
SPEAKER_01: Why's that?
1:08:49
SPEAKER_01: Because their parents are probably divorced.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh, shit.
1:08:53
SPEAKER_01: I hadn't thought about that.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_01: And the church is your house, and the church is split in half.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_00: And America feels like it's going through a schism, too.
1:09:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:06
SPEAKER_03: It might also click,
1:09:07
SPEAKER_03: because I have a lot of Christians in my class,
1:09:09
SPEAKER_03: and they probably go,
1:09:10
SPEAKER_03: oh,
1:09:11
SPEAKER_03: that's where all the different churches come from.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_03: That's where that starts.
1:09:15
SPEAKER_03: Now, all of a sudden, shit starts to click.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because that nobody really like it is weird.
1:09:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I grew up Catholic and like nobody really ever.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I was confirmed.
1:09:25
SPEAKER_00: I went to catechism and all that.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_00: And nobody ever took the time to be like, hey, here's why there's a Lutherans.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_00: Like nobody ever like nobody ever bothered.
1:09:35
SPEAKER_03: Here's why there's yeah, here's why there's Methodist Church of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
1:09:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:40
SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean in a like we're better than them way, just like literally historically.
1:09:43
SPEAKER_00: Like why?
1:09:44
SPEAKER_03: What the hell?
1:09:45
SPEAKER_00: Why are we in this church and they're in that one?
1:09:47
SPEAKER_03: and nobody ever my name is elder smith you know and then we're the mormons where
1:09:52
SPEAKER_01: are they coming from what's going on right which is funny because maybe once every
1:09:56
SPEAKER_01: three weeks at work we get into the topic of you know religion and you know
1:09:59
SPEAKER_01: basically we're talking about right now and somebody goes i don't really understand
1:10:03
SPEAKER_01: the difference between like protestants and like roman catholics and i'm like well
1:10:08
SPEAKER_01: guys all right
1:10:11
SPEAKER_03: I just pictured you puffing your chest out.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_03: Man, I can't visualize that.
1:10:14
SPEAKER_01: I do a little stretch.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, all right, you guys are ready for a two-hour lecture on this, okay?
1:10:19
SPEAKER_01: Cancel my appointments for the day, okay?
1:10:22
SPEAKER_01: That's good.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_01: Nurse, cancel my appointments.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's exactly how it goes.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_01: It's like, all right, everybody –
1:10:29
SPEAKER_01: Come hither.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_01: Let me start with the council of Nicaea at the beginning.
1:10:34
SPEAKER_01: Do you get like the incense and everything?
1:10:37
SPEAKER_01: Incense.
1:10:38
SPEAKER_01: I bring my,
1:10:38
SPEAKER_01: my sensor out a few icons I put on the wall and it's just,
1:10:42
SPEAKER_01: we go from there,
1:10:43
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:10:43
SPEAKER_01: we're totally about the Orthodox church.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm picturing you with one of the hats now.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_03: Oh God, this is the best day ever.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:10:52
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:10:53
SPEAKER_01: it goes on,
1:10:53
SPEAKER_01: but you know,
1:10:54
SPEAKER_01: that talking about now we're talking about,
1:10:56
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:10:56
SPEAKER_01: mainstream religion.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_01: And it's,
1:10:59
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:11:00
SPEAKER_01: it's interesting that you,
1:11:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:11:02
SPEAKER_01: you said you were,
1:11:03
SPEAKER_01: you were born a Roman Catholic,
1:11:07
SPEAKER_01: I believe.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, same here.
1:11:09
SPEAKER_01: Yep, yep, yep, yep.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_01: I was,
1:11:10
SPEAKER_01: I was baptized a Eastern Orthodox cause I'm Romanian and I,
1:11:15
SPEAKER_01: but I grew up in a very,
1:11:17
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:11:18
SPEAKER_01: atheistic family,
1:11:19
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:11:19
SPEAKER_01: very modern and,
1:11:21
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:11:22
SPEAKER_01: very,
1:11:23
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:11:24
SPEAKER_01: separated from the you know but of course the traditions and everything kind of
1:11:28
SPEAKER_01: lived they're part of the the background radiation of life you know um but i um you
1:11:37
SPEAKER_01: know i i've always you know i've i've i would say i've recently returned to more
1:11:43
SPEAKER_01: mainstream religion
1:11:45
SPEAKER_01: But even then,
1:11:46
SPEAKER_01: I can't claim that I am a hardcore religious individual because I share a lot of
1:11:53
SPEAKER_01: interest in more esoteric and occult aspects of Christianity.
1:11:58
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know if you've ever read Meditations on a Tarot by Valentin Tomberg.
1:12:03
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
1:12:03
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, I have it sitting right next to me, actually.
1:12:06
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:12:07
SPEAKER_01: It's a hermetic text written by... I believe he was a monk, or he wasn't a full monk.
1:12:14
SPEAKER_00: He was sort of a strange guy.
1:12:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but yeah, he...
1:12:20
SPEAKER_00: I need to know more about him actually,
1:12:21
SPEAKER_00: but he definitely had associations with,
1:12:24
SPEAKER_00: I,
1:12:25
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was the Eastern Orthodox or not.
1:12:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, he was born, he was born in St.
1:12:30
SPEAKER_01: Petersburg, Russia.
1:12:31
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:12:32
SPEAKER_01: He was baptized Eastern Orthodox.
1:12:34
SPEAKER_01: And then he kind of became an atheist later in life.
1:12:37
SPEAKER_01: He became a Roman Catholic, uh,
1:12:40
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe he was like a Protestant for a while, and then he went through the gamut.
1:12:45
SPEAKER_01: He explored different things.
1:12:47
SPEAKER_00: And he had followers who thought he was a reincarnation of some figure from Buddhism, actually.
1:12:55
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh, gosh.
1:12:59
SPEAKER_00: He never claimed he was, but he had followers who thought that.
1:13:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:13:02
SPEAKER_01: And then that book is, is fascinating.
1:13:05
SPEAKER_01: It's a, it's a bit of a tough one.
1:13:07
SPEAKER_01: It's not one I'm like, here, you should read this one.
1:13:09
SPEAKER_01: It's like, this is level two, level three.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_00: No, that's dude.
1:13:12
SPEAKER_00: I, people ask me about what should I read on the tarot?
1:13:14
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they bring that up and they're like, they're just trying to step their toe in it.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, no, that's, that's the, the graduate thesis.
1:13:21
SPEAKER_00: Like you can read it, but like, if you're just trying to like, what is the tarot?
1:13:24
SPEAKER_00: That is not, that is not, that is not the book.
1:13:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
1:13:30
SPEAKER_01: that's a little bit on,
1:13:31
SPEAKER_01: you got to read a little bit of,
1:13:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:13:33
SPEAKER_01: because it's ultimately a Christian text.
1:13:35
SPEAKER_01: It's a Christian esoteric text and it uses the tarot in a Christian framework and
1:13:43
SPEAKER_01: also using a lot of the symbolism of the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
1:13:50
SPEAKER_01: And it gets confusing a little bit if you're not familiar with some of the core ideas.
1:13:55
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you got to read like
1:13:57
SPEAKER_01: 200 years of philosophy to even get near any of that stuff.
1:14:01
SPEAKER_01: It's for schizos, guys.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_00: It really is.
1:14:08
SPEAKER_00: I read it through twice, and then now I just kind of pick and choose.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_00: If I give myself a reading and a major arcana card shows up, I will go back and read that chapter.
1:14:19
SPEAKER_00: But there's still a lot of it that's over my head, to be honest.
1:14:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's some things that are like, you just don't bite on this apple yet, man.
1:14:28
SPEAKER_01: It's not time.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_01: But I definitely, you know, I...
1:14:36
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting because you get attacked,
1:14:41
SPEAKER_01: I would guess,
1:14:42
SPEAKER_01: criticized,
1:14:42
SPEAKER_01: maybe not attacked,
1:14:43
SPEAKER_01: but criticized by factions on our internet world that would be like,
1:14:50
SPEAKER_01: oh my god,
1:14:50
SPEAKER_01: you're just a cultist,
1:14:52
SPEAKER_01: Satanist or something.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've been called a witch.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_00: Heresy.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_00: I've been called,
1:14:57
SPEAKER_00: what's that Bible verse that's something like suffer not a witch or something like that?
1:15:01
SPEAKER_00: I've been, I've been, had that thrown at me a few times.
1:15:04
SPEAKER_00: Nice.
1:15:04
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:15:05
SPEAKER_01: And you're just like, man, you know, I'm an author, dude.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_01: That's why I'm a digital.
1:15:11
SPEAKER_01: I can't, you know, like, it's my job to do this, you know?
1:15:14
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:15:15
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_01: If you can't play with fire,
1:15:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:15:17
SPEAKER_01: it's going to consume us all,
1:15:19
SPEAKER_01: but it,
1:15:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:15:20
SPEAKER_01: some of us have to do it.
1:15:22
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
1:15:23
SPEAKER_01: And,
1:15:24
SPEAKER_01: there's an element where like we we've demysticized the universe you know i don't
1:15:29
SPEAKER_01: know if you're we've tried to you've tried to you can't truly do it but we've done
1:15:35
SPEAKER_01: a really good job of it and i don't know if you're a fan of mircha eliade the
1:15:40
SPEAKER_01: romanian oh yeah yeah that's my that's my guy okay he he's he's my guy that i'm
1:15:45
SPEAKER_01: obsessed with i think he's probably if i had to choose one figure that where i i
1:15:50
SPEAKER_01: and then his his main easiest not book is one that i do recommend to everybody um
1:15:57
SPEAKER_01: and i'm probably gonna do a full like 10 episode podcast on that like a schizoid
1:16:02
SPEAKER_01: reading of all those books right but I think that you know we've demysticized the
1:16:09
SPEAKER_01: world and we've actually demysticized religion itself in a way we've made religion
1:16:15
SPEAKER_01: sterile and boring you know
1:16:17
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not going to throw – okay, I'm going to throw some shade here on our little Protestant friends.
1:16:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, guys.
1:16:24
SPEAKER_01: I got invited – maybe a year ago, my wife got invited to go to church with a friend of hers.
1:16:31
SPEAKER_01: And she's like, oh, we should go.
1:16:33
SPEAKER_01: It might be fun.
1:16:34
SPEAKER_01: It might be interesting.
1:16:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yeah, whatever.
1:16:36
SPEAKER_01: I'll go, okay?
1:16:37
SPEAKER_01: I'll commit some heresy and go or whatever.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:16:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I, I went, I went to a, a Protestant church and I felt like I went to a Starbucks.
1:16:47
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:16:48
SPEAKER_01: It was so sterile and so devoid of mystical energy or like just, just anything, you know?
1:16:56
SPEAKER_01: And they separated the kids from the adults and the kids went to like a playground.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_01: They had everything.
1:17:01
SPEAKER_01: It was like a McDonald's playground.
1:17:02
SPEAKER_01: They had tubes and stuff and there was a band and they played bass and like, I was like,
1:17:08
SPEAKER_01: oh my God, I hated it.
1:17:11
SPEAKER_03: I feel like this is where we bring in our obligatory Kaczynski reference of
1:17:16
SPEAKER_03: industrial society and its consequences.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_01: It became commercial Christianity, devoid of mysticism.
1:17:24
SPEAKER_01: And I've always been one of those guys that's like, I need the incense, man.
1:17:27
SPEAKER_01: I need the magic.
1:17:28
SPEAKER_01: I need the...
1:17:29
SPEAKER_01: I need that vibration that you feel when you walk into a sacred place,
1:17:34
SPEAKER_01: whether it's a Christian church or even a temple or a shrine.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_01: When I was in Japan,
1:17:42
SPEAKER_01: I'd walk into these shrines sometimes on the top of a mountain somewhere and you'd
1:17:47
SPEAKER_01: walk into this place and you're like,
1:17:48
SPEAKER_01: okay,
1:17:49
SPEAKER_01: I get it.
1:17:50
SPEAKER_03: It's interesting to me.
1:17:53
SPEAKER_03: I'm thinking back to my own experiences and I think of some of the
1:17:57
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:17:58
SPEAKER_03: Baptist churches I've been to and some of the Pentecostal churches I've been to and
1:18:02
SPEAKER_03: anything that gets into like spiritualism or like mysticism,
1:18:05
SPEAKER_03: it's also fricking noisy and that's great or whatever,
1:18:09
SPEAKER_03: but where's the,
1:18:11
SPEAKER_03: like,
1:18:11
SPEAKER_03: I remember stepping into some of the churches when I visited Poland and it's like,
1:18:14
SPEAKER_03: Oh,
1:18:15
SPEAKER_03: holy shit.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:18:17
SPEAKER_03: And it's just all imposing.
1:18:20
SPEAKER_03: Shut the fuck up.
1:18:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there is something, too.
1:18:25
SPEAKER_00: There is something, too.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_00: Maybe this is just my tendency, but aesthetically, there's a darkness missing.
1:18:37
SPEAKER_00: The wood isn't dark.
1:18:38
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
1:18:39
SPEAKER_00: Literally,
1:18:39
SPEAKER_00: visually,
1:18:40
SPEAKER_00: there's this like,
1:18:42
SPEAKER_00: everything should be a sort of a light gray drywall kind of thing.
1:18:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:18:48
SPEAKER_00: Maw for everyone.
1:18:50
SPEAKER_00: No features.
1:18:52
SPEAKER_00: What I liked about the Catholic Church growing up,
1:18:55
SPEAKER_00: and I don't attend there anymore and don't really see myself as a Catholic other
1:19:01
SPEAKER_00: than sort of,
1:19:01
SPEAKER_00: I guess,
1:19:01
SPEAKER_00: ethnically almost,
1:19:03
SPEAKER_00: but
1:19:04
SPEAKER_00: There's there's like it was it was heavy.
1:19:09
SPEAKER_00: It was like,
1:19:09
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:19:10
SPEAKER_00: there there were organ sounds like and the wood was heavy and like there was a certain.
1:19:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:19:17
SPEAKER_00: There was a certain intensity to it.
1:19:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think most most American.
1:19:21
SPEAKER_00: Have you guys heard of this term Sheila ism?
1:19:24
SPEAKER_00: No.
1:19:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_00: Sheila, the woman's name, like, like the woman's name.
1:19:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_00: So I came, I came across this recently.
1:19:30
SPEAKER_00: I was reading a Harold Bloom's book, the American religion.
1:19:34
SPEAKER_00: And he basically argues that all the American religions like,
1:19:37
SPEAKER_00: uh,
1:19:38
SPEAKER_00: Mormonism and Southern baptism and,
1:19:40
SPEAKER_00: and,
1:19:41
SPEAKER_00: uh,
1:19:41
SPEAKER_00: uh,
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: Seventh-day Adventism and all this.
1:19:43
SPEAKER_00: He basically argues that they're fundamentally Gnostic.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I don't really want to get, I wasn't really trying to get into that part of it.
1:19:51
SPEAKER_00: But he says that basically the typical person who thinks of themselves as
1:19:55
SPEAKER_00: quote-unquote religious is really practicing something like Sheilaism.
1:19:59
SPEAKER_00: And Sheilaism comes from this other book called Habits of,
1:20:03
SPEAKER_00: I think it's Habits of the Heart or Heart Habits from the 80s in which you're
1:20:08
SPEAKER_00: talking about like basically religion in the Midwest.
1:20:12
SPEAKER_00: And they came across this woman who said that she believed in Sheilaism,
1:20:16
SPEAKER_00: which means you just kind of listen to the voice in your head.
1:20:19
SPEAKER_00: And that's, you know, you kind of just do what you think is right.
1:20:24
SPEAKER_00: And and most and, you know, that's not the worst piece of advice in the world.
1:20:29
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:20:30
SPEAKER_00: That's a good that's a good starting point to, like, do what you think is right.
1:20:35
SPEAKER_00: But I think a lot of like American religion is basically that.
1:20:39
SPEAKER_00: And so you don't it doesn't end up having any there isn't end up being any meat on the bones.
1:20:44
SPEAKER_00: It's like we're all going to get here in this room and we all we all agree that
1:20:49
SPEAKER_00: we're doing what we think is right.
1:20:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:20:50
SPEAKER_00: OK, cool.
1:20:51
SPEAKER_00: Let's sing a song and then we'll be back next Sunday.
1:20:54
SPEAKER_01: right there there's a lack of gravitas you know yeah there's no there's no
1:20:58
SPEAKER_03: attachment there's no attachment to what you actually end up doing you just say the
1:21:02
SPEAKER_03: right things but you don't actually do the right things um there's nobody ever asks
1:21:06
SPEAKER_01: either there's a level of you know like i said in mere trail light is most famous
1:21:10
SPEAKER_01: book which i do recommend everybody to read it's the sacred and the profane and he
1:21:14
SPEAKER_01: talks about the sacred and the profane and when he he said he uses the word the
1:21:19
SPEAKER_01: profane it's it's not
1:21:21
SPEAKER_01: It's not a good translation into English from Romanian,
1:21:24
SPEAKER_01: but the profane,
1:21:27
SPEAKER_01: when we say the word profane in English,
1:21:28
SPEAKER_01: we mean like an active kind of ruining of something,
1:21:32
SPEAKER_01: right?
1:21:33
SPEAKER_01: The profane, a better word would be the sacred and the mundane.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_01: or the material.
1:21:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
1:21:39
SPEAKER_01: It would be a better translation.
1:21:41
SPEAKER_01: And I think that,
1:21:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:21:44
SPEAKER_01: that's what's missing in a lot of McDonald's churches in the United States and why
1:21:50
SPEAKER_01: they're so susceptible to the latest fads,
1:21:54
SPEAKER_01: the Flanderisms of,
1:21:56
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:21:57
SPEAKER_01: the Simpsons Flanderism of the religion is that they lack the sacred because
1:22:03
SPEAKER_01: there's no traditional tradition
1:22:06
SPEAKER_01: connection to the axis mundi of the universe because they're so topical you know
1:22:11
SPEAKER_01: and by by that is they can allow a a level of the profane or the mundanity of like
1:22:17
SPEAKER_01: looking like a starbucks like an apple store and if your church is no different
1:22:21
SPEAKER_01: than an apple store then it's just an apple store you know yeah yeah and there is
1:22:27
SPEAKER_01: no sacred and that's why your kids are going to become atheists and go away
1:22:30
SPEAKER_01: And there's a level.
1:22:33
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not like an intradenominational kind of guy.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_01: I think that any religion that is aimed towards the good and the true is worth pursuing.
1:22:46
SPEAKER_01: And specifically every denomination.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_01: But I went to Bucharest recently about a year ago.
1:22:54
SPEAKER_01: And I spent some time alone just walking the streets.
1:22:57
SPEAKER_01: Just, you know, no GPS, nothing.
1:23:00
SPEAKER_01: Just walking the streets using my memories from 30-something years ago.
1:23:04
SPEAKER_01: And I connected it to a level of – I don't know.
1:23:08
SPEAKER_01: I felt like I was in a –
1:23:10
SPEAKER_01: sacred memory space, basically, because I moved from Bucharest when I was seven, six years old, right?
1:23:17
SPEAKER_01: And I've never been back since then until last year.
1:23:21
SPEAKER_01: And I had memories of like walking down the streets with my parents and my grandmother.
1:23:26
SPEAKER_01: And I remembered in one park that my grandpa used to take me to, my grandpa who died,
1:23:31
SPEAKER_01: over 30 years ago,
1:23:32
SPEAKER_01: right,
1:23:33
SPEAKER_01: before I even moved to the U.S.,
1:23:35
SPEAKER_01: there was a statue of Atlas,
1:23:37
SPEAKER_01: Atlas,
1:23:38
SPEAKER_01: the god,
1:23:39
SPEAKER_01: and he's holding the globe,
1:23:40
SPEAKER_01: and he's bent over,
1:23:41
SPEAKER_01: and it's in this rose garden off,
1:23:44
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:23:44
SPEAKER_01: the beaten path,
1:23:45
SPEAKER_01: and I was walking through the park with my uncle and my aunt,
1:23:48
SPEAKER_01: and I was like,
1:23:48
SPEAKER_01: no,
1:23:48
SPEAKER_01: no,
1:23:48
SPEAKER_01: there's a statue of Atlas here.
1:23:50
SPEAKER_01: I know where it is.
1:23:51
SPEAKER_01: He's like, how the hell do you remember this?
1:23:53
SPEAKER_01: Like, it's here.
1:23:54
SPEAKER_01: Like, I know how to get to it, and I got to it.
1:23:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, I found it, right, and it was still there,
1:24:00
SPEAKER_01: There was some graffiti on the walls and kind of janky looking compared to how I
1:24:04
SPEAKER_01: remembered it,
1:24:05
SPEAKER_01: but it was there.
1:24:06
SPEAKER_01: And I was like one of the most spiritual moments I've ever had in my life because I
1:24:09
SPEAKER_01: connected to my past that no longer existed.
1:24:12
SPEAKER_01: And I could walk to that city.
1:24:14
SPEAKER_01: It's been 30 years.
1:24:15
SPEAKER_01: It's modernized now.
1:24:16
SPEAKER_01: I left at the end of communism when there was barely any cars on the streets.
1:24:21
SPEAKER_01: And now it's like Starbucks and McDonald's and it's now a big...
1:24:26
SPEAKER_01: European city with millions of cars and beamers and all kinds of stuff everywhere.
1:24:31
SPEAKER_01: And I could still remember the paths.
1:24:33
SPEAKER_01: And what's wild about that city is that
1:24:36
SPEAKER_01: there's all these old churches and some of them are like a thousand years old.
1:24:41
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:24:41
SPEAKER_01: they've been there since the beginning,
1:24:43
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:24:43
SPEAKER_01: that city and they're built out of wood and they're surrounded by this like skyscraper,
1:24:47
SPEAKER_01: but there's this little church and you walk into it and it feels like you are no
1:24:52
SPEAKER_01: longer in 2024.
1:24:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like you are transported to, I don't know, that time when it was built almost.
1:25:01
SPEAKER_01: you know, and they're, they're small.
1:25:03
SPEAKER_01: And some of them are even kind of dinky,
1:25:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:25:05
SPEAKER_01: and covered in like smoke near the candle smoke of a thousand years.
1:25:10
SPEAKER_01: And it's just,
1:25:11
SPEAKER_01: It's oppressively mystical almost.
1:25:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to describe it.
1:25:17
SPEAKER_01: You feel like a thumb is pushing you down.
1:25:19
SPEAKER_03: I love it.
1:25:21
SPEAKER_01: It's wild.
1:25:21
SPEAKER_03: I keep thinking about the geography of North America as we have this discussion.
1:25:27
SPEAKER_03: And perhaps we shouldn't be too harsh on American spirituality.
1:25:31
SPEAKER_01: I'm not actually.
1:25:32
SPEAKER_03: I support American spirituality.
1:25:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I mean, of course.
1:25:35
SPEAKER_03: But I think to myself...
1:25:37
SPEAKER_03: The Romanian church that you're describing,
1:25:40
SPEAKER_03: there is no chance for something like that to really exist here yet.
1:25:44
SPEAKER_03: Anything that did exist like that here probably got bulldozed or is part of a national park.
1:25:51
SPEAKER_03: I keep thinking of John Muir and the Sierra Nevada out west.
1:25:57
SPEAKER_03: For me,
1:25:58
SPEAKER_03: the most spiritual I've felt are in the natural cathedrals that litter,
1:26:04
SPEAKER_03: for lack of a better word,
1:26:05
SPEAKER_03: North America.
1:26:07
SPEAKER_03: I think about living out in Colorado.
1:26:08
SPEAKER_03: I think about going to the Grand Canyon.
1:26:09
SPEAKER_03: I think about growing up on the shores of Lake Erie.
1:26:14
SPEAKER_03: I think about seeing the Mississippi River for the first time,
1:26:17
SPEAKER_03: and it's just you felt the oppressive thumb of something much larger than you.
1:26:24
SPEAKER_03: And it's just, wow, cool.
1:26:26
SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
1:26:27
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_01: I think the Grand Canyon brought a tear to mind when I first saw it two years ago.
1:26:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man.
1:26:34
SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
1:26:35
SPEAKER_01: I climbed Mount Fuji.
1:26:36
SPEAKER_01: And Mount Fuji, I climbed Mount Fuji in the middle.
1:26:38
SPEAKER_01: I still love that story, by the way.
1:26:40
SPEAKER_01: I climbed Mount Fuji in the middle of the night.
1:26:42
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm going to keep the other part of the story.
1:26:44
SPEAKER_01: And if you do the Mount Fuji experience correctly,
1:26:48
SPEAKER_01: right,
1:26:48
SPEAKER_01: the way the monks do it,
1:26:51
SPEAKER_01: is you start off at the base of Mount Fuji.
1:26:54
SPEAKER_01: at like 7 p.m all right so you you spend all day in tokyo that's what we usually
1:27:00
SPEAKER_01: did and we hopped on a bus and we drove to mount fuji and it was one of the lower
1:27:04
SPEAKER_01: stations and you hung out for a little bit and then he opened like the gate to the
1:27:08
SPEAKER_01: the path that like ascends the mountain
1:27:11
SPEAKER_01: and you just go and you start at 7 p.m and if you're keeping a you know monk's pace
1:27:17
SPEAKER_01: and those guys man those guys are fast i'm not gonna lie those 80 year old japanese
1:27:21
SPEAKER_01: like shinto mugs they're not fucking around you climb the mountain starting at 7
1:27:29
SPEAKER_01: p.m and you get to the top as the sun rises yeah and you're above the world you
1:27:34
SPEAKER_01: know you're basically living in in in the japanese flag basically you know it just
1:27:40
SPEAKER_01: it just
1:27:41
SPEAKER_01: it's a very powerful experience right and i did a yeah go ahead sorry no i was
1:27:46
SPEAKER_00: gonna say we did a similar thing on mount kilimanjaro you leave in the middle of
1:27:50
SPEAKER_00: the night so you can get there right at the peak right at sunrise right yeah that's
1:27:54
SPEAKER_01: that's the other that's the other like up with the mountains freestanding these
1:27:57
SPEAKER_01: freestanding mountains these freestanding mountains well okay i'll get back to the
1:28:01
SPEAKER_01: mountain right but um yeah um
1:28:05
SPEAKER_01: The way I felt was great.
1:28:08
SPEAKER_01: I thought it was amazing.
1:28:09
SPEAKER_01: I've got a picture of me standing on top of this mountain and above the clouds.
1:28:13
SPEAKER_01: And when we went,
1:28:14
SPEAKER_01: we were driving across the country,
1:28:16
SPEAKER_01: moving to South Carolina,
1:28:17
SPEAKER_01: and my wife insisted that we go to the Grand Canyon.
1:28:19
SPEAKER_01: She's like, we're going to go to the Grand Canyon.
1:28:21
SPEAKER_01: We're staying two nights in Flagstaff.
1:28:23
SPEAKER_01: We're going to drive up to the Grand Canyon.
1:28:25
SPEAKER_01: She insisted on it.
1:28:26
SPEAKER_01: it right i was like i don't know just a fucking hole i don't know if i want to see
1:28:29
SPEAKER_01: it you know yeah let's go to like let's go to like taos arizona instead or
1:28:33
SPEAKER_01: something right and uh i went i you know she she won out like she always does right
1:28:39
SPEAKER_01: and uh it it blew me away i it the grand canyon is a lot more i felt a lot more
1:28:45
SPEAKER_01: connection to the the majesty of it than i did on mount fuji which i didn't expect
1:28:51
SPEAKER_02: that
1:28:51
SPEAKER_01: And I think maybe because the Grand Canyon is mine.
1:28:55
SPEAKER_01: It's my adopted country's land.
1:28:57
SPEAKER_01: And it really affected me.
1:28:58
SPEAKER_01: I was like, wow.
1:28:59
SPEAKER_01: I feel that way.
1:29:09
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, go ahead.
1:29:09
SPEAKER_01: Well,
1:29:10
SPEAKER_01: I was traveling across the country with all our possessions in the back of our RAV4,
1:29:14
SPEAKER_01: including my dog and my three-year-old daughter at the time,
1:29:17
SPEAKER_01: you know.
1:29:18
SPEAKER_01: And I was doing kind of a reverse Oregon Trail,
1:29:21
SPEAKER_01: basically,
1:29:21
SPEAKER_01: going from California back east,
1:29:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:29:23
SPEAKER_01: for the first time for me.
1:29:25
SPEAKER_01: And seeing the country – because what we did was we took the slow way back down.
1:29:31
SPEAKER_01: We basically stopped everywhere and spent the night almost everywhere.
1:29:36
SPEAKER_01: And we really wanted to experience the United States.
1:29:38
SPEAKER_01: And I'm still paying for it, by the way.
1:29:41
SPEAKER_01: I'm broke.
1:29:42
SPEAKER_01: But like –
1:29:46
SPEAKER_01: It was a very emotional experience for me and I think about it all the time.
1:29:52
SPEAKER_03: Traveling across the United States like that,
1:29:55
SPEAKER_03: when I was young,
1:29:56
SPEAKER_03: we took several trips out west and one year involved the train and then we drove
1:30:00
SPEAKER_03: down to the Grand Canyon and then I've moved across the country several times by automobile.
1:30:07
SPEAKER_03: It just doesn't fucking stop.
1:30:09
SPEAKER_03: yeah yeah yeah like i've driven how many days and i'm still dude what is this place
1:30:16
SPEAKER_00: that's the american pilgrimage in my opinion it's like pretty much going coast to
1:30:20
SPEAKER_00: coast you don't have to be exactly coast to coast necessarily but like pretty much
1:30:26
SPEAKER_00: traversing the whole continent you know the whole continent that is like you gotta
1:30:29
SPEAKER_00: go yeah yeah because you won't really you won't really understand america until you
1:30:34
SPEAKER_00: do that on some level i don't think
1:30:36
SPEAKER_01: No, absolutely.
1:30:37
SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
1:30:38
SPEAKER_01: Even me who grew up in the United States,
1:30:41
SPEAKER_01: I did not have a good perspective of the United States until I did this trip as a 39-year-old.
1:30:48
SPEAKER_01: And it was so interesting because I have European family members and European friends,
1:30:54
SPEAKER_01: and they don't have –
1:30:56
SPEAKER_01: the goddamn faintest idea how big the united states oh no people have no idea
1:31:00
SPEAKER_01: people have no idea if you spend time in europe and you you know interact with
1:31:04
SPEAKER_01: europeans they have no fucking clue how big the united states is right because in
1:31:09
SPEAKER_01: europe you know my cousin lives in england you know and she goes back to bucharest
1:31:13
SPEAKER_01: like oh she's like you know we had like a little family reunion when i went and she
1:31:17
SPEAKER_01: like oh she like messaged me she's like i'll be there in a few hours
1:31:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, and then I picked her up at the airport with an Uber like four hours later and she came out.
1:31:25
SPEAKER_01: She's, oh yeah, I was at work this morning, blah, blah, blah.
1:31:27
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:31:28
SPEAKER_01: it was like a trip from like London to Bucharest was like a trip from like here to
1:31:33
SPEAKER_01: Charleston for me,
1:31:34
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:31:34
SPEAKER_01: or from like here to Florida.
1:31:35
SPEAKER_01: You know, it was like, oh, I'll be there in a few hours.
1:31:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'll see you, you know, and I got to go back to work on Monday.
1:31:41
SPEAKER_01: But you cross the United States.
1:31:43
SPEAKER_01: It's a fucking week and a half long drive if you're driving at a normal pace, you know?
1:31:47
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
1:31:48
SPEAKER_03: One of my dreams is to grab one of the sub stack,
1:31:51
SPEAKER_03: one of the Euro sub stacks,
1:31:52
SPEAKER_03: and get them down here to Florida.
1:31:55
SPEAKER_03: Be like, get in the goddamn car.
1:31:57
SPEAKER_03: What?
1:31:57
SPEAKER_03: Just get in the goddamn car.
1:31:59
SPEAKER_03: We're going to Washington.
1:32:00
SPEAKER_03: Deal with it.
1:32:00
SPEAKER_03: You know, like, yeah, right.
1:32:03
SPEAKER_03: Talk to me in three weeks, you know, write about it and then try not to murder each other.
1:32:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, you know who did that, right?
1:32:10
SPEAKER_01: Baudrillard did that.
1:32:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, he wrote a whole book about him coming to America and traveling across the country.
1:32:17
SPEAKER_01: And it's a great little it's called America.
1:32:21
SPEAKER_00: yeah i've i've been fortunate enough to do it a bunch of times i mean so i grew up
1:32:25
SPEAKER_00: in michigan and my my folks drove us out to yellowstone when i was a kid and then
1:32:29
SPEAKER_00: another trip drove us to maine and yeah i lived there for a while all right yeah
1:32:34
SPEAKER_00: it's beautiful and then when i got out of college well when i was in high school i
1:32:39
SPEAKER_00: took a train to new mexico so in the boy scouts for a backpacking trip and then
1:32:44
SPEAKER_00: And then I recurrent sort of theme is driving across the country.
1:32:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I drove I moved to Idaho from Michigan.
1:32:50
SPEAKER_00: I drove out there.
1:32:51
SPEAKER_00: I took a bus from Portland, Oregon to New York City.
1:32:56
SPEAKER_00: I took a Greyhound.
1:32:57
SPEAKER_00: It's like 67 hours or something like that.
1:33:01
SPEAKER_00: And you don't go through very many of the big cities.
1:33:03
SPEAKER_00: You go through a lot of little podunk towns and stuff.
1:33:07
SPEAKER_00: And there's some of the remaining adventure of the world you can kind of find there.
1:33:12
SPEAKER_00: It's just like I got to Omaha and I fell asleep in a McDonald's and missed my connecting bus.
1:33:19
SPEAKER_00: So all of a sudden I'm just spending the night in Omaha apparently.
1:33:22
SPEAKER_00: There's a rest station in Iowa that's got a
1:33:30
SPEAKER_03: bicycle that i left there years ago because it was gonna it was about to fall off
1:33:34
SPEAKER_03: the car so we pull off the side of the road just throw it in there and like head
1:33:37
SPEAKER_03: out so yeah so there's i don't know whatever happened to that bike i'd like to
1:33:41
SPEAKER_03: think it's still there waiting
1:33:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I had a road trip with a bunch of friends of mine when I was like 19.
1:33:47
SPEAKER_00: We drove from Detroit to San Francisco.
1:33:50
SPEAKER_00: And I remember we slept in a rest stop in Nebraska.
1:33:53
SPEAKER_00: We slept on the picnic tables.
1:33:55
SPEAKER_00: And years later on my bus trip, going back the other direction, the bus stopped at that rest stop.
1:34:04
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's awesome.
1:34:05
SPEAKER_00: I was standing there smoking a cigarette and it took me like...
1:34:08
SPEAKER_00: five minutes to be like, I've been here before.
1:34:10
SPEAKER_00: Cause you're in the middle of nowhere, you know, literally like middle of nowhere, Nebraska.
1:34:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm saying like, I've been here before.
1:34:16
SPEAKER_00: What, what, how did, you know, trying to make that connection.
1:34:19
SPEAKER_03: And then like that vague sense of the fuck.
1:34:22
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:34:22
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:34:24
SPEAKER_01: That right there is the spirituality of America.
1:34:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's a reason why the road trip novel or movie, you know, you talk about the beats, right?
1:34:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, probably the most famous beat novel is the road trip one, you know?
1:34:37
SPEAKER_01: And,
1:34:37
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:34:39
SPEAKER_01: it's such a critical part of the American identity,
1:34:44
SPEAKER_01: this movement,
1:34:45
SPEAKER_01: this going West,
1:34:47
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:34:47
SPEAKER_01: this going to fucking Mars,
1:34:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:34:49
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:34:50
SPEAKER_00: yeah and it definitely i mean it goes back to like manifest death like it's a it's
1:34:55
SPEAKER_00: not like a it's not a tradition just on based on the car the road trip with the car
1:35:02
SPEAKER_00: is like just the latest iteration of it right it goes back to like a hundred
1:35:06
SPEAKER_00: percent horse and buggy you know we're landing in new york and we're gonna take our
1:35:10
SPEAKER_00: family west because there's some promise out there that we might get a piece of
1:35:13
SPEAKER_01: land there might be something good out there and there might be monsters out there
1:35:17
SPEAKER_01: too but we're right
1:35:18
SPEAKER_01: go anyways we're gonna go anyways you know and that's such an interesting like
1:35:23
SPEAKER_01: unique part of you know american like fiction i mean the the i've always said that
1:35:32
SPEAKER_01: you know if the europeans have
1:35:35
SPEAKER_01: Lord of the Rings and the great myths and the fairy tales as the knights and the
1:35:43
SPEAKER_01: princesses as their fundamental mythology.
1:35:47
SPEAKER_01: The Americans have the West, the Western.
1:35:51
SPEAKER_01: The Western is the American fairy tale.
1:35:55
SPEAKER_01: And it's a critical part.
1:35:56
SPEAKER_01: And look, I'm going to throw some pride towards my...
1:36:02
SPEAKER_01: recently adopted world there's a fucking reason why some of the best american
1:36:05
SPEAKER_01: writers are from the south you know yeah the faulkner and the mccarthys and stuff
1:36:10
SPEAKER_01: because they're southerners and southwesterners that went west you know and that's
1:36:16
SPEAKER_01: why the environment plays such a significant role in some of our our best novels
1:36:22
SPEAKER_01: you know even moby dick is ultimately an american western novel if you really want
1:36:27
SPEAKER_01: to be yeah you know
1:36:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in a sort of fascinating... I literally just finished reading that not long ago in a new podcast.
1:36:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be doing a first episode.
1:36:38
SPEAKER_00: It's going to have to do with Moby Dick.
1:36:40
SPEAKER_00: And it is strange.
1:36:41
SPEAKER_00: It's like this...
1:36:44
SPEAKER_00: totally american book half the characters aren't americans and very little of the
1:36:49
SPEAKER_00: book takes place in america but like it's it is it's like a recapitulation of this
1:36:56
SPEAKER_00: thing you're talking about of like the pursuit of something that's out there right
1:37:01
SPEAKER_00: it could be fortune and it could be disaster yeah
1:37:05
SPEAKER_01: And did you find it?
1:37:07
SPEAKER_01: So I recently read it about two years ago for the first time myself.
1:37:11
SPEAKER_01: And you know what shocked me about it is that it's fucking funny.
1:37:15
SPEAKER_01: yeah i was gonna say that it's hilarious yeah it's it's uh it's build it's
1:37:21
SPEAKER_01: described often as kind of a hard dry novel and there is some hard dry parts to it
1:37:27
SPEAKER_01: but i found it hilarious like he is he's a total shit lord you know yes yes yeah
1:37:34
SPEAKER_01: dude is like a he's a he's a substack poster he's fisto basically you know
1:37:42
SPEAKER_01: The novel starts off with the guy going, yeah, I was just bored with everything.
1:37:47
SPEAKER_01: So I decided to like, I don't know, walk around and get drunk.
1:37:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I decided to sign up to a sub stack.
1:37:53
SPEAKER_00: Well,
1:37:55
SPEAKER_00: but he has this moment where he's like,
1:37:56
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:37:57
SPEAKER_00: I figured I better go wailing or else I might kill myself.
1:38:00
SPEAKER_00: Ha ha ha.
1:38:01
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, wait, was that, was he really going to kill himself?
1:38:04
SPEAKER_00: Or did he like, and it's very, that part of it's very tongue in cheek.
1:38:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:38:08
SPEAKER_01: And he's like, yeah, I was just wondering around getting drunk, thinking about killing myself.
1:38:12
SPEAKER_01: And I ended up like sharing a bed with this like cannibal dude.
1:38:16
SPEAKER_01: And we were smoking shit out of his pipe, you know?
1:38:19
SPEAKER_01: And it was like, and then we were on the ship.
1:38:21
SPEAKER_01: And it's hilariously written and there's so much to it.
1:38:25
SPEAKER_01: And,
1:38:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:38:25
SPEAKER_01: people criticize the,
1:38:27
SPEAKER_01: one of the main criticism towards it is the wailing chapters,
1:38:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:38:31
SPEAKER_01: the detailed,
1:38:32
SPEAKER_01: almost like a dictionary style,
1:38:35
SPEAKER_01: encyclopedic wailing terminology and stories.
1:38:39
SPEAKER_01: But I find that,
1:38:40
SPEAKER_01: I find those fascinating because I think that they are critical to the novel itself
1:38:44
SPEAKER_01: because they're boring and they're supposed to be boring.
1:38:46
SPEAKER_01: And they're,
1:38:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they are, but they're not all boring.
1:38:51
SPEAKER_00: The whiteness of the whale chapter is a friggin' masterpiece, man.
1:38:56
SPEAKER_00: He somehow managed to... He literally managed to...
1:39:02
SPEAKER_00: take the whale and write somehow extrapolated out into a,
1:39:09
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:39:10
SPEAKER_00: whatever it is,
1:39:10
SPEAKER_00: 10 pages,
1:39:11
SPEAKER_00: 12 pages piece that could stand on its own.
1:39:15
SPEAKER_00: That is somehow about everything.
1:39:17
SPEAKER_00: It's like,
1:39:19
SPEAKER_00: the the history of the universe including human consciousness is somehow caught up
1:39:24
SPEAKER_00: in his metaphor of the whiteness of the whale it's it's a it's masterful but if you
1:39:28
SPEAKER_00: don't if you just like flip to it you're like oh another thing about you know
1:39:32
SPEAKER_00: another uh encyclopedia entry about whales damn whales you're you're not gonna like
1:39:37
SPEAKER_00: it's not gonna stick for you yeah yeah i mean it's stuck for me because every now
1:39:42
SPEAKER_01: and then people mention whales i'm like well let me tell you about the sperm right
1:39:45
SPEAKER_01: okay
1:39:47
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:39:47
SPEAKER_01: So inside its fucking skull, it's got this thing called.
1:39:50
SPEAKER_03: Hold on.
1:39:51
SPEAKER_03: Hold on.
1:39:51
SPEAKER_03: Talk about the whales.
1:39:52
SPEAKER_03: We got to get the probes and the incense.
1:39:54
SPEAKER_01: Cancel my patience.
1:39:55
SPEAKER_01: Cancel my patience.
1:39:57
SPEAKER_03: It happens once a week.
1:39:59
SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about whales or the Orthodox Church.
1:40:02
SPEAKER_01: All right.
1:40:02
SPEAKER_01: We're canceling everything.
1:40:03
SPEAKER_01: Here we go.
1:40:04
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how my clinic manager puts up with me.
1:40:09
SPEAKER_01: She's like, God bless her.
1:40:10
SPEAKER_01: She's like 22 years old.
1:40:11
SPEAKER_01: And she has the patient with the whales.
1:40:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:40:14
SPEAKER_03: God forbid anyone ever brings up Orthodox whales.
1:40:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Orthodox whales.
1:40:18
SPEAKER_03: We'll start a new church, the Orthodox whale church.
1:40:21
SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
1:40:22
SPEAKER_01: Let me talk about Jonah and the whale real fast.
1:40:25
SPEAKER_03: Make whaling great again.
1:40:26
SPEAKER_03: The guy's going to move to Japan.
1:40:28
SPEAKER_03: He's never going to come back.
1:40:29
SPEAKER_03: He's just going to whale forever.
1:40:31
SPEAKER_01: Alex is going on again, on and on about this stuff again.
1:40:33
SPEAKER_01: Goddamn whales on Mount Fuji.
1:40:36
SPEAKER_01: I just can't with this.
1:40:38
SPEAKER_01: But I do recommend Moby Dick for readers at home.
1:40:41
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's so good.
1:40:42
SPEAKER_01: It's a fantastic novel.
1:40:43
SPEAKER_01: And if you like Blood Meridian, Blood Meridian is Moby Dick's
1:40:48
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:40:49
SPEAKER_00: I didn't,
1:40:50
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:40:50
SPEAKER_00: I tried to read Moby Dick in my early 20s,
1:40:53
SPEAKER_00: and I mostly bounced off of it,
1:40:55
SPEAKER_00: to be honest.
1:40:56
SPEAKER_00: And I read it now, and it's, well, yeah, Blood Meridian is totally a riff on it.
1:41:02
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:41:02
SPEAKER_00: there's not only a lot of similar characters,
1:41:05
SPEAKER_00: but just like straight up tropes and literary techniques and moves are taken right
1:41:10
SPEAKER_00: from it.
1:41:10
SPEAKER_03: Isn't that funny?
1:41:11
SPEAKER_03: Like when you reread something, it's like, dang, can I bring down the level of the podcast for a second?
1:41:18
SPEAKER_03: Can I kind of get a little maybe mid-brow here?
1:41:21
SPEAKER_03: The best experience I've had with this personally lately is I reread Starship Troopers over the summer.
1:41:27
SPEAKER_03: And in high school, I didn't get any of it.
1:41:30
SPEAKER_03: And now that I'm a little older and I reread it and I go, holy fuck, I'm Mr. Dubois.
1:41:35
SPEAKER_03: I'm that guy.
1:41:36
SPEAKER_03: I'm that social studies teacher.
1:41:38
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:41:39
SPEAKER_03: All right.
1:41:39
SPEAKER_03: You know what?
1:41:40
SPEAKER_03: Fine.
1:41:41
SPEAKER_03: So be it.
1:41:42
SPEAKER_03: Citizenship, guaranteed, service, whatever.
1:41:45
SPEAKER_03: Let's do it.
1:41:45
SPEAKER_03: I don't even care anymore.
1:41:47
SPEAKER_03: What?
1:41:48
SPEAKER_03: What?
1:41:49
SPEAKER_03: It's comical.
1:41:50
SPEAKER_03: It's hilarious because it's humbling.
1:41:53
SPEAKER_03: It's so humbling.
1:41:55
SPEAKER_03: You think back to when you were young and you're just like, I was such a fucking moron.
1:41:58
SPEAKER_00: Jesus Christ.
1:42:00
SPEAKER_03: And it's just, okay, fine.
1:42:01
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
1:42:01
SPEAKER_03: All right.
1:42:02
SPEAKER_03: At least I understand that now.
1:42:03
SPEAKER_00: Honestly,
1:42:04
SPEAKER_00: I spent,
1:42:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:42:06
SPEAKER_00: I got a bachelor's of English and I went and got an MFA and I don't think I really
1:42:11
SPEAKER_00: learned how to read until the last semester of my master's program.
1:42:15
SPEAKER_00: you know something clicked and i was like oh you gotta pay and i couldn't even
1:42:19
SPEAKER_00: really articulate what the difference was to you but there i remember there was
1:42:22
SPEAKER_00: like a moment where i was like oh you gotta look at it like this like and it's like
1:42:28
SPEAKER_00: i don't know why it took that much you know i was re obsessive reader you know at
1:42:32
SPEAKER_00: that point i'd read however i had hundreds of books you know and and gotten a's for
1:42:37
SPEAKER_00: writing on my analysis of them and yet something
1:42:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm still,
1:42:42
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:42:42
SPEAKER_00: I'm still getting,
1:42:43
SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm still learning how to read,
1:42:45
SPEAKER_00: but that was a moment.
1:42:47
SPEAKER_00: Well,
1:42:47
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:42:48
SPEAKER_01: it goes back to what I was saying earlier,
1:42:50
SPEAKER_01: where I think great literature can speak to you through time and different phases
1:42:55
SPEAKER_01: of your life,
1:42:56
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:42:57
SPEAKER_01: because ultimately great
1:42:58
SPEAKER_01: literature taps into that semiotic consciousness, right?
1:43:02
SPEAKER_01: That Jungian subconsciousness.
1:43:04
SPEAKER_01: And you might get the text and you might get the symbols put into your brain,
1:43:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:43:10
SPEAKER_01: as you're reading them.
1:43:11
SPEAKER_01: But if you don't have the proper decoder ring built into your brain yet,
1:43:17
SPEAKER_01: often comes with age and experience.
1:43:19
SPEAKER_01: It just won't click.
1:43:20
SPEAKER_01: That's all it is.
1:43:20
SPEAKER_01: Parts will click.
1:43:22
SPEAKER_01: 100%.
1:43:22
SPEAKER_01: But not all of it will click.
1:43:23
SPEAKER_01: Because,
1:43:23
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
1:43:24
SPEAKER_01: when I read Starship Troopers for the first time,
1:43:26
SPEAKER_01: I was the Filipino boy from,
1:43:28
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:43:28
SPEAKER_01: Brazil or wherever,
1:43:29
SPEAKER_01: you know?
1:43:29
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:43:31
SPEAKER_01: That's the main character, right?
1:43:32
SPEAKER_01: He's a little Filipino kid or something.
1:43:33
SPEAKER_01: I got to read this book.
1:43:34
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
1:43:35
SPEAKER_03: He's Brazilian from Rio.
1:43:37
SPEAKER_03: He's from Rio.
1:43:37
SPEAKER_01: But I thought he was Filipino.
1:43:38
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
1:43:40
SPEAKER_03: Brazilian.
1:43:40
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:43:41
SPEAKER_01: I don't think he's Filipino.
1:43:42
SPEAKER_01: No.
1:43:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to have to review that.
1:43:45
SPEAKER_01: Maybe.
1:43:46
SPEAKER_03: Brad, I make a joke with making it a little lowbrow, but no, it's a fantastic book.
1:43:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I like Heinlein.
1:43:54
SPEAKER_00: I've read Stranger in a Strange Land.
1:43:56
SPEAKER_03: Oh, well, I mean, look, earlier we were talking about who starts tropes and this and that.
1:44:03
SPEAKER_03: Military science fiction.
1:44:04
SPEAKER_03: That's the granddaddy right there.
1:44:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:44:06
SPEAKER_03: Everything.
1:44:07
SPEAKER_03: And the way he, the way he tells the story and how it builds up to the end and the final reference.
1:44:12
SPEAKER_03: I'm just like, Heinlein, you son of a bitch.
1:44:14
SPEAKER_03: Like it's going to bring me to tears.
1:44:15
SPEAKER_03: Just talking about it.
1:44:16
SPEAKER_03: It's good.
1:44:18
SPEAKER_03: So fucking good.
1:44:19
SPEAKER_01: It goes on the list.
1:44:21
SPEAKER_01: It's short too.
1:44:22
SPEAKER_01: You can read it in one day.
1:44:23
SPEAKER_01: I think I read it in one day in between patrols in Afghanistan.
1:44:28
SPEAKER_01: For the longest time,
1:44:29
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it still is,
1:44:29
SPEAKER_01: but it was part of the Commandant and the Marine Corps' recommended books.
1:44:33
SPEAKER_01: It was laying around everywhere.
1:44:34
SPEAKER_00: It was like...
1:44:37
SPEAKER_01: I,
1:44:38
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:44:38
SPEAKER_01: there was when I was in this rinky dinky ass patrol base in Afghanistan,
1:44:42
SPEAKER_01: there was just people would send books,
1:44:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:44:45
SPEAKER_01: like care packages and stuff.
1:44:46
SPEAKER_01: And they would send books and there's this,
1:44:48
SPEAKER_01: we had this little tent that just had books and people were sending like a lot of
1:44:53
SPEAKER_01: used books,
1:44:53
SPEAKER_01: obviously from like bookstores and stuff.
1:44:55
SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of weird, cool stuff.
1:44:56
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Oh shit, I'll pick this up.
1:44:58
SPEAKER_01: Like there was a collection of like old,
1:45:01
SPEAKER_01: like kind of like pulp magazines from like the new,
1:45:04
SPEAKER_01: the new wave pulp era from the seventies,
1:45:06
SPEAKER_01: like orbits and stuff.
1:45:07
SPEAKER_01: And it had all these great,
1:45:08
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:45:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:45:09
SPEAKER_01: they're probably worth money now if I would have taken them home with me,
1:45:11
SPEAKER_01: but I'm not carrying that stuff with me.
1:45:15
SPEAKER_03: I wonder,
1:45:16
SPEAKER_03: I wonder if what we're describing is the experience of the prodigal son goes out,
1:45:21
SPEAKER_03: lives life,
1:45:22
SPEAKER_03: comes back home and gets it.
1:45:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:45:25
SPEAKER_00: There is definitely something to that.
1:45:28
SPEAKER_03: That story's been, you know, I've joked with Alex.
1:45:30
SPEAKER_03: I've recently come back to Catholicism and I tell Alex,
1:45:34
SPEAKER_03: I've been on the prodigal arc for probably about 15 years now.
1:45:37
SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
1:45:39
SPEAKER_03: And it's like that joke.
1:45:40
SPEAKER_03: It's like we were saying earlier, the knowledge is back there in the back of your head.
1:45:43
SPEAKER_03: Like, it's just waiting for you to get it.
1:45:45
SPEAKER_03: And it'll wait.
1:45:46
SPEAKER_03: It'll wait.
1:45:46
SPEAKER_03: But maybe that's what we're describing.
1:45:49
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
1:45:49
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, yeah.
1:45:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, fuck, man.
1:45:53
SPEAKER_01: I could tell you stories about my kind of return.
1:45:56
SPEAKER_01: I'll save that for a different podcast.
1:45:59
SPEAKER_01: It's funny how it all works.
1:46:02
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I mean, that's the power of art and literature, I think.
1:46:06
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:46:06
SPEAKER_01: We can talk about these symbols and these kind of universal truths and we share a
1:46:12
SPEAKER_01: connection just by talking about these novels.
1:46:14
SPEAKER_01: There's just like this level of excitement that like,
1:46:17
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:46:17
SPEAKER_01: just talking about Moby Dick right now,
1:46:18
SPEAKER_01: you know.
1:46:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:46:19
SPEAKER_01: You're talking about,
1:46:20
SPEAKER_01: I see that cannibal,
1:46:21
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:46:22
SPEAKER_01: old,
1:46:22
SPEAKER_01: I can't pronounce his name,
1:46:23
SPEAKER_01: Queeque or whatever.
1:46:24
SPEAKER_00: Queeque, yeah.
1:46:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:46:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:46:26
SPEAKER_00: dude,
1:46:27
SPEAKER_00: that's a hundred and whatever,
1:46:29
SPEAKER_00: 170 years ago that book was written,
1:46:31
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:46:31
SPEAKER_00: and you read it and it's like,
1:46:32
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:46:32
SPEAKER_00: it's still,
1:46:33
SPEAKER_00: it still speaks.
1:46:34
SPEAKER_00: Like I still resonate with it.
1:46:36
SPEAKER_03: We're sitting here doing the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
1:46:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's exactly what we're doing.
1:46:42
SPEAKER_01: Love it.
1:46:43
SPEAKER_01: So good.
1:46:43
SPEAKER_01: All right.
1:46:44
SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to change topics real fast as we near the end.
1:46:47
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:46:48
SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
1:46:50
SPEAKER_01: any,
1:46:50
SPEAKER_01: we'll take it to the,
1:46:51
SPEAKER_01: we'll take it to the contemporary or Brad,
1:46:53
SPEAKER_01: any novels or films that you've read and liked and enjoyed and found interesting
1:46:59
SPEAKER_01: besides Moby Dick.
1:47:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:47:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't read a ton of like recent stuff that's come out to be honest.
1:47:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:47:08
SPEAKER_00: I,
1:47:08
SPEAKER_00: I occasionally read,
1:47:09
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:47:10
SPEAKER_00: stuff from internet friends,
1:47:12
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:47:12
SPEAKER_00: books from,
1:47:13
SPEAKER_00: from internet friends.
1:47:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, and on that front, I can totally, um, recommend, um,
1:47:19
SPEAKER_00: Andrew Edwards book, King of Dogs.
1:47:22
SPEAKER_00: Definitely check it out.
1:47:23
SPEAKER_00: It's like a,
1:47:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:47:25
SPEAKER_00: on the sort of surface of it,
1:47:26
SPEAKER_00: it's sort of like a survival action book,
1:47:28
SPEAKER_00: but it's got some real depth to it.
1:47:31
SPEAKER_00: Very smartly written, very beautiful.
1:47:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, I recently read, um, uh, I can never say the title and I'm going to say it wrong.
1:47:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Ohmasville by, uh, Ernst Junga.
1:47:43
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you guys are familiar with that at all.
1:47:45
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I mean, welcome to the younger appreciation.
1:47:48
SPEAKER_00: Okay, good.
1:47:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:47:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're coming on the Younger episode.
1:47:51
SPEAKER_03: We're going to talk about that book.
1:47:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we're talking about that one.
1:47:55
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
1:47:55
SPEAKER_03: Dude, I just finished that book.
1:47:57
SPEAKER_03: I just finished it.
1:47:57
SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
1:47:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's so good, man.
1:47:59
SPEAKER_03: It's so good.
1:48:00
SPEAKER_03: It's life-changing, life-changing.
1:48:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:48:04
SPEAKER_03: Such a good book.
1:48:05
SPEAKER_00: He's got this, like, there's a certain...
1:48:08
SPEAKER_00: You know, and he's at his best in this book, in my opinion, from what I've read.
1:48:12
SPEAKER_00: And he's that guy, you know, he lived to be 100 and whatever.
1:48:14
SPEAKER_00: And half the stuff's not even translated.
1:48:17
SPEAKER_00: Whatever it was.
1:48:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:48:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:48:18
SPEAKER_01: The man lived.
1:48:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:48:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he definitely did.
1:48:22
SPEAKER_03: Despite his best efforts.
1:48:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right, right, right, right.
1:48:26
SPEAKER_00: But,
1:48:26
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:48:26
SPEAKER_00: there's a certain audacity he has in this Omasville where it's like,
1:48:31
SPEAKER_00: he's not even going to,
1:48:32
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:48:32
SPEAKER_00: pretend he,
1:48:34
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:48:35
SPEAKER_00: there's almost no plot.
1:48:37
SPEAKER_00: There is a plot, but, like, it kind of doesn't matter.
1:48:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:48:41
SPEAKER_00: There's a way in which it's not even really a novel.
1:48:43
SPEAKER_00: It's, it's what.
1:48:45
SPEAKER_00: It's a diary.
1:48:46
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a diary.
1:48:47
SPEAKER_00: It just happens to be a fictional character's diary.
1:48:50
SPEAKER_00: But,
1:48:50
SPEAKER_00: man,
1:48:51
SPEAKER_00: the sort of philosophical places that he goes,
1:48:55
SPEAKER_00: and not in a dry,
1:48:57
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:48:57
SPEAKER_00: this is what Heidegger had to say,
1:48:59
SPEAKER_00: but in a,
1:48:59
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:49:00
SPEAKER_00: actual lived,
1:49:02
SPEAKER_00: sort of living philosophy,
1:49:05
SPEAKER_00: leveraging some wonderful poetry.
1:49:09
SPEAKER_00: I wish I could read German.
1:49:10
SPEAKER_03: I had this sense.
1:49:11
SPEAKER_03: I had the sense the last like four or five chapters are just all payoff.
1:49:15
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:49:15
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
1:49:17
SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's almost tantric right up until the last four chapters.
1:49:20
SPEAKER_03: And it's just fucking oh, my God, this this guy.
1:49:23
SPEAKER_00: Jesus.
1:49:24
SPEAKER_00: My God.
1:49:25
SPEAKER_00: I was reading it.
1:49:25
SPEAKER_00: I was reading most of it on a flight.
1:49:28
SPEAKER_00: And like, I have it.
1:49:30
SPEAKER_00: I've transitioned to an e-book and I resisted it forever.
1:49:34
SPEAKER_00: But now I have an e-book and I have like
1:49:36
SPEAKER_00: hundred books on this thing and I'm reading it and I literally as you're saying
1:49:40
SPEAKER_00: like the last whatever four or five chapters I'm like I kept setting the book down
1:49:45
SPEAKER_03: and going Jesus Christ I had a time where I would read a chapter or I'd get through
1:49:53
SPEAKER_03: like because he has these parts of the book where he just hammers it
1:49:58
SPEAKER_03: It's like build up, build up, build.
1:49:59
SPEAKER_03: And then he just comes out of nowhere with a haymaker that lays you out.
1:50:02
SPEAKER_03: And I put the book down for weeks.
1:50:04
SPEAKER_03: I'm just going to think about that.
1:50:06
SPEAKER_03: I'm just going to walk away and just kind of let that marinate.
1:50:09
SPEAKER_03: I had to.
1:50:10
SPEAKER_03: I had to.
1:50:12
SPEAKER_03: One does not simply read this cover to cover walking into Mordor.
1:50:16
SPEAKER_03: No, no.
1:50:17
SPEAKER_01: It's not a novel that you can just power through.
1:50:21
SPEAKER_01: It's one that you have to savor.
1:50:24
SPEAKER_03: yeah you gotta walk away like you gotta you gotta plan out the books you're gonna
1:50:28
SPEAKER_00: read when you're taking a break yeah yeah and i like i've got so many highlights
1:50:34
SPEAKER_00: like i kind of just want to go back through and just like at least like read those
1:50:38
SPEAKER_03: yes you know yeah oh my god what get out of my head man come on what the no look i
1:50:44
SPEAKER_03: want to go back i'm gonna go back i'm gonna give it some time but i'm gonna go back
1:50:47
SPEAKER_03: i'm gonna go read through and i'm gonna highlight every reference i don't
1:50:50
SPEAKER_03: understand
1:50:51
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to go back through and research every reference.
1:50:54
SPEAKER_03: I mean...
1:50:56
SPEAKER_03: Let's reconvene the podcast in 15 years and see how we get it.
1:51:01
SPEAKER_01: That's where I'm at with this thing.
1:51:04
SPEAKER_01: 55-year-old Fisto.
1:51:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
1:51:07
SPEAKER_01: How has your life of being an anarch in the forest been?
1:51:11
SPEAKER_01: Nurse, cancel my appointments.
1:51:13
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about younger with Fisto.
1:51:15
SPEAKER_03: Sir, this is a retirement home.
1:51:18
SPEAKER_03: You don't have a nurse anymore.
1:51:19
SPEAKER_00: Sir, this is a retirement home.
1:51:21
SPEAKER_03: Alex and Fisto, you're 75 years old shitting in a bucket.
1:51:27
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:51:27
SPEAKER_00: I know you're an anarch and all.
1:51:29
SPEAKER_03: I know you're a big podcaster, but it's time to take your medicine.
1:51:32
SPEAKER_01: Come on.
1:51:36
SPEAKER_01: I'm never going to a nursing home.
1:51:38
SPEAKER_01: I'll walk into the swamp of South Carolina before I go to a nursing home.
1:51:44
SPEAKER_01: I vibe with that.
1:51:46
SPEAKER_03: Dine in the saddle.
1:51:47
SPEAKER_03: Let's do it.
1:51:48
SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
1:51:49
SPEAKER_01: But have you ever read Murakami at all?
1:51:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, I've read IQ 84.
1:51:57
SPEAKER_00: Is that?
1:51:58
SPEAKER_00: Wait, is that what it's called?
1:51:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, IQ 84.
1:52:01
SPEAKER_00: 1Q or IQ?
1:52:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I did read that.
1:52:04
SPEAKER_01: It's actually 1984, I think.
1:52:06
SPEAKER_01: I think it's just a play on Japanese kanji.
1:52:10
SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
1:52:11
SPEAKER_01: Kanji for Q and like 9 or whatever is like the same or something like that.
1:52:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that makes sense.
1:52:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:52:17
SPEAKER_00: So I read that and I read, um, uh, oh God, it was years ago.
1:52:22
SPEAKER_00: Wind up bird chronicle.
1:52:24
SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm reading right now.
1:52:25
SPEAKER_01: I'm almost done with it.
1:52:26
SPEAKER_01: And it's just,
1:52:27
SPEAKER_00: uh,
1:52:27
SPEAKER_01: the reason to ask is because he's such a,
1:52:29
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:52:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:52:30
SPEAKER_01: his themes are always dream dreams and wind up bird is just a giant fucking dream.
1:52:35
SPEAKER_01: You know, you're like, is this real?
1:52:37
SPEAKER_01: Is this not real?
1:52:38
SPEAKER_01: It's like a Japanese, uh, twin peaks basically.
1:52:42
SPEAKER_01: Um,
1:52:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:52:43
SPEAKER_00: I remember loving it, but it's like one of those things.
1:52:45
SPEAKER_00: Some books fade.
1:52:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, I couldn't tell you a lot of specifics about it, but I do remember enjoying it.
1:52:51
SPEAKER_00: But it's funny that now his newest book,
1:52:54
SPEAKER_00: he's like,
1:52:54
SPEAKER_00: his latest book that's coming out,
1:52:57
SPEAKER_00: somebody is,
1:52:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
1:52:58
SPEAKER_00: there's sort of a joke on Twitter about it.
1:52:59
SPEAKER_00: It's like, the reviews are like, it has everything.
1:53:01
SPEAKER_00: It's like jazz, Beatles, and like three other things.
1:53:04
SPEAKER_00: People are like, yeah, that's what he's been writing about the whole fucking time.
1:53:07
SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you mean?
1:53:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the guy literally, I picked...
1:53:11
SPEAKER_01: I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday,
1:53:13
SPEAKER_01: and I picked up a short story collection,
1:53:16
SPEAKER_01: his collection,
1:53:17
SPEAKER_01: Men Without Women.
1:53:18
SPEAKER_01: And my wife's looking.
1:53:19
SPEAKER_01: She's like, these are all fucking Beatles songs.
1:53:20
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, yeah, you're right.
1:53:23
SPEAKER_01: Every title in this collection is a Beatles song.
1:53:26
SPEAKER_01: And I picked up that book because the first story in that collection is Drive My Car,
1:53:31
SPEAKER_01: which was a Japanese movie that was made like three years ago.
1:53:35
SPEAKER_01: And it's a three-hour movie.
1:53:37
SPEAKER_01: It's a great movie.
1:53:38
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
1:53:39
SPEAKER_01: But it is a Japanese movie.
1:53:41
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, it's based on the story?
1:53:43
SPEAKER_00: It's based on the story.
1:53:44
SPEAKER_01: It's based on the story, right?
1:53:46
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, it once again hits everything.
1:53:49
SPEAKER_01: There's jazz.
1:53:50
SPEAKER_01: There's a European car fascination.
1:53:52
SPEAKER_01: There's a guy whose wife disappears or leaves him or dies.
1:53:56
SPEAKER_01: I can't remember exactly.
1:53:58
SPEAKER_01: But once again, as I'm reading Murakami, I'm thinking, you know what?
1:54:02
SPEAKER_01: I read some of his stuff when I was younger, and it didn't hit with me.
1:54:05
SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, this is stupid.
1:54:07
SPEAKER_01: But it hit a lot harder now because it deals with aging and divorce and adult shit
1:54:14
SPEAKER_01: that a 22-year-old just does not vibe with.
1:54:17
SPEAKER_01: And wistfulness.
1:54:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:54:21
SPEAKER_01: I love Japanese fiction, right?
1:54:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm a weeb non-weeb, okay?
1:54:25
SPEAKER_01: Because I don't particularly enjoy... I don't enjoy internet in Japan.
1:54:29
SPEAKER_01: I don't enjoy anime and any of that stuff.
1:54:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, I don't have a beef against it.
1:54:35
SPEAKER_01: There's some good stuff.
1:54:36
SPEAKER_01: I don't really enjoy that, but I do enjoy the artistic side of Japan and the classical side.
1:54:43
SPEAKER_01: And in Japanese artistic culture, they have this...
1:54:48
SPEAKER_01: they have this concept called wabi-sabi, right?
1:54:51
SPEAKER_01: And I'm probably pronouncing it improperly, but the idea of it is that it's impermanence, right?
1:54:58
SPEAKER_01: The Japanese, their spiritual soul is obsessed with the idea of impermanence, right?
1:55:05
SPEAKER_01: So you live in Japan, they, every like season, every few weeks, right.
1:55:11
SPEAKER_01: They replant all their flowers and they have seasons for each flower and they make
1:55:15
SPEAKER_01: a big fucking deal about it.
1:55:17
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:55:17
SPEAKER_01: It's like,
1:55:17
SPEAKER_01: Oh,
1:55:18
SPEAKER_01: it's carnation season,
1:55:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:55:19
SPEAKER_01: and everybody goes and oohs and ahs at the beautiful flowers,
1:55:22
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:55:23
SPEAKER_01: and then they're dead.
1:55:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:55:24
SPEAKER_01: And then the most important one is,
1:55:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:55:27
SPEAKER_01: the,
1:55:27
SPEAKER_01: the cherry blossoms and the cherry blossoms like only happen in spring in certain climate.
1:55:33
SPEAKER_01: And it only lasts a week.
1:55:34
Yeah.
1:55:35
SPEAKER_01: And it's such a big deal when all the trees just explode and just pure beauty.
1:55:40
SPEAKER_01: But it's such a sad beauty because you know it's going to blow away in a few days.
1:55:46
SPEAKER_01: And then you're walking through this park by my house and I'm just surrounded by
1:55:50
SPEAKER_01: these lanterns shooting light and these beautiful cherry trees.
1:55:54
SPEAKER_01: And it's like one of those samurai movies where it's like raining petals.
1:55:58
SPEAKER_01: And the next day you go there and the wind comes and the rain comes and it's all gone.
1:56:02
SPEAKER_01: It's all on the ground.
1:56:02
SPEAKER_01: It's all mud.
1:56:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:56:04
SPEAKER_01: And there's so much of their culture is focused on this impermanence and imperfection,
1:56:10
SPEAKER_01: this temporal kind of movement to where they,
1:56:13
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:56:13
SPEAKER_01: they treasure,
1:56:14
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:56:15
SPEAKER_01: old stuff that's,
1:56:16
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:56:16
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:56:16
SPEAKER_01: wood that's,
1:56:17
SPEAKER_01: like,
1:56:17
SPEAKER_01: that's tarnished,
1:56:19
SPEAKER_01: metal pots and stuff that are tarnished.
1:56:22
SPEAKER_01: And there's something I – there's a wistfulness, like a sadness to everything they do that I really –
1:56:31
SPEAKER_01: i feel like i i feel it you know and we feel the same way when we experience nature
1:56:36
SPEAKER_01: like you know like the grand canyon of like this is not gonna be here forever you
1:56:41
SPEAKER_01: know and uh it's it's just this interesting or like in a very christian kind of
1:56:49
SPEAKER_01: mindset is that
1:56:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm not here forever and I'm not even meant to be here in the first place,
1:56:55
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:56:55
SPEAKER_01: and I'm only here temporarily and I'm going to enjoy these glimpses of beauty and
1:57:00
SPEAKER_01: truth for,
1:57:01
SPEAKER_01: even if it's just a second,
1:57:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to enjoy it.
1:57:04
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like so much of our world has made, has profaned that concept with our materialistic kind of,
1:57:12
SPEAKER_01: mundanity you know where we don't notice those little moments of you know your kids
1:57:16
SPEAKER_01: smiling or that moment where your first child is born and you see them for the very
1:57:21
SPEAKER_01: first second it just seared into your mind and it's only a second that they're
1:57:25
SPEAKER_01: newborn it's the the second you pick them up or the nurse picks them up you know
1:57:30
SPEAKER_01: it's over but that very first second that first breath you're like
1:57:34
SPEAKER_01: Fuck.
1:57:35
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
1:57:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
1:57:37
SPEAKER_00: and I think there can be,
1:57:38
SPEAKER_00: and I'm not trying to criticize American culture too intensely or broadly,
1:57:44
SPEAKER_00: but there can be,
1:57:45
SPEAKER_00: I think,
1:57:45
SPEAKER_00: a tendency in America to pretend we can permanently capture these things.
1:57:50
SPEAKER_00: That's why you see the cell phones at concerts, right?
1:57:55
SPEAKER_00: Everybody's recording, videoing the entire concert for some reason.
1:58:00
SPEAKER_00: That's going to somehow...
1:58:02
SPEAKER_00: not actually enjoy right you're like missing the thing because you think you're
1:58:05
SPEAKER_00: gonna somehow set it in stone and that's just not that's not gonna happen you're
1:58:09
SPEAKER_00: now you're and then you're never gonna watch that anyway like yeah yeah I think we
1:58:14
SPEAKER_00: do have this kind of delude I was thinking about this the other day um
1:58:18
SPEAKER_00: And not to just like talk about tweets I had,
1:58:21
SPEAKER_00: but I did tweet it where it's like I realized the other day that the best song and
1:58:27
SPEAKER_00: I don't like saying best,
1:58:28
SPEAKER_00: but I think if I were to say what was the most moved I was by music was around a campfire.
1:58:36
SPEAKER_00: This woman, I didn't really know her.
1:58:38
SPEAKER_00: She was like a friend of a friend.
1:58:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know her name.
1:58:41
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't get in touch with her if I wanted to.
1:58:45
SPEAKER_00: Somehow in the course of the evening, it was decided she was going to sing this song that she'd written.
1:58:51
SPEAKER_00: She didn't have an instrument or anything.
1:58:54
SPEAKER_00: And,
1:58:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:58:55
SPEAKER_00: if you hear that,
1:58:55
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:58:56
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:58:56
SPEAKER_00: if you're hanging out and some of you are hanging out with us,
1:58:58
SPEAKER_00: like,
1:58:58
SPEAKER_00: hey,
1:58:59
SPEAKER_00: can I sing you a song?
1:59:00
SPEAKER_00: You're going to be like, oh, geez.
1:59:01
SPEAKER_00: All right.
1:59:01
SPEAKER_00: You're like, oh, my God.
1:59:03
SPEAKER_00: Like, all right, I'm going to have to grin and nod through this.
1:59:06
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:59:07
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm not going to try and recreate this song by any means.
1:59:11
SPEAKER_00: But she started singing and about halfway through,
1:59:14
SPEAKER_00: I was like holding back tears and not necessarily sad tears,
1:59:20
SPEAKER_00: but not even not sad tears.
1:59:21
SPEAKER_00: Like it was incredibly moving.
1:59:24
SPEAKER_00: And I will never hear that song again.
1:59:27
SPEAKER_00: There's like...
1:59:29
SPEAKER_00: If I do, it's like lottery chances.
1:59:31
SPEAKER_00: There's no way.
1:59:33
SPEAKER_00: She's not even really like a person.
1:59:35
SPEAKER_00: She's not even like a person who goes and performs music.
1:59:38
SPEAKER_00: She just decided to write this song and she had a beautiful voice.
1:59:42
SPEAKER_00: And I think about that a lot.
1:59:44
SPEAKER_00: Man,
1:59:45
SPEAKER_00: I could spend the rest of my life digging through records and finding the oldest,
1:59:50
SPEAKER_00: coolest,
1:59:50
SPEAKER_00: weirdest stuff.
1:59:52
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if I'll ever come across anything that's been put on tape
1:59:57
SPEAKER_00: Or on CD or whatever, that is going to hit me like that hit me.
2:00:00
SPEAKER_01: Right, usually haunted by it forever, you know.
2:00:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a great story, man.
2:00:07
SPEAKER_01: That does capture,
2:00:09
SPEAKER_01: I guess,
2:00:09
SPEAKER_01: the truth of the power of sitting around a campfire,
2:00:14
SPEAKER_01: which is pretty much the...
2:00:15
SPEAKER_01: your your prototype that's where stories come from right yeah yeah yeah right there
2:00:21
SPEAKER_01: yeah that's going back to the old school man that's actually a great story like
2:00:27
SPEAKER_01: that that uh that makes me think a lot about you know mark fisher's like the idea
2:00:31
SPEAKER_01: of ontology and how we digitized all our media and we're basically beating you know
2:00:38
SPEAKER_01: digital ghosts over and over and
2:00:40
SPEAKER_03: over for yeah i'm trying i'm trying to think of something comparable for my own
2:00:43
SPEAKER_03: self i don't think of anything that like stands out right away because i'm trying
2:00:46
SPEAKER_00: to limit it to live music yeah yeah and i've seen a lot of great i've seen a lot of
2:00:51
SPEAKER_00: like great concerts i've gone to those have been great and similarly but like
2:00:55
SPEAKER_03: something about this particular one yeah sorry no i i remember now i remember now
2:01:01
SPEAKER_03: Back in the early 2000s, I was in college, and I got to see David Byrne play.
2:01:08
SPEAKER_03: This is when he was doing his solo thing.
2:01:10
SPEAKER_03: I don't even remember the song.
2:01:11
SPEAKER_03: I can't remember the song, but I remember the timbre of his voice.
2:01:15
SPEAKER_03: And after this particular song, I remember the crowd roared for 10 minutes straight.
2:01:20
SPEAKER_03: They wouldn't let the band continue.
2:01:22
SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's cool.
2:01:22
SPEAKER_03: They would not stop.
2:01:24
SPEAKER_03: And Byrne just sat there like...
2:01:26
SPEAKER_03: he was clearly like humbled by it.
2:01:29
SPEAKER_03: And he just was like, okay, he's, he, he just, he let, he let the crowd have it out.
2:01:35
SPEAKER_03: And I remember it was like being in a cathedral,
2:01:38
SPEAKER_03: you know,
2:01:38
SPEAKER_03: that the sound of the song and then the crowd appreciation after I,
2:01:44
SPEAKER_03: It was church.
2:01:46
SPEAKER_03: It was church.
2:01:47
SPEAKER_03: That's the best way I can say it.
2:01:48
SPEAKER_01: You can never recreate it.
2:01:49
SPEAKER_01: I'll never see that again.
2:01:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that will never happen again.
2:01:51
SPEAKER_01: I like that.
2:01:53
SPEAKER_01: I remember the first time I saw – I randomly went to one of the best concert venues
2:01:58
SPEAKER_01: in the country,
2:01:59
SPEAKER_01: which is the Coliseum in Los Angeles because it's set up like an old Greek coliseum.
2:02:05
SPEAKER_01: And I saw Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
2:02:06
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh, I'll go, whatever.
2:02:09
SPEAKER_01: And it was this amazing concert.
2:02:11
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what.
2:02:12
SPEAKER_01: They just were on fire that day.
2:02:14
SPEAKER_01: And I was obsessed with recreating that experience.
2:02:20
SPEAKER_01: And I went and saw him twice, two more times.
2:02:21
SPEAKER_01: I saw him with Young.
2:02:24
SPEAKER_01: And it just didn't click.
2:02:27
SPEAKER_01: There was something about that night, that specific day that was just amazing.
2:02:31
SPEAKER_01: perfect you know it was like me and a close friend of mine and we drove all the way
2:02:35
SPEAKER_01: to los angeles from orange county and it was just it was i can't recreate it yeah
2:02:42
SPEAKER_01: but um you know uh
2:02:46
SPEAKER_01: mitchell it talks about the idea of time right and how time itself can be sacred
2:02:51
SPEAKER_01: and and profane and he says that for the most part we we live in a in profane time
2:02:57
SPEAKER_01: and time that we don't pay attention to it just passes you know like you get up in
2:03:01
SPEAKER_01: the morning you you know shower brush your teeth or whatever eat a bagel and drive
2:03:04
SPEAKER_01: to work and you stop at the gas station and you don't even register that time it's
2:03:09
SPEAKER_01: nonsensical time you know
2:03:11
SPEAKER_01: But every now and then throughout your life,
2:03:12
SPEAKER_01: you hit these moments where you enter into like sacred time.
2:03:16
SPEAKER_01: And it's the moments like when you first see your child for the first time or what
2:03:22
SPEAKER_01: you described with the music or those moments where you hang out in your bedroom
2:03:28
SPEAKER_01: with that girl you like had a crush on for five years or whatever.
2:03:32
SPEAKER_01: And it feels like you're there forever.
2:03:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, a year, it feels like amazing.
2:03:36
SPEAKER_01: It's like the best time of your life, you know?
2:03:37
SPEAKER_01: And you'll remember that forever.
2:03:39
SPEAKER_01: And that's, you know, we kind of stumble into it.
2:03:42
SPEAKER_01: We stumble into this sacred time.
2:03:45
SPEAKER_01: And I think that when we write or create, we tend to, we aim for that field, you know?
2:03:52
SPEAKER_01: We aim to,
2:03:53
SPEAKER_01: like,
2:03:54
SPEAKER_01: push through that wall in the dark well and open into that other room,
2:03:59
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:03:59
SPEAKER_01: the lodge or whatever is on the other side.
2:04:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:04:02
SPEAKER_01: And hopefully not the black one, not the white lodge.
2:04:05
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
2:04:05
SPEAKER_03: All right.
2:04:06
SPEAKER_03: The white lodge.
2:04:07
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I think that that's, that's the beauty of art, right?
2:04:11
SPEAKER_01: That is ultimately what, what we're doing here.
2:04:13
SPEAKER_01: You know,
2:04:13
SPEAKER_01: that's the beauty of art and culture and civilization and people,
2:04:16
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:04:18
SPEAKER_01: whether,
2:04:18
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:04:18
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
2:04:19
SPEAKER_01: And I think that a lot of it gets lost in the digital like labyrinth where we,
2:04:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:04:24
SPEAKER_01: cuss each other out on,
2:04:25
SPEAKER_01: on sub stack and stuff.
2:04:27
SPEAKER_01: And some people deserve to be cussed out, you know,
2:04:29
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
2:04:31
SPEAKER_03: My favorite post that I get on Substack and what makes all of it worth it is when
2:04:35
SPEAKER_03: you have a lurker come out from lurking and go,
2:04:39
SPEAKER_03: Bisto,
2:04:40
SPEAKER_03: that was fucking hilarious.
2:04:42
SPEAKER_03: You've never seen this guy post.
2:04:44
SPEAKER_03: You have no idea who it is.
2:04:45
SPEAKER_03: And he just goes, dude, I'm dying.
2:04:49
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
2:04:50
SPEAKER_03: For me, that's when... I mean, the Substack stuff, whatever.
2:04:54
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the digital stuff.
2:04:56
SPEAKER_03: But...
2:04:58
SPEAKER_03: I guess if you hit it hard enough with a hammer,
2:05:00
SPEAKER_03: even divine shit will come out of the internet if you hit it hard enough with a hammer.
2:05:04
SPEAKER_01: It's true.
2:05:05
SPEAKER_01: We are connected through the digital labyrinth right now.
2:05:08
SPEAKER_01: Ultimately, right?
2:05:10
SPEAKER_01: There's goodness to it, right?
2:05:12
SPEAKER_01: Alright, Brad.
2:05:14
SPEAKER_01: Before we leave...
2:05:16
SPEAKER_01: You're going to start a new podcast.
2:05:17
SPEAKER_01: Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
2:05:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll tell you a little bit.
2:05:24
SPEAKER_00: I think I've only told a few people about this in my personal life.
2:05:27
SPEAKER_00: You guys may be familiar with,
2:05:31
SPEAKER_00: maybe not,
2:05:32
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Gwynn and I are starting a podcast together,
2:05:36
SPEAKER_00: formerly the Blood Meridian guy.
2:05:40
SPEAKER_00: We're calling it Method and Madness.
2:05:42
SPEAKER_00: We're not going to focus on...
2:05:44
SPEAKER_00: Part of the reason I'm not doing Art of Darkness anymore is I kind of got burnt out
2:05:48
SPEAKER_00: on doing biographies.
2:05:49
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of work.
2:05:51
SPEAKER_00: You're reading a lot and it was interesting and we did a lot of them,
2:05:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:05:54
SPEAKER_00: but I didn't feel the need to do those anymore.
2:05:58
SPEAKER_00: And so we're doing,
2:05:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:05:59
SPEAKER_00: we're going to,
2:06:00
SPEAKER_00: we're going to,
2:06:01
SPEAKER_00: Aaron and I have similar enough tastes,
2:06:04
SPEAKER_00: but different enough perspectives that I think we're going to be able to do
2:06:07
SPEAKER_00: something pretty cool.
2:06:08
SPEAKER_00: First episode we're talking about is Moby Dick.
2:06:11
SPEAKER_00: We're going to dig into what Moby Dick is and,
2:06:13
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:06:14
SPEAKER_00: how it was put,
2:06:14
SPEAKER_00: how it was written and,
2:06:15
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:06:16
SPEAKER_00: what a modern reader slash writer could get from it.
2:06:19
SPEAKER_00: And then we're going to do my part,
2:06:21
SPEAKER_00: which is the madness part,
2:06:23
SPEAKER_00: just following various rabbit holes that the book has,
2:06:26
SPEAKER_00: uh,
2:06:27
SPEAKER_00: Moby Dick has kind of urged me into.
2:06:29
SPEAKER_00: So I think, you know, a little, we're going to try to conduct a little alchemy here.
2:06:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, that'll be coming out in, uh, in January.
2:06:37
SPEAKER_00: We'll be releasing our first episode.
2:06:38
SPEAKER_00: So look forward to that.
2:06:40
SPEAKER_01: They always need more podcasts to listen to and more.
2:06:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:06:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:06:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:06:45
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't even have a website yet.
2:06:47
SPEAKER_00: So just follow me on Twitter, Brad Kelly, or Substack, bradkelly.substack.com.
2:06:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we don't even, there's no episodes out yet.
2:06:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm literally, before we met, I'm building the website.
2:06:59
SPEAKER_00: So...
2:07:01
SPEAKER_00: It's all very nascent at this point, but it will be out.
2:07:05
SPEAKER_03: We got the inside scoop.
2:07:06
SPEAKER_03: Doesn't he have a website yet, guys?
2:07:10
SPEAKER_01: This is why people come on Substack's best podcast so they can talk for two hours
2:07:16
SPEAKER_01: about spiritual moments around campfires instead of the books we're trying to sell.
2:07:22
SPEAKER_03: And then get a creepy record store owner recommendation at the end of it.
2:07:26
SPEAKER_03: We definitely need a creepy store owner recommendation.
2:07:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, man.
2:07:28
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm a fan of Aaron Gwynn.
2:07:30
SPEAKER_01: I know I was I was a dick to him on Twitter the other day, like two weeks ago.
2:07:34
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to apologize to Aaron Gwynn on the air here because I lashed out at
2:07:40
SPEAKER_01: him over the Cormac McCarthy thing.
2:07:42
SPEAKER_00: And that was yeah, that was I think that was a tricky moment for all us Cormac McCarthy fans.
2:07:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was.
2:07:50
SPEAKER_01: It was.
2:07:51
SPEAKER_01: yeah you know so i i i slipped into it i read the i was actually at work working a
2:07:58
SPEAKER_01: night shift and i was just like oh this guy he pissed me off why did he do that you
2:08:02
SPEAKER_03: know cancel my appointments i was like i got a shit post on on twitter about i'm
2:08:08
SPEAKER_01: working in the freaking urgent care room and i'm like okay yeah
2:08:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to read this Vanity Fair article about Cormac McCarthy and his
2:08:17
SPEAKER_01: 14-year-old girlfriend or whatever.
2:08:18
SPEAKER_01: This is a serious literary series.
2:08:23
SPEAKER_03: I understand that you've shattered your leg, but there are more important things.
2:08:26
SPEAKER_01: Send them to X-Ray.
2:08:27
SPEAKER_01: Take your time to get them out of here.
2:08:30
SPEAKER_03: Deal with it.
2:08:31
SPEAKER_03: Walk it off.
2:08:32
SPEAKER_03: All right.
2:08:33
SPEAKER_01: So I do apologize for my internet brain.
2:08:35
SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I should have been meaning to apologize to him for a while now.
2:08:39
SPEAKER_01: And he has no idea who I am.
2:08:42
SPEAKER_01: He's got way more followers.
2:08:43
SPEAKER_01: I don't, I don't know as much.
2:08:45
SPEAKER_01: He,
2:08:45
SPEAKER_00: You know, the thing I love, I love Aaron.
2:08:48
SPEAKER_00: He puts it out there and sometimes the internet is not friendly to him about it.
2:08:54
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
2:08:55
SPEAKER_00: And so it's interesting.
2:08:58
SPEAKER_00: It's, he's got an interesting internet presence, man.
2:09:01
SPEAKER_00: Cause he does occasionally step in it.
2:09:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he got all of basically the entire humanities, uh,
2:09:09
SPEAKER_00: uh, whatever you want to call it, academic, academic world against them last year.
2:09:13
SPEAKER_00: Cause he said he'd never read Borges and, uh, and, uh, the pylon was incredible.
2:09:19
SPEAKER_00: That's all he had to do.
2:09:21
SPEAKER_00: I had to take notes from this guy.
2:09:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:09:26
SPEAKER_00: He didn't even, he didn't even diss Borges.
2:09:28
SPEAKER_00: He's just like, I never really read it.
2:09:30
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's like, it was like insane.
2:09:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:09:34
SPEAKER_01: So Bruce sucks.
2:09:35
SPEAKER_01: Fuck your mad lines, bro.
2:09:37
SPEAKER_01: You're like,
2:09:37
SPEAKER_01: What?
2:09:38
SPEAKER_01: Oh, man.
2:09:39
SPEAKER_03: I'm getting tingly just thinking about it.
2:09:42
SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's so good.
2:09:43
SPEAKER_01: Fisto and I are not, you know, because we straddle the sides, you know?
2:09:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, ultimately, we are anarchs here on this podcast, right?
2:09:53
SPEAKER_01: That's how I think of myself, yeah.
2:09:55
SPEAKER_01: I don't like anybody.
2:09:57
SPEAKER_01: Like, if you try to tell me what to do, I fucking hate you.
2:09:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm one of those guys that if I lived in a fascist dictatorship,
2:10:05
SPEAKER_01: I would be Roberto Boliano and I'd be a communist.
2:10:08
SPEAKER_01: And if I lived under communism, I would be a fascist.
2:10:11
SPEAKER_01: And it's just how it is.
2:10:12
SPEAKER_01: I can't – I despise anybody that tries to put –
2:10:21
SPEAKER_01: make our lives mundane, you know, to profane our, our artistic freedom.
2:10:26
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
2:10:27
SPEAKER_01: So you're my enemy that if you're that person,
2:10:29
SPEAKER_01: so I,
2:10:30
SPEAKER_01: I've made enemies on all sides,
2:10:31
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:10:32
SPEAKER_01: like I've joked,
2:10:33
SPEAKER_01: we've joked around here.
2:10:34
SPEAKER_01: We've been called, well, what is it?
2:10:35
SPEAKER_01: We've been called communists.
2:10:37
SPEAKER_01: We've been called fascists.
2:10:38
SPEAKER_01: We've been called volcano demon worship volcano.
2:10:42
SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
2:10:43
SPEAKER_03: Volcano Jew demon lovers.
2:10:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:10:46
SPEAKER_01: I've been called an anti-Semite and a Jew-loving volcano demon lover.
2:10:53
SPEAKER_00: Wait, volcano lover?
2:10:55
SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
2:10:55
SPEAKER_00: That's a new one.
2:10:56
SPEAKER_01: Something to do with paganism.
2:10:58
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
2:10:59
SPEAKER_00: I've gotten the pagan charge.
2:11:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:11:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:11:02
SPEAKER_01: I get, I get basically blocked like once a day, you know?
2:11:05
SPEAKER_00: And,
2:11:06
SPEAKER_01: um,
2:11:06
SPEAKER_01: if you want to like spaz out my sub stack subscriptions,
2:11:09
SPEAKER_01: go up and down all the time,
2:11:10
SPEAKER_01: because sometimes I just get in a fucking mood and I just want to post them.
2:11:12
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
2:11:13
SPEAKER_01: Everybody.
2:11:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:11:13
SPEAKER_01: Hey man.
2:11:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, you know what?
2:11:15
SPEAKER_01: Like I'll post something.
2:11:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm,
2:11:18
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, go ahead.
2:11:19
SPEAKER_01: You do it too, man.
2:11:20
SPEAKER_03: Oh, absolutely.
2:11:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, without hesitation.
2:11:22
SPEAKER_03: Look,
2:11:23
SPEAKER_03: when somebody brings up,
2:11:24
SPEAKER_03: so so-and-so said such-and-such,
2:11:25
SPEAKER_03: and it elicited the mob upon him,
2:11:28
SPEAKER_03: I lean forward and take notes.
2:11:29
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, okay.
2:11:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, how do you do that?
2:11:32
SPEAKER_03: Okay, and he said, what specific words?
2:11:34
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
2:11:35
SPEAKER_03: Who did?
2:11:36
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
2:11:36
SPEAKER_03: So, but I mean, like, you know, I was going to say, speaking of losing subscribers.
2:11:41
SPEAKER_03: So like this, you know, being on something like Substack is new for me.
2:11:44
SPEAKER_03: I missed Twitter.
2:11:45
SPEAKER_03: I never did it.
2:11:46
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I don't know how any of this stuff works.
2:11:48
SPEAKER_03: It's all new to me.
2:11:50
SPEAKER_03: But I posted an essay last week where I mentioned,
2:11:53
SPEAKER_03: I talked a little bit about Genghis Khan and I lost five subscribers.
2:11:56
SPEAKER_03: That's like the greatest drop I've ever experienced.
2:11:59
SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, for the glory of the great Khan.
2:12:01
SPEAKER_03: Fine.
2:12:02
SPEAKER_03: Perfect.
2:12:02
SPEAKER_03: If you don't like Genghis Khan, great.
2:12:04
SPEAKER_03: I hope he comes back at the end of days and eats you alive.
2:12:06
SPEAKER_03: I'm perfectly fine with this.
2:12:09
SPEAKER_03: You know,
2:12:10
SPEAKER_03: I am now going to be Khan maxing for the next,
2:12:12
SPEAKER_03: like,
2:12:13
SPEAKER_03: month and a half because it pissed off one person.
2:12:17
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I post what I think is obvious bait, like my little Myers-Briggs INTP thing, you know?
2:12:25
SPEAKER_01: And, like,
2:12:26
SPEAKER_01: Nobody takes it.
2:12:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh, come on.
2:12:28
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to argue with you.
2:12:32
SPEAKER_01: My feminist bait was good.
2:12:33
SPEAKER_01: I did attract a good one on that one.
2:12:35
SPEAKER_03: It's like they say most of our lives are lived in mundane bait,
2:12:38
SPEAKER_03: but then every so often we step into the divine bait.
2:12:41
SPEAKER_01: And then time expands and becomes larger.
2:12:46
SPEAKER_01: I was expecting more crap for loving Harry Potter.
2:12:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, me too.
2:12:52
SPEAKER_01: That was really surprising.
2:12:55
SPEAKER_00: You never know.
2:12:56
SPEAKER_00: You can never predict this stuff, man.
2:12:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're right.
2:12:58
SPEAKER_00: It's really hard.
2:12:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to post a picture of my wand that I bought in Orlando.
2:13:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a Harry Potter dude at all.
2:13:05
SPEAKER_01: I've actually never read the novels,
2:13:07
SPEAKER_01: and I just watched the movies for the first time last year because my daughter has
2:13:10
SPEAKER_01: gone into him.
2:13:11
SPEAKER_01: and i was watching with my daughter and i was like oh these are actually pretty
2:13:13
SPEAKER_01: good i can see why they are pretty good you know and uh yeah i took her to for last
2:13:18
SPEAKER_01: christmas exactly this time last year i took her to orlando studios and we did the
2:13:22
SPEAKER_01: whole harry potter thing and i was just there man yeah i grew up poor right so when
2:13:27
SPEAKER_01: we went to disneyland when i was a little kid we never got right you know me and my
2:13:30
SPEAKER_01: brother my mom's like i can't afford this i'm sorry you get a balloon and like a
2:13:34
SPEAKER_01: churro or something right
2:13:36
SPEAKER_01: So now that I'm not rich by any means,
2:13:39
SPEAKER_01: but I have more money to spend than my parents did,
2:13:42
SPEAKER_01: I spoil my kids.
2:13:43
SPEAKER_01: So we went out all that.
2:13:44
SPEAKER_01: I wore my Gryffindor sweater hoodie that I bought.
2:13:46
SPEAKER_01: And we bought the wands that do crap around the park and stuff.
2:13:50
SPEAKER_01: And I bought my Sirius Black wand.
2:13:52
SPEAKER_01: And she got her Ravenclaw stuff.
2:13:55
SPEAKER_01: And it's just fun to hang out with the kids.
2:13:57
SPEAKER_01: Have you gone to the Sirius Black part yet, Fisto?
2:14:00
SPEAKER_01: He's the best character in this.
2:14:01
SPEAKER_03: No, not yet.
2:14:02
SPEAKER_03: So we've watched just the first two movies.
2:14:03
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
2:14:03
SPEAKER_01: The third movie is where it clicks, man.
2:14:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:14:07
SPEAKER_03: That's probably going to be this weekend, either this week or this weekend.
2:14:09
SPEAKER_00: They're Christmas movies, man.
2:14:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
2:14:13
SPEAKER_03: It's the spirit of the season.
2:14:15
SPEAKER_03: We'll knock it up loud.
2:14:16
SPEAKER_03: The thing that got me where it clicked, I saw Sorcerer's Stone ages ago, and I don't remember it at all.
2:14:24
SPEAKER_03: But where it clicked for me is like – I mean all the magic stuff, it's funny.
2:14:27
SPEAKER_03: A lot of it is just humor.
2:14:29
SPEAKER_03: And like in the second movie when he pulls a literal sword out of a hat,
2:14:32
SPEAKER_03: I was like,
2:14:33
SPEAKER_03: oh,
2:14:33
SPEAKER_03: that's just a really big wizard joke.
2:14:34
SPEAKER_03: That's hilarious.
2:14:36
SPEAKER_03: That's fantastic.
2:14:36
SPEAKER_03: Like that's just funny.
2:14:37
SPEAKER_03: But where it clicked for me that,
2:14:40
SPEAKER_03: oh,
2:14:41
SPEAKER_03: shit,
2:14:41
SPEAKER_03: this is the real deal is at the end where they're passing out the points or
2:14:45
SPEAKER_03: whatever and then Dumbledore tells that kid,
2:14:47
SPEAKER_03: it takes a lot to stand up to your enemies but even more to stand up to your friends.
2:14:51
SPEAKER_03: And I was like, that's some Bonhoeffer shit right there.
2:14:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's go.
2:14:54
SPEAKER_03: All right.
2:14:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
2:14:55
SPEAKER_03: You know, and I was like, this is good stuff.
2:14:57
SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm going to show my kids this.
2:14:59
SPEAKER_00: No, I think, I think thematically, I think thematically it is pretty good for kids from what I've seen.
2:15:05
SPEAKER_00: It's like,
2:15:05
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:15:05
SPEAKER_00: it encourages,
2:15:06
SPEAKER_00: it encourages like courage and individuality and sort of standing up for the right thing.
2:15:11
SPEAKER_03: And yeah, it's mystical, you know, all that.
2:15:14
SPEAKER_03: I mean, come on, we're talking about, you know, Santa Claus.
2:15:15
SPEAKER_03: All right.
2:15:16
SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, right.
2:15:17
SPEAKER_03: Harry Potter for real?
2:15:18
SPEAKER_03: Well, do you want the answer now or not?
2:15:20
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:15:22
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
2:15:22
SPEAKER_01: I think I commented on your post.
2:15:26
SPEAKER_01: I was like, just don't be autistic about it.
2:15:29
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
2:15:30
SPEAKER_01: Because when people go, oh, well, the magic makes no sense.
2:15:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, well, no, it doesn't make any sense.
2:15:35
SPEAKER_01: It's stupid.
2:15:35
SPEAKER_01: Of course it's stupid.
2:15:36
SPEAKER_01: But it's not about the magic system or whatever, nerd.
2:15:39
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:15:41
SPEAKER_03: You're watching a feature film beamed across radio waves into your living room and
2:15:46
SPEAKER_03: you're yelling about magic.
2:15:47
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:15:48
SPEAKER_01: It's about three friends going through some trials for children to grow up with children.
2:15:54
SPEAKER_01: It makes perfect sense.
2:15:55
SPEAKER_01: Chocolate frogs that come alive and move around.
2:15:57
SPEAKER_01: That's cool, man.
2:15:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
2:15:59
SPEAKER_01: Why not?
2:15:59
SPEAKER_01: Just vibe with it, dude.
2:16:00
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
2:16:02
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that's part of the fun.
2:16:06
SPEAKER_01: For all its ills, the internet can lead to amazing things like us talking right now.
2:16:10
SPEAKER_01: And you sharing your podcast and I'm looking forward to it actually.
2:16:13
SPEAKER_01: That's, I knew you were doing a new podcast.
2:16:16
SPEAKER_01: I heard it on the last episode of art of darkness.
2:16:18
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the five preview thing you guys did.
2:16:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I, uh,
2:16:25
SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, I got excited about that.
2:16:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh, I need another freaking podcast.
2:16:29
SPEAKER_01: So it's great that Art of Darkness is still going, you know.
2:16:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:16:32
SPEAKER_01: And I like the new co-host they picked.
2:16:34
SPEAKER_01: She did that fantastic Aleister Crowley episode.
2:16:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:16:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:16:39
SPEAKER_00: Well, no.
2:16:39
SPEAKER_00: So Abby, that's a different person.
2:16:42
SPEAKER_00: So Abby was on the Roberto Bolaño episode.
2:16:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's my other favorite episode.
2:16:47
SPEAKER_00: Alfred Hitchcock episode.
2:16:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
2:16:49
SPEAKER_01: I love the,
2:16:50
SPEAKER_01: so a quick aside,
2:16:52
SPEAKER_01: I,
2:16:52
SPEAKER_01: before listening to you guys do the Roberto Bolliano episode,
2:16:55
SPEAKER_01: I avoided Latin American literature with a passion.
2:16:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:16:59
SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
2:17:00
SPEAKER_01: I think I was, I think I was exposed to it.
2:17:02
SPEAKER_01: Like the,
2:17:03
SPEAKER_01: some,
2:17:03
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:17:04
SPEAKER_01: I just,
2:17:05
SPEAKER_01: whenever I thought American Latin American fiction,
2:17:07
SPEAKER_01: I thought like,
2:17:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:17:09
SPEAKER_01: go into Abolita's house and the magic mangoes and shit like that.
2:17:13
SPEAKER_01: And just really annoying stuff.
2:17:14
SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to deal with it.
2:17:15
SPEAKER_01: I was like, I don't want to deal with this stuff.
2:17:16
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:17:16
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:17:17
SPEAKER_01: And then you guys did Roberto Bolano.
2:17:19
SPEAKER_01: I was like, let me read this.
2:17:20
SPEAKER_01: And then now he's probably in the top three of my favorite authors.
2:17:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
2:17:25
SPEAKER_01: I read,
2:17:26
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:17:26
SPEAKER_01: as soon as I finished the episode,
2:17:28
SPEAKER_01: I read,
2:17:28
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:17:29
SPEAKER_01: the Savage Detectives,
2:17:30
SPEAKER_01: which,
2:17:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
2:17:30
SPEAKER_01: it's fantastic.
2:17:32
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh, that's my life growing up.
2:17:34
SPEAKER_01: And then I'm an infer realist, guys.
2:17:37
SPEAKER_01: Get ready for it.
2:17:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:17:40
SPEAKER_01: two six six six or whatever i don't know the proper way of calling it is that
2:17:44
SPEAKER_01: mind-blowing you know yes yes it's just like it's such a what's the darkest one of
2:17:50
SPEAKER_01: the darkest novels i've ever read is that chapter is motherfucker dude that like
2:17:55
SPEAKER_01: depressed me like you can't get more depressing than that chapter in that novel but
2:17:59
SPEAKER_01: then it's funny also
2:18:00
SPEAKER_00: you know yeah it is it is his Bolaño's like Bolaño's sort of like the the register
2:18:07
SPEAKER_00: he writes at is fucking amazing like it is it's funny and sort of you know it's
2:18:13
SPEAKER_00: sort of sloppy at times almost you know not sloppy but less like thrown together
2:18:18
SPEAKER_00: feeling sometimes but man yeah it's I just read not too long ago and I was on uh I
2:18:24
SPEAKER_00: was on uh Rare Candy's Game of Fiction episode talking about uh Bye Night in Chewie
2:18:29
SPEAKER_01: yeah
2:18:29
SPEAKER_01: I bought it because of that episode.
2:18:31
SPEAKER_01: It's sitting right now.
2:18:32
SPEAKER_00: It's good, man.
2:18:33
SPEAKER_01: It's fucking good.
2:18:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
2:18:35
SPEAKER_01: As soon as I'm done with Murakami, I'm going to move on to that one.
2:18:40
SPEAKER_01: I picked that one up too.
2:18:43
SPEAKER_01: I've read Cowboy Graves, which is a short story collection.
2:18:46
SPEAKER_01: I haven't read Amulet.
2:18:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm missing a few.
2:18:49
SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to savor all of them.
2:18:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a few I haven't read.
2:18:53
SPEAKER_00: I've read Savage Detectives 2666 and By Night in Chile.
2:18:58
SPEAKER_00: That's the ones I've read.
2:18:59
SPEAKER_01: They've all been amazing.
2:19:01
SPEAKER_01: I've read Borges after Boleano.
2:19:05
SPEAKER_01: That's really because of my friend Neil from Pylon Press.
2:19:07
SPEAKER_01: He's a Borges guy because he's Argentinian.
2:19:10
SPEAKER_01: Basically, he would slap me if I said I didn't like Borges.
2:19:15
SPEAKER_01: He'd fly from France over to my house.
2:19:18
SPEAKER_01: You would deserve it.
2:19:19
SPEAKER_03: He would drop that slap from Orbit.
2:19:21
SPEAKER_01: Because whenever he's on the podcast, he's been on twice or three times now.
2:19:25
SPEAKER_01: I just, I don't even talk because I feel stupid.
2:19:28
SPEAKER_01: He was on there.
2:19:30
SPEAKER_01: He's like, just talk, Neil.
2:19:31
SPEAKER_01: He just makes you feel retarded.
2:19:32
SPEAKER_01: You're like, I know what you're talking about.
2:19:35
SPEAKER_00: Everybody needs that friend.
2:19:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:19:37
SPEAKER_01: But so you got your podcast coming up.
2:19:39
SPEAKER_01: You have another novel coming up, which sounds fantastic.
2:19:41
SPEAKER_01: It's about sewers in Detroit, right?
2:19:43
SPEAKER_00: It is.
2:19:44
SPEAKER_00: Largely.
2:19:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:19:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had one of my jobs.
2:19:49
SPEAKER_00: I still sort of have it, but I've sort of switched positions.
2:19:52
SPEAKER_00: I spent a lot of time in the sewers of Detroit.
2:19:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh.
2:19:56
SPEAKER_00: I at least got this novel out of it.
2:19:58
SPEAKER_00: So it's a sort of a mind bender, uh, cosmic blue collar, cosmic horrors set underground.
2:20:05
SPEAKER_00: So, um, check out for that.
2:20:07
SPEAKER_00: The urban dark, that'll be out at some point.
2:20:09
SPEAKER_00: The first chapter of it is on my sub stack actually.
2:20:14
SPEAKER_03: Alex, Alex, let's make sure we link that.
2:20:16
SPEAKER_03: Um,
2:20:17
SPEAKER_03: I grew up in Cleveland, so anything about Detroit, I'm like, oh, that's kind of hometown.
2:20:23
SPEAKER_00: Cleveland and Detroit have very similar vibes, for sure.
2:20:27
SPEAKER_03: Massive losers.
2:20:28
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm just kidding.
2:20:31
SPEAKER_01: The most northern city I've ever been to is Pittsburgh.
2:20:34
SPEAKER_03: oh fuck pittsburgh man fine it's fine we're gonna have the prince of pittsburgh on
2:20:41
SPEAKER_01: this podcast too so really i'm gonna push the fuck out of him yeah who's the prince
2:20:45
SPEAKER_01: of pittsburgh oh he's uh that's what i call him he's a fantasy writer named shiler
2:20:50
SPEAKER_01: hernstrom he's one of the best sword and sorcery kind of like metaphysical fantasy
2:20:54
SPEAKER_01: writing he's kind of big in that scene uh he's one of the pylon guys and uh
2:20:59
SPEAKER_01: I drove up to Pittsburgh to hang out with him,
2:21:01
SPEAKER_01: and he just showed me around,
2:21:03
SPEAKER_01: so I kept on calling him the Prince of Pittsburgh because he's from Pittsburgh.
2:21:06
SPEAKER_01: Nice.
2:21:07
SPEAKER_03: Cool, man.
2:21:08
SPEAKER_03: Man, we got to have a decennious review meetup in Pittsburgh or something.
2:21:12
SPEAKER_03: Just like a real Midwest shithole town.
2:21:14
SPEAKER_03: No, Youngstown.
2:21:15
SPEAKER_03: That's where we'll do it.
2:21:16
SPEAKER_03: We'll do it in Youngstown.
2:21:17
SPEAKER_01: Andy Warhol is from Pittsburgh, okay?
2:21:19
SPEAKER_01: So there's some cool elements here.
2:21:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:21:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we got to pick one of those cities so like one of us gets shot.
2:21:24
SPEAKER_01: That's what you guys never did on Art of Darkness.
2:21:27
SPEAKER_01: Warhol.
2:21:28
SPEAKER_00: What's that?
2:21:28
SPEAKER_00: Warhol.
2:21:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I bet I wouldn't be surprised if Kevin plans on doing a Warhol episode this year.
2:21:35
SPEAKER_00: I know we had talked about it a lot.
2:21:36
SPEAKER_01: He's definitely up there.
2:21:37
SPEAKER_01: The Bowie episode is great.
2:21:38
SPEAKER_01: I know everything about Bowie already.
2:21:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
2:21:42
SPEAKER_01: All right, so we covered that.
2:21:44
SPEAKER_01: We got that.
2:21:45
SPEAKER_01: So last question.
2:21:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay, what is your favorite tarot card, man?
2:21:50
SPEAKER_00: Which one speaks to you?
2:21:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, so here's the part of how I think about tarot.
2:21:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I have a favorite.
2:21:59
SPEAKER_00: There's ones that are more and less interesting,
2:22:01
SPEAKER_00: but the one thing I think about a lot is trying to figure out what major arcana
2:22:07
SPEAKER_00: card sort of encapsulates the moment I'm in in my life.
2:22:12
SPEAKER_00: And right now that is the star.
2:22:15
SPEAKER_00: The star is all about restoration and growth.
2:22:19
SPEAKER_00: Tom Berg in Meditations on the Tarot says it's about the... The arcanum of the star is about growth.
2:22:26
SPEAKER_00: It's about contemplating the correspondence between principles of biological growth and spiritual growth.
2:22:34
SPEAKER_00: And so...
2:22:35
SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking a lot about that.
2:22:37
SPEAKER_00: It's also about restoring things.
2:22:40
SPEAKER_00: So it's about sort of like the card right before it is the tower has crashed, right?
2:22:44
SPEAKER_00: The tower has been blown apart.
2:22:46
SPEAKER_00: And then the star card is about like how one puts pieces back together,
2:22:51
SPEAKER_00: uses sort of what they've managed to save from the collapse in order to build
2:22:58
SPEAKER_00: something new and hopefully even better.
2:23:01
SPEAKER_00: So I've been meditating on that quite a bit lately.
2:23:04
SPEAKER_01: right interestingly enough i uh did a a spread for like the new year from for
2:23:10
SPEAKER_01: myself and the main card was the star also oh wow yeah yeah interesting and it's it
2:23:18
SPEAKER_01: was very appropriate because i'm
2:23:19
SPEAKER_01: And starting new projects and moving away from old career parts and that kind of stuff.
2:23:26
SPEAKER_03: Makes me wonder if it isn't linked to my students' appreciation of the Hagia Sophia,
2:23:33
SPEAKER_03: which if people don't know,
2:23:35
SPEAKER_03: was rebuilt,
2:23:35
SPEAKER_03: was built in the wake of the Nicarides that had devastated Constantinople.
2:23:39
SPEAKER_03: And it was the greatest church for a thousand years.
2:23:42
SPEAKER_00: yeah yeah yeah fun and that's a place i have actually been to is that is a place
2:23:47
SPEAKER_00: that will it's another place like grand canyon you walk in there and you're like
2:23:51
SPEAKER_00: why i'm i'm crying okay i guess i'm crying now yeah like it's it's really something
2:23:58
SPEAKER_01: yeah there you go yeah well that's wonderful and would you you know if somebody
2:24:01
SPEAKER_01: wants to get into like you know the whole tarot card thing or the whole you know
2:24:06
SPEAKER_01: would you what deck would you recommend the writer white
2:24:10
SPEAKER_00: Rider Waite Smith.
2:24:12
SPEAKER_00: I recommend the Rider Waite Smith for a couple of reasons.
2:24:15
SPEAKER_00: One is it is the first deck,
2:24:19
SPEAKER_00: other than the Solobuska,
2:24:20
SPEAKER_00: which is kind of a cheat,
2:24:21
SPEAKER_00: it's the first deck to have images of people or figures on the Miner Arcana.
2:24:28
SPEAKER_00: I believe that Pamela Coleman Smith created the art in a genuinely visionary state.
2:24:36
SPEAKER_00: And most tarot decks that were created after it are essentially reimaginings of the Rider Waite Smith.
2:24:46
SPEAKER_00: And if you pick up a book on the tarot, it's probably talking about the Rider-Waite-Smith.
2:24:51
SPEAKER_00: So it's the most accessible because there's the most reference material associated with it.
2:24:57
SPEAKER_00: So to me, the Rider-Waite-Smith is definitely the best place to start.
2:25:02
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a personal bias, but that's definitely my recommendation.
2:25:06
SPEAKER_01: All right.
2:25:08
SPEAKER_01: All right, guys.
2:25:09
SPEAKER_01: So Brad, thank you for coming on.
2:25:10
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, man.
2:25:11
SPEAKER_00: This is great.
2:25:12
SPEAKER_01: It was a great conversation.
2:25:13
SPEAKER_01: Real pleasure.
2:25:14
SPEAKER_01: You're always welcome back,
2:25:15
SPEAKER_01: and you're definitely going to be invited back when we do our younger episode.
2:25:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's do it, man.
2:25:20
SPEAKER_00: That'd be awesome.
2:25:21
SPEAKER_01: Spring or something.
2:25:22
SPEAKER_01: And then we'll definitely be listeners of you guys' new podcast and still listeners
2:25:27
SPEAKER_01: of Art of Darkness still.
2:25:28
SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
2:25:29
SPEAKER_01: For all the listeners back home right now,
2:25:32
SPEAKER_01: if you haven't listened to Art of Darkness,
2:25:35
SPEAKER_01: go to their YouTube or their Spotify or they're everywhere and just pick a random
2:25:40
SPEAKER_01: episode that interests you.
2:25:41
SPEAKER_01: Find an artist you like and you're going to listen to all of them because that's what I did.
2:25:45
SPEAKER_01: I just went through the entire discussion.
2:25:47
SPEAKER_00: I went through the entire discussion.
2:25:48
SPEAKER_00: That's awesome, man.
2:25:49
SPEAKER_00: Deal with it.
2:25:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:25:50
SPEAKER_01: Read Brad's book, House of Sleep.
2:25:52
SPEAKER_01: Pick up Brad's new book when it comes out.
2:25:55
SPEAKER_01: It's about, you know, tunnels and stuff.
2:25:57
SPEAKER_01: Actually, you know, when you first described it, it made me think of the novel V by Pynchon.
2:26:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:26:03
SPEAKER_01: The rats in the sewers and the...
2:26:06
SPEAKER_00: yeah there's a little bit of that in there i think yeah yeah that's the kind of
2:26:10
SPEAKER_01: vibe that steward part um and uh pick up the book and support all all the guys that
2:26:16
SPEAKER_01: do stuff you know that's what we're doing we're doing stuff outside the mainstream
2:26:19
SPEAKER_01: okay and then we're just ordinary dudes out here uh trying to
2:26:24
SPEAKER_01: tap into the extraordinary all right that's what we're doing so good night guys and
2:26:29
SPEAKER_01: uh for every listener please like share subscribe and all the fun boring you know
2:26:34
SPEAKER_01: stuff because that helps us spread the word it helps us get brad's books out to
2:26:39
SPEAKER_01: more listeners and that's the whole point right if you can't do any if you can't
2:26:43
SPEAKER_01: throw money our way or you know brad's way
2:26:45
SPEAKER_01: uh throw us some likes and some shares and get you know get out out there so we can
2:26:49
SPEAKER_01: get those patrons to help out okay spread the christmas spirit spread the christmas
2:26:53
SPEAKER_01: joy folks this is gonna be our last episode before christmas right so merry
2:26:57
SPEAKER_03: christmas guys be sure to slap a santa hat on that avatar all right spread the
2:27:02
SPEAKER_01: cheer and have a good time yeah and all the stories about santa are true they're
2:27:07
SPEAKER_01: all true lies okay especially the lies especially the lies all right good night
2:27:12
SPEAKER_01: guys thanks brad one more time thank you so much thank you