Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Jenkins, and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi. Hi. I'm still liking that your teacher called you Padman.

It was a really cool move.

Yeah, and at a young age, that's cool. Fifth grade, you said? Eighth. Oh.

I was really old.

You just looked like you were in fifth grade.

No, I was very developed.

Very tall. Today's guest is one of my very favorite authors. I've talked about his books a million times on here. Eric Larson. He's a journalist and a best-selling author. He wrote The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake in the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, and of course, The Devil in the White City. Tasty. He has a new book out now that I read and love, and I can't stop thinking about it.

I need to read it.

I brought it up today in our interview with another guest. The new book is called The Demon of Unrest, a saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.

I'll say it's time Family.

Well, what's really fascinating is about it and unique, I think, is most books about the Civil War, they start with the first shot, basically. This is all about how on earth did we get to that point where we were a unified country and then we were divided.

Yeah.

Great book. And he was just a joy.

It was so fun. Really fun to talk to. Yeah. Great stories.

I think he had a good time, which was fun. I hope so. Yeah, we hope so. Please enjoy Eric Larson.

He's an option expert.

He's an option expert. He's an option expert.Hi there.

How are you? I'm good. How are you? Nice to meet you, Eric. Hi. How are you?

I'm getting there.

I heard you just got back from Portugal.

Not a direct flight. Have you been?

Not to Portugal yet, but just about Everybody I know has been Portugal.

I hadn't been either. Yeah, it's like the place to be.

Lisbon is so, so cute. It's crazy.

Huge? Huge.

I haven't seen that word a lot in your writing.Cute?Cute. It's true.

Maybe in the next book.

Yeah, vile. You have a vernacular, and I just don't recall cute being used many times.

I'm thinking now, I don't think I use cute in any of my books. Wow.

Yeah. I would love AI to scan all your written work to see.

That's exciting. Vile was in Connections a couple of days ago. Do you play Connections? No.

It's a really fun game. Eric, we're about to change your life. Do you play any of the New York Times puzzles?

I did do Spelling Bee, and then got burned out. Then I did Wurtle a little bit, but it's just not my thing. My wife is a Wurtle fanatic and a Spelling Bee fanatic.

Connections is going to be for you. So Spelling Bee, let's agree, it's exhausted. It's laborious. Tedious.

Some days it was tedious. You get 276 six words. It's like, yes. Eight pangrams.

Yeah.

I also find it's hard to know when you're cheating at Spelling Bee as well because you want to get a sense of how many words are out there. Now, okay, are you aware of Connections? We'd love to explain it to you.

Vaguely aware of connections. Okay. I've seen it. The grid. And then I've just ignored it.

Okay, listen, 16 words, you're going to put them in four different groups. They range from easy to pretty darn hard. You're already... Oh, no. No, no. Can I I'll tell you this is going to be perfect for your attention span because how long is it taking you? I can do it on the toilet. It takes about 10 minutes.

Well, sometimes if it's too hard and we don't want to run out of... You have four guesses to mess up on. I'll put it down and I'll revisit it later because it's too stressful.

I'm not a word game guy. I'm too impatient.

Is that one of your main character defects? I have many character defects. Oh, I can't wait to learn about it.

That's the least of them.

I have many as well. Let's start in New York City. You're one of the rare guests where when I look on Wikipedia, your parents are a complete enigma. I'd have no clue what they did. What did mom and dad do?

Interesting. Okay, so born in Brooklyn, moved to Long Island.

At what age?

Two. Actually, moved initially to Central Islet, Long Island, but moved from Central Islet because my mother was convinced that people would escape from the state asylum in Central Islet and come and kill us. Then we moved to Maspiqua, and then we moved from there to Freeport, Long Island. But one of my lasting memories of Maspiqua was, and I swear this is true, looking out my back window and seeing a guy who lived on a canal down the street had a World War II torpedo bomber in his backyard with the folded wings and the works. Really? And either I had this really active imagination as a kid or it was real. I believe it. I believe it, too. But anyways, my father was a professor of speech and theater at Brooklyn College. My mother was a sometimes substitute teacher, wrote an occasional mystery story. She had a good for crime and great woman. My father was an only child. That imposed challenges.

Yes.

But in my house, growing up, the selling thing was if we wanted any book whatsoever, we could have it.

Sky was the limit on books.

Just go to mom and dad and say, I'd like this book.

That's a good policy.

It worked out. Look what it produced.

Was all the moving your father taking different jobs?

He was always at Brooklyn College. It's just us moving until we found the right location, right schools. And Freeport at the time was a great place to grow up.

Say the name of the town with a torpedo bomber.

Massapiqua.

Now, Alec Baldwin and Jerry Seinfeld, are they from there?

I don't know where they're from, but they may be Long Island.

I mean, definitely Long Island. I think Massapiqua. Maybe. I feel like they've heard them bond over that.

Lou Reid was from Freeport.

Lou Reid was he doing in the movie? He was a tough gentleman. I tried to buy a song off of him for a movie once, and it was really priced to not move. Really? Yes.

Well, good for him. He knows what he's worth. Well, did he?

Because no one ever put Walk on the Wild Side in a movie because no one could afford it. You You get the whole Beatles catalog for the price of Walk on the Wild Side.

Another stellar locale was Guy Lombardo's restaurant was in freeport, On the Water.

Oh, baby.

That was a real high point in Freeport life.

You must have siblings because you said with great disdain, only child, and I relate, my wife was an only child. Did your father have the unique gift of being able to host a party and then leave in the middle of it and go read a book in his room?

He didn't have that neck, but he had a lot of the characteristics of only children, needy and adverse to compromise. We would periodically, probably disclosing way too much, but as kids, we would occasionally think, God, we wish that our mother would divorce our father.

Okay, sure.

So all kinds of issues.

And you had siblings?

Two siblings. I have an older sister and a younger sister. Okay. Younger sister lives in Tiburon here in California. Older sister lives in New York and has a house in Southampton, as do we, around the corner.

Okay, wonderful. And do you think being raised between two girls had an impact on you? Because I feel like boys who had lots of sisters were good Boys. A little better off. Yeah, a little better off.

I think it had a huge difference. First of all, I've always loved women. What I mean is I much rather have a conversation with a woman than with a guy. I can connect in ways that I can't otherwise.

Yeah, you're allowed to have the full range of emotions around females. You are. And that's verbade around boys.

But that's not to say that I didn't occasionally beat the shit out of my sisters.

Well, sure. That's just natural.

Testosterone. I mean, come on.

I like to think you got your ass kicked once or twice by the older sister, though.

I did.

Okay, good. As long as it was a two-way street. What student were you?

I was a really great student, too good a student. I spent a lot of time studying. I wanted to do well in school, and I did very well.

Yeah, and what was driving that?

There was no pressure from the home front. I think it was mostly or completely self-imposed. Just an innate drive to do well. Luckily, I had the tools.

What do you mean too well? Too much pressure on yourself?

No, too well. Maybe there were other things that I could also have been doing besides studying.

A little more well-rounded. You could have been more social, maybe.

Well, I could have been more social. I always refer to myself to this day as a high functioning introvert. I marvel at the fact that here I am. I write books. Each book takes about four years, very locked down.

Yeah, you research, primarily.

But I'm on my own. Then at the end of the For years, you're expected by your publisher to go out and just blossom like a monarch butterfly and be social.

Charismatic.

Charismatic and engaging. It's just not my nature.

You're right. This is plagued all fronts for writers. There's a personality type. Let's get real. Writers are expected to be salesmen in Hollywood. They have to go in front of a studio, and they have to be great salesmen or women.

This is a very interesting thing. I would fail utterly in Hollywood because, as I understand, a lot of the pitching is oral. Yes, entirely. I'm a terrible oral pitcher. This is why I never tell people what my next project is, because if I talk about what my next project is, the thing I'm afraid of is that the person I'm talking to is just going to glaze over.

Like when I was talking to you about connections.Yes.Just lose you entirely.Yes, exactly.

You noticed that, didn't you?

Yes, I'm observing it.

The idea of pitching something orally is completely alien to me, so I would wither completely. But in what I do, where I choose to do a detailed book proposal for each book, it's my sweet spot.

I was listening to you talk with somebody about the way a book proposal works for non-fiction or specifically some research-oriented book, that unlike a novel where you would go in and pitch a publisher, and perhaps you would have some outline or whatever you would have, the non-fiction world is much more, you described it as, venture capitalist. You hand them a document and it's completely flushed out on a level that you would never do for a novel.

I do. Novels and non-fiction, two completely different worlds. With novels, unless you're really, really, really, really successful, you have to have the novel done before somebody's going to buy that work. Nonfiction, assuming you have some track record, I do a detailed book proposal. My agent tells me now, he says, Look, you don't have to do a detail. Just write a letter. But the reason I do the book proposal is to hold the heebie-jeebies at bay. When I get the contract, the time comes to start the project. I have no doubt that this is a book. But if I just wrote a letter and said, I think I want to write about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah consuming. Deadline is not so much of a thing. For me, once I've got a book proposal, I've got a pretty good handle on what my timing is going to be, except with one project, and that was this project because of the pandemic.

How did it impact?

I conceived this book in March of 2020, just after my book tour for my previous book, Splendid and Vile, About Churchill. After that, had been cut in half by the pandemic. And suddenly, I was at our Southampton pandemic readout with nothing to do. More time on my hands than I had ever expected to have. So I started looking for the next project, but I couldn't do the thing that I usually do. And that is when I think I have an idea, I jump into a physical archive with no pre-planning, just see what's there. And that's a very important step for me. And I could not do it in this case because archives were closed. And even if they were open, I would not have wanted to fly to them or take the train or anything like that. So right away from the start, I couldn't do the things that I wanted to do to make the research proceed the way it should. So it left me behind the curve through much of the project. Interesting. And yet at the same time, I felt that this book had a very definite window into which it should be borne, after which it would lose some of its energy.

And that was this pre-November election period. For one thing, we didn't want to get caught up in the primaries. We didn't want to get caught up in the conventions and all the attention that they would get. But also to everything, there is a season. And I was behind the curve. So this became a really difficult book to do.

Now, I'm assuming that as your books have covered a myriad of different historical topics, the archives you then visit vary greatly, or do you have favorite places you go? Do you have churches?

My church is the Library of Congress, Madison Reading Room. It's the Manuscript division of the Library Congress in DC.

So you'll travel. You're also out of your environment, too, right? You build a little bubble.

Which helps because you just shake everything up. I love going there. It is God's gifts to researchers. It's so civilized. You don't even have to make an appointment, although it's not a bad idea to make sure that suddenly the place isn't packed and you're not going to be able to go. But you got to go through a certain amount of hoops to get in. You got to get a readers card. But then once you're there, just the things that are at your fingertips. Sometimes I just for the hell of it, I would order up the papers of somebody I wasn't even interested in.

Forgive It's all my ignorance. Do you step up to a counter and say, Hey, give me everything you got on...

Yeah, how does this work? Well, more or less, you have basically a call slip. You give it to the guys at the desk and they evaluate, first of all, whether you're allowed to have it. The only standard there is something so fragile Like photographs, for example. You need to wear white gloves. Oh, wow. Then the material comes out, they wheel it out on a cart.

I want to go.

There are all kinds of rules about how you're supposed to take things out of the file box and how you're supposed to put something in each file box to mark exactly where the file came from, and then you just get to go through this material. It was so much better now than when I first started doing research on my books, is that now you can photograph your documents with your iPhone phone, which is such a big benefit because you used to have to bring them up to the desk and ask, Please, may I photocopy this? Then they'd look it over and see if you could photocopy it without damaging it. Then you would photocopy it. It added another 30 % of the time necessary to do your search. Now, I just photograph these things. Now, the flip side of that is my phone will have like a thousand photographs.

Well, I was just thinking that you probably have the boringest photo.

No, the most interesting.

No, no, no. If he says to you, Oh, yeah, let me show you this know what we got. Then you have to watch him scroll through because we're always stuck in this situation where you're watching someone scroll through, and it's just like a reams and reams. I'll come back with a thousand photographs, and then I got to process those photographs.

I say it's a lot easier than it used to be with the photocopy, but One of the benefit there was, at least, you came back with what you needed in the shape you needed it. Now, you come back with a thousand photographs, you got to process them on your computer. Now, also because the image software is so good, you can't resist trying to touch them up and make them clearer, sharper. So suddenly, he's just lost in doing the whole photo thing.

Has it loosened up what would have normally been an editorial process? Because it was so inconvenient, do you think you end up coming home with more shit than you would have in the past? Yeah. I would imagine it's like a gift and a curse a little bit. Why didn't even take a picture of this as you're looking at it?

Actually, I talked to other writers about as well. Yeah, because you can, you do.

Well, it's why people are photographing every mundane thing in the world. Back when you had to buy Fuji film, you pay to get a process. No one's going to fucking have a picture of their toast when you got to go to the drug store to get that process.

No, that is absolutely true. I took a picture of a hamburger yesterday, only because I rarely eat a burger, but I was so hungry. I ordered this burger. It was more architecture than burgers. And I just had to take a picture, send it to my wife. I was a burger fanatic.

Where was it? Was it here?

Yeah, it was at Shutters, at the lobby restaurant.

They do a good burger. Monica and I are a bit of burger files. We love burgers. We tell you, anywhere in the country.

My kids are really partial to In-N-Out burger. Oh, beautiful place. Because we don't have them on the East Coast. Yeah, what a treat. I'm not chilling for In-N-Out burger. For Big Burger.

We are.

I have zero connection whatsoever to them. But I also find that people are very nice at the In-N-Out burger.

You feel like you're time traveling to the '50s when it was still novel and people were stoked to be in a new... Yeah. Even the poor person that's manually chopping the French fries out of the big potatoes. Have you seen them do that?

I mean, it's just a great operation. It is.

When AI takes over, it's going to taste worse for sure.

Yeah, again, robots are so- AI takes over in and out burger.

Yeah. Apparently, there's a place in Pasadena that is run by robots.

There's no humans on site.

I'm skeptical of this. I want to go check it out, but that's the gimmick. The robots bring out the food, and apparently not cooking it.

I'm nervous for teenagers frequenting that place. I know. I think they're interested in what teenagers might do to the robots.

You're not going to find me at that place anytime soon.

Okay, are you ever at the manuscript room, leafing through some documents, does it cross your mind like, I bet McCullo touched this. No. It doesn't.

No, I prefer to think that nobody else touched him but me. But of course, I'm wrong.

But there's overlap.

What would he have done that I've worked on?

I don't know. Well, he wrote 17.

177 is his way before me.

Yeah, I'm trying to think what I read of his that might overlap. That's its own question. That's some foreshadowing. But I guess I have such a romantic imagination. I'd be really excited about the history I'm touching. Then I would also think of my peers that have also been here doing this stuff.

I have to tell you, honestly, I have never once thought about my peers touching what I've been touching. What I have thought about is the person who actually wrote this thing and what the context was. Wow, FDR wrote this. Or in the case of Wilson, in my book about the Lusitania, his love letters that you just got, that virtually steamed with lust. Was he naked when he wrote this? Yeah. What's this lie?

It's incredible how much we know about history through the correspondence between people. The demon of unrest. We're learning so much by what someone's saying to their brother.

Invaluable. And all public domain, which makes it even better. Why? I like writing about the dead. Nobody's going to sue you.

That's true. That is nice.

I was stunned, by the way, with Splendid and the Vial to find that Churchill had copyrighted all his public speeches. They weren't actually public domain. When I worked on Splendid and the Vial, I had to get the rights from the company that controls them. They were quite civilized about it. I think many of them have become now public domain. Don't quote me on that, but I was astonished. He used a public speech. There's this whole thing about we'll fight on the beaches and stuff. That's copyrighted by Churchill? Yeah.

What do you suppose his motivation for that was?

He was an entrepreneur. He wanted to make money off that. He was perpetually short of cash. Okay.

You know what I confused about. I was conflating Chernow because I was thinking of Grant. The only other book I've read in this phase of history is probably Grant.

I admire Ron Chernow, but I definitely don't think a lot about whether he touched this. I think that's good.

Fair. That's fair.

My style, the reason I don't use research assistance is because I want the material to just do me. I want to come to it absolutely fresh. When I'm in an archive, I often don't know what I'm looking for, but I know exactly when I find it. Even on a more elementary level, if I had a research assistant, I said, I want you to find me everything you can about what so and so did on this particular day. It's like plugging into a search engine, and you're going to get exactly back what you asked for. If I'm going into that archive, I'm looking at those things, but then everything that comes out of that file, I'm also curious about, and I am willing to go down every single rabbit hole known to man. If there's something gleaming at the end of that rabbit hole, you never know what you're going to find. The thing you find on an envelope might be more interesting than the thing you find in the envelope.

Or it's like going to the grocery store for bread and coming home with your It's like you just don't know what you're going to do.

It's exactly that way. Yeah, you're walking down the aisles. Even more to the point, I refer to this as the serendipity effect, which is that I love so-called open stack libraries where you can wander and pull your books by yourself. It's common in university libraries but uncommon in some other contexts. Like the New York Public Library, you have to go to the counter and put in your book request, and then they come out. The problem there is you get exactly what you're looking for. But if you're in an open stack library and you see your book on the shelf, and suddenly within 10 books of that book, there are things that are peripherially related, and you never know what's going to pop out.

That is exciting. Sorry, another analogy. In the healthy and days of going to a video store, you'd go for one title. It was always out because you were going for a new release. Then all of a sudden, you're renting some gang movie from the '80s, and you love it.

That takes me back. But I would go to the video store when we had just moved to Seattle, it was the Firehouse video on Capitol Hill. We'd go there with the kids, and we'd look for the videos to watch that night. Always We just came back with things that we didn't necessarily set out to have, which was the fun of it.

That's the price we're paying for being able to order exactly what we want.

I think that is the price that we pay.

Yeah, less discovery.

I'll throw in for the gals. Please. Tripped to Target. Okay, great. You think you're going for toothpaste, and then you will spend $700.

Yes, and have some rugs and some other stuff.

That's right. My wife is a great meanderer when it comes to shopping. When she are in a grocery store or a liquor store or whatever, I walk through Mission Directed. I'm like, Okay, I want this, this, this, and this. I look around, Where's my wife? She's just drifting.

Well, we're nesters.

Nesters. It's genetic. Okay, so in '76, you graduate from Penn with a degree in Russian history.

Russian history, language, and culture. It was my own major.

Okay. What pulled you into that?

My freshman year, Russian history course was taught by a guy who was incredible, this Alexander Ryazanovsky, who unfortunately has died. He was, in fact, an exile Russian Prince.

No way. Out of a Datsievsky book.

Yeah. I mean, he was a total expert on Russian history, and he was a dynamic lecturer. I'd gone to college with the idea that I was going to be a lawyer until I tested that idea out by taking a business law course. Three days later dropped the course because I could not read law books. I could not read histories of legal cases.

You would just zone out.

I mean, just shoot myself more likely.

Right, sure.

But Professor Riazenowski was just this very warm and dynamic guy. He actually, at one point in sophomore year, a couple of us were in his classes. He came over to our dorm to teach us how to drink vodka the Russian way, which was a big mistake I've never been so hung over in my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, As fast as you can. Yeah, first of all, you chill the vodka in a freezer, and then you have it in a little glass, two fingers' worth, and then you drink it down in one shot saying, Na zdrovia.

To your health. What could be more fun than drinking vodka with a professor?My dream.That.

Russian history professor. Yes.

So we took a family vacation. I was probably 22. My sister was probably 17. We all went to Russia. We went into this huge wooden big public dining hall, and it was all picnic tables. And every two people was a fifth, but completely unmarked vodka. When we sat down, we felt like they're anticipating us all drinking a lot of water. We thought it was just 100 water bottles. No water was available. And my whole family, including my mother, we just got shit faced by 11 AM. Where was this? St. Petersburg in probably '97 or something. That must have been so funny. It was wonderful. We barely made it back to the friendship. Okay, did you have favorite Russian authors? Were you drawn to Russian literature?

I was definitely drawn to Russian literature. I've read everything by Tolstoy. Unfortunately, I've read it all in English, except for a couple of small things that I was able to read in Russian. But Tolstoy is my guy.

Okay, I like Dostoevsky.

I like Dostoevsky, too.

Okay, we're not shitting on him.

Not dissing anybody.

But I want to ask you, you just brought up the exact curiosity I have, which is why I like it. There is this detached... I don't know what adjectives I want to use here without offending our Russian-Listeners? Listeners? I don't know.

Just imagine you're talking to Putin and just go for it.

Oh, yeah. I'll let it rip on him. There's like a detached, a little sociopathy. There's something very bleak and interesting about it, and I love it. I have left reading all those books wondering, is that just what happens when you translate Russian English? Because that could also be the mechanism.

That is a very interesting question, one that I've often wondered about, and on my bucket list is, in fact, to read War and Peace in the original Russian. Now, my bucket list is quite deep. I seriously doubt it's ever going to happen, but it would not take me that long to brush off my Russian. I have four intensive years of it, and I got pretty good at it, but then lost it all. But I think I could get that Russian back pretty quick. Then reading, of course, is much less challenging than conversational. Just see what the reading experience was like.

Yeah, I am curious what happens.

I feel the same way about I'm a big fan of Scandinavian noir detective stories. Joe Nesbo, Hedding Mankel, and there's a pair of writers back in the '60s and '70s whose detective was Martin Beck. I don't know if you've read those. No, I haven't. The thing I love about these is the same remoteness. I do wonder how much of that comes from the Scandinavian Gestalt, or how much of that is from the translation effect.

Yeah, it's hard to know.

I I'm going to say I did ask a native Russian speaker who... Oh, you know who's read them both? I might have even asked him, is the wonderful Barrio.

Oh, no. George Sanders.

George Sanders. I think he has read them all in Russian and English. Really? Yes. He's taught all of this. Yeah, he teaches a Russian literature course.

No, I did not know that about George.

Yeah, that's his big kink, I guess. I don't know why we want to say that.

Okay.

Good guy. I met him once at Jeff Bezos. Had this campfire thing. They had a nice conversation with him.

A beautiful human being, right?

He is lovely. Really nice guy. One more thing about Russian history, Russian language. One thing that really compelled me to dive super deep into Russian literature was another professor, a female professor of Russian literature, Marie Jean Lo at Penn, mainly because I was in love with her.

Yeah, sure.

That's a great motivator. That will do it. I was in love with my religion professor, and yeah, I was obsessed with religion for a semester. For a semester.

I got very religious for a semester. It totally got me so deep into Russian. Then I took a separate course just strictly on Tolstoy, a seminar with The thing I realized about War and Peace is that what translation you pick is very important. There are different translations, and there are different advocates of each one, but they are markedly different.

Is there one widely acknowledged as the best?

The one that is typically referred to as the Maud translation.

Okay. I would just be comforted to know that there is some unanimous- Because that would drive me nuts.

Totally. Am I reading the right translation?

Yeah. I'm going to spend a year reading this book by God. It's going to be the best version of it.

Well, I read War and Peace in English. I think it was the same translation each time, but I've read it now three times. What I find so fascinating about War and Peace is that each time you read it, it is like you have lived another life. The first time was when I was quite young. Second time was probably 10, 15 years later. Very different experience because I was older. Yeah, of course. Then I read it again another 10 some years after that, and totally different experience.

That's encouraging. I should do that. I have done that with Catcher in the Right, but my book is Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment is excellent.

I'm certain I know what it's like to have murdered someone and walk around with that on my shoulders going mad from the weight of it. I know what it feels like.

I know what you mean. But the thing about War and Peace, that feeling has not happened to me with any other book that I've read repeatedly. That book, The Emotive Qualities, the Moments in the book, The Oak tree. Those are the things that keep morphing into other things.

It can map on somehow.I like that.

My other absolute all time favorite book is The Maltese Falcon by Dashal Hammond. Oh, I've never read it. I have read that, I don't know, 10 times, but it doesn't change in my life. It doesn't make me think I've lived another life. It just makes me respect more and more Dashiell Hammond and how he did this, because with The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammond created this diaspora of characters that we all take for granted as stereotypes, like Sam Spade. There was no Sam Spade before Dashiell Hammond invented Sam Spade. There was no Casper Gutman before Hammond invented Casper Gutman, all these characters.Archetypes.Yeah, that's the genius. But also the way he writes it, his narrative approach is so interesting. I don't even think I could But talk about a remove. He never tells you what anybody's thinking, but you know everything that's going on.

I'm so intrigued to read it now.

Yeah, me too.

Do a book club.

Read it before you see the film. But the film is absolutely brilliant. And part of the reason it's brilliant, while the casting is unbelievable, but also because the screenplay was essentially the book. No producers' notes on this one.

Yeah, it didn't get bastardized. When you were studying Russian history, there's an element of it that's a little countercultural for you because you're at the height of the Cold War and our fear of the Soviet Union. Did you feel like you were being a little punk rock by spending your time? I'm sincere.

I had zero interest in Cold War, Russian history, Soviet era, anything, post-revolutionary Russian. Absolutely zero appeal to me. So it was a fool's errand to be studying Russian because I knew in my heart of hearts that I was never going to visit Soviet Russia because I didn't want to.

You wanted to go to pre-1917 Russia.

Yeah. Then when things began to warm up and change with Gorbachev and so forth, I started thinking, This is the window. But of course, my life was not at a point where I could take advantage of that. Now it's like, forget it. I have studied three languages, each in considerable depth. I'm probably the absolute wrong person to study languages because I have zero retention. But French, Italian, and Russian. Occasionally, I think to myself, Okay, at this point in my life, I would love to concentrate on one of those languages again. Which should I do? I think about Russian because I just love the way Russian sounds, the flow, but I'm never going to use it. Or do I do Italian? I love Italian. Or should I do French? And then I do nothing.

Listen, Portuguese, that's what I'll do.

I'm going to solve this for you. It's Italian because you would love spending time there. They will enjoy you speaking your terrible version of Italian to them. They'll be charmed by it. When you go to France and muddle up, they're not going to like it. So this is a very easy choice to make. You're just going to study Italian.

Well, I come from a family of Italians. We, for a time, were renting villas in Tuscany with friends. We rent for a couple of weeks at a time. When I was doing in my book, Thunderstrike, which is about Marconi and second most famous murderer in English history, Pauley Harvey Crippen, I knew I'd have to do a lot of research in Italy.

I read this, and he's wandering around villages in France. No? No. I'm conflating that with another.

Yeah, he conflated with some other. Oh, that was the Okay, sorry, sir. But anyway, I knew I had to do a lot of Italian research in Italy. My eldest daughter, she and I studied Italian together. She has the gift, and by the time she was 16, she was essentially fluent. Still is to this day, but she spent a year here, a year there in worked with the State Department. I brought her with me to try to open doors, and absolutely, that was the case because they loved hearing her speak. I remember being at a restaurant in Deruta, a porcelain place, and the waiter looks at my daughter and says, You know, your Italian is very good. Then he looks over at me, puts his hand on my arm and he says, Yours is not so good.

This is very nice of him to point that out.

How nice of him. I always loved traveling in Italy, and I know exactly what you mean. I've loved traveling in France as well, but you got to have a sharper grasp of French to crack the wall than you have to have in Italy.

There's some benefit of the doubt and some goodwill towards us. Totally. I think that helps.

My wife and I spent six months in Paris, and that was an unforgettable experience.

What a city. So special. You may like this analogy for five seconds. My wife was on an international tour for some movie, and stop one is Hamburg. We're in Hamburg, and the things I love about the Germans It was like, everything runs so perfectly efficiently. You could set your watch by anything that's happening, and it's so clean, everything's so orderly. And we're there for four to five days. And I'm just marveling at all this. I don't realize that I'm slowly dying just a little bit. My passion is. I don't know that yet. But our next stop is Paris. We land, we're on the way to the hotel, graffiti everywhere, trash everywhere. It's a dump. But in seconds, I'm hungry, I'm horny, I'm on fire. And I go, Yeah, these things are all trade offs.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Berlin is such an interesting place. I traveled there for In the Garden of Bees. Yes. Here is Berlin, which can be way out there. I think it had a gay mayor before anybody else. Then on the other hand, still the old control.

Yeah. The Yabaah house, and You have a ball house, and then you also have- It's odd. Yeah. It's like the drug capital of Germany.

Then you step off a curb and traffic for 10 miles around stops.

Yes.

I'm half exaggerating. I went to a restaurant in Munich, back to the Marconi book. My daughter was still with me. We were in a restaurant night without really realizing that my napkin had slid off my lap onto the floor. This guy comes over from about three tables away, older German gentleman, picks up my napkin and presents it to me. Sure.

He couldn't stand that napkin on the floor. No, he couldn't. There's no way he could have dealt with the rest of his meal. He couldn't stand it.

So the rules were just crazy.

All that chaos.

Whereas in Italy...

Oh, God. No, you could be on fire.

Okay, so this is another moment involving my eldest daughter I have three daughters. I love them all equally. Don't get me wrong. But she did the School of Advanced International Studies, and one year is spent in Bologna. I visited her there. We went to this restaurant. It was one of her favorites. It was called the Drugaria, a drug store, essentially. It was a very good restaurant. She'd been there numerous times before, but we sat down on the table, and she is struck by how frosty the wait staff are. Then it occurred to her. She says to the waiter when he comes over to take our order, My father would like this. Suddenly, the lights are on. It's like, I'm not the old guy having an affair with the young woman. I'm the father.

You were feeling that Roman Catholic.

But I would think they would like that.

Not in Balonia. This was a very prudish lokal, but the change was incredible.

She let the pressure out of the room.

We were just treated so well.

I appreciate her doing that because we're all caught in these situations where you're at a nice restaurant and you're like, God, I pray that guy's with his granddaughter right now. I just pray that that's what's happening.

I know what you made. Ultimately, the chef came down and sat with us instructing me on how to do a particular balsamic reduction for steak, which is unbelievable. Like chocolate sauce, only not chocolate. So that was just a remarkable moment.

Did you go to the Ducati plant while you were there? No. Okay, you missed out. It's pretty great. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. I guess there's really no careers for you to pursue with that degree per se.

Russian history and language.

Other than you would become a professor, I presume.

I could have gone into the State Department. I'm sure there would be professions, but I wasn't interested in any of them.

When do you get the bug to get a graduate degree in journalism?

A very direct chain of causality.

Another beautiful teacher? No. Okay.

Two beautiful male actors, actually. I was working for a publisher in New York, Grass and Dunlap. I was going to be promoted to assistant editor from Editorial System, which is next to Ponscom. Yeah. While I was there working for Grass and Dunlap, I had all these friends. We went to see all the President's men, Redford and Hoffman. It's as good as it gets. Taking down the President, this suspensful film. I was like, Man, that's what I'm going to do. I also said, Yeah, I'm going to apply to one journal in school, the only one I want to go to, that's Columbia. If I get in, I'll go. If I don't get in, I'm going to Europe with my girlfriend. So I got in. Still went to Europe with my girlfriend. We broke up at the Ferry at Calais. What's the Ferry at Calais? The Ferry at Calais, the Dover.

Romantic way to end.

It was not that romantic. I had no hotel. I was alone in this ferry terminal trying to sleep, and I got kicked out every hour.

Oh, yikes.

Yes. My mother said to me when I was young, and it proved to be very true, that if you want to find out what relationship you really have, go abroad somewhere with them. Being on an extended trip with another person will really shine the light on whether or not you're a match.

Absolutely endorse that. Always travel with the person you think you're going to spend your life with.

Yeah, the sooner the better. Yeah.

This is not an analogy to that. But the reason I went to the university University of Pennsylvania. It was because my high school girlfriend was going. And two weeks later, we broke up. Okay.

It seems to be a theme. Yeah. Your wife is a doctor.

A neonatologist, intensive care for newborn babies.

And did you meet her at Columbia? No. No. Later down the road.

Later down the road, it was in San Francisco. I was working for the Wall Street Journal, and it was a blind date. It was. And we dated and broke up and got engaged and broke up, got engaged again and broke up. Wow. Then the third engagement took. We've been married for close to 40 years now.

Oh, my God. Why are you sick to it? Yeah.

You were rewarded.

Well, you get worn down. No, she's great.

Forty years. That's incredible. You get your degree in journalism from Columbia, and then you end up writing at the Bucks County Courier Times in Levittown, PA, about murder, witches, and environmental poisonings. Were there a lot of murders in Levittown?

There were a lot of murders in Bucks County, yeah. South Side, Philly. At least the bodies were dumped in Bucks County. It's not that there were that many murders, but I had a really fabulous job at the Bucks County Courier Times, and it was a great place to work at that time. It was a large local newspaper, lots of things going on. I worked for the Sunday newspaper, which had a circulation of 125,000, which was really good. But the best thing was that I wrote something called the Sunday Special, a full-page story with photos that would run once a week. I would do one week, and then colleague would do the next week. But then on Saturday nights, I covered the cops. That was always very interesting, always also very depressing because my clockwork, some kid gets killed in a car wreck, and I got to talk to the parents. But it was just so instructive in what life is like. It would leave me off to do during the week stories about crime things that happened over the weekends. The thing about the witch, that was part of a murder investigation. The cops had consulted this witch.

The way cops sometimes talk to psychics, Boy, when I went to that house, I had the creepiest feeling that this was no place I'd ever been before, and she was gorgeous. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Counterintuitive. When you think witch, you think the wart on the nose.

There were no warts on her nose.

No warts to be found.

None that I could say. That was just a chilling conversation.

Is it fair to say you bought in a bit? Did you leave there thinking she had some weird connection?

I'm not shy about saying, I agree with Shakespeare, more things on heaven and earth William James, the famous Harvard psychologist. He was open to the potential for... Anything.

I was an Anthropology major, and I took a witchcraft course. Pretty fascinating.

That would have been good.

I think I've met a couple witches. I think my facelift is a witch.

So my apartment in Manhattan, we've been looking and looking and looking. At one point, again, this same daughter came up.

These other daughters are so sad right now.

We're going to have to throw them a couple of bones here at some point.

My other daughters, they have- Listen, this trip to Lisbon, I was with my oldest daughter.

We went and saw Taylor Swift. I get it. Oh, well, fine.

Taylor Swift in Lisbon with their eldest daughter.

The others are not going to- Yeah, this morning was a disaster. Oh, no.

But I'd been looking for two weeks for an apartment in Manhattan, and I'd come up things that I thought were ideal New York apartments. They mixed one out of hand. I was like, What are you thinking? They chose this place up on the upper east side, which I never thought I'd live in, Carnegie Hill. We're in this apartment, which we bought and did a significant renovation. I also had sworn that whatever place we buy, we're not going to renovate. Yeah. I'm being overruled at every turn.

I know this well.

We're in this place. It had been done in an art deco style back in the '80s. We go into this back room, the third bedroom, and my eldest daughter tasks me on the shoulder. She lifts this little canvas cover off, and there's a tool area with the drill press and so forth. There is this witchy cudgel thing with crystals. Then she said, Yeah, there's something else you should see. I'm like, Okay, what's that? She leads me over to this document on the wall, which was her official Wicken certificate. The woman and her husband. They hadn't been making jewelry, as the ad said. They'd been making witch shit.

And you proceeded with the purchase. You weren't put off. I would want nothing to do with that place.

No, I'll tell you, I was not at all put off. It had a very good vibe. These were good witches.

There's some good witches out there.

I guess you're I loved the book Rosemary's Baby, and the film, Rosemary's Baby.

I actually had told my real estate broker in New York, I said, Look, I wouldn't mind a little witchy element in whatever house we look at.

Oh, wow.

Have they ever heard that before?

Hereby, sheer luck was this place that was owned by witches.

I wouldn't mind a little witchy vibe.Witchy element.Okay, Eric, I'll be sure to look for that.

I think the vibe in the apartment has been really great.

Have you ever stayed at the Maritime Hotel? In meatpacking? No. It has some crazy history. I had to stay there for a month or so doing a movie, and it had been a refuge for wayward girls. There's all this crazy lore about the place. A lot of witch experiences.

I have to go. Speaking of witches, I just recently had to do a talk at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. I didn't even know that existed until I went there. Charming Town, with a weird supernatural past, went out for drinks and burgers afterwards to a bar and grill called the Second Salem. It's that thing. It's the witches' Tower where the witches used to meet. The legend is that there's a werewolf that priles one of the streets in town. It was really interesting. It used to be the headquarters, somebody had a school for the occult.

Hogwarts?

No. Was it named Hogwarts? No. That's in Madison, Wisconsin.

You would know the name if I could remember. So that was fascinating to me.

I want to go. I would love to see a werewolf. Let me ask you this. The job at the Bucks County Courier Times, was this something that the The only slot that was open for you was this macabre, or were you drawn to the macabre? It sounds like with all the witch talk, that maybe you're interested in the darkness.

Yeah, that's where the stories are. Also, look, I'm Scandinavian. We're into dark.

Well, it's fucking dark there six months of the year. You got to embrace that.

My late architect, friend Bill Zeriman, we used to talk a lot about our love of these Scandinavian noir books, and he said, I'll tell you one thing, these Scandinavians really know how to kill people.

And he's right.

Okay, Okay, so you go on to write for the Wall Street Journal, as you mentioned, and Time, quite a bit. You've published your first book in 1992, your second, 94, your third, 99. And then I now meet you in 2002 because I, like many other people read The Devil in the White City and was, well, a lot of things, completely blown away with it. Couldn't stop reading it. It's such a page turner. What I thought was so unique and novel about it, which I'm sure you already know, is I just loved this weird synergy between all these different topics all converging at once. I grew up in Detroit, and we would visit Chicago a lot as a kid, yet I didn't know the history of it. So to learn the history of the skyscraper and learning to build in something without bedrock and what the World's Fair meant back then. Me reading that book led to me on one of these boat architecture tour. Oh, I think it was one of our live shows. I made time to go out and do one of those tours on the boat. I would have never been interested in that without reading that book.

That was the first thing I did when I started doing the actual on-site My research for that book was I took the architecture tour on the boat.

So obviously, you already know that that was a bit of a novel approach to a historical serial killer story to involve all these things.

But did you know that on the eve of publication of that book, I was convinced my career was over.

Because why? What story had you told yourself?

Because it had two narratives traveling side by side that never actually touched except in one location. I figured every critic in the country was going to cut me a new one, and I was happily wrong.

That's a legitimate fear. I think we've certainly seen that approach go wrong. We see a movie trying to tell too many stories, and none of it really coalesces. This one did in the most unique way. I got a lot of this reading The Demon of Unrest. Your current book, it's one of my favorite things about reading historic books, and why I'm drawn to them is it reminds you of how shitty it was to be alive in different times. It gives you a level of gratitude. But just for starters, the killer, H. H. Holmes, he's just wandering around America, and there's no photo ID. He can introduce himself as any old person he wants. He can kill the people that live below him running the pharmacy and just write a letter to their relatives saying they're somewhere else, and just assume ownership of a business. It was madness what could happen back then without any communication between counties and cities and no way to identify anyone. I guess I'm curious, how did the story come to you? Did you first start with the serial killer or did you have an interest in the world fair or where did it start?

I had read a thriller about Old New York called The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Have you guys read that? Not read that, no. It left me feeling like I had a sense of an old New York was like, and I really liked just sinking into that past. I started thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to try to write a non-fiction book about a historical murder and try to evoke the same sense of past? I started doing some research. I went to my local library, living in Seattle then, and took out a book called The Encyclopedia of murder. Wonderful. Started the day. I don't where I came across a killer, H for Homes or M for Mudge at his real name. I wasn't interested. Here's a guy with acid vests dissection tables. I didn't want to do crime porn. I wanted to do something more like that. I don't know if you ever saw the film Gospard Park. Yeah. I kept looking. I was having zero luck. But I did remember that when I read about Holmes, I had read glancingly about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. I have since learned that anybody who writes about the fair has written about Holmes in passing.

Anybody who wrote about Holmes, wrote about the fair in passing, at least until I did my book. I started thinking about the World's Fair of 1893. Sounded like it was a big deal, didn't know anything about it. Often that's a good path is just read and maybe something will come. I went back to the library, took out a bunch of books about the World's Fair of 1893. The first one I got should have killed that book right away. It was the most boring book. Clearly, somebody's attempt at getting tenure. But I know from experience, look at the footnotes. Always go to the footnotes. I go to the footnotes, and right away, I'm intrigued. There's one footnote in particular, probably the book owes its origin entirely, too, was the a footnote about Juicy Fruit Gum. I love Juicy Fruit Gum.

The Wrigley family.

Well, here's this footnote saying that gum was introduced to consumers at the fair. I love that gum, and I was like, Wow, this gum is 100 years old. I started looking more and more. First of all, I went through the rest of the footnotes in this awful monograph and came up with even more stuff and people went to the fair, and then I realized, Yeah, that's the story. Within 24 hours of reading this, this story is a story of darkness and light, and the title Devon the Wild City came to me right then. No, wow. Now I can talk about homeless. He's so bad. Had juxtaposed against this World's Fair, which was such an act of civic goodwill, literally nicknamed the White City, for Christ's sake. Then the question is, okay, what am I going to do? Just write about the experience of a World's Fair that's so static. I got into the idea of, How about building this thing? This is rather suspensely. They did in a year and a half. At the time, when I started working on this book, in my house in Seattle, we were renovating a basement, and that was taking six months.

Yes, right. These guys were building an entire city in a year and a half. All these amazing talents participating.

Yeah, and you realize all the story is getting to the world fair.

That was the story juxtaposed against the killer. The killer turned out to be, to me, much less interesting part of the story. Very static part of the story.

Kills people, and he always kills people.

Although I did find the end where he was dragging those people around the countryside, pursued by that stallworth detective.

Yeah, that was a bit Bonnie and Clytie.

Thank you. I love finding that. But started with the fair. I since heard, actually, and very satisfying to me from a lot of people that they came to the book thinking, Oh, good, a serial killer story, but they fell for the world's fair narrative.

It's incredible how many details of that book, I still remember having read it 20 years ago, but just the notion, and I'll tell it to my children, we'll see a Ferris wheel. I go, The ferris wheel was a response to the Eiffel Tower, this spectacular thing that had been unveiled at the previous World's Fair. We're at the Eiffel Tower, I bring it up. Edison and electrification. There's so much stuff from that period. We were launching into what would be a century of rapid inventions and developments just coming our way. Even the Olmsted stuff, I didn't know anything about Olmsted.

Olmsted is my favorite character in the whole book. One of my favorite characters in my entire career writing. The man never had an unoriginal thought in his life. His handwriting sucks.

Really quick for people. He designed Central Park being probably the most prominent.

Cemetery in Oakland, California, various things. But he's really an original thinker and very kind, warm.

And watching him have to interact with people that were so much more nuts and bolts, geometry architecture was interesting as well. There's a lot of archetypes with pretty predictable friction.

I like the fact that there was this tension with Burnham trying to his way at all times. The director of works at the fair and all these great minds either resisting or going for it. It's just very much the way corporations work today. It was nice to see that even back then, there could be corporate assholes.

Yeah. Well, also you're bringing together a bunch of people that are giants in their own, right? They have been barking orders for a while now in their career, and now they got to come together and collaborate.

Then there were also these weirdly mystical moments when Root dies. You're 100 pages into the book, and one of the key architects, literally of the fair, just dies. Yeah. And suddenly, his close partner is alone to finish this project.

The stress of that deadline, I can't imagine. The whole world's going to watch. You're carrying the weight of Chicago's pride on your shoulders.

Everything. Yeah, absolutely. It's just amazing that he did it. So going into that book, first of all, I didn't even know that the Ferris wheel originated at the World's Fair until I stumbled across this while I was doing the research. Definitely had no idea that it was named for a person. George Washington Gale Farris. I had assumed it was F-E-R-R-O-U-S. But no, it's a guy, an incredibly handsome guy, the Clark Gable of his era.

That whole chapter about all the submissions they were receiving because they just opened it up to the nation saying, We need something spectacular. Skies and Limits, send us your ideas.

Some of these were absolutely crackpot ideas.

How long did it take to write that one? About four years. You never felt like, This is so daunting.

I was thinking the whole time, you must read really quickly. I couldn't have read the boring book about the World's Fair and then looked at the footnotes and then read five more books. That would have been my four years.

I am a very slow reader. But when you're doing research, I have the luxury. I don't have to teach anything. I don't have a second job. This is what I do. It's like erosion. I just read, read, read, read. I don't have to like it. But if I find a single fact in the course of a day that just lights the imagination, it's very satisfying. One classic example in my research for the fair was the fact that there was this very innovative ambulance service. And that particular day that I learned about this ambulance service, the The only thing that I took away that day, this is from the Chicago Historical Society, was the fact that that innovative ambulance service was founded by a doctor named Gentles, G-E-N-T-L-E-S. Dr. Gentles founded this innovative ambulance service, which had rubber tires, so it was a much more humane gentle way of taking care of people. Oh, whoa. Dr.

Gentles. Yes, it's good branding.

But then also when I came across the final report on the fair, all the ailments that people had had who were hauled off by this Innovative Ambulance Service, including somebody who's identified as extreme flatulence. Oh, my.

I don't know if you remember that.

That's going to be really extreme.

I'm proud of myself that I didn't remember that, but I remembered a lot of this other stuff.

When I came across that, I thought, Oh, my God, this list. I'm big on lists. If I find a list that is in and of It's all very interesting, I will run the whole list in the book.

Have you read Blitz by Chance? Drugs in the Third Reich? And what they're working off of primarily is he had a physician that was with him all day long, Hitler, and he kept really meticulous records of what he gave him all day long. And it's insane. I think you would have loved this list.

Have met to read the book, but have not done so.

Oh, he's shooting them up with bovine hormones. I mean, the amount of injections he was receiving towards the end, he was a full-blown junkie. He was a speedball addict. And you watch all of his decisions throughout those four years, they perfectly correlate with his rising addiction. It's really fascinating. I'll read it. List galore. And then I wanted to just touch in on In the Garden of Bees, Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. This You had the same... You might get triggered by the word I use, but it's actually what I like most about your writing. There's these things that are on the surface, very pedestrian, but they become the thing I'm most interested in. The notion that at that time, ambassadorships were given out to socialites and people that were rich, and that this professor from the University of Chicago would take this role of ambassador in Germany on the eve of the Nazi Party, and that he would be expected to all of these parties out of his own bank account. This is something that never crossed my mind.

I get the term pedestrian. I would say even mundane, but it's those things that sometimes tie us to an era or a character in a way that is charming. So this guy had the same issues that we have.

The task is impossible. He's going to try to uphold diplomatic relationships with what ends up being the most tyrannical ruler of all time. And then, additionally, he doesn't not have any money to do that job. It's comical.

The reason Dodd and his daughter are in there is because I was looking for people through whom to experience the rise of Hitler as if I had been taken back to the past, what would I have thought? I wanted people who were naive, and both were naive in very particular ways. Dodd was not going to be judgmental. He resolved, and Martha Dodd was totally infatuated with the whole Nazi thing. Oh, she got swept up in the glitz and the glam?

Yeah. Sleeping with the head of the Gestapa.

Nice suits, the whole deal.

Yeah, she was waiting for this.

Yeah. Then the fact they actually both underwent a character transformation, which in fiction and film and so forth, is what you always need. And in this case, they didn't force it. We get it now. This is a horror.

This is not going to lessen. This is going to worsen. Thrilling book.

What brought you to that book?

I had no ideas, again. And I went to a very big bookstore to look at the non-fiction area to see what books might be coming out, what books were just out, what covers look good, what stories looked good. Everything informs the beast. And then I came across a book with a cover out that always meant to read, never had. And that was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire. Fuck, what a book. I had never read it. I got 50 pages into the book before I realized, wait a minute, William Shire was actually there in 1933, 34, when all this stuff was starting to happen. Oh, yes. He went to cocktail parties with all these people we now know to be Monsters. Joseph Goebbels was high on the invitation list for parties because he had a good sense of humor.

Sure. Cosby. Yeah. It sucks when these monsters are charming, but that happens.

Well, it's common, I think, You're right.

That is the wonderful, unique perspective of Rise and Falls that he was there.

That's what made me start thinking, Yeah, so wow. I would love to try to capture that through the lives of some Americans who were in Berlin during this time. I looked for other characters through whom we could tell this story, and that's when I stumbled on Ambassador Dodd. Still was not interested in him necessarily as a character because diplomatic history is to me very tedious. I did not want to do that thing. But it was when I came across his daughter that I realized this This is great stuff. And then I went back to my church, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, where Martha Dodd had 70 linear feet of documents. Wow. Which is a lot of material, even her passport and her baby book, and then her love letters to Boris. Wow.

So cool.

Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of... The world is extremely heightened, as heightened as it gets, yet the problems are so human and normal, which is like a father with a young daughter and a wife and all these things that it would have been stressful back at home, and now we're in this crazy cauldron.

Well, one of the things that really appealed to me that does inform that book in a way is the fact that I am a father of three daughters, and here is this ambassador giving his daughter leeway that I would never have given my daughters. And yet it was a different time. She was a fully functioning human being. Even in Chicago, she had a full, thriving love life. He wasn't judgmental, and it made me think, Wow, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Yeah. Well, again, that's the gift of reading this historical stuff is it forces you to try to imagine, and it's really present in the demon of unrest, and now I would love to get into that. Of the many things that it reminds you of is how often people's kids died. Lincoln himself, he gets into the White House, and he himself has maybe two children that have died at this point.

One child had died, another would die.

While he's dealing with everything else.

That's the thing. These commonplace tragedies unfold. This one character in demon of unrest, Evan Ruffin, loses three daughters in one summer.

And his wife in one year.

It's incredible.

He had eleven kids, and by the time he dies, he has watched seven or eight of them die.

And yet, he's a complete asshole.

He's a terrible person. Yeah. Most of the people in this book are terrible. You know that show, Finding Your Roots? With Dr. Henry Louis Gates. They do these really comprehensive genealogical dives into your history, and it's a TV show. I just did it a week ago. And of course, I have a lot of family from Kentucky. They own slaves. So he's asking me, What does that feel like to learn that? And I was like, I can't say I'm terribly shocked, but I have to file it in this category of, I really don't understand at all what it was like to be alive in so many ways. That, to me, seems incomprehensible that I would own a human being. But also, it seems incomprehensible is that I would lose six children and proceed through my career and my life as if nothing. I can't even begin to get a foothold in that. It's so foreign. We have come to be so expectant that we will have health in our families.

This is why my kids know me to be the king of the anxiety.

Because you're spending a lot of time in these eras.

It started when I was a reporter, covering car crash and everything else, continuing in all this stuff where I know what the potentialities are. My kids, I actually send them routinely. I send them dad alerts. My kids, by the way, are in their 30s. Yeah. Great. I literally sent them once. I said, Dad alert, never swim with otters.

Oh, good heads up. Why? They kill?

Well, you saw that story, right? I didn't. I did not. I think on CNN, and it was in the news about this young woman who went swimming with otters and was just mauled. Yeah. There's a photograph of her face scratched and all this stuff. I mean, they're not charming.

I was bit by a seal once on the beach that I thought was cute and puppy-like. It was not. Oh, my God. The animals like to bite people. Let's just believe it.

To them, I'm the king of his items. I've decided I'm going to make myself a T-shirt, and it's going to say Defcon dad.

I like it. You're owning it.

I own it totally.

Okay, so if we could start with the broadest description of the book, it will not take a genius to see the parallels of why you drawn to it. You mentioned COVID, you mentioned 2020. You watched the January sixth Storming of the Capital. In this book is a Civil War book, but just takes us to the beginning of the Civil War.

It started as a question, how did the Civil War actually start? How really? What was the TikTok? I'm not talking about the website TikTok. What's the TikTok? We, journalists, always love to talk about the TikTok. What's the timeline? I had the timeline in this book of documents that I had. I wanted to explore the possibility of writing about the run up to the Civil War and capturing really the same sense of anxiety and anger and suspense that I felt watching January sixth unfold. I'd already been at work on this project, but that's what solidified my interest. It was like, maybe there's a way to capture that in this historical context. People must have felt the same way as the country was descending toward what ultimately became something even worse than they could have imagined.

Yes, there's just this really palpable level of distrust, a lot of us them. But what was illuminating about this book is, I I don't know that I knew the writing was on the wall so deeply before it happened. I think maybe first we would talk about what was unique about South Carolina in the South. I don't even know that I knew they played that heavy of a role. All the books I've read about this period. We're at war already. Grant's coming to his own.

That's standard Civil War storyography. People refer to it as, That's the good stuff. To me, the origins of things are very important, the origin story of Hitler's rise. But South Carolina had always had a reputation as being a rebellious, cantankerous state. In fact, it was even something of an embarrassment to other states. When secession was beginning to loom for the south, generally, there were those in other states who really did not want South Carolina to lead the charge because it would undercut the significance and the meaning of trying to actually secede from the union, because that's what South Carolina does.

It was unique in that it was a very wealthy state, primarily from slave trading.

The state actually was not super wealthy. The state was in economic decline. But the planter elite who held all the power and led the charge with regard to secession and control politics, they owned thousands of enslaved. They were the ones who were terrified that Lincoln would become President, abolished slavery despite his protestations that would not. If that happened, they knew full well that their entire lives, their entire cultures would be upended.

Yeah, like a light switch. I think most salient, they were nervous that there would be an uprising and they would be murdered. Because all these people are sitting on these properties, they're outnumbered 30 to one, 100 to one.

That was another element of it, was this fear not only that Lincoln would abolish slavery, but also that the abolitionist rancor in the north would encourage slave insurrections. And this was the nightmare. A planter like James Henry Hammond would write about how we're not afraid of our slaves. Oh, yes, they were. Why else was there a nine o'clock curfew that required every black person to get off the streets of Charleston? Especially terrified of the so-called house slaves, house servants, those who were in charge of functions within the house because they had access to the household day in and day night.

Preparing the food.

Yeah. Poison was the big terror.

Yeah, it's funny. I saw something related to this. It was a little documentary. It was charting countries with loose gun rights against their previous history with slavery. It's as spot on as it gets. If you look at all these countries had a long history of owning human beings, you see a real openness to gun ownership. Interesting. As they should be, they're living in fear that at some point they're going to say, Fuck this and kill us.

I'm quite surprised it didn't happen more.

Well, there were enough examples where it did happen to inform the culture.

Well, to drive the hysteria. Yeah, I think there's few when you consider, but meals were made out of them. Because I think a lot of people just go like, Oh, well, what they were afraid of is the entire economy there was built on this premise. When that premise is made illegally, there is no economy. But that's glazing over what they were really afraid of, which is like, they knew this is nuts that we're in this position, and it would not take much for someone to make this right.

Absolutely. Even deeper, more ativistic fear was not so much of being slaughtered in their sleep, but also the fear that the Black race would be made equal to the White. The loss of race control was something that was just as terrifying, if not more so. The idea that a Black man might marry your daughter. Some people in my book, they addressed that head-on. There's one quote that had to be in the book. I mean, it is there that I knew I had to have, where a guy was warning that a black person might even one day become president. What a horror that would be.

Well, and even on Sundays, it was not uncommon for black folks to go to church and to wear the clothing that the elite Whites were wearing, and this was abhorred.

Well, this led to concerns. The term they used was demoralization. It meant, what were they doing? Putting on airs. What were they doing? Wearing white people's clothes.

What would they want next? Their freedom?

Yeah, so these were terrifying.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. So, yeah, you get this sense of, well, first, the brutality and the ugliness of it. Similar to your past books, you're telling a few different stories here. We're profiling a few different characters in it. Abraham Lincoln, on the eve of, basically, election night, James Hammond, this Southerner who was born poor, had aspirations, married a very plain, wealthy girl. This man is fucking vile. I mean, there's so much of this person's story that is Jefferson-esque and it's grotesque sexual abuse. Beyond Jefferson-esque. Yeah. Then this guy, Edmund Ruffin. This character seems most current to me. You'd see this person at the Capital 6 riots. This is a man who, again, he lost most of the people he loved in his life, and the only thing keeping him from suicide was the mission of seceding.

And his hatred of the North, his hatred of Yankees. Ruffin deserves credit, but I don't mean it in a standard way. He deserves credit for being one of the few in that era to envision what a civil war would actually be in his book that he wrote called Anticipations of the Future, which basically ends with all of New York in flames, corps littering the streets.

He was very bullish about the outcome of that.

But he was a hater before hateing was cool.

Driven by anger and resentment. It was the fuel, and he went to an incredible length. Yeah, he wrote this book in no time as a response to Uncle Tom's cabin.

Four hundred and some page book. He knew it sucked. He acknowledged that in his diary, but he said, at least it might help move things along. Yeah. She just made one point also about Ruffin and Hammond. They typically don't appear in classic white guy civil war historiography, except in passing reference. The reason they're in this for significant amounts is because when you write about the origins of the Civil War, leading up to the point where you can start talking about the origins of the Civil War, there is a lot of backstory that needs to be done. There's two ways you can do that backstory. One is as expository history, where it's just, Okay, this happened, this happened, this happened, and bore your audience to death, like that monograph about the Devil and the White City. Or tell it through the lives of characters who lived through the keynotes of that backstory, the advent of Uncle Tom's Cabin, John Brown's Attack on Harpers Ferry. Ruffin and Hammond are in this book because they mark off the backstory and then continue their story beyond the election.

Their own personal story gets into the nuance and complexity of what that undertaking really meant. Because James Hammond, he starts as an Edmund Ruffin. They're even really close friends for a while. But over time, he starts to get a little more apprehensive. He does.

One very important point, why do they cease being friends? Because Ruffin is getting too much attention. This is a big part of the story as I saw it, not those two characters as others, is personal traits, personal vanities, human ego.

The results of this vanity we then live with. Historically, it's wild, the human foibles that end up impacting us. Yeah.

And we keep repeating.

Yes. I don't know. If we have a hero, it's Abe Lincoln. But this person, too, is really a bit of a hero in the book, Major Robert Anderson.

I think Anderson is the hero of the book. Major Robert Anderson was a Southern-born officer in the United States Army. He had been in an instructor in artillery tactics at West Point. He is selected to take charge of the federal presence in Charleston Harbor, which included a number of forts, including Sumpter and including an arsenal. He is placed in command, undoubtedly because there is this belief that being a Southern-born guy, being sympathetic to the South, being a former slave owner, and his wife as well, that he might help mollify the hurt feelings and anger in Charleston. But there was also speculation, more nefarious, that a part of John Floyd, who was the Secretary of War, very sympathetic to the South, and eventually fled to join the south, that maybe he might have appointed Anderson to this position with the idea that Anderson might at some point just say, Okay, we're done. The Southern loyalty might prevail. Total misreading of Major Robert Anderson. He was loyal to a fault, not to the United States necessarily, but to the United States Army. He had made an oath. He was going to stick to that oath by God because it was military training.

He was smart enough to know that his original position in Charleston Harbor at a fort called Fort Moultrie was indefensible if things got worse and things were getting rapidly worse. Then he said, Okay, and he concocted a secret plot and moved to Fort Sumter. Wow.

These forts were built to defend our country against the British, foreign-born adversaries arriving by boat.

Yeah, against Britain, Spain, and France, the traditional enemies of the United States.

Yes, and they're all fortified seaward facing out. But now we're in this precarious situation where secession is looming. Abraham Lincoln has been elected. There are these three federally owned and controlled forts, and the South Carolians are not going to want those federally owned places to exist in their new statehood. So this is a Tinder box. So we're in an incredibly dynamic situation. And this man Major Robert Anderson, he is outnumbered 25 to 1 by the surrounding troops, and the troops are being led by a former student of his at West Point, General Beauregard. Again, it paints that really subtle picture that is really relevant at all times when you're talking about Civil War. So many people were friends.

Knew each other. They were friends. They both fought in the Mexican War. Anderson considered Beauregard his favorite pupil and vice versa's favorite instructor. They were very cordial to each other throughout the run up to Fort Sumter, even virtually on the Eve of Fort Sumter, even as Beauregard worked tirelessly to install gun batteries with the sole intention of killing Anderson and his men at Fort Sumter. But it was all going to be gentlemanly. If you don't mind, I'm to fire this cannon and blow your head off. Yes. These guys were honored to the end.

Okay, great. So conveniently for us, we just did 25 minutes on this topic. A good deal of the book is dedicated to the prevailing culture of the South at the time, and it's a perverse obsession with honor and chivalry. And so to give you the backstory, we were in India together not long ago, and I'm looking over the city, and I'm looking at this palace, and I'm thinking of the history. I'm thinking of the English being here, and I'm thinking about how people felt justified in exploiting other people. And it just occurred to me. I'm like, that manners and dress, that's why that shit exists. You have to display why you're superior to somebody. If think that you're entitled to their labor for free. So I think all these weird rituals and customs just start bubbling up as tools to help you convince yourself you are rightly entitled to this because you are superior, the way you talk, the way you walk. So to me, we We're just talking about, I'm reading all this chivalry stuff, and I'm like, That's all this bullshit is. We have this very elevated code, and only the most refined humans would be able to live by this code.

That demonstrates our superiority and our right to own other people.

Because of this code, as the north and as the rest of the world came to revile slavery more and more throughout the 19th century, especially in the Antebellum period, for these Southern planters, this was a personal affront. This was no longer just attacking an institution. You were attacking us as planters who have this exaltet sense of honor, who have convinced ourselves that slavery is actually the best of all possible worlds.

For them and us.

For them and us. A blessing. That's where the fuel for the Civil War came in.

Yeah. Okay. So some of the crazy practices, like dueling. There's tons of rules about dueling. It's something that can go down at any moment. Old Hickory is in the White House a bit before this with a gunshot wound sustained from a duel that he murdered somebody. So this is a thing.

Men are dueling. This is real. Even though it was technically illegal in South Carolina, it was also attributed to as one reason why society would remain polite to each other is because there was the threat that if you weren't, you would pay the ultimate price. My favorite element of the whole dueling culture, though, was that women could not engage in a duel. They could not challenge a man to a duel. They could not be the subject target of a duel. But if they did something inflammatory and assaulted another man, their husband that could be held to account by the other man.

Oh, boy.

Jesus. I'm just thinking, wow.

Ownership everywhere.

Yeah, the code duelo.

Okay, now this was crazy. Talk about fun little facts I learned, just like Devil in the White City. I had no idea. Ten of the deep south states didn't even put Lincoln on the ballot. How many states did we have then? Thirty-four. Almost a third of the states didn't get to vote for him. We're also learning a lot of really interesting history about Abe Lincoln. There were four candidates, and he He had previously gone to try to become senator and made a series of speeches.

He had tried to win election as a US senator had failed. That led to the whole Lincoln Douglas debates, and that made him a prominent national figure. When it came time for the Republican Party, which again was anti-slavery party Democrats for the pro-slavery. When it came time for the Republican nomination, the guy who everybody thought was going to be a shoe in was William Henry Seward, who ultimately became Lincoln's Secretary of State. Everybody thought he was going to be the Republican nominee. Even Seward himself thought he was going to be the nominee. He was certain of it. But in 1858, he had made what is often attributed to as why he did not get the nomination was a rather inflammatory speech in which he identified slavery as the irrepressible conflict and descended into a really quite a bellicose speech about basically North versus South and ending slavery and so forth. The feeling was that maybe he wasn't electable, whereas Lincoln, because his position was really quite moderate, he made a big point of saying he would respect slavery in those states where it existed. And so he wins the nomination.

Much of his energy in what he laments is that he is being painted as someone who's going to abolish slavery, which he has no intention of. He just doesn't want any further states to adopt it.

Talk about an echo chamber. The south had convinced itself that he was the Antichrist and that he would abolish slavery. If he did, their lives would be upended.

It's really fascinating. They manifest their own fear. Had they not seceded, it'd be interesting to see what the timeline would have been.

Yes, speculative history, I don't do. But there were so many inflection points in the story. We have to wonder what would have happened if this.

Some other interesting facts. So 15 states held slaves at that time. There were almost 4 million folks enslaved at that time. So a lot of these states, Whites weren't a big majority, sometimes a minority.

But again, the Blacks had no power. Right. They couldn't vote.

So 15 of the largest slave owners in South Carolina were women. I guess counterintuitive. There was a Choctaw chief who was a planner and a big slave owner. I was interested, too, in the amounts and you converted it. Charleston was the big trading area for slavery.

It was one of the big slave trading nodes, another one in Mississippi. Charleston, for that portion of the United States, definitely at the center of slave trading.

Yeah. Ryan Slave Mart was this cheeky answer because they did finally get away with the public auction in this town square. But he just built an enormous structure where you could accomplish the same thing. Yeah.

And numerous slave auctions were held there by various people, not just by the Ryan Smart folks.

In current day dollars, they were paying $55,000 for people.

$1,500 for a prime number one field hand. The terms they used was a lot of money. Slays were capital.

Right. People would get loans against-Yup, mortgages against their holdings.

We cut back to the fears of Southern planters because not only was it that slaves were providing the labor that allowed them to get rich off selling their crops, the slaves represented something else even more important, and that was capital because of the capital nature of slavery. One of the things that they really hoped for was that their young female slaves would become pregnant, either through marriage or not, and that through so-called natural increase, there would be more slaves. Babies would be born.

Their capital would grow on its own.

Suddenly, their capital is growing in a very significant way.

It's so horrific. It's really worth, though, diving into it. It is because a big plot point in this whole march towards the Civil War was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Here's a book that's first serialized, right? In a paper, and it's getting 50,000 readers on Friday, and the book comes out and sells 300,000 copies in the first three months. In the south, there's certain that this is going to be the title shift. It's also interesting how art even then was impacting how society and politics win.

The impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin cannot be underestimated. It was new. It was shocking. And the responses that I include in the book were comical. Southerners would come up with some variant on a so-and-so's cabin, and the fault was actually New York Financiers, a financial firm called Skin & Flint, that thing.

It gave rise to a bunch of terrible counterpunches.

But it was a really, really shocking thing when it first appeared. It was the right book at the right time, or the wrong book at the right time, depending on which part of the country you lived in.

It's such a page turner. It's like Devil in the White City. Of course, you start the book with basically, We're about to experience the first shot that starts the war in South Carolina, and then we backtrack. So cool. We keep bouncing back and forth, and the characters are just so flushed out and real, and it's fantastic. Thank you. I got so sucked in so quickly. Good.

Do you feel pressure when you're doing these books because people have expectations of one of your books?

Do they get harder to write?

I do feel pressure, but I also try to put that pressure aside as much as I possibly can. If I start thinking to myself, Hope this book gets critically reviewed well, and I really try to suppress that thinking. It comes more to the fore when the book is done, like launching your baby into the world. Yeah, scary. Anybody who can weigh in in a positive or negative way, and you deal.

Okay. You already told me at the beginning that you hate telling me what you're going to work on next, so I guess I'm not going to ask you.

I'm just going to patiently wait. I'm not going to talk about, but I will tell you that as things stand now, it looks like I'm going to be going back into the gilded age for this next project.

Oh, that's my favorite, period.

Mine, too.

Do you have a favorite? Do you read your peers or do you try not to?

I try not to because it's like in Midnight in Paris, the Hemmingway character, Owen Wilson asked if he would read his and the Hemmingway character says, No, I hate it, which I haven't read it. I hate it because if I read it and I hate it, I'm going to hate it because I hate bad writing. If I love it, I'm going to hate it all the more.

Yes, there's no win.

Eric, this has been so much fun. For an introvert, I found you to be very extroverted in this couple hours.

High functioning introvert.

You did specify.

I like this. Very relaxing, very pleased. You guys are obviously very engaged and incredibly informed. Well, thank you. I try. You know more about my book. You have more at hand than I can remember. Yeah, it's been six to X months since I've last been in close contact with my material.

I bet. It's dense. There's so much stuff in there. I don't know how you would hold on to what you hold on to. Well, I do encourage everyone to read The Demon of Unrest, a saga of hubris, heartbreak, and heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. Please check that out. Eric, thanks so much. I hope we get to talk to you on your next book.

I hope so, too.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

How was Field Day?

Field Day was great. I think the last we spoke on here, I was going into the weekend with the five kids sleepover, the musical performance the night before, and then Field Day. Yes. It's been a raucous four days. How was it? I mean, the concert had issues. Look, these things are going to have issues. Yeah. Very ambitious. Sure. Extremely ambitious. Strings, no wind instruments, which, thank God. Well, no, the recorder was there.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I won't give any judgment of it. I'll just say that there were five grades performed, and all five grades played the same song, and each grade had three classes. So maybe 14 times with the same song. But what was really fun was interacting with all the other parents. I had a real good time doing that. And then the sleepover was really lovely. These kids these days, they're nicer than the kids when we were young. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Even there were three little boys, and we watched a movie after we played volleyball. We did everything. We swam, we played volleyball. The gals all sat in individual recliners, but the three little boys all cuddled up on one bed.

Oh, cute.

And I was like, God bless where we're going with this.

I love that.

I would have expected the reverse of that in my fifth grade life. Yes. Yeah. And I loved it. And then there were no raucous kids up till 2:00 in the morning, which was really nice. But I did figure out some interesting thing that I noticed after. In fact, I only figured it out while I was sharing AA last night. It went so much better than anticipated. It was genuinely quite fun. And of course, when I went to bed at night, I liked myself, which is nice. It's nice to like yourself at night. But I think I was trying to really figure out why it was so pleasurable. I think when both of us, Kristin and I, are both there for that type of an event, I have some expectation that I will only have to do X amount of it. And then if I'm now doing Y amount of it, I'm unhappy. And something about going into it knowing, oh, I'll be doing every single thing that happens. Order the food, clean up the thing, fold the towels, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's really a result of appropriate expectations, as this is a lesson I've already learned in life, but it was really on display.

Yeah. That I knew I was going to have to do everything, and I didn't mind at all. It's when I think I don't have to do something and I got to do it that I get grumpy.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And then, okay, so field day, oh, man, did I luck out. Kristin was very envious. There were seven events, I think, maybe eight. I had Bouncy House. That was my first shift, 9:00 to 12:00 Bouncy House. Well, there's nothing to do. They come in a group, you split it into two, you put a Timer on five and a half minutes. I brought a chair over there. I sat next to a Bouncy house and shot the shit with my co-host. And a joy, an absolute joy.

Well, Bouncy houses can get real crazy, though.

There can be injuries.

Yeah, big time.

Hence the waiver. All the kids had to sign a waiver. But there was nothing for the parent to have to do. You let them go in and go bananas. Some of the other stations were like, Arts and Crafts. Kristen had three-legged in potato sack races. Oh, that's a big one. You got to explain things. You got to line them up. You got to tie stuff to them. You're active. You're standing. Middle of the day sun, blah, blah, blah. I'm sitting on a chair over there. I brought a little cooler full of snacks and beverages. I was having the time of my life. Then I moved over to football toss, whatever that meant. I didn't really know what that meant. That was my second shift. Luckily, there was a dad there that was clearly born to be a coach, probably is a coach.

Okay.

I didn't even know what this was. We got three rings and three footballs, and he devised some game. Two lines, make it in that ring, move back. It was great. I just stood there and picked up the rings when they fell down. Oh, nice. So I didn't have to do much thinking.

So mainly you just stood and sat.

Yeah, but it was delightful.

So cute. Field Day was so fun. Do you remember it?

Ours was way better than what I witnessed yesterday. Okay. Because ours was metric field day. So the whole day was designed to help us understand the metric system, which, of course, didn't work. None of us know it. But there was a full obstacle course race, and I get, presumably it had been measured out in meters or something. Then there were these two huge buckets of colored water and these presumably liter carrying devices. And you had to race to run across the parking lot and fill up this see-through container. You had to get your colored water to the line to win. What a blast. Then there was a long jump. I'm going to brag. The only thing I ever was ever a winner at, obstacle course. I wish that were an Olympic event. Because you didn't have to be great at any one thing. You had to be good at all the things. And that was as a Jack of all trades, that was really... I was maybe 20th percentile fast as a runner, but 20th percentile jumper, 20th percentile climber, or whatever. You add this all up, and it was a real winning combination. Interesting.

And I won every year, five years in a row.

That's exciting.

What taste of victory. A sweet, sweet, sweet like honey.

I know it. I know it well.

What was your field day?

I don't remember.

Was it linked to any learning?

I just remember it linked to any learning? Okay. And I remember you had to wear certain colors.

Oh, grade Pacific colors?

Probably like your team was yellow or blue and you had to wear whatever color. Yes. And we probably got free tees. Yeah. I love a free tea still. Still to this day.

Sure, sure, sure.

Calleigh and I lived for free tees. Any time that was on the table- You were so excited. We were going to go. We were going to be there. We were in it for the free tea. Let's see. What did I do this weekend? I saw Challenges.

What's that?

The Zendaya, the tennis movie. I saw Challenges. I loved it.

Is this the one my friend, Trilling, told me that there's some movie with Zendaya that's so fun? Does she have two movies out right now?

Dune and Challenges.

Okay, then he was talking about Challenges. Yeah, it is fun.

Is it so fun? It's very- And there's a world.

It's a world, yeah.

Tennis World. Is that what he means?

No, more like a tone world.

It's very stylized. Yeah. It's very sexy.

Oh, very Sexy? Yeah.

Oh, wow. That was what it was leading with.

Okay, a sexy movie.

Yeah. There was a threesome.

Oh, my goodness.

And yeah, it was good.

Doubles on a single? That was a tennis joke. Oh, wow.

Yeah, exactly. We have a friend who has a stalker. Really? Yeah. And it's uncomfortable.

Well, I wanted to say that's exciting, but then I got nervous to say it's exciting.

It's not exciting. It's not.

No. It's just very newsworthy, eventful.

It is eventful. It's bad.

Why don't I talk to this motherfucker?

You could.

Yeah. Put me in, coach.

I don't know. Yes. It seems like- Remember when we interviewed the stalker, I was like, God, if you had had a boyfriend that liked to fight, the one that the dude kept showing up at the apartment.

You get your ass kick three, four times. You're not coming back a fifth time. Yeah. So, oh, boy, I think I need to start hanging out with this person. This is exciting. I finally have a mission. Oh, boy. Yeah, I've been waiting to get put in, coach. I've been sitting on the bench for a long time.

You don't want it to escalate the problem, though.

Well, how could it get worse? The stalker is already loitering around.

They're loitering. They're at a loitering phase, but they're not at a approaching phase.

You don't think they should be confronted?

I don't know what the answer is based on the Armchair Anonymous when nothing can be done about these people.

It's so annoying. But didn't it sound like the prevailing issue in all those stories with that law enforcement didn't go get these people? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm suggesting vigilante style, I go confront them. The problem was they weren't being held accountable for their actions.

That's true.

Yeah. Maybe. I should maybe get deputized first with like, I hear Port Authority is the easiest way to become a police officer. Oh, wow. That's what Shaq was. Oh, my God. Shaquille O'Neill was an active police officer while he played for the Lakers with the Long Beach Port Authority. Did you see what Metta World Peace did when he was playing? He got a job at Circuit City, so he had a discount on DVDs. That is spectacular. Then the Commissioner made him quit. Oh, really? Yeah.

Well, he probably wasn't showing up to his job.

Which one, though? Think about being the scheduler at Circuit City dealing with meta and going like, so hold on, you can't work weekends? Well, some weekends I can. When I have home games, I can work on the weekend. But no, when I'm... Let me see. How many games you guys play? Because they play so many games. They play 82 games a year or something. I mean, that's quite a schedule to be juggling with another job at Circuit City.

I really blame the person who hired him.

How can he resist, though? He's got the opportunity to put Metta in his store. Customers will know there's some chance that if they come shopping, you can't turn that opportunity down.

You're right.

Then he's like, he called in sick one time, But then at Circuit City on all the TVs, a games playing in Denver. That son of a bitch lied to me. He said he had the flu. Wow. Also, you just don't see anyone that tall working at Circuit City.

I never, yeah.

As soon as you'd enter the store, you'd know exactly what department Metta was working in.

He was so tall.

Yeah.

Okay, well, this is for Eric Larson.

Yes. That was a lovely interview.

It was. You asked if Alec Baldwin and Seinfeld are from Massapiqua. Alec Baldwin is.

Okay. Halfway there. Okay. So far, I've got a E.

Yep. And then Seinfeld, on Wikipedia, it says Seinfeld was born in Brooklyn. What's funny is there's an episode coming up where Seinfeld is from that's talked about again. That person says that he's from Levittown.

Well, he's 100% was raised on Long Island. Which is Long Island. Yeah. So I don't know if it was... I feel like in the Alec Baldwin episode of Comedians in Cars with Coffee, they talked about being from the same spot. Yeah, it says Seinfeld grew up in Massapeakewa, but maybe not born.

Where does it say that? On Wikipedia?

The Google AI search result thing that they have now. You probably can't be born in Massapeakewa unless you enter in a bathtub of your mom's house. There's probably not a...

Alec Baldwin was born in Amadeville, New York.

Amadilleville Whore.

Yeah, but then raised in Nassau Shores of nearby Massapeakewa.

Fun name, Massapeakewa.

Oh, yeah. It does say here. Okay. Well, it's weird the way they throw it in because they have like, Seinfeld's second cousin is musician and actor Evan Seinfeld. Seinfeld grew up in Massapeakewa and attended Massapeakewa High School.

Okay, so now I got 100 %.

They are both from Massa Piqua.

Here's the problem, when you only take a two-question test, one write is failing, two write's a plus plus. The gap is enormous. There's nothing in between.

Yeah.

That's why you should always ask for a third Question.

Well, true and false.

That's why it's upsetting. Checkbox.

Yeah, I hated that.

Fuck, I hated that one. You got it, though. No. Didn't you? I quit.

That was yesterday's? That was yesterday's. Yeah, yesterday's was I hated it.

I stayed at those last eight forever. I was supposed to be researching. Oh, I could vent about this. The kids and Kristin went to bed really early. My mom's in town, sweet Laura LeBeau is in town. And my mom fell asleep at seven. Then the kids were asleep, and Kristin by 8:30. And then all of a sudden, I was on my own at 8:30, which never happens. I was like, Okay, great. Tomorrow's really busy. I'm going to do my research tonight. Get in bed, pull out my computer, think, Oh, I didn't look at connections. Yeah. An hour I spent.

Wow.

Yeah, an hour.

Did you put it down?

And I kept getting madder and madder and madder.

You have to put it down sometimes.

Do you want to know my whole process? Sure. I solve the first four, and I select them. So four in black. I screen grab that. I then take the pen and I wipe out the words of those four. I don't even want to see the words.

Okay.

Then I find the next four, and I wipe out the words for those. And then I save that to my photos. Then I go into my photos and I look at the remaining eight words and try to get my last two categories like that.

That's a lot of work.

Yeah. Do you feel like it's a cheat or a good strategy? I don't think it's a cheat. I mean, still got to figure out the things.

I do if- Do you do a version of that? Sort of. It depends on how much time I have. Often I don't. So then I'm It's just like, these are the four that are popping out. I'm going. I'm just going to go for it. But if I'm really trying to get reverse back-Of course.and I have time, I will write them out.

And then you got to figure out- Which one's hard.

The whole point is to see them to know which one's hardest. That's right.

You can select that first. But okay, so I have maybe on four occasions written down the remaining eight words. The bottom line is it's too many... I'm going to blame my dyslexia. It's too many words for me to look at that thing. So I I have to write them down if I'm going to do a reverse back. But even now, when I write them down, I'm like, do I make two columns of four? Do I write all eight in one column of eight? How are you writing them on the paper? Is that thoughtful?

Yeah. So I'm just writing, dash, the four words, another Dash, the next four. Four words.

Okay. So you're looking at them basically in four columns, two rows.

No. So by the time I'm writing it, I've already figured it out. Do you know what I'm saying? No.

Because why would you write them down if you already figured it out?

Because I need to know the order. I can't see. I can't figure out what the order is without seeing it all. Okay. So I'm like, if I open up- You need to see all four categories, and then you evaluate what one seems hardest.

Exactly. Which is Getting less and less predictable.

I know. But yeah, so I'm only writing it out to figure out the order. Reverse back.

Yeah. Coveted reverse back.

But that's interesting that you screen grab and- Yeah, try that out. Okay, maybe I'll try it.

It's nice.

And now I learned the mini, crossword mini is timed. That's a whole thing.

Oh, should we start that?

Well, I always do the mini, but people have chains where they do mini, and it's who gets the fastest time.

That's It's fun.

It's fun, but I don't know if I can take that on.

Not with Max in the chain. Yeah. I'm sure he would be blistering fast. Probably.

Okay, hold on. There's more facts. Let me see. He said Guy Lombardo's Restaurant, but I didn't know who that was. He is Canadian and American band leader, violinist, and hydroplane racer, whose unique sweet jazz style remained popular with audiences for nearly five decades.

Man, you want to talk about something that is incongruous.

Hydroplane racer.

Yes. Jazz musician, hydroplane racer.

That's a pop-out.

Yeah, and he formed the Royal Canadians in 1924. Oh, wow. You want to know the truth? You want me to admit my mistake?

Sure.

I thought that was a football coach.

Oh, Lombardi. Yeah.

This is Lombardo.

I I think that's what he said. Yeah. Oh, I mean, unless I misheard, maybe I misheard. He said he had a restaurant.

Vince Lombardi is the coach.

Oh, then yeah, then no. It was Guy Lombardo. It was Guy. Yeah. And he had a restaurant, apparently.

I have a good friend named Guy, Stevenson. So I want to tiptoe around this. Okay. I don't want to be offensive to anyone with the name Guy.

Well, we have a mutual friend named Guy.

We do up in Seattle now. Yeah. It's a funny name because it's a description. Yeah. It's like me named Man.

I know.

Or male. What if you were short-sighted and you named your child either Baby or Boy, forgetting that they would then turn into a guy?

A man or a guy? Yeah. I mean, I wonder where it first came from. Obviously, it's an old name. Maybe it started as a nickname.

For Gyson? Yep, exactly. For guy-man? Yeah.

It is weird.

Is there a female equivalent?

Lady.

Lady? Good job. Do you think there's any lady and guys that met and got married?

I hope so. That's a meet you.

And then they had children. They named their children Children.

You know it's funny now that you're bringing... When you said baby. Baby is a funny pet name for a lover. It's the most common pet name ever. But it's weird when you really think about it.

Well, not to me, because babies produce a visceral feeling because their cuteness is so appealing.

Yeah.

And so you meet a grown up human that actually produces that feeling. And the only other comp for it is the joy you experience looking at a little cooing baby.

That's interesting. I think it's more for a lot of people, or maybe when it started, I feel like it's more like I'm protecting you. I'm someone that protects you like you would a baby. But it's funny.

I'm sorry, this is off topic, but it is one of the funniest things that happened the entire weekend, and I forgot to tell you.

Okay, let's hear it.

So Saturday, we went to In-N-Out. I said, Let's take the charger. I'm afraid the battery is going to die if I don't drive it. They're like, No, let's take the road master. They want to take the road master. Great. So we get in the road master, we go to In-N-Out, and then I decide for some weird reason, I'm going to take Lancash him home. And then I said, Do you guys want to cruise? And they're like, Yeah, let's cruise and listen to music. Great. So I'm like, Well, I got to top off the tank. So I pull him to the mobile gas station right by the 101 entrance. Right as I pull up to the pump, I see in the parking lot 100 feet away, Someone has a Dodge Challenger 170. These are so rare. I don't know how many there are, but I don't think many. And I'm like, Checking it out. Oh, it's over there. I start filling up. Then the car pulls up to the pump on the direct other side of me. So now I'm I'm looking at the back tires. It comes with full drag slicks, the whole thing. I'm scoping the car.

The guy gets out. He walks inside. I don't even look at the guy, really. He comes back. I finish my stuff. I get in back into the car, and I have the window down, and I'm checking out this 170 one more time because it's right next to me. And then I lock eyes with the guy, and the guy is like, Hawking the roadmaster. And as I stare at him closely, I realized, oh, my God, it's Tim Allen. No way. Of course it's... And I step out of the car immediately and I go, Of course it's you. And as I'm saying, Of course it's you, he is going, Of course it's you. I was thinking, This has to be you, but you looked older. And I go, Yeah, it's happened.

Because you guys work together.

Yeah, I guess eight years ago or something. We had maybe three lunches on that. We didn't have many scenes together. But the point is, he goes, I saw this roadmaster and I thought, who has It's those rims and those brakes and that motor in a roadmaster? It has to be him. And I go, Dude, I was thinking the exact same thing. Who would own a 170 other than Tim Allen? So we get out of the car, we're chatting, and then we start explosively talking about cars. It's just one after another. And then the girls now get out of the car because I'm fully engaged in a conversation with a stranger. And they walk up and they're both staring at him quizzically. And then Lincoln goes, Why does he look familiar? And I go, The Santa Claus. And they're like, Oh, right, right, right, right. They're both pumped. And then he is so kind. He says to Delta, he says, Close your eyes. And she goes, What? I'm not closing my eyes, of course.

Yeah, good for her.

And I go, Do it, honey. I think you'll be happy you did this. He's like, Yeah, close your eyes. So she closes her eyes and he goes, To infinity and beyond. In his total Buzz Light ear voice. That's fine. And Delta's eyes popped open and she was so excited. It was such a fun running. That's so it was such a fun run in.

So cute. Fun. So is he a notorious car guy?

I'd say second only to Jay Lanos. Really?

He raced Transam for a minute.

I can only imagine. I think he's got like 100 cars. And he's from Detroit. Yeah. And an ex-cokehead. Oh, he is? Yeah. So he and I are... We got a lot in common.

Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. Cool. Now I want In-N-Out.

Yeah.

In-n-out comes up in this episode. Oh, it does? Yes. Eric Larson's kids love it.

Of course.

Might have to get it today. Now I really want it.

My order takes forever, though. What is it again? Well, it keeps evolving. Okay. I get a lettuce-wrapped double, and then I get a Flying Dutchman. You know what that is?

Yeah, that's just the patty with the cheese.

The cheese. Yeah. So I get a Flying Dutchman with chopped grilled onions. And then I get a flying Dutchman no cheese, chopped grilled onions. So six patties. I can't allow myself to do the six slices of cheese. I got to draw the line somewhere in this crazy world.

You don't go animal style. What are you doing?

Well, in essence, I am because I'm getting the grilled onions, which is the main-Yeah, but not the sauce. Well, I get sides of the sauce. Then I'm in charge of how much sauce it has. I see. So I'm I'm just doing my own animal- I introduced you to animal style. You did, the fries. I'd never had them.

They're so good.

Yeah, I don't allow myself to get them. I want them. But I'm eating six Patty's. I can't do everything.

They're just so good. I'm getting in in five minutes. Okay, good.

I don't want to hold you back.

Okay, so have Churchill's speeches become public domain? Churchill's speeches might remain copyrighted in the US until 2034. And while some government official speeches are public domain, saying, Spiro Agnews might still have active copyrights. So it seems some are and some aren't.

So it sounds like it transferred from him to another company.

Spiro Agnew.

It's hard not to hate some of these people who own these copyrights because forever, and in fact, it ended while I was doing chips. You know, these two women owned Happy Birthday. That's why you never hear the real Happy Birthday in a television show. Yes. Because they had to license that, and it was not cheap.

I know. I I love that for them, though.

Oh, I hate that.

It's so brilliant.

They didn't write the song.

Oh, yeah, but they knew what to do.

No, this is like when companies were starting to patent organisms. And I think the first case of it was, whether it was BP or mobile, whoever was responsible for the Valdies oil spill, they ended up inventing an organism that would eat oil, which is radical. Right. Then they patented that organism.

Yeah, that seems not allowed.

And that opened up the door basically to if you were first to produce the genome of a chimpanzee, you could patent or copyright that. And then for anyone who would want to study it, they'd have to pay a license. It's not a good precedent.

Yeah, that's getting Trixie.

Happy birthday song. And it's so against the common good.

Yeah, you're right. That's true.

People should be able to sing Happy.

I wonder how much money those women made.

Maybe Rob will find out before we conclude.

Okay, The Maritime Hotel. So there's a New Yorker article when it opened that talks about it may be being haunted.

Spooky, spooky. If you remember, this is where Leslie Arfen was working in the basement. That's how we met.

Oh, it was there. Ghost sightings reports of inexplicable noise, distant children's voices, and sensations of general unease among the guests have become sufficiently prevalent. Went, according to the staff, great find, that the operators at the front desk have begun to keep a log recording each new disturbance.

I heard a story from someone that said they woke up and someone was making love to them.

A ghost? Mm-hmm.

Wow. Yeah.

Okay. Last Wednesday, but many years ago, a would-be ghost Buster booked a room on the second floor and checked in just as the snow was beginning to stick. He had armed himself with a tape recorder, a Polaroid camera, and an open mind. Three Nets of investigative tools deemed indispensable by Dr. Hans Holzer, at-large professor of parapsychology. Okay, let's see. In the elevator, on the way to the room, Holzer's new apprentice asked the Bellhop about ghost sightings. You hear things, crazy things, the Bellhop replied. I don't know if it's really sightings as much as people hearing stuff. The building has a crazy history. The Bellhop then provided brief instructions for ordering room service, but don't answer the door unless they say room service. Yes, he said, because it could be a ghost.

That's the code you're looking for? They can't violate that.

You need confirmation.

It's funny the rules that ghosts do abide by.

Yeah, well, each floor seemed equally ominous, dark blue walls and ceiling, a long, narrow hallway with a a hole at either end. Today, we had to move two people from this floor. They kept hearing children talking. If you don't mind, I'd like to get off this floor now.

But really quick, if your conclusion was the children's voices you were hearing were ghosts, would you be satiated by moving one floor up? I would need to get out of the hotel. Same. Can we be further down the hallway from the ghosts? They're kicking up a lot of. I can't sleep. Too loud.

Also, Why couldn't it just have been children?

Exactly. Why would you leap to the least probable explanation? It's not like they forbid kids at that hotel. It's not an adults-only hotel. Really great Italian restaurant in the- Did you like it then?

Yeah, that's what it It says.

Yeah, really exceptional. That Italian restaurant is one of the more memorable emotions I've ever had in my life, which was I had broken up with Bri, I don't know how long before, but months and months and months. And it was pretty all-consuming. Yeah. And I was eating by myself on a late spring day, and the weather was perfect, and I was by myself, and I just had this huge swell of like, You're just a free human being on planet Earth. Like, sky's the limit. Yeah. Yeah. It switched in that exact moment at that restaurant.

And it didn't go back?

It didn't go back.

Wow. Yeah.

Funny enough, our guest earlier today was the illusion of closure. So I'm not going to go so far as to say it was like that was closure. But whatever cycle of thought I was stuck in- You were done with it.

Stopped.

Yeah, that's great. And I actually had optimism and excitement about my future.

When you guys broke up, the feelings that you were ruminating on, what were they? Just like, I'm not going to find anyone.

Yeah. What's interesting is it's not like I was pining to get back together. It was just this enormous loss in my life. It had been the last nine years and a co-identity and someone I report everything to and share everything with and just this humongous chunk of my life now gone. And it was hard not to be aware of that. And then total pessimism that I would ever meet anyone I liked as much as her.

Yeah. That didn't lead to, fuck, I got to get back together with her. Like, there's no one I'd rather be with?

No, because I knew we couldn't. I felt, who knows that I knew, I felt like we weren't ever going to be able to go back to whatever magic was there. Again, we still talk at that point. We're still friends. I still care about her. But being romantic partners was not going to ever happen again. That felt very clear. Yet I also mourned it so much.

Yeah.

And yeah, just that pessimism. And you and I are both great at creating pretty compelling stories in our minds. And so the story, I believe, made so much sense, which is like falling in love is a young person's game. Right. You become jaded and disillusioned and all these things happen.

And you were a young person.

Well, I didn't think so. You didn't think so, yeah. I'm in my new decade of being 30, which seemed crazy in my 20s that I'd ever be 30. Yeah. So, yeah, I felt very much like, well, I'm not a kid anymore. I'm not an adolescent. I'm not even a young adult. I'm in the middle of my life. And that whole experience probably is something that happens when you're nubile.

Right. Have you ever had a relationship where you break up and get back together a lot?

It's so common.

Yeah, it's so common. Well, ding, ding, ding. Eric Larson, he was saying him and his wife broke up, and then they got engaged and broke up, and got engaged again and broke up, and then got engaged and it stuck.

Yeah, I know quite a few people that that was their story. I have never gotten back together with someone I broke up with. I have hooked up with- An ex. Only one, though. And that was when I was much younger.

Yeah.

But no. But I know this is a big thing. I know a lot of people when they're dating someone, they're really threatened by that person's ex.

Yes.

And again, I guess rightly so, a lot of people do hook up with their exes, or they're still in love with their ex, or they want to get back together with their ex, whatever the situation is. But I've never had that.

Yes. I think, I mean, so common for people to-Fall back in. Or no, No, to be anxious about people's exes. But more than people are worried they're going to get back together, I think it's more of an internal, is our love as strong as theirs? It's always a comparison point.

I would say what would be really pertinent if I was evaluating it is, how did they break up? Was it completely unexpected? And it's still a huge question mark. I think that one's probably more vulnerable. If two people had a very long time together and they dissolved it over time, I think that's different. Whereas you're super in love with someone, that person cheated on you, so you ended it out of retaliation, but you were never not still in love with them. That one, of course, is, I think, probably ripe. If I started dating a girl and she had dumped her ex-boyfriend because he cheated on her, I probably wouldn't want her to hang out with that dude. Also, just this weird thing, do people leave with the power or not. I know that's a dicey concept, but I do think it's a reality, which is like, in many of these scenarios, one person gets dumped and the other person, they didn't want to get dumped. So for them to be around the ex is probably more problematic than the person who wanted to leave the relationship.

Yes. If you're with someone who was in love with someone and they got dumped, yes, it would be scary as the current partner.

Yeah, to know that they were going to Santa Barbara for the weekend.

Or even just in general, the idea of them, not even them seeing. Sure.

Well, because you would go like, Well, they would choose to be with this person. Right.

They just couldn't. So they're with me now. On the backup plan. I'm second best. It's all though, none of that's- But also Guess what?

There's a reality like, no, you can't compete. When I first met Kristen, I have no illusions that I'm competing with the level of love that her and her ex-boyfriend, who I won't name, hang out. There's no way. They were together for five years. They had dogs together and co-her cohabitated. I think it's a naive and childish, even fantasy that you would have that level.

That expectation. Yeah.

You could get there. Right. But of course not.

Yeah. It's true. I know we all just want so badly to be so important to someone.

Yes. Indispensable.

Yeah. Okay. If you want to look up the girl who got mauled by the otter, this is what she looks like. Fuck. She's pretty mauled up. It looks really bad.

Really mauled up.

She's smiling in this picture, though.

Another hot update. I turned a rib eye into three burgers yesterday for my mom and I.

What do you mean?

Well, You know how Jose Andres, his burger is a rib eye.

And he grinds it up.

He grinds the whole thing up and then makes burgers out of it. And it's sensational. You know what's really funny is I was thinking, even me saying it out loud, people would object to that. They would go like, A rib eye is expensive. You're going to make hamburger out of it? And then, you don't think that would happen?

I mean, that's silly.

Do you think that would happen, Rob? Hopefully not. It'd be a stupid thing. Yeah, because I was just thinking, I was predicting people would have an issue with that. But then I was like, you're just talking about what shape you eat this rib eye in? Yeah, and there's like, Wagyu burgers. Yeah. But I can see people going like, You can't take a $30 steak and turn it into three hamburgers. But it's like, well, you're eating the steak. It's not like you ground it up and threw it in the trash. You've changed the shape of it. And it was tasty. I like the shape of a burger. Oh, it was great. I grilled them up. They were delish.

Well, I hope you have a fun time with your mom. Oh, thank you.

Me too. I'm taking her to the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday to go to the Jazz Festival.

Oh, fun. With Guy Lombardo?

Guy Lombardo, yeah. He's going to do some hydroplane racing and then play the clarinet.

The Happy Birthday song?

Well, he can't afford it. Oh, you're about to tell us the... It collects an estimated $2 million a year in licensing fees.

Okay, that's not as much as I would have expected. But that's still pretty good.

Warner Chapel acquired it from a smaller publishing group for $25 million. They bought it for $29 million.

I mean, smart, so it can be in movies and stuff.

But I thought this got ruled that it was public domain. It was up for that in 2015. Yeah, that would have been when I made Chippies. Well, that's what the crazy thing is. I wanted to put it in the movie, and I said, It'll eat into your music budget. And then I did the research and I found out, Oh, yeah, Warner now owned it. So Warner is going to charge me to put it in their movie. And I was like, This whole thing is a racket.

Yeah, Tennis Racket, Challenges.

Apparently, as of May 24th, 2024, it's public domain. Okay.

Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday. You have to sing it fast, according to Kristen. Yeah, if she's present. And low. All right.

All right. Love you. Love you.