#1158 - Chuck Palahniuk

[0] four, three, two, one.

[1] And we're live.

[2] How are you, Chuck?

[3] I am great.

[4] Look at this place.

[5] Thanks for being here, man. Appreciate it.

[6] Thank you.

[7] I've read your books.

[8] I've watched movies based on your book, so it's very cool to meet you in real life.

[9] And it's always a disappointment.

[10] It is always so heartbreaking because people expect somebody so not me. And I am constantly breaking their heart when they meet me. Well, I expect you.

[11] you, so you're not breaking my heart at all.

[12] I'm very pleased to meet you.

[13] So I didn't have any weirdo expectations or any delusions of who you are.

[14] And don't just, just don't kill yourself, okay?

[15] I mean, Anthony Bourdain, and he kills himself.

[16] Well, I think there's a lot of other factors involved there.

[17] I don't know.

[18] I see this.

[19] So many of my peers, it's like the moment I meet them, boom, they're gone.

[20] Yeah, I'm not going to do that.

[21] Okay.

[22] So don't worry.

[23] Everything's fine.

[24] Listen, I want to talk to you about a bunch of things.

[25] First of all, I would love to talk to you about your writing process.

[26] Because one of the things I read once is I believe you were writing down, it was on the Cape.

[27] It was in Massachusetts.

[28] Were you ever writing down there?

[29] Were you ever writing somewhere where you made a deal with yourself where you wouldn't turn the heat on unless you were writing?

[30] Oh my gosh.

[31] Do you think I'm a white person, don't you?

[32] That is so weird.

[33] The Cape?

[34] The Cape?

[35] You've never been to the Cape Cod?

[36] That's like in England.

[37] Is that all white people?

[38] That's in England.

[39] New England, yes, no. I never read anything like that about you?

[40] No. I'm sorry.

[41] Never been on the Cape.

[42] You never been to Cape Cod?

[43] Never had a clam -bake - He's a white person.

[44] Clams are wonderful.

[45] What's wrong with clams?

[46] No, no, no, it's just something.

[47] Maybe it's something I attributed to you for many, many years.

[48] It was just an interesting story that someone said that they were forcing themselves to be disciplined writing, and so they wouldn't write unless they had the heat on.

[49] And so they lived in this place over the winter.

[50] God, wasn't you?

[51] It's so embarrassing.

[52] You were talking about Michael Cunningham.

[53] Is that who it was?

[54] Yeah, because he, I think that's his story about living in Provincetown.

[55] Might have been.

[56] Fuck this all up.

[57] What a terrible way to get going.

[58] But one thing I wanted to talk to you to.

[59] Ambien much lately?

[60] No, I don't, any at all.

[61] I just sleep.

[62] I'm fortunate in that regard.

[63] All right.

[64] You don't take that shit, do you?

[65] Of course I do.

[66] Do you?

[67] Yeah, three times a day.

[68] Oh, you're fucking with me. We got started off poorly.

[69] Once a day.

[70] Once a day.

[71] Do you really take Ambien?

[72] Yeah, you know, to tell the truth, just before I want to do anything I don't want to do, it's like elves and the shoemaker thing, it's like I don't want to do my taxes, so I take Ambien.

[73] And then I wake up and my taxes are done.

[74] Oh.

[75] And do you have plausible deniability, too?

[76] If you can get videotape, you take an Ambien.

[77] People have committed murder on Ambien and gotten off because they had no memory.

[78] That is true.

[79] Yeah, it's a hypnotic.

[80] We actually did a pretty in -depth discussion about that after the Roseanne Bar thing came out.

[81] My own mom has taken in.

[82] She stopped taking it.

[83] But one of the reasons why she stopped taking it is because she woke up in the middle of the night and she had a white bathroom mat and she painted it with lipstick and makeup.

[84] She had no recollection of it whatsoever.

[85] However, but she painted it like a two -year -old would.

[86] They got a hold of their mom's lipstick.

[87] And she just woke up and went, what the fuck am I doing?

[88] Like, what is this?

[89] Hey, she got off easy.

[90] I've heard war stories, a hundred war stories.

[91] Oh, yeah, no, I have heard about murder.

[92] I've heard about people driving their car to someone's house, killing them, driving home, and having no recollection of it.

[93] Well, a young woman in London climbed at the top of a construction crane, fell asleep on a huge counterweight.

[94] So far up over London, wakes up in the morning, birds up.

[95] around her.

[96] She has no idea where she's at.

[97] She is terrified.

[98] Jesus Christ, yeah.

[99] You writing about Ambien right now?

[100] I am.

[101] I can tell you're locked in.

[102] Ambien and a hundred other things.

[103] If it's fair to say, it seems like you're writing, like one of the ways you collect data is almost like you're reporting on these people.

[104] Like you're collecting real life interactions between people and real life characteristics, and then you incorporate them into fiction.

[105] Exactly.

[106] That's fair to say?

[107] My degree is journalism.

[108] I have no idea how to be with people, so I need to introduce a topic and see if it resonates and then get everybody's take on these common experiences and then pick the very best one.

[109] So in a way, basically what I'm doing is kind of an ongoing field study that becomes whatever my next book is.

[110] When you wrote five, you tapped into something that it was really fascinating for me as someone who's been involved in martial arts my whole life and I I've understood the cathartic release of violence but I never saw it articulated the way you did and you made it enticing for a thinking person you made it like you what you did it you sort of opened up these uh these doors of understanding for someone who maybe had frustration or had some pent up rage or had some, some angst that just was not going to get out any other way.

[111] And then you wrote about it.

[112] And then when you wrote, reading what you wrote, it made you go, yeah, okay.

[113] Oh, all right.

[114] Now, it's like you added an element to it that really didn't exist before in pop culture.

[115] It was really fascinating for me as someone who's watching that whole thing.

[116] unfurl and watching people get like really resonating with people watching people really getting excited about your work it's like oh he he hit some nerve that nobody really hit before and it's not a nerve that gets hit very much you know and it there's so many different aspects to it and one is just my classic thing is that there are so few social model novels or stories for men for for women there are a you know every season there's a new new Joy Luck Club, a new How to Make an American Quilt, a new traveling sisterhood of the Yagaha pants, whatever, just all these different models in which women can come together and talk about their lives.

[117] And if you're a man, you've got either a fight club or you have the Dead Poet Society.

[118] And that is really it.

[119] So we don't have a lot of narratives that that depict to men a role or a kind of script in which to come together and talk about their shed.

[120] Another thing is Jordan Peterson, back to Jordan Peterson Peterson.

[121] He talks about that need for really rough play.

[122] And he talks about it a lot.

[123] And a lot of my friends, they brag about how badly their kids hurt them.

[124] Oh, my gosh, my daughter came at me the other day.

[125] I had no idea how strong she was.

[126] she pulled my arm out of the socket.

[127] And they're proud.

[128] They're proud that their kid can play that rough and is growing up that strong.

[129] But, you know, we've kind of fallen away from this idea of consensual rough play.

[130] And I think Fight Club resonated with that a lot.

[131] And also the idea of Joseph Campbell's idea that there needs to be a secondary father in men's lives, that you're born, if you're lucky, with a biological father that you do not choose.

[132] and that is the nurturing, loving father that you eventually kind of have to reject.

[133] But in doing so, you have to choose a new father.

[134] And that father by choice typically is a minister or a teacher or a drill sergeant or a coach, one of those fathers.

[135] And you kind of put yourself an apprenticeship to the secondary father.

[136] And you have to sort of consign your life to the secondary father and agree to learn what they're going to teach you.

[137] just like a karate kid.

[138] And that is getting harder and harder and harder to find.

[139] So Fight Club was also depicting a new form of the secondary father with all these kids that were showing up on the doorstep of this ramshackle old house.

[140] So there were just so many aspects of men's lives that were not being addressed when Fight Club came out.

[141] And it sort of reinvented so many of those things that had fallen by the wayside.

[142] That's a huge part of martial arts.

[143] A huge part of martial arts is your relationship with the master, with the coach, with finding someone who can guide you through the most dangerous waters of competition.

[144] It's absolutely imperative.

[145] Bad relationships with coaches are absolutely disastrous, and it's imperative that someone find the right coach, find someone who they really can trust and appreciate, and you do develop.

[146] It's such a common theme.

[147] they talk about this person being like a son or this person being like a father you know i mean it's um it's i i never thought about it that way i forgot about that part of joseph campbell but yeah that is a huge huge issue with with young men and um young men getting into martial arts is something that i've talked about so many times i don't discuss it as the need for rough play i say there's human reward systems that are just not being they're not being met and that systems that have been in place for thousands and thousands of years that are designed to reward us for fighting off the enemy, running away from danger, developing physical skills, and having a body that's capable of not just physical activity, but violence.

[148] Well, and beyond just that, you know, it's also the whole idea of apprenticeship.

[149] You know, whether you're apprenticing yourself to a fighting coach or to a metallurgist or to a welder or to a bricklayer or to a mason you are apprenticing yourself to somebody that you're going to do all this grunt work for but in exchange you're going to you're going to learn a kind of really master skill at something and so it's a way of mastering yourself as you master this other thing so you know it's not just always a physical you know fighting thing it doesn't have to be in that form.

[150] Just difficult.

[151] Something that's a struggle, something that's hard to learn.

[152] Right.

[153] Yeah.

[154] And that relationship that you have with that secondary father, too, it's almost in some ways more intense.

[155] The pride of someone teaching you something, and then you eventually developing those skills, and then this person who is teaching you this, being proud of your work, is extremely satisfactory.

[156] Well, do you remember officer and a gentleman?

[157] You know, Richard Gere really has this drunken, this not their dad, and then he has this drill sergeant who's constantly trying to wash him out.

[158] And then finally he reaches the existential crisis of saying, you can't throw me out of the service because I have nothing else.

[159] I have nowhere else to go in the world.

[160] My life will amount to nothing unless I can master this thing.

[161] And he's a relatively young man, but it is that existentialistic moment where you realize that You have to sacrifice your youth for something.

[162] You're not going to live forever.

[163] It's a very Martin Heidegger moment where you realize you have to become a being living towards death.

[164] You're not going to live forever.

[165] And you've got to give your life to something.

[166] Now, when you approach a novel like that, when you have a story like that that's brewing your head, how do you decide what to pull the trigger on?

[167] Like, do you just go on instinct?

[168] Do you just have a concept in your head?

[169] and it just seems more and more attractive and you just say, okay, this is it?

[170] You know, one really good test is if you can take it to a party and you can tell a very small part of it, as much of it as you know at that point, and people will vie for a chance to relate some aspect of their life that is very much like that, but an even more extreme example of that.

[171] So in a way, they're fleshing out your theme with parts of their own lives.

[172] And so you find yourself drawing from the experience of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people.

[173] And at the same time, you're beta testing it.

[174] You're kind of taking it on the road.

[175] And you're seeing that it's an idea that resonates with a huge number of people, that everyone can relate to it.

[176] That's interesting.

[177] So do you purposely, like, go to parties with, like, a couple, like, bullets in the chamber?

[178] Sometimes or sometimes I just go to the party and I listen to hear.

[179] somebody tell that personal anecdote that does evoke all those other anecdotes.

[180] Because a great anecdote doesn't leave people speechless.

[181] It leaves them competing to tell a better version of the same thing.

[182] And that's when a real writer just starts realizing, okay, there's a pattern.

[183] And that can be turned into something really big.

[184] That's really interesting.

[185] There's a parallel there with comedy, for sure that's if you in good material oftentimes not always but oftentimes you'll see the audience going oh my god you do that or yeah that's fascinating now um nothing i really wanted to talk to you about is something that you brought up uh when you sent the notes to matt was um censorship and that and and and self censorship which is going on apparently in writer groups and and groups of people that are deciding that certain words should be eliminated from a vocabulary and from vernacular and that you shouldn't discuss certain things anymore.

[186] These things are, it's harming fiction and harming literature that you can't explore the darker ideas.

[187] You know, oh, you want to see me crucify myself right now?

[188] Yeah.

[189] Okay.

[190] This is kind of the career ending moment.

[191] For several years, I was in a writer's workshop.

[192] And the core group of us had been meeting since 1990.

[193] So this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old.

[194] And gradually, people were asking each other not to use certain words.

[195] First, you know, nobody really used the N word, but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop.

[196] And then in a story, I used the word faggot.

[197] And a very good friend of mine said, you're not bringing that word in.

[198] to workshop.

[199] You're not writing anything with the F word.

[200] And it just became more and more tightly strictured that way.

[201] And so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other.

[202] And one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strait, who had written a book called Wild, which was a hugely successful book.

[203] It was it will be on book store shelves for the rest of history, Cheryl's book Wild.

[204] But while she was writing it, she had written a segment about how as a child she would be sat on the sofa with her grandfather, and her grandfather taught her how to masturbate him.

[205] And so as a child, she would masturbate her grandfather until he achieved orgasm.

[206] And then later, she would find these featherless birds that had fallen out of a nest and she picked one up and she knew it would die so she crushed it between her bare hands this is a very small child and she wrote how as that bird died crushed between her hands its death rose its spasms of death felt exactly like her grandfather's penis ejaculating in her little hand.

[207] Whoa.

[208] That was the best thing she ever wrote.

[209] And her editor at Knaf said, that is not going in this book because we want this book to be a big book.

[210] And if we see you jerking off your grandfather and then killing baby birds, that is not going to make Oprah Winfrey happy.

[211] So it was a magnificent piece of writing and a magnificent kind of parallel and awareness for a child to have.

[212] And this juxtaposition of sexual abuse and death was magnificent.

[213] Oh, my God.

[214] It worked on every level.

[215] But the publisher said this is not going to be in the book.

[216] Did she send it to you or did she show it to you?

[217] She brought her to a workshop and she read it.

[218] There was even a newspaper reporter present there.

[219] And we all realized it was fantastically powerful.

[220] but then she said they won't take this this can't go in wow did she do anything with it did she publish it online or no and there were so many parts of that book that were so much better than what they actually did publish really and so it's that kind of censorship where you're trying to reach a reader standing in line at Starbucks and this has got to go in that point of purchase stand, and it's got to be a face -out.

[221] And I understand for a long time, if you wanted a face -out, yet Barnes & Noble, especially on the Discover New Writers' Face -out stack, you could not have the word fuck on the first page, because they did not want people picking up that book and opening it and seeing the F -word, that that just did not fit their corporate culture.

[222] And so, you know, so much of this censorship is because people really want to reach the large just audience without offending people.

[223] But there's giant problems with that, right?

[224] I mean, one of the more fascinating things about books is that the story plays out in your mind.

[225] Exactly.

[226] The nature of consumption makes it about the only medium in which you can go to those places.

[227] Yeah, literally.

[228] You couldn't, there's no way you would be able to find, to be able to, I mean, to put that in a book, her story about a grandfather in the bird.

[229] Maybe you could put the bird in, but the grandfather part, there's just no way.

[230] Yeah.

[231] And I feel like I'm telling stories out of school, but it's such a perfect example of that kind of self -censorship.

[232] And it's also something so magnificent that I feel it should come out.

[233] It should sort of be stated.

[234] I don't want to steal her thunder.

[235] I want to honor the story.

[236] But it's like so many stories that people tell me. I'm kind of seen as a safe person, you know, kind of a degraded monster maybe.

[237] But as a degraded monster with no self -esteem whatsoever, they feel safe telling me these things.

[238] Because in a way, they probably feel a little morally superior to me. Why do you think people would consider you a degraded monster?

[239] Because I can read a story like guts that is so completely humanely.

[240] Because as I read it, it's in the first person.

[241] So people more or less assume that it's my story, even though its stories garnered from many different people.

[242] But the fact that I'm presenting it means that I'm the person that is losing face.

[243] And afterwards, people feel like they can risk losing face by telling me their story that's very much like the gut story.

[244] So when someone is writing something that's deeply disturbing like that, when you hit those, parts of your mind and you come to this pathway do you consider do you say well no one's ever going to allow this to be in a book no one's ever do you consider those thoughts or do you just go through with it first and then review it or do you not do that at all you know my formative years with a punk years the 70s into the 80s and we always used to have a saying people would say don't hit the break until you hear a glass break or don't stop until you hear a glass break.

[245] And so I always think the point of writing is to coach yourself to that point that you would never have gone voluntarily and also to coach your reader to the point where the reader would never have gone voluntarily.

[246] In a story like guts, you know, it's very funny on the front end.

[247] And if you told people on the front end where it was going to go, they'd never read that story.

[248] but it's very funny and charming and well -paced on the front.

[249] And then once people realize where it's going to go, they're already trapped.

[250] And so in a way, it's a way...

[251] You seem to enjoy that, though.

[252] Like, the way you said they're already trapped, you seem to take some satisfaction in that.

[253] But in writing it, I'm also sort of springing the trap on myself.

[254] Starting down a path that I have no idea is going to be so humiliating or so...

[255] so emotionally upsetting or so dark, because if I did, I would never go down that path.

[256] When you write a story like that, how much of it do you plan out in advance?

[257] I might plan out up to the end of the second act.

[258] You know, at the moment of greatest crisis, this will happen.

[259] You know, in Fight Club, the moment of greatest crisis is going to be when everyone in the support groups figures out that this guy is lying to them, and they're all given the choice of either accepting him for his transgressions or rejecting him.

[260] Same thing in choke.

[261] There's going to be that moment when people realize that he has faked choking and that he's made them into a fake hero, and they're going to either kill him or accept him.

[262] And so I typically know that the second act is going to end with the transgression being revealed.

[263] But beyond that, I don't want to know because I want the story to complete itself with its own momentum at that point.

[264] And if it doesn't surprise me beyond the second act, then it's not going to surprise the reader.

[265] Do you write, do you have like a storyboard laid out and do you use like index cards or anything to figure out where things are going or do you just kind of, you know?

[266] No, no, you know, that's part of the glory is that whenever I get stuck, I go to the gym and I say, okay, I'm working on this scene where this happens and this happens and this happens.

[267] And my friends will say, there'll always be somebody there with a really fresh take and life experience who can say, well, have you thought about this happening?

[268] And it will take the story in a direction that is so unexpected because it's not from my experience.

[269] and that's the glory.

[270] And they feel like they've contributed.

[271] They're so happy.

[272] And I'm happy to spend time among people.

[273] And I'm happy to have the story complete in a way that I never, ever could have anticipated.

[274] That's fascinating.

[275] So you do it at the gym?

[276] Yeah, the gym is really great because you're around people and you have these recoveries between sets, so you have a little time to talk.

[277] And at the same time you have, during the exercise itself, you have time to think.

[278] And so it paces the talking versus the thinking.

[279] And it's also kind of highly oxygenated and it's physically active.

[280] And your mind is kind of, your mind is not engaged with something else.

[281] Your mind is kind of disengaged like it is while you're taking a shower.

[282] Yeah, a lot of people like to walk.

[283] They like to write, read a little bit of it, and then walk and bring a recorder or their phone to record on.

[284] I think probably along the same lines.

[285] Charles Dickens walked somewhere between 12 and 20 miles a day as he wrote and the Lakeland poets walked constantly I mean walking is a big part of writing anything physical right like anything where you're forcing your body to move forcing the blood to flow and also mindless so it allows your mind to wander yeah so I love the fact that you're so open with these ideas too that you bring them to people and get their take on it and then incorporate their take.

[286] Is this something you've always done?

[287] Because of the workshopping?

[288] Is it just this willingness to be open with your ideas and express them?

[289] Yeah, really, you know, workshop was the crucial thing, having that social expectation that you were going to bring work every week.

[290] And it was also kind of a party, a reward for having brought the work.

[291] And it was also a way of testing the work so that you knew whether it was working, you know, you weren't constantly sort of questioning yourself.

[292] Workshop just provides so many really important ways of keeping you writing.

[293] Now, and you've done this always.

[294] It seems like you've done this most of your career.

[295] I have, and this is not the first workshop I've been bumped out of.

[296] The first workshop I was in was a lot of very nice ladies, and I was probably 28.

[297] and I had written a scene in which a man, a young man, has done up an inflatable sex doll so it looks exactly like the woman he's obsessed with.

[298] And during the seduction of this sex doll, he accidentally snags the back of it with the zipper of its dress.

[299] And he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air.

[300] So he's got to copulate faster and faster to try to achieve.

[301] achieve orgasm before this thing completely goes flat.

[302] And at the end of the scene, he's standing there with this completely deflated sex doll hanging off of his erection like this surrender flag.

[303] And, of course, his mother walks into the room.

[304] And after I wrote that scene, the leader of the workshop I was in, my first workshop, she took me aside afterwards, and she said, the other writers in the workshop no longer feel safe around you.

[305] She really did.

[306] She said you've written something that really frightens them, and they would like you to politely leave the workshop and not come back.

[307] Wow.

[308] And so that's when I started with Tom Spanbauer's workshop in which almost anything went.

[309] And so this kind of periodic implosion of the workshop, is kind of part of the process.

[310] Well, it seems only twice, right?

[311] There are more times than that?

[312] You know, it's been twice, but in the past.

[313] Twice catastrophic.

[314] Twice catastrophic, yeah, yeah.

[315] But a few other flat tires along the way?

[316] Periodically, we've kind of had to pretend that we were disbanding in order to get rid of a member who was just more trouble than they were worth.

[317] How many people were in these workshops?

[318] Boy, lately it's been, last, it was about eight.

[319] But we've been up to like 16, 60s.

[320] And now when I teach, I typically have about 25 people.

[321] What does it feel?

[322] I mean, to be in a workshop for that long and then have such a disagreement and to disband like that or to have you forced out, what does that feel like?

[323] That's got to suck.

[324] No, you know, I think in a way we all need kind of a respite from each other.

[325] We all had kind of knew what to expect from one another.

[326] And I think we were all less of a resource for one another.

[327] you know there's always a chance we'll come back together so so it's not a big tragedy so there's a chance that they might so did they kick you out or did they just disband I left the workshop and I understood that it disbanded after that that seems I just don't understand how someone who is a creative writer can't understand the the not just the necessity like the need to delve into the darker possibilities of human reality.

[328] The story she wrote about her grandfather in the bird is a perfect example of that.

[329] I mean, although very few people will experience that in their life, we all can appreciate that these are possible scenarios.

[330] And I think it really comes down to what purpose reading and writing serves in people's lives.

[331] And most people, they want reading to be able to.

[332] a comforting activity.

[333] They want to be able to read a book and then fall asleep, knowing the detective will apprehend the killer by the end of the book, that things will end very well.

[334] In a way, they want to be bored or lulled by the book.

[335] Not so many people really want to be kind of confronted by books.

[336] But some people do, right?

[337] I mean, it's kind of like pretty much all forms of art, whether it's music or movies.

[338] I mean, there's superhero movies, and then there's movies like no country for old men where the bad guy gets away at the end and you leave the movie theater you're like what the fuck you know but those those are all satisfying in different ways to different people and isn't that sort of the point of creative expression is that you're getting surprised you're getting taken down a road that's here's the world through this person's eyes and they create this world if you put limitations on that you're going to yeah you're going to eliminate some disturbing aspects that might bother some people, but you're also going to eliminate some magical moments that might just carry, literally it might change the way you view people.

[339] You know, and part of it has to do with the nature of, you know, movies.

[340] Movies are going to always kind of attract a more dynamic audience.

[341] Movies carry their own authority through motion.

[342] And books are going to be a slower medium that's harder to consume.

[343] And so maybe books are always going to, at this point, be seen of it as kind of a sedative as a kind of thing that lulls you and comforts you and puts you to sleep but by who by some people right i mean i mean maybe there's a market for those kind of books but there's also a market for your books there's there's clearly a market for people that they want to tap into those more disturbing aspects of consciousness and of reality and that market is moving to video games and that market is moving to edge your films there's just other forms of storytelling that are serving that market better.

[344] Really?

[345] Oh, yeah.

[346] Better than books?

[347] Oh, yeah.

[348] But why is that?

[349] Is that because of censorship?

[350] Or it's because artists aren't exploring those ideas as much anymore?

[351] You know, and part of it is because books are harder to consume.

[352] Books take an enormous amount of a commitment of time and effort to read a book where everything else is 30 minutes to two hours.

[353] And to write a book as well.

[354] I mean, it's such a solitary discipline to sit alone with your computer.

[355] No, it is not.

[356] Not for me. I hate that model.

[357] You know, I want to be in the Mermaid Tavern talking about my ideas with my compatriots and getting their take on them and finding out how it resonates with everything else in people's lives.

[358] What's the Mermaid Tavern?

[359] Oh, it's the reference to where, not Coleridge.

[360] all the famous writers of Shakespeare's time basically hung out it was like the white horse tavern in New York but the mermaid tavern was in London during that time and Boswell all the writers hung out there in exchange ideas and entertained one another and so I want writing to be my social outlet but you have to write it by yourself right I mean when you're sitting alone actually putting your fingers on the keyboards.

[361] No, you do that part in airplanes.

[362] Really?

[363] Yeah, I write notebooks and notebooks and notebooks in public.

[364] And then when I'm trapped in some unbearable place like an airplane or an airport, then I do that horrible part of keyboarding.

[365] Yeah.

[366] So that's the only time you actually write right?

[367] The keyboarding is not writing.

[368] You remember the Truman Capote quote about, But on the road, Jack Kerouac, Capote said that's not writing, that's typing.

[369] And so the part on the airplane or in the airport where you have the laptop open, that's not writing.

[370] Really?

[371] That's typing.

[372] This is writing.

[373] Writing to you is physical pen to paper.

[374] Sloppy, everything, yeah.

[375] Why is it different?

[376] Because it's written down in the moment that you hear it and that is not set in New Times, 12 points so that it looks so finished, it looks like a finished book, and it's much harder to monkey with it.

[377] Once you see it on that screen in Word, it looks like a book.

[378] It's much harder to edit it.

[379] But when it's scrawled on the page in front of you, you can draw arrows, you can scribble it out, you can do whatever you want to it.

[380] It's much less precious.

[381] Is this something that you've always taken?

[382] Did you learn this approach?

[383] or is this something that just sort of made sense to you?

[384] This is how old I am.

[385] It used to be, I grew up in the age of typewriters, when even typewriters were kind of precious because you would have to buy ribbons for them, and those ribbons were really expensive.

[386] And so something had to be written out completely longhand, it had to be perfect longhand, before you could risk wasting a typewriter, ribbon to type it out.

[387] Wow.

[388] So you just developed it this way and just stuck with it, even the age of computers.

[389] Well, and also because writing is something I do in the moment.

[390] Somebody says something insightful, something really bright, something phrased just wrong so that it's suddenly really fresh.

[391] And I want to be able to write it down in that moment.

[392] So that when I do have to go to the boring part with a keyboard.

[393] I have got so much wonderful fresh stuff that it makes a keyboarding part fun because it allows me to sort of archive and to curate, preserve these fantastically bright things that were said by so many different people.

[394] And you don't, do you ever record?

[395] Do you ever record yourself?

[396] Like record ideas, then listen to them, transcribe them?

[397] Oh, God, no. No?

[398] No. That was a big Hunter S. Thompson thing.

[399] He would record a lot of his ideas and then transcribe them and write them out?

[400] You know, I kind of write word for word, sentence for sentence.

[401] And so the transcription is just too much of an effort for me. Usually when I do interviews for magazines, I will record my interview subjects.

[402] And even then, transcribing the interviews is such a misery because people seldom talk in complete sentences.

[403] And there's so many false starts and so many.

[404] sentences that just don't go anywhere.

[405] Right.

[406] So, no, talking into a recorder is just that, a mess.

[407] And so this notebook that you have in front of you, this is a notebook for life or is this a notebook for a particular project?

[408] Like, how do you organize it?

[409] This is a notebook where three pages are devoted to topics that I will talk to you about if we're desperate.

[410] and there are little notes in here about contacting my agent for different issues.

[411] Oh, so it's all universal.

[412] It's like for all sorts of things.

[413] It's for tasks that you need to do.

[414] And then as well as that, parts of books you're writing.

[415] And there's all these little notes that Jamie just gave me about microphones.

[416] Yeah, you're writing something about someone who's into recording equipment.

[417] Yeah, that's just a small part of it, but that's what she knows.

[418] Yeah.

[419] Now, this, I want to go back to this workshop.

[420] thing like what was it just words just the use of the word faggot or the N word it was it just words that characters were utilizing in your story that was so disturbing to them it was words but it was also some situations that I thought were you know I got that people were very upset by people would leave the room or people would leave the room or would would weep would weep in just complete upset just part of you go yeah I got this and you see someone weeping some shit you wrote no most of the time people would go to the bathroom and weep and i would find out about it much later so did you get post satisfaction that way no it just made me feel like a bully and that is really kind of another thing that it's a thin line especially when i read a story like guts am i entertaining people or am i bullying them am i beating them up and i how so bullying Why in that way?

[421] Why describe it that way?

[422] Kind of charming them into a story that eventually will make them faint or eventually will make them wretch, but will upset them very deeply.

[423] And I feel a real reluctance about that.

[424] Doesn't that sort of half that bridge have to be crossed, though?

[425] If you're really going to explore every single possibility in a creative narrative, if you're really going to write a book and just let your mind go wild, That has to be on the table, doesn't it?

[426] It does, but I don't think it hurts to be aware so that you don't lapse into being a bully for the sake of being a bully.

[427] You know, I think anybody who's a really hard trainer kind of, you know, comes up against that.

[428] Am I a really good trainer or is part of me a sadist?

[429] Right.

[430] And you have to make sure that you don't become that sadist.

[431] So you're not a monster.

[432] So there you go.

[433] Yeah, but I worry about it.

[434] Well, that's why you're not.

[435] But it's being able to explore those possibilities and being able to just delve into the deep recesses of your mind in the interest of creativity, that seems to be if anybody's going to appreciate that, it's going to be creative writers.

[436] But it's not my mind.

[437] I'm delving into the deep recesses if I'm lucky, if I'm doing it right.

[438] your mind of something like comedians.

[439] They'll say, oh my gosh, that happened to you too.

[440] And a lot of times there are things that people have never, ever talked about.

[441] I tell a classic anecdote.

[442] After I had read the gut story at an event, a woman came up and she was a middle -aged woman.

[443] She was about my age.

[444] And she said, I really love that you read that.

[445] story about how you got your anus prolapsed while masturbating in a swimming pool, which is not my story, but I'm the one that read it.

[446] So that's the one, I'm the one that they're picturing in this horrendous situation.

[447] And she says, since you can tell that story, I'm going to tell you a story.

[448] And she said how when she was seven years old, she was in second grade, and she was in a little organization called the Brownies, which is a precursor to the Girl Scouts.

[449] You wear a brown dress, little brown hat, you get these little merit badges.

[450] And she said, one day I had a stomachache and my mom kept me home from school.

[451] And we had this heating pad.

[452] It must have been in the 1960s.

[453] And this heating pad had this vibrating function.

[454] And she put me face down on this heating pad on my stomach and I fell asleep and while I was asleep this vibrating warm heating pad must have slid down between my legs she says because I woke up with the most amazing feeling a feeling like I'd never felt before oh my god it felt so good and so next time it was my turn to host the brownies I said, brownies, you've got to try this heating pad.

[455] And she says, all the brownies, they turned the heating pad on, the vibrating heating pad, and they rode it like a pony all afternoon.

[456] And she said, it was like sex in the city for 70 -year -old girls.

[457] They could not get enough of this heating pad.

[458] And they were all right in this heating pad, and they had a great time.

[459] And she said, and for the first time in my life, I was the most popular girl in my class.

[460] and I was the girl that all the girls wanted to play with.

[461] And for every Brownie troop meeting, it was at my house.

[462] And I was the leader until the day that my mother came home from work early.

[463] And she caught us with a heating pad.

[464] And she sent the other brownies home.

[465] And she whipped the cord out of the wall.

[466] She just ripped it out of the socket.

[467] And she started to beat me with it.

[468] And she beat me with that cord.

[469] and she beat me and she said you fucking piece of shit you dirty whore what kind of a fucking whore am I raising you whore and she beat me and she beat me and she says this woman who's my age now she says I have not had an orgasm since I was seven years old and then she goes but if you can tell that swimming pool story about how you got hurt jacking off under water?

[470] She says, I can tell my heating pad story and I can tell that story until I can make it funny.

[471] And then maybe someday I can go back to my mom and I can say, do you remember that heating pad we used to have?

[472] And it'll be complete.

[473] Holy shit.

[474] And so see, see, see, see, see, that's what I'm trying to do.

[475] I'm trying to create the opening for people to tell these stories that they never thought that they could tell because that's the way in which they're going to resolve these stories and they're going to master these stories.

[476] We have these bidet toilet things that have a little button on the wall.

[477] You press it, it shoots hot water up your ass.

[478] And my kids come over.

[479] And they love these toilets.

[480] I have two daughters.

[481] and my youngest when she was seven she would sit on the toilet and she was laughing and giggling and we didn't tell her there's anything wrong with it so she was telling us how much she loves it how much she loves the hot water when it shoots under her butt she was like it feels so good and there was no shame in it and there was this weird moment where I'm like am I supposed to react to this?

[482] Am I supposed to say, yeah, I know I like it too.

[483] Am I supposed to say, hey, don't do that too much.

[484] Am I supposed to say, don't tell anybody you like that.

[485] You can like it, but don't tell anybody you like it.

[486] Like, what are I supposed to do?

[487] And I didn't do anything.

[488] I just let her smile and she walked out of the bathroom laughing.

[489] Like, it was great.

[490] And it was no, there was no issue.

[491] But it was this moment where I was like, wow, if I was a religious person or a suppressive person or some person with some sexual issues, this could be a real problem for this little girl.

[492] Instead, I was like, okay, let's get out of the bathroom now.

[493] I guess you're done.

[494] All righty.

[495] And she has no idea that this was even like a moment of, you know, crisis in my mind.

[496] Or I was like, okay, how do I handle this?

[497] I'm in the bathroom with my 7 -year -old daughter and she's getting water shot up her ass and she's enjoying it.

[498] So you talk about it on the radio?

[499] Is that how you deal with it?

[500] I enjoy it too.

[501] I enjoy it too.

[502] We all do.

[503] We talk about these toilets.

[504] They're amazing.

[505] It's warm water.

[506] It shoots in your...

[507] It's great.

[508] It feels awesome.

[509] But it's not supposed to feel awesome for like a little girl for some reason, right?

[510] See, you tell that story, and people will have so many versions of that story.

[511] Oh, yeah.

[512] For me, I was in Germany.

[513] I went in the bathroom in the airport.

[514] I didn't know what this button was, so I pressed it.

[515] I looked down just in time to see this little plastic arm swing out.

[516] I didn't know what that thing was going to do.

[517] So I jumped off the head, and this thing shot up with such force, it knocked a ceiling panel out of the ceiling.

[518] And all this hot toilet water came sprinkling down on me. And that's the only time I've ever been around one of those.

[519] Well, we have one here if you want to try it out.

[520] I don't know.

[521] It scares me. There's two of them.

[522] It's one in that bathroom, one in that one.

[523] That bathroom you could lock.

[524] It's private.

[525] And see, that's my process, is you tell these stories, and you kind of gather the stories that people tell related to these stories.

[526] And you choose the ones that escalate the fastest, that escalate the best.

[527] And that gives you a gradual sort of, you've established the precedent, and then something worse, escalating worse, escalating worse, escalating to the most atrocious or extreme version.

[528] And that's what brings the story to crisis.

[529] I have a hard time believing that someone would be angry at that woman for her story.

[530] You know, and it's not, it's about her and her story.

[531] Right.

[532] Her relationship to that story.

[533] That one you're going to get away with.

[534] You'll get away with that one.

[535] the jerking off the grandfather one is in a different place like she's a victim of sexual abuse she's a victim of violence strange that violence for some reason is more acceptable than sexual abuse in a lot of ways sexual abuse seems to be transformative like there's something about sexual abuse that it ruins you introduce an experience a memory into a person life that ruins them?

[536] This is a rough segue, but I find with so many beginning writers is that they have absolutely no capacity to be with tension or suspense.

[537] So they might start to create suspense, but then they'll resolve it instantly.

[538] And so the story never really gets off the ground because something has happened to them, whether it's violent or whether it's sexual abuse, that makes them.

[539] cling to a kind of calm serenity and that's all they want and that's all they ever want and then writing in a way seems to be a way of coaching them back to a greater and greater tolerance with the unresolved with the tense with suspense.

[540] Some of the best moments in books that I've read are moments where you're reading and you're like oh fuck like where is this going?

[541] Like you know you're going to get introduced into some really disturbing scene.

[542] you have to be with that.

[543] You have to be with that until it's resolved.

[544] And that's good writing.

[545] You know, bad writing is where it comes up, it's resolved.

[546] Now, when you're in this workshop and they're discussing with you this possibility of censorship, of you self -censoring or of them not accepting your ideas, like how do you debate that with them?

[547] How do you talk about that?

[548] Boy, there's really no debate.

[549] You know, And that was another aspect of the workshop, is that we had all known each other for so many years that we didn't have the freedom to kind of teach each other or anything new.

[550] Yeah.

[551] So there was a staleness there too.

[552] We were all kind of hardened into the people we were going to be.

[553] I just don't understand their argument.

[554] I just don't understand if you're going to really paint a monster.

[555] You have to have monstrous actions.

[556] They have to be a real monster.

[557] We know of real monsters.

[558] I mean, there was just some guy just got arrested.

[559] Some had sex slaves in his basement.

[560] And, you know, you hear about those people.

[561] And you go, yeah, yeah, they're out there.

[562] There's probably a hundred of them scattered across the country right now where they have a locked basement and we don't know about it.

[563] Those are real people.

[564] But if you wrote about one of those people using real scenes that were depicted in the news, you know, real eyewitness testimony, real interviews with these monsters, some people would object to that.

[565] But if you're going to write about a monster, you have to write them in a monstrous way.

[566] Oh, I totally agree.

[567] Yeah.

[568] What are they trying to achieve?

[569] I just don't understand what they might not enjoy what you're doing.

[570] It might not be something that they want to take in recreationally, that they want to read your work in that way.

[571] But the fact that they don't appreciate what you're doing or the fact that they don't want you to do what you're doing or they don't want you to bring it to the workshop.

[572] Is this a new thing?

[573] Is there a new trend?

[574] You know, in a way, it's an ongoing thing for me because, you know, I haven't been kicked out of workshops before for just going a little bit too far.

[575] And so in a way, it's kind of a, it's maybe my goal.

[576] Maybe my goal is to, you know, always piss off my beta audience as a way of kind of proving that I've gone too far.

[577] That's not too far, though.

[578] It's too far when you piss off the alphas.

[579] Well, not the betas, right?

[580] You go really far when you piss off psychos.

[581] When they're like, Jesus, man, the fuck are you doing in my brain?

[582] You know, oh, God, that's another thing not to talk about.

[583] Just keep going.

[584] My books are banned so many places.

[585] And sometimes I think that maybe that's a good thing because they aren't reaching the psychos.

[586] My books are banned in prison systems.

[587] What?

[588] Because they are enormously popular.

[589] These prison librarians tell me, but the books are considered way too stimulating.

[590] So people in prison cannot read my books.

[591] Holy shit.

[592] All prisons?

[593] I don't know if it's all, but it's Texas and a number of other really big states.

[594] So I don't know.

[595] That's kind of a badge of honor.

[596] Yeah, but it doesn't equate to like the immortality of being banned like Howl or, topic of cancer or salmon rushdie yeah exactly yeah oh god that fucking struggle man the struggle of wanting to express yourself as as freely as possible but being limited even by your own peers that is um that's unexpected to someone who's in the outside of literature someone who just reads it because it's not in the comedy world well it is in the comedy world but not amongst good comedians.

[597] Well, another aspect of that is that so often people aren't censoring it because it offends them.

[598] They're censoring it because they're afraid it will offend someone they know.

[599] They're doing it.

[600] They're kind of white -nighting on behalf of someone else.

[601] David Sedaris told me this story about telling a joke or something very funny about a girl in a wheelchair and how he looked out in the audience and no one was laughing.

[602] they were all looking at a girl in a wheelchair and the moment she started to laugh the entire audience started to laugh oh yeah and so so often people in a workshop they might not personally feel offended by the word but they're thinking how that word might hurt people they know yeah that's a fact yeah that's a giant issue in comedy if you if someone's telling a joke if someone's on stage talking about someone who's fat and there's a fat person in the front row, that joke will bomb.

[603] Yeah.

[604] It just, yeah.

[605] But that's because people are good people overall.

[606] You know, they recognize that they don't want to cause pain.

[607] Another really odd comic, David Sedaris, story, is that he always told me, when you're on the road, don't read from your current book.

[608] Always read from the next book.

[609] Because it's a way of road testing the stories and finding out which ones work and should go into the next book.

[610] and in doing so he was telling this story about being in this this forensic laboratory as an autopsy was taking place and this autopsy table was adjacent to this huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite from this lunchroom and then the lunchroom were the rest of the forensic staff and they were all eating their lunches they all had tuna sandwiches and cans of coke and barbecued potato chips and they were watching through the window as this absolutely perfect 12 -year -old boy was being autopsied.

[611] And just hours before this kid, like two hours before this kid had been riding his bicycle, he'd fallen over, he'd hit his head on the curb, and now two hours later, he was dead.

[612] And dead without almost a scratch on him.

[613] Just this perfect, naked, dead, 12 -year -old boy.

[614] on the autopsy table.

[615] And as the technicians eating their lunch, watching it through a window, they watch as the pathologist incizes around the top of the kid's face, at the top of the forehead, the hairline, and then peels the face down, like peeling an orange, peels the entire face off of the skull of this little boy and leaves the face around the neck.

[616] like a mask, like a rubber mask.

[617] And this exposes this liver -colored, dark -red musculature of the child's underlying face.

[618] And this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich, he points this out, and he says, see that, that there?

[619] That's the color of red that I want to paint our rec room.

[620] Holy shit.

[621] And when Sedaris told that story in front of 600 people, it was dead silent and you could hear people weeping people were crying and they were hating David Sedaris in that moment and so I had to laugh I laughed really loud like a donkey and it was amazing how the hatred in that auditorium swung from hating David who they did not want to hate to hating this jackass over here who was actually laughing And so I threw myself on the sword for David, and that story never went in any book.

[622] Wow.

[623] Did the story not go in any book just because of the reaction by the audience or just the uncomfortable moment?

[624] He just decided.

[625] Did you speak to him about it?

[626] No, I didn't.

[627] Not afterwards.

[628] It was just such an awkward, painful thing.

[629] I would never kind of throw it back in his face.

[630] Right.

[631] But to my knowledge, that was the only time the story was told.

[632] Do you have those, like, scattered about?

[633] Are there scenes where you read?

[634] and you just sat and looked at him and went, no, I just got to put that one somewhere else.

[635] Oh, they were...

[636] Set that aside.

[637] Jokes that I told where I got hissed by 800 people.

[638] And you know, if you can live through those moments, you realize you can live through a lot.

[639] If you can be hated by 1 ,100 people at a Barnes & Noble on Union Square, yeah, you can be hated by your mother.

[640] It's okay.

[641] Now, when those people come to see you, how many of those people are fans of literature, and how many of those people are specifically fans of your work?

[642] Like, there would be a difference.

[643] Like, the people who are fans of your work would at least expect some uncomfortable moments.

[644] And for the most part, there tend to be more or less just fans of my work.

[645] And still, still hiss.

[646] Oh, yeah, but it's, again, they're hissing on behalf of someone.

[647] They're not hissing for themselves.

[648] You know, I made this horrible cheap shot, and they always know a cheap shot.

[649] People always know a cheap shot.

[650] I was commenting about how in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote had made this observation that Americans don't like true beauty, true classical natural beauty.

[651] They want to see a very plain person who has been so groomed, so exercised, so made up, so styleized, that she can kind of pass as this amazing, strange beauty.

[652] that's what Americans want because natural classic beauty is not egalitarian.

[653] You're either born with it or you're not.

[654] They want to see a plain person who has been transformed.

[655] And to make my point, at the end of the story, I made a cheap shot.

[656] I said, and that's why we have Sarah Jessica Parker.

[657] And I said this in New York.

[658] And in New York, Sarah, Jessica Parker is worshipped like a god.

[659] and that whole crowd hissed and booed and did everything but throw excrement at me. Wow.

[660] But then later in line, half of them came up and whispered, that was really funny.

[661] Yeah, well, that's one of the things about dark comedy clubs.

[662] You want them dark.

[663] You don't want everyone illuminated.

[664] Like the crowd is, like, it's one of the real issues with doing a comedy, special is that especially the old way they used to do them they used to like to light up the audience which completely changes the dynamic of the the room changes what you'll laugh and what you won't laugh at you know a scene like the sarah could sarah jessica parker joke it's a perfect example like you don't want to be caught dead being the one person that throws their head back and howls at that you know chief shots are just to stay away from them but that's another i'll ask you ask you a question you know with so many college is becoming these kind of strident, safe places that demand their own aesthetic.

[665] What is it like doing comedy?

[666] Well, it hasn't changed that much.

[667] People have gotten a little bit more sensitive because they're aware that other people are more sensitive.

[668] The audiences that come to nightclubs, which is primarily where I perform, if I do a theater, those people are there to see me. so that's they're they're usually pretty loose pretty fun but if you're in a nightclub they're there to see especially the comedy store one of the good things about the comedy store is there's literally two dozen people in the lineup they're not necessarily just there to see you they're there to see anthony jesselnick and chris delia and all these other comedians that are also there as well so you get a a much broader comedy audience but they're nightclub audiences they have a few drinks in them, maybe they smoked a little pot before they got there.

[669] Those people were there to have a good time.

[670] Colleges are a nightmare now.

[671] It's a nightmare because it's recreational outrage.

[672] It's kids who have been under the control of their parents for most of their life and haven't had their own sovereignty and identity and now they're free.

[673] And they are very quick to be outraged.

[674] They want to point out their moral superiority.

[675] They want to point out their moral superiority.

[676] They want a virtue signal in every opportunity.

[677] They want to shut down.

[678] Anything they think is, air quotes, problematic.

[679] They don't want things to go in a bad way.

[680] And they think, for some reason, that comedy should be uplifting, and it should only punch up.

[681] Like, I had this conversation once with a professor who wrote a book on comedy.

[682] And he said, all great comedy punches up.

[683] And I said, that's bullshit.

[684] I said, one of the greatest bits of all time is Sam Kinnison's bit about starving children in Africa, about watching those commercials where starving kids are in Africa.

[685] and, you know, couldn't you please help?

[686] And he goes in, you know, and Kinnison's like, he just want to grab the guy.

[687] Hey, why don't you help him?

[688] You're right fucking there.

[689] Or send something like me. He goes, send something like me. He's going to take these people and go, hey, we just drove here, 5 ,000 miles with your food.

[690] And it occurred to us, you wouldn't be world hunger.

[691] If you people would live where the fucking food is.

[692] He goes, come here.

[693] You see that?

[694] That's sand.

[695] We got sand in America, too.

[696] We just don't live in it, asshole.

[697] And he goes in one of the greatest.

[698] bits of all time is literally about starving babies in Africa.

[699] It's one of the greatest bits of all time.

[700] And he didn't have anything to say.

[701] You didn't know where to go with it.

[702] I'm like, don't say comedy is only about punching up.

[703] That's crazy talk.

[704] What you're doing is you're, there's, there's a, this moral thing that they're trying to achieve that literally is completely independent of humor.

[705] it's not what's funny it's like they want to they want it to be a multi -purpose tool they want it to be funny as well as morally uplifting and great for people who are discriminated against and amazing for folks who are marginalized and uplifting for those who are disenfranchised well that's not what comedy is what comedy is is funny those things are wonderful if you want to do a spoken word show or poetry or writing or you know a one person play those those are great but that's not funny comedy is funny so it's either funny or it's not funny and some things are funny that are fucked up you know kinnison had a bit about homosexual necrophiliacs who are paying money to spend a few hours undisturbed with the freshest male corpses and so he'd lie down on his stomach and he goes you imagine these people they're on the slabs like well went through life and had a good time and everything and now I guess I'm going to go and be with Jesus and hey what the hell is this and he's rocking back and forth feels like some guy's got his dick in my ass you mean life keeps fucking you in the ass even after you're dead it never ends it never ends oh oh he would close on it because he couldn't follow it it was such a powerful bit it was about a dead guy getting fucked in the ass there is no further down that you could punch other than starving babies in Africa.

[706] You know, and I'm not sure about if this is punching down, but do you remember the routine that kind of put Whoopi Goldberg on the map a million years ago about being a black surfer chick?

[707] No. Oh, you know, she did it on television.

[708] I must have seen it on cable when I was like 19 years old.

[709] But she talks in Valley Speak.

[710] Nobody's seen this whoopee person before.

[711] She's brand new.

[712] Nobody's ever seen her on television.

[713] She's got this funny name.

[714] And she's doing this valspeak about being the only black surfer chick on the beach, and she loves surfing, and she loves this one white surfer guy, and she finally hooks up with him, and then she realizes she's pregnant.

[715] And it's all very funny.

[716] The whole front end, you're just roaring with laughter.

[717] And then she's pregnant, and she doesn't know what to do, so she gets a rusty wire coat hanger.

[718] And she goes into a public bathroom on the beach, and she gives herself a coat hanger a boy.

[719] portion.

[720] And it spills out there on the concrete floor.

[721] And everything's okay.

[722] And now I'm back on the beach and I'm just doing fine.

[723] And why don't you come on down and see me here on the beach?

[724] It's great down here.

[725] It's great.

[726] Holy shit.

[727] It's a fantastic piece.

[728] And she did it on television?

[729] She did it on TV.

[730] And it started so light like an Ira 11 novel.

[731] And then it went to such a dark, horrible place.

[732] And then it came up with just this kind of token.

[733] Everything is okay.

[734] Ending.

[735] I'm going to be all right.

[736] Don't worry.

[737] This is just something that happened.

[738] Be happy.

[739] That it just leaves you.

[740] Shaken.

[741] And that's a kind of comedy that I love.

[742] Yeah.

[743] Damn.

[744] It goes to that dark or that sentimental place and it breaks your heart.

[745] And then it kind of comes out of it a little bit.

[746] But Ira Levin did that so well.

[747] Nora Ephron in her books, she was so good at doing that.

[748] Heartburn.

[749] Heartburn is fantastically funny, but by the end, you're just weeping.

[750] The book is so sad.

[751] But these are moments that if you're going to, if you're going to censor people, if you're going to self -censor, if you're going to decide that people can't use certain words, if you're going to decide that certain scenarios are just too upsetting for the, reader, these words are going to, these moments are going to be harder and harder to achieve.

[752] And these are the moments that we're going to talk about.

[753] Like if you and, if we were in here, if we were in a bar somewhere and we're having a few drinks talking about great stories or great moments, these are the moments we would bring up.

[754] These are the impactful things that, saying that Sarah, Jessica Parker joke in front of those thousand people and they're booing and hissing and you're literally on fire under your skin, like, ugh.

[755] And you're beating yourself out viciously.

[756] Like, why did I say that?

[757] I'm such a jerk.

[758] I didn't need to say that.

[759] That was just cruel and thoughtless.

[760] And, yeah.

[761] But if you said that exact same joke and it killed, I'd still kind of beat myself up a little bit.

[762] Right.

[763] You'd be like, who are these awful people that are laughing at this unfortunate girl?

[764] Do you think that the reason why people love the transformation thing is because it almost like everyone feels like they have a chance?

[765] Instead of like.

[766] That's exactly what it is.

[767] is that you can be, you don't have to be born with it, that you have a chance of attaining it.

[768] Yeah.

[769] Yeah, the unfairness that is just the reality of life.

[770] You know, one of the things that Jordan talks about all the time is equality of outcome.

[771] That this idea of equality of outcome is, it's absurd.

[772] It's never going to happen.

[773] It's not what life is.

[774] Life is not about equality of outcome.

[775] It doesn't happen that way because not everyone's willing to put the same effort in and not everyone who's given the same tools at birth.

[776] And you've got to be a little careful too.

[777] You fall into that Jake Gatsby trap where you get exactly what you wanted when you were four or 14 years old and you realize, oh, this is not an adult's dream.

[778] This is a dream of a child.

[779] It's one of the things that is interesting about your current situation.

[780] And one of the things that I've read about, your take on it.

[781] I don't know how much you want to go into this, but you got ripped off.

[782] I got embezzled, which is a word I can now spell.

[783] Was it someone you trusted?

[784] It was.

[785] It was the accountant for the agency that represented my work, and this is a man I had worked with for almost 20, 21 years, and one of my favorite people in my professional life.

[786] Fuck.

[787] And what I thought was interesting was your take on it.

[788] I mean, the whole thing's horrific and everyone's worst nightmare, you know, who trust people with their money.

[789] But what was interesting is you decided that there's some merit to this, there's some benefit to this, that this is going to make you hungry again, that this is like you have to work now.

[790] And also that I have been really poor in my life.

[791] and it was never my goal to be really rich it was never my goal to have money it was my goal to be a writer it was my goal to be able to write books for a living and I can still do that you know I've been poor poor is not something I'm afraid of as long as I can write books I'll be a happy person yeah to be rich and to not be creative like as if you know you've met those people sure those you go to those parties those rich people parties and all they have to talk about is their servants.

[792] It's like, I hate my maid.

[793] I hate my, the gardener.

[794] We have this new person to do the this, and they're doing a lousy job.

[795] And all they have to talk about in their lives is their household help.

[796] I hate those parties.

[797] Or objects.

[798] Or objects, yeah.

[799] There was a guy that used to live down the street for me. I managed to call him bling, because every conversation that I would have with them, it would eventually be like, yeah, look at this new car I got.

[800] Where'd you get that watch?

[801] or, you know, what kind of car are you driving?

[802] Like, what do you do in the house?

[803] You got a new sink?

[804] You know, it's got a new TV?

[805] Which size did you get?

[806] It was always objects.

[807] It was always things.

[808] You know, he was just this strange guy that was just working for things.

[809] Yeah, the same things that everybody else is working for and just a different combination of things.

[810] Yeah, but it's a game, you know, trying to accumulate points in the game, you know?

[811] And because these things are difficult to achieve, then they become attractive.

[812] and then they become the main focus because it's hard to get a Bentley.

[813] You got to save up a lot of money to get a Bentley.

[814] You know how much those costs?

[815] Which model is that?

[816] Is that the one with the let...

[817] Oh, look, you've got the perforated leather seats.

[818] That's extra expensive.

[819] And then this becomes the main goal.

[820] Yeah.

[821] But so many people fall into that bizarre trap.

[822] It's such a strange, common trap.

[823] Well, you know, but it's the only trap that we kind of have.

[824] You are not really trained to, again, go to that, that place of of wanting to learn something to wanting to create something to apprentice yourself to somebody who creates the thing that you dream of creating.

[825] It's much easier to kind of fall into the ready made trap of these things are for sale and the people who sell them will treat you really nice.

[826] You go into their showroom and they will treat you so nice and you are always welcome there.

[827] And you have a way of kind of, you know, signaling that you've accomplished something in a very public way.

[828] Yeah.

[829] It's much, much harder to apprentice yourself and to sit down and do those 10 ,000 million words or to, you know, paint those pictures or whatever, build those brick walls and really develop the pride of a skill.

[830] Yeah.

[831] I mean, the pride of a skill and the knowledge that your discipline and your focus allows you to achieve these works, at these things when they're done.

[832] I mean, what is that feeling of satisfaction like when you touch the back cover of a book for the first time and it's over?

[833] No, that's nothing.

[834] That's nothing compared to when you hear it echoed in the culture and you hear people pick up the word snowflake and you hear all these people say the first rule of blank is when you realize that you've kind of dictated the semantics of the culture for a period.

[835] That feels like power.

[836] That is, that's glorious.

[837] When you found out that this guy ripped you off, we shocked?

[838] Did you have suspicions before this?

[839] I had known almost a year before.

[840] So you had an idea for a year?

[841] Yeah.

[842] And then it was confirmed.

[843] It was finally.

[844] What happened?

[845] You know, a year ago, I was supposed to start receiving some significant payments from this year's book, and they never came through, and they still never came through, and every time I requested them, the publisher said that they had been paid, but the accountant said that there were technical difficulties with wiring me the money, or he had personal problems in his life caring for his mother.

[846] And so there was always some reason why the money never came through.

[847] And finally, I kind of, I told my agent I didn't want to do any more deals until we had this money thing resolved.

[848] And at that point, the accountant made a videotaped confession and has since pled guilty, and I believe his sentencing is going to be in November.

[849] But according to the district attorney, they can't seem to find any of the money.

[850] So the money seems to be gone.

[851] How must he still?

[852] You know, it's kind of up in the air.

[853] It's initially they said it was $3 .5 million, and now they're saying it could be as much as $25 million.

[854] And this is from not just me. This is from Mario Puso's estate, the man that wrote The Godfather.

[855] This is from a lot of different estates.

[856] The agency handled the estate of Lillian Hellman and Jacqueline Suzanne and a lot of very big, big writers.

[857] Edward Gorey, who wrote those creepy, wonderful cartoon books, a lot of different writers, a lot of different estates lost money.

[858] So was this guy doing this from the jump, or does this somewhere along the line?

[859] He lost his mind.

[860] Nobody really knows.

[861] Yeah.

[862] Jamie, can you hit that pause button while I go out and take a leak?

[863] Just go out and take a leak.

[864] Oh, thank God.

[865] Go ahead.

[866] Don't worry about it, man. I know it's rough.

[867] Get used to it, though.

[868] What?

[869] Are we anywhere close to 330?

[870] No, it's 2 .30, but we can end anytime you'd like.

[871] No, 3 .30 is kind of my drop dead.

[872] Okay.

[873] But I'll be right back.

[874] Okay.

[875] Neil deGrasse Tyson's here Ladies and gentlemen He's waiting He got here way early though right Yeah That was planned He's got some work to do before us Oh okay He's probably in the tank right now I hope This dude's intense right Yeah I can't believe I fucked up That original story I was trying to look to see if it was someone else Man I really thought it was attributed to him But that's me My fucked up brain He's intense though Kind of creeps me out With his intensity a little bit What do you think about some of the shit that he's written like guts yeah you know joke yeah a couple other ones what was the one where someone turned into a werewolf on an airplane so what i think that was from his uh collection of horror stories the one with the alien on the cover the the process though it's like survivor survivor he's so perfectly designed for being a writer you know like it's one of the more fascinating things about this podcast is getting to pick the brain of someone like him and however when would you ever have two plus hours to sit down with a guy like that and just find out how he thinks about shit like who is you know how he's never going to let you in like that this is one of the weirder things about podcasts is that for three hours or whatever the time is the phones go away you're you're wearing headsets which I try to encourage people to wear it now because for a while I was like, yeah, do whatever you want.

[876] But there's something about the headset that locks you in.

[877] Your voice is exactly the same level of sound as my voice is because it's all coming through the headsets.

[878] So it's all combined.

[879] So you're much more aware of talking over each other and shit like that.

[880] But you're also much more aware there's nothing else going on that the sound of your voices, it's by isolating, by putting the headset on and eliminating the outside noise, You would never be able to have a conversation with a guy like that.

[881] Like, that's gotten this deep into the game.

[882] That's what I was going to say, the depth, the depth of everything.

[883] Yeah.

[884] His background in journalism is probably where that's coming from.

[885] His appreciation for darkness, too.

[886] Like, his appreciation for that story of the little girl jerking the grandpa off.

[887] Fuck, dude.

[888] It's, oh, he's back.

[889] I've got to stop talking shit about him.

[890] Feel better?

[891] Something about this podcast makes people pee Drinking all this coffee That's it too I've developed a superhuman bladder Occasionally though I have to get up Occasionally So back to this dude ripping you off This guy who's your friend So They don't know where the fuck the money is No they don't And he's not talking You know I guess he hasn't really talked about where the money is gone At first, they thought there was some dummy corporations, and they could recover the money.

[892] So we were all looking for a big payday.

[893] But now the DA says they cannot find the money.

[894] And he doesn't want to talk?

[895] Or he's saying the money is spent.

[896] I'm not sure.

[897] Don't you want to torture him?

[898] No, I don't.

[899] Don't you want someone to torture him?

[900] No, but it's so sweet.

[901] It is so sweet because I've had readers.

[902] Readers offer to torture him?

[903] to kill him and they say they'll do it free of charge so apparently these are people who do it for a living yeah so damn i need to make a list okay i'm going to get some free killings it's going to have to be some people i really don't like but you want the money first you don't want to just kill somebody you want to make sure you get that money first otherwise it's sitting in coffee cans buried in the divada desert you know i really between you and me i really don't care really no you know i'm not i really I'm seriously not somebody.

[904] It would have given me a little more wiggle room.

[905] I wouldn't be writing so frantically on the next book.

[906] I could maybe take a little time off and, I don't know, relax.

[907] But, you know, this is what I do.

[908] And so what the hell?

[909] Yeah, you have your health.

[910] You have a million ideas.

[911] Yeah, great ideas, a great profession that you love.

[912] You're involved in it right now currently.

[913] You're in the process.

[914] All these projects.

[915] and so, you know, I haven't really lost any of the things that I really love.

[916] You know, my dad is dead, my mother is dead.

[917] And I think after your parents are dead, there's not a lot that can hurt you that much, except, you know, of course, the death of a child.

[918] And so, you know, you're kind of bulletproof after those things.

[919] Well, the real issue that happens with successful people is they lose their hunger.

[920] Right.

[921] They lose that.

[922] It's a death sentence for comedian.

[923] One of the things that happens with comedians is the early specials tend to be really good, and then the later specials tend to be really bad.

[924] And it's because these people are now super wealthy and coddled, and there's no danger in their life, and there's no real risk or challenges, and there's no growing or learning.

[925] Everything is just, like, performing to people that adore you.

[926] Another aspect, and I talk about this more and more with writers I know, is that when you're starting out, you've got a lot of downtime, a lot of daydreaming time, a lot of slack, unstructured time.

[927] But the more successful you become, the more your time is really scheduled.

[928] And you just don't have those, I'm really bored times when you tend to come up with fantastic ideas.

[929] And so in a way, being somewhat poor again gives me those really slack times when the ideas occur.

[930] That makes a lot of sense.

[931] yeah um again to bring it back to comedians comedians uh they'll they get movie careers that's another death sentence for their comedy they start doing movies they're on sets all day they're constantly working and then you don't have enough time to concentrate on your stand -up and you have zero fuck around time because you're just doing things all day you lose that this is weird name drop be brad pitt advice brad pitt told me brad pitt said that success is actually one of the, failure is actually one of the best things that can happen because only failure gives you that kind of alone isolation downtime when you can really reinvent yourself in a significant way and create something remarkable again, that ongoing success becomes kind of a mediocrity.

[932] You really need to fail to fall out of the limelight long enough to produce something really strong again totally makes sense one of the best things that can happen to a comedian is bombing when you bomb that feeling is so bad i was described it as like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother but the problem the difference is that there's probably someone out there who would enjoy sucking a thousand dicks in front of their mother but nobody enjoys bombing so it's probably worse than that but that feeling whatever it is reignites your appreciation for people was attention span, your appreciation for tightening up, your delivery, your concepts, figuring out a better way to get them through, you never want to experience that again.

[933] And some of the greatest moments in my own personal journey of stand -up have come from eating shit.

[934] That's where they come from.

[935] You got to eat, I mean, it's great to do well.

[936] Wonderful.

[937] Feels great.

[938] But those eating shit ones, those are the ones that get you to the notebook again.

[939] Those are the ones that reinvigorate you, have you spending hours and hours in your hotel room, going over sheets of paper and checking out an idea, making sure these concepts connect together in some sort of a meaningful way and figuring out how to tighten things, cut out the fat.

[940] When you're in this situation right now and you're frantically writing now and, you know, and sort of forced into this element of creativity, this, like, you're forced to be hungry again.

[941] I mean, I wouldn't wish it on you, but in a way, do you feel like it's kind of a gift?

[942] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[943] In a way, you have to accept ultimately that everything is a gift.

[944] Because it's always about what they call cognitive reframing.

[945] Cognitive reframing.

[946] Whatever happens, you reframe it in such a way that you recognize the value of it.

[947] And so, yeah, regardless of what happens, you know, before my father got murdered, He had been asking me for an introduction to Winona Ryder in 1998.

[948] And I kept on thinking, I am not going to introduce my father to Winona Ryder because I know he's going to hit on her.

[949] And I was just going to be mortified to have my dad hitting on Winona Ryder.

[950] And he'd always talk about how pretty she was.

[951] Any chance I can meet her.

[952] And to tell the truth when I got the word that my father had been murdered by a white supremacist in the mountains of Idaho.

[953] One of my first thoughts was, I'm off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing.

[954] And that's cognitive reframing.

[955] And you have to do it all the time.

[956] That's glass half full right there.

[957] And I love my father.

[958] But, you know, nobody, none of our relationships are completely perfect all the time.

[959] Right.

[960] There's no way around it.

[961] Yeah.

[962] Yeah.

[963] Yeah.

[964] Well, that's, again, the great thing about unchained writing is that you can express those ideas.

[965] And that would be my main concern about any sort of a workshop or support group or any sort of group of like -minded peers that wouldn't understand that.

[966] And that would want you to limit your language.

[967] I just don't, it just doesn't compute.

[968] Yeah, and in the platonic world, yeah, everybody should kind of get it.

[969] But unless you're rustling feathers, even within workshop, you're not going far enough.

[970] You know, I loved writing that line in Fight Club where Tyler and Marla have sex for the first time.

[971] And the most romantic thing that Marla can say is, I want to have your baby.

[972] So what is the inverse?

[973] So, of course, Marla turns to him and she says, I hope I got pregnant because I really want to have your abortion.

[974] And that's the line that the movie studio went around and around.

[975] And even Brad Pitt said, you know, my mom's going to see this movie.

[976] I don't want her to see this line.

[977] And they shot that scene with so many different substitute lines.

[978] And then finally Fincher wrote the line.

[979] And Helen Bonham Carter says, I haven't been fuck like that since grade school.

[980] And at that point, 23 Fox said, can we switch it back to the abortion line?

[981] and so unless you're always kind of pushing to kind of you know until you get some pushback you don't feel like you're pushing hard enough and so pushback is not a bad thing it's just kind of a it's proof that you're doing your job there's a trend that's happening now though this this this is that this pushback is coming far quicker than it ever has before is a there's a trend now to limit language and limit creativity and just limit subject matter, trigger warnings, and stop people from, you know, stop people from experiencing things that might be disturbing.

[982] And I could see both sides of that.

[983] Because on one hand, we've got a generation that has been exposed to so much sensationalistic stuff in order to attain their attention.

[984] They've really been overloaded with the most extreme versions of everything.

[985] in order to get their ticket money or whatever.

[986] They've really been pounded by so much stimuli.

[987] I could see them kind of really pulling back and wanting to be monastic for the rest of their lives.

[988] And on the other hand, I see them as wanting to sort of counter -dominate in order to just create room enough in the world for their statement.

[989] You know, they're moving into a world that's already so occupied by attention getters that if they can shut some down that there might be room for their own expression.

[990] So I kind of see benefit on both sides and in a way too they're dominating their teachers, which is good because it's a way of exploring your own power and figuring out what you can do in the world and that you can have effect, you can have agency.

[991] So I don't think it's a totally bad thing.

[992] That's interesting.

[993] the the idea that them dominating their teachers is in some way good having the well it certainly gives you confidence and it lets you understand that you can affect change even if it's meaningless change did you pay attention to what happened at evergreen state in in uh Washington yeah did you see when there's a for people don't know the story it's uh the brett weinstein story where the students decided that there was going to be a a day of absence.

[994] Traditionally, it had been where people of color stayed home just so that people could recognize the important part that they play in the culture and society.

[995] But then they had ramped it up and decided white people are going to have to stay home now.

[996] And he was like, that's racist.

[997] And the whole thing went crazy and went haywire and the schools basically falling apart.

[998] But there was a scene that was filmed where the president of the university was in president of the college was in this auditorium and he was addressing his children and uh they told him to stop moving his hands because it was threatening and so he put his hands down he put them behind his back and they all started laughing and i was like wow this dumb fuck like this this this this guy's running this university and he let them tell him not to move his hands gesturing as he's speaking.

[999] He's like, one of the most non -threatening beta people on the planet.

[1000] And this guy is just giving, he just wants to keep his job and try to silence this mob, this angry horde of, you know, fucking kids, they're kids.

[1001] But when he listens and puts his hands down, I've probably watched it 10 times, they all start laughing.

[1002] You know, and just, I think it just demonstrates how desperately they want a stronger leader.

[1003] Yeah.

[1004] They don't want, they don't, they don't, respect.

[1005] They don't want to learn from somebody who is a college professor and has never really attained anything in the world.

[1006] They just don't want to become another cog in that same kind of, you know, wheel.

[1007] They want to learn from somebody the respect and whose attainments they respect, whose achievements they respect.

[1008] Right, that's probably part of the issue at universities, right, is that these professors are so terrified of the reactions of these students, which is not the place you're supposed to be with a mentor student relationship.

[1009] It's not supposed to be that way.

[1010] It's not supposed to be that the mentor desperately needs the student.

[1011] You know, you see that sometimes in private schools with rich kids.

[1012] They treat their teachers like shit and the teachers have to bite their tongue because they have to.

[1013] You know, this is not, it's not the normal dynamic that exists with the older wise person and the young person who's trying to learn from this person they deeply respect.

[1014] It's not that dynamic at all.

[1015] It's this old person who's weak and wants to keep their job and is willing to tailor their own thoughts and ideas to this irrational mob of social justice warriors.

[1016] And that's what we're seeing on campuses now.

[1017] You know, professors calling for censorship and to stop freedom of expression.

[1018] You know, when I was in college, my favorite professor, Roy Halbertson, he was the John Hausman of the journalism school.

[1019] He was this old gray eminence, and nothing made him happy.

[1020] You could never please this John Hausman, paper chase guy.

[1021] Nothing was good enough, and nothing would make him smile.

[1022] And I worked my ass off to make him happy.

[1023] And I finally got an A in one of his courses, but he is about the only professor I remember out of my entire four years it was this man that just didn't take shit from anybody yeah this the dynamic of the kid being in control it's not good for the kid either it's not good for anyone they get out of school they're going to be baffled and they're going to look for that power in other places that power that they enjoyed in the universities and you're seeing that spill off you've seen that spill out into, you know, social media and different forms of activism with people trying to reachieve that power that they had and sort of forcing people to their will.

[1024] And in a way, it's kind of a farm camp because a few of those people will achieve that power and they will be able to kind of leverage that power to something more legitimate, something larger, and those will be the next generation of leaders that emerge.

[1025] So this is in a way a laboratory where, leaders are taking form.

[1026] And the rest of them will just kind of filter down into whatever jobs, whatever careers, but they will always have their kind of glory days when they say, remember that time, we shut down the ROTC building, and that will seem like a big glorious pass to them, but that will be enough.

[1027] What's causing all this?

[1028] Have you thought about that?

[1029] Like, why is this ramping up?

[1030] Because it seems like it is.

[1031] You know, on one level, it is a disillusionment with the the goals of the baby boomers that so many people have seen their parents achieve what they thought was going to make them happy with the houses and the trips and the careers and the possessions and the wives and the second wives and the step siblings and they're seeing their parents get everything that they want and still not be happy and so you see a generation that's kind of floundering thinking you know they don't know what's going to make them happy I don't know what's going to make me happy.

[1032] And so people are really distrustful of advertisements to tell them what's going to make them happy.

[1033] And so, you know, I think it's just a big struggle, a big, everyone blind in the dark right now.

[1034] So just a reaction to what they see that's ineffective, what they see that's going wrong.

[1035] So they're choosing to embrace a different group of values.

[1036] Right.

[1037] Well, but they're not even sure, even that new group of values kind of dictated to them with a lot of pre -existing language.

[1038] And so I think ultimately that's not going to be very fulfilling either.

[1039] It's got to be something that emerges from a kind of limnoid laboratory like Burning Man. These kind of fringe things that are all, as Victor Turner would say, they're all kind of experiments in, and how to be.

[1040] That's what Fight Club was.

[1041] This is this kind of experiment in how interaction could be structured in a different way.

[1042] And these things take place in these kind of playful environments like Burning Man, like Cockcophony Society used to do.

[1043] And they're fun.

[1044] And the ones that are the most fun will be the ones that are perpetuated.

[1045] Burning Man is fun, and that is why Burning Man has existed for 30 years.

[1046] and Occupy was not fun and that's why we had one Occupy and I know people are going to be pissed off about that but no, every year Burning Man is bigger and it's funner and more people go there and every year we don't have another Occupy Well, I don't know if that's a valid comparison because Occupy was infiltrated by cops and the FBI and they pretended to be protesters and sat amongst them and the whole thing was kind of misguided in the first place whereas what Burning Man is is a complete removal of these people from society I mean they decided to meet in one of the most hostile climates in the world and there's something about that the recognition that you're out there in the desert with a fucking mask over your face and you're dancing with dirty underwear on and that all these people are doing it together and then half of them are fucked out of their mind on drugs and you're not against something you're not protesting something you're there to create something celebrate contribute something yeah Yeah.

[1047] And the protests also at Occupy, a lot of them were misinformed, and they didn't really understand the process they were protesting against.

[1048] There's a very funny, famous video with Peter Schiff, who's been on this podcast before, is a financial wizard who set up shop there with a $5 ,000 suit on.

[1049] And he basically said, I am the 1%.

[1050] You know, ask me questions.

[1051] And he interviewed these kids, so they would tell him what's wrong with the world.

[1052] the, you know, the imbalance of finances and financial inequity, and they just didn't understand what they were upset about.

[1053] And he would explain to them how capitalism actually works and how he's employing all these people.

[1054] And the reason why he makes so much money is because he employs so many people.

[1055] And if he wasn't doing this, these people would be out of work.

[1056] You understand that I'm creating something.

[1057] And you can create something, too.

[1058] You can create a business.

[1059] And you can, if you work hard, and he's going over this.

[1060] And you can see that what they're fighting against is almost like a concept.

[1061] They're fighting against this idea of this evil tyranny that's controlling their fate.

[1062] Well, they really don't understand it, though.

[1063] That's what Occupy was, in my opinion.

[1064] It was like they knew something was wrong.

[1065] It was almost to me like white blood cells surrounding an infection.

[1066] Like, there's something fucked up here.

[1067] Let's just surround this thing and figure out.

[1068] and then there's swelling and pus.

[1069] And that's really what it was.

[1070] It's like there's a real recognition that there's a gigantic problem with the financial institutions.

[1071] The gigantic problem with the whole reason why the economy collapsed and the bailouts and these fucking creeps are getting all these bonuses even though their companies failed and the tax dollars had to rescue them.

[1072] There was a recognition that there was something wrong, but not a deep understanding of what the system was that they were actually protesting.

[1073] There was too much of that.

[1074] Burning Man doesn't have any of that.

[1075] Burning Man is obviously society's fucked.

[1076] There's no arguments that it's not.

[1077] Even if it's better than it's ever been before, which it probably is, you know, if you want to listen to Pinker or a lot of other people, that it'll argue that it's better and it's progressing into this better and better path.

[1078] And I think that's probably right, ultimately.

[1079] It's still fucked.

[1080] And Burning Man offers this alternative, like this unique society of free expression and free love and all these people having a good time together exploring alternate states of consciousness.

[1081] Well, Victor Turner, who talked about these limnoid events, it would say things like Burning Man, they also provide an outlet for people to self -select to leave the culture.

[1082] They are killed.

[1083] You know, people who just don't fit in, they die.

[1084] Or they express themselves so much that they can.

[1085] go back to the ordinary postal carrier life that they had before, because so many cultures have something like a samba, festival, where you go crazy for a week, and then you go back to your normal life waiting tables.

[1086] So they are, in a way, an event that kind of keeps the status quo in place.

[1087] But they do create these kind of, if not aesthetic movements.

[1088] They are the, there are a laboratory for sort of coming up with some new form of being together, some new social structure, new symbols and, you know, new narrative.

[1089] Yeah, it's a fascinating thing for me because I feel it's trickled off into regular life in a lot of ways now.

[1090] I know way more people that are microdosing psilocybin on a daily basis.

[1091] People are more, especially now that marijuana is legal, people are way more.

[1092] accepting of people getting high, of people just choosing to sort of look at the world in a different way and actively seek these different states of consciousness.

[1093] It's way more common.

[1094] It's way more discussed.

[1095] And that's kind of the way it's supposed to be, is that these things start in the experiments, and the ones that are most successful become institutions.

[1096] and the new ones start.

[1097] But we need, you know, these are the laboratories.

[1098] Portland kind of used to be that way.

[1099] Portland was such a laboratory incubator city, but the cost of living is killing that very quickly.

[1100] It's become really trendy.

[1101] It's like it's a, you know, it's a hip place to live.

[1102] It's a hip, it's identified with hip, you know, in a way you kind of get your hip card just by living there.

[1103] You don't have to do anything anymore.

[1104] Yeah.

[1105] It's like New York City used to be like you were tough.

[1106] Hey, I'm from New York.

[1107] You know, I can handle it.

[1108] Yeah.

[1109] I'm hip.

[1110] I'm from Portland.

[1111] Nope.

[1112] Is that where you live?

[1113] I live outside of Portland.

[1114] I live up in the Columbia Gorge.

[1115] It's gorgeous up there, man. Yeah.

[1116] The fucking green.

[1117] You guys have a neon glowing, it rains all the time green in Oregon.

[1118] That's just we don't experience here for more than a month a year.

[1119] Yeah, we got forest fires right now.

[1120] Yeah.

[1121] Oh, do where you are?

[1122] Not so much.

[1123] This year they're not so close, but the air is still much worse than it is here.

[1124] Fucking forest fires are everywhere right now.

[1125] I've been evacuated a couple of times.

[1126] It's pretty terrifying stuff.

[1127] Do you live in Georgia?

[1128] No, I live here.

[1129] Oh, okay.

[1130] Okay.

[1131] Georgia.

[1132] Why did you say Georgia?

[1133] I thought somebody told me. Why'd you whisper it like no one's listening?

[1134] Yeah, don't tell anybody.

[1135] Well, I have a secret friendship with Jim Goad, who's one of the few people who makes me really laugh.

[1136] even though, you know, most of the world...

[1137] It's not a secret anymore.

[1138] Most of the world hates Jim Goad.

[1139] Why do they hate Jim Goad?

[1140] Because he writes, he's very transgressive in -your -face pieces.

[1141] But when he writes about his brother, he kills me. It is some of the most touching stuff I've ever read in my life about his brother's death.

[1142] So, you know, the whole world, I think, is so fooled in that they think that Jim Goode is a bad person, and they think that maybe I'm a good person.

[1143] when it's just exactly the opposite.

[1144] How are you a bad person?

[1145] Oh, let's not even go down that road.

[1146] I already told on Cheryl Strayed killing that bird.

[1147] Come on, do I got to do more?

[1148] That's not being a bad person.

[1149] That's a person who's appreciative of a dark moment.

[1150] That doesn't make you a bad person.

[1151] No, I'm a bad person.

[1152] Are you?

[1153] Yeah.

[1154] I am.

[1155] Give me an example.

[1156] You know, and this is awkward, but this is another one of those cognitive reframing honesty things is I took care of my mother while she was dying of lung cancer and even while I was taking care of her and she was lapsing in and out of consciousness in her home there was a little part of me that felt this glee that thought I will never have to worry about mom again I will never have to worry about whether mom is offended by my work I will never have to worry about mom falling down the stairs and breaking her leg, that this enormous concern in my life will be resolved.

[1157] And it's going to be at the cost of losing someone I love, you know, so much.

[1158] But the benefit is that this huge burden of responsibility is going to be lifted.

[1159] And so there was this kind of secret glee thinking, you know, I'm going to have some freedom here that I never imagined.

[1160] Yeah, Nora Ephron touches on that in her work when she talks about her mother's death.

[1161] And I think it's just an honest thing, but it's not a thing that makes you look very good.

[1162] I don't think that makes you a bad person.

[1163] I think that makes you a person who's honest about thoughts that are very uncomfortable.

[1164] That is just something that people think, I think all the time if they're dealing with someone who's completely incapacitated and they have to care for them 24 -7 but they don't express it.

[1165] It's just a reality of the burden of someone who's really sick or really dying.

[1166] There's no getting around it.

[1167] I don't think it's a bad.

[1168] That's not a good example.

[1169] I need a example why you're a bad person.

[1170] Maybe you're just really self -critical.

[1171] are aware of things that other people could take out of context of the totality of your life and just use it as an example.

[1172] Put it in quotes and use it as an example of you being a bad person.

[1173] You know, another thing is I'm really, really conflicted about the nature of my creativity, this idea that in journalism school, they call the theory seduce and betray, that when you go into an interview situation, your goal is to gain the trust.

[1174] of that person and to get them to reveal something very intimate that you're going to betray by revealing to the public.

[1175] So you're basically going in there to charm them and then to hurt them.

[1176] And so much of my creative process is that way.

[1177] Because, for example, the gut story, the story in which the guy puts the carrot up his butt that was my best friend at the time in like late 20s and he got fantastically drunk and he told me that carrot story and I honestly believe he had never told anybody the carrot story and I kept that story in my mind for you know 10 15 almost probably 20 years until I found a way to put it with three similar stories and make a larger piece out of it and the first time I read that story.

[1178] I hadn't seen him in maybe a couple years, this friend.

[1179] And I look across this big auditorium and there he is.

[1180] And I'm telling his carrot story in front of hundreds and hundreds of people.

[1181] And the look on his face, he's just stricken.

[1182] And he hasn't talked to me since.

[1183] And this is why even David's...

[1184] But did you use his name?

[1185] No. Then fuck him.

[1186] No, but...

[1187] What's wrong with him?

[1188] People still feel betrayed.

[1189] And get over it.

[1190] You need to hang out with more comedians.

[1191] If he was a comic, you'd be laughing.

[1192] Well, you know, David Sedaris has told me he said his family is very reluctant to share their lives with them anymore.

[1193] Because he's kind of made them involuntary public figures and they have to deal with a fallout from these stories about them.

[1194] And really only his brother and his sister, Amy, have kind of been able to spin this in a good way.

[1195] But it alienates a lot of people.

[1196] Oh, for sure.

[1197] Well, especially if you use their actual name or people know the origin of the actual story.

[1198] Yeah.

[1199] But you're not a bad person.

[1200] Sorry.

[1201] Sorry to break it to you.

[1202] I think you're a bad person.

[1203] Those are only examples.

[1204] You're not convinced.

[1205] No, no, I'm just not revealing the worst stuff.

[1206] Okay, of course.

[1207] Do you think that you have to have some sort of embracing of these dark thoughts to create the way you create?

[1208] I mean, you're creating these characters that go down some horrible roads, both mentally and in reality, in your work.

[1209] And it's amazing stuff.

[1210] But to cultivate that, don't you think you have to be kind of in touch with those thoughts of your own?

[1211] To kind of in touch with this, you know, this thing where you're watching your mom die and you are going to be relieved of a burden.

[1212] And you don't want to tell anybody that you're kind of looking forward to that a little bit, even though you love your mom dearly.

[1213] That's a natural thing that people don't want to discuss but absolutely exists.

[1214] It's the elephant in the room.

[1215] And that's kind of like how comedy works or anything where you're stating this unstated thing.

[1216] You're creating this enormous relief.

[1217] My classic example, when I teach, I ask my students, I say, so what do you call a black man that flies a place?

[1218] a pilot you fucking racist you're creating this tension they don't want you to say what they think you're going to say they don't want to hate you they like you and they don't want you to say something hateful and awful and then you turn it around and you put it on them and so in a way you know I always think that's the soul of comedy is to create this this tension that you relieve as quickly as possible and the relief occurs as laughter i was having dinner with a good friend of mine his wife and a buddy of mine and my friend's friend and his wife and fun time the whole night everybody's laughing and joking and or having dinner and having a couple of drinks and joking around talking about things and i forget what led to him saying this but we were talking about oh just unfortunate scenarios and you know people that just their life is not going the way they'd like it to go and things going bad and out of nowhere the guy goes well it's like this my daughter has uh she had a baby with a black man and we're we're both like looking at him like where is this going and then he goes and uh you know i just think it's incredibly selfish to bring that kid into the world and this kid doesn't have an identity they're not black and they're not white and they don't they're not going to have an identity they're not going to have a group to belong to and my friend's jaws dropped my i didn't know the guy i just met him that night and my dropped and I looked at my other friend who was with me who didn't know any of these other people and everyone's like what the fuck and then a couple of us get up and go to the bathroom and I turned to my friend Andrew and I said let's get the fuck out of here and we just left and I texted my friend I go too much racism how to go and we just left and but it was so weird it's like this guy was holding into this and he's like you know what I can trust these people with some racist shit I can trust them and it didn't work and he knew it didn't work He knew it went over The world Like a lead balloon He knew it He could feel it Because everybody was like What?

[1219] Like wait a minute Your daughter is in love With a man who's black They have a child together And you think it's incredibly selfish To bring that kid in the world Like what the fuck I wish I could remember What the fuck we were talking about before then But what we were talking about Before then was like drug addicts Or people fuck up Or you know People were addicted to gambling or something, you know, people whose lives were in chaos.

[1220] And then he brings up his daughter having a baby with a guy who was the wrong amount of melanin in his skin, whose ancestors came from the wrong part of the world for him.

[1221] It was weird, man. It was weird also to see him recognize.

[1222] It's funny, you know, you throw out a story, I throw out a story.

[1223] I had a hired car from Philadelphia to New York once on tour.

[1224] And as we're going past Liberty Hall in Philadelphia, this great guy with a Philly accent driving the car, he points at Liberty Hall and he says, that building has stood for, you know, 300 years.

[1225] I bet you can't tell me why.

[1226] And I just looked and I said, because the bricks are laid in Flemish Bond, I think that's probably it, where the bricks are offset in such a way that they bond in the center.

[1227] It's called Flemish Bond.

[1228] And the guy's so silent.

[1229] Nobody's ever answered the question.

[1230] And his father was a bricklayer, and he was so proud.

[1231] And he goes, you're right.

[1232] Nobody's ever said, Plemish Bond.

[1233] That's why it still stands.

[1234] And we were best friends.

[1235] And just talking like crazy all the way into Manhattan.

[1236] We get into Manhattan, there's two guys walking down the street.

[1237] The guy goes, oh, Christ, I hate coming to New York.

[1238] York.

[1239] Ah, the fags.

[1240] And I said, well, you know, I'm married to a man. And faggot is pretty much my middle name.

[1241] And that poor guy had to do this whole sort of rejuggling of everything that the guy who knew Flemish bond was also one of them.

[1242] Oh.

[1243] And it was one of those wonderful kind of icky but necessary moments and you know they're horrible but you know things are better afterwards you must have loved that moment though you?

[1244] No it was a horrible moment because I felt like I was throwing away any kind of chatty conversational relationship I had with this guy.

[1245] It seemed like just the salt of the earth great funny guy and it was just kind of going out on a limb and saying okay you know he's going to hate my guts after this when I was a little kid we lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11 and then moved to Florida which is the polar opposite of San Francisco and I really I don't know if I'd ever heard someone used the word faggot before but I'd never seen an adult upset about gay people before and then my friend Candy Candido was his name his dad was Cuban they were Cuban and his dad slams the newspaper on the on the table I was 11 and he's like can't believe they're letting these fags get married he was just so angry and I remember stopping and thinking like here here's a man this guy's a man he's a grown man he's a grown up but yet he's got this infant idea of what a person should be like they they got to fall into this category that category he's got it locked into his head he's a fucking baby but he's a man And he's my friend's dad.

[1246] This guy made it to 35 years old or whatever the fuck he was.

[1247] And this is his operating system that he's using to navigate his way through life.

[1248] I remember it being an important moment for me because I realized like just because someone's older doesn't mean they learned anything.

[1249] You know, and that people are capable of success in life.

[1250] You know, you could become married.

[1251] You can have children.

[1252] You get a house.

[1253] You get a good job.

[1254] You drive a car.

[1255] the whole thing, you've got it all.

[1256] You've got a checkbook.

[1257] You've got a fucking, you're operating.

[1258] It's moving.

[1259] You're successful.

[1260] It's happening.

[1261] And yet you still have these stupid ideas.

[1262] You know, but I think there's a benefit to the expression of the stupid idea.

[1263] Not that they're going to be challenged, but that at least we're aware that it's there.

[1264] Yeah.

[1265] And that, you know, we know that this thing is not just kind of festering and that there's a way of kind of not fixing this person, but at least we know where they're coming from.

[1266] Yeah.

[1267] You know, another shooting myself in the career foot thing.

[1268] I don't think you've done it once the whole show.

[1269] Okay, here it goes.

[1270] I read The Daily Stormer.

[1271] Andrew Anglin cracks me up.

[1272] Who is that?

[1273] He is the completely transgressive guy.

[1274] who really loves Fight Club.

[1275] Oh, wow.

[1276] He writes for the Daily Stormer.

[1277] I think he is the Daily Stormer.

[1278] And he writes the most atrocious, insensitive, brutal things.

[1279] But they are, they're so shocking and so transgressive that sometimes I laugh just out of the shock.

[1280] You know, the old classic joke, how do you get a nun pregnant?

[1281] you fuck her you know there's a shock value there that that just sort of jars me and makes me laugh sometimes that joke could work better if you hadn't told the black pilot joke first oh well of course the problem is like people become it you know you know what's coming yeah but uh but sometimes you know I want to go into a world where people are not watching their language so closely and I see people kind of vent the worst of themselves.

[1282] And I'm not kind of endorsing it, but I feel a little less reactive to abuse.

[1283] A Scientologist has had this exercise called bull baiting where they take you into a room and people surround you and they call you every horrible thing and then they nitpick, every aspect of your appearance or your character, who you are, and they attack you on every level.

[1284] And they do this for long, long periods of time and they do this day after day until you are completely not reactionary to that kind of verbal abuse.

[1285] You can put it over there.

[1286] You can accept the fact that it's somebody else's statement, somebody else's opinion, observation, that it's not true.

[1287] And you can be with it.

[1288] And so in a way, when I go into these sites that are so patently offensive, and deliberately, you know, aggressively offensive, I feel like in a way they're thickening my skin that I'm not quite such a delicate little reactive thing afterwards.

[1289] Do you worry about someone looking through your search results?

[1290] Oh, they're far worse things than that.

[1291] You see that in fighting.

[1292] There's certain people that.

[1293] react really poorly to trash talk.

[1294] And there's certain people that get excited by it and it doesn't bother them at all and they embrace it.

[1295] And generally it's people who grew up in abusive households and horrible environments.

[1296] Then when the trash talk starts coming, they go, oh, yeah?

[1297] Oh, okay.

[1298] Is that what's going to happen?

[1299] Fuck you, bitch.

[1300] And then you see them get excited by it.

[1301] And then you see them like saying, oh, okay, now you give me more motivation to fuck you up.

[1302] Whereas some people genuinely get dwarfed by this.

[1303] They get the pressure of not just being in conflict, but some person, but that person insulting them and verbal conflict and demeaning them and mocking them, it haunts them.

[1304] It haunts them, and it ruins them, and they can't perform.

[1305] They go out and they fight, they fight terrible.

[1306] It happens to a lot of fighters.

[1307] Guys who are tough, tough guys, something about the verbal conflict and the abuse, there's an emotional struggle that they're not prepared for.

[1308] They prepared 100 % for this physical struggle.

[1309] But there's a certain aspect of someone literally hating them as a human.

[1310] Like not thinking of them as a worthy competitor who they respect, who they're ready to go to battle with and we'll shake hands first and afterwards we'll go have a beer together after we beat the shit out of each other.

[1311] No, it's like you're a little pussy.

[1312] You're a bitch.

[1313] You shouldn't even be here.

[1314] You're weak.

[1315] You're going to fall apart, man. You know you're going to fall apart.

[1316] You're waiting to fall apart.

[1317] Just give me your neck.

[1318] Just give me a neck.

[1319] I'll choke you out, make it nice and easy.

[1320] And you see guys reacting to that, these demons inside of them, that these are thoughts that do dance around the back of their brain.

[1321] And every day they're throwing water on it.

[1322] But every day they come back and the fucking embers are still smoldering shit.

[1323] And this guy is just pouring gasoline on that shit.

[1324] And it just takes over their consciousness.

[1325] And you see them, they can't sleep good.

[1326] You see them, they look exhausted.

[1327] You see the day of the fight.

[1328] They look nervous.

[1329] They look really worried.

[1330] They look really worried this person's right.

[1331] That person has planted these seeds.

[1332] of doubt that are these invasive species, plants that are choking out all the trees.

[1333] It's wild to see.

[1334] It's wild to see how the same words can have a completely different effect on different people.

[1335] So there you are.

[1336] It's a different kind of resistance training.

[1337] Yeah, no, there's definitely something to that.

[1338] There's definitely something to be around abusive people, to being around.

[1339] I mean, you get accustomed to stuff.

[1340] People are very, very, they're very malleable.

[1341] You can get accustomed to really shitty behavior.

[1342] I mean, this isn't that like what's got to happen when you're in war?

[1343] You get accustomed to it.

[1344] You get accustomed to violence.

[1345] You get accustomed to all that.

[1346] And one of the more difficult things for people post -war is coming back into a kind, gentle, boring world.

[1347] It's almost like they, I mean, that's Hurt Locker, right?

[1348] They appreciate the danger.

[1349] They appreciate that the thrill of it all is almost more appealing than the absolute lack of thrill.

[1350] The thrill of potential violence and death and all the horrors that you come into contact with, it's almost preferable.

[1351] Did you read Sebastian Younger's Tribe?

[1352] No. That's a new one, right?

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] It's a great book, but it's about that.

[1355] It's about why being in these intense, like really dangerous.

[1356] but crackling with energy environments produce some of the happiest moments for these people's lives.

[1357] And that post -war, like they have an incredibly difficult job to sort of reintegrating to normal flats as society.

[1358] Yeah, I can see that totally.

[1359] What time is it?

[1360] It's 3 .15.

[1361] Let's wrap this up, Chuck.

[1362] Got to.

[1363] Listen, man, I really appreciate you being here.

[1364] I really appreciate picking your brain, And I thank you very much, man. And thank you for all your writing and all your work.

[1365] And stay fucked up, will you?

[1366] All right?

[1367] Hey, thanks for the plane ticket.

[1368] My pleasure.

[1369] When can we expect this book?

[1370] When are you thinking this is going to be done?

[1371] This book.

[1372] This book is just pages in an old book right now.

[1373] This is not from it.

[1374] Next year, it's Fight Club 3.

[1375] Next year will probably be a big, fat writing book from me. And this book, It won't be until 2020.

[1376] Yeah, two years.

[1377] All right.

[1378] Thank you.

[1379] Thank you.

[1380] Appreciate it.