The Joe Rogan Experience - August 22, 2018


Joe Rogan Experience #1158 - Chuck Palahniuk


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 6 minutes

Words per Minute

161.23273

Word Count

20,447

Sentence Count

1,587

Misogynist Sentences

43

Hate Speech Sentences

30


Summary

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.


Transcript

00:00:03.000 Four, three, two, one.
00:00:07.000 And we're live.
00:00:08.000 How are you, Chuck?
00:00:08.000 I am great.
00:00:09.000 Look at this place.
00:00:11.000 Thanks for being here, man.
00:00:12.000 Appreciate it.
00:00:13.000 Thank you.
00:00:13.000 I've read your books.
00:00:14.000 I've watched movies based on your books, so it's very cool to meet you in real life.
00:00:19.000 It's always a disappointment.
00:00:20.000 It is always so heartbreaking because people expect somebody so not me.
00:00:27.000 And I am constantly breaking their heart when they meet me.
00:00:31.000 Well, I expect you, so you're not breaking my heart at all.
00:00:35.000 I'm very pleased to meet you.
00:00:36.000 So I didn't have any weirdo expectations or any delusions of who you are.
00:00:41.000 And don't kill yourself, okay?
00:00:46.000 I mean Anthony Bourdain.
00:00:48.000 And he kills himself.
00:00:49.000 Well, I think there's a lot of other factors involved there.
00:00:52.000 I don't know.
00:00:53.000 I see this.
00:00:55.000 So many of my peers, it's like the moment I meet them, boom, they're gone.
00:00:59.000 Yeah, I'm not going to do that.
00:01:01.000 Okay, so don't worry.
00:01:03.000 Everything's fine.
00:01:05.000 Listen, I want to talk to you about a bunch of things.
00:01:07.000 First of all, I'd love to talk to you about your writing process.
00:01:10.000 Because one of the things I read once is, I believe you were writing down, it was on the Cape, it was in Massachusetts.
00:01:19.000 Were you ever writing down there?
00:01:20.000 Were you ever writing somewhere where you made a deal with yourself where you wouldn't turn the heat on unless you were writing?
00:01:26.000 Oh my gosh, you think I'm a white person, don't you?
00:01:29.000 That is so weird.
00:01:30.000 The Cape?
00:01:31.000 The Cape?
00:01:31.000 You've never been to the Cape Cod?
00:01:33.000 That's like in England.
00:01:34.000 Is that all white people?
00:01:35.000 That's in England, right?
00:01:35.000 New England.
00:01:36.000 New England, yes.
00:01:37.000 No.
00:01:37.000 I never read anything like that about you?
00:01:39.000 No.
00:01:40.000 I'm sorry.
00:01:41.000 Never been on the Cape.
00:01:43.000 You've never been to Cape Cod?
00:01:44.000 Never had a clam bake.
00:01:45.000 He's a white person.
00:01:47.000 Clams are wonderful.
00:01:48.000 What's wrong with clams?
00:01:50.000 No, no.
00:01:51.000 It's just something...
00:01:52.000 Maybe it's something I attributed to you for many, many years.
00:01:56.000 But 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.
00:02:03.000 And so they lived in this place over the winter.
00:02:07.000 God, it wasn't even so embarrassing.
00:02:08.000 You were talking about Michael Cunningham.
00:02:10.000 Is that who it was?
00:02:11.000 Yeah, because he...
00:02:12.000 I think that's his story about living in Provincetown.
00:02:15.000 Might have been.
00:02:17.000 Fuck this all up.
00:02:18.000 What a terrible way to get going.
00:02:20.000 One thing I wanted to talk to you about.
00:02:22.000 Ambien much lately?
00:02:23.000 No, I don't.
00:02:24.000 Any.
00:02:25.000 At all.
00:02:25.000 I just sleep.
00:02:27.000 I'm fortunate in that regard.
00:02:28.000 Alright.
00:02:29.000 You don't take that shit, do you?
00:02:30.000 Of course I do.
00:02:32.000 Do you?
00:02:32.000 Yeah, three times a day.
00:02:34.000 Oh, you're fucking with me.
00:02:36.000 We got started off poorly.
00:02:38.000 Now you're fucking with me.
00:02:40.000 Once a day.
00:02:41.000 Do you really take Ambien?
00:02:42.000 Yeah, you know, to tell the truth, just before I want to do anything I don't want to do, it's like an Elves and the Shoemaker thing.
00:02:49.000 I don't want to do my taxes, so I take Ambien.
00:02:52.000 And then I wake up and my taxes are done.
00:02:54.000 Oh.
00:02:55.000 And do you have plausible deniability, too?
00:02:58.000 If you can get videotape, you take an Ambien.
00:03:00.000 People have committed murder on Ambien and gotten off because they had no memory.
00:03:05.000 Yeah.
00:03:05.000 That is true.
00:03:06.000 Yeah, it's hypnotic.
00:03:08.000 We actually did a pretty in-depth discussion about that after the Roseanne Barr thing came out.
00:03:15.000 My 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.
00:03:27.000 She had no recollection of it whatsoever, but she painted it like a two-year-old would.
00:03:31.000 They got a hold of their mom's lipstick, and she just woke up and going, what the fuck am I doing?
00:03:37.000 Like, what is this?
00:03:38.000 Hey, she got off easy.
00:03:39.000 I've heard war stories, a hundred war stories.
00:03:41.000 Oh, yeah.
00:03:42.000 No, I have heard about murder.
00:03:44.000 I've heard about people driving their car to someone's house, killing them, driving home, and having no recollection of it.
00:03:49.000 A young woman in London climbed to the top of a construction crane, fell asleep on the huge counterweight.
00:03:55.000 So far up over London.
00:03:57.000 Wakes up in the morning, birds around her.
00:04:00.000 She has no idea where she's at.
00:04:01.000 She is terrified.
00:04:03.000 Jesus Christ.
00:04:04.000 Yeah.
00:04:06.000 You writing about Ambien right now?
00:04:07.000 I am.
00:04:09.000 I can tell.
00:04:10.000 I can tell you're locked in.
00:04:12.000 Ambien and a hundred other things.
00:04:14.000 You...
00:04:16.000 If it's fair to say, it seems like your writing, one of the ways you collect data is almost like You're reporting on these people.
00:04:26.000 Like you're collecting real-life interactions between people and real-life characteristics, and then you incorporate them into fiction.
00:04:36.000 Exactly.
00:04:37.000 That's fair to say?
00:04:38.000 My degree is journalism.
00:04:39.000 I 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.
00:04:51.000 So in a way, basically what I'm doing is...
00:04:53.000 Kind of an ongoing field study that becomes whatever my next book is.
00:04:58.000 When 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.
00:05:08.000 I've understood the cathartic release of violence, but I never saw it articulated the way you did.
00:05:16.000 And you made it enticing for a thinking person.
00:05:20.000 You made it like...
00:05:23.000 You 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.
00:05:39.000 And then you wrote about it.
00:05:41.000 And then reading what you wrote, it made you go, yeah, okay, oh, all right.
00:05:47.000 Now, it's like you added an element to it that really didn't exist before in pop culture.
00:05:52.000 It 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.
00:06:07.000 It's like, he hit some nerve that nobody really hit before.
00:06:12.000 And it's not a nerve that gets hit very much.
00:06:15.000 You know, and there's so many different aspects to it.
00:06:18.000 And one is just my classic thing is that there are so few social model novels or stories for men.
00:06:27.000 For 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.
00:06:38.000 Just all these different models in which Women can come together and talk about their lives.
00:06:43.000 And if you're a man, you've got either Fight Club or you have the Dead Poets Society.
00:06:49.000 And that is really it.
00:06:52.000 So we don't have a lot of narratives that depict to men a role or a kind of script in which to come together and talk about their shed.
00:07:02.000 Another thing is Jordan Peterson.
00:07:06.000 Back to Jordan Peterson.
00:07:08.000 He talks about that need for really rough play.
00:07:12.000 And he talks about it a lot.
00:07:14.000 And a lot of my friends, they brag about how badly their kids hurt them.
00:07:19.000 Oh my gosh, my daughter came at me the other day.
00:07:21.000 I had no idea how strong she was.
00:07:24.000 She pulled my arm out of the socket.
00:07:26.000 And they're proud.
00:07:27.000 They're proud that their kid can play that rough and is growing up that strong.
00:07:32.000 But, you know, we've kind of fallen away from this idea of consensual rough play.
00:07:38.000 And I think Fight Club resonated with that a lot.
00:07:41.000 And also the idea of Joseph Campbell's idea that there needs to be a secondary father in men's lives.
00:07:48.000 That you're born, if you're lucky, with a biological father that you do not choose.
00:07:53.000 And that is the nurturing, loving father that you eventually kind of have to reject.
00:07:58.000 But in doing so, you have to choose a new father.
00:08:01.000 And that father by choice typically is a...
00:08:06.000 A minister or a teacher or a drill sergeant or a coach.
00:08:10.000 One of those fathers.
00:08:11.000 And you kind of put yourself in apprenticeship to the secondary father.
00:08:16.000 And you have to sort of consign your life to the secondary father.
00:08:20.000 And agree to learn what they're going to teach you.
00:08:23.000 Just like in Karate Kid.
00:08:25.000 And that is getting harder and harder and harder to find.
00:08:29.000 So 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.
00:08:39.000 So there were just so many aspects of men's lives that were not being addressed when Fight Club came out.
00:08:47.000 And it sort of reinvented so many of those things that had fallen by the wayside.
00:08:51.000 That's a huge part of martial arts.
00:08:53.000 A huge part of martial arts is your relationship with the master, with the coach.
00:08:57.000 Without 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
00:09:27.000 never thought about it that way.
00:09:29.000 I forgot about that part of Joseph Campbell.
00:09:32.000 That is a huge, huge issue with young men.
00:09:36.000 Young men getting into martial arts is something that I've talked about so many times.
00:09:40.000 I 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,
00:10:05.000 but violence.
00:10:06.000 Well, and beyond just that, you know, it's also the whole idea of apprenticeship.
00:10:12.000 You 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.
00:10:26.000 But in exchange, you're going to learn a kind of really master skill at something.
00:10:31.000 And so...
00:10:33.000 It's a way of mastering yourself as you master this other thing.
00:10:37.000 So it's not just always a physical fighting thing.
00:10:43.000 It doesn't have to be in that form.
00:10:45.000 Just difficult.
00:10:46.000 Something that's a struggle.
00:10:47.000 Something that's hard to learn.
00:10:49.000 Right.
00:10:50.000 Yeah.
00:10:51.000 And that relationship that you have with that secondary father too, it's almost in some ways more intense.
00:10:58.000 The 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.
00:11:10.000 Well, do you remember Officer and a Gentleman?
00:11:12.000 Yeah.
00:11:13.000 You know, Richard Gere really has this drunken, not their dad.
00:11:18.000 And then he has this drill sergeant who's constantly trying to wash him out.
00:11:22.000 And then finally he reaches the existential crisis of saying, you can't throw me out of the service because I have nothing else.
00:11:30.000 I have nowhere else to go in the world.
00:11:32.000 My life will amount to nothing unless I can master this thing.
00:11:36.000 And he's a relatively young man, but it is that existentialistic moment where you realize that you have to sacrifice your youth for something.
00:11:46.000 You're not going to live forever.
00:11:47.000 It's a very Martin Heidegger moment where you realize you have to become a being living towards death.
00:11:54.000 You're not going to live forever, and you've got to give your life to something.
00:11:58.000 Now, 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?
00:12:06.000 Like, do you just go on instinct?
00:12:08.000 Do you just have a concept in your head and it just seems more and more attractive and you just say, okay, this is it?
00:12:16.000 You 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,
00:12:34.000 but an even more extreme example of that.
00:12:37.000 So in a way, they're fleshing out your theme with parts of their own lives.
00:12:42.000 And 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.
00:12:51.000 You'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.
00:13:00.000 That's interesting.
00:13:01.000 So do you purposely like go to parties with like a couple like bullets in the chamber?
00:13:08.000 Sometimes, 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.
00:13:18.000 Because a great anecdote doesn't leave people speechless.
00:13:21.000 It leaves them competing to tell a better version of the same thing.
00:13:27.000 And that's when a real writer just starts realizing, okay, there's a pattern.
00:13:31.000 And that can be turned into something really big.
00:13:34.000 That's really interesting.
00:13:36.000 There's a parallel there with comedy, for sure.
00:13:39.000 In good material, oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes, you'll see the audience going, oh my god, you do that!
00:13:46.000 That's fascinating.
00:13:48.000 Now, 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.
00:13:56.000 And 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.
00:14:12.000 These things are...
00:14:14.000 It's harming fiction and harming literature.
00:14:17.000 You can't explore the darker ideas.
00:14:19.000 You know, oh...
00:14:23.000 You want to see me crucify myself right now?
00:14:25.000 Yeah.
00:14:25.000 Okay.
00:14:27.000 This is kind of the career-ending moment.
00:14:31.000 For several years, I was in a writer's workshop.
00:14:35.000 And the core group of us had been meeting since 1990. So this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old.
00:14:43.000 And gradually, people were asking each other not to use certain words.
00:14:51.000 First, you know, nobody really used the N-word, but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop.
00:14:57.000 And 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.
00:15:04.000 You're not writing anything with the F-word.
00:15:08.000 And it just became more and more tightly structured that way.
00:15:14.000 And so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other.
00:15:23.000 And 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.
00:15:31.000 It was chosen as an Oprah book, and it will be on bookstore shelves for the rest of history.
00:15:37.000 Cheryl's book, Wild.
00:15:39.000 But while she was writing it, she had written a segment about how as a child she would be sat on the sofa with her grandfather.
00:15:50.000 And her grandfather taught her how to masturbate him.
00:15:54.000 And so as a child she would...
00:15:56.000 Masturbate 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.
00:16:14.000 So she crushed it between her bare hands.
00:16:16.000 This is a very small child.
00:16:18.000 And 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.
00:16:34.000 Whoa!
00:16:35.000 That was the best thing she ever wrote.
00:16:39.000 And her editor at Knopf said, that is not going in this book because we want this book to be a big book.
00:16:48.000 And if we see you jerking off your grandfather and then killing baby birds, that is not going to make Oprah Winfrey happy.
00:16:59.000 So it was a magnificent piece of writing and a magnificent kind of parallel and awareness for a child to have.
00:17:06.000 And this juxtaposition of sexual abuse and death was magnificent.
00:17:11.000 Oh my God, it worked on every level.
00:17:14.000 But the publisher said this is not going to be in the book.
00:17:18.000 Did she send it to you or did she show it to you?
00:17:20.000 She brought it to workshop and she read it.
00:17:22.000 There was even a newspaper reporter present there.
00:17:26.000 And we all realized it was fantastically powerful.
00:17:30.000 But then she said, they won't take this.
00:17:34.000 This can't go in.
00:17:36.000 Wow.
00:17:38.000 Did she do anything with it?
00:17:39.000 Did she publish it online?
00:17:40.000 No.
00:17:41.000 And there were so many parts of that book that were so much better than what they actually did publish.
00:17:47.000 Really?
00:17:47.000 And so it's that kind of censorship where...
00:17:51.000 You'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.
00:18:01.000 And 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.
00:18:15.000 Because they did not want people picking up that book and opening it and seeing the F word.
00:18:20.000 That that just did not fit their corporate culture.
00:18:23.000 And so, you know, so much of this censorship is because people really want to reach the largest audience without offending people.
00:18:35.000 Whew.
00:18:37.000 But...
00:18:38.000 There's giant problems with that, right?
00:18:40.000 I mean, one of the more fascinating things about books is that the story plays out in your mind.
00:18:47.000 Exactly.
00:18:48.000 The nature of consumption makes it about the only medium in which you can go to those places.
00:18:55.000 Yeah, literally.
00:18:56.000 You couldn't...
00:18:58.000 There's no way you would be able to find...
00:19:01.000 To 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.
00:19:13.000 Yeah.
00:19:14.000 And I feel like I'm telling stories out of school, but it's such a perfect example of that kind of self-censorship.
00:19:23.000 And it's also something so magnificent that I feel it should come out.
00:19:26.000 It should sort of be stated.
00:19:29.000 I don't want to steal her thunder.
00:19:30.000 I want to honor the story.
00:19:33.000 But it's like so many stories that people tell me.
00:19:36.000 I'm kind of seen as a safe person, you know, kind of a degraded monster maybe.
00:19:41.000 But as a degraded monster with no self-esteem whatsoever, they feel safe telling me these things.
00:19:48.000 Because in a way, they probably feel a little morally superior to me.
00:19:53.000 Why do you think people would consider you a degraded monster?
00:19:56.000 Because I can read a story like Guts that is so completely humiliating.
00:20:04.000 Because as I read it, it's in the first person.
00:20:06.000 So people more or less assume that it's my story, even though it's stories garnered from many different people.
00:20:14.000 But the fact that I'm presenting it...
00:20:16.000 It means that I'm the person that is losing face.
00:20:20.000 And afterwards, people feel like they can risk losing face by telling me their story that's very much like the gut story.
00:20:27.000 So 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?
00:20:41.000 Do 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?
00:20:51.000 You 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.
00:21:05.000 And 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.
00:21:20.000 In a story like Guts, you know, it's very funny on the front end.
00:21:24.000 And if you told people on the front end where it was going to go, they'd never read that story.
00:21:29.000 But it's very funny and charming and well-paced on the front.
00:21:33.000 And then once people realize where it's going to go, they're already trapped.
00:21:41.000 You seem to enjoy that though.
00:21:43.000 The way you said they're already trapped, you seem to take some satisfaction in that.
00:21:48.000 But in writing it, I'm also sort of springing the trap on myself.
00:21:53.000 Starting down a path that I have no idea is going to be so humiliating or so emotionally upsetting or so dark.
00:22:02.000 Because if I did, I would never go down that path.
00:22:09.000 When you write a story like that, how much of it do you plan out in advance?
00:22:14.000 I might plan out up to the end of the second act.
00:22:17.000 You know, at the moment of greatest crisis, this will happen.
00:22:23.000 You 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.
00:22:31.000 And they're all given the choice of either accepting him for his transgressions or rejecting him.
00:22:40.000 Same thing in choke.
00:22:41.000 There's going to be that moment when people realize that he has faked choking and that he's made them into a fake hero.
00:22:50.000 And they're going to either kill him or accept him.
00:22:55.000 And so I typically know that the second act is going to end with the transgression being revealed.
00:23:02.000 But beyond that, I don't want to know.
00:23:04.000 Because I want the story to complete itself with its own momentum at that point.
00:23:08.000 And if it doesn't surprise me beyond the second act, then it's not going to surprise the reader.
00:23:14.000 Do 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?
00:23:23.000 No, 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.
00:23:35.000 And 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?
00:23:44.000 And it will take the story in a direction that is so unexpected because it's not from my experience.
00:23:50.000 And that's the glory.
00:23:52.000 And they feel like they've contributed.
00:23:54.000 They're so happy.
00:23:55.000 And I'm happy to spend time among people.
00:23:59.000 And I'm happy to have the story complete in a way that I never, ever could have anticipated.
00:24:04.000 That's fascinating.
00:24:06.000 So you do it at the gym?
00:24:07.000 Yeah, 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.
00:24:20.000 And so it paces the talking versus the thinking.
00:24:25.000 And it's also kind of highly oxygenated and it's physically active.
00:24:30.000 And your mind is kind of, your mind is not engaged with something else.
00:24:34.000 Your mind is kind of disengaged like it is while you're taking a shower.
00:24:39.000 Yeah, a lot of people like to walk.
00:24:40.000 They like to write, read a little bit of it, and then walk and bring a recorder or their phone to record on.
00:24:47.000 I think probably along the same lines.
00:24:49.000 Charles Dickens walked somewhere between 12 and 20 miles a day, as he wrote.
00:24:55.000 Whoa.
00:24:56.000 And the Lakeland poets walked constantly.
00:25:00.000 I mean, walking is a big part of writing.
00:25:02.000 Anything physical, right?
00:25:03.000 Anything where you're forcing your body to move, forcing the blood to flow.
00:25:06.000 And also mindless.
00:25:08.000 So it allows your mind to wander.
00:25:11.000 Yeah.
00:25:13.000 So 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.
00:25:23.000 Is this something you've always done?
00:25:24.000 Because of the workshopping?
00:25:26.000 Is it just this willingness to be open with your ideas and express them?
00:25:32.000 Yeah, really, you know, workshop was the crucial thing, having that social expectation that you were going to bring work every week.
00:25:39.000 And it was also kind of a party, a reward for having brought the work.
00:25:43.000 And 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.
00:25:54.000 Workshop just provides so many really important ways of keeping you writing.
00:26:02.000 And you've done this always.
00:26:03.000 It seems like you've done this most of your career.
00:26:06.000 I have, and this is not the first workshop I've been bumped out of.
00:26:10.000 The 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.
00:26:27.000 And during the seduction of this sex doll, he accidentally snags the back of it with the zipper of its dress.
00:26:36.000 And he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air.
00:26:41.000 So he's got to copulate faster and faster to try to achieve orgasm before this thing completely goes flat.
00:26:49.000 And 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.
00:27:00.000 And of course, his mother walks into the room.
00:27:03.000 And 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.
00:27:19.000 She really did.
00:27:21.000 She said, you've written something that really frightens them and they would like you to politely leave the workshop and not come back.
00:27:30.000 Wow.
00:27:31.000 And so that's when I started with Tom Spanbauer's workshop, in which almost anything went.
00:27:38.000 And so this kind of periodic implosion of the workshop is kind of part of the process.
00:27:45.000 Well, it seems only twice, right?
00:27:46.000 More times than that?
00:27:48.000 You know, it's been twice, but in the past...
00:27:51.000 Twice catastrophic?
00:27:52.000 Twice catastrophic, yeah.
00:27:54.000 But a few other flat tires along the way?
00:27:58.000 Periodically, 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.
00:28:07.000 How many people are in these workshops?
00:28:08.000 Boy, 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.
00:28:18.000 What 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?
00:28:30.000 That's gotta suck.
00:28:32.000 No, you know, I think in a way we all needed kind of a respite from each other.
00:28:36.000 We all had kind of knew what to expect from one another.
00:28:39.000 And I think we were all less of a resource for one another.
00:28:44.000 You know, there's always a chance we'll come back together.
00:28:47.000 So it's not a big tragedy.
00:28:51.000 So there's a chance that they might...
00:28:52.000 So did they kick you out or did they just disband?
00:28:56.000 I left the workshop and I understood that it disbanded after that.
00:29:00.000 That seems...
00:29:01.000 I just don't understand how someone who is a creative writer can't understand the...
00:29:08.000 not just the necessity, like the need to delve into the darker possibilities of human reality.
00:29:18.000 This...
00:29:20.000 The story she wrote about her grandfather and the bird is a perfect example of that.
00:29:25.000 I mean, although very few people experience that in their life, we all can appreciate that these are possible scenarios.
00:29:31.000 And I think it really comes down to what purpose reading and writing serves in people's lives.
00:29:38.000 And most people, they want reading to be a comforting activity.
00:29:43.000 They 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.
00:29:51.000 In a way, they want to be bored or lulled by the book.
00:29:54.000 Not so many people really want to be kind of confronted by books.
00:30:00.000 But some people do, right?
00:30:01.000 I mean, it's kind of like pretty much all forms of art, whether it's music or movies.
00:30:07.000 I 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?
00:30:16.000 But those are all satisfying in different ways to different people.
00:30:22.000 And isn't that sort of the point of creative expression?
00:30:26.000 Is that you're getting surprised.
00:30:28.000 You're getting taken down a road.
00:30:29.000 Here's the world through this person's eyes.
00:30:32.000 And they create this world.
00:30:34.000 If 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.
00:30:50.000 You know, and part of it has to do with the nature of, you know, movies.
00:30:54.000 Movies are going to always kind of attract a more dynamic audience.
00:30:59.000 Movies carry their own authority through motion.
00:31:02.000 And books are going to be a slower medium that's harder to consume.
00:31:06.000 And 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.
00:31:18.000 But by who?
00:31:19.000 By some people, right?
00:31:20.000 I mean, maybe there's a market for those kind of books, but there's also a market for your books.
00:31:25.000 There's clearly a market for people that want to tap into those more disturbing aspects of consciousness and of reality.
00:31:33.000 And that market is moving to video games, and that market is moving to edgier films.
00:31:39.000 There's just other forms of storytelling that are serving that market better.
00:31:43.000 Really?
00:31:43.000 Oh, yeah.
00:31:44.000 Better than books?
00:31:45.000 Oh, yeah.
00:31:47.000 But why is that?
00:31:48.000 Is that because of censorship?
00:31:49.000 Or is it because artists aren't exploring those ideas as much anymore?
00:31:54.000 You know, and part of it is because books are harder to consume.
00:31:58.000 Books take an enormous amount of commitment of time and effort to read a book, where everything else is 30 minutes to 2 hours.
00:32:08.000 And to write a book as well.
00:32:09.000 I mean, that's such a solitary...
00:32:12.000 Discipline.
00:32:13.000 To sit alone with your computer.
00:32:15.000 No, it is not.
00:32:17.000 Not for me.
00:32:17.000 I hate that model.
00:32:19.000 You 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.
00:32:31.000 What's the Mermaid Tavern?
00:32:32.000 Oh, it's the reference to where...
00:32:39.000 Not Coleridge.
00:32:40.000 All the famous writers of Shakespeare's time basically hung out.
00:32:45.000 It was like the White Horse Tavern in New York, but the Mermaid Tavern was in London during that time.
00:32:51.000 And Boswell, all the writers hung out there and exchanged ideas and entertained one another.
00:32:59.000 And so I want writing to be my social outlet.
00:33:07.000 But you have to write it by yourself, right?
00:33:09.000 I mean, when you're sitting alone actually putting your fingers on the keyboards.
00:33:15.000 No, you do that part in airplanes.
00:33:17.000 Really?
00:33:18.000 Yeah, I write notebooks and notebooks and notebooks in public.
00:33:22.000 And then when I'm trapped in some unbearable place like an airplane or an airport, then I do that horrible part of keyboarding.
00:33:31.000 Yeah.
00:33:31.000 So that's the only time you actually write right?
00:33:34.000 The keyboarding is not writing.
00:33:36.000 You remember the Truman Capote quote about on the road, Jack Kerouac?
00:33:41.000 Capote said, that's not writing, that's typing.
00:33:45.000 And so the part on the airplane or in the airport where you have the laptop open, that's not writing.
00:33:50.000 Really?
00:33:51.000 That's typing.
00:33:53.000 This is writing.
00:33:54.000 Writing to you is physical pen to paper?
00:33:57.000 Sloppy everything, yeah.
00:33:59.000 Why is it different?
00:34:01.000 Because it's written down in the moment that you hear it and that it is not set in New Times Roman 12 points so that it looks so finished.
00:34:10.000 It looks like a finished book and it's much harder to monkey with it once you see it on that screen in Word.
00:34:16.000 It looks like a book.
00:34:18.000 It's much harder to edit it.
00:34:20.000 But when it's scrawled on the page in front of you, you can draw arrows, you can scribble it out, you can do whatever you want to it.
00:34:28.000 It's much less precious.
00:34:31.000 Is this the approach you've always taken?
00:34:34.000 Did you learn this approach?
00:34:35.000 Or is this something that just sort of made sense to you?
00:34:39.000 This is how old I am.
00:34:41.000 It used to be...
00:34:43.000 I grew up in the age of typewriters when even typewriters were kind of precious because you would have to buy ribbons for them.
00:34:51.000 And those ribbons were really expensive.
00:34:53.000 And so something had to be written out completely longhand.
00:34:59.000 It had to be perfect longhand before you could risk wasting a typewriter ribbon to type it out.
00:35:08.000 Wow, so you just developed it this way and just stuck with it, even in the age of computers.
00:35:14.000 Well, and also because writing is something I do in the moment.
00:35:20.000 Somebody 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.
00:35:31.000 So 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.
00:35:49.000 And do you ever record?
00:35:51.000 Do you ever record yourself?
00:35:53.000 Like record ideas, then listen to them, transcribe them?
00:35:56.000 Oh, God, no.
00:35:57.000 I hate that.
00:35:58.000 That was a big Hunter S. Thompson thing.
00:36:00.000 He would record a lot of his ideas and then transcribe them and write them out.
00:36:06.000 You know, I kind of write word for word, sentence for sentence.
00:36:11.000 And so the transcription is just too much of an effort for me.
00:36:17.000 Usually when I do interviews for magazines, I will record my interview subjects.
00:36:22.000 And even then, transcribing the interviews is such a misery because people seldom talk in complete sentences.
00:36:30.000 And there's so many false starts and so many sentences that just don't go anywhere.
00:36:37.000 So, no, talking into a recorder is just that.
00:36:41.000 A mess.
00:36:43.000 And so this notebook that you have in front of you, this is a notebook for life or is this a notebook for a particular project?
00:36:50.000 Like how do you organize it?
00:36:52.000 This is a notebook where three pages are devoted to topics that I will talk to you about if we're desperate.
00:37:02.000 And there are little notes in here about contacting my agent for different issues.
00:37:07.000 Oh, so it's all universal.
00:37:08.000 It's like for all sorts of things.
00:37:10.000 It's for tasks that you need to do, and then as well as that, parts of books you're writing.
00:37:15.000 And there's all these little notes that Jamie just gave me about microphones.
00:37:19.000 Yeah, you're writing something about someone who's into recording equipment?
00:37:22.000 Yeah, that's just a small part of it, but that's what she knows.
00:37:27.000 Now, I want to go back to this workshop thing.
00:37:32.000 Was it just words?
00:37:34.000 Just the use of the word faggot or the n-word?
00:37:37.000 Was it just words that characters were utilizing in your story that was so disturbing to them?
00:37:45.000 It was words, but it was also some situations that I thought were, you know, I got that people were very upset by.
00:37:51.000 People would leave the room or people would...
00:37:53.000 They would leave the room?
00:37:54.000 Or would weep.
00:37:57.000 Would weep in just complete upset.
00:37:59.000 Does part of you go, yeah, I got this.
00:38:02.000 And you see someone weeping, some shit you wrote?
00:38:05.000 No, most of the time people would go to the bathroom and weep.
00:38:08.000 And I would find out about it much later.
00:38:10.000 So did you get post-satisfaction that way?
00:38:13.000 No, it just made me feel like a bully.
00:38:15.000 And that is kind of another thing that is a thin line, especially when I read a story like Guts.
00:38:22.000 Am I entertaining people or am I bullying them?
00:38:28.000 Am I beating them up?
00:38:30.000 How so bullying?
00:38:31.000 Why in that way?
00:38:32.000 Why describe it that way?
00:38:34.000 Kind of charming them into a story that eventually will make them faint or eventually will make them wretch but will upset them very deeply.
00:38:44.000 And I feel a real reluctance about that.
00:38:50.000 Doesn't that bridge have to be crossed, though?
00:38:53.000 If 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?
00:39:06.000 It 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.
00:39:16.000 You know, I think anybody who's a really hard trainer kind of, you know, comes up against that.
00:39:23.000 Am I a really good trainer or is part of me a sadist?
00:39:26.000 Right.
00:39:26.000 And you have to make sure that you don't become that sadist.
00:39:30.000 So you're not a monster.
00:39:31.000 So there you go.
00:39:33.000 Yeah, but I worry about it.
00:39:35.000 Well, that's why you're not.
00:39:36.000 But 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,
00:39:54.000 it's going to be creative writers.
00:39:55.000 But it's not my mind.
00:39:58.000 I'm delving into the deep recesses, if I'm lucky, if I'm doing it right, of your mind.
00:40:05.000 Like comedians, they'll say, oh my gosh, that happened to you too.
00:40:11.000 And a lot of times, there are things that people have never, ever talked about.
00:40:17.000 I tell a classic anecdote.
00:40:19.000 After I had read the gut story at an event, a woman came up.
00:40:25.000 And she was a middle-aged woman.
00:40:28.000 She was about my age.
00:40:29.000 And she said, I really love that you read that story about how you got your anus prolapsed while masturbating in a swimming pool.
00:40:43.000 Which is not my story, but I'm the one that read it.
00:40:46.000 So I'm the one that they're picturing in this horrendous situation.
00:40:52.000 And she says, since you can tell that story, I'm going to tell you a story.
00:40:56.000 And 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.
00:41:07.000 You wear a brown dress, a little brown hat, you get these little merit badges.
00:41:12.000 And she said, one day I had a stomach ache and my mom kept me home from school.
00:41:21.000 And we had this heating pad.
00:41:23.000 It must have been in the 1960s.
00:41:24.000 And this heating pad had this vibrating function.
00:41:27.000 And she put me face down on this heating pad on my stomach.
00:41:31.000 And I fell asleep.
00:41:32.000 And while I was asleep, this vibrating, warm heating pad must have slid down between my legs.
00:41:39.000 She says, because I woke up with the most amazing feeling.
00:41:44.000 A feeling like I'd never felt before.
00:41:47.000 Oh my God, it felt so good.
00:41:51.000 And so, next time it was my turn to host the Brownies.
00:41:57.000 I said, Brownies, you've got to try this heating pad.
00:42:01.000 And she says, all the brownies, they turned the heating pad on, the vibrating heating pad, and they rode it like a pony all afternoon.
00:42:10.000 And she said, it was like sex in the city for 70-year-old girls.
00:42:14.000 They could not get enough of this heating pad.
00:42:17.000 And they were all riding this heating pad, and they had a great time.
00:42:21.000 And she said, and for the first time in my life, I was the most popular girl in my class.
00:42:27.000 And I was the girl that all the girls wanted to play with.
00:42:31.000 And for every Brownie troop meeting, it was at my house.
00:42:35.000 And I was the leader.
00:42:37.000 Until the day that my mother came home from work early.
00:42:41.000 And she caught us with a heating pad.
00:42:44.000 And she sent the other brownies home.
00:42:46.000 And she whipped the cord out of the wall.
00:42:49.000 She just ripped it out of the socket.
00:42:52.000 And she started to beat me with it.
00:42:54.000 And she beat me with that cord.
00:42:56.000 And she beat me.
00:42:57.000 And she said, you fucking piece of shit.
00:43:00.000 You dirty whore.
00:43:01.000 What kind of a fucking whore am I raising?
00:43:04.000 You whore!
00:43:05.000 And she beat me and she beat me.
00:43:08.000 And she says, this woman, who's my age now, she says, I have not had an orgasm since I was seven years old.
00:43:18.000 And 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.
00:43:31.000 And I can tell that story until I can make it funny.
00:43:34.000 And then maybe someday I can go back to my mom and I can say, do you remember that heating pad we used to have?
00:43:41.000 And it'll be complete.
00:43:44.000 Holy shit.
00:43:45.000 And so see, see, see, see, that's what I'm trying to do.
00:43:48.000 I'm trying to create the opening for people to tell these stories that they never thought that they could tell.
00:43:57.000 Because that's the way in which they're going to resolve these stories.
00:44:00.000 And they're going to master these stories.
00:44:03.000 We have these...
00:44:08.000 Bidet 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.
00:44:20.000 I 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.
00:44:37.000 How much she loves the hot water when it shoots onto her butt.
00:44:40.000 She was like, it feels so good.
00:44:42.000 And there was no shame in it.
00:44:44.000 And there was this weird moment where I'm like, am I supposed to react to this?
00:44:50.000 Am I supposed to say, yeah, I know, I like it too.
00:44:54.000 Am I supposed to say, hey, don't do that too much.
00:44:58.000 Am I supposed to say, don't tell anybody you like that?
00:45:00.000 You can like it, but don't tell anybody you like it.
00:45:02.000 Like, what am I supposed to do?
00:45:04.000 And I didn't do anything.
00:45:07.000 I just let her smile, and she walked out of the bathroom laughing.
00:45:12.000 Like, it was great.
00:45:13.000 And there was no issue.
00:45:15.000 But it was this moment where I was like, wow.
00:45:19.000 If 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.
00:45:29.000 Instead, I was like, okay, let's get out of the bathroom now.
00:45:32.000 I guess you're done.
00:45:33.000 Alrighty.
00:45:34.000 And she has no idea that this was even like a moment of, you know, crisis in my mind where I was like, okay, how do I handle this?
00:45:45.000 I'm in the bathroom with my seven-year-old daughter.
00:45:47.000 She's getting water shot up her ass and she's enjoying it.
00:45:50.000 So you talk about it on the radio?
00:45:52.000 Is that how you deal with it?
00:45:53.000 I enjoy it too.
00:45:55.000 I enjoy it too.
00:45:56.000 We all do.
00:45:57.000 We talk about these toilets.
00:45:58.000 They're amazing.
00:45:59.000 It's warm water.
00:46:00.000 It's great.
00:46:01.000 It feels awesome.
00:46:02.000 But it's not supposed to feel awesome for like a little girl for some reason, right?
00:46:09.000 See, you tell that story and people will have so many versions of that story.
00:46:13.000 For me, I was in Germany.
00:46:15.000 I went in the bathroom in the airport.
00:46:17.000 I didn't know what this button was, so I pressed it.
00:46:20.000 I looked down just in time to see this little plastic arm swing out.
00:46:24.000 I didn't know what that thing was going to do.
00:46:26.000 So I jumped off the head and this thing shot up with such force, it knocked a ceiling panel out of the ceiling.
00:46:34.000 And all this hot toilet water came sprinkling down on me.
00:46:38.000 And that's the only time I've ever been around one of those.
00:46:43.000 Well, we have one here, if you want to try it out.
00:46:45.000 I don't know.
00:46:46.000 It scares me.
00:46:47.000 There's two of them.
00:46:49.000 There's one in that bathroom, one in that one.
00:46:51.000 That bathroom you could lock.
00:46:53.000 It's private.
00:46:54.000 And 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.
00:47:05.000 And 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.
00:47:18.000 And that's what brings the story to crisis.
00:47:23.000 I have a hard time believing that someone would be angry at that woman for her story.
00:47:30.000 You know, and it's not...
00:47:31.000 It's about her and her story.
00:47:34.000 Right.
00:47:34.000 Her relationship to that story.
00:47:37.000 That one you're going to get away with.
00:47:39.000 You'll get away with that one.
00:47:42.000 The jerking off the grandfather one is in a different place.
00:47:46.000 She's a victim of sexual abuse.
00:47:49.000 She's a victim of violence.
00:47:52.000 Strange that violence, for some reason, is more acceptable than sexual abuse in a lot of ways.
00:47:59.000 Sexual abuse seems to be transformative.
00:48:01.000 Like, there's something about sexual abuse that it ruins.
00:48:06.000 You introduce an experience, a memory into a person's life that ruins them.
00:48:17.000 This 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.
00:48:28.000 So they might start to create suspense, but then they'll resolve it instantly.
00:48:33.000 And 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.
00:48:46.000 And that's all they want and that's all they ever want.
00:48:49.000 And 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.
00:48:59.000 Some of the best moments in books that I've read are moments where you're reading and you're like, oh, fuck.
00:49:04.000 Like, where is this going?
00:49:06.000 Like, you know you're going to get introduced into some really disturbing scene.
00:49:13.000 And you have to be with that.
00:49:15.000 You have to be with that until it's resolved.
00:49:16.000 And that's good writing.
00:49:18.000 You know, bad writing is where it comes up, it's resolved.
00:49:22.000 Now...
00:49:23.000 When 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?
00:49:38.000 How do you talk about that?
00:49:41.000 Boy, there's really no debate.
00:49:48.000 That 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.
00:50:03.000 Yeah.
00:50:04.000 So there was a staleness there, too.
00:50:06.000 We were all kind of hardened into the people we were going to be.
00:50:10.000 I just don't understand their argument.
00:50:12.000 I just don't understand...
00:50:14.000 If you're going to really paint a monster, you have to have monstrous actions.
00:50:19.000 They have to be a real monster.
00:50:21.000 We know of real monsters.
00:50:22.000 I mean, there was just some guy who just got arrested.
00:50:26.000 He had sex slaves in his basement.
00:50:29.000 You hear about those people and you go, yeah, they're out there.
00:50:33.000 There's probably a hundred of them scattered across the country right now where they have a locked basement.
00:50:37.000 We don't know about it.
00:50:38.000 Those 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.
00:50:57.000 But if you're going to write about a monster, you have to write them in a monstrous way.
00:51:06.000 I totally agree.
00:51:12.000 Yeah.
00:51:14.000 What are they trying to achieve?
00:51:16.000 I just don't understand what...
00:51:19.000 They might not enjoy what you're doing.
00:51:23.000 It might not be something that they want to take in recreationally, that they want to read your work in that way.
00:51:31.000 But 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?
00:51:41.000 Is there a new trend?
00:51:44.000 You know, in a way, it's an ongoing thing for me.
00:51:47.000 Because, you know, I've been kicked out of workshops before for just going a little bit too far.
00:51:55.000 And so, in a way, it's kind of a It's maybe my goal.
00:52:01.000 Maybe my goal is to, you know, always piss off my beta audience as a way of kind of proving that I've gone too far.
00:52:12.000 That's not too far, though.
00:52:13.000 It's too far when you piss off the alphas.
00:52:16.000 Well...
00:52:17.000 Not the betas, right?
00:52:19.000 You go really far when you piss off psychos.
00:52:22.000 When they're like, Jesus, man, the fuck are you doing to my brain?
00:52:26.000 You know...
00:52:28.000 God, that's another thing not to talk about.
00:52:30.000 Just keep going.
00:52:34.000 My books are banned so many places.
00:52:37.000 And sometimes I think that maybe that's a good thing because they aren't reaching the psychos.
00:52:42.000 My books are banned in prison systems.
00:52:45.000 What?
00:52:45.000 Because they are enormously popular, these prison librarians tell me, but the books are considered way too stimulating.
00:52:54.000 Wow.
00:52:55.000 People in prison cannot read my books.
00:52:57.000 Holy shit.
00:53:00.000 All prisons?
00:53:01.000 I don't know if it's all, but it's Texas and a number of other really big states, so I don't know.
00:53:09.000 That's kind of a badge of honor.
00:53:12.000 Yeah, but it doesn't equate to the immortality of being banned like Howl or Tropic of Cancer.
00:53:20.000 Salman Rushdie.
00:53:21.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:53:22.000 Yeah.
00:53:23.000 Oh, God.
00:53:26.000 That fucking struggle, man.
00:53:28.000 The struggle of wanting to express yourself as freely as possible, but being limited even by your own peers.
00:53:38.000 That's unexpected to someone who's on the outside of literature, someone who just reads it.
00:53:45.000 Because it's not in the comedy world.
00:53:47.000 Well, it is in the comedy world, but not amongst good comedians.
00:53:50.000 Well, another aspect of that is that so often people aren't censoring it because it offends them.
00:53:56.000 They're censoring it because they're afraid it will offend someone they know.
00:54:00.000 They're doing it, they're kind of white knighting on behalf of someone else.
00:54:05.000 David Sedaris told me this story about telling a joke or something very funny about a girl in a wheelchair.
00:54:14.000 And how he looked out in the audience and no one was laughing.
00:54:17.000 They were all looking at a girl in a wheelchair.
00:54:21.000 And the moment she started to laugh, the entire audience started to laugh.
00:54:26.000 Oh yeah.
00:54:27.000 And 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.
00:54:38.000 Yeah, that's a fact.
00:54:40.000 That's a giant issue in comedy.
00:54:42.000 If 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.
00:54:49.000 It just...
00:54:51.000 Yeah, but that's because people are good people overall.
00:54:54.000 You know, they recognize that they don't want to cause pain.
00:54:58.000 Another 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.
00:55:07.000 Always 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.
00:55:15.000 And in doing so, he was telling this story about being in this forensic laboratory as an autopsy was taking place.
00:55:24.000 And this autopsy table was adjacent to this huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite from this lunchroom.
00:55:34.000 And in the lunchroom were the rest of the forensic staff, and they were all eating their lunches.
00:55:39.000 They all had tuna sandwiches and cans of Coke and barbecued potato chips.
00:55:45.000 And they were watching through the window as this absolutely perfect 12-year-old boy was being autopsied.
00:55:54.000 And 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.
00:56:06.000 And dead without almost a scratch on him.
00:56:09.000 Just this perfect, naked, dead 12-year-old boy on the autopsy table.
00:56:16.000 And 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,
00:56:31.000 the 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.
00:56:46.000 And this exposes this liver-colored, dark red musculature of the child's underlying face.
00:56:53.000 And this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich, he points this out and he says, see that?
00:57:01.000 That there?
00:57:02.000 That's the color of red that I want to paint our rec room.
00:57:06.000 Holy shit.
00:57:07.000 And when Sedaris told that story in front of 600 people, It was dead silent.
00:57:16.000 And you could hear people weeping.
00:57:20.000 People were crying and they were hating David Sedaris in that moment.
00:57:24.000 And so I had to laugh.
00:57:26.000 I laughed really loud like a donkey.
00:57:28.000 And 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.
00:57:41.000 And so I threw myself on the sword for David and that story never went in any book.
00:57:49.000 Wow.
00:57:50.000 Did the story not go in any book just because the reaction by the audience or just the uncomfortable moment?
00:57:55.000 He just decided?
00:57:56.000 Did you speak to him about it?
00:57:57.000 No, I didn't.
00:57:58.000 Not afterwards.
00:57:59.000 It was just such an awkward, painful thing.
00:58:01.000 I would never kind of throw it back in his face.
00:58:04.000 Right.
00:58:04.000 To my knowledge, that was the only time the story was told.
00:58:07.000 Do you have those scattered about?
00:58:09.000 Are there scenes where you wrote and you just sat and looked at him and went, no, I just got to put that one somewhere else.
00:58:17.000 Set that aside.
00:58:19.000 Jokes that I told where I got hissed by 800 people.
00:58:22.000 And you know, if you can live through those moments, you realize you can live through a lot.
00:58:29.000 If you can be hated by 1,100 people at a Barnes& Noble on Union Square, yeah, you can be hated by your mother.
00:58:37.000 It's okay.
00:58:39.000 Now 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?
00:58:44.000 There would be a difference.
00:58:46.000 The people who are fans of your work would at least expect some uncomfortable moments.
00:58:52.000 And for the most part, they tend to be more or less just fans of my work.
00:58:57.000 And still, still hiss.
00:59:00.000 Oh, yeah, but it's, again, they're hissing on behalf of someone.
00:59:05.000 They're not hissing for themselves.
00:59:07.000 You know, I made this horrible cheap shot, and they always know a cheap shot.
00:59:12.000 People always know a cheap shot.
00:59:14.000 I 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.
00:59:26.000 They 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.
00:59:42.000 That's what Americans want.
00:59:44.000 Because natural classic beauty is not egalitarian.
00:59:48.000 You're either born with it or you're not.
00:59:50.000 They want to see a plain person who has been transformed.
00:59:55.000 And to make my point, at the end of the story, I made a cheap shot.
00:59:59.000 I said, and that's why we have Sarah Jessica Parker.
01:00:06.000 And I said this in New York.
01:00:09.000 And in New York, Sarah Jessica Parker is worshipped like a god.
01:00:14.000 And that whole crowd hissed and booed and did everything but throw excrement at me.
01:00:22.000 Wow.
01:00:23.000 But then later in line, half of them came up and whispered, that was really fun.
01:00:32.000 Yeah, that's one of the things about dark comedy clubs.
01:00:35.000 You want them dark.
01:00:36.000 You don't want everyone illuminated.
01:00:39.000 The crowd is one of the real issues with doing a comedy special, especially the old way they used to do them.
01:00:46.000 They used to like to light up the audience, which completely changes the dynamic of the room.
01:00:51.000 It changes what you'll laugh and what you won't laugh at.
01:00:55.000 A scene like the Sarah Jessica Parker joke.
01:00:58.000 It's a perfect example.
01:00:59.000 You don't want to be caught dead being the one person that throws their head back and howls at that.
01:01:05.000 You know, cheap shots.
01:01:07.000 Just stay away from them.
01:01:08.000 But that's another...
01:01:09.000 I'll ask you.
01:01:10.000 Ask you a question.
01:01:11.000 You know, with so many colleges becoming these kind of strident, safe places that demand their own aesthetic, what is it like doing comedy?
01:01:21.000 Well, it hasn't changed that much.
01:01:25.000 People have gotten a little bit more sensitive because they're aware that other people are more sensitive.
01:01:32.000 The audiences that come to nightclubs, which is primarily where I perform, If I do a theater, those people are there to see me.
01:01:41.000 So they're usually pretty loose, pretty fun.
01:01:45.000 But if you're in a nightclub, they're there to see, especially the Comedy Store.
01:01:49.000 One of the good things about the Comedy Store is there's literally two dozen people in the lineup.
01:01:53.000 They're not necessarily just here to see you.
01:01:55.000 They're there to see Anthony Jeselnik and Chris D'Elia and all these other comedians that are also there as well.
01:02:01.000 So you get a much broader comedy audience.
01:02:06.000 But they're nightclub audiences.
01:02:08.000 They have a few drinks in them.
01:02:10.000 Maybe they smoked a little pot before they got there.
01:02:12.000 Those people are there to have a good time.
01:02:14.000 Colleges are a nightmare now.
01:02:17.000 It's a nightmare.
01:02:18.000 Because it's recreational outrage.
01:02:21.000 It'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.
01:02:30.000 And they are very quick to...
01:02:34.000 They want to be outraged.
01:02:35.000 They want to porn out their moral superiority.
01:02:38.000 They want a virtue signaling every opportunity.
01:02:40.000 They want to shut down anything they think is, air quotes, problematic.
01:02:45.000 They don't want things to go in a bad way.
01:02:46.000 And they think for some reason that comedy should be uplifting and it should only punch up.
01:02:51.000 I had this conversation once with a professor who wrote a book on comedy.
01:02:55.000 And he said, all great comedy punches up.
01:02:58.000 And I said, that's bullshit.
01:03:00.000 I 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?
01:03:10.000 And he goes in, you know, and Kinison's like, you just want to grab the guy?
01:03:13.000 Hey, why don't you help him?
01:03:15.000 You're right fucking there.
01:03:16.000 Or send someone like me.
01:03:18.000 He goes, send someone like me.
01:03:19.000 He'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!
01:03:28.000 He goes, come here!
01:03:29.000 You see that?
01:03:30.000 That's sand!
01:03:31.000 We got sand in America too!
01:03:33.000 We just don't live in it, asshole!
01:03:36.000 He goes in one of the greatest bits of all time.
01:03:39.000 It's literally about starving babies in Africa.
01:03:44.000 It's one of the greatest bits of all time.
01:03:46.000 And he didn't have anything to say.
01:03:48.000 He didn't know where to go with it.
01:03:49.000 Don't say comedy is only about punching up.
01:03:53.000 That's crazy talk.
01:03:54.000 What you're doing is...
01:03:56.000 There's this moral thing that they're trying to achieve that literally is completely...
01:04:04.000 Independent of humor.
01:04:06.000 It's not what's funny.
01:04:08.000 They want it to be a multi-purpose tool.
01:04:14.000 They 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.
01:04:27.000 Well, that's not what comedy is.
01:04:29.000 What comedy is is funny.
01:04:30.000 Those things are wonderful if you want to do a spoken word show or poetry or writing or a one-person play.
01:04:39.000 Those are great.
01:04:41.000 But that's not funny.
01:04:43.000 Comedy is funny, so it's either funny or it's not funny, and some things are funny that are fucked up.
01:04:51.000 You 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...
01:05:05.000 Went 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?
01:05:12.000 And he's rocking back and forth.
01:05:14.000 Feels like some guy's got his dick in my ass!
01:05:16.000 You mean life keeps fucking you in the ass even after you're dead?
01:05:19.000 It never ends!
01:05:21.000 It never ends!
01:05:22.000 Oh!
01:05:23.000 Oh!
01:05:23.000 He would close on it because he couldn't follow it.
01:05:27.000 It was such a powerful bit.
01:05:28.000 It was about a dead guy getting fucked in the ass.
01:05:30.000 There is no further down that you could punch.
01:05:34.000 Other than starving babies in Africa.
01:05:37.000 You 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?
01:05:49.000 No.
01:05:49.000 Oh, you know, she did it on television.
01:05:51.000 I must have seen it on cable when I was like 19 years old.
01:05:55.000 But she talks in Valley speak.
01:05:58.000 Nobody's seen this Whoopi person before.
01:06:00.000 She's brand new.
01:06:01.000 Nobody's ever seen her on television.
01:06:02.000 She's got this funny name.
01:06:04.000 And 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.
01:06:17.000 The whole front end, you're just roaring with laughter.
01:06:20.000 And 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.
01:06:40.000 And everything's okay.
01:06:41.000 And now I'm back on the beach and I'm just doing fine.
01:06:45.000 And why don't you come on down and see me here on the beach?
01:06:47.000 It's great down here.
01:06:48.000 It's great.
01:06:50.000 Holy shit.
01:06:51.000 It's a fantastic piece.
01:06:54.000 She did it on television?
01:06:55.000 She did it on TV. And it started so light, like an Ira Levin novel.
01:07:01.000 And then it went to such a dark, horrible place.
01:07:04.000 And then it came up with just this kind of token, everything is okay ending.
01:07:11.000 I'm going to be alright.
01:07:13.000 Don't worry.
01:07:14.000 This is just something that happened.
01:07:19.000 That it just leaves you shaking.
01:07:22.000 And that's the kind of comedy that I love.
01:07:25.000 Yeah.
01:07:25.000 It goes to that dark or that sentimental place and it breaks your heart.
01:07:31.000 And then it kind of comes out of it a little bit.
01:07:35.000 But...
01:07:35.000 Ira Levin did that so well.
01:07:38.000 Nora Ephron, in her books, she was so good at doing that.
01:07:42.000 Heartburn.
01:07:44.000 Heartburn is fantastically funny, but by the end, you're just weeping.
01:07:48.000 The book is so sad.
01:07:49.000 But 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...
01:07:59.000 If 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.
01:08:07.000 And these are the moments that we're going to talk about.
01:08:09.000 If 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.
01:08:18.000 These are the impactful things.
01:08:21.000 Saying 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...
01:08:29.000 And you're beating yourself up viciously.
01:08:31.000 Like, why did I say that?
01:08:32.000 I'm such a jerk.
01:08:33.000 I didn't need to say that.
01:08:35.000 That was just cruel and thoughtless.
01:08:38.000 But if you said that exact same joke and it killed...
01:08:43.000 I'd still kind of beat myself up a little bit.
01:08:47.000 Right, you'd be like, who are these awful people that are laughing at this unfortunate girl?
01:08:52.000 Do you think that the reason why people love the transformation thing is because it almost like everyone feels like they have a chance?
01:09:00.000 Instead of like...
01:09:01.000 That's exactly what it is.
01:09:02.000 Yeah.
01:09:03.000 That you can be...
01:09:04.000 You don't have to be born with it.
01:09:06.000 Right.
01:09:06.000 That you have a chance of attaining it.
01:09:09.000 Yeah.
01:09:11.000 Yeah, the unfairness.
01:09:14.000 That is just the reality of life.
01:09:17.000 You know, one of the things that Jordan talks about all the time is equality of outcome.
01:09:21.000 That this idea of equality of outcome is, it's absurd.
01:09:27.000 It's never going to happen.
01:09:28.000 It's not what life is.
01:09:30.000 Life is not about equality of outcome.
01:09:32.000 It doesn't happen that way because not everyone's willing to put the same effort in and not everyone's given the same tools at birth.
01:09:39.000 And, you know, you've got to be a little careful, too.
01:09:42.000 You fall into that Jake Gatsby trap where you get exactly what you wanted when you were 4 or 14 years old.
01:09:49.000 And you realize, oh, this is not an adult's dream.
01:09:53.000 This is a dream of a child.
01:09:55.000 It's one of the things that is interesting about your current situation and one of the things that I've read about your take on it.
01:10:03.000 I don't know how much you want to go into this, but you got ripped off.
01:10:08.000 I got embezzled, which is a word I can now spell.
01:10:14.000 Was it someone you trusted?
01:10:15.000 It was.
01:10:16.000 It was the accountant for the agency that represented my work.
01:10:20.000 And this is a man I worked with for almost 20, 21 years.
01:10:26.000 And one of my favorite people in my professional life.
01:10:29.000 Fuck.
01:10:30.000 Oh.
01:10:33.000 What I thought was interesting was your take on it.
01:10:35.000 I mean, the whole thing's horrific and everyone's worst nightmare, you know, who trust people with their money.
01:10:42.000 But 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.
01:10:54.000 And also that I have been really poor in my life.
01:10:59.000 And it was never my goal to be really rich.
01:11:01.000 It was never my goal to have money.
01:11:03.000 It was my goal to be a writer.
01:11:04.000 It was my goal to be able to write books for a living.
01:11:08.000 And I can still do that.
01:11:10.000 You know, I've been poor.
01:11:12.000 Poor is not something I'm afraid of.
01:11:16.000 As long as I can write books, I'll be a happy person.
01:11:19.000 Yeah, to be rich and to not be creative.
01:11:22.000 You've met those people.
01:11:25.000 You go to those parties, those rich people parties, and all they have to talk about is their servants.
01:11:31.000 It's like, I hate my maid.
01:11:33.000 I hate the gardener.
01:11:34.000 We have this new person to do the this, and they're doing a lousy job.
01:11:39.000 And all they have to talk about in their lives is their household help.
01:11:42.000 I hate those parties.
01:11:44.000 Or objects.
01:11:45.000 Or objects, yeah.
01:11:47.000 There was a guy that used to live down the street from me.
01:11:48.000 I used to call him Bling Bling.
01:11:50.000 Because every conversation that I would have with him, he would eventually be like, yeah, look at this new car I got.
01:11:55.000 Or, where'd you get that watch?
01:11:57.000 Or, you know, what kind of car are you driving?
01:12:00.000 Like, what are you doing to the house?
01:12:01.000 You got a new sink?
01:12:02.000 You know, it's got a new TV? Which size did you get?
01:12:05.000 It was always objects.
01:12:06.000 It was always things.
01:12:08.000 You know, he was just this strange guy that was just working for things.
01:12:13.000 Yeah, the same things that everybody else is working for and just a different combination of things.
01:12:19.000 Yeah, 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.
01:12:30.000 You got to save up a lot of money to get a Bentley.
01:12:33.000 You know how much those cost?
01:12:34.000 Which model is that?
01:12:35.000 Is that the one with the, ooh, look, you got the perforated leather seats.
01:12:39.000 That's extra expensive.
01:12:40.000 And then this becomes the main goal.
01:12:43.000 Yeah.
01:12:44.000 But so many people fall into that bizarre trap.
01:12:47.000 It's such a strange, common trap.
01:12:50.000 Well, you know, but it's the only trap that we kind of have.
01:12:53.000 We're not really trained to, again, go to that place of wanting to, you know, learn something, to wanting to create something.
01:13:04.000 To apprentice yourself to somebody who creates the thing that you dream of creating.
01:13:10.000 It'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.
01:13:19.000 You go into their showroom and they will treat you so nice and you are always welcome there.
01:13:24.000 Yeah.
01:13:25.000 And you have a way of kind of, you know, signaling that you've accomplished something in a very public way.
01:13:31.000 Yeah.
01:13:32.000 It'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.
01:13:47.000 Yeah.
01:13:47.000 I 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.
01:14:00.000 I 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?
01:14:06.000 No, that's nothing.
01:14:06.000 That'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...
01:14:19.000 When you realize that you've kind of dictated the semantics of the culture for a period, that feels like power.
01:14:28.000 That's glorious.
01:14:33.000 When you found out that this guy ripped you off, were you shocked?
01:14:38.000 Did you have suspicions before this?
01:14:40.000 I had known almost a year before.
01:14:43.000 So you had an idea for a year and then it was confirmed?
01:14:48.000 It was finally.
01:14:49.000 What happened?
01:14:51.000 You 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,
01:15:19.000 I told my agent I didn't want to do any more deals until we had this money thing resolved.
01:15:25.000 And at that point, the accountant made a videotaped confession and has since pled guilty.
01:15:33.000 And I believe his sentencing is going to be in November.
01:15:36.000 But according to the district attorney, they can't seem to find any of the money.
01:15:42.000 So the money seems to be gone.
01:15:46.000 How much do you steal?
01:15:47.000 You know, it's kind of up in the air.
01:15:50.000 Initially they said it was 3.5 million and now they're saying it could be as much as 25 million.
01:15:56.000 And this is from not just me, this is from Mario Puzo's estate, the man that wrote The Godfather.
01:16:02.000 This is from a lot of different estates.
01:16:04.000 The agency handled the estate of Lillian Hellman and Jacqueline Suzanne.
01:16:09.000 And a lot of very big, big writers.
01:16:12.000 Edward Gorey, he wrote those creepy, wonderful cartoon books.
01:16:16.000 A lot of different writers, a lot of different estates lost money.
01:16:20.000 So was this guy doing this from the jump, or just somewhere along the line he lost his mind?
01:16:26.000 Nobody really knows.
01:16:27.000 Yeah.
01:16:28.000 Wow.
01:16:30.000 Jamie, can you hit that pause button while I go out and take a leak?
01:16:33.000 Just go out and take a leak.
01:16:35.000 Oh, thank God.
01:16:36.000 Don't worry about it, man.
01:16:38.000 I know, it's rough.
01:16:40.000 Get used to it, though.
01:16:41.000 Are we anywhere close to 3.30?
01:16:44.000 No, it's 2.30, but we can end anytime you'd like.
01:16:47.000 No, 3.30 is kind of my drop dead.
01:16:50.000 Okay.
01:16:50.000 But I'll be right back.
01:16:52.000 Okay.
01:16:54.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson's here, ladies and gentlemen.
01:16:56.000 He's waiting.
01:16:57.000 He got here way early, though, right?
01:16:59.000 That was planned.
01:17:00.000 He's got some work to do before.
01:17:01.000 Oh, okay.
01:17:02.000 He's probably in the tank right now.
01:17:03.000 I hope.
01:17:05.000 This dude's intense, right?
01:17:07.000 I can't believe I fucked up that original story.
01:17:09.000 I was trying to look to see if it was someone else.
01:17:11.000 I thought it was.
01:17:11.000 Man, I really thought it was attributed to him.
01:17:15.000 But that's me.
01:17:16.000 My fucked up brain.
01:17:18.000 He's intense, though.
01:17:20.000 Kind of creeps me out with his intensity a little bit.
01:17:23.000 When you think about some of the shit that he's written, like Guts.
01:17:26.000 Yeah.
01:17:26.000 You know?
01:17:27.000 Choke.
01:17:28.000 Yeah.
01:17:28.000 A couple other ones.
01:17:29.000 What was the one where someone turned into a werewolf on an airplane?
01:17:36.000 I think that was from his collection of horror stories.
01:17:41.000 The one with the alien on the cover?
01:17:46.000 The process though, it's like- Survivor.
01:17:49.000 Survivor.
01:17:50.000 He's so perfectly designed for being a writer.
01:17:57.000 One of the more fascinating things about this podcast is getting to pick the brain of someone like him.
01:18:02.000 When would you ever have two plus hours to sit down with a guy like that and just find out how he thinks about shit?
01:18:16.000 He's never going to let you in like that.
01:18:19.000 This 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.
01:18:35.000 Your 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...
01:18:48.000 There's nothing else going on.
01:18:50.000 The 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.
01:19:01.000 That's gotten this deep into the game.
01:19:05.000 That's what I was going to say.
01:19:07.000 The depth.
01:19:07.000 The depth of everything.
01:19:09.000 His background in journalism is probably where that's coming from.
01:19:13.000 His appreciation for darkness, too.
01:19:15.000 Like, his appreciation for that story of the little girl jerking the grandpa off.
01:19:20.000 Fuck, dude.
01:19:23.000 Oh, he's back.
01:19:24.000 I've got to stop talking shit about him.
01:19:26.000 Feel better?
01:19:28.000 Something about this podcast makes people pee.
01:19:31.000 Drinking all this coffee.
01:19:33.000 That's it, too.
01:19:34.000 I've developed a superhuman bladder.
01:19:36.000 Occasionally, though, I have to get up.
01:19:39.000 Occasionally.
01:19:41.000 So, back to this dude ripping you off.
01:19:44.000 This guy who's your friend.
01:19:46.000 So, they don't know where the fuck the money is?
01:19:50.000 No, they don't.
01:19:51.000 And he's not talking.
01:19:52.000 You know...
01:19:54.000 I guess he hasn't really talked about where the money has gone.
01:19:56.000 At first they thought there was some dummy corporations and they could recover the money.
01:20:01.000 So we were all looking for a big payday.
01:20:04.000 But now the DA says they cannot find the money.
01:20:08.000 And he doesn't want to talk?
01:20:10.000 Or he's saying the money is spent.
01:20:12.000 I'm not sure.
01:20:13.000 Don't you want to torture him?
01:20:14.000 No, I don't.
01:20:16.000 Don't you want someone to torture him?
01:20:18.000 No, but it's so sweet.
01:20:20.000 It is so sweet because I've had readers offer to torture him to kill him.
01:20:27.000 And they say they'll do it free of charge.
01:20:29.000 So apparently these are people who do it for a living.
01:20:32.000 So, damn.
01:20:34.000 I need to make a list.
01:20:36.000 Okay.
01:20:37.000 If I'm going to get some free killings, it's going to have to be some people I really don't like.
01:20:41.000 But you want the money first.
01:20:42.000 You don't want to just kill somebody.
01:20:44.000 You want to make sure you get that money first.
01:20:45.000 Otherwise, it's sitting in coffee cans buried in the Nevada desert.
01:20:48.000 You know, I really...
01:20:49.000 Between you and me, I really don't care.
01:20:52.000 Really?
01:20:53.000 No.
01:20:54.000 You know, I really am seriously not somebody.
01:20:56.000 It would have given me a little more wiggle room.
01:20:59.000 I wouldn't be writing so frantically on the next book.
01:21:02.000 I could maybe take a little time off and, I don't know, relax.
01:21:08.000 But, you know, this is what I do.
01:21:10.000 And so, what the hell?
01:21:12.000 Yeah, you have your health.
01:21:13.000 You have...
01:21:14.000 A million ideas.
01:21:16.000 Yeah.
01:21:16.000 Great ideas.
01:21:17.000 A great profession that you love.
01:21:19.000 You're involved in it right now, currently.
01:21:21.000 You're in the process.
01:21:22.000 All these projects.
01:21:24.000 And so, you know, I haven't really lost any of the things that I really love.
01:21:28.000 You know, my dad is dead.
01:21:29.000 My mother is dead.
01:21:30.000 And I think after your parents are dead...
01:21:32.000 There's not a lot that can hurt you that much, except, you know, of course, the death of a child.
01:21:38.000 And so, you know, you're kind of bulletproof after those things.
01:21:45.000 Well, the real issue that happens with successful people is they lose their hunger, right?
01:21:50.000 They lose that.
01:21:51.000 It's a death sentence for comedians.
01:21:54.000 One 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.
01:22:01.000 And 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.
01:22:12.000 Everything is just like performing to people that adore you.
01:22:16.000 Another 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.
01:22:29.000 But the more successful you become, the more your time is really scheduled.
01:22:34.000 And you just don't have those, I'm really bored times when you tend to come up with fantastic ideas.
01:22:41.000 And so in a way, being somewhat poor again gives me those really slack times when the ideas occur.
01:22:50.000 That makes a lot of sense.
01:22:53.000 Yeah.
01:22:54.000 Again, to bring it back to comedians, comedians, they get movie careers.
01:22:58.000 That's another death sentence for their comedy.
01:23:01.000 They start doing movies.
01:23:02.000 They're on sets all day.
01:23:03.000 They're constantly working.
01:23:04.000 And then you don't have enough time to concentrate on your stand-up, and you have zero fuck-around time.
01:23:10.000 Because you're just doing things all day.
01:23:13.000 You lose that.
01:23:14.000 This is weird, name-droppy Brad Pitt advice.
01:23:18.000 Brad Pitt told me, Brad Pitt said that failure is actually one of the best things that can happen.
01:23:28.000 Because 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.
01:23:41.000 That ongoing success becomes kind of a mediocrity.
01:23:47.000 You really need to fail to fall out of the limelight long enough to produce something really strong again.
01:23:54.000 Totally makes sense.
01:23:55.000 One of the best things that can happen to a comedian is bombing.
01:23:59.000 When you bomb, that feeling is so bad.
01:24:03.000 I always describe it as like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother.
01:24:07.000 But 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.
01:24:14.000 So it's probably worse than that.
01:24:15.000 But that feeling, whatever it is, reignites your appreciation for people's attention span, your appreciation for...
01:24:25.000 Tightening up your delivery, your concepts, figuring out a better way to get them through.
01:24:31.000 You never want to experience that again.
01:24:32.000 And some of the greatest moments in my own personal journey of stand-up have come from eating shit.
01:24:40.000 That's where they come from.
01:24:42.000 It's great to do well.
01:24:44.000 Wonderful.
01:24:44.000 It feels great.
01:24:45.000 But those eating shit ones, those are the ones that get you to the notebook again.
01:24:49.000 Those 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.
01:25:03.000 When 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.
01:25:17.000 I mean, I wouldn't wish it on you, but in a way, do you feel like it's kind of a gift?
01:25:22.000 In a way, you have to accept, ultimately, that everything is a gift.
01:25:27.000 Because it's always about what they call cognitive reframing.
01:25:33.000 Cognitive reframing.
01:25:34.000 Whatever happens, you reframe it in such a way that you recognize the value of it.
01:25:40.000 And 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.
01:26:00.000 And I was just going to be mortified to have my dad hitting on Winona Ryder.
01:26:04.000 And he'd always talk about how pretty she was and any chance I can meet her.
01:26:09.000 And 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.
01:26:27.000 And that's cognitive reframing.
01:26:31.000 And you have to do it all the time.
01:26:33.000 That's glass half full right there.
01:26:38.000 I love my father, but, you know, none of our relationships are completely perfect all the time.
01:26:46.000 Right.
01:26:47.000 There's no way around it.
01:26:48.000 Yeah.
01:26:49.000 Well, that's, again, the great thing about Unchained writing.
01:26:55.000 Is that you can express those ideas.
01:26:58.000 And 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.
01:27:09.000 That would want you to limit your language.
01:27:13.000 I just don't...
01:27:15.000 It just doesn't compute.
01:27:18.000 Yeah, and in the platonic world, yeah, everybody should kind of get it.
01:27:22.000 But unless you're rustling feathers, even within workshop, you're not going far enough.
01:27:28.000 You know, I loved writing that line in Fight Club.
01:27:32.000 Where Tyler and Marla have sex for the first time.
01:27:35.000 And the most romantic thing that Marla can say is, I want to have your baby.
01:27:39.000 So what is the inverse?
01:27:41.000 So of course Marla turns to him and she says, I hope I got pregnant because I really want to have your abortion.
01:27:48.000 And that's the line that the movie studio went around and around.
01:27:53.000 And even Brad Pitt said, you know, my mom's going to see this movie.
01:27:56.000 I don't want her to see this line.
01:28:00.000 And they shot that scene with so many different substitute lines.
01:28:04.000 And then finally Fincher wrote the line.
01:28:06.000 And Helen Bonham Carter says, I haven't been fucked like that since grade school.
01:28:11.000 And at that point, 20th Century Fox said, can we switch it back to the abortion line?
01:28:21.000 Unless you're always kind of pushing to kind of, you know, until you get some pushback, you don't feel like you're pushing hard enough.
01:28:31.000 And so pushback is not a bad thing.
01:28:34.000 It's just kind of a, it's proof that you're doing your job.
01:28:37.000 There's a trend that's happening now though.
01:28:40.000 This pushback is coming far quicker than it ever has before.
01:28:45.000 There's a trend now to limit language and limit creativity and just limit subject matter.
01:28:52.000 Trigger warnings and stop people from experiencing things that might be disturbing.
01:29:02.000 And I can see both sides of that.
01:29:04.000 Because on one hand, we've got a generation that has been exposed to so much sensationalistic stuff in order to attain their attention.
01:29:12.000 They've really been overloaded with the most extreme versions of everything in order to get their ticket money or whatever.
01:29:21.000 They've really been pounded by so much stimuli.
01:29:24.000 I can see them kind of really pulling back and wanting to be monastic for the rest of their lives.
01:29:29.000 And 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.
01:29:42.000 You 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.
01:29:53.000 So I kind of see benefit on both sides.
01:29:57.000 And 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.
01:30:12.000 So I don't think it's a totally bad thing.
01:30:15.000 That's interesting, the idea that them dominating their teachers is in some way good.
01:30:22.000 Well, it certainly gives you confidence and lets you understand that you can affect change, even if it's meaningless change.
01:30:32.000 Did you pay attention to what happened at Evergreen State in Washington?
01:30:37.000 Yeah.
01:30:37.000 Did you see when there's a...
01:30:39.000 For people who don't know the story, it's the Brett Weinstein story where...
01:30:44.000 The students decided that there was going to be a day of absence.
01:30:47.000 Traditionally, 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.
01:30:55.000 But then they had ramped it up and decided white people are going to have to stay home now.
01:30:59.000 And he was like, that's racist.
01:31:01.000 And the whole thing went crazy and went haywire and the school's basically falling apart.
01:31:07.000 But there was a scene that was filmed where the president of the college was in this auditorium, and he was addressing these children.
01:31:20.000 And they told him to stop moving his hands because it was threatening.
01:31:26.000 And so he put his hands down, he put them behind his back, and they all started laughing.
01:31:32.000 And I was like, wow, this dumb fuck.
01:31:35.000 Like, this guy's running this university.
01:31:37.000 And he let them tell him not to move his hands, gesturing as he's speaking.
01:31:43.000 He's like one of the most non-threatening beta people on the planet.
01:31:47.000 And this guy is just giving...
01:31:49.000 He just wants to keep his job and try to silence this mob, this angry horde of, you know, fucking kids.
01:31:56.000 They're kids.
01:31:57.000 But when he listens...
01:32:00.000 And puts his hands down.
01:32:01.000 I've probably watched it 10 times.
01:32:03.000 They all start laughing.
01:32:04.000 You know, and just, I think it just demonstrates how desperately they want a stronger leader.
01:32:11.000 They 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.
01:32:20.000 They just don't want to become another cog in that same kind of You know, wheel.
01:32:25.000 They want to learn from somebody they respect and whose attainments they respect, whose achievements they respect.
01:32:33.000 Right, that's probably part of the issue at universities, right?
01:32:36.000 Is that these professors are so terrified of the reactions of these students, which is...
01:32:42.000 Not the place you're supposed to be with a mentor-student relationship.
01:32:47.000 It's not supposed to be that way.
01:32:49.000 It's not supposed to be that the mentor desperately needs the student.
01:32:53.000 You know, you see that sometimes in private schools with rich kids.
01:32:56.000 They treat their teachers like shit, and the teachers have to bite their tongue.
01:33:00.000 Because they have to.
01:33:01.000 You know, this is not...
01:33:03.000 It'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.
01:33:12.000 It's not that dynamic at all.
01:33:14.000 It'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.
01:33:27.000 And that's what we're seeing on campuses now, you know.
01:33:30.000 Professors calling for censorship and to stop freedom of expression.
01:33:38.000 You know, when I was in college, my favorite professor, Roy Halberson, he was the John Houseman of the journalism school.
01:33:46.000 He was this old gray eminence and nothing made him happy.
01:33:50.000 You could never please this John Houseman paper chase guy.
01:33:55.000 Nothing was good enough and nothing would make him smile.
01:34:00.000 And I worked my ass off to make him happy.
01:34:03.000 And I finally got an A in one of his courses.
01:34:06.000 But he is about the only professor I remember out of my entire four years.
01:34:11.000 It was this man that just didn't take shit from anybody.
01:34:16.000 Yeah.
01:34:18.000 The dynamic of the kid being in control, it's not good for the kid either.
01:34:24.000 It's not good for anyone.
01:34:25.000 When they get out of school, they're going to be baffled.
01:34:28.000 They're going to look for that power in other places, that power that they enjoyed in the universities.
01:34:33.000 And you're seeing that spill off.
01:34:36.000 You're seeing that spill out into social media and different forms of activism with people trying to re-achieve that power that they had.
01:34:45.000 And sort of forcing people to their will.
01:34:47.000 And 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.
01:35:01.000 So this is in a way a laboratory.
01:35:05.000 Where leaders are taking form.
01:35:07.000 And 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.
01:35:25.000 What's causing all this?
01:35:26.000 Have you thought about that?
01:35:27.000 Like, why is this ramping up?
01:35:30.000 Because it seems like it is.
01:35:39.000 You 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.
01:36:01.000 And they're seeing their parents get everything that they want and still not be happy.
01:36:06.000 And so you see a generation that's kind of floundering, thinking, you know, they don't know what's going to make them happy.
01:36:13.000 I don't know what's going to make me happy.
01:36:16.000 And so people are really distrustful of advertisements that tell them what's going to make them happy.
01:36:21.000 And so, you know, I think it's just a big struggle, a big everyone blind in the dark right now.
01:36:31.000 So just a reaction to what they see that's ineffective, what they see that's going wrong.
01:36:40.000 So they're choosing to embrace a different group of values.
01:36:45.000 Right.
01:36:46.000 Well, but they're not even sure even that new group of values kind of dictated to them.
01:36:51.000 With a lot of pre-existing language.
01:36:53.000 And so I think ultimately that's not going to be very fulfilling either.
01:36:58.000 It's got to be something that emerges from a kind of limnoid laboratory like Burning Man.
01:37:05.000 These kind of fringe things that are all...
01:37:09.000 And as Victor Turner would say, they're all kind of experiments in how to be.
01:37:17.000 That's what Fight Club was.
01:37:19.000 It just is this kind of experiment in how interaction could be structured in a different way.
01:37:24.000 And these things take place in these kind of playful environments like Burning Man, like Cacophony Society used to do.
01:37:34.000 And they're fun.
01:37:35.000 And the ones that are the most fun will be the ones that are perpetuated.
01:37:40.000 Burning Man is fun and that is why Burning Man has existed for 30 years.
01:37:46.000 And Occupy was not fun and that's why we had one Occupy.
01:37:51.000 And I know people are going to be pissed off about that.
01:37:54.000 But no, every year Burning Man is bigger and it's funner and more people go there.
01:37:59.000 And every year we don't have another Occupy.
01:38:02.000 Well, 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.
01:38:15.000 Whereas what Burning Man is is a complete removal of these people from society.
01:38:20.000 I mean, they decided to meet in one of the most hostile climates in the world.
01:38:23.000 And 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.
01:38:36.000 And you're not against something.
01:38:38.000 You're not protesting something.
01:38:39.000 You're there to create something.
01:38:41.000 Celebrate, contribute something.
01:38:44.000 Yeah.
01:38:45.000 And the protests also at Occupy, a lot of them were misinformed and they didn't really understand the process they were protesting against.
01:38:52.000 There's a very funny, famous video with Peter Schiff, who's been on this podcast before, is a financial wizard, who...
01:39:02.000 We'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
01:39:32.000 many 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.
01:39:48.000 They're fighting against this idea of this evil tyranny that's controlling their fate.
01:39:56.000 Well, they really don't understand it, though.
01:39:59.000 That's what Occupy was, in my opinion.
01:40:02.000 It's like they knew something was wrong.
01:40:04.000 It was almost to me like white blood cells surrounding an infection.
01:40:08.000 Like, there's something fucked up here.
01:40:10.000 Let's just surround this thing and figure out.
01:40:13.000 And then there's swelling and pus.
01:40:14.000 And that's really what it was.
01:40:16.000 It's like there's a real recognition that there's a gigantic problem with the financial institutions.
01:40:21.000 The 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.
01:40:36.000 There was a recognition that there was something wrong, but not a deep understanding of what the system was that they were actually protesting.
01:40:44.000 There was too much of that.
01:40:46.000 Burning Man doesn't have any of that.
01:40:48.000 Burning Man is, obviously, society's fucked.
01:40:51.000 There'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.
01:41:07.000 It's still fucked.
01:41:08.000 And 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.
01:41:22.000 Well, 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.
01:41:34.000 They're killed.
01:41:35.000 People who just don't fit in, they die.
01:41:38.000 Or 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.
01:41:57.000 So they are in a way an event that kind of keeps the status quo in place.
01:42:02.000 But 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.
01:42:20.000 Yeah, it's a fascinating thing for me because I feel it's trickled off into regular life in a lot of ways now.
01:42:28.000 I know way more people that are microdosing psilocybin on a daily basis.
01:42:33.000 People 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.
01:42:50.000 Actively seek these different states of consciousness.
01:42:52.000 It's way more common.
01:42:54.000 It's way more discussed.
01:42:55.000 And that's kind of the way it's supposed to be, is that these things start In the experiments.
01:43:01.000 And the ones that are most successful become institutions.
01:43:05.000 And the new ones start.
01:43:08.000 But we need, you know, these are the laboratories.
01:43:11.000 Portland kind of used to be that way.
01:43:13.000 Portland was such a laboratory incubator city.
01:43:16.000 But the cost of living is killing that very quickly.
01:43:19.000 It's become really trendy.
01:43:21.000 It's a hip place to live.
01:43:26.000 It's a hip, and it's identified with hip, you know, in a way you kind of get your hip card just by living there.
01:43:33.000 You don't have to do anything anymore.
01:43:34.000 Yeah.
01:43:35.000 It's like New York City used to be, like, you were tough.
01:43:37.000 Hey, I'm from New York.
01:43:38.000 You know, I can handle it.
01:43:40.000 Yeah.
01:43:40.000 Yeah.
01:43:41.000 I'm hip.
01:43:42.000 I'm from Portland.
01:43:46.000 Nope.
01:43:49.000 Is that where you live?
01:43:50.000 I live outside of Portland.
01:43:52.000 I live up in the Columbia Gorge.
01:43:54.000 It's gorgeous up there, man.
01:43:56.000 Yeah.
01:43:56.000 The fucking green.
01:43:57.000 You guys have a neon glowing, it rains all the time green in Oregon that we don't experience here for more than a month a year.
01:44:05.000 Yeah, we've got forest fires right now.
01:44:07.000 Oh, where you are?
01:44:09.000 Not so much.
01:44:10.000 This year they're not so close, but the air is still much worse than it is here.
01:44:15.000 Yeah.
01:44:16.000 Fucking forest fires are everywhere right now.
01:44:17.000 I've been evacuated a couple times.
01:44:19.000 It's pretty terrifying stuff.
01:44:21.000 Do you live in Georgia?
01:44:22.000 No, I live here.
01:44:23.000 Oh, okay.
01:44:24.000 Okay.
01:44:24.000 Georgia.
01:44:25.000 Why'd you say Georgia?
01:44:26.000 I thought somebody told me.
01:44:26.000 Why'd you whisper it like no one's listening?
01:44:32.000 Yeah, don't tell anybody.
01:44:33.000 Well, 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.
01:44:39.000 Most of the world hates Jim Goad.
01:44:42.000 Why do they hate Jim Goad?
01:44:44.000 Because he writes these very transgressive, in-your-face pieces.
01:44:48.000 But when he writes about his brother, he kills me.
01:44:51.000 It is some of the most touching stuff I've ever read in my life about his brother's death.
01:44:58.000 So, 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.
01:45:10.000 How are you a bad person?
01:45:13.000 Oh, let's not even go down that road.
01:45:15.000 I already told on Cheryl Strayed, killing that bird.
01:45:18.000 Come on, do I got to do more?
01:45:19.000 That's not being a bad person.
01:45:21.000 That's a person who's appreciative of a dark moment.
01:45:24.000 That doesn't make you a bad person.
01:45:28.000 No, I'm a bad person.
01:45:30.000 Are you?
01:45:30.000 Yeah.
01:45:30.000 Really?
01:45:31.000 I am.
01:45:32.000 Give me an example.
01:45:34.000 You know, and this is awkward, but this is another one of those cognitive problems.
01:45:41.000 One of the reframing honesty things is I took care of my mother while she was dying of lung cancer.
01:45:48.000 And 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.
01:46:03.000 I will never have to worry about whether mom is offended by my work.
01:46:07.000 I will never have to worry about mom falling down the stairs and breaking her leg.
01:46:12.000 That this enormous concern in my life will be resolved.
01:46:18.000 And it's going to be at the cost of losing someone I love, you know, so much.
01:46:24.000 But the benefit is that this huge burden of responsibility is going to be lifted.
01:46:31.000 And so there was this kind of secret glee, thinking, you know, I'm going to have some freedom here that I never imagined.
01:46:40.000 Yeah, Nora Ephron touches on that in her work when she talks about her mother's death.
01:46:45.000 And I think it's just an honest thing, but it's not a thing that makes you look very good.
01:46:53.000 I don't think that makes you a bad person.
01:46:56.000 I think that makes you a person who's honest about thoughts that are very uncomfortable.
01:47:03.000 That 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.
01:47:15.000 It's just...
01:47:18.000 It's just a reality of the burden of someone who's really sick or really dying.
01:47:27.000 There's no getting around it.
01:47:29.000 I don't think it's bad.
01:47:30.000 That's not a good example.
01:47:31.000 I need an example why you're a bad person.
01:47:34.000 Maybe you're just really self-critical.
01:47:37.000 Aware of things that other people could take out of context of the totality of your life and just use it as an example.
01:47:45.000 Put it in quotes and use it as an example of you being a bad person.
01:47:49.000 You know, another thing is I'm really, really conflicted about the nature of my creativity.
01:47:57.000 This idea that in journalism school they call the theory seduce and betray.
01:48:02.000 That 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.
01:48:15.000 So you're basically going in there to charm them and then to hurt them.
01:48:23.000 And so much of my creative process is that way because, for example, the gut story.
01:48:33.000 The story in which the guy puts the carrot up his butt.
01:48:38.000 That was my best friend at the time in late 20s.
01:48:43.000 And he got fantastically drunk and he told me that carrot story.
01:48:47.000 And I honestly believe he had never told anybody the carrot story.
01:48:53.000 And 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.
01:49:05.000 And the first time I read that story, I hadn't seen him in maybe a couple years, this friend.
01:49:11.000 And I look across this big auditorium, and there he is.
01:49:15.000 And I'm telling his carrot story in front of hundreds and hundreds of people.
01:49:21.000 And the look on his face, he's just stricken.
01:49:26.000 And he hasn't talked to me since.
01:49:31.000 And this is why...
01:49:33.000 Even...
01:49:33.000 But did you use his name?
01:49:35.000 No!
01:49:36.000 Then fuck him!
01:49:37.000 No, but...
01:49:38.000 What's wrong with him?
01:49:39.000 People still feel betrayed.
01:49:41.000 Get over it.
01:49:42.000 You need to hang out with more comedians.
01:49:44.000 If he was a comic, you'd be laughing.
01:49:46.000 Well, you know, David Sedaris has told me, he said his family is very reluctant to share their lives with him anymore.
01:49:53.000 Because he's kind of made them involuntary public figures, and they have to deal with the fallout from these stories about them.
01:50:00.000 And really only his brother and his sister Amy have kind of been able to spin this in a good way.
01:50:06.000 But it alienates a lot of people.
01:50:09.000 Oh, for sure.
01:50:10.000 Well, especially if you use their actual name or people know the origin of the actual story.
01:50:15.000 Yeah.
01:50:15.000 Yeah.
01:50:16.000 But you're not a bad person.
01:50:18.000 Sorry.
01:50:19.000 Sorry to break it to you.
01:50:20.000 I think you're a bad person.
01:50:22.000 Those are the only examples.
01:50:27.000 You're not convinced?
01:50:28.000 No, no, I'm just not revealing the worst stuff.
01:50:30.000 Okay, of course.
01:50:33.000 Do you think that you have to have some sort of embracing of these dark thoughts to create the way you create?
01:50:42.000 I mean, you're creating these characters that go down some horrible roads.
01:50:49.000 Both mentally and in reality, in your work.
01:50:52.000 And it's amazing stuff, but to cultivate that, don't you think you have to be kind of in touch with those thoughts of your own?
01:50:59.000 Kind of in touch with this thing where you're watching your mom die and you are going to be relieved of a burden.
01:51:08.000 You don't want to tell anybody that you're kind of looking forward to that a little bit, even though you love your mom dearly.
01:51:15.000 That's a natural thing that people don't want to discuss, but absolutely exists.
01:51:22.000 It's the elephant in the room.
01:51:25.000 And that's kind of like how comedy works or anything where you're stating this unstated thing.
01:51:31.000 You're creating this enormous relief.
01:51:35.000 My classic example, when I teach, I ask my students, I say, so what do you call a black man that flies a plane?
01:51:46.000 A pilot, you fucking racist!
01:51:51.000 You're creating this tension.
01:51:53.000 They don't want you to say what they think you're going to say.
01:51:57.000 They don't want to hate you.
01:51:58.000 They like you.
01:52:00.000 And they don't want you to say something hateful and awful.
01:52:03.000 And then you turn it around and you put it on them.
01:52:08.000 And so, in a way, you know, I always think that's the soul of comedy is to create this tension that you relieve as quickly as possible.
01:52:17.000 And the relief occurs as laughter.
01:52:21.000 I 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.
01:52:33.000 Everybody'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.
01:52:49.000 But 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.
01:53:02.000 And out of nowhere, the guy goes, well, it's like this.
01:53:09.000 My daughter, she had a baby with a black man.
01:53:15.000 And we're both looking at him like, where is this going?
01:53:18.000 And then he goes, and I just think it's incredibly selfish to bring that kid into the world.
01:53:25.000 And this kid doesn't have an identity.
01:53:27.000 They're not black, and they're not white, and they're not going to have an identity.
01:53:32.000 They're not going to have a group to belong to.
01:53:36.000 My friend's jaws dropped.
01:53:38.000 I didn't know the guy.
01:53:39.000 I just met him that night.
01:53:40.000 And I looked at my other friend who was with me who didn't know any of these other people.
01:53:45.000 And everyone's like, what the fuck?
01:53:47.000 And then a couple of us get up and go to the bathroom.
01:53:51.000 And I turned to my friend Andrew and I said, let's get the fuck out of here.
01:53:54.000 And we just left.
01:53:54.000 And I texted my friend.
01:53:56.000 I go, too much racism.
01:53:56.000 How to go?
01:53:57.000 And we just left.
01:54:00.000 But it was so weird.
01:54:02.000 It's like this guy was holding into this and he's like, you know what?
01:54:05.000 I can trust these people with some racist shit.
01:54:07.000 I can trust them.
01:54:08.000 And it didn't work.
01:54:09.000 And he knew it didn't work.
01:54:11.000 He knew it went over like a lead balloon.
01:54:15.000 He knew it.
01:54:16.000 He could feel it.
01:54:17.000 Because everybody was like, what?
01:54:19.000 What?
01:54:19.000 Like, wait a minute.
01:54:20.000 Your 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.
01:54:28.000 Like, what the fuck?
01:54:30.000 I 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.
01:54:44.000 And 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.
01:54:55.000 It was weird, man.
01:54:57.000 It was weird also to see him recognize.
01:55:02.000 It's funny, you know, you throw out a story, I throw out a story.
01:55:06.000 I had a hired car from Philadelphia to New York once on tour.
01:55:11.000 And 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.
01:55:23.000 I bet you can't tell me why.
01:55:26.000 And I just looked and I said, because the bricks are laid in Flemish Bond.
01:55:32.000 I think that's probably it.
01:55:34.000 Where the bricks are offset in such a way that they bond in the center.
01:55:38.000 It's called Flemish Bond.
01:55:40.000 And the guy's so silent.
01:55:43.000 Nobody's ever answered the question.
01:55:46.000 And his father was a bricklayer, and he was so proud.
01:55:49.000 And he goes, you're right.
01:55:50.000 Nobody's ever said Blemish Bond.
01:55:54.000 That's why it still stands.
01:55:56.000 And we were best friends.
01:55:58.000 And just talking like crazy all the way into Manhattan.
01:56:02.000 We get into Manhattan.
01:56:04.000 There's two guys walking down the street.
01:56:06.000 The guy goes, oh, Christ, I hate coming to New York.
01:56:11.000 Ah, the fags.
01:56:13.000 And I said, well, you know, I'm married to a man, and faggot is pretty much my middle name.
01:56:21.000 And that poor guy had to do this whole re-juggling of everything that the guy who knew Flemish Bond was also one of them.
01:56:35.000 Ugh.
01:56:37.000 And it was one of those wonderful kind of icky but necessary moments.
01:56:44.000 And, you know, they're horrible but, you know, things are better afterwards.
01:56:50.000 You must have loved that moment though.
01:56:52.000 You?
01:56:53.000 No, it was a horrible moment because I felt like I was throwing away any kind of chatty, conversational relationship I had with this guy.
01:57:00.000 He seemed like just a salt of the earth, great, funny guy.
01:57:04.000 And I was just kind of going out on a limb and saying, okay, he's going to hate my guts after this.
01:57:12.000 When 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.
01:57:20.000 And I really, I don't...
01:57:25.000 I don't know if I'd ever heard someone use the word faggot before, but I'd never seen an adult upset about gay people before.
01:57:32.000 And then my friend Candy.
01:57:35.000 Candido.
01:57:36.000 What was his name?
01:57:37.000 His dad was Cuban.
01:57:38.000 They were Cuban.
01:57:39.000 And his dad slams the newspaper on the table.
01:57:43.000 I was 11. And he's like, I can't believe they're letting these fags get married.
01:57:48.000 He was just so angry.
01:57:50.000 And I remember stopping and thinking, like, here's a man.
01:57:55.000 This guy's a man.
01:57:56.000 He's a grown man.
01:57:57.000 He's a grown-up.
01:57:58.000 But yet he's got this infant idea.
01:58:04.000 What a person should be like they got to fall into this category that category.
01:58:08.000 He'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.
01:58:23.000 I remember it being an important moment for me Because I realized like just because someone's older Doesn't mean they learned anything.
01:58:32.000 And that people are capable of success in life.
01:58:36.000 You could become married.
01:58:37.000 You can have children.
01:58:38.000 You get a house.
01:58:39.000 You get a good job.
01:58:40.000 You drive a car.
01:58:41.000 You've got it all.
01:58:42.000 You've got a checkbook.
01:58:44.000 You're operating.
01:58:46.000 It's moving.
01:58:47.000 You're successful.
01:58:48.000 It's happening.
01:58:49.000 And yet you still have these stupid ideas.
01:58:53.000 You know, but I think there's a benefit to the expression of the stupid idea.
01:58:58.000 Not that they can be challenged, but that at least we're aware that it's there.
01:59:04.000 Yeah.
01:59:04.000 And 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.
01:59:15.000 Yeah.
01:59:17.000 Another shooting myself in the career foot thing.
01:59:21.000 I don't think you've done it once the whole show.
01:59:23.000 Okay, here it goes.
01:59:28.000 I read the Daily Stormer.
01:59:34.000 Andrew Anglin cracks me up.
01:59:37.000 Who is that?
01:59:38.000 He is the completely transgressive guy.
01:59:43.000 Who really loves Fight Club.
01:59:45.000 Oh wow.
01:59:45.000 And he writes for the Daily Stormer.
01:59:47.000 I think he is the Daily Stormer.
01:59:49.000 And he writes the most atrocious, insensitive, brutal things.
01:59:58.000 But they're so shocking and so transgressive that sometimes I laugh just out of the shock.
02:00:08.000 You know, the old classic joke, how do you get a nun pregnant?
02:00:13.000 You fuck her!
02:00:15.000 You know, there's a shock value there that just sort of jars me and makes me laugh sometimes.
02:00:22.000 That joke would have worked better if you hadn't told the black pilot joke first.
02:00:26.000 Oh, well, of course.
02:00:26.000 The problem is, like, people become, you know, you know what's coming.
02:00:30.000 Yeah.
02:00:34.000 But sometimes, you know, I want to go into a world where people are not watching their language so closely.
02:00:42.000 And I see people kind of vent the worst of themselves.
02:00:47.000 And I'm not kind of endorsing it.
02:00:51.000 But I feel a little less reactive to abuse.
02:00:57.000 Scientologists 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.
02:01:14.000 And 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.
02:01:23.000 You can put it over there.
02:01:25.000 You can accept the fact that it's somebody else's statement, somebody else's opinion, observation, that it's not true.
02:01:33.000 And you can be with it.
02:01:34.000 And 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.
02:01:55.000 Do you worry about someone looking through your search results?
02:01:58.000 Oh, they're far worse things than that.
02:02:06.000 You see that in fighting.
02:02:09.000 There'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.
02:02:19.000 And generally, it's people who grew up in abusive households and horrible environments.
02:02:24.000 Then when the trash talk starts coming, they go, oh yeah?
02:02:27.000 Oh, okay, is that what's going to happen?
02:02:28.000 Fuck you, bitch!
02:02:30.000 And then you see them get excited by it, and then you see them saying, oh, okay, now you're giving me more motivation to fuck you up.
02:02:38.000 Whereas some people genuinely get dwarfed by this.
02:02:41.000 They get...
02:02:44.000 The 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.
02:02:55.000 It haunts them and it ruins them.
02:02:57.000 And they can't perform.
02:02:59.000 They go out and they fight.
02:03:00.000 They fight terrible.
02:03:00.000 It happens to a lot of fighters.
02:03:02.000 Guys who are tough, tough guys.
02:03:05.000 Something about the verbal conflict and the abuse.
02:03:08.000 There's an emotional struggle that they're not prepared for.
02:03:10.000 They prepared 100% for this physical struggle.
02:03:13.000 But there's a certain aspect of someone literally hating them as a human.
02:03:18.000 Like 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.
02:03:28.000 No, it's like, you're a little pussy.
02:03:30.000 You're a bitch.
02:03:31.000 You shouldn't even be here.
02:03:33.000 You're weak.
02:03:33.000 You're gonna fall apart, man.
02:03:34.000 You know you're gonna fall apart.
02:03:36.000 You're waiting to fall apart.
02:03:37.000 Just give me your neck.
02:03:38.000 Just give me your neck.
02:03:38.000 I'll choke you out.
02:03:39.000 Make it nice and easy.
02:03:40.000 And you see guys reacting to that.
02:03:42.000 These demons inside of them.
02:03:45.000 These are thoughts that do dance around the back of their brain.
02:03:49.000 And every day they're throwing water on it.
02:03:50.000 But every day they come back and the fucking embers are still smoldering.
02:03:53.000 Shit.
02:03:54.000 And this guy's just pouring gasoline on that shit.
02:03:56.000 And it just takes over their consciousness.
02:03:58.000 You see them, they can't sleep good.
02:04:00.000 You see them, they look exhausted.
02:04:01.000 You see the day of the fight, they look nervous.
02:04:04.000 They look really worried.
02:04:06.000 They look really worried that this person's right.
02:04:08.000 That person has planted these seeds of doubt that are these invasive species plants that are choking out all the trees.
02:04:15.000 It's wild to see.
02:04:16.000 It's wild to see how the same words can have a completely different effect on different people.
02:04:24.000 So there you are.
02:04:25.000 It's a different kind of resistance training.
02:04:27.000 Yeah, no, there's definitely something to that.
02:04:29.000 There's definitely something to be around abusive people, to being around...
02:04:33.000 I mean, you get accustomed to stuff.
02:04:36.000 People are very malleable.
02:04:40.000 You can get accustomed to really shitty behavior.
02:04:43.000 I mean, isn't that like...
02:04:47.000 What's got to happen when you're in war, you get accustomed to it.
02:04:51.000 You get accustomed to violence.
02:04:53.000 You get accustomed to all that.
02:04:54.000 And one of the more difficult things for people post-war is coming back into a kind, gentle, boring world.
02:05:03.000 It's almost like they...
02:05:04.000 I mean, that's Hurt Locker, right?
02:05:06.000 They appreciate the danger.
02:05:09.000 They appreciate that the thrill of it all is almost more appealing than the absolute lack of thrill.
02:05:15.000 The thrill of potential violence and death and all the horrors that you come into contact with.
02:05:21.000 It's almost preferable.
02:05:24.000 Did you read Sebastian Junger's Tribe?
02:05:27.000 No.
02:05:28.000 That's a new one, right?
02:05:29.000 Yeah, it's a great book, but it's about that.
02:05:31.000 It'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.
02:05:50.000 And that post-war, like, they have an incredibly difficult job to sort of reintegrate into normal...
02:05:59.000 Flats is society.
02:06:01.000 Yeah, I can see that, totally.
02:06:04.000 What time is it?
02:06:05.000 It's 3.15.
02:06:06.000 Let's wrap this up, Chuck.
02:06:08.000 Listen, man, I really appreciate you being here.
02:06:10.000 I really appreciate picking your brain, and I thank you very much, man.
02:06:14.000 And thank you for all your writing and all your work, and stay fucked up, will you?
02:06:18.000 Hey, thanks for the plane ticket.
02:06:21.000 My pleasure.
02:06:23.000 When can we expect this book?
02:06:24.000 When are you thinking this is going to be done?
02:06:28.000 This book is just pages in an old book right now.
02:06:34.000 Next year is Fight Club 3. Next year will probably be a big fat writing book from me.
02:06:40.000 And this book won't be until 2020. Yeah, two years.
02:06:47.000 All right.
02:06:48.000 Thank you.
02:06:48.000 Thank you.
02:06:49.000 Appreciate it.