Part One: George Orwell and the War for Common Decency

Margaret talks with Kaveh Hoda about her problematic fave.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast about cool people who did the cool stuff.
One of the people who did cool stuff is doctor
kavejda House of pod. Some of the cool stuff you've
done in clothes, saving people's lives with medicine and entertaining
people with podcasts.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah. Yeah. I like to think that I'm saving people
with my podcasts, saving them from boring medical podcasts. That's
what I feel like I'm saving them from.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
But I have a question, because like I have to
kind of gas myself up to think that what I
do is meaningful and impactful. How does it feel to
be both like, Oh, I do this thing that's a
little bit more direct, and then I do this other
thing that's a little bit more ephemeral.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Uh. I'll tell you that's a really good question. First
of all, do not downplay what you do, Margaret. I
feel like your sphere of influence is bigger than even you,
you know, And so I think that your show is
really great. And I'm not just saying that because I'm
on it now. Although it helps, but there are a

(01:12):
lot of times in medicine where when you're doing things
to help somebody, it's not so obvious, like sometimes it's
really obvious, like if someone is having an emergency and
I fix it for them, that's great, it's super satisfying.
A lot of what you do is stuff where if
you're doing it right, the patient doesn't even notice it

(01:34):
doesn't and doesn't even like you don't get that immediate satisfaction.
That's a lot of what you do, and so you
kind of it's almost like you know, when you're talking
into this microphone and you know that you're doing you're
reaching people, but you can't see them. So it's a
little bit of a different feeling. It's kind of like
that in medicine a lot too. Or it's like I
know a lot of what I'm doing is very important

(01:54):
in helping somebody, but it won't show for many years
or maybe they'll never notice it all. That's how I
know I did a good job. So it's actually kind
of similar, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
No, that actually that actually makes a lot of sense
to me. Yeah, today we're going to talk about someone
who both directly and indirectly, like did both things right,
and in this case, it was fighting fascism and totalitarianism.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
I can't wait, Cave, have you ever heard of books?

Speaker 3 (02:22):
But I've seen them. I've seen them. I had a
couple when I was younger. I experimented a little bit,
if I'm being honest, in college.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Okay, yeah, and well.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Now I don't have so many of them because it's
all in the interwebs. But yeah, I'm familiar with the concept.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Okay, Kave is wearing a book shirt right now, just
to H.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Powell's City of Books.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, just amazing bookstore.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
Ah my peoples.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, today, you guys, we're going to talk about a
guy who made some books, some of which readers have
probably readers listeners have probably read.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yeah, there's probably people reading this podcast, so I'm sure
that there's people just doing the conscriptions.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Yeah, that's true. A couple months ago, I talked about
one of the people who is the most commonly misquoted,
constantly misunderstood writer with way better politics than anyone realized.
His name was Oscar Wilde. Oh, and this week we're
going to talk about another constantly misquoted, constantly misunderstood writer

(03:28):
who had way better politics than anyone realized. This guy
was a big fan of Oscar Wilde. Wild was a
major political influence on him. His name you might have
heard of before is George Orwell.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Oh wow, oh yeah, I've heard I've heard of George orwell, yeah,
that's how you know he's big.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah. I feel like most people who h read in
English have heard of George Orwell. That is my hypothesis here.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
That's a fair.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
That's fair, And I'm going to make a bunch of
claims about him. One of is that some people hate him,
and they usually hate him for the wrong reasons. There
are reasons to hate him, but I don't, and we'll
talk about that.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
I can't wait. I have to admit I don't know
a ton. I know like nineteen eighty four in Animal Form,
and when I was very very young the nineteen eighty
four movie came out. I think it came out like
I was too young to watch it, but I remember
seeing it on like HBO once when I was like
way too young, and it traumatized me in a deep,
deep way.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
So I just rat on his face or whatever.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
He's a broke I remember him just being totally broken
at the end of it, and so that affected me deeply, deeply,
So I Yes, I'm very excited to learn more about him.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah, he's an emotionally effective writer, which is interesting because
he's not an emotionally expressive person. And we'll talk about that.
Some of his biggest sort of some of the misunderstandings
or correct understandings of him are around the fact that
he did not express much emotion. George Orrell was a
man who went from privileged son of the empire to

(05:09):
colonial cop to anti fascist fighter who took a bullet
to the neck fighting Franco in Spain, to going on
to write some of the best English language commentary on
totalitarianism and being a major anti imperialist writer at the time.
This was a man whose sole guiding principle was he
believed in what he called common decency. And while he's

(05:33):
often painted as an anti socialist because his works are
critical of the USSR, he was very explicitly a democratic
socialist to the end of his days. He was absolutely
on the left, and he put all of his money
towards making the world a better place, and he lived
really modestly, and he also put a lot of money
towards his son. So that's like what he did with

(05:56):
his money. So far liking it, unliking where this is headed.
He's a complicated figure. His homophobia and unaddressed misogyny are
woven throughout his writings. However, I'm going to complicate especially
his misogyny, in a minute. His actions did not always
live up to his lofty ideals, especially when he was younger.

(06:18):
He is my problematic fave. He's just problematic for different
reasons than some of the listeners who are already mad
at me for talking about him. Assume, huh, so.

Speaker 3 (06:27):
It's people that are mad about this already.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, authoritarian communists hate him. Everyone else wants to claim him.
The right wing wants to claim him, the center left,
the anarchists, everyone is like, he's our guy, right except
the authoritarian left, who are like, we hate this man
with the burning heat of a thousand sons.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Okay, all right, Can I ask a question. Yeah, I
hear the term tanky used a lot.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
So yes, tankies hate him. Okay, I'm using the term correctly. Yes,
minitarian socialists specifically who are like totally fine with the
worst excesses of the USSR.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
Okay. I apologize to your listeners in advance because I
asked some very stupid questions. No, very actively pro those
kinds of questions being esca and Orwell would be very
happy that you were asking these questions too, because one
of Orwell's whole things was fuck jargon. He was like,
if you are writing, I'm going to get to it later.

(07:25):
We're gonna talk about rules of writing. He's like, only
used jargon if it is the only word to describe
what you're saying. Got it.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
A million books have been written about George Orwell, and
I haven't read them all. An awful lot of books
were written by George Orwell, and I've read a lot
of them, but I haven't read all of them. Some
of the books I haven't read are the ones he
says he wished he hadn't written, So I feel fine.
He's not a fan of his early work. Yeah, I
read read one of his books that he says he

(07:54):
didn't wish he hadn't read, and that actually was a
kind of an interesting book. It's called Keith the Asperdistra Flying,
and it's about a middle class guy who wants to
be poor in this slumming it and ends up therefore
just sort of taking advantage of his girlfriend because she
has a middle class job, and he refuses to have
a middle class job. And it was actually like probably
useful to me for me to read as like a

(08:15):
squatter who often stayed with partners, you know.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
Anyway, Yeah, that's an interesting I'm sure there's an interesting
insight into that, Like I could see also why people
from the right try to claim him and anything they
don't like that seems kind of like weirdly authoritarian. They'll
like reference like nineteen eighty four. I've seen both sides reference.
This is like nineteen eighty four. This is like thought

(08:38):
police nineteen eighty four, you know, on both sides, the
right in particular, I see using it.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, And he was Georgi Ro was incredibly critical of
the left. He was critical of the authoritarian left, and
he loved the democratic left and he loved the anarchist
left and more the democratic left is how he fully aligned.
But we're going to talk about later about how at
the end of his life he was like everyone who's
fighting for socialism, who isn't fighting for stalin, I'm I'm your.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
Guy, bored with them, common decency, anti jargon. So far
I'm on board with this guy.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, No, no, especially end of his life or will.
I'm like, yeah, this man is more fave less problematic,
and actually some of the ways he develops through is
kind of okay, well, we'll get to it, Okay. So
and I'm going to talk about his life and his
adventures and especially how was thinking developed and how he
always worked to improve himself and become less of an asshole.

(09:32):
And I'm going to focus more on the parts of
his life that are interesting to me, because there's also
I feel a bit dirty doing anything that presents it
as like the biographical sketch of this man, because in
his will, he was like, please don't write biographies about me.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
He was I'm sure nobody listened.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Nobody listened. Actually, one of the sort of some of
the books, some of the books that came out kind
of right away after he died, were a little bit
more like we're auctions on his life and writing that
were a little bit like, hey, I knew the guy,
and I swear this isn't a biography.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
He'd be cool with this. He'd be cool with this.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah. Yeah, Like and it's like or it's even kind
of a like, hey, sorry, man, you know, like, don't worry,
I'm not going to get into everything. I just want
to talk You're important and we got to talk about you.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
Why Why didn't he want this? Because he didn't want
people to focus on him and his story they want
he want people to focus on his works, or because
there's things in his past he didn't want people like
so talking about.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
I think it's a combo a little bit of those.
He was deeply private, right, and so he really compartmentalized
what he wrote about and like what he lived, which
is interesting because a lot of his books, especially as
early books, are autobiographical. He writes these books about like slumming, right.
That's like kind of how he makes his name is
that he like literally dresses up as a tramp and

(10:51):
goes around and like lives as a hobo and for
a while when he's young and he's like from the
middle class, right, but he like still compartmentalizes out certain
parts of his life, especially like his intimate life, Like
he doesn't talk about his wife where you talk about
a bunch Like some people have been like, oh, because
he's a misogynist. I honestly, as best as I can tell,
I think it's because they had an agreement where it

(11:12):
was like, no, leave me out of your writing. Yeah,
you know, and so he compartmentalized, like hell he also
we'll talk about some of the there's two bad things
he did too, like big.

Speaker 4 (11:24):
Could he also be a guy with imposter syndrome?

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Oh? Interesting?

Speaker 4 (11:29):
That was my first thought.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
I think. I think eventually he kind of came into
being like I am who I am? But he actually
I have read a bunch about how he he had
sort of imposter syndrome in that he didn't under he
like because he was so used to people kind of
shitting on him that once he like kind of came
into his power, he wasn't always totally aware of it.

(11:52):
Oh that's interesting.

Speaker 4 (11:53):
Is there two types of people that are like extreme
like of Orwellian success, that are like either like yeah,
that's me, or they have major imposter syndrome?

Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah? No, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah, yeah, something I'm very familiar with the medicine. It
was literally just talking to a group of medical students
just yesterday about this, and I prepared them and I said, listen,
you're going to have imposter syndrome, and you're going to
have it for probably the next thirty to forty years.
It's never going to go away.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
I get told, well, then you're going to turn into
an assholeho thinks you know have better than all the
people who actually have been to med school more recently,
no more recent stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Exactly, or you find a way to have both, which
is what a lot of doctors do. Okay, to be
assholes with imposter syndrome.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
Okay, So for anyone who's unfamiliar with this man, which
is totally fair. The short version is that there was
an english Man who first wrote under and then lived
under the name George Orwell, but that wasn't his birthname.
He fought in the Spanish Civil War, where he was
soured on authoritarian leftism because of what he saw there.

(13:00):
He almost was killed by He stayed committed to democratic socialism,
but he wrote two of the most famous books ever
written against totalitarianism, the book Animal Farm, about a bunch
of farmyard animals that have a revolution, only to have
one group of those animals decide that they are more
deserving than the other animals, and the book nineteen eighty four,
about a totalitarian society that tries to control how everyone

(13:21):
thinks and how much that sucks. And he is famously
quoted by all kinds of people, including the kinds of
people that he actually threw grenades at fascists, and so
we're gonna talk about him. George Orwell was born Eric
Arthur Blair on June twenty fifth, nineteen oh three. People

(13:43):
often say George Orwell was a pen name, and you'll
kind of run across people and like, ah, I know
his real name. It's Eric Blair. It was a chosen name.
By the end of his life, the only people called
him Eric were like bank managers and shit, like you
saw Eric when he signed the checks, because he never
changed the paperwork on his name. I'm a fan of
choosing your owname. So I'm going to go with George throughout,
not because it's like a dead name to call him Erica,

(14:04):
but just you know, it's what I mean.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
My only question is like, it's not I don't like
why why?

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, it's a horizontal move. It's like, yeah, this man
name is this man named?

Speaker 3 (14:15):
I mean, Eric Arthur Blair also sounds like a pretty
cool author name, like why why not?

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Okay, George is a more working class name. It's sort
of like going by Joe in America, liking Joe the
Plumber or whatever. You know.

Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, it's still like.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Every man name, and he wants an every man name
because he's a middle class dude. Wo has imposter syndrome
as a working class person, right, because he wants to
be working classes. It's like his whole thing. It's in
nineteen eighty four too.

Speaker 4 (14:42):
I just think his entire like ethosis imposter syndrome. That's
my Yeah, no's my theory going in.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
I I actually and I want to see whether you
readdress it at the end, but I think it's just
going to get reinforced and orwell. Is the name of
a river that he lived in?

Speaker 4 (15:02):
That's nice?

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, No, it's I think it's perfectly sweet. He was
born in Motihari, India, into not money but like English
fanciness and colonial evil.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
He is his.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Great grandfather Charles Blair. His great great grandfather, Charles Blair
was a rich and powerful slaver who made his money
owning people in Jamaica and married the daughter of an earl.
George's dad, Richard Blair, worked in the Opium Department and
the British Colonial Project in India, overseeing the growth of
opium and its sale to China.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
So not good, Yeah, that this is This is a
more interesting start than I expected. I was expecting something
a lot more like, you know, uh, English downtrodden, like
industrial revolutionary sort of vibe. Yeah, it's worldly. I'll give
him that. It's worldly.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
And what's interesting too is that his like the way
he says middle class, I'm like, is different than what
America thinks of his middle class, because middle class in
America is like a working class thing on some level.
England is fucking weird about class. Orwell described his upbringing
as lower upper middle class, which meant that they had

(16:20):
the prestige and thought well of themselves of the upper
middle class, but they had no money, so they were
lower middle class. So they were a lower upper middle class.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
Right, very showy, but didn't have a lot of maybe
like house rich, but like not otherwise.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
With yeah, and like position of power in evil colonial
government rich right right when he was one, his mom,
who was a feminist and a suffragette and an activist,
we I don't know as much about us. I kind
of wish I had. It's only there's so much written
about this man. His mom packed him up and moved

(16:58):
him back to England, whereupon he had a childhood that
he relentlessly described as miserable, and all of his childhood
friends are like that boy was happy, life was good.
He's just being dramatic. It's like consistent. There's like multiple
times through this period where he's like, he writes these
essays about what a fucking miserable life he had, and

(17:20):
he's like kind of a poser about being miserable in
some ways, although he is a he has a hard life.
Don't get me wrong. He's gonna die at forty six.
Oh wow, he survives getting shot through the neck. I
already spoiled that part. Like he's a he's an interesting life.
He did some British people shit, like he went off
to boarding school. He went to a place called Eton
that is fancy as hell.

Speaker 4 (17:40):
Oh fuck yeah, you ever heard of it?

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah? Yeah, it's what's called public school. And because British
people have everything backwards, because it's a private school, I
finally for this episode looked up what the fuck that means.
I've known this for a long time that public school
means private school if you're in England, and it means
like fancy ass shit. Right, it's called public school. This's
got its name because even though it's a private school.
As long as your parents could pay your tuition, you

(18:03):
could go regardless of like where your parents lived or
what they did for a living. But it's where the
rulers of the empire and shit go right.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Very confusing.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
England is a weird, complicated class night Maryland where there's
an Eaten accent. I didn't know that, and so you'll
be judged your entire life, like positively or negatively because
you have an Eton accent.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
It's like the Ivy League sort of accent.

Speaker 4 (18:28):
Sort of Okay, Hugh Laurie played House MD. You want
to eat in? And I just think that's fun to
tell my friend doctor Phota.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Of the House of Pod.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
True, we're not named after that, no, I must say,
but I love to tell you that. Yeah, No, I went.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
To eaton right, Yeah, of course we all went to
eat in here.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
Listen to me. You can hear it in my voice.

Speaker 4 (18:54):
It's like a very popular school for politicians and like
nepotism and miss actors. Yeah, it's yeah. Josh James stout
what he thinks of Eden.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
I will he George or what was a scholarship boy
at Eton because his parents didn't have any money, and
he had, like, did well enough at prep school to
get scholar I.

Speaker 4 (19:15):
Imposter syndrome with theory is just getting because they were
they were so mean to him, were they they were horrible?

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Well, he wrote that they were incredibly mean to him
constantly for being a scholarship boy.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Everyone else from that time in that school is like,
what are you talking about? He played sports with us,
We liked him.

Speaker 3 (19:36):
He might just be a sensitive guy.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
He is super sensitive, but makes a good artist.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
Yeah, I feel that.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
Like, honestly, he's into sports. He grows up to be
not a small person. More academic sources he's six foot two.
More personal sources he's six foot four, So no one's
arguing yet he is small.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
He's also sickly his entire life. He has two intense
spouts of pneumonia as a kid, and he never fully
re covered. He finishes school. Everyone else is off to university.
George wants to be different. He wants adventure. He wanted orientalism.
He wanted to go become a cop in Burma. Oh well,

(20:16):
what a choice. I know. The two worst things he
did he did when he was eighteen years old. One
of them was going to be a cop in Burma.
He's a sensitive guy, and now I'm gonna talk about
the other worst thing he did. Sensive guy trying to
fight it. He was trying to fight his sensitive nature.
That's what's happening. That's how I'm putting this together in
my home. I know, and I think he wants orientalism.
He wants like adventure and shit. And he also doesn't

(20:37):
have a critique of the colonial project. Yet he's going
to get one by becoming a colonial cop like he
does the best case what all cops should do, which
is quit, is what he does, and then spend the
rest of his life writing against the system that he
was a part of.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
But the other thing that he's going to spend the
rest of his life regretting. If you read between the
lines in one direction and then completely ignore that he
did if you read between the lines and the other direction.
Is the reason that I wrote off George Orwell for
a long time, because I knew this, even though it
only kind of came out more recently. Most overviews of
his life glide right past this. He tried to rape

(21:14):
his best friend after she friend zoned him when he
was eighteen, years old, and people who don't talk about it.
To be fair, no one talked about it at all.
Didn't No one learned this until he'd been dead for
about fifty years. Historians like to quabble, quibble whatever about
how to characterize it. Sometimes they call it assault or
attempted rape. Wikipedia called it, calls it a botched seduction.

(21:40):
His friend that this happened to, by the end of
her life is not mad about it and saw him
as the one who got away and wished she'd married him.
It is complicated. What he did is not complicated. The
long term impact, the way that that move, other parts
of it are complicated. When he was a kid, he
became super close friends with the family, two sisters and

(22:01):
a brother. When he's like eleven or whatever. The sister
is about two years older than him, and his name
Jacyntha Buddhicum, and the story of how they met sounds
like a twee British novel. This thirteen year old girl
goes out into her family's garden and there's this eleven
year old boy standing on his head. She says, what
are you doing? And I've read two versions of this.

(22:21):
He either says, quote you are noticed more if you
stand on your head than if you're a right way up.
I've also read you notice more if you stand on
your head then either way. Fucking twee novel. Shit, it's
real cheshire Cat like Alice in Wonderland.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
Have you ever stood on your head? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (22:42):
I have?

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, that's great. They become friends young George while he's
Eric at this point. They become close friends and they
hang out all the time, talking about poetry and books
and how they're going to become great writers together and shit.
And she becomes a poet and he becomes a famous writer.
He thought they would be more than friends and she didn't.
And it gets really kind of into in cul territory

(23:06):
before the assault. It's almost kind of funny. His first
love poem probably was to her when he was about
fifteen years old. It's called the Pagan because the Buddhicoms
were agnostics and their school was like being weird them
about it, like we might kick out your whole family
because you don't believe in God or whatever you know.
And the poem starts, and to be clear, he's fifteen

(23:28):
when he writes this, So here are you? And here
am I? Where we may thank our gods to be
above the earth, beneath the sky, naked souls, alive and free.
And she writes back this critique, so she's like trying
to cleverly just friendz him. She's like, hey, maybe change
naked to unarmored. Oh yeah, that's a much better choice,

(23:49):
I know. So he wrote back her another. He wrote
her another poem, Friendship and love are closely intertwined. My
heart belongs to your befriending mind, but chilling sunlit fields,
cloud shadows fall, my love can't reach your heedless heart
at all.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
Great, that's I mean, that is pure cringe low. Yeah,
young teenager. I feel the discomfort in my stomach. I
get the clamps. You think about something you did that
was really embarrassing. That's what's happening to me hearing this.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
She writes back. By light too bright, our dazzled eyes betrayed.
It's best to rest content and tranquil shade.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
So I'm not as literary as you, because you're an
excellent writer, and I write basically progress notes on patients.
But it sounds very much so that He's like, I'm
so into you, And she is very deafly and artfully
being like, I'm going to have a little fun with

(24:56):
this game, but also make it clear that it's not
going anywhere and that you need to chill.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
Yeah, and what he should have done is chill out
by listening to advertisements in the middle of an anti
capitalist podcast.

Speaker 3 (25:08):
Works for me.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
And we're back. Yeah, no, exactly. It's a he's writing
love poetry and she's writing just friends poetry, right, you know,
just friend's poetry. Yeah, this genre, I know. They go
on walks daily. Then one day, when he was eighteen,
as recounted by a family friend quote, he had attempted
to take things further and make serious love to Jacyntha.

(25:39):
He had held her down. By that time, he was
six foot four and she was under still under five
feet and though she struggled yelling at him to stop,
he had torn her skirt and badly bruised a shoulder
and her left hip. When Jacynthia yelled to stop, Eric
let her go. Jacyntha ran home crying. They never saw
each other again.

Speaker 4 (25:58):
Oh, he's a best he's a piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
This is yeah, this is the like people are mad
at orwell for the wrong reasons. This is an understanding.
This is why I completely wrote off Orwell for years. Honestly,
it's because I knew this part of the story, and
to skip around in this timeline, the timeline of his
life a little bit, just to finish out her story. Okay,
So Orwell comes home from Burma five years later, and

(26:24):
he had a ring ready to propose because he's still
in love with her and whatever, this is an insult.
He stays at her aunt's house and Orwell called her
in London, begging her to come visit, and she refused,
and he never found out why. He assumed, and this
would be a perfectly legitimate assumption that this was because
she was mad about what he'd done. It actually wasn't.

(26:45):
She refused to come visit because she had just had
a kid with some random dude and who had then
ditched her, and then she was trying to put the
kid up for adoption and she was busy. Decades later,
as he's on his deathbed, they reconnected through letters, and
he to her he was the one who got away.
Decades later, in the nineteen seventies, she wrote a memoir

(27:07):
called Eric and Me about their time together, and she
did so after quote a lifetime of ghosts and regrets
at turning away the only man who ever appealed on
all levels. How I wish I had been ready for
betrothal when Eric asked me to marry him on his
return from Burma. It took me literally years to realize
that we are all imperfect creatures, but that Eric was
less imperfect than anyone else I'd ever met. And this

(27:32):
is so interesting to me, because fuck, what a bar
The bar that the other men aren't passing is to
be better than the man who assaulted her.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
Yeah, did she address it in that book?

Speaker 2 (27:47):
I don't know. I haven't read that book. I think
I read about how the story of it came up,
and like there's a lot of like it's all little
bit third hand about what happened. Like literally, the quote
that I read about what happened is the most direct
retelling in print of what happened. And it was her

(28:10):
sister's friend recounting it and none of this, like and
the fact that she then is like, oh, he's the
one who got away, none of that because she kind
of had a pretty sad life. I think this doesn't
excuse what he did, But I I think that you
end up with this thing that informs his writing where
he sees men as monstrous because he sees himself as

(28:35):
monstrous because of what he had done. And it's interesting,
it's not I don't.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
Know, Yeah, that's that's that is such a tough situation.
I mean, clearly there's some real trauma there for both
of them.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
And and way more for her obviously.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Yeah, obviously way more for her. And it made it
even worse by the fact that, like comparatively, she still
holds him on a pedestal, you know. Yeah, that's it
really just goes to show like how bad the interactions
with these other men in her life must have been,
including probably this guy that she had had the kid

(29:15):
with who knows. Yeah, I mean sounds terrible on all lands.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
No, I know, and it yeah, And so now I'm
just going to get into all the stuff that the
bad stuff about orwell that.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
People talk about, just to do it. Let's get into it.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Before we talk more about his life. There's an awful
lot of arguments about whether or not Orwell was a
misogynist or a feminist or sort of neither. His writing
is like the Bible, there's so much of it written
at such different times that it's really easy to take
quotes out of context and paint whatever picture you want.
His male protagonists are almost universally misogynistic. The protagonist of
nineteen eighty four is violent fantasies. For example. The only

(29:51):
female protagonist he ever wrote was in a book called
A Clergyman's Daughter, which is one of these books that
I haven't read, but he also wishes he hadn't published.
In that the protagonist is by an older man, and
then they become friends, and it is generally considered his
worst book, including by him. He does not know how
to write women well. He also hated this book and
in his will asked for it to not be reprinted.

(30:13):
He told his friend it was the worst book he
ever wrote, and he'd only published it because he'd been
so hard up for money and then for fun. Counterexamples
to his misogyny later in life. There's this story recounted
by a different man who doesn't use the name of
the woman involved. There's this like they're in this literary
scene together, all these mostly men, and there's this young
ha woman in the literary scene, and you know it's

(30:34):
like written as like, oh, every head turned when she
walked by, et cetera. Later, that woman complains about all
of the men in the literary circle on how they
objectifire except or Well, the only person who didn't creep
on her and didn't treat her as a woman, but
as a person. I have read so many interpretations of
Orwell and misogyny, like I wish this hadn't been such.

(30:56):
I understand why I had to be such an large
part of my research for this because of this that
he had done. You know, Yeah, there's a lot of
convincing arguments from every position I leaned towards sort of
that he portrayed more misogynist men, not out of unconscious misogyny,
but out of attempting to draw attention to his own misogyny,
at least later in life. I think his earlier writing
is unaddressed misogyny.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
I can I ask a question about that, And this
is I guess, a bigger question on writing. Like the
fact that his characters are misogynistic, it doesn't necessarily mean
that he was embracing that, right. I mean, because I
always felt like his characters were all flawed, and he
wanted to show that they were all deeply flawed, and

(31:39):
like the fact that they were misogynistic feels like him
critiquing it. It feels like he did that on purpose,
to be like, this is a bad trait.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, I think overall that's true, And yes, absolutely, we're
actually currently in an era where people are having a
little bit of a hard time separating a care character
from the author. On the other hand, we're also in
a time where people are getting better at not letting
misogynist male writers get away with being like, no, it's
just my character, because there are absolutely people who are

(32:11):
just like, oh, it's just my characters who are all
racist pieces of shit. I'm totally great, you know.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yeah, And I.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
Think that there are people who do a better job
of it than or well of like making it clear,
because he believed in very clear writing, right, and so
I think this is an actual weak spot of his
because I don't think he successfully always addressed this. But
it is a little bit my impression because keep the
aspertise for flying, for example, seems like a critique of

(32:39):
the We call them googles in my scene, and this
is like not a word that anyone else uses. Okay, googles,
I'm going to learn there's a word called Google. An
oogle is a crusspunk who like lives out of a
backpack and travels around and eats trash and lives in squats.
I was an oogle for a very long time. It's
a slightly pejorative word, but but it's a very reclaimed

(33:01):
one and it only exists in this tiny, weird subculture. Okay,
So from there we get other words, like a Google
is a dog. Google, it's the dog that lives with
the yougle Okay, right, a Google is a boo, that's
an oogle. So if you live on your if instead
of living on someone's couch, which would be googling, you
live in someone's bed and your partner pays rent and

(33:23):
you don't, that's called googling googling.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
And I think he's critiquing that. It's possible he wasn't.
It's possible he was just unconsciously so lost in his
own character's head.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
But when I read that when I was like twenty,
I thought he was critiquing it, and I was not
in a particularly good I was, so I that's my read.
My read is that he is on some level trying
to critique misogyny but not doing a particularly adepth job
at it and sometimes falling into it.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
Let me ask a super naive question, and I don't
ask this to justify.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
I don't know gennology of Google, right, No, no, no.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
Sorry, I'm gonna google that later.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
Oh it's not it doesn't exist. No one knows it.
Oh anyway, Okay, Well, I have a friend who is
like a master's degree who used to be a no Google,
who tried to figure it out.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Probably continue on it. Okay, So I don't ask this
question to join to justify in any way misogynistic writing.
But were there writers of his time? I'm assuming there
are that you felt did a better job of writing
women's voices male writers, I mean, or were they all
pretty terrible at this point? I mean, I don't know

(34:34):
if they're better now, honestly, and I feel like I
should read more, but like especially.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
At the time, I am not certain, which is funny
because this is the era I used to like read
a lot, you know, when I was like a young,
pretentious teenager, I read an awful lot of like Turn
of the Century up to about nineteen fifty, like good literature.
I liked all the literature. I don't have an immediate
answer for you. I think that overall that that cadre

(35:00):
of writers tended to be pretty bad at it. But
I'm sure there's exceptions that I'm not thinking of right now.
And obviously there were women writing too, but they were
generally not held up.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
I'll wait for reddit.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
Yeah, so I think he never really understood women, and
he sometimes tried. That's how I feel. He was also
casually homophobic his entire life, and this was never really addressed.
People like to argue about this one. He absolutely used
anti gay slers a bunch, and he tended to look
down on homosexuality. He also and I haven't found the

(35:36):
source on this, I found someone talking about it. He
wrote how there was a bunch of homosexuality and all
boy boarding schools and how that was a positive thing overall.
How So, he wasn't like I hate the gaze. He
never wrote like I hate the gaze. He just like
was casually like, oh that nancy over there.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
You know?

Speaker 3 (35:55):
Did he actually use that term?

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah? He used nancies and like fancy boys and stuff.
I think a bunch or like he's nancy boys and
pansies I think is what he used.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
Kind of disappointed kind of feel like he as a
literary guy, he could have come up with something better.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, one of his rules
of writing is don't use the same cliches very jargony. Yeah, no, totally.
He was also a huge admirer of Oscar Wilde, who
was famously gay in prison for being gay, and Oscar
Wilde was one of his first major political influences, and
he was very supportive when his friend, the anarchist historian
George Woodcock wrote a history of wild One. Author Anna

(36:32):
Funder connects misogyny and homophobia when she says that she
writes about how one of Orwell's wives is like main wife.
He has one wife that he married like two months
before he died, but Eileen was his main wife for
many years. She's generally erase from his history, and I
hold by the that was a conscious choice, but I
could be wrong. She claims. This author claims that Orwell

(36:55):
had no sexual interest in women and would have been
happier in a time when homosexuality was more I don't
buy this. I haven't seen all of our evidence, but
I don't buy it. I have not seen any I
would be the first to believe and want to believe
that he was gay, right, like all super into claiming
as many of our heroes as queer as possible. Right,

(37:18):
he spent a while fighting in Spain and the Revolution,
where there was like a ton of out gay officers
and soldiers, and he would have had every opportunity to
be in gay relationships, and this and that. I don't know,
so people like to argue all of these things. Then finally,

(37:38):
of the of his big blind spots, there's this early
anti semitism, And this one's the easiest. I can like
this one, I have like I can tell you the
story of it. His earliest writings were explicitly and grossly
anti semitic. He talked about Jews having brought on their
own treatment on themselves. His characters were anti Semitic, But
so was he right, and everyone kind of knew it.

(38:00):
Throughout the nineteen thirties, this is really present in his writing.
He has a ton of friends who are Jewish. This
doesn't fix it until one day it does. One of
his Jewish friends in about nineteen forty challenges him on
all of it, and Orwell changes his mind. He is
presented with evidence, he changes his mind, he's always attached

(38:21):
to common decency instead of ideology, right, and he believes
that it's good to change your mind. He wrote, anti
Semitism is simply not the doctrine of a grown up person.
People who go in for that sort of thing must
take the consequences, and he means social consequences. He's a
very big free speech guy, but he's a very big

(38:41):
shame people for being fucked up. Yeah, and he went
on to write an essay called Anti Semitism Britain, exploring
this problem at great length to a very wide audience.
But it's funny because I now run across essays that
I claim he was anti Semitica's whole life, even during
this period, and I was like, oh fuck, reading all
these and reading it was like one that definitely says this,

(39:03):
and one that kind of says it, and they're The
main claim is because at the end of his life
he was like, I hate anti Semitism. I'm still anti Zionist.
Zionism is nationalism and bad and colonialism is bad. And
because he said that in the nineteen forties, this is
why some Zionist people still find it it's anti Semitic.

Speaker 3 (39:24):
He's man in some ways he's he's cutting edge, like
he is. Yeah, this is he's winning me back a
little bit. Now that's back.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, that's where I was. I was like, I don't
know if I'm ever going to do an Orwell episode
because I loved his books as a kid, right and
I knew about the fighting in Spain thing, But I
keep seeing right wing people posting about him. Yeah, and
I'm like, if nothing else, he was a democratic socialist.
He was just kind of shitty to women, you know,
And so then I like, I was like, all, I'm
gonna do an episode about him, and then he he

(39:55):
kind of won me back while I was doing the episode.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
Yeah, he's winning me. Now you're taking me on a
journe on this one.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
And he had his life was a journey. You know.
It's like if there's a like, there's a reason we
try as a society not to always hold people to
the single worst thing that they did when they were
eighteen years old, you know, and what they do about
it later is what is the most impactful. Obviously his

(40:21):
actions still had impact, and I'm not trying to deny that.
But so the other worst thing he did is he
went to Burma. Let's go back to that. Well, actually,
first he went on to a journey into the land
of advertisement. Well, actually, eventually it's gonna come up war
propagandas that's kind of the same, here's some ads. We're

(40:49):
back so young George still Eric. At this point, he
goes to Burma and he becomes a colonial cop. Burma
at this part was part of British India. And one
good thing that happened came out of this. When he
went to India, he had had a mustache that was
a style at the time. You might know it is
the toothbrush mustache. You more likely know it as the hitler.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
Fortunately, chaplain, Yeah, he had a chaplain. Fortunately, the style
at the time for colonial officials over there was a
pencil mustache. So he switched to a pencil mustache and
then kept that the rest of his life and always
the like kind of the slum in it, like I
want to be with the locals.

Speaker 4 (41:27):
Guy.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
He gets sick hand tattoos in the local style on
his fingers. Nice and he realizes really quickly that a
lot of the Burmese people don't like him at all,
And soon he realizes that the Empire is fucking evil.
He got sick there while he was there, because he
did that a lot, and that was one of his
past times, was getting sick and.

Speaker 3 (41:52):
Yeah, getting sick.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah. And in nineteen twenty seven he goes back to England.
He goes back a little bit early on, like sick leave,
and he's like, man, fuck being a colonial cop. I
am fucking done. I am never doing that again. And
he never did it again. When he left for Burma,
he had no politics. He came back first and foremost
anti colonial. At this point he also became a socialist,
starting off as an anarchist. Soon he's gonna end up

(42:16):
a democratic socialist with close friends who are anarchists. He
wrote about it that he had developed quote an anarchistic
theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always
does more harm than the crime, and that people can
be trusted to behave decently if only we let them alone.
And this probably comes kind of almost word for word
from Oscar wild because Wilde's essay the Soul of Man

(42:38):
under Socialism is basically what Orwell just said. So he's
back from Burma and now he starts doing his like
slum in it. He's like all right, well I can't.
I shouldn't go explore exotic locales overseas. That was kind
of fucked up. I'm going to do it at home.
So he dresses up as a tramp. He starts wandering
around and he puts together one of his first books

(43:00):
that people read. It's called Down and Out in Paris
in London, and he gets sick of bunch doing that,
and he starts writing a bunch and then he kind
of like, if you pretend to be poor long enough,
you kind of end up poor.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Dressed for the job you want.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, and uh, and somebody's like sick, he's staying in
shitty hospitals and stuff, and it's like fox his health up.

Speaker 1 (43:19):
You know.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
He's like committed to the bit committed. Yeah, until eventually
he's he realizes he's middle class and he moves back
to his parents' house.

Speaker 3 (43:28):
Yeah. I was gonna ask.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
I was gonna ask when that part of the story
arc happened. Yeah. Eventually he's like, all right, that's enough
of that.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
Is there an oogling term for someone that does that,
that moves back in with their parents?

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Well, okay, so it's kind of funny. Is that the
word oogle used to mean a poser street kid, so
like originally in like the early aughts, and Google was
or well, right, like someone who's a fake Oogle who's
going to move back with his parents. But those of
us middle class dropouts fake Googles like me, we tended

(44:00):
to call the oogle meant more of the like fighty shitty,
like stabby guy right who's like drunk all the time
or whatever. So to some people the oogle thing is
to be the middle class kid, and to other people
the Google is like the more real anyway.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
I'm so I feel I'm going to I can't wait
to use this knowledge. I don't know how or when,
but I am going to drop this at some point
in the near future.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
I have never found a word that is more completely
suffused within a scene and completely opaque to people outside
the scene. Yeah, Like, I have never used this word
in like company that isn't punks, like especially street punks,
and had anyone know what I'm talking about. But this

(44:48):
is a word that is.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Like now and me. Now you can use it with me.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
I'm cool exactly. Yeah, you can call me an Google
or when I'm acting like an oogle. Okay, let's get
the Jordan. But it's it's fine. So and then he
moves back with his parents and he does stuff that
totally matters, and I'm not as interested in this week's story.
He writes a bunch of books, including the ones he
later rejected entirely in which he hadn't written. He took
on the name George Orwell at this time, and it's

(45:14):
also kind of partly a way to leave his childhood
behind and make a clean break for who he wants
to become. In nineteen thirty five, he meets his wife
to be Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and before they get married, he
goes off slumming again up north and he writes The
Road to Wigan Peer, and he actually does really good
stuff with his slumming it. The Road to Wigan Peer

(45:36):
is this like, look at the conditions that the working
class and the north live in because people don't know it.
And it's basically a call for a socialism that isn't
caught up in like intellectual bullshit in jargon. He's like,
if we can't talk about socialism in a way that
matters to the miners, why are we doing it? This
gets him put under state surveillance, where he remains until

(45:56):
he dies.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
Oh wow, it's real nineteen eighty I know.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
But he's also part of the propaganda machine in the government.
It's he's woven in. It's interesting he gets married nineteen
thirty six. In nineteen thirty six, Franco staged a coup
in I wrote into this script France, which would be
a whole different story. He staged a coup in Spain,
and the Blairs are like, what, we gotta go fucking
do something about that, don't we. And the short version

(46:25):
of the Spanish Civil War you can get the long
version from like half the episodes I've ever done, is
that Spain finally managed to get itself into being a republic,
but then Franco, a fascist, invaded his own country and tried,
after he tried to stage a coup, and then it
failed because republican troops and anarchist militias threw down to
stop it. Militias ran to the front to hold back fascism,

(46:45):
while meanwhile, social revolution spread across the country and in
Barcelona and Catalonia. More broadly, millions of people started living
in an anti state, socialist life. People thought the Western
powers like France, UK and the US would help them
out because after all, they are committed to the democracy
and the republic and blah blah blah. Right, Yeah, the

(47:06):
Western governments turned their back on Spain completely. They not
only did they not show up, they blockaded aid into
the country. Only Stalin showed up to help, but there
were serious strings attached. Communists as in loyal to the USSR.
Folks were a distinct minority like politically, they were a

(47:27):
tiny fraction of the left in Spain at the time,
but if you wanted Daddy Stalin's help, you gotta let
them be in charge. And that soon turned out very badly,
with the communists going to literal war against the Republic
and the anarchists, and it's messy and bad. But this
hasn't happened yet. When the Blairs go down, well, the
Orwell if she never changes her name to Orwell, Eileen

(47:50):
goes with him. Yeah. A few months later, the Republic
is in danger and the governments of the western countries
aren't helping. But people from those countries and from other
countries around the world. Mexico shows up really hard. I
can't remember all of the countries. An awful lot of
leftists from around the world are like, we're going to

(48:12):
go fight fascism. George and Eileen are among them. On
December twenty third, nineteen thirty six, George Orwell sets off
to Spain. At first, he's like, I'm going to go
be a journalist, but as soon as he gets there,
he sees the revolution and he's like, all right, sign
me up, let's go. He actually has a good quote

(48:33):
that I didn't include in here for some reason, where
he's like, look, I don't understand it all. There's like
anarchist banners everywhere and hammers and sickles and shit, but
everyone's like in charge of themselves and that's pretty cool
and I don't need to and some of this scares me,
but this seems like something worth defending. And that's my
paraphrase of him. Yeah, but I will give his direct
quote quote. When I joined the militia, I had promised

(48:53):
myself to kill one fascist. After all, if each of
us killed one, they would soon be extinct.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
It's beautiful and simple.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
I know, I know that's lovely. Anyway, we're not sure
if he killed anyone or not. Firefights and bomb fights
are like that. He absolutely shot at fascists, and he
also fought. He gotten like a bayonet fight with a
fascist who ran away. No, that's pretty that counts for something.

(49:24):
Come on, yeah, no, I give him credit more than
I have ever done. Yeah, and how all that went,
we'll talk about on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (49:34):
Oh, that'll wait until I don't know.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
You totally have to wait till Wednesday. Five minutes breaks
a week on all go to the bathroom before we record.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
Okay, I'm a pick and be right back.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Okay, yeah, no, So, so how's orwell, how how are
you feeling about this man?

Speaker 3 (49:53):
You kind of laid out the grand work perfectly, like
I understood there's gonna be some deeply problematic parts. It
was a little bit of a dip from me emotionally.
I'm on my way back up. I think he's I
think it's very interesting. I'm a little disappointed I didn't
work in a Dexy's Midnight Runners reference with Eileen oh Bo.
But maybe I'll get to it in the second episode.

(50:15):
And I'm really I'm loving it. This is great, Like,
this is an amazing interesting character, and he's so I mean,
I don't know if he's misunderstood just because I don't
know enough about him, but I you're what you said
is exactly right. He is just so woven into pop
culture and references from everything from like stuff we watched

(50:36):
when I was growing up to like the Boys now
on TV. Everything is woven in this just Orwellian these
Orwellian ideas. So to learn more about him, I think
is really important. So, yeah, no, it's great.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
I more and more as I was like reading all
this stuff, I was like, Oh, this man fundamentally changed
the world, and we don't know what the world would
be like without him. And there are some ways in which,
because of how grossly misused he has been, there's some
ways in which it got worse right in other ways,

(51:11):
And I think overall, I think in broad strokes, I
think he did maybe more to combat the spread of
totalitarian ideology through his writing than anyone in the English language.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Huge, Yeah, And and we'll talk more about that on Wednesday,
But first we'll talk about your podcast and anything else
you want to talk about.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
I have a podcast is called The House of Pod.
It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. We will look
at the intersections of public health and pop culture and
social inequities and cover some pretty fun topics with great guests,
a lot of people that you'll already know from listening

(51:53):
to this podcast. And it's a ton of fun. And
I know you might not think that it would be
because you're like, I don't want to It sounds a
little bit medically and nerdy and sciencey, and it's not
that much. It's because we are kind of anti jargon.
So you will like it. I think if you don't,
you know, we'll send you a nicol.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
It took me like three times to finally figure out
because House of Pod makes so much sense obviously as
a play on House of God. Ah, it took me
so long to figure that out.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
Well, I mean, you're not the target audience for that book.
I mean, I mean I'm glad. Did you read it?

Speaker 2 (52:34):
No?

Speaker 3 (52:34):
No?

Speaker 2 (52:34):
Wait wait wait does a book or House of God?

Speaker 3 (52:36):
No? I don't know how god. So the House of
God is a book that was ranked one of the
best satires of all time. It's a medical book that
was one of the first books about like medicine that
showed medicine in a realistic light. It came out like
forty five years ago or something. I have the author
on the show Actually it's a problematic book and some

(52:59):
very serious ways in this depiction of minorities in particular
and misogyny. But it was the first book to really
kind of show the world of medicine in a realistic way,
and it is like a satire and it's actually, you know,
pretty brilliantly written overall by this guy who was a doctor,
and it's that's kind of what we're trying to do

(53:21):
with the show is kind of peel back the curtain
on the world of medicine and show you like, this
is kind of what it's really like. This is what
doctors are actually like when they're talking to them each other,
and you know, they're not trying to put up a
fake front. And I hope through the whole process that
we kind of, you know, break down people's anxiety about
medicine or make medicine more approachable to people.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
That's kind of the overall goal of it. So but yeah,
it's based on a book called The House of God. Okay,
that makes so much sense. Yeah, I knew that House
of God was sometimes a word that people use for
like hospitals and stuff, but I don't thah totally. And
so that was like Oh, I get it, and I
felt so clever, But now I get it actually, and uh,
totally glad I learned it on air or whatever. I

(54:04):
guess my whole thing with my podcast is I make
guests come on and talk about things they don't know.

Speaker 3 (54:08):
Oh, but I'm so good. Listen again, I have to
apologize to your listeners. I'm so sorry you have. You're
all listening right now and being like what These are
the most basic questions. Why isn't he asking?

Speaker 2 (54:18):
No?

Speaker 3 (54:19):
And I'm sorry, I hear you, I hear you. I
know I understand listeners. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Sorry, some of those listeners have those questions. I love.
One of the favorite tricks I've ever learned to get
over imposter syndrome actually in some ways is when I'm
in a crowd and someone's like, especially if I'm kind
of in like if I am like at like a
like a political thing, right. I have enough cred at
this point that if I'm in a political space or whatever,
like enough people kind of know who I am or whatever,

(54:45):
because I've been doing this for twenty years. So if
someone uses jargon, I sometimes I'm like, hey, what does
that mean? Because no one thinks I don't know what
it means, right, and so I'm like, I'm safe to
ask ask the question, you know, but someone needs to
someone needs to say like because like unless it's a
closed space, like people need to be able to understand

(55:08):
what's happening, you know, agreed, I agreed. But if you
want to hear what's happening in Spain of eighty years ago,
then you got a way till Wednesday. Uh oh, I
have a book. It's this God, it's like one of
your last few days. You can kickstart it. What are
you doing? Why haven't you kickstarted yet? Don't you want
to sign? Copy The Sapling Cage, my young adult book.

(55:30):
I actually realized more than I when I'm going through
this or what was actually a more important literary influence
on me than I'd recognize because I was thinking about
how a lot of like my actual the literary here
is that I like read more recently and I care
more about tend to write. I try to write plainly.
I try to write at a fairly like low reading level,

(55:53):
because I think the lowest reading level that you can
say the things that you need to say in as
complicated and nuanced ways as you can or need to
is the goal. I don't want things to be complicated
for the sake of complicated. And actually, upon looking back,
I was like, oh, reading Orwell's stuff on writing was
what I was doing when I first started writing, and

(56:14):
I'm very excited to read the book, so clearly I'm
writing the next nineteen eighty four is my book is
nothing like It's a fantasy book about a witch who
saves the world.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
That's yeah, I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
Yeah, all right, Well, let's see you all Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

Speaker 4 (56:47):
You get your podcasts.