In this episode of Dead Air, I chat with writer and podcaster Caitlin Durante about censorship and how it affects her writing. We talk about what it s like writing in a time where censorship is ramping up and how this is affecting her ability to write. And we talk about why she writes the way she does, and why it s important to write about things that aren t always talked about in the media. Dead Air is on all of the social medias, if you search for Dead Air on Apple Podcasts, you'll find us. Dead Air original artwork by Dee McDonnell This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Additional music by Jeff Kaale. The album art for this episode was done by our super talented Ameya Vellian. Thank you to our sponsor, LaCie. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast! Subscribe to Dead Air Radio and leave us a five star rating and review! It means you'll be the first to know whenever a new episode is released. It'll help us spread the word about Dead Air. And we'll be spreading the word to the world. Peace, Love, Blessings, Cheers. Cheers, Eternally grateful. -Eugene, Elyssa, Sarah, Caitlyn, Jenna, Emily, AJ, & Sarah, JR, and the Crews, Sarah, Susan, Caitlynneil, Emily, and Sarah, Margo, -- Michael, John Goodman, Jr., - The Vagabond, - & the rest of the crew at The Vagrant -- Thank you, Caitlynn, Rachael, . Caitie, JUICY, Rene, Racheal, Jazmin, J.J., and the rest? , Sarah, Jodie, R.J. , and the crew and the gang John Goodman . . , , Jazlyn, , & the gang, Jake, Jadyn, & more! - Thank you so much, Jaxon, Jodi, Jody, JANE, and all of your support is appreciated!
00:00:16.000I was very excited to talk to you because it's been about three years and during those three years it seems like Censorship issues and issues of what you can and can't say and what isn't acceptable,
00:00:34.000And you are, in my mind, one of the more interesting and dangerous writers out there because you...
00:00:41.000You tap into these super uncomfortable stories and you're willing to explore areas in writing that I think a lot of people would avoid.
00:00:55.000We talked about this the last time you were here, some of the more dangerous stories that you had workshopped and people had gotten upset at you for.
00:01:03.000But I really wanted to talk to you because I wanted to know how this is affecting you.
00:01:08.000How this weird climate of hypersensitivity and purity tests is affecting your writing.
00:01:40.000You know, I used to, when I look back at the books that I really loved growing up, I see that they are now under the big umbrella of the very small phenomenon called absurdist existentialism.
00:01:56.000Could Catherine write Geek Love right now?
00:01:59.000It is about a man and a woman who own a failing circus and they decide the way to save their circus is to have deformed babies.
00:02:08.000So they take insecticides, they expose themselves to radiation, and they give birth to ultimately a whole crew of severely deformed children, plus a whole crew of children that don't live, that are in the circus culture, they're called pickled punks,
00:02:24.000those kind of deformed babies in formaldehyde.
00:03:10.000F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in the 20s.
00:03:12.000These people who had survived the Spanish flu and survived the First World War.
00:03:17.000And that there is a kind of a tipping point in the culture where things seem so messed up and so unfixable that you just sort of tip into this absurdist existentialism.
00:03:28.000And there's a fantastic joy and freedom in that.
00:03:31.000And so My goal is always to try to write the kind of book I want to read.
00:03:37.000And I want to write Geek Love because I want to read Geek Love, regardless of whether or not Catherine could write it.
00:03:45.000Even if she wasn't dead, she could not write that book anymore.
00:03:50.000There's something about writing and reading that kind of stuff where you can never capture it in any other medium.
00:04:01.000And I think in some ways even audiobooks don't do justice to some of the darker ideas because you kind of want to piece them together in your own mind.
00:04:11.000And as you're reading it in silence and the author's ideas are coming to life inside your head, you know, your own creativity and imagination are intertwined with the work of the artist to try to fill in the visuals of the work.
00:04:30.000It's a place where that's the only way you can truly get the most out of those really twisted ideas.
00:04:40.000Well, and because also to be made literal enough to film or even to be said out loud kind of destroys that intimacy where it only occurs in your mind.
00:04:51.000It occurs in a kind of sub-vocalization and in the kind of sympathetic neural phenomenon that's happening when you read a verb, studies have shown that your body thinks that you are running.
00:05:05.000Your body thinks that you are doing what the verb is saying.
00:05:09.000And you lose that when you hear it out loud and you lose it especially when it has to be made literal enough to be filmed.
00:05:16.000Another absurdist existentialist book, Confederacy of Dunces.
00:05:20.000You know, John Goodman, God bless him, he has had that book optioned for decades and that will never be a movie because it is filled with racist humor, it is filled with misogynistic humor, and it is filled with homophobic humor.
00:05:36.000It is completely an unfilmable book, but people adore Confederacy of Dunces and it won the Pulitzer Prize, but it cannot be made literal enough to become a movie.
00:05:50.000Yeah, there's books that were made at a different time where even today people don't want you reading them anymore.
00:06:02.000If that ever gets under the spotlight and people start examining some of the things in that book, that might be one of those books where people just decide you shouldn't be reading that anymore.
00:06:11.000Well, I think there's kind of a political aspect too.
00:06:14.000I've seen some essays about why Mel Gibson can just get crazier and crazier and he's not canceled and why Roseanne Barr gets crazy one night on Ambien and she's gone.
00:06:28.000And a lot of these essays, for the most part, say it's because Mel Gibson is making people money and that people generally like Mel Gibson.
00:06:37.000They really like Mel Gibson and nobody really wants to cancel him.
00:06:41.000Where supposedly Roseanne Barr had offended so many people and she was so difficult that people were really gunning for any opportunity to cancel her.
00:06:50.000And I think with Confederacy of Dunces, with these really beloved books, People like them too much to really put them under that kind of microscope.
00:07:12.000The books still have so much traction in the culture that they can't be canceled out.
00:07:17.000They might be passed hand-to-hand, but they will always be in print.
00:07:21.000They removed Tom Sawyer from some schools, and there was some talk about censoring it and changing the words because the N-word's in it so much.
00:07:31.000You know, my book, Make Something Up, It was the biggest censored book of 2016, and I think the only adult censored book of 2016. But it's still read.
00:08:26.000And also he was getting all these bids for tens of hundreds of millions of dollars from people around the world who also wanted Mr. Hand's horse for their own purposes.
00:08:38.000And this is just one of 23 different stories that were all more or less each offensive in their own way.
00:08:56.000You know, a lot of people hate that documentary, but I have to like it because one of my best friend's brother-in-law made that documentary.
00:09:07.000So officially, I love that documentary.
00:09:11.000It wasn't the best, but how do you make a documentary about something that you can't show?
00:09:16.000You know, it's like they were in a weird position.
00:09:20.000Well, do you remember Into the Wild, the first big Krakauer book?
00:09:26.000When you go through that book, it's really fascinating because you know that Krakauer only had so much material about Chris McCandless.
00:09:34.000It's just a few months out of the kid's life.
00:09:37.000And so, how does he deal with that material?
00:09:40.000So he starts in, kind of after the fact, establishing the bus, the death scene.
00:09:46.000And then he starts in a very linear, deep flashback, taking Chris McCandless up to a certain point.
00:09:52.000And then he expands for several chapters saying Chris is not the first young guy at that age to sort of throw everything away and hit the road.
00:10:02.000And he profiles maybe a half dozen sort of famous guys who did the exact same thing and kind of disappeared in the culture.
00:10:11.000And so he expands the theme showing that historically it's not a one-off, that young men have always taken these kind of pilgrimages to find themselves.
00:10:21.000And then just before Chris McCandless is killed, he depicts himself climbing that steep mountain in Alaska by himself at the age of 23 and almost dying.
00:10:33.000And so he illustrates the theme over and over both with McCandless in the present and with these historical figures doing the exact same thing and then with himself explaining why this story is so compelling for him because he did the same thing at that age and he didn't die.
00:10:53.000And so if you're going to do the the zoo story You need to expand it beyond the story itself.
00:11:00.000You need to look for where it occurs and is sort of illustrated in other aspects of the culture, both historically and in other parts of the world.
00:11:09.000You need to expand the theme beyond just what actually happened.
00:11:54.000The video that's available that you can watch, and we found it the other day, and we watched it, is not the guy actually getting fucked to death by the horse.
00:12:02.000It is just him getting fucked by the horse.
00:12:04.000Apparently, they don't have the video of him actually dying or the one time that killed him.
00:12:13.000It punctured his organs or whatever it did internally that ruptured him.
00:12:16.000They had to bring him to the emergency room.
00:12:19.000And then the police were called and they started questioning him like, what's going on here?
00:12:58.000The thing about Into the Wild is that's a story that many people can sort of relate to.
00:13:05.000You can kind of relate to this idea that society and materialism and the road that everyone's on is fruitless and filled with...
00:13:18.000Angst and no one no one wants to live like that, but they just do they do because everyone has before them but really You're better off just being free and just going into the wild like that that Appeals to so many people the idea that the path that we're headed down with civilization is It's not healthy.
00:13:39.000It's not natural and ultimately it's going to be our demise So there's so many people that like the idea of going to the woods is really appealing and The idea of getting fucked to death by a horse.
00:13:56.000You know, and I don't think it's ever going to be relatable, relatable.
00:14:01.000But at least in the short story that I wrote, the main character makes the point, or he explores the point, that we find it funny because it was a white male...
00:14:23.000And if it had been anyone else, it would not be a story and it would certainly not be funny.
00:14:28.000But you take somebody who is perceived in the culture as having all of the power and you show them getting fucked to death by a horse and dying on the floor in an emergency room dumped there by their friends with rutting mare pheromone all over his legs.
00:14:57.000The other day at Bi-Mart, which is kind of this discount department store in the Northwest, they had this huge table of half-priced things, and they had all sexy names, and they were little aerosol sprays.
00:15:33.000They'll walk right up to you if you wear this.
00:15:36.000And so the idea of all these hunters spraying themselves with rutting elk pheromone so they can attract these kind of horny elk is just so appealing.
00:15:46.000Well, it is kind of fucked that when you hunt elk, primarily, especially when you hunt with a bow, you hunt them when they're fucking.
00:16:01.000So this is one of the things, this is my main way I get meat, is I hunt.
00:16:06.000And I go bow hunting in the mountains.
00:16:09.000In Fight Club 3, the graphic novel that I launched last year, the year, the worst year ever to launch a novel, I needed a backstory for the female character in Fight Club.
00:17:39.000The reason being is that that's when they congregate together in very specific areas and also when the males have their antlers in full display.
00:17:48.000Because elk antlers are, I'm pretty sure this is true, they are the quickest growing bone in all of nature.
00:18:27.000When they get older, when they hit like 13, 14 years old, then the antlers start shrinking and the tines grow smaller and it's usually because they're starting to die.
00:19:06.000That's the least horrible, because most of the time they get through it intact.
00:19:10.000When you kill an elk, one of the things that happens is you skin them and quarter them, and when you skin them, you find puncture wounds all over their body from fights.
00:19:21.000So generally speaking, they're superficial wounds.
00:19:24.000They're small wounds all over the place.
00:19:26.000But occasionally, one will hit another elk with such force that one of the tines goes through the ribcage, and that's when they die.
00:19:34.000But it's more rare, because more rare than that.
00:19:37.000We find one dead every year, but they fight all the time.
00:19:42.000They're establishing dominance almost every day.
00:19:47.000If there's a large herd of elk, maybe you'll find one a season.
00:19:52.000But the whole idea is you can find them better when they're congregating like this.
00:19:57.000And the way you call them in is you either pretend that you're a female or you pretend you're a male.
00:20:03.000So you either pretend that you're a male that wants to challenge them and steal their women, or you pretend that you're a female and that you've left...
00:20:12.000Whatever male used to have control of you, because it's generally speaking like it's one bull elk that is the herd bull, so the biggest, baddest bull in the mountain, and he'll have 20, 30 cows, and he'll be trying to breed them all.
00:20:26.000And one of them occasionally will break loose, and the bull will risk his life and leave the circle of, leave the safety of numbers to go find the one that took off to bring her back.
00:21:11.000He just went bow hunting for the first time.
00:21:14.000And he had one of those, and he was using it.
00:21:16.000And he found himself in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by what he thought were wolves, because they were barking in the dark around him.
00:21:30.000And he was also trying to retreat and find his pickup truck.
00:21:33.000And ultimately he realized that these barks were the elk themselves, that the male elk will make a barking sound that sounds very much like a wolf.
00:21:43.000And so it sounded like he was pursued by a pack of wolves, but he taped them and he showed me the video of these elk actually barking.
00:22:22.000Like when you're hunting them and you're around them and you're hiding in the woods and you're sneaking up on them and you hear them bugle, your hair's standing up on end.
00:22:46.000Yeah, that was the Bigfoot or the Sasquatch noise.
00:22:52.000I think there was a bunch of noises sold as a Sasquatch noise, but if they tried to say that noise was a Sasquatch noise, any elk hunter would go, shut the fuck up.
00:23:11.000Have you ever heard the samurai sounds when he's speaking about Sasquatch?
00:23:15.000It's one of the most ridiculous noises.
00:23:19.000There was these folks that were in the mountains of Northern California and they claimed that they were surrounded by Sasquatch and these Sasquatch had a language.
00:23:30.000And you hear the language and it's so preposterous and so stupid sounding.
00:23:35.000You know, some things they just, you just know, you know?
00:23:39.000Like, there's no if, ands, or buts, this is bullshit.
00:25:23.000I could see everybody wanting to get on board for that.
00:25:26.000Well, everybody wanted to believe after the 1967 Patterson Gimlet footage.
00:25:31.000That was the footage where it's like the dumbest, fakest-looking footage of all time of this guy in a monkey suit that's just wandering through.
00:25:44.000It's a real guy who put this monkey suit on and confessed and told everybody he did it.
00:25:49.000What's funny about the Patterson footage is it's the footage that the people who believe in UFOs, or excuse me, Bigfoot, cling to the most.
00:25:57.000The Patterson footage is their holy grail.
00:25:59.000But the guy who made that footage was arrested for writing a bad check to pay for the very camera that he used to film this.
00:28:31.000And they think they might have been wiped out.
00:28:34.000And there's speculation they might have been wiped out because, you know, they were competing for food and maybe even hunting people.
00:28:40.000Like killing children and shit like that.
00:28:43.000But they were little tiny humanoid people.
00:28:45.000Because there was a bunch of different kinds of humans.
00:28:48.000In the transition between Australopithecus and Homo sapiens, there was a lot of branches of the human tree, and some of them made it to modern times, essentially.
00:29:03.000I mean, this is like during the Ice Age, these things were alive.
00:29:07.000So while people were all over the world, you know, building structures, and while at the same time they were building these huge stone monoliths in Turkey, there was little three foot tall furry people that were living on an island in Flores.
00:34:14.000Yeah, because cuckoos reproduce by laying their eggs in the nests of other birds, and the cuckoo egg hatches first, and it hatches biggest.
00:34:23.000And so the cuckoo nestling pushes the other eggs out and destroys them, or if the other birds hatch, the cuckoo nestling kills them.
00:34:32.000And so the parents end up feeding the cuckoo fledgling.
00:34:38.000And typically the fledgling is three or four times the size of the surrogate parents.
00:34:44.000And so it's kind of tragic when you see these pictures of house sparrows feeding a nestling the size of a chicken.
00:34:52.000And that's where the whole idea of the cuckold comes from, is that you're basically raising someone else's child and you're being sort of used and your own children have been neglected or destroyed so that you can care for someone else's child.
00:36:24.000The craziest animal I ever heard of in the womb is there's a shark, I forget which kind of shark it is, but the mother shark will have multiple sharks inside of her body and the baby sharks will start eating the other baby sharks around them and murdering them inside the womb before birth.
00:37:11.000Like they did like some sort of like an x-ray or an MRI. I don't know if it's real though, the images.
00:37:21.000Do you draw from the, like when you're thinking about writing stuff, do you draw from how fucked up nature is in stories like this?
00:37:30.000You know, not very much because Because I'd much rather hang out at a party with a bunch of human beings than talk to a bunch of parasitic spiders.
00:37:40.000I really want to be around people, so I use storytelling as a way to just be in the world.
00:37:46.000Right, but I mean, the cruelty and sadness of nature, does that ever make its way?
00:37:55.000But, you know, the way I do it, there's got to be a lot of laughs on the front end.
00:38:01.000Because nobody wants to spend their time, typically when they're alone, in the waiting room at the hospital or the airport, saying, oh, I want some more cruelty and sadness right now.
00:38:12.000No, they think you've got to sell them that this thing is going to be fun and lighthearted.
00:38:36.000And she talks about being the only black beach girl, the only black surfer chick, and how she really has the hots for this one surfer dude.
00:38:44.000And the two of them hook up, and she's in love, and she gets pregnant.
00:38:49.000And the whole thing, people are roaring through the whole thing.
00:38:52.000And then she brings it to the point where she's in a dirty public bathroom at the beach, pulling open a wire coat hanger and then stuffing it inside of herself and giving herself a coat hanger abortion on this filthy concrete floor.
00:39:08.000And at that point, she's still Valley Girl Upspeak, and the audience is completely silent.
00:39:18.000And the contrast between this low slangy language telling a traumatic story, the disconnect there, makes it even more tragic.
00:39:28.000And the fact that she's not acknowledging the horror makes it even more tragic and also strangely funny in this completely nihilistic, horrible way.
00:39:39.000And at the end, you can hear a pin drop.
00:39:41.000And at the end, she says, so y'all got to come down to the beach and hang out with us.
00:43:45.000Nobody talks about it because it's so painful and because everyone thinks they're the only one.
00:43:50.000And so if I can take some of those stories and bring them to light, it creates this opening for everyone to say, oh my god, I once did this thing and my parents reacted badly to it or it destroyed my life and I've never been the same.
00:44:06.000And when Franz told me that story, he was almost weeping.
00:44:09.000But he was laughing as he was telling the story.
00:44:12.000Because he had to keep laughing in order to keep telling the story.
00:44:17.000And that's what I'm always shooting for.
00:44:22.000Those are the moments, like, those kind of stories are the ones that hit people the hardest because you know that the child has no idea that what they're doing is going to be uncomfortable for anybody.
00:44:35.000Like, here's a parallel to the story that you told before, I guess three years ago.
00:44:40.000We were talking about the writing workshop that you had done where you were talking about someone else's story about how they were jacking off in a jacuzzi and their anus got prolapsed and this woman at the writing workshop I felt comfortable enough because you told that story to tell her story about being in the Girl Scouts or the Brownies,
00:45:09.000The heating pad story, where she had put this vibrating heating pad on her vagina and had her friends do the same thing and the mom came home And she was only seven years old.
00:45:21.000And then the mom beat her with the wire that was plugged into the wall and called her a dirty whore, and she never orgasmed again.
00:45:30.000And she said, in summation, That if I could tell the story that I had just told that was so self-debasing and so humiliating, but also make it funny, then that gave her proof that she could make her own story funny.
00:45:48.000And that maybe she could someday go back to her mother and say, remember that heating pad.
00:45:53.000And that maybe ultimately she could have an orgasm.
00:45:57.000Because until you can kind of reveal these things and resolve them, they run the rest of your life and you're never going to get beyond them.
00:46:06.000Yeah, especially when you don't see it coming.
00:46:10.000When you're just a child and then you do something that you think is totally fine and all of a sudden you're getting the fuck beaten out of you and you don't understand why.
00:48:51.000And I had more or less forgotten that story Until this woman I had never met said, there is a man standing over you in a white t-shirt and he's holding something wooden and he's really sorry and it's something about dismemberment.
00:49:10.000But he was very young and he handled it the way a very young father would.
00:49:19.000And so sometimes the story isn't always a kind of...
00:49:24.000It isn't always a kind of tragedy of the child being punished for doing something good.
00:49:31.000It can come from so many different directions.
00:49:33.000And the point is to bring those stories forward.
00:49:35.000Because when you do, you create the opportunity for everyone else with a similar experience to avoid something that they have suppressed for so long.
00:50:31.000And my friend, Ina, started to sob at that point.
00:50:35.000She was uncontrollably sobbing because no one knew this.
00:50:40.000No one in our peer group But every year, Ina would secretly go to her mother's grave.
00:50:45.000Her mother died when Ina was a teenager.
00:50:47.000But every year she would go there on the anniversary of her mother's death, and she would sprinkle forget-me-not seeds on her mother's grave.
00:50:55.000And she had never told anyone she did that.
00:50:59.000And the idea that someone would somehow pick up on this image of tiny blue flowers being in turn sprinkled on Ina It was really another one of those uncanny moments.
00:52:40.000You don't want to know what these cards seem to indicate.
00:52:45.000Yeah, I don't want you to have to live with this knowledge, so I'm not going to tell you what the cards predict.
00:52:51.000So those were my only two kind of psychic friends' experiences, and they were both so unpleasant that I've never really sought out those experiences.
00:53:03.000Was the numerology one and the card reading, how long ago was this?
00:53:07.000The numerology one would have been in like 1981, and the card reading would have been in like 1983, no, 1994 or 1993. But has there been anything in your life that was so horrific that they couldn't imagine telling you?
00:53:23.000You know, except for my father's murder, not really.
00:54:47.000And this ex-husband had said that if he ever caught her with another man, he would kill them both.
00:54:54.000So my father Was going to pick her up and she was going to stay at his house in the mountains until the time of the trial.
00:55:06.000And as he was going to pick her up, he was going down this mountain road on his property and a giant boulder broke free and it rolled down the hillside and it blocked the road.
00:56:17.000And the coroner says that they were both dead before the fire got to them.
00:56:23.000And the coroner says that because of the angle of the shot, my father probably took about 20 minutes to die because the bullet ruptured his diaphragm.
00:56:31.000So with every breath, he would have been accumulating air between the lung and the diaphragm.
00:56:37.000And so every breath would have been more and more shallow because his lungs would have been more and more constricted.
00:56:43.000By this air above the diaphragm, but that eventually he'd suffocated.
00:56:50.000And all of this sounds horrible and tragic, but it forms this fantastic pattern in my father's life because my father, when he was very small, he lived in Northern Idaho with this enormous Ukrainian family.
00:57:18.000But his father took a rifle and walked around the house and tried to kill him, my father, and ultimately killed my father's, well, killed his wife, my father's mother, and then killed himself.
00:57:35.000But my father's earliest memories are of hiding underneath a bed as his father walked around the house in logging boots with a rifle calling his name, trying to get him to come out so that he could be killed.
00:57:49.000And so my father spent his entire life sort of looking for his mother because as his father was trying to kill him, he was trying to find his mother who at that point had been killed.
00:58:02.000And so my father really had this kind of serial pattern with women.
00:58:07.000He was always looking, in a way, for the woman.
00:58:12.000And ultimately, he was shot by the man with a gun.
00:58:20.000And one of the uncanny things is that their bodies were only preserved because a bed on the second floor of this structure, as it was burning, the bed fell over their bodies and insulated their bodies.
00:58:33.000And my father had escaped his father by hiding underneath a bed when he was a small child.
00:58:41.000And the fact that the Lonely Hearts ad was headlined Kismet, and the fact that this boulder rolled down in front of my father's car just as he was leaving, that prevented him from getting there in time where he probably would have been able to escape before the ex-boyfriend arrived.
00:59:43.000And maybe I am clutching at straws and I'm just a kind of person looking for significance, which is what we all are.
00:59:51.000But I'll take comfort where I can find it.
00:59:54.000Did he ever explain to you He was a great guy until he went to work in the shipyards in World War II,
01:00:18.000and he was struck in the head by a block and tackle.
01:00:21.000And after that, Grandpa Nick was crazy.
01:00:23.000And half the family says that he was always crazy, that he was always narcissistic and violent and not a good person.
01:00:36.000Narcissistic and violent is pretty common, but narcissistic and violent with a head injury, I think it's probably both.
01:00:44.000If I had a guess, knowing what I know about head injuries, I have a lot of experience with people that have had head injuries and because of all the work that I've done with the UFC and just paying attention and reading a lot on brain trauma.
01:01:00.000You know, bringing back to the Roseanne Barr story, you know, that's what made Roseanne Barr.
01:01:05.000She was hit by a car when she was 15. Roseanne Barr was sent flying through the air.
01:01:09.000She was driving, or she was walking across the street when she was 15 years old on the way to school, and a woman had the sun in her face and the windshield that she couldn't see and hit Roseanne Barr.
01:01:19.000Roseanne Barr was a straight-A student, was a whiz at math, and then spent the next nine months in a mental health institute afterwards.
01:01:28.000She couldn't count anymore and literally was knocked crazy.
01:01:34.000So when Roseanne Barr's thing happened and she got cancelled, I went out of my way to reach out to her.
01:01:41.000First of all, because as a comic, I think she's one of the most important comedians in history.
01:01:47.000If I look at the top great comics, she's in the top 20. People forget, but during her time when she was on top, Roseanne Barr was a monster.
01:02:45.000There's so much anecdotal evidence about people with traumatic brain injuries becoming geniuses or having their breakthrough after being struck in the head.
01:02:56.000And Meyer Bridge was a guy who had failed at everything.
01:03:27.000And he was nothing before the stagecoach incident.
01:03:31.000And there's so much anecdotal evidence that shows that when people have been struck in the head, They come out as a kind of savant or really bright in some way.
01:03:44.000I think they come out with less fear because they come out more impulsive.
01:05:00.000His brother Bill wrote about it, and he wrote a book called Brother Sam, or My Brother Sam, and it was about Kinnison, how there's like Kinnison 1 and Kinnison 2, When Sam was a boy, he was a normal kid.
01:05:37.000That for whatever fucking stupid reason they fixed, but it was a sign in the back parking lot where there was a bullet hole in it where Sam had pulled out a revolver.
01:05:47.000I think it was because he was in some sort of a dispute with one of the other comics and decided to shoot this sign.
01:05:53.000We would always go by that sign and touch the bullet hole like this is where fucking Sam Kennison shot like you don't crazy have to be to bring a gun to the Comedy Store and just shoot a sign and you're you're a performer there not just a performer But the most celebrated performer there at the time,
01:06:09.000you know, this is in the 80s when he was I mean, there's a period of time, I think, from like 1986 to 1988 where Sam Kinison was the greatest comic that ever lived.
01:06:20.000He couldn't sustain it because he was doing so much coke and he was partying and he wasn't really writing because he was just into being a celebrity and just having a lot of sex and doing a lot of drugs, but that wild, chaotic That irreverent,
01:06:37.000risk-taking behavior is probably directly connected to him getting hit by a car.
01:06:42.000Just a tiny tangent before we go right back there, but are you aware of the histoplasmosis culture?
01:07:02.000There's been this program where you can go down to Mexico and be exposed to toxoplasmosis because they're finding people who carry the parasite are much more reckless and aggressive.
01:07:36.000Sapolsky found that when he was doing his residency, they would find when people had motorcycle crashes, and one of the doctors told him, check the victim for toxo.
01:07:48.000And it turns out there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims of accidents that are positive for toxoplasmosis because this cat parasite makes them reckless.
01:08:01.000We should probably explain the parasite to people that don't know what we're talking about.
01:08:06.000Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that grows inside cats' digestive systems.
01:08:12.000And the way it does this, it's one of the most fascinating evolutionary processes.
01:08:17.000It tricks rats into being sexually attracted to cat urine.
01:08:23.000So literally, their testicles swell, their dicks get hard, and they become fearless.
01:08:29.000It rewires their sexual reward system to make them horny for cat piss.
01:08:34.000And so there's videos of toxo-infected rats just running up to cats, and the cats are like, what the fuck?
01:08:41.000The cats are trying to get away from them.
01:08:42.000The cats don't understand why this rat is running up against them.
01:08:46.000The rat is literally trying to get eaten.
01:08:48.000So this parasite rewires the brains of the rat, gets the rat to go near the cat, gets the cat to eat the rat so that this parasite can grow inside of the cat's gut.
01:09:02.000And then they tell humans, you have to stay away, women in particular, when they're pregnant, stay away from cat litter.
01:09:09.000Because if you're near cat shit, you might get this toxoplasmosis and it could severely impair the developmental process of the child when it's inside the womb.
01:09:21.000And then, oh, before I forget, I've got to do a shout-out to Sassy.
01:09:25.000Okay, Sassy is a Boston Terrier, one of my students' terriers, and it's a very sweet dog, so please don't cut that out.
01:09:35.000You know, I've never really told this story, and I'm going to tell it in a kind of oblique way, but I was a fantastically shitty, cowardly writer.
01:09:46.000I wrote, when I see bad student writing, It is never as bad as my student writing.
01:09:52.000I have never had a student, no matter how miserable a storyteller they were, that was as bad a storyteller as I was.
01:10:01.000And one day I was coming out of the gym in downtown Portland.
01:12:15.000Jordan Peterson, when he talks about rough play, this is kind of a jump, but I think that is why Fight Club has resonated so well with so many people, because they never had that kind of rough play with...
01:12:32.000Because I'm not sure if mothers can really provide that rough play.
01:12:36.000And so when I think when people see Fight Club, there's an aspect of that unexpressed rough play that resonates with them, is I wish I'd had that rough play as a small child.
01:12:50.000It was very different for me because as a boy growing up, I spent a lot of time doing martial arts.
01:12:59.000So I was sparring a lot from the time I was 14 to the time I was 21. I was hitting the head a lot.
01:13:06.000And when I see things like Fight Club, I enjoyed the movie because I can separate My idea of what would that be like if it was a real person from fiction and enjoying it.
01:13:22.000But when I see people just willing to get punched and willing to get hit in the head, I know way too much about the consequences of brain trauma.
01:13:34.000I know people that have been hit in the head and never been the same.
01:13:38.000And they live in darkness, meaning they live in a cloud of depression.
01:13:42.000Their brain doesn't work anymore unless they seek treatment.
01:13:46.000And there's some pretty novel treatments that are available now from a lot of the work that's been done with soldiers, PTSD. They've done a lot of work with...
01:13:55.000They use magnets to sort of rewire the brain and stimulate areas of the brain like very, very powerful magnets and there's been some therapy that is really promising in that way.
01:14:05.000I know there's a female mixed martial arts fighter named Kat Zingano and she had some really good Success with that where she was like really uncoordinated from one bad beating that she had fucked up her hormones fucked up her cortisol levels Like she couldn't stop gaining weight like her body was all fucked up from one fight that she actually won But as a fight against this woman named Amanda Nunez who's one of the greatest if not the greatest female fighters of all time She's a monster and she just knocks everyone senseless and she had cat in real trouble in the first
01:14:35.000round but cat survived and And we'll end up beating her later in the fight and stopping her.
01:14:39.000But the consequences of the beating she took in that fight haunted her for years.
01:17:02.000Like you would go full blast all the time.
01:17:04.000People got knocked out in the gym all the time.
01:17:06.000And then they would be back in the gym a few days later sparring again, which is like literally the worst thing you could ever do when you have like significant head trauma.
01:17:13.000But, you know, there's also people that get hit in the head and they learn Spanish.
01:17:17.000All of a sudden they can play the piano.
01:17:19.000It's like, the brain is fucking weird, man.
01:17:22.000The brain, like, just the chemistry of the brain is weird, right?
01:17:28.000But the fact that you could have a knock to it, and then all of a sudden you develop new talents...
01:17:34.000Well, and also there's the aspect of comfort because there's that whole Temple Grandin group of people who find comfort in slamming their heads against things.
01:17:43.000You know, severely autistic children, they slam their head against the wall because there's a kind of comforting chemical thing that happens in doing so.
01:18:44.000And a lot of times people have forgotten these incidents.
01:18:47.000They think that they don't, they're just one of, that they didn't change anything.
01:18:52.000But then later when they can identify them according to a major life change, like the fact that my writing went from garbage to, you know, something sellable.
01:19:04.000Do you think there's a possibility that just the trauma, like the emotional trauma of being assaulted and the anger and just the pain that comes with that and the fear that comes with that might have just...
01:19:18.000Did you change the way you view the world enough so that you were willing to express yourself in a more dangerous way?
01:19:24.000No, you know, I'd had very frightening things before that, but they didn't involve a physical component.
01:19:35.000You know, I'd been robbed, I'd been humiliated, just, you know, different public things like that.
01:19:43.000Yeah, that was the only time I was ever really physically assaulted, assaulted.
01:21:27.000I think that would be the worst thing to do, to play chess.
01:21:30.000Like, if I'm hit in the head, like, I don't, uh, like, I haven't done any hard sparring in a long time, but I had a bad skiing, not a bad skiing accident, I had a skiing accident two years ago.
01:21:43.000Where I was going around a corner and this lady was losing control.
01:21:47.000She didn't know how to ski very well and she was just sliding right into the trail and I had two options.
01:21:52.000Hit her or go around her and surely fall.
01:21:55.000And so I tried to go around her and I wiped out and I banged the back of my head off the ground hard.
01:22:07.000I developed an insufficiency fracture in my shin, which is like where the shin bone meets the cartilage cracked.
01:22:13.000It was pretty painful, but I could stand on it.
01:22:17.000But then I got on the ski lift with my daughter, who was 10 at the time, and I I just fell over and my wife saw me fall over she goes you fell over like an old man like an uncoordinated old man like I had a hard time getting up my coordination was all off like everything was off and for the rest of the day I was like dizzy and confused and I recovered like the next day I was okay but I never got checked out but I'm pretty sure from all the head trauma that I've had in the past that was a concussion and Pretty sure.
01:24:14.000And sometimes I just find my idol running so fast that I wish I could call room service and say, would you send somebody up to hit me really hard?
01:24:26.000Because my friends who are fighters, they say that after you've lost in a fight, your idol is knocked down and you're so at peace and your testosterone levels dive and they stay low for quite a period.
01:24:43.000And it's all set up so that you don't go back into competition before your body is fully recovered.
01:24:49.000You're not going to go back into a fight with an injury.
01:24:52.000And so sometimes I think that if I could just, you know, have a punching service and just...
01:25:08.000And it would idle until it reached a certain core temperature.
01:25:12.000And then the carburetor would knock down the idle.
01:25:15.000And sometimes, especially as a much younger man, I would just feel like my idle was set way too high.
01:25:23.000And rather than take medication, if I got slammed or I got hurt, I could knock the idle down.
01:25:34.000And I think sometimes when you're a young, reckless person, you're just looking for something to knock the idol down so that you can live a more sort of profound, examined life.
01:28:40.000And it also has the chess game because you're holding three-dimensional Tetris-like objects that weigh 80 pounds, 90 pounds.
01:28:49.000And you have to carry them up a ladder, maintaining your center of gravity, and then you have to decide how they're going to fit in relation to the pre-existing ones already cast.
01:28:58.000And so you're playing this giant primitive Tetris game that is like playing chess.
01:29:05.000And that part of it is really fascinating.
01:29:07.000Do you secure the rocks with anything other than gravity?
01:29:10.000I put a ton of steel and wire and mesh inside.
01:29:19.000And my understanding is that when the Romans built, rather than create forms for the concrete...
01:29:25.000They used cut stone, mortar together, and that was the form.
01:29:29.000And then they put all the concrete between these two stone forms.
01:29:33.000So the stone you see on the outside is actually the form that was used to hold the concrete in place until it's set.
01:29:41.000And so I build up the kind of two outer walls of stone, maybe a foot, maybe 18 inches, and then I lay in a lot of steel, and then I pour it full of concrete in the center.
01:29:53.000So it looks like it's a stone wall that's two or three feet thick, but it's really a concrete wall that is just faced with stone.
01:30:02.000So when you say lace steel, are you using rebar?
01:30:07.000What kind of steel and how are you doing it?
01:30:09.000You know, it's rebar, but it's also galvanized metal fencing.
01:30:14.000And years ago, Mason's always told me, if you want to make a porch stoop, if you want to just make a fairly small piece of concrete, dry cleaner hangers.
01:30:29.000Wire hangers from the dry cleaners because they are coated with a non-corrosive coating and because you can tangle them up and bend them up and you can just smash them in there, you know, and pour the concrete on top of them.
01:30:44.000And they will hold the mass together in a really magnificent way and they will not corrode because they're covered with that kind of plasticized coating.
01:30:53.000And better yet, you can get them for free.
01:31:20.000And did you take lessons in how to do this?
01:31:24.000Did you read a book on it or watch a video?
01:31:26.000You know, that's part of the comfort thing is my dad did concrete.
01:31:29.000My dad learned concrete work in the Navy.
01:31:34.000My maternal grandfather was a big stone worker.
01:31:38.000It's kind of a Ukrainian thing as well.
01:31:40.000And so I grew up, my poor brother and I, we grew up cleaning old cinder block because my father would get cinder block that would have plaster and stucco on it.
01:31:50.000My brother and I had to stand out in the desert with hammers and clean this cinder block Under the beating hot sun for hours and hours.
01:31:59.000So my brother and I grew up mixing concrete, mixing mortar, hod carrying, where you carry the live mortar around.
01:32:08.000And so there's something enormously comforting about the work now because it has got that link to my childhood.
01:32:16.000And did you have, what kind of design did you put down before you placed it in?
01:32:22.000Did you just do it by feel and by look or did you have like an actual like blueprint of what you were trying to do?
01:33:22.000I had started it actually the year before lockdown.
01:33:26.000But as soon as they were announcing lockdown and you started to see the first few masks, I went to the Washougal Lumberyard and I said, I need all the bags of mortar that you can get me.
01:33:37.000And I started out with like 45, 50 bags of mortar mix because I just knew that things might get really tight really fast.
01:33:47.000And I ordered in all my stone from Metro Landscape.
01:33:52.000God bless Metro Landscape, because I know they listen to you.
01:34:10.000That's a big part of the experience for a lot of people.
01:34:13.000That's one of the things that people really missed during the pandemic was gym culture, where fellow people agreeing to suffer and exercise and exert themselves.
01:34:25.000And also, we overlook the fact that there's a lot of discourse at the gym.
01:34:33.000I think maybe in particular men have to be involved in a task in order to sort of maintain a conversation.
01:34:40.000And so if you're doing something, you're not just talking.
01:34:45.000And so I think a lot of things get worked out while people work out.
01:34:52.000Yeah, there's a thing that happens, too, where there's an alleviation of tension from rigorous exercise where you're really getting after it that makes conversations easier.
01:35:02.000I've had some of the funniest conversations with my friends about their wives or their girlfriends.
01:35:06.000They'll tell you shit about what's going on in the middle of a set.
01:35:10.000Like, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do, man.
01:36:04.000And people have been having this debate since as long as I've been in weight rooms, since the early 80s.
01:36:10.000So yeah, I know a lot of people both ways.
01:36:13.000Yeah, Pavel's idea is that if you can do ten repetitions, you should do five, but you should do five many times.
01:36:21.000So instead of just going to ten and then exhausting your muscles and then going to eight and the next one and then going to seven, you should go to five and then take a long break.
01:36:30.000You should take like five minutes in between sets.
01:36:32.000Most people don't have that kind of time.
01:36:52.000And so instead of doing, you know, like say if you go to 10 repetitions and you could do 10 sets of 10 three times and on the third time you're just absolutely at failure.
01:37:03.000Instead of that, do six or seven sets of five repetitions.
01:37:08.000So you're actually doing more work and it's not as exhausting.
01:37:12.000And it doesn't blow your muscles out the same way, but it actually makes you stronger in his eyes.
01:38:22.000And I like writing more than I like that.
01:38:27.000You know, so that's never been very appealing because I have to sacrifice the writing when I go down that road.
01:38:33.000That's interesting that it kills your creativity.
01:38:35.000Maybe you're not working out hard enough when you're on them.
01:38:38.000And the kind of working out that you're talking about where it is steady and involves rest and camaraderie and talking, I get a lot of writing done during that time.
01:38:48.000Because I'm always talking to other people or to trainers, bouncing ideas off of them to see whether they engage with the idea or whether they have a similar experience.
01:38:59.000Or whether they'd seen the idea in popular culture already.
01:39:02.000So I'm constantly testing material on people at the gym.
01:39:06.000And so that leads to that more sort of subdued training that you described.
01:39:12.000I would feel like maybe the requirements of your body when you're doing steroids, they ramp up so significantly that it takes over your focus.
01:39:21.000Because when you have hyper levels of hormones, hyperhuman levels of hormones, your body has stronger requirements.
01:39:28.000Like, your body thinks it has to do more.
01:39:30.000That's why it has so much in it, you know?
01:39:34.000And it's interesting, like, you can buy stuff that's legal.
01:39:41.000That is, or used to be able to buy stuff that's legal.
01:39:44.000Some of the potent shit I ever did, I could buy at GNC. There was this stuff they used to take.
01:39:49.000It's probably terrible for your liver.
01:40:03.000I was like, I can't believe you could just buy this stuff at GNC. But that stuff, whatever that stuff does, that's not sustainable.
01:40:13.000There's certain things, like testosterone replacement is very sustainable because you can keep your body at a natural level, like a normal level, and it just accounts for the aging process.
01:40:25.000But when you do cycles, like heavy things like that stuff, that MAG-10 stuff, or Anavar, or there's a lot of other ones that you could do cycles of, you can't sustain it.
01:41:17.000Muscle tears or any kind of a knee injury and you're doing rehabilitation, there's some stuff that you could take that significantly speeds up the process of recovery.
01:41:26.000We're talking like you could take five, six months off of the process.
01:41:30.000You know, another thing that I've noticed among my friends and my contemporaries is that the people who did a lot of recreational drugs when they were younger, they did acid, they did mescaline, they did everything.
01:41:44.000They did everything except for steroids.
01:41:48.000As they've grown older, they've never done steroids.
01:41:52.000But my friends who didn't do any recreational drugs, now that they're in their 50s, edging into their 60s, they're doing massive amounts of steroids.
01:42:03.000Yeah, so people are either in one school where you did tons of acid and then nothing, or you are in the other school where you were completely straight edge, and now you're doing every steroid you can get your hands on.
01:42:16.000Who do you know in their 60s is doing steroids?
01:45:15.000I was going to say someone who had transitioned...
01:45:18.000Tried to transition to male like a trans woman or a woman rather would become a trans male and then went back and The dilemma was the size of the clitoris.
01:45:29.000It changed pretty radically and it couldn't change back So that seems to be an argument in Donna's favor.
01:45:36.000It is an argument in Donna's favor now that I'm thinking about it Like you got to get the right balance where your heart doesn't explode, but your dick gets really big Oh, you could just find a hobby, okay?
01:45:54.000Some people like to ride BMX bikes off the side of a fucking cliff, you know?
01:45:59.000My buddy Andy, Andy Stumpf, he does those fucking squirrel suits, those flying squirrel suits where you jump off cliffs and soar through the mountains.
01:47:37.000Well, I think it's interesting when I talk to people who have sort of broken through in their profession, they typically buy a really stupid thing really early on.
01:47:46.000That's the stupid thing I bought early on.
01:47:47.000And that's why I want to talk about that phenomenon.
01:50:25.000There was a designer that came out with these floor-length leather skirts a few years ago, and they looked terrific on the runway, but they weigh like 45 pounds.
01:50:46.000The things women wear, I mean, it's quite amazing that they have decided to wear these fucking torturous devices on their feet that they could barely walk around in and they're so desirable.
01:51:02.000Like those weird fucking stiletto heels and the straps that go over your toes.
01:56:04.000And so it's about going out there with as much clothes on as possible and then demonstrating a really desirable physicality and then about very slowly revealing the truth because nobody wants the full truth.
01:56:24.000Because we all know what's going to be ultimately revealed.
01:56:27.000And it's about maintaining that dopamine, that anticipation, that reason why the build-up to Christmas is so intense and that Christmas is always a really shitty day.
01:56:39.000We want that dopamine to last as long as possible.
01:56:43.000Before the reveal that it's just another day.
01:56:45.000That's one of the more interesting things about humans when it comes to sex is that we're the only animal that requires that sort of mystery and romance and the chase and the whole just the slow tension of it all.
01:57:04.000That it makes it more exciting for us.
01:57:57.000But I believe mammals actually do this, that if they are impregnated by a male that is not of their choosing, they can ejaculate the semen very effectively so they don't become impregnated.
01:59:34.000They're living life to the fullest, okay?
01:59:36.000It's interesting that porn is so prevalent but yet so forbidden and so taboo that it's sort of thought of as a bad thing and not really studied.
01:59:49.000But when you look at the amount of people that consume it, it's an insane sort of hidden consumption in our culture.
01:59:56.000And if you go to Pornhub or one of those places, a lot of it is like stepmom stuff now.
02:00:03.000I don't know why, and I don't know what happened, but I don't remember this being a thing in the past.
02:00:08.000Okay, one thing that has kind of changed the old languaging of fantasy is Michel Foucault, S&M, leather bondage, all of that was kind of based on master-slave relationships, and that whole languaging of master versus slave has been completely displaced.
02:01:51.000I used to make my own computers and used to have to set the jumpers on the motherboard and you had to set it to a certain way and the way you would read the books on descriptions.
02:02:01.000Source and replica as opposed to master and slave.
02:03:34.000Because I think, especially for men that are older, like if they're watching porn, you don't want to watch porn that's someone that's your daughter's age.
02:03:43.000You want to watch a hot lady that's a little younger than you that's keeping her shit together.
02:03:48.000Well, and I think that there's something affirming in that is that when you see an older person in any field who has kind of maintained a kind of sense of vitality and attractiveness and healthiness, That they are presenting for you as well.
02:04:04.000They're proving that at that age you can also be relatively youthful.
02:06:09.000I love to say Gunnar Heinsen is a German academic.
02:06:14.000He wrote a book called Sons and World Power, Sonnen und Weltmacht.
02:06:19.000And his whole theory about Western civilization is that all progress has come because at different points in history where there were too many second sons.
02:06:31.000Because the first son will inherit status and position automatically.
02:06:35.000There's going to be a place in society and there's going to be reproductive opportunity for the first son and resources.
02:06:41.000But for the second, third, fourth sons who get an education and are looking for a place in society, there will not be a place.
02:06:49.000So it's those sons who go out into the world as explorers.
02:07:18.000If they come from a class that educates them and leads them to think that someday they'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock gods and then they realize that's not going to happen, then they go out and they cause trouble and history changes.
02:10:48.000There's a thing we've all come to be accustomed to violence in films with human-on-human violence because we know that that's not really happening.
02:10:57.000Whereas if you know a duckling is not a good actor.
02:11:01.000So when you cut the foot off of a duckling and you see it happening...
02:11:06.000Yeah, but then I go to a restaurant and I order a duck and I know it's happening somewhere.
02:11:55.000So they probably just taped its leg or something and then scooped it up and took the tape off its leg and just, you know, CGI'd the The cut.
02:12:07.000But the bull in Apocalypse Now was real.
02:12:36.000The Mexican director who was supposed to do the original Alien movie, but there's a scene where the gunslinger walks through a huge pen filled with white bunnies and then starts to blow them away, and we see each rabbit exploded in a fairly close-up shot.
02:13:26.000And they put together a huge consortium of really gifted people, and this guy was supposed to direct it, and it was going to be called Alien.
02:13:34.000And at the last moment he bowed out, he couldn't direct it.
02:13:38.000So that group of really gifted people decided to make their movie anyway.
02:13:42.000And that's how Alien got put together.
02:14:40.000But what I found most touching is that when the mass media reported on this whole upset, They reported, they said, middle-aged Canadian novelist blank.
02:15:17.000Until I was sitting at the Island View Drive-In with Linda Ramos, space travel had been depicted as clean and glamorous and exciting, with good haircuts and great fitting clothes,
02:16:50.000And then Alien came forward and they gave us 1970s romantic fatalism.
02:16:54.000You're just going to be a schmo working in a dirty ship going through space wasting your life and then the company is going to flush you down the toilet.
02:17:05.000And we accepted the face-hugger, and we accepted the chest-burster, and we accepted everything because somebody had told us the truth about what future and space travel was actually going to be like.
02:17:18.000And we felt so honored that somebody was finally really honest with us.
02:17:26.000That they weren't feeding us a line of bullshit anymore about space.
02:17:29.000It's not much time difference between Star Wars and Alien.
02:17:39.000But Star Wars was marketed to children who were still idealistic.
02:17:44.000And Alien was marketed to kind of boomers.
02:17:48.000Who had fallen out of the idealism of the 60s and they'd seen all that idealism amount to nothing and they'd sort of fallen into the me generation of disco by that point.
02:18:00.000And they were looking for romantic fatalism to give them a takeaway from the death of their idealism.
02:18:09.000Well, first of all, Sigourney Weaver in that film shows you that this idea of diversity of casting and of having a woman hero What really matters is that it's good.
02:18:25.000What really matters is that the story's good and that it resonates and the acting is good.
02:19:21.000And there was Outlander with Sean Connery that came a few years after that where people were in space doing shit jobs, doing drugs on the side.
02:19:30.000But even Blade Runner was a kind of glamorized future.
02:19:36.000Well, Blade Runner certainly was like technologically glamorized.
02:19:41.000And there was also the promise that in the outer world colonies, it was still going to be Lost in Space and Star Trek.
02:20:20.000He wrote most of it, and it was a fascinating kind of novel because he wrote a whole slew of short stories for science fiction magazines in the 40s and 50s.
02:20:30.000And he thought, you know, if I could just plug some holes, I can sell this as a novel.
02:20:35.000So he wrote that book over maybe 20 years, and then he just cobbled it all together like a quilt and called it a novel.
02:20:43.000And some of the best books happen that way.
02:20:46.000I think Joy Luck Club got put together that way.
02:21:19.000And then I also post, I'm posting a lot of sort of writing stuff.
02:21:26.000I can only have like 20-25 students at a time and it's a way of kind of providing these for free to people likewise because they're the best things that were taught to me by my best teachers and I just assume they not die with me.
02:21:46.000Because journalists are flocking to it because they're tired of all the restrictions from editors and just the inability to just get your thoughts clearly without any sort of a filter.
02:23:22.000The Substack thing, what separates Substack from the rest of social media?
02:23:27.000Is it that they need to seek you out in particular?
02:23:31.000And then if they're going to your Substack, they clearly are interested in your writing and they know who you are, they know what you do, they're fans of your work, they're not just casuals?
02:24:29.000I know a lot of really prominent journalists that have taken their writing and moved over to there and...
02:24:36.000You know, for people that have run into problems with social media censoring their ideas and censoring their work, and that's a real issue, especially if you're a journalist that covers controversial subjects, anything that has to do with COVID-19 runs into the possibility of being censored.
02:24:58.000Well, the structure of The thing itself censors people because writing fiction or writing in general is almost becoming what painting was when photography came in.
02:25:09.000Because now as I start to write, the computer is correcting my spelling.
02:25:14.000The computer is correcting my grammar.
02:25:17.000The computer is anticipating what my next few words are going to be.
02:25:21.000And I find myself in a constant battle.
02:25:24.000With this kind of steering, helpful software that is trying to take me down a very standardized road.
02:25:31.000And it's really hard to sort of thwart all of these sort of controlling devices to try to write something that is clumsily worded but more honestly worded and also goes to a place that the culture doesn't necessarily want to go to.
02:25:50.000And so there's all these kind of I'm thwarting things that are kind of funneling people in the same direction.
02:25:58.000And sometimes I want to misspell a word.
02:26:00.000Sometimes I want to have a really clumsy grammatical construction.
02:26:03.000And sometimes I want to go to a place that nobody wants to go to.
02:26:17.000You felt like there's a more intimate relationship with, or a clean relationship with just ink, paper, thoughts, go to the ink, do the paper.
02:26:26.000Oh yeah, because I've got a mind like a sieve.
02:27:23.000You put me on these two four-hour flights.
02:27:26.000And if I ask for seat 1A, I can put that tray table down and I can put my notebook out and I can keyboard for four hours and I have nothing else to do.
02:27:38.000I have no other choice but to keyboard.
02:27:40.000And so I will take a trip just to be trapped in that seat and transcribe my notes and get so much work done.
02:27:49.000It's so funny that you say that because I too have done some of my best writing trapped on a plane.
02:28:15.000And one of them, I'm going to kind of plug this thing with the Substack money.
02:28:20.000I'm funding a program called Study Hall, where I just rent a space, and anybody who wants to can just show up in this space, but they have to work quietly.
02:28:31.000And people who can't work at home and people who want to be in the presence of other people doing a similar task, they can find the comfort of other people who are doing writing.
02:28:43.000And it seems to be enormous popular with people like myself because it's so hard to do this kind of work at home where there's a lot of distractions, a lot of demands.
02:34:20.000And so, in a way, by removing the scaffolding, by kind of Refusing to dictate my intentions, I think I'm giving them a greater freedom in assigning their own meaning.
02:35:18.000During the lockdown, I made over a hundred really elaborate four-foot bookmarks out of semi-precious stones that I picked up around the world on book tours.
02:35:35.000And I still remember the first days when he'd take my brother and I to this little rock shop, and he'd show us hematite, or he'd show us goldstone or pyrite.
02:36:09.000I came back from Germany a couple years ago, and I sat next to a gemologist who told me a great story.
02:36:17.000I don't know it's true, but I think it's true.
02:36:22.000And he said, pawn shops, hawk shops, when people would pawn diamond rings, The pawn shops, they didn't really have a way of judging what diamonds were worth what.
02:36:35.000So typically, they'd just pry the diamond out of the setting, out of the fitting, and all the diamonds would end up in a cigar box under the counter, and they'd melt down the gold because the gold could be assayed and had a value.
02:36:48.000And during the 1930s, I believe, there was one small jewelry store.
02:36:53.000And they more or less knew that every pawn shop in the country had a cigar box full of battered, second-hand diamonds that could be recut and graded and set.
02:37:06.000And so this jewelry store owner sent his sons around the country with cash and offered every pawn shop $100 cash For the box of diamonds we know you have.
02:37:18.000And every pawn shop more or less said, take them.
02:39:19.000Because I'm trying to picture rocks and bookmarks.
02:39:22.000I'm like, I'm not piecing this together in my head right.
02:39:26.000It's kind of heartbreaking because they're so beautifully wrapped that people have to destroy all this beauty in order to find out what's inside of it.
02:39:34.000And it makes a really nice metaphor and a really nice kind of discovery process where something has to be sacrificed in order to have a greater understanding of what it is.
02:41:27.000It is a fascinating book, and it really speaks to the role that gifts play in our culture throughout all of history as a gesture, not as a thing to be gotten, but as a kind of gesture or process.
02:41:45.000And how the gesture itself is the important part, not the object.
02:41:50.000And so what I'm trying to do is kind of replicate that Lewis Hyde demonstration of gift as gesture or ritual.
02:42:07.000And, you know, he writes a lot about the cultural...
02:42:14.000Cross-cultural aspect that each of us, in almost every culture, it's perceived that we're each born with a genie or an hideous demon or a genius or a guardian angel.
02:42:28.000And it's more or less a spirit that has a destiny for us.
02:42:34.000And if we will Sacrifice time and effort to developing this gift, then the Spirit will remain with us and keep us safe for our entire life.
02:42:48.000And in turn, the Spirit will be allowed to transcend to a higher plane of existence.
02:42:55.000But if we don't accept our gift, and if we don't kind of live into our destiny, whatever that gift is, then the spirit becomes malevolent, and it becomes something that haunts us and destroys us, destroys our entire household.
02:43:09.000I think the ancient Greeks called it the lemur, L-E-M-U-R, like the small monkey.
02:43:19.000I just want to keep that in mind that it's about, you know, sacrificing or dedicating, devoting a certain amount of time and energy to kind of fulfilling that destiny.
02:43:37.000At some age you realize you have to sacrifice your life for something.
02:43:42.000And I decided to sacrifice my life for writing.
02:43:45.000Because otherwise, you know, my life is going to be kind of scattershot.