Chuck Palahniuk and Joe Rogan expose how modern hypersensitivity stifles bold storytelling, like Geek Love or Confederacy of Dunces, once celebrated but now unfilmable due to offensive themes. Palahniuk’s 2016-censored Make Something Up—including "Mr. Hand’s horse"—and his mob assault trauma reveal how censorship and head injuries shape art, from Fight Club’s appeal to Flannery O’Connor’s dark humor. They contrast 1970s grit (Alien, El Topo) with 1960s idealism, proving authenticity over tokenism in casting (e.g., Sigourney Weaver) and media narratives (Atwood’s "middle-aged" framing). Palahniuk’s analog writing process—burning notes, messy drafts—challenges digital editing’s sterile control, while his Study Hall program and lockdown-era bookmarks underscore creativity’s need for raw sacrifice and shared struggle. [Automatically generated summary]
I was very excited to talk to you because it's been about three years and during those three years it seems like Censorship issues and issues of what you can and can't say and what isn't acceptable, they seem to be ramping up.
And you are, in my mind, one of the more interesting and dangerous writers out there because you...
You tap into these super uncomfortable stories and you're willing to explore areas in writing that I think a lot of people would avoid.
We talked about this the last time you were here, some of the more dangerous stories that you had workshopped and people had gotten upset at you for.
But I really wanted to talk to you because I wanted to know how this is affecting you.
How this weird climate of hypersensitivity and purity tests is affecting your writing.
You know, I used to, when I look back at the books that I really loved growing up, I see that they are now under the big umbrella of the very small phenomenon called absurdist existentialism.
It is about a man and a woman who own a failing circus and they decide the way to save their circus is to have deformed babies.
So they take insecticides, they expose themselves to radiation, and they give birth to ultimately a whole crew of severely deformed children, plus a whole crew of children that don't live, that are in the circus culture, they're called pickled punks, those kind of deformed babies in formaldehyde.
Catherine wrote that book.
It was the first banner book under the new director at Knopf, Sonny Mehta.
It was one of the top-selling books of the 20th century.
It was a huge success.
And it really is absurdist existentialism.
And the general idea is that life is so messed up, so unfixable, that we might as well go right to the crazy.
And Vonnegut wrote it, Tom Robbins wrote it throughout the 70s, Still Life with Woodpecker and Matches, even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
Nathaniel West wrote it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in the 20s.
These people who had survived the Spanish flu and survived the First World War.
And that there is a kind of a tipping point in the culture where things seem so messed up and so unfixable that you just sort of tip into this absurdist existentialism.
And there's a fantastic joy and freedom in that.
And so My goal is always to try to write the kind of book I want to read.
And I want to write Geek Love because I want to read Geek Love, regardless of whether or not Catherine could write it.
Even if she wasn't dead, she could not write that book anymore.
There's something about writing and reading that kind of stuff where you can never capture it in any other medium.
And I think in some ways even audiobooks don't do justice to some of the darker ideas because you kind of want to piece them together in your own mind.
And as you're reading it in silence and the author's ideas are coming to life inside your head, you know, your own creativity and imagination are intertwined with the work of the artist to try to fill in the visuals of the work.
It's a place where that's the only way you can truly get the most out of those really twisted ideas.
Well, and because also to be made literal enough to film or even to be said out loud kind of destroys that intimacy where it only occurs in your mind.
It occurs in a kind of sub-vocalization and in the kind of sympathetic neural phenomenon that's happening when you read a verb, studies have shown that your body thinks that you are running.
Your body thinks that you are doing what the verb is saying.
And you lose that when you hear it out loud and you lose it especially when it has to be made literal enough to be filmed.
Another absurdist existentialist book, Confederacy of Dunces.
You know, John Goodman, God bless him, he has had that book optioned for decades and that will never be a movie because it is filled with racist humor, it is filled with misogynistic humor, and it is filled with homophobic humor.
It is completely an unfilmable book, but people adore Confederacy of Dunces and it won the Pulitzer Prize, but it cannot be made literal enough to become a movie.
Yeah, there's books that were made at a different time where even today people don't want you reading them anymore.
That might be one of them.
If that ever gets under the spotlight and people start examining some of the things in that book, that might be one of those books where people just decide you shouldn't be reading that anymore.
Well, I think there's kind of a political aspect too.
I've seen some essays about why Mel Gibson can just get crazier and crazier and he's not canceled and why Roseanne Barr gets crazy one night on Ambien and she's gone.
And a lot of these essays, for the most part, say it's because Mel Gibson is making people money and that people generally like Mel Gibson.
They really like Mel Gibson and nobody really wants to cancel him.
Where supposedly Roseanne Barr had offended so many people and she was so difficult that people were really gunning for any opportunity to cancel her.
And I think with Confederacy of Dunces, with these really beloved books, People like them too much to really put them under that kind of microscope.
And also he was getting all these bids for tens of hundreds of millions of dollars from people around the world who also wanted Mr. Hand's horse for their own purposes.
And this is just one of 23 different stories that were all more or less each offensive in their own way.
Well, do you remember Into the Wild, the first big Krakauer book?
When you go through that book, it's really fascinating because you know that Krakauer only had so much material about Chris McCandless.
It's just a few months out of the kid's life.
And so, how does he deal with that material?
So he starts in, kind of after the fact, establishing the bus, the death scene.
And then he starts in a very linear, deep flashback, taking Chris McCandless up to a certain point.
And then he expands for several chapters saying Chris is not the first young guy at that age to sort of throw everything away and hit the road.
And he profiles maybe a half dozen sort of famous guys who did the exact same thing and kind of disappeared in the culture.
And so he expands the theme showing that historically it's not a one-off, that young men have always taken these kind of pilgrimages to find themselves.
And then just before Chris McCandless is killed, he depicts himself climbing that steep mountain in Alaska by himself at the age of 23 and almost dying.
And so he illustrates the theme over and over both with McCandless in the present and with these historical figures doing the exact same thing and then with himself explaining why this story is so compelling for him because he did the same thing at that age and he didn't die.
And then we show Chris dying.
And so if you're going to do the the zoo story You need to expand it beyond the story itself.
You need to look for where it occurs and is sort of illustrated in other aspects of the culture, both historically and in other parts of the world.
You need to expand the theme beyond just what actually happened.
We should probably tell people what we're talking about.
Mr. Hands is a video about a guy getting fucked to death by a horse.
It's not necessarily...
The video that's available that you can watch, and we found it the other day, and we watched it, is not the guy actually getting fucked to death by the horse.
It is just him getting fucked by the horse.
Apparently, they don't have the video of him actually dying or the one time that killed him.
It punctured his organs or whatever it did internally that ruptured him.
They had to bring him to the emergency room.
And then the police were called and they started questioning him like, what's going on here?
And then they found out that...
Well, the whole story was that it's legal in Washington State to have sex with animals.
The thing about Into the Wild is that's a story that many people can sort of relate to.
You can kind of relate to this idea that society and materialism and the road that everyone's on is fruitless and filled with...
Angst and no one no one wants to live like that, but they just do they do because everyone has before them but really You're better off just being free and just going into the wild like that that Appeals to so many people the idea that the path that we're headed down with civilization is It's not healthy.
It's not natural and ultimately it's going to be our demise So there's so many people that like the idea of going to the woods is really appealing and The idea of getting fucked to death by a horse.
You know, and I don't think it's ever going to be relatable, relatable.
But at least in the short story that I wrote, the main character makes the point, or he explores the point, that we find it funny because it was a white male...
And if it had been anyone else, it would not be a story and it would certainly not be funny.
But you take somebody who is perceived in the culture as having all of the power and you show them getting fucked to death by a horse and dying on the floor in an emergency room dumped there by their friends with rutting mare pheromone all over his legs.
The other day at Bi-Mart, which is kind of this discount department store in the Northwest, they had this huge table of half-priced things, and they had all sexy names, and they were little aerosol sprays.
They were rutting elk pheromones.
And I just had to buy them.
You know, it's like the ultimate stocking stuffer is like, who do I know that needs rutting elk pheromones?
And they all have these kind of big type on the packaging that says, the bulls will come running.
They'll follow you.
They'll follow you right to your gun.
They'll walk right up to you if you wear this.
And so the idea of all these hunters spraying themselves with rutting elk pheromone so they can attract these kind of horny elk is just so appealing.
In Fight Club 3, the graphic novel that I launched last year, the year, the worst year ever to launch a novel, I needed a backstory for the female character in Fight Club.
I wanted her to be an orphan.
So in the backstory, Tyler, who is this, you know, Tyler Durden, the eternal character, he seduces Marla's mother.
And he says, I want to do furry play.
And he seduces her out into the woods.
And, uh...
Ah, no, I got it backwards.
Uh...
He has her seduce Marla's father into doing furry play.
And so she's running through the woods naked and Marla's father is dressed up as a cougar chasing her to ravish her.
And then Tyler is in a blind with a bow and arrow and he shoots Marla's father in the back.
And he dies while rutting with Marla's mother.
That's how her father dies.
And then Tyler, who is the paramour, convinces Marla's mother to basically do the same scenario.
And as they're running through the woods, Tyler is dressed up as a grizzly bear and Marla's mother is trying to be ravished.
And then a real grizzly bear shows up.
And that's how Marla's mother is killed.
I think that is the best backstory I've ever written for a character.
When they get older, when they hit like 13, 14 years old, then the antlers start shrinking and the tines grow smaller and it's usually because they're starting to die.
But that's a rare thing.
Most of the time they die, they're killed by mountain lions or by other elk.
They stab each other to death with those things.
And we find them dead all the time.
Like every year you find one dead.
They just stab them through the lungs and they stab them while they're down.
That's the least horrible, because most of the time they get through it intact.
When you kill an elk, one of the things that happens is you skin them and quarter them, and when you skin them, you find puncture wounds all over their body from fights.
So generally speaking, they're superficial wounds.
They're small wounds all over the place.
But occasionally, one will hit another elk with such force that one of the tines goes through the ribcage, and that's when they die.
But it's more rare, because more rare than that.
We find one dead every year, but they fight all the time.
They're establishing dominance almost every day.
If there's a large herd of elk, maybe you'll find one a season.
But the whole idea is you can find them better when they're congregating like this.
And the way you call them in is you either pretend that you're a female or you pretend you're a male.
So you either pretend that you're a male that wants to challenge them and steal their women, or you pretend that you're a female and that you've left...
Whatever male used to have control of you, because it's generally speaking like it's one bull elk that is the herd bull, so the biggest, baddest bull in the mountain, and he'll have 20, 30 cows, and he'll be trying to breed them all.
And one of them occasionally will break loose, and the bull will risk his life and leave the circle of, leave the safety of numbers to go find the one that took off to bring her back.
And that's, I killed the bull...
Like that in this video that we did for Under Armour.
That's the very specific way we killed it.
We trailed the elk and we made noises like a female elk and this big herd bull thought one of his cows was left behind.
So he came back to try to get that cow and that's how we got him.
And he found himself in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by what he thought were wolves, because they were barking in the dark around him.
And he was terrified.
And for a long time...
He would just keep blowing the call.
And he was also trying to retreat and find his pickup truck.
And ultimately he realized that these barks were the elk themselves, that the male elk will make a barking sound that sounds very much like a wolf.
And so it sounded like he was pursued by a pack of wolves, but he taped them and he showed me the video of these elk actually barking.
They make like weird sounds, but it's generally the males bugle.
They make a scream.
Have you heard an elk bugle?
Oh, Jamie, you got to pull this up because it's one of the wildest sounds in nature.
And it's one of my favorite things.
Like when you're hunting them and you're around them and you're hiding in the woods and you're sneaking up on them and you hear them bugle, your hair's standing up on end.
I think there was a bunch of noises sold as a Sasquatch noise, but if they tried to say that noise was a Sasquatch noise, any elk hunter would go, shut the fuck up.
Have you ever heard the samurai sounds when he's speaking about Sasquatch?
It's one of the most ridiculous noises.
There was these folks that were in the mountains of Northern California and they claimed that they were surrounded by Sasquatch and these Sasquatch had a language.
And you hear the language and it's so preposterous and so stupid sounding.
You know, some things they just, you just know, you know?
Like, there's no if, ands, or buts, this is bullshit.
And this is one of them.
The samurai sounds, it sounds like they're Japanese.
So they're knocking on trees.
They made recordings of this.
So convenient that they had a recording device.
Right when they're experiencing Sasquatch.
But you also can hear when the men are talking and describing that these sounds are in the distance.
You can tell they're full of shit.
Like you can tell they're bad actors.
They're not, they're just, they're not experiencing what they're saying they're experiencing.
We would have to sit here and listen for 20 minutes to get some really good versions of it, but the sound was like, Like, it literally sounds like that.
Like, it sounds completely fake.
And these folks are trying to pass this off as Sasquatch language.
There was a creature that was alive while people were alive that was a little hobbit creature.
Do you know about that?
Homo floriensis, I believe this is how you say it.
They called it from the island of Flores.
They found, and this is a creature that lived as recently as 13,000 years ago, they found bones of these very small humanoids.
And what they were essentially was a branch of humans that were wiped out.
There was another version of them, I think in Vietnam, called the Orang Pendek.
So this is a real animal that lived on the Homo floresiensis.
This is like established science.
They have multiple skeletons and bones of these creatures.
And there was a little bit of dispute initially.
They thought maybe it was like a deformed human that they found.
But then they found a bunch of bones.
And they found tools so that they know that these things probably used tools and were hunters.
And they think they might have been wiped out.
And there's speculation they might have been wiped out because, you know, they were competing for food and maybe even hunting people.
Like killing children and shit like that.
But they were little tiny humanoid people.
Because there was a bunch of different kinds of humans.
In the transition between Australopithecus and Homo sapiens, there was a lot of branches of the human tree, and some of them made it to modern times, essentially.
I mean, this is like during the Ice Age, these things were alive.
This is really crazy.
So while people were all over the world, you know, building structures, and while at the same time they were building these huge stone monoliths in Turkey, there was little three foot tall furry people that were living on an island in Flores.
Yeah, because cuckoos reproduce by laying their eggs in the nests of other birds, and the cuckoo egg hatches first, and it hatches biggest.
And so the cuckoo nestling pushes the other eggs out and destroys them, or if the other birds hatch, the cuckoo nestling kills them.
And so the parents end up feeding the cuckoo fledgling.
And typically the fledgling is three or four times the size of the surrogate parents.
And so it's kind of tragic when you see these pictures of house sparrows feeding a nestling the size of a chicken.
And that's where the whole idea of the cuckold comes from, is that you're basically raising someone else's child and you're being sort of used and your own children have been neglected or destroyed so that you can care for someone else's child.
The craziest animal I ever heard of in the womb is there's a shark, I forget which kind of shark it is, but the mother shark will have multiple sharks inside of her body and the baby sharks will start eating the other baby sharks around them and murdering them inside the womb before birth.
But, you know, the way I do it, there's got to be a lot of laughs on the front end.
Because nobody wants to spend their time, typically when they're alone, in the waiting room at the hospital or the airport, saying, oh, I want some more cruelty and sadness right now.
No, they think you've got to sell them that this thing is going to be fun and lighthearted.
Do you remember, and I might have talked about this, but the old Whoopi Goldberg routine where she's the only black surfer chick.
And she does it all in upspeak, valley girl language, and it's very fast.
It's from the very early 80s.
And she talks about being the only black beach girl, the only black surfer chick, and how she really has the hots for this one surfer dude.
And the two of them hook up, and she's in love, and she gets pregnant.
And the whole thing, people are roaring through the whole thing.
And then she brings it to the point where she's in a dirty public bathroom at the beach, pulling open a wire coat hanger and then stuffing it inside of herself and giving herself a coat hanger abortion on this filthy concrete floor.
And at that point, she's still Valley Girl Upspeak, and the audience is completely silent.
The audience is horrified.
And the contrast between this low slangy language telling a traumatic story, the disconnect there, makes it even more tragic.
And the fact that she's not acknowledging the horror makes it even more tragic and also strangely funny in this completely nihilistic, horrible way.
And at the end, you can hear a pin drop.
And at the end, she says, so y'all got to come down to the beach and hang out with us.
Just hang out with us.
And she's still a character in so much denial.
And she's forcing the audience to carry the horror themselves.
That is what I want to do.
Where you have them laughing and laughing and laughing.
And at the moment of the greatest laugh, you break their hearts really badly.
And animals can't really do that.
You know, nobody wants to see the cute kitten video where they all get dropped into the wood chipper.
What is it about that feeling of discomfort that brings you joy?
Or that you enjoy giving to people that are reading your stuff?
Is it just that...
You don't like the cliché sloppy endings where everything is going to be fine and everything's great and the world is different in literature than it is in real life.
What is it about these moments of darkness where you do break everybody's heart?
I enjoy them because they prove I'm not the only one.
I'm not the only one that's had these moments of complete humiliation or complete powerlessness.
One story I've always loved is my best friend in college.
His father was this mining professor and this very super macho guy.
And my best friend Franz was like the son that just wasn't turning out right.
And in their household, they had a bunch of kids, girls and boys.
And one day, Franz's dad had all of his beer-drinking football buds over to watch the Super Bowl.
And Franz found this old doll that had been around the house for decades.
It was called Sissy.
And it barely had a hair left on its little doll head.
And Franz sat there as maybe a five or six-year-old little boy.
And he very carefully untangled Sissy's hair.
And he backcombed it.
And he teased it.
And he dressed it into a big bouffant.
And he even got one of his mother's brooches.
And he put that brooch through the front of this beehive hairdo to hold it in place.
Very Marie Antoinette.
And he was so proud that he had turned this really decrepit, ugly thing into something passably pretty.
He had sort of redeemed it.
And then he took it to his father in front of all of his father's friends in the Super Bowl.
And he said, Daddy, Daddy, look!
I made Sissy pretty!
And his father was so humiliated that he beat Franz right there in front of their whole peer group.
He just beat Franz.
And the story is so painful.
But everybody's had a pain like that.
Everybody has done that thing out of innocence and expression that for whatever reason got you slammed.
And nobody talks about it.
Nobody talks about it because it's so painful and because everyone thinks they're the only one.
And so if I can take some of those stories and bring them to light, it creates this opening for everyone to say, oh my god, I once did this thing and my parents reacted badly to it or it destroyed my life and I've never been the same.
And when Franz told me that story, he was almost weeping.
But he was laughing as he was telling the story.
Because he had to keep laughing in order to keep telling the story.
Those are the moments, like, those kind of stories are the ones that hit people the hardest because you know that the child has no idea that what they're doing is going to be uncomfortable for anybody.
Like, they have real pride in it.
Like, here's a parallel to the story that you told before, I guess three years ago.
We were talking about the writing workshop that you had done where you were talking about someone else's story about how they were jacking off in a jacuzzi and their anus got prolapsed and this woman at the writing workshop I felt comfortable enough because you told that story to tell her story about being in the Girl Scouts or the Brownies, the Brownies before the Girl Scouts?
The heating pad story, where she had put this vibrating heating pad on her vagina and had her friends do the same thing and the mom came home And she was only seven years old.
She thought it was cool.
Like, look, I found this thing.
And then the mom beat her with the wire that was plugged into the wall and called her a dirty whore, and she never orgasmed again.
And she said, in summation, That if I could tell the story that I had just told that was so self-debasing and so humiliating, but also make it funny, then that gave her proof that she could make her own story funny.
And that maybe she could someday go back to her mother and say, remember that heating pad.
And that maybe ultimately she could have an orgasm.
Because until you can kind of reveal these things and resolve them, they run the rest of your life and you're never going to get beyond them.
When you're just a child and then you do something that you think is totally fine and all of a sudden you're getting the fuck beaten out of you and you don't understand why.
Several years ago, I got a job house sitting a farm that was famous for being haunted.
It had all these paranormal studies.
So as soon as the owners were gone, I invited a bunch of psychics out to do a seance.
And I wanted to know.
And my father had been murdered about five years before that.
And one of these psychic women that I'd never met before He said, there is a man standing with you.
He's wearing a white t-shirt.
And he's holding something wooden.
And he is really, really sorry he did what he did.
But he was a very, very young man at the time.
He was only 23 or 24. He's holding something wooden and he's about to dismember you?
Does that make any sense whatsoever?
And I just kind of nodded my head and I said, I have no idea what you're talking about.
But when I was maybe three or four years old, my mother had taken my siblings into town.
And I was, you know, in our rural farm.
And I put a fender washer around one of my fingers.
And I couldn't get it off.
And so I waited until a finger was swollen up and turning sort of purple-black.
And I went to my father and I said, can you help me with this washer thing?
And my father had said, I can help you, but I want you to learn a lesson.
That there are consequences to everything you do.
And I will help you with a washer if you accept responsibility for your actions for the rest of your life.
And he took me and we had to wash the axe that we kill chickens with.
We had this hatchet.
And he took me and we sharpened the hatchet and we washed it really thoroughly so there were no germs on it.
And then he had me kneel down by the chopping block and put my hand on the chopping block.
And at the time, there was no drama.
It was just complete clarity.
My father was helping me to resolve the situation.
And at the last moment, he missed my hand with the axe.
The axe went into the chopping block, and then we went inside and used dish soap to take the washer off.
And I knew that story would just make my mother insane.
So I never told anybody my entire life that story.
I never told my siblings.
I never told anyone.
And I had more or less forgotten that story Until this woman I had never met said, there is a man standing over you in a white t-shirt and he's holding something wooden and he's really sorry and it's something about dismemberment.
But he was very young and he handled it the way a very young father would.
I was so shocked in that moment.
And so sometimes the story isn't always a kind of...
It isn't always a kind of tragedy of the child being punished for doing something good.
It can come from so many different directions.
And the point is to bring those stories forward.
Because when you do, you create the opportunity for everyone else with a similar experience to avoid something that they have suppressed for so long.
She said that he was really meticulous about his hair.
And that was the age of Vitalis.
And my father in Vitalis, he was just, you know, his hair always had to be perfect.
She really hit it on a lot of different levels.
And then she turned to a good friend of mine.
And she said, and there is a woman with you.
And she is sprinkling you with tiny blue flowers.
Does this make any sense whatsoever?
She's standing over you and she is just raining you with small blue flowers.
Does that mean anything to you?
And my friend, Ina, started to sob at that point.
She was uncontrollably sobbing because no one knew this.
No one in our peer group But every year, Ina would secretly go to her mother's grave.
Her mother died when Ina was a teenager.
But every year she would go there on the anniversary of her mother's death, and she would sprinkle forget-me-not seeds on her mother's grave.
And she had never told anyone she did that.
And the idea that someone would somehow pick up on this image of tiny blue flowers being in turn sprinkled on Ina It was really another one of those uncanny moments.
And we can't put those together.
We can't look for a pattern and we can't sort of express them unless someone expresses them first.
The numerology one would have been in like 1981, and the card reading would have been in like 1983, no, 1994 or 1993. But has there been anything in your life that was so horrific that they couldn't imagine telling you?
You know, except for my father's murder, not really.
Dad was murdered in May of 1999. He had answered a personals ad for a woman who was looking for a boyfriend.
And the ad was headlined Kismet.
I believe that's the Arab word for fate.
And dad met with her.
Her name was Rita.
She was a lawyer.
She had worked in the prison system in the Midwest.
And Dad was really, really taken with her.
She was really bright and really smart.
And she had an ex-husband who had sexually abused her daughter from a different marriage.
And they were pressing charges against his ex-husband, and he was going to go to prison.
And she had met him while he was in prison, and she was doing legal work.
And she had helped him get out of prison.
So she helped him get out of prison.
She'd married him.
He had abused her daughter.
She divorced him.
She was prosecuting him to send him back to prison.
Then she met my father.
And this ex-husband had said that if he ever caught her with another man, he would kill them both.
So my father Was going to pick her up and she was going to stay at his house in the mountains until the time of the trial.
And as he was going to pick her up, he was going down this mountain road on his property and a giant boulder broke free and it rolled down the hillside and it blocked the road.
He couldn't get out.
So he spent the day with a lever forcing this boulder off the road.
And then he took a couple extra hours and he made a sign that said Kismet Rock so that he could label this boulder as a kind of landmark.
But when he brought her back to sequester her, And he cleaned the house incredibly.
The house was just neat as a pen and stocked with all this food.
And, you know, he really planned to have this fantastically sort of idyllic time sequestered with his new girlfriend.
And he labeled the rock to surprise her.
And then he went to pick her up.
And when he went to pick her up, the ex-husband showed up and he shot my father.
And my father and the woman took refuge in her house.
And the man set fire to the house.
And the house eventually collapsed.
And the coroner says that they were both dead before the fire got to them.
And the coroner says that because of the angle of the shot, my father probably took about 20 minutes to die because the bullet ruptured his diaphragm.
So with every breath, he would have been accumulating air between the lung and the diaphragm.
And so every breath would have been more and more shallow because his lungs would have been more and more constricted.
By this air above the diaphragm, but that eventually he'd suffocated.
And all of this sounds horrible and tragic, but it forms this fantastic pattern in my father's life because my father, when he was very small, he lived in Northern Idaho with this enormous Ukrainian family.
And his father went crazy one day.
This is all public record.
I've talked about this a lot.
But his father took a rifle and walked around the house and tried to kill him, my father, and ultimately killed my father's, well, killed his wife, my father's mother, and then killed himself.
But my father's earliest memories are of hiding underneath a bed as his father walked around the house in logging boots with a rifle calling his name, trying to get him to come out so that he could be killed.
And so my father spent his entire life sort of looking for his mother because as his father was trying to kill him, he was trying to find his mother who at that point had been killed.
And so my father really had this kind of serial pattern with women.
He was always looking, in a way, for the woman.
The woman.
And ultimately, he was shot by the man with a gun.
And one of the uncanny things is that their bodies were only preserved because a bed on the second floor of this structure, as it was burning, the bed fell over their bodies and insulated their bodies.
And my father had escaped his father by hiding underneath a bed when he was a small child.
And the fact that the Lonely Hearts ad was headlined Kismet, and the fact that this boulder rolled down in front of my father's car just as he was leaving, that prevented him from getting there in time where he probably would have been able to escape before the ex-boyfriend arrived.
Or was...
There's so many odd, bizarre coincidences and synchronicities.
You know, you could sort of...
You would have to really...
Dismiss a lot of things in order to make this not something significant.
And in a way, understanding all these different aspects of it, it provides a comfort that it doesn't seem like this random thing.
It seems like some aspect of my father's life that was coming full circle.
And it was finally being completed.
And maybe I am clutching at straws and I'm just a kind of person looking for significance, which is what we all are.
But I'll take comfort where I can find it.
Did he ever explain to you He was a great guy until he went to work in the shipyards in World War II, and he was struck in the head by a block and tackle.
And after that, Grandpa Nick was crazy.
And half the family says that he was always crazy, that he was always narcissistic and violent and not a good person.
Narcissistic and violent is pretty common, but narcissistic and violent with a head injury, I think it's probably both.
If I had a guess, knowing what I know about head injuries, I have a lot of experience with people that have had head injuries and because of all the work that I've done with the UFC and just paying attention and reading a lot on brain trauma.
You know, bringing back to the Roseanne Barr story, you know, that's what made Roseanne Barr.
She was hit by a car when she was 15. Roseanne Barr was sent flying through the air.
She was driving, or she was walking across the street when she was 15 years old on the way to school, and a woman had the sun in her face and the windshield that she couldn't see and hit Roseanne Barr.
Roseanne Barr was a straight-A student, was a whiz at math, and then spent the next nine months in a mental health institute afterwards.
She couldn't count anymore and literally was knocked crazy.
So when Roseanne Barr's thing happened and she got cancelled, I went out of my way to reach out to her.
First of all, because as a comic, I think she's one of the most important comedians in history.
If I look at the top great comics, she's in the top 20. People forget, but during her time when she was on top, Roseanne Barr was a monster.
She was so funny.
She was such a good stand-up.
And on her show, the original Roseanne show, she was so good.
It was such an important cultural milestone, that show.
The show was created by brain trauma.
Something about brain trauma leaves people impulsive.
It makes them wild.
They're reckless.
A lot of times more prone to violence.
And these actions are directly created to CTE, which is I am so glad you went down that road.
The guy who did the vision studies that ultimately became motion pictures?
Meyer Bridge.
There's so much anecdotal evidence about people with traumatic brain injuries becoming geniuses or having their breakthrough after being struck in the head.
And Meyer Bridge was a guy who had failed at everything.
He sold China.
He sold encyclopedias.
He was a kind of late 19th century failure.
He failed at everything.
And then he was going across the country in a stagecoach.
The stagecoach tumbled.
Meyer Bridge was in a coma, and when he came to, he was Meyer Bridge.
He was brilliant.
He was the man who more or less invented motion pictures.
He was a hero.
He was kind of the Tesla of his time.
And he was nothing before the stagecoach incident.
And there's so much anecdotal evidence that shows that when people have been struck in the head, They come out as a kind of savant or really bright in some way.
I think they come out with less fear because they come out more impulsive.
That's one of the...
More significant and reoccurring themes when it comes to traumatic brain injuries.
People are impulsive.
And I think impulsive people are more likely to take chances.
And I think that ability to take chances sometimes pays dividends.
Like, you can become more successful because you're more willing to take risks.
You're not afraid.
Paralysis by analysis is what haunts so many people.
Because they just constantly think about, well, what if I do that?
Well, what if it fails?
What if it this?
What if it that?
Whereas wild people are just like, fuck it.
Let's do it.
Let's try it.
Let's see.
Let's go.
And those people tend to take more chances.
And I think if you take more chances, you're more likely to have more breakthroughs and more successes.
And to be less insecure would be a pretty...
Positive factor, if you consider someone who's doing something risky, like with Roseanne, stand-up comedy.
Sam Kinnison, same story.
Was hit by a car when he was five years old.
His brother wrote about it.
His brother Bill wrote about it, and he wrote a book called Brother Sam, or My Brother Sam, and it was about Kinnison, how there's like Kinnison 1 and Kinnison 2, When Sam was a boy, he was a normal kid.
Everything was fine.
Then he was hit by a car when he was five years old.
I think he was five.
And then became a fucking wild man.
Just once he was hit by a car, you just couldn't contain him.
He was crazy.
He was like, when he was a preacher, he was the wildest, most irreverent preacher.
He had just violent tendencies.
There was a sign at the comedy store.
That for whatever fucking stupid reason they fixed, but it was a sign in the back parking lot where there was a bullet hole in it where Sam had pulled out a revolver.
I think it was because he was in some sort of a dispute with one of the other comics and decided to shoot this sign.
We would always go by that sign and touch the bullet hole like this is where fucking Sam Kennison shot like you don't crazy have to be to bring a gun to the Comedy Store and just shoot a sign and you're you're a performer there not just a performer But the most celebrated performer there at the time, you know, this is in the 80s when he was I mean, there's a period of time, I think, from like 1986 to 1988 where Sam Kinison was the greatest comic that ever lived.
He couldn't sustain it because he was doing so much coke and he was partying and he wasn't really writing because he was just into being a celebrity and just having a lot of sex and doing a lot of drugs, but that wild, chaotic That irreverent, risk-taking behavior is probably directly connected to him getting hit by a car.
There's been this program where you can go down to Mexico and be exposed to toxoplasmosis because they're finding people who carry the parasite are much more reckless and aggressive.
Sapolsky found that when he was doing his residency, they would find when people had motorcycle crashes, and one of the doctors told him, check the victim for toxo.
And it turns out there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims of accidents that are positive for toxoplasmosis because this cat parasite makes them reckless.
We should probably explain the parasite to people that don't know what we're talking about.
Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that grows inside cats' digestive systems.
And the way it does this, it's one of the most fascinating evolutionary processes.
It tricks rats into being sexually attracted to cat urine.
So literally, their testicles swell, their dicks get hard, and they become fearless.
It rewires their sexual reward system to make them horny for cat piss.
And so there's videos of toxo-infected rats just running up to cats, and the cats are like, what the fuck?
The cats are trying to get away from them.
The cats don't understand why this rat is running up against them.
The rat is literally trying to get eaten.
So this parasite rewires the brains of the rat, gets the rat to go near the cat, gets the cat to eat the rat so that this parasite can grow inside of the cat's gut.
And then they tell humans, you have to stay away, women in particular, when they're pregnant, stay away from cat litter.
Because if you're near cat shit, you might get this toxoplasmosis and it could severely impair the developmental process of the child when it's inside the womb.
Jordan Peterson, when he talks about rough play, this is kind of a jump, but I think that is why Fight Club has resonated so well with so many people, because they never had that kind of rough play with...
Especially maybe their father.
Because I'm not sure if mothers can really provide that rough play.
And so when I think when people see Fight Club, there's an aspect of that unexpressed rough play that resonates with them, is I wish I'd had that rough play as a small child.
It was very different for me because as a boy growing up, I spent a lot of time doing martial arts.
So I was sparring a lot from the time I was 14 to the time I was 21. I was hitting the head a lot.
And when I see things like Fight Club, I enjoyed the movie because I can separate My idea of what would that be like if it was a real person from fiction and enjoying it.
But when I see people just willing to get punched and willing to get hit in the head, I know way too much about the consequences of brain trauma.
It's such a roll of the dice.
I know people that have been hit in the head and never been the same.
And they live in darkness, meaning they live in a cloud of depression.
Their brain doesn't work anymore unless they seek treatment.
And there's some pretty novel treatments that are available now from a lot of the work that's been done with soldiers, PTSD. They've done a lot of work with...
Magnets.
They use magnets to sort of rewire the brain and stimulate areas of the brain like very, very powerful magnets and there's been some therapy that is really promising in that way.
I know there's a female mixed martial arts fighter named Kat Zingano and she had some really good Success with that where she was like really uncoordinated from one bad beating that she had fucked up her hormones fucked up her cortisol levels Like she couldn't stop gaining weight like her body was all fucked up from one fight that she actually won But as a fight against this woman named Amanda Nunez who's one of the greatest if not the greatest female fighters of all time She's a monster and she just knocks everyone senseless and she had cat in real trouble in the first
round but cat survived and And we'll end up beating her later in the fight and stopping her.
But the consequences of the beating she took in that fight haunted her for years.
And maybe still do.
I haven't talked to her in a while.
Maybe still do.
But head trauma is one of the most risky things.
For someone like you that maybe got something good out of it.
Maybe got a danger or an anger or just a little bit of recklessness from it.
For every one story like that, I know so many stories of people who are just gone.
And I've known guys from the beginning of their career where I've met them when they were like 21, 22 years old.
Maybe I've called their fights, and maybe I've seen them in gyms training with them.
And then I see them when they're 34, 35, and they're fucked.
They're fucked.
I can see it in their face.
I can see the weirdness in their gait.
They lose some of their coordination.
And you can see the way they even move around in training.
They take shorter steps.
They look like they're less stable.
The brain's ability to communicate with the body has been beaten out.
Well, there's a lot of people that got hit in the head that didn't know that it carries lifelong consequences.
Too many people thought of it as being frivolous, like they would spar.
In the gym and they would spar essentially like a fight.
Like a lot of the sparring that we did when we were kids, it wasn't really sparring.
It was fighting.
You were fighting.
Like you would go full blast all the time.
People got knocked out in the gym all the time.
And then they would be back in the gym a few days later sparring again, which is like literally the worst thing you could ever do when you have like significant head trauma.
But, you know, there's also people that get hit in the head and they learn Spanish.
All of a sudden they can play the piano.
It's like, the brain is fucking weird, man.
The brain, like, just the chemistry of the brain is weird, right?
Like how everyone's very so greatly.
But the fact that you could have a knock to it, and then all of a sudden you develop new talents...
Well, and also there's the aspect of comfort because there's that whole Temple Grandin group of people who find comfort in slamming their heads against things.
You know, severely autistic children, they slam their head against the wall because there's a kind of comforting chemical thing that happens in doing so.
And a lot of times people have forgotten these incidents.
They think that they don't, they're just one of, that they didn't change anything.
But then later when they can identify them according to a major life change, like the fact that my writing went from garbage to, you know, something sellable.
Do you think there's a possibility that just the trauma, like the emotional trauma of being assaulted and the anger and just the pain that comes with that and the fear that comes with that might have just...
Did you change the way you view the world enough so that you were willing to express yourself in a more dangerous way?
I think that would be the worst thing to do, to play chess.
Like, if I'm hit in the head, like, I don't, uh, like, I haven't done any hard sparring in a long time, but I had a bad skiing, not a bad skiing accident, I had a skiing accident two years ago.
Where I was going around a corner and this lady was losing control.
She didn't know how to ski very well and she was just sliding right into the trail and I had two options.
Hit her or go around her and surely fall.
And so I tried to go around her and I wiped out and I banged the back of my head off the ground hard.
Like bang!
Like really hard.
And I cracked my shin.
I developed an insufficiency fracture in my shin, which is like where the shin bone meets the cartilage cracked.
It was pretty painful, but I could stand on it.
But then I got on the ski lift with my daughter, who was 10 at the time, and I I just fell over and my wife saw me fall over she goes you fell over like an old man like an uncoordinated old man like I had a hard time getting up my coordination was all off like everything was off and for the rest of the day I was like dizzy and confused and I recovered like the next day I was okay but I never got checked out but I'm pretty sure from all the head trauma that I've had in the past that was a concussion and Pretty sure.
It was hard enough.
I mean, I went down, man, and my head fucking...
I had a helmet on, which helps, but my head bounced off the hard, you know, packed down ice of the ski slope.
But if I had to play a game after that, oh my god, that'd be so fucking stupid.
She would have been a decent person if there'd been someone around to, I think he says, slap her every day of her life.
Yeah.
It so doesn't work on every level, but the story is magnificent.
Flannery O'Connor gets away with it.
And sometimes I just find my idol running so fast that I wish I could call room service and say, would you send somebody up to hit me really hard?
Yeah.
Because my friends who are fighters, they say that after you've lost in a fight, your idol is knocked down and you're so at peace and your testosterone levels dive and they stay low for quite a period.
And it's all set up so that you don't go back into competition before your body is fully recovered.
You're not going to go back into a fight with an injury.
And so sometimes I think that if I could just, you know, have a punching service and just...
No, seriously.
In the old days, you had a car.
You went out and you started your car on a cold day.
And it would idle really high.
And it would idle until it reached a certain core temperature.
And then the carburetor would knock down the idle.
And sometimes, especially as a much younger man, I would just feel like my idle was set way too high.
And rather than take medication, if I got slammed or I got hurt, I could knock the idle down.
And I think sometimes when you're a young, reckless person, you're just looking for something to knock the idol down so that you can live a more sort of profound, examined life.
And it also has the chess game because you're holding three-dimensional Tetris-like objects that weigh 80 pounds, 90 pounds.
And you have to carry them up a ladder, maintaining your center of gravity, and then you have to decide how they're going to fit in relation to the pre-existing ones already cast.
And so you're playing this giant primitive Tetris game that is like playing chess.
And my understanding is that when the Romans built, rather than create forms for the concrete...
They used cut stone, mortar together, and that was the form.
And then they put all the concrete between these two stone forms.
So the stone you see on the outside is actually the form that was used to hold the concrete in place until it's set.
And so I build up the kind of two outer walls of stone, maybe a foot, maybe 18 inches, and then I lay in a lot of steel, and then I pour it full of concrete in the center.
So it looks like it's a stone wall that's two or three feet thick, but it's really a concrete wall that is just faced with stone.
You know, it's rebar, but it's also galvanized metal fencing.
And years ago, Mason's always told me, if you want to make a porch stoop, if you want to just make a fairly small piece of concrete, dry cleaner hangers.
Wire hangers from the dry cleaners because they are coated with a non-corrosive coating and because you can tangle them up and bend them up and you can just smash them in there, you know, and pour the concrete on top of them.
And they will hold the mass together in a really magnificent way and they will not corrode because they're covered with that kind of plasticized coating.
And better yet, you can get them for free.
Go to the gym.
Every gym has got a huge box of dry cleaner hangers that people have left behind.
You know, that's part of the comfort thing is my dad did concrete.
My dad learned concrete work in the Navy.
My maternal grandfather was a big stone worker.
It's kind of a Ukrainian thing as well.
And so I grew up, my poor brother and I, we grew up cleaning old cinder block because my father would get cinder block that would have plaster and stucco on it.
My brother and I had to stand out in the desert with hammers and clean this cinder block Under the beating hot sun for hours and hours.
So my brother and I grew up mixing concrete, mixing mortar, hod carrying, where you carry the live mortar around.
And so there's something enormously comforting about the work now because it has got that link to my childhood.
I had started it actually the year before lockdown.
But as soon as they were announcing lockdown and you started to see the first few masks, I went to the Washougal Lumberyard and I said, I need all the bags of mortar that you can get me.
And I started out with like 45, 50 bags of mortar mix because I just knew that things might get really tight really fast.
And I ordered in all my stone from Metro Landscape.
God bless Metro Landscape, because I know they listen to you.
Yeah, and then I was off.
But the only thing that was missing is that camaraderie that you get at the gym, where you're with people.
That's a big part of the experience for a lot of people.
That's one of the things that people really missed during the pandemic was gym culture, where fellow people agreeing to suffer and exercise and exert themselves.
Yeah, there's a thing that happens, too, where there's an alleviation of tension from rigorous exercise where you're really getting after it that makes conversations easier.
I've had some of the funniest conversations with my friends about their wives or their girlfriends.
They'll tell you shit about what's going on in the middle of a set.
Like, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do, man.
I can't take this anymore.
Drop the weights and like, fuck.
They'll tell you things where they don't feel as vulnerable.
They don't feel as whiny either because you're all lifting weights together.
Yeah, Pavel's idea is that if you can do ten repetitions, you should do five, but you should do five many times.
So instead of just going to ten and then exhausting your muscles and then going to eight and the next one and then going to seven, you should go to five and then take a long break.
You should take like five minutes in between sets.
Most people don't have that kind of time.
Five, ten minutes, he was saying.
And then ten minutes later, do another five.
Put the weights down.
Just have a conversation.
Drink some water.
Hang out.
Relax.
You're not there to exhaust your body.
You're there to get stronger.
And he's like, and strength is a skill.
And you need to work on that skill.
And so instead of doing, you know, like say if you go to 10 repetitions and you could do 10 sets of 10 three times and on the third time you're just absolutely at failure.
Instead of that, do six or seven sets of five repetitions.
So you're actually doing more work and it's not as exhausting.
And it doesn't blow your muscles out the same way, but it actually makes you stronger in his eyes.
This is very disputed.
I don't want to say...
I train that way, but I'm not the strongest guy in the world.
So I don't know who's right or who's wrong.
And I know my friend Rob's going to be here tomorrow.
He's an actual strong man.
And they don't train that way.
They lift the heaviest fucking shit they can and almost break themselves every time.
And the kind of working out that you're talking about where it is steady and involves rest and camaraderie and talking, I get a lot of writing done during that time.
Because I'm always talking to other people or to trainers, bouncing ideas off of them to see whether they engage with the idea or whether they have a similar experience.
Or whether they'd seen the idea in popular culture already.
So I'm constantly testing material on people at the gym.
And so that leads to that more sort of subdued training that you described.
I would feel like maybe the requirements of your body when you're doing steroids, they ramp up so significantly that it takes over your focus.
Because when you have hyper levels of hormones, hyperhuman levels of hormones, your body has stronger requirements.
Like, your body thinks it has to do more.
That's why it has so much in it, you know?
And it's interesting, like, you can buy stuff that's legal.
That is, or used to be able to buy stuff that's legal.
Some of the potent shit I ever did, I could buy at GNC. There was this stuff they used to take.
It's probably terrible for your liver.
It was called Mag10.
And I remember they removed it from the market years ago.
But you used to take it, and oh my god, it was incredible.
I gained like 10 pounds.
I got so fucking strong.
I was like, I can't believe you could just buy this stuff at GNC. But that stuff, whatever that stuff does, that's not sustainable.
There's certain things, like testosterone replacement is very sustainable because you can keep your body at a natural level, like a normal level, and it just accounts for the aging process.
But when you do cycles, like heavy things like that stuff, that MAG-10 stuff, or Anavar, or there's a lot of other ones that you could do cycles of, you can't sustain it.
My time with performance enhancing drugs is all about martial arts.
It was all about increasing my ability in martial arts and recovering from injuries.
It's a pretty significant factor in recovering from injuries.
Like if you have...
Muscle tears or any kind of a knee injury and you're doing rehabilitation, there's some stuff that you could take that significantly speeds up the process of recovery.
We're talking like you could take five, six months off of the process.
You know, another thing that I've noticed among my friends and my contemporaries is that the people who did a lot of recreational drugs when they were younger, they did acid, they did mescaline, they did everything.
They did everything except for steroids.
As they've grown older, they've never done steroids.
But my friends who didn't do any recreational drugs, now that they're in their 50s, edging into their 60s, they're doing massive amounts of steroids.
Yeah, so people are either in one school where you did tons of acid and then nothing, or you are in the other school where you were completely straight edge, and now you're doing every steroid you can get your hands on.
I was going to say someone who had transitioned...
Tried to transition to male like a trans woman or a woman rather would become a trans male and then went back and The dilemma was the size of the clitoris.
It is an argument in Donna's favor now that I'm thinking about it Like you got to get the right balance where your heart doesn't explode, but your dick gets really big Oh, you could just find a hobby, okay?
Some people like to ride BMX bikes off the side of a fucking cliff, you know?
My buddy Andy, Andy Stumpf, he does those fucking squirrel suits, those flying squirrel suits where you jump off cliffs and soar through the mountains.
He held the world record for it.
That seems to me ridiculous.
Makes way more sense just growing a bigger dick with steroids than doing that.
Well, I think it's interesting when I talk to people who have sort of broken through in their profession, they typically buy a really stupid thing really early on.
There was a designer that came out with these floor-length leather skirts a few years ago, and they looked terrific on the runway, but they weigh like 45 pounds.
The things women wear, I mean, it's quite amazing that they have decided to wear these fucking torturous devices on their feet that they could barely walk around in and they're so desirable.
Like those weird fucking stiletto heels and the straps that go over your toes.
You know, this is a really coarse thing I tell my writing students.
And I'm probably going to get called out for it and I won't be able to say it anymore.
But...
It's all about withholding and it's always about a very gradual reveal.
Imagine if you're a stripper and you walk out on stage fully naked and you say, this is my vagina.
Any questions?
It's not going to work.
And so it's about going out there with as much clothes on as possible and then demonstrating a really desirable physicality and then about very slowly revealing the truth because nobody wants the full truth.
Because we all know what's going to be ultimately revealed.
And it's about maintaining that dopamine, that anticipation, that reason why the build-up to Christmas is so intense and that Christmas is always a really shitty day.
We want that dopamine to last as long as possible.
That's one of the more interesting things about humans when it comes to sex is that we're the only animal that requires that sort of mystery and romance and the chase and the whole just the slow tension of it all.
But I believe mammals actually do this, that if they are impregnated by a male that is not of their choosing, they can ejaculate the semen very effectively so they don't become impregnated.
Okay, one thing that has kind of changed the old languaging of fantasy is Michel Foucault, S&M, leather bondage, all of that was kind of based on master-slave relationships, and that whole languaging of master versus slave has been completely displaced.
In the last five or six years.
Because I believe it's seen as racist in the same way that the master bedroom can no longer be called the master bedroom.
A lot of things have broken psychologically during the lockdown.
That might be one of them.
They changed motherboard technology descriptions.
It used to be master-slave when you would set motherboards.
I don't know what they call it now.
Do you know what they call it now, Jamie?
Because that was the thing.
I used to make my own computers and used to have to set the jumpers on the motherboard and you had to set it to a certain way and the way you would read the books on descriptions.
But meanwhile, you know, there's porn stars that are like in their late 40s that are really hot.
It's crazy.
And that whole genre, the MILF genre.
Because I think, especially for men that are older, like if they're watching porn, you don't want to watch porn that's someone that's your daughter's age.
You want to watch a hot lady that's a little younger than you that's keeping her shit together.
Well, and I think that there's something affirming in that is that when you see an older person in any field who has kind of maintained a kind of sense of vitality and attractiveness and healthiness, That they are presenting for you as well.
They're proving that at that age you can also be relatively youthful.
I love to say Gunnar Heinsen is a German academic.
He wrote a book called Sons and World Power, Sonnen und Weltmacht.
And his whole theory about Western civilization is that all progress has come because at different points in history where there were too many second sons.
Because the first son will inherit status and position automatically.
There's going to be a place in society and there's going to be reproductive opportunity for the first son and resources.
But for the second, third, fourth sons who get an education and are looking for a place in society, there will not be a place.
So it's those sons who go out into the world as explorers.
Or who foment revolutions.
Because they're not guaranteed a place.
They're not guaranteed a mate.
And so they have to go out into the world and cause trouble.
And so Gunnar Heinsohn really tracked everything from Cortes up to the Arab Spring to this surplus of second and third sons.
And only if they're educated.
If they come from a class that educates them and leads them to think that someday they'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock gods and then they realize that's not going to happen, then they go out and they cause trouble and history changes.
The Mexican director who was supposed to do the original Alien movie, but there's a scene where the gunslinger walks through a huge pen filled with white bunnies and then starts to blow them away, and we see each rabbit exploded in a fairly close-up shot.
But what I found most touching is that when the mass media reported on this whole upset, They reported, they said, middle-aged Canadian novelist blank.
Yeah, in Canada, they live to like 200. Yeah, you can live forever up there.
So God bless Margaret Atwood, okay?
Anyway, what we loved about Alien...
Until I was sitting at the Island View Drive-In with Linda Ramos, space travel had been depicted as clean and glamorous and exciting, with good haircuts and great fitting clothes, and it was everything, everything.
It was the Seattle World's Fair, it was the Jetsons, it was Lost in Space, it was everything.
And for the first time with Alien, we saw what space travel was really going to be.
Just an extension of drudgery and shitshow.
You're working in a factory that goes through space.
And then Alien came forward and they gave us 1970s romantic fatalism.
You're just going to be a schmo working in a dirty ship going through space wasting your life and then the company is going to flush you down the toilet.
And we accepted the face-hugger, and we accepted the chest-burster, and we accepted everything because somebody had told us the truth about what future and space travel was actually going to be like.
And we felt so honored that somebody was finally really honest with us.
That they weren't feeding us a line of bullshit anymore about space.
But Star Wars was marketed to children who were still idealistic.
And Alien was marketed to kind of boomers.
Who had fallen out of the idealism of the 60s and they'd seen all that idealism amount to nothing and they'd sort of fallen into the me generation of disco by that point.
And they were looking for romantic fatalism to give them a takeaway from the death of their idealism.
Well, first of all, Sigourney Weaver in that film shows you that this idea of diversity of casting and of having a woman hero What really matters is that it's good.
What really matters is that the story's good and that it resonates and the acting is good.
No one cared that she was the star.
It had no effect.
It was never a token female star.
It was never some play at diversity where they could tell everybody, look how woke we are.
He wrote most of it, and it was a fascinating kind of novel because he wrote a whole slew of short stories for science fiction magazines in the 40s and 50s.
And he thought, you know, if I could just plug some holes, I can sell this as a novel.
So he wrote that book over maybe 20 years, and then he just cobbled it all together like a quilt and called it a novel.
And then I also post, I'm posting a lot of sort of writing stuff.
I can only have like 20-25 students at a time and it's a way of kind of providing these for free to people likewise because they're the best things that were taught to me by my best teachers and I just assume they not die with me.
Because journalists are flocking to it because they're tired of all the restrictions from editors and just the inability to just get your thoughts clearly without any sort of a filter.
And they also approached me because there were a lot of primarily musicians last year who couldn't tour anymore.
And so they got some musicians on board.
It became the platform for them.
And I missed two tours last year.
I had three books out, one tour.
And so it seemed like an appealing way to kind of still reach my readership and to have more of a kind of accessibility at any time to be able to go into that comment stream and interact with somebody.
For instance, Sassy.
Sassy is the Boston Terrier of a woman named Carrie, who is more or less kind of one of my Substack students.
I don't even know if she subscribes, but she seems like a very genuine person, and I wanted to mention her dog.
And it's nice to have that voluntary way to interact with people.
So you don't interact with people or read comments or anything?
That's probably healthy anyway.
The Substack thing, what separates Substack from the rest of social media?
Is it that they need to seek you out in particular?
And then if they're going to your Substack, they clearly are interested in your writing and they know who you are, they know what you do, they're fans of your work, they're not just casuals?
I know a lot of really prominent journalists that have taken their writing and moved over to there and...
You know, for people that have run into problems with social media censoring their ideas and censoring their work, and that's a real issue, especially if you're a journalist that covers controversial subjects, anything that has to do with COVID-19 runs into the possibility of being censored.
Well, the structure of The thing itself censors people because writing fiction or writing in general is almost becoming what painting was when photography came in.
Because now as I start to write, the computer is correcting my spelling.
The computer is correcting my grammar.
The computer is anticipating what my next few words are going to be.
And I find myself in a constant battle.
With this kind of steering, helpful software that is trying to take me down a very standardized road.
And it's really hard to sort of thwart all of these sort of controlling devices to try to write something that is clumsily worded but more honestly worded and also goes to a place that the culture doesn't necessarily want to go to.
And so there's all these kind of I'm thwarting things that are kind of funneling people in the same direction.
And sometimes I want to misspell a word.
Sometimes I want to have a really clumsy grammatical construction.
And sometimes I want to go to a place that nobody wants to go to.
And if I ask for seat 1A, I can put that tray table down and I can put my notebook out and I can keyboard for four hours and I have nothing else to do.
I have no other choice but to keyboard.
And so I will take a trip just to be trapped in that seat and transcribe my notes and get so much work done.
And one of them, I'm going to kind of plug this thing with the Substack money.
I'm funding a program called Study Hall, where I just rent a space, and anybody who wants to can just show up in this space, but they have to work quietly.
And people who can't work at home and people who want to be in the presence of other people doing a similar task, they can find the comfort of other people who are doing writing.
And it seems to be enormous popular with people like myself because it's so hard to do this kind of work at home where there's a lot of distractions, a lot of demands.
I used to do my best work at work.
I could get my work done in two hours and then spend the rest of my workday, you know, making notes.
And with this study hall thing, it doesn't cost them anything.
I pay all the expenses.
And it's so, it validates the task when you're surrounded by people who are also doing it.
And that's part of being on the airplane, is that you're surrounded by people who are trapped like you are.
And for the most part, are making the trip because it's part of their job.
And it's very low distraction.
There's very little else to do.
And so I think those are the two things.
The structured lack of distraction and also the proximity of other people in studious kind of behavior.
I want to give them the opportunity to express themselves by seeing something that they might relate to.
And if I give them a meaning, if I say, okay, what does this picture of a rat look like?
That's not a Rorschach test.
That's me dictating.
And so, in a way, by removing the scaffolding, by kind of Refusing to dictate my intentions, I think I'm giving them a greater freedom in assigning their own meaning.
During the lockdown, I made over a hundred really elaborate four-foot bookmarks out of semi-precious stones that I picked up around the world on book tours.
My dad was a huge rock hound.
And I still remember the first days when he'd take my brother and I to this little rock shop, and he'd show us hematite, or he'd show us goldstone or pyrite.
And then we would go look for agates.
So my earliest memories of my dad were always around these rocks, finding rocks, finding fossils.
You know, and he was a railroad brakeman.
He wasn't really a geologist.
He just loved rocks.
And so as I travel, I'm always looking for semi-precious stones.
Everything.
I came back from Germany a couple years ago, and I sat next to a gemologist who told me a great story.
I don't know it's true, but I think it's true.
And he said, pawn shops, hawk shops, when people would pawn diamond rings, The pawn shops, they didn't really have a way of judging what diamonds were worth what.
So typically, they'd just pry the diamond out of the setting, out of the fitting, and all the diamonds would end up in a cigar box under the counter, and they'd melt down the gold because the gold could be assayed and had a value.
And during the 1930s, I believe, there was one small jewelry store.
And they more or less knew that every pawn shop in the country had a cigar box full of battered, second-hand diamonds that could be recut and graded and set.
And so this jewelry store owner sent his sons around the country with cash and offered every pawn shop $100 cash For the box of diamonds we know you have.
And every pawn shop more or less said, take them.
They're worthless to us.
And so these sons came home with this enormous trove of diamonds that had been pried out of pawned rings.
And they were reset, and they were polished, and they were recut.
And that is how the Shane Company came into existence.
This is what the gemologist told me.
He says it's a famous industry story.
And I love rocks.
I love learning about rocks.
I love finding rocks.
Every aspect of rocks I love.
And so I had made all of these enormous bookmarks and then wrapped them in very elaborate ways.
And then for an animal rescue that I really support, anyone who donated $100 or more, I sent them one of these gifts.
And each of these gifts takes me between three and four days to make.
It's kind of heartbreaking because they're so beautifully wrapped that people have to destroy all this beauty in order to find out what's inside of it.
And it makes a really nice metaphor and a really nice kind of discovery process where something has to be sacrificed in order to have a greater understanding of what it is.
Yeah, it is all just kind of a...
I used pieces of jewelry that belonged to my mother before she died.
So it's got...
They're kind of cobbled together from things associated with both of my parents.
It is a fascinating book, and it really speaks to the role that gifts play in our culture throughout all of history as a gesture, not as a thing to be gotten, but as a kind of gesture or process.
And how the gesture itself is the important part, not the object.
And so what I'm trying to do is kind of replicate that Lewis Hyde demonstration of gift as gesture or ritual.
And, you know, he writes a lot about the cultural...
Cross-cultural aspect that each of us, in almost every culture, it's perceived that we're each born with a genie or an hideous demon or a genius or a guardian angel.
And it's more or less a spirit that has a destiny for us.
And if we will Sacrifice time and effort to developing this gift, then the Spirit will remain with us and keep us safe for our entire life.
And in turn, the Spirit will be allowed to transcend to a higher plane of existence.
But if we don't accept our gift, and if we don't kind of live into our destiny, whatever that gift is, then the spirit becomes malevolent, and it becomes something that haunts us and destroys us, destroys our entire household.
I think the ancient Greeks called it the lemur, L-E-M-U-R, like the small monkey.
And so...
I just want to keep that in mind that it's about, you know, sacrificing or dedicating, devoting a certain amount of time and energy to kind of fulfilling that destiny.
At some age you realize you have to sacrifice your life for something.
And I decided to sacrifice my life for writing.
Because otherwise, you know, my life is going to be kind of scattershot.