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Nov. 2, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:19

899 Stef on Writing (An Interview)

An interested listener interviews me on my favorite books and authors, as well as the writing process for fiction and non-fiction.

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	Right, so you had some questions for me as a, let's say, perhaps somewhat knowledgeable, but numerically undervalued writer.
	And I guess there's the meta question of why I would even be interested in asking these questions in the first place, but I guess it's kind of a separate topic.
	Well, I mean, just as a caveat, right?
	I mean, if this ever goes out, right?
	So people know, right? I mean, I have sold, you know, less than a thousand books in my life, but I think that the books are very high quality.
	That makes me a fifth of a bestseller in Canada.
	Actually, I think that's even for one book.
	But, of course, I've really only been selling books for two months or so, maybe three, through Lulu.
	And so that's sort of where things stand as far as that goes.
	But I think that there's good reasons why the novels that I've written, and particularly the novels, because those are the ones that I went through the standard books, Publishing process, and that's why people sort of have questions about why I don't go through that process anymore.
	And my experience has been that everybody said that the writing is fantastic.
	I had a writing teacher who was one of the most famous writers in Canada who said that my writing was like Nabokov's, you know, scintillating, brilliant, you know, had the most amazing reviews, but nobody actually wants to publish the books.
	That's why I sort of took matters into my own hands And published my own and those are selling well and people are really finding them to be very enjoyable and positive and productive and so on.
	Well, Revolutions has been out for a while, right?
	Revolutions has been out for a while, but Revolutions was published through a company called Publish America which is a company that doesn't charge you any money for publishing.
	But does nothing to promote it.
	Because normally if you go through a real publisher, like a standard traditional publisher, they'll take out the ads, they'll fund the book tour, they'll promote it for you.
	And Publish America did publish it, and I didn't have to pay to get it published.
	The promotion of it was up to me.
	And finding, sort of getting noticed is a very, very tough thing.
	So a publisher will book you on The John Stewart Show, or book you on radio shows, and so on.
	You show up and try and say something intelligent.
	Whereas Publish America is just like, well the book's available, now it's up to you to go flog it.
	And of course I did spend quite a bit of time and energy trying to get on radio shows and TV shows and be interviewed.
	And I had some success, but you know, why?
	Why would you want to read about my story about Russia?
	It's sort of hard to explain why.
	If you're an ex-Bush speechwriter writing on Iraq, then you can get on these kinds of programs, but if you're just someone out of nowhere.
	And also, a lot of people who are not published by the time that they're 40 are not published by the time that they're 40 for a damn good reason.
	So it gets progressively harder as time goes along, if that makes sense.
	Right. Well, I guess, where was I going with that?
	Well, no, that was my interruption, just to sort of put it in context, that I certainly would not have any tips to provide on how to be a wildly successful writer.
	I mean, I wanted to be a writer, I ended up being a podcaster and made...
	But I think that there's good reasons.
	And of course I became a podcaster or a philosopher fundamentally because my art wasn't selling.
	And recognizing the reasons behind why my art wasn't selling was pretty key to becoming a philosopher, trying to understand why work that was considered to be of such highly uniform, so uniformly high quality, that people would just say, well, this is great.
	And they wouldn't even say no.
	They'd just sort of sit on it for six months or a year and never hear anything back.
	So it was just a kind of passive-aggressive pandering they were giving you.
	Well, people couldn't say that the books weren't good.
	You could not read my stuff and say that the books aren't good.
	Does that mean that they're perfect?
	Sure, I'm sure they could be improved, but that's part of the whole process of writers, right?
	So no one could look at it and say, this is badly written, or the characters aren't vivid, or the metaphors aren't good, or it doesn't have pace or anything like that.
	So people couldn't say that, and they couldn't confront why they didn't want to publish it.
	And so they just kind of let it sit.
	Because fundamentally the ideas are too scary.
	Yeah, fundamentally they'd have to look at why they don't want to publish something of such high quality.
	Given that it's high quality, why don't I want to publish it?
	Well, because they know that it wouldn't sell.
	But if something that is morally focused and of very high quality won't sell, what does that say about the market that they're in and their friends and their family and so on?
	Right, right. Well, I mean, that's kind of a convenient segue into one of my questions, which is, it sounds like, and I've read a couple of books myself,
	and it seemed like there was something of a central focus around them, but Do you actually, I mean, when you put these stories together, do you actually have a fixed idea in mind?
	Do you have a particular moral that you're trying to tell, right?
	Well, I wouldn't say that it's one particular moral, but do you mean sort of from a theme or from a plot standpoint?
	Well, I guess it would be from a theme standpoint.
	Well, sure. I mean, for me, there would be no point writing a book unless it had a moral theme.
	And not a sort of preachy moral theme, but an exploratory moral theme.
	And so, for sure, I mean, almost it's really about how the smallest details of early family life, that's the one that's just for those who haven't.
	We don't know anything about it.
	That's a sort of trilogy that's ridiculously long that's set in sort of all of Europe from 1910 to 1940.
	And it's about how the smallest details of family life and early childhood experience end up informing and shaping the widest and most abstract forms of state policy.
	And I really wanted to trace those tiny decisions at the beginning of things that lead to such disastrous results at a macro or political level.
	And so there I definitely had a shape and I had an outline and so on.
	There were some surprising twists and turns even for me along the way.
	But the general idea behind the book remained stable and constant.
	And I wanted people to be able to see, you know, when you look at things like how did World War II happen, you know, there's obviously lots of political arguments and economic arguments, but...
	There was a blindness to evil that was occurring throughout Europe, and how could that possibly be there after the First World War, that there could be a blindness to evil?
	And for me, of course, the answer always comes back to, it has to have something to do with family life, so I wanted to.
	And so that was my theme. If you want to look at why people are blind as adults, look at what they were blinded to as children, or blinded themselves to as children.
	And you'll see it, right?
	So that people can get a sense that arguing, say, foreign policy just at a functional adult level is not going to be that productive.
	Right, right. So then there's definitely a moral North Star in all the stories.
	For sure. I mean, definitely the god of atheists is...
	I wanted to look at how the virus of corruption is transmitted between the generations.
	And it would be a pretty grim book, which of course was reserved for the nihilistic orgasm of almost.
	But it would be a pretty grim book if that corruption took, so to speak, right?
	So there are sort of three generations in almost.
	There are the adults in their 40s and 50s.
	There are the people that they're exploiting in their 20s.
	And then there's, and late teens, and then there's the children who are even younger, who are sort of a quasi-generation.
	They're sort of a younger sibling, separated by sort of eight years kind of generation.
	And I wanted to show what was required to stop the virus of corruption from being transmitted from generation to generation.
	And it was, of course, moral curiosity.
	It's moral curiosity that is the opposite of exploitation, and that's sort of what I go into at a more technical level in the book on truth, the tyranny of illusions.
	So, I really, really wanted to show, here's how it gets transmitted, and here's how to stop it.
	But there's no...
	Though there's a destination you're headed for, there's no necessary route you have to take to get there, right?
	Well, no. I mean, the God of Atheists went through three drafts before I figured out that the kids should start taking notes.
	And then it became much easier, right?
	But before that, I was just like, how am I going?
	Otherwise, it was just a whole bunch of internal dialogues that the kids were having, like, gee, I wonder if my parents are good or bad.
	And that had all the drama of watching paint dry.
	So once I got through that they would be anthropologists and curious within their own realm, I had to make that believable, which was tough.
	But once that fell into place, then the sequence was much easier.
	So then you must have spent a lot of time...
	So you have a starting point and an ending point.
	I have a starting point, and I have a theme, and I have characters, and then I have to work out a plot.
	And I would say that, you know, certainly plot is not my strength.
	I think that The God of Atheists is good with that, and I think that some of the soap opera of Almost, black soap opera of Almost, is not too bad.
	Revolutions is weak in plot.
	A book that I'm still working on getting out just poorer, stronger in plot.
	But plot is my Achilles heel as a writer.
	Some people are just fantastic at it.
	Ayn Rand was great at plot.
	And it's something that I sort of view as a necessary evil.
	And I view plot as being over artificial.
	I want art to mirror as much as possible our internal experience of things.
	And plot is too constructed for me.
	Because the plot of our lives, if we can call it that, is only available to us in hindsight.
	And so books which are very artfully plotted, like if you think of Atlas Shrugged, books which are very artfully plotted are too structured for me to be able to help people in the hurly-burly of their daily experience.
	And so my desire for jazz, for playing around, for riffing, for having tangents, for having the emotional energy that comes from spontaneity is constantly at war with the need to have structure and have plot.
	And I find that books that are over-plotted are to me a little arid and entertaining in the way that a crossword puzzle can be entertaining but not particularly illuminating in the present.
	They're not richly lived in the present because richly living in the present It's not about plot.
	It's not about the sort of overarching structure of our lives.
	So I like melody, but I think that the life of music comes from jazz.
	And so that's a constant tension for me when I'm writing.
	And podcasting, of course.
	Well, that's an interesting way to put it, because that kind of feeds into the whole tension between free will and determinism, too, in a way.
	Well, I think that's true.
	I think that's true and I think that the problem is if we look at our lives as ox that are plotted or things that are plotted, what happens is we just look at the long view, we look at the big picture and I think we miss the richness of the everyday moment.
	Whereas, of course, if we just focus on the everyday moment, then, you know, we lose some of the...
	There is that tension between long-term and short-term, between immediate satisfaction and long-term satisfaction that we all have to balance in our lives.
	And I think books that are over-plotted look too much towards the big picture and miss the individual richness.
	Like, to take a silly example, nobody in Atlas Shrugs takes the time to stop and smell the roses, right?
	They're all engaged in these mammoth struggles between good and evil and so on, and philosophical discussions, but nobody really takes the time to stop and smell the roses.
	They're all kind of workaholics and so on.
	And so I really want to sort of infuse what I'm doing with that sensuality of the moment while still looking at the big picture of the arc of the storyline that occurs within our own lives based on our philosophical premises, whether correct or incorrect.
	Right, the difference between someone who's morally committed and someone who's a moral martyr.
	Right, right. I mean, there's lots of objectivists and libertarians who spend their entire lives frustrated because they're not able to achieve virtue.
	And of course, the whole point of virtue is that it should lead to happiness.
	And wherever it cannot conceivably lead to happiness, i.e., I'm going to fight the state, right, then there's something wrong with that, right?
	And that's why I haven't written a novel about a man opposing the state, because that would be a tragedy.
	Yeah, that's true. And you just have to go to libertarian forums.
	There's no need for me to do that, right?
	There's plenty of those stories around, right?
	Absolutely. Before you said, just a minute ago, you said you have a starting point and a theme, but you don't have an ending point?
	No, I usually don't have the ending of a book until...
	I mean, I sort of know where things are going to go, right?
	I mean, so in Tagawa, I knew that there was going to be a swell of corruption, a great deal of temptation, and then these kids were going to do what they did.
	But I don't know what the specific ending is until I get there.
	Until I get at least halfway through the book and then I can see what's going to be believable.
	I have a blueprint which is like a watercolor.
	It's not a blueprint like Ayn Rand had these blueprints.
	Each brick goes here.
	And I think that that makes writing a little lifeless and stilted.
	So I know that it's a four bedroom house and the front looks like this and the side looks like this and this is how the living room is going to look and so on.
	And then I don't exactly just throw bricks in a heap but it's sort of like I'll add and remove until I get it right.
	And so in the process of building things, I'll put things in at the beginning of the book and I don't even know why I'm putting them in.
	So for instance in In almost Quentin's interaction with Uxbridge at the beginning of the book in the First World War, I put that in.
	Now, you have to have stuff that's going to pay off later, right?
	But I didn't know exactly why I was putting that in at the beginning and what happens later in the family dynamics when Tom understands the role that the family puts on the younger siblings relative to what happened to his siblings.
	Uncles in the First World War is something that I didn't even know until I got there, and I felt goosebumps when I was writing it because it felt true, but I certainly didn't, you know, didn't put all the stuff in about the First World War for it to pay off later.
	It's just you have to have stuff in there so you at least have something.
	You've got to plant something, right, so that you can pick something later.
	But I don't always know why I'm planting what I'm planting and where.
	And sometimes you just have to go back and take stuff out, but that one just happened to work well.
	Well, while we're on the subject of almost, then, was that also true?
	I don't want to give too much away.
	But was that also true with the ending of that book?
	Well, I knew that there had to be, I mean, it was a tragedy, right?
	You don't have a novel that ends in the Second World War that is a comedy, right?
	Or really that has war in it at all.
	But I knew that the ending was going to be bad.
	And of course I was taking some of my own personal experience having nieces through that particular process.
	I knew that the ending was going to be bad.
	And I knew that it was going to involve a duel.
	And I knew it was going to be some innocent bystanders.
	And I knew pretty much the shape of it.
	But the actual sort of how it finally laid out was a little different.
	So then, you don't have a conscious, rational map of all this, you just sort of go with what feels good at the moment?
	No, it's more like an instinct.
	Like, you know how I always nag people about how everyone's a genius and everyone's a philosopher?
	Right. If the book, for me, if the book was perfectly plotted out, you know, like every scene, every dialogue, every piece, every word was there for a reason, Then it would lack the immediacy that I'm trying to communicate.
	Because what I'm always trying to tell people is that your feelings in the moment are essential in determining your future.
	So what you feel when you meet someone is essential for you to rationally evaluate, or just let's say evaluate, who that person is, whether they're going to be good or bad for you in your life.
	And I take the same approach with my novels, right?
	So I certainly have the characters, and I think that characterization and dialogue are two of my strong points, probably because of, I mean, talent and also because of my acting training.
	But I don't always know exactly what should come next, but based on my interactions with the characters and feeling who is going to do what based on their own particular desires, I can move things forward in a way that instinctually sort of makes sense.
	And I hope that trusting my own instincts will transmit in some way to readers being able to trust their own instincts more.
	Whereas if I had everything perfectly plotted out, what I would basically be saying is...
	You need to know the structure of everything from start to end when you have all the information and then you can go back and make better decisions.
	But that's not how life works. We always have to make decisions based on incomplete information.
	That's true. Because time is limited, life is limited, and so on.
	We always have to make those decisions based on incomplete information.
	But we still have our instincts, and that's partly what I try to do through my writing process.
	It's not like, hey, where do we go next?
	It's not that. Definitely there is some structure.
	But in terms of every scene or chapter or who pops up and who recedes for a while and so on, there's a certain amount of instinct involved in that.
	So then there is a story arc, it's just that there's no specific plot steps in that arc until you actually start writing.
	Well, there's a lot of pre-writing.
	So, I mean, almost was a mofo to write, but it was more time spent researching.
	And there is a story arc.
	I have a lot of pre-writing, so I'll have lots of stuff that doesn't make it into the novel.
	Speeches, histories, feelings, thoughts, and so on.
	Stuff that I write which I then take out because it's not necessary because it can be explained through exposition or whatever.
	So there is definitely an arc, but the arc in life is based upon personality and is based on instinctual decisions that people make in the moment, based upon their prior decisions, which they may have made instinctively or intellectually.
	The arc is clear in retrospect and hazy in the moment and has to go on instinct.
	So there is an arc, but each particular step to move towards that arc is not always...
	For me, it's not perfectly...
	I don't have every single chapter in what's going to happen.
	But I definitely do have Hart and Tom go to France or go to Germany and they do this and they do that.
	And that stuff all sort of...
	But I don't know every single scene or character that's going to come in.
	Okay, so there's just a sort of a sketch of each major movement toward the other end of the arc, but it doesn't become a specific thing until you get to that point in the So that's part of why you do so many drafts?
	Is that how it becomes more specific?
	Yeah, I think so.
	I think so. I mean, do you know that thing where you sort of say in life, at the end of a particularly, like if you've had a bad friendship or a bad relationship or whatever, you look back and you say, well, there were lots of signs at the beginning, right?
	But I missed them, right?
	And the same thing can happen in a book as well, right?
	So if a character ends up, and writers always talk about this, like, oh, the character took me in a direction that I wasn't expecting.
	And all of that, to me, seems kind of silly and self-conscious and we're not possessed or anything, but...
	But certainly you can find out that a character is doing something that there were hints of earlier, but those hints are too subtle to be picked up by mortal man, even by the writer himself.
	So sometimes you need to go out and highlight that to some degree.
	So for instance, once the arc of Alder's story at the end of The God of Atheists was finished, I knew where he ended up.
	And I could see that there were signs along the way in the book, but...
	It's kind of a cheat.
	If the whole plot hinges on a character saying er at one point rather than um, then it's a bit of a cheat to the reader.
	Then it's like a murder mystery where you just didn't give any information.
	And then it's like, well, how could I have guessed that?
	So I think that I needed to go back and highlight certain things once I understood the end corruption of a character to highlight certain things that went on beforehand that make it possible to see that.
	Because, of course, with a book, you're just missing everything, right?
	I mean, if you were to meet Alder in real life, you'd get how he dressed, how he cut his hair, you'd get whether he had food between his teeth, you'd get whether his nails were bitten, you'd get whether he had an old jacket on with patches on the elbows or a new jacket, you'd get You know, if he had a beard, whether it was tightly shaved or not, you'd get a huge, you know, the vocal pressure in his speech, whether it was pressured speech or not, you'd get an enormous amount of information when meeting somebody in real life that you just can't conceivably get in a novel, right?
	So if I say, well, you know, Alder was twitching and his nails were bitten down to the root, that's too obvious, right?
	Because that kind of stuff is not obvious for a lot of people.
	So you have to put just enough hints in that it's possible, but not so much that, um, That it becomes obvious, right?
	So sometimes at the end of the book you have to go back in and put in certain things earlier that lead towards where the character has ended up and make up for the lack of direct central information that you get in a book that you just don't get...
	Sorry, that you don't get in a book that you'd get in real life or maybe even in a movie.
	Gotcha. So then...
	You had in mind that you needed an exploiter or a corrupter in the story at certain points in time, and then flesh him out as you go along.
	Well, for sure. I mean, and also, of course, in The God of Atheists, particularly with Altra, who is the philosophy prof, you have the issue that he's frightened of people, so he uses philosophy to erase others in this sort of Cartesian demon scene.
	And then, you know, not to give too much away, I don't think it's too surprising for anybody who knows my philosophy, he finds out that he's erased himself and can't speak to anyone honestly.
	So, yeah, I mean, I always want to say our ideas result in our futures.
	Who we are determines, sorry, what we believe determines what our life will be.
	But it has to be somewhat subtle.
	And I also can't. You've got to show it, not say it.
	Otherwise, it'd be a very short book.
	Guy believes in the Cartesian demon.
	He's a postmodernist. He erases others because he's afraid of them.
	And then he erases himself.
	Right? I mean, that's it.
	I just saved you, you know, two days of reading.
	Well, and that's the...
	I mean, that's sort of the next step to that question, though, is...
	Having to be that sophisticated and subtle in order to make a story out of it, how successful do you think it is?
	How effective do you think the realm of fiction is As a means of promoting a moral or ethic or philosophical point of view.
	I mean, if you look at Ayn Rand's stuff, it gets criticized all the time for being stilted precisely because it's so ideological, right?
	And yet, your stuff is also ideological, but you have to be tuned in enough to see it, right?
	Well, sure. Well, sure.
	And, you know, it's one thing that I do with listener conversations sometimes.
	If somebody says, this relationship ended badly, and we say, well, let's go back to the beginning and look for the clues, right?
	And, of course, that's why I think my stuff bears, God help you, rereading, right?
	So that you say, okay, well, here's where this guy ended up.
	What were the clues all along?
	And what that does is it helps people to up their smell test, so to speak, on sniffing out these kinds of people.
	So there's a thing at the very beginning of The God of Atheists when Terry first meets Dave.
	And Dave is sitting down in Starbucks but has a take-out cup.
	I mean, it's silly in a way, but that is an inconsistency and a lack of perceptiveness to the appropriateness of the situation, and also somebody who, you know, you could make an argument that that might be an indication of rootlessness, of wanting to be nimble, of wanting to be a nomad, of wanting to be up and going.
	And he is, of course, constantly on the move, and it's hard to pin down on anything.
	And again, it's not like you say, well, I'm never going to take a job from somebody who uses a take-out cup when they're sitting down, but it's those kinds of things in conjunction with You know, other things, like he doesn't know the name of particular software programs, but he's running a software company.
	Just things like that, right?
	You go back and you read, and you say, well, given what happened, I can see that you could see how that could happen based on the initial interview, and that's why.
	I'm really trying to train people, and you can only do that in art, not in philosophy.
	I'm trying to train people to read the clues, more than the clues, the obvious statements that everyone gives you around their...
	You can find all of this stuff in your first meeting with people.
	More than just reading the clues, but actually tuning into your own sensual experience.
	Right, and there's a bit which, and you can do more of that in literature than you can in real life, right?
	So at the very beginning of The God of Atheists, Alder comes into Joanne's bookstore and has said his lock of his hair was stuck to his forehead like Superman's question mark.
	And, I mean, that's a very dense metaphor, and you wouldn't necessarily get that just looking at someone, because that's accidental, right?
	But I'm saying that this guy feels superhuman and otherworldly, right?
	And he also is a question mark.
	He doesn't have any answers.
	He just keeps corroding a reality with endless questions.
	And he feels superior.
	There's a lot of vanity there.
	But it's fantasy, right?
	So there's a lot that's sort of built into just that one particular thing.
	A metaphor that is something that can be helpful to help people attune themselves so you don't have to waste all this time playing everything out to its final conclusion.
	It's like you say about dreams, right?
	Everything is there for a reason, right?
	Right, and everything in how somebody presents themselves to you is there for a reason.
	And once you get good at seeing it, it's really not that hard to see.
	Even if they don't realize they're doing things for a reason.
	Right, and the very opening sentence of Togo, the opening chapter, is something like Joanne's bookstore was filled with the smell of rotting, with decomposing books, as if the authors had died and were rotting with their own books, right?
	And that, of course, is, you know, and later on I say Alder preferred...
	People dead and pressed like leaves in a book, right?
	That intellectualism is a kind of death.
	It's a kind of aridity. It is a non-vitality.
	And that, I mean, yeah, that's a bit of a swipe at Rand, but it's also a swipe just at this whole highly abstract, merely conceptual, merely rational, and I say that just in terms of abstract, so logistical reasoning, approach to life, that it does hollow out individuals and makes them non-empathetic.
	Right, right. Since we've spent so much time on your books so far,
	do you apply these same sorts of Criteria for a good book to your own list of favorites that you do to your own books.
	I think so. I think that art is more than just what's good about my stuff.
	There's something that's got to be personal to mine, but there is something that must be universal.
	Quality is something that can't be purely subjective.
	Right, so I guess what I'm asking is, I know you have, as far as I can tell, you have three favorite books, right?
	Crime and Punishment, Room of the View, Great Expectations.
	Yeah, I would say those, I mean, they shift, as you say, right?
	But those are certainly three books that I consider to be very valuable, which doesn't mean necessarily that I would consider them to be highly moral or anything like that, right?
	You can admire a well-executed murder, right?
	It doesn't mean that you think it's good in terms of morality, but certainly I think those are books that fulfill a lot of the criteria that I find, that I think is important to have in a work of art.
	What in those books kind of mirrors what you do in your own book?
	Let's just take Crime and Punishment because to do all three would be very time consuming.
	In Crime and Punishment you have an incredible examination of a phenomenon that was just beginning.
	In the mid-19th century, which is the phenomenon of nihilism.
	Nihilism which I explore also in Revolutions.
	Both Dostoevsky and I, to put myself in sillyly illustrious company, used the character of Sergei Nechayev.
	He wrote about him in The Possessed and I wrote about him in Revolutions, this real character.
	You have a man who has a theory And Raskolnikov has a theory about being a Napoleon and about being a champion and a hero and a Nietzschean sort of Superman.
	And then he puts this into practice.
	And the horror of what then results is, to me, very interesting.
	It's very, very well put together.
	It's great plot, great suspense, and great excitement.
	Combined with massive errors, in terms of basic ethics, which we can talk about perhaps.
	But here you have a spontaneity, because certainly this is how Dostoevsky wrote.
	He dictated most of his books, and he would just write and then throw out whole bits.
	This book is actually a collision of another book called The Drunkard, with Marmoladov as the drunkard and Sofia as the prostitute.
	This was another book he was working on, and he's just like, Out of hell with it.
	I jammed the two together. You know, it's a horrible way to write a book.
	I've certainly never done anything like that.
	But that does result in a kind of spontaneity and a kind of wild energy to the book.
	And yeah, he is given to interminable speechifying, which I've always tried to eliminate in my books, if not my podcasts.
	And there's tons and tons of moral errors that occur, particularly there's one point at which Raskolnikov, this is later in the book, Raskolnikov says to Porfiry, That a general can level an entire city and be called a hero.
	And I kill one venomous, horrible old woman to further my education, and I'm called a moral monster.
	If I kill enough people, I get a medal, but my problem was I only killed one or two, so I get thrown in jail.
	That, of course, is a very powerful argument, and it's just touched very briefly in the book.
	And if he'd had the courage to really go into that question, and we don't know whether it was his own courage or whether the censors would just never allow that to go in as anything other than a total side point, but that to me would have really blown the book open to a complete and total moral masterpiece rather than just an artistic masterpiece, which I think it is. Really?
	You mean in terms of the argument for morality, you're saying?
	Well, sure. He says, look, you've got generals who will catapult dead bodies into cities to start plagues, and they're rewarded with songs and books and medals and so on.
	So then murder is murder is murder is murder, which is the UPB thing.
	And he was that close, and everybody gets that close.
	And then he's just like, okay, well, this guy has to be punished because he's not Christian.
	So they get close, and you could almost smell the sulfur coming off his pen when he got that close to UPB in the book, and then he can't sustain it.
	He then has to punish Raskolnikov for even having that thought, which of course is a perfectly valid thought.
	Why is it that people who murder hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands are rewarded?
	Who murdered for pay, whereas I murdered just one vile old woman for my education to save my sister from an unbelievably horrible marriage, and I must be thrown in jail for 20 years.
	Well, and of course, Raskolnikov was using the argument for morality in the inverse, right?
	He wanted absolution the way the generals got absolution.
	Right, and he wanted to say that there is no such thing as morality, that all you are doing is exercising power over me based on a mythology called individual murder is bad, mass murder is virtuous.
	That's where he was going in terms of his storytelling.
	But as a Christian and as a socialist, he couldn't get there because it would have meant overturning his own most cherished beliefs, and that, of course, as we all know, is no fun at all.
	So you're actually willing to not only accept a book that's not really, I mean, from a moral standpoint, it's not really ideal, but actually put it into your list of favorites.
	Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
	I mean, you could have a marching band song that is beautifully written, right?
	And it's played at military funerals or whatever, right?
	It doesn't mean that the song is bad, right?
	I mean, the song is artfully written and beautifully played and so on, right?
	You know, one of my favorite singers, Freddie Mercury, was a self-destructive, slut-aholic coke fiend, right?
	But that didn't mean that he wasn't a magnificent performer and a great songwriter and a great singer.
	So you have to be able to abstract quality in individual aspects of things, right?
	I mean, Freddie Mercury did not put himself forward as a moralist.
	To some degree, Dostoevsky did, though, of course, as a rampant gambling addict, it's a little harder for him, and a drinker, it's a little harder for him to be able to do that credibly, but you can abstract quality from something without having to agree with everything, right? Because otherwise, you couldn't read anything, right?
	You couldn't even read Ayn Rand because of the rank contradiction at the core of, you know, violence is good, violence is bad.
	Right, well, I guess what I'm getting at there, though, is that...
	I mean...
	If Freddie Mercury had written songs that encouraged things that you found morally reprehensible, you'd still enjoy the music?
	Well, I don't think that it's that disconnected.
	So, for instance, if Freddie Mercury wrote songs like Marilyn Manson writes songs, then he would be an entirely different kind of human being and would produce an entirely different kind of music.
	Which I would find to be too dark and too nihilistic for me.
	I mean, he wrote and he said, he says, I write silly disposable pop songs.
	And some of his songs, particularly the ragtime songs that he does, like Seaside Rendezvous and Good Old Fashioned Loverboy, I mean, it's just purely entertaining, high-spirited I mean, that's really enjoyable.
	And some of the ferocious imagination in things like Bohemian Rhapsody and so on, and some of the live stuff that they did, it's a delight because it's just so astoundingly competent, right?
	So you can enjoy the skill of a tennis player, even if he's a socialist, right?
	I mean, and that's sort of really what it is that I'm looking at.
	Whereas if he wrote, you know, kill your friends and drink their blood, then he would be an entirely different type of human being.
	But the content of the tennis players playing doesn't necessarily reflect the content of his character.
	Whereas with an artist, the content of his output is a reflection of the content of his character, right?
	Well, you can't be a professional tennis player without a huge amount of discipline and drive, right?
	I mean, so there are some aspects of that.
	I mean, I'd say almost a monomaniacal and unhealthy drive, but yeah, for sure, there definitely is...
	Like, I can admire a book like Lolita, and the opening of Lolita...
	Where Nabokov talks about the word, that it starts with the tip of the tongue in the back of your mouth, lolita, and then it walks up to the middle and to the T sound.
	I mean, that's brilliant, I think.
	That's very clever. The book is stone evil in an absolutely decadent and repulsive kind of way, and particularly as it gets further along.
	It just becomes more and more repulsive and ugly until it becomes just like, you know, sitting, sort of slithering down into a bath full of maggots, right?
	I mean, it really is just horrible.
	But I can admire certain aspects of the artistry, particularly early on, while still finding that the book is just hideous all around.
	And the same thing is true of Camus and other people like that.
	In L'étranger, where he's sitting by his mother's bedside overnight, there's a sentence, which has always struck me, where a guy comes in with, I think it's a coffee, but it's like a latte or something like that.
	And the sentence is, I can't even remember how it goes, but it's so evocative in the way that it brings just that simple thing to life, and it really does put you in the sensual moment of the scene.
	Or like the guy who beats his dog that has no hair.
	It's hideous in a very precise way and you can admire the artistry without approving, so to speak, or finding the message to be good.
	I remember when you were talking about poetry.
	Aren't you now saying that a book can be worth it just for its ornamentation alone?
	Well sure, sure.
	Because ornamentation is a foundational aspect of art, right?
	Because that which we perceive as ornamentation turns out to be essential to character.
	So ornamentation like a guy with a tongue ring, that turns out to be foundational to character.
	And so ornamentation in art is the very core of things, at least in my view.
	And so if you learn how somebody puts ornamentation to work in their own art, you can use that for good, right?
	You could theoretically study Hitler's passion in a speech and use that same passion for good and realize that you just have to throw yourself heart and soul into what it is that you're saying and have a take-no-prisoners approach to virtue in the same way that Hitler had a take-no-prisoners approach to being evil collectivist and insane, right? Well, at the same time calling himself virtuous.
	Yeah, of course. I think that you absolutely can learn.
	If you're going to go into a fight, you just watch the best fighters.
	If those best fighters use their most amazing tricks for taking down grannies and stealing their purses, then you can still use those same things, but use it to take down the bad guys.
	To me, it's just...
	In that sense, then, you can overlook Dostoevsky's flaws in Karamazov just for the sake of taking away from it what he's teaching you in terms of writing skills and storytelling skills.
	Absolutely. Absolutely. You can get an enormous amount out of very bad people.
	I'm not saying he was one of those people, right?
	But you can get an enormous amount of useful instructions out of very bad people.
	Because the extreme of the alternate viewpoint that you should not expose yourself to bad things means that you would never learn how to read and write, right?
	I mean, in any way, shape, or form.
	Because it wasn't like the kids' books that I had had really good moral messages either, right?
	So you'd never say, this contaminates my mind.
	I cannot read this. And you'd never get beyond a first grade or second grade reading level.
	That's a good point. That's a very good point.
	And so when I can't practice something consistently, I just don't practice it.
	Whether that's right or wrong, and I think for the most part it's sensible.
	But if taking something to its logical extreme and I can't practice it, then I strongly doubt that it's a good thing to begin with.
	Not that I'm the measure of anything, but nobody could practice that, right?
	Never put yourself in contact with anything that's bad, right?
	Well, you kind of lost me there.
	I'm not sure where you were going with that.
	Oh, just, I mean, if the people say, well, you shouldn't read things that are morally corrupt, right?
	Oh, right. Then you can't practice that, right?
	Because, you know, everything has some level of it, even rant, right, in my view.
	So you can't practice that consistently, and anything that you can't practice consistently, I view as highly suspect.
	I'm not saying that's your premise.
	I'm just saying if you take that to its logical extremes, you can't expose yourself to corrupt art, then you remain illiterate and unsophisticated, right?
	Right. You're depriving yourself of, like you say, the access to the things you can learn from it.
	Right, and it means that you don't develop your own arguments or your own capacity for skillful exposition in whatever form, writing, speaking, or whatever.
	You don't develop your own capacities then to the point where you can wrestle control of the culture from people who are really, really good at being bad.
	That's a good point. That's a very good point.
	Now, listen to me talking about wrestling culture, the number of books that I've sold.
	But this, of course, as we talked about before, Nietzsche sold a couple of hundred copies of some of his books and remained pretty much unknown outside of certain philological German circles until the First World War, as was the case with Freud as well.
	But once your stuff's out there, it takes time to catch up with you and so on.
	So I think that even though the numbers of books that I've sold It would be like six nanoseconds of Stephen King.
	It still is something that I would lay some sort of claim to in terms of its long-term effects.
	Zarathustra was self-published, wasn't it?
	I think so. He had a lot of trouble getting his stuff published.
	It is the case, of course, that when you are opposing a narrative, it is very hard to be heard, right?
	When you're opposing a common social narrative or a cultural prejudice where you don't fit into people's cultural prejudice.
	In fact, when you oppose the very idea of cultural prejudice, then it's very hard to get heard.
	People, they recognize the quality, but they can't process it.
	So it stalls them.
	They just deer in the headlights. They move on to other things.
	The tragedy with him, though, is that he's just replacing one social prejudice with another.
	Yeah, he was, in a sense, a necessary virus.
	In the 19th century, a lot of classical liberals look at it as a very positive time frame, but it really was a pretty smug and repulsive time frame in terms of, you know, let's replace slavery of one form with slavery with another, let's keep repressing women, there's no rights for children.
	You know, everybody looks back at John Stuart Mill and thinks that that was life for most people.
	It really was a pretty fatuous and smug time.
	And, you know, it was when statism really began to accelerate and when some private public school education went in.
	And Nietzsche was just a virus attacking all of the falsehoods.
	And there were so many falsehoods that were around him, particularly in Germany.
	He just never ran out of things to attack and therefore never got to the truth.
	But we can talk about that another time.
	Well, which kind of raises the question of why attack the falsehoods when you can just work on promoting the truth, right?
	Well, you have to quit smoking before you run the marathon, right?
	I mean, you have to attack that which is false in order to know how to aim at that which is true.
	But it's not you smoking. It's everybody else smoking.
	And you're not. Yes.
	I certainly do understand what you mean.
	But he also had a massive disconnect in his personal life.
	He's talking about the Superman but can't leave his hotel room for three days because of migraines and panic attacks.
	It's kind of... You know, there's a slight disconnect between the mental image of himself as a man who can fly over mountains and then, you know, hiding out in a hotel room unable to return a letter from a woman he likes.
	You know, like, there was just that.
	And that level of disconnect, of course, is floating around in Dostoevsky as well, right?
	So Raskolnikov says, I wanted to be a new Napoleon.
	I wanted to surmount good and evil.
	And it ended up with me rooting around That disparity was very much in those who have these amazing abstract flights of fancy, like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
	This is why they're often paired together.
	The actual reality of their lives is so wretched.
	Dostoevsky wants freedom for all human beings, but He leaves to go on a two-week vacation and spends years, I think it was in Sweden or South Switzerland, addicted to gambling.
	It's not free. But in his books, there's this soaring ethics and freedom.
	But in his life, he was a slave, just as Freud was to cigars and Nietzsche was to his various infirmities and so on.
	True freedom was just sort of the iconic Madonna for them, right?
	Right, and it's infused with energy because they can't live it, right?
	Sure, sure. And I guess that kind of gets to another, I mean, that wraps back into what I was saying about, or asking about the promotion of a moral or an ethic or a philosophy in fiction as opposed to in And now that you've done both,
	and we've admitted here that even though a work of fiction can be a masterpiece, it can also still be riven with rank contradictions.
	So I guess what I'm saying there is, Where do you stand on the use of fiction as a means of competing with the dominant social narrative?
	Well, I mean, there is the fight fire with fire thing, right?
	So given that when people think that they're thinking, they're actually just inhabiting fiction, right?
	This is the whole mythology approach that we've talked about before.
	So when people don't know that they're inhabiting a story, When they think that they're living or acting empirically when they're actually just inhabiting a fiction.
	So I think it's okay for an opposing fiction to impact that.
	Now maybe that will shake loose some habits or maybe they will look at some opposing fiction and it might make them wander.
	You have to unseat people from their certainty.
	And mythology is a fundamental problem because you can just invent answers that make you right.
	Chomsky talks about this beautifully and I think it's survival or hegemony where he says the fiction that everybody subscribes to is America makes mistakes in foreign policy but it has this idealism to bring freedom to the world and it runs into these old and corrupt cultures like the European cultures or the Middle Eastern cultures or whatever or the African cultures which are so old and fetid and corrupt that they just twist America's idealistic purity around their little finger and exploit America which is over there just trying to do good things and blah blah blah You know, mistakes were made, but with good intentions.
	And of course, there's no evidence for any of that.
	It's a story that people tell themselves.
	We went to do, quote, good things, at least that's the propaganda that was told to us, and we ended up doing absolutely horrible things for no purpose.
	And then we have to make up a story that justifies that.
	And so when you have people immersed in a fiction that they believe is reality, an opposing fiction can be very helpful.
	Because people don't know that they can't think.
	They think they are thinking when they're just manipulating propaganda or symbols or mythology.
	So I think that an opposing story can be very helpful.
	So there is this massive fiction at the core of everything which is family equals virtue.
	And not rationality equals virtue equals happiness, but family equals virtue, family equals happiness, that they're synonymous.
	And so the God of Atheists is a counter-myth to that.
	And, of course, there's a lot of informed thinking, and there's some good reasoned arguments buried in there in the way people act and what they say.
	But that is a counter-myth, right?
	Now, if I just go up to people and say, well, family doesn't equal virtue, Then they will nod and they will say, yes, I understand.
	Family doesn't equal virtue. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and have lunch with my abusive mother.
	They simply won't make the connection because you're dealing with the realm of logic, but what people actually work on is the realm of emotion and mythology.
	And that doesn't mean that that's necessarily bad.
	That's just a fact that we have to work with, that philosophers and, God help us, libertarians ignore perpetually and eternally.
	All the libertarians in the world say, gee, if we only had better arguments, we'd change people's minds.
	believe, like Christianity and Islam, those things are completely mental.
	Like they're completely mental and obviously evil.
	Because if any human being started saying those things in a book or a podcast, they'd be thrown in jail for hate crimes, right?
	And so the people, people believe the most absurd insanity with perfect piety and a perfect ease of mind, so to speak, right?
	And so clearly rationality is not what drives people.
	And then people say, well, we've just got to have more rational arguments and we'll be fine.
	But that's not the case, right?
	They're emotionally invested.
	They're emotionally invested and whoever owns the concept of virtue runs the world.
	And the concept of virtue is myth at the moment.
	It's all just made up nonsense. And so I think that having the rationality plus the counter-myth is, I think it's a one-two.
	Obviously it's not going to knock sense into people in my lifetime, but it certainly is an approach that I think works.
	Because there are people who will read The God of Atheists, or Almost, or Just Poor, or Public Lives.
	They'll read those, but they would never read the UPB book.
	Right, right. That's true.
	That is true. But do you think that that's exactly why, though, that your fiction doesn't sell?
	It's because it's so...
	Well, it exposes that it's a myth, right?
	So when I have a book, which everybody says is magnificent, like The God of Atheists, but which says family does not equal virtue, the better it's written, the worse it is for people.
	Right. Right.
	It's like kryptonite.
	Yeah, I mean, if I was just some dumb hick who couldn't write, then people could just say, well, he's too bad a writer, he's too dumb a guy, of course he's going to have stupid ideas like this.
	But when it's an obviously brilliant and intellectually challenging and brilliant book, then people say, okay, well, this really smart guy says that family doesn't equal virtue, and he's got really strong reasons in the book, emotionally resonant reasons as to why that syllogism family equals virtue is not true.
	He has children asking their parents about virtue, which, as I talk about in our truth, is explosive.
	Yeah, my son, a moralist?
	Right, right. And it's the thing, right, where...
	I won't say that because it gives too much away.
	But yeah, it's like the medieval term, right?
	My son is a moralist?
	Like, what is that? He should be on TV begging for money with a big bouffant hairdo and a cross behind him?
	But that agony that is at the heart of that syllogism that family equals virtue is something that people just don't want to touch, right?
	Because it is the root of almost all the corruption in the world, I think.
	So actually then, in a way, in order to plant the virus...
	As a fiction author, you need to wrap yourself in the protein shell of some sort of inconsistency, otherwise people won't accept it.
	It'll be rejected by the false self antibodies, right?
	Yes, I need to inhabit the world of fiction as truth.
	I need to inhabit the world.
	In order to fight a very good kung fu enemy, you need to study his moves.
	Coaches do this all the time when you're going up against the Notre Dame football team.
	You study their plays for weeks.
	And you need to get inside their heads so that you know what they're going to do next.
	Know thy enemy. Keep your friends close.
	So I need to inhabit and fully get behind the characters who I consider reprehensible.
	So I really can make the argument for family equals virtue.
	I really can make the argument that is reprehensible to me.
	That way people can't say it's a reaction formation.
	If I really get the opposing argument, then it's even more threatening to people.
	Because then I'm inhabiting their skin.
	If you've ever seen The Matrix, he goes into the agents and then he explodes them.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But he doesn't become one.
	Right, right. He goes in them in order to explode them.
	And so I have to go into these people and fully inhabit their false beliefs and act as if they're true.
	And then, you know, the book is...
	The book to go, The God of Atheists, is the children in The God of Atheists, right?
	And it produces the same consternation and hope in people.
	Right, right. Well, I mean, how...
	What's... I mean, what do you...
	How do you do that, though?
	What did it take for you to write Martin's father or Alder, for example?
	I mean, well, Alder, I guess, was probably easier because you had the model of your own professors for that, right?
	How do you do that without it becoming a sort of caricature, where you can actually feel like you're speaking from experience and yet not sort of identifying with them?
	Right. How do you get the illness without getting sick?
	How do you inhabit the illness without getting sick?
	Sure. No, I mean, that's an excellent question.
	It's because I want the book to be as good as possible that I have to make the antagonist as credible as possible.
	Right, right.
	That makes perfect sense. Right, so because I'm dedicated to getting...
	You understand. I have to repeat it.
	Sorry, go on. Next!
	No, that makes perfect sense.
	I just... But you're strong enough, right?
	If you remember Podcast 300, which was Christina and the Priest, I took on the role of a priest arguing for the existence of God.
	And I'm fully confident enough to absolutely immerse myself in opposing beliefs and know that they're completely wrong.
	It's not like an infection.
	It's not like, well, if I believe that there is a God for five minutes, suddenly I'm going to join the Moonies or something.
	I mean, that's not the case, right?
	You can... You know, a squash player can pretend to play badly for 20 minutes without suddenly not being able to play squash well again.
	Yeah, that's true. That's true.
	So, in that case, it's just a question of ego strength.
	Yeah, I can completely, incredibly inhabit opposing beliefs, at least I think so, and argue for them very vociferously.
	And I tried doing this on a couple of Sunday call-in shows where it's like, okay, you guys play the bad guys and I'll play the good guy or whatever, right?
	And they're like, what? No, I'm not going over there.
	I'll never come back. Right.
	Well, that makes sense because, I mean, how else could you write a credible story?
	Yeah. Well, if I wasn't facing a very determined and powerful enemy, why would I write the story to begin with?
	Like, if I made everybody who was bad just kind of stupid and inconsistent, and not convincing, and not...
	Like, when Dave says to Terry, when they're walking down the street, and he says, look, I know I'm the amoral bloodhound, and you're the idealist, and you can't see corruption.
	That's the beauty of the idealist.
	Like, I have to give him those lines.
	Right? So that he is a credible and intelligent bad guy.
	And I have to give him some positive virtues and so on, right?
	Because if they weren't powerful, these people, then how come we've lost?
	I mean, you can't be any stronger than your strongest enemy.
	Right, and if they weren't powerful...
	You can only be stronger than your strongest enemy.
	If they weren't powerful, then there'd be no point in the struggle in the book, and all of the protagonists would be...
	Kind of empty and flimsy themselves, throwing themselves up against paper tigers, right?
	Right, and if we didn't see how this pendulum shifts, right?
	So Terry's father is myopically slow, passive-aggressive as a human being, and therefore when somebody who's real predatory, sort of quicksilver predatory like Dave comes along, then he's been left defenseless by his parents' own emotional problems and blah blah blah blah blah, right? So it's just a painful kind of learning that we have to go through because we're launched into this world.
	With big red X's on our forehead and laser sights and everything for people to exploit us.
	The whole purpose of childhood and education and parenting these days seems to be to prime people to become healthy and productive livestock for the rulers.
	I sort of wanted to point that out as well, that you're cast into this world primed to be exploited and it's hard to change that because when you see that you also then have to start questioning the motives of people who put you out in that state.
	But there's a difference though between just building a credible adversary in the story and actually presenting Two distinctly forceful arguments in the same story,
	right? I mean, if you take Karamazov, for example, those three characters are all arguing for particular kinds of worldviews, and Dostoevsky tries to do an incredible job of balancing all three of them, right? And they're all wrong.
	And that's why the book just ends like I just ran out of English.
	And then the next thing happened that was, oh, fuck it, I can't finish this book.
	I mean, that's why the book has these incredibly long and beautiful passages in it and then just ends like, okay, I guess there's no more paper in Russia, so we'll call this the end, right?
	Because they're all wrong. And of course, that's his own prejudices, right?
	That he was trying to oppose nihilism.
	He was trying to oppose ambition and materialism and substituting for it a kind of pious vacancy, right?
	Which is Alyosha. And that's just...
	I mean, there's no answer, right?
	Right, right, right. But you see the point I'm trying to make there, though, is that...
	Like...
	The god of atheists, you're not really...
	You're not really presenting the reader with various alternatives that are credibly argued that he could choose from.
	You're making a moral statement and your antagonists are there in order to make that moral statement even more forceful, right?
	They're not an opposing argument.
	They're a sounding board.
	Right. I mean, the theme of the book is that if you don't ask important questions, you just get owned by people who think they have answers.
	The fundamental question is what Sarah asks her mom in the car.
	Is daddy a good man?
	Right. She can't answer.
	When Stephen examines his father with Sarah and Alice, if you don't ask those essential questions, which is of course what Untruth is about, if you don't ask those essential questions, then you just get owned by those who pretend to have answers.
	Right, and the minute you do ask, you get rejected.
	Well, it's worse than getting rejected.
	I mean, you get attacked. Yeah, that's true.
	Right, you're in or you're out, right?
	Who is not with me is, you know, a market man.
	So then why did you switch from non-fiction to fiction?
	I mean, vice versa...
	I started with fiction.
	I was a playwright. I was a poet.
	I was a writer to begin with.
	I started with nonfiction.
	I started with fiction and wrote some damn good stuff, I think, that got precisely nowhere, even though I had agents and publishers who were interested and so on.
	It was the same pattern.
	This is the best thing ever! Then I'd watch my inbox, either physical or email, for weeks afterwards, waiting for the, here's your contract, quit this disgusting day job in software and do what you always love.
	And so I'd get all of these amazing, you know, wow, this is great, you know, and I'd like to see more, and, you know, then it was just like, I don't know, I'm not getting any calls back.
	It was the same damn thing, you know?
	I felt like, you know, I felt like some woman in Sex and the City, like, I thought we had a great time, why doesn't he ever call?
	You know, it's so weird.
	And so I puzzled, a lot of my thinking came out of, like, why the hell would that be the case?
	And it's because I wasn't taking philosophy very seriously, despite having studied it for 10 years.
	So, okay, so, because the question I'm wondering is, because all throughout this so far you've been arguing that the The best approach to undermining the predominant social fiction is to replace it with a new social fiction,
	right? Because people don't...
	They don't change their minds based on syllogisms, they change their minds based on emotional content, right?
	So you need fiction for a number of different reasons.
	Yet, at the same time, you've switched from fiction to non-fiction and focused more on the syllogistic arguments.
	Well sure, but that's so I can sell my fiction again.
	Right, I mean, seriously, right?
	I mean, the God of Atheists is enormously enhanced by a couple of thousand podcasts, right?
	Sure, sure. Right, I mean, and if you don't know the theory, then it just seems like a bit of rant against the family, in some ways, right?
	I mean, lots of people sort of misinterpret me that way.
	So, I'm, you know, it wasn't like I did everything to, but I couldn't write a novel in my car while I was commuting.
	I couldn't. I'm not Dostoevsky.
	I couldn't dictate the novel and haven't come across with any credibility.
	I just wanted to take a minor issue.
	To replace it with a rational story, so to speak, is better.
	We're generations away from that.
	What I'm hoping is that I ride my chainmail horse as hard as I can against the massive brick wall and I leave a stain and a slight dent which other people can widen in the future.
	That's the best that I can really hope for because if I expect more, then I'm just setting myself up for disappointment that this is a claustrophobic and irrational emotional paradigm that I see.
	Dammit, I just lost the thread.
	Were we going to get to sex yet?
	I'm getting there. Little by little.
	Okay. Dang it.
	I had a good question there and I lost it.
	It'll come back. If it's really good, it'll come back.
	If you love your questions, Greg, set them free.
	If they come back to you, they are yours.
	If they don't, they never were.
	Ooh, that's good. I should write that down.
	That would make a good t-shirt.
	Yeah, make that your tagline on the website, right?
	Absolutely. Okay, so, alright, yeah, then.
	I'm going to have to get back to that.
	It was the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, but I'll get back to that in a So we might as well just go to that question.
	Well, I'm sorry. The basic difference for me is that fiction talks about the unconscious premises in action and nonfiction talks about the premises in a conscious manner.
	So you really need both.
	Well, I think you do, for sure, right?
	I mean, you know, listening to all the podcasts isn't going to help you if you don't put them into practice in your life.
	Because it's all going to seem easy until you actually try and do it, right?
	I can do that, that unicycle on top of the fire-breathing dragon, that's easy pieces, right?
	I remembered what it was now.
	So your switch from fiction to nonfiction was really to work on not your approach with everyone else, but to work on yourself.
	Well, for sure, because my fiction hadn't helped me live a life of real virtue.
	Right, right. And so fiction wasn't enough for me.
	And in the same way that Ayn Rand's fiction did not allow her to live, I would say, a life of real virtue.
	And so...
	That wasn't enough, right?
	And also, I needed to understand why I was failing in such a, like, relative to my goals in such a substantial way.
	And it either was because the book sucked, and I was completely delusional about my capacities as a writer.
	I couldn't quite get myself to believe that, because, you know, I just love the book so much that it just didn't seem to me to be quite right.
	Or there was some other reason.
	And there was some other reason that didn't have anything to do with art.
	And of course, once I started working on the family stuff and its relationship to philosophy, then I understood why my stuff was being rejected because it connects those two things.
	And that segues perfectly into the next step of this question, which is you've been talking about that connection to family as though you'd already figured that out.
	When you were writing both Almost and God of Atheists, but at the same time, you've also admitted that in setting up Free Domain and starting to write about this stuff in the non-fiction realm, articles and whatnot, that you really hadn't made the connection consciously.
	Yeah, I hadn't worked it out so logistically and consciously for sure.
	That it had taken discussions with your wife in order to really realize the full content of that connection, right?
	Right, absolutely. There's a difference between being able to bake a great dish because you've baked 10,000 and actually having a recipe, right?
	And so I think that for me, to go is at a personal level about that relationship.
	And of course, I already... I already knew Christina when I was working on To Go.
	I did the first draft, I think, before I met her, but then with subsequent drafts.
	And of course, Christina was very adept at taking the godforsaken task of helping me edit down, believe it or not, almost.
	So the process of working on those books was partly where we began to really uncover this premise of the state being an effect to the family.
	I mean, it was there unconsciously for sure, but it wasn't brought out in a conscious format that I could really begin to manipulate.
	So logistically, until I'd met her, we were working through these books, and we were talking about what came up from those books.
	So when you were writing those stories then, You were, I mean, the ethic you were working with was literally at an unconscious, instinctual level.
	You didn't have a moral map in a conscious sense.
	You were just writing from instinct.
	Well, it was a little bit more than instinct because I'd already defude at this point.
	Okay. So it was a little bit more than instinct, but it was not reasoned out in the details that are in the podcasts and my articles.
	Okay, well, in that sense then I guess you could argue that the reasoning, all it does is validate the instinct, right?
	It's not really a Well, or reject it if your instinct is a false self thing.
	But yeah, for sure. I knew that, for me, the difference is saying, you know, if I'm allergic to penicillin, then I shouldn't take penicillin.
	Maybe I was just allergic to my family and other people, or maybe just had a particularly bad family.
	And so for me it was essential and whatever.
	But then when I began to look at, both in terms of the research and the writing of Almost, which is definitely around family to state, but not state as institution, state as particular policy, Right?
	The solution in almost, since I was not an anarchist when I wrote it, the solution in almost is not a stateless assignment.
	Right, right. That's true. That is true.
	And that was, for me, that was one of the big, sort of, there was this huge buildup and then kind of a little...
	Well, yeah, when I work that for publication, I'm going to have to work the ending.
	But the problem is that I can't work the ending too much, because if I work the ending like the solution is a stateless society, then I have to layer that in much earlier.
	In many, many different ways.
	And I think that would disrupt the story too much.
	And it's okay, because that's where I was, right?
	And it's okay if somebody says, well, the government completely failed in this area.
	You have to at least acknowledge that.
	And that's an area of core mythology around the Western government saving everyone from the Nazis.
	And if you get, well, the government failed in this area of core mythology, then you're more open to examining other areas that it's failed.
	Right, right. So in a way, that makes almost maybe even more ideal a fictional representation of all this than the god of atheists because it's that sort of protein shell around the nugget of truth that's in there somewhere, right? Yeah, no, I think that's a good way of putting it, yeah.
	Alright, and while we're on the subject of almost, and actually this applies to both the books, it's kind of a Should I put on the board music?
	Is this where we're going now? Well, I'll just be really frank about it.
	All of the sex scenes in both books are essentially the explicit sex scenes, anyways.
	Not the, you know, the frosted lens fade-out, right?
	But... The porn for men, not the porn for women.
	Right. All the porn for men scenes are basically false self depictions.
	There are no graphic depictions of true self intimacy in these books.
	And I'm wondering why you did that.
	Was that a conscious choice?
	Was that just a sort of...
	I've always disliked the sexlessness of literature.
	I've really, really disliked how quality literature is always sexless.
	And, of course, a lot of the literature that I like is older when the censors were very active and so on.
	But I really dislike how sexuality is not part of literature.
	It's not part of art in a very core way, right?
	Like you've got the asexual reproduction of high art novels and so on.
	And you have porn, right?
	And I've really disliked how, I mean, we're only here because of sex, right?
	And sex is a foundational drive for most people.
	It is something which shapes so many of the decisions that we make.
	And so many, I mean, it drives nine-tenths of the economy, as it seems like when you walk into the bay or some store, it's all about sexual allure and so on.
	And it is a core part, of course, of why people get into bad relationships and why they stay in bad relationships is sexuality is a kind of drug that people use to create value where morally or rationally there is negative value, right?
	It's something people use as a compensatory mechanism, like a drug.
	We're like, I can put up with picking up garbage if I can be stoned.
	It's like, well, if you stop taking the stoned route, maybe you'll get a better job.
	Or like you were saying earlier today, it's one of those substitute values.
	Yeah, it's something which people substitute for love, which is sex and so on.
	And, of course, an enormous amount of relationship problems are surrounded in sex.
	An enormous amount of people's problems in their lives are enmeshed in the realm of sexuality.
	And in the same way that I see the highest abstractions as being rooted in early family experiences, I think that the reverse is true.
	The highest abstractions that we have Have very strong effects in something as sort of, in a sense, primal and foundational as sexuality.
	So the fact that Alder is abstracted and defensive and doesn't like the hurly-burly of family and views earthiness as somehow offensive to his refined platonic sensibilities means that he has a bad sex life.
	I hate to sort of put it that bluntly, but that to me is, you know, basically Free Domain Radio is trying to sell you better sex.
	That's really what I'm trying to get to, right?
	But it's true. If you view the material as offensive to your refined sensibilities, then sexuality, which is earthy in the extreme, and it doesn't mean that it's not a beautiful and refined thing as well, but I want to sort of show how your earthy early experiences end up producing your highest, most defensive abstractions.
	But it has to be a two-way street, right?
	So your highest and most refined abstractions end up with you being You know, having problems in the earthier aspects of your life.
	So, Reginald and Wendy, for instance, right?
	I mean, Reginald hates and fears and loathes vulnerability.
	But sexuality is vulnerability, particularly on the part of the woman.
	And so, if you hate, loathe and fear vulnerability, you are not going to be able to have tender and intimate sexual relations.
	It's just not going to be possible.
	You're going to have black lust, so to speak, at best, right?
	And so I want to show how there's no area of life that values does not affect.
	Right. Well, I guess what I'm asking then is, it seems like what you've done in all the novels is you've shown that in the negative sense rather than in the positive sense.
	But you don't need to diagnose a healthy person, right?
	Yeah, I guess that's a good point.
	So, I mean, you know, Tom has his girlfriend that he ends up marrying.
	We don't need to see their sex because it's healthy, right?
	It's positive. But we need to show where the negatives are, right?
	I mean, the maps tell you not, it's safe to sail here, and it's safe to sail here, and it's safe to sail here.
	They say, here are those rocks and here are their dragons or whatever, right?
	Okay, well, that makes some sense.
	But I guess it's a...
	It's a danger to the reader, though, if he's unable to make the distinction.
	Well, but I make the distinction insofar as whether sexuality between healthy people, it's not shown, but when there's pathological sexuality, it's shown, right?
	Right, right, right, right.
	And it's shown like overtly negative or destructive characters have this issue.
	And I also wanted to show how relationships that start out with idealization always end up with dissociation, right?
	And that occurs with Joanne and with Alder, and that occurs with...
	With Reginald and Wendy as well, right?
	That they, you know, as Joanne says about Alder, you know, he put me on a statue, but not to worship me, right?
	But to keep me at a distance.
	And that distance, of course, is impossible to maintain without dissociation during sexuality, because it is a very intimate action or interaction.
	So, you know, these people who have these problems, and of course, there's a certain amount of idealization and almost a tenderness at the beginning of Reginald and Wendy's relationship when she's in Spain...
	But, of course, the problem is that there's still this hatred and fear of vulnerability, which is taken out on everything from Wendy to the Czechoslovakians, right?
	And both of them have a sort of worship of superficialities as well.
	Well, sure. Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely. That's quite right.
	Right, so I guess what I'm saying is an unhealthy reader would read that.
	As it seems to be the case in a lot of other books, it's like this too.
	You read that and it's easy to, how do you put it, normalize that, right?
	As examples of what it's like for everybody.
	Well, right, and of course the fact that Good people have violent and destructive sex in Ayn Rand's books has always been a point of consternation for a lot of people, right?
	At least I have the bad guys having bad sex and the lights go tastefully down on the good guys.
	But, yeah, I mean, that is a sort of foundational issue, which I've talked about in some premium podcasts.
	But, you know, I really have always disliked that you can't integrate sex into literature.
	And I wanted to be able to...
	I wanted to be able to try and mesh that together, and I think that to some degree it's succeeded.
	I think I'd agree with that.
	Okay, so...
	Completely shifting gears yet again.
	What... I can give you another seven minutes.
	I have another appointment.
	I could do an hour and a half. Oh, okay. I can cut this short now if you want.
	That's no problem. No, no.
	We can do the last question if you'd like.
	Alright, yeah. Just basically, I guess I'm looking for career advice here, right?
	What was it that convinced you that you could be a good writer?
	I mean, not necessarily a successful one, but a good one, right?
	That you could... Well, my first sort of breakthrough was when I adapted Drogenev's Fathers and Sons for the stage, and I ended up producing that.
	It was a play called Seduction, and I ran it in Toronto for a couple of weeks, and it did quite well.
	That was sort of my breakthrough.
	Before that, I'd always had sort of limitations and so on, but basically hitching my You know, I'm very good at, you know, Picasso said good artists borrow, great artists steal.
	I've been very adept at hitching my star to, hitching my wagon to good stars and then catapulting past them, right?
	So I, you know, was Ayn Rand's slave for many years and then I was a slave of the Russian writers for many years and now the Russian writers.
	And so I found that what really got me going was to take an exquisite piece of art and Fathers and Sons is a great, great book.
	And adapting that to stage in a way that sort of worked and was credible and then seeing it come to life and so on was what was needed for me.
	Like I found my voice through imitation and then It grew from there, which of course is the story in sports, right?
	You're a slave to your coach, and then you get your own style.
	Same thing with dance and all these other things.
	So I think for me, it was being able to encapsulate somebody else's great piece of art in a sort of reinterpretation that worked well and I was satisfied with meant that at least I had the capacity, even if I was doing it derivationally, I had the capacity for that.
	And from there on, I just...
	Yeah, I kept a dream journal and most of my early books came out of dreams.
	So, more or less just sort of taking on other authors as tutors or mentors in a way, right?
	Yeah, I mean, if you can do a credible reproduction of the Mona Lisa, then You can at least paint, right?
	And then you just have to find a good subject, right?
	So the real turning point then is to be able to go from reproduction to actual synthesis of your own.
	Yeah, I mean, I did that.
	I also did a stage adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge.
	I was quite a Hardy fan for a while.
	And from there, I began to come up with my own ideas, right?
	Once I was able to faithfully or, I think, artistically reproduce somebody else's work in a different medium, that really helped give me some confidence to be able to start on my own stage.
	And how much of that was, do you think, was...
	Innate talent on your part, and how much do you think of that was just everyday practice, if you will?
	Well, I don't know. I always say to people that we don't know our own limitations, and I would say that whatever we imagine our own limitations to be, we're wildly wrong.
	So I do know that if I hadn't done all of that work, if I hadn't slaved away for...
	I mean, I'm guessing I started basically writing when I was like, gosh, I wrote my first novel, By the Light of an Alien Sun, when I was 13.
	And it wasn't until I was about 22 that I began to write stuff that was good.
	So if I hadn't sort of done those 10 years, and then I guess I was 24, 25 I think, when I wrote Revolutions, which I thought was a good first book.
	And then it was another ten years or more before I started writing the stuff, because there was a lot of time off in between for other things.
	But I do know that if I hadn't done that early prep work of just being a slave to other people and practice, practice, read, read, practice, practice, Then I would not have been able to achieve what I did or have or will achieve.
	But there's no guarantee that all of that work, like I also put lots of work into being an actor and, you know, I think charitably I really suck.
	So, you know, you don't know what your own limitations are and I certainly never thought of podcasting or radio or, you know, public speaking as really a career.
	So you don't know what your own capacities are, but just keep pushing in every direction until you find where you really get traction and momentum.
	And along those lines, last question too.
	How much of an influence, either positive or negative, did your classes in writing Did you find them a net positive or a net negative?
	Would you recommend creative writing classes for people or would you just say, find your own Well, I think if you want to write in a recognized genre, then...
	I guess it would say it's depending on your insane level of creativity.
	If you want to write Harlequin romances, you should absolutely take whatever courses relate to Harlequin romances.
	If you want to express your individual soul essence in a magically new kind of way, then classes aren't going to help you.
	In fact, they're probably going to hurt you.
	What I got out of, I took a course at Humber School for Writers, and I was mentored by a good writer, and it gave me confidence.
	She didn't really help me a huge amount with the book, although she did to some degree, and she helped me.
	I have a habit of not putting in sensual details, so she helped me sort of We work on that aspect of things.
	But that to me is just like a little bit of swirls on the icing on the cake.
	So they can make what is good a little better, but they can make something good.
	But you also think that depending on your goal that it can actually make it worse.
	Well, sure. I mean, I went through a bit of a crisis of confidence with the God of Atheists.
	My first teacher was an English writer named D.M. Thomas, who's famous for the White Hotel.
	And he basically said that it wasn't an awful and I wasn't a writer and he couldn't teach me because, you know, it sucked like a wet vacuum.
	He didn't even know where to start in terms of criticizing it.
	So I obviously had a choice, right?
	I could fold it in. But what I did was I went back to the school and said, well, I've already paid my fees.
	I'm not paying for this kind of feedback, so you either have to give me my fees back or find me another writer to work with.
	And I found another writer to work with.
	And of course, after I read The Right Hotel, I understood why he disliked my writing so much, because his writing is very different, so to speak.
	Same thing happened.
	Elizabeth Hafer, who's a writer in Canada, One of her books was a top 10 in 05 or whatever.
	She was my mentor and she was incredibly enthusiastic about my work and wrote me the most wonderful things.
	And again, the same thing. She's like, oh, I'm going to introduce you to my agent and this is an amazing book and blah, blah, blah.
	And then it all just sort of petered out, right?
	And so it's the same sort of thing, right?
	And so people say to me, well, why is it that you don't go for regular publishing?
	Is there something wrong with your writing?
	It's like, it could be, but it could also be that there's something fundamentally right with my writing and wrong with publishing, which is the thing.
	Where I sort of choose to sit rightly or wrongly.
	So just like we were talking about Dostoevsky and Nietzsche before, take what you can get from them and then move on.
	Yeah, absolutely. I mean, open yourself to all forms of criticism.
	Whatever is valid will stick.
	But don't be afraid to just assert your own perspective and shrug off what doesn't make sense.
	And don't necessarily take the condemnations or commendations as gospel.
	Take the commendations as gospel for sure.
	I mean, when you cross the desert of creativity, whatever oasis you can slurp some water from, just go do it.
	I mean, really hostile negative criticism of which I've had an enormous amount.
	I've had actors throw down plays that I've written in disgust saying they're not even going to bother finish reading it during a read-through.
	I've had people say, oh, I had this amazing, I won't even give out her name, she's one of the biggest editors in Canadian writing.
	Unbelievable. I got an introduction through somebody that I knew.
	And I dropped off Revolutions and Just Poor with her, which is what I had at the time.
	And she phoned me and she said, you know, she emailed me.
	She said, this is some of the most amazing metaphors I've seen in my entire career.
	These characterizations are spot on.
	The dialogue is fantastic.
	She said, but the problem is, did you, like, I think I put your books in my recycle bin and then they got taken away, right?
	And I said, oh, well, that's no problem.
	I'll just drop by more copies.
	And she's like, no, that's okay.
	What the... I'm telling you, it's just madness.
	Oh, that's more than mad. That's like really cruel.
	Oh, it's a total mind screw.
	I mean, no question, top to bottom, it's just been, I mean, other people I got introduced by somebody that Christina worked with to another agent who was like, well, you know, this is pretty amateurish, you know, maybe when you're sort of more established in your career, we could be in touch and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And, you know, this is a book that, you know, a couple of weeks later got an incredibly rave review from a professional reviewer, right?
	I mean, it's just, it has been an absolutely bewildering mindfuck to go through the publishing thing, and you just have to keep going back to, well, what is your opinion of what you're writing?
	And if you're behind it, then, you know, and it doesn't matter if nobody likes your girlfriend, if you love her, then it's good.
	I guess so.
	It's a question of finding that internal confidence though, right?
	But that's empirical, right?
	That's not just something you make up.
	Everybody's their own worst critic, if they've got any sense at all.
	So when I read my stuff, the stuff that is weak or doesn't work out or whatever is painful.
	But when I read through stuff and I still giggle and still laugh and still enjoy it and still love the language, that's just empirical.
	Then it's good, at least for me.
	And I can't be such a unique human being that it's going to be bad for everyone else.
	That's a good point. That's a very good point.
	I'm going to keep that in mind.
	But that was the whole list.
	That was the entire list, I think.
	Excellent. Well, thanks. It was very interesting.
	I hope that it was useful.
	Well, for me it was. And if it was for me, I'm not all that different than everybody else, so it must be good for somebody else, too.
	Let's hope so. Okay, well, thanks, Matt.
	I'll compile this up.
	Talk to you later. Thanks.

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