On the Road

"Kerouac's exploration of freedom, consciousness, and the search for meaning aligns with Lex Fridman's deep dives into philosophy, human experience, and the nature of reality on his podcast. It's an expected read for someone exploring the human condition through diverse lenses."

"It’s hard to have a road trip list without On the Road . I am not much of a beatnik, but you can’t help but admire the appetite for life that this book celebrates. Or, ‘celebrates’ is too strong, because they go through lots of miserable times. One of the things I like is that when he sets off on this great, transcendent road trip that is the purpose of the book, he actually has dumb ideas about the clothes he should wear. He wears the wrong shoes. He tries to hitchhike on a road where there’s not enough traffic and ends up having to go back to New York City to take a bus. It doesn’t always end well. And the drink and the drugs produce a lot of ecstatic moments, but they produce a lot of unhappiness too. “As soon as you can convince readers that you’re playing with real money, low-stakes bets feel suddenly important” Even though it’s not an unmixed celebration, still, at the heart of it, there’s this appetite for life. He wants to see America, he wants to experience the world. That is, as we talked about earlier, what the road trip is about."

"Because it explores drug use in America at a time when things were changing. The youth in America could have become either alienated or empowered, and as it turned out they became empowered. I enjoyed this book because it explores how drugs, youth and culture are interrelated. I also identified with the main character’s passion for roaming around and exploring the world. I wanted my character Deen, who is named after Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, to have those same characteristics. The drugs in On the Road aren’t the class A variety – Kerouac mostly writes about marijuana. As a writer it’s not important to take a moral stance on drug use. It’s not our responsibility to do so. However I did take a moral stance – I wanted people to read my book and think ‘I will never do heroin.’ It was a conscious decision. Jack Kerouac didn’t take that stance and that’s fine. There are also different sorts of stigmas associated with various drugs. There is the stigma of not talking about drugs at all – this is what I was dealing with. Jack Kerouac may have been dealing with the social stigma against softer drugs, a stigma that didn’t necessarily need to exist."

"It was in the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco where I discovered Kerouac's On the Road, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg's Howl and America, all of which heavily influenced The Joshua Tree."

"Both books are about young men trying to figure out their place in a world that feels alienating and sometimes hostile. They've both got great movement in them, which I think younger readers crave."

""On the Road," by Jack Kerouac. Very few readers nowadays can have heard of it as I did, in 1960, the book that made me fall in love with America aged 15."