Stefan Zweig

And I sort of developed a ...

You know, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's a kind of, uh, always was kind of famous for like a kind of cynicism, you know, and authors like S- Stefan Zweig and, um, you know, a kind of old world kind of, um, what you call it? Like a- an old world kind of cynicism and kind of slight contempt and ...

I think I got that when I was like [laughs]

[laughs]

Uh, I think issuing a lot of statements online is the kind of express- expression of, oh, we h- we have the future of humanity in our hands rhetoric, that is a huge part of the problem to begin with.

There's a story by Stefan Zweig about a chess champion, and everyone thinks he's a genius because he's a genius at chess, but on course in everything else in life he's an idiot.

I kind of felt that way when you were writing about Altman and Musk and all these other figures.

So they haven't studied ethics.

So which foreign equivalents do you follow, then?

My hero, no longer with us, is Stefan Zweig.

Oh, OK, yes.

I just think he's wonderful.

because there was this idea that Brazil would be a place where, let's say, West and the Global South, they get together, emerge and create a new tropical and exciting civilization.

There was an Austrian writer called Stefan Zweig who wrote about it.

But we never made it.

We

They filled its theaters and concert halls, bought its books and paintings, formed its collections, and supported what was new.

Stefan Zweig went so far as to write that nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture had been promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jewry.

Karl Lueger's Christian Social Movement rose against this new Vienna.

It drew its program from Catholic social reform and from the fears of artisans and small shopkeepers put at risk by industrial production.

I don't think this election will solve Brazil's deep problems.

I mean, the sad thing with that quote, with that saying, is that the Austrian, the famous Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig moved to Brazil, escaping religious persecution in Europe in the 1930s and 40s.

And then he really believed Brazil was the country of the future.

And then it was Brazilians who themselves added, and it always will be.

His contemporaries described him as as integral to Russia as the Kremlin itself.

And Stefan Zweig, who is this great Austrian chronicler of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, said that Tolstoy was this sort of epochal Russian mascot.

He said that Tolstoy had no face of his own.

His face was that of Russia.