Chuck Klosterman on Writing the Past and Relishing the Present

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Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with Chuck Klosterman, and Chuck I would describe as a person who basically has done everything. But most notably from our point of view, he has a new book out called The Nineties. Chuck, welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

I have some questions about the '90s. What was our biggest cultural fear or worry from back then that never came to fruition?

So what was the one that never came?

Yeah, that never happened.

Well, I mean, the easy answer would be Y2K. That was of course at the very end. And whether or not that didn't come to fruition, I suppose depends on if you're the kind of person who thinks, well, this is an example of them seeing a problem, diagnosing it correctly, taking all the steps to stopping it from happening, and then having a non-event. Or if you're someone who's like, well, you know, Some countries barely did anything, had the same sort of result as we did. How come our microchips didn't stop working in our dishwashers? It was never going to happen. So it was the event that didn't occur. Either way, it wasn't a tragedy, but it was certainly something we talked about for an entire year and thought about constantly and kind of perceived as sort of, you know, the possible end to the way we understood civilization. If you go to the very early part of the '90s, I suppose it was the idea that Well, the Cold War was still sort of kind of in its death throes, but I think the fear was, oh, what if a suitcase bomb gets out of Russia, someone blows up Chicago or something? I think that was something that never came to fruition. There's a specific thing that you kind of had in mind when you asked that question?

Well, I had the fear that Russia might invade the Ukraine, which now is Ukraine. That's come back. But the notion that Japan would buy up the entire world This idea that you had like crack babies who would become these super predators. There were a lot of fears that in retrospect seem relatively slight compared to what we now face.

Although that is common, I think, to sort of amplify fears in the moment and then retroactively look at anything that didn't happen and sort of perceive it as, well, I guess, you know, maybe we were amplifying that too much at the time. I mean, If 9/11 doesn't happen, we look at the attacking of the USS Cole very differently. We look at the first attempt on the World Trade Center very differently. Now that seems like a precursor to a plan that had been existed for this long stretch of time, and that this was always the goal. But if 9/11 doesn't occur, it's almost a forgotten event. So it's really difficult. I mean, when writing about history, but particularly history that people have lived through. You know, the hardest thing about writing a book about the '90s I found was the kind of bifurcation between people who remember the '90s almost like they just happened, that these things, you know, the release of Nevermind or like Quentin Tarantino films and all these things, that this is still the history they're living in. And then for other people, it's no different than the moon landing. It's just exposition about an event that they didn't experience. How do you write a book with the idea that maybe half the audience is going to be in category A and half the audience is going to be in category B. It was kind of a complicated problem. Like, did I need to literally explain what a compact disc is? I asked that myself at one point, you know. Then I would be like, well, you know, when I was growing up, I fully understood what a reel-to-reel was and what an 8-track was, even though if I didn't necessarily purchase them. But something has changed about the way time is perceived. And I sense that you've recognized this too. It's 10 years is different now than the way it used to be.

I think there's a breakpoint. Maybe it comes at 9/11, but since then everything has felt weird and a lot of aesthetics hasn't changed very much. Music doesn't go through phases the way it used to. Movies intensify maybe in terms of special effects or number of superheroes, but they don't evolve the way they used to. The '90s to me was the last part of earlier history.

Well, I mean, I think it's possible, very easy in fact, to argue that the '90s were the last decade of the 20th century, but also just the last decade that was sort of this immutable framing of time. One thing I talk about a little bit in the book, maybe I should have talked about more, but I find I wanted to get away from, you know, seeing the past through the prism of the present. But like, like this guy Mark Fisher, who's dead now, had this idea about like the slow cancellation of the future. I feel like that's one of the most profound ideas that I've come across in the last 10 years of my life. And it seems so palpable that this is occurring that, you know, like an example I will often use is, you know, if you take, say, 10 minutes from an obscure film in 1965 with like no major actors, and then you take 10 minutes from an obscure film from 1980 where nobody became famous and you show anyone these 10-minute clips, they will have no problem whatsoever figuring out which one came first. Even like a little kid can look at a movie from 1965 and a movie from 1980 and instantly understand that one predates the other. But if you do that with a film from 2005 and a film from 2020, again, sort of an obscure film where you don't recognize the actors, you're just looking at it aesthetically and trying to deduce which one came first and which one came second. It's almost impossible. And this phenomenon just seems to almost be infiltrating every aspect of the culture. This idea that everything to a degree now is somewhat retro and that certain kind of natural evolutions that happened because culture was lost or sort of forgotten or just kind of moved beyond, which doesn't really happen now. It's like so easy to access the recent past that it all sort of becomes pushed into the same sort of kind of gumbo or whatever. The '90s to me, sort of signal the end of when you were able to look at certain things or certain qualities or a certain vague sense and identify it as from that period. I fear that that may be over, although I'm not sure why I fear it.

But why did it change? What happened? When did we sense the flip there? What drove that difference?

Well, the answer, the easy answer, or the predictable answer, or the answer anyone would give, they would say is the internet. That the internet emerges in the '90s, it makes kind of a big jump in '95, but it's still sort of— when you think of the internet in the '90s, it's really more of a mechanical discussion more than a cultural discussion. But then when you move beyond about 2001, it's kind of beyond 9/11, and you see the introduction of social media and all these things, and just the ability that it is so easy for anyone to instantly access something. Like, I anything, something or anything. I mean, I use this example a lot. You know, it's like when I worked in newspapers in the '90s, there would always be like a person at that newspaper. Maybe they had once been a reporter, now they're on the night desk or something. And you would go up to a person like that and you'd be like, hey, you know, I'm trying to think of this movie. It's like, I don't know, it was like about cars and I think there's a Beach Boy in it and I feel like the film burns up. And they'd go, oh, that's Two Lane Blacktop. Like their job was to remember kind of cultural minutia. That is gone now because now everyone has the machine that does that, which is, I guess, maybe personally disappointed because it seemed like that was what my life was going to become. Like the person who remembered all these sort of insignificant things and sort of remembered what kind of, you know, but that seems to be over now. Now that it's all so available, instead of culture having depth, it's more like a real shallow ocean that's very easy to wade into and scoop up whatever you need. And it's vast. But it doesn't go deep. Yeah.

Is Seinfeld still funny? And here I have in mind two points of view. One is the view that, well, now it's just like rude. So the girlfriend named Malva, you couldn't get away with that, right? And the other view is, well, it's not rude enough. Like now we have Curb Your Enthusiasm and that's really rude and it makes Seinfeld and Jason Alexander just not necessary. What's your take? Is Seinfeld still good and funny?

I still find it funny, although I will admit it it might be difficult for someone who experienced it first to have a real accurate understanding of that. One thing that I have found when I talk to young people is that they tend to like Friends more than Seinfeld. They see Friends almost as this timeless situation dealing with problems that everyone goes through, where Seinfeld seems more rooted in this kind of like worldview that doesn't exist as much anymore. So I might be a hard person to gauge that. Does still seem funny to me. I think the thing that matters though is that the tone of Seinfeld was both unlike the culture of today, but also massively popular. That is the thing that just kept coming up over and over again whenever I'd write about television. This idea that we have these events now, like, oh, the finale of Game of Thrones, the finale of Mad Men or whatever, that seem like these points in the zeitgeist that everyone is discussing simultaneously. And yet, any episode of Seinfeld was seen and experienced by more people, which meant that experience was just kind of normative entertainment. It's always so tempting when you look back at any period of time to look for sort of these strange apex moments, the outlier that sort of seemed incongruous with everything else that was happening and maybe seems closer to what's happening in the culture of the present. And you go like, well, this is what really mattered. I always sensed that the thing that really mattered was the things that we did not even view as having that sort of ancillary, secondary meaning. They were just what was being consumed and sort of the ideas and the morals and sort of like the values, I guess, within that. So like what was important about Seinfeld wasn't that it was more kind of rude and brusque and kind of adversarial with the classic idea of a sitcom where everything is happy and everything works out. That was important. The bigger thing was that those ideas were just on, and people just watched them because there they were. And that sort of sets the texture of an era more than, say, Twin Peaks or something that doesn't seem like it fits in the time that it came.

Did the golden age of American TV end after the '90s? And if so, what happened to it? Because you have The Sopranos, Wire, the years differ, but it's around that time, right?

Well, I would say that there's the first golden era of television, which everybody kind of understands is sort of its seminal period where, you know, back when television was like, it's still like a new concept. I would say the second golden age of television actually probably comes post-'90s if we're looking at the value of the content. I mean, I think that when you look at that early part of the 21st century where you still have The Sopranos, You have The Wire, Mad Men is there, Breaking Bad, you know, it's like there are these shows that probably were for that period of time, generally superior to what was happening in cinema, which would seem like an unthinkable thing at the beginning of the '90s to even assert that somehow television could be better than movies from a, like a critical perspective was just kind of unthinkable. Seinfeld was a great show, but I wouldn't say the '90s were a golden age of television. They were probably closer to the '80s in a lot of ways. The real jump came when shows either kind of moved away from the network concept, or even within the network concept, you could make a show like Lost, which wasn't really like something that you would've seen in the past.

What's our biggest misconception about the '90s?

I would say that one of the things that I found interesting was I am not certain It is a misremembered period. I think that there is a caricature and like an idea of the '90s. I think I kind of, in this book, I kind of describe it as kind of like a low-stakes grunge cartoon kind of, and that's not perfect, but it's not radically incorrect. I mean, the '90s are still close enough that a lot of the things I think that we project upon that period aren't so far from the truth. And okay, when you look at like David Halberstam's The Fifties, or books written about the '60s, or books written about the '70s, typically the author is sort of pushed or maybe feels obligated to contradict the widespread perception of the period. Like, you know, we thought the '70s were boring. Actually, there was all this tumult going on. You know, it's always like, we thought this and we were wrong. Someone could do that with a book about the '90s. But I felt that that would be kind of a misshapen view of how it was. Like, my goal in this was to write a book that was not looking at the '90s the way we think about the culture now and sort of jamming that retrospective view into sort of a modern ideology, but to go back and try to capture what it actually felt like to experience that time. Like, in some ways it's like, it's easy. To seem smart by looking back and finding little signposts that signal a future. But it's also not difficult to do that. What's much harder is to describe what it felt like to kind of hang around that signpost with no understanding that it had any sort of future symbolic value.

Now, the 1960s, you have the professor on Gilligan's Island, you have Spock on Star Trek. How does the popular culture of the '90s portray science?

Well, I think with a pretty palpable degree of fear, which is not uncommon. I mean, you look back at a Godzilla movie and it's like, you know, atomic testing is going to cause this, you know, calamities. Frankenstein is founded on this. In the '90s, of course, we have this cloning of Dolly the sheep, and that's kind of a hinge point for the way, like, the idea of genetic engineering was seen. And there was just this immediate fear that genetics was going to be used very often to reanimate things from the past, a little bit like Jurassic Park. I mean, Jurassic Park's the biggest mainstream example. That's not really an anti-science book or an anti-science movie, but it is that the scientists have gone too far. I did find it very intriguing to realize that after Dolly the sheep was cloned in Scotland, like, Bill Clinton was trying to introduce legislation that would stop the cloning of a human being, that there was like, we gotta get ahead of this. That's odd when you look back, when you think about it in retrospect, that's an odd fear that we had that somebody would clone humans immediately because the technology existed. But that fear was around. It was like a, you know, like many things in the '90s, it was this strange combination of anxiety and excitement. Like it was thrilling that this was occurring and yet also seemed like the recipe for disaster. So it was like, you had to sort of embrace the idea while also stopping it.

Was the '90s the last era of musical subcultures, and if so, why did they go away?

I think there are still musical subcultures, but they're exclusively online now. I think the idea of the physical mass subculture is probably gone. And, you know, and of course these are easy things to be wrong about, but part of that had to do with the fact of scarcity. And not that the records didn't exist, but that you had to pay for them, and people in teen culture had limited amount of funds. So you had enough money to buy one CD, so you bought The Cure, and you listen to that real intensely because it's the only one you got that week. And when you go back in 2 weeks, maybe you buy Sisters of Mercy or Nine Inch Nails or something that's vaguely tied to it. And then you kind of realize that the people who like The Cure seem to shop at this place called Hot Topic, so maybe you start shopping there. The next thing you know, you're part of this subculture because you had a real limitation. You were limited in your choice and you were limited in the number of directions you can go. After Napster and just with file sharing in general, and then moving into things like Spotify and Apple Music, there is no pressure to sort of go down the same path over time. Like, music is now a buffet, and its value, its tangible value, is less. So people kind of just pick and choose, and everyone just sort of creates a playlist or a mixtape that suits their personality in specific. And that fights against the idea of creating a subculture, because with that subculture, what you need are the people who have shared values by default. In other words, what they decide is cool or uncool is not totally just based on what they think, but what their peers seem to think and what the artists that these peers are listening to seem to think. And if you consider yourself a goth kid or a metalhead or any of these things that happened at that time, the way your group was perceived kind of calcified or galvanized the meaning of those signifiers. And that's just not really how it is now. That's gone. Now, there again, it's something I kind of miss that. I'm not sure why I miss it. Is it just because I was familiar with it? I don't know. Like, to ascribe actual value to it's complicated.

Maybe back then you were more likely to use music to signal your personality type. So you're an indie girl who's going to go to Brown. You listen to REM, right? You could be a Deadhead. You could listen to metal. Whereas now you have, you know, your Instagram page tells everyone what you're like. So you just go off and consume the buffet.

Absolutely.

But can you still be shocked today by music you hear? So when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit or Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine, I was shocked. I'm never shocked today. Are you shocked?

Well, no, I guess the short answer is no. But that's like what you're describing in some ways, though, is really is like this slow cancellation of the future. That music from, say, 1991, '92, '93, like Nirvana's Nevermind came out the same day as Blood Sugar Sex Magic came out. You know, there was a whole bunch of records that came out that day. Had you played them to someone from 1971, it would not have seemed even like music. I think that somebody who was into rock in 1971, who was listening to Led Zeppelin and the early Beatles solo records and all that, you played them this music, they would be like, well, it seems dissident, it doesn't seem songful, it doesn't seem like music at all. I don't like the way it It's recorded. It would be just really troubling. It is very unlikely that someone would have that experience from hearing music now who had really been into music at the turn of the 21st century. It would not seem that different. It's very difficult now to create something that isn't at least partially retro. I mean, in fact, it almost seems to be gone entirely.

Now, you grew up in North Dakota. You loved metal. You documented it for Spin and other media sources. If you were coming of age today, what would be your passion in music? What would be your thing? What would be your at least partial subculture?

That's an almost impossible question, but a great one. Like, it's fun to think about that, but the answer I give is going to be completely worthless because if I'm coming up in rural North Dakota now, okay, so my hometown had 500 people and I lived outside of that town. In my hometown, there was essentially two kinds of music. There was metal and there was country. Like, AC/DC was kind of the crossover act. That's kind of all there was. You know, there was top 40 music that no one seemed to care about, and even as high school students, we seemed to view as, like, shallow and superficial while we were listening to bands like Poison and Mötley Crüe. So there's lots of contradictions here. It doesn't always make sense. But I fell into that music. Like, my brother came back from the army, he had a Mötley Crüe cassette. He had an Ozzy Osbourne cassette. I had been listening to like, you know, Huey Lewis and like, you know, Eddie Grant and Madness and Prince. Got this, I just loved it immediately. And it kind of became my whole identity for a while. So how would that experience possibly happen now? Like I would be on the internet. I assume that instead of just sitting in my bedroom, listening to an Ozzy Osbourne cassette and just reading the liner notes over and over again, I would be on a computer. And the experience of having my brother drop something off and then leave would be replaced by someone online that I find interesting sort of leading me in some direction. I don't think that I would have the same experience with music that I had growing up in a situation where my options were limited, where there was, you know, long stretches of time when I had 6 cassettes. That was all I had. And I would just play them over and over and over again. And think about them and see things in that music that probably didn't exist. It seems odd to say this now, and it seems almost crazy, but I think part of the reason I was able to succeed as a critic was because I came from a place where I was so limited in the art I was consuming that I had to think about it differently. You know, I didn't have MTV. I think if even if I'd grown up in Minneapolis 'Cause the people that I became friends with later in life, most of which came from bigger towns, you know, the people who seemed like me as an adult, they were the people who listened to the Smiths and who kind of thought Guns N' Roses was terrible or whatever, you know? But Guns N' Roses was the most interesting thing I had. I would look at Axl Rose the way somebody else might think of, I'm not even thinking of like David Byrne or something, like I had to get all this meaning from him. So that really worked to my advantage, I think. As I kind of matured and was able to experience these other kinds of art, but still kind of working from the way it was when I kind of had nothing. So I don't know what I would be like now. I don't even like reading my early books because I can't relate to the person who wrote them. So the idea of me thinking about what I was like at 13— no idea.

Why did Spin magazine fail? Like, even I subscribed.

Well, the first thing I would say is, like, it started, I think, in 1980 '08 and was still going pretty well till 2006. So it didn't really fail, it had a long life. Why is it still not like a factor in the way like the music industry operates? Well, lots of reasons. One, magazines in general matter less. More significantly though is the ideas that like, you know, when I was reading Spin as a college student, you would read about a band like Pavement, or you'd read about a band like Teenage Fanclub and those records weren't even out yet. So you would be reading this review of someone trying to sort of describe what the music was and if you would like it, if it applied to you or whatever, and then you'd wait for the record and finally hear it, and you would have had this whole kind of built-in superstructure in your mind over what this music was, and now you're finally hearing it. Whereas now it would be you would hear about the band the same time you heard it for the first time, and that kind of takes away the significance of a magazine like Spin. I read Spin because I thought it had the best writers about music, but I wouldn't need people to write about music if I could instantly hear the song itself. So I think that's part of it.

What made Grantland so wonderful?

I appreciate you saying that. I think it was that, you know, they just kind of went out and got the best writers they could find and paid them enough to do projects at other places probably wouldn't see a real demand for and kind of let him do it. I mean, the first story I wrote for Grantland was about going to a junior college basketball game when I was like a sophomore in high school, and it was a Native American team who was playing, and they only had 6 guys on the roster, and 3 of them fouled out, and they won the game 3 on 5. But this was a small junior college game in Wahpeton, North Dakota, from the '80s, there's no place to present that story to. But at Grantland, it was like, go ahead, like the weirder the better, you know? From the perspective of being a writer, Grantland almost is like almost an unrealistic scenario, just that like, we want you to be you, you know? And as a consequence, I suppose if we really went back and we read everything that was on Grantland, we would find a lot of junk that just kind of, I don't know, seems ridiculous now. But at the same time, the things that people remember were the best parts. Yeah.

What is it in non-American culture that you're most interested in? Canada not counting. No Neil Young, no Joni Mitchell.

Non-American culture. Boy, I'm a pretty American person in a lot of ways. I'm sure a criticism of this book is that instead of being called The '90s, it should be called The American '90s. I have a somewhat sort of maybe myopic view about how culture works, but in 2008, I was a guest professor at the University of Leipzig, and I taught American Studies there for a semester. And it was in East Germany, so it was very interesting. It was like, German's the main language. The second most popular language was Russian. So like, I could teach a class at this university, but I couldn't mail a letter because I'd go to the post office and no one knew what I wanted. But being in East Germany, the thing that fascinated me was talking to Germans. Especially German students, about their perception of America. And I think that the most valuable thing about traveling is the greater understanding you have of the place you're from, from the way it is perceived. And, and, you know, your natural inclination is to almost argue with these people. I was teaching a class called 20th Century Pop Culture. It's the first day, and I'm walking to class, and a graduate student just starts walking alongside of me, and he seems like a nice guy, and he asked me what I'm doing, and I tell him I'm teaching this class on 20th century pop culture, and he's like, well, that should take 10 minutes, because like they just perceive America as having no culture. But it was crazy because they all loved hip-hop, and I would be like, well, well, hip-hop is American culture. And they'd be like, oh no, that's an immigrant culture. I'm like, well, not really, that's kind of a weird way to perceive it. But I know what you're really asking more about.

But like Asian cinema in the '90s was a big deal for me. I discovered Hong Kong movies, changed my whole worldview. Of movies.

And I think that, to be honest, I was pretty unsophisticated in that way, in that I thought that I was getting deeper into culture by pursuing what I was already kind of into. So I would see a movie like Run Lola Run, or so, and I would think, oh, now I'm understanding this thing. But I was just seeing one part of it. There's a bunch of stuff I could make up, but I think in reality my interests are like domestic. They really are. There are tons of bands I liked from Britain, but that somehow didn't seem in any way separate from US culture. Like, The Beatles seem like part of American culture. Like, Led Zeppelin seems like part of American culture. In fact, Led Zeppelin seems more like it's part of American culture than UK culture. I was really into groups like Pizzicato Five, like Japanese pop music. I really liked Swedish pop music, but there again, that's something that's been so integrated into our world here It's almost like saying, oh, like, I love food from other countries. General Tso's Chicken, that's what I love. You know, it's like, it's a form of the other or whatever that is actually a form of us. Yeah.

Are you up for a lightning round of overrated versus underrated?

Sure.

Feel free to pass on any of these. George Harrison, overrated or underrated?

Wow. Well, I would say you've seen Get Back, right?

He's a whiner. And he walks off stage. Yeah, well, he's not transparent. Who would hire him?

But I don't know if any of those qualities factor into someone being overrated or underrated. I mean, I would say this, it is almost impossible to say a member of the Beatles is underrated, not because they are overrated, but because, you know, we look at their work in such a way that, you know, there's nobody out there saying that like All Things Must Pass isn't good. So I suppose if you had to make an assessment, you could say that George's music was a little more samey than John or Paul, that fundamentally his songs follow a similar kind of chord structure and a similar sort of delivery pattern, that All Things Must Pass is many versions of 3 good songs. So I suppose that makes him slightly overrated, But I mean, like, I love George Harrison, so I hate to say that, but I guess if I had to pick one or two, that's what I pick.

Okay, here's a softball. Eric Clapton, over or underrated?

Well, I mean, overrated forever and now underrated because of his sort of political position in the sense that people now have decided that not only do they not like him, but that somehow Cream was bad and that Derek and the Dominoes was bad. So he was overrated my whole life. Like, there was a long period where if you would have said, who are the most overrated figures in rock history, I would be like, that's easy, like Jim Morrison and Eric Clapton, you know. But it changed so dramatically and so radically that now it's almost as though we can't think of him as, you know, probably the most significant white blues guitar player of all time. So I would say now he is slightly underrated, but it's his own fault.

Okay, here's a guy on the injured list, Anthony Davis.

Okay, let's see, is he overrated or underrated? I would say he is probably somewhat overrated because he is often injured. He is really more of an elite defender than an elite scorer, even though he is a good shooter. He's like, it's not, he's a great player. He's an all-star, but I would say that if, if I'm listing in order the best players in the league, I would guess I would place him further down on the list than a lot of my peers. So I would say slightly overrated.

My local guy, Bradley Beal, over or underrated?

I would say slightly underrated, but only by the casual consumer. I think people who follow the NBA pretty closely have a relatively accurate view of Bradley Beal. Like, he might be properly rated, I guess, among people who understand basketball and follow basketball closely, and certainly people who live in Washington. But I would say there are a lot of people who might classify themselves as basketball fans, if you ask them about Bradley Beal, they might not know who he is or where he plays, you know.

To me, he lacks ambition, and that's a big no-no. So even though I think insiders know that about him, I still put him as a bit overrated.

When you say he lacks ambition, ambition to be great, the ambition to win?

Both.

To become a different player?

Really? Yeah, to be the best or be on the best team. He doesn't seem to care, which is fine. He might be a happier guy than a lot of his peers, but nonetheless.

Well, that's a hard thing to measure, you know, because in sports we actually reward people emotionally if they are obnoxious. Like, I mean, I remember when Justin Herbert came outta college, people didn't wanna draft him because they were like, he's not an emotional leader. Like he'll never succeed because he's just quiet. He keeps to himself. Like somehow someone like Baker Mayfield, who sort of tries to draw attention, is perceived as being like more dedicated and more intense. But it's confusing. I mean, like, you know, I grew up, my favorite player was Larry Bird. And I remember being very surprised when I found out that Larry Bird was constantly talking and trash talking his opponents. Because as somebody who was just watching at home as a kid, for some reason I thought of him almost as a stoic person, you know? That's how I viewed it, because he was talking to other players. He wasn't talking to the media.

Of the great NBA players, take something like the top 100, whatever you'd like, who's the most underrated of that lot? Who's still underappreciated?

I think that— this is a strange answer because he's very famous, but I think to a degree Wilt Chamberlain has become underrated in the fact that people discount his statistics as sort of a vestige of a previous time. But even within that previous time, the statistics he compiled are really unthinkable. The fact that you will sometimes see lists of the greatest players of all time and he will be outside the top 5, I think that's, that's very weird. I don't know if he would, you know, be in the top 100, but like there were guys like Sidney Moncrieff who were just good for years and kind of good in every way, but we would never include them sort of in this top tier because pro basketball has also adopted this, I guess, maybe predictable but also kind of curious perception that winning a championship matters almost too much now. That like, if you have not won a title, you can't be classified as a great player. And it's strange, you'll watch like the TNT show and like Kenny Smith will still kind of hold this over Charles Barkley. Like, somehow that they are equal as veterans, as former players, because Kenny Smith won 2 titles and Barkley won none. And Barkley's aware of it. They've made this decision almost collectively. This decision has been made that in basketball, because there's only 5 guys on the floor and we can kind of credit the best player as being the reason a team succeeds or fails, winning a title has become everything. And it sort of skews the way we understand this. And that's why you see guys like trying to get titles late in their career, like ring chasing or whatever. I think they believe if they can just do that, that will somehow recontextualize everything else about them.

I might say Kareem, just high total value, high peaks and high total. And for me, he's clearly top 3. I'm not sure he's viewed that way necessarily.

I think that there is a camp that places him third, that kind of goes—

But it's a camp. It should be a nation. It should be a universe, right?

I guess.

Okay. Van Morrison, was he any good? Is he any good? Is he an Eric Clapton figure who's now hated because he opposed lockdowns, or was he brilliant for decades, or just had an early peak?

Yeah, he did have an early peak. You know, he's a strange figure in the sense that he was a guy who was, you know, he's 22 years old and he's singing nostalgically about this lost past. You know, I think that if, you know, people who are fans of Van Morrison, they see him as like a interesting songwriter with a very distinctive voice. I guess compared to Eric Clapton— now of course they're tied together because they kind of sort of share this vaccination platform or whatever— he doesn't seem to me as a fraction as significant in the history of music as Clapton is. So I guess I would still say a little bit overrated, I guess. Yeah, but that's like taste too.

Why aren't the current Portland Trail Blazers better than they are? As we're speaking, they're 8 games below .500, right? On paper, they looked pretty good. No one thought they would win a title, but they were maybe like the 5th best team in the West, and now they stink. What's your meta model of the Trail Blazers?

Yeah, I think they were a team that sort of overachieved for a period, that people didn't really think of them as a premier franchise, and we'd get into the playoffs and there was this realization that Lillard was this kind of incredible scoring machine, and CJ McCollum is good, and they had, you know, all these various pieces. And then it was like they hit some kind of abstract ceiling where there was like a— almost an understanding within the team itself, but also oddly with the fan base, that they could never win a title. They could probably never even get out of the West. And once that belief sort of became like the foundational idea of the team, it just collapsed. And now you might as well blow the whole thing up. So it was almost as though they were just like— they kind of convinced themselves that they were just limited, that there was a limit to the success they could have. And as so often is the case, the self-awareness is what destroys you. Like, their self-awareness of their limitation was the problem.

So as you've written, the 1980s, you have the Celtics versus the Lakers. It's one of the great sports rivalries of all time. Can we still have sports rivalries at all? And if not, why not? Where'd they go?

You can have them at the collegiate level for sure, because, you know, part of the reason I find myself drawn to college sports more than pro sports very often is that even though the kind of person who goes to a school to play football or basketball is different than the student body, In a sense, if Stanford is playing Arizona, or if Texas is playing Georgia, there is a sense that, like, we have an understanding of what kind of person tends to go to those schools, and we can sort of apply it to the players. And even though the players might be outside of that kind of world, like, they kind of adopt those characteristics. So, like, the rivalry between, like, Michigan and Ohio State, and Auburn and Alabama, those aren't going to go away. At the pro level though, it will be difficult to see two teams that dynastic at the same time, where like the Lakers and the Celtics were clearly the two best teams in the league throughout that period. Yes, the Sixers were good in there, the Bucks were good in there, the Rockets had success, but the Sixers had to get Moses Malone in order to get over the hump to beat the Celtics. And like, when the Rockets beat the Lakers, it was an anomaly. So like, these two dynastic teams that were also completely different, even to the just the most casual viewer— race was part of it, but also playing style, and also this understanding that, you know, they were on different coasts and that there was something diametrically different about what it would be like to be a Celtic fan and what it would be like to be a Laker fan. It's hard to imagine that now now. Like, if you look at the NFL, the Patriots have had sort of this dynasty over a long period of time, and teams have kind of come and gone. What would have needed to happen would have been like if the Packers or the Cowboys had had the same kind of success as the Patriots over that same period of time, and that's almost impossible now. It kind of defies logic that the Patriots have been able to succeed the way they have for 20 years. It doesn't really make sense, especially in the NFL which is just, you know, designed to sort of allow every franchise to eventually get good and to create almost an inorganic degree of parity.

In college basketball, if so many of the good players are one-and-done, the coach doesn't get to imprint an identity on the franchise, players just want to signal they have upside potential to become lottery picks, how is it that college basketball is even still worth watching?

Well, the first thing I will say is that when I think about sports experiences in my life, and I'm discounting like, oh, you know, this team I wanted to win lost, or this team I hated succeeded, and I discount like terrible injuries to people, or like the death of Len Bias or whatever. When I think about things in sports that have disappointed me over the course of my life, the decline in college basketball is probably at the top of the list. I would say that and the introduction of instant replay are the two things that disappoint me most about the way sports has changed over time. College basketball now is solely the March Madness tournament. That seems to be the only thing even relatively serious college basketball fans care about. Because the best players play the shortest amount of time, it is real difficult to get a sense of what these guys are like and what the coach is trying to do beyond succeed. I guess that is part of it. You think of college basketball in the '70s and the '80s, and you think of like, you know, John Wooden and Bobby Knight and Dean Smith and John Thompson and all these guys. You think about these coaches who had consistently strong teams and teams that had a real clear identity. Like you could look at these teams and you would almost see when a kid graduates and a new kid is recruited, like, he's the replacement for that guy, both as a position on the floor but also as like what they would bring to the team. And that is kind of gone now. I mean, it's like the fact that Duke does this— I think people thought they might be like the last holdout of this, but they are not. When Calipari succeeded at Kentucky, it sort of proved that this is the best way to build a great team, to get the best collection of kids coming out of high school, put them together, and accept that college basketball now is more an extension of AAU basketball than high school basketball. So if you're asking me, it's like, why is it worth watching? It's like, well, I guess I still watch it. But I will say this, there was a long stretch of my life where if there was a pro game on and a college game on, I would always watch the college game. And now that's never the case. Now I will always watch the pro pro game.

Is there too much gambling money in sports today?

Too much.

Asking for scandal. The flow of betting on professional sports is much higher than the revenue of the sports themselves. There's room for conflicting incentives, people selling inside information about player injuries, referees not quite being deliberately dishonest, but just not always looking too hard at the fouls of one team and so on, relative to the flow of betting money. Why should we have great faith in the process?

Okay, so I think that officiating is the issue where this kind of does become a little dangerous and fragile. Like, one thing that sort of came out of the whole Tim Donahue situation, you know, there was a scandal that the NBA did a pretty good job of kind of like just sweeping away and everyone's forgot about it. But one of the things that came out of that was a realization that a referee can sort of dictate the outcome of a game simply by calling the game straight, in the sense that they don't have to create fouls or, you know, try to look for situations where they can dictate the outcome. They can just occasionally call traveling the way traveling actually is, or they can call lane violations on free throws, which they normally just completely ignore. So it becomes almost this invisible way of manipulating the spread because they're not doing anything They're not wrong about anything. They're actually just being correct in a way that is usually forgotten. So there is some risk with that. The fact of the matter is pro athletes are now compensated to a degree where it would be difficult to convince them to throw a game or manipulate a spread with the risk that is there with the amount of money they're already making. I mean, like there was the controversy about like Len Dawson when he played for the Chiefs in Super Bowl IV. Before that Super Bowl, there was this idea that maybe he had some, you know, relationship with gamblers. And the fact of the matter is, in the early 1970s, what a guy was making, you could definitely see how, you know, giving a guy $10,000 or whatever could be like a legitimate amount of money. At the pro level now, the amount of money you'd have to pay these guys to make it worth the risk is huge. At college, harder to say. I mean, like, here in Oregon now, I could gamble if I wanted to on the Oregon State Lottery. You can't gamble on college games. I suppose that they would see that that's still an area of danger that, you know, you could convince, particularly since you can gamble on anything now. Like, I think if somebody wanted to do this, what they would do is they would probably get involved with like the mid-majors and very small college teams where it wouldn't be that difficult not only to get to a player, but to give him something that would be worth his time. I think, though, that there was just this fear that sports might become so splintered that it could kind of recede from the culture. And they had to find a way to keep it as popular as it ever was. And gambling was the answer because gambling makes people who don't care care a lot.

Why are so many people so interested in esports? Have regular sports failed us? What's going on there?

I think that the fact that for a lot of people, their relationship to gaming starts so early that they perceive it as really no different than an athletic sport, except they were never comfortable playing athletic sports and this is the way to do it. And seeing people do it at the highest level to them is, is not any different than watching LeBron James. I mean, it is strange. My son is 8. He will watch YouTube clips of people playing video games. It seems bizarre to me. It doesn't seem remotely strange to him. Yeah.

When you teach writing, how is it that you teach that's different from how other people teach writing?

I'm probably worse.

Okay, but how are you worse? What, what is it you failed to succeed at?

Well, the most important quality of writing, in my view at least, is the unteachable element, which is voice. You know, it's like if writing has voice, the content I wouldn't say it's irrelevant, but voice can compensate for a lot. So a lot of times when you're teaching kids, like, you know, about writing, they ask questions like, how do you find your voice? Or how did you find your voice? Is something they often want to know. And the reality is your voice exists inside of you. You just have to pull it out. You're not finding it. You're not going to find it from reading other people. In fact, my take on this is that, you know, I think of my life. And, you know, there was this variety of writers, you know, I was in high school and I really liked Dave Barry, and then I went to college and I was into Douglas Copeland, and then I was into Raymond Carver for a while. I saw, I want to read all of this, you know, and then it was like, oh, Michael Lehner, I thought that was real great. And then David Foster Wallace, I was obsessed with that. But he was the last one. And I think that you don't become a writer until you no longer want to be like other writers. That's sort of the key. The key is getting beyond the idea that there is some idea of what you think writing is that you can somehow match or find or replicate, and you just kind of go off and do your own thing that only you can do. I feel pretty strongly about that, but there again, it's like I'm going by my experience. I think that you can teach mechanical aspects of writing to someone, and you can make like one little jump. You can make somebody who's kind of like very mediocre into okay, and you can turn somebody who's okay into pretty good, and somebody who's pretty good maybe you can make very good. But to really change the experience for people consuming that work, to like, to take someone and say like, if you do these things, you'll be able to become the writer you want, it doesn't seem like that's how it works to me. So, you know, I taught her writing class and I just, I think it was kind of useless because the same way I was when I was in college, you know, I was an editor at the school paper and I found that I was a real bad editor because I had two natural inclinations that were kind of dissonant. Either I would be like, I'm going to rewrite everything in this because this is terrible. Or I would be like, that's him, it's her. She gets to do what she wants. Just put it through. Like, it's hard for me to be that middle person because anytime I read anything, like any book I read, as I'm reading it, I'm changing the sentences in my mind. I'm just— that's how I've always been.

Now, you've put out a deck of cards called Hypertheticals, and I'll ask you one of your own questions. And here I'm quoting you: Every person you have ever slept with is invited to a banquet where you are the guest of honor. No one will be in attendance except you, the collection of your former lovers, and the caterers. After the meal, you're asked to give a 15-minute speech to the assembly. What do you talk about?

Well, the thing I always think about with this question is what is the likelihood that the people at this banquet are going to recognize why they are there? That's never said in the question. So I think some people hear that question and they assume they have been asked to this event for this reason, and they're coming because they are part of this sort of weird sorority or whatever. And then some people imagine the people are just there. They don't know why they've been asked. They don't know what their reason, like what the relationship is to each other. And that's usually how I think of it, that the people in this room, they don't know why they're there. If they know each other, it's by chance and they happen to know each other in life. So I think I would probably give a speech where I would kind of go over the trajectory of my life and discuss all of the things about the past that I regret. And I feel like by doing that, it would somehow connect with every person there.

You're with your parents in the honesty room. You can ask them any question. They'll give you an honest answer. What do you ask them?

Well, my dad is dead now. My mom is very old. And you know what's interesting about that is At one point I interviewed my parents just because I thought I'm just going to ask them about their life, you know? So I just put a tape recorder on. I asked my parents questions. My dad loved this. My dad talked about every detail of his life. My mom was like interviewing Tom York. Like she didn't want to say anything. Like she did not want to give me a response to anything. You know, the simplest questions. I guess what I would ask them is like, it's sort of a, I guess a narcissistic question. I would ask them, are you proud of me? Are you happy with the person I turned out to be? Because that's very important to me, and I know they would never give me a real answer on that. I'll always wonder that, you know.

Did they think you were cooler than Billy Joel?

Well, my parents wouldn't know who Billy Joel is, so probably yes. I guess I I don't really care if my parents think I was cool. My fear always was that, you know, the difference between my life and my parents' life and their experience— I can't prove this, but I think it's probably greater than most writers. I mean, it's like, due to the age of my parents, kind of the level of poverty they grew up in, the fact that we were in such a rural place, they've never totally understood anything about my career. I kind of hope they haven't read my books, but even if they have, I don't think it would make any sense to them. Maybe the novel Downtown Owl might, but none of the other ones. But yet they can also see how other people react to me. They have a sense that somehow that I did okay or whatever. I would like to know if they feel like I made them proud or if it's embarrassing, you know, that that I ended up this, you know, that I ended up becoming the person I am. So that's probably what I would ask them.

I know which answer I would bet on. Crypto, does it represent the final break with the 1990s?

Well, shouldn't that be something I should be asking you about? Because it's like, to me, cryptocurrency, I didn't know anything about it. So I was like, well, I should kind of look into this just to understand it. And it's very difficult to understand. As far as I can tell. But I came across something, an idea that I'm wondering what you will say as an economist. So my assumption always was that cryptocurrency in some ways was like, we're breaking away from the way money used to be. And there's a real opportunity to make a lot of money in this. Like, this is kind of a Wild West scenario. But I came across some information that seems to suggest that for someone like me, it might be smart to look at kind of cryptocurrency as like a safety net because in fear that the US economy collapses or the world economy collapses. I mean, is there any value in looking at cryptocurrency not as like this radical change, but as like a backup?

Early crypto prices are very countercyclical. They're like gold once had been. In more recent times, crypto prices have become highly cyclical. That is, they move with everything else. Now, what would happen if a big part of the world collapsed? I would say we don't know. I suspect some small percentage of your portfolio should in fact be in crypto just because it helps you diversify. I mean, I see the world as follows. Like every decade to me is super weird, but the 1980s and '90s pretended they weren't weird. The '80s pretended to be good versus evil. The '90s pretended that good won. But when crypto comes and persists, you have to drop all pretense that the age you're living in isn't totally weird. You have internet crypto and everyone just admits, like, right now everything's weird. And that to me is the fundamental break with the 1990s, because everyone pretended most things were normal and that, like, Seinfeld was your dose of weird, right? Jason Alexander. That's like a very manageable weird.

Oh, absolutely.

Some guy in an apartment in New York City cracking sarcastic jokes like, whoop-de-doo.

The '90s, there was not the sense that culture was unraveling, which I think is a common feeling now, that crisis is not unmanageable. Well, I mean, okay, so I have a financial advisor and he always wants me to take more risks, but I always have this fear that like at some point the way the economy of the United States works, it could just sort of collapse. And he always tells me, it's like, well, if that's your concern, it's like, it's a concern for everybody. You can't build that into your portfolio. The idea of what happens if there's like a, just a catastrophic end to capitalism. But as an economist, what is the likelihood of the way our economy is built just completely hemorrhaging and falling apart? Like, would you say there's a 2% chance of that, a 20% chance of that? Is it always 50/50?

I don't think economists are especially able to judge that. I am mostly, I, optimistic, and the biggest risks I worry about are at the level of international peace. China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, right? Big problems that I'm sure I don't understand, but I'm not sure they're going to work out well. I used to think like the countercyclical asset was to have a second residence or savings in some other country. But increasingly, I'm wondering if the countercyclical asset isn't the United States, and you're already in a sense overinvested in it. Maybe it's parts of Florida. Or the countercyclical asset. Wouldn't that be weird? How about North Dakota even? Not impossible, right?

Like buying land, you're saying?

There's fracking, climate change, it could become warmer, all the better for agriculture. I know there's nuclear silos there, but I don't really think anyone's going to attack. You can have cheap hobbies, watch basketball, enjoy the internet, listen to your music till you die. So my guess is you're more invested in the countercyclical assets than your advisor thinks. And then you think, which does mean you can take more risk. It's the person who lives, say, in Singapore, where if China becomes a truly dominant Pacific power, might start feeling they're screwed. They're the ones that have a hard time truly diversifying. You don't.

Yeah, I mean, it might be though, just like what your personality is like. Like there's a certain kind of personality whose goal seems to make more money. And my personality is like, don't lose the money you've made. I seem so lucky to have had things work out the way they have, that my fear always is that in the end, I'm going to have nothing again, that somehow I'm going to have put all this time in and done all of these things to sort of accumulate this wealth that seemed absolutely unfathomable to me for most of my life, but somehow I'm going to end up exactly the way I started.

It's not going to happen unless you blow it through some kind of weird addiction. But I would say like high-quality real estate and cheap hobbies. And I'm sure you have at least one of those right now, probably both, are the best edges. You've got them. Take more risk.

Okay. Okay.

And your human capital, right? No one can touch that short of you destroying yourself or just dying. And the more money you spend, like spending money is insuring against an early death. Because if I hit 96 years old and I'm broke, I'm like, oh my goodness, I made it to 96. I can at least read Wikipedia every day. This is still pretty awesome.

Do you have kids?

Oh, you did. Yeah, she's a huge fan of yours. And she just had a daughter, baby girl, beautiful. I can enjoy her for free. I'm kind of hedged. The real risk is premature death in my view. So you want to do things that are fun now. So if you like die when you're 63, you still will feel, you know, I got my stuff in, whatever that's going to be. And I bet you do that.

Well, that's an interesting way to look at it, I guess. But I don't know if I look at it that way, but 63, so I'm 14 years away from that or whatever. Do I even look 14 years ahead? I don't think I do. I feel like I am almost trapped in this kind of perpetual now. It's hard for me to think about my life in the future, but very easy to fixate in my life in the past.

It probably means you should take more risk. If you just hold safe assets and we have above average inflation, You get hammered, right? So you lose compound returns every year that accumulates. Real estate, equities, you at least have a chance of outrunning the demon, so to speak. And you can always earn more. That's another great thing about being in your position. Until you're senile, you can supply more labor, earn more, give talks, write more books, you know, consult, teach, whatever you want to do. You're golden.

Well, we'll see. We'll see.

We will see. That brings me to my final question. But first, I'd like to just plug Shuck's book, The '90s. On the COVID it's called The '90s: A Book. I promise you it is a book. You turn to the inside, it's just the '90s. This is an excellent, fascinating book about the '90s, a decade which also I will recommend. But final question, what is it you will do next?

Oh, like what writing project?

Doesn't have to be writing. It could just be, I'm going to spend a year watching high school basketball, or I'm going to, you know, listen to all my heavy metal records again. Anything. Your true project. Huh. The one you haven't told anyone about.

That I haven't told anyone about. I am just trying to appreciate the high likelihood that in some distant future, I will look back at this period of my life as the best period I had. And I'm trying to stay conscious of that as it's happening. Like, my daughter is 6. And she still kind of likes me to like lay in bed with her and hold her hand before she falls asleep. And sometimes, you know, that's kind of a drag or something. I kind of want, you know, it's like, look, last night, for example, I wanted to see what was going on in the football game and I was like, well, you know, but then another part of me is like, well, when I am dying and I'm thinking about the moments in my life that mattered, it's probably going to be things like lying in bed with my daughter and holding her hand in this kind of extreme extraordinarily intimate situation. You know, like we're so close to each other, both physically and intellectually, that if I could build a time machine, on my deathbed, that's probably where I'd go back to. So what I'm really trying to do now is try to be cognizant of the fact that all of the things that I wanted in life, not only I've got 'em, but like it's way beyond it. Like, I don't know what you're supposed to do when your actual life has completely usurped any dreams you had, but that's totally how it is. Like I say, I used to read Spin Magazine in college. So when I worked there in the early 2000s, all my friends from college was like, ah, your dream, you've realized your dream. And I was like, I never dreamt that when I was reading that magazine. I knew somebody wrote it, but I didn't think I could get that job. I was always thinking if I wrote one book in my life, that would be amazing. But now I've written 12. So it's sort of like, why doesn't that make me completely happy? Why am I not completely satisfied by the fact that everything that I was hoping for has not only happened, but happened many times over? Because it doesn't. It's like in some fundamental way you stay the same. And in some ways I feel the same as I did 30 years ago, even though my life then I would never want to really revisit except maybe on a vacation, but I wouldn't want to re-experience it or whatever. So that's not really an answer to the question, but I guess the answer is that I'm almost not thinking about what's next. Like I'm trying to think about what I'm doing now and failing.

Yeah. There's an old 17th century French saying I'm quite fond of, and it goes something like, things are never as good or as bad as they seem.

It's true. Hey, I wanted to ask you something.

Yeah, sure.

Before I did this podcast, I wanted to kind of, you know, so I listened to your podcast with Žižek.

Oh yeah, that was hilarious.

Are you friends with him? It sure seemed like it. And if you are, what is it like to be with him when he is not in a performative scenario?

I met him at that event. I had a breakfast with him. It was like the day before the talk. He and I hit it off very well and just spent like 3, 4 hours going crazy talking at each other. So we became friendly but hadn't met before. There's only one mode of engaging with him. And for me, it was fun because he's one of the few people I've met, you can ask him a question about anything and whether or not you agree, and often I don't, but he has an intelligent, informed answer immediately on tap, full of detail, and he can run with it. And a lot of times it's interesting.

Yeah. Oh, it's always interesting. Although I think one thing that over time I have come to realize is that a lot of his responses to things are always kind of driving back to some of these things he likes to think about. Of course.

Yes.

But like, you probably saw this, like he recently like reviewed The Matrix movie, the new Matrix movie. It was this really good review. And then at the end, he's like, "Also, I have not seen The Matrix, and that proves my point," kind of. And I was like, "Well, in a way it does." It's like, in a strange way, the epitome that you can look at something and have it only mean things outside of itself, so much so you don't even have to look at the thing itself. But yeah.

I think he's underrated. I mean, he has his cult followers, and presumably a lot of them overrate him, but a lot of serious people don't think of him as a force, is as a person truly a force in a way not actually that many thinkers are. So I'm a big fan, even though I really don't agree that much with him.

So am I. But like the underrated, overrated thing, it's hard to kind of place on him because in a sense his notoriety for what he does completely goes beyond the vast majority of people who are like philosophers or whatever, right? So in that sense, If you go from an individual's maybe importance to their field relative to their notoriety in that field, I think he might be at the top of that. Like, you know, it's just not many people. I mean, Cornel West maybe, or whatever. It's like you find a few people who are philosophers who are famous, but in terms of his ideas themselves, they could be underrated because I think that his notoriety is very often used against him. And the fact that he'll like talk about Titanic or whatever in this kind of very commercial way, you know, builds in this assumption that these ideas must not be really meaningful as much as they are like attention-grabbing. In some weird way, he's a little bit like Evan Dondo of the Lemonheads, where like Evan Dondo of the Lemonheads was making records that people kind of made fun of and didn't take seriously because he was so kind of overtly handsome. Like he was good looking in an obvious way. So there was this assumption, particularly at that time in the '90s, that if you were just like a kind of a conventionally good looking or kind of banal good looks or whatever, that made people look at his songwriting as like, again, meaningless. But now we go back and listen to him as a songwriter. It's like, oh, but he was real good. Like he was better than most. It was like, we thought he was bad because he was handsome. I think sometimes people think that Žižek is full of shit because he's famous, but that's not necessarily true.

His best side, I think, is his Hegelian side, when he insists that truth is to be found in the reconciliation of diametrically opposing ideas. And then I think he's quite good. If he gets too wrapped up into Marx or some of the heavier continental stuff, sometimes I just think he is drifting. But yeah, it's also amazing when you're with him how he uses his body. Is such an integral part of how he thinks and talks. And a lot of us aren't used to that. So he sort of is hurling his whole body at you all the time. And how he moves is part of his thought. And that's a funny notion. But I think you need to meet him to grasp him.

I mean, physicality is part of charisma.

Of course.

It's like charisma is a real thing. And in a way, I think sometimes we put charisma into a category kind of like grit or like authenticity or something. It's like, well, it's a— thing that we throw at people when we write about them, and it's just sort of this kind of imaginary construct. But I have found over and over again that charisma is one of the realest things in the experience of being alive, that there are people who are different when you're around them than they are when you see them on a screen or you read them, and it changes everything. And then there are some people who can transmit that charisma through the screen or through the page, and In some ways it's just like the most attractive quality a performer can have, you know, and the most desirable. I guess I said like voice is the most important part of what writing— there's also like a voice to his identity, just his being.

He's an athlete in a funny way.

Yes. But what's weird is even the things that we're saying about him and could be used as evidence for the criticisms of him. It's like, here I am talking about how I like this philosopher and and I'm kind of bogged down on the fact that he has charisma that can break through a TV screen or whatever, you know, that's not philosophy, right? I always think when I write stuff, it's like my goal is to be as accessible as possible. Like my self-editing is constantly making sentences straighter and more simple and more clear. But then you can become accessible to a fault where it looks easy to some people. And it also seems obvious to people because it hits someone so directly that they assume that they thought that themselves, which in some ways is the weird goal, to make the person feel like they're writing the book as they read it. But if you succeed at that goal, they're going to think you're a bad writer. It's strange.

And you might like the book last, you know, years from now also. Like, are you writing for your current self, your future self, even your past self you might write for? And you've written about this issue yourself, as you well know. True. Anyway, it's been great chatting with you. Again, Chuck Klosterman, The '90s: A Book.

Yeah, I should probably tell you my name is actually pronounced Klosterman.

Oh, apologies. Chuck Klosterman.

But I hate telling people that because there's no umlaut over it. I don't care. But it's like my dad used to always say, like, well, you should tell people to pronounce your name right. But like my son, he now goes by Klosterman. It's really funny. He's 8, but he's made the decision. And you know what? He's totally right. Like, I've spent all this time telling people, like radio hosts and stuff like that, it's like, oh, just so you know, I don't really care, but my name is Closterman. Well, if I don't care, why am I telling people? But I just feel this obligation to do it. I felt obligated to tell you, even though if anybody now realizes you mispronounced my name, they've listened to an hour and a half of a podcast. It's like, what do they care now? It's like, you know.

I face the Cowan, Cohen issue, and it's Cowan. Oh. People think it's Cohen.

That's what I thought.

But it's Irish Cowan. But I let people say Cohen. Oh yeah, whatever, you know.

I guess it's strange thing about names. It's like the most and least important thing about you. It really is. It's like you have a baby and you're coming up with its name and any name can work. And yet the thing that you do name it is going to be the one thing that's going to follow that person for the totality of their life. You know, it means nothing. It's just a collection. You could name your kid Stick and it'd be fine. If my name was Stick Closterman, nothing about me would probably be different. And then part of me is like, or would it? If I had went by Charles Klosterman—

That would be different.

Chuck Klosterman, would I be taken more seriously? I don't know. Would I be seen differently? Because Chuck makes it seem like, you know, I just kind of came off the football field or whatever. It's like, I don't know. I have no idea if my life would be different if I had gone by Charles or if I'd gone by Charlie. Would I be more playful?

It's often the combination of names that matters. Like in my case, Tyler and Cowen. They're not rare, but it's sort of together, you just don't find them much. So if someone combines the two, I figure they're close enough. They could even call me Tyrone Cowen, and it's like, well, you know, someone will think it's me.

Tyler seems like a more modern name. Like, when I only knew your name, I did assume you were younger.

I was the only Tyler in my day, like the only one. Henry Kissinger's dog was named Tyler. There was no other kid named Tyler. Now it's one of the more common names.

Was that the reason you were named Tyler, because of Kissinger's dog?

My father really wanted to name me Tyrone because of Tyrone Power, the movie star whom he liked, and my mother thought that was crazy, and she insisted it be sort of knocked down to Tyler, and they compromised on Tyler.

Hmm.

That's the story.

Yeah, it worked out.

Worked out, yeah.

My parents wanted to name me Fred, Frederick, but my sister, who was 3 years older, couldn't say Fred. She said Fwed. And even though she was only 3, for some reason my parents were like, that would be a problem. So then they named me Charles. But you know, I always think if I had been named Freddie, if I had been like Freddie Klosterman, somehow that makes me seem like I would get ahead of a, like, a career as a con artist or something like where I was like trickier.

Yeah, Freddie is like a horror movie name. I think you don't want to be a Freddie.

Well, now only if it's a Y. Now if somebody has a Y at the end, but if it's F-R-E-D-D-I-E, that doesn't really seem like a horror movie thing.

On YouTube, it's all Freddie, right?

Yeah, I don't know. It's like, when did it become more common to spell the word John, J-O-N, than J-O-H-N? Sure seems like that. I mean, I realize there are J-O-N Johns throughout time, but when I was a kid, every John was J-O-H-N. Now, was that because I came from a place where everybody was Catholic and Lutheran? Is J-O-N often used? I mean, It seems like a lot of, like, Jewish guys named John often have J-O-N, but just younger people. Now it seems like J-O-N is more common than J-O-H-N. I don't know when that happened.

I think a key thing for your kid, you want your kid to be Googleable if you have any faith in them at all, right? So you don't think they'll be a convicted criminal, in which case you want them not to be Googleable. But if your kid's John Smith, like, who can find them? Say you want to hire John Smith, you want to get a date with John Smith, you Google John Smith. You're screwed.

Well, I think, wouldn't it always be an advantage to be ungooglable though? To have the inability for someone to find you easily? Because once they meet you, they'll be able to find you. They'll know other things about you. If all they know is your name, I think it would be better if you were unfindable. If that's all they know.

Look, it's clearly better for you that you're findable. Someone types your name into Amazon search, right? Your actual books come up. Yes. Same for me.

That's true.

More and more areas are becoming like what we do. You don't have to be a writer, but someone hears about you and they might want to offer you something. If you want to cooperate with people on average more than you want to run away from them, you want your kid's name to be Googleable.

Well, that's a good argument, I guess. That's a good argument against anonymity. That could be a book title, Against Anonymity. Seems like that would sell now, you know what I'm saying?

David Brin wrote a book like that called The Transparent Society. I think he overlooked some of the costs to to that, but again, at least for your kid, you want to assume on average your kid will be successful like you've been. And on average, that's a pretty good guess.

Well, I hope you're right about that. You know, I hope you are. I hope people are Googling him in a positive way.

You know, your kids will have your talents on average and the talents of other parents, and that's good.

But it really is on average, though. There's 7 kids in my family, and there are strong similarities kind of visually, or our use of our hands when we talk, and maybe our fundamental ideas about like money and safety and spirituality and stuff. But skills-wise, like, it's pretty disconnected. I think that on average, of course, what you're saying is true. But I wonder, I have two kids and I'm shocked by how different they are. You know, it seems like they should be more similar than they are. They have the same parents. They're having the exact same experience. So I don't know.

But you compare them to other kids, right? Then they look a lot more similar.

Yes. But the way they interact with other kids is really the key difference. Like that is how they seem different to me. The way they view sort of how they operate in society and what they want from other people and what they want from friendships and what they want from themselves. I mean, what I'm saying is that like, it's not like they're so diametrically different. I can't believe it.

Their brother and sister, but they're also playing niche strategies within the family, and they'll become more similar as they age.

Absolutely.

The genes will matter more.

That's absolutely true.

The niche strategies will matter less.

I mean, definitely having kids does seemingly solve the nature versus nurture thing. It seems like nature, like it really seems obvious, but you can't tell that to somebody because now to say that somehow seems like, I don't know, they think you're a eugenicist or something like like you're somehow claiming that like the experience of society doesn't matter. But I think the experience in society generally makes people more similar. It's their nature that makes them different, you know.

And their peers may matter more than the direct environment of their parents, especially over time. Not at age 6, but at age 14 for sure.

I think even now to some degree, more than I would have liked.

Anyway, it's been wonderful.

Oh yeah, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. This interesting conversation.

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