Last Born in the Wilderness
Interview with John H. Richardson on his book about Luigi Mangione
Author and journalist John H. Richardson joins me to ruminate on his new book, Luigi: The Making and the Meaning, published by Simon & Schuster. In line with the book’s title, we discuss the making and the meaning of Luigi Mangione, currently on trial for the alleged killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. In his full book treatment of the case, Richardson follows the breadcrumbs Mangione left behind, painting a vivid picture of his influences and thinking, situating this violent act within our revolutionary moment.
Picking up and stitching together the odd pieces of Luigi’s trajectory up to and since that fateful Manhattan morning almost 11 months ago, we get a fairly complex picture of a young man who set himself on a path of enormous consequence. In a nation laden with medical debt, undirected and random acts of violence, and diffuse traumas, capping the CEO of the most profitable—i.e., parasitic—private health insurance company on his way to a bean-counter’s meeting, the deed was certainly intended as propaganda.
“Frankly, these parasites had it coming,” to quote directly from Mangione’s handwritten note collected after his arrest.
Very few things really unite people across the political spectrum, especially in the US. But this act set off a massive, largely unanimous, wave of sentiment. Aside from the consternating media and political class—wagging their fingers, clutching their pearls, wringing their hands—something had broken loose in the common folk. A kind of awesome shock, roiling glee; a trollish snicker rang out. Any attempt to eulogize the dead CEO was summarily ratioed by laugh reacts and turns of phrase: “Thoughts and prayers are out of network” and “I guess lead wasn’t covered under his policy.”
In this book, Richardson places Mangione in a proper context, both in revolutionary history and present existential crises. And as a veteran journalist, he also places himself in the story, taking us on a tour across his extraordinary career, profiling everything from climate scientists’ existential terror and grief, riding shotgun with Ted-pilled eco-radicals, and picking the mind of Ted Kaczynski himself as he wallowed restlessly in a supermax prison in Colorado.
John H. Richardson gives us a nuanced examination of not only Luigi and his alleged acts but also the troubled times we live in and the kinds of daring individuals they inevitably produce.
This impulse to correct through revolutionary violent means is a pretty widespread impulse now. It’s not just Luigi’s; it’s also racist killers who target synagogues and churches and groups of Black people in supermarkets.
So I think Luigi is part of a larger phenomenon, and then when you think about that larger phenomenon, you think about what the social contract on violence is, and then why do so many people feel that it’s okay to violate it right now. That’s a deeper conversation, and it doesn’t focus on personalities and causes as much necessarily and specifically.
I think the first thing that happens with a killing like this is they try to invalidate it through one thing or another—defuse it. “Invalidate” isn’t the right word—defuse it, and for good reason. You don’t want to trigger mass violence. Unless you’re in a more explicitly revolutionary context.
I don’t know. These are deep and complex issues.
— John H. Richardson
Episode Notes:
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Purchase a copy of Luigi: The Making and the Meaning from Bookshop
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Learn more about Luigi Mangione’s case
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The music featured is by Nick Vander, used with permission by the artist
Image: Brian Thompson’s shooter suspect in taxi CCTV / Date: 18 December 2024 / Public Domain
EP 394 / REC 10.15.2025 / REL 11.01.2025
John H. Richardson was a writer-at-large for Esquire for eighteen years and was previously a staff writer at New York magazine and Premiere. He is the author of My Father the Spy, In the Little World, The Vipers’ Club, and Luigi: the Making and the Meaning. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Crime Writing, and Best American Magazine Writing. He lives in New York City.
Preview
JOHN: this impulse to correct through revolutionary violent means is a pretty widespread impulse now. And it’s not just Luigi’s, it’s also racist killers who target synagogues and churches and groups of black people in supermarkets and stuff. So it’s like, I think Luigi’s part of a larger phenomenon. And then when you think about that larger phenomenon, you think about like, what’s the social contract on violence and why do so many people feel that it’s okay to violate it right now? that’s a deeper conversation and it doesn’t focus on personalities and causes as much necessarily specifically. I think there, the first thing that happens with a killing like this is they try to invalidate it, through one thing or another. Diffuse it. Invalidated isn’t the right word. Diffuse it. And for good reasons, you don’t want to trigger mass violence unless you’re in a more explicitly revolutionary context. I don’t know. These are deep and complex issues.
Intro
PATRICK: Hey, everybody. Thank you for being here. I’m Patrick Farnsworth, and you’re listening to Last Born in the Wilderness. Author and journalist John H. Richardson returns to the podcast. He was a writer at large for Esquire for 18 years and was previously staff writer at New York Magazine and Premiere. He’s the author of several books, including My Father, the Spy, In the Little World, and The Vipers Club. He joined me to ruminate on his new book, Luigi, The Making and the Meaning, published by Simon & Schuster. In line with the title of the book, we discuss the making and meaning of Luigi Mangione, currently on trial for the alleged killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. In his full book, Treatment of the Case, Richardson follows the breadcrumbs Mangione left behind, painting a vivid picture of his influences and thinking, situating this violent act within our revolutionary moment. Picking up and stitching together the odd pieces of Luigi’s trajectory up to and since that fateful Manhattan morning almost 11 months ago, we get a fairly complex picture of a young man who set himself on a path of enormous consequence. In a nation laden with medical debt, undirected and random acts of violence, and diffuse traumas, capping the CEO of the most profitable, i.e. parasitic, private health insurance company on his way to a bean counters meeting, The deed was certainly intended as propaganda. Frankly, these parasites had it coming, to quote directly from Mangione’s handwritten note collected after his arrest. Very few things really unite people across the political spectrum, especially in the United States, but this act set off a massive, largely unanimous wave of sentiment. Aside from the consternating media and political class, wagging their fingers, clutching their pearls, wringing their hands, something had broken loose in the common folk. A kind of awesome shock, roiling glee. A trollish snicker rang out. Any attempt to eulogize the dead CEO was summarily ratioed by laugh reacts and turns of phrase. Thoughts and prayers are out of network. I guess lead wasn’t covered under his policy. In this book, Richardson places Mangione in a proper context, both in revolutionary history and present existential crises. And as a veteran journalist, he also places himself in the story, taking us on a tour across his extraordinary career, profiling everything from climate scientists’ existential terror and grief, riding shotgun with Ted Pill’s eco-radicals, and picking the mind of Ted Kaczynski himself as he wallowed restlessly in a supermax prison in Colorado. John H. Richardson gives us a nuanced examination of not only Luigi and his alleged acts, but the troubled times we live in and the kinds of daring individuals they inevitably produce.
Last Born in the Wilderness is a 100% listener-supported project. So thank you so much to all the patrons and supporters for helping to keep the work going. If you are enjoying the work that I’m producing for this podcast, consider heading over to the Patreon page if you haven’t done so already at patreon.com slash lastborninthewilderness and become a backer on whatever level you feel comfortable with. All the resources and notes for this episode and every other interview I’ve produced for this podcast can be found on their respective episode pages at lastborninthewilderness.com.
Conversation Begins
PATRICK: I just really thank you, John, for coming on the podcast. Again, it has been six years, I think. We spoke back in 2019. You had released Children of Ted. It was a few months after the release of that. So I don’t know, it was a really memorable discussion. Like it really is one of the few, like, I have, of course, some favorites and I think that’s one of them because I don’t know, there’s something about podcasting, like, we’re doing this on Zoom now, but like when I spoke to you then, you were on like a cell phone on some dock somewhere on the East Coast.
JOHN: On a boat yeah.
PATRICK: You were an editor from, I think it was a New York Magazine, like got me in touch with you or something. Like it was just something and it was like a bit spontaneous. And it was just, it was a memorable, it was just kind of one of those things where it just, everything just kind of worked out. And the piece you wrote was so interesting and so important to me. And I think, I still think it resonates. I think a lot of people still think about it and reference it. And so when I got the e-mail that you were publishing this book about Luigi, I was like, of course, that’s what John, John’s been up to something. So it just, it really, it made sense. And anyway, I’m just so happy that we could talk again. So really thank you for being here.
JOHN: Excited to do it.
PATRICK: Yeah. So you have this new book about Luigi Mangione. This is the first, I think, full book treatment of Luigi, of his case. there’s been plenty of things written about him, articles. Of course, there’s some documentaries that have come out which have their own controversy surrounding that relating to the ongoing case. But, this book is being published in November, early November, so we’re now in like, it’s October 15th right now, so in a few weeks. I got an early draft and I just want to like address one, this is just kind of the first question I had. It’s like a pertinent question, I think, just about the nature of the subject that you’re writing about. You have an author’s note here at the very beginning, and you write, I very much believe that Luigi is innocent until proven guilty, and I condition any speculation in the following pages on that righteous legal scruple. How does one write a book about someone that is like, this event happened, this killing happened less than a year ago. The book’s coming out within that year. How do you write a book about somebody who is currently on trial for something? Like, what are the legal dimensions? I guess that’s just almost like the first thing I want to get out of the way.
JOHN: Yeah, well, it felt weird at times. I do think that innocent until proven guilty is righteous and valid for a lot of reasons. And it’s not just the obvious ones. the rules that makes triggers in jurisprudence or a whole protective group of rules that he’s entitled to. And I sometimes felt really bad like speculating on his motives and his life. If this was Luigi who did this at all, and, it does point to him and he hasn’t denied it, also there’s also him throwing out Monopoly money and having a letter to the feds and things like that. So I sort of operated in a two-mind thing where I went with the evidence that he sort of laid out and left for us. if it was him and he’s not a fall guy for some other professional hitman, which is hard to conceive. But anyway, yeah, it’s a little weird to speculate on something that’s true, but I think that, that’s actually happening in the real world and where he is afforded these and righteously deserves these legal protections. But I felt in many ways he was asking me to do this.
PATRICK: He’s asking you to do this, you said.
JOHN: Yeah, if the situation has how the police have described it, if it’s not all a total pack of lies, it seems that he left a trail of evidence and a trail of clues that he wanted followed. That was my belief.
PATRICK: Have you been in contact with him at all? Have you been able to write him letters or anything like that?
JOHN: Only to the extent that I wrote him letters and that he acknowledged that he received them. And that’s it.
PATRICK: Okay. Just curious about that. Okay. So considering that.
JOHN: Which I took, he could have, I told him what I was doing. I’m completely open in every respect. So he could have said, please don’t do this. I’m, I, my lawyers need a clear field. He wouldn’t even had to say, I’m innocent. He could have just, I’m not sure what I would have done, but I would have certainly respected it and considered it.
PATRICK: Right. Yeah, this is sort of the thing. it’s like beyond just the book itself, but just the general, it’s just sort of fascinating because it’s like, everyone’s working under the assumption he’s guilty, I suppose. And I say guilty and that people don’t think that’s even a negative thing. And that’s kind of what It’s like, if you’re in the broader public, this is really the phenomenon of it, Is the, just the, what is it, the sort of feeling of almost joy or glee or some sort of sense of like catharsis that came out of recognizing what happened and who had happened to. And then once, he became known as the potential, as the one being alleged to have committed the crime, he turns into this folk hero, akin to, as you’ve described in the book, I think Robin Hood has mentioned, and there’s probably other examples of this. idea that his, how could there, I’m sorry, this is just another question. It’s just like, how could they even do a fair trial where you have a jury who are not influenced by any of this. it’s just sort of impossible. Like, no matter how you look at it, right, because just in the general culture itself, people are making like st-like images of him and like kind of, talking about him in this way. And then you have the state, the prosecutors themselves, which are doing some pretty irregular things as well. So It’s almost like, how could there be a fair trial?
JOHN: Yeah, I don’t know if they’ve ever said, this is just an impossible trial. OJ would have been an example of that, where the saturation of media coverage was just so insane. I don’t know. It’s actually a good question. I wonder what they argued to not, what could you do? You can’t just dismiss a case because it’s over publicized. Yeah, but in this case, because of a whole complex of factors, yes, people’s, immediately a CEO shot. Before, before anyone knew who it was, who did it, the implications were clear and people had a lot of feelings about that for sure. To me, I was sort of gobsmacked by it myself. I’m not all online and in touch with how people are feeling about those things. I guess the extent of the willingness to embrace, something so shocking, that was it. wasn’t, I don’t know, just the gleefulness, I think, was the word. Yeah, that keeps coming up, the gleefulness. It’s not, it feels different than something that would have happened 20 years ago. There might have been, excitement, but that kind of trollish glee. That feels new.
PATRICK: Yeah. Like the common kind of jokey comments or things like what is it like thoughts and prayers are out of network or just things relating to the language of private health insurance, denying claims. Like I think for me, like what was so I think it’s a cathartic feeling and it doesn’t resolve anything, but it also was this moment where everyone like there aren’t these, it’s not very common anymore in the United States. where everyone has a united feeling around something. What was the last time? Like 9–11 or something.
JOHN: God, man, what a macro thing to think.
PATRICK: But like, it’s around something kind of ****** ** and traumatic, usually. so many people are silently killed by the private health insurance industry in the United States. There’s so much like, unspoken, it’s not even necessarily unspoken, but it’s just sort of this ubiquitous sort of dread and trauma that comes from engaging with this middleman between you and the doctor, and just the absurdity of these denies, these claims that you make. And it’s just, it’s just, it’s just so there’s so much there. So people feel so much and they don’t know what to do about it. wasn’t even raised in the last presidential election, as far as I know. There wasn’t even a conversation about healthcare. So yeah, for, a figure to do this, it just sort of situates itself in a context. So of course, it makes sense in retrospect to understand how this created such a reaction, widespread reaction. And of course, there’s a parasocial element too, which is a bit creepy, I think. But altogether, it fits into that pattern.
JOHN: So yeah. for me, Initially, it was just another news story. I wasn’t really paying attention beyond like, whoa, shooting in New York. CEO, wow. But then when the Kosinski stuff came out, and I guess, and also like when it came out more, I’m not sure if it was when, I guess, yeah, I guess it was when the good guy with the gun, when I started talking. my sister and my friends and seeing that social media stuff. But then when his link to Kaczynski came out, which came out so quickly, like within days, I was like, okay, I see how this all fits in. It immediately clicked for me. Yeah. And then the big question was strategy, like, tactics. What, What was he trying to accomplish? And how deep into this stuff was he? everybody made an assumption that it was about healthcare, but when I saw Kaczynski, I started thinking that healthcare was a tactical move and that it might be, his ideas might be more broad ranging. And then, so my story sort of took two paths. One was to try to tell the story of this these young guys who were attracted to Kaczynski. And the other one was to just try to do what really is still a detective story about going through the trail crumbs that he left behind. And at times it felt like he was deliberately leaving crumbs. or, and deliberately concealing his real feelings and stuff. It was, it became really mysterious. There’s still so many questions up there.
PATRICK: So you, so you’d get that impression that based on, because people were digging into like his Goodreads book reviews, which is where the industrial society and its future, Kaczynski’s so-called manifesto, like he did a, he wrote a review or some sort of, some sort of review there. Did he make any other references to Kaczynski?
JOHN: Well, he did, but we didn’t know them at the time. But later the police released more and very intriguing elements of his notebooks and where he talks about Kaczynski. And he also uses words like normies, which really surprised me because I know that this is where I’m a little bit uncertain. Another example of uncertainness. I had to educate myself that normies is like internet term. Yeah, right. And that it relates to both like Silicon Valley thinking and also revolutionary thinking. And it’s so it’s a kind of a fluid term. apparently. And then him using it, he’s a technology guy, so he seems to be using it partly in that context, but also referencing Kaczynski. So it’s, it’s very, it suggests for one thing that he’s pretty far along in his revolutionary thought. as does some of the other things that were released later that police withheld initially. And we still don’t know what else they’re withholding. But he talked in the notes that they released after about six months about killing the guy at the annual Bean Counters conference. and the message would be evident, because it would be at the bean counters confidence conference. And the police like withheld a lot of stuff like that because for, because they want to protect the public from other similar actors, I guess.
PATRICK: There was this, I was just thinking about how his manifesto as it was. actually, I have a couple of questions about the manifesto, because I think with some of the stuff that’s been left behind, the notebooks and stuff, do you feel like there was any thing. you’re kind of getting into the weeds and the details here, but it is interesting. Like, do you think that there was anything doctored, anything like, because some people were skeptical about like, is this really him writing this or, is it been modified? Because sometimes manifestos that killers leave behind, there is sometimes a sense that it’s being tampered with. Do you get that sense at all?
JOHN: I really kind of don’t, unless there’s evidence that comes out, I’m not going down those roads. I think the Speaking as a disciple, the son of a CIA agent and a fan of Oscar Wilde, the truth is on the surface. I hope I’m never so shallow as I don’t look at the truth as being on the surface, as Oscar said, something like that. It’s like, look, the secrets are a fantasy. My dad used to say, there are no secrets. Everybody knows, if there’s a secret and two people know it, then it’s not a secret. They don’t stay secrets long. Another agent, CIA officer told me once that you could learn more about foreign countries from reading their newspapers than all the spies in the courthouse, in the royal court. But, that’s not, you still want that inside gossip, inside info, especially if there’s an attack coming and stuff like that. I’m not denigrating intelligence gathering. But, the truth is on the surface in a lot of ways. And you don’t, there’s a lot that we don’t know because it’s inside Luigi, but there’s also a lot of evidence of where he went and what kinds of things he was thinking about.
PATRICK: When you were on his kind of trail of breadcrumbs, as it were, there was a few periods. Wasn’t there a period there that he disappeared and went dark before the event itself?
JOHN: Yeah, He laid in, I guess, the late summer or spring or something like that, I’m forgetting now, but he, yeah, he started. he was he stopped in April in some ways, and then he made some last contacts, I think, towards the late summer, and then disappeared completely, and then didn’t, didn’t surface until he showed up in that on the bus to New York. But he also, he, like most of us, he took periods of a break from the internet, and that’s one of the things that was interesting for me is I noticed at some point that at the beginning of 2024, nine months before his, before the killing, Luigi started posting a lot of stuff, including his reviews of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and some other books that are really pertinent to his thinking, seem pertinent to his thinking. he’s kind of a fascinating guy and really trying very hard to figure things out and earnestly trying to study the world and figure out what its problems are and hopefully maybe address them.
PATRICK: Yeah, there’s a real earnestness to him. And it seems like, I think this is what, this is what happens is that in, I don’t want to necessarily bring in other acts of political violence as a means of too much comparison, but there is this sort of phenomena of someone commits assassination, like there was, of course, recently Charlie Kirk’s assassination, immediately after people are wondering who did it, of course, but also with the motivations. And in that sort of space, people kind of fill in the void with all kinds of assumptions and and also things that they want to believe, Because they want to easily fit people into categories like, if Charlie Kirk is a right-wing activist and speaker, obviously the person who killed him must be on the other side. Turns out it’s a little more complex than that, a little more nuanced, and maybe not even as political as people want to believe, or there is a political dimension, but just not in the way people assume it is. So, with Luigi, I think people were like, he is our left-wing anarchist hero. Like, he’s the Alexander Berkeman of like, 2024 or whatever, but he’s not necessarily, at least in the sense that his ideological tendencies or whatever are a little, seem a little scattered and seem also like someone who’s just sort of figuring stuff out and kind of dipping into different sort of spaces online. He never seems to get into anything that’s too extreme, but there are times where I’m like, well, I would never, I don’t agree with that. But like, how would you kind of describe this sort of, I get this sense from you in the writing. You kind of like this person. Like you kind of like who he is. You think that he’s an interesting young man who’s kind of trying to figure it out. There’s an earnestness to him intellectually. So yeah, like, how do you kind of understand his sort of intellectual journey, I guess?
JOHN: As you say, earnest and that he’s trying to solve problems of the world that, he’s good-hearted, seems to be. Of course, these are like things that one leaves behind on the internet. So there isn’t, people get into some ugly stuff, which he apparently didn’t, or at least it’s never been turned up, but it doesn’t seem like him. his intellectual journey is weird to me. I’m not, I’m an old dude. This manosphere and all these. I can barely listen to Joe Rogan. I like the guy sometimes. He’s funny and all that. And he can be heterodotic. he can have all kinds of different opinions and stuff. But I just can’t listen to a two hour podcast. What are these kids doing with their times? I guess they play games while they’re listening to the podcast.
PATRICK: It’s a multitasking because it’s like his podcasts are tend to be 3 hours or more sometimes. Yeah.
JOHN: Anyway, I don’t know. So for me to be more serious, the books that he’s reading, these sociology type stuff, and the discussions that he’s having, which are the discussions of his generation about whether AI is valid and whether young men are having a crisis. whether AI is going to take over the world and whether young men are having a crisis and what to do about it and all, video game addiction and stuff. It’s like not stuff that I can really relate to. in a lot of ways. So I watch it. What moves me is his attempt, his reading books like The Ape Who Understood the Universe and What’s Our Problem, a Self-Help Book for Societies. like I never read books like that when I was a kid. I was reading novels and going to movies and, trying to get cultured and stuff like that. But I didn’t read books on how to solve social problems. And it’s admirable. And it’s the kind of thing people who go into social work and politics and stuff like that do. But it definitely seems, the expression I would use is it’s very positivistic. It’s looking for solutions. It’s seeing things as problems. It’s very solutions oriented. And there’s also an urgency to a sense of real crisis in the culture, which I agree with. He’s very interested in nuclear power, which I’m also sympathetic to, like anything to solve the climate crisis. He’s interested in all these kind of tech fixes, which is not Kaczynski-like.
PATRICK: Right.
JOHN: And, to me, it’s almost like an alien culture. I grew up in a different culture where it’s more about like there are problems that are insoluble and man is a tragic creature, Yeah. And we have to, and there’s such a, not exactly, I don’t use the term sin, but there’s, forces within man that cause him to destroy himself and things like that. more different like Greek tragedy and Shakespeare and stuff like that. And I don’t see any evidence of that kind of learning in Luigi’s study. It seems a little bit... shallow in that regard, naive. he’s a kid. He’s 26 years old. And a lot of this stuff is when he’s 22, 24, 25, earnest trying, dog and all that. So for me, his intellectual journey is kind of limited interest. But, and I think he needed to go outside of the sources that he seems to have been He seems to, in college, he seems to have studied very hard in his technical fields and science, in computer science. really hard, pushing himself very hard to excel. But he doesn’t seem to have got, he didn’t have a liberal education, which, might have rounded him out and given him more of a sense of the trajectory of history and stuff like that. I don’t know. I’m casting on.
PATRICK: Yeah, So I’m just curious about this because it seems like his, you’ve written about this thing called the Kaczynski moment. This is what we talked about. That was the name of the episode we did six years ago. I called it the Kaczynski moments. You talk about your own Kaczynski moment. You talk about people across different political, ends of the political ideological spectrum who come across Kaczynski’s writing and they have these moments of like, oh, like what is this actually? What’s going on? And so.
JOHN: I had one today.
PATRICK: You had one today? Yeah, see, there you go.
JOHN: I was reading this article in the New Republic called How I Became A Populist. Fantastic piece. But is this guy just realizing, you can’t fix tractors anymore and you can’t, if your rideshare app bans you, can never get another job as a ride. Using a driver, that kind of stuff, how these large corporate forces are in control. And it’s like, getting worse.
PATRICK: Yeah, it’s like a techno feudalist sort of situation we’re in now, Yeah, we’re kind of moving into this sort of feudalist direction where we have to kind of, we don’t really own things anymore as much. We’re kind of renting or paying subscription services for things. And that’s kind of the direction we’re going in and everything kind of being accumulated into fewer and fewer. Anyway, the point is just to.
JOHN: So like a Black Mirror episode?
PATRICK: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But what I get my sense is from, again, the reason I bring up his intellectual journey is just because it seems like it was, I don’t want to say interrupted, but there was this moment where he comes across Kaczynski’s work. He writes very positively about it in that review. And it seems to also influence him in other writings that you mentioned. So I guess I want to understand that how, because this is where you seem to have kind of got pulled in. right, where you recognize that Kaczynski was an element in this. So yeah, I just want to understand, like, because you talk about this also, like you say, you’re an older person, you’re not necessarily aware of the kind of, the language that’s being used, referencing certain groups of people, NPC, non-playable characters, which is a video game reference, which is also kind of like a normie-esque term. But we’re talking about someone who’s also worked in technology and seemed very optimistic and very interested in the development of artificial intelligence and things like this. But if you read Kaczynski and you take his premise seriously, you’re going to recognize that’s a false promise that is not going to liberate humanity, that’s not going to make anything better. And that actually just is further down this path that he is advocating against. And of course, Kaczynski advocated against that very violently, but altogether his intellectual ideas, yeah, they resonate with a lot of different people. So I’m curious like how that Kosinski moment came to, what can you sense from Luigi about the effect that maybe Kosinski had in his thinking?
JOHN: Well, he’s definitely aware of of AI and the big argument about AI, is it going to, when it, what is it, they, it says in Terminator 2, when it achieves consciousness or whatever it is, then will it destroy us or, make us happy little, sheep in its farm.
PATRICK: Yeah.
JOHN: he was he had people who were AI doomers on his follow lists. And so and referenced that argument in different things. He seems to have been, pretty much I would say that he seems to have been pretty optimistic that in his references to Kaczynski, though, he’s seen he seems more into the class warfare kind of argument there, that the oil companies don’t care about us and that kind of thing. But I think In his last, I talked to one of the last people he spoke to, Gerwinder, a British writer, and Gerwinder said that he was like, are there fixes? what kind of fixes can we do? Like right at the end, what kind of technological fixes? How can we deal with, these problems? So it seems like really very much up until the end, and maybe beyond that, to this time, He’s still a technical optimist in some way. it’s just not clear whether he intended this, assuming he did this, whether he intended this killing as more of an attack on capitalism or the healthcare industry. How much of it was technology? he touches all those bases in his range of concerns. Climate change, he touches, AI, he touches. But, it’s just not, to me, where he falls in all of that is ultimately not clear. But, you asked a little while ago about political violence in general. And look, I think my sister and I both had the similar reaction. Okay, finally a good guy with a gun because he’s doing something, not killing a man who’s, hasn’t raised a gun against you, but, not to get into those arguments right now, but, it’s like, There’s a natural reaction that if you’re sympathetic to what appears to be the cause, you’re more sympathetic to the person who does it, But this impulse to correct through revolutionary violent means is a pretty widespread impulse now. And it’s not just Luigi’s, it’s also racist killers who target synagogues and churches and groups of black people in supermarkets and stuff. So it’s like, I think, what’s the Luigi’s part of a larger phenomenon. And then when you think about that larger phenomenon, you think about like, what’s the social contract on violence and why do so many people feel that it’s okay to violate it right now? that’s a that’s a deeper conversation and it doesn’t focus on personalities and causes as much. necessarily specifically. I think they’re, the first thing that happens with a killing like this is they try to invalidate it, through one thing or another. Diffuse it. Invalidated isn’t the right word. Diffuse it. And for good reasons, you don’t want to trigger mass violence unless you’re in a more explicitly revolutionary context. I don’t know. These are deep and complex issues.
PATRICK: Yeah. I think also there’s a bit of sympathy that comes from just the way the prosecution or the state itself has treated Luigi, where you have famous scenes of him on a perp walk. He’s like, walk, I don’t remember, was it outside somewhere? And there was like 2 dozen dudes in full body armor with like assault rifles. Mayor Eric Adams from New York City, like trailing behind, like this is his photo op. You have him in handcuffs and ankle cuffs in the courthouse when he’s one of his appearances. So it’s just like, everything.
JOHN: On the 12th floor.
PATRICK: On the 12th floor, yeah.
JOHN: On the 12th floor, after you’ve gone through the wand and the x-ray machines. it was just, it’s just ridiculous.
PATRICK: Yeah, I just, I guess my point was just that every time the state, like, and then the charges themselves, it’s, There was a terrorism charge. Is that, was that dropped recently? I think that was dropped.
JOHN: Yes, it was. I was pleased to see the judge agreed with me. you look at the law and terrorism, it’s just not, it just didn’t fit.
PATRICK: Right. Yeah. So, my, I guess my point is just that like every time, whether it’s the media figures and the established media castigating us for feeling the feelings we’re feeling, And, the prosecution doing what it’s doing, the attempts to just sort of, I don’t know what it is, but it’s like, it’s like as if they are so disconnected. They seemingly are, the political class and the kind of media class that’s involved in this. It’s just like they’re trying to, they’re trying to wag their fingers at us for feeling these things and, also make us feel afraid, I suppose. And it’s just like, no matter what they do, though, it actually only kind of amplifies feelings of sympathy and like positive sentiment for Luigi. Because even if you feel like what he did was wrong, you’re like, well, no one should be treated like this. Like, don’t we have, aren’t we a nation of laws? Don’t we have like all of these sort of precedents to sort of make sure that people are treated fairly in a court of law? And yet that doesn’t seem to be occurring.
JOHN: Well, it’s a, I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know that much, but it seems, I know that prosecutors often say things that are prejudicial, but it seems to me what Bondi is saying, she’s just so nakedly politicizing it and saying, and declaring him guilty. without any deferences to innocent until proven guilty. she just, they seem to be making no effort, in this sense, in many cases, to not prejudice a jury. It’s like they are trying to prejudice a jury. It’s pretty shocking. Yeah. I think. overreach. They jumped to murder before they even really thought about it. you’re supposed to consider charges and history and listen to the defense attorney’s arguments and all of that. And they just sort of skipped right over that to murder. Usually it takes a year or two years to come up with a charge. And they, they make the charges because they expect them to stick. And, prosecutors are proud of their track records and stuff like that. you don’t want to charge somebody with murder if you don’t think you’re going to get that charge. Now, in this case, they might well be able to get that charge, but terrorism definitely seemed to reach. I don’t know.
PATRICK: Yeah.
JOHN: He’s a very, he’s also sympathetic in the sense that he’s attractive and he’s not raving in the courtroom and he’s, writing sensitive appreciations to his fans and stuff like that. He’s not coming off like a raving, psycho killer, that’s for sure. He’s not carving Nazi symbols into his forehead or anything like that.
PATRICK: No, but also those people tend to get some sympathetic followers too, but they’re a pretty small minority. We’re not seeing that with Luigi. We’re seeing a lot of just regular working people who are like, yeah, we like this guy. Like we’re showing up to his court appearances outside the courthouse and showing our support, and you’ve been to those, some of those court appearances or.
JOHN: Yeah, I’ve been to a couple.
PATRICK: Yeah. What was the feeling like when you were there?
JOHN: There’s definitely, factions of people who are very much there for health care. There’s people who are, seem to be true believers and guilty until proven innocent who are like anti-death penalty and, that kind of justice folks. And then there’s, the ones that you can say are fans, I guess, who are very just, into Luigi himself and a mixture of that and his message and all of that. But, it’s like any rally, really, just people trying to get the signs in front of the cameras. All those, some people are pretty closed mouth. Sure. Just want to be there physically.
Corresponding with Ted K
PATRICK: Right. Okay. All right. Well, we have been talking a lot about Luigi, but I just want to make, I just wanted to go over some of those things and we’ll talk about them in a moment. I just want to also just talk about how the book is written itself. And like, I think that’s the thing that people, when they get into reading it, it’s not just about Luigi, you’re situating him in the context of other. we kind of talked about a little bit, just the general other acts of political violence in the United States and kind of just the sentiments that he had and where that came from. But, you’re a character in this book as well. Like you’re really kind of describing your own sort of journey as a journalist, as a writer. You’re talking about, you’re writing about figures that you’ve covered in previous stories for various publications. You are also referencing figures that I’m familiar with from Children of Ted. You talk about your relationship with Theodore Kaczynski. You were a pen pal. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, but you did write him pretty regularly. You 2 wrote for how long did you, how long were you in contact with Kaczynski?
JOHN: Five or six years.
PATRICK: Yeah. And he passed away fairly recently.
JOHN: Yeah, '22, I think it was.
PATRICK: Yeah. Okay. So I think that’s the thing is that the book’s title is Luigi, the Making and the Meaning. So again, people are going to get into it and recognize that this is about Luigi, but it’s also about some of these other figures that you have written about over these years. And I would kind of describe them as being like, well, you describe them as kindred spirits to Luigi. They’re often young men. They often have this sort of revolutionary spirit to them. Some of them are more obviously influenced by Kaczynski’s work or adjacent ideas. And so I guess I’m just curious how you approach writing about them and how that fits, how you fit Luigi into this. Like how do you see Luigi fitting into this larger kind of cast of figures that you’ve written about over these years? And what is it about his story that really, yeah, like you obviously were very attracted to writing about Luigi, especially in such a short amount of time. So I just kind of want to understand the larger context of the book and how you chose to write it this way.
JOHN: Well, I was just taking it in, going sort of, wow, he was reading Kaczynski and fantasizing about what I would say to Kaczynski, sort of endless and taking in what my friends were saying and all of that. But I wasn’t really thinking of writing anything until Sean Manning called me got in touch with me and he said, do you, he’s the publisher of Simon and Schuster. And he used to work at Esquire. I see. And he, so we’d had lunch and he said he wanted to work with me someday. And so he called and said, do you think there’s, that he fits into the stuff you’ve been working on? And do you think it could be a book?
And I thought about it and I was like, of course it fits into this stuff I’ve been working on and did more research and all that. And, I didn’t know if it could be a book. I was like, I have to dig into his stuff and try to see what he’s got and all of that. And anyway, so we ended up trying to get something going and trying to see if we could get a book going. And I just sort of jumped in.
And so I wrote it like I’d be writing to you, like just talking to a friend basically and saying, this is what we’re doing and this is how I got into it. And so I started off after an introduction basically saying, I’d be writing to Ted. I’d be saying, hey, here’s this Luigi guy. Is he the one? You’ve been calling for a leader of genius for 20 years now, or 15 years, to fulfill your vision, because this is what Kaczynski’s been doing in prison. He’s been writing more books and saying, we could overthrow the industrial system this way. This is what we need. And my correspondence with him, he was downright obsessed with this topic. Like, we need a leader of genius, someone like Lenin. So I had been having this conversation with young guys saying, are you the Lenin? you think you’re Lenin? You’re Kaczynski’s Lenin? And so I was like writing to, because it’s imagining a letter to Ted, who just died, a little while ago of, is this the guy? This is, I, because, one thing was, Kaczynski thought that we could attack the, his later thinking was that we would attack the pillars of technological society, meaning turbines, refineries, Atlantic cables, things that would crash the system. Yeah. And I’d had a discussion with him where I was like, well, if we, if World War II, if we bounce back from World War II and, Hiroshima and Dresden and all that stuff in a few years, how is this going to crash the industrial system? And he told me I was an idiot. So my thinking was like, geez, this guy hit the most hated, symbol of the most hated industry in America. The head of the most powerful healthcare company that is not just affecting the price of eggs, but whether you live or die, whether your grandma goes to a decent facility, that kind of stuff. this is, That’s why he created, this had such an impact. He could have hit the head of an oil company. Nobody would have given a damn except for a bunch of environmentalists and. So I thought tactically, which was this conversation I kept having with Ted Kaczynski, that this was an interesting thing and that I would like to get Ted’s response. Of course, Ted wasn’t able to do it. so I started there and I basically started writing. So the next step for me was how did I, who was the first Ted Kaczynski fan I met? And that went back to 2004 in this protest I was at, and this kid who kept saying, Ted was right about technology, but, Ted wasn’t, what I really liked was Ted’s attitude toward, I’m like, who’s Ted? And pretty soon, it was Uncle Ted. And I realized that this was, but at first, as I got along with the guy. I thought he was nice. And he ended up working with a indigenous group that I had stayed with for a while because one of them lived with my parents in their guest houses. We ended up staying in touch over the years. And that was it. was just like, this is an oddball guy. He’s pretty radical. He’s really smart, cheerful and friendly. And I just thought it was talk, really. Then I met another one. And it was this time it got more serious. And that’s why there is me in the book, because I was changing as the years went on, too, and becoming if not more open, certainly more understanding of that worldview, and places where my own experience overlapped with theirs, stuff like that. I think in this world now where there’s so many taking the laws into their own hands, those young folks are sort of at the end of this 20, 30 year process that I’ve been observing.
PATRICK: Right. You also bring in like climate, like you’ve written about climate scientists and others who work in environmental sciences and they are, this was years ago, really, but to the present, of course, they’re experiencing a great amount of existential terror or grief. Like there’s things that I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast, which is around the climate crisis and what that means and what that’s leading to, including someone I’ve interviewed once, Dr. Jason Box. Yeah, and he’s great. and it’s interesting because, he became kind of a quote, maverick scientist or whatever, because he, I think, I don’t know when this started, but I assume it started when he tweeted that one tweet, which caused a lot of widespread reaction, which was like, he’s talking about, I think it was methane in the Arctic, subsea Arctic, I think it was, or permafrost. But basically, if this is released, then we’re ******. Like he said it pretty clear, like we’re ******. He like, this is gonna be a huge deal. And, this is the thing, It’s like you have some of these figures who are like, trying to work within the systems they’re in, whether that be academia, scientific research institutions, so on, but they’re like, we have to do something. Like, we can’t just not do this. Like, we can’t keep on hedging our language and speaking in these sort of conservative, like, will we please, will policies maybe will change if we just do this or publish this paper? Eventually you get these people who are just like, no, the situation is really dire and it’s going to get worse. And so you also contextualize where we are at, and again, I just really enjoyed just as a fan of your writing, just all the threads you were following in this book. It almost felt like this is It’s such an interesting book. I don’t know. I just think it’s such a fascinating piece of work because you’re writing about Luigi, like this is about Luigi Mangione, Everyone’s going to come in being like, this is about Luigi. He’s on the cover of the book. I don’t know if the cover’s changed, but it’s got this beautiful, oh man, beautiful profile of this beautiful young man, And they’re going to come in and learn about John H. Richardson, sort of, relationship to Ted Kaczynski, all of these young people who have a revolutionary spirit akin to, I would imagine, Mangione as well. And so I just, I don’t know, I’m kind of rambling, but I, this is just someone who’s just a fan of your work. It’s just, I really liked that. I like that it’s about a lot more. It’s A contextual thing that you’re producing here.
JOHN: Thanks. Well, I lay my, lay my cards on the table, sort of, and to some people that lacks authorial authority. But I like being, I don’t like being the voice of authority. I like telling you the journey that I took to get here, kind of. Yeah. to me, all that’s, that I, like, I wanted to put some of that stuff in there because, like, 2009 when there was the big climate conference. And just before the conference started, somebody hacked all these climate scientists emails and these trolls at the conference who I happened to be with, because I was doing a story on them, were like using it to throw dust in the gears, basically, of this epic attempt to solve a problem. And they were just having fun with it, and they were being paid by oil companies and stuff like that, And I was kind of astonished that these huge historical things could be derailed by these trolls with just lies. And then, and you begin to see how locked up things are and how, there’s so many examples of it, but how change seems impossible and how there’s forces against change and how we do see how, everything like the things Ted Kaczynski said, which is that we, the machine’s too big for us, we can’t control it. even if you’ve got 5 billionaires in your corner, there’s 20 billionaires against it. there’s huge industries. You can’t just bankrupt countries. there’s, I’m not very articulate, but I, it began to, and on the other side, there’s the environmentalists who like, I went to the, to a later climate conference and, environmentalists against nuclear power because they’ve, I said to one of them, I thought it was an existential crisis. you’re here, you flew all the way to Paris to say it’s an existential crisis, but it’s not existential enough to put up with nuclear power. And she’s like, well, yes, I guess you have a point. I’m like, what?
PATRICK: Right.
JOHN: if it’s all hands on deck, I put those hands on deck too anyway. So you just realize how locked down things are and how, and for as I started out saying, the health insurance industry is just the most painful example. Like, We’re not in control of our destinies. The machine is in control. even the pope has said it now. We’re just turning into cogs in the system. And that feeling of helplessness of being an NPC character, I don’t know, does it seem to you that it’s gotten worse over the last 20 years? That the squeeze is... Yeah. I mean...
PATRICK: No, it is much worse. Absolutely.
JOHN: Yeah, it’s things like not being able to repair your tractor because it’s like the software is locked by John Deere, what?
PATRICK: Yeah, I know. I also think about these, I know, I don’t think she makes it into your book. I could be wrong, but Greta Thunberg, being a climate activist, of course, initially a young teenager who starts this sort of movement to, for youth to kind of protest and raise their concerns around climate change. But, her trajectory is interesting too, because I’m thinking of like revolution, these young revolutionary spirits, because, she was on 2 flotillas to get into Gaza with aid. The most recent one, the Samud flotilla. She was treated like horribly, to say the very least, like really degrading, abusive behavior from the IDF, which isn’t surprising considering everything that’s been happening for the past two years. but just the kind of impunity of the state of Israel toward people who aren’t citizens of Israel or who aren’t Palestinian. So I’m just, I’m thinking of the ways that people, like I’m following these individuals in particular, they’re kind of these, they’re symbolic as obviously they’re as they are real, but like someone who understands the existential crisis of climate change and begins to recognize how the systems actually function when you have a very concrete example of extraordinary injustice and violence happening somewhere else for people to put their, take up this position like, well, I’m going to put my body on the line and do something. I don’t want to compare her to Luigi, but I just want to make this point that there is this general sense that you’re describing, like, yes, things have gotten worse in the past 20 years because there’s this sense of impunity yes, the sort of daily grind of frustrations, the squeeze that we’re all just sort of feeling, whether it’s interacting with the healthcare industry or like I’m trying to farm and I have to use this stupid ******* tractor that’s owned by this company that I can’t even repair anymore, when maybe a generation or two before this, it wouldn’t even have occurred to somebody that they couldn’t fix their own equipment, It’s just like every aspect of life is being privatized, commodified, extracted from, and it just feels increasingly more personal. And so I find it, and this is speculative, and I think we may have covered this a little bit, but just the specific case of Luigi, if he allegedly committed this crime, he understood that this was like a pain point for probably hundreds of millions of people. And he knew that if he just hit this one dude, this one guy in this very particular way, and I’m not trying to glorify the killing itself, but I watched the video again recently. It had been a while since I’ve seen it, that security cam footage. And when the first few days after it was, after the killing, people didn’t know who did it. They were looking for him. But they were like, is this a, is this like a hitman that worked? Like he must have been special forces. This guy must have been trained by the best. And I watched the video and they were commenting on how he used the gun and how it jammed and he knew how to unjam it or whatever, all these things where I’m like, this guy allegedly understood that if he committed this thing, that it would create this effect. I don’t know if he knew exactly how that would happen, but he understood the sort of importance of this act. And that’s like any sort of act of like propaganda of the deed is what anarchists would call this, I mentioned Alexander Berkman earlier, but he was a famous anarchist who killed an industrialist named Frick, or he tried to kill a guy named Frick and he was sent to prison for many years. But at the point, say it again.
JOHN: Stabbed him and stabbed him.
PATRICK: Yeah, exactly. So the point of this is that I think these revolutionary spirits, as it were, they’re kind of identifying points in which they can move the needle in a certain direction. They can move things in a particular direction. And they’re trying to find the best way to do that because it is that squeeze. People are feeling like **** all the time. It feels worse. And then now under, this authoritarian kind of lurch that we’re under with Trump, it just feels even more desperate. So it’s just like, I think writing a book about Luigi and also contextualizing it among all these other figures, I think really does kind of match the time that we’re in, John.
JOHN: Well, great. I don’t mean to make light of it. I, yeah, I wish, Part of me really wants to hear him say more things. when we saw that second dump from his documents, from his notebook, we got a lot more clarity about his thinking, about Kaczynski, about revolutionary acts, about the healthcare system itself and the way that it’s, extracts blood from the people. I would love for him to come out and say all the right things, what I would consider the right things and be a spokesman for those things and all of that. And I wonder, as others do, like what the police have withheld and prosecutors have withheld. And what’s does he does he does he say this is This is, I’m hitting the head of the healthcare industry, but he’s just one of many industries that are extracting our life force. just as a side, I think QAnon is true as a metaphor. they’re drinking the blood of our children. But it’s a metaphor, guys. But, so part of me would love that. And to find that perfect revolutionary hero who goes out and says, these are wrongs and, we must right them. But, I do think, be careful of heroes and who knows, what he’s, what he was really thinking and what he was thinking then and what he’s thinking now and all of that. I come back to that notion that, the people whose message I don’t like are also important. It’s the idea that, we give the government the monopoly of power when we, of violence, when we trust the government. there’s always people who don’t trust the government, who don’t concede the monopoly of power to the government. They’re the ones who, take the law into their own hands. But more people are doing that. And that’s, because the government ain’t doing its job. Right.
PATRICK: it feels like the social contract is broken if there was a social contract, Yeah.
JOHN: I like a civil society, but things that are required, you have a civil society, you need, a degree of equality and, social services and decency and all of that.
PATRICK: absolutely. it just, this is that desperation that people feel that people are really trying to figure out like how to survive and do that with dignity. And it seems like there’s so many aspects of life that are depriving people of dignity.
JOHN: Yeah, we’ll see that’s we haven’t really discussed the two parts of Kaczynski’s argument, but there’s the one part of the, losing control of the natural environment being, the natural environment being destroyed and industrialism. The other part is being reduced to an NPC, a cog in the system where we don’t have any agency. And that was for Luigi a really big concern.
PATRICK: Yeah.
JOHN: and to me, it’s less so because I’m an old guy and I’ve had plenty of agency in my life. I’ve done exactly pretty much what I wanted to do. And I was fortunate in it, to be able to walk through the raindrops, But I see that it is a problem for a lot of other people.
PATRICK: Well, I do want to appreciate the fact that you are of another generation that’s writing really well about a younger generation or a younger group of people or a younger person. And this is the, this is the okay boomer kind of sentiment that young folks have. I’m A millennial. It’s a sense that like, well, the boomers got away with like a crime. and they don’t even acknowledge they did that or are doing that and then they’re just going to walk away without any consequence. It’s just sort of this feeling of supreme injustice, of like universal cosmic injustice. Like you inherited one of the most prosperous decades or eras in American history and you don’t even recognize it. Like you don’t even acknowledge, I’m not saying you’re doing this, but this is sort of the general sentiment and And so I think, it’s coming, all of this, anger and frustration or resignment is coming out in all kinds of different ways. And I think this urge to find a leader, which I think is a double-edged sword, let’s say, because I think we can have some examples of very, very responsible, sensitive, respectful individuals who become leaders. But it’s such a intoxicating, role to be in, it’s like, inevitably it could, backfire and it’s not very good for the people himself. So when you talk about like looking for a new Lenin, I’m like, well, Lenin wasn’t exactly a, he, a lot of people don’t like Lenin for a lot of legitimate reasons. And so my, anyway, that’s kind of my point. It’s just like, I find that the tactic that Luigi allegedly, whoever did this, was so intelligent and intuitive, I would imagine, I would guess. But it doesn’t lead us to a revolution. It doesn’t lead us to that final part. It just seems like it’s a stepping stone on that way. It’s a landmark on the way to whatever sort of whatever it’s heading towards, whatever that means. So I don’t know. There wasn’t really a completed thought there. It just.
JOHN: Well, yeah, yeah, I think you referenced the killing of, you referenced Alexander Berkman, Alexander Berkman and the anarchists of that era. that led to a huge crackdown, the formation of the FBI and all that stuff. And there’s an awful lot of people who are warning that, these kinds of things are really counter that assassinations are very not productive historically. You can see a lot of examples of that. Well, the start of World War One, Archduke Ferdinand, they’re very unpredictable and they often cause a huge crackdown. The bombings of the, anarchist bombings of the last, early last century led to huge, crackdowns, also alien, immigration acts and shipping people back to Russia and stuff like that. and then so there’s a huge crackdown. And then subsequently there was the development of civil organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and, civil rights organizations. And it probably did an awful lot to spin the counter reaction. So these things were really complicated and dangerous and all of that, I, but you I don’t know. I’m not a revolutionary leader, but you imagine that it could go darker or lighter and that it could be more solutions oriented and more destruction oriented. We seem to be in a quasi-revolutionary period that’s very destruction oriented right now. God knows what’s going to happen. Right. for me, a lot of writing this book I was, I got a grandkid now. He’s 3 years old. I spent a lot of time with him, Yeah. It’s just really scares me.
PATRICK: Yeah, I guess that’s the final question or note I would end on is just this book, there’s a sense of urgency because of obviously the timing of the book. as I mentioned, the killing itself happened like late last year, December, I think it was early December of last year. So this book is coming out within 12 months of that event. So final, final question is just, there’s this, I feel a sense of urgency in your writing. Where is that, where’s that stemming from? Like, what are you trying to get across, I suppose, with this book in general? And what do you want people to really take out of it, take from it, I should say?
JOHN: Oh, gee. the sense of urgency is that I see, Luigi, this poor guy, this beautiful young man, was earnestly trying to solve the solutions of the world, had some kind of experience where he felt like if he didn’t do something now, he wouldn’t get a chance. he’d be broken by the system or something. That’s what I think happened to him. And it’s heartbreaking. His parents must feel awful. certainly the children of the victim feel awful. it’s just a freaking tragedy. And, but I do feel like he’s driven into that by sort of the experiences that I’m describing in that book. So, I’m not a super intellectual guy. I, the feelings that I have of sadness and urgency and fear, are things that sort of happened to me over the course of all this stuff. I didn’t like sit down and, read about social change and capitalism or, I read about climate change. I was in my beat. I was a reporter and I thought, okay, well, this is something to worry about. And I started following that. But really it was just going through all of that, which, and I think, and I do think that I’m sort of like a person out there in the world, maybe a little bit more in touch with stuff, because it’s my job as a reporter. But I sort of went through these things. I watched Craig Ventner decode the human genome. I happened to interview him about it, but I also, but everybody else watched him. I went to the climate change with, famous climate scientists and deniers, but, everybody else watched the news coverage, So, I feel like we’ve all gone to this place and we’re all sort of in this place that Kaczynski described of like, what are we going to do? Helplessness. The system seems to be locking up. And Trump is, in a way, shaking the system. And people are responding to that because the system’s locked up, So I guess, like, I want people to pull back and try to see it from a larger perspective, that this is something that’s happening to all of us. It’s not Luigi and Thompson. It’s not healthcare. It’s not climate change. It’s not AI. It’s like the whole thing seems to be out of our control and out of scale. And I don’t know what the solution is, but I do feel very moved by, and saddened by people struggling with it. I might not agree with all their solutions. maybe I don’t agree with, maybe I agree with Greta Thunberg, maybe I don’t. Maybe I agree with Luigi, maybe I don’t. Maybe I agree with Dylan Roof, maybe I don’t. But, they’re all sort of out there going, but what am I going to do? I wish that we grown-ups could create a world where young folks didn’t feel that desperate.
PATRICK: Yeah.
JOHN: Where my grandson won’t have to feel that desperate.
PATRICK: Yeah. Well, John, I think that’s a good place to end this. I know it’s a bit, there’s no like, I don’t want to end this on some sort of cheery, optimistic note. We’re talking about a guy, some stuff that’s, I guess it’s just real. So
JOHN: if you want to go optimistic, I’ll go optimistic. people are doing heroic things. The book ends with, we’re in a time of fables, we’ve gone into myth here. We ain’t, we ain’t in prose. And that opens up a lot of options for, what kind of hobbit you want to be or orc. And some people are being, Beautiful little hairy footed creatures and God bless them. And let’s try to focus on that.
PATRICK: Yeah, man, you’re right. You’re right. I’m trying to be that little hobbit myself. I guess. Well, John, thank you for that. I anyway, I just thank you so much for coming on that. I was just again, I was just so happy that we could we could do this. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks or whatever it was since we sent this up. So it’s just I’m really glad I know you and that we could do this again. It just, it was a real treat and the book is incredible. So congratulations on that. So yeah, thank you so much for the interview.
JOHN: Thank you, man. Thank you.
Outro
PATRICK: This has been Last Born in the Wilderness. Thank you for listening. The music in this episode was produced by Nick Vander. You can listen to Nick’s compositions and purchase his music at www.nickvander.bandcamp.com. And if you’d like to learn more about this work, head over to the website lastborninthewilderness.com. All the resources relating to this episode and every other episode I’ve produced can be found on its respective episode page. If you are enjoying the work that I am producing with this podcast, please consider backing it by heading over to the Patreon page at www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness. Most of the interviews I conduct and produce are released to paid members first, before I make them available to the public. But fairly often, I do make them available to all Patreon members, free and paid alike. So please consider becoming a patron of this work at www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness. And also you can make a one-time donation via PayPal at www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast. If you’d like to drop me a line, you can do that by going to the contact page at the website where there is an option to leave an audio message via memo.fm. Or you can leave a message via voicemail by calling the phone number 208-918-2837. That is 208-918-2837. And if you would like your message to be featured on the podcast Patreon page for me to respond to and for all members to hear as well, or instead as a message intended only for me to hear, please state that in the message. And finally, if you enjoyed this episode and my work at large, A really simple way that you can show your support is by subscribing to the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, consider leaving a review. That really helps with the visibility of this podcast on those platforms. And please share this podcast with anyone you feel would enjoy and benefit from listening to these conversations. Once again, thank you for listening. Take good care. See you next time.