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Cool Zone Media.

Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.

Your weekly reminder that there's a podcast you listen to called Cool People Who Did Cool

Stuff.

I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy.

This is part two of a two-parter in which I am interviewing a historian. It's also my

friend named Hugh Ryan. Hi, how are you? Hey, I'm good. I'm so excited to be back. Yeah,

I was like, I'm going to interview you about history and just history. And then I read your memoir,

and it's got a lot of history, as talked about in part one but it's also a

memoir so a lot of the stuff I want to talk to you about is just kind of this personal stuff you

talk about in this book including one of the things that you write about really interestingly and

well is you write about being a loner in scenes that are kind of based on clicks and groups.

And like you write about how like even once you're like, I've like found my people and I'm hanging out all the time and I need to spend a good chunk of that alone.

I really like the way you write about that. I don't know if I have a question here.

Do you have something I want to say about, you should.

You know, I'll say this.

I, for a long time, thought wanting to be alone a lot of the time made me a bad person.

That there was something fundamentally about being, I think because I spent so much time involuntarily alone,

where I didn't have friends or I didn't have people I thought,

you know, I could communicate with that once I found people, that if I were to try and, like,

...