Boring Writers 0:00 /480.2612244897959 1× Transcript: In the Paris Review right now, there's an interview with Elliot Weinberger. Elliot Weinberger is an essayist. Uh, he is kind of the master of the impersonal essay, so his essays throughout the years have never been in the first person. They've never featured himself. His essays are, they kind of read like extended encyclopedia entries, but then also he would do things like read a 500 page book about the Naked Mole rat and then write a two and a half page essay called The Naked Molerat. When asked about this, he would say that, you know, according to the common logic, the only thing he should be writing about is, uh, a bunch of cabbage farmers in Eastern Europe and Russia, because that's his background. And he had this quote in this essay that, uh, I thought was interesting and it made me think of actually something else entirely, but here it is: He said, "I do find it dreary, that these essayists end up writing about themselves so much. Even if they're taking documentary information, they add a lot of personal response to it, which seems to be what the new quote lyric essay is. I have no interest in first person investigation. Personally, I've never found myself to be an interesting person." That made me think of a period of my life when I was going to New York a lot. I was a playwright living in Oregon, But I was going to New York a lot. I was spending a lot of time there, and I was spending a lot of time with, you know, New York writers. It's really easy to develop a bit of an inferiority complex in that environment, not just because some of them were much more accomplished than myself, but also because they were all interesting people. They all had very interesting stories. They all had stories of, you know, being a photojournalist in Vietnam, things like that. Stories of growing up dead broke, stories of being unhoused for a while. And in that environment, you start to think, well, what is so interesting about me? How do I have the right to be here amongst all these other people, all these other people who have these very interesting stories? Because my story, at least from my perspective, is really not all that interesting. And that brings up the idea: Do you need to be an interesting person to write something interesting. Fran Liebowitz, speaking of New York writers, would say there are no prodigies in writing because you have to have lived the life. You have to have a life that you can write about in order to write well. But does it all need to be personal narrative? Can you have a mundane life or an uninteresting backstory and still write well? Well, certainly not every person with an interesting life story as a good writer or even a writer at all, but there is a certain amount of pressure to have an engaging life story. In 2005, Oprah picked a book. For her legendary book club called A Million Little Pieces. It was a harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery. That was later found out to be largely made up. The author James Fray was then dragged back on Oprah and was forced to confess his sins. The book in the eyes of Some was now invalid because it wasn't true. He said the story was real so that it would be more popular. Readers striving for that sort of authenticity probably comes from living in some sort of age of the inauthentic. Everything is digital. Everything is mass produced and comes from China. So people search for real things, but it does send me down a rabbit hole. You liked the story when you thought it was real. Now that it's not real, you don't like it, even though the story stays the same. That's a whole other post. But to get back to my original point... We're currently in a very memoir centric era. Not just because memoir is more popular than it's ever been, but because of social media and the internet. Every day we are awash with stories and fragments of stories from people that are allegedly true. People are broadcasting their personal narrative more than in any time in history, and there sits boring you. Your childhood was okay. Your job is okay. You weren't a child soldier. You didn't have to survive in the woods for two weeks alone when you were 11. What right do you have to write? In 1817, John Keats wrote to his brothers about a production of Shakespeare He had just seen. And in that letter he created a term, a term that still survives to this day called negative capability. The idea that in the writing, you negate yourself, you dissolve yourself. he found Shakespeare to be very good at that. When you look at the length and breadth of Shakespeare's work, I know I at least have a hard time discerning what his actual point of view is. So on one end you have the lived experience gang, and on the other end you have the romantics, like Keats and the big mystery that is Shakespeare. You are either telling your very personal, very real story, or you are engaging in the story, in the writing, as a way of doing the opposite. Not the reaffirming of the self, but an attempt to dissolve the self, to erase yourself in the face of the story you're creating in an almost Buddhist way. So you have these two sides, but in the end it's a false choice and every writer, I think, falls somewhere between the two extremes. It does seem these days that the favor falls pretty heavily on the memoir side of things. But maybe you want to tell a story, but you see yourself as boring. You see storytellers as interesting people with interesting stories, and you don't find yourself all that interesting. Telling a story doesn't have to be personal narrative. You don't have to always write what you know. Writing doesn't have to be about the consecration of the self. It can also be about a journey out of it. It can be an exercise in empathy and a, for lack of a better word, joining of a collective unconscious. It could be a journey outside of yourself rather than within. I know we read all these stories about writers and we see them as having these interesting lives, and they always look so well-dressed and disheveled and poetic in and of themselves. They seem very interesting and you seem well, a bit drab sometimes. But in the end, you don't have to be that person. And in the end, how much of that is us as a society placing interestingness upon these people whose work we love? You don't have to be interesting to write. You just have to be interested.

These Things We Create 0:00 /391.105306122449 1× Transcript: # These Things We Create are Living Things So I am recording this on the day of the release of the first episode of Season Five of Midnight Burger. It's always an interesting day. It's a day full of a lot of questions. I'm wondering how it's going to be received? I'm wondering how it's going to be interpreted. You'd think I would be used to it by now, but it's always fresh because I don't know that anyone ever has a concrete expectation as to how the season's going to start or what it's going to look like. So you never really know how people are going to react. I mean, you do and you don't. If you ever have the pleasure of making something that people really like, you'll find that a lot of them come to depend on it for this, that, and the other thing, and that can put a certain amount of pressure on you because you need to stay true to what the story is, but at the same time, you don't want people to feel abandoned somehow, like you've left them behind. I do get emails sometimes from people flat out begging me to go back to what we were doing in season one. When you really think about it, those complaints are, in my opinion, more about the fact that people are upset that things change at all—not just your show, but everything. I do get emails. And even though you can put thoughts like that in a certain perspective, and you can say, "Well, it's this or it's that, or it's the other thing," or "There's nothing you can do about it," you still do. You know, you still don't want to abandon people. The thing about that is when it comes right down to it, you're not all that in control, or at least you're not as in control as you think you are. Or at least for me, that's how it is. Arseny Tarkovsky was a Russian poet and the father, incidentally, of Andrei Tarkovsky, the legendary filmmaker. One time he wrote, "I would readily pay my life for a safe place with constant warmth, were it not that life's flying needle leads me on through the world like a thread." You feel like you're being absconded with a bit sometimes. If you tell a story over a long enough period of time, like I've been doing, well, it starts to be its own thing. It starts to take on a life of its own. It starts to have wants and needs like a person outside of yourself, and the longer you work on it, the more independent of you it becomes, and you go from being the creator of this thing to the person who is almost acting like the translator or caretaker of this thing. This thing is going its own way and you're just there to make sure nothing bad happens. And while that seems like a strange way to regard something that you create, because it certainly doesn't happen without you there, I really haven't found any other way of thinking about it. These things we create, in a sense, are living things and they move past you. Which helps when people are begging and pleading with you to do something else with it, because you're not in charge, as it turns out. Maybe you were at the beginning, but now you're following the natural progression of something. It would be like yelling at a river, telling it to turn. So that pressure that you feel—that you want people to receive it well—can be relieved somewhat by the fact that now, in your apartment somewhere, is this thing that's alive and it's actually not up to you what it does. And I know I'm supposed to be like an artist and be all masterful and like "this is my grand design" and everything like that. And it is, but it's also—it's about the way that you think about it. It's about the way you think about these things. And this is how I've come to think about this big, long, expansive story that I've been telling. It's its own thing now. And you can see that happen in stories that take place over a long period of time. You can see there's a point where the creator of this thing tries to reel it back in to the thing that they've created. This is a weird thing to bring up, but there was this moment where I was watching this conversation online and someone was talking about how the characters of Bert and Ernie made them feel more comfortable coming out as a gay man because they were watching this gay couple coexist on Sesame Street. And Frank Oz, the literal creator of Bert and Ernie, logs on, and he says, "Bert and Ernie aren't gay, because I created them and I decided that they weren't." But it's kind of not up to Frank anymore because he put it out there and it became its own thing, and for him to try and reel it back into his creation—it just doesn't work anymore. You've got to go where the thing wants to go. These things we create are living things. It's so weird to talk like this because this is not the type of person that I am. I'm a very—you know, I've never used a smudge stick. Okay? I've never read my horoscope. But with these things, these things that I make, there is a certain amount of spiritual—I don't know—mumbo jumbo that I kind of embrace because I've never found another way of thinking about it. So on these days when the new thing is being rolled out, there is a certain amount of calm that comes from the fact that I'm not in charge anymore. These things we create are living things, and you've gone from the thing that created it to really just the thing that feeds it. And though you may want it to go this way or that way, or the other way, in the end, you're not in charge. Not anymore.

Patience and Time Unfortunately 0:00 /397.0612244897959 1× Transcript: Okay, so this next bit is a little, uh, you know, podcaster inside baseball. So bear with me about a year ago, I guess because we had been doing this for so long, we suddenly became people that others would ask advice of. And, um, that was weird because we have no idea what to say, but a lot of the questions asked are about. Promotion, right? How do you promote your show? How do you make your show popular? What do you do? Do you do Instagram ads? Stuff like that. and I never have anything useful to say to this question because there is nothing to say, Eric Newsom, who's a podcast producer of some repute, uh, loves to tell the story about how a show that he was producing got a full page spread in the New York Times, and it did not move the needle for his show at all. Ronald Young Jr. Made a show called Weight for It a couple years ago, and it was a critical darling and it won a ton of awards. And then a year later I heard him on a podcasting round table talking about how he still struggles to get people to listen to the show. And he has not made any money from the show. And the biggest bump in downloads he got was actually from being a guest on normal gossip. and then just recently author Amy McNee in her newsletter starts talking about how she. Was thrilled because she got word that she was gonna be a guest on. Jay Shetty's podcast. Jay Shetty, one of the biggest podcasts in the world. She was very excited, really excited to talk about her book, and then when she checked her book sales a couple of days later, she was. Shocked to find that nothing happened. She just talked to millions of people about her book and nothing happened. I. And in the newsletter, she goes off on this for a while. She talks about how you know artists are taught to chase external validation. Taught to chase big breaks, but these are flashy opportunities and they rarely translate to anything tangible. So we're sitting here constantly outsourcing our power and we're kind of being sleeping. Beauty, you know, we're encasing ourselves in glass, trying to look as pretty as possible, and hoping that Prince Charming will come along and wake us up. I am wondering if the days of the big break are behind us. I mean, certainly there are big hits out there from time to time, but I don't know if there's any way to turn that into some sort of math problem, right? Like you do this plus this and it equals big break. It seems pretty random, like winning the lottery. We seem to have this inclination to think of everything as if it were the internet. And what I mean by the internet is, uh, going viral and tons of likes and trending and all that stuff, but the truth of it is some things just don't operate like the internet. Some things are slow. When you think about all of the things that went viral, they're gone in 10 minutes. You don't even think about them anymore. I, but there are other things out there that have a long trailing history. And even though we regard the internet as this place where things happen instantaneously and are gone instantaneously, there are people and organizations out there who have this long history on the internet. the internet. Writ large isn't this world of the instantaneous. It's an entire ecosystem, and in any ecosystem, you have things that are short-lived and long-lived. There are things on the internet that are like the GAD fly. They have one day in the sun and then they die. And I think the frustration of a lot of people may come from the fact that they want to be that instantaneous, instantly popular thing, and it's just not a sustainable way to live. It's not a sustainable way to exist as someone trying to make things. IThe internet is blindingly fast, but creating a reliable entity there goes very slowly and steadily. Like a tree in a forest, it requires a trillion swirling bacteria, all of them with the lifespan of a few seconds. And beneath that, the mysterious network of Mycelia. You are a creature of this forest of the internet, but you are the slow and methodical timekeeper. You are not the paramecium. You are not the gadfly, you're the oak. Slow to grow, but once grown a giant. There's so much out there that tries to seduce us into doing something instantaneously, but in the end, what we've always come back to is just patience and time. And you know what? That sucks. I really hate that. It would be great if it was instantaneous, if it, it would be great if there was some sort of short path, but I haven't found it. And it certainly sounds like no one else has found it either. So it's all the long road. There's so many people out there who are just in audition mode. They're creating things on the internet in an effort to get the attention of something or someone bigger than them. And if that's your chosen path to success, then go for it. I celebrate you. I guess my thing is. When you're making something just to try and get the attention of someone else when your several episode audio fiction is just an audition for a TV studio. I can smell it in the work. It doesn't seem like something you're enjoying. It seems like a means to an end and that's, it's never fun to listen or watch a means to an end. It is that feeling you get when you're at a party and you're talking to someone and the person you're talking to would much rather be talking to someone else in the end. Unfortunately, it's patience and time. I don't you hate that?

The Acorns Not the Valley 0:00 /335.0726530612245 1× Trees. You've heard of them. Transcript: So I'm at the, uh, beginning of season five right now of Midnight Burger. Uh, for those of you who don't know, I don't write everything first. And then we do the show. I get about an episode and a half to two episodes ahead of the show, and I keep writing and we start producing right about then. So we're kind of at the beginning of things right now and, uh, right now. I'm having this feeling where I'm at the beginning of the season and I'm looking at the end of the season and it's just such a distant mark. You know, like looking at the Empire State Building from Queens, and it could be a little daunting sometimes. Like there's so much, so much writing to do between where I am now and where we'll be then, and it's just. It's a lot to take in sometimes and it's a lot to take on sometimes. There's this short story called The Man Who Planted Trees. It's by Jean Gno. It was written in, um, uh, the 1950s and it was turned into an animated short in the eighties and it won the Academy Award. And it's a story of this. Hiker who is hiking through the, uh, sort of foothills of the Alps. And he finds himself in a really desolate valley. And there's only one man who lives there. And he starts to get to know this man, this man's a shepherd. And he asks the man why he's living there. And the man says that he wants to transform the valley into a beautiful place. And he says, but you're one guy. And he says, I know every day. The man takes his sheep out to graze, and at the bottom of his shepherd staff, he has an iron spike and he drives the iron spike into the ground and he reaches into his pocket. He takes an acorn and he puts the acorn in the hole. And he does that several times a day, every day when he takes his sheep out. And so the man, the hiker who encounters this man, he says, oh, okay. Well I, good luck. I guess the hiker goes off to fight in World War I and gets pretty screwed up as many people did by World War I. And he returns to the valley and he sees that. Over the years, there are now saplings growing things are actually happening, and the man who plants the acorns, he has stopped taking care of sheep because the sheep are eating the saplings. And now he is a beekeeper. And so the man heals, uh, of his. Of his war wounds there in this uh, valley that's starting to grow. And then he returns again several years later to see that the landscape has been transformed and about 10,000 people live there, and there's a river there now, and it looks completely different from the place that he encountered when he was hiking all those years ago. And all of this was achieved by a guy leaving his home every day and just. Doing a very simple thing, not taking on a gigantic task, but just doing a simple thing. He takes a few acorns, he makes holes in the ground, and he plants the acorns, and he does that over and over again. So when I have this feeling, I like to think about this guy. I like to think about this, you know, fictional French man who just. Focused on the things he was doing that day. He didn't think about growing this lush valley. He thought about planting a few acorns today. That really helps me get through times like this because I shouldn't be thinking about that far off goal. What I should be thinking about is what is it today? Because kind of like the man who returns to the valley and finds that it's lush. I sit here and I look back and there are now literally thousands of pages of dialogue that I've written and. If I had sat down to write episode one and thought to myself, I have thousands of pages to write, I would've found that just too much. I would've found that a pretty crushing burden. So instead it's just every day a pocket full of acorns, a few holes in the ground every single day, and then one day you look back and there's the valley.

Chickens 0:00 /366.55020408163267 1× Transcript So the other day in his newsletter, Adam Mastoianni kind of went off and he wrote 28 slightly rude notes on writing. So it's this list of things and there's one that really cracked me up and I wanted to talk about it. So he said The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it's embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is in fact secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas, which is funny because he's a pretty cynical guy himself, you know? So to hear him say like, it's such a shame, he's basically saying, what a shame I exist. You know it, and it's a funny quote, but also it just, it brings to mind something that I think about sometimes about this. Intense pressure that one might feel to make things in their story go poorly for people. Because if it's, if things go poorly, then that's real and that's honest and that's true. And for anything to go well is of course false and pandering and delusional. Right now, there's some celebration of things that end happily, you know, when you have a happy ending to your story or when th happy things happen in your story. But somehow those all always get categorized as a beach read or a nice escape or a safe place. And I am just wondering why is this, why do we have this disdain or this compartmentalization of stories that contain joy? Why is that the case? I don't know. There's this other, okay, so I think it was Friedrich Mont. Who said this, I might be wrong. He said that the artist portrays the world as either the chicken or the egg. So the chicken, the world as it has become, or the egg the world in its potential. And there does seem to be this pervasive feeling that the chicken stories, the world as it has become are valid, and the egg stories, the potential of the world are not favorable, right? You are not actually an artist. If you are making the egg stories, the world in its potential stories, right? You're not an art, you're, you'll probably be real rich, but you're not an artist, right? You can't be taken seriously 'cause you're not being honest with your audience, right? Because honesty, of course, is death and grief and sorrow and murder and dishonesty is. Something working out, something being happy, a good thing happening, a celebration, right? How dare you? How dare you tell that story. Get out of here. We're all hanging out at the cafe. We're dark artists. How dare you? How dare you brighten our day. I've certainly felt this in the past. You know, I've, I've felt this pressure to be real and have hard choices in the story. And, you know, if you have a commitment, if you have a true commitment to your story, you will not hesitate to just off everybody in your story instantly. George, our, our Martin style. So we assume that happiness and joy in a story that we're telling is dishonest or not real. But I don't think all the writers out there who are writing stories that contain joy and that have happiness, are somehow unaware of the world that's around them. I think Nora Ephron read the paper just like everybody else did. The thing about happiness and joy and happy endings is that they're not a denial of reality. In my humble opinion, they're like a prayer. A prayer for a better world. Seeing the world in its potential, because the world as dark as it may seem, is always brimming with potential. I do look around and I see the problems of the world. But I do believe that there is a solution for every single one of these problems. Potential is ever present. The potential for joy is always there, so why can't we write about that potential? Or at least, why can't we write about that potential and be considered serious artists? I'm not sure. Maybe because it's so hard to tell stories of death and grief and sorrow and murder, that the only thing you can really clinging to is the fact that you're being honest and that you're being true and you are. The problem is, so is everybody else. But they're being true to the potential and others are being true to the world. They see in front of them. It's just two commitments to two different things. One to the chicken, one to the egg. But really these days, what's the bold choice? If you reside in a world that's full of darkness. It's very difficult to look and see what could be, and it's very difficult to write about that because you're afraid to have that hope. You are afraid to believe in a better world. Unfortunately, the only way that better world comes to be is by seeing it, by envisioning it. If we don't take the time and make the choice to envision a better world, Well then all we're left with is the chicken.

Dawn Patrol 8.20.25 0:00 /622.6285714285714 1× Transcript... In 2022 research scientists at Queen Mary University of London. Did something that seemed a bit silly and unserious for people who, in my mind, wear lab coats all the time. They took tiny wooden balls and gave them two bumblebees. My first thought is why. My second thought is that sounds fun, and it was fun. They watched bumblebees engaging in an activity that could only be described as play. Given the small wooden balls, the fuzzy little bees pushed them around and rotated them with no obvious connection to either mating or survival. The behavior wasn't rewarded by scientists either. It seemed that the bees were just having a good time. Every once in a while you hit one of those moments where you find yourself exploring the universal through the particular. This is one of those times because this fun little moment of bumblebees playing ball. Purchase you on the precipice of a very large and deep rabbit hole. Because this study on playful bees is part of a growing body of research suggesting consciousness may be widespread in the animal kingdom, even among creatures. Very different from us. For decades, scientists have generally agreed that animals similar to humans like great apes, have conscious experiences. I direct you to the story of Australian legend, Ken Allen, an orangutan who escaped his enclosure several times, even sometimes taking some of the ladies in the enclosure with him, or Fu Manchu. Another orangutan in Nebraska who escaped his enclosure a few times by picking the lock with a wire he kept hidden in his mouth. I would argue that an animal that can learn to pick the lock of its own cage has earned its freedom at that point. But now scientists are saying evidence is mounting. That consciousness could extend much farther than this elite club of things with thumbs. A few weeks ago in a groundbreaking declaration, a group of 39 prominent researchers from various fields asserted that the empirical evidence indicates, quote, at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates, including reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Even more surprisingly, they extend this to many invertebrates, including octopuses, crabs, and insects like the playful bumblebee. This statement runs contrary to something like complexity theory, the idea that consciousness is this strange ghost that comes to life as soon as a system gets complicated enough like the human brain. Within complexity, consciousness arises. We assume the animal kingdom are these, uh, unconscious drones, and we walk among them like enlightened super beings. But there are now 39 very prominent, super saying Not so fast, these bees are playing ball. These scholars emphasize that a lot of uncertainty remains, but ignoring the possibility of consciousness would be irresponsible when making decisions that affect animal welfare. Essentially, if an animal might be conscious, we have an ethical duty to consider its wellbeing. Signatories to the declaration include renowned figures like psychologists, Nicola Clayton and Irene Pepperberg, neuroscientists Anil, Seth and Christophe Koch zoologist, Lars Chika, and even philosophers. David Chalmers, the Reality plus guy, and Peter Godfrey Smith, the octopus guy. If a wide range of animals. Conscious. What does that mean? Fundamentally, it suggests the inner world of animals may be richer than we've assumed raises questions about how we treat animals in context like farming, research captivity. I return you to my previous proposal regarding lock picking orangutans. For a long time, we've looked skyward and wondered, are we alone in the universe? This cadre of 39 thinkers would like us to consider that we've skipped a step that the first place we should be looking for life in the universe is right here. There are some questions that are too big to be ignored. Then there are some questions that are so big that they have to be ignored because what if we decide they're right? What does that world look like? Is it the paradise that the vegans hope for? It's also a world without pesticides. For all the crops we need to feed people, including the vegans. It's also a world where no trees can come down because hey, that's somebody's house. Are we really going to consider the work of these 39 scientists as we stroll through the zoo, or the cosmetic style or the deli? I doubt it. Maybe the root of all this is the idea of consequence. The idea that nothing we do is free of consequence. What you eat has consequence. Where you live has consequence. Where you go with the family to look at some fun animals has consequence. We're never free of it in any aspect of our lives. So then what? I suppose the first step is acknowledgement. This thing I do has consequences. What now? I don't know. I suppose next is to decide for yourself what you can live with and what you can't. But we shouldn't ignore it, right? When the orangutan escapes the zoo for the third time by using a wire to pick the lock, and all we do is shrug our shoulders and put the ape back in the cage. We're missing something, aren't we? If we ignore this apparent consciousness in other beings, we also ignore the consciousness in ourselves. We're given the ability to know this. We are given the ability to understand things. We choose not to. If you ignore the consciousness of one animal, you ignore the consciousness of all animals, including yourself. If you ignore the consequences of the zoo, well then you're just in a zoo of your own making, aren't you? But given is the wrong word, we weren't given consciousness. It happened to us all those years ago. It has apparently happened to all of them too. All of these animals. And figuring out what to do with all of that has been the journey of our species. So really and truly, I ask you what now?

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