Trump Finally Gets the Priceless Book He Deserves: Ben Fountain on How Rasputin Swims the Potomac

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, 06/09/2026. Couple of weeks ago, there was an interesting news story in the Washington Post about Donald Trump appointees pushing a $250 banknote with his portrait for those people watching. You can see his brooding face, on the cover of a $250 note. For those who aren't, you can imagine it. If I was writing a novel these days, things have become so bizarre. I might call it something like Ceausescu swims the Potomac, the Potomac, or even Rasputin Swims the Potomac. But I've been beaten to it by a much better satirist, Ben Fountain, one of America's leading satirists, best selling writer, both fiction and nonfiction. He has a new book out today, and it's appropriately called Rasputin Swims the Potomac. And he's joining us from his home in New Bern, North Carolina. Ben, congratulations on the new book.

00:01:37 Ben Fountain: Thank you, Andrew.

00:01:38 Andrew Keen: I apologize for my terrible pronunciation. Tell me a little bit about this Potomac. What kind of place is it?

00:01:48 Ben Fountain: Well, the Potomac River, it runs alongside the District of Columbia, and, it separates the District of Columbia from Virginia. And so, I suppose you could say in the title, it's symbolic, although I sort of hate symbolism. But in the book, this Rasputin character, actually does swim the Potomac. He makes a 17-mile swim [transcript reads “1717” — verify distance] down the Potomac River, in January, and that comes at the very end of the book.

00:02:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I can't imagine Ceausescu being able to swim the Potomac. I think he would drown after about a 100 yards. So this Rasputin character, then he must have some physical strength. Is he Putinesque rather than Trumpian?

00:02:48 Ben Fountain: Well, he's a professional wrestler, and, he grew up Patrick Walsh Strickland in Buffalo, New York. He was a star football player. He joined the army and served in the special forces in theaters of war, in Afghanistan and Iraq. After his military service, he made a pilgrimage to Russia and spent six years in a Russian monastery, became fluent in Russian. The next time he shows up, he's a professional wrestler in Japan, and his wrestling persona is Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, modeled on the famous Rasputin of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who was close to the czar and the czarina. Well, yes.

00:03:42 Andrew Keen: Supposedly brought the old regime down in Russia.

00:03:46 Ben Fountain: Right. And so now our Rasputin, has become a pro wrestling star in The United States. He's been a world champion several times, and, he's actually changed his name legally to Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, and he never breaks character. He assures everyone he is the Rasputin, the historical Rasputin, and that's where that's who he is when the story begins.

00:04:15 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Supposedly, at least according to Google, which supposedly tells the truth, he was assassinated in 1916, December 1916 in Saint Petersburg, but maybe back to life. Wrestling, Ben, one would have expected a satirist like yourself to, so to speak, jump on the sport, especially given Trump's obsession with it. What is it about wrestling that makes it such a an appropriate symbol for the symbolic nature or this surreal or whatever other word you use to describe contemporary America in the twenty twenties.

00:04:55 Ben Fountain: Well, you know, when I was stalking this book in my head, I was thinking a lot about the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy in American life. And you know, just how I mean, with every passing day, month, year, that line becomes increasingly blurred. And Donald Trump, throughout his career as a real estate developer and then in politics, he has blurred that line to masterful effect for his own advantage. And when I was thinking about starting this book in early twenty three, and I felt like Trump was very much a live political property, and I felt like, yes. He's going to run for president again, and I think he's got a really good shot. And he's going to be doing the same thing, blurring fantasy and reality to his advantage. And I just started thinking, well, what would be the next step on that continuum if we continue down this road as a country? And I thought, for some reason, I started thinking about pro wrestling, which is famously fake. It's scripted, and yet it's not fake. I mean, it does happen in, you know, real flesh and blood, and people bang around the ring. And so I started thinking in terms of suppose someone from the professional wrestling world entered the political arena, but not in the way Jesse Ventura did some years ago. He was a professional wrestler, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, and he ran for the governorship of Minnesota and won. But he ran as Jesse Ventura himself. Suppose a wrestler ran as his or her wrestling persona, and so the fake is baked into the presentation, and everyone knows it's fake. There's no pretense. And suppose the country buys it. Like, okay. And so where Rasputin came from, I don't know. But I just thought it just seemed like it would have a lot of juice to have a wrestler whose persona is Rasputin, and he runs for president as Rasputin. Yet there's a paper trail that establishes he was born an American citizen. So I just felt like, you know, there's a lot here to explore, and so that's where wrestling came in. Not that I'm a particular fan of it, but it just seemed like a useful vehicle to take us some places that might be illuminating and entertaining.

00:07:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The idea, of course, of Americans buying it is itself symbolic given that Americans are very good at buying things, real things and perhaps untruthful things. Ben, this is satire and comedy. You one of America's leading comic satirists. Everyone knows your book, for example, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. You've also done some nonfiction. You covered the twenty sixteen election. Is this just a more accessible version of what the Europeans call hyper realism, Baudrillard, echo, the idea of America as hyperreal?

00:08:33 Ben Fountain: Well, you know, the hyperreal is the real. The surreal is the real in The United States. We've reached that point. And I mean, Andrew, when I sat down to write this book, the idea of genre was the farthest thing from my mind. I just sat down and thought I just sat down and tried to write the story as genuinely and authentically as I could. The story of this sitting American president who's running for a third term and this wrestler, Rasputin, gets into the mix. Both masters of blurring that line between reality and fantasy. And so, you know, now people are asking me, well, are you doing satire? Or what exactly are you doing here? And I think, you know, at heart, I'm a realist down to my bones.

00:09:31 Andrew Keen: Mhmm.

00:09:32 Ben Fountain: I mean, whatever I do for it to satisfy me, it has to be anchored in some fundamental sense in the real world, at least my sense of the real world. And American life has become such that I mean, the surreal is the real, and the comical is the real. The absurd is the real. The hyperreal is the real. And so that's what I was trying to capture in the book without riding toward any particular genre or school of thought.

00:10:09 Andrew Keen: You've, you've also done some nonfiction. Your book, as I said, Beautiful Country, Burn Again, Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution was a book about a reported front row on the twenty sixteen election. Are you being a bit greedy, Ben, in the sense that if what you say the surreal is the real, the hyperreal is the real, then the only person or the only people who can actually write about this country are people like yourself who somehow exist in that gray area between fiction and nonfiction. What's ordinary nonfiction writers like myself? What are we supposed to do if we wanna write about America?

00:10:53 Ben Fountain: Well, I mean, I think we have to follow our heads and our hearts where they lead us. And we gather whatever talent and tools we have, and we try to write something genuine.

00:11:08 Andrew Keen: Now my question was it wasn't you know, it was a joking question. I mean But I mean, the joke but any joke, of course, has a serious quality behind it. I mean, my question really is, how can straight nonfiction operate in the America of the late twenty twenties?

00:11:31 Ben Fountain: I think it can be tremendously valuable. I mean, there were you know, in the world building of this novel, in trying to create a credible depiction of the interior workings of the White House, the workings of a campaign, the way what Air Force one looks like, etcetera. I mean, there were several sourcebooks that I write relied a great deal on. I mean, one was a book by Robert Draper called Weapons of Mass Delusion.

00:12:08 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Draper's excellent. He's been on the show.

00:12:11 Ben Fountain: Yeah. Yeah. He's a he's a very fun writer. Another was, a journalist named Michael Bender. He wrote a very fun book called Frankly, We Did Win This Election about the twenty twenty election. And so, I mean, the nuts and bolts, the on the ground reporting of what goes on a daily basis and then also, you know, the deeper immersion, you know, journalism that goes by the name of reportage or reportage. I think they're tremendously valuable. And I certainly relied on works like that in trying to, you know, write Rasputin Swims the Potomac.

00:12:53 Andrew Keen: Has America changed much? You've been around fifty plus years, Ben. Some people see all this surrealism, all this hyper realism throughout American history. Many filmmakers, poets, novelists, painters have presented this country as a perpetual, theater of hyperreality. Has much changed, in the last two hundred and fifty years? Of course, it's less than a month till the two hundred and fiftieth year anniversary of the independence of the republic.

00:13:27 Ben Fountain: Well, I think, you know, there have been tremendous changes in the last forty years. And the changes have come faster have become faster and more extreme, you know, with the rise of the Internet and iPhones. I mean, one of the great tools of information, disinformation, of reality and unreality in our world are these are the screens that comprise so much of our lives these days. And there's a great deal of manipulation, you know, and fakery that can happen through these screens. And you know, these processes are only going faster and faster. I mean, you know, when I was coming of age in America, there were three channels on TV. And for a kid, there was nothing to watch on TV until the evening. I mean, daytime TV was exercise shows, cooking shows, and soap operas. And so we were out in the world. I mean, the world was outside out there. And we were either in school or we were running around the neighborhood, like, getting our knees and heads banked up and playing following the creek and cat catching snakes. And I mean, we were out there in the world, the natural world, and so that was real. That's as real as it gets. And I think that way of coming of age in America has, for a critical mass of the population, gone away. And now reality is on the screen. And that's a very that's a very tenuous a very contingent form of reality. And yeah, I think there have been tremendous changes in the country, and I think we're experiencing new under the sun for the human species. And I mean, certainly, the generations that are coming of age now, no generation in American his no. No generation in human history has come of age in an environment like this one.

00:15:53 Andrew Keen: We're, of course, talking over screens. You're in North Carolina. I'm in San Francisco, California. We're having a, I hope, at least, a coherent civil conversation coherent conversation. Is this book, Ben, in its own way I mean, all novels, of course, have messages in them even if they're surreal or hyperreal. Is this book a form of cultural pessimism? Is it a kind of nostalgia back to your youth when you went out in the screw, the stream rather than the screen?

00:16:35 Ben Fountain: No. I don't think it's nostalgic at all. I think it's, it's trying to speak to the moment of how we find our way in such a perplexing and hyperstimulated world. I mean, you know, in our lives, we have so much coming at us at any one moment, again, through all these screens that dominate so much of our lives. And so how do we find our way? How do we determine what's real and what's fake? And not just in terms of political life, the life of the country, but also in terms of our own lives. It's like, how do we discover what's genuine that's gonna serve to guide us in our lives? And I think if we're if we're living our lives on the basis of fantasy and unreality, I think our prospects for living long and happy lives are pretty dim. And so, you know, there is a character in the book. He's a journalist. He's a retired community college professor of government and political science, and he's working for an online newspaper in Dallas, Texas, where I lived for forty years. And in a way, he is he's my guide into how one might try to live genuinely amid, you know, just the delirium of contemporary life. And this is a guy. He's he's

00:18:07 Andrew Keen: What's his name?

00:18:08 Ben Fountain: His name is Clarence Thomas Jr..

00:18:11 Andrew Keen: Wow. And is he, I mean, did you pick that name out of a hat, or did you did is there a reason why you called him Clarence Thomas Jr.?

00:18:21 Ben Fountain: Well, he's a he's a black gentleman in his mid sixties. He was born and grew up in North Texas. And I just thought it carried some weight for him to be saddled with the name of a public figure, a Supreme Court justice who he loathes. I mean, he you know, in a way, it's kind of like a cosmic bad joke. He has this name, Clarence Thomas Jr.. He's headed his whole life. And then lo and behold, in the nineteen nineties, there's this fig there's this guy, Clarence Thomas, who gets appointed to the Supreme Court. And he's one of the worst Supreme Court justices in American history. And so I hear my Clarence Thomas Jr., he's he's you know, he has to go around telling people, no. I'm not that guy. I'm not related to him. I'm not his friend. I'm not his associate. I'm not his ally. I don't want anything to do with that guy.

00:19:21 Andrew Keen: In a way then is Clarence Thomas Jr., rather like many Americans who are deeply disturbed, unhappy, disappointed with what's happened in the country, that when they go overseas or when they meet foreigners, they have to tell them they're American?

00:19:40 Ben Fountain: Well, you know, Clarence, he would probably be willing to have a full and frank discussion about the state of America, what it means to be an American, and the good and the bad of America. Because there's a hell of a lot of good about it, and there's a hell of a lot of bad hell of a lot of bad about it. And I think Clarence being Clarence, a thoughtful man, a well read man, a curious man who's always trying to learn more because he knows we never know enough, he'd be willing to have a conversation about America.

00:20:19 Andrew Keen: No. But my I sorry. I maybe I didn't explain my question clearly enough. Are we all burdened like your Clarence Thomas Jr. in the novel? Are we all burdened or Americans are burdened with being associated with a country that isn't really theirs in the same way as the real Clarence Thomas or, so to speak, the real Clarence Thomas wasn't the father of the Clarence Thomas Jr. in your book.

00:20:45 Ben Fountain: You know, in a way, I think it heightens the stakes for Clarence Thomas Jr. to have this name, to go through the world with, you know, this famous name that is not himself. He's a completely different individual with completely different politics and lives by a different code, by a different standard of ethics. And so in some way, he's never gonna be able to relax when he's out in the world. And yeah, as a person of color, maybe he's used to living that way, a person of color in America, where you can't ever really relax in your skin, except, well, rarely. And so maybe the name is doing some work along those lines. I will say this, Andrew. I mean, the name came to me, and it felt right. And I mean, that's a lot of how I negotiate my way through a book. Does it feel right? You know? Are my instincts and intuition are they telling me that this is the right move to make?

00:22:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. He didn't at least he didn't call him Donald Trump Jr.. I mean, there really is a Donald Trump Jr.. Clarence Thomas doesn't have kids, does he?

00:22:12 Ben Fountain: That's my understanding. He does not have kids.

00:22:16 Andrew Keen: The book, the novel, Ben, is about an America that's, on the one hand, deeply surreal, hyperreal, but also one where there's an enormous thirst for, quote, unquote, reality. This is the currency of the age. What is it, or why is it? The more hyperreal, the more surreal the world we live in, the more appetite there is for reality. We did a show recently about RFK Jr. and the kind of people who were attached to him for his supposed version of reality. What is it about reality that makes it so politically and culturally attractive?

00:23:08 Ben Fountain: Well, I think it's a it's a normal human instinct. I mean, we need to be grounded in reality if we're going to survive. I mean, that was certainly the state of human beings in prehistory and early human history. If we weren't grounded in reality, we would be somebody's meal, some saber toothed tiger or wooly mammoth. You know, we would be their meal. And I mean so on some level, I think it's it's a fundamental human yearning and longing that sits side by side with our weakness, our desire for fantasy, to escape reality, to be in a state where everything is wonderful and easy. And so these two things sit side by side in a kind of schizophrenic, you know, existence, which maybe that's human nature. We need the reality. We understand the need for reality and recognizing life for what it is. By the same token, it's really hard, and so we're susceptible to fantasy, to bells and whistles and shiny things.

00:24:29 Andrew Keen: Must reality, though, in the end win? I'm not gonna give away the story of the book, certainly the ending, but the story, as you've said, is character called Rasputin and an attempt by a politician, a president sitting president seeking a third term. Is it conceivable that maybe outside the narrative, you the story of Rasputin Swims the Potomac. But is it conceivable that hyperreality will win out? The surreal will win out over reality? Or does a novelist or a writer have almost an obligation at the end to enable even if it's writing is, I guess, a kind of wrestling fake competition, the end of the narrative reality has to come out on top.

00:25:24 Ben Fountain: Well, it depends on your time frame. I think, ultimately, reality is stronger than any of us. Sooner or later, nature reasserts itself. The course of things reasserts itself. I mean, under George W. Bush, they could promote, you know, all kinds of narratives about how we're winning the war in Iraq. And they can roll out this massive PR machine, and they can pedal that as hard as they can and talk about how they're creating their own reality. But in the end, reality is stronger than any of us and, the facts on the ground. But it depends on where you end the story. I think, I think, you know, it's certainly possible that e reality, that fantasy, they went in the short and medium terms. I mean, that's been proven, you know, throughout human history. Con men, charlatans, fakes, you know, they gain the upper hand all the time, and sometimes they die peacefully in their beds. But sooner or later I don't know if the arc of the universe bends towards justice, but it sure bends toward reality.

00:26:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You're that. Arc say that again. The arc of, history bends towards reality. That's right.

00:26:59 Ben Fountain: Arc of the universe, I don't know if it bends towards justice, I meant to say, but it certainly bends toward reality.

00:27:07 Andrew Keen: No. You've given me the headline. They've given away. That's a I hope you've copyrighted that, Ben. How does it affect, though, a novelist? I remember reading a review of, a DeLillo book after nine eleven, and the reviewers suggested that reality, or at least the reality of nine eleven kind of out-DeLillo'd DeLillo himself. I mean, what happens if we turn around in 2030 and we really do have a president, Rasputin? How's that gonna affect you? Can you keep ahead of all this? I mean, you're you're you're supposed to be one step ahead of all this because, otherwise, you're you're stuck with the rest of us.

00:27:48 Ben Fountain: Oh, well, maybe by 2030, I'll be thinking of the next big thing. I don't know. You know, it's it's not as if I'm trying to stay ahead or predict the future. I'm just trying to see things for what they are as clearly as I can. And then, you know, process that into some meaningful words and through you know, deliver those through the medium of fiction, a narrative that hopefully carries the power of experience as opposed to mere information. And so, I mean, you know, I try to see the world as clearly as I can and then find the language to report what I'm seeing. And I mean, from time to time, I do get it right. I mean, in Beautiful Country, Burn Again, that book was published in 2018. And on the first page, you know, I say, well, Trump is like the Frankenstein, and it's the dynamic of the Frankenstein that he will turn on his maker and try to destroy it at a certain point. Well, that's certainly what happened in 01/06/2021. And so, you know, when things come to pass like that or say I mean, Rasputin Swims the Potomac deals with the wrestler vying for the presidency to take away the presidency from a president who's a big wrestling fan. I mean, even as we're talking today, they're building an octagonal cage for the big UFC cage match extravaganza on the White House lawns, you know, for later this month. So you know, things like that make me think, well, you know, sometimes maybe I am on the right track. My analysis is right sometimes. And so I'll take those signs, you know, as they come.

00:30:02 Andrew Keen: Recently, we had a politician, I think I mentioned this before we went live, Joe Cunningham, a Democratic politician from South Carolina, just your neighboring state to the south, of course, from North Carolina. He's a onetime congressman. He won a Republican state and has a new book out, Life of the Party, suggesting that the Democrats need to reinvent themselves. In your view, and you're a political writer, Ben, and not just a fiction, but of nonfiction, do the Dems need to come up with an alternative hyperreal surreal candidate, an alternative to Trump or Rasputin. I mean, we all go with Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris, but they're really the old cloth. They're politicians for an age of realism. Is the reason why the Democrats don't seem to be able to keep up with the Republicans and why even now in our surreal Trumpian age, the Democrats have trusted less in some ways than the Republicans that they just don't understand the plot, that they can't come up with an alternative version of Trump?

00:31:24 Ben Fountain: Well, I don't I don't think that's the way for the Democratic Party six to succeed by out trumping Trump. I think people are really looking for something real and genuine in American politics. They're looking for, you know, a party. They're looking for leaders who will deliver a fair deal, a square deal, a new deal, a new fair deal, let's say. And I think the way for republic for Democrats to, you know, take meaningful power to change the country for the better is to champion the cause of working people, middle class people, and stand for what Democrats have traditionally stood for, and that is for immigrants, for poor people, working people, the middle class, the common man and woman. I mean, that's what made the Democratic Party the power it was throughout much of the twenties throughout much of twentieth century America, and it worked. I mean, we had the era of we had an era of broad prosperity that was shared broadly. And I mean, that discourse, that historical legacy has been so ignored even by the Democrats themselves that people have very little awareness of it these days. And I think as part of the job of the Democratic Party, look, we need to be better teachers of history. About, you know, the legacies in American history that are quite positive and quite egalitarian. And they worked. They brought prosperity to a broad swath of the population. So no, I would say the way back for the Democratic Party is not through the hyper real, but through the ultra real and focusing on what works and looking to history to see what has worked in the past and how the Democratic party championed that.

00:33:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I take your point on the real and genuine, which I think probably explains why Kamala Harris didn't do very well because I don't think there's very much real or genuine about her, perhaps about Newsom as well. But in your version of a successful democratic politician, can they escape being hectoring, being a little too virtuous? I mean, doesn't there need in America, for better or worse, to be an element of entertainment, even of reality television? I mean, Trump, obviously, is the extreme version of this, but can it be done by simply talking about working people and standard of living, blah?

00:34:25 Ben Fountain: Well

00:34:25 Andrew Keen: Even FDR.

00:34:26 Ben Fountain: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Look.

00:34:28 Andrew Keen: Is all about him, didn't he?

00:34:30 Ben Fountain: Yeah. You can't you can't ignore the showmanship aspect of politics. You can't you can't ignore the role of charisma and animal magnetism and just plain good looks. I mean, all of these things, you know, are part of politics and part of the presentation in politics. And yet, if you're if you're genuine, you know, you can kinda push through all that to the other side. I mean, one of the most successful politicians in the first twenty years of this century were Bernie Sanders, who came out of nowhere and created a political firestorm and probably would have been the Democratic nominee in 2016 and or 2020 had the party's rules been, you know, you know, reasonably fair. I mean, call it the anti call it the charisma of anti charisma. You know? It's possible to make that work. So I take your point. I mean, you gotta have people who can sell their program, who can deliver the message in a forceful and compelling way. But I think at bottom, there needs to be real stuff there, or we're all in trouble.

00:35:58 Andrew Keen: Why we're already a little bit in trouble. The Los Angeles Times, described, or included, your new book, Rasputin Swims the Potomac. And they it was the first book in their 12 best summer books to sink their teeth to sink your or our teeth into. Are your books designed to sink your teeth into? Is that how you like to think of them?

00:36:25 Ben Fountain: Oh, I certainly hope so. I mean, you know, I want my books to be ripping yarns. I want people to be turning pages because they wanna know what's the next thing that happens. Those are the kinds of novels I like to read. I mean, there are other things I'm looking for in novels as well, but I do want a compelling story. And so that's very much one of the things I'm after when I'm writing fiction. Write a rip in yarn. Make it compelling.

00:36:59 Andrew Keen: Who are your who are you trying to emulate, American or otherwise, as writers?

00:37:05 Ben Fountain: Yeah. You know? Well, there's, I mean, there's great American voices in the past. I think I really admire Hunter Thompson.

00:37:15 Andrew Keen: Mhmm.

00:37:15 Ben Fountain: He wrote a bit of fiction, mostly nonfiction, but he did something new with the American language. I mean, you know, he could twist it and torque it to capture the rage and in the moments of grace and glory as well. You know, the writers I think about today I mean, I think Marilynne Robinson is a great American writer, and I'm talking just as much about her nonfiction as her fiction. I think Zadie Smith is a great writer. You know, the way she captures, you know, the present day in her narratives, even when she's writing historical fiction that takes place in the nineteenth century. You know? So it depends on who I'm walking around thinking about that day, but, that's what I'm thinking about today.

00:38:12 Andrew Keen: You mentioned that you used to live in Dallas. Now you're back in New Bern, North Carolina. Do you think it helps, for you to be outside Los Angeles, New York, Brooklyn? I half the guests on the show who have new books, especially fiction, seem to be living in Brooklyn. Do you think it's helpful to be living outside New York, outside Brooklyn, outside Los Angeles, and San Francisco?

00:38:38 Ben Fountain: Yeah. I do. I think there's something to be said for living in the belly of the beast. And I lived in Dallas, Texas for forty one years, which I think in many ways is the most American city of all, better and worse. But in Dallas, you were living with a very powerful strain of mainstream Americana, where the free market and capitalism are they're just so much a part of daily life, daily consciousness that there's very little awareness that there might be different ways of living. And it also happens to be a very conservative city and a very conservative state. And so for someone like me, who's to the left of, you know, Gandhi, you know, I'm always having my assumptions challenged. And so I'm always having to, you know, think about the way I'm thinking about things and reacting about things because I'm not finding a whole lot of agreement in my present environment.

00:39:50 Andrew Keen: In Dallas and, of course, in North Carolina, you're in the Bible Belt. We've done many books on the evangelical movement and its association with MAGA, with Trump, with right wing radicalism. Is religion in Rasputin Swims the Potomac, the Potomac, is it, or have you or is surrealism or hyper realism, is that really the religion of contemporary American?

00:40:20 Ben Fountain: Well, you know, that's that's, okay. Let's say service. Let's say religion that is in danger of being co opted by hyperrealism or surrealism. I mean, Rasputin presents himself as a holy man of the Russian Orthodox Church. He spent six years in a Russian monastery. He's very much you know, he adheres to the precepts and the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, so he claims. And he's always talking about the holy fathers of the Russian Orthodox Church. And he says during his time in the monastery in Russia, he gained access to the mysteries of the ancient Holy Rus', the ancient Russian church going back twelve hundred years. And so his religiosity, his spirituality are very much front and center of his presentation. And so as a result, evangelicals start leaving the current president and start going over to Rasputin because he's speaking their language.

00:41:39 Andrew Keen: I wonder whether it's coincidental that you chose Rasputin as the sort of the symbol, the emblem of the dysfunctionality, the corruption of late czarist Russia. Given that it seems to me, at least, that America in the twenty twenties, with its inequality, its increasingly fundamentally separate worlds between the elites, especially the coastal elites and the people in the country, is rather like the Russia of the night late nineteenth, early twentieth century, the growth of revolutionary socialism, the emergence of a class that doesn't need to work, a kind of lumpenproletariat or peasantry. Are there equivalents between, Russia in the first the turn of the nineteenth century and turn of the twentieth century in America today?

00:42:36 Ben Fountain: Yeah. I think they're pretty striking. And you know, I seized on Rasputin as the vehicle, you know, for what was bouncing around in my head as I started the book. But the deeper I got into Rasputin and his life and times, and I read three or four biographies about him. I mean, you know, it's like, okay. Yeah. You hit a vein here. I mean, because the parallels are striking. I mean, not only the, you know, extreme wealth inequality and the inequality of opportunity. But I mean, Russian society at the time, it was a social structure that could not be maintained mainly because of the extreme, you know, social inequality, wealth inequality. But you know, as the consciousness as that awareness was permeating through the upper strata of Russian society, I mean, all kinds of crazy things started to happen. You saw I mean, get rich schemes were everywhere in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. I mean, people were convinced that they could make a fortune, you know, you know, overnight through various dubious schemes. You got all kinds of quack religions and spiritualists plying their trade. And you know, extreme decadence among the upper classes. So yeah, I think, you know, not just in material terms, but also in terms of the way people were their emotional responses, to what was going on around them are really strikingly parallel to The US.

00:44:31 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And in many ways, maybe you could compare your work with nineteenth century Russian writers like Gogol.

00:44:39 Ben Fountain: Yeah. I'm not I'm not I appreciate that. I'm deficient in my Russian novelist, and that's an area of my formation that I need to buff up.

00:44:52 Andrew Keen: Well, maybe you out googled. The book is out today. It's called Rasputin Swims the Potomac. Why do I keep on getting the I can't pronounce it. There's nothing wrong with me. I apologize, Ben. As I said, the LA Times talked described it as a summer book to sink your teeth into. And another paper, the New York Post included it in 31 of the best beach reads for the summer, so for people who are about to go to the beach. But I'm guessing, Ben, it's more like Jaws in terms of taking it to the beach. You need to be a bit careful, don't you?

00:45:32 Ben Fountain: Yeah. I like that take. We know it's pretty funny book, but it's also a book that will bite. Yeah. So yeah. You know?

00:45:46 Andrew Keen: Sink. So it's not gonna use sink your teeth into the book, but it sinks your teeth into you.

00:45:53 Ben Fountain: Fair enough. That's a fair way to put it.

00:45:56 Andrew Keen: Well, it comes with the author's, warning that it might be dangerous, but just like Jaws, it'll be something that ultimately you will appreciate. It's an important new book. It's out today, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, by, my guest, American writer, leading satirist, Ben Fountain. Ben, real honor to talk to you, and, congratulations on the book. I'm sure it's gonna be as big a seller, as anyone. Who's gonna be, Rasputin in the movie?

00:46:28 Ben Fountain: Oh, I think Sacha Baron Cohen would make a great Rasputin.

00:46:33 Andrew Keen: Excellent. Well, I will be the first in line to watch that movie, and I love the book. Thank you so much.

00:46:38 Ben Fountain: Thank you, Andrew. I appreciate it.