Fame

Messenger Boy: The Thessalonian you're fighting-- he is the biggest man I've ever seen. I wouldn't want to fight him.

Achilles: That's why no one will remember your name.

That scene is from the movie Troy, of course. Not a bad movie. I watched it in the Galaxy theater in Guttenberg, New Jersey in 2004. The movie theater had an organ. One of the few cool things about living in Hudson County.

Why do I write? Well, I write for a whole bunch of reasons. The main reason I write is because it is therapeutic. If I wasn’t writing, I would go nuts. Simple as that. Writing is how I stay sane. I have Bipolar 1, and to manage it, I take medication, get plenty of sleep—and write.

Another reason I write is for money. Sure, I write this newsletter for free, but the last iteration of this newsletter turned into a book which I sold for money. And maybe some people read the book who hadn’t been introduced to me before, and maybe they subscribe to The Daily Dirtnap or buy one of my other products. It is good marketing. So there is a business purpose to it, too.

But one big reason I write is for fame. Not for adulation, really—you might get the impression that I’m not seeking approval and I don’t need other people to like me. No, the reason I write is because I want to create a body of work that will outlive me. That’s why books are so important—if I were to die tomorrow, people would be reading them for years to come. I don’t have children, so I won’t be survived by my genetic material, but I will be survived by my ideas. And maybe 100 years from now, one of my books will be sitting amongst the dusty tomes in the reserves in some library somewhere, and some kid will pick it up and read about Wall Street in the 2000s, in its ugliest and most exciting time.

That’s actually a pretty important idea—creating something that will outlive you. The vast majority of people don’t. They go to work and put part A into slot B for 8 hours a day, come home, drink a beer or ten, go to bed, and do it all over again the next day. Or the white-collar equivalent of that. Lots of people work on Wall Street. How many of them become famous? And that’s the funny thing about fame on Wall Street, because Wall Street is a place where you can become rich without becoming famous, which is the best of both worlds. I know billionaires whose names you have never heard of before. And they don’t make the billionaires’ lists, because they are flying below the radar. Amazing. But occasionally you have a guy like Bill Ackman who wants to become part of the public discourse. If he just managed a fund and did well, we would probably applaud him, but now we get to read all his horrible takes and shitty opinions. This is a person who is seeking attention and adulation. Or, you just get so big and successful that it’s impossible to fly below the radar anymore. Bill Gross, Steve Cohen, and Stan Druckenmiller are all examples. But a TV interview with Stan is as rare as an arctic fox. He has nothing to prove to anybody. Stan will be remembered for being the greatest of all time. He’s in Cooperstown. I will be remembered for my books and newsletters. What will you be remembered for?

That’s why no one will remember your name.

The vast majority of people don’t have these sorts of ambitions. Or, they have different ambitions. If they’re a good father, and they pass away, and years later, their offspring are posting on Facebook about how much they miss their father, that is enough. One of the reasons I don’t have kids is because I had enough self-awareness to know that I would be a terrible father. Maybe you disagree. No, it’s true. There is no shared tradition of good parenting in my family. You’re good at parenting, you should be a parent. I’m good at writing, I should be a writer.

There has been some controversy in recent months about e-books. You had Marc Andreessen telling people to go out and buy physical copies of their favorite books, pronto. There was the Roald Dahl controversy and the James Bond controversy, and one of the dangers of e-books is that someone at some point in the future might decide that what you wrote is politically incorrect and edit it. That might happen to All the Evil of This World someday. But the nice thing about e-books (and print-on-demand books, and audiobooks) is that they will literally live forever. Physical books can go out of print, and good luck finding one. An author friend here in Myrtle Beach is trying to figure out ways to get another print run of his first book. As long as Amazon stays in business, or whoever buys Amazon, or whoever buys whoever buys Amazon, those books will live forever. That’s cool! The hardcovers of Street Freak are hard to come by these days, but you can always get the Kindle version. Those Bastards will live forever. This newsletter might not. Substack might hit the delete button someday. You never know.

I hate the word “content.” I prefer “literature.” But let’s roll with content for a minute. I try to create content that will hold up across the decades. Back when I was publishing Street Freak in 2011, the imprint was focusing all of its effort on a memoir written by Levi Johnston—who? Levi Johnston was the boyfriend of Sarah Palin’s daughter. The title of the book was Deer in the Headlights—a great title. But it was utter dreck. And it was stale the moment it was published. The imprint wasted all of its marketing resources on that politically-motivated vanity project and starved Street Freak of resources. I don’t know how many copies of Levi Johnston’s book sold, but I gather that Street Freak sold multiples of that. Pull up Deer in the Headlights on Amazon. It probably has an Amazon sales rank of 3,243,643,493. Nobody even gives a shit about Sarah Palin anymore, and hasn’t since that Lisa Ann portrayal on PornHub.

In the early days of Those Bastards, the book had a stratospheric sales rank and was even ranked #1 in Essays for a time. You want to know what is usually ranked highest in essays? C.S. Lewis, of course, which his wide Christian appeal, but also Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Some of the best nonfiction ever written in history, written in the 1960s, and still selling thousands of copies today. If you want to know what I want, that’s what I want. Joan Didion died not too long ago, and her books are still going to be selling 50 years from now. Bill Bennett sold several millions copies of The Book of Virtues in the 1990s, the proceeds of which he deposited into high-limit slot machines, and one of the bestselling books of that era has all but disappeared from view 30 years later. If you’ve read any Robert Pirsig, you know about the concepts of static quality and dynamic quality. Bennett’s book did not have much in the way of static quality.

TV is ephemeral. A month later, people have already forgotten about Tucker Carlson. But not in entertainment—Seinfeld ran for seven years and the stars of that show will be coasting off of that for the rest of their lives. TV and movies (and music) are a whole different animal. If you can capture people’s imagination, they will remember you forever. Look at me. Ocean’s Eleven is 22 years old and I am still quoting that movie. I’d like the kind of fame where I don’t have to go on TV very much. I’m not an entertainer, at least, not in that way.

You should leave your mark on the world, in one way or another. Jim Bob Duggar left his mark on the world, in a sense. So did Henry Ford. So did Michael Lewis. So did Larry Fink, in a malignant sort of way. But which of these people will we be talking about in the year 2100? That is the question that needs to be answered.