Transcript
Speaker: The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by the word disappointment. The act or instance of disappointing. The state or emotion of being disappointed. One that disappoints.
Speaker: Disappointment. You're looking at them. Hey, if any of you goons want a signed paperback copy of The Front Runner set to come out on November 3rd, you heard... I'll be signing books from 1 to 5 on Saturday, November 7th at HodgePodge Books and Taps in Eugene. I'll get increasingly drunker each hour. That should be something. On Thursday, November 12th, I'll be at Roundabout Books in Bend, Oregon in conversation with Lauren Fleshman. That is a ticketed event for $5 and there's already like 50 people going.
Speaker: Shit. Visit roundaboutbooks.com to get a seat, man. and I didn't have any friends. So I was like, this is a good time to write a book.
Speaker: It's Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. Take your AI pitches and shove them up your ass. I'm Brendan O'Meara, and wouldn't you know, I recorded yet another live podcast at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene, the 7th.
Speaker: of these live podcasts there. That's right. The next day I woke up with a crushing hangover. But before that happened, I spoke with Chuck Klosterman over a couple, several River King IPAs to talk about his two latest books, Football and Rock, a mainstream alternative history of alternative mainstream music. It's published by DeCapo.
Speaker: You're damn right. This podcast is going places. Might be going to hell, but it's going places. Chuck Klosterman has reached post-interview status in that he doesn't really need to do these kinds of things, but he does.
Speaker: And I was lucky to get the chance not only to interview him, as I did back in 2019, but to do it in person in front of about 40 frothing Klosterman fans. Show notes of this episode more at brendanamero.com. Hey, hey, there.
Speaker: You can search the vast archive of the podcast as well as peruse for hot blogs, just as nature intended. You can also sign up for the Wicked Hot Pitch Club or the Up 11. These go to 11.
Speaker: Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter for tasty riffs, four book recommendations, and seven other juicy links. It literally goes up to 11. There's Patreon as well if you want one-on-one coaching calls or access to the Sunday writing sessions.
Speaker: To keep you from drinking too much the night before, never stop me. Or if you just want to support this ad-free, listener-supported podcast. It's free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Does Chuck Colsterman even need an introduction? I guess, sure, why not?
Speaker: I mentioned earlier that he's post-interview, but he's also post-website. He's so popular he doesn't even have to live by the rules of us mortals. I believe he still hangs out on Twitter and you can find his fan page on Facebook. He's the author of 14 books. That's 14 books.
Speaker: They range from novels to short story collection to essays to big ideas and maybe even little ideas. Some of these titles include, oh boy, let's just list a few.
Speaker: I Wear the Black Hat, But What If We're Wrong, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, The 90s, Book, The Visible Man, Fargo Rock City, Killing Yourself to Live, Football, and his latest, Rock. Many of his books are New York Times bestsellers. He's a frequent guest with Bill Simmons on the Bill Simmons Podcast for the Ringer Network.
Speaker: He was also at one time the ethicist for the New York Times and has written for Esquire, GQ, and many other places. He became a bit of a star at Spin Magazine in the early aughts. And from there, he boarded a rocket ship and has become one of the most distinct, singular, entertaining voices in culture writing.
Speaker: In this episode, we talk about football and why the violence matters, how his brother-in-law was instrumental in Chuck becoming a professional writer, the moment Chuck realized he'd turn out to be just like his father, the moment where I look like a total fucking buffoon, the struggle of writing a fiction book with real names...
Speaker: Taking the premise of rock and applying it to a hypothetical world where David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest became what Elizabeth Gilbert's E. Pray Love became. And a rich Q&A where Chuck riffs unifying themes in essay collections, his movie cameo, Artificial Intelligence, and a few other things.
Speaker: And be sure you're following the show on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Or don't. I don't care. Parting shot on what does it all mean? But for now, why don't we cue up the riff and get on with the show?
Speaker: Sort of a for better or for worse thing, I tend to be a very heavy editor. the psychopath ripping from your book is a compliment. That was the lightning bolt. You're not crazy. Right? what Like my real practice is I just goddamn right. This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Eric. Towards the end of football, Chuck, you know yeah I'm going to read this little passage here. in you know You write, I dread autumn weddings as much as autumn funerals.
Speaker: You sometimes hear stories about football widows, a term used to describe women who lose contact with their indolent husbands at the inception of every football season, almost as if the man's couch were a casket.
Speaker: I know that if someone i I like invites me to a book reading on a Friday in November, I have to attend. I can't say I'd love to hang out, but Colorado State is playing Wyoming, and both teams are 6-2.
Speaker: Such a response would seem pathetic and immature, so I say nothing. I go to the reading and stare straight ahead, wordlessly worrying if it might be blizzarding in Laramie, and I'm missing a snow game.
Speaker: Colorado State today is two and four. Home against San Diego State, three and four. The University of Wyoming is four and three and is a home dog to Air Force, five and one. I am so, so sorry, Chuck.
Speaker: Well, I'm here. What did I say? I gotta be here though. You know, that's just how it is. You can't not do things because you want to watch football games I have found in my life. because And the thing is also, you know, the lesson you learn is that football games or sporting events in general that have not happened always seem much more meaningful than the games you remember in many ways.
Speaker: so I'm always trying to watch these event games, like I'm moving my whole life around to watch them. And if I do, I don't remember what happened two weeks later. Yeah.
Speaker: ah And it just go a little closer to the mic too. um But in the acknowledgments of football, you talk to your brother-in-law, Tom, and ah how he was one of the first ones who told you could make a living as a writer. And I wonder how formative that was as a young person to know that that might be a thing. Well, you know, that was kind of meaningful. So, you know, I'm the seventh kid in my family. So my oldest sister's 18 years older than me.
Speaker: So I have, ah you know, brother-in-laws and sister-in-laws who are almost parental figures in a sense. um So my oldest sister, Laura, married this guy, Tom. He was an actor and director from Georgia.
Speaker: and um you know And was ah just unlike anybody I had ever met from North Dakota. I mean, it's not that a person like him couldn't exist in North Dakota, but I had never met them. yeah And he was very supportive of the idea that like I liked to try like i like to write, or I liked to come up with these kind of weird ideas and things like that. And I do just i very much remember him one time telling me basically he's like, you could do this for your life. Like you could be a writer for your life. That is something you could do because I had never, I didn't know any writer growing up.
Speaker: you know Not even like, you know, even when I was living in Fargo, I didn't know anybody who had ever published a book. So it wasn't as though I thought that was an impossible thing. I just did not think it had any relationship to my life. yeah Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things, that that revelation, like, oh, this thing is actually a thing that can be conjured. And it didn't just appear out of nowhere. That there was, in fact, a writer and an artist behind it. And that you can be that person.
Speaker: well But I've often told this story, because it is true. When you know I was in college, um i I was obsessed with Spin Magazine. So I was always reading Spin Magazine. And then years later, i get hired by Spin. And my friends who had worked with me at the college newspaper are like, aha, you've achieved your dream. Your dream has been fulfilled. But honestly, I never dreamed that. Like I would read that magazine knowing it was written by people. I just did not think it was a job you could get. I don't know what I thought. Like I didn't think it was some conspiracy or something. that was like I just, it was almost as though like it was reading to me was always like looking into a a similar but separate reality that was not really connected to the reality in which I existed.
Speaker: And also in the acknowledgments too, you you say that ah the football was probably the book that your late parents would have most enjoyed out of your entire body of work. And I love the moment in the book where you write about Doug Faludi's Hail Mary pass that to defeat Miami, 1984, think. And I would love for you to just describe that moment for us, because I just found that so poignant and just ah so telling.
Speaker: Well, you know, I'd come in, I guess I must have been shopping with my parents, I believe it was the Friday after Thanksgiving, and With my mom, I was out with. My dad, of course, wasn't shopping. And I walk into the house, you know, and or maybe I was, i can't remember, I was coming from someplace. And I can hear Brent Musburger's voice in the living room.
Speaker: So I walk into the living room, and I still have, like, all my winter clothes on. And my dad is watching Miami and Boston College. And I ask him, like, you know, what's going on? What's happening? And it was, like, four seconds left. It was the it was the one play left.
Speaker: And he's like, well, Boston College played hard, but like this is over. They got beat. you know it's like And he hated Miami. So like he was kind of disenchanted. of course, he loved Boston College because it was a Catholic school and Doug Flutie was short and all these things. you know All these things my dad related to. um And ah so then the play happens where you know the ball is snapped and Doug Flutie runs to his right and he throws a Hail Mary as far as he can. And Boston College wins this game.
Speaker: So i've I watched one play of this game and it was this dramatic end. And my dad is just sitting staring at the TV and he's like, well, that's the difference between me and him. Like I gave up and he didn't. But like that was, the way it was said to me was a very,
Speaker: kind ah not very, mildly disturbing. Because I was like, is this not what he thinks about while he's watching sports? Like it it definitely seems like something he would have thought knowing his personality. didn't seem like the kind of thing he would say to me.
Speaker: And I really recall now, like I didn't recall at the time, but now I realize that in some ways that was the nexus of our relationship in the sense that I was going to kind of be him in a lot of ways. The way I would feel or the way I feel now about a lot of things is sort of maybe encapsulated in that statement, which for him was like an end of the life thing or near the end of the life. And for me, it was I was young. So i um I think it probably comes across better in the book. But that's sort of, it's a it's a thing I really remember. yeah Sure. Yeah. And it's it it is a moment that happened at the end of a particular essay. so so So it is at that point imbued with ah a sort of context that you've earned by that point. But I did find it poignant in isolation anyway. Yeah. But that as it may, that being something of a kicker or a closer, I'm always interested too in like entry points. And you know football, of course, you you slide in on into the story or into the essay on something that doesn't feel like it's rhyming with the title, of course, but then you get into your big idea. So I just wonder in terms of entry points, how are you thinking of those as you as you're looking to enter in and riff on a particular idea that you've had in mind all along?
Speaker: I mean, the honest answer to that is I don't know. I don't know how that happens. Like, I'm a very, ah I'm not educated in this way. Like, I'm a completely autodidactic person in this sense. Like, I never went to any writing school or creative writing program or anything. You know, my high school English teacher had a ah PE degree.
Speaker: Like, she was a, you know, that she just kind of taught English because it was like there was a job or whatever. So it was like, I'd And not just she was a bad teacher, she was a great teacher. But it was like, it's hard for me to sort of describe like the the the mechanics of how I write, because i it it isn't something that, it just happened, sort of. So like so writing, like I'll just have a sense that like I wanna write about this idea.
Speaker: And something will, to me, clearly seem like a way to get into it. like ah a vaguely connected, but not too connected idea. Because you don't want it to be too tight. And it seems... i don't know. It seems like it's it almost seems like like ah like you're using the anecdote. You want to use the anecdote so bad that it leads into this idea. It starts kind of with the idea.
Speaker: But, i mean that's I mean, that's not really an answer, but that's how it is. yeah Right. Well, I love the the looseness through which that you might just be like, you know what? Here's something I feel like riffing on. I'm just going to see where...
Speaker: the fingers on the keyboard take me. And um and also in the back of the book too, you write that this was one of the more fun books you've ever written. I'd love to get you get a sense of why that why that was so. well Writing the football book was the most fun, most enjoyable book I had written since the first one.
Speaker: yeah So when I wrote Fargo Rock City, you know i was ah you know I was living in Akron, Ohio. I'd just moved there, but I could afford to have a computer now for the first time, and I didn't have any friends. So I was like, this is a good time to write a book.
Speaker: You know, because it's like, you know, I hear it. um and And I wanted to write this idea, i had this idea about, you know i'd go to the bookstore and I would see in the music section, there'd be books about jazz and punk and alternative country and disco and every genre of music, except the music I listened to, which was like hair metal, like Motley Crue and Guns N' Roses and Kiss and Poison.
Speaker: So my initial assumption was that, well, I guess people who listen to that music are illiterate, so they don't buy books or whatever. it was like, well, I'm not totally illiterate, so there must be some people like me. um But i didn't know I had no idea of like how long a book was supposed to be. I remember taking books off the shelf and reading, like counting every word on the page and then multiplying it by the number of pages to get a sense of how long a book should be. I had no idea. how i just i just sat down and tried to do it. Yeah. um and It was something I had been unconsciously thinking about for a whole bunch of years. So it came out very fast in a very sort of kind of jarbled way. I had to go back and reorganize everything. But the writing process was very natural and organic.
Speaker: And the football book was the first time that really happened since then, where there is something that I had been thinking about for you know my entire life. But I had never been like, well, okay. Because, I mean, the way i always imagine writing is it's sort of like...
Speaker: every thought you have, every idea you have, everything you've learned, every experience you've had regarding a certain subject, it's kind of like a ball of yarn in your mind. And the writing is just taking the string and pulling it out straight. And with football, that happened very rapidly. it was very It was almost like the thing was on a spindle or something. I could just kind of do it real quick. The rock book I did that came out you know After that, which was actually written before the football book, was the opposite of that. That was extremely difficult to do. I mean, relatively difficult.
Speaker: It wasn't like being a coal miner, but it was like it was hard. For writing, it was hard. yes Yeah, and we'll get to rock in a moment, but that one seems like there was a straight piece of yarn, and the aim was to actually tangle it back up into a ball in some way. Yeah, sort of, to like... create another ball of string next to the other one that already exists yeah that's fake. Yeah, yeah and that'll make sense in a moment. um But ah i love this review of of football from Dwight Garner in the New York Times where he was writing a view. like He reminds me too of the very funny journalist and commentator Drew Magary. But Klosterman is cool while Magary is hot. I'd like to see them.
Speaker: A humidifier and a dehumidifier fight it out in the same damp basement. Like, what what do you make of that? ah
Speaker: not much, I guess.
Speaker: And even on in um when you were on Pabla Torre finds out, you were talking about this implicit idea that part of football's appeal and the stakes, it's the stakes of the possibility of getting hurt.
Speaker: And I wonder why you think that is Well, what what I'm talking about there is sort of like, you know, what is the allure and the draw of football? Like what, meant you know, because it is so unlike every other example of culture in the United States. It's kind of the last monoculture that exists. And it only happens in the United States. It's not really popular in any other country in any meaningful way. So it's the biggest thing here and then nowhere else. and And its dominance as a television product is just, you know, say like you there's there's
Speaker: other countries where our sport is beloved, like baseball is loved in Japan, it would never be the the hundred most popular television shows in Japan. It's not like 93 would ever be baseball games. But in the United States, that's how it is for football. yeah So um of course in that book, I'm working through ways to sort of understand why this is. And and there is, I think, a temptation sometimes particularly from people who ah don't like football, who to to sort of look at it and say like, well, it it' it has something to do with the violence, the almost like that like the like kind of the deeply buried maybe bloodlust that people just have. They want to see violence or whatever. And with football, I don't think that is actually the case.
Speaker: I don't think it is consumed as a blood sport. I don't think people watching football want to see guys get hurt or killed or anything like that. They like all the things around it, the strategy, almost like the poetry of the actions and all these things.
Speaker: But the aspect of violence is critical because it raises the stakes in a way that other sports don't experience. um One comparison I sometimes use is like guys who want to climb Mount Everest or K2, okay? They don't want to climb Mount Everest and die.
Speaker: Like they don't want to climb up this mountain and die from exposure. They want to live. They want to do the thing and come back down and tell people about it. But if there was no chance that they could die, if it was guaranteed that any time you got into trouble you would immediately be rescued by a helicopter, there you know that there was no mortality rate for climbing Everest,
Speaker: it would be a less meaningful thing. You need to have the sense that what you are doing is like ah putting your life in some kind of danger. And I think with football that happens even for the consumer, that we're watching something in the same way we'd watch baseball or basketball or any of these other sports. But the fact that we know that there is this like omnipresent risk not just of what we're seeing, like someone getting injured on the field, but potentially having CTE and having dementia in 40 years. And in some sense, they are gambling on how their experience with the world is going to exist. That knowledge sort of informs all these other things and raises the value of them in our mind in a conscious way.
Speaker: So um it's like, this is why whenever there's, say, a rule change in football for safety, Okay, like ah people here watch football, you they've changed the kickoff rules in the NFL. You know, the guys now line up close to the receiver. It looks really strange, but that's kind of what we're doing in theory for safety. Now, in a lot of ways, that has made kick returns more interesting. It certainly hasn't damaged the game in any way, but there was an immediate pushback against that, especially people who loved football for their whole life. They see this kickoff and they this new kind of formation, and they're uncomfortable.
Speaker: And what I think that is, is not their discomfort with the rule change. They don't really care how the kickoff does work, but they know it's done for safety, which in a way is moving the game away from that aspect where risk is part of it. Like no one wants to say that, right? It it would seem real crazy to be like, well, you know, I like football because guys get hurt, or I wish they made it more dangerous, or I need more violence in my life. No one's going to explicitly say those things. And yet an understanding of that is part of what makes it so popular.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, it also makes me think of any movie or live stream of Alex Honnold free soloing anything. It's like it would be boring unto itself if he was a skilled climber like himself were roped in. go god There's no inherent risk to that. dus He's going to swing off the rope. But if he falls free soloing a skyscraper, well, that that's why I guess most people tune in. Well, with with solo climbing, that that is almost a different level than what we're talking about with football, right? Because the reason we talk about football and the dangers of football so much and the CTE and all these things so much, it's such a big part of the conversation, is because due to its popularity, there is this sense that we are all in a way complicit with this.
Speaker: Like, let's say we watch the Super Bowl one year, there may be some people here who don't like football, but they go to a Super Bowl party, they're eating chips, the Super Bowl's happening, people are talking, and a guy dies on the field.
Speaker: Like, a guy gets hit and he dies on the field. okay All the people at that party, and especially the people who like normally don't engage with this, they're gonna be shocked by that, right? And they're gonna be like, well why is this happening? Like, we're having a party around an event where we witness someone die, or whatever, you know? There's this sense that because it's so popular,
Speaker: Every single person, even people who don't view themselves, like people who never watch football, but they still in a way feel like a political position, maybe this shouldn't exist because of this. We as a society are complicit. When a guy's climbing...
Speaker: like a cliff wall solo. We're not really complicit in that, right? That's not really a that's not really a an audience thing. Or like, you know, even if even things like NASCAR and bull riding and all these things that are more dangerous than football, because the popularity is smaller, we can kind of look at those things as in isolation. But when we do watch a guy, like when like if we watch like a, you know, there was this, what was, I'm trying to think with the recent documentary, there was a documentary series about this guy crazy dude who was a climber. and it's the group you what I'm talking about? I actually don't. oh
Speaker: Oh. It was this is probably it was the with the dark wizard. That's what it was called, the dark wizard. About this guy who was the best freehand climber you know of his kind of group of guys and just constantly attempted to put them put himself in danger, doing riskier and riskier things until he eventually does die. Now I suppose the interest in him is close to a blood sport.
Speaker: You watch that documentary series with the idea that like, you can almost tell the way it's framed, the way the other talking heads are communicating, this guy is gonna die, you know? And you're almost waiting for that to happen, in some ways to prove that this thing that they're doing is as dangerous as it seems.
Speaker: Yeah, and I love, like, even towards the end of football, too, you you figure that, like, football is almost racing towards its end. Like, the future has already started. I believe it's, like, something in the in the syntax of you're right. And it's almost like extraction energy. Like, you bleed the oil out of the ground and, like, raise share prices and, like,
Speaker: climate change is for the future and for suckers. And like that seems like kind of like what football is. They are just racing to get as much as they can out of the growth of that sport. Well, it more has to do with the idea that football, both at the pro and college level, and this might be true for you know lots of sports and lots of things, but it's very visible with football, is that being the biggest thing in the country is not enough.
Speaker: They have to keep expanding. They have to play games in Rio. They have to play games in London, in Germany. They want to probably expand the number of teams. They want, like, they're trying to make college football now into a version of professional football. It's like they're, like, kind of at a maximum growth at all times mentality. And as a consequence, like, it will collapse. Now, I don't think, I wouldn't say they're racing toward it. I think it's probably 40 or 50 years off. But I do think that there is a limited amount of time for football to certainly occupy the position it does, like in the center of our culture. Yeah, for sure. That makes total sense. And and as as we kind of segue into your latest book, I was listening this morning on on a run with your 2014 interview with Brian Koppelman 12 years ago, which is crazy to think. But you were, it was towards the end and you guys, he had asked you something ah of the effect of you having built a fan base, it kind of made you like the the Grateful Dead. And so you had like this cohort of people who were gonna basically, you know, whatever you put out, they were gonna read. And I think that's that's pretty true. And think it's proved to be true. You said like, I could write a really weird novel and enough people would buy it that the publisher would say that it validates doing this. And ah for Rock, I feel feel like that was very true for Decapo, but not true for Penguin.
Speaker: Well, yes, although that the reason Penguin did not put the book out, I don't think it was as straightforward as them perceiving it as less commercial.
Speaker: I'm sure they did perceive it as less commercial because it is, but I think that that was more of a subjective, taste-based response to it. I mean, there's like okay there's things about this rock book which I know are
Speaker: contradicting certain kind of unwritten rules about writing. Like, ah and you know, it's amorphous to say they're unwritten because, you know, but we there's certain things about this book that um you're just not supposed to do.
Speaker: You're not supposed to write a fiction book with non-fictional characters. There's kind of an unspoken idea that that is a problem for the reader. Because it's like, okay, Elvis is in the book, okay?
Speaker: A fictionalized version of Elvis. But you all know who Elvis is. You know with all these things about him. So are you supposed to inject your pre-existing knowledge of Elvis into that? Or are you supposed to act as though all these things you know now are thrown away? It's strange. It's strange to use real people in something that didn't happen. um The book is structured like a fake reference book.
Speaker: Well, when you read a reference book, I mean, I love reference books. That's kind of a big, was a big influence on me growing up is reading reference books, but you don't read them straight through, you know, but this is sort of also a novel. So you have to, you know, read it straight through. yeah There's also the sense that this is supposed to be an alternative false history. And because of that, a lot of the information in the book are things that in reality, if it was real,
Speaker: would be assumed to be known by everyone. I mean, let's say I was writing a real history of rock music. So it's not non it's not fiction, it's fiction. It's nonfiction, history of rock music. And I'm writing about various artists of the 1980s. I'm writing about Van Halen. I'm reading about writing about Husker Du. It would be very strange if I kept being like, can you believe the actor Ronald Reagan is president?
Speaker: Like if I just kept acting completely shocked that Reagan was president in the 80s, you know? That wouldn't be how it is, right? We all assume that these are things that anybody reading any book's going to know. So when I wrote this fake history of rock music, when these absurd, insane things kept coming up, I had to act like it was common knowledge, which kind of forces one to write in a way that's so understated it almost seems boring.
Speaker: So then I'm purposefully writing a book in a boring way? i mean, I can see why Penguin was like, I don't know if this is a great idea. Like, you know, it's like... I remember they said something. It was in a GQ interview. They're like, they love the concept. They're like, only you can do this. But then you actually did it, and it was too weird for them. they're like, I don't know what we you imagined, but it wasn't this. Well, yes. I mean, i it was because i I had pitched the football book and the rock book at the same time.
Speaker: And I assume that they would either want me to do both books, because I do a lot of, deal like a lot of my book deals are two book deals. um But I thought, it's a very high possibility they'll only want one. And I said to my agent, it's like, if they only want one, that's fine. you know and Which I assumed, of course, would be the football book, which seemed like the most commercial idea anyone could do in the world outside of like, I'm doing a book on Taylor Swift's Sex Life. Like, I can't imagine what would be more commercial than writing a book on football.
Speaker: The response back was surprising. They did not want the football book. Their argument sort of being was people who love football don't like reading about it. People who don't like football don't want to be told that they should like it. you know There's also kind of this long standing belief that when you're writing sports books, it's to your advantage to write about the smallest possible ball.
Speaker: Like golf books are successful, but as the ball gets bigger, the interest seems to go down. But the rock book, they were like, do this, this is so crazy. Only you could do like that's only you could do this book or whatever. but you know And I guess that maybe is true, but that wasn't, I mean, I kind of, I've told this joke before, so i but like I kind of think what it was like for them is like, imagine someone comes up to you and says like, hey, I'm gonna paint the town red tonight. And you go like, great, that's awesome. And then you see the person walking toward the paint store.
Speaker: And you're like, wait, you're you're literally doing this. You're literally painting things right. oh Yeah, that's what I'm doing tonight. you know I think when I said I wanted to do this, they had this idea that it was going to be sort of the backdrop for a conventional sort of novelistic style. Like there would be a young musician and a young music writer in 1966, and then the world would change over time, and you'd follow these characters and their relationship through time.
Speaker: That's what I think they probably thought. Maybe that's what I should have done. But I wanted to do it like a rock encyclopedia, as if this is all had happened, and it came out in 2002.
Speaker: yeah Yeah, well, it there are no like scenes and there are no dialogue. There are no main characters that are the vector or the donkeys, as Lawrence Wright might say, to carry you through the narrative. It reads like a nonfiction critic writing this alternate, like, well, way it is actual history in the world building that is this book ah through 1967 to 2002. So it's like you have to like discard everything that you've thought about that time and or just accept the reality of this book, which is hard when there are real names and real albums at the same time. it is kind of a mind book. And you can't totally discount it because it won't be funny if you do. Right. I mean, the book is sort of like, it's just, it's so weird. It's always weird with this. It's like, so when I was writing my earliest books, like Fugger Rock City, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Killing Yourself to Live, those early books, when I'm in my late twenty s early 30s, I felt like these things are just saturated with brilliant ideas about the world. Like I am just, I am totally reinventing the way we think about how culture is experienced. And people read them and they were like, oh, these are really funny books. I really like this. It's funny. It's hilarious. I'm like, well, okay, great, great, great. Okay, yes. Okay, so now I'm trying to write a book very consciously to be funny.
Speaker: The idea, really my goal is for that people who have spent their entire life thinking about The Beatles, thinking about Led Zeppelin, thinking about music all the time, to the fact that all of these things, their histories now are like their own person's history. Like their knowledge of the Rolling Stones is part of who they are. That this would be a book for that person just sort to sort of be able to experience these things in a kind of completely you know mirror image way or whatever. like And it would be funny for that person. Like they would be amused.
Speaker: And then of course the book comes out and people are like, let's talk about the ideas in it. And there are some ideas in it, but it's just it's like I'm just never happy, I guess. I mean, the one thing that writing has taught me is that I am never happy about anything, no matter how good the thing is. Like, you know, I just like, oh, no one knows who I am. I'm just a nobody. I'm going to publish this book and then they'll know who I am. It's meaningful. That happens. It's like, oh, now I'm alienated. It's so weird. People know these things about me. Oh, now I'm kind of famous. This person's looking at me on the subway. What does that mean? Does it mean that they know me or are they just looking at me? you know And then you start to become less popular. Why is no one looking at me on the subway? why will you this like why is it It's like, it doesn't matter what has happened in my life. I have wanted the opposite of whatever it was.
Speaker: It kind of sounds like what your father was saying at the Doug Flutie Hail Mary. Yeah. yeah Yes. That's why I wrote that sort of in a sense. Like that was my realization that this thing that he cared about.
Speaker: and yet somehow saw himself in, he was always sort of the person who failed in that scenario. Whenever I think of my own career, all I think about are the negative aspects.
Speaker: I never, you know, like, and that's a, I just, I don't know what, if it was anybody else, I would tell them they're crazy. But you can't tell yourself you're crazy. I can tell you you're crazy. Yeah, exactly. Sure, a lot of people do, you know. um Like I said, This summer, before this rock book came out, my friend, my friend Ben Heller, at a 50th birthday party. And like, we're down in San Francisco. He's having a little party or whatever. And people are, you know asking me about the book coming out, what I'm going to do next. And I'm like, oh, I, you know, who knows? You know, maybe I'll never write it. Maybe I'll no more ideas. Maybe this is it. And my friend Michael was like,
Speaker: Do you know how fucking sick I am of hearing this? Like for 15 years, you have done this every time a book, like every time you do it. Like, don't you remember you doing it? And I guess I don't.
Speaker: ah the The epigraph of of rock is a quote or a passage from Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume 3. You're like, songwriting isn't like book writing. When you write a song, some of it can be true and some of it can be fake and no one cares. It all ends up the same, but you can't do that with a book.
Speaker: Can you imagine if some guy wrote a book where he took real people and just made up how they talked and how they lived, but then every so often, almost at random, what he wrote was the way it actually was? What would that mean?
Speaker: And I was like what was it? Was it this quote that made you want to write this alternate history or this one like strike you as a lightning bolt? Like, oh my God, this is rhyming with what I'm doing. Oh, I made that quote up.
Speaker: No. There's only one. chronic There's no Chronicles 3. There's only Chronicles 1. didn't even do the Chronicles. There's no Chronicles 2. Yeah.
Speaker: No, but I'll tell you what, man. You are, this is happening a lot, which maybe is a part of the reason Penguin thought this. Okay. Here's another great example. Okay. So like, Like, so before the book even comes out, ah like, ah yeah you know, my agent reads the book and he's trying to be supportive of it, you know? So he's sort of like, I really like this, you know? I think some of these parts are hilarious. Like, that part you have about, like, the guy who, like, dies at Woodstock because he gets run over by a tractor, that's hilarious. And I was like, well, that part is true. That did happen.
Speaker: Then I was interviewed by another guy, and he was trying to be complimentary about the book. He was just this guy who knows everything about classic rock. So the guy's real smart. He knows every detail about the band Boston. He knows every detail about like the British invasion, everything like that. And he's giving me a compliment. He's like, I really appreciate that you did not you know use the, you know give in the temptation to just make up records and make up musicians. You know you used real people and real records all the way through, except that one section where you talk about that Gigi Allen guy or whatever. And I was like, that guy is real. That's all true. And then it threw off the whole interview because the guy could not believe that this is a real person. like I was surprised he didn't know who the guy was, but I guess Gigi Allen is probably the antithesis of classic rock, so maybe it is possible. But there have already been situations where people are reading the book and they're not clear about what is real and what is false, and I can see where that is kind of a problem. A weird part of me likes it. too
Speaker: A weird part of me enjoys it. i don't you know I've always been happy on this podcast to play the fool. And and know it it feels apropos that ah that I wouldn't know that that was fake. But now I look back and be like, of course there was a fake epigraph, you moron. LAUGHTER
Speaker: Although it makes me think that I did a good job of mimicking Bob Dylan's writing style. Of course. So that makes me happy in a way. yeah ok But I imagine the the idea of this book might have been like a lightning bolt at first, but then there were complications of like, oh, maybe this isn't such a good idea. But ah what was the experience of like from generation of the idea, this is amazing to like, oh, I got to stick the landing on this.
Speaker: I mean, it wasn't a lightning bolt idea. Some books are like that. Like the book, But What If We're Wrong, that was a lightning bolt idea that came, the whole thing came to me within 10 minutes of an event happening, you know? This book, The Rock Book, is not that way.
Speaker: Like, so I worked at Spin Magazine from 2002 to 2006, and it was a real great time in my life. And it was amazing to be working with these people who like,
Speaker: were so much like me in some ways, in terms of, like, what we were interested in, how we thought, and we would just, you know, it was, it was just an, this rare situation, maybe everybody has experienced this sometimes, where you're in a setting where you can make a joke about the thing that you're engaged with, and everyone will laugh, because everyone has the same information, okay,
Speaker: So that's kind of how it was at Spin. And sometimes we talked about music so much that in order to be interesting, we just had to kind of make things up. Like, wouldn't it be interesting if the opposite of this was true? Like, wouldn't it be interesting if Morrissey was like Ted Nugent and wanted to have sex with every girl he ever met? you know and But the Smith music was the same. That was always that was maybe the biggest, the if there is anything close to like this lightning bolt situation,
Speaker: It would be what at whatever point it happened where I was like, I would like to do a completely fake history of rock music, but all the records are exactly the same.
Speaker: Like the first r REM record comes out on the exact day it did and the songs are identical. And like, you know, the first Judas Priest record comes out in the in the same year it did and though everything is the same, but it's just sort of the perception and the response to these things. Because if there is like a bigger idea to this book, it is I suppose about the idea of how criticism operates in a general sense. And how so much of what we view about the value or lack of value in art is you know reverse engineering.
Speaker: Where you start from the experience that you like it and now you gotta figure out how do this how do I make this thing I like you know mesh with my my politics and my view of what should be important about art and how things are supposed to be sort of constructed in sort of a canonical sense. You know, that it's this backwards working thing. So, like with the Velvet Underground in this book, in this book, the Velvet Underground, their first record's ten times bigger than Thriller, okay? It's the biggest record but ah you know by far. It completely ellipses everything the Beatles and the Stones did, you know?
Speaker: And what you think on the um on a certain surface level, always is that means that everything we think about The Velvet Underground would now be 100 times larger. That any thought that you have about a band like The Velvet Underground would now be 100 times wider. And there are jokes in the book that sort of play into that. But in reality,
Speaker: What you think about the Velvet Underground, if you think about them at all, is often built around the fact that you know that it wasn't popular, that you knew it was cultic, that you knew it was separate from everything else, that their aesthetics could not match what was happening in 1967. And if you make them popular, all of those aspects evaporate into the air.
Speaker: Now those things become monocultural ideas. And that's so, I mean, I guess now I am talking about the ideas in the book, but that's like the big one, I suppose. yeah Yeah, and it's not like you can write a forward be like, listen, this is the timeline of how things actually happened, but that would cut against the grain of all the jokes in the book. And that's kind of the satisfaction of finding what is actually a joke, like Catherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who she was at the time. like Yes, Watergate matters. Yes, what's happening in Cambodia matters. but But they don't matter as much as this new album from Montrose. The guitar dynamics are exceptionally well recorded.
Speaker: Well, that was maybe the other idea in this book that was probably did sort of emerge from this kind of goofing around at Spin, which was, what if the things we say about music were actually true?
Speaker: Like, you know, when we're, if someone's, say, like reviewing like a Chapel Rowan record or something, you know, they're going to talk about the political implications of this, what this will mean to people in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee or whatever, who had no relationship to alternative culture and counterculture, and now they're getting it through this mainstream pop, and that her sort of adversarial nature about Palestine and Gaza and stuff, they for you know, but for the most part,
Speaker: People are putting out records and people are liking them or not liking them. you know But my thing was like, what if all of these things that we say about music and the meaning of it actually was the way it was?
Speaker: Like in this book in 1976, Carter loses to Ford because Jimmy Carter has a problematic relationship with the Allman Brothers. And then Reed accidentally endorses Ford in an NPR radio yeah get interview or whatever. like It's so of like now,
Speaker: If we're right, like there's a very famous picture, a real picture of Jimmy Carter wearing an Allman Brothers t-shirt. okay he Allman Brothers did play a show to support Jimmy Carter's campaign. They were you know from the South and they had, you know. um And if somebody's writing about the Allman Brothers playing for Jimmy Carter's campaign, they're going to completely amplify the actual meaning of that. Like it's a cool fact, it's an interesting fact if you're into Southern rock, it's an interesting fact if you're a completist about understanding Jimmy Carter, But in no way did his relationship to the Allman Brothers have any... i just I mean, if it had an impact on his election, it was negligible. But I was like, well what if it wasn't that way? What if that actually was the most important thing? What if rock music was the most important thing in the country?
Speaker: Yeah. Well, I love that in this chapter of Heaven on Fire where like a Kiss decides to like have like an elevating, dirigible like ah stage and and it blows up and Kiss dies.
Speaker: Spoiler alert. It doesn't matter. But like the what you write is like Gene quit treat teaching after six months. He was like a middle school teacher or something like, which must have been when they got to the chapter about how how hydrogen was flammable. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, is so in the in the section about Kiss dying, I mean, in some ways it's always weird talking about these things because, like, when i'm just when I'm interviewed for this book, I'm interviewed like it's a nonfiction book, and that's a totally natural thing because it's like fact after fact about bands. occurred But, of course, there's supposed to be surprises to the book, so I never know what I'm going to say, but I'll talk about this. So there's a section in this book where ah the band Kiss has made put one record out, And they play this kite festival in St. Louis, which they did do.
Speaker: There was a kite festival in St. Louis, and they kiss played in the middle of the afternoon. So in this book, I have this idea that like they make their their stage into like a box kite, and they use you know they use ah hydrogen to lift it above it, and it explodes. um And there's this with the reference he's talking about, is like this was Gene Simmons' idea. Now, Gene Simmons was a teacher. That is true. He was a teacher in Spanish Harlem. He was like, an you know, and then he quit to be in KISS. um But then then the the bigger idea of the section is that like, because KISS dies after one record, they are sort of reimagined as like the most sort of punk politically important band possible.
Speaker: In the same way that this happens when people die. I mean, like, it's very it was always very weird to me to have discussions about the artist Jeff Buckley. in that when Jeff Buckley's record came out, people were like, oh, this isn't so bad, and then he died, and it became this totally different thing, you know, obviously in a larger scale that happened with Kurt Cobain.
Speaker: um i was just talking about this with someone yesterday, yeah weirdly, where i was like, like I, my son asked me, like, you know, do I remember when Kurt Cobain died, and I was like, I do remember that day, you know, and then I went and played, in a you know, like a amateur basketball tournament, we were talking about it, and it seemed like a you know shocking but not surprising thing. But then like by two weeks later, I was meeting people on my college campus who were like saying that they were still getting over it, and I had no memory of them ever liking Nirvana. I mean, death does change things. yeah So in this situation, the perception of KISS as kind of a Maoist band, an anti-capitalist Maoist act, is like kind of dependent on their death. Yeah, there's ah you're right. by By dying young, Kiss was impregnated with the deep metaphoric significance. And I'm someone who wrote about someone who died young and... Who's that? Steve Prefontaine. Oh, well, you know... and Yeah. Go ahead. Well, and you write that, like, about Kiss, it was the shortest possible career followed by the longest possible legacy. And I was like, man, I wish I could have had that sentence. Okay, so when... um
Speaker: oh How old were you when the two Prefontaine movies came out almost simultaneously? 17 and 18. Yeah, that was that was a real interesting thing. The guy he wrote about, this track star, ah he was like a, I mean, i guess he's a significant figure in the history of US track, but he was never a gold medalist or anything like that. um But weirdly, in the 90s, two movies about this guy came out at the almost exact same time. yeah And it's so bizarre when things like that happen. That had to, in some way, influence you, though.
Speaker: That was certainly my introduction to him as a meaningful figure. Yeah, and i worked in specialty running retail in the aughts at some point, in some and we would have Without Limits, which is the superior of the two, ah starring Billy Crudup, on on on a loop basically on a weekend so people could just, know, it was on in the background. So that was my like introduction to the feature films basically, even though they came out when I was in high school.
Speaker: But yes, yeah yeah he was kind of force-fed into the the culture. There was a pre-Fontaine renaissance in the mid-'90s with that Fire on the Track documentary, which is like a brilliant Nike content marketing documentary when you really think about it. And yeah, that created this renaissance. And then, of course, yeah, he still towers over American track and field somewhat. But but yeah, that that sentence of like the shortest possible career and the longest possible legacy, I'm like, ooh, damn, that's a good sentence. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, thank you, even though it is fake in this situation. I appreciate you... It's true. greg It's true. if If I've proven anything in this conversation, it's that I have no idea what I'm talking about. No, you do. it's It's a weird thing to talk... This is a spin... a This is definitely the most unlike... the I mean...
Speaker: My other books, I feel like, are one kind of thing. and it's I do sometimes think to myself, it's like occasionally someone will buy this book and they'll be like, I've never read any of your other books before. I'm gonna see what this is like. i'm like What are you going to think the other ones are like now? Are you going to think like in every other book, I was just like, you know that thing you believe? It's the opposite. you know like yeah Well, there is there are moments in the book where like, oh, I i get that joke. Like ah you have like Georgia coach Vince Dooley. And he's like, I've had two quarterbacks and two quarterbacks quit the team in order to start rock bands. And I can't blame them. Football can't compete with rock music. Maybe it can in Nebraska or Iowa, but not down here, not in SEC country. I'm like, I get this joke.
Speaker: Well, that's it's like it's a joke for everybody, I guess. You know, it's like it's the idea. like i want i would like I like the idea that people might feel vaguely rewarded by understanding why a joke is in the book, even if they don't think it's funny.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, then there's there's a moment, too, where you but the Tom Hanks movie, that thing you do in the 90s, and you you name it here, like that thing you keep doing. And I remember that movie from the 90s. I watched it. My best friend Pete loved that movie. We had the soundtrack. I don't know why. we that That movie is meaningful for, I feel, one specific reason, is that there are lots of situations where we see a fictional film,
Speaker: or or a fictional movie or television show, whatever the case may be, where there's a piece of art, original, original piece of art in that film, and the movie or the book or whatever hinges on that art being great.
Speaker: And there's very few examples where that is actually true. you know like If you see like a, if there was someone made a movie about a painter and they wanted to make up paintings, it's like you would rarely look at the painting and be like, that is really great art or whatever. you know That's one of the few examples where the song that they wrote for that movie is legitimately great. And it sort of carries the movie because you can actually believe that this thing would have been hugely popular.
Speaker: Yeah. yeah Yeah. and And another small joke, too, is just saying yeah towards the end of the book, too, you're like spin senior editor Robert Caro. And he's interviewing someone from The Strokes. And I was just like, oh, my God. That's hilarious. But that is such a niche joke. that you would have to know who Robert Caro was, that he's just just like epic biographer of Robert Moses and of course Lyndon Johnson. But how many people are going to get that? I was like, i got that one.
Speaker: I guess, you know, in a sense, my thinking is this, like there's 330 million people in America now. Okay. So there's gotta, you if you take, if you think of, you know, 1% of that is a huge number. So if you can get one 10th of that 1%, That's all who needs to get those jokes. yeah like I only need 50,000 people in the world to want to read this.
Speaker: like I'm not like Taylor Swift or Beyonce. I don't have to worry that if my book doesn't sell six million copies, it's a failure. like One of the good things about writing is that it is still a small insular world.
Speaker: You know, you sell 100,000 copies of a book, you are huge. You are famous. You are set for a while, yeah you know? um there's It's not like if if you make a TV show and only 100,000 people watch it, like you're going to be living on the street. You know what saying?
Speaker: Totally. Let's play ah just a little hypothetical as we kind of bring the conversation of the podcast proper to to ah to a landing. And I'd love you for you to like just take the concept of rock and But apply it to literature. Let's just say like David Foster Wallace doesn't hang himself.
Speaker: It's something of that nature. He writes something that's as big as Eat, Pray, Love, and he's the canonical like popular writer of in his voice. I don't know. What would that look like to you? Okay, so you're saying in this scenario, Infinite Jest is Eat, Pray, Love?
Speaker: Yes. Okay. Well, it's a little trickier because the thing about music is is that sophisticated music and unsophisticated music is almost equally accessible.
Speaker: Like, if you listen to Olivia Rodrigo or you listen to Yes, you can almost appreciate them in the same context. like they could You could listen to those songs back to back and like them both in the same way.
Speaker: okay Literature is a little more complicated in this regard. right So it would be like so like, what that would mean is the density of infinite jest would become the normal way for people to write.
Speaker: There would be a lot more footnotes in the world, obviously. like Footnotes would be, like you know it wouldn't just be me stealing them. It would be a whole bunch of people stealing them. you know um The thing about the Velvet Underground, and the reason that works so well, in this or well enough, in this context, is that the Velvet Underground do represent sort of this idea of the gap between a commercial band and a band that critics like, or that you know avant-garde people like, or so you know it's like intellectual people like.
Speaker: Now that doesn't exist so much even in music anymore. Now, the biggest artists are covered the most. Like the New York Times is going to write about a major artist much more often, or much more likely to do so, than writing about some kind of obscure artist or whatever that they think has merit.
Speaker: Velvet Underground exists in this period where it's like, Now, in retrospect, if we listen to the music from that period, you might think like, oh, Sgt. Pepper and Velvet Underground and Nico and this Kinks record and all these, like they they sort of seem like shared reality, but didn't seem that way then.
Speaker: They seem very different, you know? And that was, I was able to sort of use that difference as a way to say like, okay, so things that we once thought were commercial are now underground. Underground things now come to the top.
Speaker: Literature is strange in the sense that when Infinite just came out, you know it wasn't it did not best sell until he died. like it did not It was not a hardcover bestseller or what anything, but it was famous because literature is small enough where that even something that, like may i mean it i there would be a lot of people who would be shocked if they found out like how few copies like a booker prize-winning book might sell. Like, it's a much smaller world. That world is more sort of, it's almost more like, kind of like Broadway theater. It's almost more dominated by the way it is discussed than what is actually consumed. So if Infinite Jest was perceived as populist like airport literature, like if you're walking through PDX or whatever, that's the book you would see.
Speaker: What that would probably mean then is something like Eat, Pray, Love would be seen as a little bit more significant because kind of the sparseness and the simplicity of the language and the straightforwardness of the ideas would become the elevated transgressive thing.
Speaker: I mean, that's always how it is. Like with like when we perceive art from it from a critical perspective, there is something that compels the critic to reach for the transgressive.
Speaker: Anything that seems to counter, kind of kind kind of, run counter or contradict what sort of the the the status quo is, is more valuable. With the idea, ironically, than that eventually that counterculture idea will become the mainstream culture and then it will be bad again.
Speaker: Like it's only good while it can still exist in that space. So if this were to happen, this thing you're describing, I suppose like people like David Foster Wallace, people like Franzen and stuff like that, I think that they would be perceived sort of like, um I don't know. it would it would be, it's it's just it is hard to imagine. like It is easy to imagine how if you give someone a Velvet Underground record and they've never heard it before, that they could play it and they could say, like well, that actually sounds contemporary. This sounds like the music I like.
Speaker: It's hard to imagine somebody who has never read that kind of literature and like giving them infinite jest and saying like, this is what you like now. yeah Like it's hard to imagine that. So it doesn't work as well. like Like it might, I suppose with the way that this book is structured, you could potentially do that with film, I think. In fact, there's even some aspects of that in this book, but it almost has to be a straightforwardly consumerist kind of art.
Speaker: Like if we if we did this with visual art, for example, and the most popular painters were now the least popular painters, and the least popular painters were now the most popular painters nobody'd fucking know anyways. I mean, it's true. It's like very few people would even know the difference. If you showed them the images, they wouldn't know because it's such an insular world. I mean, like, you know this was nice. The show was opened by a poet, you know, it's like you're kind of in some ways you're in a good position as a poet, right? Because they always go like, you know, how do you want to be, ah you know, how, how do you want to like, you know, be remembered in a hundred years, you know? Well, you'd be a poet, you sell 3000 copies now,
Speaker: and 1,000 copies in 100 years. And then you're a famous poet. okay it like yeah Awesome. I'd love to turn the the microphone, is in in essence, over to the audience. We'll do some Q&A. If there's anybody in the audience who would love to ask Chuck a question, we'll go here first. You can ask anything. It doesn't have to be about this book or out any question you want is fine. okay Because what he asks, basically, is he says, he said um I write essays, and they're kind of all over the place. Would it be better to have them sort of unified by theme?
Speaker: Well, to sell a collection of essays to a publisher, yes, it is better to have them sort of under the same idea because you know you're you're trying to convince someone to buy your book. like That's another great thing about the way the literature industry works. It's like you know your book succeeds or fails by how it does in the world, but it gets published because one person wanted to publish it and decided they could do it. you know So it's easier for them, though, to sort of comprehend like, oh, these are all books about modern dating.
Speaker: Or, oh, these are all books about um sort of like ah ah you know ah the the the chasm between you know literature and...
Speaker: the way reading is now basically a phone driven, whatever the case may be. you know It will be easier for them to convince, oh, the marketing department of this. and the public you know that they got to If they have to convince other people, it's easier if they can describe it in 100 words, as opposed to saying, these are just really great essays.
Speaker: But from a creative standpoint, I would actually argue that you should probably not worry about what unifies them. in until you're, you know, like, because the thing is,
Speaker: Like when I wrote that book, you when I wrote Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, the way that this is how that happened, okay? So I'd written Fargo Rock City, and I knew that I had a small window of time that I could yeah sell another book because it's like Fargo Rock City had gotten some attention, hadn't sold that much, but it had gotten attention. So I was like, I know I can write another book, and I really wanted to. So my first idea was, I'm gonna write a book about the real world. MTV's The Real World. and sort of how that in a sense that that is like the way people sort of understand the actual world in which they live in by having these kind of caricatures of people to explain their personality.
Speaker: But I start thinking about it and I'm like, do I really want to write a whole book about the real world? Because I'd just written a whole book about like 80s metal. So then it's like, i'm only going to write books about things that are dumb now. It's like that, you know what saying? And I also didn't know if I could actually write 250 pages of information about the real world that's interesting enough. But I was like, I can do a good essay on this. So I wrote this essay. And that's button it's in the book, right? So then I have another idea that maybe I'll do a book about the relationship between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Speaker: And that that that this relationship helps a person understand every relationship in their life. That that this is by chance the perfect split of these two ways of thinking about the world. And you know I'll write a book on that. But then I was like, well, that means I'm becoming a sports writer full time.
Speaker: And I also, again, don't know if like I can come up with enough interesting bits for the size of a book. But I know I can do a good a good essay on this.
Speaker: So I wrote that essay. So then I have these two essays, and I read them back to myself, and I'm like, well, it seems like the thing I'm writing about is not the art, but the audience for it, and how the audience for this art basically informs what we think about that.
Speaker: So it wasn't my idea to have a unifying idea, but it kind of emerged. So what I would say to you is that you take these essays you know and that you've written, read them kind of the way you would read somebody else's work, not trying to kind of detach yourself emotionally.
Speaker: And i think it's very possible because you wrote them all that there will be a unifying idea. Like there's some ideas you can't get away from. And one of the biggest ideas you can't get away from as an artist is that you exist, right? You're going to be you.
Speaker: Like you go back, you like Van Halen at all. You go back, you can listen to the early clips of Van Halen before they so had a record deal. They were a cover band. They were just this amazing cover band. They're covering Black Sabbath. They're covering Deep Purple. They're covering Earth, Wind, and Fire. They're covering all these different artists.
Speaker: They all sound like Van Halen songs. Like even though if they were doing covers of people's work, you never heard these songs and said like, that sounds like Deep Purple. It sounds like Van Halen. So in all likelihood, the essays you have written sound like you.
Speaker: Or there's something about you. Whatever you're injecting into the work is there. And that probably is the unifying aspect. So what I would say is don't try to unify them.
Speaker: write them, and then try to figure out what the unifying aspect is. you know Can I see what I'm saying? It's like like you you will not be able to escape from the fact that you are you.
Speaker: You will not be able to write an essay that doesn't sound like you, unless you do it you know out of kitsch or something, like just to be funny. But if you actually write, if you inject yourself into it, you'll be there. you know And something about you is what's making you pick these things.
Speaker: And maybe you don't recognize it yet. But then you will. And that's how you sell it. OK, good. oh Right here. you have the college championship? I got asked this question like eight days ago. And I said Notre Dame. And they immediately lost.
Speaker: oh I saw on my way here that like Miami was clobbering Pitt. So they're number one. And then no one's really touching them yet. So I think that when Miami plays Notre Dame, if Miami really rocks them, I think it's probably them. If it's not them, I'm not really sure. I mean, one thing that has changed with all this NIL and portal stuff is that it is impossible to actually project the past onto the present.
Speaker: So there was a time, you know, like the fact that Indiana won the national championship is the ultimate proof of this. That now... It is no longer a situation where anything I've ever learned about college football is remotely applicable to this. So I would say I know less about this year than almost any year of my memory.
Speaker: Big Star plays a large role in this book. There is, in fact, a photograph of one of their concerts, which will not seem reasonable. OK. But like Big Star is a great example of like if we're gonna reverse everything, right? We're gonna say that Zeppelin now is this underground cultic thing. Big Star is almost next to the Velvet Underground, maybe the clearest sort of collective example of something that is beloved by critics.
Speaker: critics and sort of very often unknown by people who even consider themselves music fans. Although that has changed too. you know One thing that I do think about this book is that in some ways it would have made a little more sense to have actually come out in 2002. Because I think to somebody who's in their twenty s now,
Speaker: um If you said to them, it's like, oh, the Velvet Underground were almost as popular as the Beatles, they might be like, probably. Because they seem as kind of present in the culture now. like Or if you ask them, who's bigger, you know the Kinks or the Velvet Underground?
Speaker: I think a lot of young people would assume it was the Velvet Underground now, even though it wasn't even close. so you know that's and Big Star is a thing, like you know Big Star gets like, you know they get mentioned in a Counting Crows song and all these things. By the time I became a professional rock critic, you know, in the mid nineties, it was assumed that you knew a lot about big star. Like that had already changed. Yeah.
Speaker: Excellent. Back there in the bar and then, and then here. Yeah. Okay. First question he's asking is how I ended up in the movie metal Lords. Okay. I ended up in this movie.
Speaker: It was during COVID the guys who made game of Thrones. One of those guys was like, well, you're rich now, obviously. You can make any movie you want. And he's always wanted to make a movie about his relationship to heavy metal. Not surprisingly, he had read Fogger Rock City when he was a younger person, because that's kind of the exact same experience he had.
Speaker: So he says to me, we're shooting this in Portland. Do you want to be the band teacher in this movie? And I was like, I guess. i Sure. I mean, it's like my policy is basically, if somebody wants to put me in a movie, I say yes.
Speaker: Like every time I've been asked to be in a movie, I have said yes. Because why not? Like to me, it's to. There is nothing to me like, I recently watched um a documentary about Martin Mull.
Speaker: And it's so wonderful to see this footage of like Martin Mull in some random TV show that I didn't even know existed. you know It's like there's got to be that same experience for people like me. So I said yes. And then i and it was a one-day thing where I had to be the band teacher for one day. i like They gave me the lines. The lines were not good.
Speaker: So I was like, can I just make them up? And they like, that's fine. yeah um And they do totally let me. And um that that's how I got in. yeah i ye it was you know it was one day. And the main thing I remember is getting COVID tested about nine times that day. That's all you did. I mean, it was right in the heart of it.
Speaker: um What would happen if this movie was on the Rewatchables podcast, you're saying, and I'm a guest? Well, I don't know if the movie had enough traction to valid to kind of justify a rewatchable thing. I don't know if a lot of people watched it once.
Speaker: I think it would be very odd to have them watch it multiple times. And if they did do it, I could imagine being on that rewatchables and Bill not knowing that I was in the movie until he watched it. And then he would be like, hey, you're in this movie. you know But of course, Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan would know.
Speaker: Yes, I guess I am. in that I literally am. yeah' it That's awesome. or Right here to Purple Hat. OK, well, my favorite Velvet Underground song, um it was one ah one or two. It's either Who Loves the Sun, or there's a cover of Sweet Jane Lou Reed does on that live record, Live in New York.
Speaker: So it's not the band, but it's him. I love the guitar playing and the tone of the guitar on that version. Because, you know, Phish was something that I was totally against when I was young. I hated that shit. I was against all of it. And then at one point, you know, I kind of started getting into the Grateful Dead a little bit. And and and it wasn't that Phish sounds like the Grateful Dead, but it helped me sort of understand sort of why this music is valuable.
Speaker: Like, what about this music is, you know, like, because Phish is more musically sophisticated than the Grateful Dead. And yet at the same time, what they are doing is this thing where it's like, This is important for things that go outside of music. It's for music people to have an experience with music there that is actually sort of transcending that. It's really about the relationship you have with people who have also sort of invested the same thing into this knowledge and stuff like that.
Speaker: um i don't know what that answers the question. but So it's like, like i don't I will admit, I don't listen to a lot of fish, but I like the idea of them. um Your first question is harder.
Speaker: Because what you're saying is that you want to write about something and you're afraid that the way you're writing it is either going to be too clear or not clear enough. Okay. um That's a hard problem. Okay. And that's probably going to exist no matter what you do.
Speaker: Like with this book that I wrote. there That was a daily thing. Like... This won't be funny to people who care about music if it's funny to everybody.
Speaker: But if it can't be funny to everybody, then what am I actually doing? Then it's kind of a masturbatory thing almost, sort of. you know The best advice that I would give you for this situation is write it like this.
Speaker: Imagine the story you want to tell. You're telling it to your funniest, smartest friend. that you ran into your funniest, smartest friend at this bar, and the friend said, so what are you working on these days? And you're like, i'm working on this idea. And he's like, tell me the idea. How would you tell it to that person?
Speaker: Because what you're actually doing is telling that version to the best version of yourself. When you think of your funniest, smartest friend, what you're really doing is you're projecting what you consider humor and what you consider intellect into someone who's close to you. So imagine what you would tell them. how much would you know What order would you do it in? Would it be funnier for them if you waited till the very end? Or would it be funny because you'd be right up front, this is crazy?
Speaker: It's a little bit like stand-up comedy in that way. Like there's some stand-up comedians who the whole thing is a long story for the punchline. And for some comedians, it's like this premise is funny. And now everything after it won't be as funny as the premise, but you need the premise to understand the jokes. So that's what I would suggest trying.
Speaker: Like i am a big advocate for writing the way a person talks. Now, this is another thing that sometimes people really bristle at, right? Because they're sort of like writing should be different than conversation. It should be elevated.
Speaker: And I just sort of perceived kind of this middle ground between I think it should be highly elevated conversation. Like if you've ever seen like the movie Metropolitan, there's these scenes where these people talk about art and no one has ever actually talked that way. Or another example. the first scene in Reservoir Dogs, when all those guys are sitting around the table. There's all these gangsters sitting around the table talking about Madonna, okay and about the idea of tipping and all these things.
Speaker: It sounds like these guys are who they are, but nobody's ever been that eloquent, right? Nobody always says the perfect thing. nobody you know That's what you should kind of strive for. The way you would tell this story anecdotally,
Speaker: if you did the best fucking job you've ever done telling a story. That's what I would attempt to do. And that might get closer to what you want. I don't know. answerza
Speaker: Okay, that's a really interesting question. So he's asking you basically like, to what degree should musical artists be engaged and commenting and aware of the culture? I have an answer that a lot of people are not going to like, but this is kind of the way I view it.
Speaker: I view that ideas like that, like putting politics and cultural ideas and sociocultural ideas into your art, matters when the art form is relatively new.
Speaker: So when you look at you know rock music, for example, you have the period of the 50s where it's just kind of youth music. right It's the invention of this idea. There had never been the idea of a teenager prior to World War II. There had been teenage people, but the idea was that you became an adult when you got married or when you started working, and that might happen at age 11.
Speaker: After World War II, there's this idea that now we have teenagers. We have these people with their own specific culture. They have cars. They like these different things. They like comic books and all these things.
Speaker: Rock music sort of became the first art, the first major art designed specifically for people in that experience. And it matures into the 60s. It's really with Dylan and then the Beatles in about 64 and all these things where rock really sort of, that that is this is a meaningful thing now. it's It's now the center of youth culture. And from that period,
Speaker: 64 maybe through 74. The idea of like, you know, like Neil Young and like Four Dead in Ohio and these things, these meaningful things, right? But once any art form becomes self-aware of itself, the value of that really decreases. Like hip hop, very political when you look at the late 80s, public enemy and things like that, you know?
Speaker: we move into the 90s that kind of disappears. You can still do it, but it doesn't really work in the same way. So I think in general, the time to input political ideas into your work is if you're working kind of on the bleeding edge of whatever you're doing.
Speaker: If you're doing something that has a pre-existing sort of experience, like now if um if a rock band starts now, there really isn't there really isn't any new ideas.
Speaker: I mean, because you're limited by the fact that it's basically guitar, bass, drums, maybe keyboards. Guitar is a limited instrument. It's really, it's a wide palette, but six strings and electricity, four strings and electricity, percussion, vols but but vocals, you know. um If you're going to make political music,
Speaker: Even that is almost like a caricature of political music you've heard from the past. Sort of like if somebody was trying to make futuristic music. If someone wants to make futuristic music, it's kind of strange.
Speaker: Still seems like the futuristic music from the 70s. It still sounds like craft work and space oddity and all these things that like were the future 40 years ago, right? Futuristic music has been solved.
Speaker: We know what the future sounds like even if we never get there. There's some similarities to that, I think, with putting political messages into pop and rock now. That it it doesn't seem effective, it doesn't seem novel, and it doesn't seem meaningful. It now seems like someone who is almost branding themselves as a person who does that. So I would actually say, like, it is pretty rare that I hear a political song and I think to myself, this a good song.
Speaker: like It has been a long time. It might go back to Crosby's Silsen Nash. So i guess I guess not much. I don't think it's in that important. yeah Excellent. look Anything else?
Speaker: Any other questions? We got one right here. I was hoping the baby was going to ask the question. I would love to get a question from a baby. That's who I called on. All right. What do you think of chew toys in the future? What does it mean?
Speaker: I mean, that's a tough question about asking about like the future of writing and the future of AI. It's like it is, you know, I've now been publishing books for 25 years.
Speaker: And when I started, they told me it's never been worse. The situation has never been worse. It has never seemed harder to be a writer than it is right now. And that has been said every year since then. And not unjustifiably, every year has gotten harder.
Speaker: Here's what I kind of think is going to happen, okay? And I have no way to prove this. This is just a person talking on stage, but this is what I think is going to happen. So people, are like you're probably, I'm guessing you're I'm guessing.
Speaker: Okay, well, like guys i'd say yeah um you know I'm 54. Everybody here, I think, i'm with the exception of that guy and my son, pretty much kind of in the same sort of like sphere.
Speaker: Yeah, yes, Gen x or late baby boom or early millennial or whatever the case may be. I think people are our age are always going to be resistant to AI writing, and we're always going to be able to recognize it.
Speaker: We will always be able to see that this does not feel, even even as it becomes more and more human and more natural, um the transference will not be flawless because it's like we will we will see the patches, we will see sort of the way it is put together, and we'll be skeptical too. It's like if I don't know this author or it doesn't seem to have an author, the speculation will be like this was done by a computer and all that. And we will be naturally resistant to it.
Speaker: um Now that is not going to be the case for people younger than us. People younger than us right now have an extremely negative view of AI, but it is completely found knowledge. They don't really understand why they're not supposed to like it, but they know they're not supposed to like it, and they know that there's something bad about it in a broad sense. They know that this is not something a person is doing.
Speaker: Art is supposed to come from a person. It's supposed to be meaningful. is it So there's going to be this period where in the arts, in writing, in filmmaking, all these forms, we're going to artificially suppress the use of AI.
Speaker: It's going to be used constantly in the health industry. It's going to be used constantly in the legal industry. It's going to be used in every other industry, but the arts, the place where it seems the easiest and most applicable to apply it, that's going to be suppressed. There'll probably be, you know, union rules with SAG and all these things that will stop this from happening, you know.
Speaker: But then at some point, someone's going to say, like, I don't care. I'm going to make a book using I'm going to write a novel with AI regardless, even though it's unpopular. I'll self-publish it or whatever. And because we've suppressed it, and because everything else is advanced, we're not going to realize how improved AI has become. And someone's going to write a novel using AI, and it's going to be great.
Speaker: People are going to be like, this is great. And then there's going to be this sudden realization, oh, anyone can do this. Anyone can go to their computer and say, like I want a thriller.
Speaker: that's sort of written in the style of Susan Orlean, but I want it to have a gay subtext, and I want it to be 260 pages long, and I want there to be an undercurrent throughout it that the main character is obsessed with the NCAA basketball tournament, and I want there to but have elements of diversity in it, but not overwhelmingly so. They're going to be able to basically say, this is exactly what I want from a book,
Speaker: and they will get that book. Or they will say, I want this movie. I want a movie that has Brad Pitt and John Wayne in it. And um they're actually, like and like, it's set on Mars. and they'll be able to basically say, I want exactly this, and they will get it. And there'll be this little window of time when people will be like, this is great. This is amazing. Like, I never imagined this could happen.
Speaker: But here is the thing. What that will mean is Every individual person will be having an individual experience with art. There will be no shared experience whatsoever. There will not be a situation like, I don't know, I'm not going to have you raise your hands, but I would guess if I did like, who here has read The Great Gatsby or whatever? I think a bunch of these people would say yes. And I could say like, what do you think about that book? And some people would say like it's overrated. And some people would say like it was actually great. And some people it's like I didn't get until I was older.
Speaker: That in some ways to me is what is important about art in general and about writing in general. It is that someone is taking something specific and making it into a collective kind of consensual experience, right? And that will be gone.
Speaker: That will end. and I don't know what happens when that happens. Like, I'm not even saying it's a tragedy. It'll be different for sure. Might not be worse. It might be better. i don't know. i can't, you know, but it's going to be different.
Speaker: I mean, the thing now about being a writer is, for me, is that if I do something and I publish it, it's like a bunch of people are getting my experience. Like, they are consciously paying $33 or whatever to sort of exist inside of my mind.
Speaker: Like that's because that's what my book is. Basically my book is the element of my mind fucking jammed into a keyboard and comes out at the end. That's kind of what it is. um And that when that disappears, I think the meaning of writing changes. Then the meaning of writing becomes just another way to be distracted or entertained. And of course, when I say that, it sounds bad. And of course it will be bad for me.
Speaker: Like it would be bad for my ability to make a living doing this, but for the consumer, might be more desirable, I don't know. But that's sort of what I think is going to happen. I think that there's gonna be a suppression of AI in writing, and then suddenly a explosion of AI in writing that will, for a moment, seem almost revolutionary and you know like transcendent, and then there'll be the slow, gradual realization that all of these things are disconnected, further alienating people from other people, which seems to kind of be the story of this century.
Speaker: All right. well Well, Chuck, this was so generous and amazing of you to come down here. I thank you so much for coming down here to talk shop and talk about your body work. appreciate you having me on. I appreciate all you coming. i It's like, you know, it's i'll never I will never get used to this.
Speaker: Like, I know it seems fake, but, like, I'm looking at all of you guys, looking at me, I'm just saying nothing. I'm just fucking talking. I'm not saying anything. And I can see you're listening to me. And that's incredibly flattering. And so when I say thank you, I'm not saying like, oh, thank you. It's like, thank you. That's insane.
Speaker: And to that I say thank you.
Speaker: Awesome. Thanks to Chuck and his son for driving down to spend the afternoon with us. Thanks to Gratitude Brewing for the space and the time. And i think I think they made some money. i I didn't make any money, ah but they did.
Speaker: um actually spent money. My bar tab was like 54 bucks. so So they made a lot of money off of and because of ya boy. Thanks to Seth from J. Michaels Books for selling Chuck's books, but none of mine. And thanks to you for listening and making it this far.
Speaker: You know what I miss? I miss Marc Maron's WTF podcast. And I miss his weekly newsletter, too, which came out every Monday and was basically the opening monologue of his Monday podcast. He will always go Monday, Thursday. But that newsletter was the ah the skeleton, if you will, I guess, of his his opening monologue.
Speaker: I remember early on when I was listening to the show, I remember at one point feeling like the opening monologues were a bit much and why don't we just get to the conversation. But as I listened to the show more and more, actually sometimes would only listen for the monologue and maybe not listen to the guests because I just really liked like Mark's company.
Speaker: you know what I mean? It was one of the few things I look forward to, and when I saw in my inbox, I was genuinely excited to see it and read it. I wish he would still do the newsletter. I think people would appreciate that, and I know I would, even if he doesn't do the podcast again, which I doubt he will. That newsletter was... I think that would be kind of cool.
Speaker: That's pretty cool. This week... has tested my patience with writing and writers in particular. yeah Aside from the usual bloviating for attention, thinking it's somehow going to increase book sales or whatever, I really hate it when I get added to people's email list without my permission. It's like my grand pet peeve. or one of I have many pet peeves in this world, but that's a big, big one. And when I give lectures on newsletters and platform building, it's one of the first rules I say, like never add anyone to your email list without their permission. It defeats the purpose and breaks breaks the code, breaks the trust.
Speaker: It's big one, man. And there were two other things, and I'm pretty sure one of these people might listen to the podcast, so I don't want to call too much attention to it, but it kind of ruined my day. The other thing was more of an inconvenience for me that cost me several hours of editing, but and now I have to like redo it, but yeah. whatever. don't it's one of those weeks. You ever have one of those weeks? I'm sure you do. This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but sometimes I really don't like writers. And it's partly because I i i so i like hate myself, and I'm a writer, and I see a lot of my ugly tendencies projected online. I'm like, I hate that about me, and I see other people doing it, so by extension, I also hate them.
Speaker: I find many to be ego monsters or attention seekers who are takers and not givers. And they give you attitude when you're just trying to, all you're trying to do is help. And then there's the incessant posting to social media. Listen, I get it.
Speaker: I post a lot too. It's mainly my guests. It's mainly audiograms. Or if it's videos of me, it's usually videos to promote the thing that helps promote the guests. I sprinkle in what I have going on here and there. I have to.
Speaker: Or at least I have to make it look like I'm doing something, even though I know it doesn't matter at all. I'm tired of AI pitches or pitches that are coming from people using AI. It seems clear to me that people might be asking the AI to quote unquote listen to an episode of the podcast and sum it up.
Speaker: but Let me read you some copy from two particular pitches that came in this week. I listened to your episode with Matthew Wolfe, Stories Can Sit in the Notebook for Years. His point about stories that almost work and not forcing a story to fit when it does not is the kind of craft honesty writers need to hear.
Speaker: Yeah, that that sounds like it's written by a person. Here's another. Your recent conversation with Elizabeth Shambly Birch about investigative research, finding the revealing details and structuring difficult material made me think of a nonfiction writer whose process could make for a fascinating conversation. That one was from a publicist of someone, but it just doesn't sound like a person would write that.
Speaker: And i don't know, maybe I'm just burned out, keeping the machine up and running, trying to get the next book off the ground, trying to get my agent to reply to my emails. Still nothing. If you know, you know. Trying to hustle the paperback of the frontrunner. And honestly, with that last one, I've just given up. Who even cares anymore? Plus, I'm kind of sick of it.
Speaker: I'm tired of being chronically online. It doesn't do the brain any good. and I loved the writer August Lamb's new book, You Don't Need a Smartphone. And I'll be interviewing her soon.
Speaker: She doesn't even own a laptop, so the audio for that one is going to be suspect at best. I might i have to talk her on a telephone. And my phone actually does have, I don't use like a phone recording app, but I guess my phone call app through my Pixel here has a phone recorder.
Speaker: And it'll work. It'll be okay. What are you going to do? I'm so tired of having that device near me, being the phone. I'm tired of what it symbolizes, what it represents.
Speaker: yeah When you leave it at home or put it in another room and then say you watch a baseball game on TV and you see all these people on their phones, it's depressing. Or even like a concert.
Speaker: Like when I go to Metallica shows, And I'll have to talk about Metallica at some point or another. Fucking James. God damn it. I mean, do I have to really opine about it? I guess if you know, you know, but god damn it.
Speaker: And I guess I've taken some video at a concert, but I actually, like, go back and watch it. But we're supposed to be there in the moment. I know, I'm i'm i'm starting to sound like get-off-my-long kind of guy.
Speaker: I don't know. Just kind of bummed. Everybody's a star. of a reality show of one, and it's really sad. So few people can just exist, can just be. If you don't post about it, did it happen at all?
Speaker: It's the modern-day equivalent of if a tree falls in the woods and nobody was there to hear it, did it make a sound? And it gets into the comparison trap too. that that That's the thing that really grinds my gears a bit of being chronically online.
Speaker: Yeah, professional comparison, lifestyle comparison. How many books a year are you reading comparisons? Like I saw a post from some guy and reposted by the writer Matt Bell that was telling people that they could read more books than they think because the average person reads a page in one minute, blah, blah, blah. He extrapolated the math on that one minute per page, but that's not the important part, the math. What is important is that it takes me at least one and a half minutes to two minutes to read a page.
Speaker: So I'm like, who's averaging one minute a page? And then I felt really shitty and almost compelled to comment, but I didn't. But the lingering feeling of shittiness stuck to me like like gum on my shoe.
Speaker: Like, I know I'm a a slowish reader, and I shouldn't feel shame for how slow I read. ah but ah But it's almost like, you know, here's this guy just saying, like, oh, you know, low-life commoners are reading a book a minute per page. And would the the assumption is, of course, that somebody like maybe Madden, certainly this other guy, like they they read faster than a a minute per page and like this is why we can read so many books and by the way here's all the fucking books we read this year and it's just like all of this shit all this performative bullshit yeah it's part of the reason why i don't post about running or follow a lot of running influencer types i'd never run a mile if i knew what was out there in the running world and the comparisons around that know running is for me man and i wish writing and podcasting could be like that
Speaker: Where I don't have to run into other folks online and feel shitty that I'm not getting this or that, doing this or that, or this writer is being a jerk to me for no reason, or this other writer is promoting their appearance on that show, but they're ignoring that they were on mine. All that bullshit.
Speaker: This career is a way of making you feel like shit more often than not. So why do I stay in it? Well, for one, it's really all I know. I don't know how to have a healthy relationship to this career and this ecosystem. Because have to exist online and I have to promote others and myself.
Speaker: I think I need to unplug a bit. I'm probably burned the fuck out. I think there's a way I can still do what I do and maybe just not post about it. It doesn't really do anything.
Speaker: I don't get new subscribers because of an audiogram. I post Instagram. I mean, I don't think so. I have no real idea where new subscribers come from. They do trickle in and it is a trickle. Like every every week, you know, the graph is just slowly goes up like the slope of a shield volcano, which is great. I'm grateful for that. Never any spike.
Speaker: And I don't know. So maybe that is a result of posting to the socials. I don't know. I'm just tired. I really need a break from the internet of it all. you know Doing this is just fine, you know but having to promote it and then that puts me onto those platforms and it's bad for me.
Speaker: and If somebody comments or shares it, i yeah I want to acknowledge that someone took the time to do that and acknowledge my appreciation or push back if someone is like blatantly wrong or something and or I have to stick up for somebody. I don't know.
Speaker: I want to acknowledge that or engage even if being on the platform is bad for my health. It's bad for me in the same way that drinking a dozen beers on the weekend is bad for me.
Speaker: yeah All of this is to say, i miss Marc Maron's newsletter. So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview. See
