Shadowing Practice: What It Means To Be A Good Man Today With Tom Junod - Learn English Speaking with Video
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My founding father was my dad.
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I made two vows.
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One, I am never going to be like him.
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And the one that I couldn't articulate to myself is like, I want nothing more than to be like him.
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First guest tonight is award-winning journalist, Tom Junot, everyone.
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Tom Junot is famous for writing essays that have defined both people and events.
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He wrote a piece called The Falling Man, which is like the canonical piece for 9-11.
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And then later on he wrote the iconic piece for Fred Rogers.
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Do you think you went to Fred Rogers suspecting that he would have secrets like your father?
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I was terrified of my dad.
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Yeah.
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And I think that one of the ways
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that I found to sort of to deal with that terror was to build up my dad and my head, to build this narrative.
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Before my mother went into surgery, she comes out and she says, I know you idolize him, but he's a mean, nasty,
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little man and no one to idolize.
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My book begins with the sentence, everybody knew.
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There's a point in the book where I open my father's briefcase and find hard evidence of his secret life.
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The only measure of my father's wrongdoing was my mom's tears.
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Did you find throughout your life, given your father's example on you, that you were attracted to figures like that
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or you were pulsed by figures like that and you went towards the Fred Rogers type?
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I went and I read this past week, I read The Meditations.
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Oh really?
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What did you think?
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I was really knocked out by it.
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Yeah.
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And I'm knocked out by it on a couple of different levels.
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Do you want to get into those levels?
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Tell me.
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Tell me.
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I have questions I want to ask you, but I want to hear this more.
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Well, so, you know, number one, you go, I had the same feeling reading Mark Cerelius that I did,
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like when I first read Samuel Pepys, which is like, oh my God, he's a dude.
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I mean, yeah, a glimpse into humanity.
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Yeah.
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And so he lived a long, long time ago, but his concerns are not very different from our concerns.
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Yes.
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Okay.
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So that's one thing.
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There is that thing.
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A time travel element.
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A time travel element to it.
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You see yourself in there.
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in a way that you don't see yourself, let's say, in the New Testament.
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Or certainly, or even in Aristotle.
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You're just like, this is smart, and I get it, but you seem like a person wearing a toga that I don't understand.
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Yeah, and he's talking to you.
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Yes, yes.
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I mean, he's talking to himself.
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The book is, I think, probably addressed to himself, but he's talking to you.
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And he's talking to you, and he's making sense.
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And so here's the other thing that I went towards.
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He's talking about death
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and he's talking about how to live as a human in
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the face of death in the years where Christianity is being developed and coming up with a very,
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very different answer.
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Aurelius is basically saying, okay, so death is simply a fact of life.
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And to accept that changes everything.
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It's natural.
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It's part of the natural world.
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It's no less natural than birth and it's part of you.
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Whereas you have Christianity on the other side saying, to me, what is the greatest philosophical mistake in the history of humanity,
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which is the wages of sin or death.
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I think that is a mistake.
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And I think it's actually a deadly mistake.
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And upon that deadly mistake is premised to me, mankind's worst invention, its worst idea, which is hell.
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Well, so I've said this before, like, cause yeah, Mark's really is in Christianity.
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It's the same time.
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Jesus, Seneca born the same year, both in provinces of the same empire, both die at the hands of the state.
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I've said like the Christian argument is like, don't sin or you will go to hell.
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And I think the stoic argument is don't sin or you will live in hell.
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Like it's a somewhat logical argument against excess and cruel.
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Like when he says the best revenge is to not be like that.
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Okay.
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So that sentence of all the sentences in the book, that is, I've circled it three times.
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I have stars.
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I have the page dog ear to it.
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I mean, that is the sentence in the book that has stood out to me.
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It's going in, I keep like a chap book and stuff and that goes there.
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And so I think that the book really gave me some hope.
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I don't read philosophy that much.
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I read poetry a lot more than I read philosophy,
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but both poetry and philosophy give me difficulty in that they don't tell a story usually.
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I mean, some poetry does actually, you know, obviously like, you know, epic poetry and stuff, but philosophy doesn't tell a story.
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And so I have trouble with it, But Aurelius spoke to me in a way that was really powerful.
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And now I want to learn more about Seneca, for sure.
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I think Aristotle said both the philosopher and the poet are concerned with wonder.
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And I think you don't get that when you read, ironically, Aristotle or most of the other philosophers.
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But when you read Marcus Aurelius, it doesn't feel like he's doing philosophy, but he is.
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Right?
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By talking about himself.
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It's similar to Montaigne, where he's like, who am I?
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Why am I here?
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What's going on?
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What does this mean?
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How could I do it differently?
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That has philosophy.
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It definitely does not feel like he's doing philosophy.
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It feels like he's talking to you.
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And he feels in certain ways like a modern day advice writer, you know, a so-called self-help writer.
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Well, there's a French philosopher named Pierre Hadeau who wrote this book about Marx
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and meditation said his argument is that that is doing philosophy.
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Writing notes to yourself about your temper, about your fear of death, about your anxiety, about obnoxious people,
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reminding yourself of what you believe, oftentimes right after you've just acted in contrary to that belief.
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That's philosophy, not philosophical discourses where you attempt to explain the universe or to teach.
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Or to get at something right or wrong.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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Meditations is philosophy for Marcus Aurelius, and its accidental byproduct is that you and I can read it 2,000 years later.
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Right.
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And so I was really happy to read it because I'm trying to figure out what's my next book to write.
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And that's, I mean, I'm not saying that I'm going to do my own meditations.
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I'm not saying that.
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But I'm saying that it basically broadened possibilities for me.
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And that was a really great gift.
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So I appreciate that to you.
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As a great writer, I would be curious what you thought of it as a text.
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Like put the philosophical contents aside.
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How did you take it stylistically?
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I thought it was really well done and astoundingly modern.
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Yeah.
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Especially given that it wasn't for an audience.
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Right.
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Astoundingly.
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And I think perhaps it's because it wasn't for an audience that it still stands up all these years.
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He's not on a stage.
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And you feel that a lot of times when you read the ancients, like they are on a stage.
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The fact that he's sitting either in his bedroom or in a camp tent or whatever doing this is, I think, what lends it its immediacy.
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And so that's the thing that I liked about it stylistically was that there is a certain immediacy to it.
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You get that advice about like, you know, just be really raw and vulnerable and specific.
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And that creates the general and you don't really believe it.
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And then this guy writes something for nobody.
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Right.
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And it somehow reaches millions of people for 20 centuries.
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It's kind of like the proof.
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Did you read the Joan Didion book that came out, The Notes to John?
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I have not read the whole thing.
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I read the excerpts that came out.
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I have the book, but I haven't read the whole thing.
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This was her table.
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Didn't I tell you this?
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No. Yeah, this is the table.
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She could have written some of those notes like at this table.
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Wow. But the chairs too.
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Dang.
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When I read that, I was like, oh, she can't write a bad sentence.
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Like she was writing for her husband.
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Like she was writing notes from therapy for her husband.
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And if that text had gotten discovered 200 years from now and someone wrongly interpreted it as an epistolary novel,
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they would have been like, this is great.
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You know what I mean?
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Like it, it, it somehow it's like, she's so good at what she does that even
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when she's jotting notes down from a therapy session to her husband, it's good.
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And I felt like here's Mark's realist writing reminders to himself.
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His to-do list is an enduring work of philosophy.
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It was pretty incredible.
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So notes to John is interesting because from the excerpt that I read, and I remember when, you know, like basically the whole discussion of, of whether it was right to publish it,
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whether it was morally right to publish it.
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And the thing that made me go out and vote yes by buying the book and reading, I guess it was in the New Yorker,
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the excerpts, was that I thought that the excerpts from her notes to her psychiatrist
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or psychologist or therapist was actually better than one of the books
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that she came out with toward the end of her life, which is Blue Nights, which I did not like Blue Nights.
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Oh, really?
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Yeah.
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I thought Blue Nights was...
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I liked Blue Nights.
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I liked, obviously, Year of Magical Thinking, but it was clear that she was not capable,
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given the profound grief and pain of your daughter drinking herself to death.
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Yes.
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She could not be fully honest about...
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And that's what I thought.
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Yes.
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That's what I thought.
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Of all of the work that she's done, it was the only thing I read that did not seem quite honest.
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And by honesty, we're not judging.
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We're just saying like she couldn't say the full weight of what she felt.
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She could not.
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It was crushing.
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But clearly in therapy and writing the notes to her husband, she was able to look in the eye in a way that she couldn't in Blue Nose.
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I completely agree.
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Yeah.
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But the thing about the thing that I didn't like about Blue Nights is
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that she couldn't say what she needed to say.
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So she said other things that seemed distracting would be the nice word to talk about it.
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It just seemed not just not quite able to be honest.
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It seemed in some parts almost dishonest.
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And that was the part that I didn't like about the book.
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Yeah, it's the definition of cognitive dissonance.
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And I think you probably could relate to
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that in your book where it's like you're having to face things that you have spent your whole life
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not facing and not only not facing
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but telling yourself right a contrary story yeah right or
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or just or just in in my case more knowing
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but not saying knowing but not speaking right right right like you could read those two books
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and just think that her daughter got a mysterious infection
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and died that's right and probably part of
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that was private like i think she probably started
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that on a year of magical thinking
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because her daughter was still alive i believe when she was writing it or she didn't, she didn't, there's a privacy issue.
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There's all these other things.
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But yeah, at the end of the day, you're like, oh, there was a lot more to the story that the notes illustrate.
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In Blue Nights, to me, she falls upon, she falls back upon some of her stylistic tics,
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like brand names, which in that book seems just, they seem so out of place and so strange.
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I was curious, so speaking of things that you know that you don't say, reading this book and then going back, I read the Mr. Rogers story.
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Sure.
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How much do you think he sensed that you weren't saying about your father?
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Because obviously you guys were talking about your relationship with your father
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and he's sort of kind of helping you heal and deal with that.
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But like you didn't fully know all the stuff then that you knew here.
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Right.
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And I'm sure you didn't tell him that much.
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Did he have a, do you think he had a sense or what do you think he understood about your father?
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Well, so I think that Fred was a genius.
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Yeah.
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So I think he definitely had a sense.
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Yeah.
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And I think he had a sense about everything, including, you know, how I felt about my dad.
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And what he was at pains to assure me about was how my dad felt about me.
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Yeah.
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I mean, he wrote me emails really until he died.
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And I have emails from him that I've kept and held onto until he died.
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And he wrote me often about my dad and about how much I know how much he loves you.
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And so he didn't really deal with it in a way that is in that story,
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but he dealt with it in a way that was even more specific and straightforward.
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Yeah.
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There's something about those people that have just the ability to kind of see past all your defenses and pretensions.
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And yeah, I wondered if he could could just read you like a book.
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He was that guy, you know, and I think that it wasn't just me.
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He had that ability with every person that he met.
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He had the ability to go and like, what does this person need?
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And how can I supply it to him?
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And how can I minister to him?
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And that's what he did with me.
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But the thing that's interesting now that you've mentioned it with Fred Rogers.
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So I wrote that story in 1998, my profile of Fred Rogers.
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In 1996, just two years earlier, I did the profile of my dad for GQ under the title of My Father's Fashion Tips.
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And I mean, there's something that happened with that story that I've only just written about, which is that my father told me a lot of his secrets.
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He told me about what happened, you know, back when I was a kid and he had his affair with Valerie Schockett.
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He told me about his bravado affair with both Gabor sisters.
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And he told me, of course, at the end of this, he told me that he,
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of all his conquests, there was one woman who was the one.
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And that all was told to me two years before I got to Fred.
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So you had the truth, but you didn't have all the facts.
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I had the truth, but not the ability to tell the truth.
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Yeah, sure.
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Also that, yes.
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So which was more of it.
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I mean, I had a lot of the facts, but I did not feel free to write about them or even talk about them.
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Yeah.
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And I suspect you didn't need to tell Fred Rogers.
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He just knew.
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He just knew.
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There's another writer that he had a relationship with.
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I'm forgetting his name.
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He wrote for Tim Madigan.
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Yes.
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There was something about, I read that book too.
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And there's this remarkable thing where he just, he just starts signing his, his letters to Tim.
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Like, I'm proud of you.
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I'm proud of you.
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And he just sensed that he hadn't heard that enough.
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And he knew that he needed, it was, it was like, I don't believe in miracles, but it struck me as like a very heavenly,
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miraculous kind of like little bit of heaven on earth kind of thing.
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It was part of his like miraculous abilities.
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Yeah.
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But also he, it was also a part of like how he spoke.
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Like, like, so I, I spoke to Fred Rogers, I guess, two months before he died.
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Yeah.
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And it was, it was like a, it was like a really, it was a sort of another sort of dad driven occasion.
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My father was still alive, but one night my cousin, you know, had a, got a load on, you know, got, had, had drank too much.
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and called me up.
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It was Christmas Eve to basically, because my father had been living with his mom for a while.
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And basically he called me to tell me, you know, what a piece of shit my dad was.
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That he's a monster, basically.
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Yeah, that he was a monster.
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And not just a monster, but a ganif, which is the word he used. But he...
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What does that mean?
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Ganif is a Yiddish word for a thief.
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Oh.
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And he called up and he talked first to my wife, Janet, and sort of laid it on her as well.
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And she got really, really upset and couldn't go to sleep that night.
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She couldn't fall asleep on Christmas Eve.
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And the thing that enabled her to finally fall asleep was to think, what would Fred Rogers do?
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And so she told me that in the morning.
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And so Christmas morning, 2002, I called Fred to tell him exactly that.
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And his response to me was, Tom, how like you to tell me that?
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Wow.
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Which is what he did.
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So I'm so proud of you.
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How like you?
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All those things.
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I get a chill just thinking about it.
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And he's saying how like you that someone had thought something nice about someone
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and you took the time to tell them
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that you were thinking of them and that someone had thought
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and that you were telling someone their positive influence on another person basically.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And he had that ability to like, what is Tom, to isolate, like what is Tom doing here that's good.
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Yes.
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And to tell you what's good and to reinforce in his way that you had done the right thing.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Which is so basic and yet so incredibly rare.
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It's so incredibly rare.
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The contract, like the idea of your father and your relationship with him being sort of part of that piece, then reading this book, it's like,
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oh, this is like an angel devil on the shoulder situation situation or a dichotomy.
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Martin Luther King talked about how we have a north and south in our soul.
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Yeah.
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And it's like, that was to me, the embodiment of that.
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Yeah.
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So Fred is very rarely mentioned in the book, like hardly at all.
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And yet he stands tall in the book as sort of an alternate father figure
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that I happened upon fairly late in my life.
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Did you find throughout your life, given your father's example on you, that you were attracted to figures like that
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or were you repulsed by figures like that and you went towards the Fred Rogers types?
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I would say both.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, actually both.
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But my father took up so much space and he was such, he was the giant of any room that he stepped in.
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So it was hard to to think,
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I'm going to find another guy like this to be influenced by or to follow.
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And so the thing that I did was I wrote about guys like that.
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Tony Curtis.
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I wrote that profile in 1995 for GQ.
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And what it really was, was a profile of my dad by proxy.
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Do you think you went to Fred Rogers suspecting that he would have secrets like your father?
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah, definitely.
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I thought that there would be something, you know, behind that particular facade.
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Yeah.
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And I think that that's basically, if you have to take a look at my career sort of pre-Fred and post-Fred, I would say that pre-Fred,
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it was definitely driven by the desire to find out people's secrets.
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Yeah.
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post-fred, it was a desire to understand people's secrets.
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And I think that that was the difference.
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Yeah.
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I remember a couple of years ago, I read Walter Iselson's biography of Da Vinci.
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And it's not a huge theme in the book, but for whatever reason, it struck me probably because I was looking to write about something similar.
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But he's talking about how Da Vinci's relationship to his father, he's an illegitimate son.
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His father can only kind of partially support him.
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And then his father has another family and all those kids get a different relationship.
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And so one of Isaacson's theories is that basically da Vinci spends his whole life looking for the perfect patron,
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like the perfect, unconditional, loving king who says, Leo, you're amazing.
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Just do what you do.
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Don't feel any pressure.
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And he finds himself in the orbit of this pope and then that Medici, whatever.
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And then inevitably there was a falling out
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and then he would leave the work unfinished
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and go to the next one
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and you're just like this great artist is still stuck in this cycle this pattern
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and i think we all have some version of
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that i just wondered
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if it's like are those the kind of editors you went
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to are those kind of people you profiled are those the bosses you had like
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you can't have that influence in your life
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and not be sort of normalized to it
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and even attracted to it well i've had definitely like my
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relationships with my editors have put me here you know i've had great, great editors.
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I can name them all from Jay Lovinger early on to David Granger.
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And now Eric Neal is my editor.
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And we have really, really deep relationships.
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And I feel like I've grown through each of those.
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The growth happens through the power of the relationship.
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Sure.
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I mean, I take responsibility for the things that I write, but I think that that part of the power of the things that I write are,
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you know, from the shared power of friendship, of mentorship, whatever it is.
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I think that living with my dad and worshipping at the altar of my dad constituted a sort of moral injury.
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And I think that my book, I mean, there's a lot of things that are never mentioned in my book.
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There's a lot of words that are never said.
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Trauma being one of them, sex addiction being another.
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Even abuse comes as a surprise to me.
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It's not part of the palette of words that I'm using.
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And moral injury is another.
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And yet, I think that the book is very much about moral injury.
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Yeah.
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I mean, for that generation, we sent them out to do this thing, feed them into this machine.
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Some of them came home, some of them didn't.
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Unlike other wars, there was at least some moral clarity about why they were there, but that doesn't change what you're seeing around you.
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You came home to this country that wasn't like the one you left.
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It was now an industrial behemoth and imperial power and also experiencing wealth and prosperity,
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unprecedented in human history.
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are you going to sit down and process your moral injury
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or are you going to go party and not when not
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when bill levitt likes your face not
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when elizabeth taylor can't keep her eyes off you according you
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know according to my dad yeah um i think about like my grandfather
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that was all there for them like i think about my grandfather he also at normandy
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and then like my i remember him he bought this condo in Hawaii.
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And I go like, I imagine explaining a condo in Hawaii decades later to a person who's on the beach in Normandy,
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like those would have been like, did I die?
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What is like, like the, how could you comprehend?
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And so, so the, the, the America that he comes back to and the temptations and the prosperity and the, the busyness of it.
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I mean, I imagine it would have been like heroin or something.
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Well, but especially for my dad, because I mean, my dad was seriously wounded, you know, in the in the hedgerows of Normandy.
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He suffered first.
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He was hit by the force of a grenade, if not the shrapnel.
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And then when he was in the field hospital, the field hospital got hit by artillery.
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And so he almost died.
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I mean, the rumor that I've heard not from him, but from, you know, my cousins and my aunts was that he was given was he was given last ride.
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And so then after that, he's about to go back to the front.
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And what happens?
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There's a lieutenant who hears him sing and takes away his gun and transforms him from an infantryman to a band singer.
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It's Gatsby-esque.
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It is.
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It's Gatsby-esque.
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It's Don Draper-esque.
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Yes.
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And the name of the act, the show, is called For Men Only.
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And so that my father goes back to the United States.
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He goes back to Brooklyn and tries to sing and can't and doesn't.
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He gets, he chokes as he told me when he, when he went to like do a tryout for Arthur Godfrey.
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So he chokes.
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So what does he do?
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He becomes, I think I call him at the end of the book of bedroom gangster, but he's also, he's also a bedroom celebrity.
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Yeah.
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And that's his legitimate celebrity is betting and wooing probably hundreds of women.
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That's the one place where he feels like who he almost could have been had.
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Has been realized.
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Yes.
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Has been realized.
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And then you have a son, me, who is watching this and believes in his father's celebrity,
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but follows that celebrity to the place where it really exists.
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which is in regard to sex.
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And that is forbidden, that is secret, that is never to be spoken of.
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And so it's, hence, that's why I wanted to talk to you about moral injury.
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Yeah, and in a way,
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we have the kind of language and understanding to deal with more obvious and straightforward forms of abuse.
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Yes.
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But in a way, like, yeah, dad gets angry and hits me is disorienting, but at least it's straightforward.
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Sure.
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Like what you went through would have been profoundly disorienting and destabilizing.
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Sure.
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Because not only would you not fully understood what was happening because it's cloak and dagger, but like it's not clear that there's anything wrong with
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that necessarily as like that
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that your father's probably thinking oh i'm just living my life
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this has nothing to do with you the understanding isn't there what's happening
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and you don't understand what's happening and
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that is the moral injury of what you're sure
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and the i mean the only measure of my father's wrongdoing was my mom's tears yeah yeah
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and she doesn't fully understand what's happening or articulate it either.
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So you can see it and she knows it, but she doesn't articulate it.
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But I mean, if your mother had left when you were five and said, he's a piece of shit, that would have given you some clarity.
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So you're looking around and going, I don't think this is right.
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This is wrong.
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Is my dad a monster?
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And then you're like, but mom's more or less okay with it day to day.
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That's another element of destabilizing too.
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Well, you know, well, once again, I mean, my mom, you know, she would go into her bedroom in the afternoon and just,
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I think that she was taking pills.
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She used to have migraines and I don't know whether to put quote marks around those migraines or not, but she would take the pills and then just go out,
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go into the bedroom and pass out for three hours.
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Right.
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What am I to make of that?
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Sure.
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I mean, even, yeah, that whole era,
458
like our understanding of what an alcoholic is or isn't is still kind of being formed and yeah,
459
it would have been, I mean, how a kid, how a teenager makes heads or tails of this would have been impossible.
460
Yeah.
461
Especially when, when I know as a teenager that the room where my mom repairs to,
462
you know, just to get away from it is where my father like keeps his stuff.
463
It's in that, It's in that room.
464
Yeah.
465
And to anybody who doesn't know the book, you know, there's a point in the book where I open my father's briefcase
466
and find like hard evidence of his secret life.
467
And that's what he that's that
468
that briefcase is sitting at the bottom of the closet in
469
the same room where my mom has passed out on the bed.
470
And the pressure of that, like it's this combustible situation because, you know, all the ingredients and you know that they could be combined at any moment.
471
and you don't know how that's going to go.
472
That's right.
473
And you don't know what you're supposed to do either.
474
Do you tell her?
475
Yeah.
476
She's suffering and she's suffering because of this unseen thing.
477
Right.
478
Do you make her see it?
479
Right.
480
What's the right thing to do?
481
What's the right thing to do there?
482
Yeah.
483
I mean, I've thought of that a lot and especially as in writing this book, because I mean, when you write a book like this, you ask yourself whether you're doing the the right thing.
484
Yeah.
485
Yeah.
486
And there is something inherently...
487
Exploitative is not the right word, but Janet Malcolm's right when she says there's something fundamentally sort of cruel about writing.
488
In the end, do you know what I mean?
489
Like there's an act of betrayal in it.
490
I do.
491
I mean, I saw the...
492
You have the Janet Malcolm book, given prime position back at the store.
493
And if you ever want to get into the Janet Malcolm thing, I will.
494
Tell me.
495
You don't like it?
496
I just think that she's wrong.
497
Tell me.
498
Well, because I think that she draws everything with way too broad a brush.
499
And so I think that the act of human witness is an essential, essential act of what we do.
500
And it's not just what we do.
501
It's what we do right.
502
So I have a shed back in Shelter Island where I write.
503
And a few years ago, I had to get bookshelves for it, finally, to fit all the stuff.
504
And then getting the bookshelves, I had to figure out, like, how am I going to, like, arrange these books?
505
And I arranged them ultimately chronologically.
506
It begins with Finnegan's Wake and then the Bible and it ends with Finnegan's Wake.
507
So there's two copies of Finnegan's Wake.
508
There's always a Finnegan's Wake at the beginning and there's Finnegan's Wake at the end.
509
So James Joyce would have been really, really happy and proud of that.
510
But looking at the history of humanity through a chronology of its books makes you realize
511
that we get most everything that we do wrong,
512
except this one thing, which is bear witness to the things that we've done bad.
513
But I think what she is saying
514
or what I take it to mean is that
515
when a writer is sitting down and looking at a story or a person's story, that ultimately their obligation is to that act of bearing witness
516
and the truth of it and the human wisdom or education or lesson or whatever.
517
Yes.
518
Not always to the flesh and blood person across from them.
519
But I wish that she would say that.
520
She doesn't say that.
521
She doesn't give any allowance.
522
to the necessity and the moral rightness of it.
523
Yeah, she makes it seem like it's something sorted.
524
Yeah.
525
And I think what she's doing is expressing the sordidness from the perspective of the subject.
526
Like, and I think Joan Didion has a great passage about this too, actually, where she's talking about how, like, I think it's in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where she's talking about how,
527
like, people assume she's nice as a reporter because she's small.
528
Right.
529
And she's like, actually a killer, you know?
530
Yeah, yeah.
531
And she's great on that subject.
532
Yes.
533
And I think that she draws distinctions there that are finer than the distinctions that Janet Malcolm draws.
534
And you experience this or it's like you really start to like this person and they're telling you things.
535
Same with your father, where it's like the difference between how you perceive yourself
536
and how this is going to be perceived by the wider world.
537
Right.
538
Who has no vested interest in buying into your mythology or cognitive dissonance.
539
That is the sensitive nature of the job.
540
Yeah.
541
There's a thing that people have been mentioning to me about Joan Didion that sort of pertains to this.
542
In one of the stories in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where she finds a couple on acid taking care of the babies.
543
And she's asked later on, like, what did you think when that happened?
544
And she answered, I thought that this is gold.
545
Yeah.
546
So I've never thought like that.
547
Right.
548
I really haven't.
549
And I mean, I've thought like, oh, this is so sad and I'm going to write about it.
550
But I never have given myself that allowance to say, oh, this is gold.
551
And so maybe I'm fooling myself more completely than Joan did.
552
But I don't.
553
You can't see a factor piece of information both ways.
554
You can't go like, oh, I see where this fits in and I also see this as a human being.
555
Oh, I always, you know, I try to always see the people as a human being.
556
And in this book, I mean, I try to see my dad as a human being.
557
I try not to do a tell-all.
558
I try not to come in, you know, with a grudge.
559
And I don't know how you look at it.
560
But to me, the book is about loving a guy who might be and probably is a bad man.
561
Given the title and what's happening in the world, I do think it would be worth talking about like the idea of masculinity.
562
Obviously, your dad's version of it in some ways, like we need more of it.
563
And in other ways, we have to eradicate it from the face of the earth.
564
And you can see how generations of those flawed ideas haunt people and create this cycle.
565
And are right now sort of making a comeback.
566
Yeah.
567
Yeah.
568
So how do you think about that?
569
There's that Miller Lite commercial where they have a, there's a kid, young man,
570
he's at a bar and he's looking at his phone and there's a girl sort of flirting with him.
571
And then Christopher Walken is at the bar and says, hey, go talk to him.
572
Go talk to her.
573
She's, you know, don't look at your phone, talk to her.
574
And so there's this lesson about manhood that's being promulgated right now on our TV screens.
575
And I have to say that I sort of agree with it.
576
I see my dad in that position.
577
He's sort of the Christopher Walken in that position saying, hey, go out and experience life.
578
You might take your lumps, but if you have confidence in yourself or at least exude confidence, you'll do okay.
579
I sort of agree with that.
580
But I think that at the same time, I see a lot of people sort of out there
581
and they're using masculinity as essentially as a shield to accomplish one thing,
582
which is being able to lie your face off with no consequences.
583
And I think that that is like the thing that I would love to address, you know, even just now,
584
because I don't address it in the book.
585
The book is, it's my story.
586
I don't get political in the book at all.
587
But I think that the idea that masculinity, manhood gives you a get out of jail for free card,
588
I think is like, is intensely damaging.
589
Yeah, it's like they want the sort of old-fashioned ideas of masculinity with like action and strength and whatever,
590
but they don't want any of the other ideas that were inseparable from it, at least as an ideal in the past, you know, honor, dignity, you know.
591
Those are the big words.
592
I mean, you just said the biggest word, which is honor.
593
And you don't see masculinity being championed as a means of honor.
594
And I look at it and I think that somehow my dad actually taught me,
595
not by example, but at least in his words, that honor was a worthwhile goal.
596
The problem is we look back
597
and we will focus on examples where they either lived up to it or didn't live up to it.
598
And what we really should be talking about is that these are all encompassing ideas, not things that you can compartmentalize.
599
Like I'll give you two examples I thought about from the book.
600
So on the one hand, there's a scene where you as a kid, because people hurt people, you're bullying this kid in the neighborhood.
601
Your dad sort of finds out and he puts a stop to it and he's like, this is not what we do, basically.
602
Pick on someone your own size is what he says.
603
There's some kind of honor and there's a valuable lesson in there.
604
Same time, there's no honor in repeatedly humiliating your wife, lying, cheating, stealing, all the things.
605
But I don't think your dad probably saw
606
that as a contradiction in terms
607
because he probably had some sense of like who you owe honor to and who you don't.
608
I think that that's a really it's a really interesting question.
609
So is manhood the thing that gets you to the point where you are allowed to have this other second life?
610
Or should it be the thing that basically tells you not to have that life, to put on the brakes?
611
And I think that's a really interesting and confusing question.
612
I mean, did my dad's actions invalidate his words?
613
Did his actions basically prove that the words were empty?
614
Or is it how I look at it is like the words were good if only his actions had been better?
615
Well, and this is what we do historically, right?
616
We look at the founders and go, yeah, sure, they said all this stuff.
617
But then, you know, here's George Washington putting out a letter demanding the recovery of his slave who he intends to be.
618
Or here's Thomas Jefferson's, you know, sort of slave concubine.
619
And we go, oh, they didn't mean a word of it.
620
And it's like, no, I think they did mean it all.
621
And they were just shamefully, woefully inadequate at living with them.
622
And then also they lived in a society
623
that allowed them to get away with that obvious contradiction because they were all sort of in on it.
624
And part of what witnessing and storytelling is really about is about bringing those contradictions to the surface.
625
To the fore.
626
Absolutely.
627
Like I was just reading Ron Chernow's book on Mark Twain.
628
Mark Twain has this fascinating thing where he's like, my mother was like the sweetest, kindest, nicest, most charitable person you ever met.
629
And yet she didn't, he's a little patronized.
630
She didn't understand the contradiction.
631
I think it's that people allowed her to live in the polite fiction in
632
which these two things were not diametrically opposed to her.
633
And part of what activism and storytelling and media
634
and culture does is surface these secrets and contradictions and force us to wrestle with them or toss out
635
whatever the veneer of politeness and civilization, which is kind of what we're doing now.
636
Yeah.
637
The baby with the bathwater.
638
So my book begins with the sentence, everybody knew.
639
And I think that what you're talking about right now, that there was an entire society set up to basically allow
640
the founding fathers to do whatever they really felt like doing while,
641
you know, producing the poetry and the, you know, the genius vision that, you know, gave birth to this country.
642
But my founding father was my dad.
643
Yes, as it is for all of us.
644
And he had a whole system in place of enablers,
645
mostly men, who basically allowed him to do, you know, whatever he wanted.
646
Men who also had, you know, really, really deep relationships with my mom, or at least what I consider deep relationships with my mom.
647
I mean, you know, my uncle Johnny, my God, you know, my Godfather, Frankie Klein, who called, you know,
648
every, every Saturday morning to see like who my dad was betting and to see who I liked, you know, all these guys, they were really good friends with my mom.
649
Your grandmother was an enabler, also a victim, but an enabler.
650
Yeah, 100%.
651
So my dad had this whole sort of world that enables him to do what he wanted to do.
652
And not only enables him, the thing is they were thrilled by it at some level.
653
They celebrated.
654
It's different than enabling, which is kind of this secret, tacit acceptance.
655
It was like, this is part of who you are.
656
This is great.
657
This is impressive.
658
They were doing it for him.
659
Like, you know, like my dad somehow convinced people
660
that like the things that he was doing was just like proof that life held sort of untold and unseen marvels.
661
That's the kind of darkness of it.
662
The contradiction where they're not thinking about what this would be like for the children in the house.
663
What's it like for your mom? Of course.
664
What it's like for, yeah, the women who are being sort of chewed up, spit out of the system.
665
There's that moment in the book where, I mean, I am just about to turn 50.
666
It's the day before I turn 50 and I go to see Frankie Klein, who was my father's wingman in Florida.
667
And he, and I'm bringing him, he loved my father so much
668
that I'm bringing him some of my father's ashes in a shot glass
669
so that he can spread them in the lake behind his house.
670
So I give him the, it's a, it's a, there's a transaction that's going on.
671
I give him the shot glass and he says, anything else?
672
And I say, yeah, who was this woman of my father's in Florida?
673
And then everything changes.
674
Yeah.
675
But what he says is, so you know.
676
Yeah.
677
Because I wouldn't have told you if you didn't know.
678
Right.
679
And that's what enables me to get in and to find out what her name was.
680
And, you know, that's the route that I take throughout the rest of the book.
681
because I am trying to find out something, not just write about my dad.
682
There's a, the world that my father left behind is a world that I try to investigate and infiltrate and do.
683
Yeah, it's like in recovery, they say you're only as sick as your secrets.
684
And so like the secrets, people think they're helping by preserving the fiction or not challenging you on the fiction.
685
And this is true in individual relationships, individuals.
686
But then I think it's also true as a society.
687
Like there's the things we don't want to know.
688
Like we vaguely know what happens in a slaughterhouse or in a sweatshop, but we're like, I know that I probably have to buy more expensive shirts, you know?
689
And so society understanding that you don't really want to know doesn't tell you.
690
And so do you have, and all of us are guilty of it and some of us are better at it than others, but I think we're all guilty of just like, I know, but I know.
691
I don't want to really know because if I really know, it's like, how does the other half live?
692
What do you do about it?
693
Well, in this book, you know, finding out the secrets does require me to act.
694
And the way that I do act is I try to find out, you know, the people that my father sort of left behind.
695
And, you know, that to me ultimately becomes, for me, whenever I sort of ask myself about, like, did I do the right thing with this book?
696
To me, the proof that I did the right thing, you know, it exists.
697
And she, you know, more to the point, she exists.
698
I have a, you know, I have sister that I find at the end of the book.
699
And, you know, I wrote to her this morning and she wrote to me.
700
I mean, we have now a sibling relationship.
701
And it's like a great gift of my life, in my life.
702
And I never saw it coming.
703
The Wright Thompson profile of Tiger Woods, he quotes someone, I think about this all the time.
704
He says, mirror, mirror on the wall, we become like daddy after all.
705
Yeah.
706
How have you wrestled with that?
707
Just try to, you know.
708
Do you think that's true? Be honorable.
709
I do.
710
Yeah.
711
I do.
712
You know, because I think that in my life, I made two vows.
713
one to myself articulated and one to myself just in my, you know, in my bones and in my cells.
714
And the one that I articulated to myself is I am never going to be like him.
715
And the one that I couldn't articulate to myself is like, I want nothing more than to be like him.
716
And so, you know, I've had to balance those things.
717
It's the North and South.
718
It is.
719
It's the North and South.
720
And so, And this is where I think where Stoicism really comes in here.
721
When you're dealing with that kind of split, it's hard to find a language for it.
722
I don't mean on the page.
723
You can find all the language that you want on the page, but I'm talking about to yourself, in your self-talk.
724
And I got to say
725
that reading Marcus Aurelius over the last week has given me sort of like a new kind of self-talk.
726
It's given me a language in which to address these things.
727
I'm not bullshitting on that.
728
In Marcus's life, he loses his father very young, and then he comes under the sway of a monster, Hadrian, who's like, although a very capable emperor,
729
a killer, not exactly a sadist, but a person who you would expect would be attracted to absolute power.
730
And so he kind of has this, well, I don't want to be like him.
731
And if you notice, he almost never appears in meditations.
732
He's not in the list of acknowledgments.
733
That start the book, right?
734
Yeah.
735
But the dominant entity in the acknowledgments is not his mother, who he clearly loved.
736
It's this stepfather Antoninus, who you might have predicted they'd be at odds with each other
737
because they're not related and they're jockeying for power and they're in this forced range kind of marriage.
738
But he, I mean, in the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man could come from that passage of Mark Cerullo's talking about Antoninus.
739
And you just see like, oh, if you get lucky enough to come in the orbit of an incredible person and you decide to listen,
740
it can really heal a lot of wounds and get your compass dialed in.
741
It's a pretty remarkable relationship they have.
742
And I think that Fred Rogers was definitely that for me.
743
Interesting that you say the title because a lot of people know
744
that it comes from the first line of the first song of the first Let's Have an album.
745
However, the people who don't know that tend to think it's from antiquity.
746
They think, oh my God, is that Homer?
747
Yeah, it seems like it could be.
748
The idea that we can sort of learn from our parents what to do, and then also what not to do,
749
but it's very hard to know in the moment which one...
750
It is.
751
You know, are you unconsciously acting like them or are you unconsciously acting like them?
752
You know, it's hard to know.
753
Sure.
754
Before my mother went into surgery back in 1999 when she was 83 years old,
755
she was set up and she was going into open heart surgery.
756
And she waited until that moment to tell me what to think of my dad.
757
Right?
758
So it's the night before, I'm on the balcony of their condo in Florida, and she comes out and she says,
759
I know you idolize him,
760
but he's a mean, nasty little man and no one to idolize.
761
So that's a moment, right?
762
That's heavy.
763
That's heavy.
764
And I think it sort of messes me up at the time,
765
but I have definitely, when I have gone to make decisions in my life,
766
it's not only Fred Rogers that I fall back on.
767
It's definitely my mom as well.
768
Well, it's like she should have given you that kind of moral clarity when you were 13.
769
Either she couldn't get there herself or she thought somehow it was wrong to badmouth your father.
770
But like you were trapped in one perspective on him until some ways that moment.
771
So there's a there to me, one of the most powerful scenes in the book is
772
when I am listening to the song Sunshine when I'm in eighth grade.
773
And it's, you know, that song by Jonathan Edwards.
774
And I hear it as a song about my dad.
775
And I hear it not only as a song about my dad, but as a protest song about my dad.
776
And she hears it the same way.
777
And we have a moment where we sit down next to each other.
778
And she says, I know you like that song.
779
And I said, I do.
780
And she goes, I do too.
781
And then, you know, we begin, we both begin crying sitting there next to each other.
782
And that was definitely a moment when I understood that she was fighting the same thing that I was fighting.
783
And I think that she understood that I was fighting the same thing she was fighting, but didn't know what to do about it.
784
Right.
785
The problem is so much of the stuff we pick up on, it's not conscious, right?
786
And so it's not until someone else goes, hey, that is just the worst way to handle that.
787
Or that's not what everyone else is doing.
788
I mean, part of one of the good things about getting married, ideally, is you get a second set of parents and you're like, oh, other families are not like this.
789
Yeah.
790
I mean, I remember going for the first time to my wife Janet's family dinner.
791
And there was a little bit like the scene in Annie Hall
792
when the dinner table splits in and you see the Annie Hall family and the Woody Allen family.
793
And it was very much like that.
794
I mean, it couldn't have been more different.
795
There's no king holding court.
796
There was no king.
797
And there was no fear, rather.
798
Right.
799
And there was fear in my family.
800
And I don't think I really got that until just this moment, which is the whole reason I love doing these kind of talks,
801
is that I'm continually on the road to understanding the thing that I've written.
802
And yeah, so there was fear.
803
Yeah.
804
And therapy is like that where you're surprised by the words coming out of your mouth because you'd never,
805
you hadn't been forced to articulate or explain some deep-seated assumption or reality that you took for granted.
806
And it's coming out of your mouth and you're like, oh, this is insane.
807
What am I saying?
808
This isn't how it is.
809
This doesn't need to be this way.
810
But what do you do with fear?
811
And that's, I think we're, I've thought of a lot of different ways to deal with it.
812
One of them is writing, but now on the other side of writing, there's stoicism, which seems like a fairly good way to go forward.
813
Do you want to go check out some books in the bookstore?
814
I would love to check out some books in the bookstore.
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Exploring Identity and Connection in Modern Masculinity: A Dialogue with Tom Junod
The video features a compelling conversation with award-winning journalist Tom Junod, delving into themes of fatherhood, legacy, and the search for moral guidance. Junod reflects on his complex relationship with his father, the impact of his mother’s honesty, and his fascination with figures like Fred Rogers and Marcus Aurelius. This dialogue offers rich material for english speaking practice, blending personal storytelling with philosophical insight, making it ideal for learners seeking to improve both fluency and comprehension.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "I was knocked out by it" – Expresses strong admiration or surprise (e.g., "I was knocked out by her presentation").
- "Hard evidence" – Concrete proof of something (e.g., "The email provided hard evidence of the agreement").
- "Canonical piece" – A work widely accepted as authoritative (e.g., "Her novel became a canonical piece of 20th-century literature").
- "Sort of to deal with" – A casual way to describe managing a challenge (e.g., "I listen to music sort of to deal with stress").
- "Time travel element" – A sense of connecting with the past (e.g., "Old letters have a time travel element that feels magical").
Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide for This Video
Shadowing (or shadowspeak) is a powerful technique to improve pronunciation and fluency. Here’s how to tackle this video: 1. Listen and mimic intonation: Junod’s speech is conversational but reflective. Pause after short phrases (e.g., "I was terrified of my dad") and repeat, focusing on his rising and falling tones. 2. Break down complex sentences: Phrases like "The only measure of my father's wrongdoing was my mom's tears" have a formal structure. Practice saying them slowly, emphasizing key words ("only," "wrongdoing," "tears"). 3. Focus on casual connectors: Words like "yeah," "I mean," and "so" are common in spoken English. Mimic how Junod uses them to flow between ideas. 4. Record and compare: Use a shadowing site or voice recorder to capture your speech, then compare it to the video. Note differences in pace and stress to improve english pronunciation. 5. Repeat daily: Choose 2-3 minutes of the dialogue and practice daily. Over time, you’ll notice greater confidence in handling nuanced, emotional speech.
This video’s blend of personal narrative and intellectual discussion makes it a dynamic tool for learners. By engaging with its content through shadowing, you’ll not only enhance your language skills but also gain insight into universal human experiences.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have defined · I've said · I've circled |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was terrified · were attracted · were pulsed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Man, which is · Pepys, which is · idea, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.