On this week's episode of Thick & Thin, we're joined by author Chuck Colonna to talk about his new book, The Dark Side Of, and why he thinks Ambien is the most powerful drug in the world. We also talk about why he doesn't take Ambien anymore and what it's really like to be a writer on Ambien. We also discuss why he stopped taking Ambien years ago and why it's a good thing he doesn t take it anymore. And we talk about how Ambien might be responsible for a lot of things, including the recent death of Anthony Bourdain and the possible link between Ambien and the Roseanne Barr scandal. And, of course, we get into the weirdo theory that Ambien may be to blame for Roseanne's recent death. If you're not a fan of Ambien, you'll have to give this episode a listen to find out if this theory is true or not. We'll talk about it in the next episode, so don't miss it! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Music by Skating on the Waterfront, courtesy of Skating On The Waterfront.co.nz. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, and tell us what you think of the episode and what you'd like to hear in the comments section below. Thank you so much for all the support we've been getting from this podcast. Peace, Love, Blessings, Cheers, Kristy. Cheers. -Alyssa, Chuck, Amy, Sarah, and Cheers! -Maggi, AJ, Jai, Rachael, Natalie, and Sarah, Caitlyn, Marnie, and Jacklyn, -PJ, Sarah, Margo, and Jonny, -Kristy, Sarah -Josie, J.A. & Sarah, John, and Jadyn, -- Thank you, Sarah & Sarah Thankyou, Sarah and Jonathon, Johnathan, and Johnathan -Jonah, JACOB, J-YANNA, JB, Jadson, JUICY, Jaxon, and Gorms, etc. -JOSH, JOSIE, JOSH, and KEVIN, JAMES, JORDAN, JAMIE, AND JOSH & KELLY, JR.
00:01:52.000Maybe it's something I attributed to you for many, many years.
00:01:56.000But it's just an interesting story that someone said that they were forcing themselves to be disciplined writing, and so they wouldn't write unless they had the heat on.
00:02:03.000And so they lived in this place over the winter.
00:03:08.000We actually did a pretty in-depth discussion about that after the Roseanne Barr thing came out.
00:03:15.000My own mom has taken it and she stopped taking it, but one of the reasons why she stopped taking it is because she woke up in the middle of the night and she had a white bathroom mat and she painted it with lipstick and makeup.
00:03:27.000She had no recollection of it whatsoever, but she painted it like a two-year-old would.
00:03:31.000They got a hold of their mom's lipstick, and she just woke up and going, what the fuck am I doing?
00:04:39.000I have no idea how to be with people, so I need to introduce a topic and see if it resonates, and then get everybody's take on these common experiences, and then pick the very best one.
00:04:51.000So in a way, basically what I'm doing is...
00:04:53.000Kind of an ongoing field study that becomes whatever my next book is.
00:04:58.000When you wrote Fight Club, you tapped into something that was really fascinating for me as someone who's been involved in martial arts my whole life.
00:05:08.000I've understood the cathartic release of violence, but I never saw it articulated the way you did.
00:05:16.000And you made it enticing for a thinking person.
00:05:23.000You sort of opened up these doors of understanding for someone who maybe had frustration or had some pent-up rage or had some angst that just was not going to get out any other way.
00:05:41.000And then reading what you wrote, it made you go, yeah, okay, oh, all right.
00:05:47.000Now, it's like you added an element to it that really didn't exist before in pop culture.
00:05:52.000It was really fascinating for me as someone who's watching that whole thing unfurl and watching people get, like, really resonating with people, watching people really getting excited about your work.
00:06:07.000It's like, he hit some nerve that nobody really hit before.
00:06:12.000And it's not a nerve that gets hit very much.
00:06:15.000You know, and there's so many different aspects to it.
00:06:18.000And one is just my classic thing is that there are so few social model novels or stories for men.
00:06:27.000For women, there are, you know, every season, there's a new Joy Luck Club, a new How to Make an American Quilt, a new Traveling Sisterhood of the Yagaha Pants, whatever.
00:06:38.000Just all these different models in which Women can come together and talk about their lives.
00:06:43.000And if you're a man, you've got either Fight Club or you have the Dead Poets Society.
00:08:25.000And that is getting harder and harder and harder to find.
00:08:29.000So Fight Club was also depicting a new form of the secondary father with all these kids that were showing up on the doorstep of this ramshackle old house.
00:08:39.000So there were just so many aspects of men's lives that were not being addressed when Fight Club came out.
00:08:47.000And it sort of reinvented so many of those things that had fallen by the wayside.
00:08:53.000A huge part of martial arts is your relationship with the master, with the coach.
00:08:57.000Without finding someone who can guide you through the the most dangerous waters of Competition that it's it's absolutely imperative bad relationships with coaches are absolutely disastrous and It's it's imperative that someone find the right coach find someone who they really can trust and appreciate and you do develop it's a Such a common theme they talk about this person being like a son or this person being like a father or I
00:09:29.000I forgot about that part of Joseph Campbell.
00:09:32.000That is a huge, huge issue with young men.
00:09:36.000Young men getting into martial arts is something that I've talked about so many times.
00:09:40.000I don't discuss it as the need for rough play I say there's human reward systems that are just not being They're not being met and that systems that have been in place for thousands and thousands of years that are designed to reward us for fighting off the enemy running away from danger developing physical skills and having a body that's capable of not just Physical activity,
00:10:06.000Well, and beyond just that, you know, it's also the whole idea of apprenticeship.
00:10:12.000You know, whether you're apprenticing yourself to a fighting coach or to a metallurgist or to a welder or to a bricklayer or to a mason, you are apprenticing yourself to somebody that you're going to do all this grunt work for.
00:10:26.000But in exchange, you're going to learn a kind of really master skill at something.
00:10:51.000And that relationship that you have with that secondary father too, it's almost in some ways more intense.
00:10:58.000The pride of someone teaching you something and then you eventually developing those skills and then this person who is teaching you this being proud of your work is extremely satisfactory.
00:11:10.000Well, do you remember Officer and a Gentleman?
00:11:13.000You know, Richard Gere really has this drunken, not their dad.
00:11:18.000And then he has this drill sergeant who's constantly trying to wash him out.
00:11:22.000And then finally he reaches the existential crisis of saying, you can't throw me out of the service because I have nothing else.
00:11:30.000I have nowhere else to go in the world.
00:11:32.000My life will amount to nothing unless I can master this thing.
00:11:36.000And he's a relatively young man, but it is that existentialistic moment where you realize that you have to sacrifice your youth for something.
00:11:47.000It's a very Martin Heidegger moment where you realize you have to become a being living towards death.
00:11:54.000You're not going to live forever, and you've got to give your life to something.
00:11:58.000Now, when you approach a novel like that, when you have a story like that that's brewing in your head, how do you decide what to pull the trigger on?
00:12:08.000Do you just have a concept in your head and it just seems more and more attractive and you just say, okay, this is it?
00:12:16.000You know, one really good test is if you can take it to a party and you can tell a very small part of it, as much of it as you know at that point, and people will vie for a chance to relate some aspect of their life that is very much like that,
00:12:34.000but an even more extreme example of that.
00:12:37.000So in a way, they're fleshing out your theme with parts of their own lives.
00:12:42.000And so you find yourself drawing from the experience of Dozens or hundreds or thousands of people and at the same time you're beta testing it.
00:12:51.000You're kind of taking it on the road and you're seeing that it's an idea that resonates with a huge number of people that everyone can relate to it.
00:13:01.000So do you purposely like go to parties with like a couple like bullets in the chamber?
00:13:08.000Sometimes, or sometimes I just go to the party and I listen to hear somebody tell that personal anecdote that does evoke all those other anecdotes.
00:13:18.000Because a great anecdote doesn't leave people speechless.
00:13:21.000It leaves them competing to tell a better version of the same thing.
00:13:27.000And that's when a real writer just starts realizing, okay, there's a pattern.
00:13:31.000And that can be turned into something really big.
00:13:48.000Now, another thing I really wanted to talk to you about is something that you brought up when you sent the notes to Matt was censorship.
00:13:56.000And self-censorship, which is going on apparently in writer groups and groups of people that are deciding that certain words should be eliminated from vocabulary and from vernacular and that you shouldn't discuss certain things anymore.
00:14:27.000This is kind of the career-ending moment.
00:14:31.000For several years, I was in a writer's workshop.
00:14:35.000And the core group of us had been meeting since 1990. So this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old.
00:14:43.000And gradually, people were asking each other not to use certain words.
00:14:51.000First, you know, nobody really used the N-word, but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop.
00:14:57.000And then in a story, I used the word faggot, and a very good friend of mine said, you're not bringing that word into workshop.
00:15:04.000You're not writing anything with the F-word.
00:15:08.000And it just became more and more tightly structured that way.
00:15:14.000And so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other.
00:15:23.000And one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strayed, who had written a book called Wild, which was a hugely successful book.
00:15:31.000It was chosen as an Oprah book, and it will be on bookstore shelves for the rest of history.
00:15:56.000Masturbate her grandfather until he achieved orgasm and then later she would find these featherless birds that had fallen out of a nest and she picked one up and she knew it would die.
00:16:14.000So she crushed it between her bare hands.
00:16:18.000And she wrote how as that bird died, crushed between her hands, its death rose, its spasms of death felt exactly like her grandfather's penis ejaculating in her little hand.
00:17:47.000And so it's that kind of censorship where...
00:17:51.000You're trying to reach a reader standing in line at Starbucks, and this has got to go in that point of purchase stand, and it's got to be a face-out.
00:18:01.000And I understand for a long time, if you wanted a face-out at Barnes& Noble, especially on the Discover New Writers face-out stack, You could not have the word fuck on the first page.
00:18:15.000Because they did not want people picking up that book and opening it and seeing the F word.
00:18:20.000That that just did not fit their corporate culture.
00:18:23.000And so, you know, so much of this censorship is because people really want to reach the largest audience without offending people.
00:18:58.000There's no way you would be able to find...
00:19:01.000To put that in a book, her story about a grandfather and the bird, maybe you could put the bird in The grandfather part, there's just no way.
00:19:33.000But it's like so many stories that people tell me.
00:19:36.000I'm kind of seen as a safe person, you know, kind of a degraded monster maybe.
00:19:41.000But as a degraded monster with no self-esteem whatsoever, they feel safe telling me these things.
00:19:48.000Because in a way, they probably feel a little morally superior to me.
00:19:53.000Why do you think people would consider you a degraded monster?
00:19:56.000Because I can read a story like Guts that is so completely humiliating.
00:20:04.000Because as I read it, it's in the first person.
00:20:06.000So people more or less assume that it's my story, even though it's stories garnered from many different people.
00:20:14.000But the fact that I'm presenting it...
00:20:16.000It means that I'm the person that is losing face.
00:20:20.000And afterwards, people feel like they can risk losing face by telling me their story that's very much like the gut story.
00:20:27.000So when someone is writing something that's deeply disturbing like that, when you hit those parts of your mind and you come to this pathway Do you consider, do you say, well, no one's ever going to allow this to be in a book?
00:20:41.000Do you consider those thoughts, or do you just go through with it first and then review it, or do you not do that at all?
00:20:51.000You know, my formative years were the punk years, the 70s and the 80s, and we always used to have a saying, people would say, don't hit the brake until you hear a glass break, or don't stop until you hear a glass break.
00:21:05.000And so I always think the point of writing is to coach yourself to that point that you would never have gone voluntarily, and also to coach your reader to the point where the reader would never have gone voluntarily.
00:21:20.000In a story like Guts, you know, it's very funny on the front end.
00:21:24.000And if you told people on the front end where it was going to go, they'd never read that story.
00:21:29.000But it's very funny and charming and well-paced on the front.
00:21:33.000And then once people realize where it's going to go, they're already trapped.
00:21:43.000The way you said they're already trapped, you seem to take some satisfaction in that.
00:21:48.000But in writing it, I'm also sort of springing the trap on myself.
00:21:53.000Starting down a path that I have no idea is going to be so humiliating or so emotionally upsetting or so dark.
00:22:02.000Because if I did, I would never go down that path.
00:22:09.000When you write a story like that, how much of it do you plan out in advance?
00:22:14.000I might plan out up to the end of the second act.
00:22:17.000You know, at the moment of greatest crisis, this will happen.
00:22:23.000You know, in Fight Club, the moment of greatest crisis is going to be when everyone in the support groups figures out that this guy is lying to them.
00:22:31.000And they're all given the choice of either accepting him for his transgressions or rejecting him.
00:22:41.000There's going to be that moment when people realize that he has faked choking and that he's made them into a fake hero.
00:22:50.000And they're going to either kill him or accept him.
00:22:55.000And so I typically know that the second act is going to end with the transgression being revealed.
00:23:02.000But beyond that, I don't want to know.
00:23:04.000Because I want the story to complete itself with its own momentum at that point.
00:23:08.000And if it doesn't surprise me beyond the second act, then it's not going to surprise the reader.
00:23:14.000Do you write, do you have like a storyboard laid out and do you use like index cards or anything to figure out where things are going or do you just kind of, you know?
00:23:23.000No, you know, that's part of the glory is that whenever I get stuck, I go to the gym and I say, okay, I'm working on this scene where this happens and this happens and this happens.
00:23:35.000And my friends will say, there'll always be somebody there with a really fresh take and life experience who can say, well, have you thought about this happening?
00:23:44.000And it will take the story in a direction that is so unexpected because it's not from my experience.
00:24:07.000Yeah, the gym is really great because you're around people and you have these recoveries between sets so you have a little time to talk and at the same time you have, during the exercise itself, you have time to think.
00:24:20.000And so it paces the talking versus the thinking.
00:24:25.000And it's also kind of highly oxygenated and it's physically active.
00:24:30.000And your mind is kind of, your mind is not engaged with something else.
00:24:34.000Your mind is kind of disengaged like it is while you're taking a shower.
00:25:13.000So I love the fact that you're so open with these ideas, too, that you bring them to people and get their take on it and then incorporate their take.
00:25:26.000Is it just this willingness to be open with your ideas and express them?
00:25:32.000Yeah, really, you know, workshop was the crucial thing, having that social expectation that you were going to bring work every week.
00:25:39.000And it was also kind of a party, a reward for having brought the work.
00:25:43.000And it was also a way of testing the work so that you knew whether it was working, you know, you weren't constantly sort of questioning yourself.
00:25:54.000Workshop just provides so many really important ways of keeping you writing.
00:26:03.000It seems like you've done this most of your career.
00:26:06.000I have, and this is not the first workshop I've been bumped out of.
00:26:10.000The first workshop I was in was a lot of very nice ladies, and I was probably 28. And I had written a scene in which a man, a young man, He has done up an inflatable sex doll so it looks exactly like the woman he's obsessed with.
00:26:27.000And during the seduction of this sex doll, he accidentally snags the back of it with the zipper of its dress.
00:26:36.000And he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air.
00:26:41.000So he's got to copulate faster and faster to try to achieve orgasm before this thing completely goes flat.
00:26:49.000And at the end of the scene, he's standing there with this completely deflated sex doll hanging off of his erection like this surrender flag.
00:27:00.000And of course, his mother walks into the room.
00:27:03.000And after I wrote that scene, the leader of the workshop I was in, my first workshop, she took me aside afterwards and she said, the other writers in the workshop no longer feel safe around you.
00:27:54.000But a few other flat tires along the way?
00:27:58.000Periodically, we've kind of had to pretend that we were disbanding in order to get rid of a member who was just more trouble than they were worth.
00:28:07.000How many people are in these workshops?
00:28:08.000Boy, lately it's been, last it was about eight, but we've been up to like 16, 17, and now when I teach I typically have about 25 people.
00:28:18.000What does it feel, I mean, to be in a workshop for that long and then have such a disagreement and to disband like that or to have you forced out, what does that feel like?
00:29:20.000The story she wrote about her grandfather and the bird is a perfect example of that.
00:29:25.000I mean, although very few people experience that in their life, we all can appreciate that these are possible scenarios.
00:29:31.000And I think it really comes down to what purpose reading and writing serves in people's lives.
00:29:38.000And most people, they want reading to be a comforting activity.
00:29:43.000They want to be able to read a book and fall asleep knowing the detective will apprehend the killer by the end of the book, that things will end very well.
00:29:51.000In a way, they want to be bored or lulled by the book.
00:29:54.000Not so many people really want to be kind of confronted by books.
00:30:01.000I mean, it's kind of like pretty much all forms of art, whether it's music or movies.
00:30:07.000I mean, there's superhero movies, and then there's movies like No Country for Old Men, where the bad guy gets away at the end, and you leave the movie theater, and you're like, what the fuck?
00:30:16.000But those are all satisfying in different ways to different people.
00:30:22.000And isn't that sort of the point of creative expression?
00:30:34.000If you put limitations on that, you're going to eliminate some disturbing aspects that might bother some people, but you're also going to eliminate some magical moments that literally might change the way you view people.
00:30:50.000You know, and part of it has to do with the nature of, you know, movies.
00:30:54.000Movies are going to always kind of attract a more dynamic audience.
00:30:59.000Movies carry their own authority through motion.
00:31:02.000And books are going to be a slower medium that's harder to consume.
00:31:06.000And so maybe books are always going to, at this point, be seen as kind of a sedative, as a kind of thing that lulls you and comforts you and puts you to sleep.
00:32:19.000You know, I want to be in the Mermaid Tavern talking about my ideas with my compatriots and getting their take on them and finding out how it resonates with everything else in people's lives.
00:34:43.000I grew up in the age of typewriters when even typewriters were kind of precious because you would have to buy ribbons for them.
00:34:51.000And those ribbons were really expensive.
00:34:53.000And so something had to be written out completely longhand.
00:34:59.000It had to be perfect longhand before you could risk wasting a typewriter ribbon to type it out.
00:35:08.000Wow, so you just developed it this way and just stuck with it, even in the age of computers.
00:35:14.000Well, and also because writing is something I do in the moment.
00:35:20.000Somebody says something insightful, something really bright, something phrased just wrong so that it's suddenly really fresh, and I want to be able to write it down in that moment.
00:35:31.000So that when I do have to go to the boring part with a keyboard, I have got so much wonderful fresh stuff that it makes the keyboarding part fun because it allows me to sort of archive and to curate, preserve these fantastically bright things that were said by so many different people.
00:38:34.000Kind of charming them into a story that eventually will make them faint or eventually will make them wretch but will upset them very deeply.
00:38:44.000And I feel a real reluctance about that.
00:38:50.000Doesn't that bridge have to be crossed, though?
00:38:53.000If you're really going to explore every single possibility in a creative narrative, if you're really going to write a book and just let your mind go wild, that has to be on the table, doesn't it?
00:39:06.000It does, but I don't think it hurts to be aware so that you don't lapse into being a bully for the sake of being a bully.
00:39:16.000You know, I think anybody who's a really hard trainer kind of, you know, comes up against that.
00:39:23.000Am I a really good trainer or is part of me a sadist?
00:39:36.000But being able to explore those possibilities and being able to just delve into the deep recesses of your mind in the interest of creativity, that seems to be if anybody's going to appreciate that,
00:40:29.000And she said, I really love that you read that story about how you got your anus prolapsed while masturbating in a swimming pool.
00:40:43.000Which is not my story, but I'm the one that read it.
00:40:46.000So I'm the one that they're picturing in this horrendous situation.
00:40:52.000And she says, since you can tell that story, I'm going to tell you a story.
00:40:56.000And she said how when she was seven years old, she was in second grade, and she was in an organization called the Brownies, which is a precursor to the Girl Scouts.
00:41:07.000You wear a brown dress, a little brown hat, you get these little merit badges.
00:41:12.000And she said, one day I had a stomach ache and my mom kept me home from school.
00:43:08.000And she says, this woman, who's my age now, she says, I have not had an orgasm since I was seven years old.
00:43:18.000And then she goes, but if you can tell that swimming pool story about how you got hurt jacking off underwater, she says, I can tell my heating pad story.
00:43:31.000And I can tell that story until I can make it funny.
00:43:34.000And then maybe someday I can go back to my mom and I can say, do you remember that heating pad we used to have?
00:44:08.000Bidet toilet things that have a little button on the wall you press it it shoots hot water up your ass and my kids come over and They love these toilets.
00:44:20.000I have two daughters and my youngest when she was seven she would sit on the toilet and she was laughing and giggling and We didn't tell her there's anything wrong with it So, she was telling us how much she loves it.
00:44:37.000How much she loves the hot water when it shoots onto her butt.
00:45:15.000But it was this moment where I was like, wow.
00:45:19.000If I was a religious person or a suppressive person or some person with some sexual issues, this could be a real problem for this little girl.
00:45:29.000Instead, I was like, okay, let's get out of the bathroom now.
00:46:54.000And see, that's my process, is you tell these stories, and you kind of gather the stories that people tell related to these stories, and you choose the ones that escalate the fastest, that escalate the best.
00:47:05.000And that gives you a gradual sort of, you've established the precedent, and then something worse, escalating worse, escalating worse, escalating to the most atrocious or extreme version.
00:47:18.000And that's what brings the story to crisis.
00:47:23.000I have a hard time believing that someone would be angry at that woman for her story.
00:47:52.000Strange that violence, for some reason, is more acceptable than sexual abuse in a lot of ways.
00:47:59.000Sexual abuse seems to be transformative.
00:48:01.000Like, there's something about sexual abuse that it ruins.
00:48:06.000You introduce an experience, a memory into a person's life that ruins them.
00:48:17.000This is a rough segue, but I find with so many beginning writers is that they have absolutely no capacity to be with tension or suspense.
00:48:28.000So they might start to create suspense, but then they'll resolve it instantly.
00:48:33.000And so the story never really gets off the ground because something has happened to them, whether it's violent or whether it's sexual abuse, that makes them cling to a kind of calm serenity.
00:48:46.000And that's all they want and that's all they ever want.
00:48:49.000And then writing in a way seems to be a way of coaching them back to a greater and greater tolerance with the unresolved, with the tense, with suspense.
00:48:59.000Some of the best moments in books that I've read are moments where you're reading and you're like, oh, fuck.
00:49:23.000When you're in this workshop and they're discussing with you this possibility of censorship, of you self-censoring or of them not accepting your ideas, how do you debate that with them?
00:49:48.000That was another aspect of the workshop, is that we had all known each other for so many years that we didn't have the freedom to kind of teach each other anything new.
00:50:38.000Those are real people, but if you wrote about one of those people, using real scenes that were depicted in the news, you know, real eyewitness testimony, real interviews with these monsters, some people would object to that.
00:50:57.000But if you're going to write about a monster, you have to write them in a monstrous way.
00:51:19.000They might not enjoy what you're doing.
00:51:23.000It might not be something that they want to take in recreationally, that they want to read your work in that way.
00:51:31.000But the fact that they don't appreciate what you're doing, or the fact that they don't want you to do what you're doing, or they don't want you to bring it to the workshop, is this a new thing?
00:54:27.000And so often people in a workshop, they might not personally feel offended by the word, but they're thinking how that word might hurt people they know.
00:54:42.000If someone's telling a joke, if someone's on stage talking about someone who's fat, and there's a fat person in the front row, that joke will bomb.
00:54:51.000Yeah, but that's because people are good people overall.
00:54:54.000You know, they recognize that they don't want to cause pain.
00:54:58.000Another really odd comic, David Sedaris' story, is that he always told me, when you're on the road, don't read from your current book.
00:55:07.000Always read from the next book because it's a way of road testing the stories and finding out which ones work and should go into the next book.
00:55:15.000And in doing so, he was telling this story about being in this forensic laboratory as an autopsy was taking place.
00:55:24.000And this autopsy table was adjacent to this huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite from this lunchroom.
00:55:34.000And in the lunchroom were the rest of the forensic staff, and they were all eating their lunches.
00:55:39.000They all had tuna sandwiches and cans of Coke and barbecued potato chips.
00:55:45.000And they were watching through the window as this absolutely perfect 12-year-old boy was being autopsied.
00:55:54.000And just hours before this kid, like two hours before this kid had been riding his bicycle, he'd fallen over, he'd hit his head on the curb, and now two hours later, he was dead.
00:56:06.000And dead without almost a scratch on him.
00:56:09.000Just this perfect, naked, dead 12-year-old boy on the autopsy table.
00:56:16.000And as the technicians eating their lunch, watching it through a window, they watch as the pathologist incises around the top of the kid's face, at the top of the forehead,
00:56:31.000the hairline, and then peels the face down like peeling an orange, peels the entire face off of the skull of this little boy and leaves the face around the neck like a mask, like a rubber mask.
00:56:46.000And this exposes this liver-colored, dark red musculature of the child's underlying face.
00:56:53.000And this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich, he points this out and he says, see that?
00:57:28.000And it was amazing how that hatred in that auditorium swung from hating David, who they did not want to hate, To hating this jackass over here who was actually laughing.
00:57:41.000And so I threw myself on the sword for David and that story never went in any book.
00:58:39.000Now when those people come to see you, how many of those people are fans of literature and how many of those people are specifically fans of your work?
00:59:14.000I was commenting about how in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote had made this observation that Americans don't like true beauty, true classical natural beauty.
00:59:26.000They want to see a very plain person who has been so groomed, so exercised, so made up, so stylized that she can kind of pass as this amazing strange beauty.
01:01:11.000You know, with so many colleges becoming these kind of strident, safe places that demand their own aesthetic, what is it like doing comedy?
01:02:21.000It's kids who have been under the control of their parents for most of their life and haven't had their own sovereignty and identity and now they're free.
01:03:00.000I said, one of the greatest bits of all time is Sam Kinison's bit about starving children in Africa, about watching those commercials where starving kids are in Africa and, you know, couldn't you please help?
01:03:10.000And he goes in, you know, and Kinison's like, you just want to grab the guy?
01:03:19.000He's going to take these people and go, hey, we just drove here 5,000 miles with your food and it occurred to us, you wouldn't be world hungry if you people would live where the fucking food is!
01:04:08.000They want it to be a multi-purpose tool.
01:04:14.000They want it to be funny as well as morally uplifting and great for people who are discriminated against and amazing for folks who are marginalized and uplifting for those who are disenfranchised.
01:04:43.000Comedy is funny, so it's either funny or it's not funny, and some things are funny that are fucked up.
01:04:51.000You know, Kinison had a bit about homosexual necrophiliacs who are paying money to spend a few hours undisturbed with the freshest male corpses, and so he'd lie down on his stomach, and he goes, you imagine these people, they're on the slabs, like, well...
01:05:05.000Went through life and had a good time and everything and now I guess I'm gonna go and be with Jesus and, hey, what the hell is this?
01:05:37.000You know, and I'm not sure about if this is punching down, but do you remember the routine that kind of put Whoopi Goldberg on the map a million years ago about being a black surfer chick?
01:06:04.000And she's doing this Val speak about being the only black surfer chick on the beach and she loves surfing and she loves this one white surfer guy and she finally hooks up with him and then she realizes she's pregnant and it's all very funny.
01:06:17.000The whole front end, you're just roaring with laughter.
01:06:20.000And then she's pregnant and she doesn't know what to do so she gets a rusty wire coat hanger and she goes into a public bathroom on the beach and she gives herself a coat hanger abortion and it spills out there on the concrete floor.
01:07:49.000But these are moments that if you're going to censor people, if you're going to self-censor, if you're going to decide that people can't use certain words...
01:07:59.000If you're going to decide that certain scenarios are just too upsetting for the reader, these moments are going to be harder and harder to achieve.
01:08:07.000And these are the moments that we're going to talk about.
01:08:09.000If we were in here, if we were in a bar somewhere, and we were having a few drinks talking about great stories or great moments, these are the moments we would bring up.
01:08:21.000Saying that Jessica Parker joke in front of those thousand people and they're booing and hissing and you're literally on fire under your skin like...
01:08:29.000And you're beating yourself up viciously.
01:10:33.000What I thought was interesting was your take on it.
01:10:35.000I mean, the whole thing's horrific and everyone's worst nightmare, you know, who trust people with their money.
01:10:42.000But what was interesting is you decided that there's some merit to this, there's some benefit to this, that this is going to make you hungry again, that this is, like, you have to work now.
01:10:54.000And also that I have been really poor in my life.
01:10:59.000And it was never my goal to be really rich.
01:12:08.000You know, he was just this strange guy that was just working for things.
01:12:13.000Yeah, the same things that everybody else is working for and just a different combination of things.
01:12:19.000Yeah, but it's a game, you know, trying to accumulate points in the game, you know, and because these things are difficult to achieve, then they become attractive and then they become the main focus because it's hard to get a Bentley.
01:12:30.000You got to save up a lot of money to get a Bentley.
01:12:50.000Well, you know, but it's the only trap that we kind of have.
01:12:53.000We're not really trained to, again, go to that place of wanting to, you know, learn something, to wanting to create something.
01:13:04.000To apprentice yourself to somebody who creates the thing that you dream of creating.
01:13:10.000It's much easier to kind of fall into the ready-made trap of these things are for sale and the people who sell them will treat you really nice.
01:13:19.000You go into their showroom and they will treat you so nice and you are always welcome there.
01:13:32.000It's much, much harder to apprentice yourself and to sit down and do those 10,000 million words or to, you know, paint those pictures or whatever, build those brick walls and really develop the pride of a skill.
01:13:47.000I mean, the pride of a skill and the knowledge that your discipline and your focus allows you to achieve these works, these things when they're done.
01:14:00.000I mean, what is that feeling of satisfaction like when you touch the back cover of a book for the first time and it's over?
01:14:06.000That's nothing compared to when you hear it echoed in the culture, and you hear people pick up the word snowflake, and you hear all these people say the first rule of blank is...
01:14:19.000When you realize that you've kind of dictated the semantics of the culture for a period, that feels like power.
01:14:51.000You know, a year ago I was supposed to start receiving some significant payments from this year's book and they never came through and they still never came through and every time I requested them the publisher said that they had been paid but the accountant said that there were technical difficulties with wiring me the money or he had personal problems in his life caring for his mother and so there was always some reason why the money never came through And finally,
01:15:19.000I told my agent I didn't want to do any more deals until we had this money thing resolved.
01:15:25.000And at that point, the accountant made a videotaped confession and has since pled guilty.
01:15:33.000And I believe his sentencing is going to be in November.
01:15:36.000But according to the district attorney, they can't seem to find any of the money.
01:17:50.000He's so perfectly designed for being a writer.
01:17:57.000One of the more fascinating things about this podcast is getting to pick the brain of someone like him.
01:18:02.000When would you ever have two plus hours to sit down with a guy like that and just find out how he thinks about shit?
01:18:16.000He's never going to let you in like that.
01:18:19.000This is one of the weirder things about podcasts, is that for three hours or whatever the time is, the phones go away, you're wearing headsets, which I try to encourage people to wear now, because for a while it's like, yeah, do whatever you want, but there's something about the headset that locks you in.
01:18:35.000Your voice is exactly the same level of sound as my voice is, because it's all coming through the headsets, so it's all combined, so you're much more aware of talking over each other and shit like that, but you're also much more aware...
01:18:50.000The sound of your voices, by isolating, by putting the headset on and eliminating the outside noise, you would never be able to have a conversation with a guy like that.
01:19:01.000That's gotten this deep into the game.
01:21:54.000One of the things that happens with comedians is the early specials tend to be really good, and then the later specials tend to be really bad.
01:22:01.000And it's because these people are now super wealthy and coddled and there's no danger in their life and there's no real risk or challenges and there's no growing or learning.
01:22:12.000Everything is just like performing to people that adore you.
01:22:16.000Another aspect, and I talk about this more and more with writers I know, is that when you're starting out, you've got a lot of downtime, a lot of daydreaming time, a lot of slack, unstructured time.
01:22:29.000But the more successful you become, the more your time is really scheduled.
01:22:34.000And you just don't have those, I'm really bored times when you tend to come up with fantastic ideas.
01:22:41.000And so in a way, being somewhat poor again gives me those really slack times when the ideas occur.
01:23:14.000This is weird, name-droppy Brad Pitt advice.
01:23:18.000Brad Pitt told me, Brad Pitt said that failure is actually one of the best things that can happen.
01:23:28.000Because only failure gives you that kind of alone isolation downtime when you can really reinvent yourself in a significant way and create something remarkable again.
01:23:41.000That ongoing success becomes kind of a mediocrity.
01:23:47.000You really need to fail to fall out of the limelight long enough to produce something really strong again.
01:23:55.000One of the best things that can happen to a comedian is bombing.
01:23:59.000When you bomb, that feeling is so bad.
01:24:03.000I always describe it as like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother.
01:24:07.000But the difference is that there's probably someone out there who would enjoy sucking a thousand dicks in front of their mother, but nobody enjoys bombing.
01:24:45.000But those eating shit ones, those are the ones that get you to the notebook again.
01:24:49.000Those are the ones that reinvigorate you, have you spending hours and hours in your hotel room going over sheets of paper and checking out ideas, making sure these concepts connect together in some sort of a meaningful way and figuring out how to tighten things and cut out the fat.
01:25:03.000When you're in this situation right now and you're frantically writing now and sort of forced into this element of creativity, you're forced to be hungry again.
01:25:17.000I mean, I wouldn't wish it on you, but in a way, do you feel like it's kind of a gift?
01:25:22.000In a way, you have to accept, ultimately, that everything is a gift.
01:25:27.000Because it's always about what they call cognitive reframing.
01:25:34.000Whatever happens, you reframe it in such a way that you recognize the value of it.
01:25:40.000And so, yeah, regardless of what happens, You know, before my father got murdered, he had been asking me for an introduction to Winona Ryder in 1998. And I kept on thinking, I am not going to introduce my father to Winona Ryder because I know he's going to hit on her.
01:26:00.000And I was just going to be mortified to have my dad hitting on Winona Ryder.
01:26:04.000And he'd always talk about how pretty she was and any chance I can meet her.
01:26:09.000And to tell the truth, when I got the word that my father had been murdered by a white supremacist in the mountains of Idaho, one of my first thoughts was, I'm off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing.
01:26:58.000And that would be my main concern about any sort of a workshop or support group or any sort of group of like-minded peers that wouldn't understand that.
01:27:09.000That would want you to limit your language.
01:29:04.000Because on one hand, we've got a generation that has been exposed to so much sensationalistic stuff in order to attain their attention.
01:29:12.000They've really been overloaded with the most extreme versions of everything in order to get their ticket money or whatever.
01:29:21.000They've really been pounded by so much stimuli.
01:29:24.000I can see them kind of really pulling back and wanting to be monastic for the rest of their lives.
01:29:29.000And on the other hand, I see them as being, as wanting to sort of counter dominate in order to just create room enough in the world for their statement.
01:29:42.000You know, they're moving into a world that's already so occupied by attention getters that if they can shut some down that there might be room for their own expression.
01:29:53.000So I kind of see benefit on both sides.
01:29:57.000And in a way, too, they're dominating their teachers, which is good, because it's a way of exploring your own power and figuring out what you can do in the world and that you can have effect, you can have agency.
01:30:12.000So I don't think it's a totally bad thing.
01:30:15.000That's interesting, the idea that them dominating their teachers is in some way good.
01:30:22.000Well, it certainly gives you confidence and lets you understand that you can affect change, even if it's meaningless change.
01:30:32.000Did you pay attention to what happened at Evergreen State in Washington?
01:30:39.000For people who don't know the story, it's the Brett Weinstein story where...
01:30:44.000The students decided that there was going to be a day of absence.
01:30:47.000Traditionally, it had been where people of color stayed home just so that people could recognize the important part that they play in the culture and society.
01:30:55.000But then they had ramped it up and decided white people are going to have to stay home now.
01:32:04.000You know, and just, I think it just demonstrates how desperately they want a stronger leader.
01:32:11.000They don't want, they don't respect, they don't want to learn from somebody who is a college professor and has never really attained anything in the world.
01:32:20.000They just don't want to become another cog in that same kind of You know, wheel.
01:32:25.000They want to learn from somebody they respect and whose attainments they respect, whose achievements they respect.
01:32:33.000Right, that's probably part of the issue at universities, right?
01:32:36.000Is that these professors are so terrified of the reactions of these students, which is...
01:32:42.000Not the place you're supposed to be with a mentor-student relationship.
01:33:03.000It's not the normal dynamic that exists with the older wise person and the young person who's trying to learn from this person they deeply respect.
01:33:14.000It's this old person who's weak and wants to keep their job and is willing to tailor their own thoughts and ideas to this irrational mob of social justice warriors.
01:33:27.000And that's what we're seeing on campuses now, you know.
01:33:30.000Professors calling for censorship and to stop freedom of expression.
01:33:38.000You know, when I was in college, my favorite professor, Roy Halberson, he was the John Houseman of the journalism school.
01:33:46.000He was this old gray eminence and nothing made him happy.
01:33:50.000You could never please this John Houseman paper chase guy.
01:33:55.000Nothing was good enough and nothing would make him smile.
01:34:00.000And I worked my ass off to make him happy.
01:34:03.000And I finally got an A in one of his courses.
01:34:06.000But he is about the only professor I remember out of my entire four years.
01:34:11.000It was this man that just didn't take shit from anybody.
01:34:36.000You're seeing that spill out into social media and different forms of activism with people trying to re-achieve that power that they had.
01:34:45.000And sort of forcing people to their will.
01:34:47.000And in a way it's kind of a farm camp because a few of those people will achieve that power and they will be able to kind of leverage that power to something more legitimate, something larger, and those will be the next generation of leaders that emerge.
01:35:07.000And the rest of them will just kind of filter down into whatever jobs, whatever careers, but they will always have their kind of glory days when they say, remember that time we shut down the ROTC building, and that will seem like a big glorious past to them, but that will be enough.
01:35:39.000You know, on one level, it is a disillusionment with the goals of the baby boomers that so many people have seen their parents achieve what they thought was going to make them happy with the houses and the trips and the careers and the possessions and the wives and the second wives and the step-siblings.
01:36:01.000And they're seeing their parents get everything that they want and still not be happy.
01:36:06.000And so you see a generation that's kind of floundering, thinking, you know, they don't know what's going to make them happy.
01:36:13.000I don't know what's going to make me happy.
01:36:16.000And so people are really distrustful of advertisements that tell them what's going to make them happy.
01:36:21.000And so, you know, I think it's just a big struggle, a big everyone blind in the dark right now.
01:36:31.000So just a reaction to what they see that's ineffective, what they see that's going wrong.
01:36:40.000So they're choosing to embrace a different group of values.
01:37:35.000And the ones that are the most fun will be the ones that are perpetuated.
01:37:40.000Burning Man is fun and that is why Burning Man has existed for 30 years.
01:37:46.000And Occupy was not fun and that's why we had one Occupy.
01:37:51.000And I know people are going to be pissed off about that.
01:37:54.000But no, every year Burning Man is bigger and it's funner and more people go there.
01:37:59.000And every year we don't have another Occupy.
01:38:02.000Well, I don't know if that's a valid comparison because Occupy was infiltrated by cops and the FBI and they pretended to be protesters and sat amongst them and the whole thing was kind of misguided in the first place.
01:38:15.000Whereas what Burning Man is is a complete removal of these people from society.
01:38:20.000I mean, they decided to meet in one of the most hostile climates in the world.
01:38:23.000And there's something about that, the recognition that you're out there in the desert with a fucking mask over your face, and you're dancing with dirty underwear on, and that all these people are doing it together, and then half of them are fucked out of their mind on drugs.
01:38:45.000And the protests also at Occupy, a lot of them were misinformed and they didn't really understand the process they were protesting against.
01:38:52.000There's a very funny, famous video with Peter Schiff, who's been on this podcast before, is a financial wizard, who...
01:39:02.000We'll set up shop there with a $5,000 suit on and it basically said I am the 1% you know ask me questions and he interviewed these kids so they would tell him what's wrong with the world and the you know The imbalance of finances and financial inequity and they just didn't understand what they were upset about and he would explain to them how capitalism actually works and how he's employing all these people and the reason why he makes so much money is because he employs so
01:39:32.000many people and if he wasn't doing this these people would be out of work you understand that I'm creating something and you can create something too you can create a business and you can if you work hard and you know and he's going over this and you could see that What they're fighting against is almost like a concept.
01:39:48.000They're fighting against this idea of this evil tyranny that's controlling their fate.
01:39:56.000Well, they really don't understand it, though.
01:39:59.000That's what Occupy was, in my opinion.
01:40:02.000It's like they knew something was wrong.
01:40:04.000It was almost to me like white blood cells surrounding an infection.
01:40:08.000Like, there's something fucked up here.
01:40:10.000Let's just surround this thing and figure out.
01:40:16.000It's like there's a real recognition that there's a gigantic problem with the financial institutions.
01:40:21.000The gigantic problem with the whole reason why the economy collapsed and the bailouts and these fucking creeps are getting all these bonuses even though their companies failed and the tax dollars had to rescue them.
01:40:36.000There was a recognition that there was something wrong, but not a deep understanding of what the system was that they were actually protesting.
01:40:48.000Burning Man is, obviously, society's fucked.
01:40:51.000There's no arguments that it's not, even if it's better than it's ever been before, which it probably is, you know, if you want to listen to Pinker or a lot of other people that'll argue that it's better and it's progressing into this better and better path, and I think that's probably right, ultimately.
01:41:08.000And Burning Man offers this alternative, like this unique society of free expression and free love and all these people having a good time together exploring alternate states of consciousness.
01:41:22.000Well, Victor Turner, who talked about these liminoid events, he would say things like Burning Man, they also provide an outlet for people to self-select to leave the culture.
01:41:35.000People who just don't fit in, they die.
01:41:38.000Or they express themselves so much that they can go back to the ordinary postal carrier life that they had before because so many cultures have something like Samba, festival, where you go crazy for a week and then you go back to your normal life waiting tables.
01:41:57.000So they are in a way an event that kind of keeps the status quo in place.
01:42:02.000But they do create these kind of, if not aesthetic movements, they are a laboratory for sort of coming up with some new form of being together, some new social structure, new symbols, new narrative.
01:42:20.000Yeah, it's a fascinating thing for me because I feel it's trickled off into regular life in a lot of ways now.
01:42:28.000I know way more people that are microdosing psilocybin on a daily basis.
01:42:33.000People are more, especially now that marijuana is legal, people are way more accepting of people getting high, of people just choosing to sort of look at the world in a different way.
01:42:50.000Actively seek these different states of consciousness.
01:44:33.000Well, I have a secret friendship with Jim Goad, who's one of the few people who makes me really laugh, even though most of the world- It's not a secret anymore.
01:44:44.000Because he writes these very transgressive, in-your-face pieces.
01:44:48.000But when he writes about his brother, he kills me.
01:44:51.000It is some of the most touching stuff I've ever read in my life about his brother's death.
01:44:58.000So, you know, the whole world, I think, is so fooled in that they think that Jim Goat is a bad person and they think that maybe I'm a good person when it's just exactly the opposite.
01:45:34.000You know, and this is awkward, but this is another one of those cognitive problems.
01:45:41.000One of the reframing honesty things is I took care of my mother while she was dying of lung cancer.
01:45:48.000And even while I was taking care of her and she was lapsing in and out of consciousness in her home, there was a little part of me that felt this glee that thought, I will never have to worry about mom again.
01:46:03.000I will never have to worry about whether mom is offended by my work.
01:46:07.000I will never have to worry about mom falling down the stairs and breaking her leg.
01:46:12.000That this enormous concern in my life will be resolved.
01:46:18.000And it's going to be at the cost of losing someone I love, you know, so much.
01:46:24.000But the benefit is that this huge burden of responsibility is going to be lifted.
01:46:31.000And so there was this kind of secret glee, thinking, you know, I'm going to have some freedom here that I never imagined.
01:46:40.000Yeah, Nora Ephron touches on that in her work when she talks about her mother's death.
01:46:45.000And I think it's just an honest thing, but it's not a thing that makes you look very good.
01:46:53.000I don't think that makes you a bad person.
01:46:56.000I think that makes you a person who's honest about thoughts that are very uncomfortable.
01:47:03.000That is just something that people think, I think, all the time, if they're dealing with someone who's completely incapacitated and they have to care for them 24-7, but they don't express it.
01:47:31.000I need an example why you're a bad person.
01:47:34.000Maybe you're just really self-critical.
01:47:37.000Aware of things that other people could take out of context of the totality of your life and just use it as an example.
01:47:45.000Put it in quotes and use it as an example of you being a bad person.
01:47:49.000You know, another thing is I'm really, really conflicted about the nature of my creativity.
01:47:57.000This idea that in journalism school they call the theory seduce and betray.
01:48:02.000That when you go into an interview situation Your goal is to gain the trust of that person and to get them to reveal something very intimate that you're going to betray by revealing to the public.
01:48:15.000So you're basically going in there to charm them and then to hurt them.
01:48:23.000And so much of my creative process is that way because, for example, the gut story.
01:48:33.000The story in which the guy puts the carrot up his butt.
01:48:38.000That was my best friend at the time in late 20s.
01:48:43.000And he got fantastically drunk and he told me that carrot story.
01:48:47.000And I honestly believe he had never told anybody the carrot story.
01:48:53.000And I kept that story in my mind for, you know, 10, 15, almost probably 20 years until I found a way to put it with three similar stories and make a larger piece out of it.
01:49:05.000And the first time I read that story, I hadn't seen him in maybe a couple years, this friend.
01:49:11.000And I look across this big auditorium, and there he is.
01:49:15.000And I'm telling his carrot story in front of hundreds and hundreds of people.
01:49:21.000And the look on his face, he's just stricken.
01:52:21.000I was having dinner with a good friend of mine, his wife and a buddy of mine and my friend's friend and his wife and fun time the whole night.
01:52:33.000Everybody's laughing and joking and we're having dinner and having a couple of drinks and joking around talking about things and I forget what led to him saying this.
01:52:49.000But we were talking about just unfortunate scenarios and, you know, people that just their life is not going the way they'd like it to go and things going bad.
01:53:02.000And out of nowhere, the guy goes, well, it's like this.
01:53:09.000My daughter, she had a baby with a black man.
01:53:15.000And we're both looking at him like, where is this going?
01:53:18.000And then he goes, and I just think it's incredibly selfish to bring that kid into the world.
01:53:25.000And this kid doesn't have an identity.
01:53:27.000They're not black, and they're not white, and they're not going to have an identity.
01:53:32.000They're not going to have a group to belong to.
01:54:20.000Your daughter's in love with a man who's black, they have a child together, and you think it's incredibly selfish to bring that kid into the world.
01:54:30.000I wish I could remember what the fuck we were talking about before then, but what we were talking about before then was like drug addicts or people who fuck up or, you know, people who are addicted to gambling or something, you know, people whose lives were in chaos.
01:54:44.000And then he brings up his daughter having a baby with a guy who has the wrong amount of melanin in his skin, whose ancestors came from the wrong part of the world for him.
01:54:57.000It was weird also to see him recognize.
01:55:02.000It's funny, you know, you throw out a story, I throw out a story.
01:55:06.000I had a hired car from Philadelphia to New York once on tour.
01:55:11.000And as we're going past Liberty Hall in Philadelphia, this great guy with a Philly accent driving the car, he points at Liberty Hall and he says, that building has stood for, you know, 300 years.
01:56:53.000No, it was a horrible moment because I felt like I was throwing away any kind of chatty, conversational relationship I had with this guy.
01:57:00.000He seemed like just a salt of the earth, great, funny guy.
01:57:04.000And I was just kind of going out on a limb and saying, okay, he's going to hate my guts after this.
01:57:12.000When I was a little kid, we lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11, and then moved to Florida, which is the polar opposite of San Francisco.
01:58:04.000What a person should be like they got to fall into this category that category.
01:58:08.000He's got it locked into his head He's a fucking baby, but he's a man and he's my friend's dad This guy said this guy made it to 35 years old or whatever the fuck he was And this is his this is his operating system that he's using to Navigate his way through life.
01:58:23.000I remember it being an important moment for me Because I realized like just because someone's older Doesn't mean they learned anything.
01:58:32.000And that people are capable of success in life.
01:59:04.000And that, you know, we know that this thing is not just kind of festering and that there's a way of kind of not fixing this person, but at least we know where they're coming from.
02:00:51.000But I feel a little less reactive to abuse.
02:00:57.000Scientologists have this exercise called bull baiting where they take you into a room and people surround you and they call you every horrible thing and then they nitpick every aspect of your appearance or your character, who you are, and they attack you on every level.
02:01:14.000And they do this for long, long periods of time, and they do this day after day, until you are completely not reactionary to that kind of verbal abuse.
02:01:34.000And so in a way, when I go into these sites that are so patently offensive, And deliberately, you know, aggressively offensive, I feel like in a way they're thickening my skin, that I'm not quite such a delicate little reactive thing afterwards.
02:01:55.000Do you worry about someone looking through your search results?
02:01:58.000Oh, they're far worse things than that.
02:02:09.000There's certain people that react really poorly to trash talk, and there's certain people that get excited by it, and it doesn't bother them at all, and they embrace it.
02:02:19.000And generally, it's people who grew up in abusive households and horrible environments.
02:02:24.000Then when the trash talk starts coming, they go, oh yeah?
02:02:27.000Oh, okay, is that what's going to happen?
02:02:44.000The pressure of not just being in conflict with some person, but that person insulting them and verbal conflict and demeaning them and mocking them, it haunts them.
02:03:05.000Something about the verbal conflict and the abuse.
02:03:08.000There's an emotional struggle that they're not prepared for.
02:03:10.000They prepared 100% for this physical struggle.
02:03:13.000But there's a certain aspect of someone literally hating them as a human.
02:03:18.000Like not thinking of them as a worthy competitor who they respect, who they're ready to go to battle with and will shake hands first and afterwards we'll go have a beer together after we beat the shit out of each other.
02:05:29.000Yeah, it's a great book, but it's about that.
02:05:31.000It's about why, you know, being in these intense, like, really dangerous but crackling with energy environments produce some of the happiest moments for these people's lives.
02:05:50.000And that post-war, like, they have an incredibly difficult job to sort of reintegrate into normal...