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Jan. 5, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience

03:00:50

Joe Rogan Experience #1588 - Lawrence Wright

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58:41

lawrence wright

01:56:06

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		The Joe Rogan Experience.
unidentified		Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, first of all, pleasure to meet you.
unidentified		I've enjoyed your work.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much.
unidentified		Tremendously.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm a gigantic fan of Going Clear in particular.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I read the book and watched the HBO documentary on it.
		One of the most bonkers things in our culture today.
		Amazing that Scientology is still a thing.
		I passed by the Church of Scientology here just the other day.
		I was like, huh.
		Still works!
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they've just moved it.
		When the documentary came out, some woman had just gone to see it at the movie theater, and it was on the drag, you know, on Guadalupe, across from the university.
		And she drove her car through the plate glass windows of the Scientology building.
		And she didn't stop there.
		She drove around the lobby a little bit, knocking over bookshelves.
		I had to issue a statement deploring violence in any form.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Was she a victim of it?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No, she had just seen the documentary and she was really worked up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		That's a hype.
		She might have some other issues.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, she might.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe Scientology could have helped her.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I could have been.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		There might have been a course for that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a weird thing when you see so many people that are so successful that are Scientologists.
		At least you used to see that.
		I had a neighbor who was one of the nicest guys.
		He was a great guy.
		He was in my old neighborhood.
		And he was a Scientologist.
		And I found out in the most bizarre way.
		Because there was a piece of land that was for sale.
		And he was talking about this piece of land, about possibly purchasing it, but he was going to have to put it off because he needed $50,000 because his wife was going clear.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it was like a scene in a movie where the record skips.
		And I went, what?
		Like, what are you doing?
		And this was me of, you know, I was probably 28 at the time, 29. I was...
		The podcast has radically changed the way I look at things because I've had a chance to educate myself and have all these conversations with brilliant people and just enough of these conversations where I have a different perspective.
		But back then I really didn't know too much about Scientology other than I had bought a book From Dianetics Online, not online, rather, on television, late night TV in 1994. And they wouldn't stop sending me these pamphlets, asking me to come to all these various meetings and this and that, and sending me all these things for programs they have, discounts.
		I mean, I was...
		In one way, I admired their hustle.
		I was like, these guys don't stop.
		They just kept sending this shit to my mailbox.
		I thought it was a self-help book.
		I had always been into Anthony Robbins and all these different...
		I was into motivation.
		What can I get that's going to help me work harder or succeed better?
		You know, whatever.
		So I saw this thing and it was like, wow, this seems very compelling.
		And I knew that there was a bunch of famous people that were Scientologists, like Tom Cruise and all of them.
		I was like, maybe this is legit.
		And I was reading it and I was like, boy, this seems odd.
		It seems off.
		Without getting too much into it.
		So when I talked to this guy who was my neighbor, I really didn't have a deep background in understanding it.
		But that was the beginning of me like really getting into it.
		Like talking to him and finding out like how much money he had to spend and what was it about.
		And like what do they do for you?
		And he was explaining how nothing would ever influence you again.
		No negative influence.
		That's what going clear meant.
		That was probably one of the first times I had ever heard that expression.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		The first time I ran into it was when I was in college, and my girlfriend and I were living in an apartment above this little storefront, and it was Scientology.
		And I'd never heard of it before, and they showed me the e-meter and stuff like that, and I just thought it was interesting.
		I wasn't put off by it.
		I thought, maybe so.
		I didn't pursue it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How old were you at the time?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I was 21. I've always been interested in religions.
		It's one of the themes, I guess, of my work and why people go into one religion, why they believe one thing rather than another.
		Because in America, you can believe anything you want.
		That's not true in a lot of countries, but in our country, there's a smorgasbord of religions you can choose from.
		If you don't see something, you can make up your own.
		It's a very fertile religious culture, which interests me.
		As a reporter, I think about how people have strong political beliefs, and it doesn't affect their behavior at all.
		You know a lot of people like that, I'm sure.
		But if you have powerful religious beliefs, it determines your life.
		And as journalists, we should pay more attention to that.
		So I've always been intrigued by different religious manifestations and So Scientology was on my list.
		I had wanted to write about it.
		And because they're, you know, they're always scaring everybody with, you know, legal threats or, you know, shakedowns and stuff like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do they still do that or have they kind of backed off from that?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, the people that, some of my sources for that, you know, they hounded them mercilessly.
		And, you know, they hire private investigators.
		They're not The job that private investigators are doing is not so much to sneak up on your, you know, go through your trash, although they do that, it's to intimidate you.
		And, you know, they had somebody following me around for a while, mainly to my public events, you know, when I was making speeches.
		I'm in a band, and he came to one of my gigs.
unidentified		LAUGHTER What kind of band are you in?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's a blues band.
		We play Texas, Louisiana music.
		We used to back before the pandemic.
		We had a regular gig at the Skylark Lounge in East Austin.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I want to come see you when everything comes back.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you'll be invited.
		We're going to be really rusty.
		We need a lot of rehearsal now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's to be expected.
		So, you got really fascinated by religions, and what made you focus on Scientology?
		I mean, there's a lot of crazy religions out there.
		One of the weirdest ones about Scientology is we know who made it, right?
		It's like him and Joseph Smith.
		Those are the Mormons and Scientology, the only ones where we know who the creator is.
		And the Scientology one is particularly weird, because he was a science fiction author.
		It's like, that didn't raise any red flags to people?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, you mentioned Mormons in the same breath, and I think that's apt.
		You know, they were the most stigmatized religion in the 19th century.
		You know, Mark Twain hated them.
		Zane Grey wrote a book.
		A novel about how wicked they were.
		They were hounded from one state to another.
		And Scientology is kind of the modern equivalent of that.
		And one of the reasons I wanted to write about it is you have these famous and sometimes wealthy people, as you point out, affiliating with this organization There must be a kind of public relations martyrdom for them.
		I mean, you can admire Tom Cruise or John Travolta for their acting, but you also think, are they a little nuts?
		You know, is there something going on with them that they need this religion?
		So why do they affiliate?
		Why do they lend their Celebrity and their standing to such a stigmatized religion.
		That was one of the reasons I wanted to write about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, they must get some benefit out of it.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And they do.
		I think especially at the lower levels, they offer courses.
		Like Jerry Seinfeld was in for a while.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think he was ever in.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think he was interested in it and he was studying it.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		He took some courses.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But he was never committed as a Scientologist.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		What is a Scientologist?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I mean, once you're going to the Celebrity Center and you're taking courses, you know, I say you're a Scientologist.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you go fishing once, are you a fisherman?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that case.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Aren't you?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a good question.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I'm testing the water.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've played basketball a couple times.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm hardly a basketball player.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's a little different.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it?
		I mean, I guess it is.
		But I mean, I feel like taking courses in things doesn't make you— Well, Leonard Cohen did as well.
unidentified		Sure.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And Rock Hudson.
		I mean, there were—a lot of people were drawn to it.
		And I think, you know, part of it is Scientology set itself up as a religion for celebrities.
		It deliberately targeted people like that.
		For instance, if you go to Hollywood and you look at prominent actors and so on, they tend not to be Southern Baptists.
		It's not designed for them.
		They may come from a Southern Baptist background, but if they move to Hollywood and they're looking for a group of spiritual seekers like themselves, And they want to affiliate with people like them.
		Scientology says, here we are.
		And we have the Celebrity Center, where people like you can come and you can hang around with other famous people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think they offer a certain amount of protection.
		I think there's something there for that.
		And there's also, I think, there's a structure.
		That exists, and I think there's a lot of people that, especially in such a volatile, sort of, it's an uncertain world, the world of acting in particular.
		It's such a crazy world.
		I mean, I always said, if you want a formula, like, why is LA the way it is?
		Well, just stop and think about what it is.
		You have a bunch of people that move there from somewhere else because they want fame, right?
		And then you make them audition, which is the weirdest thing.
		You go into an unnatural environment, usually a conference room.
		There's a bunch of people sitting around judging you, and you want them to like you enough to pick you to do this thing.
		So you can't In any way, buck trends.
		You have to be uber polite.
		Whatever the ideology is that's accepted, the general vibe of Hollywood, you must confirm to that.
		You must conform to that, rather.
		They don't even have opinions.
		They have this conglomeration of opinions they've adopted in order to be let in to this tribe.
		And then you hope that they pick you.
		And so you have these incredibly insecure people who want acceptance and love, and then you make them beg for it.
		They're essentially going there and hoping that these people will like them.
		And that's where you get the abuse, like the Harvey Weinsteins of the world and these type of people.
		It's like they're preying on this need to be accepted and brought into this group in order to work, to be able to work.
		You have to play this fucked up game.
		And so if something comes along, like Scientology, that gives you structure, and gives you family, and gives you, like, we are, for you, we're going to help you become clear, we're going to bring you to the next level, you know, you're a success, it gives you something where you feel like, like, have you ever done martial arts?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I did judo when I was in high school.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One of the beautiful things about martial arts is the belt system.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because when you're a white belt and all of a sudden they tie that blue belt on your waist, you're like, wow, I am making progress.
		This is really happening.
		And you feel fantastic.
		Whereas if you went to a martial art, like I did kickboxing for a while, there's no belts.
		And it just feels weird.
		You don't know where you are.
		Where am I? Because of that, some kickboxing systems, even Muay Thai, some weird systems have developed their own belt structure, which is weird.
		The system, they've just sort of added to the existing martial art that didn't have a belt structure.
		But it's to give people this sense of progress.
		Give people scaffolding.
		Give people structure.
		Give people this thing where you feel like something is happening for me.
		And I think that's one of the things that Scientology does really well for these fucked up people.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		And you know, the other thing, you mentioned the word community.
		When I started writing about different religious groups, I am asking about beliefs.
		I noticed that people would always say, well, we believe this or that.
		And finally I began to focus on the we rather than the belief.
		Because Scientology has bizarre beliefs, as does Mormonism.
		They're out of the mainstream, for sure.
		But especially I can speak about the Mormons.
		I also wrote about them.
		It's a beautiful community.
		Yeah.
		Nicest people.
		Yeah, and Amish, for instance, I wrote about them.
		You know, they're a lot like Scientology in some ways because they have the same policy of disconnection.
		You know, we lived up in central Pennsylvania in this little Amish community called Keshikokuelas Valley or Big Valley.
		And it's famous among anthropologists because they're so schismatic, and they define their community by the color of their buggies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is schismatic?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know what that means.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That means they break off, fraction off.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, here's a church, and one part of the church doesn't agree with the other part, so they break off and start another church.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, man.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		So in this little community, they have the white buggies, the black buggies, and the yellow buggies, and they all have a different set of...
		It's not a different set of beliefs.
		They have a different set of practices.
		You know, like the white buggies are the most...
		They're called the old order.
		They don't have...
		They don't have eaves on their buildings.
		They don't use electrical power at all, and they're very rigid about that.
		No pictures on the walls and so on.
		Whereas if you go up the grade, when you finally graduate out of the Amish, you get into the Mennonite community, then they'll...
		Start driving cars.
		But the most progressive Amish would use tractors only for tractor power.
		They wouldn't use them in the fields, but they'd use them to help load the hay in the barn.
		But if you're a yellow buggy, and your daughter marries a white buggy, You'll never speak to her again, and you're living in the same community.
		And that's not any different from Scientology.
		But the reason they do that is to enforce the boundaries of their community.
		And I think another significant part of this We look at Scientology and Mormonism and you might laugh at the theological construct that their religion is built upon.
		I think the crazier it sounds, then you have to crawl over this huge wall of doubt and misgivings to accept that Xenu, this ruler of 75 million years ago, sent a bunch of thetans to the earth and what looked like DC-8s and dropped them into volcanoes where they were exploded by a hydrogen bomb and their spirits were caught by a net and then they were set in front of a 3D movie theater.
		It takes a lot to swallow that, right?
		But if you do, at least if you say you do, you go over the wall and you go join a community that's very supportive.
		And you have to say, if somebody, do you really believe that shit?
		Oh yes, we believe this.
		You're reinforcing your affiliation with the community.
		And I think people have a hunger, especially in our time, for strong communities.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, for sure.
		I mean, we also like questions to be answered, even if those answers don't make sense.
		Because it removes this bizarre...
		Like, there's an existential angst to just being alive.
		Just being on a planet that's hurling through the universe...
		Above us is stars and space and there's so many questions and we have a finite lifespan.
		If you really start thinking about it, you can kind of freak out.
		And if it's really open-ended, if you really don't know what life is, if we really were single-celled organisms that became multi-celled organisms and we used to be a shrew and a shrew evolved and eventually became a human being and We don't even know exactly how all these steps happened, and here we are today, and you don't know where it's going, and is humanity even going to make it?
		You're not going to make it.
		No matter what humanity, if humanity dies off, you have a finite lifespan.
		If you're lucky, you live to be 100. And all those questions are so confusing and scary and If someone comes along and says, we have all the answers, put your mind at ease, we have Xenu.
		And Xenu has created you and you got dropped off in a volcano and you're here today.
		And all you have to do is follow these steps and you will be free of all the confusion and all the emotional stress and the chaos that this life has.
		You don't need psychiatric medication.
		You don't need anything.
		You need us.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And also they offer the prospect of eternal life.
		Because the idea is that...
		You are not Joe Rogan.
		You are a Thetan.
		And you are an eternal being.
		And you incarnate in different bodies, you know, repeatedly.
		And so they will help you discover your past lives.
		And they'll also help you, you know, save civilization.
		So you have a noble purpose.
		And you have the assurance that if you die...
		You'll keep going.
		And that's good news.
		So there's a reluctance to part with the good news that a lot of religions have to offer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I had this conversation recently with a friend where we were talking about living forever.
		And they were like, I wouldn't want to live forever.
		I was like, but do you want to die now?
		And they're like, no.
		And I said, well, do you enjoy life?
		Yes.
		I enjoy life.
		I'm having a great time.
		Why would you want it to end?
		If you found out that life right now, like Lawrence Wright, Jamie Vernon, and I sitting here having a conversation, that this is life.
		And this just keeps going.
		It keeps going forever.
		You meet new people, you go to dinner, you go to see a concert one day when the COVID's up, but it just keeps going.
		Would you be okay with that?
		Or do you need an end?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, Joe, I started a group called the Immortality Working Group, because I'm on the side of living as long as possible.
		Now, I don't want to be decrepit.
		There are things about the possibilities of the end that are pretty awful, and I don't want to endure them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, one of my associates in my now aging group of immortalists, is that a word?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is now.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		He teaches psychology at the University of Texas, and he starts his class by saying, I'm pretty sure that at least one student in this room will never die.
unidentified		Whoa.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Because he's, you know, on top of a lot of the research that, you know, there are creatures, you know, they tend to be like seaweed and stuff like that, that are, you know, well, cancer, you know, is immortal.
		You know, life can be immortal, but in the current construction that we have with our bodies, we're not.
		On the other hand, in the 20th century, we extended the lifespan of human beings by 30 years.
		So that's a significant contribution.
		So there are a lot of things on the horizon.
		I'm afraid that, for me, it's a little over the horizon.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You think you missed the cut?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I'm hoping my children are able to, and my grandchildren now, are able to, but I'd like to be among them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The real question is, what are you missing out on if you don't die?
		If you're a religious person, you think there's something at the end of the line.
		But even if you're a quote-unquote spiritual person or someone who's maybe plunged into some psychedelic waters upon occasion, you recognize that there might be some things that we don't totally understand about this life that we're living in.
		Maybe there is something that all of these cultures for...
		Untold thousands of years have been speculating about a soul, a thing.
		It's not just your physical tissue and your eyes' ability to see what's in front of you and your ears' ability to hear things, but there's a something inside of you.
		Have you ever seen a dead body?
		It's the weirdest thing.
		They feel like they're empty.
		They feel like empty vessels when you see a dead body.
		It doesn't just seem like the person's not moving.
		It's like whatever was in them is not there anymore.
		Now, is that a perception?
		Is that something you think of because you know the person's not going to move and you know they're gone?
		Or is there a thing inside of a person?
		Is there a thing that creates whatever consciousness is, whatever your embodiment is?
		Is there a soul?
		We don't know.
		It sounds crazy, but life is crazy.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've been assaulted with a lot of mortal thoughts recently.
		Sometimes in the morning when I'm just on the edge of waking, We tend to, you know, still be accessible when you wake up in the morning.
		And the other morning I had a vision of both of my parents in their caskets.
		And, you know, I agree that there is a sense that, you know, this is an empty vessel.
		And, you know, where is the life force that was once my mother and my father?
		I don't know.
		But if you're weighing the prospect of heaven, you know, or some assemblage of souls in, you know, the cloudy ether somewhere,
		versus the actual pleasure of life itself, when it is pleasurable, I mean, you know, As a reporter, I can't help but have experienced many people's misfortune.
		And, you know, there are a lot of lives that I would not want to have spent.
		But, you know, I cling to the joy of being alive and, you know, the love of my family and my, you know, my work.
		You know, those things are incredibly rewarding to me, and I don't want to leave it.
		So, you know, that's why I'm still looking for the pill or whatever that will keep it going.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I've had many life extension experts on the podcast.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, guys like David Sinclair and Aubrey de Grey and a few others.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Those are the top guys.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and it's an interesting prospect.
		You know, the idea of living for...
		But I really do wonder if one day you get...
		Like if a movie's amazing for three hours, does it suck when it hits seven?
		You know?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, how long would you like to live?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've never thought about it.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, narrow the range.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, a hundred years, a thousand years, two hundred and fifty, a million?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think I've ever put a number on it.
		I think I enjoy being alive.
		I really do.
		I'm just going to keep going.
		I'm not going to think about a number because those numbers seem like I'm 53 years old.
		That seems bizarre to me.
		When I was a child, I thought of a 53-year-old man as being a fucking dead man.
		He's a dead man walking.
		He's not going to make it.
		53, oh my god, you're so old.
		You can't do anything.
		But I can do a lot of things at 53 so I think my perception of what 53 is is based on what I thought of it when I was a child Not based on the reality of it maintaining your body being healthy and enjoying your life like do you enjoy it?
		Well, then keep keep doing it.
		That's my philosophy.
		That's my thought process So I put very little thought into my actual age other than knowing like hey, you know You're 53 maybe you shouldn't do shit that you did when you were 23 because things break easier, right?
		That's about it.
		But other than that, if it comes to a point where there's a real health crisis, where my body starts really failing, then I'm sure I'm going to have to confront my mortality in a much more direct way.
		But the way I look at it now, it's like, I like life.
		I'm enjoying what I'm doing.
		And you were talking about, with your life, you're a very fortunate person.
		You do a thing that you love doing.
		And that, I think, is if there's a key to life other than loved ones and family and surrounding yourself with nice people and really realizing that, oh, you can really enjoy your time if you're around other people that are enjoying their time as well.
		And friendly, compassionate people.
		We're just very nice people.
		That's a better world.
		It's a better life.
		Some people don't have that option.
		They've never had that option.
		They've been fucked from the go.
		From the jump, they've grew up in a terrible environment with terrible people.
		And they've just encountered violence and crime and hardship.
		And they really haven't met a lot of very generous, warm, friendly people.
		They haven't had the opportunity to experience humanity at its best.
		And unfortunately, when over and over again you've been punished by circumstance, people get hardened.
		And so their view of life is very different than your view of life or my view of life.
		They haven't been fortunate.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm 20 years older than you, and so those questions are more acute.
		And sometimes, like when I'm filling out a form, you know, when you come to the year and they have this drop-down menu, it's like I'm flying past decades and, you know, revolutions, presidential assassinations, wars, you know, and I finally come to my birth date, which is...
		One third of the entire history of the United States.
		Maybe it's a fourth.
		No, it's between a third and a fourth.
		That's a long time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a crazy thing to think of, isn't it?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		A lot of my high school classmates have passed on.
		That kind of stuff happens with annoying regularity.
		But I think about these things a great deal.
		I do feel like You know, the Woody Allen line, when someone said, you know, but you will live on in your work, and he said, no, I want to live on in my apartment.
		I like having some kind of legacy with my family and with my work.
		But, you know, it's not given to us, apparently, to understand what else there might be, if there's anything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's why religion is so attractive, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because someone comes along and answers.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Although not all religion, like Judaism, doesn't place much of an interest in an afterlife.
		And I think that's one of the reasons there's a strong sense of civic commitment.
		A lot of philanthropy among Jews is, you know, cities and our culture is so enriched by that kind of philanthropy.
		I think it's driven by the absence of an afterlife as a part of their purpose.
		Their consideration.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Also, an incredibly strong community.
		Yeah.
		And it's difficult to get in.
		I mean, they're not proselytizing.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, you have to go through a lot.
		I have an uncle that converted to Judaism when I was a child, and it was one of the first times that I ever really questioned religion.
		I had gone to—two things got me.
		One was that, my uncle converting, because I didn't know what Judaism was.
		I was like, wait a minute, there's another religion?
		I remember being like six years old when this was going on.
		And the other thing was going to Catholic school.
		I did one year in Catholic school, and that cured me more than anything.
		I was like, there's no fucking way these ladies are talking to God.
		If there's a God out there, there's no way he wants these crazy bitches running the show.
		Like, this is mad.
		These are angry, crazy people.
		They're sadists.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We're going to torture little kids and scream at you and tell you're going to sit on a nail in the closet.
		You're going to stay here.
		You're never going home.
		And like, woo!
		And my parents got divorced when I was very young.
		They split up when I was about five years old.
		So that made me very religious because I felt like I needed something to like some stability.
		And that stability when I was a small child was God.
		And so it was the Catholic Church.
		It was Catholicism.
		And then going to Catholic school, I was actually excited about it.
		But then when my uncle was converting, I remember thinking, well, what do they believe?
		Well, is he going to go to heaven?
		Like, is he still in?
		Is he still a part of the team?
		Like, what happens now?
		Like, this is bizarre.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		He just opted out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, he went to their...
		Well, did they have...
		Their version of the afterlife is very different than ours.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's just not pronounced.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I was very pious in my teenage years, so I was a little late blooming.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What started that for you?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I think there was an organization still around called Young Life, and it's sort of It's a Protestant, mainly, organization that recruits teenagers in high school.
		And for me, it was a way of finding social acceptance.
		I was not much of an athlete.
		I was not popular.
		But you could get into this organization.
		And the way you advance in a religious organization is through piety.
		And I think that's what's really dangerous about religion.
		It's one thing to associate in the community and enjoy the fellowship of other people that are searchers or part of that environment.
		But if you want to get ahead, You believe it more strongly than the next person.
		And that allows you to advance up the ranks.
		And when that happens, when those pious people get control, then the rules start to harden.
		And that's what I think...
		Scientology is a great example of that.
		But so many religions are exactly the same way.
		And they start enforcing, you know, they become doctrinaire.
		And doctrinaire, being doctrinaire is their power.
		That's where they get their, you know, People are afraid of them.
		They're afraid to contradict them because, you know, they have the Bible on their hand or they have the Word of the Lord, you know, or, you know, it could be, you know, you could talk in tongues or something like that.
		Well, you must be really spiritual.
		You're deeply into it.
		You know, whatever religion there is, there's always a route to power.
		And I think that's where they often go off the tracks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the levels, right?
		Like showing someone that you're more pious and that you can almost compete to get to the top.
		Like there's a ladder to climb.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And, you know, Scientology had the brilliant idea of ritualizing that and monetizing it.
		So, you know, each of these steps that you take on the bridge to total freedom, as they call it, And you pay very dearly for it, but they're all a notch in your belt.
		And, you know, the higher you go, the more you're valued.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so strange that it doesn't occur to them that it was created by a science fiction author who wrote terrible books.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It may not be true still, but He had the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of titles published.
		More than a thousand.
		Many more.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Never had a second draft.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, he used to type on butcher paper, on rolls.
		He had an IBM electric typewriter, one of the earliest ones, and he would sit back and close his eyes and start typing.
		And the roll would just go through.
		And then when he was done, he'd rip it off and then roll in another sheet and start the next story.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he didn't look at what he was typing?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		I mean, you know, the legend is a lot of it is, I think, automatic writing.
		And it reads like that.
		You know, he would tell a story.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well you're being very charitable because automatic writing could be interesting.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It could be.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He wrote it was nonsense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He wrote a lot of really bad fiction.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		There's no question about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Horrible.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		But there's one thing I find very interesting about his writings and his, I guess, theology and I'm not sure what the right word is for the organization of the church and so on and the organization of his psychology.
		The whole thing about the Thetans and so on.
		As I said, thousands of books.
		How many million pages?
		No telling how many.
		There's this uncanny consistency to it.
		There's a unified vision.
		And I think that if you want to go in and start picking it, what he said that was wrong, It's pretty much armored against that.
		Whatever lunacy was driving his mind, it made sense to him.
		I think that Scientology really is just a journey into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He was very much self-medicating in a lot of ways, right?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, early on when he got out of the service, and that's where he really went into Dianetics, the whole idea that he cured himself of being blind and lame, when actually he had conjunctivitis.
		He wasn't lame at all, but he checked himself into a naval hospital and he claimed that they told him he was a hopeless case.
		And he cured himself with these maxims that became Dianetics.
		All of that You know, Dianetics is full of what he says, studies show this.
		There aren't any studies, but they're all things that he imagined, you know, sitting in that naval hospital.
		And it comes up with this scheme of self-help.
		Which is really a way of him trying to treat himself.
		He had asked for the VA for psychiatric counseling and they never responded.
		So he sort of was treating himself.
		And I compare it to a shaman, like in an Indian society.
		Where, you know, schizophrenics are often the shamans, and they're the people that go out, you know, both actually physically go out on spirit quests, but also, you know, they go into hallucinations and they come back and they try to heal their community.
		And I think basically that's what Hubbard was up to.
		I know I'm giving him more credit than you think he deserves.
unidentified		No.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		But I think he should be seen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I think you're very accurate in that way.
		I mean, I think there's also some deception and there's also some fuckery going on.
		Oh, yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		But he believes that's all in the service of the great message that he's trying to deliver.
unidentified		Maybe.
unidentified		Maybe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's hard to say, right?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hard to say what he really meant and thought.
		But clearly, he also recognized it.
		I mean, there was one of the great quotes from him about if you really want to make money.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Religion.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's where the money is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, he kind of knew.
		So it wasn't like he was structuring it in this way where you can go from tier to tier and pay.
		And like I said about my neighbor, whose wife was going clear, it was $50,000 she was going to have to pay.
		I mean, he was a carpenter.
		He wasn't making that much money.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, if you want to go up the whole rank, you know, you can think about millions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I wonder if he still lives there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'd like to go visit him and just see if he's still a part of it.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, you can ask the church.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		They'll tell you where he is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's just...
		It's weird because, like, for him, it was providing some stability.
		It was doing something for him, at least the way he's...
		I didn't know him that well.
		I just knew him enough to have conversations with him or running into each other outside the house.
		But he seemed like a real nice guy.
		And it was giving him some sort of structure.
		Something about it.
		But, you know, I almost want to sit down with him and make him watch Battlefield Earth.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Nobody can watch that.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've watched it like five times!
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No, really.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I love it.
		I get high and watch it.
		It's fucking hilarious.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I suppose there's one way of trying to approach it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's like the science fiction version of Showgirls.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, there's movies that you watch just because they suck.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, you just want to watch them just because they're so preposterous.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That movie is one of the most preposterous movies of all time.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's horrible.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And it's better than the novel.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it really?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've read some of his stuff, and it reads like a 10-year-old writing a story without anyone going, well, Billy, maybe we should edit this down a little.
		Let's try to consolidate some of these ideas, and maybe there's a better way to phrase this.
		It's just one draft.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		No, he just flies through it.
		You know, when I was working on that story for The New Yorker, which is where it started, I think many things you can trace back to his experience in the war.
		He had this longing to be a hero, and he wasn't.
		At some point he was in a sub-chaser.
		He was captaining a sub-chaser off the coast of California and he took it out and one thing, he did artillery practice against these islands off of Mexico.
		So he was shelling Mexico, which was a hostile action.
		But he thought that he had come upon a Japanese submarine and chased around dropping depth charges everywhere and it turns out sunken limbs or something like that.
		So he had essentially a disgraceful experience in the service.
		But when he got out, he posed as having been a spy, that he was on the first...
		The first ship to be sunk in the Pacific and he escaped to some desert island and all this sort of thing.
		Of course, we got his records and almost every single day of his career in the service is marked by some sort of report.
		So we could find exactly where he was, what he did.
		But the church insisted that he really was a hero and that they gave me a...
		I've forgotten the form, but when you're discharged, there's a form that gives you assignments and stuff like that.
		And he had all these glorious assignments.
		Then they showed me a picture of all the medals he'd won.
		Well, that's interesting.
		And so we got through the records from St. Louis where they're kept, you know, and a huge box of stuff.
		And I went through and I found the actual discharge thing, which Didn't bear any resemblance to the one the church gave me.
		And then I looked at the medals more closely, and some of them from foreign countries, some of them from wars, like in the 19th century.
		And so, you know, he couldn't possibly have won them.
		And so...
		How did they expect me to miss that?
		And also, what was Hubbard thinking?
		Because he's the one that came up with these medals.
		He awarded them to himself, and he passed on to the church the legacy of his mendaciousness, and they have to defend it because he's the founder.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a thing that happens in cults where people give in to whatever the doctrine is, right?
		And whether you want to call it religion or a cult, clearly there was not a lot of research into the veracity of his claims by the people that were a part of the organization.
		And there's a willingness to give in to the top person.
		It's a weird thing.
		My background originally was in martial arts and I saw it a lot in martial arts.
		Martial arts are very culty, particularly a lot of traditional martial arts.
		Even the traditional martial arts Taekwondo that I was a part of, the instructor was God.
		Like, they were the lord of this dojang or this gymnasium or whatever you wanted to call it, where everybody trained.
		And, you know, you called them sir and you bowed to them when you saw them.
		My traditional martial art background though was legitimate.
		They were legitimately teaching you a good martial art and they had these tenets that they thought were designed to increase your human potential and they were building up your character and it was really what you wanted from martial arts.
		But I ran into a bunch that were not.
		A bunch where there was people that were claiming to have special touch, and they could use their chi, and they could touch you in a way.
		And these people, they don't just exist.
		There's hundreds of them, hundreds of schools that still exist today.
		And there's a couple of websites.
		One of them is Fake Black Belts, and another one, there's Instagram pages, McDojo.
		What is it?
		McDojo Life.
		I'm sorry, I keep forgetting the name.
		I have too many names of McDojo Life.
		And they document these people.
		Where someone comes at them and they touch like this.
		And the person shakes and falls on the ground.
		So you have these students who are part of this horseshit.
		They give into it.
		And they, I don't know if they believe it.
		I've never interviewed them.
		I don't know what's going on.
		But they will run at the person.
		The person will literally, this master will put his hands up like this and they'll be paralyzed and they'll fall to the ground.
		And it's not one.
		There's thousands of them.
		They're all over the world!
		And you've got to wonder, what is happening?
		How is this so successful in so many different places?
		There's a thing that happens where someone becomes a part of one of these organizations and it gives them the sense of community and family and you have to give in to whatever the belief system is.
		And the belief system is that this guy has a magic touch.
		And you go running at this guy and he...
		And you almost like...
		You don't want to buck the trend because you want to keep coming back to this place that you call home.
		So you give in to it.
		You fall to the ground.
		But I've seen it...
		All over the country.
		It exists everywhere.
		It exists in Asian communities, white communities, black communities.
		It seems universal.
		It's very similar.
		The man has magic.
		He has a magic touch.
		And he knows some secret techniques.
		Especially in martial arts, traditionally, it's very hard to fake because you have to spar.
		So when you're sparring, people try to test you so they find out how good you are.
		They're trying to figure out whether or not they can get through your defenses.
		But these people have figured out a way to brainwash someone in this weirdest culty way.
		And by seeing that and seeing how predominant it was and how it was so...
		There were so many versions of it.
		It just makes sense that this would exist in Scientology or Moonies or fill in the blank.
		There's a thing with human beings where we want to give in to the chief.
		We want to give in to the main alpha.
		Whatever for whatever reason and you see it with like people with politically as well You see like people give in to a political leader whether it's Trump or whoever it is like that person can do no wrong That is there that is their person and anything that says anything different is lies and disinformation Well, what you said made me think of one of the hardest stories I ever did I did a An article from The New Yorker about the sons of Jim Jones.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And not everybody died in Jonestown.
		He had three sons.
		Two of them were adopted.
		And they were playing a basketball tournament in Georgetown, Guyana.
		This story took place when I... You remember the Branch Davidians?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Now that you're a Texan.
unidentified		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's just up the road.
unidentified		Waco.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		My editor at the New Yorker at the time was Tina Brown, and she asked me to go write about the Branch Davidians.
		And I said, Tina, there are more reporters than Branch Davidians up there right now.
		I couldn't, you know.
		But what I had been watching the news coverage, and just before, the place was called Rancho Apocalypse, which turned out to be really appropriate.
		But they sent before the conflagration.
		They sent out a van with children, you know, who had grown up in this community.
		And these kids, you know, as they drove past the ATF and FBI lines and then the media line, and you could see these children looking out the windows, they were leaving behind everybody they knew.
		They were leaving behind the only world they knew.
		And they were going into what?
		And I thought, what happened to those kids?
		This must have happened.
		You know, what will happen to those?
		It must have happened to children elsewhere.
		And so I started doing some investigation, and I found out that, you know, Jones had these three kids.
		Three young boys.
		Well, they were young men.
		And there was Jim Jr., who was black, and then there was Steven, who was the natural son, and then there was Tim Jones.
		For whatever reason, they hadn't talked to anybody, and they agreed to talk to me.
		Wow.
		And perhaps it had to do with the Branch Davidian thing that was going on at that same time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So this was in the early 90s?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was 15 years after Jonestown.
		It was actually almost exactly 15 years.
		And there's a cemetery in Oakland where...
		Most of the 900 bodies were buried.
		They took an earthmover and took a hill down, half of a hill, and then they stacked all the caskets up and covered it again.
		But it still has this distortion, and you can see what remained of the Jonestown followers.
		It was interesting to me that the people who joined the Jones cult were all good people.
		They were all, you know, it was started in Indianapolis and then it moved to the Bay Area.
		And it was largely a, you know, largely black.
		Jones was very, very progressive, you know, on race.
		But, you know, a lot of good-hearted people involved in it.
		And he was a big figure in San Francisco at the time politically.
		His support was sought after.
		He was admired as a community leader.
		But he was totally crazy and paranoid and suddenly decided he had to remove the entire group.
		And you can't tell your family.
		You can't tell anybody.
		He sent his sons down to Guyana to clear the jungle so they could make this village.
		And then overnight, they move, you know, nearly a thousand people to South America and leaving behind all their friends, their jobs and stuff like that.
		One day, you know, they've been removed.
		They've been raptured, you know, off to South America.
		And so...
		I was interested in learning more about it, but these young men were totally haunted, but you would certainly relate to Tim Jones.
		He was physically very powerful.
		He curled 100 pounds with either hand.
		But he couldn't get on an elevator.
		The last time he tried to do an airplane flight, I mean, this had been years ago, I don't know if it's changed for him now, but he made the airplane turn around and drop him off at the gate.
		Which is hard to do, but when you're as physically overpowering as Tim was, he's kind of a formidable figure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he just had all sorts of anxieties.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		So I went to talk to him, and...
		He said, I'll do it on one condition.
		We have to do it in a public place, you know, a restaurant, someplace where I won't cry.
		And I want my wife there because I never told her about it.
		And it's a little hard for me to tell this story because we went to a restaurant.
		And within five minutes he was crying, you know, and pounding the table and the waiter was keeping his distance.
		People in the restaurant were, you know, frightened.
		And he told the story of going back, he's the one who had to identify 900 people.
		His natural birth parents, his adopted parents, he had a wife and children then too.
		They were all dead.
		Everybody was dead.
		And I've never forgotten the power of a religious belief in a personality like Jim Jones who could persuade All those people to stay with him, train them in this, you know, suicide drills night after night, you know, and then one day it's real.
		And, you know, the boys felt guilty because they thought if they had been there, they might have been able to stop it, but probably not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, there's been so many of them.
		It's almost strange that there's not more.
		That, you know, you have like the Heaven's Gate, which is a very small cult.
		You know, you have certain sects of the Moonies that are still active, right?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are a lot.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, to me, Aum Shinrikyo, that Japanese cult that was, you know, remember the blind yoga instructor and they drank his bath water and stuff like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you don't remember the blessing?
		You've got a lot catching up to do.
		But, uh...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What year was this?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It was in the 90s, and, you know, Shom Shinrikyo is the name of it, and...
		There were like 50,000 members in Japan, and there were a number of them in Russia as well.
		But there was a far more dangerous cult than—well, I thought it was more dangerous in prospect than al-Qaeda— Because a lot of these people were engineers and scientists.
		They were experimenting with poisons.
		They poisoned a lot of people on the Tokyo subway with sarin gas.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, now I remember this.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And they were very adept.
		And if Al-Qaeda had had that kind of expertise, Then, you know, they were also very interested in, you know, weapons of mass destruction, as are some of the white supremacist groups right now.
		But al-Qaeda, I think, and ISIS as being religious cults as well.
		I think that they continue to prosper.
		What's alarming is how much more empowered they are now with the kinds of weaponry that you can get, the drones.
		When I was writing about the intelligence community, I got to meet—who is it in the Bond movies that makes the weapon?
		Q. Q. I got to meet our Q, but he wouldn't show me the good stuff.
		But I asked him what he was worried about, and he said the way in which high school kids can create computer viruses now— We'll soon see them able to create actual biological viruses because the technology like CRISPR and stuff like that is so accessible.
		And, you know, that's a terrifying thought.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is terrifying.
		I mean, I don't want to downplay what these people have done and how many of them do exist, but it's almost shocking that there's not more.
		Because there is this weird...
		There's a, you know, a small percentage of people that have this strange desire to have a group of followers that unflinchingly just listen to everything they say.
		There was a guy in Australia recently that was saying he was Jesus.
		You remember this guy?
		He had a Mary.
		Like, he even kind of looked like he could be, like, when you think of the stereotypical Jesus painting, like a white guy with beard and long hair, he looked like this guy.
		And he had this woman that he met, and he was convincing this woman that she was Mary.
		That's her.
		But then she found out there was another Mary in the past.
		Another woman that he had called Mary to, but...
		Apparently, he said, no, he had made a mistake.
		And people were like, wait a minute, Jesus makes mistakes?
		How do you know this is Mary?
		He's like, no, this one's definitely Mary.
		That other one was just a fake Mary.
		She tricked me.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever heard of something called the Jerusalem Syndrome?
unidentified		Yes.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I don't know how real it is, but I've been a lot in the Middle East.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's hardcore Christians that go down to Israel, right?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's not just that.
		They...
		Sometimes you see them saying that they're Jesus.
		But if it happens to be a Jewish person who's gone off, then they are David.
		They've chosen a suitably appropriate, iconic religious figure to be.
		And there's an asylum Back in the day when Israel was fighting for its independence in 1948, there was a little Palestinian village called Deir Yassin where Jewish terrorists massacred the townspeople to take it over because it was on a road to the airport.
		That village is now this psychiatric institution where people are suffering such delusions.
		I got to visit it one time when I was in Jerusalem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's almost too much.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		The psychiatrist I was interviewing, his office was in a little Palestinian house.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whoa.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you bring that up to him?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was his reaction?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's unfortunate, but you know...
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Unfortunate?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jesus Christ.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like setting up shop in a gas chamber.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's one of those historical scars that you see the Middle East is covered with such places.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		What is it about people where this pops up?
		What things have to be in place where someone can create some sort of an environment like that where they can decide that they're the main ruler, that they're going to create this bizarre environment, set up these rules, and have all these people follow along with them?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I suppose that there are a lot of people that want to be that person and aren't.
		They're probably all around us.
		They just don't have the magic charisma to attract the followers.
		I think a lot of people that go into the ministry or into politics or something like that probably have a great deal of that gene.
		And if they had the opportunity, they would maybe exercise it to a greater degree.
		But you have to have the consent of the followers.
		And if you don't get that kind of buy-in, then you're not going to have much of a cult.
		Like your friends with Jesus and Mary.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think they've got a group.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Do they really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think there's a group that followed them.
		Yeah.
		I mean, I don't know if they're still active.
		But it's just a strange...
		It's like, you know, there's these natural patterns that you can find in nature.
		Predator and prey and...
		And food sources and water and all these things that just reoccur over and over again, despite the terrain, despite the geography, the part of the world.
		You can kind of see the patterns.
		But that's one of the weirdest patterns with human beings, is the obviously fraudulent leader who makes up a bunch of crazy shit and pretends that he has some secret wisdom and that the gods or a god are on his side.
		And gets all these people to follow them, and even in the Jonestown case, gets them to commit murder and suicide.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, it's a strange pattern.
		Whether it's the Heaven Gate guys who all kill themselves because, you know, Hale-Bob Comet was coming and there's people behind it.
		Are they still around?
		What's it saying?
		There's our website.
		Welcome to Divine Truth.
		Oh, boy.
unidentified		At what point in time is this lady going, Mary's still hanging in.
unidentified		Mary 2. The Queen Mary 2. That might be Mary 3. We don't even know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He might have found a new Mary.
		This one's the real, real Mary.
		Yeah.
		Is there a lot going on?
		Do they have a lot of members?
		I wonder how many members they have.
		Divine truth is hilarious to call it that.
		Do you think Jesus would be more creative?
		The real Jesus?
		Like, just divine truth, that's it?
unidentified		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I thought we heard that one already.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You ever heard him talk?
		It's not very compelling.
		It's not that good.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, there's some of these...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
		Give me some.
		Give me some.
		Here it goes.
unidentified		Little Laura.
unidentified		She also has a brother over here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fuck that accent, by the way.
		You can't be Jesus with an Australian accent.
		That's ridiculous.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it's going to grow, I have to say.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		He's not going to be franchising that coming soon to a strip mall near you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I love the Australian accents, don't get me wrong.
		Jesus would be susceptible to accents?
		Really?
		Jesus would be so easily influenced that he would take on the vernacular and the way people, the accents that they use in the region?
		Come on, get the fuck out of here.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, when he shows up as a Palestinian, that's going to be...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, Jesus has some restructuring to do.
		We've got to rethink this whole thing.
		When you looked at all these various religions, how do you decide which ones to focus on, which ones to write about?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's intuitive.
		I don't know.
		You know, I'm drawn by story.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you written much about the Catholic Church?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I did write a profile of a defrocked priest named Matthew Fox.
		He's a really fascinating guy.
		He was...
		A Dominican.
		And he had a college, a spiritual university.
		But he would invite people from different religious traditions, and he set up shop in this convent.
		In the summer when the nuns go on vacation, I don't know why the nuns go on vacation, but for whatever reason, he had it to himself.
		Holy Names College in Oakland.
		And I got to sleep in the convent.
		I was really, you know, how many times do you get that opportunity?
		But Matt made a sort of tactical error when he invited...
		A witch to come talk.
unidentified		A witch?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		A witch.
		And Starhawk.
		She's kind of a famous witch.
		Her name's Starhawk?
		Her name's Starhawk, yeah.
		And so Starhawk got the nuns out and she built a kettle over a fire and she had the nuns jumping over the kettle and this got to the, you know, to the Vatican.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jesus Christ!
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And so Matt was out on his ear after that...
		But I just found him a fascinating guy.
		He was kind of a spiritual adventurer.
		He wanted to know every different religious idea and try it out and see what you thought.
		It was fascinating spending time with him.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The reason why I brought up the Catholic Church is obviously the sex abuse.
		That is one of the strangest religious groups, cults, whatever you want to call it ever, that is so connected to priests abusing children.
		I mean, you say Catholic priest, people automatically in their mind think child abuse.
		I can't think of another religion where you can say that of.
		But it's not that there's not great Catholics.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Catholic religion, like, in general, like, I know a lot of Catholics that go to church, they're wonderful people.
		It's not them.
		It's specifically these priests and how did this culture of these priests, not just doing it, but getting away with it, getting shipped to different parishes where they didn't know.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Yeah.
		Did you have such an experience?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		So, the...
		I was in Boy Scouts, which is now similarly stained by that.
		And I regret what's happened to the Boy Scouts because it gave me a lot.
		I loved it.
		I learned a lot of things in the Boy Scouts I would never have learned otherwise.
		And I liked the comradeship of the other boys.
		Some of the scout leaders were a little peculiar.
		They were mostly good guys.
		I thought about being a scout leader at one point, but I had been a conscientious objector and they wouldn't let me.
		So that didn't happen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In which war?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Vietnam.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I did two years of alternative service in Egypt.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Teaching at the American University.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was in scouts.
		I was in for one year, and I was in a neighborhood outside of Boston at the time.
		I think it's kind of gentrified now, but it was shady as fuck.
		Back in the 80s.
		It was called Jamaica Plain.
		Actually, I guess it wasn't even the 80s.
		It was the late 70s.
		Because I went to high school in 81, so maybe it was 80. Maybe it was 79, 80. Either way, a lot of criminals.
		These kids were sketchy fucking kids.
		Yeah, they were tying other kids to their cots and leaving them in the middle of the woods and doing creepy shit.
		And they're basically inner-city kids having fun with no real authority.
		You leave us all in a room together with bunks, and kids start plotting things and doing things.
		But fortunately, there was no sexual abuse.
		There was just a lot of...
		You know, thuggish, young kids.
		But also, there wasn't a lot of structure.
		Like, I remember I just would go, I was into fishing, so I'd just go fishing every day.
		I would just blow off all their activities and go fishing, and no one seemed to give a shit.
		So I just basically was in a fishing camp for a couple weeks, hanging out with some boys that you had to, like, keep your eyes on.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, one of my strongest memories of the Boy Scouts is when we were out camping, and There was a Sunday we go to have this service and we're up on a bluff over a creek and there's a bunch of logs and they're covered with turtles and so we're up on top of this bluff and we're praying and this sort of thing and we all have our 22s.
		And then after the service, we all go stand on the edge of the bluff and shoot the turtles.
		That's kind of the archetypal Boy Scout experience.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, we had 22s too, and I remember, maybe I shot one one day, but I remember doing something else, some other activity, and I heard, pew!
		And I realized it was a ricochet.
		These fucking wild ass kids had got these rifles and they were shooting rocks and all kinds of different things.
		And a bullet went ricocheting by us.
		And I was like, fuck this.
		And from that point on, I just basically went fishing every day.
		I was like, all these other activities are quite dangerous.
		Yeah.
		There was no sexual abuse.
		I didn't hear of any.
		The counselor was a youngish guy.
		You know, a guy who was maybe 20, 21. Really nice guy who had gone through the Boy Scouts himself, became an Eagle Scout, did the whole deal.
		And, you know, for him, it had helped him avoid a lot of the pitfalls of growing up in a bad neighborhood.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's what I think it can offer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think that's less connected to child abuse, though, than the Catholic Church is.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's just really going through a big period of that right now.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And I'm not sure that bringing girls into the Boy Scouts is the right decision.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, without appropriate security measures being put in place to make sure these boys don't abuse these girls.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Leaving teenage boys alone with teenage girls in the woods just seems like a recipe for disaster.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Or a dream come true.
unidentified		Or fun.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Depending on what the boys are and who the girls are.
		Yeah.
		I don't know.
		It's just...
		It's just...
		There's something very strange about that these, like, whether it's the Catholic Church or any group like that, that's connected to abusive minors.
		It's very strange.
		And the fact that it's protected and covered up, you know, and it's all under this one name, but obviously it's very different.
		It's very different in different places.
		I mean, you could have a Catholic Church, it's amazing, and everybody's great, and it's a great sense of community, and everybody...
		You know, genuinely goes there and it's warm and friendly and they have a good time.
		And then you could go to a hellscape.
		You could be in the worst kind of environment ever.
		And I know people that have been abused that were raised as Catholics.
		It's scary.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, I did an article in a book later that touches on this in an oblique way, which was...
		You remember the kind of ritual abuse scare in the late 80s and early 90s?
		Satanic ritual abuse?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I do.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I had...
		I was interested in...
		Well, another way of starting this story is in therapy.
		And my therapist, people that I really admired, they knew I was an investigative reporter.
		And they said, well, you know, we're seeing a lot of...
		Patients, especially young women, who've been satanically abused and have multiple personality disorder.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You wrote a book about this, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And so, you know, I thought, well, that's interesting.
		And then one of them said, and Satanists are responsible for 50 murders a year in Austin alone.
		And I thought, we never had 50 murders in Austin, you know, total.
		So I didn't say anything.
		I just thought, wait, this is interesting information.
		But I discounted it.
		But I mentioned it to my editor, and I said I was interested in the multiple personality disorder, and this is Tina again.
		And she goes, oh, that's interesting.
		And I said, well, you know, a lot of times when they started questioning, they find out that they had been satanically ritually abused.
		She goes, oh, that's hot, hot, hot!
		She was very enthusiastic about it.
		So then I went to a workshop for cops.
		And there's another cop who was going around the country telling...
		I've heard police and various sheriffs, deputies and stuff around the country about satanic ritual abuse.
		And he said, they are responsible for 50,000 murders a year in America.
		I thought once again, that's more murderous than there are in America.
		You know, and these are cops telling this story to themselves.
		And so, you know, and maybe it's true.
		What year was this?
		I think it was 93 that I did this story.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So pre-internet.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You couldn't just research this.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Before the internet exploded, before what we think of as the internet.
		And I found this, there was, you know, thousands of lawsuits and arrests, you know, around the country, but there was only one conviction, and it was for this sheriff's deputy in Olympia, Washington, named Paul Ingram, and his daughters.
		had accused him of raping them repeatedly and bringing the neighbors over and they had been cut up.
		They had children ripped out of their stomachs and sacrificed.
		Other deputies in the Olympia department were involved in it and so on.
		All of this was You know, wild, but he confessed to it.
		And so I thought if there's anything to it, then, you know, And I went up to Olympia and I spent a lot of time talking to the cops and trying to piece together what had actually happened.
		And because there was confession, there was never really a trial.
		So they never had the cops who were investigating and who were his colleagues.
		They didn't have to put together a coherent case.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What did he confess to exactly?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		He confessed to raping his children.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jesus Christ.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, Jesus Christ had something to do with it, because they were all members of this four-square gospel church, you know, and a very religious family.
		And the idea of Satan was very real to them.
		And Erica, the oldest daughter, had made this outcry.
		And so...
		It started at a religious camp.
		And then it kind of spread.
		And then her sister made a similar outcry.
		And then they started implicating their neighbors.
		And all this amazing story.
		Of, you know, the abuse that they had suffered and how many people had been killed.
		Pretty soon there were helicopters flying around the county looking for, you know, satanic fires and digging up their property.
		And they never found anything.
		So I asked one of the cops, well, did you find any bones?
		Yeah, we did.
		It was an elk bone.
		Well, that's not exactly...
		You found an elk bone?
		That's the proof?
		And so it turned out one of the cops had taken these girls in for a physical inspection.
		And There weren't any scars.
		In fact, they were virgins.
		So there was never any other thing that all the things they had described had never taken place.
		And yet, Paul Ingram confessed to it because his preacher came in and told him that, you know, God would not allow anything other than real memories to come into his mind.
		And a psychologist came in and hypnotized him.
		And pretty soon he was eliciting these fantasies.
		And so Paul began to fantasize about what...
		And at this point, the girls hadn't gotten so ripe in their storytelling.
		He began telling what he visualized.
		I can see myself going into Erica's room, you know, and...
		The preacher took that back to the church and the gossip started and it gets into the ears of the girls and they start making similar but not exactly the same sort of statements about what happened.
		So these memories never coalesced.
		Anyway, Paul, I think he served 13 years in prison for a crime that never actually occurred.
		One day I happened to be in LA and you remember, since you spent some time there, Amy Semple McPherson?
		She was an evangelist, a great character in American religious history.
		She had affairs with Charlie Chaplin and so on and she was really A huge figure on the scale of Billy Graham or something like that at the time in the 20s.
		And she started this congregation.
		And I talked to the woman who was the camp counselor at that church.
		And I said, well, how did Erica make this confession?
		She said, well, it was a dramatic moment.
		You know, I had been talking to the girls.
		And I would say, you know, I know that one of you here has been abused.
		And, you know, I can see you in the closet.
		I see you hiding.
		And you can hear the footsteps coming towards you.
		And some girl, oh, it was me!
		It was me!
		You know, so she's eliciting these things.
		And so at the end of the camp, Erica is on the stage and she's just weeping.
		And she's not...
		We're not saying anything.
		And so one of the counselors called over, Paula was her name, you know, come help us understand what's going on with this young woman.
		And she put her hand on Erica's head and she says, she's been abused.
		And then she said, and it's by her father, and it's happened many times.
		So, in the mind of this very religious young woman, the message came from God, you know, that she had been abused, and so she made an outcry It wasn't hers.
		It was the camp counselors, really, that started this whole folly.
		And what happened after that, during that period of time, these kinds of stories took root in daytime talk shows.
		It was all over the place, spread to other countries really quickly.
		Thousands of families were ripped apart by these kinds of accusations.
		And people like my therapist, brilliant, adorable people, took it on as their mission was to rescue people like that.
		And what happened is it drove away people who really had been abused.
		Their abuse was so insignificant by comparison with these elaborate tales of having babies cut up on you.
		And I finally decided that These were abortion fantasies.
		I think the whole abortion discussion, put yourself in the mind of an 18-year-old virgin and drawn to sexual ideas and yet haunted by the prospect of abortion and all the stuff that goes in it.
		The fantasies that they elicited were very similar to abortions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But what caused the father to think that he had done these things?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just because of the hypnotherapy?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That was a big part of it, but when he went into his first session, he made two statements.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't remember it, but my daughters wouldn't lie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And that's what hung him.
unidentified		Oh, God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's been a lot of, like, weird cases in the past of people putting memories, particularly in children.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Remember there was a very famous case of a child care center?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Remember that?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, there have been a bunch of them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And there was one here in Austin, Fran and Dan, that was...
		Actually, I... I attended one of the days of the trial.
		There was a daycare center south of town.
		Fran and Dan had operated it for years, and people would go drop their kids off and pick them up after work.
		And during this period of time when there was this heightened fear of childhood sexual abuse, some of the parents began quizzing their children.
		And there were psychologists who would come around with a doll and, you know, anatomically correct, you know.
		Anybody touch you?
		You know, sort of suggestive.
		And so they elicited some stories from these children.
		And the stories were, Mommy dropped me off and we flew to Mexico.
		And we killed a giraffe and buried it.
		And, you know...
		Childhood fantasies along that line.
		And the police couldn't prosecute the idea that somehow they had all flown on a private jet from a daycare center in South Austin.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then kill the giraffe and had enough time to come back home.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So, you know, eventually, you know, they start, you know, they assemble, you know, of these psychologists who are, you know, using these dolls and so on to try to elicit, you know, like, did Dan ever touch you any place that made you feel uncomfortable?
		You can tell me.
		It's okay.
		You know, don't feel...
		So eventually, a child agrees to one of those things, and then other parents hear it, and, oh my God, you know, she was abused by Dan...
		Honey, did Dan ever, you know, so it began to, there was never any real evidence, but when the day I was there, they put a child on the stand, and she had her doll and a lollipop in her mouth.
		And she was sitting on the lap of, I forgot, it might have been her mother.
		But, you know, the prosecutor says, you know, did Dan ever touch you?
		No.
		Did he ever hurt?
		No.
		Your Honor, can we have a recess?
		And then it was, yes, yes.
		It was shocking to me that children were manipulated in that fashion.
		Lives were destroyed.
		Eventually, Fran and Dan were exonerated.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's always going to be people that believe, though.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yes, they will.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And they attack me, you know, because I signed a friend of the court brief about, you know, implanting memories as you suggested.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How could anyone not know that if you lead children in a certain way like that, they're going to make things up?
		I don't even necessarily think children totally understand memory.
		Think about how humans misconstrue memories.
		Memories are terrible.
		I've said this before.
		If you ask me what I did a week ago, I have a blurry slideshow in my head.
		I have a calendar that can tell you, oh, I had a podcast on that day and a comedy show on that day.
		I can't recall it like a movie, like a 4K film that I could just rewatch.
		That was the exact moment I knew something was wrong.
		We don't have that kind of memory.
		But some people are so fucking sure of their memory.
		It's crazy.
		Like, what is happening in your head?
		What is your memory like?
		Because my memory is terrible.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I have strategies to try to remember, you know, like why I walked downstairs.
		You know, what did I want to get?
		You know, that's just an immediate memory.
		But, you know, I keep a journal.
		Out of defense, you know, for make sure that I remembered things correctly.
		You know, if something happened to me that I want to remember, I'll write it down.
		Sure.
		Because when I'm writing, when I'm researching, you know, like when I wrote about The Looming Tower, about Al-Qaeda, I interviewed 600 people.
		I don't remember all that.
		And I read all these books and stuff.
		I'd take note cards.
		And I had, you know, this elaborate, almost as long as your table, you know, boxes of notes and very scrupulously ordered.
		Because I can't remember it.
		And, you know, but put it on note cards, I can find it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's just so strange that, I mean, I guess back then they didn't know about memories well.
		Like, that would never fly today.
		If you tried leading a child that way today, the defense attorneys would intervene.
		And they were saying...
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		This wasn't so long ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How old was this?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It was in the 90s.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but even in the 90s, it seems like not that long ago, but 30, 25 years ago, that's a long time ago now.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I guess you're right.
		At that time, we had four hospitals in Austin, and by the time I wrote this, they each had a dissociative disorders wing, which is like multiple personalities.
		We had enough multiple personalities in Austin to stock four different psych wards.
		And then when my article, mainly the book, when the book came out, insurance companies decided not to fund psychiatric investigations into certain dissociative disorders including multiple personalities and repressed memories like these.
		And those wards disappeared.
		Once the money dried up, there was just no support for it.
		The whole architecture of the repressed memory syndrome just vanished.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The repressed memory thing is very strange to me.
		It's very strange.
		Because there's been so many cases where people have led the person who's particularly under hypnosis, led them into these memories, almost helped them.
		And there's real evidence that you can do that, that you can sit someone down and impart or implant a fake memory of an event, particularly under hypnosis.
		There was a guy named John Mack.
		It was a Harvard psychologist who, he did a lot of work with people that were having hypnotic regression stories of UFO abductions.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that was one of the main criticisms was they thought that he was leading these people into these ideas and suggesting these ideas and giving these people, I don't know if he did or didn't, but That's the kind of thing that you could do to someone if they were under hypnosis.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You could implant some kind of crazy, fantastic memory of visitation in the middle of the night.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I had a story when I was working on the repressed memory story.
		I ran across this study that was another thing you wouldn't do now because of the conventions of experimentation have changed.
		A psychiatrist in Georgia had a patient and he told her in advance what he'd like to do.
		I want to hypnotize you and see if I can elicit a memory that didn't happen.
		And so she agreed and he hypnotized her and he said, Helen, you were late today coming to your session, which wasn't true.
		What happened?
		What delayed you?
		I don't know, I was driving and I saw a cow on the side of the road.
		Oh really?
		What was the cow doing?
		It was giving birth and it was having trouble.
		And so I got out of the car and I tugged on the calf and I helped.
		And he said, and there was a light above.
		And she said, and a spaceship came down.
		And, you know, and I got on the spaceship and, you know, two things.
		You were late and there was a light.
		And she came up with a UFO fantasy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And the cow giving birth.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		The cow was pretty amazing, you know, but the...
		What was interesting about that is that when she awakened, he told her what she had imagined.
		And he said, you know, this wasn't true.
		You know, we're on time.
		You know, I don't think there's going to be any baby calves on the side of the road.
		And, you know, no spaceship, but this didn't happen.
		She couldn't shake the memory.
		It was as real to her as the actual drive into the office.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you been put under before?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		I mean, when I was in the eighth grade, I discovered the abnormal psychology shelf in the library.
		And I used to hypnotize people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Under eight?
		Well, I was in the eighth grade.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'm sorry.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		So I was 12, maybe.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Eighth grade.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That should be 13, no?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Maybe I was 13. And I hypnotized my sister.
		She was a synambulist.
		She was easy.
		Synambulists are the people who walk in their sleep.
		And so they tend to be very suggestible.
		And so I would...
		She was a good subject for a beginner.
		And I used to hypnotize her and make her rigid and suspend her between chairs and then stick pins in her.
		Make sure that she was really under.
		And then I would hypnotize my fraternity brothers.
		I hypnotized my girlfriend.
unidentified		Jesus!
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I finally gave it up because I thought...
		This is really irresponsible.
		I was probably, by that time, by the time I realized how irresponsible it was, I was probably responsible enough to do it.
		But I haven't hypnotized anybody in many years.
		And I, but the only time I tried to, I had a dentist in Dallas when I was a kid.
		He used to hypnotize people and, you know, he's going to drill a cavity for me.
		And I said, I'd like for you to hypnotize me.
		And so it was, you know, your mouth is feeling like a block of wood.
		Your mouth is feeling like a block of wood.
		Nurse, I think he's ready.
		And I said, no, I'm not.
unidentified		Give me the Novocaine.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Then, the only other time that I had what was kind of success in being hypnotized was in 1983. It was the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
		And I had grown up in Dallas during the assassination.
		There was a story that was quite widely circulated that school children in Dallas had laughed when they heard the news.
		And I wasn't sure that I hadn't been one of them.
		I remember being astonished.
		I remember gaping.
		I remember, you know, did a ha-ha-ha come out of my mouth?
		I don't know.
		If it did, you know, but I think I smiled in amazement.
		I'm not really sure.
		I mean, you have to go back to what Dallas was like at that time.
		It was hysterical.
		You know, the politics were off the rails.
		Kennedy was hated, although not in my family, but there was this sense of Dallas as being a separate entity from the rest of the country and that Kennedy was the enemy.
		And I was anxious that maybe I had been one of those people that laughed.
		And so I had a friend who was a therapist who did hypnosis and I asked her to hypnotize me and see if she could take me back to the classroom.
		And help me remember.
		And so she put me under, regressed my memories, you know, to the point that I hear the ding-ding-ding PA system and the choked voice of our principal coming on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did she tell you you're hearing these things?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		She's asking me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You could recall.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what do I recall?
		And I remember seeing the face of my friend Steve Zink, one of my classmates in the algebra class, and I couldn't.
		Get it myself and so she gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion that I would have a dream and it would reveal to me what I had experienced and so I did have a very vivid dream and it was I was flying in a helicopter over the canopy of what I thought was Vietnam jungle.
		And you were looking for a child.
		And I saw it in the top of a canopy just lying on top of the tree.
		And as we got closer, I realized it was actually just a doll with these little X eyes.
		And that was the dream.
		And I decided from that that the me that I thought might have laughed was just a figment, an effigy of some sort, and that I really hadn't laughed.
		You'd have to understand what a scarring experience it was to have been from Dallas at that period of time and how everybody in the world hated you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's such a strange thing to try to...
		Remember, what was your reaction?
		How old were you at the time?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Thirteen, I guess.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it was a very strange thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you feel like you felt guilt at the possibility that you had laughed?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I did.
		I didn't want to be one of those people.
		And, you know, I have friends from Dallas who do remember people in their classroom laughing.
		And my experience, the real memory I have of it, is that people looked around in just astonishment.
		And part of the astonishment, I think, was that we just thought nothing would ever happen in Dallas.
		On the one hand, it was totally crazy.
		And on the other hand, it was totally paralyzed.
		There was just a sense of the conformity was so powerful.
		That, you know, you felt imprisoned by the sameness of every day, every thought, you know, just this very, very rigid environment.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So some spectacularly unique occurrence, like the president getting assassinated in Dealey Plaza just seemed impossible.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oddly enough, no.
		I mean, that was the thing.
		You know, if it was going to happen anywhere, it seemed like Dallas would be the right spot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because they hated Kennedy.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And even that morning, I went out to get the newspaper and there was that famous ad, welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas, you know, just this bleak thing.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And then there was, you know, it's just...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How was it bleak?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it made all these absurd charges about, you know, his aiding communists and so on and race, you know, race...
		It had a racist undertone to it.
		It was...
		There was...
		Yeah, there it is.
		It shows up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Huh.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You can see how it's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I can't read all that.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, it says, Welcome, Mr. Kennedy, to Dallas.
		You can see that it is saying a city, a city.
		It's about who we are, and we are not you.
		And it was...
		It was almost...
		And then in the same newspaper, maybe your guy can find it, there is a wanted...
		Oh, no, wait a minute.
		It's separate.
		It was on top of the newspaper was a wanted poster for Kennedy with full face and profile.
		Somebody had placed it on top of that.
		And it was like wanted for treason or something like that.
		There it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, wanted for treason.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that was on our doorstep that morning.
		So...
		That was the atmosphere of Dallas in 1963. Wow.
		There was a...
		There was a, you know, Adlai Stevenson had come to Dallas in October the month before to make a speech about the United Nations, and he was the UN ambassador.
		And he was assaulted.
		And he went out to greet the crowd.
		He was booed down.
		And by the way, I think Lee Harvey Oswald was in the audience that night.
		But he went out to try to talk to the crowd.
		And Stanley Marcus was his escort.
		And he said, don't try that, Adelaide.
		You know, this is crazy.
		And people were really worked up.
		You know, this woman was holding a sign and she whapped it.
		Down on top of Ambassador Stevenson's head, the sign said, If you seek peace, ask Jesus.
		So, that's...
		At some reason, that always struck me as the Dallas...
		And I just want to say...
		As I'm talking about Dallas in the past, Dallas of today is a totally different place.
		And I think in some ways, you know, it was so chastened and humbled by that horrible experience.
		I've said in the past, if Kennedy had to die somewhere, I'm grateful he did in Dallas because it made that city a far better place.
		And you remember the police killings a few years ago, nine cops, you know.
		It was a block away from the Dealey Plaza, but the way in which that city handled that tragedy by comparison was so magnificent.
		I have a lot of admiration for the city that Dallas has become.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I love Dallas.
		It's a great city.
		But that is a crazy slice of history.
		And it's so fascinating how, no matter who the president is, there's always some faction that think that that one person, that figurehead, is the enemy of democracy, the enemy of freedom, the champion of whatever, you know, whether it's the communists or Soviets or fill in the blank, whoever it is, China, whoever it is, there's always going to be some faction that think that that person is the real reason why we're all fucked up.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's the tension of democracy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		You were telling me, we were talking before this podcast started, and I said, we got to stop talking.
		Don't say any more.
		Because you wrote a novel about a pandemic.
		And you wrote it, and it came out during the pandemic.
		Which, I mean, it's almost like great timing and terrible timing.
		Like, George Carlin had a particularly damning special that was going to be released around September 11th.
		And they never released it.
		Because it was very anti-American.
		George Carlin, as he got older, was very much a curmudgeon, and he had some great rants.
		They just felt like this is just not appropriate, like post 9-11.
		It's just right after the tragedy.
		But your novel that you wrote, when this was all going down, your novel came out in April, right?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When this was all going down, we'd already been shut down in March.
		That's when it really hit the United States.
		What was that like for you, to have this...
		Sort of coordinate.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It was weird.
		It's still strange to me.
		It started a decade ago when Ridley Scott had me write a script.
		He had read the Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road, which is this post-apocalyptic story of father and son.
unidentified		So Ridley said, well, what happened?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, because Cormac didn't bother to explain.
		And I thought, well, how would civilization end?
		And so I conceived of a pandemic being more interesting than an atomic bomb, for instance, because it's hard to find heroes.
		And public health, I've always been...
		I'm fascinated by the kinds of people.
		I did a number of stories out of CDC when I was a young reporter.
		You know, I thought, these people are really cool.
		You know, they're brilliant.
		They're humble.
		They're incredibly courageous.
		They go off to these hot zones.
		You know, would you want to go to an Ebola zone?
		I mean, just horrifying.
		But, you know, off they go.
		You know, it really intrigued me.
		Ridley didn't make it.
		And he was right to because I hadn't solved the problems of the story and I hadn't done enough research.
		So I stuck it away.
		But I never forgot it and I thought...
		I really wanted to revisit it because I thought...
		You know, in a way we're due.
		You know, I had studied the 1918 pandemic when I was writing a story about the 1976 swine flu fiasco.
		It was so awful.
		675,000 Americans killed.
		As many as 100 million people worldwide.
		And 675,000 Americans was more than all the American soldiers who died in all the wars of the 20th century.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we have to take into consideration the size of the population back then was so much smaller.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		But October 1918 is still the deadliest month in American history.
		So when I decided I was going to write this, first of all, I went out and interviewed all the people that I would want to talk to, just as if I were doing a non-fiction novel or a non-fiction book or a New Yorker story.
		I made a calendar on my computer that was based on 1918. What happened in March of 1918 corresponds roughly with what happens in my novel, which is set in 2020. It was meant to be a kind of cautionary tale.
		And in January, I began to hear about this unidentified virus in China.
		And I thought, geez, that could be something.
		You know, SARS in 2003 happened.
		The Chinese hit it.
		You know, there was this...
		There was a virus going around.
		Nobody knew anything about it.
		World health authorities went over to investigate.
		And Chinese authorities took patients out of the hospital and put them in ambulances to hide them until the authorities left.
		And this thing went, I think, 37 countries before it was smothered, fortunately, by good health practices.
		I thought this is, you know, early on and by February I was telling my wife to start stocking up on groceries because I had just written this novel, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How long did it take you to write it?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		A year and a half, I guess.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just, the timing is insane.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I was on, for one thing, this British presenter, when I was promoting the book, I don't think anybody paying attention to this book at all.
		If it weren't for this pandemic, I think you're probably right.
		But it's not such a smart publishing strategy to bring out a book when the bookstores are closed.
		I'm going to have to remind myself not to do that again.
		But it was weird because the story became what I got right and what I got wrong.
		And it is interesting.
		I mean, there were See, I did the research, and I talked to the experts.
		Like, one of the guys that I talked to, Barney Graham, he works at National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is Dr. Fauci's shop.
		He helped me design my novel virus and he helped me cure it.
		He's the guy that invented the vaccine that is in both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
		And I had him to myself.
		He was one of many people in that category who advised me about how would you make a vaccine and so on.
		So I did all the research and I asked them, my sources, Suppose we had another event like 1918. Would we be any better prepared than our ancestors were?
		And the answer was, this is our biggest nightmare.
		And there were a lot of reasons for it.
		But one is, you know, we don't have a vaccine.
		We don't have any therapeutics.
		We'd be in exactly the same spot.
		And that's what happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just the timing of it is impeccable.
		It's crazy.
		When did you finish the book?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I finished it in August of 2019, I guess.
		Maybe July.
		It was in the summer.
		And I called it the end of October because there's a...
		October was the deadliest month.
		And October Revolution Island off the Russian coast plays a role in it.
		So anyway, it's...
		I enjoyed the work.
		I love research, and I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't.
		But part of the time, my hero's on a submarine.
		So I got to go to Kings Bay, Georgia, where we have our nuclear fleet, and get a little tour of the submarines.
		You know, not everybody gets to do that sort of thing.
		So I was able to make, you know, I like to make things as real as possible.
		And then it gives you a sense of authority when you sit down to write.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It had to be a bizarre feeling to have finished that book and have it come out in the middle of the pandemic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you almost had to feel like maybe the simulation is real.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Going back to what I got wrong, everything unfolded exactly as I had anticipated, unfortunately, but I didn't anticipate how people would self-isolate so willingly, really.
		I mean, it's frayed now, but at the cost of so much.
		It's impoverishing.
		It's, you know, spiritually, socially, culturally, you know, in so many ways it's damaged us.
		And yet it's a price that people have, so many people have been willing to pay.
		But my take on government was totally right.
		You know, government's fucked up in the novel and maybe I underestimated how badly the government would behave in this one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You wrote a long piece you were saying, too, right before we started, about COVID. What did you write it for?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was it?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		The New Yorker.
		Yeah, it's out now.
		It's called The Plague Year.
		And it occupies most of the magazine.
		People like Barney Graham are sources of mine now.
		They're the same sources I use on my novel.
		Oh, there it is.
unidentified		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's gotten a lot of reaction and I'm writing it as a book now.
		It's heartbreaking.
		It's a tragic story.
		The novel is tragic, but it's a novel.
		This chronicling of what happened to us this year has been really hard.
		And I think what has been missed in a lot of the coverage is just the personal experience of this catastrophe.
		And, you know, a lot of the stories I tell in there, you know, just they're hard, hard stories.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's an insane and in our lifetime unprecedented time where there's never been a moment where people have been asked to stop doing everything and it still didn't work.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In fact, in a lot of places it was worse where they asked people to lock down than in places like Florida or in Texas where they don't shut everything down the same way.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, we went through it in Texas and like so many states, you know, For one thing, the governors should never have had to do this on their own.
		You know, there was never a national plan.
		And there should have been.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But wouldn't the national plan vary depending upon the pandemic, depending upon what the virus was?
		I mean, it's one thing if you're dealing with something that's as contagious as the measles and as deadly as Ebola.
		You know, that would have been, that would have required us to take extremely drastic measures.
		And that was a lot of what we feared was going to be coming with COVID. I mean, there was an initial thought of what the virus was going to do, and this insane reaction to that, anticipating that, but no correction once we realized what it had begun.
		And also, no correction once we realized what the consequences of The lockdowns and this now we're now into nine, ten months of this isolation and fear and the economic disaster and despair.
		It's so much happening.
		And trying to find the path out of it is the weirdest part.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		In many respects, the economy is correcting itself.
		You know, it's not...
		Dead as it was, you know, a few months ago.
		You see a lot of activity.
unidentified		Many...
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, one of the people I talked about in my story was a Goldman Sachs analyst, Steve Strongin.
		And, you know, at first, you know, the...
		We had the biggest plunge, you know, in recorded history.
		And, you know, one of the analysts at Goldman was saying, you know, usually if you're trying to do econometrics, I think it's pronounced econometrics, you analyze, you know, wage increases and how would that affect spending patterns and, you know, restaurant availability, and then you...
		In this case, there were no restaurants.
		You subtract that from the economy.
		Take out airlines.
		It's more like arithmetic.
		You just strike them.
		And that's just never happened before.
		And yet there's another thing that's going on, which is that the economy is reorganizing.
		Around a new reality.
		And that's one of the things about capitalism that's good, is it's nimble, and it sees opportunity.
		Initially, when the markets crashed and unemployment went further south than we've ever seen it go, the stock market just froze.
		And then there was a realization, according to one of my sources, when they learned that this was transmitted asymptomatically, in other words, you can have it and not have any symptoms and infect me, then investors realized the usual treatments, public health approaches, We're going to work.
		If you have symptomatic transmission, you get sick, you go to bed.
		So you don't transmit so much.
		If you are sick and walking around the world and greeting everybody and passing it off, that's an entirely different experience.
		And that's why this disease is so sneaky.
		And from the Wall Street point of view, it was Oh, fuck.
		You know, so they wanted, at that point, you know, they had gone from just trying to, you know, get some money to operate their businesses to rushing to safety.
		So you had five stocks like Amazon and Apple and so on, occupying 20% of the S&P. And, you know, but Strongman said, that's not the, you know, the purpose of Wall Street is to move money from Businesses that are no longer useful into the businesses of the future.
		And that's when you see the rush for opportunity.
		And that's why the stock market has gone so crazy during this period and gone into historic highs where people are still, many people are still underwater.
		And there's going to be a lot of economic damage that's going to last for quite a long time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I don't understand how they're going to pull out of it.
		When you look at, like, Los Angeles has lost 75% of its restaurants.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just insanity.
		I mean, I don't know.
		What percentage small businesses are still barely hanging on?
		How many have they lost already?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, like Austin, your new city, you know, used to be known as the live music capital of America.
		Ah.
		Is there a more vulnerable business to be in than a bar that plays music?
		The bar that we patronize, Skylark Lounge, a lot of old musicians play there.
		Miss Lavelle White, who was born in 1929, was still singing the blues at Skylark.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		1929?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, she's a great blues legend.
unidentified		Wow.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, a lot of the bars are...
		We're permanently out of business, but so I think are a lot of the bands.
		Musicians typically live on a really small level of comfort to start with.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		As do comedians.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I bet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We lost Cap City Comedy Club in Austin, which is one of the best clubs in the world.
		An amazing club that had been open for 34 years, I believe.
		Maybe more.
		It might be 35. And it went under while I was here.
		We're hoping to bring some comedy back.
		I want to start a place once it feels like it's responsible and safe to do it.
		But it's just such a tricky thing to figure out when and how and what to do and measures to take place.
		I've been doing these shows at Stubbs Amphitheater with Dave Chappelle, but we test the whole crowd, so they get there early, they get tested, and they've only had to turn away a couple people, and that was not even the shows that I was a part of.
		I just did one spot on one of those shows, and Dave had done three, and out of those three, so for 1,200 people, they turned away two people that tested positive.
		I don't think there was any other ones.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Audience for comedy is safer than the average population then because our positivity rate right now in Texas is over 20. Is it 20%?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in Los Angeles they think it's so crazy that one out of 20 people has gotten the virus, either gotten over it or is currently infected.
		One out of 80 currently have it, I think.
		That's the most estimates right now.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And this new strain is sweeping through.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		In California, in particular, it's driving out the old strain really quickly, as it did in the UK. It was stunning how quickly it overtook the contagion.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's more contagious but not more extreme in its symptoms or anything like that, right?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's what they say, but I haven't heard that it's less.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I did, but it was from an unreliable source.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think there's wishful thinking involved in it.
		In 1918, there was a mutation.
		That made it more fatal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the weirdest part about this is the asymptomatic people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Somewhere in the neighborhood of as much as half the people that get it don't even know they have it.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		More than half.
		Maybe as much as 70%.
		That is so crazy.
		That's true of polio also, for instance.
		Only like one out of 200 cases of polio actually ever goes to see a doctor.
		What?
		When I was a kid, you know, I grew up in the polio era.
		And one morning, I woke up, I'm about five or six years old, six maybe, and I couldn't move my legs.
		And, you know, it was terrifying.
		And I think it was a reaction to a tetanus shot that I had gotten.
		You know, there were...
		There's a syndrome called Guillain-Barre, which is very similar to polio in some ways.
		In fact, there's a lot of scholarship now that says that Franklin Roosevelt may have had Guillain-Barre rather than polio because onset as an adult was so unusual.
		And it might have been the horse serum in which the tetanus shot was grown.
		Or it could have been something else entirely.
		But I don't know, I don't remember how many days it was before I was able to move, but I was.
		It was a scarring fright, and I've been advised not to take flu shots.
		And it's one of the reasons I have been so interested in this vaccine.
		And I'm going to take it because, you know, the kinds of, you know, possible pollution, you know, like horse serum or flu shots grown in chicken eggs and stuff like that, it's not a feature of this vaccine, at least not the Moderna and the Pfizer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		With any kind of vaccine, there comes a certain level of paranoia, especially a new vaccine.
		And that's been fascinating and frightening to behold and to read online all of the crazy theories and what people anticipate could happen.
		And people that say, I'm not taking that fucking thing.
		All the people that are terrified of it and don't want to try some what they deem to be an experimental vaccine.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I'm hesitant to get into this because I don't want to encourage the anti-vaxxers because I think it's important for the nation to protect itself, protect the health of our communities.
		But this is a story that is where a lot of the anti-vaxxers come from.
		In 1976, there was a young recruit at Fort Dix, New Jersey named David Lewis.
		He was 19 years old, a healthy young soldier, and he was on a march.
		He got sick on the march.
		And died, you know, quickly.
		And there was flu on the camp, but they sent in his blood sample to the CDC. Couldn't find any modern flus that it corresponded to.
		So they checked against swine samples.
		And pigs, after 1918, became a reservoir for the 1918 flu.
		We gave it to them, and they kept it.
		And so over the years, there were occasional examples of farmers getting sick from their pigs.
		But it was the H1N1 strain, which was 1918. Okay.
		And that's what killed David Lewis.
		And there were several other soldiers that had gotten it but weren't that ill.
		So I decided I would write about it, and I went up to Fort Dix.
		At the time, Gerald Ford was president, and the question was, Should we vaccinate everybody?
		And flu vaccines, you know, were already kind of on board.
		All you had to do is change the formula, and so it wasn't like what we're going through now.
		And the head of the CDC, David Sincer at the time, said, you know, we're going to go whole hog.
		He says, we're going to vaccinate everybody in the country.
		And so I went up to Fort Dix to find out what was going on.
		And I talked to the environmental health officer from Macon, Georgia.
		And as we were talking, you know, I said that I had talked to David Lewis's mother, who was a nurse.
		And he said, hey, did she tell you about that pig?
		And I said, what pig was that?
		Oh, some story.
		David ran into some pig, you know, God knows.
		And so I called Mrs. Lewis and she thinks, you know, yes, this was where David got sick.
		So the question was, Did he get sick from a pig?
		Or was it a human disease?
		And his fiancée, a very attractive young woman, they were going to go in the mission fields, and she was a nurse and a pilot.
		She was a lively person.
		Peg, laugh him.
		She and I, they had been driving over Christmas from her home in upstate New York to his home in Massachusetts.
		And the snow had closed the road down to a single lane.
		And they came upon a pig in the middle of the road, a big 200 pound hog.
		And David nudged it to see if he could move it.
		But, you know, so he got out and grabbed the pig by his ears and pulled him off to the side of the road.
		So the question was, did the pig cough in his face?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Jesus.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Because if he got it from a pig, And he got a huge viral load.
		And then some other people may have gotten it from him, but they didn't get that sick and it died out.
		Because in 1918, you had 100 million people dead.
		And so far, you had one, but you're going to vaccinate everybody.
		We had to find the pig.
		So we went house to house on this Route 23, knocking on doors.
		Did you see a pig out on the road over Christmas?
		And a lot of people had.
		And finally, it wasn't too hard to find the owner of the pig.
		He lived in, my memory may be a little wrong, It seemed like a double-wide trailer.
		It was a house pig, not evident at the moment, but it was his pet.
		And he had been in a railroad accident and lost a couple of limbs and was propped up against the refrigerator.
		And I proposed to him.
		I just like a little blood from your pig.
		Take it to the CDC. You know, they'll analyze it.
		You know, the whole country's waiting in line to get these inoculations.
		And if it happens that your pig is the source of it, then, you know, we might be able to save everybody a lot of trouble.
		And so he looked at this girl on the couch and he said, I know you.
		I know your family.
		I know where you live.
		You fuck with my pig.
		I'll burn your house down.
		Welcome to epidemiology.
		I said, really?
		We don't have to go that far.
		We finally worked a deal where his vet extracted a little blood, sent it to the CDC, and the pig had never been sick a day in his life.
		Millions of Americans, I think it was 26 million Americans, were vaccinated before there were hundreds of cases of Guillain-Barre.
		And a couple of dozen people died.
		And Gerald Ford called off the vaccination and lost the election.
		It was a fiasco.
		And, you know, I mean, history might have been different if that pig had been sick.
		Going back to that, you can see a government in disarray rushing ill-advised into the most extreme position, which is vaccinate everybody.
		Don't wait to see if it spreads.
		Of course I understand their hesitancy about waiting.
		This is a disease that has a history of leveling all of civilization.
		So you don't want to treat it lightly.
		But, you know, they sped to the finish line.
		And unfortunately, it caused a lot of damage and left a legacy of distrust that has never really gone away.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And yet here we are.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Here we are in a very, very similar spot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, it was an election year, you know, a novel disease.
		You know, we haven't seen...
		Hey, we're going to get through this.
		One of the things that I... With all the misjudgments that have been done, especially by the government, There have been a lot of heroic and brilliant people out there working on this, and I had the privilege of meeting so many of them.
		And I'm totally confident, even given my own history of having a vaccine reaction, I think this vaccine is a lifesaver.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I hope you're right.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I do too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you take any extraordinary measures to protect your health?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you done anything different during this pandemic?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No.
		It's been a very isolating experience.
		And as a reporter, it's hard.
		I miss my friends.
		I miss travel.
		I miss playing music.
		You know, there's a lot of things that I've really, really missed, but I don't want to put my family at risk.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		You're in the age group where you can get the vaccine, though, in Texas.
		You know, there was some real controversy as to whether or not they should vaccinate essential workers first or older people that are more at risk.
		And there's been some weird shit written about that that's flavored with social justice and all sorts of...
		I'm sure you're aware of all that.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I would like to get the vaccine.
		Look for it.
		I've signed up with our local pharmacy.
		Actually, healthcare workers are positive at a lower rate than the general population strictly because they behave themselves.
		They wear masks.
		They wear PPE. They're careful.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they really know how to wear the mask properly, too.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yes, they do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're sealed to their face.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		And they often wear face shields and stuff like that.
		But on the other hand, they're confronted every day with the possibility of...
		And I've talked to a lot of these people, you know...
		Some of them are single.
		They haven't seen their families in 10 months.
		There's nurses living in basements of their own homes so that they don't infect their children.
		Every day, they don't know if they haven't gotten infected that day.
		And so, yes, I think they should be at the front of the line.
		But, you know, I'm going to be competing with Uber drivers.
		And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of lobbies coming out for we're next.
		And it's a hard judgment to make about who's the most valuable.
		You start looking at elderly people where they have less life.
		You know, to lose.
		And so that's an argument against going out and vaccinating people like me who are so desperate to live forever.
		But it's all made more difficult by the failure.
		You know, at every stage we've failed.
		But this is the final stage and we're failing at getting the vaccine out and getting it into the arms of the people who need it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what's the issue here with the failure?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Start with, you know, over-promising.
		I was told by Pfizer back in September, I think, when, maybe it was August, when they had the results of their first trial.
		It was really, really positive.
		And they were going to have 100 million doses by the end of the year.
		And Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I predicted, you know, that we'd have 100 million vaccinations, and then it was 40, and then it was 20. And now, you know, as it turned out, a little less than 4 million vaccines by the end of 2020. Moderna is now coming online, and, you know, that's going to supplement things a lot more.
		But it's, you know, my doctor...
		There's a sheet that says, you know, where all the vaccines are going, and it said that he'd gotten 500 doses.
		He doesn't have any.
		He never had any.
		I don't know what they're saying, but, you know, there are all these different entities that claim that they have vaccine, or it is claimed that they have one, they don't have it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a mess.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And they're also worried about not having enough vials to put the vaccine in.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		So you may have a huge amount of vaccine that you simply can't bottle.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's also the transportation issue, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because it has to be insanely cold.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Other vaccines are going to come online soon, you know, AstraZeneca, Johnson& Johnson, you know, there are a bunch of others, but probably the gold standard is the Pfizer and the Moderna, which is the same vaccine that Barney Graham and Jason McClellan invented.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you wrote a novel about the pandemic, you wrote this piece for The New Yorker about the real state of what happened during COVID-19.
		As a writer, you've got to have an imagination about what could possibly take place.
		How do we bounce back?
		There's pitfalls and there's Hope, you know, there's possible, you know, bright futures, and there's possible dystopian futures.
		When you look at the future, what do you see?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Joe Rogan's Comedy Club?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's a good place to start, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would love to have that here.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Can't you see it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I can see that.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are other people with similar visions, and this is a reset time.
		Our culture has been leveled.
		There are a lot of things that are going to change.
		Office spaces, you know, skyscrapers, that kind of thing.
		You know, we're going to see...
		You're going to be living in a city where a lot of people are moving.
		You know, they're drawn to...
		First of all, they're escaping.
		They're escaping the idea of cities.
		It's been scarring, I think, to be trapped in a building where you have to ride an elevator every day.
		And, you know, push the button, you might die.
		You know, people long to be outdoors.
		And so they're moving to places where those things are easier.
		A lot of people in the West are leaving because of the fires.
		You know, climate change and things like that have made a big difference.
		So people are moving.
		And if you're in New York or L.A. and you're looking at a map of America and you're thinking, where should I go?
		There aren't a lot of places that, you know, there's no place like New York, there's no place like LA, but there are places that have attributes that make those places congenial.
		And, you know, so Texas is one of the places where a lot of people wind up because it's got, it's dynamic.
		I think that's the And also there are places inside Texas, like Austin, that are tolerant and interesting.
		Austin has had a reputation for being cool, far beyond what it deserves, and this has gone on for as long as I've been here.
		Ever since I moved to Austin, when people would ask me, where are you from?
		Texas.
		You get this kind of look.
		Where in Texas?
		Austin.
		Oh, Austin.
		It's forgivable.
		And it's supposed to, oh, I hear it's great.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you say Waco, they'll look at you sideways.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's one of those places that people think about moving if they have to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I had an opportunity to buy David Koresh's Mustang at one point in time.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And you passed it up?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I fucked up.
		I didn't have a place for it.
		It was for sale.
		I have a bit of a car problem.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's totally understandable.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I think that's a worthy problem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Also, I didn't know if I wanted to have his car.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Bad juju?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		It's a 68 Camaro, which is a nice car.
		I like 69s a little bit more, a little wider car.
		That's it right there.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was for sale.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's David Koresh's car?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, he should have spent more time working on the car.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why?
unidentified		It looks great.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It looks great, but just driving around a little bit would be a beauty.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, he, like most cult leaders, was too busy trying to fuck the wives of all of his...
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It always comes up, doesn't it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's the thing they always do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They always want to have access to everyone's wife.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's kind of crazy how these patterns just emerge over and over and over again.
		That's like one of the big ones.
		They want to separate you from your family.
		Yeah.
		I've had Steve Hassan on the podcast before who's a cult expert.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I know him, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, who was in the Moonies himself.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He got rescued.
		And he sort of outlined the steps they do.
		But one of the things is, like, remove you from the influence of your family.
		Yeah.
		Fascinating.
		You know?
		And with Koresh, they literally had a walled compound and brought everybody into the compound.
		And this one guy with this vision...
		And it's funny.
		It's like we have these tolerant people.
		Like, we tolerate a certain level.
		Like the Joel Osteen.
		It's like, eh...
		Seems to be doing more harm than he's doing good.
		Or more good, rather, than he's doing harm.
		Let it go.
		No big deal.
		Yeah, he's making a lot of money, and yeah, he's doing all this, and it doesn't seem right, but at least he's not banging everybody's wife.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, this brings up another memory.
		In my church in Dallas, the first Methodist church when I was growing up, Dallas had the reputation in the 60s of being the most religious city in America.
		It had the largest Methodist, the largest Baptist churches in the whole country and one of the largest Presbyterians and a large Catholic population as well.
		It also had high rates of murder and divorce and all those things that you find in a really turbulent culture that Dallas was.
		And my father taught Sunday school for years and years.
		And then Robert Goodrich was our pastor and he became a bishop and his son was a quarterback on our high school team.
		So we knew all these people pretty well.
		And Years later, the church had kind of gone into decline and downtown Dallas was sort of inner city.
		They brought in this charismatic young preacher named Walker Raley.
		His first action as a preacher and First Methodist was to blow into the microphone and breathe life into the church again.
		And he was very charismatic.
		He has great sermons.
		And I went to see him several times when we went back to Dallas for holidays and so on.
		I could see the attraction.
		And he was very progressive.
		And then these threats on his life began to appear.
		Apparently because of you know his racial progressivism and you know notes were slipped under his door and FBI began to investigate and then over Easter there was a really you know a very straightforward threat to kill him and so he wore a bulletproof vest under his vestments and You know,
		everybody, you know, inside the church circle, you know, we're all terrified.
		And then his wife is strangled in the garage and into a coma.
		And Walker Rayleigh did it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I was about to say.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I got suspicious almost immediately.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, he was never convicted.
		And I interviewed him and, you know, He said, you have all these piercing blue eyes and that sincerity.
		I don't know where you stand on me, Larry, but this all comes as a horrible, horrible shock to me.
		I said, I think you did it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You have the courage to say that to his face.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I didn't think he could strangle me.
		Although we were in the kitchen where there were a lot of sharp knives.
		But yeah, there it is.
		How about that?
		You guys can really flush this out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How do you say it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Rayleigh?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Rayleigh.
		Walker Rayleigh.
		He got off.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How did he get off?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, there was no witness.
		There was talk that his children, he had two kids, one of them may have been partially strangled.
		That's not clear, but you know...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		At the same time?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like one of them might have been a witness?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
		And it turned out Walker really was having an affair with the daughter of our previous minister, Lucy Goodrich.
		She called herself Lucy Papillon.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Lucy.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And she played the piano in my father's Sunday school class.
		I've had my own brushes with, I don't know, there's something about religion and sexuality.
		You know, I wrote about Jimmy Swigert, for instance.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've seen him!
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yes, indeed.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I remember that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That was wild.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I went to his church, and man, that church was crazy.
		You would have loved the services.
		I mean, it started off with this bass drum and then a guitar lick and then the curtains open and it's just rocking.
		It was much better music than the First Methodist Church in Dallas.
		And Jimmy was a real performer.
		Yeah, there he is.
		I remember at the end of the sermon, you know, people would come up and he would embrace them.
unidentified		And he liked to get hookers, right?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Very low class, you know, out on airport road, they're sitting in a plastic lawn chair, that kind of thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a bizarre fetish.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		But I think that there's something about when you climb into the spiritual spotlight.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that her?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That girl?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She looks like she's got her shit together.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You're inviting a certain amount of sexual projection.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because of the spotlight.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, then there's also the putting yourself in this position of being the ambassador of the Lord's Word.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, and you're preaching about this pious lifestyle and all the pressure.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, also the emotionality that Swaggart, I mean, that was one of his signature things, is that he would weep.
		That wasn't the only time he wept, you know.
		He would weep, he would rant, he would speak in tongues, he would dance, he would sing.
unidentified		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Is he dead now?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No, no, he's old.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Gotta get him in here.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I've thought about, you know, doing a follow-up, you know, because I'm intrigued by Disgrace.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, so many Titanic figures have fallen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This guy that strangled his wife, I'm sorry to interrupt you there.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Walker Rayleigh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Rayleigh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What did he say when he said, I think you did it?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		If I remember correctly, it's sort of, I'm sorry you feel that way, you know.
		He's now living in California.
		He's in L.A. He married another wealthy woman, I understand.
		She set him up and then she passed away.
		I don't know under what circumstances.
		I think he's with some...
		Anyway, he's got a Facebook page.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There he is.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		What year was this?
		It's in the 80s.
		I'm sorry.
		I'm not good on it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No worries.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And Peggy, his wife, in a coma.
		She lived for like 26 years.
		You can check to see when she passed away.
		Never regained consciousness, but was in a coma for that entire...
		And then it became a homicide.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When she died?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the evidence?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It was all circumstantial.
		He left a telephone message.
		Honey, I'm running a little late.
		I don't know what time it is.
		He was driving a Honda, which has a little clock right there on the dashboard.
		I've been studying over at SMU. Did you listen to the message?
		I think it had been published.
		I quoted it, so I either listened to it or I read it.
		But that was one of the things.
		He lied about not knowing what time it was.
		He lied about his whereabouts.
		He went over to visit Lucy.
		He...
		And, you know, there was no...
		Also, all those notes and stuff were written to him.
		There was one point where...
unidentified		Notes?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, when I told you about the death threats, he wrote them himself.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, written to him, you said.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you meant written by him.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Written by him.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And after Peggy was in a coma...
		Walker was in the hospital visiting and he overdosed and left a suicide note about how wrong he had been.
		But he never actually admitted what he had done.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He was wrong about.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he tried to commit suicide but survived.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Jesus.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		So he was in a coma and she was in a coma.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Jesus Christ.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And the wrong person came out of it.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it really goes back to what we were talking about earlier, this desire that people have to be this leader and to be this person with this secret inside knowledge and to be in control of a covenant, to be in control of a parish.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, in your performing career, for instance, isn't there some element of that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's want and attention, for sure.
		There's wanting acceptance.
		There's wanting to be successful, to be...
		To be recognized by people for your work, you know, for what you do.
		But you would hope that whatever pathology leads you to stand-up comedy in the first place.
		Because there's not a single person that gets in it that's not fucked up.
		Like, you have to have something wrong with you to want to be a comic.
		Because it's such a brutal, emotional battle.
		You bomb so often, particularly in the beginning.
		Bombing is devastating.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I bet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is the worst.
		It's, uh...
		I described it as, it's like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother.
		But the thing is, I think there's probably a person out there that wants to suck a thousand dicks in front of their mother.
		I doubt there's a person who wants to bomb.
		It's devastating.
		But it's also...
		For a person like myself who grew up in martial arts, it's a complex challenge.
		It's a complex challenge of managing concepts and emotions and how to get an idea across to people.
		And in a way, it's kind of a mass hypnosis because you're trying to bring people into a state of mind where they think the way you're thinking and they allow you to think for them and then you can get them to feel good in laughter.
		It's very rewarding.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I bet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		To look at it as an art form is a very rewarding art form when it's done well.
		Like a show that's done well.
		But I was telling Jamie the other day, I'll fuck up one line of one joke and then it will haunt me for days.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I won't be able to enjoy dinner.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'll be driving in my car by myself and I'll just be like...
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm the same way.
		I discovered an error in my novel just the other day.
		It's been published.
		It's out there.
		It's a terrible error.
		And it's been many eyes were on it, copy editors, editors, you know, me many times, you know, it all slipped by.
		But that achievement of getting a laugh is, you know, Even just in an ordinary setting, if you come up with something that's funny, I remember some of my best lines for decades!
		I will never tell them again, but that was the moment when I got it right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In that moment, yeah.
		Those are magical moments.
		And as a comic, like I said, it's a really rewarding art form.
		But there's no...
		I don't have a desire to, like, lead people or to be revered or to have some sort of...
		I mean, it sounds ironic that I do have this weird platform.
		But this is all accidental.
		This came about from just hanging out with my friends, talking shit.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And most of the time we were high.
		Like...
		Almost all the early podcasts, we were blasted out of our head.
		Because we're living in California, you know, and most of the early ones were all comedians.
		So we just have an excuse to get baked and to just make each other laugh and to put some stuff out on the internet.
		And then along the way I started saying, man, I'd like to talk to that guy.
		I'd like to try to get some guests.
		And then all of a sudden I have scientists on and professors and athletes.
		It just got weird.
		And it became what it is now.
		But it was never a plan.
		It was just something that sort of happened.
		And now...
		Over the last few years, I've recognized, like, oh, shit.
		I have, like, a responsibility.
		Like, I can't just talk shit anymore.
		Because now people are listening.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a whole aftermarket of, you know, other people commenting on your shows.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Oh, yeah.
		And taking things out of context and misrepresenting what my intention was.
		And then also, like, just the act of, you know, what I would call talking shit.
		Like, when Especially comics are around talking shit.
		They don't mean what they're saying.
		They're just being silly.
		They're just trying to say provocative, outrageous things to get a reaction from each other, to crack each other up, or just to have fun.
		And when you take that stuff and you put it in quotes, it becomes a totally different animal.
		You take away all the flavor and the fun, and now it's just a hurtful thing or an ignorant thing.
		Yeah.
		The podcast has become a very different endeavor than what I initially had.
		But also, because of the higher profile, now it's allowed me to talk to more interesting people and more influential people.
		Like we were talking about the Elon Musk conversation before the show.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Fabulous conversation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fantastic.
		Just to have an opportunity to sit down with one of the most interesting people I think that's ever lived and one of the most productive and prolific people.
		Just the fact that he's able to juggle all these plates simultaneously.
		He's a really unique guy.
		Off air, like super friendly.
		Really?
		Really easy to talk to.
		Very nice.
		When I first met him, I was kind of taken...
		It took a while during the first conversation I had with him to loosen him up.
		It took a while for him to relax because he was one way and then we were on camera and then all of a sudden he was very aware that he was on camera and he was a little tense.
		So then the whiskey started flowing and then I pulled out a joint and that became history.
		But it was all only possible because the podcast had become this thing where it was like, you have some ideas, go there.
		And then you can get those ideas out and there's no middleman.
		No one's going to stop you from discussing things.
		No producer's going to run in and say this is not appropriate or this is controversial.
		We'd like to steer away from this subject.
		I don't want to steer away from anything.
		If you want to talk about it, I'm more than willing to talk about it.
		I think any subject can be approached reasonably.
		You know, and when a guy like him wants to come on, and particularly, I found the most interesting thing, like, I could tell talking to him that it was almost like his, like, when you're looking at his eyes and he's discussing these things, it's almost like his brain is just wired different.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And when I said that to him, I was like, I have this feeling that, what is it like to be you?
		And he was like, he wouldn't want to be me.
		And that he realized when he was really young that it was different.
		That he thought everyone's mind worked like that.
		His brain is just like a tornado of ideas.
		And he's just trying to use his time as wisely as possible to give...
		Attention to all these different ideas whether it's the boring company or whether it's a solar power company or Tesla or SpaceX It's like who the fuck is running?
		That mean companies that are that influential that powerful that significant and four of them simultaneously.
		Yeah, how is that even possible?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, what's interesting about I was gonna say people like Elon Musk and there aren't very many people like him but ever They challenge you about what life could be and what you might be.
		I mean, you say you fell into this, but in a way, you created it organically.
		You made it you.
		And Elon Musk...
		Of course, he made a couple of billion dollars to get started.
		But he allowed himself to become himself.
		There was a role out there in the universe that he could step into.
		And I think that's true for all of us in many ways.
		I think we all get handicapped.
		Oftentimes, I'm in countries where I'm dealing with people who will never be fulfilled.
		Their culture is so confining.
		They can never be who they might be.
		But we're not in that culture.
		And so the potential to become bigger than we are is always there.
		But there are only a few people that actually become as big as they might be.
		You're limited by money or opportunity.
		We talked about some of those neighborhoods in Baltimore or something like that.
		They're tremendous barriers.
		But there are people that come out of those places and take the world on.
		There's something fascinating to me about accepting the challenge.
		There's a lot of risk involved.
		You can be totally deluded.
		And I'm sure you know people who think that they're so great, and everybody knows they're not, and it's a huge joke.
		But there are also people like Elon Musk who think they could be greater, and they are able to...
		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think that's a very significant point, that the people that think they're great, but they're deluded.
		That is the most toxic...
		Attribute that a person can have if they want to achieve something, because it'll keep you from progressing, because you have this distorted perception of your own worth.
		There's a lot of people out there that are extremely mediocre, that feel short-sighted.
		They feel like people have looked past them.
		They haven't got their just due.
		And it's weird.
		It's a weird thing, that sentiment, that idea that you haven't gotten the attention you deserve.
		But you get exactly what you deserve.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's the sad thing.
		Is it the case that they're in the wrong calling?
		Not necessarily.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think a lot of it is just discipline.
		A lot of people are not willing to work hard enough to grow.
		Like that feeling that you have when you found that you have an error in your novel and it just fucking rots you.
		That feeling.
		Everybody doesn't get that feeling.
		Some people are very satisfied with their work, even if their work is mediocre.
		Some people think that their stuff is awesome just because it's them, you know?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think that that's one of the advantages of mixed martial arts, I'm sure, is you find out really quickly where you stand.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And the truth is laid bare.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can't lie to yourself, because if you're lying to yourself, if you're pretending, there's physical consequences.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And the same thing is true for stand-up.
		You know, the laughs tell you, you know, are you who you would like to be or think you are or not?
		And, you know, also I think in writing, you know, people buy your books or they don't.
		They go see your play or your movie or they don't.
		You know, there's a critic's way in.
		You know, all of these things, you get feedback about where you are versus where you want to be.
unidentified		Right.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And I'm in a kind of unusual spot.
		I'm a lot further ahead than I ever thought I'd be.
		You know, I never thought I would achieve the kind of success that I've had.
		And I'm really grateful for it, but it makes me wonder, what if I'd been more ambitious when I was younger?
		What if I'd laid in some study time that I didn't have?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't this mirror what we were talking about before the podcast started?
		We were saying about the differences between our culture and other cultures is that we're, at least as a concept, endlessly ambitious.
		We want to work harder.
		We want to put in more hours to the...
		To the detriment of our personal lives, the detriment of our relaxation and social time.
		If you had been more ambitious, would you have been you?
		And would you have had the same kind of impact that you've had?
		Isn't part of the reason why you've had the kind of impact that you've had Is that you really just have concentrated on the work.
		You've concentrated on whether it's with Going Clear or your book about the pandemic or whatever these things are.
		From my admiration of you, you're a guy who puts incredible focus on a subject.
		And you seem to be, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to get absorbed in the work.
		If you're really ambitious, then you're thinking about end results.
		Then you're thinking about...
		Ultimate goals or you're thinking about numbers like what what is where's the benefit in that when you obviously are wealthy you obviously are healthy You obviously are fulfilled in terms of your career.
		Why would you want to be more ambitious?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's an interesting point.
		I think If I I had a realization, a kind of epiphany at some point.
		I tend to have these.
		I've had my two or three in my life where something came really clear, almost like a voice in my ear.
		But the helpful little tidbit that came into my ear was, nobody's going to remember you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Even if they do remember you, they're going to die, too.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		All the writers that were famous when I was in college, if you go to college now, they don't know their names.
		They don't know who Norman Mailer is or Gore Vidal or any of those people.
		Those people have all been forgotten.
		A small pool of recondite literatures will know those names.
		But those were the people that were just like, I'll never be that.
		And then that subsided into, they aren't that either.
		Their reputation is so mighty at one time.
		You know, have all diminished into the pool of forgetfulness, and that'll happen to everybody except, you know, Shakespeare, a few, you know, a few, and those, you know, those giant names of the past are enshrined in the academy so firmly that it would take a lot to remove them.
		But I can see a time when, you know, reading and, you know, that sort of thing is going to be overtaken by other pursuits, and You know, no writers will really be known very well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know about that.
		I think there's always going to be a desire to hear the well-formed thoughts of intelligent people and creative people.
		I think that's always going to be the case because there's something incredibly rewarding about whether it's great fiction or non-fiction about reading someone's really well thought out, well edited work.
		It's a giant part of what makes us understand each other.
		Is reading other people's writing or seeing their work, whether it's music or comedy or anything.
		Seeing what happens when someone focuses on a thing and hones it down and puts it into a presentable package and this is done here.
		And then you distribute it to the world.
		And then the world reads it and takes it in and goes, oh, wow, I like how he thought about that.
		And it changes the way people think about things.
		It changes the way people consider things.
		It gives people energy and enthusiasm.
		It gives them motivation and ambition.
		I think writing is always going to be a thing.
		I think it's a very important thing.
		And I know for me personally, when I get less focused on things, when I feel like maybe less in control of my thought process is when I'm not writing.
		When I sit down and I force myself and I discipline myself to write, I feel like my thoughts are better formed, they're more concise, they're more easily digestible to other people, and I think it's a direct result of focus and discipline.
		The focus and discipline to sit down and put the work in.
		And then when I do that, that muscle, whatever that thing is, it grows.
		It gets stronger.
		It gets sharper.
		The endurance or whatever it is, it becomes more applicable in all the other things that I do in life.
		I think writing is always going to be a thing.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I really do.
		Well, you said that so well.
		It made me...
		I'm proud of my profession, and then also because you said it so easily, it undermines your argument.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's something I've thought about a lot, you know?
		I've also thought about, like, my own profession, the various stages of it.
		Like, in the beginning, I remember just wanting to work.
		I just wanted to be a professional.
		I couldn't imagine being able to pay my bills just telling jokes.
		And then it got to a point, well, God, I would love to be really successful.
		I want to be famous.
		There's comedians that sell out comedy clubs.
		And then there's, oh, there's comedians that sell out theaters.
		Holy shit, I could never sell out a theater.
		And then all of a sudden, I'm selling out theaters.
		And then it became arenas.
		And that was only over the last few years.
		But that's the most bizarre shit.
		When you walk into a room and there's 15,000 people all waiting to hear you talk.
		It's the strangest thing on earth.
		But the ambition has changed to now the main focus.
		And even while all that stuff happened, it was like the more impressive things happened, the more I just focused on work.
		Instead of focusing on getting attention, which is what I did when I was really young and starting out, I focused on just being better at the thing.
		And the more I was better at the thing, the more I focused on that, then the other kind of success sort of just fell into place.
		But that's not what I ever think about.
		I always just think about the work itself.
		And the more I think about that, about how to put the bits together and how to make them better and how to edit them, and maybe I should go over that again.
		Maybe I'm just settling for this position.
		Maybe I need to rewrite it entirely and start from scratch and switch it around and maybe look at it from a totally different angle.
		That's when it's been the most rewarding for me.
		But also, I feel the least responsible for it, which is the weirdest part about it.
		I feel like when something is done, even though I know I put a whole lot of work into it, it's like...
		I just showed up.
		It's almost like Pressfield writes about the muse, and he writes about it like it's a real thing.
		Treat it like it's a real thing that you show up, and you put in the work, and then it'll come visit you.
		It almost feels like that sometimes.
		It almost feels like the better I get at it, the more successful I get at it, the less I feel like I did it.
		And the more I feel like it's just a matter of me forcing myself to show up and then this process takes place.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		I look at it a little differently because I think people that are hugely successful are the most true to themselves.
		Elon Musk is an excellent example.
		To be somebody else or to correspond to a stereotype of some sort is very limiting.
		And also, you can't, you don't have the original genius that comes along with being who you really are.
		And so if you, it seems to me that what you've done is command all the Joe Rogan-ness that you can and poured it into a novel form.
		And made it part of you.
		And, you know, if you were trying to be something else, it might not be—it wouldn't give you the chance to be who you are in the genuine way that this does.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe that's true, but maybe the way that I'm able to do that is by just getting out of my own way and not thinking about me at all.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		But that's the same thing.
		Getting out of your own way, when you say that, what's getting in your way is social constructs that are not you.
		And if you remove those and just allow whatever is your essence to manifest itself...
		Then, you know, you may go to prison.
		I mean, who knows what that essence is?
		But on the other hand, you become authentically who you are.
		And I think that that's what people are so hungry for in any field, whether it's comedy or, you know, politics or writing.
		They want something that feels real.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think you're 100% right about authenticity.
		I think that's the thing that I value more than anything.
		Whether someone's right or wrong, if I hear them talk or I hear their take on things, if I know it's genuinely coming from their real thoughts, there's no ideological bend, there's not some predetermined position that they've taken, but they're just actually thinking about things and looking through it and trying to formulate their thoughts in an honest way.
		I can appreciate that more than anything because it's so...
		Especially in the broadcast medium, it's so rare because there's too many gatekeepers.
		To have an idea and to bring it to a television show, for instance, it's like you're going through so many people.
		It's so difficult to get your own actual thoughts and have them unmolested and then distribute them to the world.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I went through that with—we did an adaptation of The Looming Tower, and it was not hard, honestly.
		The problem was that there were a lot of people over the years that wanted to do it, and I didn't want them to, because I thought, you know, 9-11— It's kind of sacred.
		And, you know, go make entertainment of it.
		But on the other hand, it needs to, I mean, you know, kids now, they don't have any experience of it.
		You know, it's like World War II for me.
		You know, my dad was in the war.
		Well, you know, I wasn't.
		So I thought it was important to memorialize it.
		So I produced it with a couple of friends.
		The thing was, they couldn't fuck with it.
		There had to be this general agreement that the tone has to be exactly right.
		Because if you get it wrong, it'll be a sin in some way.
		And so anyway, it was a good experience.
		You know, I'd like to do it again, but I know what you mean.
		I've pitched things in the past, and the pitching itself is...
		It's such a high feeling.
		Nothing comes of it.
		You know, everybody calls their agents and stuff like that.
		Oh, they loved you!
		You know, this sort of thing.
		It never goes anywhere.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One out of a hundred.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it just doesn't.
		But I don't know.
		I like to work in different formats.
		I love the movies and I love plays.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What are you working on now?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm finishing a book about COVID and I had a, you know, I told you about my, a little bit about my movie background, but I had a play that we had two productions here in Austin.
		It was called Sonny's Last Shot at the time.
		And it was a lot of fun.
		It was about Texas politics and it's set in the Texas House of Representatives, my favorite political body.
		And It never traveled.
		And I thought, well, a Broadway producer came down and took a look and she said, you know, thought about it as a musical?
		Well, yeah.
		You know, Texas politics does make you want to dance.
		I and a great pal of mine, Marsha Ball, who's a Singer, songwriter, piano player, extraordinary and beloved figure in Austin Music.
		She and I started writing music for it and then Broadway producer bailed on it and said, you know, it shouldn't be a musical.
		It should be a television series.
		So we went to HBO and sold it.
		And I wrote a pilot, and they fired my executive and trashed all of his projects.
		So I had neither a series nor a musical.
		And then I started to write it as a novel.
		Because I thought, you know, I've got to get the story out somehow.
		But I'd miss the music.
		So...
		It's now going to become a podcast.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		A musical podcast.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And my son, Gordon, who's also a musician, has joined me and Marsha.
		And we're writing new songs.
		I wish I had written songs when I was younger because it's a huge amount of fun.
		And the kind of writing I do is usually very solitary.
		My creative process is, you know, essentially, you know, I spend the whole day alone.
		And, you know, working with other really creative people is a great joy, especially these people.
		So we're having fun and, you know, we just wrote a couple of songs over the holidays.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's awesome.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I love that you're willing to take on all these different kinds of projects.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		You know, it all comes from nobody's going to remember you.
		You know, it's like Jerry Lee Lewis.
		You know, I idolize him.
		You know, one of the reasons I took up the piano was I wanted to play Great Balls of Fire on my 40th birthday, so I took up piano when I was 38 and a half.
		And I even got my feet into it, as is required.
		He's always done the same thing.
		And he's Jerry Lee Lewis, and he's kind of imprisoned by that.
		And does he ever want to sit down and play a little Dvorak, you know, or something like that?
		You know, who knows?
		As shocking as it might sound, nobody's going to remember him either.
		And if you no longer are tied to this idea of becoming really famous and having this enduring legacy, it frees you up to do whatever you want to do.
		And in a way, that's become my brand.
		You know, he's the guy who does everything.
		And I'm all right with that.
		But...
		I would rather do this and maybe not have quite a deep trough in the culture.
		You know, if you just keep trying to write one book after another, some of them are not going to be any good.
		You know, but if you are diversifying and you're...
		I have an idea for a play, but it's not a book.
		You're supposed to be writing books, and that play never gets done.
		But if it's a really good idea...
		That's the hardest part in the creative field, I think, is getting the idea.
		There's just precious few of them.
		And so, you know, I have to pay attention to the ideas as they come to me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a great freedom to be able to chase different ideas and to pursue different kinds of work.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		And every one of them reinforces the other.
		You know, when people say, well, you write movies and plays and, you know, nonfiction.
		You know, there's the are you crazy question that my editors often ask me.
		But by writing movies and plays, there's no narrative in them.
		It's all scenes and dialogue.
		Those are very powerful elements.
		And too often ignored by non-fiction writers.
		And, you know, if you incorporate the kind of scenic construction...
		In a nonfiction story or book, it gives a tremendous amount of power.
		And contrarily, you know, if you take your skills of reporting and apply it to fiction, learn how the world really works, make it feel real and authentic, you know, it cross-pollinates.
		And I think I'm a far better writer because I have developed these tools from different kinds of craft.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a great way to end this.
		We just did three hours.
		Can you believe it?
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		That's pretty impressive.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pretty amazing, right?
		There's like a time warp in this room.
		Thank you very much, man.
lawrence wright ▲ ● ▼		It's been my great pleasure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mine as well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.

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