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Episode 66—Brin-Jonathan Butler on the Risk of Chess, Obsession with Obsessives, and the Blessing of Struggle
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Brin-Jonathan Butler (@brinicio on Twitter), a freelance writer and author, returns! “Obsession has always fascinated me, whether it’s more a dance with your virtues or your demons,” Butler says. Hey, hey, it’s The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world’s best artists—leaders in narrative journalism, essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film—and tease our their stories, tips, and tricks and how you can apply those tools to your own work. I’m your host @BrendanOMeara, Brendan O’Meara in real life. IMO, this show is at its best when you, the listener, get to hang out and feel like your listening to a couple of CNFers talk shop over coffee or beer or absinthe, though that could take a turn for the weird. That’s what happens when you’ve got someone like Brin-Jonathan Butler back on the podcast. This is his third rodeo at CNF HQ. He sent me a DM on Twitter and said, “We should another show, no?” And I said, “Um…two words, hell yes!” And then he said, “Awesome.” So we got it done. Brin’s got a new book coming out in a year titled “Heavy Lies the Crown” and it’s about chess. We talk about how this book came to pass, how he went about navigating a world that was quite foreign to him, and hammering out a book from start to finish, oh, in about six months. For other insights into writing a book like your ass is on fire, go listen to episode 52 New York Times writer Joe Drape. Brin also talks about how he ensures high profile people have a good interview, the importance of moving around and taking walks, the mental ballet of conning yourself into finishing art. If you can, leave a nice review on iTunes. They help so much, and, simply put, they're validating and let me know that I should keep going with the show. Thanks!
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Support
00:00:00
Speaker
Support for the Creative Nonfiction podcast comes from the third annual Hippocamp, a conference for creative nonfiction writers. It starts today, September 8th, and goes through Sunday, September 10th. What are you waiting for? Create, share, live. I know what you're waiting for. It's the riff.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hey, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world's best artists, as in leaders in narrative journalism, essay, memoir, radio and documentary film, and tease out their stories, tips and tricks, and how you can apply those tools to your own work. I'm your host at Brendan O'Mara, Brendan O'Mara in real life. IMO.
00:00:50
Speaker
This show is at its best when you, the listener, get to hang out and feel like you're listening to a couple of CNF-ers talk shop over coffee or beer or absinthe, though that could take a turn for the weird.
Bryn Jonathan Butler's Chess Journey
00:01:04
Speaker
That's what happens when you've got someone like Bryn Jonathan Butler back on the podcast.
00:01:09
Speaker
This is his third rodeo at CNF HQ. He sent me a DM on Twitter and said, we should do another show, no? And I said, um, two words. Hell yes. And then he said, awesome. So we got it done. Brin's got a new book coming out in a year that'll publish around Halloween.
00:01:30
Speaker
2018, Heavy Lies the Crown, and it's about chess of all things. We talk about how this book came to pass, how we went about navigating a world that was quite foreign to him, and hammering out a book from start to finish in about 6 months.
00:01:48
Speaker
For other insights into writing a book like your ass is on fire, go listen to episode 52 with New York Times writer Joe Drape. But back to Bryn. Bryn also talks about how he ensures high profile people have a good interview, the importance of moving around and taking walks, and the mental ballet of conning yourself into finishing works of art.
00:02:10
Speaker
If you're coming to this for the first time, I always like to ask people to leave ratings and reviews on iTunes, like this nice one from Kathy Renee. She said, quote, just finished number 60 with Lee Guttkind, longtime reader of the magazine, but I had never heard him speak until now. Thanks, Brendan, end quote. Thank you, Kathy. Let's do the show.
00:02:35
Speaker
I think it was the profile in the New York Times that ran a little over a year ago.
00:02:40
Speaker
And we'll talk about that too, because there's some cool things in there. But it was in there that you were writing a chess book for Simon and Schuster. I'm like, oh, that's cool. And then I would see some tweets come up every now and again from what you're working on. And so chess is something that's always fascinated me. I know how the pieces move, but that's kind of the essential, essentially all I know about the game. So how did you become so drawn to chess, enough so to want to write a book about it?
00:03:11
Speaker
Well, I didn't want to write a book about it. I had an editor from Simon and Schuster reach out to me because in some interview, like we're doing, I mentioned that when I dropped out of high school, my first harebrained idea was to hustle chests to try to make a living. And so the equivalent of Washington Square Park in Vancouver was the art gallery. That's where all the best hustlers played.
00:03:41
Speaker
kind of developed a bit of an addiction for what's called bullet chess. Speed chess by definition is five-minute games or under where you have five minutes on each clock and if you either beat your opponent or if their clock runs out, whoever's clock runs out loses. So the one-minute games are the kind of frenetic
00:04:03
Speaker
It just looks like an epileptic fit on a board with how fast people are moving the pieces and slapping the clock. And I just fell in love with it. It was just so intense, like a, like a knife fight intellectually with, with opponents. So I just mentioned in passing that I, I gave that a crack for a summer. I don't think I ever made more than 40 or $50 in a day hustling tourists. Um, and certainly players who are any stronger.
00:04:32
Speaker
Uh, not any stronger than just a total novice, but I got pretty good at that one discipline, but it's sort of like comparing the hundred meter dashed or running a marathon in terms of what classic chess is. So they're very separate disciplines. So this editor just reached out and just said, I noticed you had this background in chess. Of course, you know that the world chess championships are playing in your backyard in New York. And I had absolutely no idea.
00:04:58
Speaker
that they were being played in New York. And I said, of course they are. And he said, what about covering that as a book? And I said, absolutely. So there was never any inquisition about what in fact was my history with chess, which was totally limited to just this one summer, more or less. And I guess the other thing that has figured heavily in the composition of the book was I was
00:05:29
Speaker
very obsessed with Bobby Fisher's story. I found it incredibly compelling. There's a lot of similar coordinates to JD Salinger's disappearance at the top of his game. Him going crazy in the sense of these bookends of the Cold War gives us two major American symbolic moments of victory. The Apollo moon landing and Bobby Fisher beating Boris Spassky, which was watched by
00:05:58
Speaker
It's up there in the top 10 most watched events in human history at that time. Then you had 9-11, Fisher called into a radio station in the Philippines cheering on terrorism as the towers were on fire and saying, good, I hope America does get its head kicked in. It deserves it. What goes around comes around, and I hope America gets wiped out, which was kind of the start of George Bush really dialing up the pressure.
00:06:28
Speaker
pursuing him as a fugitive from justice for coming out of retirement in the early 90s to play a game where he won a $5 million contest in a rematch against Spassky. And one of the places that Fisher stayed was in Budapest, where my mother is from. And it turns out where his biological father was born also. And so in the late 90s, when I first went to Europe, that was a place that I went to sort of see if I could
00:06:55
Speaker
sniff them out somewhere because I knew he liked Japanese restaurants and he loved the, the spas that are over there. There's a lot of, um, saunas and that kind of thing is a big part of Hungarian culture at Eastern European culture. And, and so I was just trying to find him. I just was so intrigued why he was turning down multimillion dollar offers to come back and play anybody really, but he just preferred to disappear.
00:07:24
Speaker
at the age of 20, you know, 28 was when he left in 1972. He never played another competitive game after showing up on the Joni Carson show and playing a goofy game or a goofy game against Bob Hope, I think it was. And that was it. So from there, I just was off and running with the book. I showed up at the tournament on 36 hours after Trump was elected. That was the backdrop for the tournament. Putin was sending in
00:07:54
Speaker
political, top-level political officials to support the Russian challenger at the tournament who was competing against the top player in the world, Magnus Carlsen. It was just completely surreal, like being in the games room of the Titanic after it struck the iceberg. Just nobody gave a shit. They just like, we're playing chess.
00:08:14
Speaker
So that's how it started. Wow. Were you at all, or you must have been on some level, how surprised were you that chess as a game had just so much personal overlap for you as you dove deeper into the project as you found that where your mother was from is also where Bobby Fischer would
00:08:35
Speaker
was part of his travels and so forth. How did you process that as you were learning how chess was sort of woven into your life?
The Obsessive Nature of Chess
00:08:46
Speaker
I think the big thing that jumped out at me was I'm just fascinated by subcultures and by individuals who really are forced through obsession. Obsession is something that's always intrigued me. And whether it's more a dance with your virtues or your demons and chess
00:09:05
Speaker
chess is sort of known in the culture as this expression of like 1500 years after it was invented. What is it? Is it an art form? Is it science? Is it math? What's this application off the chess board? Nobody really agrees what it is. It was invented right around the time of Islam and almost immediately people were banning it because they saw how addictive it was. 600 million people do it.
00:09:33
Speaker
30 people can make a living off it. Do you want your kid to do that instead of getting an Ivy League education if they have that kind of capacity intellectually? I don't know. I mean, it's a hard way to make a living. And it's a struggle and a grind and an insular community where people basically buy into a make believe battlefield for supremacy. There's
00:09:59
Speaker
a kind of bloodlust to it that when you hear people like Bobby Fischer go on Dick Cavett and say, the equivalent to a home run in chess is breaking a man's ego. And he goes a little further to say, it's more satisfying to watch your opponent cave in than it is to murder them. So I'm like, whoa, we're somewhere. I don't know if anybody has really mined this vein of this degree of sadism.
00:10:28
Speaker
that's involved with chess. And for me, anyway, it was even darker. The more and more I started researching, I bought about 35 books on chess, you know, specific to chess, but also its history, a lot of its practitioners and that kind of thing. And it was just darker than anything I'd seen in boxing, which has killed a thousand people in the 20th century, people training or fighting or sparring.
00:10:55
Speaker
And chess has a very long line of people that met very scary cautionary tale endings in asylums, playing God on the chessboard and winning, by the way. Bobby Fischer cheering on 9-11 after being a Cold War hero. Before him in the United States, our best chess player was Paul Morphy, who died in the bathtub surrounded by women's shoes.
00:11:23
Speaker
There was just, it was so juicy a subject. If you pulled away from just studying games on the board or chess theory and just look at the characters, it was so rich. It was just very challenging. You know, I think what drives a good, a good story is sort of most readers want to know what happens next. And chess, an average chess game at the world championships was taking about five or six hours, sometimes seven hours.
00:11:52
Speaker
It's like watching Andy Warhol's Empire State Building movie or The Kiss. The whole tournament was like 80 hours of chess of two guys sitting, staring at each other. I don't know beyond like watching your child sleep when you spend that much time staring at a person not doing anything beyond moving pieces on a board. So there was a lot of just fascination for me.
00:12:21
Speaker
trying to understand it as a subculture rather than an exploration of the meaning of games played on the board and trying to offer that to readers. I wanted to write a book about chess for people that didn't know anything about chess and make it compelling as well as offering some portraits of people that would be compelling for people who've given their lives to chess.
00:12:44
Speaker
For people at the top level, they're starting at five or six and they're giving 12, 14 hours a day to this for the rest of their lives. It's an obsession that I find few parallels with in any kind of human endeavor intellectually of art, science, math. It's very, very strange. And once your four or five moves into a game, you're dealing with literally billions of possibilities on the board.
00:13:12
Speaker
It's bottomless. The ocean floor sinks to infinity. There are more possibilities on a chessboard than there are atoms in the galaxy. And so these guys are on a quest that can have no completion in a way. And it seems to bump into things that were really interesting, such as by gender, why is chess segregated? Why 1997 was the biggest event in internet history.
00:13:40
Speaker
when a computer was able to beat the top chess player in the world, Gary Kasparov. That kind of melted down the internet for a little while. So there was just a lot of eccentricity in it that really drew me to it, which I think I've always been interested in portraits of eccentric people haunted by their obsessions. So it was just taking that to an even further degree than I think I've ever done in all of my journalism with
00:14:09
Speaker
boxing or bullfighting or ghost writing for Lance Armstrong, just some really out there people and none of it really even prepared me for how out there chess was.
00:14:21
Speaker
Did you find that your own obsessions, that you saw your own obsessions reflected in chess, since you're so, you're obsessed to these very, obsessed, drawn to these very obsessive subcultures, like even Ghostwriting for Lance Armstrong, if you're gonna be a Tour de France cyclist, talk about obsessions, chess, boxing, Cuba, did you find that your own obsessions were reflected in this project?
00:14:49
Speaker
Yeah. And not in a nice way. I mean, Lance Armstrong asked me to write for him because he said he read something I wrote and it was the first time he really saw himself in the language. He's like, you know, you, you have this attitude, the way you write, it's kind of how I approach cycling via killer and all this. And I was like, that's not how I see my writing. But, but what they're, where there was an overlap is when I was 24 and traveling, traveling in Europe for a year with a girlfriend,
00:15:18
Speaker
I stumbled into a small town where the apartment we rented had a TV and the Tour de France was on. And I watched Lance Armstrong's face climbing a mountain and I didn't know anything about cycling. You know, Lance, his own term to describe himself was cancer Jesus, which I'd never heard before, which was terrifying and fascinating. But I was watching the look on his face and it reminded me of
00:15:45
Speaker
I did a really stupid thing when I was 14. I was running every morning for boxing at 4 o'clock in the morning. And I noticed there was a marathon. And at that time, we're talking like 1994, marathons were not like a thing the way they are now. You know, where it's something a lot of casual weekend warrior athletes do at that time.
00:16:08
Speaker
It really wasn't a thing. And I just decided, well, I'm running five miles a day. What's the difference to run 26.2? I'll just go a little slower, but I can pace myself for this. So I didn't train. And it was the dumbest thing I've ever done. And after mile six, my mother was showing up at every mile, you know, with her very thick Count Dracula accent saying, Breeny, just stop. Just let's go home. This is terrible. Why are you doing this?
00:16:37
Speaker
And she shows up at mile seven and says the same thing. And then mile eight. And by mile nine, I, I was hitting that wall even before you're supposed to hit the wall at the midway point. And I was just thinking like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna collapse. But I'm so angry that I'm like 20 years younger than the median age of this event.
00:17:02
Speaker
that I told my mother, if you show up again and tell me to stop, I will never speak to you again for the rest of my life. Meet me at the finish line. I have no idea when I'll get there. It could be next week, but I'm going to get there and I'm not going to stop. So just go there. And it'll probably be about three hours from now. And I think I got there in three hours and 56 minutes. But by doing that and learning how many tens of thousands of times I had to con myself from my
00:17:32
Speaker
overwhelming desire to stop and go home and be very upset with myself as a quitter. I was like, I think I could do a fucking novel because maybe it's the same thing. Maybe you have to con your way into finishing a lot of things in life that you're not up for it, but you can find a way to do it anyway. So it gave me a kind of confidence.
00:17:56
Speaker
in a scary way, because as I say, it wasn't pretty what my fuel was to get to that finish line, but I did get there. So there was a certain confidence in like that marine exercise where they throw you in a pool with a blindfold on and you have to find bricks and not drown looking for bricks. That to me is everyday writing. That's not a good day where you're just like, I have to find something good so I can continue
00:18:25
Speaker
laying track down for this train to get to the station, even though I don't know how I'm going to do that. I don't know where this is going. I don't feel up for this. You know, it's never a good day to write. It's as bad as like a good day to quit smoking. And so I, when I saw Lance's face, I recognized, oh, that's what I look like. I look like this maniacal obsessive asshole.
00:18:49
Speaker
who was just driven by self-hatred. Oh, great. This is really beautiful to see. And you see something similar with chess. Their faces are all like ciphers of getting lost in something. Bobby Fischer was looking at a chess board with 100 million people looking over his shoulder. And the only person who could see the end was him.
00:19:15
Speaker
And there's something really beautiful and poetic about that that I get off on when I was in such close proximity to these two geniuses combating one another, trying to compose this gorgeous symphony on the board that nobody can hear but them. It's like Beethoven with the ninth. We all get to hear it. He never did get to hear it. And there's an element of that with chess.
00:19:39
Speaker
And my favorite writer on chess is Harold Schonberg, who was the New York Times music critic. I think this is because it's so musical and yet nobody is like holding Beethoven at gunpoint to compose things. And that's essentially the dynamic that chess players face that as they're trying to compose something with harmony and counterpoint, this elegance with how the pieces are moving.
00:20:04
Speaker
somebody is trying to rig explosives to blow it up across the table from you. So that's a lot of pressure. That's a lot of psychic pressure. And the big drama of it is it's a high wire act where in a way everybody, as much as we want to see something built, we enjoy watching it torn down because we know where a lot of these guys end up. They end up in asylums. That's not
00:20:27
Speaker
especially at the highest level, it's more dangerous the better you are at it for a lot of these guys. So that drama just really drew me in. What types of minds or people did you find in your research that chess tends to attract? Total obsessives. I talked to Stanley Kubrick's wife, who I think is in her mid to late 80s, about Stanley's obsession with chess.
00:20:54
Speaker
I think you can look at his perspective or sort of his orientation as a filmmaker, as a genius with a camera and framing, with his genius strategically with chess. He was always obsessed with Napoleon, who was another junkie at chess, one of the greatest military tacticians in history, who was an awful chess player. Whenever he'd play as generals, he'd get annihilated after putting on some of the greatest battles ever fought. Ben Franklin was another chess obsessive.
00:21:24
Speaker
who was actually a very good chess player. But I mean, throughout history, chess was invented around the same time as Islam. And within 20 years, people were trying to ban it because they saw people playing it couldn't stop. They just dropped everything. And it is a rabbit hole to fall down. There's something about it. I think it draws on something that's similar to the compulsion to write. There's something beautiful about how somebody compared it to marriage that I quite like the analogy because
00:21:54
Speaker
You know, marriage is very simple to understand and it's incomprehensible to solve. And chess is the same way. Any idiot can learn it in 30 seconds and its greatest geniuses can never get anywhere close to solving it. Its possibilities are infinite and you're in the billions, the range of billions within five or six moves. So if you're able to wrap your head around that, if your mind is oriented that way,
00:22:22
Speaker
The ocean's floor just dropping off. That's both intoxicating and very frightening. I compare it in the book to what's called the rapture of the deep, which is what divers refer to the every 10 meters you go below, I think 30 meters. It's equivalent of taking like drinking a martini. And so some of these guys who are going down 300 feet, they are drunk out of their heads.
00:22:49
Speaker
and are hallucinating and feeling serenity like they've never felt. And if they go back up too quickly, they get the bends and they can die, or they can drown down below. And I think there's something similar with what chess players experience trying to get to the bottom of the game. And a game that, as I say, is unsolvable. So it's a very dangerous, troubling pursuit for a certain kind of obsessive person who's just the kind of person that I
00:23:19
Speaker
can't wait to talk to and gain their insights about what drew them in. And when you were talking about the marathon you ran at 14 and that degree of when it's getting really hard and you were baited to quit but didn't, there's
Challenges in Writing and Creative Freedom
00:23:43
Speaker
And then extrapolating that to the idea of writing a novel or some narrative non-fiction, long writing. What is the trap in continuing on something when it might be easier to quit? Or have you ever experienced a project where it probably would have been better to quit and move on to something else? How do you tow that line?
00:24:10
Speaker
If money is on the line and you don't have any other way to pay rent, you're going to hand in the best you can do even if you're not happy with it. I don't know that I've ever been happy with anything I've handed in. I mean, they don't end, but they stop. It's like people's lives. Most people's lives don't end in a very satisfactory way, but everybody stops. There's something about that with writing too.
00:24:40
Speaker
I mean, it's where having an editor that you really trust can be such a magical addition to what you're doing. I mean, it's hard to think of writing as really being collaborative, but I've been very fortunate, never more so than with Glenn Stout at SB Nation, where
00:24:59
Speaker
I knew that I could reach for things that I wasn't able to get to on my own because he was there to help me. He could see what I was going for and I could exhaust myself knowing that I wouldn't get there because while I'd fall asleep, midnight or one o'clock in the morning would give suggestions and offer ideas so that when I woke up in the morning with a little bit more gas,
00:25:25
Speaker
you know, there was some stepping stones in like that raging river to help me get across. And if I was just on my own, I would have never tried because I know that I would have drowned. So I think for writers to find that editor who offers that for you, it just makes you 20 or 30% better than you are on your own. And there's the opposite too, where editors are people that
00:25:52
Speaker
are not interested in where you're trying to go. There's a house mentality of what is supposed to be published at that, whatever that particular place is, that can be very constrictive to your vision and your voice and what you want to say and all of that. But with this project, I was given a pretty long leash by the editor at Simon & Schuster to say,
00:26:20
Speaker
We want you to have fun doing this. We trust you. We want you, you know, what Hunter S. Thompson was doing with the Hells Angels or a lot of other people with nonfiction. We want you to try to do something great with this. And I kept saying, I don't know anything about chess. I don't know how to do this. And they said, well, great. Well, figure it out because you figuring it out is going to take us somewhere new. And we think that no matter where we're going to drop you, you're going to come back with something that's good. So.
00:26:50
Speaker
That's a very benevolent, supportive place to be operating, even when you have absolutely no faith that you're going to succeed. And I also had a very sharp turnaround. I started this in November, not having any contacts in chess, not having any background in the history of the game. So I had to cram 35 books in while reporting a tournament that took a month.
00:27:18
Speaker
while trying to corral 50 people either tangentially or directly associated with chess to talk to me on the record. And chess people are not very easy to talk to. Now, ostensibly, I began the book with the main focus being Magnus Carlsen and his opponent, Sergey Kiryakin, neither of whom would grant me any access to talk to them. So I was kind of like, maybe you want your advance back because they don't want to talk. You know, so it's, uh,
00:27:47
Speaker
It's tricky, but it's also what I think makes the job be as fun as it is, is because you're somewhere new and you're off on an adventure and there's real danger if you fuck up. There's no net under you. Sometimes that can create some vitality and beauty to what you're doing or intensity that shows up on the page and it shows up in
00:28:17
Speaker
how you're meeting these people and I don't know, I just think you just have to trust something that you don't see that you're gonna be able to find it.
00:28:30
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of people, agents or editors might say, oh, if you came to them with an idea and they'd be like, all right, well, what makes you qualified to write a book about fill in the blank? And so this must have been really liberating, but it probably infused with some pressure that they were like,
00:28:50
Speaker
We actually like that you don't know anything. Now go out there and bring us back the world of chess filtered through your taste. So what was that like when they gave you that degree of freedom to just say, you know what, that we do trust you? Well, it was scary just on a really basic level that the initial turnaround was like six months from day one starting.
00:29:15
Speaker
Very often, if any of your listeners have had experience trying to get a book published, you often, even before you meet the agent, have to have a proposal that's practically the size of a book. This was two or three days after this initial email, I signed a contract with Simon and Schuster to write the thing. I didn't have to submit a proposal. As I said, I didn't even talk about any of my background with chess. It was just off you go.
00:29:46
Speaker
I'm riding my bike from Spanish Harlem all the way down the East River and bumping into the Fulton Market where the chess championships were played and meeting everybody who was organizing it. America is in complete shock in terms of Trump has just been elected. Like American flags are being burned outside the Trump Plaza.
00:30:10
Speaker
apartment building and there's riots and there's dump trucks blocking Trump Plaza as police are called out. It was a very strange time. It was a scary time for a lot of people. I've never seen New York. I wasn't here when 9-11 happened, and I understand why that could be hyperbole to make this comparison, but I've heard others make the comparison that they hadn't seen New Yorkers in such shock.
00:30:38
Speaker
about sort of what was going to happen the way they were after Trump was elected. I was seeing a lot of people crying on the subway and streets just seemed very quiet. I mean, 80% of Manhattan voted for the woman who didn't get elected. And here a New Yorker was coming in and nobody knew what to expect. So there was a kind of odd apocalyptic feel.
00:31:05
Speaker
In chess, I felt like where the world championships were played was the only place where nobody was talking about Trump. And I wasn't sure if that was even more horrifying or a fertile place to kind of explore what kind of people don't give a shit about politics at all. I mean, it's why I made the analogy about the Titanic hitting the glacier. I was in the games room, like we're playing chess.
00:31:32
Speaker
You know, like we'll get busy jumping into lifeboats, but for now we got to finish this game. Like this, we have priorities here and there's something just so funny and strange and sad. And, um, I just felt like the coordinates of that dynamic were something, something that I do feel equipped to write about. I'm not qualified to talk about the games that were being played. And I'm frankly not interested in talking about the games that were played.
00:32:03
Speaker
But the characters involved, I feel like I've been doing that all my life is trying to get to know these kind of people and getting them to share who they are in ways that they've never done before. And I just hope that that would have value first for my editor, second for the publisher, and third for a readership that maybe has some curiosity about chess, but they haven't had somebody
00:32:28
Speaker
Like I think Kafka made the joke that lawyers are the only people that could write a 10,000 word brief and call it a brief. A lot of people who write about chess are not really writing about it for non chess players. And I think that there might be value in that because the characters are just so interesting. You might really enjoy what's going on off the board. Because I certainly did. I certainly felt very intoxicated by
00:32:58
Speaker
such a wealth of eccentricity and also just nice people, kind people, generous people, and closed off people, emotionally shut in people. The agent of Magnus Carlsen, the first thing she said to me when I tried to arrange an interview is, you know he's on the spectrum, right? Well, he's never been publicly declared on the spectrum. And I was like, what's autism's relationship to top level chess? Do they all have to be?
00:33:26
Speaker
totally antisocial and fit into that designation? Or is that unfair? Is that a sleazy way to dismiss them? But there was just so many things I mentioned before, just women's limited involvement with chess. And some women I read, some feminists were like, women are too smart to waste their time with chess.
00:33:56
Speaker
And then the racial breakdown of chess, it was very, very white and it was very Russian at the chess tournament. Putin's people were sent in. Donald Trump is publicly saying in his quest to make America great again, we don't even make grandmasters in the United States anymore. Well, actually we have over 90 grandmasters. So there was this fun stuff that it was bumping into that I was hoping if I
00:34:24
Speaker
have a notebook and I'm writing some of this stuff down, maybe I don't have to write about the games very much but can just find the drama of this subculture milieu. How did you make this project manageable given that you had such a tight deadline and it seemed like every person you spoke to knocked over a set of dominoes that went to a totally different corner of the chess world. How did you navigate that?
Psychological Drama in Chess
00:34:54
Speaker
I guess the fundamental answer to that is distilling what is on the line with chess. What is the intrinsic drama? And it's the psychic vulnerability of it that's claimed a lot of its top people. And the first one was the most famous chess player of all time. This is like its greatest Rorschach test, which is Bobby Fischer. You can't have his genius, you can't have him
00:35:21
Speaker
playing a game of chess where a hundred million people are watching it. Like as many people watching the Apollo moon landing or watching this guy from Brooklyn whose sister brought him a chess board when he was six and all alone in his Brooklyn apartment on Crown Heights takes on the Soviet hedge money and breaks them. You know, like as one of the definitive moments of the Cold War, you can't have all that. You can't have him making as much money in some cases as Muhammad Ali because of
00:35:51
Speaker
His act was that popular without where he went, which is becoming a Holocaust-denying raging lunatic who looks like the Colonel Kong from Dr. Strangelove riding a nuclear bomb like it's a rodeo. That's the way he sounded during 9-11. It was almost like, hoo-ha! The towers are coming down. We're going to get them. I love that ambiguity.
00:36:21
Speaker
of the two extremes because it does make you question the kind of line between genius and madness, which a lot of the world's great characters have done. Van Gogh, Beethoven, there's a slew of them. Napoleon is a great liberator and then no, he's the ultimate dictator. There's so many
00:36:46
Speaker
There's so many interesting things that it bumps into and the people who've been interested in chess throughout history were wonderful. And as I went along, you would just stumble into something. You know, I show up at the tournament on the first day, I was the only journalist who was given VIP access, which was weird. And because it's like a $1,500 a day room where you're getting served like tacos or something. And the whole setup of the facility
00:37:15
Speaker
felt like something between like an art show and like an auction house, like all very Russian. It was, again, like America's going through this psychosis or nervous breakdown. And, you know, we're all eating very high end falafel tacos and getting served espresso. Like it was just weird. And then I'm sitting next to Frank Brady, who knew Bobby Fischer since he was a little kid, wrote
00:37:45
Speaker
the some great biographies on him. And also wrote biographies on Hugh Hefner and Barbra Streisand and Orson Welles. And I'm like, you're the most interesting person I've ever met. And we talked, I sat by him for the whole tournament and probably talked to him for 40 hours. He's also runs the president of the Marshall chess club, which is where Fisher played a lot of really important games. And
00:38:13
Speaker
No, there were a lot of similar people to Brady who just let me into their world and let me be a tourist but didn't treat me in a nasty way. That's very easy to do with a tourist. And I'd say, what are some of the famous characters who really showed promise but weren't able to
00:38:40
Speaker
You know, when Bobby Fischer walked away in 1972, a lot of Americans were looking for the next Bobby Fischer, the famous movie in 1993, searching for Bobby Fischer, who was predicated on that theory that, you know, we can create another one as if, you know, maybe somebody should ask, do we want another one given where he ended up? But that wasn't asked. And Brady would point me in the direction of some characters that I'd never heard of before that were just as interesting as Fischer in terms of their
00:39:09
Speaker
their rise in promise and ultimately not making it. There wasn't another Bobby Fischer. There's never been another Bobby Fischer since. And some of these guys, one in particular that's in my book that I'd never heard of before, pretty much was on the track to being as close as we've had to that. And he lost it, was institutionalized. And one day in 1978, he played nine games in a row.
00:39:36
Speaker
lost all of them to vastly inferior competition, went to his sister's house and left his wallet and money and keys on the table and walked into one of the worst blizzards in the history that's been recorded in New York. And his body was never found. And a lot of chess players would say, well, that's by design. Of course he'd kill himself in a way you could never find his body. And I'm like, that's not very easy to do if we don't include the blizzard.
00:40:06
Speaker
But the idea that you think somebody could could or would do that, based on no evidence, it's that kind of stuff where you're just like, where am I? Emotionally, this is very out there. And and yet fun and and intriguing. And there were, you know, other people, King, one character that was fun was Charles the First.
00:40:32
Speaker
in England was the first recorded case in England of Regicide where a king was executed because he started two civil wars that didn't work out so well. So Cromwell sent him a note, sent a messenger to say, your days are numbered, buddy. And the messenger delivered the message. Charles was playing a game of chess and read the note, went back to his chess game and finished the game. Nobody had any idea what the note said.
00:41:00
Speaker
And then a few days later, he was brought to the scaffold to be beheaded and was allowed to bring two possessions, his most prized possessions to the gallows. And he brought a copy of the Bible and his chess board. And that chess board, he gave to a Bishop who gave him his last rites and it stayed in their family for hundreds of years. And it was sold at auction four years ago for almost a million dollars.
00:41:26
Speaker
So I'm like, these are great stories. And I don't have to talk about chess because I don't know how to talk about chess. I'm talking about people. Yeah, it's like you let those geniuses play in the chessboard who essentially have the music plugged into their headphones and no one else can hear it except them. So you have to circumvent that and just see everything in the orbit of these people. And it turns out to be just every bit is compelling, if not more compelling than what's actually going down on the game itself.
00:41:56
Speaker
That's very true, and I find with major events, and I mean, I think Gay Talis probably is like the most famous for this, but sometimes with a big event, the most telling Rosetta Stones available are people on the fringes, like the gossip. It's hard for me to look at history as a whole as being anything but gossip, and sometimes the best gossip is the stuff that you don't see reported.
00:42:24
Speaker
but you can, you can kind of dig it up. And Jess is very much treated like kind of a dirty secret. It's practitioners and the people who care about it. So there was some suspicion about me when I was asking some of these questions related to mental illness and some of, some of the risks that are involved, but I think it's unavoidable. You know, you're, when you're watching boxing, what's wrong with saying,
00:42:52
Speaker
You know, getting punched in the head can lead to your brain bleeding. It can lead to death. The first time Americans watched somebody get killed was watching a boxer on TV getting killed. And chess, this is part of the risk of chess, and that's the inherent drama is that they're risking something. You know, there's stakes. There are important stakes involved. And the fact that it's a make-believe battlefield where those stakes are put up gives it its own
00:43:23
Speaker
bizarre dimension and color and I just wanted to get into that as much as I could and not mock it or judge it but try to understand it. It really takes on the the pallor of Greek mythology it's like how close can these guys ascend before ultimately the wings melt and they just come crumbling down. Greek mythology is like that which is my was my favorite thing as a kid it was the only thing I read as a kid because
00:43:52
Speaker
I was, I don't know what was wrong with me in regard to books until I was 15 or 16. But I love all Greek myths. And all these characters are straight out of Greek mythology. I mean, all of chess is like watching, like a Rolodex of the famous characters subjected to horrendous, torturous fates. When you're watching these guys at the board, there are 1984 Kasparov played Karpov and Karpov over the course of 40
00:44:21
Speaker
40 some odd draws was 130 pound guy at the beginning of the tournament was 108 pounds by the end of the tournament five months later. And a doctor had to stop the event to protect his health. He was he was showing signs of exhaustion and he was a really ailing person. But at first blush for a lot of people, you know, when Bobby Fisher used to say I train like an athlete, like I, because people say you look like an athlete, you don't look like our
00:44:51
Speaker
stereotypical idea of a pencil pushing chess player because he had these broad shoulders, he was tall. And he'd say you have to be athletic in order to do this because the stamina, the stress, the anxiety, the nerves. I mean, anybody that's focusing on a strictly intellectual endeavor for five or six hours, like, it's not easy. And there's not somebody trying to disrupt what you're doing. It's so unnerving. So it's watching these guys combat one another,
00:45:19
Speaker
in what looks like a torture chamber, like a cross between a torture chamber and like a dunk tank at some community fair was, it was very hard because these were young kids and you would watch these two 25 year olds in the flower of their youth. Like it was like the pressure was a blowtorch that was applied to them. And you just see them age 10 or 15 years over the course of six hours with their faces crumbling and nervous ticks coming on and
00:45:48
Speaker
They're not able or willing very often to articulate what the drama is. And I had to, I had to really use a scalpel to find quotes from their histories to, you know, Magnus Carlsen saying, I can see myself when I look at what happened to Bobby Fischer, that that's a risk that I have. But it's not something I will talk to anybody about, not even my family, not anybody. It's, I have a lot of dark secrets that I just don't share with anyone.
00:46:18
Speaker
And there's something really compelling about that. There's always something compelling with people that make you wonder rather than let you know what's going on. And you can tell a lot is going on with these people. They are very, very complex, complicated people who are applying that to a board game. So Don Quixote was like my immediate point of reference for the whole journey of the absurdity of
Chess Personalities and Their Stories
00:46:43
Speaker
everybody. We all have a Don Quixote component to the stuff that we are
00:46:47
Speaker
we pledge our allegiance to on some level we can look absurd anybody when i read the art of learning by josh weights can who is the basis of searching for bobby fisher as i'm sure as i'm sure you know the uh... there's a part in there but when he's like eight or nine years old playing in washington square and uh... his mother was quoted as saying like you look like a you know when he got into that mode when he was so focused that he did look like a little old man
00:47:14
Speaker
Like the eight, like you said, the game has a way of aging the face when they get into that deep, deep flow state. Absolutely. And I saw Searching for Bobby Fisher as a kid, too. And it was a really interesting movie. I found it very compelling. And yet you look back on it and they leave out everything about the pitfalls of wanting to be Bobby Fisher.
00:47:39
Speaker
or the idea that you can choose to be Bobby Fischer itself seems very intellectually dishonest. So in my own obsessive way, I tracked down every single character in that film, the real life people, to find their true backstories and to see how consistent it was with the spirit of that film. And that's a big chunk of the book because the movie was so completely full of shit. It was so full of shit. So, you know, Josh Waitskin, who was the only one of that group that wouldn't talk to me,
00:48:09
Speaker
I did meet him. He showed up at the 12th and final game of the tournament, which ended up being a draw. So they went into tiebreak chess and all of that. But his mentor, Bruce Pandolfini, I interviewed his father, Fred Weitskin. And the first thing Fred Weitskin said to me was I signed the book deal to write Searching for Bobby Fischer right after Truman Capote had died. And he signed the book deal with Capote's publisher and they were like, Capote just died yesterday.
00:48:37
Speaker
This better work. We need something here. And so he recognized that his son was six years old. And he described it to me as a devil's act. That what if his son decided to not play chess anymore? And was it ethical? Was it moral to force him to play chess so that he could finish his book for Simon and Schuster? And so I thought, well, that's something that's left out of the book. I mean, that trophy parent kind of kind of dynamic. And I mean, he was wonderful and really articulate and honest. But I thought,
00:49:07
Speaker
Maybe it'd be fun for readers who enjoyed that film to get a sense of what was going on behind the scenes. Josh is nemesis in that film. Jeff Sarwer is his name. He has a fictional name in the film. Jeff was actually younger than Josh in real life and was a world champion, a junior world champion. So was his sister and their dad forced them to become it, tortured them to become these prodigies and
00:49:33
Speaker
Jeff was actually a way bigger prospect than than Josh Waitskin ever was. And Jeff ended up becoming a fugitive with his sister and his dad and disappeared to Europe. And now is a high stakes poker player who plays secret games in closed pizza shops with very, very wealthy Europeans like after hours. And I was like,
00:50:01
Speaker
What, where is this story? This guy is incredible. And so I found him and interviewed him for three hours and he was wonderful. And his story might be the most exciting of any story I've heard in chess. And I've never heard anybody really tell it. And that, that was definitely important to me recognizing that Simon and Schuster is offering me platform to reach a lot of people that
00:50:28
Speaker
not a lot of other venues can really hit. I have the opportunity to get a bit of the benefit of the doubt that maybe this has been vetted for a general reader, that it's not going to be something where you're going to get lost in the weeds a little bit, but it could be engaging, even if you're not comfortable with the idea of engaging with chess for various prejudices.
00:50:57
Speaker
I really wanted upfront that this is going to be engaging. This is going to tell stories and introduce you to people that you're going to be interested in. Much in a way, my favorite documentarian, one of them, Louis Theroux, is this Oxford educated historian. All he's doing is taking you to the fringes of humanity across the United States and England, but finding people that you were so surprised that you identify with. He was a real model for me with this book.
00:51:27
Speaker
I want to hold the reader's hand to meet some people that I think they're going to hear some amazing stories. I've met a lot of people who've asked me about this project when I started talking about the current character I'm working on. They're just like, I have no idea that this could be interesting. I hope that's indicative of something that will carry me and carry the reader through a book. It's meant to be fun. It's meant to be engaging. It's meant to be available.
00:51:56
Speaker
It's not trying to be abstruse and some kind of cipher. I'm trying to offer ciphers to you, but not decode them, but just explore them, in orbit of them for a little while with some compassion and curiosity. So when you're conducting these several-hour interviews with key characters, are you a strictly notebook guy or are you a notebook and recorder guy as you do these things?
00:52:25
Speaker
Depends on the person. I do like to have a recorder, but I always have a notebook with me. I actually interviewed Gates Elise for the book because I found out when he first got a job at the New York Times sports desk, Bobby Fischer was on his radar. So he went to meet Bobby Fischer and had this great line about him. What was it? This little 13-year-old was looking at the board as though the fate of humanity rested in the balance of
00:52:54
Speaker
the moves that he had to make. Absolutely true. I don't think that's hyperbole at all. That is how Bobby looked at the world, even them. But Talis was like, I don't want any homework. I don't, you know, I don't want to talk really about this, this kind of stuff. This was 60 years ago. I'll meet you and you know, we can discuss it. Well, of course he talked about it. You know, like, of course he did. But I think if a recorder was out,
00:53:21
Speaker
it would have been very different. He would have viewed the interaction very differently. So with some people who were open to talking, I think a lot of people were surprised just that they found it kind of audacious to write a chess book for non-chess people. And that was enough to be inviting for people like Harry Benson, one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, photographed, was on the plane with the Beatles, orchestrated the Beatles photo op,
00:53:50
Speaker
with Muhammad Ali, photographed 13 presidents, was 10 feet away from RFK getting assassinated, photographed everybody, everything, the black and white ball at the Plaza Hotel. And he said, Bobby Fischer was the most interesting person I ever photographed and the most interesting person I ever met. And I wrote him an email and just said, would you be willing to say a little more about that? Because that's enough for me for a chapter. I want to know how that could possibly be.
00:54:20
Speaker
of all the people that you've met, everybody who's anybody in American culture, how could a chess player be so interesting? And he was like, come up to my apartment and his dogs were harassing us for an hour and a half and he couldn't have been more kind and generous to share his thoughts. And again, we're not talking about chess. We're talking about a human connection and somebody that's seen a lot and
00:54:47
Speaker
Why is it that this guy stood out? That's sort of my orientation to this too is just like passing around some wallet photos of these people that just blew me away.
00:55:00
Speaker
when you're when you're interviewing folks that are that are titanic in nature uh... gate to lease a lot of these people in the chess world uh... mike tyson aro morris all these people that you've gotten access to tay off of stevenson how do you personally keep from getting overwhelmed by their profiles so you can conduct what you hope is that it and what ultimately always turns out as a very compelling interview because you're so good at it
00:55:28
Speaker
So how do you keep from getting overwhelmed by their profile? Trying to fixate on topics that might intrigue them, that might take them off their script, that is a subject that they're really fascinated by, but maybe haven't looked at it from a certain angle. Get them intrigued, get them licking their chops about something.
00:55:59
Speaker
get their mind into a playful state. I think that's probably the biggest thing. My worst ideas happen when I'm sitting at the computer. I need to go for a walk. I need to have a cigarette. I need to play with my cat or something. That's when my mind is open to connecting some dots that I can't do when there's a strain on me to connect dots.
00:56:28
Speaker
I like those moments with people maybe being a little counterintuitive or risking looking like an asshole. One of the biggest benefactors of chess, since nobody can make a living at it, is a billionaire who lives in St. Louis. He was raised in an orphanage and Rex Sinkfeld is his name. I mentioned the Trump anecdote about there are no grandmasters and he was like,
00:56:56
Speaker
Oh, I called Mike Pence right away when he said that. And I was like, Mike, this is just dead wrong. You need to talk to Trump immediately. I could not believe, A, that he had Mike Pence's number on speed dial, B, that Mike Pence answered the phone immediately, and C, that there wasn't something more important going on where
00:57:18
Speaker
You know, he's just going to walk over to Trump and have that conversation because it was clear from Rex that was the expectation. So you're, you're just dealing with corridors of power that are realms that I'm absolutely nowhere near to and never will, but it's totally normative for them. And I kind of enjoy just being really hopelessly miscast in a role where they feel comfortable to talk to me about that kind of stuff.
00:57:47
Speaker
without having to explain it. They're just, they're in that matter of fact zone of comfort about their quotidian stuff, which is not quotidian to anybody else. I mean, you're talking to the vice president, clearly he's talking to Trump all the time. Uh, that's just normal. And, you know, Errol Morris spending time with serial killers was how he spent his free time in his twenties. Like that was fun and normal and, um,
00:58:17
Speaker
a big part of his identity. And so I just try to get into that. And, you know, what, almost more than anything, he wanted to tell, you know, Ed Gein jokes, which dealt with like the most horrifically dark subject matter imaginable, like people ritualistically murdered and cannibalized, but it was like, that's his humor. So I don't know that he would feel especially comfortable
00:58:47
Speaker
talking in that way unless he felt safe and trusted you. And I'm just sort of in on, I want them to drop their guard and share those sides because I don't, that's what I want most. Like that's the loot of people for me is to share who they really are or like in the dark. And I don't know, I just think it's fun to window shop that kind of thing.
00:59:16
Speaker
for a couple of hours. And generally, you have to be in a bit of a playful, unguarded state to be there. So I try to figure out how to get there with each subject. And that takes my mind off that I have absolutely no business talking to these people, that I'm ridiculously unqualified and on and on and on. But fuck it, I don't mind being miscast in my own movie. I've been miscast in my own movie my entire life. At some point, you have to like, well, and so what do you want to do about it?
00:59:46
Speaker
When in the process do you feel most alive? Is it in that repertorial stage or the writing stage or the rewriting? What pocket feels most warm and great? When you find the truth, when you put it together after you've experienced it, some reporter in Spain
01:00:16
Speaker
basically wouldn't give me an interview with him. And he was friends with all the Hemingway grandkids and all the bullfighting people. He's like, I'll talk to you, but you got to show up on the course in Pamplona and run with me or else I'm not going to waste my time talking to you. I don't want to run with the bulls. I don't I don't want to be rectally impaled by a 1200 pound bull. No interest. Got to pay to play.
01:00:40
Speaker
Yeah, but no, don't have to prove any of that shit. I like the man's short stories. Hemingway's short stories are great. No interest in trophy hunting. Hate that shit. Really don't need a horn up my ass. That's not how I want to die. That's not how I want to become an invalid. I don't want to be a quadriplegic. What happened? I was in Pamplona trying to report on a story. No, don't need any of that. But you do it.
01:01:10
Speaker
and you get the story, that's a certain high, but the ultimate for me is trying to then package that experience where I can offer something similar to that high, synthesize it to a reader that I'll never meet in my life. Or maybe I will meet them. I have met a few of them, but I just mean offering
01:01:38
Speaker
being utilized to the best of your ability to offer something and in this case, what I'm trying to offer is the truth of some things that might be complicated or tricky or slippery or whatever. That's the thrill. I mean, that's the juice for me reading these guys that I've loved is it not only provides company for a lonely person and I think a lot of people who write or who they read, it's solitary.
01:02:06
Speaker
What is it? You can't eavesdrop on a man in prayer. Well, it's true with somebody reading or writing. You're interrupting them. Talk to them. And I like people, but I spent a lot of time alone. And I hope that there's something that you can come away with being introspective that has value because introspection, I think, is counterproductive.
The Struggles and Determination of a Writer
01:02:28
Speaker
in a lot of ways to how society is structured. It's why child actors can make tens of millions of dollars for things that, you know, producing shit. And an ultimate example of introspection might be chess and they, you know, they can't make enough money to buy a falafel sandwich. And that was another thing that I wanted to explore was, I'm interested in, like we were saying before with Kyoto,
01:02:54
Speaker
people who pursue failed journeys, but there's some kind of nobility in what the failed journey is. And losers are always confronted with who they are. Losers are always very self-aware. Winning doesn't require any self-awareness whatsoever. So I'm a sucker, as I think a lot of writers are, and not just an advocate for underdogs, but losers are so much more interesting. Lance Armstrong is a winner.
01:03:23
Speaker
When you spend time with Lance Armstrong, you understand what drives somebody like that to become a winner. Or Michael Jordan, or a host of other characters, or Trump. Trump's always winning, no matter what's happening. I think there was just a tweet where he was saying, it's a perfect day, and it's like, have you seen what's happened the last two weeks? But in his mind, it's no matter what the defeat is, it's declare victory.
01:03:50
Speaker
That is a rewarded trait in our culture, in our society. We like winners and he's a killer or whatever. I don't find that there's any introspection there, there's any inner life. I've always been really intrigued by how idiosyncratic and singular what people see, looking at the same thing. If you give them time, they come at you with ways that are so surprising with what they're gleaning
01:04:19
Speaker
from events. It always blows me away. How do you paint yourself using those in terms of winning and losing? What coat of paint do you feel that you shine or that you identify most with? Probably not as a professional, but treating my profession as an adventure. And I'm a very bad traveler, so as they say,
01:04:49
Speaker
I probably see myself as like Woody Allen starring in like an action film, like a Stallone film or something. Like I mean, not that I'm doing like big action stuff in my stories, aside from like running with the Bulls and Taplona. We're running up a hill with Manny Pacquiao. Well, here and there. Okay. Like there's a few things that are, I'm forced to do it because there's no way to get the story, but it's always a little bit harebrained and silly.
01:05:17
Speaker
And I'm not running with Pacquiao up to the Hollywood sign. I'm not sharing that story because the 500 of us who started, it's me and Pacquiao at the top, high-fiving each other. I fell off about halfway. I couldn't keep up with them. I tried. I've run a lot in my life and I couldn't do it, but I tried.
01:05:43
Speaker
I'm an observer. I'm not an interesting participant in anything. I'm not exceptional in anything that I participate in. I'm an observer. I'm, you know, in the regressing to some caveman scenario, I'm not good at cooking and I'm not good at hunting. But if there's some curiosity about what's going on on the other side of a hill, I would really like to go over and see. And I think I can come back and while people are cooking and
01:06:13
Speaker
People have hunted the food that they're cooking. If people need something to do while they're eating, I can usually tell a story that seems to amuse or not annoy a disparate group of folks that I've encountered around the world. So that role is okay for me. You know, like... Yeah. In New Yorker, New York, the New York Times profile of you about last November, whenever it came out.
01:06:41
Speaker
it was really enlightening a lot of the some of the things you said you dispelled a lot of mess up probably a lot of a lot of writers have a lot maybe a lot of writers might be like inwardly or secretly ashamed about which is something to do this kind of work you do need a second job of some kind of maybe even a third job and here you you know your byline credits are like made are major league your writing is right up there with with any anyone doing this kind of work
01:07:11
Speaker
you're doing teaching boxing lessons and you're you know you said you're either rich or you have a second job and you're doing a lot of this other stuff and I wonder you know how conscious were you of like you know what this is something I need to articulate so people understand that even if you have a high degree of
01:07:34
Speaker
high degree of say publishing cred that that in fact sometimes you do need this supplemental income to to pursue this kind of work well I mean just like chess where we're saying 30 people can make a living and 600 million people are doing it it's true to a lesser degree with writing you know if you're if what your passion is is writing best of luck but I mean you're competing with hundreds of thousands of really smart capable people that are all trying to
01:08:03
Speaker
scrounge together enough money to pay the rent and almost all of them are failing. Almost all of them need a second job. You want to be a sculptor, you want to be a filmmaker, you want to be any kind of athlete. This is becoming more and more common that there's no support system to look after you. It's winner take all in almost all of these fields. If you're the winner, good for you and you're doing better than ever, but
01:08:30
Speaker
If you're not the winner, if you're second or third place, we're a country that doesn't know really who got the silver medal or care. And that's very true in this pecking order as well with writing. And I've never really been ashamed to say, you know, I think the New York Times on social media
01:08:55
Speaker
I told the writer I'm on Medicaid after a book deal at a pretty good place and I've been published some pretty good places, but most of those places didn't pay me. Esquire didn't pay me anything to exert my book. Paris Review didn't pay me anything. Harper's didn't pay me anything. If you think that being published there means
01:09:17
Speaker
Oh boy, he must have got 10 grand for that. Not only did I not get 10 grand, I didn't get anything. I got the prestige of being published there, which is not nothing. Like maybe all of that stuff created a tipping point that led some editor from Simon and Schuster to say, it seems like you have the gravitas to do a book and no, we don't need a fucking proposal or any vetting like we trust you. But to be 37,
01:09:46
Speaker
at the time that the book found me and have absolutely no financial security whatsoever. And I think to be in what many people trying to get behind the walls of publishing and journalism, aspiring to that would look at me and say, wow, he must have editors interested in what he's doing. There must be a lot of opportunities. I'm struggling. I mean, everybody is struggling. Vice Sports just shut down. Vocative shut down. MTV shut down.
01:10:15
Speaker
None of these magazines want to pay anything. Oh, so you try and do film. Go to Vice and do film, which I've done. You get $1,000 to do a short film. Well, try to live in New York City on $1,000. And then the New York Times tweets after the article comes out, like, here's this tortured romantic of boxing.
01:10:38
Speaker
boxing writer and they say he's on Medicaid and he wouldn't have it any other way. Bullshit. I would definitely rather have it another way. But I'm not materialistic. I don't particularly give a shit about money. If I can pay for the rent and have some freedom to do some of the things I like, like travel, wonderful. But I never know where the next paycheck is coming from. I've never had anybody offer me a job.
01:11:07
Speaker
ever, ever. And like, I think I'm proud of the work I've done. But I mean, I think the thing that makes me comfortable to admit those, I don't know if they're failings, but those limitations to whatever space I occupy in the culture of journalism or publishing or whatever. But, you know, I've, I've got to write the things that I actually care about, I've got to go to a wars that I believe in. And that is a very distinct
01:11:36
Speaker
luxury in a way, you know, like most people earn their money from things that they don't care about beyond earning their money. They detest their jobs. So I have a great deal of appreciation for that because I can't do anything else. You know, I was pretty good boxer, but I was not going to be able to support myself doing it. The closest I ever got was some
01:11:58
Speaker
like criminal saying, we'll give you 2000 a month to fight in some underground tournament. Well, no, not doing that. Sorry, I'm busy in Tampa lona waiting to get rectally assaulted by a handful of bulls. No, like, I don't want those those career paths. This is this is this is what I know how to do. And it still felt like 1000 to one shot to ever get a book deal. You know, I wrote in I told that reporter,
01:12:25
Speaker
I wrote a million words before I sold one. That's true. That doesn't make me feel great. That makes me, that's doing the marathon again at mile six with 20.2 to go. And a bunch of like old people handing out water like, you can do it, Sonny. You're young. You'll do it. I don't think I can do it. And your encouragement is just enraging me. No, I mean, it's so horrible. I remember like mile 10.
01:12:53
Speaker
And my mother brings this up to me. She's like, really? I kept my word. I didn't stop to talk to you to tell you to stop. I wanted to, but I saw you. I had your father drive over and we saw you and I couldn't stop crying. And I was like, I was crying too at mile 10. All I wanted to do was just go home.
01:13:15
Speaker
There's definitely been times like many, many years writing all through my 20s, not having a dollar from what I love to do and everybody I know being like, you're a fucking asshole. You can't do this or however good you are at it, you can't support yourself. Get a job. Get a job. What's your real job?
01:13:36
Speaker
I think what the benefit of that, as opposed to getting famous, like some of my literary heroes, you know, Fitzgerald, boom, like Gatsby's there when he's 30. You know, he's a big success at 25. I wanted, I wanted to be that too. You know, but I didn't, it didn't happen. But what it allows for is that when I meet
01:13:59
Speaker
a lot of other accomplished people. I find a lot of them are the same way. They struggled. Errol Morris couldn't support himself until he was 40. Morris is the smartest person I've ever met in my life. And he was doing such interesting stuff. He couldn't financially support himself until he was 40. There are so many characters that are like that in the culture where we think, oh, of course they got to where they are. Of course they knew they'd get there. Bullshit. They did not know that.
01:14:26
Speaker
have any idea that they get there and they gave up hope in many cases, but they found a way to get there anyway. And hopefully when that happens, it doesn't harden you, but it makes you a lot more compassionate for other people's struggles. Everybody's doing their best. However shitty they're doing at it, they're doing their best. And if you take some time to figure out
01:14:49
Speaker
what that calculus is about where they're at and what's driving them or what's holding them back, it's hard not to be won over by people's humanity and their struggles. So I hope that offers, you know, this is my particular lane, the way I was forged that it might, it might offer something different than somebody straight out of Columbia or Harvard who won a national essay award. And to them, failure would have been becoming
01:15:19
Speaker
what their parents wanted, which was a lawyer or doctor just like them. That wasn't me. That wasn't going to be me. I was going to be homeless or kill myself. So I'm very aware of that and not proud of it, but I'm, I had no plan B ever and got very, very lucky, but at the same time to be lucky, you have to be close. And I just say lucky, not in any humble brag, but like I consider living in New York.
01:15:45
Speaker
Strictly on the basis of doing two things I care about writing and boxing is like a privilege. I think it's I've tried to do other jobs when I first got here when I couldn't didn't have any boxing clients are writing and I was not reveling in Medicaid as the New York Times suspected It was really hard there's a lot of people here that are destroying their bodies They're destroying their souls doing what they have to do to try to support themselves or support the people they care about so it's
01:16:16
Speaker
and i don't know how long i'm gonna be in you know after this book i don't have anything lined up so i don't know where it goes from here i just hope it can i can find something else one of the one of the great measures of success as a as a writer and you've got this at least at least for me to to share with you and granted this doesn't pay a dime but at least it might put some put some gas in the tank is that i know that whenever i see a bren jonathan butler byline
01:16:45
Speaker
I'm going to sit back, I'm going to savor every word, every sentence, every paragraph, and just know that I'm in for a good ride with a magazine story, online story, or a book. In this case, I cannot wait to read the chess books because I know I'm going to be in for something great and I know thousands and thousands of other people are going to feel the same way. Thanks for the work you do and thanks for coming on the podcast again.
01:17:14
Speaker
Oh, it's my pleasure and that's there. It's the best that I can do because you can only keep doing it if you're offering something of value to the people that are reading it, that are consuming it. It's very easy for me to want to offer my best because that reciprocity is the only thing that keeps me afloat. As I say, there's no plan B, so if I'm not off
01:17:41
Speaker
If I'm not offering something of value, there's a certain justice to the reader being able to chuck a baseball at the target of my dunk tank, and down I go. And I deserve it. If I'm not bringing something of value to you, who gives a shit if it's of value to me? And unfortunately, so far, there's been a convergence of those two value systems. But that's that you were asking before about the great high. The great high is
01:18:09
Speaker
offering something of value to somebody I've never met. And some of those people have become my friends. And I wouldn't have been able to meet them without this profession. Of course. Well, very nice. Well, as always, we'll have to do this again at another point in the future. But thanks for carving out the time to do this now. Like I said, it was a lot of fun. And best of luck with the book. And I can't wait to get my hands on it and read it, man.
01:18:38
Speaker
Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. The book is going to be called Heavy Lies the Crown. And I hired Mickey Duje to illustrate it. He's illustrated a few of my pieces. So I've already seen a number of his illustrations, but that that was something I was hoping would be fun for readers, too. I actually paid for it out of my own pocket. But but it's his artwork is something I'm such a big fan of his. So I'm delighted that he would take time to to offer offer his
01:19:07
Speaker
his wonderful talents to the book. So I hope that offers some extra value to readers who get bored with my writing. They can look at his pictures a little. Highly unlikely they get bored if you're writing. When does the book come out exactly? It comes out on Halloween 2018 just before the next world championship. Every day is Halloween in New York. There you go. Every day is Halloween.
01:19:30
Speaker
That is perfect. Fantastic. Well, thanks again, Brandon. We'll be in touch. I'll let you know when this episode's up.
01:19:46
Speaker
Okay friends, we've come to the end. If you've made it this far, I ask that you head over to BrendanOmera.com and sign up for my monthly newsletter. That blasts out my reading list for the month, about a book a week, and what you may have missed in the world of the podcast. So, if you wouldn't mind doing that, that'd be great. You know, and also the reviews on iTunes for the podcast itself, ratings too. Those are immeasurably invaluable, if that's even a combination of words.
01:20:15
Speaker
And, long time listeners. No, I sometimes like to throw in a gag at the end of the show, dealing with how my wife won't subscribe to the podcast. So I told her that downloads and listens are up. I asked her what she thought. Not proud of it. Till next time friends, thanks for listening. Riff you later.