Gregg Hurwitz

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] This is episode seven, a conversation with author Greg Hurwitz.

[2] Greg has written 17 novels, including his most recent work, A Nowhere Man. He has written screenplays for many of the major studios, and written, developed, and produced television for various networks.

[3] He is a New York Times best -selling comic book writer, having pen stories for both Marvel and DC.

[4] He has also published numerous academic, articles on Shakespeare, taught fiction writing in the USC English department, and guest lectured for UCLA, and for Harvard in the United States and internationally.

[5] You can support this podcast by donating to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's Patreon account by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon.

[6] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, are available at self -authoring .com.

[7] All right, it's looking good.

[8] So I'm here today with Greg Hurwitz, who's a novelist and a screenwriter and a comic book writer and a variety of other things as well.

[9] And we're going to talk a little bit about his latest book, The Nowhere Man, and then we're going to talk to him about writing more generally.

[10] And that's the plan anyways.

[11] So how are you doing, Greg?

[12] I'm doing well.

[13] Thank you.

[14] So why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your new book and then about who you are?

[15] well my new book I started a new series with my last book and usually I write standalone thrillers but my last book was based on I've I've sort of done a lot of really dumb things in the name of research over the year so I've gone undercover to mind control cults I've gone up and done airplanes I've snuck on a demolition range of navy seals and blown up cars and one of the things that kept coming up when I dealt with a lot of the spec ops guys were how these off the books programs were implemented over the years, the sort of history beneath the history that we're all aware of.

[16] And I got really interested in this, and I thought about a character who was taken out of foster homes at the age of 12.

[17] This is a program called the Orphan Program, and basically raised up to be assassins, to be, it's their full training, it's their full life.

[18] And that's Orphanx.

[19] That's the first book in the series.

[20] And so in the second book, the one that's just come out called The Nowhere Man, this assassin is taken by somebody who doesn't know who he is but wants something from him and he's taken off and spirited off kidnapped to this remote chateau he doesn't know where it is and the people don't know have no idea what his real identity is or who he is and they think that he's trapped in there with them and in fact they're trapped in there with him and they're soon going to realize that they have a major problem on their hands and so it's the second in the folding out of this new character his name is Evan Smoke So this is the first time that you've written a series.

[21] No, it's the second time you've written a series.

[22] Is that right?

[23] Yeah, I wrote a series early in my career, and then I went about nine books with stand -alones, and then I returned to it.

[24] And part of that is it takes so long.

[25] I mean, the majority of my waking hours I'm spending inside a manuscript and with a character.

[26] Like, I spend more time with my characters who are fictional than I do with my wife and kids.

[27] And so it took me a lot of years to find...

[28] better?

[29] Your fiction?

[30] The characters?

[31] Yeah, yeah.

[32] They're less complicated, which is actually one of the themes of the books, um, or the ways of which, uh, the complications that arise from intimacy, because my, my character was, was raised with a veil of perfection.

[33] You know, a lot of the notions that I play with with him I came to when I was writing on, on Batman.

[34] I wrote Batman comics for a couple of years.

[35] And there were some notions in there that interested me. And one of them was the, the balance between perfection and intimacy.

[36] That was my main focus with Batman.

[37] Because part of the reason why I like Batman so much is, you know, he doesn't have a magic ring like Green Lantern.

[38] He can't fly like Superman.

[39] He's just a human who represents the pinnacle of what can be accomplished through sheer discipline.

[40] But part of why that works is his parents are dead.

[41] He's not married.

[42] He has no kids.

[43] He lives up in Wayne Manor.

[44] And he's completely undisturbed by everyone and everything so he can hone it.

[45] And the more that you let people into your life, and the more that you allow intimacy in your life, the more complications come that sort of detract from this previous notion of perfection.

[46] Okay, so I've got a question about that.

[47] So that seems to me to reflect in some sense the problem, maybe the different problems or maybe the different orientation of men and women.

[48] So it's possible for men to, and I think many men can do this too, to sacrifice everything, including intimacy, to become really good at one thing, whereas women, as far as I can tell, and of course this is a broad generalization and one that will undoubtedly get me in trouble.

[49] You never get in trouble, no, no, no, I know.

[50] Women are, I think, more concerned with intimacy and with relationship, and that's an interesting dichotomy that you established between those two.

[51] And so why, you said that intimacy detracts from perfection because it's sort of, it spreads you out in the world.

[52] Why did you come across that particular paradox?

[53] Why do you think that one fascinates you?

[54] Well, I think that part of it is, is I'm hyper disciplined.

[55] And one of the things that I noticed is that I think that's the thing, when you find a character who you need to live with more than you do with your family, you have to find something at the heart of them that's uniquely compelling.

[56] And for me, I think I have a strong perfectionist drive.

[57] And as I've got, when I was younger, it served me well, right?

[58] A lot of the traits that we have or negative traits that might be survival instincts that got us through a key period of our life, they're easy to discard when they're not helpful, right?

[59] So like, if you can have a bit of a temper, it's easy to get rid of it.

[60] The ones that are really hard or adaptive, you know, qualities that we have that have gotten us very, very far, but now we're starting to interfere with our lives.

[61] And so one of the things that I notice is that my drive for severe discipline and perfection is tough when you're married when you have a wife, when you have two kids, when you have a dog, if you're singularly focused.

[62] But it's also not something that the answer is to just give up completely.

[63] You know, so it's trying to find a balance of maintaining the value in the drive and the discipline that's necessary to be a novelist and screenwriter and comic book writer and also to exhibit discipline in other areas in my life.

[64] while also, you know, allowing for sort of the complications that come with intimacy.

[65] And so with Evan, Smoke, with my main character, for me, the whole series coalesce around a certain exchange that he has, which is, you know, one of the things that I did when I first was thinking about him being pulled out, he's this Brooke foster kid, he's pulled out of the projects of these Baltimore at the age of 12, and he's raised only by handler.

[66] No one even knows who he is, and his co -named's Orphanx.

[67] And I thought instead of making this the usual sobby backstory, what if that handler was a really fundamentally good man and became like a father figure and actually loved him?

[68] And at one point, Jack Johns, who's his handler, tells him the heart when he's a kid.

[69] He says the hard part is not going to be making you a killer.

[70] The hard part is going to be keeping you human.

[71] And for Evan, the thing that's stuck in my head was it would be so much easier if he was just purely an assassin if his moral compass was never broken.

[72] but because of the way that he was raised he at a certain point the ambiguities of committing these assassinations in different territories where we're not supposed to be and he has limited information the moral ambiguities become too much and he leaves and becomes sort of a pro bono assassin for people in desperate need like that's where we meet him in the series and it's only because Jack gave him a human connection that opened up the complexities that make this complicated for him you know when I was writing The Punisher who's a Marvel character that's not hard.

[73] The Punisher's, family's all dead, he just wants to kill everybody.

[74] He wants to punish everybody.

[75] With Evan, there's this thing at the heart of it that, like, he still has to function with this humanity that was given to him from his father figure.

[76] Yeah, I was thinking of the Batman movie with Heath Ledger, and one of the things that happens in that movie is that the Joker accuses Batman of being exactly the same as he is, fundamentally.

[77] mentally, like they're, you could say, opposite sides of the same coin, or maybe even closer than that.

[78] And it seems to me that there's something in what you're saying that mitigates against the deadly danger, or maybe even would you call it a psychopathic intensity of single -mindedness?

[79] Because one question you might ask yourself is that if intimacy interferes with perfection, then why bother with it?

[80] Right.

[81] Well, and also, like, how do we widen out the definition?

[82] perfection it's like okay so if you take bruce way into his logical end and he's you know killed a lot of bad guys and maintained fit physical perfection uh and dies alone in his manner is that actually perfection like you have to broaden out the definition of what you apply perfection to and um do as good a job of laying out that dichotomy in my earlier question as i might have but one of the things you mentioned was that it was his presupposition that men were after perfection and women were after wholeness right that's a more inclusive the question with perfection is that it's single -minded right and it only focuses on let's say one thing whereas wholeness seems to be something more like the balance between a variety of positive and valuable things and you can't be perfect at a variety of useful and balanced or valuable and balanced things.

[83] You have to settle for maybe B plus at a variety of them, but the question is, is the totality then more valuable than perfection along one axis?

[84] And I suppose it depends on the situation, but obviously that's something that you're continually toying with.

[85] And you said it's because it reflects a similar situation in your own life and with your own character.

[86] So you've managed to integrate intimacy into your life, and so what's being the advantage to that?

[87] well the advantages it's i mean a lot of the things that give that ultimately give i think pleasure and meaning to life come from intimacy you know it's that it's like there's the old saw that people say when people die it's rare that they're going to say gosh i wish i worked more you know regardless of what the work is versus spending time with your family and with your friends and it's like i've noticed increasingly as i get older there's a shift in priorities and values but it still is one that's hard for me at times because I get, I can get single -minded.

[88] I mean, I can get hypomanic when I'm writing.

[89] I write generally 10 hours a day, but I've written as much as 23 hours straight, you know, when I was on a TV show that was at risk of shutting down.

[90] And we need a script, and there's just not a choice for it.

[91] So I can get incredibly focused, but the more focus that I get with writing, one of the things that you're doing with writing when you're in a venture that's difficult is you have a very high error recognition alarm system, right?

[92] That's cliched.

[93] That's not going to work.

[94] That's been seen before.

[95] You want to do something that's new.

[96] And if you're in a field that's hard, that's turned up really high.

[97] Well, that can make living with you really difficult or interacting with other people.

[98] It's very effective for work to say, how do I make everything better?

[99] What's everything that's wrong with this?

[100] It's sort of an approach to a manuscript.

[101] But it doesn't work as well if you have a two -year -old or a five -year -old at home or you're trying to deal with something else.

[102] and you can also lose perspective.

[103] So there's a single -mindedness to the range of perfection that you can lose things at the periphery.

[104] So like having some B -pluses in other arenas, I think, are better.

[105] I mean, that's one of the things what relationships are good for is literally providing perspective.

[106] Like we always say that.

[107] You know, my friend gave me good perspective, but it's like there's somebody literally outside you looking at you aware of what your blind spots are, aware of the things that you're doing wrong that we just can't see.

[108] And that's one of the way of intimacy is immensely useful is it's like you can be on perfection and just tail off in the wilderness and be gone if you don't have other people looking at you and keeping you human you know and so it's right right well that's that's actually one of the arguments that i've been making up here as you know for the necessity of freedom of speech is that it isn't so much that you get to say what you think and be right it's that you get to say what you think and be exposed to the corrective views of other people.

[109] And they have the same responsibility and right with regards to their own speech.

[110] They have to say what they think, but they have to be open to corrective input from other people.

[111] And it's impossible.

[112] Like if we want to evolve into a society where if you misspeak, like for instance, there was a Saturday Night Live writer who made a tweet that was denigrating Baron Trump, right?

[113] And she ultimately regretted it, right?

[114] And so she apologized.

[115] It doesn't matter.

[116] Saturday Night Live kind of suspended or either suspended her or let her go, suspended her indefinitely.

[117] And so there's this interesting question of like, if you're a comedian and your job is to be funny, being funny revolves on being a reverent and on being surprising.

[118] You're the court jester in a certain way.

[119] You have to go too far sometimes in order to do your job properly.

[120] And maybe that's three times out of 10.

[121] So she said something that she believed that she went too far and she apologized for us.

[122] And we've gotten in this place that people don't accept apologies anymore.

[123] Well, it's not good enough.

[124] I think it's worse, actually.

[125] I think it looks to me like we've got to a place where if you make an apology, people regard that as final proof of your guilt.

[126] It's not...

[127] Right, which then, yeah, and then it encourages a lack of insight and apology from people who increasingly rise in power.

[128] But the thing for me that's so interesting is It's like when I write, I give myself permission to write a vomit draft of a book.

[129] I talk to so many aspiring writers who say, I sit down and I just lock up.

[130] I write a paragraph and then I don't know what to do.

[131] I have conversation after conversation with people.

[132] And I say, don't be afraid to make mistakes and fail.

[133] You cannot fix a blank page.

[134] Get something down.

[135] I call it the vomit draft.

[136] Yeah.

[137] And then you can fix it.

[138] And if we're losing that ability in speech, like everyone has to speak like Winston Churchill on first pass.

[139] Everyone has to have perfectly constructed sentences, perfectly regarded thought, we're going to lose our ability to interact in ways that are meaningful.

[140] And to stop and pause and say, you're right.

[141] That did go too far.

[142] Let me back off.

[143] Yeah, well, I tell my students, my graduate students and my undergraduates as well, to write a really bad first draft.

[144] And I also tell them you can't play around with that.

[145] Like you can't pretend that you're going to write a really bad first draft.

[146] and then, you know, break the rules of that game and try to write something good anyways, because that doesn't work, it doesn't free you up.

[147] And, you know, I tell them at the same time, if they're trying to write a 2 ,000 -word essay to write a really bad 3 ,000 -word essay or 4 ,000 -word essay, so that they can feel comfortable in throwing away 50 % of it.

[148] Well, it's also amazing how you get to good through that.

[149] Like, a lot of times I sit down, you know, and if you're not feeling it and if I just start writing at a certain point it's sort of like if you set I always tell you know younger writers set time that you make sacrosan you know that is above all else that you have to write so even if it's an hour twice a week at a certain point you're going to hit the hour mark and realize that you're at an hour and a half you're at an hour and 45 minutes it leads to more and so if you're willing to write into mistakes and errors and not be overly concerned with you know if every everything is impeccably detailed, you will get to stuff that's better.

[150] At a certain point, you'll start doing real writing.

[151] The language will start to actually be alive as opposed to dead.

[152] It's a way to access it.

[153] It's like a warm -up.

[154] It's jogging a warm -up lap on a track before you sprint.

[155] And we need to be able to have that, you know, and it's...

[156] Well, you also say that you have to push yourself out to the place where you're actually making errors.

[157] You were talking about comedians.

[158] And it seems to me that that's...

[159] If you're exploring a set of new ideas, instead of just writing...

[160] down what you already know, which would sort of be like imitating yourself or parodying yourself, you have to push yourself past what you already know.

[161] And if you're not doing that, if you're doing that, you're going to make mistakes.

[162] And if you're not doing that, then you're not going to be doing something that's creative and interesting.

[163] And so there is some kind of, excuse me, there is some kind of optimal ratio of error to creative thought.

[164] I remember There was a good study done about relationships and their longevity.

[165] And one question might be, how many positive interactions compared to negative interactions do you have to have in order for a relationship to maintain itself stably across time?

[166] And you'd think, well, the higher, the positive to the negative, the better.

[167] But that isn't how it turned out.

[168] it turned out that five positive to one negative interactions, roughly speaking, was the lower bound.

[169] If the negative, if the ratio got lower than that, then people got unhappy and the relationship degenerated.

[170] But if it got above 11 positive interactions to one negative interaction, it also became unstable.

[171] And I think the reason for that is that there's no corrective information.

[172] Well, and contentment is deadening.

[173] Yeah, that's a tough one for people to grasp, because they often don't get to contentment.

[174] But is it contentment exactly, or is it stasis?

[175] Or it's also, there's something horrific about only seeing the positive reflected back to you.

[176] I think you just start to take things for granted.

[177] I mean, look, I always say about books, it's like when I'm writing any project, if there's not a certain point that I'm scared that I can't pull it off, I haven't chosen the right project.

[178] I mean, and I'm, I don't know, 18 novels and I mean, I've written 10 scripts.

[179] I've written 80 comics.

[180] And part of that is how to change things up.

[181] And this whole notion that we're talking about with this character, with Evan Smoke, started with that.

[182] I was like, I was thinking about writing this ultra -badass assassin character.

[183] It's a thriller.

[184] It deals with other themes, some of which we can get into.

[185] But part of what I thought about was, you know, we never see, we never see James Bond go home.

[186] home.

[187] We never see Jason Bourne and a badass mission.

[188] He's bleeding in his arm and he gets in an elevator with a single mom who is an elderly woman who's a neighbor and they're nagging him to go to his homeowners association meeting because he haven't done it yet.

[189] So it's like if I can create a character who represents these archetypal ideals but cross them in the world with me and you, no one's done that.

[190] And the whole time I was writing that, I was thinking, is this going to just fail miserably?

[191] Is this not going to interest people?

[192] Am I Because we're using, you know, anyone who's writing genre, we're using a previous mole, which I don't mean in a way that's denigrating.

[193] I mean, that's what Shakespeare did.

[194] You know, some of the structure and containment and traditions of a form can be enormously useful.

[195] But I'm always trying to tap it and break it at the edges.

[196] I did that a lot when I was writing Batman.

[197] So let's talk about the comics a bit.

[198] You wrote Batman for how long?

[199] Two years.

[200] I started writing six months of The Penguin, and I had this really funny thing.

[201] I was writing for Marvel, or Wolverine and Punisher, who are two of my favorite characters.

[202] And DC came along and told me I could do sort of whatever I wanted and, you know, pick a character.

[203] And I said, what I really want to do is write a graphic novel of the Penguin.

[204] And he sort of looked at me with alarm because of all the choices that I had, that was totally bizarre.

[205] but one of my big inspirations in comics is the killing joke by Alan Moore that's the essential origin story of the Joker and I thought the penguin had always been kind of a joke and furthermore I thought how interesting because if you're the penguin then Batman is the enemy and Batman is a bully right and so I wanted to do this alternate thing and so he was like you know the publisher of DC let me do it but I still remember there was an online poll that said um that listed 10 upcoming comics mine among it and asked how much readers were anticipating them, and I got 0 .013 % of the vote.

[206] And I still remember, one of my favorite denigrating comments of all time is one guy just wrote, I'm so glad Hurwitz's mom voted for him, which was great.

[207] And so it came out to, like, the interest of no one, but what happened is that the critics really sparked to it, and then readers really sparked to it, and people all of a sudden said, we've never looked at the penguin this way.

[208] And it was this very interesting object lesson And had I gone for the obvious and said, let me write Batman right away, let me write Superman right away.

[209] I chose something that was super bizarre that I had to write and that I knew that I really wanted to write and could do well.

[210] And from the most unlikely position, it led to me having, it sort of led to a whole other phase of my career.

[211] You know, and then I found myself, you know, all of a sudden working on Batman for two years with the best artists in the world.

[212] So that's interesting.

[213] You took a lowly approach and an approach to something that people are.

[214] actually found contemptible.

[215] Yes.

[216] So, and, and through that, you got what you want?

[217] So what in the world wasn't about the penguin and the story that you wrote?

[218] Why in the world did the penguin grip you like that?

[219] Do you have any idea?

[220] And tell us again, tell us what you made of it as well.

[221] Well, I, I had a strong affinity, like I said, for the killing joke.

[222] And I always thought the penguin was so interesting because of all of Batman's rivals, he's the only one who's sane right of the whole you know of all of the nemeses and the other thing that just really struck me was this whole way to view Batman through a completely different prism I mean like you can look at the Joker who's insane and then he looks at Batman but Batman's semi insane too like there's craziness and such an interesting prism so with the penguin I wrote about you know his upbringing and you know he's this unappealing overweight kid his brothers were, you know, athletic and robust.

[223] He was always bullied growing up.

[224] And it's like, well, guess what Batman is?

[225] Batman's like this paragon of a physical specimen.

[226] So he's always appearing in the background.

[227] But I was like, if I can get people to empathize with the penguin and view Batman as a villain, or not as a villain necessarily, but just to really, if we can really relate to the penguin and what his position is in that universe, I just thought that would be cool.

[228] But also a lot of it was, and this is a lot of what happens is like I don't have a conscious thought about it.

[229] You know, I was literally driving to the meeting with the publisher of DC and I just was thinking, I know this story.

[230] I know how to write it.

[231] I know how I want to sort of direct it on the page.

[232] I know what I want to say with it.

[233] And it's only in hindsight I can look back and untangle it and realize that, you know, oh, well, part of what I was interested in was the aspect that it's that he's actually saying.

[234] and there's a bullying way, and it's a way to look at Batman through a new Engel.

[235] Yeah, well, there's an interesting idea lurking in there as well, which is if you think of Batman as an ideal, now he's kind of a one -dimensional ideal.

[236] An ideal is also a judge, because it's something that you can't attain to exactly, or that if you look at it, makes you acutely aware of your lack.

[237] And so, on the one hand, an ideal is something that, is positive and worth striving for, but on the other hand, it's necessarily something that's got this, it's not exactly a bullying element, but it's something similar to that, because you're insufficient in its presence.

[238] Right.

[239] I might say as well, to the degree that the ideal is one -dimensional, the fact that you're insufficient in its presence is actually a bit, it's a bit unjust or unfair, because there may be other dimensions of comparison along which you're doing fine.

[240] It's actually a claim that's quite similar to the postmodernist idea, you know, that if you erect a hierarchy of values, then by necessity you exclude people from that hierarchy, and that that is, in some sense, it's oppressive and it's wrong.

[241] Of course, the issue they don't address is that if there's no hierarchy of values, there's nowhere to go and there's nothing to do.

[242] But there is a point there that if you're the...

[243] exemplar of something you make everyone else feel insufficient in your presence and you could also imagine it would be easy for that to take on a bullying aspect you know well and that's something i played with you know so then even when i was doing batman i still focused a lot on the villains and their perspective so i did it i did a run with david finch on the scarecrow who i re -inanded for the new 52 and then i did one with the madhatter with Ethan van skyber some of these amazing artist but one of the things that I put in one of the comics is one of the thugs who Batman comes along and the thug says like you don't remember me do you and Batman says no and he goes you came flying through the window and you know the typical Batman scene and kick me with your you know your boots laying on my jaw here's what that surgery was here's what I'm living with and he goes down this very detail you know because so often it's Batman swings through window and smashes a bad guy and we all move on and I took these pauses sometimes to kind of look at things from a different angle and it was like horrific and fractured his skull and his you know his sinus was out and like it was it's this horrific injury that took you know 15 screws and I sort of detail the whole thing as he throws it back to Batman to be like you know I'm I'm kind of cannon fodder in your mission maybe what I was doing is wrong here's the level of pain that you inflicted on me nonetheless.

[244] And it was this interesting pause.

[245] And I'd say the things that there's always a tightrope act when you're writing, you know, a comic book character, because they're sort of in a public trust.

[246] You know, I don't own them.

[247] D .C. doesn't fully own them, though they own them legally.

[248] But like, there's stuff that you know that you can't do.

[249] You can't have Batman kill a busload of nuns.

[250] I mean, there's the obvious.

[251] But part of what they hire me is it's like, I need to bring something new to this character, but also I need to honor the traditions that have come before.

[252] So it's like I've been entrusted with this thing where I have to play with it and I have to navigate that tightrope very, very meticulously to do something that makes it worth them bringing me on, to give readers something new and to make myself feel like I've put my own stamp on the character, but not stray too far.

[253] So it's a real exercise in being the sort of, you know, holding the flame of this tradition.

[254] One of the ways I did that a lot too, that was I would make fun of the tradition itself.

[255] I got slightly meta with it, for instance.

[256] So I give you one example is I did a scene where Jim Gordon, the police commissioner, is talking, you know, it's late at night, Batman appears in his office, they're having a conversation, it's darkly lit, and Jim starts to muse on something, and he walks, you know, so the frame is just with him, he's looking out the window, and he talks for two panels, and then he says, oh, this is the part where I turn around and you're no longer there, right?

[257] And there's a blank, and then Batman says, nope, and then they turn around and regard each other very awkwardly for a panel and then they go, all right then they both walk away awkwardly.

[258] So it's like it's knowing that we all live in a world of Batman comics and maybe Batman himself even does also.

[259] And some of those little nuances are a way to kind of massage it into something in a culture that's increasingly pop culture aware.

[260] So I was thinking about this perfection issue again and the issue of monstrousness So I read this, I think it was a billion wicked thoughts, which is a very interesting book.

[261] The Google engineers were looking at Google searches and trying to do psychology as a consequence.

[262] And because they're engineers, they'll think anything they want to think and they don't care much about how politically correct it is, for example.

[263] And one of the things they noted was that they were looking at pornography use.

[264] And it's no surprise to anyone, of course, that men use.

[265] images for pornography fundamentally and everyone knows what the images are like.

[266] It's usually young women who are symmetrical and so forth and youthful from a sociobiological perspective because that's associated with fruitfulness and fecundity and that sort of thing.

[267] That's actually my favorite website is young women who are symmetrical .com.

[268] The advertisement has to be slightly different, but nonetheless, point is taken.

[269] Yes, exactly.

[270] Exactly.

[271] Well, they also looked at female pornography use, surprisingly enough, and it was almost all literary.

[272] It was written, and it was stories.

[273] And they pointed out that the basic story, and this is something that I found extremely useful, because in some ways I've always been looking for the fundamental female myth, because it's not exactly the same as the hero archetype, which is perhaps the fundamental male myth.

[274] But anyways, the female myth was essentially beauty and the beast.

[275] So the guy was beastly, obviously, and she would entice him into a relationship that would tame him in some sense.

[276] And he would become humanized, but under her tutelage and devote himself to her.

[277] And they named the five most common beasts in this kind of literature, the soft, pornography or maybe even hardcore portographic literature.

[278] I know that even Harlequin, the big purveyor of romance novels, has a pretty hardcore side imprint.

[279] Anyways, the five most popular beasts were surgeon, billionaire, pirate, vampire, and war wolf which is really quite comical as far as I'm concerned.

[280] But it made me think while you were talking about perfection, that there is kind of monstrousness in perfection as well.

[281] And so, you know, again, the research evidence seems to suggest that women mate across and up dominance hierarchies where men mate across and down, socioeconomic dominance hierarchies.

[282] And so the women are in some sense attracted to guys who are unidimensionally monstrous enough to climb to the top of a given dominance hierarchy.

[283] But then, so that begs the question.

[284] which is that in that drive for perfection, if there isn't something intrinsically monstrous, and that has something to do with the willingness to sacrifice everything else to that single -minded pursuit.

[285] So I wonder if those things are even, if you can even take them apart, because Batman, who's obviously a creature of the night, I would say he's probably the superhero that has the most self -evident integration of pathology associated with his character, something like that, because he's this dark guy, and he definitely operates outside of the parameters of the law quite clearly.

[286] And he is motivated to no small end by vengeance, I would say, and the borderline between vengeance and justices, of course, very murky.

[287] So then you talked about the requirement or the utility of intimacy in buffering against that perfection, But that makes you wonder, too, if it also provides a necessary buffer against monstrousness.

[288] Yes.

[289] Well, that's the line to get back to with Jack, to Evan Smoke, when he says the hard part is turning into a killer, and the hard part is keeping you human.

[290] And that's the flaw that he deals with.

[291] But I can say, you know, with Orphanx, I mean, this is a book that connected with readers.

[292] It's been translated and published in 20 languages.

[293] The vast majority emails that I get are about his relationship, trying to navigate his way through the normal world.

[294] That's the stuff that people love with it.

[295] So there's the mission, there's the spy stuff.

[296] I'd say there's two parts.

[297] One of them is that he is a trained assassin who now has become a pro -bo -to assassin.

[298] His moral compass was never broken because of his upbringing with Jack.

[299] He now helps only the truly desperate.

[300] Right.

[301] And so he's not an evil capitalist.

[302] exactly well he has he has money stashed in the bank accounts everywhere from when he was operating off the book so there's a there's a good capitalist strain still going on oh yeah but the other thing is these interactions like you know there's a single mother who's been widowed with a young boy who lives downstairs from him who he is who he's enamored of but has no idea he doesn't speak the language of intimacy so there's this like distant flirtatious relationship with her the boy's very enamored of evan and he He doesn't quite know what to do with her to complicate matters further.

[303] She's a district attorney.

[304] So if she actually knew anything about him that's legitimate, she'd have to prosecute him.

[305] And those moments of him trying to figure out, I'm carrying out this mission that requires comprehensive discipline and focus.

[306] And yet here's this draw to this woman and her kid in the kind of warmth of a house that's an immense draw for him.

[307] And I think at the heart of him, there's this conflict where like I view it that he, he's kind of got his face up to the glass and he's looking in and all these people leading ordinary lives that he himself can never lead.

[308] Like he can never live those lives.

[309] But so what he can do is to protect people when those ordinary lives are disrupted and when they're put upon by horrible men, right?

[310] Or horrible, unfixable solutions.

[311] The cops can't help you.

[312] Nobody can help you.

[313] You're powerless.

[314] You've been bullied nearly into oblivion.

[315] And there's a huge risk to yourself.

[316] They can call him and he can fix it.

[317] it.

[318] So he can constantly reestablish and protect the lives of other people, but he can't ever have it.

[319] And so that, for me, is what's really interesting.

[320] And that takes a twist in the Nowhere Man, as we discussed, which deals more with kind of different thematics, since he's the one who's captured, about aging versus, you know, about trying to be everything versus trying to be one thing.

[321] Yeah, you play that out differently in the Nowhere, man, with different, that's a, yeah, that's a slightly different theme, right?

[322] There's a Peter Pan theme there.

[323] yeah i mean my my go ahead no no go ahead you know the well so i mean so again in the nowhere man i mean for the second book it's always tricky to follow up a book that that that connects with readership in a certain way but i really wanted to turn reader expectations on their head so i thought well what if instead of of evan going and doing another mission that we're used to he gets the anonymous phone call and goes and helps someone what if he finds himself in exactly the kind of predicament that other people usually call him a form so that nowhere man opens with him finishing out the end of an operation somehow manages to get kidnapped as i mentioned he comes to in this distant chateau where he's being overseen by a guy called rene peter casseroi and we're not quite sure why he's there they don't know who he is yet things are going to get really bad there's dozens of armed guards but evan now is the one who he would normally call and has to free himself so it's about his own liberation to get back to finishing the mission that he wants to do and to protect other people who are at the chateau.

[324] But what was interesting to me is that conversation that we seem to always have in thrillers and mysteries and comics, you're just like me. Renee has a similar thing to Evan and says, like me, you don't obey any rules.

[325] He knows he's a vigilante.

[326] He doesn't quite know what he does, but he thinks he might be a drug dealer or an arms dealer.

[327] He's ambiguous.

[328] He's really just after a particular bank account that Evan was attached to and hasn't yet learned who he is.

[329] And Evan says, no, you want to be everything.

[330] I want to be one thing well.

[331] And it occurred to me when I was doing that.

[332] So Peter, Renee, I'm sorry, Renee Peter Casaroy.

[333] Casseroys is a play on the French word for Pan.

[334] So it's sort of René Peter Pan.

[335] He's obsessed with luxury, with being all things, with not making choices, with turning back the clock on 80s.

[336] He takes a regimen of pills.

[337] He's obsessed with the aging process, and it occurred to me again after I wrote it, because I don't go in charting these things out like an engineer.

[338] I go in writing a story that I want to write.

[339] But it occurred to me that Evan's statement to say, we're as different as can be.

[340] You want to be everything.

[341] I want to be one thing well.

[342] That being one thing well is our only antidote really to aging.

[343] So it's the exact opposite of what Renee is trying to do.

[344] It's also the antidote to really.

[345] meaning that it's the antidote to becoming an old child, too, which is, of course, that Peter Pan's story, right?

[346] There's this idea that you have to give up everything to become one thing.

[347] But if you don't give it up, then you become no thing eventually.

[348] Because aging drives, maybe that's also why your character, Casaroy, has to fight off aging, because aging is forcing him to become, well, if not to become one thing, at least to lose his capacity to become anything or everything.

[349] Exactly.

[350] And that's the only thing that that's your bulwark.

[351] I mean, that's the other argument to perfection versus intimacy.

[352] At some point, at some point, the toll of aging takes perfection away from us in every way.

[353] If you're a sharpshooter, if you're an athlete, if you're young Paul Newman and look like young Paul Newman, who is probably the best -looking human of either gender and history, at some point no matter what you are perfect at, you're a great surgeon, perfection will be taken from you.

[354] So, well, what's the antidote to that?

[355] The antidote to that is doing something else well and making choices.

[356] Are you a good husband?

[357] Are you a good father?

[358] Do you have a good community around you?

[359] Do you have friendships around you?

[360] So that when aging comes and starts to kick out those stilts, you have enough under you that you don't just topple over.

[361] Yeah, right.

[362] Well, so that's interesting because you talked about the necessity for perfection as an antidote, say, to the Peter Pan problem.

[363] But what the case you're making now is more that even perfection as an antidote to the Peter Pan syndrome has its problems, but maybe those aren't echoed with intimacy.

[364] and you know because you talked about getting older and the fact that your family and friends become more important to you which is definitely something that I've noticed and I guess on your deathbed let's say one of the things that's going to matter is who's around there with you right and as you get older and you get robbed of things I wonder if it's the intimate relationships that you have that provides solace with regards to that.

[365] I mean, one of the things that distresses me about the way that our world, the modern Western world is unfolding is that we act as if we're never going to be any older than 35.

[366] Jung talked about that, Carl Jung talked about that.

[367] He thought it was a flaw in our founding myth, because if you think about Western culture as predicated on Christianity, of course, Christ died when he was about 32.

[368] That's the theory.

[369] And so there's not necessarily any model there for moving into the latter happening.

[370] half of life.

[371] And there is this obsession in Western culture with youthfulness and with the possibilities of youth and people, people act, I would say, as if they're never going to get old.

[372] And so one of the dangers there is that you don't establish the kind of relationships that are going to buttress you in your old age.

[373] You end up simple, for example, in your 40s or whatever, and it starts to get pretty ugly.

[374] You're lonesome.

[375] In L .A. you see it in space.

[376] Because L .A. is the land of the perpetual adolescent, right?

[377] So everyone comes out here off their proverbial bus from, you know, Des Moines or Northern Alberta.

[378] And they want to make it.

[379] They're the best -looking person from their hometown who started their hometown play.

[380] And, you know, it's squeezing the universe through a funnel for people who are actually going to be a movie star or actually going to make it as a singer.

[381] But it's sort of this intermittent reinforcement thing that happens is it's like they'll go two or three years working on jobs.

[382] because they need to keep their schedule open for auditions and then they'll get cast as an extra in one thing and then they go three or four more years because you know because at any point you could hit the lottery and everyone has the story of that you know the guy who is you know our culture is also built around never give up right yeah and you know follow your dreams and there's a there's a there's a pervasive notion that you you never settle and and I'm not denigrating those things I'm saying And that's part of how our culture is built.

[383] But you see a ton of people here in their 40s, 50s who never sort of moved on to, you know, a job or a skill that's gratifying.

[384] Their whole life has been spent waiting for another break.

[385] And it's heartbreaking because, you know, they had some success for a period and never recaptured it and didn't reinvent themselves.

[386] I noticed something really interesting when I went to Australia for book tour.

[387] And I'm going back there in a couple weeks, which was amazing, which is I did.

[388] a lot of events with really famous Australians who didn't cross over to the U .S. So like you have your ACDC that came over here and just blew up or, you know, Nicole can't mean, fill in the blank.

[389] But there was people who were like big movie stars who didn't make it here.

[390] A big, like an enormous rock band there that just didn't make it to the U .S. And the one thing that was amazed with is for some reason I came into contact with them either for festivals or, you know, we had reading together, is they all had.

[391] meaningful second slash third acts so this guy who's a big huge movie star there was now a big crime fiction reviewer so I met him because you just don't make the sort of money and fame here and have the kind of blown out exposure that you linger and capture a catch after it the guy who was a songwriter for one of the biggest rock bands in all of Australia wrote this amazing memoir was like incredible and was working on that And it's sort of like if you don't achieve a sort of astronomical level of exposure, fame, and money, you still have to make a living.

[392] And making a living is a really good motivation to continue to search for and find meaning.

[393] Great.

[394] Yeah.

[395] Well, that's why, yeah, that's one of the problems with having wealth, I think, with regards to children, is that if you're wealthy, your children can be deprived of necessity.

[396] Right.

[397] Right.

[398] And also, usually by the time one has attained wealth, you've sort of baked in the discipline and the love for your field that led to it.

[399] I mean, I guess we can exclude people who do a job that they hate forever, but usually people who really make a lot of money sort of love what they're doing at some level, I find.

[400] And by the time you get to a point that you no longer have to work, you love the work so much and you start to realize that the money, once people stop chasing you for bills, isn't what brings you the happiness.

[401] Yeah, because you couldn't take all these shortcuts when you were younger and, like, trust fund kids can.

[402] Yeah, well, the empirical evidence on that is pretty clear.

[403] Just give me one sec here.

[404] There is a relationship between material well -being and happiness, roughly speaking, or let's say wealth and happiness, up to the point where you're basically in the lower middle class, I would say.

[405] And that's basically the point where bill collectors stop chasing you're around.

[406] So there's definitely pain in privation.

[407] But there isn't a tremendous amount of advantage by the evidence in moving far up the economic ladder beyond that.

[408] And I think it's because money solves a certain set of problems, but the ones it doesn't solve, it doesn't solve at all.

[409] Right.

[410] It doesn't solve ensuring that your children are doing well.

[411] It doesn't solve health in any final sense, the problem of ill health.

[412] I was also thinking with regards to perfection and intimacy, there's another kind of opposition between them, which is that if you're after perfection, you can't have intimacy, because you have to, you mentioned that we have this idea that you shouldn't settle.

[413] And people often say that in relationship to their relationships, but they forget that the person that you're having a relationship with has settled for you.

[414] And that means that they've settled for imperfection in every sense of the word.

[415] And you, if you're after perfection in your relationship, then first of all, you have impossible standards.

[416] Second, you're impossible to live with.

[417] And third, if you meet someone that triggers that ideal, then you're going to feel so inferior in relationship to them that you're going to make a fool of yourself.

[418] That's the classical anima or animus possession from the union perspective.

[419] You know, you find someone who meets your ideal of perfection, and then you're so tongue -tied in their presence that you can't help but act like a complete deer in the headlights or something equally pathological.

[420] So to get intimacy, you have to give up that, you have to give up that demand, at least for immediate perfection.

[421] Maybe you can work towards it within the confines of the relationship, but that's a whole different thing.

[422] Yeah, well, and from a thriller perspective, I mean, for me, what was so interesting in building this, with Evan is, it's like he's trained as a lone wolf, right?

[423] There's an orphan program that kicked out orphans, but none of them know who each other is.

[424] They operate alone.

[425] But he's chosen to live in the middle of this residential tower in the Wilshire corridor, kind of hiding among people.

[426] But so he's constantly among people.

[427] But if he sticks to his normal routine, which is just training, he's got like a hidden vault that's like his operations comm center that's hidden in the back of his, you know, super modern penthouse.

[428] There's all these sort of fantasy elements to it, which I think I undercut enough to not turn it into like sort of, you know, weapons porn or spy porn.

[429] Like there's there's an awareness that I'm, I erode at them even as I revel in some of these archetypes.

[430] But if he just sticks to his routine, there's no one there to tell him or point out his imperfections, right?

[431] When he's on a mission, it doesn't matter.

[432] He's operating solo.

[433] He's kicking ass.

[434] He has the righteousness and the moral, the legitimate moral superiority of doing what is the right thing in the protection of other people.

[435] That's all fine.

[436] There's no one to literally gaze on him or even look at him and notice where his imperfections are.

[437] Notice where he's tongue tied.

[438] Notice what skills that there are that he's lacking if his life stays in that narrow lane.

[439] But he doesn't want his life to just be in that lane.

[440] But every time he widens it out, there's all these complications where it's like, what do you do with an unruly eight -year -old.

[441] who's asking you inappropriate questions.

[442] These are things that his training wasn't for.

[443] And there's a real interest in that.

[444] And one of the other things I wanted to add is you talked about the female erotica or that women tend to read in the types of monsters, which I love that a surgeon is included in them.

[445] I'm sure a lot of them can, we can start combining them so you get like a werewolf surgeon.

[446] You can really start up in the ante.

[447] But I think one of the things that's really interesting in terms of what constitutes a successful balance.

[448] to me it's not also the full taming of the monstrous of perfectionism whether like in this instance we're talking about that being from the male side of it it's also like I had a question that was I didn't interview yesterday and somebody asked me who knows me and my wife pretty well and said does your wife get does she get upset when you're like okay honey I'm off to like the Mexican jungles to go down class four white water rafts to do research or I'm going to go you know like I just was on a range in Vegas shooting a lot of insane weaponry or you know when I'm when I'm doing these sort of more dangerous elements that are for research and it was interesting because I hadn't been asked that that specifically but I was like well I was a writer when I met my wife and she liked that and knew that and one of the primary aims is if that's something that she liked in me she that's the last thing she wants to erode in me now like we also have a relationship where like obviously there's things like if there are things about me that are annoying in my perfectionism or need to be ringed in that's a good discussion but it also doesn't mean that you want to hollow out the aspect of the of the perfectionist drive or the aspects that involve sort of dangerous with danger having one foot in monstrosity from your spouse or partner in either direction it's like you know my wife and I just genuinely like each other we don't want to erode in each other those things that cause the initial attraction.

[449] And it's interesting because I think that's something you see a lot in marriages, I don't know if it's particularly in America, where, you know, you get the sort of domineering, controlling wife, and then the husband is like the little boy getting away with things and, you know, trying to get things done.

[450] And there's this imbalance that happens really quickly as they push each other into these roles and forget the very things that more attractive to begin with.

[451] Yeah, well, you see that operating in the other direction, although I would say in a different way, because you can see husbands who punish or fail to reward their wives for being attractive, even though...

[452] Yeah, the domineering husband.

[453] Yeah, you said something once that stuck with me, where I think someone was bragging about how they never cleaned the house or something, some such thing.

[454] Yeah.

[455] And you said, well, if you turn your wife into a maid, then you'll be married to a maid.

[456] Yes, yes.

[457] I think it was toilets, actually.

[458] I'm not the sort of guy who cleans the toilets.

[459] I think I said, yeah, you're the sort of guy who makes your wife clean the toilets.

[460] right yeah well that's the thing is that it's also very difficult within a relationship to continually reward your partner for the traits that make them attractive because that also makes them attractive to other people and so if you're concerned in any way about your feigning attractiveness or if you're jealous or resentful then you may come to punish your partner for what makes them attractive and of course that's that's death because you'll also have content for them and for you if you get away with that but it happens a lot yeah well you know it goes down to the we have we've had this conversation before that at the end of the day there are any there are no decisions that aren't fundamentally moral there's no good decisions when you're looking at something of like well this is 90 % moral but 10 % shady but I can reap huge financial reward it's like don't think you'll get away with that and likewise you know within a marriage you know if you have a spouse who you're denigrating or you're concerned about their attractiveness because of your own insecurity and you haven't put that to rest and you're unwilling to look at that that will cost you you know I think about it a lot as pertains to writing because I think a lot that the qualities for me at least that that make me a better writer are the same ones that make me a better man and a better human and it's not something that people talk a lot about but a lot of it is you know if I'm in a conversation, it's like, can I acknowledge what my shortcomings are or what my flaws are?

[461] Can I acknowledge in an argument what's going on?

[462] Can I pay attention to people enough to recognize small moments of vulnerabilities and to try to honor or respect those?

[463] Those are all the things in writing that make people connect to character.

[464] Those are all the things in writing that you need to round out a character.

[465] And I remember when I was, look, I started really young and had a lot of luck early.

[466] I started my first book.

[467] I was 19.

[468] I sold it at, I think it was 22.

[469] 23 and you know there's stuff in there that's awful like no one should ever be accountable for anything that they thought when they were 19 but you know I have a line in there where it's like he was the best of the best you know about like an FBI agent and it's like those are the people we don't like you know so like as I get older a lot of this trust I put in characters are the times where you say something out of a more base instinct and then you feel like shit about it like that's something that makes you relate to a character like I did this thing and I said something, I reacted in anger, I have a petty jealousy, but that I'm aware of and I acted badly and I feel I feel badly for it.

[470] I wish I could have acted better.

[471] But you need to have the, you know, the, a pretty, you need to iris pretty wide opening to take that input in if you want to be talented artist.

[472] Because you're trying to capture all of those things, which means you have to look at them in yourself, not just in other people.

[473] It's something you see in good comedians and I was watching Louis C .K. recently, and, like, he definitely goes too far quite often.

[474] And one of the things about Louis C .K., that's, and you also see this as Sarah Silverman, I think, where either of them, something will come into their head, and they'll say it, and they know perfectly well that they've gone too far, but they're not going to not say it, and then they have the good graces to be, like, self -disgusted, I would say.

[475] Yeah.

[476] I said it.

[477] You know, Louis C. Yeah, it's a mix of like self -discussed and a hint of pride.

[478] Yeah, exactly.

[479] It's going at the same time, but I mean, Louis C .K. has the good graces to be embarrassed at least 20 % of the time he's performing.

[480] And for good reason, too.

[481] Yeah, yeah.

[482] Yeah, yeah.

[483] Like the synobun in the airport, yeah.

[484] Yeah, no, he's, yeah.

[485] But, I mean, it's a big part of it is like if you want to shut down self -awareness, everything shuts down.

[486] And we're talking about with aging.

[487] We're talking about with marriage and relationships, but I'm also talking about if you wanted, if you actually want to engage in an endeavor that is interesting, whether that's writing or teaching or being a psychologist or being, I mean, fill in the blank for anything that you want to engage in a way that's new and unique, you better reflect, you better think on yourself.

[488] You better not armor yourself solely in ideology, right?

[489] You better be able to maintain a sort of openness to the world even as you're learning.

[490] You better not get to air.

[491] again.

[492] Like if you go down that checklist, I find a lot of them really apply to my writing in ways that are more direct than I ever would have thought would be the case.

[493] I didn't start kind of thinking about this until I was in my 30s, which is also probably around the time that I started becoming a better human.

[494] But, you know, to really think about like getting caught short at times or engaging in something where I'm so adamant that I'm right about it and then reflecting on it afterwards and realizing that I'm wrong.

[495] It's like there's so much fodder.

[496] That's where all the gold is in writing.

[497] That's where all those pieces are.

[498] And really paying attention to people and not overlooking their own quiet everyday tragedies and recognizing their everyday triumphs.

[499] Because that's what rounds out a character.

[500] If you can capture that, all of a sudden you feel like you're reading something that's alive.

[501] And if you don't, you're reading something that you feel like is fill in the blank.

[502] And especially with a form like a thriller of crime fiction, which I'm far from denigrating.

[503] I think it's an incredible form.

[504] Yeah, well, that's something that's interesting, too, is that you, that's a form that you've stuck with in many ways throughout your writing career, and that's been about 20, 20, you have 23 books now?

[505] I have 17 or 18 out, maybe, and three more in the pipe line, yeah.

[506] Okay, so, and you've been basically putting out something like a book a year.

[507] Yeah, so there's two places we could go with that.

[508] One is that I'd like to talk with you a little bit about how you've actually managed to have a successful career as a writer, because that's a very difficult thing to pull off.

[509] And the other issue is why you've inserted yourself in this very limited form, genre form.

[510] And I'm curious about why that one, and also what it is about the genre, and the fact that it's, you know very very commercial and very attractive in in a sort of i wouldn't say easy way but a very accessible way it's very accessible to people and so what's what's the attraction like why not something that's arguably more literary well i don't i mean the first thing is is it's like it's not selected like i can only write stuff that i feel in my gut that i need to write and fortunately for me, from a financial perspective, that tends to be stuff that's highly commercial.

[511] But, you know, one of the things I think about, like, for me, the gold standard is always Hitchcock.

[512] Like, no one's like, oh, is he commercial?

[513] Or was he a critical success?

[514] And what's interesting is, you know, we talk about all the stuff that we only see in hindsight.

[515] Like, you follow only the things that are of interest.

[516] And then in hindsight, they all make sense.

[517] So, right?

[518] So in college, I studied the English in psychology, as you know, you were there.

[519] and I got really fascinated with Shakespeare and tragedy in particular.

[520] And it's like, okay, so I'm studying Jungian analysis of Shakespeare and tragedy.

[521] All that is is about narrative.

[522] All of it is narrative.

[523] I only chose it because I was interested.

[524] I was very into Freud.

[525] You know, those case studies read like short stories.

[526] But so it's like, let's take Shakespeare.

[527] Okay.

[528] So why would Shakespeare choose this form that is limited, right?

[529] Everything's got five back.

[530] He basically wrote a highly convention.

[531] highly structured, narrative -driven form, sometimes tipping into propaganda that deals with lust, intrigue, and murder.

[532] Designed to sell out the most, you know, the most seats in the Globe Theater to put asses in chairs.

[533] He had no interest in enduring literary value.

[534] You know, a lot of people who have interest in enduring literary value don't enduringly, you know, don't tend to endure as another discussion.

[535] But, I mean, you cut that globe theater.

[536] But, I mean, you cut the globe theory.

[537] in half, and it's a perfect cross -section of Elizabethan society.

[538] So I'll have a joke for Mavitt's metamorphosis, and then he'll make a dick joke for the groundlings.

[539] He's trying to appeal everywhere.

[540] And within the constraints of the form, there's a liberation.

[541] So he takes the Jew of Malta in terms of an emirchen of Venice, in very few original plots, right?

[542] And so there's this reworking of trying to do something that's great within a form that's recognized but I think it's recognizable because it's pleasingly archetypal and people forget you know look this Camoos the Stranger was inspired by James M. Cain's The Postman always rings twice like these forms are you know you want to talk about existentialism but you certainly have in Chandler oh yeah you know so there's an enormous amount and it's been said quite often that noir is modern tragedy but instead of falling from the throne, you're falling from the curb into the gutter, right?

[543] You're just starting lower.

[544] It's also been said that crime fiction has replaced the social model.

[545] And if you look at, you know, you look at like Mystic River from Dennis Lehane.

[546] It's like that that's such an interesting story, right?

[547] You know, I wrote a book called Telling the Lies.

[548] It takes place in San Francisco that is built around a thriller, but is all about class and society and ethics in San Francisco.

[549] And in a weird way for me, when I'm playing with these notions of intimacy versus perfection, when I'm playing with this notion of, you know, aging versus focus, the themes around humanity about being better, if I can wrap them in what I hope is an enormously entertaining, page -turning story that's propulsive that people want to read, that's the kind of thing that I most enjoy and engage in, that for me is sort of the ultimate win.

[550] I mean, I get to write about everything that I want to write about in as exciting and compelling fashion that I can manage within the restraints of my skill.

[551] And I don't do that as having a ceiling.

[552] You know, I don't think anyone's going to come along and go, you know, look, Macbeth, you know, pretty lacking on the, on the quality scale.

[553] You know, you look at, and so there's always an aim for it.

[554] And also, I just love thrillers, you know, and sort of write a thriller with more meat on the bones where I'm really stretching.

[555] And there's a number of people who do it in the form.

[556] It's not like I'm the only one.

[557] It's just a great, it's a great focus.

[558] And, you know, again, if you don't focus on something, where do you wind up?

[559] Yeah, yeah, right.

[560] And also, look, this goes back to narrative, to archetypal narrative, too.

[561] Like, I believe that there are fundamentally, fundamental story structures and that are as selected for as opposable thumbs and islands, you know, and I think, you know, you find a tribe that's been, you know, in the middle of Amazon that's had no exposure.

[562] They'll have eyelids, opposable thumbs, and a hero archetype.

[563] This is the archetype.

[564] Gilgamesh is a thriller.

[565] You know, Beowulf is a kick -ass thriller.

[566] That's what those things are.

[567] And that's the form that just appeals to me, you know.

[568] Yeah, Moses, the Exodus is the thriller.

[569] Yeah, the tale.

[570] You know, I look, I collect Faulkner paperbacks from the 50s, and they're insane.

[571] Like, they have these harlequin -type covers, you know, like another from America's leading purveyor of, you know, murder and lust, William Faulkner.

[572] I mean, they were packages as such.

[573] But you read Sanctuary with the, the courtroom case and the corn cob, I mean, good God, there's, you know, he's got, he's, he's, he's up to his elbows in, in certain genre conventions.

[574] There's a reason he went to Hollywood and adapted Chandler novels.

[575] Right, right, right.

[576] You know, so, for me, it's all about, I was a story slurred away.

[577] Yes.

[578] Yeah, well, and he also did the big sleep, I want to say.

[579] Oh, that's a great thought.

[580] I need to be fat, I need someone a fact -checked out to make sure I got to have that one right.

[581] But you know, I'm I do.

[582] I do.

[583] That's true.

[584] Yeah.

[585] At the end of the day, though, like, I am a structure slot.

[586] I think structure is essential.

[587] I don't think you could be a structure slot.

[588] Watch me. Watch me. Structure slot.

[589] And that'll be my website instead of young women who are symmetrically perfect and represent a particular young and ideal.

[590] But I feel like I like to know where I am within a story.

[591] You know, I like to, I like to know where the terms are.

[592] I like to play with them.

[593] Liza with Batman we talked about.

[594] Once you have the conventions, you can start to play with them.

[595] You can start to find more elbow room within them.

[596] Yeah, well, that's a strange thing, too, is that, you know, people often think about creative freedom as the freedom from any structural impositions whatsoever.

[597] And that's the Peter Pan thing.

[598] What did you call your character, Casso?

[599] Oh, Casaroy.

[600] Casaroy, yeah.

[601] It's the same.

[602] without structure and without limits you have freedom it's like you don't just have chaos well and i have like you know having written all these novels in the nowhere man there's one novel that something really i'm sorry there's one chapter that something really bad happens to avon and each chapter in the orphan accident and the norah man has a title that's taken from something in the chapter usually a sort of humorous way that it can be double -run but it's a phrase from the chapter as the chapter heading and so one of the chapters after this horrific thing happened to Evan is just cold and the whole chapter is just the word cold that's the whole chapter it's a one word chapter and then you move on so it's that's not conventional writing i'm not you know there's ways that you can start to play once you're within it but you know i don't want to write a whole you know book in haiku and like like the mass experimentation or you know i wrote a book called a crime writer where i literally it's a crime writer who lands on something that's in the middle of seemingly one of his own stories, a disaster situation, and he realizes that in order to understand what happened, he has to write it down.

[603] So then I introduce a typewriter font that's the first sentence of the book that we read, or the first paragraph of the book, and then at a certain point his editor comes in and has handwritten edits in the margins of the typewriter so that we see the development process of the writing, which mirrors the process of his own writing, which is the story of what happened to him, which is the novel that we're reading.

[604] So there's all these ways that you can play with in the form to make it interesting, but at the end of the day, I want to know where I am in a story.

[605] That's what always appeals to me. All right, so look, let's, I'd like you to talk a little bit about your career from a practical sense, too, because you've been able to maintain it for a long time.

[606] So I think people would be interested to know what your typical, how you learn to write, and what your typical day looks like or has looked like across the last 20 years because one of the strange things about being an independent artist is that you don't have those external constraints precisely driving you the same way that you do if you have to go to work every day if you have to be up at 9 for someone else and it's very easy for people to drift in a situation like that because you can always put off what you have to do until tomorrow Or you can always substitute the long, medium or longer term ambition for something short term that needs to be done right now.

[607] So let's start out by how you learn to write.

[608] Well, I never took a writing course or read a book on writing.

[609] I mean, how you learn to write a novel is you read, you know, 2 ,000 novels, and then you try and write one and screw it up.

[610] Like, that's it.

[611] Same with screenplays.

[612] You know, watch a million movies.

[613] the thing itself.

[614] My first book I wrote a disastrous first draft.

[615] I mean the the end of each chapter was better than the beginning, literally from what I'd learned while writing the chapter.

[616] But again, don't be afraid.

[617] I've had two things that have benefited me a lot.

[618] One is I'm not afraid to fail.

[619] I'm not afraid to embarrass myself.

[620] And I also don't have any delay between wanting to try something and trying it.

[621] Like I don't hold back and wait and think about it.

[622] and I just was like, I want to write a novel, I'm 19, I think I know more than I do, I'm just going to jump in and do it.

[623] I wrote it.

[624] I had a really shitty first draft, the vomit draft.

[625] I sat down and took it apart like an engine block, and then I looked at it all and reconstructed it.

[626] Okay, so when you said it's took it apart, what do you mean exactly?

[627] Just kind of chapter by chapter and like this plot isn't working and this is too long a stretch without action and this character isn't developed enough.

[628] You know, I took the chapters out and it felt like, Like, I did it, you know, my first draft was half the length of the final novel.

[629] It wasn't until my third novel that I wrote a rough draft that could constitute a novel on its own that functioned.

[630] Yeah, so part of what you were doing was separating the production end of the process from the editing end.

[631] I mean, that's what a bad first draft does, is you allow yourself.

[632] Yeah, and then as I get further along, it's like I, like my first draft now is what my tenth draft used.

[633] to be, right?

[634] It keeps sort of evolving, but then, you know, I'll try something new.

[635] Like, Orphinex I did more rewriting on than any of my previous six books.

[636] It still wasn't anywhere close to my first, you know, three novels.

[637] But I really was doing something new.

[638] I was building an entire character, an entire mythology, and launching this big new franchise into the world.

[639] And so in some ways, I overwrote it and pulled stuff back that I saved for future books.

[640] I mean, so I'd say that's one part of it.

[641] The other is, I think it might have been advice you gave me when I was, shut out, I don't know, 18, but you said, when it comes to writing, and if you didn't say it, we can just pretend that you did.

[642] We'll give you credit for this anyway.

[643] I'll wait until I hear whether or not it's why not.

[644] Okay.

[645] Then you leave me. If it's not wise, then I'll be like Wiley Coyote out over the cliff.

[646] Okay.

[647] But you said there's always going to be a dozen things that are more pressing to do, than right.

[648] Always.

[649] And if you don't decide to make that time sort of holy and protected, nobody else will do that for you.

[650] And that's essential.

[651] And I was already kind of into my first book and doing it.

[652] And I thought that's exactly right.

[653] Like it's always more pressing to clean the house or pick up your dry cleaning or, you know, pick up one of your kids.

[654] If you don't just carve it out, it's not like I'm a surgeon that I'm in an office, one of those monstrous surgeons where I'm in an office and no one can reach me and my day is sad.

[655] I mean at any time right now I could be disturbed all the time by anyone.

[656] My phone can ring.

[657] So unless I say, this is my writing schedule.

[658] I'm unplugged.

[659] You know, kids leave me alone unless someone is on fire or the house is on fire.

[660] And it is thus.

[661] I need the same amount of space that I would have were I an accountant or a psychologist or, you know, a doctor or a lawyer, you know.

[662] And so I had to make that time kind of holy or sacrosan and then I would say the other thing is that mattered a lot as I realized early on that the one thing I'll say there's two other pieces that I'll say the one thing that I can control absolutely was discipline that's the only controllable thing and it's such an impossible field and so you have to wait for luck and I had a lot of luck early which I don't say with false humility or fishing for compliments like my first book was good and I think it was sellable and there's a lot of first books that are good and sellable You never know when that luck's going to come.

[663] And I thought in sort of work ethics, if I flap my wings as hard as I could that I'm just bumping along the ceiling all the time, the one moment that that hatch opens, that the lucky break comes, I was going to be right there to fly through it.

[664] And so from day one, I was like, I'm going full speed all the way no matter what.

[665] And I still do.

[666] I mean, I still feel like the one thing I can control is I've never been laid on a deadline.

[667] you know and I write all day every day I've built it up like a muscle so how much time do you spend writing in a day now at minimum I write from six to four 30 or five on longer days if I'm on deadline or if I'm near the end of a book and I can smell it it'll be 13 14 15 sometimes 16 hours and I've had spells of like I said I once wrote a script for a TV show in one 23 hour sitting because there was a risk that a microeconomy in Vancouver would shut down if I did it.

[668] If it's a shut down the show, it's problematic.

[669] So I can go when I go.

[670] But at a minimum, I'm writing all day every day, you know, with a break to work out in the middle.

[671] And the other thing I'd say is really interesting is like, you know, it's funny seeing which values get.

[672] So people look at my kind of resume, and I went to all these fancy schools.

[673] And people always ask me, like they ask me about Shakespeare.

[674] They asked me about my educational background.

[675] Okay, you studied English inside here.

[676] You went and did a master's in England.

[677] I think in some ways one of the biggest values for me was came from being an athlete.

[678] Because I was a pole vaulter in college, right?

[679] I played soccer growing up.

[680] I played a little bit of soccer in England.

[681] And writing is like training.

[682] It's like working out.

[683] It's building a muscle.

[684] And as with pole vaulting when I was training day 27 when the heptagonal championships were in day 275, I have 100 things more important to do than train on day 27 and know that I have to go that far.

[685] That's like day 27 are writing a novel.

[686] You know, and so there's a lot of things.

[687] I think people undervalue, they value sports now for health and for, you know, being active and being well -rounded.

[688] But we don't tend to talk about the values that they instill.

[689] And a lot of that is like discipline, long -term planning.

[690] You know, like I, when I was in high school, I sucked at pole vaulting.

[691] I mean, my whole first year I was too small to bend the pole.

[692] Sophomore year I was awful.

[693] And we're talking it was a three -year process to build up to start jumping at a high level and eventually, you know, at a national level and then in college, but it takes a lot of discipline.

[694] And so the discipline aspect of writing, I think, is really important.

[695] And then, you know, for people starting out, one of the things I say is, like, pick a certain amount of time that you do no matter what and force yourself to get stuff on the page.

[696] And if you say all I can find is an hour, day or two hours a day, or I'm sorry, two hours twice a week, that will soon turn into two hours and 15 minutes or two and a half hours.

[697] will expand itself as your discipline goes on.

[698] It's like running.

[699] And the other thing I say is that, look, I meet a lot of people who want to be writers, and I meet very few who actually want to write.

[700] I love writing.

[701] I actually love the writing process.

[702] If you don't, don't do this.

[703] There's a million other things you can do and make more money, and it's easier, and you can be happier.

[704] So when you say you love it, what do you mean exactly?

[705] I mean, that doesn't mean it's easy by any stretch of the imagination.

[706] No. What is it you love about it?

[707] And exactly what do you mean by that?

[708] Well, it's the one place I really clearly lose time.

[709] You know when things are going well, an hour and a half, two hours will pass.

[710] That happens to me when I'm on the soccer field too.

[711] It's like I just, it's, I feel fully inhabited in something else aside from me in a manner that is productive.

[712] And I feel like, I don't, I'm not one for getting precious about writing with beckoning the muse and whatnot, but like, there's a part of pleasure.

[713] I have these really loud keyboards that I hammer on.

[714] I have a whole broken slew of keyboards that I've gone through.

[715] I feel like a carpenter.

[716] I feel like I'm pounding and hammering and cutting and pasting, and I like the keyboard to be really loud so that it's a muscular action.

[717] And I just feel utterly engaged and fascinated in this world that I'm in control, but there's endless opportunities, and my job is to be open to opportunity while also making sure that I'm kind of steering the ship.

[718] And there's an enormous amount of responsibility.

[719] And at the same time, I'm living in a world of my own making, and I'm wholly alone.

[720] Okay, so first, let's hear your keyboard.

[721] Yeah, you just like that 1930s newsroom.

[722] What my friends joke with me about is that when they're on the phone, and if I'm rude enough to be writing or finishing a sentence, they say, you sound like the asshole travel agent where they can't move your flight.

[723] We're like, okay, so Dulles is shut down.

[724] Can I go through Chicago?

[725] No, I'm terribly sorry.

[726] Can you get me?

[727] No, I'm sorry.

[728] Your flight's now been delayed six hours.

[729] I mean, it's the loud, old -fashioned, angry travel agent keyboard.

[730] Right, right, right.

[731] It's very funny.

[732] So you're talking, yeah, so you talked about discipline and you talked about responsibility when you're writing.

[733] What do you mean by that, exactly?

[734] Well, your ego is constantly subsurricular.

[735] to the plot.

[736] So to write well, you come up with a basic set of tenants that start your story.

[737] It's like, it's so complex.

[738] It's like, it's like surfing.

[739] Like there's so many factors.

[740] So when people are like, you know, there's there's sort of like the idiot criticism of certain movies like, you know, Passenger 57.

[741] You remember where Wesley Snipes is the super badass spec ops guy on the airplane that gets hijacked.

[742] And some people are like, well, what are the odds that he'd be on the plane that got hijacked?

[743] And you're like, well, it's a hundred percent.

[744] because no one wants to write a story about the other 99 ,999 times that a plane got hijacked and passenger 50 -sizen wasn't on it.

[745] Like that's why we're writing this story.

[746] So you have a unique set of circumstances that can involve coincidence at the outset.

[747] That's first act stuff, right?

[748] So, okay, this is a story about the one time that an orphan who was taken out of a program at the age of 12 and trained to be an assassin, you know, left the program because his moral compass wasn't broken and that's his story it's like whatever you think the odds of that are that's the narrative contract that's what i'm doing and i can't introduce him in the third act of a realism based mystery that's you know a drawing room mystery that takes place in vermont so we set the course of it right okay so that's the contract with the that's the narrative contract and the contract with the reader you don't get to break absolutely you say look give me leeway well i set this up yeah here's the coincidence yeah so the coincidence Or here's the unlikely set of circumstances that are why I have decided to sit down at my typewriter sounding keyboard and devote you all my life to this.

[749] Okay, so we're all in on that.

[750] Then you round out your characters.

[751] And what you want is to give them freedom, but you're also steering.

[752] Like, I don't believe all the stuff that, like, you know, oh, my gosh, I just start to channel everything and it's magic.

[753] Like, you're controlling it, but when I'm writing well, I have characters who are wittier than I am in.

[754] real time, not meaning like, one of the things that's great with writing books is that, you know, I can a year later go back with the perfect comeback to a, you know, like I have a year to come up with and polish the dialogue.

[755] And that's great.

[756] So whenever you've been in a party and someone slights you and you're driving home going, oh, I should have said that.

[757] We get to say that when we're writing.

[758] But I've had that happen in real time.

[759] So there's something that starts to go on with characters as you engage in them that they're doing stuff that I feel like I'm typing just behind it happening.

[760] Like it's just moving.

[761] And that's a great feeling.

[762] And there's this really weird thing that you want to get to, which is by the end of a book, the conclusion should feel at once inevitable and unpredictable.

[763] So you want to have things happen.

[764] And we've all had that.

[765] I don't know if some people had it with the success.

[766] Some people had it with, we've all had that feeling in a movie or reading a book where you're right on the lip of discovery and then the thing happens.

[767] And you're like, oh my god that makes so much sense and completely caught me off guard at the same time yeah yeah that's the win right and so you need to sort of you have a responsibility to always make your needs subservient to the plot like the story is paramount and so as much as you're the creator you have to give free will to the story you have to give stuff up that you don't and wouldn't otherwise i might have spent weeks doing research on something.

[768] If it doesn't fit the story properly, I have to, you know, they call it killing your babies.

[769] Right, right.

[770] You have to get rid of it.

[771] You got to throw it out.

[772] Yeah, it's another thing that's really useful for, I think, beginning writers to know that we touched on previously, which is that, yeah, you have to be willing to throw things away, lots of things.

[773] I mean, what I do to kind of take the sting out of that to some degree is I always have a document open on my computer called culls, and I'll pull out a paragraph that doesn't fit and throw it in there and, you know, there's always the possibility that I'll find a place for it later, but often I do something with it later, too.

[774] So the writing isn't necessarily wasted, but, yeah.

[775] Well, and, you know, so you're trying to make everything work, and you're trying to be surprising at the same time, but also you have to be open to opportunity.

[776] And I, I had, my third book in particular, I learned this, because I got all the way to the end, and the ending that I thought was the exact opposite of the ending of the story that I had created.

[777] And I realized I had a choice.

[778] I can either honor the story that I've created and make this thing that's better and surprising and I'm planned for, or I can write propaganda.

[779] I can convert the story to my own means.

[780] And look, that's like, that's Anne Rand, right?

[781] It's like, there's never going to be a shocking reveal where they're, you know, in Amran, you know what it is and she's filling it out.

[782] You know what all of her thoughts are.

[783] So the writing for isn't a process of discovery necessarily.

[784] It's a process of furthering a set of philosophical points that she thinks.

[785] Well, the other thing that she does that's second rate, I think, is that all her heroes and all her villains, like all her heroes are the same hero and all her villains are the same villain, and all the villains are completely villainous, and all the heroes are completely heroic.

[786] Well, and that's propaganda.

[787] Yes, yes.

[788] Well, it's exactly the opposite of Dostoevsky, you know, where he makes his villains are more heroic than his heroes by a substantial margin.

[789] He always makes Superman to argue against fundamentally.

[790] Right.

[791] And so, you know, a lot is about being open.

[792] And the other thing I would say with writers is, you know, I see a lot here who are, you know, this is true for, you know, fill in the blank for artistic field.

[793] But a lot of people who are like, you know, I went to Beverly Hills High, I studied screenwriting undergrad, I got a master's in screenwriting, and here I go and I'm ready to go.

[794] And I want to write.

[795] And you're like, well, what the hell are you going to write?

[796] about.

[797] You know, a lot of people, I think having a broad range of life experience is important.

[798] You know, there's some of the writers who I admire them.

[799] Like James Elroy was like borderline homeless, if not homeless for a while, just knocking about and figuring stuff out and odd jobs and like living out in the world.

[800] And so if you want to write this or create some sort of constructed amalgam of previous things that have been constructed, go all the way through all the coursework and do all that but it's huge benefit to just pursue anything that interests you because looking back it makes sense i don't know why i chose young you know and looking in hindsight it's like well no shit right he didn't write about anything but storytelling but i didn't choose him in some way and i remember even in college so i was english in psychology but like i i i sort of wanted to you know i took a course in opera and i took a course in classical music i mean which i have zero aptitude for music but i really was you know, in art, in all these different arenas to just have at least a basis of things to write about.

[801] And I think the same is true for life experiences, like do a lot of stuff.

[802] Do stuff that's dangerous, you know?

[803] So let's, okay, so we should fill in a backstory here for people too, because I imagine they're somewhat curious.

[804] I mean, I've known you for a long time.

[805] We met when you were a student at Harvard when I was teaching there.

[806] And you're actually the only one of the undergraduates that I knew there that I've kept up a relationship with over.

[807] this protracted period of time for a variety of reasons, but it's not like I didn't meet all sorts of remarkable undergraduates there, but do you have any particular memories of that period of time when we were interacting?

[808] I can certainly tell one story, but I'll see what you come up with first.

[809] Well, I remember you were formal in a way that I respected then, because I still remember we were we were friends or seeing each other outside of school for like four years before i finally was like is it okay if i call you jordan instead of dr peterson and i think that the the the the formals may be the wrong word you you you you you had a certain authority that i think was key to the teaching process and you didn't brook fools um at all like if someone came in with an argument from either end of the spectrum, from an ideological perspective, you had no interest in it.

[810] And so that was really palpable for me. And then I think what happened with Young was that I just sort of fell in love with all of that.

[811] It's weird how much our interests aligned along those fronts.

[812] Because I've been very interested, obviously, in storytelling and thrillers and all this stuff.

[813] But dealing with Young and dealing with the shadow.

[814] So, we encountered some early political correctness there together, if I remember correctly, because you were in the English department and you were studying Shakespeare and you wanted to study Shakespeare from a union perspective.

[815] And if I remember correctly at that time, Shakespeare wasn't exactly popular in the English department.

[816] And you was, well, they're very...

[817] A Nazi.

[818] Yeah, exactly.

[819] The very opposite of popular.

[820] So that was also very interesting.

[821] yeah I was hitting a lot of that though I think it wasn't it didn't feel like it was the pitch that it was now but it was at a sort of 90s pitch where and it also felt kind of more interesting where like it felt more conversational a weird way like where people like I had my favorite feminist like I was like I really like Naomi Wolfe like some of what she says really makes sense to me like there was conversations about stuff in a way that felt different and there's there's sort of this rigidity now with people snapping to both sides of the equation.

[822] But I mean, I think one of the things that I you know, in our courses that I liked a lot was that if somebody raised something that was clearly just some ideologically based, here's what I'm supposed to be saying and reiterating, you wouldn't have any tolerance for us.

[823] And I always respected that because it was like, and it also wasn't from a perspective of being shut down to it.

[824] It was like, I'll have any conversation that you want to have on the merits, but I'm not going to engage in a conversation with a false bit of scaffolding that you're inhabiting.

[825] It was sort of the vibe.

[826] So that was interesting.

[827] So I remember, the thing I remember, one of the things I remember was, and I'm sure you remember this too, is that in one of my personality classes, I had asked the questions for a scale called the sensation -seeking scale, which was one of the early versions of a big five variant.

[828] And the sensation -seeking scale asks people in part about minor juvenile rule breaking, I think like shoplifting might have been one of them anyways.

[829] And so I asked everyone questions and I had them score it.

[830] And then I asked people to put up their hands at each level of increase in scores.

[831] Like, are you in the bottom 10th percentile, the next 10th percentile or whatever?

[832] And if I remember correctly, you were the only person who put up his hand in the highest of the categories.

[833] And if I also remember correctly, I laughed about that quite a bit.

[834] And then if I also remember correctly, you got a date out of that.

[835] Yeah, somebody asked me out.

[836] But look, it was either like the top percentile sensation -seeking or a werewolf surgeon.

[837] It was going to be one of the two.

[838] So I pretty much hit it.

[839] Yeah, yeah.

[840] But look, we should also keep in mind that this was at Harvard.

[841] So like the skills for like crazy sensation -seeking daredebels, you know, was not.

[842] Yeah, I know it was dampened down.

[843] One of the things I was really surprised about when I administered that.

[844] scale to the whole class was just how low the overall scores were.

[845] And we know that conscientiousness is a really good predictor of academic performance.

[846] And so I would say that, you know, the kids there tended towards hyper -consciousness more than towards, say, entrepreneurial, the entrepreneurial sort of artistic.

[847] It's like if you want the win, like we're talking about this from the big five, it's like obviously conscientiousness better predictor in some ways than IQ, right, on a straight scale.

[848] But it's, like, if you can have the talent and conscientiousness, that's where you see people killing it.

[849] Yeah.

[850] People are doing like three or four shows.

[851] I mean, like, that's just the win.

[852] And so, you know, one - Yeah, it's rare to have that entrepreneurial, artistic creative ability and also to ally that with, say, industriousness, which is part of conscientiousness.

[853] And it's rough, too, because the orderliness part of conscientiousness seems to constrain creativity.

[854] So there's a real, I mean, one of the things we found, for example, is, you know, that on the political continuum, imagine that that runs from left, liberal, to right conservative, something like that, the fundamental one.

[855] The conservatives are high in conscientiousness and low in creativity, but mostly what they're high in is orderliness, whereas liberals are high in openness and low in orderliness.

[856] One of the things that comes out of that that's really interesting is that I've been thinking a lot about lately is I've been trying to figure out why conscientiousness and openness aren't correlated so there's no real reason for them to link together to predict political temperament but one of the things that struck me really hard and i think trump's discussion of the wall between the u .s and mexico really got this active in my mind was that as well as all this stuff i've been involved in recently with regards to what you can say and what you can't say and and that kind of political correctness is that i think the fundamental political question boils down to whether borders should be open or closed.

[857] And high, orderly, low, creative people like everything to be in boxes, and they don't get much of a kick out of the potential creative interplay that can come from loosening the borders between things.

[858] But they're also willing to subject themselves to the discipline of order.

[859] So that's one of the things that gives them an advantage.

[860] But on the other side of the spectrum, with the...

[861] And they're unwilling to recognize tunnels that run beneath.

[862] Well, yeah, there is.

[863] They wouldn't think that up.

[864] It's like, oh, look, there's a wall.

[865] I better turn around and go home.

[866] Well, we could put a ladder over it.

[867] How would that work?

[868] Yes, yes, that's definitely.

[869] But the underground is of less interest, too, in general.

[870] Yes, yes, exactly.

[871] Well, and so the liberal types, they like to take advantage of the possibilities that are set forth by breaking the borders between things, but they're also unwilling to accept the discipline that working within an orderly structure will provide.

[872] Anyways, I think the border issue is pervasive at every level of analysis.

[873] So the conservative types like the borders around everything to remain tight, sexuality, identity, nationality, the state itself, whereas the more...

[874] Except what's weird is except, I mean, conventionally, right now with Trump is not the case, but conventionally conservatives are for true.

[875] trick, even though Clinton co -opted it.

[876] So it's interesting because, like, when it comes to money, it's sort of like only rules around maximizing money.

[877] Yeah.

[878] Because free trade, go ahead.

[879] I know that it's a funny one.

[880] I mean, you never get a pure manifestation of these things.

[881] I mean, conservatives can be protectionist, too, at times.

[882] Right.

[883] You know, so I guess the political expression depends to some degree on what's happening in the environment at that particular point.

[884] But surfing all these walls is like.

[885] I mean, that's the trick, right?

[886] It's so much easier to armor yourself in one pure ideology.

[887] You know, one of the things I think about a lot is like with the skills.

[888] So I've just gotten back from a two -week tour, a two -week leg of the tour.

[889] I mean, a different city every day, and it's like it's reviews and it's readers and it's all the stuff.

[890] I've been thinking a lot about how much work it takes to not to stay open creatively but stay focused enough.

[891] I'm pretty high in orderliness.

[892] that's something that can interfere.

[893] But it's weird because one of the things I think about it's like to be a writer, you sort of need the sensitivity of a butterfly with the height of a rhinoceros.

[894] Like you need to be so sensitive and attuned to things and also so willing to accept, you know, rejection or negative reviews or all kinds of weird feedback and everything else.

[895] And I'm saying this from someone who's been fortunate enough to be largely successful, But it's still, there's a battering that you take when you try and advance something outside the normal structure.

[896] Careful, you're starting to sound like Madonna.

[897] Well, I actually watched that speech she made the other day, and I think she's depressed, actually.

[898] What was the speech?

[899] What did I say that sounded like Madonna?

[900] Woman of the Year Award or something like that.

[901] I happened to watch a version of it where she was intercut with Milo Yanopoulos, which was actually quite comical.

[902] But she spent a lot of time complaining about how hard it was to be Madonna and to be a woman.

[903] And I was watching it very carefully because she didn't say one positive thing about her life.

[904] And I thought, and she seemed to be close to tears most of the time.

[905] And I thought, there's something wrong.

[906] She looked to me like she was actually depressed because it was, you know, I mean, she's had a pretty successful go of it.

[907] And to only focus on the negative is kind of rough.

[908] but neither of those things are bad that i'm that i'm pointing to meaning like you want to be as sensitive as possible so that you're attuned to constant sort of vibration i just can't get this whole butterfly rhinoceros image out again it's like yeah it's i can see i will redact it what i mean is there's a there's a trick to trying to be to maintain all your openness and also be tough as hell right Like, that's sort of one of the ways to do it, because you need to blaze forward with it.

[909] Like a butterfly rhinoceros, blazing forward.

[910] Exactly, exactly.

[911] You know, as the common refrain.

[912] You know, look, it's as Socrates said.

[913] Yeah.

[914] Floating like a butterfly sting like a rhinoceros.

[915] I guess that's the thing.

[916] All right.

[917] But I mean, you think about, but when you're breaking away from those structures, when you're in a space that's entrepreneurial, burial, that's the challenge, I mean, look, that's part of the challenge that we're seeing people not resisting with group think.

[918] Like, there's such a need to apparel and armor yourself in, in set ideologies, you know, and to have things be a certain way, to just go all the way off on orderliness.

[919] But to try and maintain high discipline, high orderliness, and high openness, there's a constant tension that's moving.

[920] Yeah.

[921] Yeah.

[922] Well, I think that's part of why high -level creative performance is so rare is because it's very difficult to bring those things together because they actually they're mutually constraining well the thing that's interesting for me is I've worked with a lot of celebrities who are at a fairly high level well at the highest level let's just say whether it's in you know acting or singing or you know household name people who you know some of whom carry with it the the press reputation of being smart and some who do not the one thing that always amazes me is like anyone at a certain level of fame has a level of unbelievable sharpness like there's no one who accidentally stumbles their way all the way up to having a top 10 hit or a number one movie or something else it's very very rare yeah and so even people that we look at and go oh that's some stupid celebrity that's a dumb actor that's this idiot singer people are running empires yeah you know and they somehow have to do that while keeping their antenna up and focused and and letting enough in to keep creating in a way that's meaningful it's it's I've yet to meet someone there's a lot of people who are a pain in the ass but I've yet to meet people at that level I'm not impressed yeah well one of the things I've learned in recent years is to go watch famous people when they come to Toronto no matter whether or not I like them so for example I went and saw Dolly Parton with my wife about six months ago outside at the Molson Amphitheater.

[923] And like, I wouldn't say I'm a great fan of Dolly Parton's music.

[924] I mean, she's quite the phenomena, but she was absolutely amazing, absolutely amazing, brilliant, witty, self -denegrating, incredibly musically talented, really engaging with the audience.

[925] She really seemed to like to be there.

[926] It was a real treat.

[927] And I agree with what you said is that it's a rare person who, especially who manages to sustain that across any amount of time, who doesn't have something truly remarkable about them.

[928] Yeah.

[929] I mean, I'd also like to point out my magnanimity of not taking the open revenge shot for your Madonna comment about you going to a Dolly Parton concert.

[930] I just want that noted, let the record show that I'm showing enormous restraint at this point.

[931] I definitely, and you have to work the entire discovery.

[932] and I'm very happy about that.

[933] But that's true.

[934] I mean, it's coming out too, right?

[935] Yeah, a movie coming out in June.

[936] You want to talk a little bit about that?

[937] It's called The Book of Henry.

[938] And it stars Naomi Watts.

[939] We have Jacob Tremblay in it, who's the boy from Room, Sarah Silverman, who we mentioned earlier, Dean Norris, a terrific cast.

[940] Maddie Ziegler, who is amazing.

[941] Jaden Levinner, is the boy from St. Vincent and Midnight Special.

[942] And it's about I'm constrained because we have it very kind of under wraps.

[943] We want it to be a surprise.

[944] It's a very unusual, very special kind of film.

[945] I wrote the rough draft of this, the first draft, 18 years ago.

[946] This script has literally grown up with me. And I, it's about a single mom, Naomi Watts, plays the character, who is raising two boys, one of whom's a prodigy, and something very bad is happening next door to them.

[947] And working with her son who's a prodigy she has to figure out she's a lot like the child in the relationship and the 12 year old is more like the adult and they have to sort of navigate through their way to a solution it has very strong thriller elements it has some humor i mean one of the things i said um i was thinking about is that i hope there's a lot of emotions in it that will catch people off guard um and how it got made why it took so long get made is it was so unusual how it got made was I found a director off a movie called Safety Not Guaranteed.

[948] It's a wonderful little small independent movie called Colin Tramaro.

[949] And we were moving forward toward production.

[950] And then he said, look, I just had a meeting with Spielberg.

[951] There's no conceivable way he would give me Jurassic World off my tiny little movie that costs probably less than the catering budget for Jurassic World.

[952] But I just want to give you a heads up.

[953] And two weeks later he called and was like, dude, I got Jurassic World.

[954] And so I lost him.

[955] And he said to me, you never know, maybe that movie will, you know, make all this money.

[956] We can just come back and get this green list.

[957] And so he went off and made it, you know, it made, I think, $1 .7 billion for Universal.

[958] And true to his word, and I have enormous regard for Colin for a variety of reasons.

[959] But this being one of them, you know, he came back and called me and said, well, now I'm doing one of the next Star Wars movies and I have a window and let's shoot this thing and go.

[960] And so we had this small window.

[961] I did the rewrite in like four or five days, the production redrides.

[962] And we just, he cast it like that.

[963] I mean, at that point, he was someone who everyone wanted to work with.

[964] And off we went.

[965] And it was amazing.

[966] It was like, you know, 18 years later, an overnight success.

[967] Cool.

[968] So, yeah, I was.

[969] That was good, great.

[970] We should probably call it quits.

[971] I think it's been about 90 minutes, which seems to be about the right amount of time.

[972] So thanks very much for talking with me. and, well, we'll talk soon.

[973] Thank you for listening to Episode 7 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[974] For relevant links in a description of the episode, please check the show notes.

[975] To support this podcast, you can provide a monthly donation on Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

[976] Also, please check out self -authoring .com for Dr. Peterson's self -development programs.

[977] Thank you.

[978] Thank you.