Joe Rogan is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster. In this episode, he talks about how he became a member of the Church of Scientology, why he joined, and why he thinks it's one of the most insane religions in the world. He also talks about why he didn't join until he was 21 years old, and what it was like growing up in the 80s and 90s as a child in a religious cult, and how he went on to become a self-proclaimed atheist and then a believer in the religion he grew up in. Joe Rogan Experience is a show about comedy, stand-up comedy, and the weirdest things you can do with your time and money. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to our new show on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your stuff. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about it! if you re a podcaster and/or a listener, please tell us what you think about it in the comments section below! We ll be looking out for new podcasters in the future episodes, and we'll get them on the next episode of the show! Thank you so much for all the support, love, and support, bye! Peace, Blessings, Cheers! Cheers. -Eugene & Rory - The Crew at The Joe Rogans Experience "J.R. "The J.R." - The J.J. Experience" - All Day and Night, All Day, by Night, By Day, By Night, by All Day All Day by Night by Day, All-Day, by Morning, by By Day by Day - All Day - by Night - by Morning by Day by Morning - by By Night by Night All Day By Day - By Day By Morning, By Morning by Night By Day - by Day by Morning by Night by Day and All Day "By Night, all Day by Evening by Day "All Day" by Night "By Day" by Evening, By Evening, by Day & Evening, All By Night - By Night By Day and Evening by Night's by Day is by Day's by Night? by Day/Night, by Evening's by Morning... by Day or Evening, Day's By Day... by Night... By Day/By Day,By Day's Day, Day By Night?
00:00:43.000When the documentary came out, some woman had just gone to see it at the movie theater, and it was on the drag, you know, on Guadalupe, across from the university.
00:00:56.000And she drove her car through the plate glass windows of the Scientology building.
00:01:39.000And I found out in the most bizarre way.
00:01:42.000Because there was a piece of land that was for sale.
00:01:46.000And he was talking about this piece of land, about possibly purchasing it, but he was going to have to put it off because he needed $50,000 because his wife was going clear.
00:01:57.000And it was like a scene in a movie where the record skips.
00:02:04.000And this was me of, you know, I was probably 28 at the time, 29. I was...
00:02:13.000The podcast has radically changed the way I look at things because I've had a chance to educate myself and have all these conversations with brilliant people and just enough of these conversations where I have a different perspective.
00:02:26.000But back then I really didn't know too much about Scientology other than I had bought a book From Dianetics Online, not online, rather, on television, late night TV in 1994. And they wouldn't stop sending me these pamphlets,
00:02:41.000asking me to come to all these various meetings and this and that, and sending me all these things for programs they have, discounts.
00:03:56.000That was probably one of the first times I had ever heard that expression.
00:04:00.000The first time I ran into it was when I was in college, and my girlfriend and I were living in an apartment above this little storefront, and it was Scientology.
00:04:12.000And I'd never heard of it before, and they showed me the e-meter and stuff like that, and I just thought it was interesting.
00:05:47.000And because they're, you know, they're always scaring everybody with, you know, legal threats or, you know, shakedowns and stuff like that.
00:05:56.000Do they still do that or have they kind of backed off from that?
00:05:59.000Oh, the people that, some of my sources for that, you know, they hounded them mercilessly.
00:06:04.000And, you know, they hire private investigators.
00:06:08.000They're not The job that private investigators are doing is not so much to sneak up on your, you know, go through your trash, although they do that, it's to intimidate you.
00:06:22.000And, you know, they had somebody following me around for a while, mainly to my public events, you know, when I was making speeches.
00:06:31.000I'm in a band, and he came to one of my gigs.
00:06:34.000LAUGHTER What kind of band are you in?
00:07:55.000They were hounded from one state to another.
00:07:58.000And Scientology is kind of the modern equivalent of that.
00:08:01.000And one of the reasons I wanted to write about it is you have these famous and sometimes wealthy people, as you point out, affiliating with this organization There must be a kind of public relations martyrdom for them.
00:08:17.000I mean, you can admire Tom Cruise or John Travolta for their acting, but you also think, are they a little nuts?
00:08:26.000You know, is there something going on with them that they need this religion?
00:10:04.000They may come from a Southern Baptist background, but if they move to Hollywood and they're looking for a group of spiritual seekers like themselves, And they want to affiliate with people like them.
00:10:20.000And we have the Celebrity Center, where people like you can come and you can hang around with other famous people.
00:10:26.000I think they offer a certain amount of protection.
00:10:28.000I think there's something there for that.
00:10:31.000And there's also, I think, there's a structure.
00:10:35.000That exists, and I think there's a lot of people that, especially in such a volatile, sort of, it's an uncertain world, the world of acting in particular.
00:12:11.000And so if something comes along, like Scientology, that gives you structure, and gives you family, and gives you, like, we are, for you, we're going to help you become clear, we're going to bring you to the next level, you know, you're a success, it gives you something where you feel like,
00:12:27.000like, have you ever done martial arts?
00:12:51.000Where am I? Because of that, some kickboxing systems, even Muay Thai, some weird systems have developed their own belt structure, which is weird.
00:13:02.000The system, they've just sort of added to the existing martial art that didn't have a belt structure.
00:13:07.000But it's to give people this sense of progress.
00:14:43.000So in this little community, they have the white buggies, the black buggies, and the yellow buggies, and they all have a different set of...
00:15:26.000But the most progressive Amish would use tractors only for tractor power.
00:15:31.000They wouldn't use them in the fields, but they'd use them to help load the hay in the barn.
00:15:36.000But if you're a yellow buggy, and your daughter marries a white buggy, You'll never speak to her again, and you're living in the same community.
00:15:47.000And that's not any different from Scientology.
00:15:51.000But the reason they do that is to enforce the boundaries of their community.
00:15:57.000And I think another significant part of this We look at Scientology and Mormonism and you might laugh at the theological construct that their religion is built upon.
00:16:18.000I think the crazier it sounds, then you have to crawl over this huge wall of doubt and misgivings to accept that Xenu, this ruler of 75 million years ago,
00:16:35.000sent a bunch of thetans to the earth and what looked like DC-8s and dropped them into volcanoes where they were exploded by a hydrogen bomb and their spirits were caught by a net and then they were set in front of a 3D movie theater.
00:16:49.000It takes a lot to swallow that, right?
00:16:52.000But if you do, at least if you say you do, you go over the wall and you go join a community that's very supportive.
00:17:02.000And you have to say, if somebody, do you really believe that shit?
00:17:30.000Like, there's an existential angst to just being alive.
00:17:36.000Just being on a planet that's hurling through the universe...
00:17:42.000Above us is stars and space and there's so many questions and we have a finite lifespan.
00:17:48.000If you really start thinking about it, you can kind of freak out.
00:17:53.000And if it's really open-ended, if you really don't know what life is, if we really were single-celled organisms that became multi-celled organisms and we used to be a shrew and a shrew evolved and eventually became a human being and We don't even know exactly how all these steps happened,
00:18:09.000and here we are today, and you don't know where it's going, and is humanity even going to make it?
00:18:15.000No matter what humanity, if humanity dies off, you have a finite lifespan.
00:18:20.000If you're lucky, you live to be 100. And all those questions are so confusing and scary and If someone comes along and says, we have all the answers, put your mind at ease, we have Xenu.
00:18:32.000And Xenu has created you and you got dropped off in a volcano and you're here today.
00:18:36.000And all you have to do is follow these steps and you will be free of all the confusion and all the emotional stress and the chaos that this life has.
00:18:47.000You don't need psychiatric medication.
00:20:48.000He teaches psychology at the University of Texas, and he starts his class by saying, I'm pretty sure that at least one student in this room will never die.
00:20:58.000Because he's, you know, on top of a lot of the research that, you know, there are creatures, you know, they tend to be like seaweed and stuff like that, that are, you know, well, cancer, you know, is immortal.
00:21:11.000You know, life can be immortal, but in the current construction that we have with our bodies, we're not.
00:21:20.000On the other hand, in the 20th century, we extended the lifespan of human beings by 30 years.
00:21:40.000I'm hoping my children are able to, and my grandchildren now, are able to, but I'd like to be among them.
00:21:49.000The real question is, what are you missing out on if you don't die?
00:21:55.000If you're a religious person, you think there's something at the end of the line.
00:21:59.000But even if you're a quote-unquote spiritual person or someone who's maybe plunged into some psychedelic waters upon occasion, you recognize that there might be some things that we don't totally understand about this life that we're living in.
00:22:12.000Maybe there is something that all of these cultures for...
00:22:18.000Untold thousands of years have been speculating about a soul, a thing.
00:22:23.000It's not just your physical tissue and your eyes' ability to see what's in front of you and your ears' ability to hear things, but there's a something inside of you.
00:23:48.000But if you're weighing the prospect of heaven, you know, or some assemblage of souls in, you know, the cloudy ether somewhere,
00:24:03.000versus the actual pleasure of life itself, when it is pleasurable, I mean, you know, As a reporter, I can't help but have experienced many people's misfortune.
00:24:20.000And, you know, there are a lot of lives that I would not want to have spent.
00:24:25.000But, you know, I cling to the joy of being alive and, you know, the love of my family and my, you know, my work.
00:24:34.000You know, those things are incredibly rewarding to me, and I don't want to leave it.
00:24:38.000So, you know, that's why I'm still looking for the pill or whatever that will keep it going.
00:24:48.000Yeah, I've had many life extension experts on the podcast.
00:24:52.000You know, guys like David Sinclair and Aubrey de Grey and a few others.
00:25:46.000But I can do a lot of things at 53. So I think my perception of what 53 is is based on what I thought of it when I was a child, not based on the reality of it.
00:26:16.000But other than that, if it comes to a point where there's a real health crisis, where my body starts really failing, then I'm sure I'm going to have to confront my mortality in a much more direct way.
00:26:28.000But the way I look at it now, it's like, I like life.
00:26:38.000And that, I think, is if there's a key to life other than loved ones and family and surrounding yourself with nice people and really realizing that, oh, you can really enjoy your time if you're around other people that are enjoying their time as well.
00:27:41.000Well, I'm 20 years older than you, and so those questions are more acute.
00:27:48.000And sometimes, like when I'm filling out a form, you know, when you come to the year and they have this drop-down menu, it's like I'm flying past decades and, you know, revolutions, presidential assassinations,
00:28:04.000wars, you know, and I finally come to my birth date, which is...
00:28:09.000One third of the entire history of the United States.
00:28:24.000A lot of my high school classmates have passed on.
00:28:29.000That kind of stuff happens with annoying regularity.
00:28:35.000But I think about these things a great deal.
00:28:41.000I do feel like You know, the Woody Allen line, when someone said, you know, but you will live on in your work, and he said, no, I want to live on in my apartment.
00:28:54.000I like having some kind of legacy with my family and with my work.
00:29:02.000But, you know, it's not given to us, apparently, to understand what else there might be, if there's anything.
00:29:11.000Well, that's why religion is so attractive, right?
00:29:13.000Because someone comes along and answers.
00:29:14.000Although not all religion, like Judaism, doesn't place much of an interest in an afterlife.
00:29:19.000And I think that's one of the reasons there's a strong sense of civic commitment.
00:29:24.000A lot of philanthropy among Jews is, you know, cities and our culture is so enriched by that kind of philanthropy.
00:29:33.000I think it's driven by the absence of an afterlife as a part of their purpose.
00:32:39.000Scientology is a great example of that.
00:32:42.000But so many religions are exactly the same way.
00:32:45.000And they start enforcing, you know, they become doctrinaire.
00:32:50.000And doctrinaire, being doctrinaire is their power.
00:32:53.000That's where they get their, you know, People are afraid of them.
00:32:58.000They're afraid to contradict them because, you know, they have the Bible on their hand or they have the Word of the Lord, you know, or, you know, it could be, you know, you could talk in tongues or something like that.
00:33:36.000And, you know, Scientology had the brilliant idea of ritualizing that and monetizing it.
00:33:42.000So, you know, each of these steps that you take on the bridge to total freedom, as they call it, And you pay very dearly for it, but they're all a notch in your belt.
00:33:53.000And, you know, the higher you go, the more you're valued.
00:33:58.000It's so strange that it doesn't occur to them that it was created by a science fiction author who wrote terrible books.
00:34:06.000It may not be true still, but He had the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of titles published.
00:35:11.000But there's one thing I find very interesting about his writings and his, I guess, theology and I'm not sure what the right word is for the organization of the church and so on and the organization of his psychology.
00:35:27.000The whole thing about the Thetans and so on.
00:35:43.000And I think that if you want to go in and start picking it, what he said that was wrong, It's pretty much armored against that.
00:35:54.000Whatever lunacy was driving his mind, it made sense to him.
00:36:01.000I think that Scientology really is just a journey into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard.
00:36:08.000He was very much self-medicating in a lot of ways, right?
00:36:12.000Yeah, early on when he got out of the service, and that's where he really went into Dianetics, the whole idea that he cured himself of being blind and lame,
00:37:22.000And I compare it to a shaman, like in an Indian society.
00:37:29.000Where, you know, schizophrenics are often the shamans, and they're the people that go out, you know, both actually physically go out on spirit quests, but also, you know, they go into hallucinations and they come back and they try to heal their community.
00:37:47.000And I think basically that's what Hubbard was up to.
00:37:53.000I know I'm giving him more credit than you think he deserves.
00:39:56.000I've read some of his stuff, and it reads like a 10-year-old writing a story without anyone going, well, Billy, maybe we should edit this down a little.
00:40:08.000Let's try to consolidate some of these ideas, and maybe there's a better way to phrase this.
00:40:19.000You know, when I was working on that story for The New Yorker, which is where it started, I think many things you can trace back to his experience in the war.
00:40:34.000He had this longing to be a hero, and he wasn't.
00:40:45.000He was captaining a sub-chaser off the coast of California and he took it out and one thing, he did artillery practice against these islands off of Mexico.
00:40:56.000So he was shelling Mexico, which was a hostile action.
00:41:02.000But he thought that he had come upon a Japanese submarine and chased around dropping depth charges everywhere and it turns out sunken limbs or something like that.
00:41:13.000So he had essentially a disgraceful experience in the service.
00:41:19.000But when he got out, he posed as having been a spy, that he was on the first...
00:41:31.000The first ship to be sunk in the Pacific and he escaped to some desert island and all this sort of thing.
00:41:38.000Of course, we got his records and almost every single day of his career in the service is marked by some sort of report.
00:41:48.000So we could find exactly where he was, what he did.
00:41:54.000But the church insisted that he really was a hero and that they gave me a...
00:42:02.000I've forgotten the form, but when you're discharged, there's a form that gives you assignments and stuff like that.
00:42:11.000And he had all these glorious assignments.
00:42:14.000Then they showed me a picture of all the medals he'd won.
00:43:03.000Because he's the one that came up with these medals.
00:43:05.000He awarded them to himself, and he passed on to the church the legacy of his mendaciousness, and they have to defend it because he's the founder.
00:43:16.000Well, there's a thing that happens in cults where people give in to whatever the doctrine is, right?
00:43:25.000And whether you want to call it religion or a cult, clearly there was not a lot of research into the veracity of his claims by the people that were a part of the organization.
00:43:37.000And there's a willingness to give in to the top person.
00:43:45.000My background originally was in martial arts and I saw it a lot in martial arts.
00:43:51.000Martial arts are very culty, particularly a lot of traditional martial arts.
00:43:55.000Even the traditional martial arts Taekwondo that I was a part of, the instructor was God.
00:44:01.000Like, they were the lord of this dojang or this gymnasium or whatever you wanted to call it, where everybody trained.
00:44:09.000And, you know, you called them sir and you bowed to them when you saw them.
00:44:14.000My traditional martial art background though was legitimate.
00:44:18.000They were legitimately teaching you a good martial art and they had these tenets that they thought were designed to increase your human potential and they were building up your character and it was really what you wanted from martial arts.
00:45:37.000And you've got to wonder, what is happening?
00:45:39.000How is this so successful in so many different places?
00:45:43.000There's a thing that happens where someone becomes a part of one of these organizations and it gives them the sense of community and family and you have to give in to whatever the belief system is.
00:45:54.000And the belief system is that this guy has a magic touch.
00:45:56.000And you go running at this guy and he...
00:47:08.000Whatever for whatever reason and you see it with like people with politically as well You see like people give in to a political leader whether it's Trump or whoever it is like that person can do no wrong That is there that is their person and anything that says anything different is lies and disinformation Well,
00:47:27.000what you said made me think of one of the hardest stories I ever did I did a An article from The New Yorker about the sons of Jim Jones.
00:48:17.000But what I had been watching the news coverage, and just before, the place was called Rancho Apocalypse, which turned out to be really appropriate.
00:48:27.000But they sent before the conflagration.
00:48:32.000They sent out a van with children, you know, who had grown up in this community.
00:48:39.000And these kids, you know, as they drove past the ATF and FBI lines and then the media line, and you could see these children looking out the windows, they were leaving behind everybody they knew.
00:48:52.000They were leaving behind the only world they knew.
00:51:14.000He sent his sons down to Guyana to clear the jungle so they could make this village.
00:51:22.000And then overnight, they move, you know, nearly a thousand people to South America and leaving behind all their friends, their jobs and stuff like that.
00:51:34.000One day, you know, they've been removed.
00:51:38.000They've been raptured, you know, off to South America.
00:52:13.000The last time he tried to do an airplane flight, I mean, this had been years ago, I don't know if it's changed for him now, but he made the airplane turn around and drop him off at the gate.
00:52:27.000Which is hard to do, but when you're as physically overpowering as Tim was, he's kind of a formidable figure.
00:52:38.000So he just had all sorts of anxieties.
00:53:36.000And I've never forgotten the power of a religious belief in a personality like Jim Jones who could persuade All those people to stay with him, train them in this,
00:53:53.000you know, suicide drills night after night, you know, and then one day it's real.
00:53:58.000And, you know, the boys felt guilty because they thought if they had been there, they might have been able to stop it, but probably not.
00:54:17.000Yeah, I mean, there's been so many of them.
00:54:19.000It's almost strange that there's not more.
00:54:23.000That, you know, you have like the Heaven's Gate, which is a very small cult.
00:54:28.000You know, you have certain sects of the Moonies that are still active, right?
00:54:35.000You know, to me, Aum Shinrikyo, that Japanese cult that was, you know, remember the blind yoga instructor and they drank his bath water and stuff like that.
00:54:53.000It was in the 90s, and, you know, Shom Shinrikyo is the name of it, and...
00:55:03.000There were like 50,000 members in Japan, and there were a number of them in Russia as well.
00:55:09.000But there was a far more dangerous cult than—well, I thought it was more dangerous in prospect than al-Qaeda— Because a lot of these people were engineers and scientists.
00:55:41.000And if Al-Qaeda had had that kind of expertise, Then, you know, they were also very interested in, you know, weapons of mass destruction, as are some of the white supremacist groups right now.
00:55:57.000But al-Qaeda, I think, and ISIS as being religious cults as well.
00:56:02.000I think that they continue to prosper.
00:56:07.000What's alarming is how much more empowered they are now with the kinds of weaponry that you can get, the drones.
00:56:17.000When I was writing about the intelligence community, I got to meet—who is it in the Bond movies that makes the weapon?
00:56:27.000Q. Q. I got to meet our Q, but he wouldn't show me the good stuff.
00:56:33.000But I asked him what he was worried about, and he said the way in which high school kids can create computer viruses now— We'll soon see them able to create actual biological viruses because the technology like CRISPR and stuff like that is so accessible.
00:56:56.000And, you know, that's a terrifying thought.
00:57:03.000I mean, I don't want to downplay what these people have done and how many of them do exist, but it's almost shocking that there's not more.
00:57:16.000There's a, you know, a small percentage of people that have this strange desire to have a group of followers that unflinchingly just listen to everything they say.
00:57:28.000There was a guy in Australia recently that was saying he was Jesus.
00:57:34.000Like, he even kind of looked like he could be, like, when you think of the stereotypical Jesus painting, like a white guy with beard and long hair, he looked like this guy.
00:57:44.000And he had this woman that he met, and he was convincing this woman that she was Mary.
00:58:27.000Sometimes you see them saying that they're Jesus.
00:58:30.000But if it happens to be a Jewish person who's gone off, then they are David.
00:58:42.000They've chosen a suitably appropriate, iconic religious figure to be.
00:58:49.000And there's an asylum Back in the day when Israel was fighting for its independence in 1948, there was a little Palestinian village called Deir Yassin where Jewish terrorists massacred the townspeople to take it over because it was on a road to the airport.
00:59:17.000That village is now this psychiatric institution where people are suffering such delusions.
00:59:24.000I got to visit it one time when I was in Jerusalem.
01:00:07.000What is it about people where this pops up?
01:00:11.000What things have to be in place where someone can create some sort of an environment like that where they can decide that they're the main ruler, that they're going to create this bizarre environment,
01:00:29.000set up these rules, and have all these people follow along with them?
01:00:34.000I suppose that there are a lot of people that want to be that person and aren't.
01:01:40.000And food sources and water and all these things that just reoccur over and over again, despite the terrain, despite the geography, the part of the world.
01:01:52.000But that's one of the weirdest patterns with human beings, is the obviously fraudulent leader who makes up a bunch of crazy shit and pretends that he has some secret wisdom and that the gods or a god are on his side.
01:02:06.000And gets all these people to follow them, and even in the Jonestown case, gets them to commit murder and suicide.
01:05:10.000And so Starhawk got the nuns out and she built a kettle over a fire and she had the nuns jumping over the kettle and this got to the, you know, to the Vatican.
01:05:23.000And so Matt was out on his ear after that...
01:06:20.000It's specifically these priests and how did this culture of these priests, not just doing it, but getting away with it, getting shipped to different parishes where they didn't know.
01:08:17.000But also, there wasn't a lot of structure.
01:08:20.000Like, I remember I just would go, I was into fishing, so I'd just go fishing every day.
01:08:24.000I would just blow off all their activities and go fishing, and no one seemed to give a shit.
01:08:28.000So I just basically was in a fishing camp for a couple weeks, hanging out with some boys that you had to, like, keep your eyes on.
01:08:34.000Yeah, one of my strongest memories of the Boy Scouts is when we were out camping, and There was a Sunday we go to have this service and we're up on a bluff over a creek and there's a bunch of logs and they're covered with turtles and so we're up on top of this bluff and we're praying and this sort of thing and we all have our 22s.
01:08:56.000And then after the service, we all go stand on the edge of the bluff and shoot the turtles.
01:09:02.000That's kind of the archetypal Boy Scout experience.
01:09:05.000Well, we had 22s too, and I remember, maybe I shot one one day, but I remember doing something else, some other activity, and I heard, pew!
01:09:40.000You know, a guy who was maybe 20, 21. Really nice guy who had gone through the Boy Scouts himself, became an Eagle Scout, did the whole deal.
01:09:47.000And, you know, for him, it had helped him avoid a lot of the pitfalls of growing up in a bad neighborhood.
01:10:36.000There's something very strange about that these, like, whether it's the Catholic Church or any group like that, that's connected to abusive minors.
01:13:51.000Before the internet exploded, before what we think of as the internet.
01:13:55.000And I found this, there was, you know, thousands of lawsuits and arrests, you know, around the country, but there was only one conviction, and it was for this sheriff's deputy in Olympia, Washington,
01:14:16.000had accused him of raping them repeatedly and bringing the neighbors over and they had been cut up.
01:14:26.000They had children ripped out of their stomachs and sacrificed.
01:14:33.000Other deputies in the Olympia department were involved in it and so on.
01:14:40.000All of this was You know, wild, but he confessed to it.
01:14:45.000And so I thought if there's anything to it, then, you know, And I went up to Olympia and I spent a lot of time talking to the cops and trying to piece together what had actually happened.
01:15:00.000And because there was confession, there was never really a trial.
01:15:03.000So they never had the cops who were investigating and who were his colleagues.
01:15:12.000They didn't have to put together a coherent case.
01:15:21.000Well, Jesus Christ had something to do with it, because they were all members of this four-square gospel church, you know, and a very religious family.
01:15:34.000And the idea of Satan was very real to them.
01:15:41.000And Erica, the oldest daughter, had made this outcry.
01:16:56.000So there was never any other thing that all the things they had described had never taken place.
01:17:03.000And yet, Paul Ingram confessed to it because his preacher came in and told him that, you know, God would not allow anything other than real memories to come into his mind.
01:17:15.000And a psychologist came in and hypnotized him.
01:17:19.000And pretty soon he was eliciting these fantasies.
01:17:24.000And so Paul began to fantasize about what...
01:17:29.000And at this point, the girls hadn't gotten so ripe in their storytelling.
01:17:41.000I can see myself going into Erica's room, you know, and...
01:17:47.000The preacher took that back to the church and the gossip started and it gets into the ears of the girls and they start making similar but not exactly the same sort of statements about what happened.
01:18:04.000Anyway, Paul, I think he served 13 years in prison for a crime that never actually occurred.
01:18:14.000One day I happened to be in LA and you remember, since you spent some time there, Amy Semple McPherson?
01:18:21.000She was an evangelist, a great character in American religious history.
01:18:28.000She had affairs with Charlie Chaplin and so on and she was really A huge figure on the scale of Billy Graham or something like that at the time in the 20s.
01:19:34.000And so one of the counselors called over, Paula was her name, you know, come help us understand what's going on with this young woman.
01:19:42.000And she put her hand on Erica's head and she says, she's been abused.
01:19:52.000And then she said, and it's by her father, and it's happened many times.
01:19:56.000So, in the mind of this very religious young woman, the message came from God, you know, that she had been abused, and so she made an outcry It wasn't hers.
01:20:12.000It was the camp counselors, really, that started this whole folly.
01:20:17.000And what happened after that, during that period of time, these kinds of stories took root in daytime talk shows.
01:20:30.000It was all over the place, spread to other countries really quickly.
01:20:35.000Thousands of families were ripped apart by these kinds of accusations.
01:20:39.000And people like my therapist, brilliant, adorable people, took it on as their mission was to rescue people like that.
01:20:49.000And what happened is it drove away people who really had been abused.
01:20:54.000Their abuse was so insignificant by comparison with these elaborate tales of having babies cut up on you.
01:21:04.000And I finally decided that These were abortion fantasies.
01:21:11.000I think the whole abortion discussion, put yourself in the mind of an 18-year-old virgin and drawn to sexual ideas and yet haunted by the prospect of abortion and all the stuff that goes in it.
01:21:30.000The fantasies that they elicited were very similar to abortions.
01:21:34.000But what caused the father to think that he had done these things?
01:22:14.000And there was one here in Austin, Fran and Dan, that was...
01:22:19.000Actually, I... I attended one of the days of the trial.
01:22:26.000There was a daycare center south of town.
01:22:31.000Fran and Dan had operated it for years, and people would go drop their kids off and pick them up after work.
01:22:42.000And during this period of time when there was this heightened fear of childhood sexual abuse, some of the parents began quizzing their children.
01:22:52.000And there were psychologists who would come around with a doll and, you know, anatomically correct, you know.
01:23:45.000So, you know, eventually, you know, they start, you know, they assemble, you know, of these psychologists who are, you know, using these dolls and so on to try to elicit, you know, like, did Dan ever touch you any place that made you feel uncomfortable?
01:24:07.000So eventually, a child agrees to one of those things, and then other parents hear it, and, oh my God, you know, she was abused by Dan...
01:24:19.000Honey, did Dan ever, you know, so it began to, there was never any real evidence, but when the day I was there, they put a child on the stand, and she had her doll and a lollipop in her mouth.
01:24:36.000And she was sitting on the lap of, I forgot, it might have been her mother.
01:24:42.000But, you know, the prosecutor says, you know, did Dan ever touch you?
01:26:57.000Because when I'm writing, when I'm researching, you know, like when I wrote about The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda, I interviewed 600 people.
01:28:01.000At that time, we had four hospitals in Austin, and by the time I wrote this, they each had a dissociative disorders wing, which is like multiple personalities.
01:28:14.000We had enough multiple personalities in Austin to stock four different psych wards.
01:28:23.000And then when my article, mainly the book, when the book came out, insurance companies decided not to fund psychiatric investigations into certain dissociative disorders including multiple personalities and repressed memories like these.
01:29:06.000Because there's been so many cases where people have led the person who's particularly under hypnosis, led them into these memories, almost helped them.
01:29:17.000And there's real evidence that you can do that, that you can sit someone down and impart or implant a fake memory of an event, particularly under hypnosis.
01:29:42.000And that was one of the main criticisms was they thought that he was leading these people into these ideas and suggesting these ideas and giving these people, I don't know if he did or didn't, but That's the kind of thing that you could do to someone if they were under hypnosis.
01:30:02.000You could implant some kind of crazy, fantastic memory of visitation in the middle of the night.
01:30:11.000I had a story when I was working on the repressed memory story.
01:30:16.000I ran across this study that was another thing you wouldn't do now because of the conventions of experimentation have changed.
01:30:26.000A psychiatrist in Georgia had a patient and he told her in advance what he'd like to do.
01:30:34.000I want to hypnotize you and see if I can elicit a memory that didn't happen.
01:30:44.000And so she agreed and he hypnotized her and he said, Helen, you were late today coming to your session, which wasn't true.
01:34:08.000Then, the only other time that I had what was kind of success in being hypnotized was in 1983. It was the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
01:34:28.000And I had grown up in Dallas during the assassination.
01:34:32.000There was a story that was quite widely circulated that school children in Dallas had laughed when they heard the news.
01:34:42.000And I wasn't sure that I hadn't been one of them.
01:35:10.000You know, the politics were off the rails.
01:35:13.000Kennedy was hated, although not in my family, but there was this sense of Dallas as being a separate entity from the rest of the country and that Kennedy was the enemy.
01:35:31.000And I was anxious that maybe I had been one of those people that laughed.
01:35:36.000And so I had a friend who was a therapist who did hypnosis and I asked her to hypnotize me and see if she could take me back to the classroom.
01:35:50.000And so she put me under, regressed my memories, you know, to the point that I hear the ding-ding-ding PA system and the choked voice of our principal coming on.
01:36:06.000Did she tell you you're hearing these things?
01:36:13.000And I remember seeing the face of my friend Steve Zink, one of my classmates in the algebra class, and I couldn't.
01:36:24.000Get it myself and so she gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion that I would have a dream and it would reveal to me what I had experienced and so I did have a very vivid dream and it was I was flying in a helicopter over the canopy of what I thought was Vietnam jungle.
01:37:05.000And I decided from that that the me that I thought might have laughed was just a figment, an effigy of some sort, and that I really hadn't laughed.
01:37:21.000You'd have to understand what a scarring experience it was to have been from Dallas at that period of time and how everybody in the world hated you.
01:37:28.000It's such a strange thing to try to...
01:38:48.000And even that morning, I went out to get the newspaper and there was that famous ad, welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas, you know, just this bleak thing.
01:38:56.000And then there was, you know, it's just...
01:40:15.000There was a, you know, Adlai Stevenson had come to Dallas in October the month before to make a speech about the United Nations, and he was the UN ambassador.
01:42:08.000And it's so fascinating how, no matter who the president is, there's always some faction that think that that one person, that figurehead, is the enemy of democracy, the enemy of freedom, the champion of whatever, you know, whether it's the communists or Soviets or fill in the blank,
01:42:28.000whoever it is, China, whoever it is, there's always going to be some faction that think that that person is the real reason why we're all fucked up.
01:42:40.000You were telling me, we were talking before this podcast started, and I said, we've got to stop talking, don't say any more, because you wrote a novel that Right.
01:43:05.000A particularly damning special that was going to be released around September 11th, and they never released it because it was very anti-American.
01:43:18.000George Carlin, as he got older, was very much a curmudgeon, and he had some great rants.
01:43:24.000They just felt like this is just not appropriate, like post 9-11.
01:46:06.000But October 1918 is still the deadliest month in American history.
01:46:11.000So when I decided I was going to write this, first of all, I went out and interviewed all the people that I would want to talk to, just as if I were doing a non-fiction novel or a non-fiction book or a New Yorker story.
01:46:28.000I made a calendar on my computer that was based on 1918. What happened in March of 1918 corresponds roughly with what happens in my novel,
01:46:44.000which is set in 2020. It was meant to be a kind of cautionary tale.
01:46:53.000And in January, I began to hear about this unidentified virus in China.
01:47:01.000And I thought, geez, that could be something.
01:47:18.000World health authorities went over to investigate.
01:47:21.000And Chinese authorities took patients out of the hospital and put them in ambulances to hide them until the authorities left.
01:47:31.000And this thing went, I think, 37 countries before it was smothered, fortunately, by good health practices.
01:47:39.000I thought this is, you know, early on and by February I was telling my wife to start stocking up on groceries because I had just written this novel, you know.
01:47:53.000Yeah, I was on, for one thing, this British presenter, when I was promoting the book, I don't think anybody paying attention to this book at all.
01:48:05.000If it weren't for this pandemic, I think you're probably right.
01:48:09.000But it's not such a smart publishing strategy to bring out a book when the bookstores are closed.
01:48:16.000I'm going to have to remind myself not to do that again.
01:48:20.000But it was weird because the story became what I got right and what I got wrong.
01:48:29.000I mean, there were See, I did the research, and I talked to the experts.
01:48:38.000Like, one of the guys that I talked to, Barney Graham, he works at National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is Dr. Fauci's shop.
01:48:50.000He helped me design my novel virus and he helped me cure it.
01:48:56.000He's the guy that invented the vaccine that is in both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
01:49:07.000He was one of many people in that category who advised me about how would you make a vaccine and so on.
01:49:17.000So I did all the research and I asked them, my sources, Suppose we had another event like 1918. Would we be any better prepared than our ancestors were?
01:49:33.000And the answer was, this is our biggest nightmare.
01:49:39.000And there were a lot of reasons for it.
01:49:42.000But one is, you know, we don't have a vaccine.
01:50:27.000I love research, and I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't.
01:50:31.000But part of the time, my hero's on a submarine.
01:50:34.000So I got to go to Kings Bay, Georgia, where we have our nuclear fleet, and get a little tour of the submarines.
01:50:45.000You know, not everybody gets to do that sort of thing.
01:50:49.000So I was able to make, you know, I like to make things as real as possible.
01:50:54.000And then it gives you a sense of authority when you sit down to write.
01:51:00.000It had to be a bizarre feeling to have finished that book and have it come out in the middle of the pandemic.
01:51:06.000I mean, you almost had to feel like maybe the simulation is real.
01:51:14.000Going back to what I got wrong, everything unfolded exactly as I had anticipated, unfortunately, but I didn't anticipate how people would self-isolate so willingly,
01:52:47.000The novel is tragic, but it's a novel.
01:52:53.000This chronicling of what happened to us this year has been really hard.
01:52:58.000And I think what has been missed in a lot of the coverage is just the personal experience of this catastrophe.
01:53:08.000And, you know, a lot of the stories I tell in there, you know, just they're hard, hard stories.
01:53:15.000Well, it's an insane and in our lifetime unprecedented time where there's never been a moment where people have been asked to stop doing everything and it still didn't work.
01:53:28.000In fact, in a lot of places it was worse where they asked people to lock down than in places like Florida or in Texas where they don't shut everything down the same way.
01:53:37.000Well, we went through it in Texas and like so many states, you know, For one thing, the governors should never have had to do this on their own.
01:53:47.000You know, there was never a national plan.
01:53:55.000But wouldn't the national plan vary depending upon the pandemic, depending upon what the virus was?
01:54:00.000I mean, it's one thing if you're dealing with something that's as contagious as the measles and as deadly as Ebola.
01:54:06.000You know, that would have been, that would have required us to take extremely drastic measures.
01:54:11.000And that was a lot of what we feared was going to be coming with COVID. I mean, there was an initial thought of what the virus was going to do, and this insane reaction to that, anticipating that,
01:54:27.000but no correction once we realized what it had begun.
01:54:30.000And also, no correction once we realized what the consequences of The lockdowns and this now we're now into nine, ten months of this isolation and fear and the economic disaster and despair.
01:55:16.000And, you know, at first, you know, the...
01:55:20.000We had the biggest plunge, you know, in recorded history.
01:55:24.000And, you know, one of the analysts at Goldman was saying, you know, usually if you're trying to do econometrics, I think it's pronounced econometrics, you analyze, you know, wage increases and how would that affect spending patterns and,
01:55:42.000you know, restaurant availability, and then you...
01:55:48.000In this case, there were no restaurants.
01:56:11.000And that's one of the things about capitalism that's good, is it's nimble, and it sees opportunity.
01:56:21.000Initially, when the markets crashed and unemployment went further south than we've ever seen it go, the stock market just froze.
01:56:36.000And then there was a realization, according to one of my sources, when they learned that this was transmitted asymptomatically, in other words, you can have it and not have any symptoms and infect me,
01:56:54.000then investors realized the usual treatments, public health approaches, We're going to work.
01:57:04.000If you have symptomatic transmission, you get sick, you go to bed.
01:57:11.000If you are sick and walking around the world and greeting everybody and passing it off, that's an entirely different experience.
01:57:18.000And that's why this disease is so sneaky.
01:57:21.000And from the Wall Street point of view, it was Oh, fuck.
01:57:26.000You know, so they wanted, at that point, you know, they had gone from just trying to, you know, get some money to operate their businesses to rushing to safety.
01:57:35.000So you had five stocks like Amazon and Apple and so on, occupying 20% of the S&P. And, you know, but Strongman said, that's not the, you know, the purpose of Wall Street is to move money from Businesses that are no longer useful into the businesses of the future.
01:57:58.000And that's when you see the rush for opportunity.
01:58:00.000And that's why the stock market has gone so crazy during this period and gone into historic highs where people are still, many people are still underwater.
01:58:11.000And there's going to be a lot of economic damage that's going to last for quite a long time.
01:59:37.000It might be 35. And it went under while I was here.
01:59:43.000We're hoping to bring some comedy back.
01:59:45.000I want to start a place once it feels like it's responsible and safe to do it.
01:59:50.000But it's just such a tricky thing to figure out when and how and what to do and measures to take place.
01:59:58.000I've been doing these shows at Stubbs Amphitheater with Dave Chappelle, but we test the whole crowd, so they get there early, they get tested, and they've only had to turn away a couple people, and that was not even the shows that I was a part of.
02:00:12.000I just did one spot on one of those shows, and Dave had done three, and out of those three, so for 1,200 people, they turned away two people that tested positive.
02:00:22.000I don't think there was any other ones.
02:00:25.000Audience for comedy is safer than the average population then because our positivity rate right now in Texas is over 20. Is it 20%?
02:00:35.000Yeah, in Los Angeles they think it's so crazy that one out of 20 people has gotten the virus, either gotten over it or is currently infected.
02:00:44.000One out of 80 currently have it, I think.
02:00:48.000And this new strain is sweeping through.
02:00:51.000In California, in particular, it's driving out the old strain really quickly, as it did in the UK. It was stunning how quickly it overtook the contagion.
02:01:00.000Yeah, it's more contagious but not more extreme in its symptoms or anything like that, right?
02:01:06.000That's what they say, but I haven't heard that it's less.
02:01:13.000I did, but it was from an unreliable source.
02:01:15.000Yeah, I think there's wishful thinking involved in it.
02:02:16.000There's a syndrome called Guillain-Barre, which is very similar to polio in some ways.
02:02:24.000In fact, there's a lot of scholarship now that says that Franklin Roosevelt may have had Guillain-Barre rather than polio because onset as an adult was so unusual.
02:02:35.000And it might have been the horse serum in which the tetanus shot was grown.
02:02:44.000Or it could have been something else entirely.
02:02:46.000But I don't know, I don't remember how many days it was before I was able to move, but I was.
02:02:56.000It was a scarring fright, and I've been advised not to take flu shots.
02:03:04.000And it's one of the reasons I have been so interested in this vaccine.
02:03:09.000And I'm going to take it because, you know, the kinds of, you know, possible pollution, you know, like horse serum or flu shots grown in chicken eggs and stuff like that, it's not a feature of this vaccine, at least not the Moderna and the Pfizer.
02:03:26.000With any kind of vaccine, there comes a certain level of paranoia, especially a new vaccine.
02:03:34.000And that's been fascinating and frightening to behold and to read online all of the crazy theories and what people anticipate could happen.
02:03:47.000And people that say, I'm not taking that fucking thing.
02:03:51.000All the people that are terrified of it and don't want to try some what they deem to be an experimental vaccine.
02:04:00.000I'm hesitant to get into this because I don't want to encourage the anti-vaxxers because I think it's important for the nation to protect itself, protect the health of our communities.
02:04:15.000But this is a story that is where a lot of the anti-vaxxers come from.
02:04:20.000In 1976, there was a young recruit at Fort Dix, New Jersey named David Lewis.
02:04:31.000He was 19 years old, a healthy young soldier, and he was on a march.
02:11:18.000One of the things that I... With all the misjudgments that have been done, especially by the government, There have been a lot of heroic and brilliant people out there working on this, and I had the privilege of meeting so many of them.
02:11:35.000And I'm totally confident, even given my own history of having a vaccine reaction, I think this vaccine is a lifesaver.
02:12:23.000You're in the age group where you can get the vaccine, though, in Texas.
02:12:27.000You know, there was some real controversy as to whether or not they should vaccinate essential workers first or older people that are more at risk.
02:12:36.000And there's been some weird shit written about that that's flavored with social justice and all sorts of...
02:14:55.000And they were going to have 100 million doses by the end of the year.
02:15:00.000And Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I predicted, you know, that we'd have 100 million vaccinations, and then it was 40, and then it was 20. And now, you know,
02:15:16.000as it turned out, a little less than 4 million vaccines by the end of 2020. Moderna is now coming online, and, you know, that's going to supplement things a lot more.
02:15:46.000I don't know what they're saying, but, you know, there are all these different entities that claim that they have vaccine, or it is claimed that they have one, they don't have it.
02:16:14.000Other vaccines are going to come online soon, you know, AstraZeneca, Johnson& Johnson, you know, there are a bunch of others, but probably the gold standard is the Pfizer and the Moderna, which is the same vaccine that Barney Graham and Jason McClellan invented.
02:16:33.000When you wrote a novel about the pandemic, you wrote this piece for The New Yorker about the real state of what happened during COVID-19.
02:16:43.000As a writer, you've got to have an imagination about what could possibly take place.
02:18:24.000And if you're in New York or L.A. and you're looking at a map of America and you're thinking, where should I go?
02:18:36.000There aren't a lot of places that, you know, there's no place like New York, there's no place like LA, but there are places that have attributes that make those places congenial.
02:18:52.000And, you know, so Texas is one of the places where a lot of people wind up because it's got, it's dynamic.
02:18:59.000I think that's the And also there are places inside Texas, like Austin, that are tolerant and interesting.
02:19:10.000Austin has had a reputation for being cool, far beyond what it deserves, and this has gone on for as long as I've been here.
02:19:21.000Ever since I moved to Austin, when people would ask me, where are you from?
02:21:37.000Yeah, he's making a lot of money, and yeah, he's doing all this, and it doesn't seem right, but at least he's not banging everybody's wife.
02:21:49.000In my church in Dallas, the first Methodist church when I was growing up, Dallas had the reputation in the 60s of being the most religious city in America.
02:22:04.000It had the largest Methodist, the largest Baptist churches in the whole country and one of the largest Presbyterians and a large Catholic population as well.
02:22:12.000It also had high rates of murder and divorce and all those things that you find in a really turbulent culture that Dallas was.
02:22:21.000And my father taught Sunday school for years and years.
02:22:27.000And then Robert Goodrich was our pastor and he became a bishop and his son was a quarterback on our high school team.
02:22:40.000So we knew all these people pretty well.
02:22:43.000And Years later, the church had kind of gone into decline and downtown Dallas was sort of inner city.
02:22:51.000They brought in this charismatic young preacher named Walker Raley.
02:22:57.000His first action as a preacher and First Methodist was to blow into the microphone and breathe life into the church again.
02:23:23.000And then these threats on his life began to appear.
02:23:26.000Apparently because of you know his racial progressivism and you know notes were slipped under his door and FBI began to investigate and then over Easter there was a really you know a very straightforward threat to kill him and so he wore a bulletproof vest under his vestments and You know,
02:23:55.000everybody, you know, inside the church circle, you know, we're all terrified.
02:24:02.000And then his wife is strangled in the garage and into a coma.
02:30:59.000I mean, it really goes back to what we were talking about earlier, this desire that people have to be this leader and to be this person with this secret inside knowledge and to be in control of a covenant, to be in control of a parish.
02:31:14.000Well, in your performing career, for instance, isn't there some element of that?
02:32:19.000For a person like myself who grew up in martial arts, it's a complex challenge.
02:32:25.000It's a complex challenge of managing concepts and emotions and how to get an idea across to people.
02:32:34.000And in a way, it's kind of a mass hypnosis because you're trying to bring people into a state of mind where they think the way you're thinking and they allow you to think for them and then you can get them to feel good in laughter.
02:36:22.000Just to have an opportunity to sit down with one of the most interesting people I think that's ever lived and one of the most productive and prolific people.
02:36:33.000Just the fact that he's able to juggle all these plates simultaneously.
02:36:47.000When I first met him, I was kind of taken...
02:36:50.000It took a while during the first conversation I had with him to loosen him up.
02:36:54.000It took a while for him to relax because he was one way and then we were on camera and then all of a sudden he was very aware that he was on camera and he was a little tense.
02:37:03.000So then the whiskey started flowing and then I pulled out a joint and that became history.
02:37:09.000But it was all only possible because the podcast had become this thing where it was like, you have some ideas, go there.
02:37:20.000And then you can get those ideas out and there's no middleman.
02:37:23.000No one's going to stop you from discussing things.
02:37:25.000No producer's going to run in and say this is not appropriate or this is controversial.
02:37:29.000We'd like to steer away from this subject.
02:37:31.000I don't want to steer away from anything.
02:37:32.000If you want to talk about it, I'm more than willing to talk about it.
02:37:35.000I think any subject can be approached reasonably.
02:37:38.000You know, and when a guy like him wants to come on, and particularly, I found the most interesting thing, like, I could tell talking to him that it was almost like his, like, when you're looking at his eyes and he's discussing these things,
02:37:53.000it's almost like his brain is just wired different.
02:37:56.000And when I said that to him, I was like, I have this feeling that, what is it like to be you?
02:38:03.000And he was like, he wouldn't want to be me.
02:38:06.000And that he realized when he was really young that it was different.
02:38:10.000That he thought everyone's mind worked like that.
02:38:12.000His brain is just like a tornado of ideas.
02:38:15.000And he's just trying to use his time as wisely as possible to give...
02:38:20.000Attention to all these different ideas whether it's the boring company or whether it's a solar power company or Tesla or SpaceX It's like who the fuck is running?
02:38:31.000That mean companies that are that influential that powerful that significant and four of them simultaneously.
02:38:39.000Well, what's interesting about I was gonna say people like Elon Musk and there aren't very many people like him but ever They challenge you about what life could be and what you might be.
02:38:54.000I mean, you say you fell into this, but in a way, you created it organically.
02:40:50.000Attribute that a person can have if they want to achieve something, because it'll keep you from progressing, because you have this distorted perception of your own worth.
02:40:58.000There's a lot of people out there that are extremely mediocre, that feel short-sighted.
02:41:03.000They feel like people have looked past them.
02:44:05.000Ultimate goals or you're thinking about numbers like what what is where's the benefit in that when you obviously are wealthy you obviously are healthy You obviously are fulfilled in terms of your career.
02:44:16.000Why would you want to be more ambitious?
02:45:10.000A small pool of recondite literatures will know those names.
02:45:18.000But those were the people that were just like, I'll never be that.
02:45:22.000And then that subsided into, they aren't that either.
02:45:29.000Their reputation is so mighty at one time.
02:45:34.000You know, have all diminished into the pool of forgetfulness, and that'll happen to everybody except, you know, Shakespeare, a few, you know, a few, and those, you know, those giant names of the past are enshrined in the academy so firmly that it would take a lot to remove them.
02:45:55.000But I can see a time when, you know, reading and, you know, that sort of thing is going to be overtaken by other pursuits, and You know, no writers will really be known very well.
02:46:08.000I think there's always going to be a desire to hear the well-formed thoughts of intelligent people and creative people.
02:46:15.000I think that's always going to be the case because there's something incredibly rewarding about whether it's great fiction or non-fiction about reading someone's really well thought out, well edited work.
02:46:28.000It's a giant part of what makes us understand each other.
02:46:33.000Is reading other people's writing or seeing their work, whether it's music or comedy or anything.
02:46:38.000Seeing what happens when someone focuses on a thing and hones it down and puts it into a presentable package and this is done here.
02:46:50.000And then you distribute it to the world.
02:46:51.000And then the world reads it and takes it in and goes, oh, wow, I like how he thought about that.
02:46:56.000And it changes the way people think about things.
02:46:58.000It changes the way people consider things.
02:47:00.000It gives people energy and enthusiasm.
02:47:02.000It gives them motivation and ambition.
02:47:05.000I think writing is always going to be a thing.
02:47:09.000And I know for me personally, when I get less focused on things, when I feel like maybe less in control of my thought process is when I'm not writing.
02:47:23.000When I sit down and I force myself and I discipline myself to write, I feel like my thoughts are better formed, they're more concise, they're more easily digestible to other people, and I think it's a direct result of focus and discipline.
02:47:42.000The focus and discipline to sit down and put the work in.
02:47:46.000And then when I do that, that muscle, whatever that thing is, it grows.
02:48:59.000But the ambition has changed to now the main focus.
02:49:05.000And even while all that stuff happened, it was like the more impressive things happened, the more I just focused on work.
02:49:12.000Instead of focusing on getting attention, which is what I did when I was really young and starting out, I focused on just being better at the thing.
02:49:21.000And the more I was better at the thing, the more I focused on that, then the other kind of success sort of just fell into place.
02:49:27.000But that's not what I ever think about.
02:49:31.000I always just think about the work itself.
02:49:33.000And the more I think about that, about how to put the bits together and how to make them better and how to edit them, and maybe I should go over that again.
02:49:41.000Maybe I'm just settling for this position.
02:49:44.000Maybe I need to rewrite it entirely and start from scratch and switch it around and maybe look at it from a totally different angle.
02:49:52.000That's when it's been the most rewarding for me.
02:49:56.000But also, I feel the least responsible for it, which is the weirdest part about it.
02:50:01.000I feel like when something is done, even though I know I put a whole lot of work into it, it's like...
02:51:26.000And, you know, if you were trying to be something else, it might not be—it wouldn't give you the chance to be who you are in the genuine way that this does.
02:51:39.000Maybe that's true, but maybe the way that I'm able to do that is by just getting out of my own way and not thinking about me at all.
02:52:27.000I think you're 100% right about authenticity.
02:52:29.000I think that's the thing that I value more than anything.
02:52:32.000Whether someone's right or wrong, if I hear them talk or I hear their take on things, if I know it's genuinely coming from their real thoughts, there's no ideological bend, there's not some predetermined position that they've taken,
02:52:48.000but they're just actually thinking about things and looking through it and trying to formulate their thoughts in an honest way.
02:52:54.000I can appreciate that more than anything because it's so...
02:52:57.000Especially in the broadcast medium, it's so rare because there's too many gatekeepers.
02:53:02.000To have an idea and to bring it to a television show, for instance, it's like you're going through so many people.
02:53:13.000It's so difficult to get your own actual thoughts and have them unmolested and then distribute them to the world.
02:53:23.000Yeah, I went through that with—we did an adaptation of The Looming Tower, and it was not hard, honestly.
02:53:35.000The problem was that there were a lot of people over the years that wanted to do it, and I didn't want them to, because I thought, you know, 9-11— It's kind of sacred.
02:53:45.000And, you know, go make entertainment of it.
02:53:48.000But on the other hand, it needs to, I mean, you know, kids now, they don't have any experience of it.
02:53:54.000You know, it's like World War II for me.
02:55:13.000Well, I'm finishing a book about COVID and I had a, you know, I told you about my, a little bit about my movie background, but I had a play that we had two productions here in Austin.
02:55:29.000It was called Sonny's Last Shot at the time.
02:57:48.000You know, one of the reasons I took up the piano was I wanted to play Great Balls of Fire on my 40th birthday, so I took up piano when I was 38 and a half.
02:57:57.000And I even got my feet into it, as is required.
02:58:18.000As shocking as it might sound, nobody's going to remember him either.
02:58:22.000And if you no longer are tied to this idea of becoming really famous and having this enduring legacy, it frees you up to do whatever you want to do.
02:59:58.000And too often ignored by non-fiction writers.
03:00:02.000And, you know, if you incorporate the kind of scenic construction...
03:00:06.000In a nonfiction story or book, it gives a tremendous amount of power.
03:00:12.000And contrarily, you know, if you take your skills of reporting and apply it to fiction, learn how the world really works, make it feel real and authentic, you know, it cross-pollinates.
03:00:27.000And I think I'm a far better writer because I have developed these tools from different kinds of craft.