Duncan Trussell Family Hour - DAVID MACLEAN

Episode Date: March 12, 2014

David MacLean (The Answer To The Riddle Is Me) returns to the DTFH to talk about his terrifying encounter with amnesia.

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Holy sweet Jesus mother of God, a gigantic thank you to those of you who have been donating to the podcast. Believe it or not, I spend a ton of time recording these damn things and your donations help keep me afloat. There's lots of ways you can support the Duncan Trestle Family podcast if you don't feel like donating. For example, you can go to DuncanTrestle.com and buy a t-shirt or a poster. You can also go to DuncanTrestle.com and click on our Amazon portal. What this does is it takes you to Amazon.com and then anything that you buy from Amazon, they give us a percentage of what you buy. This is a way for you to support the podcast without having to do anything more than click on a simple link. If you don't feel like doing anything that

involves money, then why not go to iTunes and leave a nice review. If you don't feel like doing that, you can go to DuncanTrestle.com and join our forum. There is a Minecraft server there and there is a message board with a lot of interesting conversations that pop up that I try to participate in whenever I have the time. Also, don't forget to watch Joe Rogan Questions Everything, which is coming out tomorrow, August the 14th. This episode is called Buy Apocalypse and it was a very scary episode to shoot because we interviewed doctors who are actively working on vaccines for diseases that don't exist yet, but which they think could exist thanks to bioterrorists and mother nature. Specifically, the vortex of vileness that happens at some chicken farms in Asia where

these industrial chicken farms have chickens stacked on top of each other. The chickens are vomiting and shitting into each other's mouths and all of this creates a waterfall of pestilence that pours down onto the concrete floors where rats lap it up and these rats are eaten by migratory predatory ducks and these ducks end up shitting into people's fried chicken at cafes and this can eventually cause something called bird flu, which once bird flu gets into a human and mutates so that it can be transmitted from human to human, then we've got a real problem and what a lot of scientists think will eventually wipe out millions of us. So this is a fun episode to watch with your kids or your grandma, get the whole family into the room, seal off the doors with plastic bags,

put everybody in gas masks, wrap the baby in duct tape, leave some room so it can breathe and can watch the TV and then just sit with your shotguns in your lap and watch this episode of Joe Rogan Questions Everything. David McLean is today's guest and he, this is his second appearance on the Duncan Tressel Family, our podcast. If you didn't listen to his first appearance, then I'll give you a little bit of a backstory. McLean went to India with me and Emil and we wandered around India for about a month and then of course after college we all went our separate ways. I became a comedian, my friend Emil became a musician and David McLean became a professor and got a Fulbright scholarship and ended up going back to India where he had laryum-induced amnesia and in a train

station completely lost all of his memories and spent a week in this state in India which is, I mean, I don't know where, I guess I can think of a few good places to get amnesia. I think probably directly after you've taken your daughter to a Justin Bieber concert, that's a great time to get amnesia. There's wonderful times to get amnesia but the worst place and time to get amnesia would be when you're in college, when you're college age in India because they just think you're some crazy westerner who sucked down too much ketamine. Anyway, he wrote a book called The Answer to the Riddle is Me and this book is coming out in January but in this podcast we don't just talk about that experience but my favorite part of this

podcast is some of the advice that he gives on writing and the second part of the podcast. It was hugely inspirational for me and has really gotten me writing again so if there's for the writers out there, hang in there till the last half of the podcast because he gives some incredible advice about writing and the writing process. If you want to find out more about David, you can go to davidstewartmclain.com. That's got links to all his writings, you can get on his mailing list, you can pre-order his book and you should follow him on Twitter. He is at David S. McClain, that's M-A-C-L-E-A-N. I'll have the link on my website along with links to his website, links to pre-order his book, links to his Twitter page and a link

to the article he just wrote for The New York Times about the dangers of the anti-malarial drug larium. All right everybody, please open your third eyes, rip open your chest cavity, throw all those secret flowers out of your chest and into the ether where they can sail down the river of love directly into the open baby bird-like mouth of my friend David McClain. It's the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour Podcast, published author, professor, and most importantly, father, and even more important than that, friend of mine, the great David McClain. Welcome, sir. Hello, hello, hello. So is the book, your book, is it out now? No, it's January 2014. January 2014. Yeah. I just have the

publishers copy. Yeah. How does that feel? Are you, what does it feel knowing that you're on the precipice of having something you created being distributed to the four corners of the earth to be read by countless people? I can't answer that. You haven't thought about that? No, I haven't. You know, it was, it was really hard to have like my in-laws read it, and it was really hard to have my parents read it. Yeah. Because my parents are, it's about my life, and it's about a terrible moment in time in my life. And like, my parents like, both read it in like two days, which I was kind of pissed off. I was like, it took me three years. You read it in two days? Right. Right. That's weird. There's some craft in that, motherfucker. Like, you know, I tweeted recently

what a piece of shit I thought Pacific Rim was. And then I, then I, then I thought about that later and thought, my god, can you imagine the people, the amount of people it took to make that, the amount of artists and just people who know so much more about everything than I do. Right. To make that thing years and years and years of work to get that thing into, into existence. And then some asshole, some bearded stoner feels okay. Yeah, piece of shit. Which, yeah, yeah, which it was. I thought it was a piece of shit. But it's a, it's still like a, that's a, that's one of the, I think that must be one of the great fears of an author right before this thing that you worked on for so long comes out is that it's going to fall in the hands of not just intelligent

people, but dopes, angry dopes who are just going to send you emails or are you worried that you're going to get like, I'm, why am I going negative on this? It's funny, it's funny because like my friend had a friend, she published a book and it's a great book. It's her name's Maya Arnold. And, and she wrote this great article about the worst thing is not being read at all. Right. Because her book just came out and nobody reviewed it, nobody, and it was gone really quick. Right. And it was just sort of like, oh no, that's worse. Well, I think that you're going to have the opposite luck because that you're, the story, I haven't read the book yet and I can't, I can't wait to get going on it. But the name of the book is the answer to the riddle is me.

And this is, for those of you who haven't heard the last time David was on the podcast, he was in a train station in India and had amnesia. Yeah. I don't want to say any too much more. I don't know how much is a spoiler. Yeah, spoiler. Well, I live, so I, I'm a walking spoiler to the book. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. If you're listening to this, you know he lived. Fuck. But, but, but the, the, the, when I tell people your story, because I do tell people your story from time to time, just because I know people who go overseas and are going to take William and I always say don't touch that shit. But when I tell people your story, they immediately perk up and I'm like, are you fucking shitting me? What, what is that like? Like I had recently,

I don't know why this happened, but I woke up in the middle of the night in my bed and I had about a four second period where I couldn't remember where I was or, or, or what I was. I had like a four second period of coming out of sleep amnesia. And it was the most strange, I was, it was long enough for me to think, I don't know what I am. Right. And then it's like, oh, this is your house, you're dunking. Yeah, I got this thing tomorrow. How long did you have that experience for? Oh, it was probably, it was probably a week, but then it just kept returning. It was, so even when I stopped taking the drug, so what happened last Tuesday on the 29th, I believe, is the FDA released a new drug warning for larium, generic name Mefliquin,

and they gave it the black box and they talked about giving it the black box, saying that some of the neurologic side effects, which are like dizziness, loss of balance, all these vestibular things can become permanent. So permanent. Yeah. So a side effect becomes permanent out of this drug. And it's the kind of drug, train, train, the kind of drug that you can, that keeps the stakes of it keeps getting keeps rising. So it's like one of those things where it's like, even if you read all the small print, you don't know everything. So even if you do your due diligence, five or six or 10 years later, you'll find out what you were really doing with your body. And that's a, for me, that's really interesting because like, it throws into question,

like, how much do we know? How can we know what we know? And what in this sort of recklessness with which we put things in our body, and to either crawl into a cave because that's terrifying, or just be like, okay, right, right? Like you can either be terrified and only drink rainwater and clarified alcohol. Yes. Or you can just be like, well, I'll eat the food out of the whole foods bins, even though I know it's full of syphilis and, and, and hepatitis. Yeah. I mean, I know what you're saying. When I, I don't need more after I got cancer, I stopped doing a lot of stuff that I did. But like e-cigarettes, for example, vapor cigarettes, you know, you see people confidently smoking those things, like they're sucking on an angel's nipple or something, like

we've solved the problem. He got it. Do you understand what that shit is that, what is the chemical that makes the vapor? Right. What, what, what process are they using? This is an unregulated market. You don't, you've never been to an e-cigarette factory, for example. You don't know, you're not a chemist. You don't know anything about this. All you know is that you're inhaling some form of vapor. And this is also in marijuana. They have marijuana e-cigarettes too. And I always think to myself, man, that is such a ballsy move to just trust a corporation in that, in that, in that intimate away, is to absorb the new, this new thing into your body. Yeah. It doesn't smell, and I can do it on airplanes. It must be fine. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and, and, but that is the,

that, that if you start getting, if you stop trusting products, people will immediately put you in a category of, at the very best, annoying, at the very worst, paranoid. And that's, I think for me is like, how do you, how do you express sort of frustration or just a sort of questioning about something you don't know? Like I didn't understand the science and I still really don't understand the neuroscience behind the struggle that I took. I really took a stab at learning it and figuring it out. But what's the difference between that and becoming Jenny McCarthy? Right. And just having these sort of ill-formed, non-scientific ideas about vaccines, which she has. Yes. And like, how do you know when you're full of shit? And I think that's like the, the

only question is like, when do you know you're full of shit? Can you answer that for me, please? I don't. I wish I knew. I last, last semester in this creative writing nonfiction workshop, I started out the class by saying the, the only question we have in front of us is how do we know when we're full of shit? Wow. Which is not the way to start a class, it turns out. Why? Like, if you want good evaluations, don't start out a class like that. Really? You got in trouble for that? Well, it's just, it's, it's very aggressive. Like, it's very aggressive. I think it's, listen, man, I, before we started recording, I had a conversation with you for eight minutes that made me want to go to your college and take a class with you. I think that's brilliant to start

a class like that. But it is, it seems like that's the whole question. And I think like, everything in your life is sort of geared to, towards telling you you're okay. And creating this narrative where you're okay and you know things and you're safe. Yes. And like, this is the Sam Scoville. All hail Sam Scoville. Sam Scoville was a professor at the college. David and I and Emil Amos went to and he was a beloved, I don't know what you'd call him. I don't know what you'd call this guy. He was just a paradigm wrecking ball, but I don't know what he was. Yeah, I think about him all the time. That's all I know. Yeah, he's, he's really brilliant. And it was like, the whole idea is like, how does a fish know when it's wet? How

does a fish know what wetness is? And it's a sort of like, Oh, right, how do I know like this mess that I'm swimming in? How do I know all of the things that are influencing me into keeping myself safe? Yes. In the whole part of my whole book is like, for a really long time, I tried really hard to act like nothing had happened to me. Because the only way I could feel safe in life was if that event in my life hadn't happened. So wait, you mean after you, you, you recovered, you tried to forget it? Right. Absolutely. You tried to forget you had amnesia. Right. Oh. Yeah, no, it was, so I, it was one of those things and it's, and it's why, like denial and repression really work. Yes. Right. Because you just sort of issue this event from your life. Is denial and repression bad?

I wonder, I wonder if it's that bad, right? There's an objectivist view of the universe that, that, that you, you need to attain something outside of yourself, you need to get outside of yourself to be somewhere else. Or you can just stay in yourself and it's okay. Like, I don't know, I don't know the answer. Like for me, it kept showing up in all of my other work. This event I was repressing and, and I was trying to, it kept showing up. I had people who lost years of their lives in all of these different formats in my fiction. Finally, I was like, you know, just, just write it, just write the thing you don't want to write. And then that sort of helped. So going and going back, going into the denial helps. Yeah. And that's, that's not a new idea. People say all the time that

if you want to, if you want to deal with a problem, you have to go to the core of the problem. If you want to, if you want to destroy cancer in your body, you have to locate the source, right? Yeah, kill the DNA, kill the, the go to the thing itself, you know, that's one of the cool things about cancer is that it can't heal. So that's why radiation works really well on it. Because if you, if you blast it, other cells will heal, cancer just dies. It's like a zombie. You know, you shoot a zombie. I don't know if it's like a zombie. I don't know why I said that. But in, so the, the, um, this, this, this question of denial is something that I have been, um, contemplating since I've been doing the show with Rogan and

have come into contact with people who are in deep, deep denial regarding what is real and what isn't real. And so that they, they've chosen to live many of them, not all of them, but many of them seem to have chosen to live on the side in the, in the unreal, in the, in the, in, in the unreal, not in the sense of like, um, unprovable unreal, but the things that they believe, if you sat down for 10 minutes with a scientist, with an encyclopedia, with the internet and did a few searches, you could show them, no, no, no, you see this is 100% wrong. And, and, and, and I, I keep wondering, well, when the question that keeps coming into my mind is do we have a responsibility as humans to live, to try to live in the truth as much as possible? That's my first question.

And my second question is, do we have a responsibility as humans to try to tell the truth to people who are living in denial? Hmm. Which is what evangelists feel like, right? Oh, man, right. Right. It's like, you don't know. You don't know the glory that could be yours. Let me tell you. Right. I was standing, it was downtown at the Chicago, at the, the, the, the reflective bean sculpture. And I was watching these Mormons, um, and I was sitting with my like five and seven year old nephews. And then Mormons were standing on like a milk crate,

like shouting to the people and nobody was listening. And my nephew was like, why, why does that guy do that? I was like, you know, actually it might be something to respect, because his tenet of faith is that he does that. And he does it whether or not people listen to him. And there's something to that. There's something to like doing something radically unpopular, because you believe it to be true. Yeah. And, and while, I don't know if I believe that. No, you probably don't, Dave. You know, I can remember, uh, one of the great things you said to me when we were in India that pissed me off so much. Was you just one of them? Uh, no, but, you know, again, like I always like now I recognize that the people who angered me

with the truth were my dearest friends. And even though like I didn't, a lot of people, I couldn't, I didn't forgive them for a long time. Anytime anyone upsets you with the truth, it's like, I still have reactions to the truth, but that, that are generally, I know I'm getting told the truth because I get mad at first. And then I have to like stop and be like, wait, it's the truth. Take it. But, um, one thing you said to me, because, uh, back then I was still like chanting Hari Krishna, but also approaching in a little bit of a literalist way, man. I was really like kind of like into this idea of this like blue skin being. And you said to me, what's the difference between that and a comic book character, man? Something along those lines.

I remember you saying it to me. I don't, I'm on the roof and I got mad and I'm like, no, it's not a comic book character. This is a, this is a, this is a, I don't remember what I'm sure whatever I said was 100% wrong, but it, but that, uh, that was a wonderful, uh, crack in the windshield of, uh, delusion that you, you started there for me. And then way, way down now, down the line, I recognize like clearly a comic book character to the, actually interestingly enough, um, a friend of mine who I met through this podcast, uh, is at what's called a chaos magician. And so their idea is like everything's subjective. You understand Batman a lot better than you understand Ganesh. So why not start worshiping Batman? Because it says it's, you can connect to

that representation of specific facet of reality a hell of a lot better than you can connect to something that resonated with people 5,000 years ago, uh, who came from a completely different continent and spoke a different language. And that's chaos magic, which is like we, we don't have to remove worshiping from our lives because we understand that the thing we're worshiping isn't a literal entity, but we can acknowledge the fact that they're like archetypical forces in the universe that take certain forms, find the form that you resonate with the best and then connect with that thing through ritualistic magic. And it's non-different than a person burning incense It's interesting though. So like all the money that, uh, the Dark Knight returns may

made is, is just tithes. Yes. Like people are just tithing and going to the movies is a form of worship. Yes. And that, uh, this is a practice and cosplay is a form of worship. Yes. And, uh, yeah, that's the idea. And the idea is cause what we're, what through worship what you're trying to do is, well, I mean, I, you can't, I don't know what everyone's trying to do through worship, but one thing that I really love through a ritual is it invokes a specific emotional state and it invokes an emotional state. And those emotional states can care, can go from the moment of the ritual to the rest of my life. If I sit down and pray, which I do a lot, if I sit down and pray and I'll say God, cause I'm not afraid to say God, please God,

help me get in shape. Please get, make it so that I start running. Please. What I've done is subjectively put a tiny little marble on the part of the scale that's going to move me closer to running. Now, how powerful that effect is, I don't know, but if that one little marble is enough that the scale pushes down and I find myself running by the LA River, then God damn it, the magic work, the prayer worked, the entity itself that I contacted, who the fuck knows? Right, right, right. Because you've made a promise to a thing bigger than you. Yes. Like that's, that's the intercessionary prayer. You're making this promise to a thing bigger than you. And if that is what gets you, what moves that scale, then that, that's what

moves that scale. But I'm willing to admit that this thing that I'm praying to may very well just be some formation in my brain. It may be a pack of neurons. I'm very willing to admit that. But what I'm asking, what I want to know from you is, what about the people who don't think that way? What about the people who think that this is a living entity, a being external to the human condition? There is only one way to contact this being, people who don't contact this being in this way are at risk of eternal damnation, and they're telling this to kids. Right. What about that? When I used to teach, well, I still teach, but when I used to teach freshman composition, I had a student give a presentation, and he started giving a presentation about his belief

in Jesus. And I was like, well, bring it in, whatever you got. And in the middle of the conversation, he just sort of said, any of you who aren't evangelical, if you're Catholic, Muslim, or whatever, I think is what he said, you're going to hell. And it was like, I was caught because I was like, is that hate speech? Because you're burning everybody here who doesn't agree with you. Yes. Should I stop this? Or is this his free moment of inquiry? Right. Am I supposed to allow this? Because I surely wouldn't allow anybody to get up and say, I believe all gay people will go to hell. Right. And I would stop that immediately. I'd be like, no, you are not allowed to say that. But for some reason, because of his belief in this,

in God, I was like, well, okay. Well, that's something that I think we have to deal with as a modern society at this point. And I think that that's something nobody wants to deal with. And it's a thing that we're more and more coming into contact with. And it's something where it's like people want to, you know, I, you know, it's funny, you brought up Mormons. I've been reading this book by Krocauer, have you ever read the book Under the Banner of Heaven? It's a great book. Fucking love it. It's an amazing thing to hear about the history of Mormonism, specifically the fact that Joseph Smith was a very horny man. He wanted to have, he liked the ladies, he liked having sex. This is from the book Under the Banner of Heaven. He enjoyed making love to women,

nothing wrong with that at all. But he wanted to, he wanted to turn the act of making love to women into something sacred. Nothing wrong with that. But according to his paradigm, he couldn't just make love to a woman and think, I offer up this experience to the universe. Thank you, Force of Evolution, for bringing this thing. Draining heaven of angels. So what he did is he, God came to Joseph Smith and it was a very convenient visit and said, if you should marry, you should start marrying many, many, many, many, many women. So that was the beginning of polygamy. And he at one point got dragged out of his house by a mob, taken into the forest and there was a surgeon there who was going to cut his fucking cock off because he was going around humping

17 year olds in the name of God. And they were going to take his penis off. Now this is all from Under the Banner of Heaven. You guys can look it up, especially there's some Mormons who listen to this because I've been in contact with them on Twitter. And you can look all of this up. I'm not making it up. It's the truth. Joseph Smith was eventually murdered in a prison by a mob because he had formed a militia to burn down the printing press of a follower he had excommunicated who had started printing. Joseph Smith is humping all these women. And so, so the long and short of it is when you start saying that stuff publicly, Mormons will get really mad and they'll say you're a bigot. What you're saying is hate speech. That's a bigoted thing to say about our prophet

when it's like, well, no, it's not a bigoted thing to say. Your prophet historically went to little girls, 16 year olds, 17 year olds and told them, if you don't marry me, you will go to hell forever. And when he says marry, he means fuck. He doesn't mean marry. They're not talking about, oh, we're just going to put a ring on each other's fingers. We're going to walk down the aisle and it's going to be, he means going to be a partnership. I'm going to put my cock inside of your 17 year old pussy, religiously. And if you don't agree to that, you will go to hell forever. In my opinion, that is not a good man. And I think that cultural relativism would say, no, no, no, there's a good man. It's hard though, because in some ways, when you say those things,

you're impugning the actions of the believers. And sometimes the actions of the believers are bigger and more beautiful through their faith than the actions of that one man. Absolutely. Right. And so like, that's the thing that there is something beautiful in the Mormon who's standing on a crate saying what he believes in the middle of everybody else taking pictures of themselves and like making sure that all their friends are in their pictures so they can tweet it of them standing in front of the fucking like Chicago Bean, like the act of standing on a milk crate and saying what you believe, at least you do that. What was he saying specifically? Well, I, it was, he said, you know the Book of Mormon, the book is even better than the musical.

Yeah, no, it was, it was such, it was such a hook. It was like, and you could see his buddies, none of them wanted to stand on the milk crate and they were all like being like, oh, he's, he's got this. God, you know what, man? I can't get mad at that. This is the, when you tell me that it just softens me up. Right. I mean, it was sort of like, oh, he's, he's doing something like. Well, guys, I don't know. I don't know, David. I don't know the answer to this, to this problem. When I see, I just think that right now there's an allergy to truth that is, that seems to be breaking out all over the planet. And it's, I think it's a dangerous thing. And when you see, when you see little examples of it, it's cute. Right. One little

example of it. You know what? I bet when you've got a little cell inside of you. Right. That says to the other, Hey guys, I got an idea. I'm going to try it this way. Right. You know, and then that cells, the DNA changes just a little bit. Yeah. Let's try it this way pals. There's a better way to be a testicle. And then like a couple more, like you, you, you're right. Oh, he's right. Why do we have to do what the harmony of the body says? Stupid old body. We're going to mutate mutations what makes evolution happen? Next thing you know, one of your balls is getting chopped off by an Indian in Beverly Hills because you got fucking ball cancer. So in that way, it's like, when you see people who are deluded and they're an individual, it's cute. Right. When you see it in mass,

it's fucked up, man. It's funny though, to go to like, and to go from like one person proclaiming their faith to a testicle being cut off. I mean, I think that's a, that's a pretty big jump in logic. The reason that I say that I use the, I reference cancer is because cancer to me seems like a biological example of things going away from the truth, going away from the harmony of the body in mass. And the more things that do that, the closer you get to death. So in that way, I think that a system itself that functions without full contact with the truth, the further away from the truth that it gets, the more likely the system is to fail. But one of the claims you have there is that the truth

is a static thing that everybody needs to come to, which is exactly what we're criticizing about that person standing on the milk crate. Yes. Is that this is a static truth that we all need to come to. And the fact of the matter is like, I kind of trust the guy who's standing on the milk crate and yelling out what he believes rather than all of the people around me where I'm like, I don't know where you stand. And that actually lets me live in my delusion that everything's okay. Yes. If I had everybody yelling out what they believed, I would be able to live in a better state of continual paranoia. Listen, let me tell you, man, you know who you sound like right now? You sound like somebody that more and more, I think, is someone I almost consider to be

my guru, which is this guy, Ragu Marcus, who runs the Love Server Member Foundation. Whenever I get off on these shrill stupid things, he's always like, wait, you're just like them right now. What's the difference? Where's your anchor, man? You might not be standing on a fucking box talking about the Book of Mormon, but you're talking into a microphone and you're talking on a digital box right now and you're howling out your idea of the truth. Hey, man, you tell me, you tell me what's the difference? What's the big difference here? How do you know that you're rooted in the truth as opposed to these, you're drinking fucking Takate, sitting in your weird room with Aleister Crowley posters and pictures

of the fucking Kabbalah? Where's your, you're not exactly Albert Einstein right now, friend. Right, at least that's sort of rooted in a mythology, a clear mythology, and there's a sort of, and I'm idealizing here, a beautiful belief in it as opposed to like my ironic sort of relationship to a lot of iconography, which I will populate my house with iconography with all the while saying, not really sure I believe any of this. I've got Hanuman tearing his chest open with Ram and Sita there, and I'm like, I'm not really sure. And as opposed to someone who actually believes it. And then it's just sort of like, well, who's the fool? I'll tell you the fool is. The fool is the person who when approached with the truth. And there is, there might not be one

ultimate truth, but there's definitely truth. For example, we know that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. Truth. That's a truth. You can't, the fool would be the person when approached with truth, kind of in the same way you just push my face into the fire. I'm not going to like freak out over that and be like, no, I'm right. I'm more than willing to admit, most of the time, I'm completely fucking wrong, or diluted a little bit myself or off. I'm willing to adjust my thoughts as much as possible to try to coincide with the reality that's happening right now. The fool is the person who's not willing to do that. And that's a dangerous person, I think. And I think that one thing that Dalai Lama said, there's a great book about science.

I think Richard, somehow, I don't know how Richard Gere was involved in it, but I read this quote by the Dalai Lama saying, if science refutes things that we believe in Buddhism, then we must adjust Buddhism to correspond with science. Because science is trying as much as possible to let reality speak for itself. And here's what's happening, whether or not it coincides with your belief of things, here is definitely what's happening. You know what science gives us? Science gives us cyborgs. Science gives us people with robotic arms. Science cured my cancer, where I would have died in the 80s if I'd gotten this very same cancer. I could have easily died. Science cured that. The approach to knowledge that science had cured that cancer

science puts us into airplanes. Science will probably invent teleportation. Science is eventually going to make it so that babies who are born deaf can hear again. Science brings us true miracles. You know what religion brings us? Religion brings us incense, chanting, a kind of sense of community. But god damn it, I don't know that it's like their approach to truth is really creating the type of beneficial effects that science is bringing us. Religion brings us suicide bombers. Religion brings us people who are terrifying their children with absolute lies. Come on man, there's no hell. Right. Okay, but science also with women who were struggling with breast cancer at the turn of the century, the other century, not the most recent one that we all remember,

that Prince sang about. The other one, like when women had that cancer, there were surgeons who prided themselves. They thought that cancer had a root, so they had to dig as deep as they could. They would deform these women in order to get the cancer. There was a pride among surgeons about who could cut the most, who could get the most healthy tissue out in order to get the... So you just disfigure women in order for their health, which of course has been disproven. Science also brought us thalidomide and thalidomide babies. Like science, science isn't some beautiful... But it changes. And I believe that. I believe as soon as you think that science is a destination, that's when you're in trouble. Yes, but it's a process and it's a process willing to

change. That's the key. That's the fucking key. And I love that. You know, for example, you can look in Judaism, and I don't remember which branch of Judaism it is, but when the... I think it... I can't remember what the name of the rabbi is that does the circumcisions, but what they'll do is they'll do... The moil. The moil will do the circumcisions and then we'll suck the tip of the baby's penis. Yeah, the herpes. Is that where you're getting... Yeah, yeah. So now, if a man walked up to you and said to you, hey, listen, I know you have a little girl, but if a man walked up to you and said, listen, I'm going to shave off the very top of your little girl's pussy after birth, and then I'm going to suck it to make sure that it's clean,

you would have the man arrested. It's funny because like, you know, my wife and I had this discussion because we didn't know what we were going to have. So we, you know, we had to have the discussion about circumcision. And so we... That's a weird discussion to have. And because there's a lot of weirdness and the problem with anti-circumcision people, they do themselves a disservice, is they sound as sort of batshit as the anti-vaccine people. And there's something about that that like, it's the fervor of a belief. Yeah. That sort of will turn me off, where I'm like, well, because you believe this so strongly, I'm going to disagree with you. Yeah. Just because I'm worried about it. But my wife said she would default to the person who had the equipment.

And so like, if we had a boy, I don't think he would be circumcised. Tip of my dick's gone. Tip of my dick's gone. I love it. It's nice to be able to not wash every day. I like it. I like the way it looks. I like the way my penis looks. I like it. I like that it looks like it's got a little like steel helmet and it's like riveted on. I like that. But let me tell you, man, if that started now, if that started now, if somebody was, if somebody now said, listen everybody, I was on a mountain, a voice came to me and said that from now on, we got to chop the tips of the baby's dicks off. It's like, oh, time to go to the mental asylum. You've lost your mind. Somehow because things happened long enough ago, they are okay. Well, it was a way to

mark the body in so people would know of what faith you were. It was a secret handshake. That's a deeply secret handshake. So do you believe, yeah, took my dick off. I just don't like that when you start talking about stuff like this, people will say that you're a bigot. When it's like, listen, we have to keep moving here. We've got to keep moving. Guys, it's like I think about, sometimes I think about this idea of is a ridiculous idea. But I think about the idea of a house where some kids were left in the house when they were young and they had rules that they were taught to follow by their parents. And then the parents left and said, we're going to be back. Make sure you follow these rules. And the kids grew and grew and grew and grew.

And they began to realize like, no, no, no, no, we need to go outside. It's time for us to change these rules that our parents gave us because they were rules for little babies and things are different now. I think things are different now. I think we live in a time where if you want to get your kids, the tip of your kids penis cut off, then you have to really think about the why you want to do that. What's the reason for doing that? Is it going to diminish the child's sexual pleasure? People say that it does. Is it going to hurt the child? People say that it does. Is it going to be more hygienic for the child? People say that it is, but you need to look at it from the perspective of here's the reason that we are doing this is based on physical reality. We're not doing it

because an invisible man told a guy with a beard to chop the tips of baby dicks off. Right. My favorite part of that is when you talk to people who have had their kids circumcised, they will say things like, well, we wanted him to match his dad. We didn't want the kid to feel weird that he didn't look like dad. And it's like, when was the last time you saw your dad's dick? I mean, let me ask somebody else because somebody else will be able to tell me. I think you just gave me the first question that I'm going to ask from now on doing this podcast. That's like a Larry King question. That's a great question, man. That's a great question that can only,

that you don't want to be able to answer that. Right. Right. It's sort of like, well, no, but it is. It's this idea of like, you don't want the kid to feel weird. You want him to look like dad. It's like, really? Yeah. Really? That's what it's coming down to. David, what do we do here? We've got an overpopulated planet of which a very large part of the population believes an invisible homophobic man. What are we supposed to do here? What would you do? What's the plan? Let's say that I, the particle accelerator accident happens. Suddenly you find yourself enthroned in the great seat of power. You are the new world order leader. You are sitting on a giant iron throne. Whatever you say will happen. What do we do? What do you do about the

people who are using religion as an excuse to shoot girls in the face who are learning to read? What do you do about people who are snipping off the tips of baby cocks? What do you do about the people who are getting a plurality of wives and marrying 14 year olds so that they can be religious pedophiles? What do you do about people who want to destroy mosques in Israel because they think that there should be a Jewish temple there? What's your answer to that, man? What do you do? There's no way to answer that question, right? There's no way. I mean, other than being like, being flip about it and being like, well, I want milkshakes to be cheaper. There's no way to answer that question. Why is there no way to answer that question? I think

there's a way to answer the question. Let's hear it. Well, no. This is why no one wants to answer the question because by answering the question, the derision that you would receive, I mean, the very best people are going to roll their eyes and think you sound like a blow out of the very worst people are going to say you're a hateful bigot. Right. But I'll tell you this much, man. If I'm in a house and if I'm on an island with five people and there's a pregnant woman on the island and one of the people says we have to start chopping the tip of the baby's dick off. If it's a boy, we got to chop the tip of his penis off and PS, the pregnant woman, we need to cover her in cloth so that nobody can see her face. And by the way, God told me that she has to marry me

or she's going to hell. Right. That person, that's the person I don't listen to on the island. That's the person that I don't give any power to at all. The guy who says we have to dress the woman like beekeepers and invisible man told me that she has to marry me. And if it's a boy, we're chopping the tip of his penis off. I don't know that I don't know that that guy gets to have any kind of power on an island. That's the crazy man right on a planet. That's the priest. Yeah. I defer back to my milkshake option. I have no answer for that because it's a question that is it's too big. I mean, in some ways, like the initial goal of that question is the initial response to that question is well,

just make them all English majors. If people were English majors, they'd have perspective, they'd have a sense of history, they'd have like a sense of education of worldliness and empathy outside of themselves. But that's what I got out of an English major. Like I can't speak for anybody else's, but you're brilliant. You're wonderful. People like, no, I'm not being sweet. You're fucking brilliant. And by the way, people like you are the ones who should be like who I wouldn't why is it weird to fantasize about a society where people like you are calling the shots? I mean, one of the most terrifying things I heard for whatever reason, I was laying in bed and decided to watch Netflix documentaries on fundamentalist Christians idea, the apocalypse.

Really great documentaries with fundamentalist Christians being driven around Israel in a tour bus. And they, you know, they like one of the pastor was really proud of the fact that he had photoshopped this mosque and the Temple of the Mount. You know, there's a mosque there. The Muslims, they fucking won the game. They have a mosque and what many people consider to be the most sacred part of the world. And so it infuriates Christians and this guy had photoshopped the mosque out and put in the temple and he like loved showing this picture. What was very terrifying in this documentary was at one point they showed a clip of Ronald Reagan, president of the United States during a debate, talking about his belief that there is going to be

Armageddon, that an invisible man is going to rain fire on Israel. Okay. Why does that man get to be in control of a nuclear arsenal? Right. Because there's no way he would be given that nuclear arsenal unless he believed that. Or at least he said it. There's no way he would be given that unless he said it. Oh my God. Think of that. That's even more horrifying. Yeah, he's mouthing. He's playing a part. He knows his part. Yeah, I would say I am. So there you go. This is my thing and this is the thing that I often see like in composition students when they first start learning about rhetoric and how like arguments work or whatever, all they have is arguing from conviction. All they have is like because I believe it, it's true. It must be true because I believe

it. And if I believe it hard enough, then it'll be true. And it's like, right, you know that doesn't work. Right? Like, you know that doesn't work. Like, you can't believe something into happening. Like, what those students end up is they end up really, they either say, oh, well, here let me, let me find some facts and evidence. And because I'm a materialist, like, I believe in facts and evidence and I love a good argument. But when you only argue based on because, duh, like that's when that's when you lose, you've, you've removed yourself from the conversation. And you've become an anchor on Fox News. Yeah, no, you've stopped, you've stopped engaging in a conversation and the conversation is the thing. If, if you want any progress, the conversation is the thing. It's

the same thing we were just talking about science, that science is only awful when viewed at a moment to moment basis. Yeah. When you look at it from like my perspective, like in versus your perspective, like science fucked me up. Right. Science cured you. Right. In those different moments, we have different experiences, but it's the process of inquiry of science that's really important. Yes. Anything that stops that inquiry, that's what's awful. Yes. Right. Like that. Anything that stops, and this is stupid because it just sounds like Rodney King saying like, why can't we all get to just get along. But at some point you do, you just want like anything that's going to stop this conversation, stop that. Yes. Right. And there are a lot of people who don't want this kind of

conversation to happen. Well, as soon as you're like, well, we can't have this conversation because I had a conversation with, with this thing up on the mountain that tells me that we need to stop having this conversation. Yes. Like beware that guy. Like I would worry about that. You should worry about that guy. And what's really scary is that guy is everywhere. And that guy is controlling entire denominations of people. There, that's a, there are not all of them. Right. I like to go to Agape Church. I like Reverend Michael Beckwith in Culver City. I love him. And I love the stuff that he says. I don't believe in all of it. And a lot of it seems cheesy and manipulative. But the essence of the thing I really love, it makes me happy when I leave it. So I love, I love,

and I've eaten edible marijuana and gone to the Gnostic Christian Church that's really close to me and enjoyed watching the ceremony of the mass and the, in the incense and the weird prayers that they say. I love all of it. I love ritual, but man, I get really scared when, no, I'm not scared. That's a lie. I don't feel scared at all. But I get, I get butt frustrated, I guess is a better word. I get frustrated at the idea that people who, people who don't understand that it's symbolic what they're doing, who take a literal interpretation of the thing and then try to transform that literal interpretation into law using subversive measures to try to make that happen. That's where shit gets weird because that's where you end up in Texas with these insane anti-abortion laws

and they just ran out of the juice to execute the prisoners with. Yeah. Did you hear about that? No. It's a problem in Texas. Ran out of the chemical that they use to kill people, simultaneous to creating these draconian anti-abortion laws that are based on their belief in the imaginary man. See where it goes, man? Starts with a guy on a stump, ends with a retarded man strapped down to a silver table getting poison put in his veins and a woman who might die from being pregnant not being allowed to get an abortion. Starts with a stump, ends with Texas. But then like Wendy Davis, when she stands on her stump and proclaims what she believes and is like heroic standing up on that filibuster stump and stops that law from happening for the brief moment that

she stopped it from happening. In those moments when I'm cheering that, how is that different from cheering the guy who's standing on the milk crate by the Chicago bean? Because she's cheering something I want to hear? No. This is how I feel about the abortion debate, which is really difficult, because my beliefs are you can't make decisions for other people. You can't. About other people's bodies, you just can't. By the way, let me just say this before you continue. I am against abortion. I don't like abortion. Yeah, no, you don't. You love it. No, no, no. I'm serious. Are you really? Yeah. Yeah, I don't like abortion. I think that's a really bad thing. 99% of the time, I really think it's a very bad thing. But god damn it, it's not my right to tell somebody they

can't do that. So in, so to me, the argument comes down to, I will say you can't make a decision for it. Shit. God damn me. God damn you. So my, my belief comes down to you can't make the decision for somebody else. But that argument that I just made could so easily be turned to, well, then a mother can't make that decision for a fetus. I'm like, oh, the one thing I had. God damn it, David McLean. Right. And so like, I feel like that's the only place I can actually be is in that divided place where it's just sort of like, I think it's, it's this way. I would, I'm afraid, man, that if I got put on that throne of power that I said that you, that what would you do if you were there? I'm afraid I'd be a monster.

That's the thing. You can't, you can't start making changes other than the glib. I really feel like, and even the glib will come and bite you in the ass. The indecision will destroy you too. Like, well, I remember the, the, the first monk in the second monk conversation in Sri Lanka really well, where you were talking to Emil about there's two monks standing on a hill. One monk looks down and he says, look at all the misery and horror in the life, in the world. Da, da, da, da, da. And the second monk says, it's all perfect. Look at it. It's all perfect. And you and Emil were having this conversation where like, you kept saying, you're the, you're the first monk. You're the first monk. You're the first monk to the point where

Emil like, flipped the table. Yeah. You remember this? And then, and then ran off into the, the surf. Nobody's proudest moment. Like, nobody's proudest moment. Like, none of us look good in that. College. College. Oh, but, but it's that question. It's like, you know, it's neither, it's a false dichotomy. It's not like the first monk or second monk is right. It's actually that question of standing behind the two monks and figuring out which one is right. Is the only question is like, is everything going all right? And it's actually, this is perfection. Or is this horrible and, and inhumane and terrible and we have to work? I have my answer. Yes. First monk, I say, you think everything's horrible? Go help. Right.

Second monk, I say, you think everything's perfect? Go help. Right. That's the answer. Go fucking help. However it is, whatever the thing is, because it's the leaving the self. It's the leaving the self and interacting with anything, because all, both of those things are just interior states of being. Everything's awful. Everything's perfect. It's both the delusion that you're living in when you actually interact with other people that those notions become secondary because the action itself does more than whatever belief you hold. Do you have a little bit longer? Yeah. You, first of all, you have become a wise man and it's so cool to be around you man. You're so, you've gotten this like academic, beautiful, academic way of analyzing reality that comes

from being disciplined with your thought process and it's so cool to see. I want to talk to you. I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop because I have to pee, but I want to talk to you a little bit about writing before we finish this thing up. Is that cool? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. Great. Save the dolphins. So I wanted, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is just to get some real world writing advice because I want to, I keep wanting to write essays. I have some ideas for essays to write. I want to, I like have this fantasy of writing a book, but I can't do it. And I'm worried to myself that I'm deluding myself by thinking that I can just write a book. Like that's it. That's kind of like saying like, oh, I'm just going to build a house.

I've got a saw. Like if someone gave me all the tools to build a house, someone like said, look, here's all the wood you need and tools to build a house. What else do you need? Come on. And then that great shame cycle you would enter. You'd be like, I've been given all of this to make the house and now the house doesn't, it doesn't exist. Yeah. Because I'm, I'm, I'm sad and because of all the failings that I already know about myself. Yes. So what do we do here, Dave? Is it, is it unreal? Let me just ask you a few questions. One, can anyone write? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, so my answer to this, and this is nobody ever wants to hear this, but it's the thing that gets in the way of people writing is what they want to write about

because they'll start writing and they'll get angry at the thing that they're writing because it wasn't what was in their head. And like one of the things you have to do in writing is like, get over the thing that brought you to the chair. Like the thing that brought you to the chair is great and really wonderful. But at some point you have to give over to the practice of what you've written versus what you want to write. What you want to write is going to destroy you. What you have written is the thing you got. Right? So like it's, it's this process of being like, so one of my favorite examples of this is, is this writer, Joanne Beard, who wrote this amazing essay called the fourth state of matter. And so the fourth state of matter, I don't want to,

it's, it's an amazing essay. It's one of the best of the last 30 years, like just groundbreaking essay. And what she did when she started to write the essay was she wanted to write about her famous dogs, famous dogs in her life, like the dogs she loved so much in her life. And she was like, you know, the most famous dog in my life was this dog. You know, when that dog was dying, oh right, yeah, this, this, my, my husband was leaving me. Oh right, when, when this dog was dying, this, this other horrific thing happened. And what she ended up doing was writing the essay that she didn't know she was trying actively not to write by sitting down to write something glib and just like, here's an essay on famous dogs. She ends up writing this thing, backing herself

into the corner to write the thing that she couldn't have written if she sat down to write that. Wow. And that's, I feel like the key, and it goes back to my question of how do you know when you're full of shit, is like, is to let the practice of writing take over at some point and sort of subvert what you want. Like the, I see a lot of people who want to write and, and they usually sit next to me in airplanes, is they, they have it all up here, man. Got it all up here. Just, I just need someone to like, plug in and then do, do, do, do, do, do, and then boop, there you go. That is the sound. I got the ideas word, man, you do it. And that's sort of, that's, that comes from people who think that books are ideas, as opposed to like,

songs that you re-sing in your head. You're basically letting somebody else sing in your head. And that the, the music of a work is as important as any idea in the work itself. And that like, you're having this intensely synesthetic experience of listening with your eyes. And like, too often people think like, it's just about the ideas, like it's just about the, the bumper sticker quotes from Nietzsche, it's all about the, the, the, the things I can call from it in order to make my life better, as opposed to the experience of reading, which is what everyone loves. Like that, that moment is beautiful when you, when you get, when you lose time reading a book, when you, when you get suckered into something. Like, it's like the most powerful asset.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. It's this sort of like, I've lost a day just thinking about this book. I've lost this thing in, by being in this other realm. And I think like, for me, that's the key, is like, allowing yourself to get to that point of not knowing. And that's where, that's where the interesting stuff happens. Like, if you set out to write exactly what you wanted to write perfectly, that's the best you can ever do is what you already knew. Like that's the bed, like that's the best you can think of. Like the thing is, you've got to be able to write smarter than you are. Like I have to, because like, I'm not that smart. Like I know things, but I also know that I'm pretty limited in what I know. But in order to write

smarter than myself, I have to let the practice become bigger than me. The practice. I'm sitting down every day and writing and then listening to what I'm writing, so I, what I've written so that I can revise it. What do you mean listening to what you've written? Okay, so you reread what you, you write. This is my practice. So I reread what I write and I see where I flinch. And I know all of my flinches, like, well, not all of them, because I'm developing new ones all the time. All the times where I dodge out of the way of something real, and like, it's always like when I start talking about pop culture, it's like, as soon as I make that jump into, there's a Simpsons episode, like I've actually flinched away from this really

interesting thing. And so you start to track your tics, and you track your tics, and then you see, oh, every time I talk about this, I start talking about something else. I got to look at what that thing that I keep flinching away from it. You know what I mean? Yeah, now I do, but I've never thought of it before. But it's, it's, it's not so much like, I got it all worked out. I know of one person, two, who claims that they had it all worked out in their head before they sat down to write, and that was like Edward P. Jones for his book, The Known World. Supposedly he didn't write for 10, 10 years, and then knocked it out in two years, right, because he had, he had already worked it out all in his head. And that's the one example, Nabokov, you can make a case, says that

too. But like, everybody else I've ever known as a writer has been like, well, I started out writing this thing and it became this totally different thing. And that's the good moment where you get to someplace you never thought of. That's, that's the best. Yeah. That's the only time I've ever had any success as a writer. Can you walk, so just walk me through what a day of writing looks like for you. Trying not to write for a really long time. Like, I'll say to myself, as I'm sitting there, like, oh, you know what, I need to research pneumatic tubes. Let me, let me research pneumatic tubes. I'm going to do this because I, you know, I really need to know more before I, before I write, because what I know now isn't good enough to write. Yes. So I need to know more. And that

screws off two hours easy. Yes. And then I finally say, well, I'm never going to know everything about pneumatic tubes. So I might as well start writing. And so I'll write, and I'll write, and I'll write for about two hours. And then like, I'll just be begging for distractions. I'll be like, please, please, please. But there's this guy, Ron Carlson, short story writer and novelist. And he always says, sit 15 minutes longer than you after, then after the first time you want to get up. Because that's when your best ideas will happen. So like that first moment where you're like, man, I need more coffee. Man, my big thing is, oh, I need to stand in the other room, because I'll be smarter in the other room.

Let me just get up from the chair and go stand in the other room. And then you have to sit through that and then write some more. And then you finally get some coffee, you do whatever. And then you hate everything you write. Yes. And then a week later, you look at it, you go, it's not so bad. There's actually some things in there that I accidentally wrote that were good. The stuff that I thought I was writing that was good, that's terrible. That's just terrible. But the stuff that I accidentally, that actually accidentally slipped through, that was good. So that's, I'm going to keep that and just work off of that. So when you say work off of that, what you see you revise, eliminating the bullshit,

you have this core something, what is that look, what do you do from there? What it is, it's the tone and this is going to sound really pretentious. But for me, it's all about the tone. And I think about tone in terms of like a space shuttle finding the entry window into the planet, back into Earth. Like if it's just an angle off, it'll blow up, right? And it won't be able to land. But it has to be the exact angle. And then once you find that exact angle in the tone, like then you can go somewhere, you can land the sucker, right? But you have to like keep at it and keep at it until you find the right tone. And the right tone usually just ends up being like a sentence where I'm like, Oh, right, that's the one,

that's the one, that's going to be my tuning fork for the way the rest of this is going to work. Wow. One sentence. One sentence. And you'll be like, Oh, right, I'm not flinching here. I'm not trying, I'm not sounding smart. I'm not trying to impress anybody. I'm not, this is just this thing. And it's usually just a humble thing like, yeah, I woke up. Like, you know, just a simple thing where it's just like, Right, right, right. Out of outside of all the things that I wished I knew all the things that I want to know, all of the things that please would make this easier for me. Once all of those things fall away, you've got the thing that you have. And the thing you have is usually pretty good.

Now, once you have that, the tone, the initial core idea, what do you do after that? What is it? You just repeat this process over and you go back? How many times do you revise that initial thing before you continue on with the work? Or, or how does it work? Or is every new piece, does it involve that process of like, try to let go? The core of the thing when I'm fully not myself will be the thing I use. Then you come back and build off of that initial thing. Like there's an essay I'm trying to write now that I've written six different openings for. And it's just not there yet. And I don't know yet how it's going to be. And it's frustrating. It's, it's, there's no correlation to like,

dollars per hour on this, because it just sort of like, you're going to write way more than you'll ever be paid for. All right. And it's just sort of like, okay, so I'm just going to sit here and just beat my head against this. And then something that I'm not terribly ashamed of might show up. What are some books you can recommend to people as in me regarding grammar, if somebody doesn't understand basic grammar? Yeah, I don't think I, I don't think I do. Like I think I have, I clearly have issues with commas. I clearly have no idea what a comma is. And they're, they're, it's embarrassing for me.

How do you deal with that though? It's, it's just one of those things where you just, for me, it's just sort of like, I try to read more than I write. And I try to be like, Oh, right. That's, and so those, those are my style in grammar guides, is the stuff I'm reading. And then you read someone like Cormac McCarthy, and that'll just screw you up for a while, because the way he changes punctuation will destroy you. And so like, that's, that's, that would be so great if people, they found smoldering corpses next to Cormac McCarthy. The blood meridian, they're like, couldn't handle sutri.

But no, for me, the book that I love to teach, and I think it's really brilliant, is The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick, and a friend, my friend, Kath, told me to read it. And, and I was like, right, I'll get to it. I'll get to it. And I put it all for years. And then I read it. And as soon as I read it, I read it in like a day, because everything I needed to know was in that book. Because her thing is, you have to know who's speaking, and as soon as you know who's speaking, you know what's said. Right. And it's like, you have all of these different personas in your life, and you got to get rid of the, any persona that's not part of the thing that's, that's being said.

And so you have to like, God, that sounds weird. No, it doesn't. It makes great sense. And so you whittle away all of the sort of nonsense. And then you have a part of yourself. And you, this little part of yourself, this wedge of yourself, is the thing that's speaking. And that isn't the totality of you. Like that's impossible. And you just have to, like, remove that off the table. But you can talk about this side, this slight element of the truth. Sure. Well, I've gotten in wild arguments with myself and, and dreams. I mean, I can remember in a dream like, waking, like in the midst of the dream, realizing I was dreaming and arguing with a person in my dream and thinking, who is that? Yay. Yeah. Right. Because that's the only

interesting thing. Like in some ways, it's like that, that you surfer in yourself has to be present in some ways in the essay, because there's like, risking, talks about there's like, centripetal and centrifugal language. There's language that spins out and language that spins in. And, and the good writer has to like, navigate the place between those. And you know that, can you, can you go into a little bit more depth with that? What does that mean? Spinning out and spinning it? Okay. So language that spins out is language that opens more opportunities, opens like, he's basically the setup, right? So you have the setup in that that language is always setting up. And then the other language, the closing language,

is the thing that sort of puts a nice little bow tie on it. The thing that like, part of your brain says, I'll write this and it'll be the moral and then I can get up and go away. Okay, right. This will close this. Sure. This will just, I'll zing this motherfucker and it'll be done and then I can leave. Yes. And it's like, you can feel the want of that when you're writing, like, please just give me an escape hatch. Oh, I'm going to fake closure here. Right. I'm going to fake closure because this seems like a place that wisdom sits. And I feel like the best writing is writing that like, tampers with that idea of wisdom of a place where you can sit and feel comfortable. Like anything that you walk out of more sure than you walked in is a dangerous thing.

That's usually propaganda. Right. Like you want something that like, like James Baldwin is brilliant at this. If you read like, Notes of a Native Son, he's so good at being like, the way we've looked at this is wrong. And actually, this is going to be more complicated. Right. And it's, it's, and one of the things I talked about with my students is imagine a bad writer wrote this. And like, think about like, you see those texts that you really love and you just to be like, imagine someone terrible writing this. And, and then you're like, Oh, right. That's why this is good. Because it opens and it's weird and it's like complicated. And it doesn't go for the easy out, even though like the easy out probably sell better. But like, it's, it's that sort of like,

constantly usurping yourself from being comfortable. God damn it. You're, you have some lucky students, David McClain. Where are some of them? Where do you teach? You know, I'm in a university of Chicago. I teach there. And then I also teach at Columbia College. And every once in a while, the Art Institute of Chicago. What if people listening in Chicago want to take writing classes from you? You know, sure, you just have to get into those programs. Like, I'm teaching in the fall, I'm teaching this really cool class. You know, this class? Yes. Okay. So I'm teaching a ecstastic essay class. A what? Ecstastic essay class. So ecstasis was in the Republic with Plato. And ecstasis is like the fourth removal

from the pure state of being. And so like, first you have the perfect idea of a bed. Yes. And then you have a bed. Yes. And then you have some other iteration of a bed. And then you have a painting that behaves like a bed. And that's ecstastic. And so what I want is like, and I don't know what I'm talking about in some ways, because I really want to explore this idea. Because I want to know if you can make an essay behave like a James Brown song. I want to know if you can make an essay replicate the experience of looking at a painting. I want to know. And so poets do this all the time. They do ecstastic poetry. And it's great. It's really interesting. Poets love Caravaggio. And they always sort of like try to replicate that experience of looking

at a Caravaggio. And so I want my students to try to replicate the experience of an art that they love, a piece of art that they love. Does it have to be a piece of art? Can you do like an essay that mimics a car crash or an essay that mimics an upset stomach? That's great. Absolutely. In this class, I think I'm just going to make it about another work of art, because I want them to research that work of art. Right. And that sort of person who made it and the history of behind that work of art. Like if you think about James Brown's Live at the Apollo, like this is an album that's one groove. And it was like, it's only one groove, like the entire album. I don't know it. And so like the entire album, so his publisher

didn't want, Sid King didn't want to release a live album because he was just like, nobody buys this crap. Come on. And so James Brown rented the Apollo Theater himself, put on this show, and this show, it happens to be like on the seventh day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. When like the Russian ambassador leaves the US, it's that day. Right. And so when people are screaming in the audience, they actually have a good idea that this might be the end. Right. You have this sort of like, you have this idea. This is all in this great book about that album. It's slipping my name, the book about the album. But it's this history of the album, this album that like people are screaming. They really, in history, they have a reason to believe

that they might die tomorrow. And so you listen to like James Brown saying, please, please. And it's like one continuous groove. And that's what I want an essay to behave like. Wow. Right. I want an essay to behave like Glenn Gould playing Bach and Glenn Gould plays Bach and he hums at the same time. And so when Glenn Gould's playing Bach and humming at the same time, that's the way I feel when I write. Like I'm writing about something in the past, but my present self is humming as I'm writing about it. And so I want both of those things at once. Wow. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to agree with you, man, only because it's brilliant. I have to. See, writing simple. Man. This, thank you very much. The writing advice is, it's so accessible. You make it so

accessible, man. This is what a teacher does. This is what a good professor does. This is the thing. And I always sort of really emphasize this. And because people want the writing process to be difficult and it's really not, you just sit down, just sit down, like really sit down, like turn off the internet and sit down and like write the thing you know rather than the thing you wished you know. No. Right? Yes. Like that's so, it seems so dumb, but it's just like, of course, of course that's all you got. Nobody wants to be the thing they know. Right. Right. Everybody really wants to be, oh God, give a 24 year old Derrida, like fucking everybody wants to be Derrida and Foucault. Like, yes. Get out of that. Because that's what you, you're eschewing all of your life experience

for somebody else's theory about life. The essence of this is in the Bhagavad Gita, it is better to be an honest street sweeper than a dishonest king. That's true. But it is, so like, that's my question always is like, how do you know what you know? And how do you know when you're, how do you know when you're a liar? Like, I don't know David. Because I've seen people who, who, I watch them and I'm like, and I know that I do it too. And, and so I'm just sort of like, how do you know? I don't know, man. You don't have an answer, do you? No, no. No, God, no. I wish I knew. But, but that's,

yeah, that's my, that's my big issue in writing is like, I want to get past all the ways that I wished I thought about this and get to like what I know about it. Um, and get past all the ways I wished I felt and get to like how I feel. You're talking about, uh, something I've been thinking about, which is what would it be like if I didn't feel guilty all the time? I don't know if it's possible. Yeah. This is original sin. Can we go back to, you're talking about you know, it's like when you're a kid and you wonder what it would be like to be in a zero gravity environment. Right. Right.

But it, it's not that, I feel like at some point, like it's not that hard that the truth leaks out of you in spite of yourself. Maybe you don't get it. Maybe you just don't get to enjoy it. Right. Maybe that's the, the great curse. I think I read some essay by Alistair Crowley. That's this very esoteric essay where he's talking about the holy grail and how the moment you drink from the holy grail, you no longer care about what the grail gives to you. It's the only time you care about the thing is prior to it. The moment you have it, it's no longer an issue. Right. You're just sort of like, so there's nothing to be gained. Oh that. Oh that. I already knew that. Yeah. It's still, it's like, you know, futuristic Japanese video

game arcade. You go into the video game arcade, somebody says, great game, human life, 70 you'll be, you'll be, you'll think you're in there for 70 years. You're, you're going to come out of it. The moment that you're in it, you won't remember that you're in a Japanese video game arcade. You'll just think that you're a living thing. But right now, if I told you, David, we just got drunk in Japan. It was a really fun video arcade. You wanted to be a human. You're in the midst of this game right now. Everyone that you know is a digital fabrication of some deeper part of yourself. It might drive you insane. Right. But the moment we take the device off your head and you come to your true identity as a being in the Japanese video game

arcade, you're like, oh yeah, it's a pretty cool game. Yeah, yeah. Let's play something else. Kind of boring. Do they have Gallagher? Because that, that shit's killer. I love Gallagher, man. That shit's cute. David, I love you. I love you too, Duncan. It's been too long, man. Too long. Thank you so much. Where can people find you? DavidStuartMcLean.com. The book comes out January 14th, 2014. Well, yeah, we'll have you back on. Oh yeah. We. With the blue room. Yeah. So, um, great. The book comes out in January. Too bad. No one's going to read that. That's when the new Xbox comes out. I know. I know. It's just, and you know, the demons are coming. It's just terrible. It's, it's, you know, you know, when, when they pushed back my publication date

past December 21st of last year, I was like, great. Now the apocalypse. Like I wrote a book and now it's, now the apocalypse is going to come. Thank you, God. Oh my God. I'm listening to the stand, um, the stand. Stephen King's the stand again. And one of the characters, uh, is a, as a singer who had a hit song just before the apocalypse. Oh, great. Yeah. It's great news at some point. He's like, the character realizes like there's no point in even telling people. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Right. Like there are people like running past you, burning. And at some point you're like, but my career, nothing. But are you on Twitter? I am on Twitter. It's at David S. McClain, um, whatever. I'll have these links at dunkintrustle.com.

Thank you very much, David. Thank you. Enlightening conversation. Thank you. As always. Thanks for listening everyone. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to us on iTunes. Leave a nice little comment. And now this track is called, We Gathered in Spring by the band Midlake from their album Trials of Van Oculpanther. This album is available for download on iTunes. Highly recommend it. I'm tired of being here on this heaven. No one lives to be 300 years like the way it used to be. I think they were giants. I think they were giants. You will stay to finish your work as long as need be.

As long as need be. On a clear day, I can see my old house and my wife in the front yard talking with a friend. We Gathered in Spring, we Gathered in Spring, we Gathered in Spring, we Gathered in Spring. I'm tired of being here on this hill where I'm sure to find my last meal. No one lives to be 300 years on a clear day. I can't see my old house and my wife in the front yard talking with a friend. We Gathered in Spring, we Gathered in Spring, we Gathered in Spring,