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Episode 125—Episode 125—Brin-Jonathan Butler Talks “The Grandmaster,” Obsession, Madness, and the Power of Being an Outsider
121 Plays6 years ago
Brin-Jonathan Butler has the world record for appearances on The Creative Nonfiction Podcast at four times.His new book The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match that Made Chess Great Again is a masterpiece. Be sure to visit Brendan O’Meara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter. If you want to connect on social, I”m @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod on twitter. On Facebook you can search for the podcast by name and the hanlde @CNFPodHost. If you’re an Instagrammer, I post drawings I do and audiograms from the show. Got any questions or concerns? Ping me on social or email me creativenonfictionpodcast@gmail.com. Maybe I’ll answer the question on the show. Thanks to our sponsors in Goucher College’s MFA in Nonfiction as well as Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Go check them out.
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Transcript
Introduction to Goucher College's MFA Program
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on campus residencies allow you
00:00:16
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
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Visit goucher.edu forward slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for nonfiction.
Bryn Jonathan Butler's Literary Contributions
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Bryn Jonathan Butler.
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has the world record for appearances on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast at four times. In honor of that, here's a riff in four, four time. Hit it. Ooh. His book, The Grandmaster, Magnus Carlsen, and the match that made chess great again, published by Simon Schuster,
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is a masterpiece. Go out and buy it.
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You can buy his memoir, too, The Domino Diaries. It's his Cuba book. Highly recommend. Show notes for lengths. OK.
Exploring Self-Doubt as a Podcast Host
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So I got to be honest with you. You would think that after 125 of these episodes, the show where I talk to the best artists about the art and craft of telling true stories, that I'd be armed to the gills to make good work, good written work, because that's my stock and trade.
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But what happens, at least in my own stupid little brain, is that immersing myself with all these amazing artists is that it's stifling because they're so good that I feel like I can't even hang. It's like I'm a junior varsity guard and I'm on the bench of that team. Like by their very talent, which they have cultivated over years and decades, really.
00:02:26
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It squashes my drive. I'm like, why even contribute anything or make anything when they're doing it so well? It's stupid. I know that on a very visceral level, but I can't argue with a gut feeling, especially when I read Bryn's work because he's just so damn good. I'm just like, well, Brendan, go take a shower, turn in your key fob, and good luck in your next life. Here's a $5 gift card to Starbucks.
00:02:56
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I suspect that comedians feel the same way all the time. I bet some look at someone like maybe Eliza Schlesinger or Chris Rock and say, I can't do that. Geez, why even try? But when I frame it like that, it sounds patently foolish, right? Of course you need to keep trying. The world needs you. It needs your voice. So keep going.
00:03:19
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Where was I? Anyway, have you subscribed to the show? Go find it where you get your podcast and tell a friend. Just one friend. And maybe they'll tell one friend. Let's grow this thing. Also, consider leaving an honest review or rating over on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Whatever they call it. They help validate this entire enterprise. Also,
00:03:46
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I've got a monthly newsletter where I send out my reading recommendations for the month, as well as what you might have missed from the world of the podcast.
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and a few other goodies I've stumbled across that I think will add value to your month.
Sponsorship by Creative Nonfiction Magazine
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Maybe a laugh, maybe a little snippet that shows you you're not alone. Before I turn Brin loose on you, let me tell you that today's podcast is brought to you by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. For nearly 25 years, Creative Nonfiction has been fuel for nonfiction writers and storytellers.
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publishing a lively blend of exceptional long and short term non-fiction narratives and interviews as well as columns that examine the craft, style, trends, and ethics of writing true stories. In short, creative non-fiction is true stories well told. All right, here's Bryn, fourth trip back to the podcast.
00:04:49
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So what's going on? It's hard to believe it's been about a year since the last time we spoke when we kind of talked about the Grand Master a little bit obliquely, but it's hard to believe it's been a year, what you've been up to.
Challenges in Writing About Chess
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Yeah, just shaping it. I mean, that was just trying to figure out what it would be when I handed it in and then the editor had very different ideas of what it should be.
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structuring it kind of in accordance with his ideas versus where I tried to go in creating something was an interesting process. And then it's always a big risk. Like this is a very sensitive community, the chess community. So I was very weary that I was not pretending to be an insider. Like it was very much an outsider looking in and hoping that that could have some value. So there are a lot of nerves
00:05:45
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tied into this kind of thing because they want mainstream exposure, but they despise the fact that insiders aren't writing it for a mainstream audience. It's like tourists are coming in to do it. So that was a tricky balance to try to walk.
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I've had that experience while trying to write profiles about prominent bodybuilders.
The Subcultures of Chess and Bodybuilding
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Similarly, they have a similar level of obsession, a similar disdain that they don't have mainstream coverage because they're drugged up freaks, everyone knows that, but they still put in immense amounts of work to manifest their body chemistry.
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And the insiders, of course, turned a blind eye to the pharmaceuticals and then lean on the fact that like protein shakes and various over-the-counter supplements are what's leading to Mr. Olympia. So it's kind of a similar thing. Like the insider community also can't write about it in a mainstream way, but they also don't let outsiders in. That's it. Yeah.
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I think bodybuilders, I've known some bodybuilders. Like I trained with a guy when I was 18 and had like six months of trying to get into really good shape and eat properly the way serious bodybuilders do. I had a guy who I think got, I think he was silver in a national bodybuilding competition in Canada. And it was funny because he was using a full arsenal of steroids on top of training and dieting.
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And he's like, you should do it too, man. If you're serious, you gotta, you gotta start injecting all that. And I was like, absolutely no, no needles are coming to me that are not absolutely necessary legally. You know, the ones you need to get a permanent residency in Canada, I mean, in the United States, I can't avoid those, but I'm not taking steroids. Um, but it was a similar thing that there's a,
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a feeling that they're kind of freaks and they're both really sensitive and vulnerable but kind of arrogant in their way at the same time and chess has a lot of that. Super arrogant people and yet super insecure. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a bodybuilder or a chess player. It's just the observation.
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Yeah, it seems that on that level, why I'm drawn to that, because my primary form of physical exertion and exercise is weight training, not that I body build, but I just like that. So I've been drawn to that community because I like that obsessive
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That singular focus, I'm always drawn to people with singular focus and that's what I really loved about reading about in the Grand Master these people that are so obsessed
The Theme of Obsession in Pursuits
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and that's kind of what I like about that bodybuilding community for what it's worth. These people have that focus and is that something that you are drawn to as well with some of these subcultures, that laser-like focus?
00:09:05
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Oh, yeah. Well, I'm interested. I mean, I love how it contributes to the obsessiveness that it's dangerous, you know, that whether it's I mean, whether it's for anything, if you think it's legitimate to become obsessed about painting or working on a novel, or physics related or math related or Wall Street, whether it's earning money. It doesn't really matter in terms of how precarious it can be in
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not just destabilizing your life, but destabilizing your identity. You know, like it's, it's interesting, the degree of, uh, I think one of the things in the book that I became quite intrigued by is this popular conception of, um, the sacrifices that people have to make in order to be elite or to be the world's best at something. But I think it's actually the opposite. I think everybody around them,
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is forced to sacrifice, but they get to do what they've been doing since they were three or four years old in a completely unfettered, unmitigated way. It's just this pure, clean, incredibly narrow obsession. And they just feast at that trough for their whole life, if they're good enough. And if they're not good enough, then they have to sort of take on the responsibilities that everybody else is expected to have become well-balanced and like,
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get the job, look after basic sustenance, but if you're exceptional, then you lead a life that doesn't bear much relationship to the ones that everybody else is forced to take on. And so that intrigues
The Financial Realities of Chess
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me with obsession in kind of any area and chess more than most pursuits, there's no financial rewards. So you're having to confront the entanglements that are tied into
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poverty, extreme poverty. In most cases, only about 30 people who play chess are able to make a living strictly from playing chess. And you think of the top 30 in any other sport, they're doing pretty well financially, relatively speaking.
00:11:14
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Yeah, it sounds like some other obsessions, at least there's some sort of a net to catch you. If you're a little bit savvy and smart, whether that's athletics and there is some sort of financial reward that if you played those cards right, when you're old and wrinkled at the age of 31 or something, you might have a financial safety net. But it seems like the cost of the obsession of chess is truly walking that tight
00:11:42
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that tightrope without a net to catch you if you fail, if you're not one of those 30 in the world. I think anything that capitalism has had around for 1500 years and 600 million people are doing it and it hasn't been able to figure out how to turn a buck off it, be careful.
Capitalism and the Commercialization of Chess
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Because I can't think of too many other things that are remotely out there
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I mean Che Guevara wanted to have nuclear missiles pointed at New York and fired. And his image is the most reproduced in the world because capitalism completely divorced his image from anything to do with what he stood for as a person. So if it can do that to a Che, who was in his day, the Osama bin Laden in terms of being the CIA's most dangerous man in the world, we can lose all that and just say, he looks cool.
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And he can be on the drum kit of whatever rock band or mouse pad or college dorm room. You know what I mean? Like it's not been able to do that to chess in any way. Like 10 or 12 seats at Manny Pacquiao Floyd Mayweather would pay for the entire chess championship that went on for three weeks in New York.
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I just think that's one aspect that's interesting in America is anything that doesn't make a buck, a serious buck cannot be taken seriously. It doesn't matter about its quality or value. If it doesn't make money, nobody takes it seriously here. And that was something I was really interested in exploring is how important is the painting or the work of art versus the wall that you hang it on. And increasingly,
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You know, we judge movies. People don't talk about movies. They talk always about box office first. And same with sporting events. We're talking about the salaries of people far more than we're talking about the actual sports. We've all become insiders and accountants in a way that's strange. With chess, there's very little of that. It's very democratic in a very pleasing, hopeful way in that there's just, you know, you sit down to the board
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It's just you and it's just the person you're with. And this game was invented at the same time as toilet paper and Excalibur being offered from the lady in the lake and nobody solved it and no human being will ever be able to solve it. And off you go. You start playing. Um, but it's a strange one. It's a, it's the strangest pursuit I've ever looked at, but it's also, you know, a fascinating one and it's been a worthy one for
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hundreds of millions of people today and billions of people going back centuries.
Personal Reflections on Writing About Chess
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I mean, I can't think of very many things that have infected more people in terms of their interest or their obsession that chess even, you know, it's up there. If it was a religion, it would be the fourth largest religion in the world right now. How is your relationship to chess changed after having written this book?
00:15:03
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Um, I think, I think over the process of writing the book, I think I had a lot of death around me in the year leading up to it. And so I felt like more and more life kind of echoes poker in that poker is a game of incomplete information. And so it's life. We, we miss a lot of these important moments because we don't have enough information to recognize them while they're happening.
00:15:32
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then you sort of have to look backwards when you're helpless at those moments and understand their significance. Chess is the other kind of tragedy in that all information is there. It's just ungraspable. It's unfathomable. You jump into a boat and you're in the middle of the ocean and there is no horizon to guide you, which I love. I think it's fascinating, but it's also
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It can explain that the bigger you are in that game with your obsession or your hardware or your energy, you get further away from everybody else. So my earliest observation being around somebody like Magnus Carlsen is I've never been so up close to somebody who is further away from me in my life with any person I've ever met. And I don't know how chess is able to offer that feeling.
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It was like getting images from a satellite that are, you know, light years away. They're current, like you just, boom, you get it, but you're aware at the same time in real space and time how much further away this is. And I loved that feeling, but I felt very clumsy in trying to grasp some understanding of what it means in writing about it. So I was, I've never been more anxious in terms of people
00:17:00
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reading my suppositions or inferences or just trying to get in the headspace of somebody like this because they're very, very mysterious, enigmatic people in lots of good ways, but lots of scary ways too. So how did you synthesize this book in the face of that anxiety and the weight of that world? Uh, so on your shoulders as you were writing,
00:17:29
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Like I always do try to go to people who are a lot smarter than I am and get their insights. And, uh, you know, so, and some often, often just the journey to get those people to talk provides a lot of funny material. That's interesting or enlightening, or at least, uh, you know, you feel like Don Quixote on the way to trying to get them to open up. So.
00:17:59
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You know, Gates Elise agreed to meet me and it was funny because probably 95% of what he wanted to talk about is how dysfunctional my relationship is with the girl I was living with. I didn't realize I was hiring him for that kind of therapy, but okay. And then 5% was, Brandon, here's what it was like for me to fucking meet Bobby Fisher. I don't have anything to fucking say about it. Okay.
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All right. All right.
Errol Morris and the Sacrifices of Mastery
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Um, and then, you know, big hero of mine was Errol Morris, who is somebody that's endlessly dealt with obsessives. And I found out that he went to the same psychiatrist that Bobby Fisher was being taken to in Brooklyn because most chess players, most great chess players never had a dad, or if they did have a dad, it was the first person that they defeated.
00:18:58
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when they were four or five years old. And that's kind of an interesting feature is that patricide is the initiation for most chess players. It's shitty to lose a chest. It's a very hurtful feeling, even if you don't understand it in any kind of meaningful context or you're not being observed losing. There's something about it that hurts in a very idiosyncratic, definitive way. And I don't know why, but it just, it does. And
00:19:27
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yet there's something really sickening about beating somebody you care about at it too. So if you get over that feeling of being like, it's like with boxing, I had a new boxing client who was 14 years old, and she's really, really talented. Like if she gave up everything and just focused on boxing, she could go to the Olympics, even though I've only seen her a handful, like even after three or four lessons, you can just see she just was a natural at it. I don't know if she's going to
00:19:56
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dedicate herself that way. But at one point I asked her, have you ever thought since we've been doing this about what it would be like to actually have a contest against somebody or a fight?
A Boxing Prodigy's Psychological Complexities
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And she said, yeah, I have. And I said, is it scary for you to imagine yourself in that conflict? Is it? And she said, it's really scary. And I said, you know, it's scary for everybody. The idea of getting hurt. And she said, no, I'm not scared of getting hurt. I'm scared of hurting somebody. That's the part that people don't talk about.
00:20:26
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is to get over that mechanism. Who the hell wants to hurt somebody? Whether it's a competition or it's real life, that is hurtful to hurt people, to see the impact of things. It's why it's easier to send a nasty message as a text message than to criticize somebody to their face. Seeing pain on somebody, you think of people you care about or yourself being in pain, it's much easier to empathize.
00:20:56
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And chess players were some of the most amazingly heartless sadistic people that I've ever encountered. And I think a lot of it is because in the rest of their lives, they feel incredibly not inept, but vulnerable. You know, these are not physically imposing people most of the time. But on the chess board, you sit down with them. Few people will take more pleasure
00:21:26
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in going after your ego. You think you're smart. You have a better degree than I do. You have a better accomplishment. You make more money. Let's see how you do on the chessboard here. Let's see a certain kind of justice where all things are equal and watch me not just slaughter you, but get you to the point where you want to slit your own King's throat. And I found that
00:21:55
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my intuitive take about chess players being sadistic, I was very hesitant to offer that to a lot of major insiders in the chess world, because I thought, Oh God, they're gonna, they're gonna say, I'm just projecting, I'm projecting. And then I read this guy, Harold Schonberg, who was the music critic for the New York Times, and also their chess critic with Bobby Fischer in 1972.
00:22:20
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And it's all where Schoenberg went, was the sadism of Bobby Fischer and the sadism of these great players. And I thought, okay, as long as there's one precedent with somebody who's taking issue with Fischer being called the Mozart of chess, he said, he's not Mozart, he's Beethoven. It's aggression that we're looking at with this. And listen to anything that Bobby Fischer says about what he enjoys about chess. It's destroying egos.
00:22:48
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It's murdering people over the board. It's utter contempt. The idea that you would have the audacity to sit down with me and bring your whole life's focus and dedication to this game and think that it even deserves to sit across from me. I'm going to hand you your heart in front of the world because I'm the most important person in the world. It's just people haven't realized it yet. That was the kind of audacity.
00:23:18
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that Fisher had, that he was like a world leader or a world conqueror kind of person. So where does that come from? I think a really distorted, terrifying child-like place that we don't generally like to go to. You know, like Freud didn't avoid writing about child sexuality because it wasn't there. It's because none of the adult world wanted anything to do with knowing about it.
00:23:47
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And I think there's something similar with some of this stuff, with violence and sadism, bullying, the projected torment that we feel at that age, the vulnerability and wanting to inflict it on others. Chess offers a kind of opportunity for that, because it's just a game, but if you allow the game to become more real than life,
00:24:15
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Boy, it's a nightmarish place to go. I love the quote that you essentially have at the front inscription of the book from Don Quixote. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, 30 or 40 hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.
00:24:35
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And that gets to the very heart of what you're saying is that there is a ruthlessness among the chess elite and probably the chess amateurs as well to see them squirm across the other side of the board. No question. And Magnus Carlsen was no different. Magnus Carlsen, there were a pile of quotes of his over the years where
00:25:03
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He goes on the record just to say about how much he delights in watching people squirm and watching them be exposed as inferior to him. And it's, I think that people don't take it seriously. They just think, oh, it's just rhetoric or showmanship or whatever. I think it's absolutely dead serious to him. I think that K. Talise said this about Bobby Fischer, seeing him at 13 years old,
00:25:31
Speaker
12, 12 years old, I think 1955, he was writing for the sports desk at the New York Times, said, when Bobby Fischer leans over the chessboard, it's as if the fate of the world resides on the next move he's going to do. I don't think that's hyperbole. I think that's how these guys feel about what they do. And one of the things that was an interesting transformation for me is, and I conclude the book with it, is
00:25:58
Speaker
I acknowledge that this game is not as transferable to a general audience as a painting is or a musical composition or a sports endeavor. But if you don't think for a second that a Magnus Carlsen isn't as talented as Beethoven was or Shakespeare or any number of these practitioners that we regard as timeless
00:26:26
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that we put on the Voyager probe, you know, so that aliens wouldn't take us over. And he's worked just as hard as those people have. He's given 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day since he was five years old, since he was four years old to it. And that's part of what makes chess, for me anyway, more compelling, is that it will never be as communicable as these other art forms or sports or endeavors that we do
00:26:54
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And they give their time to it anyway. Or maybe they don't have any choice. They have to give their time to it. But that was something that I thought adds to the game rather than detracts to it. That it's hard. It takes energy to appreciate it. And I don't think it's just being a snob. I just think the people who get lost in that world, like Don Quixote, like anybody getting lost in something,
00:27:21
Speaker
chess is one that takes a lot of effort to do. It takes any idiot in 10 minutes can learn how to play and nobody will ever, no human being ever born will ever be able to master it. It encompasses both of those extremes and I think there's something quite magical about that.
00:27:40
Speaker
In your research, do you think you found that the people who are playing at this elite level, and this can even extend anecdotally to the greats of Van Gogh or Beethoven, these geniuses you cite towards the very end, that the secret to their greatness is that it does in fact remain
00:28:02
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a secret that that in fact is really a claustrophobic mindset for these obsessive geniuses and that maybe ultimately is what drives some of these people mad? No question. I think the link between genius and untenable psyche is a very tender bond. No question.
00:28:29
Speaker
We've always been, we've always had a very romantic attachment to this notion of what that is. I mean, I was intrigued by the comparisons to Bobby Fischer or now Magnus Carlsen to Mozart, but they don't, they don't approach their craft the way great composers do. Like when you go through, Schonberg has this assembly of the great composers and this portraits of them, and he does the same thing with chess players.
00:28:57
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It's much more analogous to a Glenn Gould. It's much more analogous to a great interpreter of Bach or Beethoven or Mozart, you know, or Rachmaninoff. It's not the great composers that originate from nothing because I don't believe any of those people are able creatively to allocate 12, 14, 16 hours a day to something like coming up with great operas or symphonies.
00:29:27
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It's the interpreters that can do that, that have to do that, indeed have to do that. And it's the same with chess, that they have to spend 12, 14 hours a day. Bobby Fischer, who didn't graduate high school, dropped out in 10th grade, had to teach himself Spanish and German and Russian in order to read everything that was available in any language about chess. So he did. But scholastically,
00:29:58
Speaker
a joke, but where his obsessions lay, he was ruthless and couldn't stop. And I think Errol Morris in the book makes the point that a movie like Searching for Bobby Fischer posits that we can turn our kids into prodigies. We can turn him into the next Bobby Fischer. And he says that's, you know, nobody gets turned into this. If anything, you have to hold them back from this because they can't stop.
00:30:27
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There's no agency that any of these great people, Van Gogh starting at 30 years old for nine years putting out all that work. He didn't need encouragement to go out and do it. If anything, the bouts of madness didn't inspire him to anything. They were the only things that held him back. The only time he took a break or could stop.
00:30:52
Speaker
was being institutionalized. And it seems like there's something similar with chess, just that these guys are out there at the extremes in a way that very few of us can possibly understand. I'm grasping forward to somebody that I think has been pretty obsessed with the pursuit of writing and reading about writers and artists and all of that. But I think I also have a life. I've wanted to have
00:31:22
Speaker
friends and a sex life and, you know, like some things that make me feel human apart from some sort of monastic approach. And I wasn't an indentured child laborer to writing when I was a kid. I mean, writing is also one of the only areas of being a prodigy where you can't be a prodigy, right? Like to be a prodigy as a painter or a chess player or with music,
00:31:52
Speaker
You can show that at five. You can't do that in writing because in writing you actually have to know something. And that's kind of an interesting feature, right? There's no great novels by seven-year-olds. You can't read Tolstoy at five and then go to the park and regurgitate it the way Mozart did seeing his first symphony at four. You have to know something in order to create in this medium.
00:32:21
Speaker
In a way, I feel like I have my own lane of obsession, but it's just not comparable to what they're doing with chess. And that's part of what makes it fascinating. I did interview a number of prodigies along the way, and I interviewed a lot of people who knew prodigies on the way up trying to be Bobby Fischer, and in the process of being encouraged to become that, lost their way, often in very tragic circumstances.
00:32:51
Speaker
My favorite character in the whole book was a guy named Peter Winston, who for 40 year anniversary of the blizzard that hit New York in 1978 in February, and he left his wallet, his jacket and any identification and walked out into that storm and was never seen again. And his sister had never talked about it for 40 years.
00:33:18
Speaker
She was somebody that I was able to have some discussions with about the impact of how chess stole his life away. In the process of this book and maybe in your conversations with Errol Morris, as you said, he's been in and among obsessive people and you as well. Did you ever find that there was a danger in flying
00:33:45
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too close to the obsesses and that it would draw you into your own obsessions and that it would similarly sort of partition you off from the world that you so actively want to engage in? Yeah, I mean I think both Aaron Morris and I, it's one thing we share is the things that scare us, we want to get close to it to try to inoculate us in some fashion so
00:34:15
Speaker
Like with him, when I interviewed him for Amazon, one of the things that jumped out at me was that he was doing his work at about three years old when his dad died suddenly. And he was surrounded by all these objects of his father in his home and the photographs and all this forensic detail of who this person was when the memories themselves were out of reach. So I said, weren't you kind of,
00:34:44
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the guy who created recreations and documentaries, weren't you doing that with your dad? Like right away? Like what wouldn't those be some of your first memories of coming home to an empty house that still has all the like accessories of your father gathered there, you know, his room, his office and all this kind of stuff, but, but not the person themselves.
00:35:12
Speaker
So you have to rebuild who they are through, you know, the detritus of their life that's left in the house. Well, that's, that's a lot of his films. I mean, that's his whole artistic canon, I think. And he was like, I do remember my mother saying to me that when the event happened, which I don't remember him dying, but shortly after he died, my mother said for two or three days, I was running around the house screaming uncontrollably.
00:35:43
Speaker
And so imagine that you know that that happened, but you don't remember it happening is, is an interesting thought, isn't it? Like kind of reminds me of, uh, ID sedation. When you get your wisdom teeth out, you're semi-conscious. So some part of you still locked away. Oh my God, this is so horrible. I hate the dentist with a passion. Um, but I don't have a clear memory of what did happen, but the trauma is in there somewhere, some semi-conscious place. Um,
00:36:12
Speaker
And I think the same is true with me. I didn't lose a parent or anything like that and was trying to put the pieces together about what they meant, but certainly suicide and suicidal artists and people, I mean, three times more people kill themselves than get murdered. And this was a country where murder is mainstream entertainment. Suicide is
00:36:38
Speaker
We can't talk about it without a hotline number at the bottom of the article, which I find, you know, and 25 times more people attempt suicide than succeed at it. So this is a major, major thing of people going on right now. Yeah. I worked out the numbers. Every time I walk into a subway car at, at rush hour, one person out of every three cars in New York, uh, on a train,
00:37:07
Speaker
in the morning or at night is going to attempt suicide that year. Every time I walk into the subway, one person in three cars is going to attempt suicide during rush hour. And so my way of dealing with my own stuff there with ambivalence or sensitivity or stuff that makes me feel hopeless about things, about myself or about the world around me is to look at lives that inspire me where people were dealing with
00:37:36
Speaker
Uh, if that is mental illness, I don't know that suicide necessarily is a byproduct of mental illness. I think often, you know, with Donald Trump being president, it's quite a rational thing to consider a lot of the time, um, you know, to not be in a state of perpetual nervous breakdown makes me really question your sensitivity with, with what the world, you know, by 2040, all these environmental projections, like, you know, thinking about wanting to have kids in a world like this. Like I think that.
00:38:06
Speaker
that seems more delusional than, you know, confronting your own mortality or what we are on this planet in terms of our ambivalence about wanting to be here with how we conduct ourselves. So I've always forensically gone through artists and personalities and people I know and tried to get them to talk about some of this darker stuff to help me to know that I'm not alone in it. And so
00:38:36
Speaker
That was something with chess where the idea of giving your life to something that's not going to financially reward you or that everybody's going to think that you're kind of crazy to be pursuing it because there's no clear applicable skill that chess offers to the rest of the world. So it has this kind of noble position of we metaphorically like to apply it to everything.
00:39:03
Speaker
But in terms of what sort of job you'd be good at, if you're really good at chess, after 1500 years, we're not really closer at figuring out what that is. Great chess players are not immensely smarter than other people according to any standardized test. You don't, you don't, it doesn't require genius hardware to become a genius chess player. So when Bobby Fischer says, uh, I'm not, I'm not a genius chess player. I'm a genius who plays chess.
00:39:33
Speaker
There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence in any field where he's even marginally adequate at anything beyond chess. So that's another feature that's just interesting is we're, we're always trying to size up ability versus the discipline to realize our full potential. And chess is something where inescapably, you know, you're rating all the time in relation to chess.
00:40:01
Speaker
You don't know that with writing. We can pretend it by saying, I have this, I'm this ranking on Amazon or, you know, I'm at this publisher or whatever. Again, we're talking about the wall that our work is hung on. But with chess, you know exactly where you are. You, you always know exactly where you are from the beginning that you apply yourself. And there's a burden to that. There's a clarity to it, but there's a burden to that. There's no American idol.
00:40:29
Speaker
with chess, where you go in and you say, all my friends said I was really good that when I sing in the shower, I could have a record that would be America's number one. And people are like, how fucking delusional is this person? There's no equivalent in chess. You know exactly where you are. And it's conspicuously, immediately apparent where you stand. And none of the people who get to become world champions
00:40:57
Speaker
were like, where did he come from? He blindsided us. Magnus Carlsen didn't blindside anybody getting to where he is. It was immediately apparent at five that he had the kind of potential to get there. And it was the same, you know, Bobby Fischer at 12, they knew he was doing enormously impressive, almost otherworldly things on the chessboard that told us he had the potential to do something incredible.
00:41:24
Speaker
And a lot of us are able to nurse delusions that we are special, kind of like Van Gogh, that we look at, you know, nobody appreciated him. So if I appreciate Van Gogh's artwork, maybe somebody will eventually appreciate me in my life or after I'm gone. And I think it's reassuring, but it's not accurate most of the time. You know, there aren't, who's the next Van Gogh after that? You know, Anthony Bourdain saying,
00:41:51
Speaker
Gee shucks I was found in the slush pile of the New Yorker and that's what launched my life Who's the other person who's been found in the slush pile with the New Yorker because I don't know who it is I've never heard of them When did you recognize in yourself that when you had those darker moments those lonely moments
00:42:13
Speaker
And when did you have that awareness and then how did you figure out for yourself that by seeking out inspiring figures, obsessive figures, people you admire, that that would be an inoculation to pull you out of a funk or just a dark time to then make you feel like it's worth it out there? Yeah.
00:42:40
Speaker
I know when it happened, I know it about 10 years old, you know, like, I always think of it. If you had a can of paints and you're mixing colors together, uh, I did this when I was a little kid, finger paint or whatever, you know, what colors can I create? It was a magical thing to do. Right. But as you're stirring these new colors, the moment you introduce black for the first time and you find out nothing mixes with black, black makes everything else black.
00:43:09
Speaker
That's kind of what happened to me at about 10 where suddenly everything just became black in me. Just the way I felt about myself and the way I felt about everything around me. I went from this incredibly happy kid that drew a lot of people to me. Um, the way I felt about the world, it was just this unspooling of the world is so much better than I thought it could ever be. Every new day felt like that. Just discovering more things that just made me go, wow.
00:43:39
Speaker
And then it all seemed to change. And I can't put my finger on why, why that happened. I mean, my parents separated when I was six, but I felt pretty good when they separated because they were arguing and I don't like loud voices. So I don't remember anything there being torn up inside. They were, they still are best friends, you know, so it was, they were very civilized to each other in a way that a lot of other kids I knew when their parents broke up weren't.
00:44:09
Speaker
you know, the divorce was about antagonizing each other, attacking each other, often using the kids as pawns and all that. None of that happened to me. My parents were talking on the phone every morning and they cared about each other and you know, they were still not divorced, even though it's been 33 years since they separated, you know, they worked out financial arrangements. They didn't need to go to external forces to deal with stuff. They were just good to each other, even though the relationship didn't work out the way they hoped. Um,
00:44:39
Speaker
But then for me, I think as I was plunging with this kind of darkness, this weird random event lured me out somewhere where I was beaten up and humiliated in front of a lot of people that I knew. It's not hard. I mean, it's not easy to have your worst day. Like at the best of times, your worst day is a pretty hard thing. I'm sure we all have our own version of it, but mine was
00:45:08
Speaker
very much in public in front of everybody I knew so that my identity was completely defined by that incident, not just to myself, but to those around me. And I think what happened that day was transformative into, you know, like, I think, like I was saying about chess players having to kill off their father if they, if they had one.
00:45:36
Speaker
or they just didn't have their father and this kind of launches them into the sort of isolation that's necessary to braid a chest. I think something artistically is similar in that if you have an event that destroys your identity or really alters it in a way that you can't deal with, that's where you get creative. That's where you start revisiting it and reassembling it and deconstructing it.
00:46:03
Speaker
And for three years after that incident, I couldn't leave my front door from 11 to 14. And then, and then just the accident of finding Mike Tyson in prison for rape and seeing him as a very nightmarish figure and him talking about his experience with bullying made me see that he was a construct and that he'd used
00:46:28
Speaker
other identities in order to create his own because he felt he had no identity. And so I started doing the same thing. My first books that I was reading were biographies, biographies of him and biographies of the writers that he mentioned that he was reading in solitary confinement because solitary confinement in prison with the reputation of being a rapist seemed like the most horrifying thing imaginable to me.
00:46:55
Speaker
at 14 years old. And I couldn't imagine how you could deal with even moment to moment with being that exposed and that, you know, your reputation is ruined for the rest of your life. And if he did it, you've traumatized somebody else's life forever. And what could, you know, how could you ever be driven to the point of wanting to inflict that on somebody? What kind of person could be driven to that?
00:47:21
Speaker
So I think it started very early, like for me, 14 years old, that became my first time I ever felt a passion towards anything was about seeing how these lives had been created. You know, the idea that your life could be a bit of an open book, but also how these people manipulated their stories, how they curated their stories fascinated me, not judging them,
00:47:50
Speaker
not looking for veracity, but the idea that great artists were only artistic with their endeavors and not with their personal life or their private life. Like what Oscar Wilde said, like, my genius is for my life. It's not my work. I think that's true for all of these creative people. And I just mentioned Anthony Bourdain as an example, but what an origin story, right? I mean, after he kills himself,
00:48:15
Speaker
it inverts the biography, so you can't see the biography without it leading to that end, which itself is a profound, interesting feature of suicide. But just going through the way he peddled his origin story, you know, I'm a chef, and all I dreamed of was being a heroin addict, and I was this ironic, heroin addict figure in my own mind. I love Hemingway and George Orwell,
00:48:44
Speaker
Hunter S. Thompson. And I just become a cook, but I'm not a very good cook. And then at 41 years old, at my mom, my mom's prodding me to send something over to the New Yorker. Well, it's interesting what he's including. And it's interesting what he's leaving out. He went to Vassar. Your mom worked at the New York Times as an editor and a writer. Your dad went to Yale and was an executive at Columbia Records.
00:49:13
Speaker
You're one of the most socially gifted people who's ever lived, you know, just by virtue of after he died with anybody laying into him, despite the fact that he's been a very vocal liberal, like nobody was criticizing him, really, it seemed, right? After he killed, it was just universal mourning, universal sadness about how much they were charmed by him and loved him and enjoyed spending time with him. And what a wise and
00:49:43
Speaker
honest and genuine voice he was. So I found it fascinating just that he becomes more complex when you look at his story as part of his creative life, because obviously it was. Do you think this needle in a haystack story of him at The New Yorker has a remote possibility of being true? I doubt it. I doubt it.
00:50:12
Speaker
because what he's leaving out is that he was 41. His mother was incredibly connected. He's at Vassar, a very connected school for privileged people. His dad's in an incredibly privileged position. You don't think he met a lot of people that helped grease the wheels for him to take off, but he wants you to think it's this Auchuck story and that ambition was only something he had when he was a teenager. So I found
00:50:40
Speaker
many stories that are like that with, you know, F Scott Fitzgerald first wanted glory with football and then with World War One. Writing was the third fallback. Hemingway was stealing the army uniform when he came back after World War One and he poses for his portrait. He's an ambulance driver handing out chocolate and cigarettes, but he steals an army uniform to make it seem to history that he was in the military sort of thing.
00:51:09
Speaker
So already at that age, he is becoming a publicist for himself. And there are many, many cases of that. George Orwell was another person where his sort of toffee-nosed accent was very noted in bars that he went to despite him sort of going on the field trip of down and out in London and Paris. And look how poor I am. A lot of people think that was very curated.
00:51:39
Speaker
what he was doing. So I was always fascinated by that, just trying to understand what motivates it. And I think a big part of my own life was the only way to redeem that pain and hurt was creative, artistic. That's a realm where you can find redemption. It's not cheap and it's hard.
00:52:06
Speaker
But I don't know where to do it in like, quote unquote, regular life or like, you know, the kind of jobs that friends told me was failing for years and years at getting anything published. They're like, you know, you're just living this dream. But failing at my dream was more than succeeding at their situation. Yeah. So I think I know this is the most long winded explanation to your question, but it's a tough question. I grapple with it every day.
00:52:35
Speaker
Yeah. Given that traumatic moment that you experienced that basically just kept you indoors for several years really, it led to a very, what I would
00:52:50
Speaker
Probably assume is a very internal internalized life and that's something that I Your writing is always so very thoughtful and seems very well thought out and very when I read your sentences, they're always so Heavy and in a good way like I they they're weighted with so much thought
00:53:09
Speaker
that it makes me wonder where that came from or if that is natural to you, given that internal life that I think you were sort of forced to live. So where does that thoughtfulness come from and how do you process that so it seems to come out so naturally? Well, according to ancestry DNA, there's
00:53:33
Speaker
25% Jewish component that might explain some of the neuroses and like a Woody Allen No, I'm I mean that is true. But but not not my hypothesis based on quasi anti-semitic theorizing. No, um, I think I just just felt I think a lot of people feel this way just grossly miscast in their own life and
00:54:01
Speaker
that can be a curse that you just, oh my God, I can never deal with it. You know, the setting is wrong or I'm ill-equipped to do what I'm doing. I think what I've tried to do with it the best I can is to be miscast in the kind of roles that I would want to be in. And I think that that's created
00:54:30
Speaker
in some cases, a kind of unique effect. I learned a really valuable lesson in that if you have issues with rejection, which I do, it hurts just as much to be rejected by somebody that you're not passionately in love with.
00:54:54
Speaker
but you think is like a safe person to approach to ask out on a date as somebody who you believe is your soulmate. The rejection hurts just about the same. So why not go after the people that you're really enthusiastic about was a good lesson. And I, I heard that lesson with, with regard to publishing as well. I met a guy who was at Viking publishing house, who was involved in helping discover Jack Kerouac and,
00:55:22
Speaker
couple of other people. And when I was talking to him about the first thing I'd written that seemed to have some potential to go somewhere. And I was like, you know, I'll try a local little small Vancouver publishing house. He said, absolutely not. Go to the top people because the top people have a lot of top people that can recognize something that's good and it's going to find its way there. Always work from the top down. Don't work from the bottom up. And that was a really good lesson. I mean,
00:55:51
Speaker
I was a complete fucking failure in Vancouver trying to make anything happen with what I was passionate about with writing. New York is supposed to be a hundred or a thousand times harder, right? You know, you've got this intense concentration of the most competitive people in the world. And I'm not saying I've made it, but I've been able to live here for nine or 10 years in a way that I wasn't able to do in a much smaller place.
00:56:18
Speaker
in a much smaller place with a much safer apparatus of government subsidizing writers and all that kind of stuff. So that doesn't make any sense, does it? But trying to do the same stuff that I was doing in Vancouver over here suddenly became viable. And so I think I think a lot of that was the same thing I'm talking about is
00:56:43
Speaker
I'm trying to make it in Vancouver feeling very miscast, but I don't belong in these kinds of literary groups or that sort of ethos. I feel very out of step around other writers. I've never surrounded myself with writing communities because I just feel really shitty being around them. But I love being around readers. I love being around compulsive readers, but a lot of writing, I think you know, it's a status obsessed community like chess.
00:57:13
Speaker
big arrogance, big ambition, but they don't talk about arrogance. They don't talk about ambition. They talk about supporting, you know, supporting this ecosystem and all of that, but it's ruthless ambition. And you never see more of it than on Twitter, the endless self promotion, the endless extended family, extended high school experience and all that. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to be good at that. I'm not, I have nothing to say on Twitter. I don't know what to say.
00:57:42
Speaker
I don't have a wise crack that I think is really good. My, my things that they are stupid, you know? And I, so I tip my hat to people that are really able to do that and get, get lots of jobs off it and read 9,000 things a day and promote those articles and promote those writers. And maybe those writers will then recommend you to the right, whatever, but I don't know how to fucking do that. I'm not good at pretending I like people that I don't like.
00:58:08
Speaker
you know, or, you know, pretending I don't like people that I really do like, you know, to play it cool. I'm not cool. I'm very awkward. Um, but at the same time, I have been able to make some allies in this game being, being somebody that like, doesn't find the right song to dance to, you know, so I like people, I like, uh,
00:58:37
Speaker
A lot of the writing that I was doing to start off with was, I was told very frequently, it's really good, but it doesn't fit this. And then I try to fit over there and they'd say, well, it doesn't fit here because it really belongs over there. At a certain point, somebody said, no, this is trying to be something different. And then I get in the door. So if I'm in the door, like, okay. And, and suddenly it's a little easier to get work and that kind of stuff. But.
00:59:04
Speaker
I never assumed that it would happen. I just didn't know how to do anything else. So like chess players, I don't really have any other serviceable skills. I never considered that I could teach boxing and make money at it because I was like, who the hell is going to want to learn how to box? I can't teach a class because I have too much anxiety to be around a group and be the focal point of a group. I could never do that. I'd make a hundred times more money.
00:59:31
Speaker
But I can't do it. So I mean, I'm under a tunnel in Central Park teaching some odd person who wants to learn from me. But in the end, it's so weird that the New York Times wants to do a profile about it because it's just like, what is this? And what this is is normal to me because I don't know anything else. And I was a terrible student in school. But I think what I was obsessed with was the other kids who were there.
01:00:01
Speaker
trying to understand who they were, trying to understand where they came from, who their parents were, what it was like to walk into their houses. All of that is visceral and really vivid to me about deconstructing those people and not judging them, but really trying to understand them. And I think if you're somebody who feels very vulnerable and exposed and is sensitive, one of your defense mechanisms is trying to figure out how other people pick.
01:00:27
Speaker
maybe to manipulate them or maybe to be of service to them. And for a long time, I used it in a very dark and manipulative way because I didn't feel safe unless I impressed upon people that I could figure out a way to hurt them emotionally because I felt like anybody could hurt me emotionally. So it was a very foolish, misguided defense mechanism. But I think with writing, it's using the same
01:00:55
Speaker
curse, but trying to use it in a positive way to help understand people and in trying to understand them, bring that out to an audience where then they feel that they're not alone in things that they might be afraid to talk about. And I think there's something positive you can do with it, but it's very easy to move in a negative direction. This bullying thing that happened to me, I bullied people too, even though I was the smallest kid, I couldn't do it physically, but I definitely did it emotionally.
01:01:22
Speaker
And you just feel worse and worse about yourself as you're doing it, but you're also still trying to understand people. You just trying to understand them in a way that you can scare them because you feel scared by everybody. So I, I, I, it's helped, it's helped in trying to understand the psychology of scary people as well as people who are scared because I've been, I've been both. If that makes sense. Yeah.
01:01:54
Speaker
and not ever in a physical way, but just like in an emotional and mental way, it's its own version of chess, I think. Yeah, for sure. Jeez. And in the process of writing or the research or the interviewing and that aspect of it, where do you feel most alive and most engaged in that process?
01:02:24
Speaker
Um, in that I find, I find the best interviews that I get. And some people close to me always make fun of me, but it's like, it's not even when you think you're walking into the room, you know, to have that, that meaningful conversation that you've been nervous about. It's the taxi ride to the room. It's the guy on the escalator who just happens to be beside you, like with the chest thing, opening day guys on the escalator. And I'm saying what the hell brought you here?
01:02:54
Speaker
He spent thousands of dollars flying over, getting a hotel, paying the cover charge to go to the chess tournament. And he said, you know, I was a serious chess player when I was a kid. I just couldn't handle it. My nerves could not handle it. So I went into open heart surgery instead. And I, I love those kinds of moments because there's so much more revealing
01:03:18
Speaker
and interesting and make you think about so many stuff that you hadn't considered before in such a fun way. Um, then polished pat answers where people are trying to, you know, just do emotional plumbing or intellectual plumbing and, and, oh, I covered all the bases there. These are good sound bites or whatever. All that's bullshit. I'm not interested in it. They're not interested in it. It's, it's, uh,
01:03:46
Speaker
It's steering it into something that's where you're both a little bit off balance. That's fun. You know, and I just think it's just more like a couple of the reviews that have come in so far. One of the things that's been very generous of them is to say there is an advantage of having an outsider come in.
01:04:10
Speaker
who has some skills at interviewing that has interviewed a wide variety of people because we're hearing questions asked of chess people that we haven't heard asked before because generally it's just chess people asking the questions. And I know for me, the people that ask me questions that have nothing to do with boxing always offer me a lot more to think about about boxing than I thought of before. And it's true, like outsiders just naturally have often
01:04:39
Speaker
a fresh vantage point because nobody has educated their way of thinking. And I'm a total sucker for that is I want, I love having just totally new take. I, I love educated people. A lot of my friends are very, very well educated and I reap the benefits of that with their wit and their conversation and, and all of that. But getting somebody who doesn't know anybody, anything about something,
01:05:09
Speaker
often they ask questions that other people wouldn't dare who have been obsessed with that subject or very well versed in it. And I tried to do that with this book is to take it, take it in an organic direction of, I have to rush to put this together. I want to go to the people that I go to that I think are so intelligent and wise. And it's even better if you don't, it's like the moment somebody said, I don't, I don't know how to play chess.
01:05:39
Speaker
and then off they go about it, those were often the most interesting people. Harry Benson has photographed anybody who's anybody in the second half of the 20th century, 12 or 13 presidents saying, I don't even know how to move a fucking pawn, but Bobby Fischer is the most interesting person that I've ever met. He's the most interesting person I've ever photographed. Off you go, right? How is that gonna be a boring interview? Him explaining that, because you know,
01:06:08
Speaker
everybody else that he's come into contact with, how could it be this guy? You know, how could Bobby Fischer imprint that to you when you don't even care about chess? That's, that's fun. You know, that's really, really fun for me. And his stupid fucking dog is there who he's saying is so old, he could get a driver's license. You know, I love those moments, you know, and his wife who looks after everything for him. So you're getting a sense that
01:06:36
Speaker
there would be no Harry Benson if his wife hadn't really given her life to facilitate everything outside of photography to make his career work the way it does.
01:06:48
Speaker
How did you develop your particular taste in interviewing and the questions that you come up with that are often so insightful and engage the interviewee on a... It gets them going down a wormhole that just is incredibly compelling. Errol Morris turned me on to Hans Scharf who
01:07:16
Speaker
was the Nazis most famous interrogator of mostly, uh, shot down us pilots. And a lot of techniques were very counterintuitive to Nazi interrogation methods in that his number one methodology for getting actionable intelligence was being nice, being, being really nice and really trying to empathize with the pilots who'd been shot down.
01:07:45
Speaker
and doing things like, have you ever wanted to fly one of our German planes that shot you down or that you shot down? Cause I've arranged for you to have a test flight. There will be a plane behind it that will shoot you down if you do anything, but wouldn't it be fun for you to have an opportunity to fly one of ours and off they go. And then the guy would land and he'd say, why don't we just go for a walk? I want to hear more about your flight. And after, after World War II,
01:08:15
Speaker
Almost everybody that he interrogated who gave up all this information said, this guy was an interrogator. He didn't interrogate me. We just talked. I want to see him after the war. I want to be friends with him. And he moved over to California where he spent the rest of his life. And a lot of these people interrogated were his friends. And I just thought, wow. And the CIA adopted a lot of his methods as well because they were just so effective. So.
01:08:43
Speaker
That really intrigued me, that and Morris's observation that if you get anybody talking in a sustained way, and I think I've proven this with you today for 10 minutes about something they care about, they come off as crazy. Just let them spout off about anything they give a shit about and you'll be somewhere new with them. They're going to start revealing stuff that's a little unpackaged.
01:09:11
Speaker
and unmanicured and all that. And I love those moments and I feel like an area where I don't have a flaw of character is that I think I'm with you. If you're trying to be an individual, if you're trying to be a specific in whatever the hell it is, if I'm interested, I don't have any moral judgment.
01:09:38
Speaker
I'm just intrigued and I want to see where you're going to, you're going to lead me. Those, those are the things, uh, that's where I become Alice falling down the rabbit hole. And I forget that I'm about to die if I hit the ground and I just get lost in the pattern on the wall. And that to me is people, just deep, nothing, nothing is more interesting to me than how people are managing that tumble down their, their own rabbit holes.
01:10:10
Speaker
Nothing can be more depressing also than how they are dealing with denial or rationalizations or whatever, but also just how creative people are, what artists we all are making our lives fit into these weird narrow confines of what is normal, what is acceptable. Nobody is normal.
01:10:36
Speaker
It's a it's a crazy dynamic. So there's no way to adapt to it without going a little nutty is what I find. So are the chess people more nutty? Maybe they're free. They're free from attempting to fit in in a way that others aren't. But, you know, how many lawyers have I met who aren't immensely coping with the stress and boredom of being a lawyer by alcoholism or infidelity?
01:11:06
Speaker
or not being responsive parents or whatever, right? Like, I mean, it's everybody, it's everybody, it's nobody. So I like trying to forge my way in to trying to get these people to talk plainly about what's going on with them personally and professionally and not be distracted by the uniform or the hoops that they've jumped through to get where they are.
01:11:36
Speaker
I don't, I don't really understand status very well in this world. You know, like for me, when you get a rental car after five minutes, the rental car becomes any car, right? It doesn't matter how fancy the car is. It just becomes another car where you're stuck in traffic. You're stuck in a traffic light and you're saying, oh fuck, why didn't I just walk? And there's something about that kind of convention, conventionality with, you know,
01:12:03
Speaker
You have a TV. Well, a 20 inch TV. Well, if I had a 60 inch TV, but then the TV becomes a TV, an apartment becomes an apartment. You know, the only things that don't do that are certain people or like, you know, my cat is be limited in his range of stuff. He does. I'm endlessly surprised by him, like far more so than any object. So.
01:12:27
Speaker
And people are endlessly more complex. So it's not hard for me to get lost in that stuff. And maybe part of it is, you know, my mother made her living, put a roof over my head and food in the kitchen by tarot cards and a crystal ball and people who were seeking help.
01:12:51
Speaker
and couldn't find it anywhere else, couldn't find it any other conventional way, but came to her and went back to her. And I don't think she, I don't think she was succeeding in that by duping them. I think she succeeded in that because yeah, she didn't have credentials at any, any legitimate place, but it didn't matter. It worked. She was listening. She cared. She empathized. She had some wisdom to offer.
01:13:16
Speaker
that assisted these people. Whenever my mom dies, I promise you, thousands and thousands of people will be very, very affected by the impact that she had by listening to them because nobody else was listening to them in their lives. That's a weird thing because my mother drives me absolutely fucking crazy and I'm thousands of miles away from her. All technology means that I'm in constant contact with her in 900 different ways that I don't want to be.
01:13:46
Speaker
I recognize that she is a much, much better person than I am in terms of having a positive impact on people's lives, making their burdens less. It's just in the process. I carry the scars of fucking Hungarian homespun love.
01:14:08
Speaker
I don't think that can be in any way discredited that the way your mom empathically listened to strangers who inevitably would become friends had an effect on the way you go about your interviewing and your reporting and your ability to get people to open up. I think that is like the seminal skill and probably whether you knew it. It's like when Gay Talise,
01:14:35
Speaker
he talked about being in the seamstress shop and his mother just listened to a lot of these war mothers coming in and the way she listened to them tell stories was very formidable for him to become the reporter he was. Similarly, I think that's exactly where it comes from for you. Well, and not just stories, but the most personal stories, the dark secrets. My father is the same.
01:15:04
Speaker
You go to a lawyer, you go to my dad as a child protection lawyer, and you're a parent trying to get your kid back. You're dealing with divorce. You're a kid that doesn't have anywhere else to go. Your last champion, your last knight to defend you, to protect you, is this person. And you know that they can't, that what you tell them is protected, is safe. And they have to represent that, and they have to actually live up to that.
01:15:35
Speaker
Both, both of my parents and their respective professions are repositories for thousands of people's darkest secrets in the aid of trying to help them and support them in their lives when there's nowhere else to go. And, uh, that carried a weight in their lives. You know, it carries a distance that you have to have where my mother's day to day was here's what my husband did to me.
01:16:03
Speaker
Here's what my wife did to me. Here's what it was like going through my child dying, my parents dying, all of that. That was every day. That was every person walking in there was talking about that kind of stuff. I don't know how to deal with this. I don't know how to cope with this help. That was normal for her. And it was normal for my dad too. You know, the family's falling apart. I need your help. And the first thing my father would say to married couples divorcing is,
01:16:33
Speaker
decide how much money you want to give to me in attacking each other. Because if you can just be amiable, if you can just try to be civilized with one another, you can keep that money for yourselves and for your families. Like it's not going to benefit either of you to go out and like to tooth and nail attack each other. It's just going to make me more money in litigating it sort of thing. So, you know, I think both, both of those people,
01:16:59
Speaker
what kind of people want to get into professions where everybody's telling you all this horrendously dark sewage of their lives. You know, they're fucked up people too, but you can make something positive of being fucked up and empathizing with the ways in which others are fucked up in their own unique calibration. And, you know, I, I think there's a part of that with writing for me and that I'm not qualified to do this in any formal way, but I'm,
01:17:29
Speaker
I'm game, like I'm in, I'm 100% all in, and I'm never going to get status out of it or money or whatever, but in terms of what I want out of it, which is access. Yeah, man, I feel like I want that as much as anybody on the planet, and I'm as invested in trying to make good use of it as anybody who's out there.
01:17:51
Speaker
You know, when Gay Talis sits down and you see somebody who's trying to solve my relationship, you know, and I'm like, this is fairly unsolicited, but I don't care. Like, I mean, I'm, I've got nothing to, to hide from him. I'm just intrigued that this 85 year old guy and his ridiculous outfit, because fashion to me is patently absurd. It's maybe the most absurd thing that human beings are concerned with, but it's not absurd to him.
01:18:21
Speaker
As you say, like that's how he grew up and that's how he, very important to him that he's on the Upper East side and shows me the house he has with his wife, who's this top editor and all that kind of stuff. I'm not dismissive of any of that. I just, I just also am kind of struck by when he asked me, you know, do you want a coffee and a Danish? And I say no to both of them. He still comes back with them and there's 900 packets of sugar. And I'm like, what an interesting thing it must've been to be his kids.
01:18:51
Speaker
how interesting it must be that he wrote a book that almost destroyed his family and was stunned when his family was like, why did you keep doing this? Like, like somebody who's so observant is so utterly blissfully oblivious to themselves. And that's a thing that we should all be worried about. You know, so in that sense, I'm not there to
01:19:19
Speaker
You know attack him for it, but I was trying to learn from it There's it's nobody will ever be able to be successful in the way that Gates police was in this line of work ever again You'll never be compensated it for it in the same way but a Lot of us are still that's the that's the thing we want to do with our lives I don't know that that's what I want to do with my life, but I that's what I've tried to do for the last while
01:19:49
Speaker
So it was interesting to see somebody who's the epitome of success at it in certain ways. Obviously he's been shit all over for that last book he did about the lawyer's motel and some of his comments about women and all that, but interesting character, you know, really interesting character. I won't see him again, I expect, but I'm, I'm glad I had my little coffee with him to talk about Bobby Fisher. How long did you sit there and speak with him?
01:20:19
Speaker
or him talking about your girlfriend, your relationship. Yeah. He talked to me, my girl, I talked to him a couple of times on the phone. He was one of the only people that had somebody on record to talk about Mike Tyson's trainer potentially being a pedophile. And that was, uh, let's see, there was a biography of Floyd Patterson that mentioned that Patterson had told Talise,
01:20:47
Speaker
who wrote all these great pieces about Patterson that they'd slept in the same bed custom auto and Floyd Patterson and that cuss had played footsie with him while they were sleeping and Patterson, who was a teenager at the time, by the way, interpreted as a sexual advance. So that was the only thing that was on record by
01:21:08
Speaker
by somebody. There were no other victims that had gone forward to the police or police reports or anything. So I contacted him the first time I spoke with him to say, could we talk about this? Because I'm looking at kind of a nexus of things that look a little Jerry Sandusky-ish here. And his first question to me was, are, are, Bryn, is that how you say your name? Bryn? What kind of name is that? Bryn? What is it? Welsh?
01:21:36
Speaker
Okay. What's your question? Yeah. Are you, are you, are you, you're asking me the, you're trying to say it's Jerry Sandusky with all this. I resent the, you know, that, that inference, but, uh, are, are you a homosexual? Jesus. What's that? Are you, are you a homosexual? And I was, I was pausing in real time, Brendan, just like, I can't, again, where, where would I ever imagine that this is where we would go?
01:22:04
Speaker
That's, he's very antagonistic like that. That's kind of his approach. He gets right in your face. Yeah. So I'm thinking about it. And as I'm thinking about it, I say, well, I don't, I don't know. And he was like, what do you mean? You don't know. I'm like, well, you know, I'm 37 as I was at the time. Maybe I hadn't met the right guy yet. What does that even mean?
01:22:32
Speaker
I said, well, I don't, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't think so. No, no, I haven't felt sexual attraction to a man, but could happen. You never, you know, maybe I just haven't met that guy yet. But I mean, that's a patently absurd answer to that question. What I'm trying to say is, do you have some kind of agenda with custom auto with conflating homosexuality with with being a sexual predator? So it was all all of that. And he was very defensive and very angry and all that. I was just saying,
01:23:02
Speaker
You know, there's only one thing that's on record. You were the person who heard it on record from somebody who was with him in a bed who interpreted it as a sexual advance. So again, a very comically super bizarre interaction with Gay Taliz. And then, um, just this one time where he agreed to meet me near his apartment on the Upper East Side, he emailed me, I think four or five times to change the details of the meeting.
01:23:31
Speaker
which was really interesting. You know, like, I know we said 215, but I'd like to make it 210. Would 210 be adequate for you? Would that be whenever the fuck you want to meet, gay? Any time you want to be, I'll be there just telling when to meet. And the moment we arrived there, and this was instructive about sort of his MO of why he's got the kind of material he has.
01:23:57
Speaker
is I think it was the first warm winter day moving into spring. And there were all these tables that were outside this little cafe, this Italian cafe. And one by one, as the tables would become open, a pregnant woman or a woman with a newborn child in a stroller would approach and would petition me saying, I know you were here first. I'd really like to sit down. Well, I'm not going to say fuck off. So I was like, go ahead, take it.
01:24:26
Speaker
But consequently, I'd been standing there for an hour waiting for a seat and nothing had come up or like nothing had become available because it was this stampede of pregnant women or women with with children and strollers. And when police arrives, he's like what the it's not me being vulgar now. It's the way he speaks. He's much more vulgar than I am. What the fuck are you doing here? Where the fuck is it a seat for you to sit down?
01:24:54
Speaker
So he went from table to table of these pregnant or new mothers. How much longer are you going to be sitting here for? Are you almost done? It looks like you're almost done. I'm looking at that muffin you have there. It looks like five minutes more. What do you think? And one of the women was just like, okay, I'm going to get up and go. You're welcome to have this suit. I am not capable of doing that. Not because I'm a good guy, but because I'm Canadian and much too passive to confront
01:25:24
Speaker
a newborn mother or a pregnant woman about giving up her table, or even claiming a table that I rightfully deserve by being there before her, it can't, it's just not going to happen.
01:25:34
Speaker
Gay is going to jump on the fucking table. That's his style. Like asking you if you're a homosexual, like he'll get in your face like that and try to get that to reveal something about you and then probably backpedal a bit and be a bit softer. But like he will like, you know, try to push you to the very edge of the cliff. And just before you're going to fall off and plummet to your death, he'll like grab you by the hand and pull you back.
01:26:04
Speaker
He, I don't, I don't know what it is with him because, you know, maybe, maybe for a lot of guys, it would be a really threatening thing off the top to be, are you gay or are you bisexual? I don't give a fuck. Like, I mean, I don't, what do I care? But, and I think if you read a lot of his work, I think probably he would care if you said to him, like, let's put our finger on what you actually are on the spectrum of straight to gay or bisexual. Like, let's discuss it.
01:26:35
Speaker
and all that could be a sort of topic. Like I bet if you scrutinized him, like I mentioned about almost destroying his marriage with that book he did by neighbor's wife, he was very uncomfortable discussing that, discussing the impact of that book on his kids. Why was he uncomfortable with it? Because he had no idea the actual impact it had on his kids.
01:26:56
Speaker
And when they said it in front of the interviewer, he was incredibly uncomfortable because it showed how oblivious he was for somebody who's so noted for their powers of observation. And that to me is very consistent with how people operate. The things that are really important to us often we're, we're blind to a lot. You'd think that we'd be the great authorities on it. We're not any idiot passing by could notice a lot more than we can.
01:27:24
Speaker
very frequently about those things. We get blindsided by stuff that we should never get blindsided by. And maybe Thales is a much more, I don't know, just emblematic example of that, given he's so much more observant than we all are. But maybe somebody a lot less observant would at least be more conscientious of the impact of certain actions they take on their family in real time than he was. So. Yeah.
01:27:53
Speaker
Yeah. Huh. What was it like speaking with Neil deGrasse Tyson at the world chess championships? Delicious. Delicious. He had cowboy boots on and he's playing, sitting across the table from his kid. Uh, I was nervous because I think the world was his intellect and I love, I love his spirit and, and where he's coming from and how he uses his intellect. And he just has, uh,
01:28:24
Speaker
He just has such a wonderful presence. Like, I mean, he's got a huge charisma about him that is just as a kind of enlightened, freakishly intelligent, conscientious person. And yet this was behind the curtain a little bit of what he presents on TV. He still speaks just as eloquently with that beautiful sultry voice of his, but there was this kid with a big afro
01:28:50
Speaker
And, uh, they're hunched over a table and you can see Tyson expects that his kid is going to beat him because he told me that his kid has been able to beat him for many, many years. And his kid was only, I think a late teenager or something. So it was a very human interaction. And I was a little afraid of, uh, I dunno, just, just disturbing.
01:29:17
Speaker
It was just so nice to see a little like a chess board, an unused chess board is available in this room. And just, just him and his kid on a whim, Hey, you want to go play off? They went just like all these other fathers and sons and mothers and daughters who were at the event. Uh, just happens to be that this is one of the world's great thinkers and this is his boy and off they go. And then I had to be the asshole to turn it into a consciously observed setting.
01:29:47
Speaker
But, um, he couldn't have been nicer and I added them on Twitter and said, Oh wow, you got 900,000 million Twitter followers. Yep. All right then. Good to know. Yeah. So there were lots of, there were lots of weirdos who passed through that fucking VIP and I've never had a VIP anything in my life. So it was totally surreal being the only journalist who was allowed in there. Um,
01:30:17
Speaker
And then like a billionaire like Peter Thiel walks in and $1,200 a day VIP access isn't enough. So we need to double VIP where there's a private chef and private security who if I motioned at Peter Thiel, you could see them go for their guns. I'm not exaggerating like that was my friend Oliver Rader wrote it in 538 as a joke to make Ollie laugh.
01:30:42
Speaker
I was gesturing to Teal to get his attention. And he's the most reptilian person imaginable, like constipated electric eels look friendlier than Teal does in repose. And, and one of the guys was like motioning over at me like to stop me.
The Creative Process Behind the Book
01:31:00
Speaker
And you could just see, you know, armed to the guilt, like where I want to assassinate Peter Teal, you know, so he can't make his getaway to the New Zealand Island he's bought.
01:31:11
Speaker
is that the world chess championships and the double VIP sections eating his billionaire tacos or whatever. And that's part of my favorite stuff about the book was just like,
01:31:24
Speaker
Who will be in the section today? I don't know. Part of what I liked about the book so much too is just these observations you have and the weird random celebrities that actually took interest in it. As you were like fleshing all of this out and taking all of this in,
01:31:50
Speaker
There was something you were talking about way back at the beginning of our conversation about you trying to suss out the structure of this book and the approach to it with your editor. What was that experience like and how did your initial vision of this book change from your initial conception of it after the event to what it ultimately became?
01:32:18
Speaker
I'm very grateful to an editor giving me an assignment that allows me to live off of writing for two years. That's a degree of economic liberty that I've never experienced in my life, that I wasn't afraid about paying next month's rent.
01:32:40
Speaker
I didn't have that for two years. I didn't have more than that. I'm not flying on a private plane, but I just had two years of not worrying about next month's rent, provided I complete this assignment. Beyond that, I thought it was a preposterous blueprint about what to do because we didn't know what the hell it would be. When he says to me, you've read John McPhee's,
01:33:10
Speaker
John McPhee's book about tennis with Arthur Ashe, right? Levels of the game. Yeah. You've read Norman Mailer's The Fight, right? Yes, I have. And then he listed a couple others. David Foster Wallace with tennis and stuff. Yeah, okay. Just go do the same thing, but do it about chess. Well, there's a few problems there. One is chess, last time I looked,
01:33:40
Speaker
is not boxing in terms of being audience friendly. Last time I looked Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Kiryakin are not Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. And also we don't know what this championship is going to be in terms of its own intrinsic value. It could be a terrible match. So we don't know if it's a memorable match. And if I said to you, Brendan,
01:34:09
Speaker
Hey, you know what I want you to write about? Write about the 2014 Super Bowl. You remember that one, right? Because it was a big Super Bowl and I'm sure hundreds of millions of people watched it. Do you remember who played in that Super Bowl? I don't. Yeah. Yeah. Do you?
01:34:25
Speaker
14 maybe. I'm thinking I might actually know because I think New England was in it and I'm a big Pats fan. That might have been the Seahawks Patriots one, I don't know. But I don't know. No, it wasn't. No, it definitely wasn't. I think it was Broncos Seahawks, but whatever. I don't know. Fact is, I'm proving your point. I don't know. Well, how could you not know about the biggest event, like biggest TV event in America that happened only four years ago? Yeah. What do you mean you don't know?
01:34:55
Speaker
Wait a minute, because I'm expecting you to write a great book about it four years after the fact. Cause I'm sure there's a lot of other people who need to look back on that event from four years ago. Well, okay. So if you can't do that about this, if it sounds preposterous to do it about the Superbowl, what about the chess championship? Let's look back at that championship from two years ago. We don't know if it's any good yet. Well, huh.
01:35:23
Speaker
So that was the challenge creatively is if it's amazing, which chances are it's not because how many of them have been amazing to a general audience? That's easy. One, 1972, Bobby Fischer. Name another one? Oh, you can't? Before it? What about after it? Oh, you can't. Oh, so you're saying that chess has never been compelling to a general audience other than when Bobby Fischer was playing.
01:35:53
Speaker
Okay, well, so that's kind of where I was coming from is we can have different opinions about some of these things, but they're basic facts to understand. One of them is that chess is not boxing. Another is that I'm not Norman Naylor. I'm not David Foster Wallace. I'm not John McPhee. Like I have my own weird little lane, but I'm not a big name taking this on.
01:36:21
Speaker
where my name alone is people can say, oh, if this guy's taken on chess, I know I need to get, get reading that. No, I'm not that. So, um, and the subject matter itself is not going to immediately turn on your general audience either. So that's what scared the hell out of me is kind of thinking, is he delusional, but this is as compelling as it seems to be for him. And yet he's readily telling me he doesn't know anything about chess.
Chess's Historical Journey and Cultural Impact
01:36:50
Speaker
he just noticed that it was in New York. Well, okay, that's cool. It's in New York. Like I just get to ride my city bike down every day to go to go watch it, but I don't know what to expect. And I, at the time I'd read a number of books on Bobby Fischer, but I hadn't read general chess books, you know, or, or, you know, so I ordered 30 books off of, off of Amazon, every book that had been written about chess and,
01:37:19
Speaker
did a crash course immersion about its history and got to kind of curate the history that I found the most compelling. But I had no idea if anybody else would give a shit about what I'm drawn to. So I felt fortunate that what I handed in with his assistance, structuring it with more of a focus on the match itself,
01:37:45
Speaker
as opposed to what I was doing, which was much more drawn to other things outside of chess, the subculture, the themes that we've been talking about of artificial intelligence and, you know, how Alan Turing used AI first against the chess game, how Kasparov was playing the computer that IBM had created, which was the biggest event in internet history in 1997.
01:38:15
Speaker
chess was invented when the Chinese invented toilet paper and over in England, King Arthur and Excalibur and all that, how chess infiltrated the world on the Silk Road from India into the Middle East, then it's on Columbus's ship as he goes to Cuba. People are playing chess. He was kind of like, you're throwing everything but the kitchen sink at this. Let's get back to that tournament. Let's get back to how this is organized.
01:38:43
Speaker
how this operates as a business. The political backdrop of this with Donald Trump was really interesting to me. So it just felt like there were a lot of moving parts that I wanted to keep in a cohesive way, but at the same time allow for some creativity.
01:39:03
Speaker
uh that I knew was going to be unusual for a book about this subject matter relative to all the other books that I read and I didn't know if it would be perceived as for the better that it was a bit of a shaggy dog or people just say what the fuck is this who is this asshole
01:39:20
Speaker
that what I love about it so much is that it doesn't hinge so much on the match itself the that isn't really even the wireframe I mean it is it is there and of course it factors in but it everything that I was so compelled by and drawn to was
01:39:38
Speaker
all those stories about basically illustrating that chess is like the great human virus that is totally just infected people to an extent and whether it's a person walking out into the blizzard of 76 or an English king bringing his chess set to the gallows
01:40:02
Speaker
or another Babylonian king or whatever it was, wherever that was, you know, the wars are waging outside and what is he doing? He's playing chess in his upper chambers as his city's being besieged. Like that to me was just the fascinating element of how this game has just infiltrated and really infected the minds of people to an extent that it really, sometimes it takes people over off into their detriment.
01:40:33
Speaker
Yeah. And I think, I think that that, that was the starting point for me was getting the assignment and going to see the impact of Donald Trump being elected president in a city where I think 70 or 80% of people voted for Hillary Clinton. And the immediate thing that jumped out at me about going to the Plaza hotel, which had a lot of significance to Trump's business career and that he bought it and claimed it was his Mona Lisa. It's the first time I bought big, big acquisition.
01:41:03
Speaker
that wasn't money related. Of course, there was a total failure, as was the second marriage he had there with Marla Maples that his creditors actually paid for. He never paid them back. But I was just thinking, America seems to be going through this collective psychosis. And it feels like what was going on in the Titanic, this unsinkable ship, when it hits the iceberg, how were people dealing with that?
01:41:32
Speaker
And I just immediately started moving around that ship. Something I often have in the background when I'm writing is that video of the real time reenactment with animation of the ship hitting the bird and going down. It's incredibly bizarre and meditative at the same time. And I was thinking the one place we always hear about the band
01:41:57
Speaker
on the deck that started playing music, made no attempt to escape, but was serenading a lot of people to their death. But I was thinking about the games room, and I was thinking about maybe there were just people in there who were so compelled, possibly by a game of chess, they were like, we hit the glacier, fuck off, like we're in the middle of the game. And that was the feeling and the image that I got that made me think that I had a book at the very beginning, which was,
01:42:27
Speaker
The only place in New York where people were not talking about politics, were not talking about Trump. People were crying on the subways. People outside Trump Tower were beating a pinata of Trump. They were burning the American flag. All these things I saw. But the one place nobody was talking about Trump or politics was inside the grand opening of the world chess championship where people were like, can't wait for what Magnus is going to do tomorrow. And
01:42:56
Speaker
I'm just thinking America is never going to be the same after this. America we're riding pro wrestling has become real life. And these people don't care. Does that mean they're a superior breed of people or are they the most frightening group of people imaginable? But off I went from that point forward. And then, as you mentioned, there are these precedents historically
01:43:25
Speaker
going back 800 years and then another 800 years to Baghdad. Civil wars between two brothers and England, the first king, put to death. Both these guys were obsessed with chess, too, as their literal kingdoms were burning down or they were about to be executed. They were more concerned with the chess game, something they could control, whereas the rest of the world realized they couldn't control.
Making Chess Engaging and Relatable
01:43:50
Speaker
That was an interesting metaphor, an interesting symbol.
01:43:54
Speaker
So let's say you have a fluid deadline or a deadline that is very far off in the future to the extent that it doesn't feel quite real yet. As I suspect with a book of this nature when you had some lead time before you had to turn in any drafts,
01:44:16
Speaker
I wonder what's the key for you for doing the kind of writing you need to do and holding yourself accountable so you can get the work done and not be swamped by, oh geez, I don't know. It's just kind of like swimming and all the time you have. How did you hold yourself accountable to get the work done?
01:44:45
Speaker
Well, there wasn't much of a lead time. Initially there was six months to hand in the manuscript and I, you know, which is very little when you consider I'm not an expert on this subject. I was not purporting to be an expert on this subject. So just if you consider reading closely 30 fat books on chess, you know, chess is not an easy subject matter to really
01:45:12
Speaker
grasp at a level where you can have intelligent conversations with people that are in their sixties or seventies who are very, very well versed in the history. And these are very sensitive people that if you seem out of step, they're just like, you know, they don't want to deal with a troglodyte about chess or tourists. So I was, I was concerned with that because I don't think you'll find, well, in two areas, I don't think you'll find a more preoccupied individual than a chess player.
01:45:42
Speaker
Um, and secondly, more status obsessed people, you know, like one, one subculture that I found utterly fascinating was grandmaster culture. Where it's like, we all know what a grandmaster is, that it's an expert chess player. There used to be five, less than a hundred years ago, there were five of them, a czar over in Russia, there will be five and, and, you know, you have the world champion and five. Well, now there's 1600 of them.
01:46:12
Speaker
Well, what the hell, what, what are you doing with your life? If you're ranked 1600 at anything, like, what does that really mean? Right? Like, is that an accomplishment? Like, I mean, it is an accomplishment, but I mean, is it a really meaningful accomplishment? Like, should somebody be tossing a red carpet in front of you or like flower petals in your path? So I was just sort of like, and there as you was,
01:46:36
Speaker
They would literally introduce themselves by saying, hi, Brendan, I'm Joe Blow. And I happened to be a grand master of chess. I achieved that ranking when I was 14 years old and three months and 17 days. You're just like, okay. I got my driver's license when I was 17. I procrastinated and I failed the written test twice. And on the third time I succeeded in my first driving test, I made one infraction.
01:47:01
Speaker
And then I was handed my driver's life. Like you're just kind of like, what is, what is this exchange? And, and, you know, it's like somebody, the first place my mind went is anytime I hear a celebrity or person talk about being in Mensa, I know I'm not going to hear anything that they've come up with, with their top 2% brain that is remotely interesting to discuss. All we're going to talk about is how they've qualified for Mensa.
01:47:31
Speaker
It's the most boring subject. Like the only people that would want to be it, like the only people who would achieve menza would be people who want to be members of menza, which is such an incredible indictment on your intellect, meaning anything as a passport to going somewhere interesting, right? Like it's the most boring place in the world. I surround myself in a congregation of really smart people. Okay, great. Yeah. Good for you.
01:47:57
Speaker
So there was there was an element with being a grandmaster. One guy who was really interesting was the guy who was the first black grandmaster. And it was very similar for me to like the the identity around Jean-Michel Basquiat as an artist in that everybody was giving him so much attention saying, you know, how do we discuss that you're the first major black artist who's being embraced by the art world and all that? You guys are all fucking racist.
01:48:28
Speaker
And they'd say, well, yeah, maybe we are racist, but isn't there like a benefit to us being racist and that you're making so much money by us fetishizing you? And I remember somebody asked him the question, um, what was it about being, do you feel like you're exploiting us as a black artist or that we're exploiting you as a black artist? And he was kind of like both. And so with his chess player, the first, the first quote unquote black grandmaster,
01:48:58
Speaker
The moment I raised the issue of that being part of his identity, part of all the media that surrounded him, he says, oh, this is the only narrative. And I was like, okay, to be fair, your email address after becoming a grandmaster was first black grandmaster. So it's not as if I'm inventing this fucking line of inquiries or like,
01:49:23
Speaker
You know, this is something that you've propagated as well and benefited from. I think it's a worthy subject to talk about. And it's not like you've been shy talking about it before, but it was incredibly awkward. Right. But, you know, and it was the same way with other grandmas. You talk to women in chess, an incredibly misogynistic field of endeavor. Chess. I mean, just all the big names in chess have been brutal towards women in ways that is such an indictment.
01:49:54
Speaker
on chess as a whole is how shitty they've been to women. But we talk, you know, a lot of people say chess is segregated. Why would you segregate men and women in chess? There's no physical component to it. It's not like, you know, the hundred meter dash or boxing or anything where it would make absolutely no sense to be intergender. Why would women only compete against women? Well, I dare you to ask
01:50:20
Speaker
a serious female chess player, that question, and the look that you're going to get from them. So there are all these tripwires that you had to kind of make a fool of yourself to broach certain things. And that was a challenge. I mean, I don't think anybody likes to just feel like a complete idiot. But at the same time, some of these basic questions are things that a general audience
01:50:48
Speaker
really wonders about. And if you go to insider baseball with chess, I feel like you lose so many people. So I was really trying hard to make sure that when I would have a conversation with people that I knew who were like, you're covering chess. And I would give them like a two minute elevator speech about what I'd found. They'd go, fuck, I had no idea that it was that interesting. I'm going to read this book. I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose that.
01:51:15
Speaker
because that scared me that I would make a book that would be dry in a textbook. And sometimes what the editor was saying, keep it on the match, keep it on this incredible match. And I was sort of pushing back saying, it's not easy to write about six hours of two guys playing a game that ends up in a draw and keep that compelling. Yeah, it's just not that that's just not going to be a winning formula for your average reader, because it's not a winning winning formula for for
01:51:45
Speaker
us chess people in the VIP section watching it, most people look bored. That doesn't portend good things for your general audience.
The Pleasure of Writing and Overcoming Judgment
01:52:06
Speaker
all these things that you just never knew about about the culture and uh... is uh... i know when i finish i always when i read read a book a have an index card and i was just scribble some notes on it just so and i one of the things about about uh... about that i wrote is that hit near his work meeting years always bears repeat reading and i i think this book is a repeat reader and i i i look forward to going back to it and um... i know you said earlier that
01:52:35
Speaker
when your editor said, be like Norman Mailer or David Foster Wallace, and you're like, I'm not those guys. I think for people who know you and have been familiar with your work for a while, someone like myself and others, when I see your name turned on a subject,
01:52:54
Speaker
I know I'm in for a great ride the way people would look at Wallace's work and be like, all right, well, he's turned on tennis. I'm I know I'm going for a great ride. And I think and I hope that once people read this, your name is going to be in that in that class because now when they see you turned on to the Kentucky Derby, maybe
01:53:16
Speaker
be like, oh, we're in for a great ride. I know that already. Other people do. But I think this is going to open that up for you. That is my great hope because I think you're deserved of that kind of title in in laurels, if you will. Well, it's very kind of you. I mean, I would I would love to. I'd love to. It was it was a big challenge to do something that was a very foreign world. And my concern is is always trying to
01:53:46
Speaker
Yeah. Take, take something away from it. That would be valued people that I'll never meet, but that I respect their time and to make their investment worthy of something. So, you know, I wasn't sure where the hell this thing would land, but I, I gave it a lot to try to make it work. And chess is a real challenge to write about because there's no action. There's no discernible action and
01:54:16
Speaker
My main passport into writing about stuff has been the way I've covered, you know, I think the easiest thing to write about, which is two people killing each other in a ring in public. You know, how do you make that boring? Like, you know, the stakes are as intense as they can be. And one of the people I interviewed for the book I wrote about Cuba is that why do we write about Cuba? We write about it because it covers our faults as a writer.
01:54:45
Speaker
Because how do you tell a boring story that like you go to Cuba, there are no boring stories. They're just they're just not because it's such an extreme place and people's lives are at the extremes and there's characters everywhere. And there's, you know, incidents that are everywhere and a dynamic that is unbelievable all the time. And its impact is unique on every person that it that it's pursuing. So
01:55:16
Speaker
Chest was kind of the comeuppance, if you will, of two kids sitting across from each other for 70 hours over the course of three weeks. Go, Bryn, make it interesting. No pressure. That was really scary because they are not talking to me about what's going on. And if they are talking, they're saying very, very boring things about what's going on most of the time.
01:55:45
Speaker
So I had to come up with something that didn't seem like too much of a reach or, you know, just like tourism, like what's ugly, you know, what's his name? What's that great German film? Werner Herzog. Tourism is a mortal sin. That was something that was an adage for me from the beginning with this. I am a tourist. This is a mortal sin contract that I have signed. Beware.
01:56:13
Speaker
And no, but I was very aware of it is that everybody there who was a part of this world was looking at me saying, why the fuck should you get a book deal to write about this? I've given my life to this. Who the fuck are you? And, and I wanted to, I wanted to earn, earn that respect, you know, just to, to make, not to say fuck you, but just to say like, fair enough. I understand that feeling. And, and I would,
01:56:43
Speaker
I'm going to do my best to try to offer you something and everybody you know something that maybe you didn't know this about some of these people or the way this is assembled is a little unusual that makes you consider some stuff that you've been around your whole life. I don't know. I don't mean that to sound arrogant or presumptuous, but that was kind of the challenge to me was, as I always am, when I hand the thing in, I assume
01:57:12
Speaker
it's going to be hated. And then when that person says, no, this is good. And then you think the reviews are going to come in. My assumption is what the fuck is this and who the fuck is this asshole? I've never lost that fear. It's not because I think I'm a fraud or I have no talent, but I just, I just feel like my way of going about it is weird in a way that at any moment somebody could just say this, this is not, you know, if this is it,
01:57:40
Speaker
I'm here for ice cream, which is what I think writing should be. It should be that pleasurable. Like you're in, you're in that mode where you're like, fuck it. I don't care about the calories or love handles. I just want to have some ice cream. That's the feeling you've got to give somebody that it's pleasurable to keep going. And there's nothing worse than being in a mood for ice cream and your first taste is this is awful. Yeah.
01:58:05
Speaker
Right? You just overwhelmed with self-hatred. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're just, it's just such a, you know, it's like somebody you've, you've been making out with and you're just like, my God, the sex is going to be incredible with this person. The moment it starts, it's terrible. It's something really, really upsetting about, you know, ordinarily, if you have great chemistry, kissing somebody or great, great chemistry with conversation,
01:58:35
Speaker
Those are about as good indicators as you can hope for that more stuff will, you know, instead of just a band singing a song, you're going to have a whole orchestra singing it. It will be even better. Sometimes it doesn't work out that way.
Conclusion and Future Episodes
01:58:50
Speaker
And there were lots of times with a book about chess where I was very afraid that the chemistry I'd have with the subject matter would just not work because it's hard. It's really hard because a lot of books on chess and most of them
01:59:05
Speaker
more work to get through and i didn't want to write something that would be work for somebody to go through well i think uh... we've done about close to two hours here brenn night will enjoyed every every minute of it uh... this is uh... wonderful just that just a killer book and i think you're gonna get a lot of it just a lot of uh... well-deserved praise and i wish you the best of success with it uh... it's uh...
01:59:33
Speaker
I just really appreciate you coming back on the show. Fourth time on the show, and always, always just a great, great pleasure to get to talk to you about this kind of stuff. My pleasure, and thank you for having me, Brendan. I appreciate the support. Thank you. Did you make it to the end? Doesn't get much better than that. In the time it took you to listen to this episode, a Kenyan finished a marathon. True story.
02:00:02
Speaker
Thanks to Bryn for circling the bases for his fourth trip. Go buy the book, would you? It's a re-reader, brah.
02:00:11
Speaker
Thanks to our sponsors and Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction as well as Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Go check them out. Links in the show notes. Be sure to visit BrendanOmera.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter. If you want to connect on social, I'm at Brendan Omera and at cnfpod on Twitter. On Facebook, you can search for the podcast by name and the handle at cnfpodhost.
02:00:41
Speaker
If you're an Instagram-a, I post drawings, I do an audiogram from the show. Just a bunch of random stupid stuff if you like random stupid stuff. Got any questions or concerns? Ping me on social or email me, creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com.
02:00:59
Speaker
Maybe I'll answer the question on the show, if you would like. That'll do for this week. Next week will be my, will, will be most likely Sam Chiarelli or Glen Stout to talk about their new books, Dig and the Pats. I haven't decided which one. It's up in the air. You know what? I'm outta here. If you can't do interview, see ya.