John Nye: belief

Transcript context

…Not The Downward Sloping Demand Curve. I think I told you once that, as a boy, one of the most influential books to me was the book Memoirs of a Sword Swallower by Dan Mannix. This is a fairly obscure cult book, but it’s an autobiography of him running away to the circus, or the carnival actually, and learning to become both a sword swallower and a fire eater. What was interesting to me about that, at the age of 10, was both the interesting detail at the level of how he got involved in magic and in the carnival and the functionings of the day-to-day, as well as the exoticism for a boy in the Philippines — just thinking about the way the world had developed. It didn’t make me want to run away to the carnival or to the circus. But it made me think about things in a very, very different way. And it really spurred my interest in fantasy, in horror, in science fiction, all heavily driven by my interest in that book. And what would be a book from the history of ideas? More narrowly.…

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