Ben Fountain: "We're Real Good At The Blur"

Summary

The Gist – “Ben Fountain: ‘We're Real Good At The Blur’”

Podcast Host: Mike Pesca (Peach Fish Productions)
Guest: Ben Fountain, author of Rasputin Swims the Potomac
Date: June 29, 2026
Length: ~50 minutes

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Mike Pesca conducts a rich, far-reaching interview with acclaimed novelist Ben Fountain, discussing his new political satire Rasputin Swims the Potomac. The conversation explores the novel's themes of blurred reality and fantasy in American politics—especially in the Trump era—the evolving role of media spectacle (from football to professional wrestling to reality television), and how fiction can capture the undercurrents of anxiety, confusion, and transformation that shape contemporary American life.

Pesca begins with a candid announcement about the forthcoming end of The Gist in its current form, setting a reflective and personal tone that threads through the episode. The main event is a deep-dive with Fountain, whose career and process are examined alongside substantive exchanges about the nature of modern spectacle, truth, and the changing landscape of American stories.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Podcasting, Change, and Endings

[01:55–08:24]

• Mike Pesca announces the end of The Gist as listeners know it, scheduled for the following week. He reflects on how podcasting, once in his "wheelhouse," has shifted due to technological, media, and market changes.
  • “As a sole proprietor, compelled to try many initiatives ... there is more time needed, learning curves, more opportunity for the unforeseen piece of the gist puzzle to call out to be solved.” [03:13]
  • He observes that current audiences seem to desire more consistency and clear ideological content.
  • The challenge for eclectic creators: “I am pretty hard to predict. I’m pretty hard to characterize. ... I do not right now want to sound like the old country doctor who’s complaining there’s not enough time to connect with patients, communicators who aren’t communicating in a way that connects, aren’t really communicating.” [05:20–06:04]

---

2. Introducing Ben Fountain and Rasputin Swims the Potomac

[11:37–12:21]

• Ben Fountain, lauded as author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, joins to discuss his new novel, an ambitious, satirical, and sprawling exploration of American politics where the lines between real and fake are intentionally blurred.
  • Pesca characterizes the book: “Think what would happen if Thomas Pynchon went to a lot of no-Kings rallies and took a lot of notes. You get something like Rasputin Swims the Potomac.” [11:55]

---

3. The Blurring of Reality and Fantasy: Wrestling, Politics, and Trump

[12:23–24:26]

• Fountain explains the formulation of his central character, a pro-wrestler (with the persona "Rasputin") running for president, and how Trump’s legacy inspired the narrative:
  • “Trump ... has been a master of the blur his entire career. ... If we continue on the same continuum of blurring fantasy and reality, where it gets increasingly blurred, what’s the next step?” [13:29]
  • Fountain draws on pro-wrestling concepts like "kayfabe” (the shared pretense of storylines), noting how both wrestling and Trumpian politics openly bake the fake into the real:
    • “It’s a perfect mirror of what’s going on in the larger culture. It’s the fake that becomes real. The real that is fake. ... We’re real good at the blur, and we can take one piece of you and just blow it up...” [17:09, quoting from his own book]
  • Pesca observes parallels in reality TV fandom and political loyalty, where both occupants (fans/voters) believe they see through fakery, granting themselves a kind of “faux sophistication.” [19:21–22:19]
    • “Big fans of [reality TV or wrestling] have this self sophistication where they tell themselves, ‘Of course we know it’s not real.’ ... but because you’re telling yourself you’re wise to the game, you think you’re much wiser than you are.” [19:35]
  • Fountain: “It applies to politics as much as it does wrestling ... On some level, we choose to believe one candidate and not another. There’s different levels of consciousness and buy-in going on all the time.” [20:51]

---

4. American Spectacle: Football, Wrestling, and the Shifting Mirror

[24:26–29:19]

• Discussion shifts to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and the novel’s use of football as a mirror for America in the 2010s.
• Pesca asks if wrestling now provides a more apt metaphor for American culture:
  • Fountain: “Maybe wrestling is even farther along on the continuum of blurring reality and fantasy. ... Football is a hard game ... the outcome is not predetermined ... [wrestling] is ... built around blurring fake and real.” [25:57]
  • They briefly discuss the corrosive influence of gambling on both sports and society, and even war. Fountain: “The corrupting influence is tremendous and pervasive and ... dangerous for ... civilization, for the social contract.” [27:19–27:34]

---

5. Crafting the Novel: Perspective and Process

[28:17–36:10]

• Fountain describes his evolution as a writer—moving from the single perspective in Billy Lynn to three in Devil Makes Three, and finally to the many in Rasputin Swims the Potomac.
  • “I think I’ve gotten better as a writer ... I’ve gotten more ambitious as a writer. ... My mantra at that point was, keep it simple, stupid. ... And I had to get better as a writer, I definitely had to get stronger if that book was going to be any good.” [29:19–30:33]
  • The new novel’s “sprawling” nature is deliberate, reflecting the information overload and fractured attention of our age.
  • The story follows two primary guides: Clarence Thomas Jr., a retired African American professor writing for a Dallas-based digital outlet, and Faith Spack, a privileged former reality-TV-star-turned-political-staffer.
    • “[Faith] is the liaison between the reality TV show the Real West Wing and the actual West Wing.” [31:44]
  • Fountain stresses the importance of embodying every character, no matter how small: “To that character, he or she is the most important person in the story...” [33:26]

---

6. Writing with Visual and Cultural Texture

[33:58–36:10]

• On the cinematic qualities of his fiction, Fountain cites Robert Altman’s ensemble movies as an influence, describing how fiction and modern TV series alike can handle large, overlapping casts and social complexity.
  • “TV and movies are a big part of my formation ... [Altman] was just a master at capturing the cross talk between characters and the conflicting agendas...” [34:51]
  • Regarding the film adaptation of Billy Lynn: “We got to have the ride, and the ride was great ... I really wanted it to be amped up and in hyperdrive the whole time. ... Ang Lee was going for something more internal.” [36:15–37:27]

---

7. Redaction as a Literary Device (and a Statement)

[37:41–43:44]

• Fountain reveals why "Trump" appears redacted in his novel:
  • “At a certain point in the writing of the book, I realized I was tired of seeing his name. ... It started with that. ... He’s too much with us in our exterior lives. ... And I think for a lot of us, he’s very much a dominant figure in our interior lives. And I think it’s a bad sign when any president is so overwhelming.” [38:13]
  • He also notes influence from reading redacted government documents, especially the Epstein files: “We were getting a lot about the Epstein files and redactions and Trump’s name being redacted at times ... I just thought, okay, let’s just redact him, redact his name.” [39:52]

---

8. Fiction, Anxiety, and Capturing the Zeitgeist

[45:24–50:29]

• The conversation turns towards fiction’s role in documenting collective anxiety and the overload of the present.
  • Pesca: “Novels help. ... The form of the novel is a balm, I think, for our times.” [50:29]
  • Fountain’s aim isn’t prediction but communication of “the reality that’s going on in our heads and our hearts, what the times are doing to us, whether the times are good for us ... or is it going the opposite way?” [47:28]
    • He describes surreal elements in the book (e.g., “weeping sickness”, red lightning, smartphone glitches) as metaphors for actual undercurrents of distress and dissociation.
      • “Is that literally going to happen? Probably not. But ... does it crystallize something that’s in ourselves that we’re feeling, some kind of anxiety or profound sadness? ... That’s what I’m trying to get on the page.” [47:48]

---

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “Trump ... has been a master of the blur his entire career. ... what would come after Trump? ... I just started thinking about pro wrestlers and how the fake is baked into the presentation. Everybody knows it's fake. ... The fake is the real, the real is the fake.”
  — Ben Fountain [13:29–14:30]

• “We're real good at the blur, and we can take one piece of you and just blow it up and you'll be making millions of dollars a year.”
  — Ben Fountain, quoting a character from his novel [17:09]

• “Big fans of [reality TV or wrestling] have this self sophistication where they tell themselves, ‘Of course we know it’s not real.’ ... but because you’re telling yourself you’re wise to the game, you think you’re much wiser than you are.”
  — Mike Pesca [19:35]

• “The corrupting influence [of gambling] is tremendous and pervasive ... and I think it's really dangerous for ... civilization, for the social contract.”
  — Ben Fountain [27:19]

• “To that character, he or she is the most important person in the story, even if they only have one line, even if they only show up for a paragraph. And so you've got to do them justice to the extent they're on the page.”
  — Ben Fountain [33:26]

• On redacting Trump:
  “At a certain point in the writing of the book, I realized I was tired of seeing his name ... He's too much with us ... in our exterior lives ... and in our interior lives. ... It's a bad sign when any president is so overwhelming ... I think it's a sign of illness, maybe even psychopathy, certainly neurosis.”
  — Ben Fountain [38:13–39:42]

• “For me, certainly the goal is not to be a prophet in terms of specific things ... but to try to dig down into the reality of what's going on, the reality that's going on in our heads and our hearts, what the times are doing to us, whether the times are good for us ... or is it going the opposite way?”
  — Ben Fountain [47:28]

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• [01:55]–[08:24]: Pesca’s announcement of The Gist ending & reflections on podcasting/media
• [11:37]–[12:23]: Intro to Ben Fountain & his novel
• [12:23]–[24:26]: The blur: wrestling, politics, Trump, reality, fandom
• [24:26]–[29:19]: Football & wrestling as mirrors; gambling’s influence
• [28:17]–[36:10]: Fountain’s writing evolution; narrative sprawl; cinematic influences
• [37:41]–[43:44]: Redacting Trump; fiction vs. reality; changes in the real world
• [45:24]–[50:29]: Novels as balm for anxiety; metaphors in fiction; documentation of the era

---

Tone & Language

The conversation is intellectually playful but earnest, alternating between analytical rigor and wry observation. Both Pesca and Fountain speak with self-awareness and humor, never shying from big questions about storytelling, society, and personal capacity for change.

---

Conclusion

This episode is a must-listen or must-read for those interested in the intersection of fiction, politics, spectacle, and the American psyche. Fountain’s Rasputin Swims the Potomac emerges as both a satire and a time capsule—one deeply attuned to our moment’s nervous energies, its cravings for spectacle, and its confusion over what’s real. The discussion is timely, poignant, and, much like The Gist itself, resistant to easy categorization—a fitting summation for one of the podcast’s final episodes.

---

Transcript

[Notion Representative]

If you build things online, you know the stack can get messy fast docs in one place, project tracking somewhere else, AI tools scattered everywhere. That's why I've been spending more time in Notion lately. It's become the one workspace where I can actually organize ideas, collaborate with people, and now build on top of it too. Notion just launched their new developer platform and it opens up a ton of possibilities for builders, startups and teams. You can create integrations, connect workflows, build AI powered experiences, and customize Notion in ways that fit how you actually work. What I like is that it doesn't feel overly technical or locked behind enterprise complexity. I was recently experimenting with automating some recurring workflow tasks and it was surprisingly easy to get something functional up and running without rebuilding my entire system from scratch. That's the sweet spot. Whether you're building internal tools, AI agents, automations, or entirely new products, the Notion developer platform gives you a flexible foundation to work from. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at notion.com amp that's all lowercase letters notion.com amp A M P to try Notions developer platform today notion.com amp Comcast

[Comcast Announcer]

is delivering extraordinary experiences in live sports through the incredible broadcast and storytelling from NBC, innovative and personalized viewing features on Xfinity and Peacock, and the country's most reliable WI fi Viewers can enjoy every game changing play faster and more seamlessly than ever, all on a network built to deliver unforgettable moments as close to live as possible. The ultimate experience for the American sports fan. Learn more at comcastcorporation.com Sports Foreign It's

[Mike Pesca]

Monday, June 29, 2026 from peach fish Productions it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and an announcement, a sad one that I did not want to make. The gist as we know it is ending. I will be giving you my goodbye episode next Thursday. After that the feed will be populated with something old, something new, nothing boring, something rude. Is that a teaser? What? The decision was made by me in close consultation with Peach Fish CEO Michelle wasn't imposed on us and it'll be good to do something different. In fact, I'll be doing something completely different. I will not be talking into microphones, except maybe to clarify my Hardee's order in the drive thru. So like I said, more explication to come. But I was thinking about the constraints and challenges of what I do or have tried to do these last dozen years. The challenge and eventually the ceiling became a simple question. Where is the time I put into the show actually going. And that's changed a lot. As a sole proprietor, compelled to try many initiatives, subscriptions, writing on substack video. With each foray into a media that isn't squarely within my area of expertise, there is more time needed, learning curves, more opportunity for the unforeseen piece of the just puzzle to call out to be solved. You know, I like solving those puzzles. I like rising to the challenge. But I do have, from 2014, when I kind of invented this kind of show, to, I don't know, let's say 20, 22, 23, it was more squarely within my wheelhouse. And then things change. They changed to video, they changed to clips, the clip economy, social media, more ideological consistency within each podcast. And I was definitely eager to understand and work with the challenges.

[Comcast Announcer]

But.

[Mike Pesca]

But I do have to say, just as the past is a foreign country, so is change. So, you know, when you're in a foreign land and relatively simple, things become hard, maybe frustratingly hard. Take up more of your time, I don't know, ordering the right thing or getting to the right place or reading street signs, things that you dispatch in seconds at home, and then get on to the real thing you were trying to do. Well, the podcasting landscape became a little like that. I remember one time I was in the Dominican Republic and I was following signs towards the highway, or I assumed it was the highway. That was the word on the sign. Higway. H I G U E Y. The Spanish word for highway, right? No. Higway is a city in the Dominican Republic, and that city is accessible by a different kind of terra, which is the actual word for highway, pronounced not that way, I'm sure, but definitely not hig way. So what I was doing was I was following the highway to the wrong highway. There's an analogy there somewhere. Pretty often I wasn't doing podcasting with all the work I was putting in. We were all putting in Corey and Jeff and Kathleen and Michelle and me. Joel, beforehand. I wasn't talking into a microphone. I wasn't using words and ideas to connect to an audience. I was trying to get attention for the fact that that was what I have been doing here. I was using social media or outside collaborators. This is the way of the world. I get it. But I'm not great at optimizing for getting attention as opposed to rewarding attention already earned. Plus, the thing I was not terribly successful to get people to pay attention to, I think stopped being exactly the thing that people wanted to pay attention to or maybe. And this I suspect is the case that that thing good podcast, interesting host, good conversations, maybe something unpredictable. That's the thing that the media landscape determined wasn't the most remunerative. There's more. I'll get into this more much later. This is just a little bit of an explanation of what's going on, but I think there is a taste shift or a content shift that I did resist. I think audiences who are seeking out new content want clear lines like this is the Trump always bad content or this is the we're doomed as a society because of technology or because of the environment or because of the way current politics are. Where that podcast or the on the other hand or the everything is perfectly fine. Don't let empirical evidence tell you otherwise. Outpost. Just keep investing in crypto, as you know, because you probably found me years ago and stuck around. I am pretty hard to predict. I'm pretty hard to characterize. So it's like a radio station to use an antiquated reference, that doesn't play classic rock or it doesn't play pop. A plays sometimes a little classical and sometimes a little classic rock and sometimes edm. There's no market for that. But you know, you like that, you like the hard to predict or characterize part. Maybe you love that and I love that you love that. But as a business proposition, an extremely crowded landscape, it is a lot harder to define yourself to a new audience if you're that weird hybrid, non consistent thing. I do not right now want to sound like the old country doctor who's complaining there's not enough time to connect with patients, communicators who aren't communicating in a way that connects, aren't really communicating. So the algorithmic and the visual have to an extent overwhelmed podcasting or have just maybe overwhelmed this podcast. Or Maybe it's that 3,000 episodes and 12 years and two months is enough for anyone. But we're not at that 12 and 2 mark yet. There is still more to come. So stick with us as you always have and I not only love you for it, but I owe you more than a decade of my labor and my passion and I commit to at least a few more shows. As always. You can email me at the gist@mike pesca.com and on the show today, Ben Fountain, who is the author of one of the most profound novels I've read In the last 15 years, Billy Lynn's long halftime walk. I've been following him since he's writing nonfiction and today he joins us to talk about his new Novel, ambitious, sprawling, scathing, funny. It's called Rasputin Swims the Potomac and he's up for the whole show. Ben Fountain. Up next,

[Ben Fountain]

foreign.

[Mike Pesca]

Primaries are, you may have heard, all around us. And you could trade the biggest political races on Kalshee, on Calci, you could trade major primaries, election outcomes and the biggest political storylines as they happen. I'll tell you about one election I'm looking at and trading or thinking of trading on calcium. I'll get you inside my mindset. So let's look at Maine Senate, right? Platner Collins. Back in May, Kalshee had Graham Platner at 71% and Susan Collins at 29%. So if you put money on Susan Collins, invested in her on the platform, you'd get more than three times your return. Now it's at Platner 60, Collins 40. Now, here's the thing. Couple things about this. You let's say you think that Collins won't win, but you think more oppo research is coming out on Platner and he's going to take a hit, but eventually just the politics of Maine will win out, which is that it's a much more Democratic state. Now, Kalshee isn't like a bet. It's like a stock market investment. So if the Collins stock goes from, let us consider it a stock, if that commodity goes from a 40% chance of winning to a 70% chance of winning even if she doesn't win. If you cash out at 70, you still have made a good deal of profit on your investment. And here's the other thing about calcium, what it allows you to do with political races. Sometimes I invest on or predict these races as a hedge against disappointment. So if I want one candidate or one party to win, or specifically would be very upset were a candidate to win, I sometimes invest in that candidate in case they do win. Well, I didn't want that person serving in government, but, you know, I got 40 bucks in my pocket. It makes it go down a little better. On cow sheet, you're trading against your peers in a live market, meaning there's no house except of reference representatives. And as the probability changes, you can buy in and out of your position for a limited time. Download the Kalshi app and use the code gist to get $10. When you trade 10k a l s h I kalshi trade on anything, 18 plus restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Prices, values and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information see kalshi.com regulatory Comcast

[Comcast Announcer]

is delivering extraordinary experiences in live sports through the incredible broadcast and storytelling from NBC, innovative and personalized viewing features on Xfinity and Peacock and the country's most reliable WI Fi. Viewers can enjoy every game changing play faster and more seamlessly than ever, all on a network built to deliver unforgettable moments as close to live as possible. The ultimate experience for the American sports fan. The Learn more@comcast corporation.com sports

[Mike Pesca]

Ben Fountain is one of our best novelists. I would say that Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk was the best novel of the aughts. I don't know, maybe that's damning it from with faint, faint praise. What's really been better since then? Ben Fountains also written Devil Makes Three and a collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and Beautiful Country Burn Again, which is nonfiction and about politics. His new book is definitely fiction and definitely about politics. It is called Rasputin Swims the Potomac. And think what would happen if Thomas Pynchon went to a lot of no Kings rallies and took a lot of notes. You get something like Rasputin swimming the Potomac. Ben, welcome to the gist.

[Ben Fountain]

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

[Mike Pesca]

This is situated in, I think, a year from now, pretty much a Donald Trump type president. I can only presume because his name is not in the book. It is literally redacted. Which I want to ask you about, has successfully challenged the 22nd Amendment. So can run again. Is that, is that the.

[Ben Fountain]

That is correct.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Ben Fountain]

That's our ground level with that. Yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

But that doesn't mean that his cult is automatically going to rally around him, enter this figure of Rasputin. Tell me about how you conceptualize this character.

[Ben Fountain]

Well, you know, I was in 2023, 2022, I started thinking, I realized Trump is still very much alive, political property. And he is going to run again. He can't not run again. And so I was thinking also the fact that there's such a blurring of boundaries in American life now between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump, the 45th president, former president at the time, he has been a master of the blur his entire career. I mean, real estate, a great deal of the real estate business is built on puff marketing, prison image. And, and so that's, I think that's been very much part of his political package. And I was thinking, well, if we continue on the same continuum of blurring fantasy and reality, where it gets increasingly blurred, what's the next step? And I mean what would come after Trump? And so I was trying to conceptualize that as I just started thinking about pro wrestlers and how the fake is baked into the presentation. Everybody knows it's fake. I mean, you know, quote, fake. The fake is the real, the real is the fake.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Ben Fountain]

And so I started thinking, well, what if we have a professional wrestler who runs for president in Persona, like, not as Jesse Ventura, running as Jesse Ventura, known as the body in professional wrestling, but what if he ran as the body? Or say, suppose you had a wrestler who's Rasputin and he never breaks character, and everybody knows he's not Rasputin. Rasputin died in 1916, but he insists I am Rasputin and a critical mass of the country buys it. And so I just started with that scenario, folded it in with my sense that Trump had a really good chance of being elected in 2024. And I mean, I started writing the book in April of 2023. And so I'm just, like, playing it out on the page. It's like, what would this look like and where would it take us?

[Mike Pesca]

So how much of pro wrestling do you know or did you research? Donald Trump is famously indie. Pro Wrestling hall of Fame, the WWE hall of Fame. And then there are concepts like kayfabe, which is the acknowledgement of the fakery of the wrestling, the wearing of the mask. There are also concepts like the shoot and the work. You know, a work is a scripted, predetermined thing. A shoot is sort of fake. But I was interviewing a wrestling expert, and they talk about sometimes the shoot becomes the work and the work becomes a shoot, which is something like what happens with Donald Trump in that his fiction becomes nonfiction and vice versa. So to go back to my original question, how immersed were you, or are you in the Argo and the general nature of fakery and wrestling?

[Ben Fountain]

Well, I mean, I haven't paid much attention to wrestling since I was a little kid and in. My son went through his wrestling phase, you know, when he was pre adolescent, and so I got a face full of it then. And. And then he moved on. I didn't know much about it. And. And so I did have to do a certain amount of research and watch some documentaries, read Mick Foley's, you know, memoir.

[Mike Pesca]

Sure.

[Ben Fountain]

Pretty good Mankind.

[Mike Pesca]

And he's a good.

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah, yeah, and, yeah. Smart, smart gentleman. So, you know, you never know enough. There is always more to know. But I hope I got sufficient grounding in that world to make it not only plausible in the book, but. But hopefully, you know, add something to the narrative.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. And I'm no expert, and I wasn't insisting on verisimilitude of wrestling jargon. I was just wondering, were there things that you came across that became light bulbs or shoots, and you said, I'm using that word again, or, or seeds. And they became something in the book, some great ideas that maybe explained Trump or that you developed and we can now read in the book.

[Ben Fountain]

Well, you know, I mean, when you do this work for a certain amount of time, hopefully you start to develop instincts and intuitions. And so you'll latch onto an idea and you'll think, well, this feels like it's pretty fertile ground, but you don't know until you start exploring it. And so I had this notion, well, let's draw in the world of professional wrestling and see where it takes us. And the deeper I got into it, the more pleased I was at the fact that I kind of stumbled into. Into this world, because I think it's. It's a perfect mirror of what's going on in the larger culture. It's. It's the fake that becomes real. The real that is fake. And the lines are constantly blurring. I mean, at a certain point, you know, Ricardo Levy, who's head of, you know, this wrestling association, he's trying to get face back to become, you know, come into the wrestling world. And he's, he says, look, I mean, you're one way in this, in this situation, you're another way in this person. We're always blurring. I mean, our personalities are always shifting. He said, we're real good at the blur, and we can take one piece of you and just blow it up and you'll be making millions of dollars a year. Let us do this with you. And so it's, it's an entire subculture that's built around blurring. Fake and real.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. And what is the weave if not verbal blur? And in fact, what is the weave as a brand if not an excuse for. I didn't make sense in the moment, but if we call it a weave, maybe I'll give myself credit for being some linguistic genius. So Faith is the character in the book who we are most asked to identify with, who's frazzled and working on the Trump redacted staff. She has a background in reality television, which is the other, I think, more distaff version of wrestling. And one thing that I find very interesting, and of course, Trump has the background in reality television, is that big fans of each have this self sophistication where they tell Themselves. Of course we know it's not real. People who don't understand us think that we are dupes and think that we think it's not real, but we know it's not real. But then I would say as an outsider, no, it's not that you're total dupes. And you think that the wrestling outcomes aren't preordained or that they don't use massive amounts of editing in reality TV shows, but because you're telling yourself you're wise to the game, you think you're much wiser than you are. And I do think that those two very similar forms of media and the fandom of each engage in that kind of self deception. And probably a lot of people are into politics due to go,

[Ben Fountain]

you know, this is a really interesting psychological complex we're talking about. I think it has layers and layers and layers. And, and I think with any particular person at any one time, they're always shifting. It's a continuum. And, and so, and it applies to politics as much as it does wrestling. I mean, on some level, we choose to believe one candidate and not another. We choose to, to buy into one political agenda and not another. And, and there's different levels of consciousness and buy in going on all the time. And, and so that's very much true in the wrestling arena. And I think in reality TV too, it's, we know it's fake, and yet on some profound level, it's not fake. It's answering a particular need in us. And, and so what is that need? What is being answered? I think, I think that's worth, you know, exploring on the page in fiction, you know, trying to get to the truth of it.

[Mike Pesca]

Here's another observation that I just thought of as you were talking. The faux sophistication aspect of it, what the fans would call sophistication. There is an echo in many of Trump's fans who say politicians are all fake or politicians are all lying to you. This does a few things. It allows great leeway for Donald Trump's lies, but also somehow his lying and his operating in that vernacular confers upon him authenticity in the way that maybe a reality TV star has an authenticity because they're the only ones who are acknowledging what quote, everyone knows what that is, that it's all fake.

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah, it's, it's kind of, we're kind of in a hall of mirrors here. Okay, so take somebody. Okay. The first winner of Survivor, Richard Hatch, I mean, he was a master at this game. And not only had he did he master the psychology of the game. He mastered the Persona of the conniving, cynical, you know, dastardly, you know, protagonist

[Mike Pesca]

who what in wrestling would be called the heel.

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah, the heel. And he thrived on it. And we loved him. We hate, we hated to love him and we loved to hate him. And, and so, you know, shift over to the 47th president. I mean, you know, you know, the things he says every day. It's like if he can have it both ways, he'll say something and it has literal meaning if he needs to walk it back or change position. He just said, oh, you were taking that seriously, you were taking that literally, what an idiot you are. And so, you know, people say, well, take him seriously, but not literally. And so again, you get this blurry. I mean, what is reality at that point?

[Mike Pesca]

So Billy Lynn's long halftime walk, if you haven't read it, 19 year old private returning from war, thrust into the middle of the Dallas Cowboy Stadium. Essentially overwhelmed, sensory overwhelmed, which echoes his experience in war. There's some flashbacks, there's some trying to filter the world through. Not dumb, but certainly not educated kid who has a couple of sergeants or mentors. And it's about football and spectacle and Americana and heroism and, and how we set our ignorant children up to be, I guess, meatbags. Do you think that football, that in the way that football best explained and was a mirror of American society in the 2010s, wrestling has been become that by 2026?

[Ben Fountain]

Huh? I hadn't thought of it in those terms. Well, you know, I was working with a not original idea when I was writing Billy Lynn, I mean, all the time. I mean, this has been around for a long time. Football is a reflection of American society. You know, like George Will said, it combines the two worst parts of American culture. Violence and committee meetings.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, he's. And he's a baseball enthusiast. He says that. Yeah, a lot. Yeah, he's. He was saying that before football totally trounced baseball's popularity.

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah, right. But you know, I mean, the parallels between war and football taking territory, violence, etc. Etc. I mean, it wasn't an original idea I was working with, but again, I felt like if I'm a smart enough writer, diligent enough, maybe we can get some work done as far as trying to figure out what's going on. You know, I think maybe, maybe wrestling is, it's even farther along on the continuum of blurring reality and fantasy. I mean, football is a hard game and it is played by hard men. And the Outcome is not predetermined. Although with, you know, the overwhelming, you know, influence of gambling coming into sports and in our culture, you know, sometimes I wonder. There's just such. There's such huge amounts of money on the line now I find myself having these cynical, unpleasant thoughts about what might be going on on the field. But anyway, well, I have those cynical,

[Mike Pesca]

unpleasant thoughts with what might be going on with war, because you could bet on that, on the betting markets. And in fact, I think an Israeli officer was recently indicted for betting on outcomes of war.

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah, it's the corrupt. The corrupting influence is, is tremendous and pervasive and, and I think it's really dangerous for. Okay, I'll say it. For civilization, for the social contract.

[Mike Pesca]

And we'll be back with Ben Fountain in a minute.

[Comcast Announcer]

Comcast is delivering extraordinary experiences in live sports through the incredible broadcast and storytelling from NBC, innovative and personalized viewing features on Xfinity and Peacock, and the country's most reliable WI Fi viewers can enjoy every game changing play faster and more seamlessly than ever, all on a network built to deliver unforgettable moments as close to live as possible. The ultimate experience for the American sports fan. Learn [e-mail] sports

[Mike Pesca]

and we're back with Ben Fountain, author of Rasputin Swims the Potomac. And Ben, as you know, I read Billy Lynn's Halftime Walk and I heard you do some interviews, talking about your process. So in that one, you watched one of these real life halftime spectacles, there was an overwhelmed soldier returning from possibly take it all in. And you said then your process was to write from the inside out. Just imagine Billy, imagine what his perceptions were. So that works with one character. And from there the novel unfolded. Then you move on to next novel, Devil Makes Three, and that has three characters, therefore different perspectives. This one, however, is sprawling, hundreds of perspectives. The question is, have you gotten better, more ambitious, or maybe has your attention, like the rest of society, refracted into a million little shards? Can you tell me if what I think is happening with your approach to writing a novel is what's actually happening? And if so, what explains that, do you think?

[Ben Fountain]

Well, I'll tell you honestly, I think I've gotten better as a writer, Stronger. I can do more. I've gotten more ambitious as a writer. I mean, Billy Lynn was a pretty straight line, a pretty straight shot, except for one extended flashback. It takes place over the course of one day. So limited timeline. There's one perspective, that's Billy Lynn. I mean, at that point, I had Two failed novels in the drawer. And my mantra at that point was, keep it simple, stupid. Because my downfall until then had been I was taking on too much. And so with Devil Makes Three, there's three main characters, three different perspectives. One is a white male American. One is a white female American, both expats in Haiti. And then the third is a young Haitian American woman. And I felt like this is what needed to be done to do the story justice or to have a chance of doing the story justice. And I'm going to have to work my way into all three characters, two of whom have obvious, you know, I mean, I'm a guy, I'm a white male American, you know, bourgeois, and the young CIA agent and the young Haitian American obviously are, you know, they're female. And I had to get better as a writer. I definitely had to get stronger if that book was going to be any good. With Rasputin Swims Potomac, we've got two main characters who are our guides into this very surreal world. And one is Clarence Thomas Jr. Who's a retired community college professor of government in Dallas. And now in his, quote, retirement, he's writing for this spunky upstart online newspaper called the Dallas Daily. And when they got in touch with him and said, you want to write for us? He said, sure. What do you want me to write about? They said, well, what do you want to write about? Well, politics. Okay, do you want to write about state, national or local? He said, how about national? So he's now the Dallas dailies national affairs correspondent. And so he's one God. He is an African American man who came of age in North Texas in the 1970s. He has his own particular experience and view of the world informed by, you know, who he is and what he's dealt with. The other main character is Faith Spack. She's 25, 26 year old, you know, white American woman, comes from a pretty privileged background, although that has its own hitches. I mean, she's the illegitimate love. She's the love child of a famous Dallas billionaire, and she and her mother have to keep his identity secret to continue getting her trust fund support. But, you know, she was a reality TV star for a little while in her teens, and she left that behind and went to college, got into politics as a staffer, and now she's at the White House as a special assistant, as assistant communications director for special projects. In other words, she's the liaison between the reality TV show the Real West Wing and the actual West Wing. And so, you know, Between Clarence Thomas and Faith Spack, I've got a pretty broad area of experience I need to try to master and get on the page. I didn't know if I could do it.

[Mike Pesca]

And the probably hundred more characters than you've ever had in a book before. So even if you're not writing from Rasputin's perspective or Stephen Miller who shows up, you plausibly convey what they may say.

[Ben Fountain]

Well, I'm trying. I read something some smart writer once said, and to the effect of every character in the story, to that character, he or she is the most important person in the story, even if they only have one line, even if they only show up for a paragraph. And so you've got to do them justice to the extent they're on the page. And so it's. You can never really coast,

[Mike Pesca]

have you? So Billy Lynn got made into a movie, and as an American, I'm sure you grew up watching movies and you think of. You can't help but think of certain scenes. Just things sit cinema graphically. You think of it in terms of cinema. We all do. But since so much of the novel is about attention, have you been thinking of things or scenes or scenes you write down? Not so much as a hour and a half long movie, but one of these sprawling series that might be on Netflix with so much that can be packed in and so many angles that can be explored. I'm thinking about your attention.

[Ben Fountain]

Well, let me just say I think it would. I think Rasputin Swims of Potomac would make a hell of a good limited series.

[Mike Pesca]

So did I. That's why I said it. Yeah.

[Ben Fountain]

Same for Devil makes Three, for that matter. But I mean, sure, that is part of my mindset. I mean, TV and movies are a big part of my formation. You know, I'm a baby boomer, and so naturally, at times my mind is going to flash into that kind of mode. You know, when I was writing Billy Lynn, I wasn't thinking so much about other writers as I was about Robert Altman and, you know, these sprawling ensemble movies that he would make. And he was just a master at capturing the cross talk between characters and the conflicting agendas. And people are so set on their own goals. What they want, they're talking past each other, moving past each other, even though these are very crowded and claustrophobic scenes. And so as I was thinking, I was thinking about Robert Altman a lot, and probably I was thinking about him a lot with. With Rasputin, Swimsuit, Potomac, because you're getting the same thing It's. It is a very crowded stage at times.

[Mike Pesca]

We pleased with the movie version of Billy Lynn?

[Ben Fountain]

Well, we got to have the ride, and the ride was great. I got to meet and interact with a lot of great people, and everybody on the movie was trying very hard to make a good movie. There were no hacks, there were no shortcuts. Yeah, everybody was all in. I think Ang Lee, in addition to being a real artist, he's a gentleman and a very thoughtful person. You know, I'm reasonably pleased with it. I wanted it to have more crazy energy. I really wanted it to be amped up and in hyper drive the whole time. That's the way I envisioned it. The soldiers, you know, including Billy, they are getting so much thrown at them on that day. It's just overstimulation, you know, amped up to 11. And I would have made a louder, more in your face, intense movie, you know, sensor intense, you know, in a sensory sense, whereas Ang Lee was going for something more internal.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. Even his Hulk movie isn't compared to superhero movies, isn't like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Fountain]

But it was a great experience and. And wouldn't trade it for anything.

[Mike Pesca]

Tell me about the decision to render the name Trump. I strongly presume, since he and his family matches the things that you read in the book, matches everything about his biography to render it as a redaction. Now, I've read other novels where the conceit of an anonymous main character was conve. Of the Richard Reeve novels Independence Day. Maybe the main character is called X. Then he recently just got divorced, so there's like a little pun there. So there are a couple of choices available to you. Just change the name. Why the redaction?

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah, you know, I'm just going to put it right out there. The inspiration for the fictional president in Rasputin swimsuit Potomac is most definitely Donald J. Trump.

[Notion Representative]

Whoa.

[Mike Pesca]

Breaking news.

[Ben Fountain]

Okay, so it's. I mean, he's the inspiration. Once you start pushing it into the fictional realm, it becomes something else. Yeah, Mike. At a certain point in the writing of the book, I realized I was tired of seeing of his. I was tired of seeing his name. I mean, it's just. It started with that. I was just damn tired of seeing his name. He's too much with us. He's too much with us in our exterior lives, you know, our collective lives. We cut on the news, we look at the newspaper. He dominates. And I think for a lot of us, he's very much a dominant figure in our interior lives. And I think It's a bad sign when any president is so overwhelming in both our external and interior lives. I mean, there's more to life than politics. And when politics dominates our lives to this extent, I think it's a sign of illness, maybe even psychopathy, certainly neurosis. I mean, there's so much more out there in the world. I mean, like nature or Shakespeare or Jackass. I mean, you know, doesn't have to all be highbrow. Yeah, there are all these great things out there, and yet we're too much obsessed with politics, I think. So there was that. At a certain point, I started thinking, well, should I change his name to something silly and clever like Rumpf or Stumpf? But, you know, at this particular time, we were getting a lot about the Epstein files and redactions and Trump's name being redacted at times, the names of the victims not being redacted, but names of perpetrators being redacted, and just, you know, the obscene gamesmanship going on with all that. And so I just thought, okay, let's. Let's just redact him, redact his name.

[Mike Pesca]

I think that could be a selling point. It's more cognitively easy on the kind of person who would. Who had cotton to the book. And in fact, I'm thinking maybe this is a business opportunity, like news organizations can sell filters where you actually will filter certain words so you don't have to keep experiencing it, just lighten the cognitive load. Now, in the book, it is roughly in the present, things are invented. A lot of different. Names of media organizations, the character of Rasputin, many of the characters. But then there are echoes of the real world. And, and also. And this is what I want to ask about, there are things that you wrote about that have changed since the writing. So, for instance, Ms. NBC is referenced in the book. It's now called Ms. Now. And CBS had no hint of being bought by Paramount. And there were just so many changes, as you noted, these changes from the time the book went to press to the time it was published. Do you just surrender and say, that's exactly the world we're living in? Or did you have a little mental checklist where you said, well, that one's. That one's different now. Oh, my God.

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah, you can't keep up with it. I mean, you know, American life, culture, politics, it's just moving at such breakneck speed now. You can only, like a fiction writer can only try to capture the gist or the attitude or the thrust of it and try to crystallize it in fiction in a way that's going to ring true to wherever this reality takes us. And, you know, if there are very. If there are deviations between what the world, how the world has unfolded and what's in the book, that's fine. It's fiction, it's a novel. I mean, I think we have enough placeholders in the book that we know to a greater or lesser extent this novel is based in reality. I mean, I don't call the White House the Purple House.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Fountain]

And it's not Jefferson D.C. it's Washington D.C. and so, you know, doing this balancing act, you know, of made up things and things taken directly from reality, I mean, there's no great method to it. It's just me operating on instinct. Well, this feels right. That feels right. I mean, you know, there is a character in the book named Stephen Miller. There's a character named Steve Bannon. And. Well, are they based. Are these fictional characters based on the real Steve Miller? Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon? Yeah. And I think it's okay in fiction. It happens all the time.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Ben Fountain]

That the real names cross over into the fictional realm.

[Mike Pesca]

I'm thinking also of the register that the book is written in. Were you going for some of the pyrotechnics and frenetic energy that you longed for in the film filming of Billy Lynn? Was. Is. Is that one of the things that you were trying to achieve on the page?

[Ben Fountain]

Absolutely. I mean, Mike, we live in very turbulent times. We live very. In very intense sensory overload, mental overload times. I mean, all these screens that are in our lives, it's like six different fire hoses aimed at us at any one point. And so for the book to have any chance of being any good, I had to get that on the page, this kind of frenetic sensory overload. But I also felt like it was important to have some quiet moments in the book. Hopefully we all get a few quiet moments. I mean, Clarence Thomas, he thinks about things. He thinks very consciously about his thinking. I mean, he's a student of history, he's a scholar, he was a professor.

[Mike Pesca]

No relation to the other Clarence Thomas, by the way.

[Ben Fountain]

No. In fact, that's one of the banes of his existence.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. So it did help him get elected to local office.

[Ben Fountain]

He's an African American man and he happens to share the same name as the Supreme Court justice for whom he has a special loathing. And so that's kind of his cross to bear throughout the book. You know, Faith, she's a thoughtful person, too. They're both in the middle of this maelstrom of, you know, American public life, presidential politics. But they're both thinking people in their own way, and they're very actively trying to make sense of what they're experiencing.

[Mike Pesca]

I don't know that the book will, and I hope it won't one day be one of these books that predicted so much. I think, though, that the book may one day, and I know you don't care about legacy. You have to write in the moment and as an artist, express what you're feeling then. But I think the book might one day be regarded as a pretty accurate artifact of the anxieties that someone like you and someone reading the book and much of the polity has. And therefore, I do think that some of the things in the book will have echoes in real life and maybe will come true. And some of the concerns of the book may not, in fact come to pass, like actually overruling the 22nd Amendment or this weeping disease, which is this, you know, mass psychosis that sweeps through the crowd of Trump admirers. And I was thinking of white noise, which I'm sure you know and regard well. And DeLillo's predictions weren't all true. Like we remember the free floating miasmic event, the free floating toxic event, but he was also very concerned with, with, with prescription medicine and also was very put off by supermarket scanners, for instance. And so when you read the book, everyone kind of remember toxic event and talks about its predictive nature. But I always found something valuable in the fact that even the kind of normal things or the things that didn't really upend life but just became priced in, pun intended, part of it were at least noted. And so I wonder if you had any strategy or inclination or when you were thinking, do I put this in? Do I not put this in? How much do I think that this is a likelihood and how much do I think this is far fetched? Or were you more guided by this is the anxiety. Maybe there's another word for it that I'm feeling now and I got to get this on the page.

[Ben Fountain]

Yeah. I mean, for me, certainly the goal is not to be a prophet in terms of specific things, specific occurrences, but to try to dig down into the reality of what's going on, the reality that's going on in our heads and our hearts, what the times are doing to us, whether the times are good for us, are the times making us happier, better people, or is it going the opposite way? And, and so what I'm trying to do is crystallize that on the page in a plausible way, in a way that people can recognize and identify with. And so the weeping sickness that sweeps across the country, these outbreaks of uncontrollable weeping people will just break down in the middle of the street or in a crowd, a whole big chunk of a crowd will just bust out weeping. I mean, is that literally going to happen? Probably not. But I mean, does it crystallize something that's in ourselves that we're feeling some kind of anxiety or profound sadness, you know, some confusion and. And so that's the point of something like the weeping sickness or the red lightning in the sky, which is this uncanny red lightning that shows up. What's going on with that? Well, I don't know, except it felt right. It feels like it captures something in the air that's going around. Or in Clarence Thomas, he's on his phone and like Tom jumps onto a different track and. But it's always when he's got his phone and then it happens to Faith. And do I think that's going to happen? You know, literally no. But I do think something profound is happening with our phones and the way they take us out of the moment and. And you know, the toxic aspect of what's going on. I mean, human brains, we weren't built for this stuff. We were built for long periods of roaming the Savannah and doing one. One thing at a time. And. And so what's going, you know, the way our brains, our hearts, our heads are being rewired, you know, our daily routines, how we act toward one another, undergoing some pretty radical changes. And I think that creates tremendous anxiety and uncertainty. So that's what I'm trying to get on the page.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, we evolved. We were the ones who recognized threats in the Savannah. We were good at it. And now we have these machines in our pockets that are just million threats per day generators. And so of course our allostatic, allostatic load will be challenged. And of course we're going to have threatened. Of course we're going to see it like a saber tooth tiger every minute into our threat matrix. It's also overwhelming. And this is why novels help. This is why the form of the novel is a bomb, I think, for our times. And luckily enough, you write in that form and you think in that form. And I want to thank you and I also have a bonus question to ask you. But first let me thank you and say the name of the book is Rasputin Swims the Potomac. It is about. We have broken news here. A guy named Donald Trump and someone who might be a professional wrestler who could, in fact, challenge him. Ben Fountain. Thank you.

[Ben Fountain]

Thank you, Mike. It's been a pleasure.

[Mike Pesca]

That's it for today's show. The Gist is produced by by Cory Wara. Jeff Craig does How to Ben Astaire is our booking coordinator. Kathleen Sykes does the Gist list. And Michelle Pesca is extraordinary in her role as coo. Thanks for listening.

[Comcast Announcer]

Comcast is delivering extraordinary experiences in live sports through the incredible broadcast and storytelling from NBC, innovative and personalized viewing, features on Xfinity and Peacock, and the country's most reliable WI Fi. Viewers can enjoy every game changing play faster and more seamlessly than ever, all on a network built to deliver unforgettable moments as close to live as possible. The ultimate experience for the American sports fan. Learn [e-mail] sports.