Chuck Palahniuk

00:02four three two one and we're live how are you chuck I am great look at this place thanks for being here man appreciate it thank you I've read your books I've watched movies based on your book so it's very cool to meet you in real life it's always a disappointment it is always so heartbreaking because people expect somebody somebody so not me and I am constantly breaking their heart when they meet me well I expect you so you're not breaking my heart at all I'm very pleased to meet you so I didn't have any weirdo expectations or any delusions of who you are and don't just just don't kill yourself okay I meet Anthony Bourdain and he kills himself well I think there's a lot of other factors involved there I don't know so many of my peers is like the mole when I meet them boom they're gone um yeah I'm I'm not gonna do that okay so don't worry everything's fine

01:04listen I want to talk to you about a bunch of things first of all I love to talk to you about your writing process because one of them one things that I've read once is uh I believe you were writing down it was on the Cape is in Massachusetts we ever writing down there we do we ever writing somewhere where you made a deal with yourself where you wouldn't turn the heat on unless you were writing oh my gosh do you think I'm a white person don't you that was so weird the Cape the Cape you never been in the Cape Cod that's like you know all white people in England New England yes no I've never read anything like that about you no I'm sorry never been on the Cape you never been to Cape Cod never had a he-said person wonderful clams no no no no it's just something maybe something I attributed to you for many many years this is just an interesting story that someone said that they were forcing

01:59themselves to be disciplined writing and so they wouldn't write unless they had a heat on and so they they lived in this place over the winter God wasn't you know it's home Barry you're talking about Michael Cunningham who was yeah because he I think that's his story about living in Provincetown might have been this all up what terrible way to get going the one thing I wanted to talk to you though being much lately no I don't any at all I just sleep I'm fortunate in that regard all right you don't take that do you of course I do do you yeah three times a day oh you with me no we got we got started off poorly once a day do you really take care of in yeah you know what to tell the truth just before I want to do anything I don't want to do it's like a elves and the shoemaker thing is I don't want to do my taxes so I take ambien and then I wake up and my taxes are done ah

02:55and do you have plausible deniability to if you can get videotape you take an ambien people have committed murder on ambien and gotten off yes they had no memory that is true yeah it's hypnotic we would actually did a pretty in-depth discussion about that after the Roseanne Barr thing came out my own mom has taken and she stopped taking it but one of the reasons why she stopped taking is because she woke up in the middle of the night and she had a white bathroom mat and she painted it with lipstick and makeup she had no recollection of it whatsoever but she painted it like a two-year-old would if they got to hold their mom's lipstick and she just woke up and what the am i doing like what is this hey she got off easy I've heard worse stories hundred war stories oh yeah no I have heard about murder I've heard about people driving their car to someone's house killing them

03:47driving home and having no recollection of it well young woman in London climbed at the top of a construction crane fell asleep on a huge counterweight so far up over London wakes up in the morning birds around her she has no idea where she's at she is terrified Jesus Christ yeah you writing about an ambien right now I am I can tell you locked in ambient and a hundred other other things so you if it's fair to say you it seems like you're writing like one of the you're one of the ways you collect data is almost like you're reporting on these people like you're collecting real-life interactions between people and real-life characteristics and then you incorporate them into fiction exactly that's fair to say my degree is journalism I have no idea how to be with people so I need to introduce a topic and see if it resonates and then get everybody's take on these common experiences and then

04:49pick the very best one so in a way basically what I'm doing is kind of an ongoing field study that becomes whatever my next book is when you wrote Fight Club you tapped into something that it was really fascinating for me as someone who's been involved in martial arts my whole life and I'm kind of understood the cathartic release of violence but I never saw it articulated the way you did and you made it enticing for a thinking person you made it like you would you did it you you sort of opened up these these doors of understanding for someone who maybe maybe had frustration or had some pent-up rage or had some some ank's that just was not going to get out any other way and then you wrote about it and then when you wrote you're reading what you wrote a bank made you go yeah okay oh alright now it's like you you added an element to it that really didn't exist before in pop culture it was

05:53really fascinating for me as as someone who's what watching that whole thing unfurl and watching people get like really resonating with people watching people really getting excited about your work it's like oh he hit some nerve that we don't know what he really hit before and it's not a nerve that gets hit very much you know and there's so many different aspects to it and one is just my classic thing is that there are so few social model novels or stories for men for women there are us you know every season there's a new joy Luck Club a new how to make an American quilt a new traveling Sisterhood of the Yamaha hands or whatever just all these different model in which women can come together and talk about their lives and if you're a man you've got either Fight Club or you have the Dead Poets Society and that is really it so we don't have a lot of narratives that that depict two men a

06:56role or a kind of script you know in which to come together and talk about their shed another thing is Jordan Peterson back to Jordison Peterson he talks about that need for really rough play and he talks about it a lot and a lot of my friends they they brag about how badly their kids hurt them oh my gosh my daughter came at me the other day I had no idea how strong she was she pulled my arm out of the socket and they're proud they're proud that their kid can play that rough and is growing up that strong but you know we've kind of fallen away from this idea of consensual rough play and I think Fight Club resonated with that a lot and also the idea of Joseph Campbell's idea that there needs to be a secondary father in men's lives that you're born if you're lucky with a biological father that you do not choose and that is the the nurturing loving father that you

07:56eventually kind of have to reject but in doing so you have to choose a new father and that that father by choice typically is a a minister or a teacher or a drill sergeant or a coach one of those fathers and you kind of put yourself in apprenticeship to the secondary father and you have to sort of consign your life to the secondary father and agree to learn what they're going to teach you just like in Karate Kid mm-hmm and that is getting harder and harder and harder to find so Fight Club was also depicting a new form of the secondary father with all these these kids that were showing up on the doorstep of this ramshackle old house so there was just so many aspects of men's lives that were not being addressed when Fight Club came out and it sort of reinvented so many of those things that had fallen by the wayside that's a huge part of martial arts part of martial arts is your

08:54relationship with the master with the coach with finding someone who can guide you through the the most dangerous waters of competition that it's it's absolutely imperative bad relationships with coaches are absolutely disastrous and it's it's imperative that someone find the right coach find someone who they really can trust and appreciate and you do develop it's a such a common theme they talk about this person being like a son or this person being like a father you know I mean it's it's I never thought about it that way I forgot about that part of Joseph Campbell but yeah that that is a huge huge issue with with young men and young men getting into martial arts is something that I've talked about so many times I don't discuss it as the need for rough play I say there's human reward systems that are just not being they're not being met and that systems that have been in place

09:48for thousands and thousands of years that are designed to reward us for fighting off the enemy running away from danger developing physical skills and having a body that's capable of not just physical activity but violence well and and beyond just that you know it's also the whole idea of apprenticeship you know whether you're apprentices your self to a fighting coach or to a metallurgist or to a welder or to a bricklayer or to a Mason you are apprentice in yourself to somebody that you're going to do all this grunt work for but in exchange you're going to you can learn that kind of really master skill at something and so it's a way of mastering yourself as you master this other thing so you know it's not just always a physical you know fighting thing it doesn't have to be in that form just difficult something that's a struggle something that's hard to learn

10:49right yeah in that relationship that you have with that secondary father to the it's almost in in some ways more intense the the pride of someone teaching you something and then you eventually developing those skills and then this person who is teaching you this being proud of your work is extremely satisfactory well and do you remember officer and a gentleman yeah you know Richard Gere really has this drunken yes not their dad and then he has this drill sergeant who's constantly trying to wash him out and then finally he reaches it at the existential crisis of saying you can't throw me out of the service because I have no nothing else I have nowhere else to go in the world my life will amount to nothing unless I can master this thing and he's a relatively young man but is that existentialist moment where you you realize that you have to sacrifice your youth for

11:45something you're not gonna live forever it's a very Martin Heidegger moment where you realize you have to become a being living towards death you're not gonna live forever and you've got to give your life to something now when you approach a novel like that when you have a story like that that's brewing your head how do you decide what to pull the trigger on like do you just go on instinct did you just have a concept in your head and it just seems more and more attractive and you just say okay this is it you know one really good test is if you can take it to a party and you can tell a very small part of it as much of it as you know at that point and people will vie for a chance to relate some aspect of their life that is very much like that but an even more extreme example of that so in a way they're they're fleshing out your theme with parts of their own lives and so you find

12:43yourself drawing from the experience of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people and at the same time your beta testing it you're kind of taking it on the road and you're seeing that it's an idea that Reza resonates with a huge number of people that everyone can relate to it hmm that's interesting so do you purposely let go to parties with like a couple like bullets in the chamber sometimes or sometimes they just go to the party and I listen to hear somebody tell that that personal anecdote that does evoke all those other anecdotes because a great anecdote doesn't people speechless it leaves some competing to tell the better version of the same thing and that's when a real writer just starts realizing okay there's a pattern and that can be turned into something really big that's really interesting there's a parallel there with comedy for sure that's if you in

13:40good material oftentimes not always but oftentimes you'll see the audience going oh my god you do that or you know that's fascinating now um nothing I really wanted to talk to you about is something that you brought up when you send the notes - Matt was censorship and that and in self-censorship which is going on apparently in writer groups and and groups of people that are deciding that certain words should be eliminated from a vocabulary and from vernacular and that you shouldn't discuss certain things anymore these things are it's harming fiction and harming literature you can't explore the darker ideas you know oh you want to see me crucify myself right now yeah okay this is gonna be a career-ending moment for for several years I was in a Writers Workshop and the core group of us had been meeting since 1990 so this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old and

14:43gradually people were asking each other not to use certain words first you know and nobody really used the n-word but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop and then in a story I used the word and a very good friend of mine said you're not bringing that word into workshop you're not writing anything with the f-word and and it just became more and more tightly structured that way and so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other and one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strayed who had written a book called wild which was a hugely successful book it was chosen as an Oprah book and it will be on bookstore shelves for the rest of history Cheryl's book wild but while she was writing it she had written a segment about how as a child she would be sat on

15:47the sofa with her grandfather and her grandfather taught her how to masturbate him and so as a child she would masturbate her grandfather until he achieved orgasm and then later she would find these feather lists featherless birds that are falling out of a nest and she picked one up and she knew it would die so she crushed it between her bare hands this is a very small child and she wrote how as that bird died crushed between her hands it it's death rose it's spasms of death felt exactly like her grandfather's penis ejaculating in her little hand that was the best thing she ever wrote and her editor at Knopf said that is not going in this book because we want this book to be a big book and if we see you jerking off your grandfather and then killing baby birds that is not gonna make Oprah Winfrey happy so it was a magnificent piece of writing and a magnificent kind of

17:03parallel an awareness for a child to have and this juxtaposition of sexual abuse and death was magnificent oh my god it worked on every level but the publisher said this is not gonna be in the book did she send it to you or did she show it to you she brought her to workshop and she read it it was even a newspaper reporter present there and we all realized it was fantastically powerful but then she said they won't take this this can't go in Wow did she do anything with it she published it online or no and there were so many parts of that book there were so much better than what they actually did publish really and so it's that kind of censorship where you're trying to reach a reader standing in line at Starbucks and this has got to go in that point-of-purchase stand and it's got to be a face out and I understand for a long time if you want her to face out

18:04yet Barnes and Noble especially on the discover new writers face out stack you could not have the word on the first page because they did not want people picking up that book and opening it and seeing the f-word that that just did not fit their corporate culture and so you know so much of this censorship is it's because people really want to reach the largest audience without offending people but there's giant problems with that right I mean one of the more fascinating things about ebooks is that the story plays out in your mind exactly the nature of consumption makes it about the only medium which in which you can go to those places yeah literally you couldn't there's no way you would be able to find to put that in a book her story about a grandfather and the bird maybe you could put the bird in but the grandfather part is in this no way yeah and I I feel like I'm telling stories

19:17out of school but it's such a perfect example of that kind of self-censorship and it's also something so magnificent that I feel it should come out it should sort of be stated I don't want to steal her thunder I want to honor the story but it's like so many stories that people tell me I'm kind of seen as a safe person you know kind of a degraded monster maybe but as a degraded monster with no self-esteem whatsoever they feel safe telling me these things because in a way they probably feel a little morally superior to me why do you think people would consider you a degraded monster because I can read a story like guts that is so completely humiliating because as I read it it's in the first person so people more or less assume that it's my story even though it's stories garnered from many different people but the fact that I'm presenting it means I'm the person

20:17that is this losing face and afterwards people feel like they can risk losing face by telling me their story that's very much like the gut story so when someone is writing something that's deeply disturbing like that when you when you when you hit those parts of your mind and you come to this pathway D do you consider do you say well no one's ever gonna allow this to be in a book no one's ever do you consider those thoughts or do you just go through with it first and then review it or do you do not do that at all you know my formative years with a Punk years the 70s into the 80s and we always used to have a saying people would say don't hit the brake until you hear a glass break or don't stop until you hear a glass break and so I always think the point of writing is to coach yourself to that point that you would never have gone voluntarily and also to coach a reader to the point

21:18where the reader would never have gone voluntarily in a story like guts you know it's very funny on the front end and if you told people on the front end where it was gonna go they'd never read that story but it's very funny and charming and well paced on the front and then once people realize where it's gonna go they're already trapped and so in a way it's it's a way to enjoy that though you like the way you said they're already trapped you seem to take some satisfaction in that but in writing it I'm also sort of springing the trap on myself mmm starting down a path that I have no idea is going to be so humiliating or so emotionally upsetting or so dark because if I did I would never would go down that path when you write a story like that how much of the deep plan out in advance I might plan out up to the end of the second act you know at the moment of

22:20greatest crisis this will happen you know in Fight Club the moment of greatest crisis is going to be when everyone in the support groups figures out that this guy is lying to them and they're all given the choice of either accepting him for his transgressions or rejecting him same thing in choke there's going to be that moment yeah when people realize that he has faked choking and that he's made them into a fake hero and they're gonna either kill him or accept him and so I typically know that the second act is gonna end with the transgression being revealed but beyond that I don't want to know because I want the story to complete itself with its own momentum at that point and if it doesn't surprise me beyond the second act then it's not going to surprise the reader do you write do you have like a storyboard laid out and you do use like index cards or

23:19anything to figure out where things are going or do you just kind of no no no you know that's part of the glory is that whenever I get stuck I go to the gym and I say okay this I'm working on this scene where this happens and this happens this happens and my friends will say they'll always be somebody there with a really fresh take and life experience who can say well have you thought about this happening and it will take the story in a direction that is so unexpected because it's not from my experience and that that's the glory and they feel like they've contributed they're so happy and and I'm happy to spend time among people and I'm happy to have the story complete in a way that I never ever could have anticipated that's fascinating so you do it at the gym yeah the gym is really great because you're around people and you have these recoveries between sets so you have a

24:13little time to talk and at the same time you have during the exercise itself you have time to think mm-hmm and so it paces the talking versus of thinking and it's also kind of highly oxygenated and it's physically active and your mind is kind of you know you mind is not engaged with something else your mind is kind of disengaged like it is while you're taking a shower yeah a lot of people like to walk they like to read write read a little bit of it and then walk and bring a recorder or their phone to record on think probably along the same lines Charles Dickens walked somewhere between 12 and 20 miles a day as he wrote whoa and the the Lakeland poets walked constantly I mean walking is a big part of writing anything physical right like anything we're forcing your body to move forcing the blood to flow and and also mindless so it allows your mind to wander yeah so

25:13I love the fact that you're so open with these ideas too that you bring them to people and get their take on it and then incorporate their take is this something you've always done because of the workshopping is it because just this willingness to be open with your ideas and express them yeah really in a workshop was the crucial thing having that social expectation that you were going to bring work every week and it was also kind of a party a reward for having brought to work and it was also a way of testing the work so that you knew whether it was working you know you weren't constantly sort of questioning yourself workshop just provides so many really important ways of keeping right keeping you writing now yeah and you've done this always it seems like you've done this most of your career I have and this is not the first workshop I've been bumped out of the first workshop I was

26:11in was I'm very a lot of very nice ladies and I was probably 28 and I had written a scene in which a man a young man has done up an inflatable sex doll so it looks exactly like the woman he's obsessed with and during the the seduction of this sex doll he accidentally snags the back of it with a zipper of its dress and he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air so he's got to copulate faster and faster to try to achieve orgasm before this thing completely goes flat and at the end of the scene he's standing there with this completely deflated sex doll hanging off of his erection like this the surrender flag and of course his mother walks into the room and after I wrote that scene the leader of the workshop I was in my first workshop she took me aside afterwards and she said the other writers in the workshop no longer feel safe around you she really did she said

27:22you've written something that really frightens them and they would like you to politely leave the workshop and not come back Wow and so that's when I started with Tom Spann Bowers workshop in which almost anything went and so this kind of periodic implosion of the workshop it's kind of part of the process well it seems only twice right more and more times than that you know it's been twice but in the pathways catastrophic twice catastrophic yeah yeah but a few other flat tires along the way periodically we've kind of had to pretend that we were disbanding in order to get rid of a member who was just more trouble than they were worth how many people are in this workshops boy lately it's been last it was about eight but we've been up to like 16 17 and now when I teach I typically have about 25 people what does it feel I mean to be in a workshop for that long and then have

28:23such a disagreement and to disband like that or to have you forced out what does that feel like that's got to suck no you know I think in a way we all need a kind of a respite from each other we all had kind of knew what to expect from one another and I think we were all less less of a resource for one another you know there's always a chance we'll come back together so so it's not a big tragedy so there's a chance that they might so did they kick you out or do they just disband I left the workshop and I understood that it disbanded right after that that seems I just don't understand how someone who is a creative writer can't understand the the not just the the necessity like the need to delve into the darker possibilities of human reality that this the the story she wrote about her grandfather in the bird is a perfect example that I mean although very few people will experience

29:27that in their life we all can appreciate that these are possible scenarios and I think you know it it really comes down to what people what purpose reading and writing serves in people's lives and most people they want reading to be a comforting activity they want to be able to read a book and then fall asleep knowing the detective will apprehend the killer by the end of the book mm-hmm that things will end very well in a way they want to be bored or lolled by the book not so many people really want to be kind of confronted by books but some people do right I mean isn't it it's kind of like pretty much all forms of art whether it's music or movies I mean there's superhero movies and then there's movies like No Country for Old Men or the bad guy gets away at the end and you leave the movie theater you're like what the you know but those those are all satisfying in different

30:20ways to different people and isn't that sort of the point of creative expression that you're getting surprised you're getting taken down a row that is here's the world through this person's eyes and they create this world if you put limitations on that you're gonna yeah you're gonna eliminate some disturbing aspects that might bother some people you're also going to eliminate some magical moments that might just care it might literally let might change the way you view people you know and part of it has to do with the nature of you know movies movies are going to always kind of attract a more dynamic audience movies carry their own Authority through motion and books are going to be a slower medium that's harder to consume and so maybe books are always gonna at this point be seeing it's kind of a sedative it's a kind of thing that lulls you and comforts you and put you to

31:16sleep but by who by some people right I mean I mean maybe there's a market for those kind of books but there's also a market for your books there's there's there's clearly a market for people that they want to tap into those more disturbing aspects of consciousness and of reality and that market is moving to videogames and that market is moving to edgier films there's just other forms of storytelling that are serving that market better really oh yeah better than books oh yeah but why is that is that because of the censorship or is because artists aren't exploring those ideas as much anymore you know and part of it is because books are harder to consume books take an enormous amount of a commitment of time and effort to read a book where everything else is thirty minutes to two hours and to write a book as well it's such a solitary discipline to sit alone with your computer no it is

32:16not not for me no I hate that model you know I want to be in the mermaid tavern talking about my ideas with my compatriots and getting their take on them and finding out how it resonates with everything else in people's lives what's the mermaid tower oh is that the reference to we're not Coleridge all the famous writers of Shakespeare's time basically hung out that it was like the White Horse Tavern in New York but the mermaid tavern was in London during that time and Boswell all the writers hung out there and exchange ideas and entertained one another hmm and so yeah I want writing to be my social outlet but you have to write it by yourself right I mean when you're when you're sitting alone actually putting your fingers on the keyboards no you do that part in airplanes really yeah I'm write notebooks notebooks and notebooks in public and then when I'm trapped in some unbearable

33:24place like an airplane or an airport then I do that horrible part of keyboarding yeah so that's the only time you're actually right right the keyboarding is not writing you remember the Truman Capote quote about on the road Jack Kerouac Capote said that's not writing that's typing and so the part on the airplane or in the airport where you have the laptop open that's not writing really that's typing this is writing writing to you is physical pen to paper ah sloppy everything yeah why is that why is it different because it's written down at the moment that you hear it and that is not set in New Times Roman twelve-point so that it looks so finished it looks like I finished a book and it's much harder to monkey with it once you see it on that screen and in word it looks like a book it's much harder to edit it but when it's scrawled on the page in front of you you can draw

34:24arrows you can scribble it out you can you can do whatever you want to it it's much less precious is this something that you vote there's the approach you've always taken did you learn this approach or is it something that just sort of made sense to you this is how old I am it used to be I grew up in the age of typewriters when even typewriters were kind of precious because you would have to buy ribbons for them and those ribbons were really expensive and so something had to be written out completely longhand it had to be perfect longhand before you could risk wasting a typewriter ribbon to type it out Wow so you just developed it this way and just stuck with it even in the age of computers well and also because writing is something I do in the moment somebody says something insightful something really bright something phrased just wrong so it's suddenly really fresh and I want

35:29to be able to write it down in that moment so that when I do have to go to the boring part with a key I have got so much wonderful fresh stuff that it makes a keyboarding part fun because it allows me to to sort of archive and a curate preserve these fantastically bright things that were said by so many different people and you don't do you ever record do you ever record yourself like record ideas then listen to them transcribe them oh god no no that was a big hunter s Thompson thing he would record a lot of his ideas and then transcribe them and write them out you know I kind of write word for word sentence for sentence and so the transcription is just too much of an effort for me usually when I do interviews for magazines I will record my interview subjects and even then transcribing the interviews is so it's such a misery because people seldom talk in complete sentences and there's so

36:31many false starts and so many sentences that just don't go anywhere right so no talking into a recorder is just that a mess and so this notebook that you have in front of you this this is a notebook for life or is this a notebook for a particular project like how do you how do you organize it this is a notebook where three pages are devoted to topics that I will talk to you about if we're desperate and there are little notes in here about contacting my agent for different issues so it's all Universal it's like for all sorts of things yeah tasks that you need to do and then as well as that parts of books you're writing and there's all these little notes that Jamie just gave me about microphones yeah you're writing something about someone who's into recording equipment yeah that's just a small part of it but that's what she knows yeah now this I want to go back to

37:29this workshop thing like what was it just words just the use of the word or the n-word it was just words that characters were utilizing in your story that was so disturbing to them it was words but it was also some situation I thought were you know I got that people were very upset by people would leave the room or people would it would leave the room or what would weep would weep in just complete upset just part of you go yeah I got this and you see someone weeping some you wrote no most of the time people would go to the bathroom and weep and I would find out about it much later so did you get post satisfaction that way no it just made me feel like a bully and this is really kind of another thing that it's a thin line especially when I read a story like guts am i entertaining people or am i bullying them am i beating them up and how so bullying why in that way why do

38:32you way described it that way kind of charming them into a story that eventually will make them faint or eventually will make them wretch but will upset them very deeply and I feel a real reluctance about that doesn't that sort of half that bridge have to be crossed though if you're if you're really going to explore every single possibility in a creative narrative if you're if you're really gonna write a book and just let your mind go wild that has to be on the table doesn't it it does but I don't think it hurts to be aware so that you don't lapse into being a bully for the sake of being a bully you know I think anybody who's a really hard trainer kind of you know comes up against that am I a really good trainer or as part of me a sadist right and you have to make sure that you don't become that sadist but so you're not a monster so there you go yeah but I worry about

39:34it well that's why you're not but it's the being able to explore those possibilities and being able to just delve into the deep recesses of your mind in the interest of creativity that seems to be if anybody's gonna appreciate that it's going to be creative writers but it's not my mind I'm delving into the deep recesses if I'm lucky if I'm doing it right of your mind something that they'll like comedians they'll say oh my gosh that happened to you too and a lot of times there are things that people have never ever talked about I tell a classic anecdote after I had read the the gut story at an event a woman came up and she was a middle-aged woman she was about my age and she said I really love that you read that story about how you got your anus prolapsed while masturbating in a swimming pool which is not my story but I'm the one that read it so that's the

40:47one I'm the one that they're picturing in this horrendous situation and she says since you can tell that story I'm gonna tell you a story and she said how when when she was seven years old she was in second grade and she was in a little organization called the brownies which is the precursor to the Girl Scouts you you wear a brown dress little brown hat you get these little merit badges and she said one day I had a stomachache and my mom kept me home from school and we had this heating pad it must have been in the 1960s and this heating pad had this vibrating function and she put me facedown on this heating pad on my stomach and I fell asleep and while I was asleep this vibrating warm heating pad must have slid down between my legs she says because I woke up with the most amazing feeling a feeling like I'd never felt before oh my god it felt so good and so next

41:54time it was my turn to host the brownies I said brownies you've got it try this heating pad and she says all the brownies to turn the heating pad on the vibrating heating pad and they rode it like a pony all afternoon and she said it was like Sex in the City for seven year old girls they could not get enough of this heating pad and they were all riding this heating pad and had a great time and she said and for the first time in my life I was the most popular girl in my class and I was the girl that all the girls wanted to play with and for every Brownie troop meeting it was at my house and I was the leader until the day that my mother came home from work early and she caught us with a heating pad and she sent the other brownies home and she whipped the cord out of the wall she just ripped it out of the socket and she started to beat me with it and she beat

42:55me with that cord and she beat me and she said you piece of you dirty what kind of a am i raising you and she beat me and she beat me and she says this woman who's my age now she says I have not had an orgasm since I was 7 years old and then she goes but if you can tell that swimming-pool story about how you got hurt jacking off underwater she says I can tell my heating pad story and I can tell that story until I can make it funny and then maybe someday I can go back to my mom and I can say do you remember that heating pad we used to have and it'll be complete oh and so si si si si that's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to create the opening for people to tell these stories that they they never thought that they could tell because that's the way in which they're going to resolve these stories and they're gonna master these stories we have these bidet toilet things that have

44:10a little button on the wall you press it it shoots hot water up your ass and my kids come over and they loved these toilets I have two daughters and my youngest when she was seven she would sit on the toilet and choose laugh and giggling and we didn't tell her there's anything wrong with it so she was telling us how much she loves it how much she loves the hot water when it shoots on to her but she's like it feels so good and there was no shame in it and there was this weird moment where I'm like am I supposed to react to this am I supposed to say yeah I know I like it too am I supposed to say hey don't do that too much am I supposed to say don't tell anybody you like that you can like it but don't tell anybody you like it like what am I supposed to do and I didn't do anything I just let her smile and she walked out of the bathroom laughing like it was great and it was no there was no

45:15issue but it was this moment where I was like wow if I was a religious person or a suppressive person or some person with some sexual issues this could be a real problem for this little girl instead I was like okay let's get out of the bathroom now I guess you're done all righty and she has no idea that this was even like a moment of you know crisis in my mind or I was like okay how do I handle this I'm in the bathroom with my seven-year-old daughter she's getting water shot up her ass and she's enjoying it you know so you talk about it on the radio is that how you deal with I enjoy it - sure I enjoy - we all do we talk about these toilets they're amazing it's warm water shoots near it's great feels awesome but it's not supposed to feel awesome for like a little girl for some reason right see you tell that story and people will have so many versions of that story yeah

46:13for me I was in Germany I went in the bathroom in the airport I didn't know what this button was so I pressed it I looked down just in time to see this little plastic arms swing out I didn't know what that thing was gonna do so I jumped off the head and this thing shot up with such force it knocked a ceiling panel out of the ceiling and all this hot toilet water came sprinkling down on me uh and that's the only time I've ever been around one of those with what we have one here if you want to try it out I don't know it scares me there's two of them it's one in that bathroom one that one one of that bathroom you could lock its private and see that's my process is you know tell these stories and you kind of gather the stories that people tell related to these stories and you choose the ones that escalate the fastest to escalate the best and that gives you a gradual

47:08sort of you've established the precedent and then something worse escalating worse escalating worse escalating to the most atrocious or extreme version and that's what brings a story to crisis i I have a hard time believing that someone would be angry at that woman for her story you know and it's not it's hard it's about her and her story right her relationship to that story is that one you're gonna get away with you'll get away with that one the dude jerkin off the grandfather one is in a different place like she's she's a victim of sexual abuse she's a victim of violets strange that violence for some reason is more acceptable than sexual abuse in a lot of ways sexual abuse seems to be transformative like there's something about sexual abuse that it ruins you introduce an experience a memory into a person's life that ruins them this is the rough Segway but I find with so many beginning

48:21writers is that they have absolutely no capacity to be with tension or suspense so they might start to create suspense but then they'll resolve it instantly and so the story never really gets off the ground because something has happened to them whether it's violent or whether it's sexual abuse that that makes them cling to a kind of calm serenity and that's all they want and that's all they ever want and then writing in a way seems to be a way of coaching them back to a greater and greater tolerance with the unresolved with the tents with suspense if some of the best moments in books that I've read are moments where you're reading you're like oh like whereas it's going like you know you're going to get introduced and some really disturbing scene and you have to be with that you have to be with that until it's resolved and that's good writing you know bad writing is where it comes

49:20up is resolved now when you're in this workshop and they're discussing with you this possibility of censorship of you self censoring or of them not accepting your ideas like how do you how do you debate that with them how do you how do you talk about that boy there's really no debate you know and there was another aspect of the workshop is that we had all known each other for so many years that there really we we didn't have the freedom to kind of teach each other anything new yeah so there was a staleness there - hmm we're all kind of hardened into the people we were going to be I just don't understand their argument I just don't understand if you're gonna really paint a monster you have to have monstrous actions you have to it they have to be a real monster we know of real monsters I mean it was just some some guy just got arrested some had sex slaves in his basement and

50:28you know you hear about those people and you go yeah yeah they're out there it's probably a hundred of them scattered across the country right now or they have a locked basement we don't know about it those are real people but if you wrote about one of those people using real scenes that were depicted in the news you know real eyewitness testimony real interviews with these monsters some people would object to that but if you're gonna write about a monster you have to write them in a monstrous way oh I totally agree yeah what are they trying to achieve like I just don't understand what they might not enjoy what you're doing it might not it might not be something that they want to take in recreationally that they want to read your work in that in that way but the fact that they don't appreciate what you're doing or the fact that they don't want you to do what you're doing they

51:36didn't want you to bring it to the workshop look is this a new thing this is is there a new trend you know it's in a way it's a it's an ongoing thing for me because you know I've been kicked out of workshops before for just going a little bit too far and so in a way it's kind of a it's maybe my goal maybe my goal is to you know always piss off my beta audience as a way of kind of proving that I've gone too far that's not too far though you it's too far when you piss off the alphas well not the betas right it's a bit you go really far when you piss off psychos when they like Jesus man the you doing my brain you know oh my god that's another thing not to talk about my books are banned so many places and and sometimes I think that maybe that's a good thing because it they aren't reaching the psychos my books are banned in prison systems what because they are enormous ly popular these Prison

52:49librarians tell me but the books are considered way too stimulating so why people in prison cannot read my books holy all prisons I don't know if it's all but it's Texas and a number of other really big states so I don't know that's kind of a badge of honor yeah but it doesn't equate to like the the immortality of being banned like howl or tropic of cancer or salman rushdie yeah exactly yeah oh god that struggle man the struggle of wanting to express yourself as as freely as possible but being limited even by your own peers that is that's unexpected to someone who's on the outside of literature someone who just reads it because it's not in the comedy world what is in the comedy world but not amongst good comedians another aspect of that is that so often people aren't censoring it because it offends them they're censoring it because they're afraid it will offend someone they know

54:00they're doing it they're kind of white knighting on behalf of someone else David Sedaris told me this story about telling a joke or something very funny about a girl in a wheelchair and how he looked out in the audience and no one was laughing they were all looking at a girl in a wheelchair and the moment she started to laugh the entire audience started to laugh oh yeah and so so often people in a workshop they might not personally feel offended by the word but they're thinking how that word might hurt people they know but yeah that's a fact yeah that's a that's a giant issue in comedy if you if someone's telling a joke of someone's onstage talking about someone who's fat and there's a fat person in the front row that joke will bomb yeah it just yeah but that's because people are good people overall you know they were recognized that they don't want to cause

54:57pain another really odd comic David Sedaris story is it he always told me when you're on the road don't read from your current book always read from the next book piece it's the way of road-testing the stories and finding out which ones work and should go into the next book and in doing so he was telling this story about being in this this forensic laboratory as and as an autopsy was taking place and this autopsy table was adjacent to this this huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite for this lunch room and then the lunch room were the rest of the forensic staff and they're all eating their lunches they all had tuna sandwiches and cans of coke and barbecued potato chips and they were watching through the window as this absolutely perfect twelve-year-old boy was being autopsy and just hours before this kid like two hours before this kid had been riding his bicycle he'd fallen

56:01over he'd hit his head on the curb and now two hours later he was dead and dead without almost a scratch on him just this perfect naked dead twelve-year-old boy on the autopsy table and as he the the technicians eating their lunch watching it through a window they watch as the as the pathologist in sizes around the top of the kids face at the top of the forehead the hairline and then peels the face down like peeling an orange peels the entire face off of the skull of this little boy and leaves the face around the neck like a mask like a rubber mask and this exposes this liver colored dark red musculature of the child's underlying face and this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich he points this out and he says see that that there that's the color of red that I want to paint our rec room holy and when Sedaris told that story in front of 600

57:11people it was dead silent and you could hear people weeping people were crying and they were hating David Sedaris in that moment and so I had to laugh I laughed really loud like a dog and it was amazing how the hatred in that auditorium swung from hating David who they did not want to hate to hating this jackass over here who was actually laughing and so I threw myself on the sword for David and that story never went in any boy Wow did this story not go in any book just because the reaction by the audience so just the uncomfortable moment he just decided you speak to him about it no I did not afterwards it was just such an awkward painful thing I would never had to throw it back in his face right to my knowledge that was the only time the story was told to have those like scattered about are the these are their scenes what you wrote and you just sat

58:13and looked at him what no I just got to put that one somewhere else oh there that that aside jokes that I told where I got hissed by 800 people and you know as you can live through those moments you realize you can live through a lot you can be hated by 1,100 people at a Barnes & Noble on Union Square oh yeah you can be hated by your mother it's okay now when those people come to see you how many those people are fans of literature and how many of those people are specifically fans of your work like there's there would be a difference like the people or fans of your work would at least expect some uncomfortable moments and for the most part that tend to be more or less just fans of my work mmm and still still hiss oh yeah but it's again their hissing on behalf of someone they're not hissing out for themselves you know I made this horrible cheap shot

59:10and they always know a cheap shot people always know a cheap shot I I was commenting about how in Breakfast at Tiffany's Truman Capote had made this observation that Americans don't like true beauty true classical natural beauty they want to see a very plain person who has been so groomed so exercised so made up so style stylized that she can kind of pass as this this amazing strange beauty that's what Americans want because natural classic beauty is not a gala terian you're either born with it or you're not hmm they want to see a plain person who has been transformed and to make my point at the end of the story I made a cheap shot I said and that's why we have Sarah Jessica Parker and I said this in New York in New York Sarah Jessica Parker is worshipped like a God and that whole crowd hissed and booed and did everything but throw excrement at me Wow

60:22but then later in line half of them came up and whispered that was really funny yeah that's well that's one of the things about dark comedy clubs you want them dark you know you don't want everyone illuminated like that when the the crowd is like the one this is one of the real issues with doing a comedy special is that especially the old way they used to do them needs to like to light up the audience which completely changes the dynamic of the the room changes what you laugh and what you won't laugh at you know a scene like this Erica Sarah Jessica Parker joke it's perfect example like you don't want to be caught dead being the one person that throws their head back in the house at that you know cheap shots they're just to stay away from them but that's another I'll ask you ask you a question you know with so many colleges becoming these kind of strident safe places that

61:16demand their own aesthetic what is it like doing comedy well it hasn't changed that much people getting a little got a little bit more sensitive because they're aware that other people are more sensitive without the audience's that come to nightclubs which is primarily where I perform if I do a theater those people were there to see me so that's there they're usually pretty loose pretty fun but if you're in a nightclub they're there to see especially the comedy storm only good things about the comedy stores there's literally two dozen people on the line out there not necessarily just here to see you they're there to see Anthony Jeselnik and Chris D'Elia and all these other comedians that are also there as well so you get a much broader comedy audience but their nightclub audiences they have a few drinks in them maybe they smoked a little pot before they got there

62:12people there to have a good time colleges are a nightmare now it's a nightmare because it's recreational outrage it's it's kids who have been under the control of their parents for most of their life and haven't had their own sovereignty and identity and now they're free and they are very quick to be outraged they want to porn out their moral superiority there was a virtue signal and every opportunity they want to shut down anything they think is air quotes problematic they don't want things to go on a bad when they think for some reason that comedy should be uplifting and it should only punch up like I had this conversation once with a professor who wrote a book on a comedy and he said all great comedy punches up and I said that's I said one of the greatest bits of all time is Sam Kinison spit about starving children in Africa about watching those commercials

63:05we're starving kids are in Africa and you know they couldn't you please help and he goes in you know and kinnison's like you just want to grab the guy hey why don't you help them you're right there or send something like me you go send something like me it's gonna take these people go hey we just drove here 5,000 miles with your food and occurred to us you wouldn't be world hungry a few people would deliver the food as he goes come here you see that that's sand we got sand in America - we just don't live in an he's built he goes and one of the greatest bits of all time is literally about starving babies in Africa it's one of the greatest bits of all time and he didn't have anything to say you didn't know where to go with it I don't don't say comedy is only about punching up that's crazy talk that's what you're doing is you're there's there's a this moral thing that

64:00they're trying to achieve that literally is completely independent of humor it's not what's funny it's like they're they they want to they want it to be a multi-purpose tool they want it to be funny as well as morally uplifting and great for people who are discriminated against and amazing for folks who are marginalized and uplift for those who are disenfranchised well that's not what comedy is what comedy is is funny those things are wonderful in turn if you want to do a spoken word show or poetry or writing or you know a one-person play those are great but that's not funny comedy is funny so it's either funny or it's not funny and some things are funny that are up you know Kinnison had a bit about homosexual necrophiliacs or paying money to spend a few hours undisturbed but the freshest male corpses and he's so he would lie down on his stomach and he goes you imagine these people there

65:03on the slabs like well I went through life and had a good time and everything and now I guess I'm gonna go and be with Jesus and hey what the hell is this he's rocking back and forth feels like some guy's got his dick in my ass you mean life keeps you in the ass even after you're dead it never ends it never ends oh you'd close on it because it was that he couldn't follow it it was such a powerful bit it's about a dead guy getting in the ass there is no further down that you could punch other than starving babies in Africa you know and I'm not sure about if this is punching down but do you remember this the routine that kind of put Whoopi Goldberg on the map a million years ago about being a black surfer chick no oh you know she did it on television I must have seen it on cable when I was like 19 years old but she talks in Valley speak nobody's seen this will be person before

66:00she's brand-new nobody's ever seen her on television she's got this funny name and she's doing this Val speak about being the only black surfer chick on the beach and she loves surfing and she loves this one white surfer guy and she finally hooks up with him and then she realized that she's pregnant and it's all very funny the whole front end you're just roaring with laughter and then she's pregnant and she doesn't know what to do so she gets a rusty wire coat hanger and she goes into a public bathroom on the beach and she gives herself a coat hanger abortion and it spills out there on the concrete floor and everything's okay and now I'm back on the beach and I'm just doing fine and and why don't you come on down and see me here on the beach it's great down here it's great oh it's a fantastic piece and she did it on television if she did it on TV and it started so light

66:59like an IRA Levin novel and then it went to such a dark horrible place and then it came up with just this kind of token everything is okay ending every I'm gonna be all right don't worry this is just something to happen just leaves you shaken and that's the kind of comedy I love know where it goes to that dark or that sentimental place and it breaks your heart and then it kind of comes out of it a little bit but I are 11 to death so well Nora Ephron in her books she was so good at doing that heartburn heartburn is fantastically funny but by the end you're just weeping the book is so sad but these are moments that if you're gonna if you're gonna censor people if you're going to self-censor if you're going to decide that people can't use certain words if you're gonna decide the certain scenarios are just too upsetting for the the reader the these words are gonna these moments are going

68:06to be harder and harder to achieve and these are the moments that we're gonna talk about like if you and I we weren't here if we were in a bar somewhere and we're having a few drinks talking about great stories or great moments these are the moments we would bring up these are the impactful things that it's saying that Sarah Jessica Parker choked in front of those thousand people and they're booing and hissing and you were you're literally on fire under your skin like and you're beating yourself up viciously like why did I say that I'm such a jerk yeah I didn't need to say that that was just cruel and thoughtless and yeah but if you said that exact same joke and it killed I'd still kind of beat myself up a little bit right you'd be like who is awful people laughing and this unfortunate girl do you think that the reason why people love the transformation thing is because

68:56it almost like if everyone feels like they have a chance instead of like that's exactly what it is yeah that you can be you don't have to be born with it today you have a chance of attaining it you know yeah the unfairness the that is just the reality of life you know one of the things that Jordan talks about all the time is equality of outcome that the that this idea of equality of outcome is it's absurd it's never going to happen it's not it's not what life is life is not about equality of outcome it doesn't happen that way because not everyone's willing to put the same effort in and not everyone was given the same tools at birth and you know you got to be a little careful too or you fall into that Jay Gatsby trap well you get exactly what you wanted when you were 4 or 14 years old and I realized oh this is not an adult's dream this is a dream of a child it's one of the things that is

69:56interesting about your current situation and one of the things that I've read about your take on it I don't know how much you want to go into this but you got ripped off I got embezzled which is a word I can now spell was it someone you trusted it was it was a the accountant for the agency that represented my work and this is a man who worked with for almost 20 21 years and one of my favorite people in my professional life and what I thought was interesting was your take on I mean the whole thing's horrific and everyone's worst nightmare but you know who trusts people with their money but was interesting as you'd you decided that there's some merit to this there's some benefit to this that this is going to make you hungry again that this is like you have to work now and also that that I have been really poor in my life and it was never my goal to be really

71:01rich it was never my goal to have money it was my goal to be a riot was my goal to be able to write books for a living and I can still do that you know I've been poor poor is not something I'm afraid of as long as I can write books I'll be a happy person you had to be rich and to not be creative look as if you know sounds painful you sure does you go to those parties those rich people parties and all they have to talk about is their servants mmm I hate my maid I hate my gardener we have this new person to do that this and they're doing a lousy job and all they have to talk about in their lives is their household help I hate those parties or objects over objects yeah there was a guy that leased to live down the street from managed to call him bling bling because every conversation that I would have with them it would eventually be like yeah look at this new car got or where'd you get that

71:56watch or you know what what kind of car you drive it and like what are you doing to the house you got a new sink you know it's got a new TV which which size did you get it was always objects it was always things you know he was just a strange guy that was just working for things yeah the same things that everybody else is working for and just a different combination of things yeah but it's a game you know trying to accumulate points in the game you know and because these things are difficult to achieve then they become attractive and then they become the main focus because it's hard to get a Bentley you gotta save up a lot of money to get a Bentley you know how much those costs which model is that is that the one with the delet well look at you got the perforated leather seats that's extra expensive and then this becomes the main goal yeah but so many people fall into that bizarre trowel

72:46this is such a strange common trap well you know but it's the only trap that we kind of have you are not really trained to again go to that that place of wanting to you know learn something to wanting to create something to apprentice yourself to somebody who creates the thing that you dream of creating it's much easier to kind of fall into the ready-made trap of these things up for sale and the people who sell them will treat you really nice hmm you go into their showroom and they will treat you so nice and you are always welcome there yeah and you have a way of kind of you know signaling that you've accomplished something in a very public way yeah it's much much harder to apprentice yourself and to sit down and do those 10,000 million words or to you know paint those pictures or whatever build those brick walls and really develop the pride of a skill yeah I mean the the pride of a

73:50skill and the knowledge that your your discipline and your focus allows you to achieve these works that these things when they're done I mean what is that feeling of satisfaction like when you touch the back cover of a book for the first time and it's over no that's nothing that's nothing compared to when you hear it echoed in the culture and you hear people pick up the word snowflake and you hear all these people say the first rule of blank is when you realize that you've kind of dictated the semantics of the culture for a period that feels like power that is that's glorious when you found out that this guy ripped you off we shocked did you have suspicions before this I had known almost a year before so you had an idea for a year yeah and then it was confirmed it was finally what would happen you know a year ago I was supposed to start receiving some

74:54significant payments from this year's book and they never came through and they still never came through and every time I requested them the publisher said that they had been paid but the accountant said that there were technical difficulties with wiring me the money or he had personal problems in his life caring for his mother and so there was always some reason why the money never came through and finally I kind of I told my agent I didn't want to do any more deals until we had this money thing resolved and at that point the accountant made a videotaped confession and has since pled guilty and I believe his sentencing is going to be in November but according to the district attorney they can't seem to find any of the money so the money seems to be gone Hamas who still you know it's kind of up in the air it's uh initially they said it was 3.5 million and now they're

75:54saying it could be as much as 25 million and this is from not just me this is from Mario Puzo's estate the man that wrote The Godfather this is from a lot of different estates the agency handled the estate of Lillian Hellman and Jacqueline Susann and a lot of very big big writers edward gorey he wrote those creepy wonderful cartoon books a lot of different writers a lot of different estates lost money so was this guy doing this from the jump or this is somewhere along the line he lost his mind nobody really knows yeah Wow Jamie can you hit that pause button while I go on take a leak just go and take a leak oh yeah don't worry about it man I know it's rough get used to it though what a week anywhere close to 3:30 we know it's it's 2:30 but we can end anytime you'd like know 3:30 it's kind of my drop dead okay okay neil degrasse tyson's here ladies and

76:56gentlemen he's waiting he got here way early though right yeah that was the plan he's got some work to do before it's okay he's probably in the tank right now I hope Stu's intense right yeah can't believe I up that original story I was trying to look to see if else man I really thought it was attributed to him but that's me my up brain he's intense though kind of creeps me out with his intensity a little bit what do you think about some of the that he's written like guts yeah you know joke yeah what was the one where someone turned into a werewolf on an airplane so what I think that was from his collection of horror stories they want the alien on the cover the process though it's like survivor he's so perfectly designed for being a writer you know like it's one of the more fascinating things about this podcast is getting to pick the brain of someone like him and however when would

78:04you ever have two plus hours to sit down with a guy like that and just find out how he thinks about like who's you know how he's never gonna let you in like that this is one of the weirder things about podcasts is that for three hours or whatever the time is the phone's go away you're you're wearing headsets which I try to encourage people to wear now because for a while so yeah do whatever you want but there's something about the headset that locks you in your voice is exactly the same level of sound as my voices because they're it's all coming through the headsets so it's all combined so you're much more aware of talking over each other and like that but you're also much more aware there's nothing else going on that the sound of your voice is it's it's by isolating by putting the headset on and eliminating the outside noise you would never be able to you'd never be able to

78:59have a conversation with a guy like that like that's gotten this deep into the game just that's what I was gonna say the depth the depth of everything yeah background in journalism is probably where that's coming from but he's appreciation for darkness too like his appreciation for that story of the little girl jerk and the grandpa dude it's always back guy stop talking both feel better some of the support cast makes people pee that's it - I've developed a superhuman bladder occasionally though I have to get up occasionally so back to this dude ripping you off this guy who is your friend so they don't know where the the money is and no they don't and he's not talking you know I guess he hasn't really talked about where the money is gone at first they thought there was some dummy corporations and they could recover the money so we were all looking for a big

80:03payday but now the DEA says they cannot find the money and he doesn't want to talk or he's saying the money is spent I'm not sure don't you want torture him no I don't don't you want someone to torture him no but it's so sweet it is so sweet because I have had a readers readers offer the torch room to kill him and they say they'll do it free of charge so apparently these are people who can't do it for a living yeah so damn I need to make a list okay I'm going to get some free killings it's gonna have to be some people I really don't like but you want the money first you don't want to just kill some money one make sure you get that money first otherwise it's sitting in coffee cans buried in the Nevada desert you know I really between you and me I really don't care really no you know I'm not I really am seriously not somebody it would have given me a little more wiggle room I

80:59wouldn't be writing so frantically on the next book I could maybe take a little time off and I don't know relax but you know this is what I do and so what the hell yeah you have your health you have a million ideas great ideas a great profession that you love you're involved in it right now currently and we're in the process all these projects and so you know I haven't really lost any of the things that I really love you know my dad is dead my mother is dead and I think after your parents are dead there's not a lot that can hurt you that much except you know of course the death of a child mm-hmm and so you know you kind of bulletproof after those things well the real issue that happens with successful people is they lose their hunger right they lose that it's it's a death sentence for comedians one of the things that happens with comedians is the early specials tend to be really

81:58good and then the the later specials tend to be really bad and it's because these people are now super wealthy and coddled and there's no danger in their life and no no real risk or challenges and there's no growing or learning everything is just like performing to people that adore you another aspect and I talk about this more and more with writers I know is that when you're starting out you've got a lot of downtime a lot of day trading daydreaming time a lot of slack unstructured time but the more successful you become the more your time is really scheduled and you just don't have those I'm really bored times yeah when you tend to come up with fantastic ideas and so in a way being somewhat poor again gives me those does really slack times when the ideas occur that makes a lot of sense yeah again to bring back to comedians comedians they get movie careers then it's another death

83:00sentence for their comedy they start doing movies they're on sets all day they're constantly working and then you don't have enough time to concentrate on your stand-up and you have zero around time because you're just doing things all day you lose that this is weird named Robby Brad Pitt advice Brad Pitt told me Brad Pitt said that success is actually one of the failure is actually one of the best things that can happen because only failure gives you that kind of alone isolation down time when you can really reinvent yourself in a significant way and create something remarkable again that ongoing success becomes kind of a mediocrity mm-hmm you really need to fail to fall out of the limelight long enough to produce something really strong again totally makes sense one of the best things that can happen to a comedian is bombing when you bomb that feeling is so bad I was

84:03describe it as like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother but the problem the difference is that there's probably someone out there who would enjoy sucking a thousand dicks in front of their mother but nobody enjoys bombing so it's probably worse than that but that feeling whatever it is reignites your appreciation for people attention span your appreciation for tightening up your delivery your concepts figuring out a better way to get them through you never one experience that again and some of the greatest moments in my own personal journey of stand-up have come from eating that's where they come from you got each I mean it's great to do well wonderful feels great but those eating ones those are the ones that get you to the notebook again those are the ones that reinvigorate you have you spending hours and hours in your hotel room going over sheets of paper and checking

84:57out idea making sure these concepts connect together and some sort of a meaningful way and figuring out what tighten things cut out the fat when you're in this situation right now and you're the frantically writing now and and and you know and sort of forced into this element of creativity this like that you're forced to be hungry again it I mean I wouldn't wish it on you but in a way do you feel like it's kind of a gift oh yeah yeah in a way you have to accept ultimately that everything is a gift because it's always about what they call cognitive reframing cognitive reframing whatever happens you reframe it in such a way that you recognize the value of it and so yeah regardless of what happens you know before my father got murdered he had been asking me for an introduction to Winona Ryder in 1998 and I kept on thinking I am NOT gonna introduce my father to Winona Ryder

85:56because I know he's gonna hit on her and I wasn't just going to be mortified they have my dad hitting on Winona Ryder and he'd always talk about how pretty she was any chance I can meet her and and and to tell the truth when I got the word that my father had been murdered by a white supremacist in the mountains of Idaho one of my first thoughts was I'm off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing and that's cognitive reframing uh and you have to do it all the time that's glass half-full right there I love my father but you know nobody not none of our relationships are completely perfect all the time right there's no way around it yeah yeah well that's again the great thing about unchained writing is that you can express those ideas and that would that would be my my main concern about any sort of a workshop or support group or any any any sort of group of like-minded

87:06peers that wouldn't understand that and that would want you to limit your language I just don't it does doesn't compute yeah and in the Platonic world yeah everybody should kind of get it but unless you're ruffling feathers even within workshop you're not going far enough you know I loved writing that line in Fight Club where Tyler and Marla have sex for the first time and I'm the most romantic thing that Marla can say is I want to have your baby so what is the inverse so of course Marla turns to him and she says I hope I got pregnant because I really want to have your abortion and that's the line that the movie studio went around and around and even Brad Pitt said you know my mom's gonna see this movie I I don't want her to see this line and they shot that scene with so many different substitute lines and then finally Fincher wrote the line and Helena Bonham Carter says I haven't been

88:08like that since grade school and at that point 20s the tree fox said can we switch it back to the abortion line unless you're always kind of pushing to kind of you know until you get some pushback you don't feel like you're pushing hard enough and so push back is not a bad thing it's just kind of a it's proof that you're doing your job there's a trend that's happening now though this this is that this pushback is coming far quicker that it never has before is a there's a trend now to limit language and limit creativity and just limit the subject matter trigger warnings and stop people from you know stop people from experiencing things that might be disturbing and I could see both sides of that because on one hand we've got a generation that has been exposed to so much sensationalistic stuff in order to attain their attention they've really been overloaded with the most extreme

89:15versions of everything in order to get there their ticket money or whatever they've really been pounded by so much stimuli I could see them kind of really pulling back and wanting to be monastic for the rest of their lives and on the other hand I see them as being as wanting to sort of counter dominate in order to just create room enough in the world for their statement you know they're moving into a world that's already so occupied by attention getters that if they can shut some down that there might be room for their own expression so I kind of see benefit on both sides and in a way to their their dominating their teachers which is good because it's this a way of exploring your own power mmm and figuring out what you can do in the world and that you can have effect you can have agency so I don't think it's a totally bad thing that's interesting the the idea that

90:17them dominating their teachers is in some way good having them well it certainly gives you confidence and and lets you understand that you can affect change even if it's meaningless change did you pay attention to what happened in Evergreen State in in Washington yeah did you see when there's a for people don't know the story it's the Bret Weinstein story where the students decided that there was going to be a day of absence traditionally it had been where people of color stayed home just so that people could recognize the important part that they play in the culture and society but then they had ramped it up and aside did white people gonna have to stay home now and he was like that's racist and the whole thing went crazy and went haywire and the the school is basically falling apart but there was a scene that was filmed where the president of the university was in president of college

91:16was in this auditorium and he was addressing these children and they told him to stop moving his hands because it was threatening and so he put his hands down he put them behind his back and they all started laughing and I was like wow this dumb like this this this guy's running this university and he let them tell him not to move his hands gesturing as he's speaking he's like one of the ones one of the most non-threatening beta people on the planet and this guy is just giving just wants to keep his job and try to silence this mob this angry horde of you know kids their kids but when he listens and puts his hands down I probably watched it 10 times they all start laughing you know and just I think it just demonstrates how desperately they want a stronger leader yeah they don't want they don't respect they didn't want to learn from somebody who is a college professor and has never

92:18really attained anything in the world they just don't want to become another cog in that same kind of you know wheel they want to learn from somebody the respect and who's attainments they respect whose achievements they respect right that's probably part of the issue at universities right is that these professors are so terrified of the reactions of these students which is not the place you're supposed to be with a mentor student relationship it's it's not supposed to be that way it's not supposed to be the mentor desperately needs the student you know you see that sometimes in private schools with rich kids they treat their teachers like and the teachers have to bite their tongue because they they have to you know this is not it's not not it's not the normal dynamic that exists with the older wise person and the young person who's trying to earn from this person a deeply respect

93:12it's not that dynamic at all it's this old person who's weak and wants to keep their job and is willing to tailor their own thoughts and ideas to this irrational mob of social justice warriors and that's what we're seeing on campuses now you know professors calling for censorship and and and to stop freedom of expression you know when I was in college my favorite professor Roy Halverson he was the John Houseman of the journalism school he was this old grey eminence and nothing made him happy you could never please this this uh this John Houseman Paperchase guy nothing was good enough and nothing would make him smile and I worked my ass off to make him happy and I finally got an A in one of his courses but he is about the only professor I remember out of my entire four years it was this man that just didn't take from anybody yeah this the dynamic of the kid being in control

94:21it's not good for the kid either mm-hmm it's not good for any when they get out of school they're gonna be baffled they're gonna look for that power in other places that power that they enjoyed in the universities and you're seeing that spill off you've seen that spill out into you know social media and these different forms of activism what people are trying to reach Eve that power that they had and sort of forcing people to their will and in a way it's kind of a farm camp because a few of those people will achieve that power and they will be able to kind of leverage that power to something more legitimate something larger and those will be the next generation of leaders that emerge so this is in a way a laboratory where where leaders are taking form and the rest of them will just kind of filter down into whatever jobs whatever careers but they will always have their kind of

95:13glory days when they say to remember that time we we shut down the ROTC building and that will seem like a big glorious pass to them but that won't be enough what's causing all this the exam if you thought about that like why is this ramping up because it seems like it is you know I think on one level it is a disillusionment with the the goals of the baby boomers but so many people have seen their their parents achieve what they thought was gonna make them happy with the houses and the trips and the careers and the possessions and the wives and the second wives and and the step-siblings and they're seeing their parents get everything that they want and still not be happy and so you see a generation that's kind of floundering thinking you know they don't know what's going to make them happy I don't know what's gonna make me happy and so people are really distrustful of advertisements

96:19to tell them what's gonna make them happy and so you know I think it's just a big struggle a big everyone and blind in the dark right now so just just a reaction to what they see that's ineffective what see they see that's going wrong so that they're choosing to embrace a different group of values right well and but they don't not even sure even that new group of values kind of dictated to them with a lot of pre-existing language and so I don't I think ultimately that's not going to be very fulfilling either it's got to be something that emerges from a kind of limb noid laboratory like Burning Man these kind of fringe things that are all as Victor Turner would say they're all kind of a experiments in and how to be that's what Fight Club was and just this is kind of experiment inhale interaction to be structured in a different way and these things take place in these kind of

97:27playful environments like burning man like cacophony Society used to do and they're fun and the ones that are the most on we'll be the ones that are perpetuated Burning Man is fun and that is why Burning Man has existed for 30 years and occupy was not fun and that's why we had one occupy and I know people are gonna be pissed off about that but no every year Burning Man is bigger and it's funner and more people go there and every year we don't have another occupy well I don't know if that's a valid comparison because occupy was infiltrated by cops and the FBI and they pretended to be protesters and sat amongst them and the whole thing was kind of misguided in the first place whereas what Burning Man is is a complete removal of these people from society I mean they decided to meet and one of the most hostile climates in the world and there's something about that

98:24the recognition that you're out there in the desert with a mask over your face and you're dancing with dirty underwear on and then all these people are doing it together and then half of them are out of their mind on drugs and you're not against something you're not protesting sighing you're there to create salivating celebrate contribute something yeah in the protests also would occupy a lot of them were misinformed and they didn't really understand the process they were protesting against there's a very funny famous video with Peter Schiff who's been on this podcast before is a financial wizard who was set up shop there with a $5,000 suit on and it basically said I am the 1% you know ask me questions and he interviewed these kids so they would tell him what's wrong with the world and the the you know the imbalance of finances and financial and equity and they just didn't understand

99:24what they were upset about and he would explain to them how capitalism actually works and how he's employing all these people and the reason why he makes so much money cuz he employs so many people and if he wasn't doing this these people would be out of work you understand that I'm creating something and you can create something too you can create a business and you can if you work hard and you know and he's going over this and you can see that what they're fighting against is almost like a concept they're fighting against this I of this evil tyranny that's controlling their fate what they really don't understand it though that's that's what occupy was in my opinion it's like they knew something was wrong it was almost to me like white blood cells surrounding an infection like there's something up here let's just surround this thing and figure out and then there's swelling and

100:14pus and that's really what it was it's like there's a real recognition that there's a gigantic problem with the financial institutions the gigantic problem with the whole reason why the economy collapsed and the bailouts and these creeps are getting all these bonuses even though the their companies failed and that tax dollars had to rescue them there was a recognition that there was something wrong but not a deep understanding of what the system was that they were actually protesting there was too much of that Bernie man doesn't have any of that Burning Man is obviously society's there's no arguments that it's not even if it's better than it's ever been before which it probably is you know if you want to listen to Pinker or a lot of other people that'll argue that it's better and it's progressing into this better and better path and I think that's probably right ultimately still

101:07and Burning Man offers this alternative like this unique Society of free expression and free love and all these people having a good time together exploring alternate states of consciousness well Victor Turner who talked about these Lemon oyd events it would say things like Burning Man they also provide an outlet for people to self-select to leave the culture they are they're killed you know people who just don't fit in they die or they express themselves so much that they can go back to the ordinary postal carrier life that they had before because so many cultures have something like Samba the fest of all where you go crazy for a week and then you go back to your normal life waiting tables so they are in a way an event that kind of keeps the status quo in place but they do create these kind of if not aesthetic movements they are the there are a laboratory for sort of coming up

102:12with some new form of being together some new social structures new symbols and you know new narrative yeah it's it's a fascinating thing for me because I feel it's trickled off into regular life in a lot of ways now I know way more people that are micro dosing psilocybin on a daily basis people are more accepting now that marijuana is legal people are way more accepting of people getting high of people just choosing to sort of look at the world in a different way and actively seek these different states of consciousness it's way more comments way more discussed and that's kind of the way it's supposed to be is that these things start in the experiments and the ones that are most successful become institutions and in the new ones start but we need you know these are the laboratories Portland kind of used to be that way Portland was such a laboratory incubator city but the cost

103:17of living is is killing that very quickly it's become really trendy it's like it's a it's a yeah it's a hip place to live it's a hip and it's identified with hip you know in a way you kind of get your hip card just by living there you don't have to know anything anymore yeah it's like New York City used to be like you were tough hey I'm from New York you know I can handle it yeah yeah I'm hip I'm from Portland nope is that where you live I live outside of Portland I live up in the Columbia Gorge it's gorgeous up there man yeah the green do you guys have a neon glowing it rains all the time green in Oregon that's just we don't experience here for more than a month a year yeah we got forest fires right now so OD where you are not so much this year they're not so close but the air is still much worse than it is here so forest fires are everywhere right now I've been evacuated a couple

104:19of times it's pretty terrifying stuff I didn't live in Georgia no I live here okay okay Georgia why'd you whisper like no one's listening well I have a secret of friendship with Jim God who's one of the few people who makes me really laugh even though you know most secret anymore most of the world hates Jim God why do they hate Jim goat because he raised he's very transgressive in-your-face pieces but when he writes about his brother he kills me is some of the most touching stuff I have ever read in my life about his brother's death so you know the whole world I think is so fooled and that they think that Jim goat is a bad person and they think that maybe I'm a good person when it's just exactly the opposite how are you a bad person oh let's not even go down that road I already told on Cheryl Strayed killing that bird come on do I got to do more that's not being a bad person that's a

105:21person who's appreciative of a dark moment that doesn't make you a bad person no I'm a bad person are you really give me an example you know and this is awkward but this is another one of those cognitive reframing honesty things is I took care of my mother while she was dying of lung cancer and even while I was taking care of her and she was lapsing in and out of consciousness in her home there was a little part of me that felt this Glee that thought I will never have to worry about mom again I will never have to worry about whether mom is offended by my work I will never have to worry about mom falling down the stairs and breaking her leg that this enormous concern in my life will be resolved and it's gonna be at the cost of losing someone I love you know so much but the benefit is that this huge burden of responsibility is going to be lifted and so there was this kind of secret

106:32Glee thinking you know I'm gonna I'm gonna have some freedom here that I never imagined yeah Norah Efrain touches on that in her work when she talks about her mother's death and I think it's just a it's an it's an honest thing but it's not a thing that makes you look very good I don't think that makes you a bad person I think that that makes you a person who's honest about thoughts that are very uncomfortable that that is just something that people think I think all the time if they're dealing with someone who's completely incapacitated and they have to care for them 24/7 but they don't express it it's just it's just a a reality of the burden of someone who's really sick or really dying is it there's there's no getting around it I don't think it's about that's not a good example I need to I need a example why you're a bad person maybe you're just really self-critical

107:36or aware of things that other people could take out of context of the totality of your life and just use it as an example put it in quotes and use it as an example of you being a bad person you know another thing is I'm really really conflicted about the nature of my creativity this idea that in journalism school that they call the theory seduced and betray that when you go into an interview situation your goal is to gain the trust of that person and to get them to reveal something very intimate that you're gonna betray by revealing to the public so you just you're basically going in there to to charm them and then to hurt them and and so much of my creative process is that way because for example the guts story mm-hmm the story in which the guy puts the carrot up his butt that was my best friend at the time in like late 20s and he got fantastically drunk and he told me that

108:46carrot story and I honestly believe he had never told anybody the carrot story and I I kept that story in my mind for you know 10 15 almost probably 20 years until I found a way to put it with three similar stories and make a larger piece out of it and the first time I read that story I hadn't seen him in maybe a couple years this friend and I look across this big auditorium and there he is and I'm telling his carrot story in front of hundreds and hundreds of people and the look on his face he's just stricken and he hasn't talked to me since and this is even even did you use his name no then him no but what's wrong with that people still feel betrayed and I get over it you need to hang out with more comedians use a comic you'd be laughing well you know David Sedaris has told me he said his family is very reluctant to share their lives with him anymore because he's kind of made them

109:54involuntary public figures and they have to deal with a fallout yeah from these stories about them and really only his brother and his sister Amy have kind of been able to spin this in a good way but it alienates a lot of people oh for sure well especially if you use their actual name or people know the origin of the actual story yeah yeah but that's you're not a bad person sorry sorry to break it to you think you're a bad person those are the only examples you're not convinced no no I'm just not revealing the worst of course do you think that you have to have some sort of embracing of these dark thoughts to create the way you create I mean you're creating these characters that go down some horrible roads both mentally and in reality in your work and it's amazing stuff but to cultivate that don't you think you have to be kind of in touch with those thoughts of your

110:58own to kind of in touch with this you know this thing where you're watching your mom die and you you are going to be relieved of a burden and you don't want to tell anybody that you're kind of looking forward to that a little bit even though you love your mom dearly they said that's a natural thing that people don't want to discuss but absolutely exists it's the elephant in the room and that's kind of like how Comedy Works or anything where you're stating this unstated thing you're creating this enormous relief my classic example when I teach I asked my students I say so so what do you call a black man that flies a plane a pilot you racist you're creating this tension right they don't want you to say what they think they're gonna say they don't want to hate you they like you right and they don't want you to say something hateful and awful yeah and then you turn it around you put

112:06it on them and so in a way you know I always think that's the the soul of comedy is to create this this tension that you relieve as quickly as possible and the relief occurs as laughter I was having dinner with a good friend of mine his wife and a buddy of mine and my friend's friend and his wife and funtime the whole night everybody's laughing and joking and or have a dinner and having a couple of drinks and joking around talking about things and I forget what led to him saying this but we were talking about just unfortunate scenarios and you know people that just the life is not going the way they'd like it to go and things going back and out of nowhere the guy goes well that's like this my daughter has she had a baby with a black man and we're we were both like looking at him like where is this going and then he goes and you know I just think it's incredibly selfish to bring that kid

113:24into the world and this kid doesn't have an identity they're not black and the not white and they don't they're not gonna have an identity they're not gonna have a group to belong to and my friends jaws dropped my huh no the guy I just met on that night and my drop and I looked at my other friend who was with me who didn't know any of these other people and everyone's like what the and then a couple of us get up and go to the bathroom and I turn to my friend and I said let's get the out of here and we just left and I texted my friend I go to much racism how'd it go and we just left and but it was so weird I was like this guy was holding into this and he's like you know what I can trust these people with some racist I can trust them and it didn't work and he knew it didn't work he knew it went over the world like a lead balloon he knew it he could feel it because

114:17everybody was like what like wait a minute your daughter's in love with a man who's black they have a child together and you think it's incredibly selfish to bring that kid in the world like what the I wish I could remember what the we were talking about before then but what we were talking about before them was like drug addicts or people up or you know people were addicted to gambling or something you know people whose lives were in chaos and then he brings up his daughter having a baby with a guy who was the wrong amount of melanin skin whose ancestors came from the wrong part of the world for him it was weird man it was we it was weird also to see him recognize I did funny you know you threw out a story I throw out a story I had a hired car from Philadelphia to New York once on tour and as we're going past Liberty in Philadelphia this this great guy with

115:16a Philly accent driving the car he points at Liberty Hall and he says that building has stood for you know 300 years I bet you can't tell me why and I just looked and I said because the bricks are laid in Flemish bond I think that's probably it where the the brick bricks are offset in such a way that they they bond in the center called Flemish bond any guys so silent nobody's ever answered the question and his father was a bricklayer and he was so proud and he goes you're right nobody's ever said Flemish bond that's why it still stands and we were best friends and just talking like crazy all the way into Manhattan we get into Manhattan there's two guys walking down the street the guy goes oh Christ I hate coming to New York ah the and I said well you know I'm married to a man and is pretty much my middle name we juggle everything that the guy who knew Flemish bond was also

116:34one of them and it was one of those wonderful kind of icky but necessary moments and you know they're horrible but you know things are better afterwards you must have loved that moment though you know it was a horrible moment because I felt like I was throwing away any kind of chatty conversational relationship I had with this guy mm-hmm you seem like just assaulted the earth great funny guy and it was just kind of going out on a limb and saying okay you know he's gonna hate my guts after this when I was a little kid we lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11 and then moved to Florida which is the polar opposite of San Francisco and I I really I don't know if I'd ever heard someone used the word before but I'd never seen an adult upset about gay people before and then my friend candy Candido was his name his dad was cube and they were Cuban and his dad slams a

117:42newspaper on the on the table I was 11 and he's like can't believe they're letting these get married he was just so angry and I remember stopping and thinking like here here's a man this guy's a man he's a grown man he's a grown-up but yet he's he's got this infant idea of what a person should be like they gotta fall into this category that category he's got it locked into his head he's a baby but he's a man and he's my friend's dad this guy's this guy made it to 35 years old or whatever the he was and this is his this is his operating system that he's using to navigate his way through life I remember it being an important moment for me because I realized like just because someone's older doesn't mean they learned anything you know and that people are capable of success in life you know you could become married you can have children you get a house you

118:38get a good job you drive a car the whole thing you got it all you've got a checkbook you got a you're you're operating it's moving you're successful it's happening and yet you still have these stupid ideas you know but I think there's there's a benefit to the expression of the stupid idea not that it they could never be challenged but that at least when we're aware that it's there yeah and that you know we know that this thing is not just kind of festering and that there's a way of kind of not fixing this person but at least we know where they're coming from yeah you know it oh another shooting myself in the career foot thing I don't think you've done it once the whole show okay here it goes I read the daily stormer Andrew Anglin cracks me up who's that he is the completely transgressive guy who really loves Fight Club oh wow writes for the daily stormer I think he is the

119:48daily stormer and he writes the most atrocious insensitive brutal things but they are they're so shocking and so transgressive that that sometimes I laugh just out of the shock you know the old classic joke how do you get a nun pregnant you her you know there's a shock value there that that just sort of jars me and makes me laugh sometimes that joke would have worked better if you hadn't told the black pilot joke first oh well the problem is like people become it you know you know what's coming yeah but but sometimes you know I I want to go into a world where people are not watching their language so closely mmm and and I see people kind of vent the worst of themselves right I'm not kind of endorsing it but I feel a little less reactive to abuse Scientologists has happened this exercise called bull baiting where they take you into a room and people surround

121:03you and they call you every horrible thing and then they they nitpick Horrell every aspect of your appearance or your your character who you are and they attack you on every level and they do this for long long periods of time and they do this day after day until you are completely not reactionary to that kind of verbal abuse you can you can put it over there you can accept the fact that it's somebody else's statement somebody else's opinion observation that it's not true and you can be with it and so in a way when I go into these sites that are so patently offensive and in deliberately you know aggressively offensive I feel like in a way our thickening my skin that I'm not quite such a delicate little reactive thing afterwards do you worry about someone looking through your search results oh you're far worse things than that you see that infighting there's certain

122:10people that react really poorly to trash talk and there's certain people that get excited by it and it doesn't bother them at all and they embrace it and generally it's people who grew up in abusive households and horrible environments then when the trash talk starts coming they go oh yeah oh okay that what's gonna happen you and then and then you see them get excited by it and then you see them like saying oh okay now you've given me more motivation to you up whereas some people genuinely get dwarfed by this you think they get they get the pressure of not just being in conflict but some person but that person insulting them and verbal conflict and and demeaning them and mocking them it haunts them it haunts them and it ruins them and they can't perform they go out and they fight they fight terrible it happens to a lot of fighters guys who are tough tough guys something about the

123:05verbal conflict and the abuse there's an emotional struggle that they're not prepared for they prepared 100% for this physical struggle but there's a certain aspect of someone literally hating them as a human like not thinking of them as a worthy competitor who they respect that they're ready to go to battle with and will shake hands first and afterwards we'll go have a beer together after we beat the out of each other no it's like you're you're a little you're a you shouldn't you shouldn't even be here you're weak you're gonna fall apart man you know you're gonna fall put your waiting to fall apart just give me your neck just give me a neck I'll choke you out make it nice and easy and you see guys reacting to that these demons inside of them that these these are thoughts that do dance around the back of their brain and every day they're throwing water on

123:50it but every day they come back and the members are still smoldering and this guy is just pouring gasoline on that and it just takes over their consciousness do you see them they can't sleep good you see them they look exhausted you see the day of the fight they look nervous they look they look really worried they look really worried this person's right that person has planted these seeds of doubt that are these invasive species plants that are choking out all the trees it's wild to see it's wild to see how the same words can have a completely different effect on different people so there you are it's a different kind of resistance training ya know there's definitely something to that there's definitely something to be around abusive people to being around I mean you get accustomed to stuff you get you people are very very they're very malleable now you can you can get

124:41accustom to really shitty behavior I mean this is not like this what's got to happen when you're in war you get accustomed to it you get accustomed to violence you get accustomed to all that and one of the more difficult things for people post war is coming back into a kind gentle boring world it's almost like they they I mean that's Hurt Locker right they appreciate the danger they appreciate that the thrill of it all is almost more appealing than the absolute lack of thrill the thrill of potential violence and death and all the horrors that you come into contact with it's almost preferable did you read Sebastian Junger tribe no that's the new one right yeah it's a great book but it's about that it's about why the you know being in these intense like really dangerous but crackling with energy environments produce some of the happiest moments for these people's lives

125:49and that post post war like they have an incredibly difficult job just sort of reintegrating to normal flat society yeah I could see that totally what time is it it's 3:15 let's wrap this up Chuck gotta listen man I really appreciate you being here I really appreciate picking your brain and I thank you very much man and thank you for all your all your writing and all your work and stay up will ya all right hey thanks for the plane ticket my pleasure um when can we expect this book when you uh when you this is gonna be done this is this book this book is just uh is a pages in a notebook right now this is not funny next year is Fight Club 3 next year will probably be a big fat writing book from me and this book will won't be until 2020 yeah two years all right thank you thank you appreciate