Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: your weekly podcast about cool people who did the cool stuff.
Speaker 2: One of the people who did cool stuff is doctor
Speaker 2: kavejda House of pod. Some of the cool stuff you've
Speaker 2: done in clothes, saving people's lives with medicine and entertaining
Speaker 2: people with podcasts.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I like to think that I'm saving people
Speaker 3: with my podcasts, saving them from boring medical podcasts. That's
Speaker 3: what I feel like I'm saving them from.
Speaker 2: But I have a question, because like I have to
Speaker 2: kind of gas myself up to think that what I
Speaker 2: do is meaningful and impactful. How does it feel to
Speaker 2: be both like, Oh, I do this thing that's a
Speaker 2: little bit more direct, and then I do this other
Speaker 2: thing that's a little bit more ephemeral.
Speaker 3: Uh. I'll tell you that's a really good question. First
Speaker 3: of all, do not downplay what you do, Margaret. I
Speaker 3: feel like your sphere of influence is bigger than even you,
Speaker 3: you know, And so I think that your show is
Speaker 3: really great. And I'm not just saying that because I'm
Speaker 3: on it now. Although it helps, but there are a
Speaker 3: lot of times in medicine where when you're doing things
Speaker 3: to help somebody, it's not so obvious, like sometimes it's
Speaker 3: really obvious, like if someone is having an emergency and
Speaker 3: I fix it for them, that's great, it's super satisfying.
Speaker 3: A lot of what you do is stuff where if
Speaker 3: you're doing it right, the patient doesn't even notice it
Speaker 3: doesn't and doesn't even like you don't get that immediate satisfaction.
Speaker 3: That's a lot of what you do, and so you
Speaker 3: kind of it's almost like you know, when you're talking
Speaker 3: into this microphone and you know that you're doing you're
Speaker 3: reaching people, but you can't see them. So it's a
Speaker 3: little bit of a different feeling. It's kind of like
Speaker 3: that in medicine a lot too. Or it's like I
Speaker 3: know a lot of what I'm doing is very important
Speaker 3: in helping somebody, but it won't show for many years
Speaker 3: or maybe they'll never notice it all. That's how I
Speaker 3: know I did a good job. So it's actually kind
Speaker 3: of similar, I guess, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: No, that actually that actually makes a lot of sense
Speaker 2: to me. Yeah, today we're going to talk about someone
Speaker 2: who both directly and indirectly, like did both things right,
Speaker 2: and in this case, it was fighting fascism and totalitarianism.
Speaker 3: I can't wait.
Speaker 2: I can't wait, Cave, have you ever heard of books?
Speaker 3: But I've seen them. I've seen them. I had a
Speaker 3: couple when I was younger. I experimented a little bit,
Speaker 3: if I'm being honest, in college.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, and well.
Speaker 3: Now I don't have so many of them because it's
Speaker 3: all in the interwebs. But yeah, I'm familiar with the concept.
Speaker 2: Okay, Kave is wearing a book shirt right now, just
Speaker 2: to H.
Speaker 3: Powell's City of Books.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just amazing bookstore.
Speaker 4: Ah my peoples.
Speaker 2: Yeah, today, you guys, we're going to talk about a
Speaker 2: guy who made some books, some of which readers have
Speaker 2: probably readers listeners have probably read.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's probably people reading this podcast, so I'm sure
Speaker 3: that there's people just doing the conscriptions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true. A couple months ago, I talked about
Speaker 2: one of the people who is the most commonly misquoted,
Speaker 2: constantly misunderstood writer with way better politics than anyone realized.
Speaker 2: His name was Oscar Wilde. Oh, and this week we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about another constantly misquoted, constantly misunderstood writer
Speaker 2: who had way better politics than anyone realized. This guy
Speaker 2: was a big fan of Oscar Wilde. Wild was a
Speaker 2: major political influence on him. His name you might have
Speaker 2: heard of before is George Orwell.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, oh yeah, I've heard I've heard of George orwell, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's how you know he's big.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like most people who h read in
Speaker 2: English have heard of George Orwell. That is my hypothesis here.
Speaker 3: That's a fair.
Speaker 2: That's fair, And I'm going to make a bunch of
Speaker 2: claims about him. One of is that some people hate him,
Speaker 2: and they usually hate him for the wrong reasons. There
Speaker 2: are reasons to hate him, but I don't, and we'll
Speaker 2: talk about that.
Speaker 3: I can't wait. I have to admit I don't know
Speaker 3: a ton. I know like nineteen eighty four in Animal Form,
Speaker 3: and when I was very very young the nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: four movie came out. I think it came out like
Speaker 3: I was too young to watch it, but I remember
Speaker 3: seeing it on like HBO once when I was like
Speaker 3: way too young, and it traumatized me in a deep,
Speaker 3: deep way.
Speaker 2: So I just rat on his face or whatever.
Speaker 3: He's a broke I remember him just being totally broken
Speaker 3: at the end of it, and so that affected me deeply, deeply,
Speaker 3: So I Yes, I'm very excited to learn more about him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's an emotionally effective writer, which is interesting because
Speaker 2: he's not an emotionally expressive person. And we'll talk about that.
Speaker 2: Some of his biggest sort of some of the misunderstandings
Speaker 2: or correct understandings of him are around the fact that
Speaker 2: he did not express much emotion. George Orrell was a
Speaker 2: man who went from privileged son of the empire to
Speaker 2: colonial cop to anti fascist fighter who took a bullet
Speaker 2: to the neck fighting Franco in Spain, to going on
Speaker 2: to write some of the best English language commentary on
Speaker 2: totalitarianism and being a major anti imperialist writer at the time.
Speaker 2: This was a man whose sole guiding principle was he
Speaker 2: believed in what he called common decency. And while he's
Speaker 2: often painted as an anti socialist because his works are
Speaker 2: critical of the USSR, he was very explicitly a democratic
Speaker 2: socialist to the end of his days. He was absolutely
Speaker 2: on the left, and he put all of his money
Speaker 2: towards making the world a better place, and he lived
Speaker 2: really modestly, and he also put a lot of money
Speaker 2: towards his son. So that's like what he did with
Speaker 2: his money. So far liking it, unliking where this is headed.
Speaker 2: He's a complicated figure. His homophobia and unaddressed misogyny are
Speaker 2: woven throughout his writings. However, I'm going to complicate especially
Speaker 2: his misogyny, in a minute. His actions did not always
Speaker 2: live up to his lofty ideals, especially when he was younger.
Speaker 2: He is my problematic fave. He's just problematic for different
Speaker 2: reasons than some of the listeners who are already mad
Speaker 2: at me for talking about him. Assume, huh, so.
Speaker 3: It's people that are mad about this already.
Speaker 2: Yeah, authoritarian communists hate him. Everyone else wants to claim him.
Speaker 2: The right wing wants to claim him, the center left,
Speaker 2: the anarchists, everyone is like, he's our guy, right except
Speaker 2: the authoritarian left, who are like, we hate this man
Speaker 2: with the burning heat of a thousand sons.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, Can I ask a question. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: hear the term tanky used a lot.
Speaker 2: So yes, tankies hate him. Okay, I'm using the term correctly. Yes,
Speaker 2: minitarian socialists specifically who are like totally fine with the
Speaker 2: worst excesses of the USSR.
Speaker 3: Okay. I apologize to your listeners in advance because I
Speaker 3: asked some very stupid questions. No, very actively pro those
Speaker 3: kinds of questions being esca and Orwell would be very
Speaker 3: happy that you were asking these questions too, because one
Speaker 3: of Orwell's whole things was fuck jargon. He was like,
Speaker 3: if you are writing, I'm going to get to it later.
Speaker 3: We're gonna talk about rules of writing. He's like, only
Speaker 3: used jargon if it is the only word to describe
Speaker 3: what you're saying. Got it.
Speaker 2: A million books have been written about George Orwell, and
Speaker 2: I haven't read them all. An awful lot of books
Speaker 2: were written by George Orwell, and I've read a lot
Speaker 2: of them, but I haven't read all of them. Some
Speaker 2: of the books I haven't read are the ones he
Speaker 2: says he wished he hadn't written, So I feel fine.
Speaker 2: He's not a fan of his early work. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: read read one of his books that he says he
Speaker 2: didn't wish he hadn't read, and that actually was a
Speaker 2: kind of an interesting book. It's called Keith the Asperdistra Flying,
Speaker 2: and it's about a middle class guy who wants to
Speaker 2: be poor in this slumming it and ends up therefore
Speaker 2: just sort of taking advantage of his girlfriend because she
Speaker 2: has a middle class job, and he refuses to have
Speaker 2: a middle class job. And it was actually like probably
Speaker 2: useful to me for me to read as like a
Speaker 2: squatter who often stayed with partners, you know.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Yeah, that's an interesting I'm sure there's an interesting
Speaker 3: insight into that, Like I could see also why people
Speaker 3: from the right try to claim him and anything they
Speaker 3: don't like that seems kind of like weirdly authoritarian. They'll
Speaker 3: like reference like nineteen eighty four. I've seen both sides reference.
Speaker 3: This is like nineteen eighty four. This is like thought
Speaker 3: police nineteen eighty four, you know, on both sides, the
Speaker 3: right in particular, I see using it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And he was Georgi Ro was incredibly critical of
Speaker 2: the left. He was critical of the authoritarian left, and
Speaker 2: he loved the democratic left and he loved the anarchist
Speaker 2: left and more the democratic left is how he fully aligned.
Speaker 2: But we're going to talk about later about how at
Speaker 2: the end of his life he was like everyone who's
Speaker 2: fighting for socialism, who isn't fighting for stalin, I'm I'm your.
Speaker 3: Guy, bored with them, common decency, anti jargon. So far
Speaker 3: I'm on board with this guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, no, especially end of his life or will.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, this man is more fave less problematic,
Speaker 2: and actually some of the ways he develops through is
Speaker 2: kind of okay, well, we'll get to it, Okay. So
Speaker 2: and I'm going to talk about his life and his
Speaker 2: adventures and especially how was thinking developed and how he
Speaker 2: always worked to improve himself and become less of an asshole.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to focus more on the parts of
Speaker 2: his life that are interesting to me, because there's also
Speaker 2: I feel a bit dirty doing anything that presents it
Speaker 2: as like the biographical sketch of this man, because in
Speaker 2: his will, he was like, please don't write biographies about me.
Speaker 3: He was I'm sure nobody listened.
Speaker 2: Nobody listened. Actually, one of the sort of some of
Speaker 2: the books, some of the books that came out kind
Speaker 2: of right away after he died, were a little bit
Speaker 2: more like we're auctions on his life and writing that
Speaker 2: were a little bit like, hey, I knew the guy,
Speaker 2: and I swear this isn't a biography.
Speaker 3: He'd be cool with this. He'd be cool with this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Like and it's like or it's even kind
Speaker 2: of a like, hey, sorry, man, you know, like, don't worry,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to get into everything. I just want
Speaker 2: to talk You're important and we got to talk about you.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: Why Why didn't he want this? Because he didn't want
Speaker 3: people to focus on him and his story they want
Speaker 3: he want people to focus on his works, or because
Speaker 3: there's things in his past he didn't want people like
Speaker 3: so talking about.
Speaker 2: I think it's a combo a little bit of those.
Speaker 2: He was deeply private, right, and so he really compartmentalized
Speaker 2: what he wrote about and like what he lived, which
Speaker 2: is interesting because a lot of his books, especially as
Speaker 2: early books, are autobiographical. He writes these books about like slumming, right.
Speaker 2: That's like kind of how he makes his name is
Speaker 2: that he like literally dresses up as a tramp and
Speaker 2: goes around and like lives as a hobo and for
Speaker 2: a while when he's young and he's like from the
Speaker 2: middle class, right, but he like still compartmentalizes out certain
Speaker 2: parts of his life, especially like his intimate life, Like
Speaker 2: he doesn't talk about his wife where you talk about
Speaker 2: a bunch Like some people have been like, oh, because
Speaker 2: he's a misogynist. I honestly, as best as I can tell,
Speaker 2: I think it's because they had an agreement where it
Speaker 2: was like, no, leave me out of your writing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, and so he compartmentalized, like hell he also
Speaker 2: we'll talk about some of the there's two bad things
Speaker 2: he did too, like big.
Speaker 4: Could he also be a guy with imposter syndrome?
Speaker 2: Oh? Interesting?
Speaker 4: That was my first thought.
Speaker 2: I think. I think eventually he kind of came into
Speaker 2: being like I am who I am? But he actually
Speaker 2: I have read a bunch about how he he had
Speaker 2: sort of imposter syndrome in that he didn't under he
Speaker 2: like because he was so used to people kind of
Speaker 2: shitting on him that once he like kind of came
Speaker 2: into his power, he wasn't always totally aware of it.
Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting.
Speaker 4: Is there two types of people that are like extreme
Speaker 4: like of Orwellian success, that are like either like yeah,
Speaker 4: that's me, or they have major imposter syndrome?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, something I'm very familiar with the medicine. It
Speaker 3: was literally just talking to a group of medical students
Speaker 3: just yesterday about this, and I prepared them and I said, listen,
Speaker 3: you're going to have imposter syndrome, and you're going to
Speaker 3: have it for probably the next thirty to forty years.
Speaker 3: It's never going to go away.
Speaker 2: I get told, well, then you're going to turn into
Speaker 2: an assholeho thinks you know have better than all the
Speaker 2: people who actually have been to med school more recently,
Speaker 2: no more recent stuff.
Speaker 3: Exactly, or you find a way to have both, which
Speaker 3: is what a lot of doctors do. Okay, to be
Speaker 3: assholes with imposter syndrome.
Speaker 2: Okay, So for anyone who's unfamiliar with this man, which
Speaker 2: is totally fair. The short version is that there was
Speaker 2: an english Man who first wrote under and then lived
Speaker 2: under the name George Orwell, but that wasn't his birthname.
Speaker 2: He fought in the Spanish Civil War, where he was
Speaker 2: soured on authoritarian leftism because of what he saw there.
Speaker 2: He almost was killed by He stayed committed to democratic socialism,
Speaker 2: but he wrote two of the most famous books ever
Speaker 2: written against totalitarianism, the book Animal Farm, about a bunch
Speaker 2: of farmyard animals that have a revolution, only to have
Speaker 2: one group of those animals decide that they are more
Speaker 2: deserving than the other animals, and the book nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 2: about a totalitarian society that tries to control how everyone
Speaker 2: thinks and how much that sucks. And he is famously
Speaker 2: quoted by all kinds of people, including the kinds of
Speaker 2: people that he actually threw grenades at fascists, and so
Speaker 2: we're gonna talk about him. George Orwell was born Eric
Speaker 2: Arthur Blair on June twenty fifth, nineteen oh three. People
Speaker 2: often say George Orwell was a pen name, and you'll
Speaker 2: kind of run across people and like, ah, I know
Speaker 2: his real name. It's Eric Blair. It was a chosen name.
Speaker 2: By the end of his life, the only people called
Speaker 2: him Eric were like bank managers and shit, like you
Speaker 2: saw Eric when he signed the checks, because he never
Speaker 2: changed the paperwork on his name. I'm a fan of
Speaker 2: choosing your owname. So I'm going to go with George throughout,
Speaker 2: not because it's like a dead name to call him Erica,
Speaker 2: but just you know, it's what I mean.
Speaker 3: My only question is like, it's not I don't like
Speaker 3: why why?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a horizontal move. It's like, yeah, this man
Speaker 2: name is this man named?
Speaker 3: I mean, Eric Arthur Blair also sounds like a pretty
Speaker 3: cool author name, like why why not?
Speaker 2: Okay, George is a more working class name. It's sort
Speaker 2: of like going by Joe in America, liking Joe the
Speaker 2: Plumber or whatever. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's still like.
Speaker 2: Every man name, and he wants an every man name
Speaker 2: because he's a middle class dude. Wo has imposter syndrome
Speaker 2: as a working class person, right, because he wants to
Speaker 2: be working classes. It's like his whole thing. It's in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four too.
Speaker 4: I just think his entire like ethosis imposter syndrome. That's
Speaker 4: my Yeah, no's my theory going in.
Speaker 2: I I actually and I want to see whether you
Speaker 2: readdress it at the end, but I think it's just
Speaker 2: going to get reinforced and orwell. Is the name of
Speaker 2: a river that he lived in?
Speaker 4: That's nice?
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's I think it's perfectly sweet. He was
Speaker 2: born in Motihari, India, into not money but like English
Speaker 2: fanciness and colonial evil.
Speaker 3: He is his.
Speaker 2: Great grandfather Charles Blair. His great great grandfather, Charles Blair
Speaker 2: was a rich and powerful slaver who made his money
Speaker 2: owning people in Jamaica and married the daughter of an earl.
Speaker 2: George's dad, Richard Blair, worked in the Opium Department and
Speaker 2: the British Colonial Project in India, overseeing the growth of
Speaker 2: opium and its sale to China.
Speaker 3: So not good, Yeah, that this is This is a
Speaker 3: more interesting start than I expected. I was expecting something
Speaker 3: a lot more like, you know, uh, English downtrodden, like
Speaker 3: industrial revolutionary sort of vibe. Yeah, it's worldly. I'll give
Speaker 3: him that. It's worldly.
Speaker 2: And what's interesting too is that his like the way
Speaker 2: he says middle class, I'm like, is different than what
Speaker 2: America thinks of his middle class, because middle class in
Speaker 2: America is like a working class thing on some level.
Speaker 2: England is fucking weird about class. Orwell described his upbringing
Speaker 2: as lower upper middle class, which meant that they had
Speaker 2: the prestige and thought well of themselves of the upper
Speaker 2: middle class, but they had no money, so they were
Speaker 2: lower middle class. So they were a lower upper middle class.
Speaker 3: Right, very showy, but didn't have a lot of maybe
Speaker 3: like house rich, but like not otherwise.
Speaker 2: With yeah, and like position of power in evil colonial
Speaker 2: government rich right right when he was one, his mom,
Speaker 2: who was a feminist and a suffragette and an activist,
Speaker 2: we I don't know as much about us. I kind
Speaker 2: of wish I had. It's only there's so much written
Speaker 2: about this man. His mom packed him up and moved
Speaker 2: him back to England, whereupon he had a childhood that
Speaker 2: he relentlessly described as miserable, and all of his childhood
Speaker 2: friends are like that boy was happy, life was good.
Speaker 2: He's just being dramatic. It's like consistent. There's like multiple
Speaker 2: times through this period where he's like, he writes these
Speaker 2: essays about what a fucking miserable life he had, and
Speaker 2: he's like kind of a poser about being miserable in
Speaker 2: some ways, although he is a he has a hard life.
Speaker 2: Don't get me wrong. He's gonna die at forty six.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, he survives getting shot through the neck. I
Speaker 2: already spoiled that part. Like he's a he's an interesting life.
Speaker 2: He did some British people shit, like he went off
Speaker 2: to boarding school. He went to a place called Eton
Speaker 2: that is fancy as hell.
Speaker 4: Oh fuck yeah, you ever heard of it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, it's what's called public school. And because British
Speaker 2: people have everything backwards, because it's a private school, I
Speaker 2: finally for this episode looked up what the fuck that means.
Speaker 2: I've known this for a long time that public school
Speaker 2: means private school if you're in England, and it means
Speaker 2: like fancy ass shit. Right, it's called public school. This's
Speaker 2: got its name because even though it's a private school.
Speaker 2: As long as your parents could pay your tuition, you
Speaker 2: could go regardless of like where your parents lived or
Speaker 2: what they did for a living. But it's where the
Speaker 2: rulers of the empire and shit go right.
Speaker 3: Very confusing.
Speaker 2: England is a weird, complicated class night Maryland where there's
Speaker 2: an Eaten accent. I didn't know that, and so you'll
Speaker 2: be judged your entire life, like positively or negatively because
Speaker 2: you have an Eton accent.
Speaker 3: It's like the Ivy League sort of accent.
Speaker 4: Sort of Okay, Hugh Laurie played House MD. You want
Speaker 4: to eat in? And I just think that's fun to
Speaker 4: tell my friend doctor Phota.
Speaker 2: Of the House of Pod.
Speaker 3: True, we're not named after that, no, I must say,
Speaker 3: but I love to tell you that. Yeah, No, I went.
Speaker 2: To eaton right, Yeah, of course we all went to
Speaker 2: eat in here.
Speaker 3: Listen to me. You can hear it in my voice.
Speaker 4: It's like a very popular school for politicians and like
Speaker 4: nepotism and miss actors. Yeah, it's yeah. Josh James stout
Speaker 4: what he thinks of Eden.
Speaker 2: I will he George or what was a scholarship boy
Speaker 2: at Eton because his parents didn't have any money, and
Speaker 2: he had, like, did well enough at prep school to
Speaker 2: get scholar I.
Speaker 4: Imposter syndrome with theory is just getting because they were
Speaker 4: they were so mean to him, were they they were horrible?
Speaker 2: Well, he wrote that they were incredibly mean to him
Speaker 2: constantly for being a scholarship boy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Everyone else from that time in that school is like,
Speaker 2: what are you talking about? He played sports with us,
Speaker 2: We liked him.
Speaker 3: He might just be a sensitive guy.
Speaker 2: He is super sensitive, but makes a good artist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel that.
Speaker 2: Like, honestly, he's into sports. He grows up to be
Speaker 2: not a small person. More academic sources he's six foot two.
Speaker 2: More personal sources he's six foot four, So no one's
Speaker 2: arguing yet he is small.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He's also sickly his entire life. He has two intense
Speaker 2: spouts of pneumonia as a kid, and he never fully
Speaker 2: re covered. He finishes school. Everyone else is off to university.
Speaker 2: George wants to be different. He wants adventure. He wanted orientalism.
Speaker 2: He wanted to go become a cop in Burma. Oh well,
Speaker 2: what a choice. I know. The two worst things he
Speaker 2: did he did when he was eighteen years old. One
Speaker 2: of them was going to be a cop in Burma.
Speaker 2: He's a sensitive guy, and now I'm gonna talk about
Speaker 2: the other worst thing he did. Sensive guy trying to
Speaker 2: fight it. He was trying to fight his sensitive nature.
Speaker 2: That's what's happening. That's how I'm putting this together in
Speaker 2: my home. I know, and I think he wants orientalism.
Speaker 2: He wants like adventure and shit. And he also doesn't
Speaker 2: have a critique of the colonial project. Yet he's going
Speaker 2: to get one by becoming a colonial cop like he
Speaker 2: does the best case what all cops should do, which
Speaker 2: is quit, is what he does, and then spend the
Speaker 2: rest of his life writing against the system that he
Speaker 2: was a part of.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the other thing that he's going to spend the
Speaker 2: rest of his life regretting. If you read between the
Speaker 2: lines in one direction and then completely ignore that he
Speaker 2: did if you read between the lines and the other direction.
Speaker 2: Is the reason that I wrote off George Orwell for
Speaker 2: a long time, because I knew this, even though it
Speaker 2: only kind of came out more recently. Most overviews of
Speaker 2: his life glide right past this. He tried to rape
Speaker 2: his best friend after she friend zoned him when he
Speaker 2: was eighteen, years old, and people who don't talk about it.
Speaker 2: To be fair, no one talked about it at all.
Speaker 2: Didn't No one learned this until he'd been dead for
Speaker 2: about fifty years. Historians like to quabble, quibble whatever about
Speaker 2: how to characterize it. Sometimes they call it assault or
Speaker 2: attempted rape. Wikipedia called it, calls it a botched seduction.
Speaker 2: His friend that this happened to, by the end of
Speaker 2: her life is not mad about it and saw him
Speaker 2: as the one who got away and wished she'd married him.
Speaker 2: It is complicated. What he did is not complicated. The
Speaker 2: long term impact, the way that that move, other parts
Speaker 2: of it are complicated. When he was a kid, he
Speaker 2: became super close friends with the family, two sisters and
Speaker 2: a brother. When he's like eleven or whatever. The sister
Speaker 2: is about two years older than him, and his name
Speaker 2: Jacyntha Buddhicum, and the story of how they met sounds
Speaker 2: like a twee British novel. This thirteen year old girl
Speaker 2: goes out into her family's garden and there's this eleven
Speaker 2: year old boy standing on his head. She says, what
Speaker 2: are you doing? And I've read two versions of this.
Speaker 2: He either says, quote you are noticed more if you
Speaker 2: stand on your head than if you're a right way up.
Speaker 2: I've also read you notice more if you stand on
Speaker 2: your head then either way. Fucking twee novel. Shit, it's
Speaker 2: real cheshire Cat like Alice in Wonderland.
Speaker 3: Have you ever stood on your head? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I have?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. They become friends young George while he's
Speaker 2: Eric at this point. They become close friends and they
Speaker 2: hang out all the time, talking about poetry and books
Speaker 2: and how they're going to become great writers together and shit.
Speaker 2: And she becomes a poet and he becomes a famous writer.
Speaker 2: He thought they would be more than friends and she didn't.
Speaker 2: And it gets really kind of into in cul territory
Speaker 2: before the assault. It's almost kind of funny. His first
Speaker 2: love poem probably was to her when he was about
Speaker 2: fifteen years old. It's called the Pagan because the Buddhicoms
Speaker 2: were agnostics and their school was like being weird them
Speaker 2: about it, like we might kick out your whole family
Speaker 2: because you don't believe in God or whatever you know.
Speaker 2: And the poem starts, and to be clear, he's fifteen
Speaker 2: when he writes this, So here are you? And here
Speaker 2: am I? Where we may thank our gods to be
Speaker 2: above the earth, beneath the sky, naked souls, alive and free.
Speaker 2: And she writes back this critique, so she's like trying
Speaker 2: to cleverly just friendz him. She's like, hey, maybe change
Speaker 2: naked to unarmored. Oh yeah, that's a much better choice,
Speaker 2: I know. So he wrote back her another. He wrote
Speaker 2: her another poem, Friendship and love are closely intertwined. My
Speaker 2: heart belongs to your befriending mind, but chilling sunlit fields,
Speaker 2: cloud shadows fall, my love can't reach your heedless heart
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 3: Great, that's I mean, that is pure cringe low. Yeah,
Speaker 3: young teenager. I feel the discomfort in my stomach. I
Speaker 3: get the clamps. You think about something you did that
Speaker 3: was really embarrassing. That's what's happening to me hearing this.
Speaker 2: She writes back. By light too bright, our dazzled eyes betrayed.
Speaker 2: It's best to rest content and tranquil shade.
Speaker 3: So I'm not as literary as you, because you're an
Speaker 3: excellent writer, and I write basically progress notes on patients.
Speaker 3: But it sounds very much so that He's like, I'm
Speaker 3: so into you, And she is very deafly and artfully
Speaker 3: being like, I'm going to have a little fun with
Speaker 3: this game, but also make it clear that it's not
Speaker 3: going anywhere and that you need to chill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what he should have done is chill out
Speaker 2: by listening to advertisements in the middle of an anti
Speaker 2: capitalist podcast.
Speaker 3: Works for me.
Speaker 2: And we're back. Yeah, no, exactly. It's a he's writing
Speaker 2: love poetry and she's writing just friends poetry, right, you know,
Speaker 2: just friend's poetry. Yeah, this genre, I know. They go
Speaker 2: on walks daily. Then one day, when he was eighteen,
Speaker 2: as recounted by a family friend quote, he had attempted
Speaker 2: to take things further and make serious love to Jacyntha.
Speaker 2: He had held her down. By that time, he was
Speaker 2: six foot four and she was under still under five
Speaker 2: feet and though she struggled yelling at him to stop,
Speaker 2: he had torn her skirt and badly bruised a shoulder
Speaker 2: and her left hip. When Jacynthia yelled to stop, Eric
Speaker 2: let her go. Jacyntha ran home crying. They never saw
Speaker 2: each other again.
Speaker 4: Oh, he's a best he's a piece of shit.
Speaker 2: This is yeah, this is the like people are mad
Speaker 2: at orwell for the wrong reasons. This is an understanding.
Speaker 2: This is why I completely wrote off Orwell for years. Honestly,
Speaker 2: it's because I knew this part of the story, and
Speaker 2: to skip around in this timeline, the timeline of his
Speaker 2: life a little bit, just to finish out her story. Okay,
Speaker 2: So Orwell comes home from Burma five years later, and
Speaker 2: he had a ring ready to propose because he's still
Speaker 2: in love with her and whatever, this is an insult.
Speaker 2: He stays at her aunt's house and Orwell called her
Speaker 2: in London, begging her to come visit, and she refused,
Speaker 2: and he never found out why. He assumed, and this
Speaker 2: would be a perfectly legitimate assumption that this was because
Speaker 2: she was mad about what he'd done. It actually wasn't.
Speaker 2: She refused to come visit because she had just had
Speaker 2: a kid with some random dude and who had then
Speaker 2: ditched her, and then she was trying to put the
Speaker 2: kid up for adoption and she was busy. Decades later,
Speaker 2: as he's on his deathbed, they reconnected through letters, and
Speaker 2: he to her he was the one who got away.
Speaker 2: Decades later, in the nineteen seventies, she wrote a memoir
Speaker 2: called Eric and Me about their time together, and she
Speaker 2: did so after quote a lifetime of ghosts and regrets
Speaker 2: at turning away the only man who ever appealed on
Speaker 2: all levels. How I wish I had been ready for
Speaker 2: betrothal when Eric asked me to marry him on his
Speaker 2: return from Burma. It took me literally years to realize
Speaker 2: that we are all imperfect creatures, but that Eric was
Speaker 2: less imperfect than anyone else I'd ever met. And this
Speaker 2: is so interesting to me, because fuck, what a bar
Speaker 2: The bar that the other men aren't passing is to
Speaker 2: be better than the man who assaulted her.
Speaker 3: Yeah, did she address it in that book?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I haven't read that book. I think
Speaker 2: I read about how the story of it came up,
Speaker 2: and like there's a lot of like it's all little
Speaker 2: bit third hand about what happened. Like literally, the quote
Speaker 2: that I read about what happened is the most direct
Speaker 2: retelling in print of what happened. And it was her
Speaker 2: sister's friend recounting it and none of this, like and
Speaker 2: the fact that she then is like, oh, he's the
Speaker 2: one who got away, none of that because she kind
Speaker 2: of had a pretty sad life. I think this doesn't
Speaker 2: excuse what he did, But I I think that you
Speaker 2: end up with this thing that informs his writing where
Speaker 2: he sees men as monstrous because he sees himself as
Speaker 2: monstrous because of what he had done. And it's interesting,
Speaker 2: it's not I don't.
Speaker 3: Know, Yeah, that's that's that is such a tough situation.
Speaker 3: I mean, clearly there's some real trauma there for both
Speaker 3: of them.
Speaker 2: And and way more for her obviously.
Speaker 3: Yeah, obviously way more for her. And it made it
Speaker 3: even worse by the fact that, like comparatively, she still
Speaker 3: holds him on a pedestal, you know. Yeah, that's it
Speaker 3: really just goes to show like how bad the interactions
Speaker 3: with these other men in her life must have been,
Speaker 3: including probably this guy that she had had the kid
Speaker 3: with who knows. Yeah, I mean sounds terrible on all lands.
Speaker 2: No, I know, and it yeah, And so now I'm
Speaker 2: just going to get into all the stuff that the
Speaker 2: bad stuff about orwell that.
Speaker 3: People talk about, just to do it. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: Before we talk more about his life. There's an awful
Speaker 2: lot of arguments about whether or not Orwell was a
Speaker 2: misogynist or a feminist or sort of neither. His writing
Speaker 2: is like the Bible, there's so much of it written
Speaker 2: at such different times that it's really easy to take
Speaker 2: quotes out of context and paint whatever picture you want.
Speaker 2: His male protagonists are almost universally misogynistic. The protagonist of
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four is violent fantasies. For example. The only
Speaker 2: female protagonist he ever wrote was in a book called
Speaker 2: A Clergyman's Daughter, which is one of these books that
Speaker 2: I haven't read, but he also wishes he hadn't published.
Speaker 2: In that the protagonist is by an older man, and
Speaker 2: then they become friends, and it is generally considered his
Speaker 2: worst book, including by him. He does not know how
Speaker 2: to write women well. He also hated this book and
Speaker 2: in his will asked for it to not be reprinted.
Speaker 2: He told his friend it was the worst book he
Speaker 2: ever wrote, and he'd only published it because he'd been
Speaker 2: so hard up for money and then for fun. Counterexamples
Speaker 2: to his misogyny later in life. There's this story recounted
Speaker 2: by a different man who doesn't use the name of
Speaker 2: the woman involved. There's this like they're in this literary
Speaker 2: scene together, all these mostly men, and there's this young
Speaker 2: ha woman in the literary scene, and you know it's
Speaker 2: like written as like, oh, every head turned when she
Speaker 2: walked by, et cetera. Later, that woman complains about all
Speaker 2: of the men in the literary circle on how they
Speaker 2: objectifire except or Well, the only person who didn't creep
Speaker 2: on her and didn't treat her as a woman, but
Speaker 2: as a person. I have read so many interpretations of
Speaker 2: Orwell and misogyny, like I wish this hadn't been such.
Speaker 2: I understand why I had to be such an large
Speaker 2: part of my research for this because of this that
Speaker 2: he had done. You know, Yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: convincing arguments from every position I leaned towards sort of
Speaker 2: that he portrayed more misogynist men, not out of unconscious misogyny,
Speaker 2: but out of attempting to draw attention to his own misogyny,
Speaker 2: at least later in life. I think his earlier writing
Speaker 2: is unaddressed misogyny.
Speaker 3: I can I ask a question about that, And this
Speaker 3: is I guess, a bigger question on writing. Like the
Speaker 3: fact that his characters are misogynistic, it doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 3: that he was embracing that, right. I mean, because I
Speaker 3: always felt like his characters were all flawed, and he
Speaker 3: wanted to show that they were all deeply flawed, and
Speaker 3: like the fact that they were misogynistic feels like him
Speaker 3: critiquing it. It feels like he did that on purpose,
Speaker 3: to be like, this is a bad trait.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think overall that's true, And yes, absolutely, we're
Speaker 2: actually currently in an era where people are having a
Speaker 2: little bit of a hard time separating a care character
Speaker 2: from the author. On the other hand, we're also in
Speaker 2: a time where people are getting better at not letting
Speaker 2: misogynist male writers get away with being like, no, it's
Speaker 2: just my character, because there are absolutely people who are
Speaker 2: just like, oh, it's just my characters who are all
Speaker 2: racist pieces of shit. I'm totally great, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I.
Speaker 2: Think that there are people who do a better job
Speaker 2: of it than or well of like making it clear,
Speaker 2: because he believed in very clear writing, right, and so
Speaker 2: I think this is an actual weak spot of his
Speaker 2: because I don't think he successfully always addressed this. But
Speaker 2: it is a little bit my impression because keep the
Speaker 2: aspertise for flying, for example, seems like a critique of
Speaker 2: the We call them googles in my scene, and this
Speaker 2: is like not a word that anyone else uses. Okay, googles,
Speaker 2: I'm going to learn there's a word called Google. An
Speaker 2: oogle is a crusspunk who like lives out of a
Speaker 2: backpack and travels around and eats trash and lives in squats.
Speaker 2: I was an oogle for a very long time. It's
Speaker 2: a slightly pejorative word, but but it's a very reclaimed
Speaker 2: one and it only exists in this tiny, weird subculture. Okay,
Speaker 2: So from there we get other words, like a Google
Speaker 2: is a dog. Google, it's the dog that lives with
Speaker 2: the yougle Okay, right, a Google is a boo, that's
Speaker 2: an oogle. So if you live on your if instead
Speaker 2: of living on someone's couch, which would be googling, you
Speaker 2: live in someone's bed and your partner pays rent and
Speaker 2: you don't, that's called googling googling.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And I think he's critiquing that. It's possible he wasn't.
Speaker 2: It's possible he was just unconsciously so lost in his
Speaker 2: own character's head.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But when I read that when I was like twenty,
Speaker 2: I thought he was critiquing it, and I was not
Speaker 2: in a particularly good I was, so I that's my read.
Speaker 2: My read is that he is on some level trying
Speaker 2: to critique misogyny but not doing a particularly adepth job
Speaker 2: at it and sometimes falling into it.
Speaker 3: Let me ask a super naive question, and I don't
Speaker 3: ask this to justify.
Speaker 2: I don't know gennology of Google, right, No, no, no.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I'm gonna google that later.
Speaker 2: Oh it's not it doesn't exist. No one knows it.
Speaker 2: Oh anyway, Okay, Well, I have a friend who is
Speaker 2: like a master's degree who used to be a no Google,
Speaker 2: who tried to figure it out.
Speaker 3: Probably continue on it. Okay, So I don't ask this
Speaker 3: question to join to justify in any way misogynistic writing.
Speaker 3: But were there writers of his time? I'm assuming there
Speaker 3: are that you felt did a better job of writing
Speaker 3: women's voices male writers, I mean, or were they all
Speaker 3: pretty terrible at this point? I mean, I don't know
Speaker 3: if they're better now, honestly, and I feel like I
Speaker 3: should read more, but like especially.
Speaker 2: At the time, I am not certain, which is funny
Speaker 2: because this is the era I used to like read
Speaker 2: a lot, you know, when I was like a young,
Speaker 2: pretentious teenager, I read an awful lot of like Turn
Speaker 2: of the Century up to about nineteen fifty, like good literature.
Speaker 2: I liked all the literature. I don't have an immediate
Speaker 2: answer for you. I think that overall that that cadre
Speaker 2: of writers tended to be pretty bad at it. But
Speaker 2: I'm sure there's exceptions that I'm not thinking of right now.
Speaker 2: And obviously there were women writing too, but they were
Speaker 2: generally not held up.
Speaker 3: I'll wait for reddit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think he never really understood women, and
Speaker 2: he sometimes tried. That's how I feel. He was also
Speaker 2: casually homophobic his entire life, and this was never really addressed.
Speaker 2: People like to argue about this one. He absolutely used
Speaker 2: anti gay slers a bunch, and he tended to look
Speaker 2: down on homosexuality. He also and I haven't found the
Speaker 2: source on this, I found someone talking about it. He
Speaker 2: wrote how there was a bunch of homosexuality and all
Speaker 2: boy boarding schools and how that was a positive thing overall.
Speaker 2: How So, he wasn't like I hate the gaze. He
Speaker 2: never wrote like I hate the gaze. He just like
Speaker 2: was casually like, oh that nancy over there.
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: Did he actually use that term?
Speaker 2: Yeah? He used nancies and like fancy boys and stuff.
Speaker 2: I think a bunch or like he's nancy boys and
Speaker 2: pansies I think is what he used.
Speaker 3: Kind of disappointed kind of feel like he as a
Speaker 3: literary guy, he could have come up with something better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, one of his rules
Speaker 2: of writing is don't use the same cliches very jargony. Yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 2: He was also a huge admirer of Oscar Wilde, who
Speaker 2: was famously gay in prison for being gay, and Oscar
Speaker 2: Wilde was one of his first major political influences, and
Speaker 2: he was very supportive when his friend, the anarchist historian
Speaker 2: George Woodcock wrote a history of wild One. Author Anna
Speaker 2: Funder connects misogyny and homophobia when she says that she
Speaker 2: writes about how one of Orwell's wives is like main wife.
Speaker 2: He has one wife that he married like two months
Speaker 2: before he died, but Eileen was his main wife for
Speaker 2: many years. She's generally erase from his history, and I
Speaker 2: hold by the that was a conscious choice, but I
Speaker 2: could be wrong. She claims. This author claims that Orwell
Speaker 2: had no sexual interest in women and would have been
Speaker 2: happier in a time when homosexuality was more I don't
Speaker 2: buy this. I haven't seen all of our evidence, but
Speaker 2: I don't buy it. I have not seen any I
Speaker 2: would be the first to believe and want to believe
Speaker 2: that he was gay, right, like all super into claiming
Speaker 2: as many of our heroes as queer as possible. Right,
Speaker 2: he spent a while fighting in Spain and the Revolution,
Speaker 2: where there was like a ton of out gay officers
Speaker 2: and soldiers, and he would have had every opportunity to
Speaker 2: be in gay relationships, and this and that. I don't know,
Speaker 2: so people like to argue all of these things. Then finally,
Speaker 2: of the of his big blind spots, there's this early
Speaker 2: anti semitism, And this one's the easiest. I can like
Speaker 2: this one, I have like I can tell you the
Speaker 2: story of it. His earliest writings were explicitly and grossly
Speaker 2: anti semitic. He talked about Jews having brought on their
Speaker 2: own treatment on themselves. His characters were anti Semitic, But
Speaker 2: so was he right, and everyone kind of knew it.
Speaker 2: Throughout the nineteen thirties, this is really present in his writing.
Speaker 2: He has a ton of friends who are Jewish. This
Speaker 2: doesn't fix it until one day it does. One of
Speaker 2: his Jewish friends in about nineteen forty challenges him on
Speaker 2: all of it, and Orwell changes his mind. He is
Speaker 2: presented with evidence, he changes his mind, he's always attached
Speaker 2: to common decency instead of ideology, right, and he believes
Speaker 2: that it's good to change your mind. He wrote, anti
Speaker 2: Semitism is simply not the doctrine of a grown up person.
Speaker 2: People who go in for that sort of thing must
Speaker 2: take the consequences, and he means social consequences. He's a
Speaker 2: very big free speech guy, but he's a very big
Speaker 2: shame people for being fucked up. Yeah, and he went
Speaker 2: on to write an essay called Anti Semitism Britain, exploring
Speaker 2: this problem at great length to a very wide audience.
Speaker 2: But it's funny because I now run across essays that
Speaker 2: I claim he was anti Semitica's whole life, even during
Speaker 2: this period, and I was like, oh fuck, reading all
Speaker 2: these and reading it was like one that definitely says this,
Speaker 2: and one that kind of says it, and they're The
Speaker 2: main claim is because at the end of his life
Speaker 2: he was like, I hate anti Semitism. I'm still anti Zionist.
Speaker 2: Zionism is nationalism and bad and colonialism is bad. And
Speaker 2: because he said that in the nineteen forties, this is
Speaker 2: why some Zionist people still find it it's anti Semitic.
Speaker 3: He's man in some ways he's he's cutting edge, like
Speaker 3: he is. Yeah, this is he's winning me back a
Speaker 3: little bit. Now that's back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's where I was. I was like, I don't
Speaker 2: know if I'm ever going to do an Orwell episode
Speaker 2: because I loved his books as a kid, right and
Speaker 2: I knew about the fighting in Spain thing, But I
Speaker 2: keep seeing right wing people posting about him. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, if nothing else, he was a democratic socialist.
Speaker 2: He was just kind of shitty to women, you know,
Speaker 2: And so then I like, I was like, all, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna do an episode about him, and then he he
Speaker 2: kind of won me back while I was doing the episode.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's winning me. Now you're taking me on a
Speaker 3: journe on this one.
Speaker 2: And he had his life was a journey. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like if there's a like, there's a reason we
Speaker 2: try as a society not to always hold people to
Speaker 2: the single worst thing that they did when they were
Speaker 2: eighteen years old, you know, and what they do about
Speaker 2: it later is what is the most impactful. Obviously his
Speaker 2: actions still had impact, and I'm not trying to deny that.
Speaker 2: But so the other worst thing he did is he
Speaker 2: went to Burma. Let's go back to that. Well, actually,
Speaker 2: first he went on to a journey into the land
Speaker 2: of advertisement. Well, actually, eventually it's gonna come up war
Speaker 2: propagandas that's kind of the same, here's some ads. We're
Speaker 2: back so young George still Eric. At this point, he
Speaker 2: goes to Burma and he becomes a colonial cop. Burma
Speaker 2: at this part was part of British India. And one
Speaker 2: good thing that happened came out of this. When he
Speaker 2: went to India, he had had a mustache that was
Speaker 2: a style at the time. You might know it is
Speaker 2: the toothbrush mustache. You more likely know it as the hitler.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Fortunately, chaplain, Yeah, he had a chaplain. Fortunately, the style
Speaker 2: at the time for colonial officials over there was a
Speaker 2: pencil mustache. So he switched to a pencil mustache and
Speaker 2: then kept that the rest of his life and always
Speaker 2: the like kind of the slum in it, like I
Speaker 2: want to be with the locals.
Speaker 4: Guy.
Speaker 2: He gets sick hand tattoos in the local style on
Speaker 2: his fingers. Nice and he realizes really quickly that a
Speaker 2: lot of the Burmese people don't like him at all,
Speaker 2: And soon he realizes that the Empire is fucking evil.
Speaker 2: He got sick there while he was there, because he
Speaker 2: did that a lot, and that was one of his
Speaker 2: past times, was getting sick and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, getting sick.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And in nineteen twenty seven he goes back to England.
Speaker 2: He goes back a little bit early on, like sick leave,
Speaker 2: and he's like, man, fuck being a colonial cop. I
Speaker 2: am fucking done. I am never doing that again. And
Speaker 2: he never did it again. When he left for Burma,
Speaker 2: he had no politics. He came back first and foremost
Speaker 2: anti colonial. At this point he also became a socialist,
Speaker 2: starting off as an anarchist. Soon he's gonna end up
Speaker 2: a democratic socialist with close friends who are anarchists. He
Speaker 2: wrote about it that he had developed quote an anarchistic
Speaker 2: theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always
Speaker 2: does more harm than the crime, and that people can
Speaker 2: be trusted to behave decently if only we let them alone.
Speaker 2: And this probably comes kind of almost word for word
Speaker 2: from Oscar wild because Wilde's essay the Soul of Man
Speaker 2: under Socialism is basically what Orwell just said. So he's
Speaker 2: back from Burma and now he starts doing his like
Speaker 2: slum in it. He's like all right, well I can't.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't go explore exotic locales overseas. That was kind
Speaker 2: of fucked up. I'm going to do it at home.
Speaker 2: So he dresses up as a tramp. He starts wandering
Speaker 2: around and he puts together one of his first books
Speaker 2: that people read. It's called Down and Out in Paris
Speaker 2: in London, and he gets sick of bunch doing that,
Speaker 2: and he starts writing a bunch and then he kind
Speaker 2: of like, if you pretend to be poor long enough,
Speaker 2: you kind of end up poor.
Speaker 3: Dressed for the job you want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and uh, and somebody's like sick, he's staying in
Speaker 2: shitty hospitals and stuff, and it's like fox his health up.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He's like committed to the bit committed. Yeah, until eventually
Speaker 2: he's he realizes he's middle class and he moves back
Speaker 2: to his parents' house.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I was gonna ask.
Speaker 2: I was gonna ask when that part of the story
Speaker 2: arc happened. Yeah. Eventually he's like, all right, that's enough
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 3: Is there an oogling term for someone that does that,
Speaker 3: that moves back in with their parents?
Speaker 2: Well, okay, so it's kind of funny. Is that the
Speaker 2: word oogle used to mean a poser street kid, so
Speaker 2: like originally in like the early aughts, and Google was
Speaker 2: or well, right, like someone who's a fake Oogle who's
Speaker 2: going to move back with his parents. But those of
Speaker 2: us middle class dropouts fake Googles like me, we tended
Speaker 2: to call the oogle meant more of the like fighty shitty,
Speaker 2: like stabby guy right who's like drunk all the time
Speaker 2: or whatever. So to some people the oogle thing is
Speaker 2: to be the middle class kid, and to other people
Speaker 2: the Google is like the more real anyway.
Speaker 3: I'm so I feel I'm going to I can't wait
Speaker 3: to use this knowledge. I don't know how or when,
Speaker 3: but I am going to drop this at some point
Speaker 3: in the near future.
Speaker 2: I have never found a word that is more completely
Speaker 2: suffused within a scene and completely opaque to people outside
Speaker 2: the scene. Yeah, Like, I have never used this word
Speaker 2: in like company that isn't punks, like especially street punks,
Speaker 2: and had anyone know what I'm talking about. But this
Speaker 2: is a word that is.
Speaker 3: Like now and me. Now you can use it with me.
Speaker 2: I'm cool exactly. Yeah, you can call me an Google
Speaker 2: or when I'm acting like an oogle. Okay, let's get
Speaker 2: the Jordan. But it's it's fine. So and then he
Speaker 2: moves back with his parents and he does stuff that
Speaker 2: totally matters, and I'm not as interested in this week's story.
Speaker 2: He writes a bunch of books, including the ones he
Speaker 2: later rejected entirely in which he hadn't written. He took
Speaker 2: on the name George Orwell at this time, and it's
Speaker 2: also kind of partly a way to leave his childhood
Speaker 2: behind and make a clean break for who he wants
Speaker 2: to become. In nineteen thirty five, he meets his wife
Speaker 2: to be Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and before they get married, he
Speaker 2: goes off slumming again up north and he writes The
Speaker 2: Road to Wigan Peer, and he actually does really good
Speaker 2: stuff with his slumming it. The Road to Wigan Peer
Speaker 2: is this like, look at the conditions that the working
Speaker 2: class and the north live in because people don't know it.
Speaker 2: And it's basically a call for a socialism that isn't
Speaker 2: caught up in like intellectual bullshit in jargon. He's like,
Speaker 2: if we can't talk about socialism in a way that
Speaker 2: matters to the miners, why are we doing it? This
Speaker 2: gets him put under state surveillance, where he remains until
Speaker 2: he dies.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, it's real nineteen eighty I know.
Speaker 2: But he's also part of the propaganda machine in the government.
Speaker 2: It's he's woven in. It's interesting he gets married nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty six. In nineteen thirty six, Franco staged a coup
Speaker 2: in I wrote into this script France, which would be
Speaker 2: a whole different story. He staged a coup in Spain,
Speaker 2: and the Blairs are like, what, we gotta go fucking
Speaker 2: do something about that, don't we. And the short version
Speaker 2: of the Spanish Civil War you can get the long
Speaker 2: version from like half the episodes I've ever done, is
Speaker 2: that Spain finally managed to get itself into being a republic,
Speaker 2: but then Franco, a fascist, invaded his own country and tried,
Speaker 2: after he tried to stage a coup, and then it
Speaker 2: failed because republican troops and anarchist militias threw down to
Speaker 2: stop it. Militias ran to the front to hold back fascism,
Speaker 2: while meanwhile, social revolution spread across the country and in
Speaker 2: Barcelona and Catalonia. More broadly, millions of people started living
Speaker 2: in an anti state, socialist life. People thought the Western
Speaker 2: powers like France, UK and the US would help them
Speaker 2: out because after all, they are committed to the democracy
Speaker 2: and the republic and blah blah blah. Right, Yeah, the
Speaker 2: Western governments turned their back on Spain completely. They not
Speaker 2: only did they not show up, they blockaded aid into
Speaker 2: the country. Only Stalin showed up to help, but there
Speaker 2: were serious strings attached. Communists as in loyal to the USSR.
Speaker 2: Folks were a distinct minority like politically, they were a
Speaker 2: tiny fraction of the left in Spain at the time,
Speaker 2: but if you wanted Daddy Stalin's help, you gotta let
Speaker 2: them be in charge. And that soon turned out very badly,
Speaker 2: with the communists going to literal war against the Republic
Speaker 2: and the anarchists, and it's messy and bad. But this
Speaker 2: hasn't happened yet. When the Blairs go down, well, the
Speaker 2: Orwell if she never changes her name to Orwell, Eileen
Speaker 2: goes with him. Yeah. A few months later, the Republic
Speaker 2: is in danger and the governments of the western countries
Speaker 2: aren't helping. But people from those countries and from other
Speaker 2: countries around the world. Mexico shows up really hard. I
Speaker 2: can't remember all of the countries. An awful lot of
Speaker 2: leftists from around the world are like, we're going to
Speaker 2: go fight fascism. George and Eileen are among them. On
Speaker 2: December twenty third, nineteen thirty six, George Orwell sets off
Speaker 2: to Spain. At first, he's like, I'm going to go
Speaker 2: be a journalist, but as soon as he gets there,
Speaker 2: he sees the revolution and he's like, all right, sign
Speaker 2: me up, let's go. He actually has a good quote
Speaker 2: that I didn't include in here for some reason, where
Speaker 2: he's like, look, I don't understand it all. There's like
Speaker 2: anarchist banners everywhere and hammers and sickles and shit, but
Speaker 2: everyone's like in charge of themselves and that's pretty cool
Speaker 2: and I don't need to and some of this scares me,
Speaker 2: but this seems like something worth defending. And that's my
Speaker 2: paraphrase of him. Yeah, but I will give his direct
Speaker 2: quote quote. When I joined the militia, I had promised
Speaker 2: myself to kill one fascist. After all, if each of
Speaker 2: us killed one, they would soon be extinct.
Speaker 3: It's beautiful and simple.
Speaker 2: I know, I know that's lovely. Anyway, we're not sure
Speaker 2: if he killed anyone or not. Firefights and bomb fights
Speaker 2: are like that. He absolutely shot at fascists, and he
Speaker 2: also fought. He gotten like a bayonet fight with a
Speaker 2: fascist who ran away. No, that's pretty that counts for something.
Speaker 2: Come on, yeah, no, I give him credit more than
Speaker 2: I have ever done. Yeah, and how all that went,
Speaker 2: we'll talk about on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Oh, that'll wait until I don't know.
Speaker 2: You totally have to wait till Wednesday. Five minutes breaks
Speaker 2: a week on all go to the bathroom before we record.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm a pick and be right back.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, no, So, so how's orwell, how how are
Speaker 2: you feeling about this man?
Speaker 3: You kind of laid out the grand work perfectly, like
Speaker 3: I understood there's gonna be some deeply problematic parts. It
Speaker 3: was a little bit of a dip from me emotionally.
Speaker 3: I'm on my way back up. I think he's I
Speaker 3: think it's very interesting. I'm a little disappointed I didn't
Speaker 3: work in a Dexy's Midnight Runners reference with Eileen oh Bo.
Speaker 3: But maybe I'll get to it in the second episode.
Speaker 3: And I'm really I'm loving it. This is great, Like,
Speaker 3: this is an amazing interesting character, and he's so I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't know if he's misunderstood just because I don't
Speaker 3: know enough about him, but I you're what you said
Speaker 3: is exactly right. He is just so woven into pop
Speaker 3: culture and references from everything from like stuff we watched
Speaker 3: when I was growing up to like the Boys now
Speaker 3: on TV. Everything is woven in this just Orwellian these
Speaker 3: Orwellian ideas. So to learn more about him, I think
Speaker 3: is really important. So, yeah, no, it's great.
Speaker 2: I more and more as I was like reading all
Speaker 2: this stuff, I was like, Oh, this man fundamentally changed
Speaker 2: the world, and we don't know what the world would
Speaker 2: be like without him. And there are some ways in which,
Speaker 2: because of how grossly misused he has been, there's some
Speaker 2: ways in which it got worse right in other ways,
Speaker 2: And I think overall, I think in broad strokes, I
Speaker 2: think he did maybe more to combat the spread of
Speaker 2: totalitarian ideology through his writing than anyone in the English language.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Huge, Yeah, And and we'll talk more about that on Wednesday,
Speaker 2: But first we'll talk about your podcast and anything else
Speaker 2: you want to talk about.
Speaker 3: I have a podcast is called The House of Pod.
Speaker 3: It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. We will look
Speaker 3: at the intersections of public health and pop culture and
Speaker 3: social inequities and cover some pretty fun topics with great guests,
Speaker 3: a lot of people that you'll already know from listening
Speaker 3: to this podcast. And it's a ton of fun. And
Speaker 3: I know you might not think that it would be
Speaker 3: because you're like, I don't want to It sounds a
Speaker 3: little bit medically and nerdy and sciencey, and it's not
Speaker 3: that much. It's because we are kind of anti jargon.
Speaker 3: So you will like it. I think if you don't,
Speaker 3: you know, we'll send you a nicol.
Speaker 2: It took me like three times to finally figure out
Speaker 2: because House of Pod makes so much sense obviously as
Speaker 2: a play on House of God. Ah, it took me
Speaker 2: so long to figure that out.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, you're not the target audience for that book.
Speaker 3: I mean, I mean I'm glad. Did you read it?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Wait wait wait does a book or House of God?
Speaker 3: No? I don't know how god. So the House of
Speaker 3: God is a book that was ranked one of the
Speaker 3: best satires of all time. It's a medical book that
Speaker 3: was one of the first books about like medicine that
Speaker 3: showed medicine in a realistic light. It came out like
Speaker 3: forty five years ago or something. I have the author
Speaker 3: on the show Actually it's a problematic book and some
Speaker 3: very serious ways in this depiction of minorities in particular
Speaker 3: and misogyny. But it was the first book to really
Speaker 3: kind of show the world of medicine in a realistic way,
Speaker 3: and it is like a satire and it's actually, you know,
Speaker 3: pretty brilliantly written overall by this guy who was a doctor,
Speaker 3: and it's that's kind of what we're trying to do
Speaker 3: with the show is kind of peel back the curtain
Speaker 3: on the world of medicine and show you like, this
Speaker 3: is kind of what it's really like. This is what
Speaker 3: doctors are actually like when they're talking to them each other,
Speaker 3: and you know, they're not trying to put up a
Speaker 3: fake front. And I hope through the whole process that
Speaker 3: we kind of, you know, break down people's anxiety about
Speaker 3: medicine or make medicine more approachable to people.
Speaker 2: That's kind of the overall goal of it. So but yeah,
Speaker 2: it's based on a book called The House of God. Okay,
Speaker 2: that makes so much sense. Yeah, I knew that House
Speaker 2: of God was sometimes a word that people use for
Speaker 2: like hospitals and stuff, but I don't thah totally. And
Speaker 2: so that was like Oh, I get it, and I
Speaker 2: felt so clever, But now I get it actually, and uh,
Speaker 2: totally glad I learned it on air or whatever. I
Speaker 2: guess my whole thing with my podcast is I make
Speaker 2: guests come on and talk about things they don't know.
Speaker 3: Oh, but I'm so good. Listen again, I have to
Speaker 3: apologize to your listeners. I'm so sorry you have. You're
Speaker 3: all listening right now and being like what These are
Speaker 3: the most basic questions. Why isn't he asking?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: And I'm sorry, I hear you, I hear you. I
Speaker 3: know I understand listeners. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: Sorry, some of those listeners have those questions. I love.
Speaker 2: One of the favorite tricks I've ever learned to get
Speaker 2: over imposter syndrome actually in some ways is when I'm
Speaker 2: in a crowd and someone's like, especially if I'm kind
Speaker 2: of in like if I am like at like a
Speaker 2: like a political thing, right. I have enough cred at
Speaker 2: this point that if I'm in a political space or whatever,
Speaker 2: like enough people kind of know who I am or whatever,
Speaker 2: because I've been doing this for twenty years. So if
Speaker 2: someone uses jargon, I sometimes I'm like, hey, what does
Speaker 2: that mean? Because no one thinks I don't know what
Speaker 2: it means, right, and so I'm like, I'm safe to
Speaker 2: ask ask the question, you know, but someone needs to
Speaker 2: someone needs to say like because like unless it's a
Speaker 2: closed space, like people need to be able to understand
Speaker 2: what's happening, you know, agreed, I agreed. But if you
Speaker 2: want to hear what's happening in Spain of eighty years ago,
Speaker 2: then you got a way till Wednesday. Uh oh, I
Speaker 2: have a book. It's this God, it's like one of
Speaker 2: your last few days. You can kickstart it. What are
Speaker 2: you doing? Why haven't you kickstarted yet? Don't you want
Speaker 2: to sign? Copy The Sapling Cage, my young adult book.
Speaker 2: I actually realized more than I when I'm going through
Speaker 2: this or what was actually a more important literary influence
Speaker 2: on me than I'd recognize because I was thinking about
Speaker 2: how a lot of like my actual the literary here
Speaker 2: is that I like read more recently and I care
Speaker 2: more about tend to write. I try to write plainly.
Speaker 2: I try to write at a fairly like low reading level,
Speaker 2: because I think the lowest reading level that you can
Speaker 2: say the things that you need to say in as
Speaker 2: complicated and nuanced ways as you can or need to
Speaker 2: is the goal. I don't want things to be complicated
Speaker 2: for the sake of complicated. And actually, upon looking back,
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, reading Orwell's stuff on writing was
Speaker 2: what I was doing when I first started writing, and
Speaker 2: I'm very excited to read the book, so clearly I'm
Speaker 2: writing the next nineteen eighty four is my book is
Speaker 2: nothing like It's a fantasy book about a witch who
Speaker 2: saves the world.
Speaker 3: That's yeah, I can't wait.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, Well, let's see you all Wednesday.
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