Episode 131: Simply Dag! 🎉

Simply Dag: The Private Man in a Public—and Dangerous—Office launches today, July 29th, in honor of Dag's birthday. 

In this episode:

• Why I wrote the book
• Why Dag Hammarskjöld matters
• Substance, Spectacle, and the Taxes We Pay to History

Housekeeping:

Breaking news alerts, special episodes, and bonus materials are now in the Members Only area. con-sara-cy theories (way after dark) is an area for listeners who want to go all the way in. You can start a membership for $5/month here: https://consaracytheories.buzzsprout.com/2289560/supporters/new

Links:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14756079

***

For insider information & spilled tea, please subscribe to my weekly newsletter, The Unicorn Dispatch, here: https://sara-causey.kit.com/2d8b7742dd

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, is now available anywhere Amazon books are sold: https://a.co/d/0f9PAg9g

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses her latest book, Simply Dag: The Private Man in a Public and Dangerous Office, and its relevance to Dag Hammarskjöld's legacy. She criticizes the elitism in Hammarskjöld scholarship and advocates for a more accessible, human portrayal. Causey highlights the financial challenges of independent podcasting and the benefits of her new members-only area, con-sara-cy theories (way after dark). She emphasizes the importance of substance over spectacle, criticizing modern attention-seeking practices, and encourages listeners to support deep, meaningful content. Causey also mentions her upcoming dark comedy satire on Hammarskjöld's posthumous portrayal.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Dag Hammarskjöld, Simply Dag, biography, substance vs spectacle, historical legacy, podcast membership, breaking news alerts, independent podcasting, Amazon books, Hammarskjöld scholarship, quiet diplomacy, AI impact, posthumous control, attention economy.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in tonight. It is July 29th, which is Dag Hammarskjöld's birthday. It's also the birthdate of my latest major nonfiction release, Simply Dag: The Private Man in a public and dangerous office. In this episode, I will talk about why I wrote the book, why Dag Hammarskjöld still matters, and then also substance, spectacle, and the taxes we pay to history. A few housekeeping notes first: breaking news alerts, special episodes, and bonus materials are now in the members-only area. I've launched what I'm calling Conserracy Theories way after dark, and it's an area for listeners who want to go all the way in. I've always said that this is my nighttime broadcast. I have a couple of daytime broadcasts that are fairly G to PG rated. This is the R-rated version. This is adults only. This is the place where we can come after work or after you've been with the kids all day and you have some time to yourself. It's a bit like 789, o'clock hanging out after dark. Conservacy theories way after dark is a little bit more for the 123, a.m. club. It's for people that want to really, really, really go behind the curtain. Memberships are available for five bucks a month, and that really is going towards helping the infrastructure of this podcast. As I've always said, I don't have any corporate sponsors, and I don't want any. I am really and truly independent, and that takes money. I recently had to buy a new podcasting microphone. It was only like 6065, bucks, but that's still money, you know. And everything is so flipping expensive right now. It's like having to pay to host this podcast on Buzzsprout, and then pay to host the website, and then pay for equipment. It all adds up. So a few people putting some money in the kitty every month, and then in return, it's not just about what's in it for me. Of course, it's about what's in it for you. Regular episodes and guest episodes will still be available out in the public, free of charge. But those breaking news alerts, special episodes, and bonus materials are going in the members-only club. I'll drop a link to that in the write-up for this podcast episode because those episodes, if you're just subscribed on like Spotify or Apple, or you go to the ConserracyTheories.com website once a week to check and see what's on offer, you're not going to see those episodes come through in your feed. So if that's something that you're interested in, I'll drop a link. Go ahead and sign up, and I would definitely love to see you there. Obviously, that is not for everybody. If you're the kind of person that is like, oh, I don't really like foul language, or I I want to keep everything very G-rated, stay out of there. That's not the place for you. Not because things are deliberately obscene. It's just things are very very real, and sometimes we can say things behind a paywall when we're we're not worried about randos from the general public tapping in, potentially getting offended. We can be a little bit more honest about what we really think, and that is the space if you want to be a member of the club. In the meantime, let's saddle up tonight and take our ride to think about Dag Hammarskjöld, why he still matters, why I wrote the book, and then why we're living in this age of substance, spectacle, and the taxes we pay to history.

Simply Dag, the private man in a public and dangerous office, is now available anywhere Amazon books are sold. Sara's first book, the multi-award-winning Decoding the Unicorn, is also available on Amazon. Go beyond the headlines. Look beyond the boring academic work. Engage with something deeper and buy your copies today. And now, back to the show.

I want to start by talking about why I wrote the book. To me, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. If I'm on a podcast or I'm guesting on somebody else's program, and they ask me, "Well, why did you write a second book? I always want to say, "Like, why wouldn't I? Dag had the most amazing life. He was and is such an amazing person. He's not in a flesh suit anymore, so I guess we could say he was an amazing human and is still yet an incredible spirit, and so to me it's just like why would I not like you write one biography about a person and that's it. You're just automatically supposed to go on to another subject, and there are plenty of biographers who do that. I remember one time locally on the noon news they were. Interviewing a biographer who had written about several U.S. presidents, and he said, "You know, it's like somebody is your housemate for two or three years, and you write the book, and then you move on to someone else. They move out of the house, and you get a new housemate for the next person that you're going to research. And I thought, "I guess that's how it's done, but that's not what I'm interested in, and that's not to say that I won't ever write about anybody else. It means that I'm not ever reaching some point where I'm like I've said everything that I want to say about Dag, or I feel like I've said that there, all that there is to say about him, and now I'm done. I actually had someone tell me that they were done with Dag? Like people just keep bringing them up, but you know I'm done with them. I've moved on, and I thought, well, good for you, good for you. I'm sure that when you were cashing the checks and getting your bona fides, that you know, good, good, good for you, good for you that you're done. But I don't feel that way at all, so to me it's like I wrote the book because I feel like one of the things that's missing, a huge huge component of what's missing from so-called Hammarskjöld scholarship is the heart. There's plenty of stuff about who can posture, in my opinion, about who can posture and be the most intellectual, and you have people that will say, "Oh well, I knew Dag for you know maybe four or five hours. I was only ever around him for four or five hours in my entire life, but that qualifies me to write a doorstop of a biography. Or somebody will trot out as an academic and say, "Well, because I have Ivy League degrees, or I was educated at Cambridge or Oxford or Harvard. That means that I have the right to tell all the peons and plebs what they're supposed to think about Dag Hammersholt, or it's not even really written for John and Jane Q. Public. It's I think in so many ways written to be esoteric and difficult for the average person to access, and and it's done in my opinion on purpose, so that it's like I'm going to posture and blowviate for my fellow academics about the great dog Hammerhude, but I'm not really here for anybody else. I don't really care if the unwashed masses ever come to know his legacy and why he's important. I have actually written. It won't be published probably until maybe 2028. But I have written a dark comedy satire in the vein of Doctor Strangelove about how Dag has been portrayed posthumously. I would say I borrowed from the overall tone of Doctor Strangelove, and also from Network, because it's like you have all of these entities that collude together, but they don't just collude together while somebody is alive. That's really only the beginning. I talked in an earlier episode about the film Z, like when the bureaucrats are around the table, and they're like, "Well, if this guy dies, then we have to make sure that we knock the halo from his head. We can't allow him to turn into a saint or an angel posthumously. So, dealing with a troublesome person when that person is alive and in a flesh suit is only one part of the issue.

They then set about legacy management and posthumous control of what the public is allowed to know and what the public is allowed to think, and part of that, in my opinion and in my analysis, is trotting out academics who will toe the line, trotting out bureaucrats and technocrats who will toe the line, and I feel that Dag deserves so much more than that. You know, I've I've read various books where it'll be like I was a distant friend of the Hammerhild family in Sweden, or I was Dag's third cousin twice removed, or I was a diplomat and I was around him one time at a two-hour meeting, and it's like, well, what in any way, shape, or form, qualifies you to be the arbiter of what does or doesn't get said about Dag, if that's the credential that you're bringing to the table? These books don't focus on what was Dag thinking, what was Dag feeling, what was it like for Dag in that moment, what was what was Dag's experience like, and really making that universally relatable because we're all human. Even Dag himself, in one of his speeches, he was talking about how circus performers perform for the audience and they do magical tricks and feats and cool things, and the audience applauds, and that's it. It's over with. It's a flash in the pan, and the problem comes when the public expects diplomats, politicians, statesmen, public figures, etc. to perform in the same way, where there's a pressure of. You need to be doing backflips. You need to be walking a tightrope. You need to be a lion tamer. You need to be a juggler. We want quick, fast, and in a hurry, and we want to be entertained. And Dag's point was like, real diplomacy, real statesmanship is not like that. It can be messy. It can be slow. It can feel like you're trying to walk uphill with a weighted vest on, it's not always about a quick fix or a quick result that dazzles the public. And I think in Dax's case, he so often gets reduced down to secular saint, strange esoteric unknowable Christian mystic. Which what does that even mean anyway? Or highbrow intellectual that only other intellectuals, only people from the Ivy Leagues or the European aristocracy are allowed to touch, and they do not like me. Can you remember that song by the game in 50 Cent where he's like, "Rich folks do not want me around, because if it pop off and when it pop off. Somebody gonna get, you know. I mean that that's how it is. They don't they don't want somebody who's saying I'm a real person, and I want to make Dag's life and legacy accessible to other real people. It's like, well, no, we don't want you to do that. Dag matters, even though we're talking about somebody who was born in 1905. You know, today would be his 121st birthday. It may seem like that was not even one, but multiple generations ago. Why would we even still care? Why would we even still be talking about him? How could he possibly have anything to teach us now in modernity? You know, one of the things that I'm talking about on these special episodes is about what's happening with AI and the the types of things that Lord Elon is telling us are coming in the future. Why would somebody born in 1905 that would have no concept of artificial intelligence and and AI gaining sentience and all of these things? How could he still be relevant to us now. Dag was murdered in 1961, so later on in September it'll be the 65th anniversary of his murder. Again, you think, well, that's that's been so long ago. Why would we even still talk about the relevance? To me, yes, there's certainly a tenderness in it of well, because Dag's an amazing person, his his legacy shouldn't be thrown to the wayside, just because he was born a long time ago. But also, I look around at the types of things that we're going through now, and I just I just know we could have it so much better. I saw an article pop up earlier on Perfect union about how the orange man has absolutely enriched himself while he's been in office, particularly this second time around.

The mean tweets and the bloviating, and he-I guess the other night I don't follow this truth social shit, but I guess the other night he had had like a meme dump. There was a picture of him trying to help George Washington from falling off the cliff at Mount Rushmore, and another picture of him, like an AI picture of him standing outside the White House with JFK. And I was like, "Oh, that wouldn't have happened. Oh, oh Oh no no no no no! I no those two would not have gotten along. The the the blowviating and and the rhetoric and saying I don't believe in perma wars and then getting us into a perma war and and having people betting like live action betting on what's going to happen in major world events, events where somebody could be killed, where your kids or grandkids could be sent off into the theater of war, and allowing people to bet on those events to see what happens, we could have it so much better. And then at the same time, when we look at everything that happened in the 1960s, you know, you have Dag Hammarskjöld, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy. It's sort of like if somebody comes along that really presents a challenge to the system, you're not going to be allowed to exist anymore, it's like how David Talbott in the excellent book *The Devil's Chessboard* talks about how Allen Dulles was busier after JFK fired him than he was when he was working at the Charlie India Alpha. If somebody comes along who is deemed troublesome, boom. But the agencies have gotten savvier. They're not always just popping people. Tefree Tepstein, Diddy and his freak-off parties. You know there are other levels of ruining someone. You know truly a troublesome person can certainly be eliminated. From the chessboard completely, but they can also be ruined. They can be in a honeypot scandal. They can have people lose any sense of credibility and be publicly humiliated, ostracized from society, and so forth. Nowadays, diplomacy is not even considered like it's not even a menu item anymore. It's the question is just: Are we going to go into hot kinetic warfare, or are we not? And then these wars just go on and on and on, with no end in sight. Remember at the beginning of all this mess with the U.S. and Russia and Ukraine, everybody was I stand with Ukraine, and they had the Ukrainian flag. They knew fuck all, absolutely nothing about Ukraine as a nation. They didn't know anything about the dynamics between Russia and the Ukraine, but they were more than happy to virtue signal by putting up a flag and saying, "I stand with them. What? What's even going on in that situation now? I think the conflict has lasted for more than 12 years now. There was the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Donbas, and then in 2022, I believe is when what they're calling a full-scale invasion happened. But people got bored with that, so now it's time to talk about the war with Iran and how all the petroleum products are going up, and everybody's feeling pinched again, and we've got diarrhea parasites, and there's just seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel for what's going on here. We could have it so much better, you know. You had somebody who was talking about things like quiet diplomacy, preventive diplomacy. Let's take a look at a dustup and get the delegates to come to the negotiating table before it turns into a full-scale war. Let's don't let disagreements and problems fester. It's like the scripture about don't go to sleep with anger, like get get things straight before the sun goes down. There's no impetus. There's no drive to even do that anymore. It's basically like: Are we smashing the war button, or are we not? And that's it. There's no like diplomacy involved, and there are varying opinions about the UN. I certainly do not believe that the UN now in modernity is anything like what Dag envisioned it to be. His vision of a meeting house, a place where nations could come and hash out their differences without going to war, it's expanded so much beyond that.

It's sort of like instead of it being a meeting house just for that, like the main thrust, the main thing that Dag saw was the purpose of the UN. That's been put to the side in favor of things like Agenda 2030 and Stabby Wabbies and getting involved with the WEF. And it's like this is a clown show. It's just it's a clown. It's an absolute clown show. And to me, one of the reasons why Dag is still so relevant is because we could have it so much better. He showed us a different path. What happens when someone who's an introvert and an HSP gets into a leadership role, instead of it being somebody that's highly extroverted and aggressive? Not even just being extroverted, but aggressive. Someone who is aggressive and full of machismo and shouting and stomping and acting like an overgrown baby when they don't get their way. Imagine if instead of having that, or if you want to look at senile old man, somebody who tells the media my butt's been wiped, and he goes around eating ice cream and doesn't even know where the hell he is anymore. We could have it so much better, and I feel like the books that I've written, Decoding the Unicorn, and then also now Simply DAG, are to really show people this is not the only way. We've been living this way for a long time now, but we don't ever want to normalize it. We don't ever want to think. Well, this is just how it is now, or this is this is all we've got. We should just choose between the lesser of two evils because we can't have it any better. I guess we could, and frankly, we should. So I want to shift gears now, but only slightly, and talk about substance, spectacle, and the taxes we pay to history. When you write a biography, obviously it's an interesting exercise because you spend all of this time-months, years, maybe even decades-immersed in somebody else's life, their archives, their private papers and photographs, their philosophy, and you start to develop a deep appreciation for how they walked through the world. I've said many times before that I'm not a fan of hit pieces. I'm not a fan, or and I don't really understand people who act like, oh, well, I got immersed in this person's world. I realized that I hated their guts, and so now I've written. The 1000-page biography-it's like, why wouldn't you have stopped? Like, if you if you got immersed in somebody else's life, you started out on the front end thinking, "Hey, I might really like this person, but you discovered a month or six or whatever into the research process that you hated their guts. Why would you keep going? Because it's a hell of a lot of work, and it's also a lot of money too. That's like what I was saying about you know putting a little bit of money to to get to the extra episodes because nothing's cheap anymore, and nothing worth having is cheap either. So it's like in order to get things that you need access to archives, photocopies. If there's a place you can't travel to, and you need an archivist to digitize something for you, or to make a paper copy and put it to you in the mail, all of this stuff takes money. Nobody's just gonna do something like that for free. Every once in a while, it's kind of like the saying that a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. Every once in a while, you find a nice person who says, "I like you. I like the person you're researching. Let me do you a solid. But those are the exceptions and not the rules. It takes money, so to me, it's like, why would somebody spend time and money being a biographer of somebody that they absolutely detest? And you know, I deal with this a bit in the satire that I'm writing, but it's like the reason why they're doing it is because it's not their money. It might be their time in some cases, but it's not their money. They have a backer that's maneuvering them to write a hit piece. Dag was a man of quiet dignity, of discipline and modesty.

He didn't seek the spotlight, and he certainly was not the kind of person who sought the spotlight for its own sake. He cared about the work, time and again, in both decoding the unicorn and now simply Dag. That's something that I come back to over and over again. Dag cared about the work. It's not about me. The private man needs to just stay private. The public secretary general, fine. Look at my deeds. Look at what I've done, and you can debate what I did in the Swedish government. You can debate what I've done as secretary general. All of that's fair game. It's public information, and the press has a right to question all of that. But getting into nitpicky details of my personal life really shouldn't matter. He was about the work, the duty, and the substance, and I've been reflecting on that, especially now that we're here at Dag's birthday, because I knew there would be certain individuals that would want to co-opt that, not to celebrate Dag, but to celebrate other things. I might just need to leave it at that, and it just made me wonder, like, what happens when a serious historical figure meets the modern attention economy? We live in a culture now that is obsessed with things like proximity and clout, and when you look at how historical figures are referenced on social media today, you start to notice a pretty interesting tax that those serious subjects have to pay, and we could call it loosely the substance versus spectacle phenomenon. So on one hand, you have the the slow deep work, the stuff that's decidedly unsexy to John and Jane Q Public, it's slow, it can be grueling, it can be frustrating, it can be maddening. That's like in the process of writing Simply Dag. I had one TV station that was really good to me, very good. They gave me what I needed at a reasonable cost, and they couldn't have been nicer. I had another television network that they were assholes. They were flat out assholes to me, and I never figured out why. But you have all of this stuff that's going on behind the curtain, slow, grueling, frustrating, but it's also deeply rewarding if you love your subject. It's the work, it's the stuff that goes into actual creation: writing books, conducting research, taking photographs, making art, producing podcasts, building up a body of work takes time, and it requires you to actually bring something to the table. Okay. Now, on the other hand, in modernity, the internet has given us a shortcut, and that is the art of co-opting. And I think that's only getting worse as we see the prevalence of AI, because you have data that's been fed into AI so that now it can spit out look-alike art or look-alike paintings or look-alike photographs, and people think I I don't necessarily want the real thing. I don't necessarily need human creation if I can just have this. But even a. From AI, this manifests as like let's say somebody taking a profound quote, an historical reference, a serious subject, and they essentially use it as decoration. It becomes a decorative caption for some totally unrelated bid for attention, maybe even a thirst trap. And you've probably seen this across every niche on the internet, the deeply philosophical quote paired with a photo that is not philosophical, right? It's using a giant's legacy as a prop to get eyes on a thirst trap. I mean, to be more blunt about it, it could be somebody taking a quote from markings and putting it next to a picture of them or an AI version of them in a string bikini, or somebody taking JFK's "Ask Not" quote and putting it next to them in a pair of booty shorts with their cheeks hanging out. Why? But we have a clout economy. Thirst traps and provocative photos are a tale as old as time. You know, if a lady hangs her boobies or her butt cheeks out, dudes are gonna look. And the internet runs on simple algorithms, and the low-hanging fruit is what gets those fast and easy clicks. It's human nature and basic marketing. We could also get into the argument of how these social media platforms have been deliberately engineered to become addictive.

You know, they hack into these parts of the human brain that are perhaps better left alone. But what I find so funny, and and we could even say ironic, is the juxtaposition because you take somebody like Dag Hammersholt, a man who was practically allergic to self-aggrandizement and just random publicity, and then you attach his name to a desperate plea for social media validation, the contrast is pretty comedic. If you know who Dag really was, part of what they're counting on is that you don't even know who this person was and what they stood for. You're just going, "Oh, hey, look, a pair of boobs! Oh, hey, look, it's it's a booty hanging out of the shorts. And that reveals a lot about the current moment that we're in. I will at some point record an episode. I haven't decided yet if it'll be a bonus episode or a regular episode, but about how we are moving into a post-literate society. I know that that weird version of the Odyssey is out, which no, I'm not going to go to the theater and see that. And they're like, oh, the the copies, old copies of the Odyssey are flying off the shelf, and I'm like, really, because I can see a lot of Gen Z kids really sitting and reading the Odyssey. I don't fucking think so. When people don't have an original insight to offer, or when they have not put in the work to build a craft, they haven't grown some funk of their own. To paraphrase Elton John, the easiest move is to manufacture some sort of fake proximity to something real. It's like chasing a reflection or chasing the glow of a campfire because you haven't lit your own fire. And I think that we should choose substance over shortcuts. As a woman myself, especially as a female creator, and artist, and author, and researcher, I think about this choice a lot. Deep sigh, deep heavy existential perimenopausal sigh. We live in a world that constantly tells women that our quickest path to attention or to elevation is the physical shortcut, the lowest common denominator. Like, look at the stories that have been floating around the internet about how many young women now think, "Well, I want to have a job as a content creator, or I want to have a job as an OnlyFans girl. They think that their only value, the only thing that they can bring to the table, is boobs and a butt. Like if I if I flash my boobs on the internet, maybe I'll get some money. If I shake my butt on the internet. Maybe I'll get some money, and it's like, oh my God, that's all you think you have to offer. That's it. It reminds me, and I've been out to La La Land numerous times. It reminds me all the time of that old Rick Springfield song, "Don't Talk to Strangers. Every man's an actor, and every girl is pretty. When you get out to Hollywood, that's how it is. Just being pretty, or even being like really like, oh, that guy was so hot, that lady was so gorgeous. Like, that's just the basic price of entry in L.A. in Hollywood. That. There's not not anything special. You might have been the prettiest girl in your hometown, or you may have been the homecoming king and the captain of the football team that all the girls swooned over. But you get out to La La Land, and that's nothing. So to me, it's like the absolute lowest common denominator is to say I can flex my muscles, or I can show my boobs, I can show my butt. There's a lot of power, and frankly, it's a reclamation of your own power in rejecting the shortcuts, in deciding that you want to be known for your mind, your heart, for the for your craft, for the things that you make with your own hands, and not just flopping your boobs around or flexing your muscles. I'm proud to be a biographer, and I am damn proud to be Dag Hammersholt's biographer. I have never made any secret of the fact that I love Dag. If you are looking for a hit piece or a smear campaign about him, you are in the wrong place.

I'm also proud to create art and photography, and to go out in nature and just capture a moment like that means something to me. There was a garden spider that I photographed a little while back, and she only had a web in my barn for like maybe three days, and then she just vanished. I don't know where she went, but I'm glad that I captured that moment, that one moment where she had that unique zigzag web, and there she was. There was a prairie rose. One day when I was out hiking, there was this beautiful prairie rose that I saw and photographed. And by the time I got there, a couple of weeks later, to go hiking again, it was gone. And I'm glad that I was able to capture that moment in time. It's like that flower's gone now, that spider is gone now, but I captured that moment in time so that there's always going to be a record that it happened. There's always a record that it existed, and there's very much that part of my personality that likes to be not only a curator but a conservationist and a preserver, somebody that preserves things. I like writing books that require some amount of intelligence. My work enjoys it when the audience meets me halfway. You know, if I have to sit and explain everything about everything, it loses something. I love, I love, I love how David Lynch refused to do that. I think I've talked before on the air about how he was on. I think it was maybe the Graham Norton show, and Graham Norton's like, "You've said that Eraserhead is actually your most spiritual movie. What did you mean by that? Are you willing to elaborate? And he's like, No, I love that because some of the magic goes away if you have to just bump, bump, bump for the audience. Well, here's what Lost Highway means. Well, here's what Blue Velvet means. Here's what I was thinking in Eraserhead. It loses something if you have to spell everything out, and I like creating things that are not meant for lowest common denominator. And I like those kinds of movies and novels too. There's nothing wrong with sitting down and watching a cheesy action movie or reading like a beach read romance novel. Nothing wrong with it at all. To me, I come back to what Trent Reznor said about the bubble gum pop and the the boy bands and the girl groups, kind of late '90s, early '00s. He said, if you listen to that all the time, it's like trying to make a diet off of birthday cake. There's nothing wrong with having birthday cake on your birthday, but if you eat birthday cake at every meal, you're going to be sick and you're going to start to hate birthday cake. And I agree. If the only things, the only stuff that you're consuming are cheesy action flicks that are frankly pretty vapid, and then romance beach reads or like hardcore erotica where everything is a sentence that a caveman could have written. I just think you're doing yourself a disservice, and I like to write things that have some level of respect for the reader's intelligence, which is not the same thing as making intellectual snobbery. You can respect the reader's intelligence while still making something accessible. Simply Dag can still be a book that says, I hope that you bring your own emotional experience into the text, while not being, oh, this is from the Ivy League, and I'm writing about the Great Dog Hammer Heald. Things can be different than lowest common denominator schlock or pretentious, ostentatious Ivy League melodrama. At the end of the day, spectacle is ephemeral. A provocative photo gets a double tap today and is forgotten tomorrow. But it's the substance that lasts, and that's also, quite frankly, one of the reasons why substance is so dangerous to the system. Remember what? F.K. said a man may die, but it's the idea that lives on, and they want to crush the important ideas, the books, the podcasts, the genuine historical record that stays behind forever. Like it's something that can be passed down as a legacy. The algorithm's just going to move on to the next shiny thing.

It's exactly what what Dag was talking about with the juggler or the lion tamer at the circus that gets a quick burst of applause and everybody goes ooh and ah in the audience, but then they're already the next day onto the next thing. The circus ends, the tent packs up, they take the big top away, and that's that. But you want to really build something meaningful that's not built on the juggler and the lion tamer, or the gal with fake tatas that's hanging her boobies out. So today, as we celebrate Dag's birthday and the launch of Simply Dag, my invitation to you is pretty simple: seek out the substance, support the people who are actually doing the work, building the craft, and respecting the legacy of whatever it is, if Dad's not your cup of tea, that's fine. Go find somebody who is. Go find a legacy. Build your own legacy. Do your own stuff. Go beyond the romanticy beach read, the hardcore erotica, or the action movie with a lot of explosions. It's fine to engage with that stuff sometimes, but just not all the time. Let the spectacle do what it does in its little corner of the internet, while all the rest of us focus on something that actually endures and that's really deeply meaningful. It's been my pleasure to write about DAG and to continue to write about DAG. To not be done with DAG to not feel like well I wrote a couple of books and so that's it. There's more to come I assure you. You can find simply DAG on Amazon anywhere Amazon books are sold. If you're interested in conspiracy theories way after dark, consider becoming a subscriber to that. And thank you all for being here, for supporting me, for supporting this podcast, for supporting the book, and for valuing depth in a world full of surface noise. I am very grateful for each and every one of you, and I do not take it for granted. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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