Chuck Palahniuk debunks myths about his persona while revealing how Ambien fuels his writing, blending real-life extremes—like a woman’s crane climb—into fiction. His journalism background shapes stories like Fight Club, addressing male narrative gaps, but censorship stifles dark themes, as seen with Cheryl Strayed’s unpublished Wild segment. Palahniuk argues offensive content proves creative boldness, comparing it to comedians losing edge without struggle, and credits financial loss and early parental death for emotional resilience. They explore Burning Man as a social lab versus Occupy Wall Street’s reactive nature, linking fringe experiences to Junger’s Tribe on post-war camaraderie, ultimately framing raw storytelling as essential to confronting societal disillusionment. [Automatically generated summary]
Maybe it's something I attributed to you for many, many years.
But it's just an interesting story that someone said that they were forcing themselves to be disciplined writing, and so they wouldn't write unless they had the heat on.
We actually did a pretty in-depth discussion about that after the Roseanne Barr thing came out.
My own mom has taken it and she stopped taking it, but one of the reasons why she stopped taking it is because she woke up in the middle of the night and she had a white bathroom mat and she painted it with lipstick and makeup.
She had no recollection of it whatsoever, but she painted it like a two-year-old would.
They got a hold of their mom's lipstick, and she just woke up and going, what the fuck am I doing?
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.
So in a way, basically what I'm doing is...
Kind of an ongoing field study that becomes whatever my next book is.
When you wrote Fight Club, you tapped into something that was really fascinating for me as someone who's been involved in martial arts my whole life.
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 sort of opened up these doors of understanding for someone who maybe had frustration or had some pent-up rage or had some angst that just was not going to get out any other way.
And then you wrote about it.
And then reading what you wrote, it made you go, yeah, okay, oh, all right.
Now, it's like you added an element to it that really didn't exist before in pop culture.
It was really fascinating for me as someone who's watching that whole thing unfurl and watching people get, like, really resonating with people, watching people really getting excited about your work.
It's like, he hit some nerve that nobody really hit before.
You know, and 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 women, there are, you know, every season, there's a new Joy Luck Club, a new How to Make an American Quilt, a new Traveling Sisterhood of the Yagaha Pants, whatever.
Just all these different models in which Women can come together and talk about their lives.
And if you're a man, you've got either Fight Club or you have the Dead Poets Society.
And that is really it.
So we don't have a lot of narratives that depict to men a role or a kind of script in which to come together and talk about their shed.
Another thing is Jordan Peterson.
Back to Jordan Peterson.
He talks about that need for really rough play.
And he talks about it a lot.
And a lot of my friends, they brag about how badly their kids hurt them.
Oh my gosh, my daughter came at me the other day.
I had no idea how strong she was.
She pulled my arm out of the socket.
And they're proud.
They're proud that their kid can play that rough and is growing up that strong.
But, you know, we've kind of fallen away from this idea of consensual rough play.
And I think Fight Club resonated with that a lot.
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.
And that is the nurturing, loving father that you eventually kind of have to reject.
But in doing so, you have to choose a new father.
And that father by choice typically is a...
A minister or a teacher or a drill sergeant or a coach.
One of those fathers.
And you kind of put yourself in apprenticeship to the secondary father.
And you have to sort of consign your life to the secondary father.
And agree to learn what they're going to teach you.
Just like in Karate Kid.
And that is getting harder and harder and harder to find.
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.
So there were just so many aspects of men's lives that were not being addressed when Fight Club came out.
And it sort of reinvented so many of those things that had fallen by the wayside.
A huge part of martial arts is your relationship with the master, with the coach.
Without finding someone who can guide you through the the most dangerous waters of Competition that it's it's absolutely imperative bad relationships with coaches are absolutely disastrous and It's it's imperative that someone find the right coach find someone who they really can trust and appreciate and you do develop it's a Such a common theme they talk about this person being like a son or this person being like a father or I
never thought about it that way.
I forgot about that part of Joseph Campbell.
That is a huge, huge issue with young men.
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.
Well, and beyond just that, you know, it's also the whole idea of apprenticeship.
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 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 it's not just always a physical fighting thing.
And that relationship that you have with that secondary father too, it's almost in some ways more intense.
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.
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.
So in a way, they're fleshing out your theme with parts of their own lives.
And so you find yourself drawing from the experience of Dozens or hundreds or thousands of people and at the same time you're beta testing it.
You're kind of taking it on the road and you're seeing that it's an idea that resonates with a huge number of people that everyone can relate to it.
In good material, oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes, you'll see the audience going, oh my god, you do that!
That's fascinating.
Now, another thing I really wanted to talk to you about is something that you brought up when you sent the notes to Matt was censorship.
And self-censorship, which is going on apparently in writer groups and groups of people that are deciding that certain words should be eliminated from vocabulary and from vernacular and that you shouldn't discuss certain things anymore.
And the core group of us had been meeting since 1990. So this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old.
And gradually, people were asking each other not to use certain words.
First, you know, nobody really used the N-word, but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop.
And then in a story, I used the word faggot, and a very good friend of mine said, you're not bringing that word into workshop.
You're not writing anything with the F-word.
And it just became more and more tightly structured that way.
And so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other.
And one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strayed, who had written a book called Wild, which was a hugely successful book.
It was chosen as an Oprah book, and it will be on bookstore shelves for the rest of history.
Cheryl's book, Wild.
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.
And so as a child she would...
Masturbate her grandfather until he achieved orgasm and then later she would find these featherless birds that had fallen out of a nest and she picked one up and she knew it would die.
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.
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.
And I understand for a long time, if you wanted a face-out at Barnes& Noble, especially on the Discover New Writers face-out stack, You could not have the word fuck on the first page.
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.
And so, you know, so much of this censorship is because people really want to reach the largest audience without offending people.
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?
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 were the punk years, the 70s and the 80s, and we always used to have a saying, people would say, don't hit the brake until you hear a glass break, or don't stop until you hear a glass break.
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.
In a story like Guts, you know, it's very funny on the front end.
And if you told people on the front end where it was going to go, they'd never read that story.
But it's very funny and charming and well-paced on the front.
And then once people realize where it's going to go, they're already trapped.
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?
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.
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?
And it will take the story in a direction that is so unexpected because it's not from my experience.
And that's the glory.
And they feel like they've contributed.
They're so happy.
And I'm happy to spend time among people.
And I'm happy to have the story complete in a way that I never, ever could have anticipated.
Yeah, the gym is really great because you're around people and you have these recoveries between sets so you have a little time to talk and at the same time you have, during the exercise itself, you have time to think.
And so it paces the talking versus the thinking.
And it's also kind of highly oxygenated and it's physically active.
And your mind is kind of, your mind is not engaged with something else.
Your mind is kind of disengaged like it is while you're taking a shower.
I have, and this is not the first workshop I've been bumped out of.
The first workshop I was in was a lot of very nice ladies, and I was probably 28. And I had written a scene in which a man, a young man, He has done up an inflatable sex doll so it looks exactly like the woman he's obsessed with.
And during the seduction of this sex doll, he accidentally snags the back of it with the zipper of its dress.
And he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air.
So he's got to copulate faster and faster to try to achieve orgasm before this thing completely goes flat.
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.
And of course, his mother walks into the room.
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.
She really did.
She said, you've written something that really frightens them and they would like you to politely leave the workshop and not come back.
What does it feel, I mean, to be in a workshop for that long and then have such a disagreement and to disband like that or to have you forced out, what does that feel like?
And I think it really comes down to what purpose reading and writing serves in people's lives.
And most people, they want reading to be a comforting activity.
They want to be able to read a book and fall asleep knowing the detective will apprehend the killer by the end of the book, that things will end very well.
In a way, they want to be bored or lulled by the book.
Not so many people really want to be kind of confronted by books.
I mean, it's kind of like pretty much all forms of art, whether it's music or movies.
I mean, there's superhero movies, and then there's movies like No Country for Old Men, where the bad guy gets away at the end, and you leave the movie theater, and you're like, what the fuck?
But 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.
Here's the world through this person's eyes.
And they create this world.
If you put limitations on that, you're going to eliminate some disturbing aspects that might bother some people, but you're also going to eliminate some magical moments that literally might change the way you view people.
You know, and part of it has to do with the nature of, you know, movies.
Movies are going to always kind of attract a more dynamic audience.
Movies carry their own authority through motion.
And books are going to be a slower medium that's harder to consume.
And so maybe books are always going to, at this point, be seen as kind of a sedative, as a kind of thing that lulls you and comforts you and puts you to sleep.
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.
Well, and also because writing is something I do in the moment.
Somebody says something insightful, something really bright, something phrased just wrong so that it's suddenly really fresh, and I want to be able to write it down in that moment.
So that when I do have to go to the boring part with a keyboard, I have got so much wonderful fresh stuff that it makes the keyboarding part fun because it allows me to sort of archive and to curate, preserve these fantastically bright things that were said by so many different people.
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?
But being able to explore those possibilities and being able to just delve into the deep recesses of your mind in the interest of creativity, that seems to be if anybody's going to appreciate that, it's going to be creative writers.
I'm delving into the deep recesses, if I'm lucky, if I'm doing it right, of your mind.
Like comedians, they'll say, oh my gosh, that happened to you too.
And a lot of times, there are things that people have never, ever talked about.
I tell a classic anecdote.
After I had read the gut story at an event, a woman came up.
And she was a middle-aged woman.
She was about my age.
And she said, I really love that you read that 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.
So I'm the one that they're picturing in this horrendous situation.
And she says, since you can tell that story, I'm going to tell you a story.
And she said how when she was seven years old, she was in second grade, and she was in an organization called the Brownies, which is a precursor to the Girl Scouts.
You wear a brown dress, a little brown hat, you get these little merit badges.
And she said, one day I had a stomach ache and my mom kept me home from school.
And we had this heating pad.
It must have been in the 1960s.
And this heating pad had this vibrating function.
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.
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.
And she said, it was like sex in the city for 70-year-old girls.
They could not get enough of this heating pad.
And they were all riding this heating pad, and they had a great time.
And she said, and for the first time in my life, I was the most popular girl in my class.
And I was the girl that all the girls wanted to play with.
And for every Brownie troop meeting, it was at my house.
And I was the leader.
Until the day that my mother came home from work early.
And she caught us with a heating pad.
And she sent the other brownies home.
And she whipped the cord out of the wall.
She just ripped it out of the socket.
And she started to beat me with it.
And she beat me with that cord.
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 underwater, she says, I can tell my heating pad story.
And I can tell that story until I can make it funny.
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?
Bidet toilet things that have a little button on the wall you press it it shoots hot water up your ass and my kids come over and They love these toilets.
I have two daughters and my youngest when she was seven she would sit on the toilet and she was laughing and giggling and We didn't tell her there's anything wrong with it So, she was telling us how much she loves it.
How much she loves the hot water when it shoots onto 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?
Am I supposed to say, yeah, I know, I like it too.
Am I supposed to say, hey, don't do that too much.
Am I supposed to say, don't tell anybody you like that?
You can like it, but don't tell anybody you like it.
Like, what am I supposed to do?
And I didn't do anything.
I just let her smile, and she walked out of the bathroom laughing.
Like, it was great.
And there was no issue.
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.
Instead, I was like, okay, let's get out of the bathroom now.
I guess you're done.
Alrighty.
And she has no idea that this was even like a moment of, you know, crisis in my mind where I was like, okay, how do I handle this?
I'm in the bathroom with my seven-year-old daughter.
She's getting water shot up her ass and she's enjoying it.
And see, that's my process, is you tell these stories, and you kind of gather the stories that people tell related to these stories, and you choose the ones that escalate the fastest, that escalate the best.
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.
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.
So they might start to create suspense, but then they'll resolve it instantly.
And so the story never really gets off the ground because something has happened to them, whether it's violent or whether it's sexual abuse, that makes them cling to a kind of calm serenity.
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.
When you're in this workshop and they're discussing with you this possibility of censorship, of you self-censoring or of them not accepting your ideas, how do you debate that with them?
That was another aspect of the workshop, is that we had all known each other for so many years that we didn't have the freedom to kind of teach each other anything new.
Yeah.
So there was a staleness there, too.
We were all kind of hardened into the people we were going to be.
If you're going to really paint a monster, you have to have monstrous actions.
They have to be a real monster.
We know of real monsters.
I mean, there was just some guy who just got arrested.
He had sex slaves in his basement.
You hear about those people and you go, yeah, they're out there.
There's probably a hundred of them scattered across the country right now where they have a locked basement.
We don't know about it.
Those are real people, but if you wrote about one of those people, using real scenes that were depicted in the news, you know, real eyewitness testimony, real interviews with these monsters, some people would object to that.
But if you're going to write about a monster, you have to write them in a monstrous way.
It might not be something that they want to take in recreationally, that they want to read your work in that way.
But the fact that they don't appreciate what you're doing, or the fact that they don't want you to do what you're doing, or they don't want you to bring it to the workshop, is this a new thing?
And so often people in a workshop, they might not personally feel offended by the word, but they're thinking how that word might hurt people they know.
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.
Always read from the next book because it's a way of road testing the stories and finding out which ones work and should go into the next book.
And in doing so, he was telling this story about being in 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 in 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.
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.
And dead without almost a scratch on him.
Just this perfect, naked, dead 12-year-old boy on the autopsy table.
And as the technicians eating their lunch, watching it through a window, they watch as the pathologist incises around the top of the kid's face, at the top of the forehead, the hairline, and then peels the face down like peeling an orange, peels the entire face off of the skull of this little boy and leaves the face around the neck like a mask, like a rubber mask.
And this exposes this liver-colored, dark red musculature of the child's underlying face.
And this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich, he points this out and he says, see that?
That there?
That's the color of red that I want to paint our rec room.
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 that hatred in that auditorium swung from hating David, who they did not want to hate, To hating this jackass over here who was actually laughing.
And so I threw myself on the sword for David and that story never went in any book.
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?
There would be a difference.
The people who are fans of your work would at least expect some uncomfortable moments.
Oh, yeah, but it's, again, they're hissing on behalf of someone.
They're not hissing for themselves.
You know, I made this horrible cheap shot, and they always know a cheap shot.
People always know a cheap shot.
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.
They want to see a very plain person who has been so groomed, so exercised, so made up, so stylized that she can kind of pass as this amazing strange beauty.
That's what Americans want.
Because natural classic beauty is not egalitarian.
You're either born with it or you're not.
They want to see a plain person who has been transformed.
And to make my point, at the end of the story, I made a cheap shot.
I said, and that's why we have Sarah Jessica Parker.
And I said this in New York.
And in New York, Sarah Jessica Parker is worshipped like a god.
And that whole crowd hissed and booed and did everything but throw excrement at me.
People have gotten a little bit more sensitive because they're aware that other people are more sensitive.
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 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 here to see you.
They're there to see Anthony Jeselnik and Chris D'Elia and all these other comedians that are also there as well.
So you get 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.
Those people are there to have a good time.
Colleges are a nightmare now.
It's a nightmare.
Because it's recreational outrage.
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.
And they are very quick to...
They want to be outraged.
They want to porn out their moral superiority.
They want a virtue signaling every opportunity.
They want to shut down anything they think is, air quotes, problematic.
They don't want things to go in a bad way.
And they think for some reason that comedy should be uplifting and it should only punch up.
I had this conversation once with a professor who wrote a book on comedy.
And he said, all great comedy punches up.
And I said, that's bullshit.
I said, one of the greatest bits of all time is Sam Kinison's bit about starving children in Africa, about watching those commercials where starving kids are in Africa and, you know, couldn't you please help?
And he goes in, you know, and Kinison's like, you just want to grab the guy?
unidentified
Hey, why don't you help him?
You're right fucking there.
Or send someone like me.
He goes, send someone like me.
He's going to take these people and go, hey, we just drove here 5,000 miles with your food and it occurred to us, you wouldn't be world hungry if you people would live where the fucking food is!
There's this moral thing that they're trying to achieve that literally is completely...
Independent of humor.
It's not what's funny.
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 a one-person play.
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, Kinison had a bit about homosexual necrophiliacs who are paying money to spend a few hours undisturbed with the freshest male corpses, and so he'd lie down on his stomach, and he goes, you imagine these people, they're on the slabs, like, well...
Went through life and had a good time and everything and now I guess I'm gonna go and be with Jesus and, hey, what the hell is this?
And he's rocking back and forth.
unidentified
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?
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?
I must have seen it on cable when I was like 19 years old.
But she talks in Valley speak.
Nobody's seen this Whoopi person before.
She's brand new.
Nobody's ever seen her on television.
She's got this funny name.
And she's doing this Val speak about being the only black surfer chick on the beach and she loves surfing and she loves this one white surfer guy and she finally hooks up with him and then she realizes she's pregnant and it's all very funny.
The whole front end, you're just roaring with laughter.
And then she's pregnant and she doesn't know what to do so she gets a rusty wire coat hanger and she goes into a public bathroom on the beach and she gives herself a coat hanger abortion and it spills out there on the concrete floor.
And everything's okay.
And now I'm back on the beach and I'm just doing fine.
And why don't you come on down and see me here on the beach?
But these are moments that if you're going to censor people, if you're going to self-censor, if you're going to decide that people can't use certain words...
If you're going to decide that certain scenarios are just too upsetting for the reader, these moments are going to be harder and harder to achieve.
And these are the moments that we're going to talk about.
If we were in here, if we were in a bar somewhere, and we were having a few drinks talking about great stories or great moments, these are the moments we would bring up.
These are the impactful things.
Saying that Jessica Parker joke in front of those thousand people and they're booing and hissing and you're literally on fire under your skin like...
What I thought was interesting was your take on it.
I mean, the whole thing's horrific and everyone's worst nightmare, you know, who trust people with their money.
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.
Yeah, but it's a game, you know, trying to accumulate points in the game, you know, and because these things are difficult to achieve, then they become attractive and then they become the main focus because it's hard to get a Bentley.
You got to save up a lot of money to get a Bentley.
You know how much those cost?
Which model is that?
Is that the one with the, ooh, look, you got the perforated leather seats.
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.
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, that feels like power.
You know, a year ago I was supposed to start receiving some significant payments from this year's book and they never came through and they still never came through and every time I requested them the publisher said that they had been paid but the accountant said that there were technical difficulties with wiring me the money or he had personal problems in his life caring for his mother and so there was always some reason why the money never came through And finally,
I told my agent I didn't want to do any more deals until we had this money thing resolved.
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.
But according to the district attorney, they can't seem to find any of the money.
What was the one where someone turned into a werewolf on an airplane?
I think that was from his collection of horror stories.
The one with the alien on the cover?
The process though, it's like- Survivor.
Survivor.
He's so perfectly designed for being a writer.
One of the more fascinating things about this podcast is getting to pick the brain of someone like him.
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?
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 wearing headsets, which I try to encourage people to wear now, because for a while it's like, yeah, do whatever you want, but there's something about the headset that locks you in.
Your voice is exactly the same level of sound as my voice is, because it's all coming through the headsets, so it's all combined, so you're much more aware of talking over each other and shit like that, but you're also much more aware...
There's nothing else going on.
The sound of your voices, by isolating, by putting the headset on and eliminating the outside noise, you would never be able to have a conversation with a guy like that.
Well, the real issue that happens with successful people is they lose their hunger, right?
They lose that.
It's a death sentence for comedians.
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.
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.
Everything is just like performing to people that adore you.
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.
But the more successful you become, the more your time is really scheduled.
And you just don't have those, I'm really bored times when you tend to come up with fantastic ideas.
And so in a way, being somewhat poor again gives me those really slack times when the ideas occur.
Brad Pitt told me, Brad Pitt said that 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.
You really need to fail to fall out of the limelight long enough to produce something really strong again.
One of the best things that can happen to a comedian is bombing.
When you bomb, that feeling is so bad.
I always describe it as like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother.
But the difference is that there's probably someone out there who would enjoy sucking a thousand dicks in front of their mother, but nobody enjoys bombing.
So it's probably worse than that.
But that feeling, whatever it is, reignites your appreciation for people's 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.
And some of the greatest moments in my own personal journey of stand-up have come from eating shit.
That's where they come from.
It's great to do well.
Wonderful.
It feels great.
But those eating shit ones, those are the ones that get you to the notebook again.
Those are the ones that reinvigorate you, have you spending hours and hours in your hotel room going over sheets of paper and checking out ideas, making sure these concepts connect together in some sort of a meaningful way and figuring out how to tighten things and cut out the fat.
When you're in this situation right now and you're frantically writing now and sort of forced into this element of creativity, you're forced to be hungry again.
I mean, I wouldn't wish it on you, but in a way, do you feel like it's kind of a gift?
In a way, you have to accept, ultimately, that everything is a gift.
Because it's always about what they call cognitive reframing.
Cognitive reframing.
Whatever happens, you reframe it in such a way that you recognize the value of it.
And so, yeah, regardless of what happens, You know, before my father got murdered, he had been asking me for an introduction to Winona Ryder in 1998. And I kept on thinking, I am not going to introduce my father to Winona Ryder because I know he's going to hit on her.
And I was just going to be mortified to have my dad hitting on Winona Ryder.
And he'd always talk about how pretty she was and any chance I can meet her.
And to tell the truth, when I got the word that my father had been murdered by a white supremacist in the mountains of Idaho, one of my first thoughts was, I'm off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing.
Well, that's, again, the great thing about Unchained writing.
Is that you can express those ideas.
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.
Because on one hand, we've got a generation that has been exposed to so much sensationalistic stuff in order to attain their attention.
They've really been overloaded with the most extreme versions of everything in order to get their ticket money or whatever.
They've really been pounded by so much stimuli.
I can see them kind of really pulling back and wanting to be monastic for the rest of their lives.
And on the other hand, I see them as being, as wanting to sort of counter dominate in order to just create room enough in the world for their statement.
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.
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.
For people who don't know the story, it's the Brett Weinstein story where...
The students decided that there was going to be a day of absence.
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.
But then they had ramped it up and decided white people are going to have to stay home now.
And he was like, that's racist.
And the whole thing went crazy and went haywire and the school's basically falling apart.
But there was a scene that was filmed where the president of the college was in this auditorium, and he was addressing these children.
And 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 guy's running this university.
And he let them tell him not to move his hands, gesturing as he's speaking.
He's like one of the most non-threatening beta people on the planet.
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.
You know, and just, I think it just demonstrates how desperately they want a stronger leader.
They don't want, they don't respect, they don't want to learn from somebody who is a college professor and has never really attained anything in the world.
They just don't want to become another cog in that same kind of You know, wheel.
They want to learn from somebody they respect and whose attainments they respect, whose achievements they respect.
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.
It's not supposed to be that way.
It's not supposed to be that the mentor desperately needs the student.
You know, you see that sometimes in private schools with rich kids.
They treat their teachers like shit, and the teachers have to bite their tongue.
Because they have to.
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.
It's not that dynamic at all.
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.
And that's what we're seeing on campuses now, you know.
Professors calling for censorship and to stop freedom of expression.
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.
So this is in a way a laboratory.
Where leaders are taking form.
And the rest of them will just kind of filter down into whatever jobs, whatever careers, but they will always have their kind of glory days when they say, remember that time we shut down the ROTC building, and that will seem like a big glorious past to them, but that will be enough.
You know, on one level, it is a disillusionment with the goals of the baby boomers that so many people have seen their parents achieve it is a disillusionment with the goals of the baby boomers that so many people have seen their parents achieve what they thought was going to make them happy with the houses and the trips and the careers and the possessions
And 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.
And so people are really distrustful of advertisements that tell them what's going to make them happy.
And so, you know, I think it's just a big struggle, a big everyone blind in the dark right now.
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 the protests also at Occupy, a lot of them were misinformed and they didn't really understand the process they were protesting against.
There's a very funny, famous video with Peter Schiff, who's been on this podcast before, is a financial wizard, who...
We'll set up shop there with a $5,000 suit on and it basically said I am the 1% you know ask me questions and he interviewed these kids so they would tell him what's wrong with the world and the you know The imbalance of finances and financial inequity and they just didn't understand what they were upset about and he would explain to them how capitalism actually works and how he's employing all these people and the reason why he makes so much money is because he employs so
many people and if he wasn't doing this these people would be out of work you understand that I'm creating something and you can create something too you can create a business and you can if you work hard and you know and he's going over this and you could see that What they're fighting against is almost like a concept.
They're fighting against this idea of this evil tyranny that's controlling their fate.
Well, they really don't understand it, though.
That's what Occupy was, in my opinion.
It's like they knew something was wrong.
It was almost to me like white blood cells surrounding an infection.
Like, there's something fucked up here.
Let's just surround this thing and figure out.
And then there's swelling and pus.
And that's really what it was.
It's like there's a real recognition that there's a gigantic problem with the financial institutions.
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.
There was a recognition that there was something wrong, but not a deep understanding of what the system was that they were actually protesting.
There was too much of that.
Burning Man doesn't have any of that.
Burning Man is, obviously, society's fucked.
There's no arguments that it's not, even if it's better than it's ever been before, which it probably is, you know, if you want to listen to Pinker or a lot of other people that'll argue that it's better and it's progressing into this better and better path, and I think that's probably right, ultimately.
It's still fucked.
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.
Well, Victor Turner, who talked about these liminoid events, he would say things like Burning Man, they also provide an outlet for people to self-select to leave the culture.
They're killed.
People who just don't fit in, they die.
Or they express themselves so much that they can go back to the ordinary postal carrier life that they had before because so many cultures have something like Samba, festival, where you go crazy for a week and then you go back to your normal life waiting tables.
So they are in a way an event that kind of keeps the status quo in place.
But they do create these kind of, if not aesthetic movements, they are a laboratory for sort of coming up with some new form of being together, some new social structure, new symbols, new narrative.
Yeah, it's a fascinating thing for me because I feel it's trickled off into regular life in a lot of ways now.
I know way more people that are microdosing psilocybin on a daily basis.
People are more, especially now that marijuana is legal, people are way more accepting of people getting high, of people just choosing to sort of look at the world in a different way.
Actively seek these different states of consciousness.
Well, I have a secret friendship with Jim Goad, who's one of the few people who makes me really laugh, even though most of the world- It's not a secret anymore.
Because he writes these very transgressive, in-your-face pieces.
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.
So, you know, the whole world, I think, is so fooled in that they think that Jim Goat is a bad person and they think that maybe I'm a good person when it's just exactly the opposite.
You know, and this is awkward, but this is another one of those cognitive problems.
One of the 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.
And it's going to be at the cost of losing someone I love, you know, so much.
But the benefit is that this huge burden of responsibility is going to be lifted.
And so there was this kind of secret glee, thinking, you know, I'm going to have some freedom here that I never imagined.
Yeah, Nora Ephron touches on that in her work when she talks about her mother's death.
And I think it's just an honest thing, but it's not a thing that makes you look very good.
I think that makes you a person who's honest about thoughts that are very uncomfortable.
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.
It's just...
It's just a reality of the burden of someone who's really sick or really dying.
There's no getting around it.
I don't think it's bad.
That's not a good example.
I need an example why you're a bad person.
Maybe you're just really self-critical.
Aware of things that other people could take out of context of the totality of your life and just use it as an example.
Put it in quotes and use it as an example of you being a bad person.
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 of that person and to get them to reveal something very intimate that you're going to betray by revealing to the public.
So you're basically going in there to charm them and then to hurt them.
And so much of my creative process is that way 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 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, I hadn't seen him in maybe a couple years, this friend.
And I look across this big auditorium, and there he is.
And I'm telling his carrot story in front of hundreds and hundreds of people.
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 we're having dinner and having a couple of drinks and joking around talking about things and I forget what led to him saying this.
But we were talking about just unfortunate scenarios and, you know, people that just their life is not going the way they'd like it to go and things going bad.
And out of nowhere, the guy goes, well, it's like this.
My daughter, she had a baby with a black man.
And we're both looking at him like, where is this going?
And then he goes, and 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're not going to have an identity.
They're not going to have a group to belong to.
My friend's jaws dropped.
I didn't know the guy.
I just met him that night.
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.
But it was so weird.
It's like this guy was holding into this and he's like, you know what?
Your daughter's in love with a man who's black, they have a child together, and you think it's incredibly selfish to bring that kid into the world.
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 who fuck up or, you know, people who are addicted to gambling or something, you know, people whose lives were in chaos.
And then he brings up his daughter having a baby with a guy who has the wrong amount of melanin in his skin, whose ancestors came from the wrong part of the world for him.
It's funny, you know, you throw out a story, I throw out a story.
I had a hired car from Philadelphia to New York once on tour.
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.
I bet you can't tell me why.
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.
It's called Flemish Bond.
And the guy's so silent.
Nobody's ever answered the question.
And his father was a bricklayer, and he was so proud.
And he goes, you're right.
Nobody's ever said Blemish Bond.
That's why it still stands.
And we were best friends.
And just talking like crazy all the way into Manhattan.
We get into Manhattan.
There's two guys walking down the street.
The guy goes, oh, Christ, I hate coming to New York.
Ah, the fags.
And I said, well, you know, I'm married to a man, and faggot is pretty much my middle name.
And that poor guy had to do this whole re-juggling of everything that the guy who knew Flemish Bond was also one of them.
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...
I don't know if I'd ever heard someone use the word faggot before, but I'd never seen an adult upset about gay people before.
And then my friend Candy.
Candido.
What was his name?
His dad was Cuban.
They were Cuban.
And his dad slams the newspaper on the table.
I was 11. And he's like, I can't believe they're letting these fags get married.
He was just so angry.
And I remember stopping and thinking, like, 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.
What a person should be like 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 This guy said this guy made it to 35 years old or whatever the fuck he was And this is his this is his operating system that he's using to Navigate his way through life.
I remember it being an important moment for me Because I realized like just because someone's older Doesn't mean they learned anything.
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.
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.
And I'm not kind of endorsing it.
But I feel a little less reactive to abuse.
Scientologists have this exercise called bull baiting where they take you into a room and people surround you and they call you every horrible thing and then they nitpick every aspect of your appearance or your character, who you are, and they attack you on every level.
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.
You can put it over there.
You can accept the fact that it's somebody else's statement, somebody else's opinion, observation, that it's not true.
And you can be with it.
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.
There's certain people that react really poorly to trash talk, and there's certain people that get excited by it, and it doesn't bother them at all, and they embrace it.
And generally, it's people who grew up in abusive households and horrible environments.
Then when the trash talk starts coming, they go, oh yeah?
Oh, okay, is that what's going to happen?
Fuck you, bitch!
And then you see them get excited by it, and then you see them saying, oh, okay, now you're giving me more motivation to fuck you up.
Whereas some people genuinely get dwarfed by this.
They get...
The pressure of not just being in conflict with some person, but that person insulting them and verbal conflict and demeaning them and mocking them, it haunts them.
It haunts them and it ruins them.
And they can't perform.
They go out and they fight.
They fight terrible.
It happens to a lot of fighters.
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.
They prepared 100% for this physical struggle.
But there's a certain aspect of someone literally hating them as a human.
Like not thinking of them as a worthy competitor who they respect, who they're ready to go to battle with and will shake hands first and afterwards we'll go have a beer together after we beat the shit out of each other.
No, it's like, you're a little pussy.
You're a bitch.
You shouldn't even be here.
You're weak.
You're gonna fall apart, man.
You know you're gonna fall apart.
You're waiting to fall apart.
Just give me your neck.
Just give me your neck.
I'll choke you out.
Make it nice and easy.
And you see guys reacting to that.
These demons inside of them.
These are thoughts that do dance around the back of their brain.
And every day they're throwing water on it.
But every day they come back and the fucking embers are still smoldering.
It's about why, you know, being in these intense, like, really dangerous but crackling with energy environments produce some of the happiest moments for these people's lives.
And that post-war, like, they have an incredibly difficult job to sort of reintegrate into normal...