In the Dust of This Planet
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Hey, it's Latif. This is Radiolab. I'm just going to kick it over to Jad. This is a rerun from several years ago, but it's a weird one. It's not a typical Radiolab episode. And yet, like every great Radiolab episode, it feels like it's about now somehow more than things that are being made now that are about now. I don't know. Whatever. You listen to it. And yeah, enjoy.

Hey, this is Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab, the podcast. Robert is out of town today, so it's just me. I thought in this podcast, I'd wander a little bit. Generally, and that should be in front of your mouth.

So I'm going to start with a conversation that Brooke Gladstone and I, this is Brooke from On The Media, that she and I had with my brother-in-law, Eugene. I'm Eugene Thacker. I'm an author and professor at the New School in New York City. We talked about this very weird thing that happened to Eugene.

And I asked Brooke to join me because it just felt like her kind of story. I've been wearing black since I was 13. I just want to point out the two of you are head to toe in black right now. In any case, to set it up, Eugene is a hardcore scholar of philosophy, and he writes these books.

that sometimes can be a little dense. I mean, he'll use words like exegesis and radiocination. And so the family joke is that he writes books for no one. I think the joke started out, I write books that nobody reads. And then...

After a slow, long period of acceptance, I started to think, well, maybe I should write books for no one to read and just sort of embrace that. Meaning at a certain point, if you do this kind of work, you kind of have to ask yourself. If you knew that this would not be published, would you still write it?

How committed are you? And he decided he was committed. He would write it no matter what. So the story begins a couple years ago. In 2011. Eugene writes this book. Called In the Dust of This Planet. In the Dust of This Planet. It's kind of a hard book to describe, but if you had to sum it up in a sentence? It's about the end of the world. But not in the Hollywood sense. It's darker than that. Your hypothesis is the greatest horror is that...

Nothing exists and nothing matters. And the world that we live in, that we define in terms of humanity, doesn't care about us. Right. What in philosophy is often referred to as nihilism or pessimism, that there might not be a purpose to things or to your life or to our existence or to the cosmos. There might not be an order to things. We might not be here for a reason. This all might be...

really arbitrary in an accident. That there's no inherent meaning to anything. That it just doesn't matter. This is what Nietzsche called... The most difficult thought. And in the book, Eugene traces this idea through all of these different horror movies, from slasher films to sort of more supernatural horror...

And also music. I mean, at one point he goes into this deconstruction of how different types of black metal deal with this thought. I don't know. It's something, it's a way of thinking I've always found really intriguing and ironically kind of inspiring. Are you a pessimist? On my better days. Are you a nihilist? Not as much as I should be. Okay, so Eugene writes this book in 2011. It is dark. It is dense. He writes it, as he says, for no one. And as expected...

Beyond a few philosophy types, no one really pays attention. So he keeps his head down, teaching, writing. But then, some things happen. 2014. All kinds of ghettos in the world. It's all one ghetto, man. Giant gutter in outer space. The show True Detective comes along.

Comes a big hit. And at the center of the show is this character, Russ Cole, this Louisiana detective, who is one dark dude. I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. He goes on these rants about how there's no order in the world, how humans are just this accident, we have to deal with that. Look, I'd consider myself a realist, but in philosophical terms, I'm what's called a pessimist. And I just remember watching it and being like, wow.

That's Eugene's wife, Prama Murthy, my sister-in-law. I was like, this replicates so many conversations that we've had in the car. She's like, were they listening in on us? Yeah, it was eerie. So Prama goes online, clicks around. And all of a sudden I see this article about...

about the true detective director. It was an article where actually the writer of the show, Nick Pizzolatto, was asked, how did you create that character of the nihilist police detective? And he lists a bunch of things he was reading at the time. And included in that list was Eugene. To which I was like, cool. At least one person is reading the book. But I really just try to key my head to the ground and just keep writing, just doing what I'm doing. But then...

things got weirder. Okay, so now let's pull up the Lucky magazine. Let's see if we can find it. Short time later, Prema is flipping through this fashion magazine. Lucky magazine, and there was a spread with this actress. Lily Collins, 25-year-old actress. Who I'd never heard of. Pretty big right now. She's standing on a street corner. Dressed up in all of this sort of goth makeup and clothing. And in the photo, she is...

Wearing Eugene's book on her chest. She had on, in one of the shots, a sweatshirt that had the cover of the book. In the dust of this planet. Big letters right on her chest. And I was just like, no way. I mean, it was definitely...

What the f***? This is crazy. Like, what? She's just casually wearing my husband's book cover. I don't know. Again, I didn't react to, but it was just strange. Turns out a Norwegian artist had made a painting of the book. That image had gotten picked up by a fashion label and turned into some very expensive clothes. You know, I write books for no one to read, so obviously I'm not pulling in a lot of royalties on these. But, you know... Eugene says he's not going to sue. I'm not. I'm not.

going to see or take any legal action or really do anything about it. Because he says that's not why he writes. Okay, so that happened. But then it gets weirder still. So one day my wife Carla Murthy is online. This is the day that Jay-Z and Beyonce announced they're going to do this big international tour. Carla's watching the video that they released to promote that tour, sort of a fake movie trailer. So it says on the run, it's all flashy, guns, fire, hookers.

You're a smart guy. It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. I mean, it's some kind of Bonnie and Clyde thing, I think. I mean, they're running from someone. You're not quite sure who. Beyonce's in a wedding dress. She's got a veil on. But she's shooting semi-automatic weapons in a wedding dress. Cut to car chases. Cut to money flying everywhere. But at exactly 37 seconds in. Go back, go back, go back. It's like,

You see Jay-Z turn, stick a giant gun out to his right, and he is wearing Eugene's book. Right there on his back, in the dust of this planet. Now this is the point at which I was like, okay, what do we make of this? I mean, could it be that Eugene is no longer writing books for no one? That somehow he has become a conduit for this idea that we all...

in that subterranean way that pop music operates that we all are channeling right now? That was my thought. Yeah, no, I think that's the question.

is whether this is something particular to the moment we're living in. And Eugene, his knee-jerk reaction is... I think it could have been this cover or a million other covers. No. This is just meaningless appropriation. I don't think there's anything more than that to me than it just looks like a cool phrase to go on a t-shirt to put on a goth girl in some photo shoot. And why is it cool?

Right. Because my hunch is you might be right, but you also might be wrong because of the answer that you're about to give to Brooke's question. It's cool because some publicist decided it was right. This was sort of the conversation I wanted to have, and it's why I called Brooke. Like, what is behind all of this nihilistic entertainment that's everywhere? Now, Brooke, for her part, agreed that Eugene probably is tapping into something. Yes, but is this unique to this moment? Absolutely.

And to that I would say no. Really? You don't think this says anything about now? I think there are cycles in which the sense of meaninglessness comes out in sharper relief than other times. But you can identify them over and over again. Yeah. Nihilism goes all the way back.

Brooke actually turned us on to this guy. Simon Critchley. I am the Hans Jonas professor at the New School for Social Research. Simon wrote an article that basically made the argument that nihilism is the basic credo of cool. Because it's sexy. It's interesting. And it's been that way forever. Oh, I've got the best thing for you. You'll love this.

It's a Russian word, right? He said the word really got its pop in 1862. This is 150 years ago. There's a novel by Turgenev called Fathers and Sons. And in the novel, the son, who's the nihilist, turns to his conservative dad and he says... We base our conduct on what we recognize as useful. In these days, the most useful thing we can do is to repudiate. And so we repudiate everything. The father says, everything? Everything. Everything.

with indescribable composure. So that's the Nihilist moment. Everything goes.

And Simon says roughly from that point on, you see young people glom on to this idea again and again as a way to say no to the older generation or to just what's happening in the world. For example, after World War I, you had tens of millions of people dead. This lost generation that was confused and disgusted at what had just happened. And out of that, says Brooke, you get Dada. I want to pull up here on the computer.

The manifesto of Tristan Sarr. He was one of the founders of the Dada movement. He says, Dada means nothing.

Everything one looks at is false. Dada, abolition of memory. Dada, abolition of archaeology. Dada, abolition of prophets. Dada, abolition of the future. And after World War II, she and Simon say you had similar movements in the 70s and 80s with the threat of nuclear annihilation. You get punk rock. It just keeps going. Pop culture, at least since I was a kid, has always been deeply nihilistic, you know.

All right, so it's nothing new. But when I ran Simon through the Eugene jacket situation, and then I asked him, like, is there something different about today's nihilism versus nihilisms of the past? Like, is there something more potent about it? Without hesitation, he said... I'd say yes. Huh. Based on what? That's producer Andy Mills, who was with me during the interview. Well, you know, you can get...

Simon says it was more of a gut feeling based on this class that he taught last year with Eugene, oddly enough. I didn't actually know that they knew each other, but they had taught this class together. So the seminar that we did in the fall last year was one of those rare seminars. We're teaching mysticism. Nobody teaches mysticism. Really obscure stuff. We're doing desert fathers, medieval female mystics. This is early Christianity. Neither of us are religious.

He says they started the seminar, not really expecting much, by talking about how in the 4th century AD... There was a city, Alexandria. This is near Egypt. Alexandria was a lot like Manhattan. It was an offshore island. It was a colony of a former power. Roman Empire. And it's the seat of all culture and all learning in the ancient world. At a certain point in the 4th century, people start to leave. They start to leave and go into the desert.

People wander off and they seem to want something else. The city doesn't just doesn't do it anymore. Why?

It's corrupt. It's broken. It's sinful. He said crime was rampant, pollution, and so people just started to wander off into the desert and live in these caves. And these intense forms of ascetic practice begin. Like you had these women. Who were not educated because women couldn't be educated. Who were so enraptured with Christ that they began... Hurting themselves, throwing themselves into icy rivers, jumping into ovens. The body is something which is...

You're trying to strip away in order that you can free the capacity for love. That's a classic mystic idea, right? The body is just getting in the way. I want to go soul to soul with God. Exactly. But the premise of that, again, is that the world is a kind of field of ruins. But he says what really struck him is that as he was talking about all this, he would glance out at the students and he would notice this

look in their eyes. I just felt that in the room there was this deep need was being fulfilled by these strange mystics. He said the students were just in it in a way that almost never happens when you're teaching. We weren't not saving souls, but it was hitting something really, really deep.

What exactly? I mean, do you think they were starting to form the thought of wandering into the desert, so to speak? Yeah, I think there's a sense in which, you know, what do you do? Succeed, walk away. You know, that's where a lot of people are at. As for what's behind it all...

He says, just turn on the news. A video showing the beheading of a second American journalist has now been verified. Disease experts say this is turning into one of the longest, deadliest outbreaks ever. The girls were gang raped and strangled. Once again, it is mostly children we are seeing brought into this hospital.

I mean, the world I grew up in made sense. It was completely crazy, mutually assured destruction, but it made sense. And you could understand it in very simple terms. There was the United States, there was the Soviet Union. We were going to be eviscerated. That was clear. But, you know, you knew what the balance of power was. You're nostalgic for mutually assured destruction? Is that what's happening now? It seems a much simpler world. Well, you at least knew who to blame for it, right? Right.

That's Andy again. I feel like that's the thing. Like, you look at the Cold War and you could see, like, specifically, like, f*** you Soviets, f*** you Americans, f*** the nukes. That's right. Right? That's right. And now, who am I supposed to say f*** you to? I'm saying f*** you to... Everybody. Carbon emissions! Speaking of which... Today, the world's leading climate scientists warn it will get worse. No doubt, one of the reasons for the current gloom is that we are in the middle of an uncomfortable shift...

and how we talk about climate change. This was made official when the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released a report where for the first time they stopped

using the language of prevention, and shifted to the language of adaptation. In other words, hundreds of scientists and policymakers, this is the world's top organization for assessing climate change, were now saying, we can't stop it. It's inevitable. So now we need to talk about dealing with the mess that is now on our doorstep. That's David Victor. Professor of International Relations at University of California at San Diego. And he is one of the authors of the report. When the IPCC first began back in the late 1980s, you could imagine...

that people would take the climate change problem seriously. They would start to control emissions, and then over a period of decades, climate would stop changing. And instead what's happened is people have talked a lot about climate change, but they haven't actually done much to control emissions. And now he says we're all in this strange middle ground where we're trying to find the language to say why it's important to keep working at this, while at the same time,

admitting some degree of failure. And that's the kind of inevitability that I think you see in the new reports. And the reports are bending over backwards to try and find ways to be optimistic. The report says if you put into place all these technologies and international agreements, we could still stop warming at two degrees. My own assessment is that the kinds of actions you'd need to do that are so heroic that we're not going to see them on this planet.

All of which reminded me of that True Detective moment. Look, I'd consider myself a realist, but in philosophical terms, I'm what's called a pessimist. Oh, okay. What's that mean? Well, pessimists like nihilists agree there's no meaning. They're just a little more mopey about it, less likely to do something. It means I'm bad at parties. I mean, is that where we're all headed? You know, in a recent Wall Street Journal poll, 76% of people 18 and over said,

weren't confident that the future is going to be brighter than the past. Which brings me back to Brooke's question. Why is it cool? Call it nihilism, pessimism, whatever. Shouldn't it be depressing? Why would you want to put a phrase like, in the dust of this planet, a phrase that deliberately negates the person wearing it, why would you want to put it on your chest or on your back? Yeah, yes, we can. That's fine. We encourage it. That's good. Okay.

And since it was Jay-Z's jacket, which was in a way the catalyst for this whole podcast, we decided to talk to him. Sort of. That's coming up.

WNYC Studios is supported by Zuckerman Spader. Through nearly five decades of taking on high-stakes legal matters, Zuckerman Spader is recognized nationally as a premier litigation and investigations firm. Their lawyers routinely represent individuals, organizations, and law firms in business disputes, government, and internal investigations and at trial. When the lawyer you choose matters most. Online at Zuckerman.com.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Good. This sounds great. This is Jad's radio lab. So we ended up in the flow of things, you know, as we were trying to figure out, like, in the dust of this planet, why is that cool? Why is that just scary and depressing? We ended up... They want to talk to me? Why? That's a good question. Talking to this lady, who it turns out was the person who made the decision to put it on Jay-Z's back. I should say my name, I guess. My name is June Ambrose. I've been a costume designer for 22 years, 23 this year, and I've worked with everyone from...

Luther Vandross to Puck B to Sean to Mariah Carey, Busta Rhymes, Mary J. Blasio, Alicia Keys, Dave Matthews Band, Backstreet Boys, Kelly Ripa, Kim Cattrall, Missy Elliott. Did you do the Missy with the balloon? Yeah. That was you? Yeah. Oh my God. And of course...

Jay-Z and Beyonce. That's like culture, basically. Yeah, I was responsible for some of that Nazi stuff. It occurred to Andy and I during the interview that June has probably influenced the fashion sense of a significant portion of the human beings on this planet. And she was very clear that a costume is more than just a costume. It's like a conversation.

Without words. That really what she's doing when she styles someone is whispering to all the people that are going to watch the videos, come in contact with the billboards, go to the concerts. I don't have to talk to you, but I can create this conversation with a pair of pants and how they fall and how they fit and the texture and the color and the feel. She says with Jay-Z for that video.

She knew she needed something epic. But like effortless. I knew I wanted a biker jacket because it was a motorcycle scene, but I knew that I just couldn't give him a black leather jacket. I needed to say something, feel like something. So we were on the hunt. Her and her assistant went to dozens of places. Ateliers, studios, showrooms. Looking at all these leather jackets. It's like finding a needle in a haystack. Nothing was right. But then... They saunter into this one place. Black denim. This place that does sort of high-end grunge. They're flipping through the racks when...

She sees it. The jacket. Those words. And that was it. I knew it. I said, "This is what I need." It just felt, I mean, it was just perfect.

The question was why. At this point, I hadn't really told her the whole backstory. So I pulled out a screen capture from the video. This is one where you see Jay-Z sort of standing in the desert, shot from behind, in the dust of this planet on his back. And he's kind of pointing this really long, dirty, hairy gun off to his right, sort of up, like he's about to shoot the sun. Yeah, you'd think he's about to shoot the sun. I printed it out because it's just got this, like,

billboard quality to it, right? Here it is. I have a really cool one in my phone too that's never been used. Okay, so let's just look at this for a second. So why did you choose that jacket? You know, it's something very menacing about it. It's almost like the aftermath, that there was something going on that was periling, the end of an era, the beginning of something new. She says in the back of her head she was thinking about how the music industry might be dying. It's definitely in a place where it's like, what now? You can hear it in the music.

And, you know, if this is the biggest tour in history, really, what now? You know, and these are the whispers that you hear. But she says one of the loudest whispers was super simple. Just, here's a guy, massive pop star. Like a sovereign. He's in the desert. It's about to go down. The end of the world is literally on his back. But it was almost as if he didn't even know that was on his back. You know what I mean? It's like that was the afterthought. Like, oh, yeah, the world's ending. I don't care. Going out of step.

In other words? He wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid. Wasn't afraid. You know what? That's what, that's what this, we talk about whispers. That's what I get from it. Now that you said that. It's not so much I don't give a shit. I'm not afraid. Yeah. I mean, we all have to leave the planet. You know, everybody has their day. What you work on is not being afraid when you have to leave. Yeah, we'll get it to you. Okay. That'd be cool. Thank you. This is, um, this was actually refreshing. Oh, cool. I actually learned something.

Walking out of that interview. Thank you. This was, by the way, after we had told her that the phrase on Jay-Z's back was lifted from a book written by my brother-in-law, Eugene. Oh, wow. Now I need to get the book and I need to get it to Jay. Which she was very interested to know. Can we do that? Yeah, let's do that. And we did send him the book, Haven't Heard Back. Oh, my God. Anyhow, walking out of there, I kept thinking, is that what this is all about? That all this pop nihilism around us is not about tearing down power structures or embracing nothingness. It's just...

Look at me. Look how brave I am. That I can wear it on a t-shirt. Yeah, I would go with that. And this is why, as you pointed out, you know, from Dada to punk, this is a recurring motif of how badass you are in facing mortality. Bingo. Badass. That's what I was thinking. I think that that is nothing more than a posture. ♪

I mean, it's all fine when you're 18 to wear that T-shirt. But when you're like in your 50s dealing with cancer, like, OK, you know, maybe maybe then is when you really have to confront those things. So I just it's a it's simply a posture. And that's why it's in pop culture. A quite cynical response would be to say, you know, why we love nihilism in pop culture is that it saves us having to be burdened with it. Simon Critchley again. It saves us from feeling it.

We can enjoy it in our rooms. We can get off on it and then we let it go and we go back to work. But Simon says you don't have to be cynical about this if you don't want to be. I mean, Nietzsche, Mr. Dark Pessimist himself, had this idea about nihilism that it was just the beginning. That if you really dealt with it, took it in, accelerated it to its logical end, you could get to the other side.

which he called... A revaluation of values. Some new way of thinking about who we are as moral creatures. And that's kind of where I am. And love, love is that capacity which can sear through that. And that, he suspects, is why his students were so interested in those mystics, because they had found a way through. These people, these mystics, have got the uncompromising commitment to something like love. The fact that they were ready to go all the way...

to negate even their own bodies.

for that love. Right, so in a world where love has been reduced to Tinder exchanges, if that's the hell that you're living in as a 25-year-old, then yeah, you're going to read these mystics and think, "I want what she's having." You know? "I'll take what she's having." Burn my flesh. That's right, burn my flesh. And you could argue, I mean, why not, that Jay-Z and Beyoncé, they've got a little bit of that going on. I mean, part of what's made this tour so big, biggest tour ever, actually,

is that it's like this grand love story. I'm with the love of my life. So it's like, it works. I have a fantasy. I have a fantasy that Beyonce and Jay-Z will do this tour and they will go off into the desert and they'll live in a little hut. Like this monastic existence together in love in a new sort of age of Aquarius will begin. Starting with the two of them. That's beautiful. The loudest mic drop. Oh.

Any chance of that? Oh, you can really hear me slip on that. Yeah, oh, that's a nice sound. That was your answer. Pina Colada on the beach. Maybe a perfect response to Jade's question. Yeah. Special thanks to the Murthy Tribe and to Zero Books, and of course to Eugene Thacker, who, even though he harbors no redemptive fantasies about human beings whatsoever, is an awesome dude, and this piece is an homage to him.

To him, one of the most committed writers I know. Also happens to be my brother-in-law. If you would like to read In the Dust of This Planet, and I actually do highly recommend it. It's super fascinating. Go to our website, radiolab.org, and we'll link you to it. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dillon Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasambindam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson,

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