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Episode 186: Brin-Jonathan Butler — Misfits, Status, and ‘Tourist Information’
122 Plays5 years ago
Brin-Jonathan Butler has a new podcast called Tourist Information.
Thanks to Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing for the support.
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Transcript
Introduction to Bryn Jonathan Butler and Storytelling
00:00:02
Speaker
ACNFers, Bryn Jonathan Butler makes his fifth return visit to the greatest podcast in the world, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. He's as good as they come. As far as I'm concerned, there's nobody better. Subjective.
00:00:17
Speaker
I know, but whatever. Discover your story, man. Bay Path University's fully online MFA in creative non-fiction writing. Faculty have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, edit, and reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer all your questions and their years of experience as writers and teachers have made for an unbeatable experience.
Humor in Podcasting and Name Mispronunciations
00:00:40
Speaker
Head over to baypath.edu slash MFA for more information.
00:00:48
Speaker
So episode 186 with Bryn Johnson. I didn't edit the interview portion of the show. I just didn't have the time this week. And clearly I'm not going to edit me bungling the intro and butchering Bryn's name.
Tourist Information Podcast and Interviewing Techniques
00:01:07
Speaker
Episode 186 is with Bryn Jonathan Butler at Bryniceo on Twitter.
00:01:14
Speaker
He's the very definition. Well this show, this episode, this particular conversation is the very definition of a riff. That might make sense later. This isn't so much an interview, so much as it is a riff. Oh yes. Real professional this week.
00:01:42
Speaker
Really polished good lord
00:01:46
Speaker
Bryn's got a new podcast. It's titled, Taurus Information, where he interviews these cats about boxing. Not cats, but you know, cats. Gives you a sense of who he is as an interviewer, which is why I'm one of the reasons I was really tickled to listen to his show, because I love his writing so much. His journalism is so good. And you want to know, how does this person pull information out of people so they can best
00:02:14
Speaker
synthesize that information into his beautiful prose. He's the author of the Memoir of Domino Diaries, the Grand Master. He's been a best American travel writing, best American sports writing, notable selection, you name it. He's all over it. He's as good as they come.
Social Media Musings and Twitter Raffle Mishaps
00:02:37
Speaker
It gives you, I don't know, it made me think about how interviewing is a skill. There's a difference between asking good questions and being a good interviewer. You know, good interviewers always ask good questions, but askers of good questions are not necessarily good interviewers. I could point to several podcasts about that, but I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to stoop that level. Not anymore. A few years ago, I would have been like, yep, that person is a piece of shit and I'm better.
00:03:09
Speaker
Not anymore. Not anymore, we don't do that. Anyway, I gotta say, my social media sabbatical is going well. I do promote the podcast here and there, but not having any of that garbage on my phone, except thing, Instagram, has been nice. I definitely don't feel like I'm missing anything. A little bit here and there, but not a whole lot.
00:03:32
Speaker
You wanted to know what complete garbage Twitter is. I don't even mean like the trolling part of it. This gives you the evidence of just how meaningless it is.
00:03:46
Speaker
I put out a tweet this week at CNF Pod, if you want to follow along, telling people that if at least 10 people retweeted this one tweet, I'd raffle off my copy of Tim O'Brien's latest book. You know how many retweets that got? One. That tells me a couple things. One, perhaps even if a tweet with the requisite hashtags
00:04:10
Speaker
It is just invisible. Nobody's seeing it. The algorithms are such that when I tweet, it floats away. The other thing is that maybe people don't give a shit and I can't do anything about that. But there's 725 followers of the at CNF pod account. That's not nothing, right? It further cemented how little social media matters and how disproportionately it takes up our attention for the value it adds in our lives, right?
Reflections on Time and Reconnecting with Bryn
00:04:38
Speaker
Frankly, I'd rather make a good podcast that you feel like you can nestle into for an hour a week. Don't forget to tweet it out. Okay. Let, let's wrap, let's wrap things up here. All right. A few things, friends of the merit.com. Hey, hey, for show notes, newsletter is the jam. The podcast, like I said earlier, it's unedited this week.
00:05:03
Speaker
Brynn is probably my favorite writer going. He's the author, again, of the Grandmaster Domino Diaries. He's at Berniceo on Twitter. His new podcast is tourist information. Step into the ring, CNFers. It's odd how time compresses the further along you go, huh? Yeah, it's amazing and kind of dispiriting to realize that
00:05:27
Speaker
I feel like, given that I read your work and you see people pop up on a Twitter feed, so you get a sense that you've been in touch with this person for a long time, then you realize you see some concrete evidence that it's quite the opposite. It's like, holy shit, I haven't actually had a conversation with this guy in over two years. It is what it is, as they say, but it's nice to be talking to you again after over two years.
Freelancing, Travel Writing, and Meghan Markle's Location Confusion
00:05:55
Speaker
Likewise.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, what's that? I think I was reading something by Michael Hare, his friendship with Stanley Kubrick, and he he defined like a period of seven years as as one phone call with interruptions. Right. So this is good. You know, so how are things going for you? And, you know, given that we haven't spoken in a while, but how are how are things? It's, you know, it's good to hear your voice. And I'm glad to glad to be able to hear you in podcast form, too. So like, what's, you know, what's going on in your neck of the woods?
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, man, just just a different hustle after having the backdrop of a book. And so trying to freelance some stuff, a little bit more of a focus on travel than than boxing. And your travel or workforce related? No, I mean, I mean, writing about travel as it. Leisure travel.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, my private jet going to visit Meghan Markle in my old neighborhood and my own, it's funny because I actually, when I was eight, I want to raffle to go visit the Queen's arrival to Vancouver. And it's been a little bit funny to just loosely follow Meghan and Harry's, I guess, what is it, escape?
00:07:16
Speaker
to my old stomping grounds and to see it referenced endlessly that she was walking in the park with her kid in Vancouver and I'm like, calling where she was Vancouver is like calling the Hamptons New York City.
Profiling DBC Pierre and Historical Kidnappings
00:07:29
Speaker
Like it's so far away from Vancouver. But for Americans, it's like, it might as well be the North wet territory or something. Like it's all the same, it seems like. Yeah. This is funny. So yeah, I mean, I just,
00:07:46
Speaker
I did a profile on DBC Pierre, the 2003 Booker prize winner, where he grew up in Mexico city. Um, I might have to go back to Vancouver where I haven't been in 10 years, which is kind of odd to do a story about a kidnapping that took place 30 years ago. And I have this story coming out probably next week for Haslet magazine next week or two weeks.
00:08:12
Speaker
about the passenger and interviewing Jack Nicholson and kind of coincides while I was reporting on that story in the south of Spain where Antonioni was filming the last scenes of the passenger, Anthony Bourdain's suicide was announced.
Boxing's Misfits and Fascinating Personalities
00:08:29
Speaker
And so it kind of became, I don't know, evocative of how prevalent a theme that is with a lot of artists, writers, painters,
00:08:42
Speaker
this odd thing about revisiting a biography through the prism of their death, which I think is kind of unavoidable with suicide. So yeah, a lot of different stuff than, than boxing. I think the last since we last spoke has been kind of the focus. Yeah. Is that in any way kind of refreshing for you to kind of, uh, you know, pivot off of, off of that. And I know you can always go back to it, but to, you know, just to,
00:09:11
Speaker
go over to this sandbox? Yeah, it is. I mean, I think this is more my interest. I think boxing may be the consistent theme with the characters that I'm drawn to are misfits.
Status in Boxing Matches and Media
00:09:27
Speaker
And I don't think anybody who gets involved in boxing isn't a misfit, almost by definition of doing something that most people are terrified of their whole lives. And these people, it's their day job.
00:09:40
Speaker
I always liked how boxing just revealed people more than sort of any kind of blow-by-blow account of what they were doing in the ring. And I also like the misfits who were drawn to boxing. You get such an interesting assembly of characters. I mean, I requested the seating arrangement for Pacquiao Mayweather from Showtime, and they allowed me to see what's called, oh, I'm gonna get this wrong, a giga,
00:10:11
Speaker
It's like a giga photo. So essentially what that means, I'm saying it wrong. I'm getting it giga. Okay. I'm going to describe it instead of getting the word wrong, but what it is, which is quite interesting is a high definition photo that basically shows the entire crowd where you can zoom in on every face that was there. So I'm talking about like 12,000 people worth of faces that you can zoom in where you're two feet from them.
00:10:40
Speaker
So this was interesting for me because I think the seating arrangement for Pacquiao Mayweather might be the highest concentration of celebrity that's ever been assembled. When you think about, you have Trump surrounded by, what, 20 billionaires, oligarchs and such. You have the award ceremony from the Oscars, the Grammys, comedy,
00:11:10
Speaker
you know, it was just like through this accident of boxing, it was sort of like looking at the seating arrangement of the Titanic. So one of like the hardest seats seats to get onto was, was like the Titanic for the early 20th century. So I was kind of looking at it like if you were in charge of where prices is of no importance, I mean, some of those seats were going for $375,000. How do you say to like puff daddy,
00:11:38
Speaker
I'm sorry, but you can't sit in front of Jay-Z or Trump, I'm sorry, but you can't be in front of this Chinese or Russian oligarch. It seems so emblematic of our time of that status is everything, but when the money is no object to go after what you're pursuing, how do you keep the egos in check?
00:11:59
Speaker
when you're like offering where you get to sit, where it has nothing really to do with an event, even though that event seemed a perfect distillation of our time and that it was the biggest non-event, it was just where are you sitting was the big thing. And I remember I was in the seventh row reporting on it and behind me was Sting, Jesse Jackson, Louis CK, Magic Johnson. I went to the bathroom and was using a urinal next to Dave Chappelle.
00:12:28
Speaker
We exit the bathroom and Nicki Minaj were in orbit of her backside where we're both looking at each other like, that can only be one person. And you were seeing more celebrities than faces you didn't know at the MGM Grand. So it just seemed, I don't know, like these are where I seem to go with boxing more than who won or lost than who was winning the rounds. I mean, that's a very long winded reply.
00:12:58
Speaker
Well, this whole notion of status and status roles, you know, who's up and who's down is and how do you how do you get up in relation to someone else going down is it's almost a more interesting sparring duel than what's actually going on in the ring. I think so. And I mean, you and I know, you know, where most journalists live is Twitter and it. I don't know that Twitter has much purchase on people outside of people on Twitter. I don't know that they
00:13:28
Speaker
follow what is maniacally followed by sort of journalist Twitter. So it's, yeah, it's, I am, I am intrigued that sort of any arena of ambition status is paramount and the way that people jockey for that, um, as things become more kind of diffuse, like in terms of what we're focusing on, there's not events that bring everybody together anymore.
DBC Pierre's Booker Prize and Literary Journeys
00:13:53
Speaker
We're not looking at the same thing anymore.
00:13:55
Speaker
We're finding our own pockets and our own bubbles to discuss it. And I'm not sure where any of this is headed, but it's really weird that a lot of life just seems like this hallway at high school during lunch hour recess where we gossip. And that has taken over the discussion of sort of what seems to be more important things often, unless you're signaling about why it's important because you care about it and all that, which is again, back to status.
00:14:25
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And you see it too, like in just if you go into any press box or media row, there's there is a certain jockeying of position even among the tenured reporters and everything. And there is this sense of who is the king of the row and who isn't. And I don't spend much time in press boxes anymore, but it's just like you get that sense of
00:14:50
Speaker
you know, of swagger when a certain person comes in, like, you know, they get the first question or, you know, this, that and the other, you know, podcasting, it's like who can get the biggest fish on their show for a certain interview. You see it all the time everywhere. And like, actually, when you see it, you sort of can't unsee it ever again. No, you can't. And I mean, even the New York Times, with who they're going to endorse with candidates, they turn it into like a bachelor show, right?
00:15:15
Speaker
where it was like, let's interview all the people, and we're not even gonna sign off on one person. We're gonna be diplomatic here, lest there be this Twitter backlash, or there was a recent review. I think it's the first negative review I've seen of Gia Tolentino, where talk about status, like how elevated she became with her work in the New Yorker. Again, prestigious status, you're at the New Yorker, and then she gets a book that is on Obama's book list, and the London Review of Books,
00:15:46
Speaker
does a pretty scathing review of her, Lauren Euler, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, O-Y-L-E-R. In order to do a negative review, I noticed she had to get off of social media because of, I would assume, a horrendous backlash of supporters of Gia Tolentino. And then it's like, how much is that about supporting Tolentino?
00:16:12
Speaker
And how much of it is about, by supporting Gia Tolentino, you are shoring up your position, ideally, to gain a better position at a job or at the New Yorker or whatever. There's so much performance to all of this that I think everybody is struggling with this battle between privacy and publicity and especially in an industry that is imploding. I totally understand.
00:16:39
Speaker
understand why, but the mechanics of that kind of stuff, I think as I mentioned with Bourdain's suicide, his narrative to becoming what he did, like how unusual it was that, hey, I'm on the slush pile of The New Yorker and I can't believe any of this happened, almost none of that was true. And so I've always been very curious about how people
00:17:06
Speaker
calibrate and curate their narratives and how much it lines up with the past. And I'm even finding as I'm working on this profile about D.B.C. Pierre, another guy, quite like Bourdain, who wins the Booker Prize at 42 without ever having written anything and having a kind of lost decade of drug addiction, alcoholism, gambling, conning people out of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debts.
00:17:36
Speaker
It's been pretty interesting just trying to get the facts about a timeline of things happening, of what's on the record, what isn't, and a lot of things not lining up and sort of trying to make sense of it in a careful way. But it does make me sort of think how everybody is just trying to find their way with telling their story in this industry, because I'm still as fascinated by writers and
00:18:04
Speaker
storytelling as I've ever been, but it's dealing with the social media realities of it and a real difficulty of making a living doing it. You're seeing even the likes of the New York Times really having to pander in ways that seem pretty embarrassing often. Yeah, I'm always drawn to
00:18:27
Speaker
uh, profiles of, of artists, specifically writers and even chefs. I really love, I love that kind of drive and rigor that often drives these people. And, uh, your conversation with, uh, DBC Pierre on your, on your podcast was, uh, was pretty, oh, it was just pretty gripping. He's just a great talker. And, um, and, uh, what struck me too, like when you alluded to it, him winning the Booker prize, but basically the, you know, the first book he ever wrote, it's like.
00:18:56
Speaker
A lot of us would love to win such a thing and get onto that plane. But it's like, what if it happens too soon? And for him, it led to essentially a 10-year period of trying to live up to that. And that must have been interesting for you to unpack. What if you get that prize, but you're not equipped to have that prize yet?
00:19:24
Speaker
And you get it. And how do you process that and live up to it for the rest of your career?
Storytelling, Failure, and the Craft of Writing
00:19:29
Speaker
That must have been something very interesting for you to unpack with him. Well, especially since like what's your resume to get there? Let's not forget because he's competing against Margaret Atwood at that time and some real heavyweights. And I think there was a lot of dissension amongst that group to say this guy doesn't he may have the chops with a book that is getting a lot of attention, but this guy hasn't
00:19:53
Speaker
jump through the necessary hoops that we have, and if he hasn't gone to the right MFA program or doesn't have connections in the literary world, wait a second, like, then what's the point of these connections? What's the point of these MFA programs where a lot of people who go to it go there as much for the connections they're going to form as what they're going to learn? So he was really attacked hard in the media for this backstory, this tremendously salacious backstory, but
00:20:23
Speaker
it had the opposite effect in that it was the best publicity that the Booker Prize had probably ever had outside of literary circles. So in a way it made him almost a must win for the Booker, because if you're in the shortlist and everybody's just talking about your backstory rather than the books that are competing for the prize, it'd be a weird thing if he lost. And then it's sort of like, oh, the guy who
00:20:49
Speaker
didn't, didn't win it has this great backstory that we still want to keep talking about rather than the books that were written for people that aren't reading those books like in the pages of London, not tabloids, but even the newspapers were all covering his thing. So I was really interested in him unpacking that side of things. And, and the other side of it that was kind of interesting was what he wanted to do is first we went to Mexico city where he grew up, his father,
00:21:17
Speaker
was an agricultural geneticist who was partnered with a Nobel Prize winner. And the climate down in Mexico City allows for, I think, three harvests where most places would just have one. So it was a tremendous place to develop food for places where food shortages were just rampant. In Africa and India and stuff, I think was their focus of trying to find ways to just produce more food.
00:21:47
Speaker
And then what Pierre wanted to do, aside from growing up in this big gated community that he took me to in the southeastern part of Mexico City, was go to Oaxaca to visit somebody who had written to him, who had said that they'd been greatly inspired by his work, which was also how I became a pen pal of Pierre for about nine years, was just saying, you're kind of the patron saint of people that can make it who don't have the qualifications to make it, which is certainly me.
00:22:17
Speaker
And he wanted Misfits and he wanted to go to Oaxaca to meet this guy who was a drug runner dealing with the cartel, had been a pimp for a while, then had become himself a prostitute, had worked with Larry Flint at Hustler.
00:22:34
Speaker
to go cover the bunny ranch in the early 2000s and was covering a mother-daughter prostitution team and then married the daughter of one of these and had been living illegally in Oaxaca. And so he had a 2 million word manuscript that nobody had ever seen. And so what Pierre suggested to me was we can do some other things or we can kind of stage a literary intervention
Journalism's Changing Landscape and Writer's Struggles
00:22:59
Speaker
as it were with a 43 year old guy
00:23:03
Speaker
that is addicted to smack for the last 25 years. And we can see if we can do some good and try to help him get this manuscript somewhere. It's just, we don't know what the manuscript is. And so it was odd that of the three of us being misfits of in various ways, Pierre made good in a way that was just so unlikely and unexpected with the Booker prize. I'm somewhere as
00:23:29
Speaker
the half known in the industry with a few books out there and, you know, journalism for eight, nine years. And then the question was kind of, where is this guy going to land? What, what if he gets this manuscript through some people that Pierre knows or somebody that I know and somebody has a look at it? What is it if you're 43 and nobody's really seen the great work that you have and when they do, what if it doesn't do anything and nobody wants it or,
00:23:58
Speaker
What if it amounted to being a shitty review in the New York Times or somewhere else? Or what if it's a, you know, he becomes like a William Burroughs or something for his time. So it's just interesting to think about that for how many people long to be in the position of being heard, which is, I think, like the big motivation behind most writers is we want somebody to read us, right? As much as to make money from it.
00:24:28
Speaker
Glenn Stout said, I think at the beginning, the introduction of the best American sports writing book that I mean, a lot of writers are going to end up having to pay to be published places and they'd be very willing to because we're, we're so desperate just to try to be heard in that way. So, so I don't know if that was kind of the dynamic that I was most intrigued by in that assignment was just, just where, where do we land?
00:24:58
Speaker
when our work is seen and how important is the timing at which it's seen, you know, which unfortunately I think timing is almost everything with this as much as the quality of the work or who you are presenting the work. Was there a profile on were you going to be working on a profile of Pierre anyway or was it this sort of this literary sort of
00:25:21
Speaker
you know, this intervention, is that what you're like, oh, this is the animating force of this. And this that was your gateway into profiling him for for Haslet. Right. That's where you're you're writing it. That's right. No, it was going to be Pierre. I really wanted to do the Mexico City thing. And a writer that I've always loved was was Malcolm Lowry. And Malcolm Lowry, like Pierre, got his big jump with Under the Volcano.
00:25:50
Speaker
not far away from Mexico City and Cuernavaca, but that book launched him in a way where I think the New York Times said it was the greatest book written since Joyce's Ulysses and it just destroyed his life. And I think for Pierre, probably the success he had, I think Vernon God Little sold around 1.2 million copies. That's what Pierre told me. You know, just a monster, even though it did absolutely nothing in the United States. It was panned by both the New Yorker and the New York Times.
00:26:19
Speaker
So I wanted to look at the origin of this very nebulous origin story that he had up close. Go with him. Let's visit the house where you grew up. Let's go to the places that meant something to you in Mexico City. Let's look at how you descended into addiction when your father died when you were 19. He got brain cancer when Pierre was 16.
00:26:42
Speaker
He got arrested trying to bring a car in from Texas into Mexico and lost his Mexican visa. And then he's just kind of drifting. And once once I kind of set up like a time where Pierre had had a window to go down there, he was finishing a new book called Dopamine City, which really interested me. He's very fascinated by neuroscientists.
00:27:05
Speaker
neuroscience, and actually, I just interviewed a neuroscientist for my podcast, Tourist Information, who specialized in dopamine, brain trauma, and love boxing. So it was a fortunate intersection.
Podcasting Process and Interview Techniques
00:27:21
Speaker
But Pierre just said, look, we can do my story, but as we're doing my story, let's look at a kindred spirit who
00:27:29
Speaker
I think I very easily could have been. I got off the train at a certain stop. I was able to get off the train of where I was going for self-direction. And this guy's gone a little further than me. And I think there'd be something really useful in trying to understand where I was coming from to see somebody who followed a similar path and went further down the tracks on that path. So that was our agenda, but Mexico,
00:27:57
Speaker
of the top six murder capitals in the world. Mexico has five of them. And this guy's involved in the cartel, involved in prostitution, drug running, is a drug addict of 25 years. There were some risks associated with it. And then just the backdrop of we're there just before the day of the dead. And so Pierre suggested I do some interviews with what's called the Notaroha.
00:28:26
Speaker
the red letter, which is the death press down there that puts graphic depictions of the cartel's most vicious murders of men, women, and children on the front pages of all their newspapers and tabloids for everybody to see just walking around the streets. And their relationship to death is something that I was very intrigued by and troubled by. And Pierre's book making
00:28:56
Speaker
essentially a very dark comedy about a school shooting where the suspected shooter is put into a reality show while he's on death row as a teenager. Remember, this came out in 2003. This is before the Kardashians. This was pretty prophetic to, I think, where we are now, where what was dismissed as sort of South Parkian take on American culture now looks not even like naturalism. It looks understated.
00:29:25
Speaker
to where a lot of things are now. So I, I mean, even the title of the book was a reference to bullfighting, which was, I think it's a 21st century comedy in the presence of death. And that's, that's an expression of how bullfighting is treated, that it's a tragedy in the presence of death. And he, he, he got the impetus for the book.
00:29:49
Speaker
by a school shooting that took place in the Northwest in Oregon in April of 1998. A year later Columbine happens and he literally signs the book deal 45 minutes before the first plane hit the tower for 9-11. So there was just a lot there about death and his way of treating that subject that he mentioned to me that Vernon got little
00:30:18
Speaker
was a Latin novel that was written in English. Like the sensibility of it was much more like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who, by the way, he went to school with two of Marquez's kids in Mexico City and said, I don't know if it's a hindrance or an advantage when Marquez is on the curriculum for these two kids to write essays about dad, to write essays about Gabo. So I don't know, these are just themes, I think,
00:30:45
Speaker
Death and time have always been really big themes in what I've been drawn to in my work, usually as a backdrop, but I think this put it much more into the foreground for me to look at Pierre and to look at this guy that we just had a dinner with at night, as it sounded like there was cannon fire while we were interviewing him.
00:31:08
Speaker
And he called the dinner off at the end just because he said he needed to do drugs. It was just too difficult for him to continue talking, even though there he was sitting with a literary hero of his. And I'm also very interested, having dealt with in my own family with the effects of addiction, is can you really intervene and help somebody? What can you really do? How do you do that? If somebody doesn't want to be helped,
00:31:38
Speaker
then what do you do? And this just seemed such an unlikely opportunity to potentially be of assistance to this guy. And so in the intervening
Performance vs. Privacy in Storytelling and Journalism
00:31:50
Speaker
two months since we did that interview, and I was working on the profile, I've gone through 55,000 words that he's written that I think is part, a very limited part of this 2 million words that he thinks is his great
00:32:08
Speaker
home about his life. And it's just very interesting to see some somebody driven to try to speak out about who they are in this world and all the regrets he's had. But boy, just suicide and regret and a lot of shame just permeate everything that's in it. And yet there's a there must be some hope in that he just keeps going like 2 million words. So
00:32:38
Speaker
There are a number, you know, it's hard not to see parallels with some of the other people out there that are now beloved. My 40th birthday, I was in France and sort of doing the trail of Van Gogh from just north of Paris where he took his own life to Saint-Remy where he was being hospitalized. And just to imagine that there's a pilgrimage trail where millions and millions and millions of people are visiting because of the connection they feel to this guy.
00:33:07
Speaker
And yet in his own life, before he took it in 1890, had no idea that anybody would ever give a shit. Like he was just contending with that nobody fucking cared. And I certainly can connect to that with many years of trying my best to try to get some work out there and just failing and failing and failing. So I, I still have a lot of probably not
00:33:31
Speaker
too much empathy for those people, but it's hard to get the chip off your shoulder and the feeling of support for people who are underdogs out there because there's a lot of them. And to your point of like failing and failing and failing, you know, I look at your body of work and I see, I just see so much I admire. But you see, you know, you have the
00:33:58
Speaker
the viewpoint of having carrying your various failures. And they're probably very, if you're anything like me, they're probably very much on the forefront of your mind almost all the time. So how have you mitigated the failure? How do you dance with it and use it as fuel and not let it weigh you down too much so you can still put out the stuff you're able to crank out? Well, I think the real benefit of failure is that I think
00:34:28
Speaker
losing at anything. I was involved in a program that was on Netflix, a series called Losers.
Social Media's Impact on Mental Health
00:34:35
Speaker
And I was, I did all the interviews for the first episode of that and brought this ex-heavyweight champion who was nearly killed in his next fight, Michael Bent, who's transitioned into acting, has played Othello on stage and done the choreography for Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby, the boxing choreography.
00:34:56
Speaker
and also in Ali, the Michael Mann biopic of Ali. And what came to the forefront working on that film and just working with Michael Bent, who's become a pretty good friend of mine, is that losers are forced to confront who they are. We're forced to look at ourselves every time we confront something where we didn't get where we wanted to go. The perennial winners of this world, I mean, look at the pathology of
00:35:23
Speaker
Lance Armstrong or Donald Trump, where everything is about winning, right? There's no, there's nothing immoral about what you do to win. The only thing that's immoral is if you lose. And that's, you know, that it's a very binary outlook of the world. So I think it's been very fortunate, it wasn't in real time, particularly enjoyable, but to to write three books that were unpublishable,
00:35:51
Speaker
and to get a lot of rejection letters in a time where you couldn't electronically send it. So it cost a fair bit of money to send out all those manuscripts all over the place. I don't think those books were publishable. I think I needed to write them, but I don't think any, but they weren't for anybody else. And after some years of churning stuff out there where maybe what you're, if you think that writing,
00:36:19
Speaker
is going to solve a lot of your problems in terms of your identity or things you don't like about yourself. If you got a bunch of validation at a point where you weren't developed enough, I think internally or mature enough, I think you're going to be a lot more fucked up than, than trying to deal with some of some of the frustration that's involved with, with the persistence of keeping going, despite meeting failure. I mean,
00:36:47
Speaker
I know with Pierre, who's probably the only living writer that I regularly talk to, it was really hard for him in the 17 years since he won the Booker Prize because everything is measured against, hey, you just won the biggest English language prize in the world or one of them straight out of the gates. How could you ever write anything that's going to measure up to that? It's like Orson Well syndrome, where you're the youngest has-been ever in Hollywood.
00:37:17
Speaker
And I've heard Mark Marin make the point that if you go to Hollywood and are substituting the needs you have from your parents with Hollywood, they're going to solve all those needs you have for validation stuff. You're in real trouble. And so I think for me also, the Grandmaster was an interesting thing in that it's a for hire assignment. I was told what to do.
00:37:46
Speaker
what basically the book was that was wanted. And as that became untenable with a chess match that was really not that compelling objectively, I was pushing back to say, look, I need to do this some other ways because what the assignment was I was given is really not what can be written. And there was a lot of friction there.
00:38:10
Speaker
in publishing, when you get your advance to do your book, if you deliver something that they don't like, they don't have to have any justification to say, we don't like this, you owe us all the money back. And that was really, really frightening. I mean, I didn't have any other means of supporting myself, and I certainly didn't have any means to pay that money back. So to then get the book out there with a major publishing house, like Simon and Schuster, and to get it reviewed in the New York Times, and the New York Times review is
00:38:40
Speaker
something about the book that really had nothing to do with the book that I wrote, or when people write criticism and cite lines that actually I didn't write, like those were things that had to be in there. When you immediately get that kind of feedback that's negative, it's sort of like, you know, you are really angry and pissed off and frustrated. But I think on the other hand, you're just kind of like, well, wait a minute, like, what does this have to do with me? When they're just when somebody says,
00:39:09
Speaker
you know, this match is not that compelling to tether a book to, I'm kind of like, you're right. But I had to. So sorry, I did my best there. Or New York Times says, you know, is chess a sport? This book argues that it is. Well, I argued that it was in about three sentences, because when I didn't do that, my editor said, we absolutely need this to be in here. So, okay, like, that's your angle on this thing? Well, that really wasn't what I wrote.
00:39:38
Speaker
But if that's what you want to focus on, and a lot of people said to me, it doesn't make any difference if it's panned. All people will look at six months from now, it was reviewed in the New York Times. That's its own thing to assist you in the resume. And back to Margaret Atwood, she was one of three judges in Canada with their biggest nonfiction award. And it was shortlisted there, the RBC Taylor Award,
00:40:08
Speaker
And it's like, it's just so interesting to me that a book where it's, it's, it's a weird thing. Like I say, we're so much of what the book is, is not how you would do it organically. It's really what you were not paint by numbers quite Brendan, but, but largely it was a little bit of, this has got to be a pizza and it's got to be a microwavable pizza. And you're sort of like, well, I want to be a chef. Well, that's great.
00:40:36
Speaker
but this is a microwavable pizza for people who want microwavable pizzas. And at first I was really angry about that and upset and really didn't want my name attached to that kind of thing. But on the other hand, I was like, I was able to live on this for three years. And is it the worst thing in the world that you'll get some negative reviews and then some other places that might be appreciated? It's nice to be nominated for
00:41:04
Speaker
the biggest nonfiction award in Canada, even though it's no longer existing, because I guess it's not viable to support Canadian nonfiction. But, you know, you're just kind of like, you just I think you just let it go in the rear view mirror. And it's I think it's on you to reduce the high beams of how that feels. And just look back at the windshield about where you want to go, because
00:41:30
Speaker
like you're saying, it's been almost two years since you and I talked, it seems like it was last week. And, you know, in the meantime, I'm meeting a lot of people who are dealing with marriages falling apart or a new child or a loved one is dying and stuff. I mean, life is happening in the meantime. And if you don't wake up in the morning and get to work, it can become very easy to become untethered from your from your life and float
00:41:58
Speaker
often to some place which is not a good spot to be in. And so I'm very aware of that. It's very easy, especially in New York, in the United States, to this deafening amount of noise and stress that is just part of being alive right now. You really have to find the things that are of value to focus on that give your life meaning and the people that give you your life meaning that you care about and support you and that you support
00:42:29
Speaker
and control what you can control and accept what you can't control. And I've always the last, especially the last five, six years, tried my best to really focus on that and manage it the best I can as a very, very neurotic individual. That kind of gets what I wanted to ask you next too, because you're at the start of a new decade. And I wonder how your relationship to your work and your writing and ambition
00:42:58
Speaker
might have changed or morphed, say, from when you were 30 to now when you're 40. Yeah, I mean, finding the stories that are meaningful, I think it gets harder and harder to make a living from this craft. I mean, I fell ass backwards in a very goofy way to a book with a major publishing house like Simon & Schuster. I mean, not a lot of people
00:43:25
Speaker
get an offer to do a for hire assignment for places like that. And three days later, sign the book deal. And two days later are covering it. That just doesn't really happen. So when I bring up, Anthony Bourdain is discovered on a slush pile to New Yorker, even though that's not true. His mom worked at the New York Times was friends with David Remnick's wife and gave him gave gave her who gave Remnick
00:43:48
Speaker
that work that leads to confidential and a massive book deal. Like that's the real story. He was a hugely connected person, but still it's unlikely to get your start at 42. Um, I'm just aware of, of how much timing and luck and, and I guess persistence as well has led to some opportunities, but I don't, I don't know where the next book is, which is a scary feeling because it is a huge amount of security to have
00:44:17
Speaker
a chunk of change. And I didn't have any massive book deal, but I mean, for me to have two and a half years to be able to focus on that and do some freelance, but for the first time in my adult life, not be afraid of where, where am I going to find the money to pay the rent? I, it's always a hustle. I still teach boxing. I'm still going to the same tunnel that was on the cover of the New York times Metro section to train people in the dead of winter.
00:44:45
Speaker
And I remember when that happened, I had a lot of friends say, you're on the cover of the Metro section of the New York times. Your life is going to be completely different. It wasn't like nothing changed. I got two clients who were upper East side, extraordinarily wealthy people where we did one lesson and I never heard from them again. Like nothing really changed. So this idea, and I don't know if you're this way, but I certainly had,
00:45:13
Speaker
hugely romantic attachments to the origin myths of the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Hemingway, or Marguerite Durrell, or Patricia Highsmith, where that book comes up, or that movie taken from their book, and they're launched, and they're flying, and they can, it seems like they can write whenever they want, they can travel whenever they want, but really, real life is
00:45:42
Speaker
they don't have to deal with the regular stuff. Just like you hear, listen to the long form podcast and as much as they talk about diversity with gender or race, you know what kind of diversity they don't talk about? Socioeconomic status. You're not hearing a lot of people that had to pay student loan debt. When you're hearing about people who are quote unquote broke, it's a very relative term when your parents are doctors and lawyers and you're broke. And you know, so you're finding that journalism is becoming
00:46:13
Speaker
kind of a field trip for people that are rich. And increasingly, it's only rich people that are participating in it. And that interests me that, and that's not completely new. I mean, yeah, Gertrude Stein discovers Picasso and she finds all this great artwork. Do you know how she was doing that? She was living off of a massive amount of money from her brother Leo.
00:46:37
Speaker
or Virginia Woolf writing those great books. She's fucking rich. Of course she has time to write. She doesn't have to have a day job. You know, there's a lot of it, you know, for Hemingway in Paris while he's starving in Paris. No, he's not. He's living off of his wife's trust fund, which was a seven figure trust fund in today's dollars. Like it's, there's a lot of bullshit about the romanticism of starving artists that when you actually like go to a granular level of how they're living, they're not fucking starving. Far, far from it.
00:47:07
Speaker
And I do have this kind of perpetual terror of being on a kind of conveyor belt that's drawing me over a cliff economically. And every little assignment or book deal gives me a little room on that conveyor belt treadmill to get a little further away from the cliff. But I definitely feel like I don't know where the lever is to shut it off.
00:47:35
Speaker
I'm being drawn over. And I've always felt that a bit emotionally too, is I'm trying to find some things to stabilize me, but I think there's a deficient machine here. It's like a hemophiliac. I don't know how to plug the stuff that's bleeding out of me a little bit. I'm just trying to find more ways to create a blood infusion to sustain me.
00:48:03
Speaker
And that's a curse, but I think it can also be a real blessing. Maybe if you don't have that fear, you don't take some chances that can lead to some stuff. And I'm definitely somebody that's had to take some chances to make some things happen. You're also aware at 40, unlike 30, I feel my vulnerabilities a lot more. I feel a lot more fragile. There's an F Scott Fitzgerald line, don't confuse arthritis for a stiff joint.
00:48:33
Speaker
but sometimes you confuse a stiff joint for arthritis. Like I make it works both ways or I inverted that, but I mean, sometimes a stiff joint is not a stiff joint. It is arthritis. You are getting older. You can't do some of the things that you used to do. Um, I haven't slept more than three hours a night since I started the chess book. And it's like, is that the rest of my life that I'm an insomniac? I don't know. And I don't know how it happened. I've never had problems with sleeping before.
00:48:59
Speaker
My mother sends me fucking care packages that is just nothing but this herbal mumbo jumbo bullshit that is really not doing anything. I'm taking like the Michael Jackson, what is it, propofol equivalent of melatonin every night just to try to get four hours sleep. I'm practically intravenously using orange flavored,
00:49:25
Speaker
Melatonin, but it's kind of like you just wonder sometimes with those kind of things like you've got to look after yourself the best you can again controlling what you can control and being aware of If if the rest of my life is gonna operate on three hours sleep. I'm already noticing pretty serious memory loss I'm not functioning the way I used to function so you kind of have to make some adjustments to deal with it and
00:49:50
Speaker
It reminds me a little bit of some boxers, you know, who Muhammad Ali is as a 21 year old Cassius Clay, where you have the ability to rely on your athleticism and timing and speed and all that. It's very different when you slow down and it's not so easy to be able to jump around. It's not so easy to take advantage of people because your reflexes are so much better. So you have to become a little bit more canny and selective and pick your spots a little more.
00:50:17
Speaker
And I don't know if it makes you better. I guess, hopefully you can mitigate how much worse you're getting. But, you know, I've managed to find three stories to work on that I'm very drawn to that paid a lot better than the kind of slop pay that you get for most things that are out there. I'm still doing jobs where I have to go on social media and shame the people to actually pay me for like the work I've done, done it twice.
00:50:47
Speaker
And it's fascinating because you get all these emails from them. They finally respond and say, why are you putting this on social media? What are you doing? Of course we're going to pay you. Well, you didn't respond to seven emails. Yes, I never saw them. Well, here they are. Oh, well, we would never ordinarily do this. It's just so intolerable that you would shame us. It's so disproportionate. I have rent to pay. Fuck you. When you say you're going to pay, pay me.
00:51:14
Speaker
I can only imagine if you're a journalist trying to start out and that's the reality of, is just your, your disposable and their, you know, their attitude toward writers are, there's just so many of them like, why bother having to pay? And there's fewer and fewer spots where you can just, you know, my, my friend Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali's biographer told me that he used to do Q and A's for Penthouse with like,
00:51:42
Speaker
I think he did Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and a few other sort of New York celebrities. You could get like $15,000 for doing a two page Q&A that you could probably write up in an hour and a half of like early 1980s money. I had a thing from the chess book, like when the world championships were going on that was a two pager in Playboy and the print edition, you get a thousand bucks. Playboy is not easy to get into. Right.
00:52:10
Speaker
So like I say, if you or my son or daughter said my dream is to become a journalist, it's really weird to be in that position to be like, great, I want to support you. But be ready. You've got a lot of really fucking talented people vying for very, very few spots that in any way could give you a hope in hell of supporting yourself. And you're probably going to have to go to a major city in order to do it. And rent is not cheap.
00:52:40
Speaker
So, you know, I really admire some people. I had to come to New York just because a lot of the people were passing through here. Boxing is a New York thing or a Las Vegas thing. Like you kind of have to be on one coast or the other to cover that sport. And there was no barrier to entry with boxing. Thank fucking God. So you could you could bullshit your way into getting a credential and then just keep going and off you go.
00:53:06
Speaker
That's getting a lot harder. The walls are a lot harder to figure a way around or through or under in this industry. So I'm really amazed at a lot of people that are fighting the good fight and producing really good work, especially when they're not really getting compensated very much or there's no money to really report on it, on the stuff that they're doing the way it needs to. It's always like very,
00:53:36
Speaker
interesting to see people who are on a staff job making six figures or $200,000, $300,000 a year say, yeah, this was a good story, but it just wasn't reported enough. And it's like, well, that's not because the writer didn't want to, it's because they couldn't. And you can, and you don't have to think about it, and everything you do is expensed. And you're on a salary where you own a home and don't have to deal with a lot of these stresses of
00:54:03
Speaker
you know, being in a shitty, loud, or dangerous neighborhood, or, you know, like being able to pay your medical bills, or go to the dentist, or whatever. And so I meet those kind of people on both sides. And it's interesting how little they know of how each other lives. Same with subjects. I did a profile in Oakland of Andre Ward. And he's like, this is what journalists really need to do, Brinn, is come out here, spend a week with the subject, like, find the real story. And I'm like,
00:54:32
Speaker
It's not that other journalists don't want to do this. It's that nobody will send them to do this. Do you get that? Do you get that 98% of people who cover boxing don't get paid? They just get a credential to go to the fight, but they're not paid? He had no idea. And why would he have an idea, right? Like, how would you know that? So those are some of the things like, I guess, the backstage pass to some of the stuff that is interesting.
00:55:00
Speaker
but it's probably only interesting to us. Like I don't think regular people give a flying fuck about it, which I get. What's great about, you know, speaking of projects and so forth, what I love about your podcast is I like hearing how, you know, I've been reading your writing for years. And then of course, you know, I don't get necessarily a back
00:55:25
Speaker
a backstage pass to how you go about interviewing the sources. And I felt it was kind of it's kind of great to see the for lack of a better term, the performance about how you're going about getting getting information and having these conversations. And I wonder how close your interviewing style for the podcast is to your actual reporting style or if they are one in the same. No, they're definitely different. You're right. It's performance.
00:55:55
Speaker
And I don't have to, I mean, even though I know the audio quality of the first several episodes has been dog shit, because a lot of times it's been a work in progress figuring out the right equipment, which I think you've solved a hell of a lot better than I have. I have recently bought a very good zoom and some better microphones and stuff. So starting with this neuroscientist, the stuff is going to change because it needed to, if we're going to force me to pronounce chronic, what is it?
00:56:25
Speaker
chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Does that sound right? Yes, it does. Yeah, epigenetics, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Yeah, no, I had to really work on it because the Aaron Hernandez documentary, I was like, I need to not sound like a complete idiot and reference Ian Robertson and stuff. I'm interested in it, but I'm still a complete layman to it. I think
00:56:51
Speaker
I definitely feel like I'm channeling a lot more of my mother as like a spiritual therapist, where there's the element of her channeling spirits in order to delve into the darkness of who the people are that she's been talking to for decades now. I mean, 35 years, she's been doing therapy with people that have kind of exhausted every other area of
00:57:18
Speaker
going to a conventional therapist or a psychiatrist and they seek out my mother. My mother with the thick Hungarian accent and crazy blue eyes just opening like a horse and fire to sort of go into them. I think that there's a part of that of what she taps into with her intuition and just that she's passionately interested in the people she's talking to. I mean, she doesn't meet anybody I think where she just doesn't
00:57:47
Speaker
you remind me of Troy from Star Trek, the next generation, the beta Z, the half human, half beta Z, it's like connection. My mother just has that quality of just really locking into somebody. And I think I have part of that from her where that I am chasing her. I was thinking about this the other day, this different, the cross currents,
00:58:17
Speaker
of the impulse to do trophy hunting like the Trump kids versus the kind of people who love their pets so much. They want to stuff them like taxidermy so that the cat never dies. It's just like there on a chair or something by the bed. And that's interesting, right? Like that's our relationship to these animals. They're both really drawn to animals. I'm much more of the latter, even though I could never, that's the most disgusting thing imaginable to have
00:58:43
Speaker
my cat Raul next to me is a stuffed perched animal looking at me. But I understand the impulse in that I am emotionally bracing for losing my animal every day and every time I look at him. And I think that when you're meeting a subject, part of how I think about meeting them is I have done all this research on who they are. I have researched for the last eight months a kidnapping of a 21-year-old kid
00:59:13
Speaker
who kidnapped a billionaire's daughter 30 years ago in Canada. And I have read every single criminal-related instance of his life. I've read psychiatric accounts of his parole board, which happened three times. I have done this deep dive into him that maybe is deeper than any, you know, I've spent eight months on it, just doing nothing but research on somebody who has no idea I'm delving into their life.
00:59:43
Speaker
it is a partly like the voyeur in me is just utterly fascinated by it because it's sort of like, like how a portrait artist has an excuse to stare at a face up close for seven hours or 10 hours a day and then come back and do the same thing. We never get to do that, right? Because you never are given a passport to do that. You're just a weirdo or whatever, but journalism, you get to do it from a distance. So I find that
01:00:10
Speaker
If I'm doing all of that, and if I make the decision, and I've got it all lined up through Corrections Canada, their media person, I have all these connections to go after this guy, to like push the button and say, I want to fly over and interview you. Nobody has interviewed you in the 30 years since you did this horrible crime. And, and then be in a room with him and record it.
01:00:35
Speaker
The beautiful thing about that for me that now that I'm doing podcasts is I don't have to worry about the fucking audio quality. I don't have to worry that he speaks in a full sentence or that it's, you know, rendered for an audience that knows nothing about his crime. It's for me and I am informed and I am obsessed with it and him and all of these features of his case, of the crime,
01:01:01
Speaker
of how the very little bits of information I have of him talking to other people about the crime, like it can be really intimate. And I find it's very different having a quote unquote intimate exchange with somebody where they know it's going out publicly. And like there's an element of this that's really interesting. I don't know if you, were you ever a fan of Candid Camera?
01:01:28
Speaker
Oh yeah, a little bit. Yeah, I would catch it on like Nick at night or something. Okay. So candid camera began with Alan font with candid microphone and it was, he was in world war two and he'd record people. And what he found was while he was recording them for the radio, as soon as the red light came on, the conversation just became stilted or at least a lot more stilted. And he's like, we need to do something about this. So he'd do pre-interviews disabled the red light.
01:01:57
Speaker
And then the pre-interview became the interview. And he was just like, let's just use this, it's better. And that idea that if you get somebody who is not performing, you get a lot better, more revealing stuff, which I don't think is always true. I think even when you're performing, that artifice reveals a lot of stuff too. What kind of makeup somebody applies to themselves to look a certain way, you can reverse engineer that to find a lot of truths as well, as much as
01:02:27
Speaker
the Instagram celebrity who's not wearing makeup, look at how genuine and sincere she like that becomes its own performance. So there's there's an element of with with font font really deconstructed this poll we have this struggle about performance versus privacy. And initially he was hated for what he was doing with candid microphone, you know, it was intrusive, it was prurient,
01:02:56
Speaker
It was lurid and then very quickly people were like, but I'd like it to happen to me because I'd like people to hear what I have to say. Like it became its own version of social media and Instagram, right? Where just as human beings, we just can't not be taking selfies of wherever the fuck we are and what we're eating and every quotidian, not even quotidian, but just the microscopically boring, arrestingly boring things that we consider, think about, do, it needs to be shared.
01:03:27
Speaker
You know, Truman Show goes from Dicetopian nightmare in 1998 to it's a Dicetopian nightmare to not be on a reality show for kids five years later. Well, how the fuck did that happen? But there's we're just we're just wired this way. So I'm I'm always really conscious and I feel very frustrated with doing the podcast because like I have a producer there who's managing the equipment. I have sometimes a producer
01:03:56
Speaker
who's a fucking millennial who wants to photograph us talking, which makes me want him to be drawn and quartered. Cause I just, cause I just can't, it's not the same thing as Brandon. I want to talk to you about doing your podcast. I'd like to come out to Oregon. Could we go someplace where you're comfortable and I'm just going to record this conversation. This is not going anywhere, but
01:04:22
Speaker
But let's just talk about it. And after we talk about it, even if I use anything, I'm going to run that by you. So you can feel totally safe. And I've noticed even, I think just having pretty civilized conversations with people where I'm not trying to do anything gotcha, but like even Ben Anderson, you know, the HBO war correspondent, he went to his house. We have a conversation. I pushed back a little bit to kind of,
01:04:52
Speaker
look at, because I've always been fascinated by war correspondence. That's kind of what got me into writing was the work of Michael Hare and George Orwell and Jesus is gonna piss me off. Let's get her name right. Like Martha Gellhorn, right? Yes, you guys. That's it. That's it. God, I it's because of Hemingway and all his wives that I and she would hate that because she despised more than anything being known as Hemingway's third wife.
01:05:22
Speaker
Um, but those were people that he was very drawn to. And so when we were trying to go back to who was he before he was a war correspondent, why do you need to go to the front lines of these horrible war zones when like you're in Northern England, like deal with coal mining? Why, why not just do local? There's, you know, why do we have to be, uh, a celebrity who need Madonna going into
01:05:49
Speaker
some sub-Saharan African country to find a child when there's a lot of kids who are on the street in New York, like on the Upper East Side or around you, Madonna. But again, it becomes performative. But it's interesting. Why does it need to be a global thing instead of a national thing, instead of a civic thing, instead of a neighborhood thing, instead of dealing with your own house kind of thing? You know what I mean? So with him, when he was talking about
01:06:20
Speaker
some of the stuff he did before he got into writing, he mentioned one item. And he was like, I need to take this out. Because we're some things in my life right now. I just don't want this out there. And I understand you weren't trying to like you didn't get this out of me or anything. I said it, but I have to be more conscious of this detail. And so it was already up like it had been up for an hour. And I don't know, it's like a weird feeling that you
01:06:50
Speaker
Like, I don't know if you do this in your mind, but as you're listening to your subjects, are you underlining? What are the interesting bits to quote, to pull quote, or, you know, what, what would be a good gateway drug into the bulk of the interview? If you put this on Twitter or you put this on your website related to them. I mean, I'm certainly doing it. I can't listen to people and not highlight an underline as they're talking.
01:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, that usually comes to me in the edit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I'm listening back through, I'm like, OK, that's the that's the little that's the tweet worthy thing that'll pull that that'll pull people in. This one probably won't get edited because I need to turn it around for tomorrow. But yeah, I'm pretty much just going to export this and add my intro and outros and call it a day.
01:07:42
Speaker
But but yes, that's usually you're like, oh, there are things that my like my brain will just hook on to. And oftentimes those are the things I kind of double down on as I'm talking to people. They just like I put a pin in it and we come back to that. And that just seems to really animate the conversation. But yeah, it's just like, yeah, you underline it like, oh, that's good. That's good for the audiogram. That's good for the the pull quote. And that'll be the like you said, the gateway into this deeper and broader conversation.
01:08:09
Speaker
And you got to do it, right? I mean, like it's part of the job. And I'm aware doing these podcasts, it's just a different, there's a part of me that really wants to operate behind the scenes to make stuff happen. Like that's the blessing of maybe the 20 year old self wants to be on stage to do something with writing. You know, cause I do think writing very much is performance for people that are like,
01:08:38
Speaker
don't photograph me. I don't want to be seen. This is so embarrassing. Like you, I mean, I just hear it endlessly when I listen to interviews of writers is how did I get here? And it's like, you don't get here unless you wanted to be here. You just, you just don't. And it's its own performance to say, I don't want to be here and I'm here. Right? It's, it's its own way of patting yourself on the back to be like, I'm not somebody who consciously cultivated blah, blah, blah, blah. And
01:09:05
Speaker
I'm not saying that's everybody, but again, it's this element of privacy versus publicity. I thought that was the most interesting thing of that. Gia Tolentino, who I think is a great writer, and I think she's navigating some very stressful waters with her career and all that. New York is not an easy place to write for. It's a very strenuous place to be fact-checked and the kind of criticism you can get from people who are maybe jealous of your position.
01:09:34
Speaker
when she got some pushback from that London Review of Books, you know, even she had to acknowledge like, boy, like this person got me in a bunch of ways. And I feel that way too, that when you go out there on stage with an essay, we're doing a line of work where you can't be there to say, please keep going, it gets better. It actually has to be good. It actually has to find a lot of people you don't know
01:10:03
Speaker
and reach them where they are and be meaningful and of use and of service to them and fucking entertaining to them to make their load a little bit less. And that's what is going to create the momentum. Your script being read in their voice, in their head, is a very intimate connection. It's what makes this magical that we're
01:10:32
Speaker
we are always, in a sense, like writing the script for the private theater and the imagination of our readers. And if you betray that relationship where it's perceived as betrayed, because they're like, I don't like my voice reading this stuff. I don't like imagining the people. This male or female author is writing for me.
01:10:57
Speaker
You know, it's like the moment you see their name again or any words from them, you're just saying, ah, fuck them. You know, you become othered very quickly because if you're not othered and somebody lets you in to their imagination, there's all kinds of benefits passively of the enjoyment we get from binge watching anything, going to a movie theater and all that.
01:11:23
Speaker
but it's a totally different drug what we're offering when it's really good. You know, the writers that you and I love and who reach us, it's like it's not an accident that, like, D.B.C. Pierre is the only living writer I would ever want to meet and spend time with. And I don't mean journalists, I know a lot of journalists, but I mean, in the sense of fiction writer, it's enough to have the work.
01:11:52
Speaker
I don't particularly want to have coffee with them. I don't want to share a cigarette with them. I'm cool that they're out there. But he was one of the only ones where I just thought, I have a hunch we're going to get along. And maybe most of these writers would not particularly want to get along with me. I don't know. But I never just really had the sense that I would want to meet them. And I notice, I don't know about you. I'm curious what you think about this. But I find it really interesting that
01:12:21
Speaker
most of the emotional lives of journalists today, as far as I can tell, has really lived on Twitter. A lot of them have real dysfunctionality with relationships. They're like only children where the performance seems to be like, look what I painted. Here are grownups. Look what it is. And it's a really odd dynamic. I don't know why it became that, that it's sort of like this idea of
01:12:51
Speaker
I don't know the performative nature of being a writer or journalist chasing after things. Maybe maybe this is from fucking Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford and and this romantic romanticizing of journalism. But it's odd to me that it's like an academic pursuit now when it used to always be a blue collar pursuit up until very recently. Right. Like it was it was just a trade that people fell into. A lot of people
01:13:17
Speaker
hadn't graduated high school. They certainly didn't go to college. They certainly didn't go to great colleges, Ivy league colleges. And now the background of writers is pretty much the same. Like they kind of all have the same backgrounds. Their parents had the same jobs. They had the same sort of socio-economic status. Like there's a homogeneity to it that is pretty fascinating. And even, even where, I mean, I know the industry is skews enormously white and male, but even the women or minorities that are in it,
01:13:47
Speaker
socioeconomically, they're not coming from a lot of the backgrounds that they're covering, right? Like in terms of, like they came from affluence in many cases, at least that's the impression that I glean from listening to a lot of the interviews of them. And I listen to a lot of interviews, I'm fascinated by it and trying to, I don't know, just see how people navigate this stuff and present this kind of thing. And
01:14:13
Speaker
And maybe this is just, you know, my own form of entertainment at 40. Like maybe I should not pay attention to any of it. Just pay attention to, to what I'm writing, but it's, it is, um, cause it doesn't feel good to follow it. Frankly. I don't, I don't feel good ever looking at Twitter. I don't feel good ever looking at Facebook. I don't have Instagram. I don't know how to manage social media in a way that's entertaining or part of my brand. Like I just don't know how to.
01:14:43
Speaker
Do any of that and it's not like I wouldn't like to do it because like you'd make a lot more money You'd have a lot more ease in your life if you could do it. I'm just aware. I'm totally dysfunctional at it Yeah, I am too. I've kind of pulled way back and I almost use it almost as just a as a different kind of email like I just check to see like it might be a better way for me to reach a certain person to be there, but I don't I
01:15:11
Speaker
kind of had this little social media sabbatical of sorts that started the year. And I just kind of, it's only on my desktop. And I just will plug into it just to be like, Oh, I need to message this person who maybe find out who their representation is, if I can't read, if I can't find that out on my own. Or I came across as a result of Twitter, I came across like Ian Frisch's book, Magic is Dead, like coming out and like that was and I
01:15:39
Speaker
I was able to request the book and get him on the show and he was on last year and it was great I would have never have come across that were not for Twitter. So I kind of just use it as a I try to use it as a tool and not and not like, you know Reese's Pieces at a movie Well, it's funny to me because I went to the New York Public Library the main library to see the JD Salinger exhibit that was curated by Matt Salinger and
01:16:06
Speaker
One of my closest friends when I came to New York were no longer friends, which bothers me a bit, but was a biographer of Salinger, the first biographer out of the gates right after Salinger died. And he had all this correspondence of Salinger and stuff. And I think I've told you before, like above my desk now, I have a sign that I pried off with a jackknife from Salinger's property while he was alive in 2006. And some truck pulled up and was like, what are you doing there?
01:16:35
Speaker
You know where you are? You know what mailbox you're looking at and stuff? And I said, yeah, but it's public property and I'm not going to do anything and I'm not going to harass the old man. But anyway, I was always fascinated by the world's reaction to somebody who could be on Oprah, who could be wherever he wants, could have Steven Spielberg make Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield and Leonardo DiCaprio was going to star as Holden Caul... and on and on and on and just says, you know what?
01:17:05
Speaker
Fuck you. Who I actually care about is that every individual reader gets to imagine Holden how they want to. And the only place that you can hear his voice is in your head. That's what's important to me. I don't need more money. I don't need more status. I don't need more readers. I don't do any publicity for this thing. And anybody who says, like, there's great publicity and just falling off the map, show me the next person that did that worked out really well, right?
01:17:34
Speaker
Like where are the great examples of that? Well, of course Salinger created this mythic status. Thomas Pynchon has not talked about the way JD Salinger is. And by the way, he still publishes. So it's not a fair example, but I was so interested in Matt Salinger. He had a couple of interviews about his dad and he's part of a trust with Salinger's widow where he said, you can look and track society
01:18:03
Speaker
where they talk about Salinger as he stopped publishing. So he is a private man, to he is a secretive man, to he's reclusive, to he's notoriously reclusive, and on and on and on. And it just descends into it becoming pathologized into, isn't he creepy? Isn't he crazy? And on and on. What it's really showing, he says, is it's tracking our own connection to publicity.
01:18:33
Speaker
that to be private, to want to be private is now looked at as sick. When we know the more time you spend on Facebook or Twitter, the more depressed you become, we're designed to sell ourselves short in how well we're doing in our life and to overestimate the achievements of others. It's designed like all advertising to make you feel worse and that the solution to it is something you don't need that's not gonna make you feel better.
01:19:01
Speaker
And and I just find it so interesting in that I Think if you have enough failure and and I mean of course Salinger was the most ambitious status whore in terms of Once I'm at the New Yorker, that's all that can be published Anything that wasn't at the New Yorker is not befitting of being published. So it's not like he didn't have this same struggle decades and decades and decades ago when people
01:19:29
Speaker
across the country were talking about things like short stories. Well, now nobody reads a short story unless you're writing it or teaching it. Who the fuck is mentioning, Brendan, I just read this incredible short story while I was at my construction job. Like that is not happening. Right? Yes, it's not part of the discourse. There's not a lot of short stories being sent on Facebook. I mean, people who are not on social media, I guess, which is everybody,
01:19:55
Speaker
but we're just in a different place, right? Where it's not part of the conversation. Writers are not talked about. They had status. I mean, even if Scott Fitzgerald, what he died, I think in 1940, was saying movies have just replaced what we are as writers. We're not relevant anymore. Like there's just no way to compete with this. I think he called it like the low gear of collaborative art, that is movies. That was funny.
01:20:25
Speaker
But it is something I think that is like a real hit to people's egos with journalists is they're just so desperate to get the attention. Like I've been listening to the podcast of Ronan Farrow, where good for him for what he did with Weinstein and my literary agent's wife is Megan Toohey, who with Jodi Kanter, like also brought down Weinstein and all that's so important. But to listen to Ronan Farrow
01:20:52
Speaker
endlessly talk about his own process of reporting. It's so self congratulatory and just smug and embarrassing. And I'm just like, like, you're extraordinarily wealthy guy with a lot of status. You're engaged to john Lovett is one of the funniest people I've ever heard in politics. But you still need to be, I don't know, just sort of
01:21:19
Speaker
as shamelessly self promoting as anybody like I think one of the benefits if you're in a position of security is you don't have to fucking pander to do any of that shit. But the truth is, it's not about pandering. It's the needs of the people doing it. It's not who they're supplying to. It's that there's just something really fucked up about like the the DNA of people who want to get involved in this that I find really
01:21:46
Speaker
troubling, but maybe that's just my own fucking thing. I don't know. Yeah. Well, it's always, it's always fun to get to talk to you about this stuff, Brandon. I could, we could, I could go on for another hour or two with you, but I think, I think for the purposes of this, we should, um, you know, we'll, we'll, uh, we'll, uh, you know, table the rest of our conversation and hopefully get to have this more frequently than every, uh, two years. So, uh,
01:22:12
Speaker
So yeah, Bryn, thank you. Thanks so much for being hopping on in short notice. And I can't wait for the Haslet pieces to come out. And I, of course, will eagerly await for each and every episode of Tourist information. Thanks so much, Bryn. It was fun talking to you. We did it. We made it, CNFers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Bryn D'Omero. I make the show for you.
01:22:42
Speaker
I hope it made something worth sharing. If you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at friendsatomera.com. Follow the show on the various social media channels at CNF Pot across them all. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can't do interviews, see ya.