language that you used again, but...

He makes you feel like that's about the endless monotony of working a soulless corporate job where you have no impact on the world.

And so I feel like through reading that story, it's like for the...

the time I read it really closely and I was like, I'm going to make a point to understand every word and every sentence and and all that, like it took me like six hours to read and it was like 60 pages, but it's just so dense, you know, but I was like, I just sat there for six hours and I like for those six hours, I was like, I feel like I feel like I know what it feels like to live like a meaningless life and like such an acute way that I wouldn't know any other way and I think in Infinite Jest he's doing a similar thing but not quite because I think that Infinite Jest is a novel about excess and about consumer culture and living in a world where everything is just like too much And it's all coming at you at once.

And so I think that sense of like being overwhelmed and you'll notice all the sentences are packed with so many adverbs and adjectives and sub clauses and all this stuff are like descriptive and he goes off on tangents and all this.

And it's like it feels very like... overwhelming at times and i think that that is designed to sort of mirror like the the this culture where we're we're being trained to just want entertainment non-stop and in a way it is kind of entertainment non-stop but at the same time it can get very boring and technical and and so i think in it's at the same time it's sort of training you to not place instant gratification as your number one priority, you know?

So I'm like, my brain will

read that as like, he was hungry.

So if you would, uh, just tell me a little bit how you hooked up with Apocalypse Confidential, uh, and about the experiencing, experience of, you know, getting your first novel published.

Yeah.

Um, so the, um...

I first heard about Apocalypse Confidential because, um, one, their, um, I think it was their nonfiction or essays editor at the time named E-Eitan, um, he and I had, had chatted a bit about David Foster Wallace.

We were both David Foster Wallace fans, and he, uh, he knew that I had a book that I was pitching around.

And so he said, "Hey, you should send it to, to my press," and I did.

And, um, a few months later, they, they told me that they were publishing it, which was, of course, great news.

Yeah, yeah

And I, I just kind of wonder if, if E Unum Plurum was something of his philosophical manifesto or a kind of manifesto, do you think that he's trying to bear out this thesis, this, this conviction that he has in everything that he does as a fiction writer, or is he meaningfully departing from that and just sort of letting a, a non-philosophical, non-meaning infused B roll into his, his literature that, that doesn't resolve to this project?

A great question.

I think yes and no.

I think that he always struggled with, with trying to bear out that thesis in his own work, I think, because, because he was so self-conscious and his work is so self-conscious that when you, when y- i- in order to be truly sincere, I feel like you need to be vulnerable.

And I think he, he sometimes struggled with that and felt the need to sort of predict every possible criticism that anyone could have of him.

Like, he'd be sincere, and then he'd be like, "Now, of course, you're gonna say that this is sappy bullshit," or whatever, and it's like, okay, well now we're back to the self, self-ironizing.

I think we see that particularly in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

What do you think people who might not be familiar with Wallace or only know him through his memification and the discourse around him online, what would you want to tell them about how we might look to his approach as a, a way to understand how we are to, to make sense of these obligations to, to different social contexts and to expressing ourselves in, in different ways? How might he, he help people understand that in 2026?