The Joe Rogan Experience - #1588 - Lawrence Wright

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Lawrence Wright is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of multiple books including "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief", and "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11". His newest title is "The End of October", a medical thriller about a doctor's race to stop a global pandemic.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day well uh first of all pleasure i've enjoyed your work thank you tremendously i i'm a gigantic fear a fan of uh going clear in particular oh really, I read the book and watched the HBO documentary on it. One of the most bonkers things in our culture today. Yeah. Amazing. That Scientology is like still... I mean, I passed by the Church of Scientology here just the other day.

I was like, oh, still works. Yeah, they've just moved it. When the documentary came out um some woman had just gone to see it at the movie theater and the and the uh it was on the drag you know on guadalupe across from um the university and she drove her car through the plate glass windows of the scientology building and she didn't stop there she drove around the lobby a little bit knocking over bookshelves. She might have had to issue a statement deploring violence in any form. Was she a victim of it?

No, she had just seen the documentary, and she was really worked up. Wow. That's a hype. She might have some other issues. Yeah, she might. Maybe Scientology could have helped her. Yeah, I might have been a course for that. Well, it's a weird thing when you see so many people that are so successful that are Scientologists.

At least you used to see that. I had a neighbor who was one of the nicest guys. He was a great guy. He was in my old neighborhood, and he was a Scientologist. And I found out in the most bizarre way, because there was a piece of land that was for sale. And he was talking about this piece of land, about possibly purchasing it. But he was going to have to put it off because he needed $50,000 because his wife was going clear. Right.

And it was like a scene in a movie where the record skips. And I went, what? Like, what are you doing and this was me of you know i was probably 28 at the time 29 i was the podcast has radically changed the way i look at things because i've had a chance to educate myself and have all these conversations with brilliant people and just enough of these conversations where I have a different perspective. But back then I really didn't know too much about Scientology other than I had bought a book from Dianetics online.

Cause not online rather on, on television, late night TV, 94. And they wouldn't stop sending me these pamphlets asking me to come to all these various meetings and this and that, and sending me all thesephlets asking me to come to all these various uh meetings and this and that and sending me all these things for programs they have discounts and i mean i was in one way i was kind of i admired their hustle i was like this is these guys don't stop right

like they just kept sending this shit to my mailbox i thought it was like a self-help book and i would always been into like anthony robbins and all these different i was into motivation like what can i what can i get that's gonna help me like work harder or succeed better you know whatever so i saw this thing and it was like wow this seems uh very compelling and i knew that there was a bunch of famous people that were scientologists like tom cruise and all right i was like was like, maybe this is legit. And I was reading it, and I was like, boy, this seems odd. It seems off without getting too much into it.

So when I talked to this guy who was my neighbor, I really didn't have a deep background in understanding it. But that was the beginning of me really getting into it, like talking to him and and finding out like how much money he had to spend and what was it about and like what do they do for you and they he was explaining how nothing would ever influence you again no negative influence that's going clear meant that was probably one of the first times i had ever heard that expression yeah i first time i ran into it was when i was in college and college, and my girlfriend and I were living in an apartment above this little storefront, and it was Scientology. And I'd never heard of it before, and they showed me the e-meter and stuff like that, and I just thought it was interesting. I wasn't put off by it. I was, you know, I thought maybe so.

I didn't pursue it. How old were you at the time? I was 21. 21, yeah. And, you know, it was, I've always been interested in religions. You know, it's one of the themes, I guess, of my work and why people go into one religion, why they believe one thing rather than another. Because in America, you can believe anything you want. And, you know, that's not true in a lot of countries.

But in our country, there's a smorgasbord of religions you can choose from. And if you don't see something, you know, you can make up your own. And if you don't see something, you can make up your own. And it's a very fertile religious culture, which interests me. And as a reporter, I think about how people have strong political beliefs, and it doesn't affect their behavior at all. You know a lot of people like that, I'm sure. But if you have powerful religious beliefs, it determines your life. And as journalists, we should pay more attention to that. So I've always been intrigued by different religious manifestations.

And so Scientology was on my list. I had wanted to write about it. And because they're, you know, they're always scaring everybody with, you know, legal threats or, you know, shakedowns and stuff like that. Do they still do that or have they kind of backed sources for that, they hounded them mercilessly. And they hire private investigators. The job that private investigators are doing is not so much to sneak up on your, go through your trash, although they do that. It's to intimidate you. And, you know, they had somebody following me around for a while, mainly to my public events, you know, when I was making speeches. I'm in a band, and he came to one of my gigs. What kind of band are you in?

It's a blues band. We play, you know, Texas, Louisiana music. And we used to back before the pandemic. I don't know if our, we had a regular gig at the Skylark Lounge in East Austin and opening. Well, I want to come see you. Oh, you'll be invited. Yeah, we got it. We're going to be really rusty.

We need a lot of rehearsal now. That's to be expected. So you got really fascinated by religions and what what made you focus on scientology i mean there's there's a lot of crazy religions out there one of the weirdest ones about scientology is we know who made it right it's like him and joseph smith those are the mormons and Scientology, the only ones where we know who the creator is. And the Scientology one is particularly weird because it was a science fiction author. Yeah.

It's like that didn't raise any red flags to people. Well, you know, you mentioned Mormons in the same breath, and I think that's apt. You know, they were the most stigmatized religion in the 19th century. Mark Twain hated them. Zane Gray wrote a novel about how wicked they were. They were hounded from one state to another. And Scientology is kind of the modern equivalent of that. And one of the reasons I wanted to write about it is you have these famous and sometimes wealthy people, as you point out, affiliating with this organization. There must be a kind of public relations martyrdom for them. I mean, you can admire Tom

Cruise or John Travolta for their acting, But you also think, are they a little nuts? You know, is there something going on with them that they need this religion? And so why do they affiliate? Why do they lend their celebrity and their standing to such a stigmatized religion? That was one of the reasons I wanted to write about it. Well, they must get some benefit out of it. That's what I, and they do. Yeah. do yeah i'm not you know i think especially at the lower levels you know they offer courses like jerry seinfeld was in for a while i don't think he was ever in i think he was interested in it and he was studying he took some courses yeah and but he was never like committed as a scientologist what what is a Scientologist? I mean, once you're going to the Celebrity Center and you're taking courses, you know,

I say you're a Scientologist. If you go fishing once, are you a fisherman? Yeah, that case. Aren't you? It's a good question. I'm testing the water. I've played basketball a couple of times. I'm hardly a basketball player.

That's a little different. Is it? I mean, I guess it is. But I mean, basketball player. That's a little different. Is it? I mean, I guess it is. But I mean, I feel like taking courses in things doesn't make you... Well, Leonard Cohen did as well. Sure. And Rock Hudson. I mean, there were...

A lot of people were drawn to it. And I think part of it is Scientology set itself up as a religion for celebrities. It deliberately targeted people like that. And for instance, if you go to Hollywood and you look at, you know, prominent actors and so on, they tend not to be Southern Baptists. You know, it's not designed for them. And, you know, they may come from a Southern Baptist background, but if they move to Hollywood and they're looking for a group of spiritual seekers like themselves, and they want to affiliate with people like them, Scientology says, here we are. And we have the Celebrity Center where people like you can come and you can hang around with other famous people. I think they offer a certain amount of protection.

I think there's something there for that. And there's also, I think, there's a structure that exists. And I think there's a lot of people that, especially in such a volatile sort of, it's an uncertain world, the world of acting in particular. It's such a crazy world. I mean, I always said if you want a formula, like why is L.A. the way it is? Well, just stop and think about what it is. You have a bunch of people that move there from somewhere else

because they want fame, right? And then you make them audition audition which is the weirdest thing you go into an unnatural environment usually a conference room there's a bunch of people sitting around judging you and you want them to like you enough to pick you to do this thing so you can't in any way buck trends you have to be like uber polite you have whatever the ideology is that's accepted the general vibe of hollywood you must confirm to that you must conform to that rather you like there's they don't even have opinions they have this conglomeration of opinions they've adopted in order to be let in to this tribe and then you you hope that they pick you and so you have these incredibly insecure

people who want acceptance and love and then you make them beg for it they're essentially like going there and hoping that these people will like them and that's where you get the abuse like the harvey weinsteins of the world and these type of people it's like they're preying on this need to be accepted and brought into this group in order to Be to work to be able to work you you have to play this fucked-up game and so something comes along like Scientology that gives you structure and gives you family and gives you like We are for you. We're gonna help you become clear. We're gonna bring you to the next level You know, you're you're a 60 gives you something where. We're going to bring you to the next level. You know, you're a success.

It gives you something where you feel like, like, have you ever done martial arts? I did judo when I was in high school. One of the beautiful things about martial arts is the belt system. Yeah. Because, like, when you're a white belt and all of a sudden they tie that blue belt on your waist,

you're like, wow, I am making progress. This is really happening. And you feel fantastic. Whereas if you went to a martial art like uh i did kickboxing for a while there's no belts and it just feels weird like you don't know where you are like where am i like it's not it's not the most success like and because of that some kickboxing systems even muay thai some weird systems have developed their own belt structure which is weird the system they've just sort of added to the existing martial art

that didn't have a belt structure. But it's to give people this sense of progress, give people scaffolding, give people structure, give people this thing where you feel like something is happening for me. And I think that's one of the things that Scientology does really well for these fucked up people. Absolutely. And you know the other thing, you mentioned the word community. When I started writing about different religious groups, I am asking about beliefs. I noticed that people would always say, well we believe this or that. And I finally I began to focus on the we rather than the belief. Because you you know, Scientology has, you know, bizarre beliefs, as does, you know, Mormonism. You know, they're out of the mainstream for sure.

But they, especially I can speak about the Mormons. I also wrote about them. It's a beautiful community. Yeah. You know, and... Nicest people. Yeah. And Amish, for instance, I wrote about them.

You know, they're a lot like Scientology in some ways because they have the same policy of disconnection. You know, we lived up in central Pennsylvania in this little Amish community called Kishikakweles Valley or Big Valley. And it's famous among anthropologists because they're so schismatic and they define their community

by the color of their buggies. What is schismatic? I don't know what that means. That means they break a fraction off. So, you know, here's a church and one part of the church doesn't agree with the other part. So they break off and start another church.

So in this little community they have the white buggies the black buggy buggies and the yellow buggies and they all have a different set of it's not a different set of beliefs they have a different set of practices you know like the white buggies are the most they're called the old order they don't have uh they don't have uh eaves on their buildings you know no They don't have eaves on their buildings. They don't use electrical power at all, and they're very rigid about that. No pictures on the walls and so on. Whereas if you go up the grade, when you finally graduate out of the Amish, you get into the Mennonite community, then they'll start driving cars, you know, but the most progressive Amish would use tractors only for tractor power. They

wouldn't use them in the fields, but they'd use them to help load the hay in the barn. So, but if you're a yellow buggy and your daughter marries a white buggy, you'll never speak to her again, and you're living in the same community. And that's not any different from Scientology. But the reason they do that is to enforce the boundaries of their community. And I think another significant part of this is that we look at Scientology and, you know, Mormonism, and you might laugh at their, you know, the theological construct that their religion is built upon. easier it sounds, then you have to crawl over this huge wall of doubt and misgivings to accept that Xenu, this ruler of 75 million years ago, sent a bunch of Thetans to the earth and what

looked like DC-8s and dropped them into volcanoes where they were exploded by a hydrogen bomb and their spirits were caught by a net and then they were set in front of a 3D movie theater. It takes a lot to swallow that, right? But if you do, at least if you say you do, you go over the wall and you go join a community that's very supportive. And you have to say, if somebody, do you really believe that shit? Oh, yes, we believe this. You're reinforcing your affiliation with the community.

And I think people have a hunger, especially in our time, you know, for strong communities. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we also like questions to be answered, even if those answers don't make sense, because it removes this bizarre, like, there's an existential angst to just being alive, just being on a planet that's hurling through the universe. Above us is stars and space, and there's so many questions and and we have a finite lifespan there's if you really start thinking about it you can kind of freak out and if it's really open-ended if you really don't know what life is if we really were single-celled organisms that became multi-celled organisms and we used to be a shrew and a shrew evolved and eventually became a human being and we don't even know exactly how all these steps happened and here we are today and you don't

know where it's going and is humanity even going to make it and you're not going to make it no matter what humanity you if humanity dies off you have a finite lifespan if you're lucky you live to be 100 and all those questions are so confusing and scary and if someone comes along and says we have all the answers put your mind at ease we have xenu and xenu has created you and you got dropped off in a volcano and you're here today and all you have to do is follow these steps and you will be free of all the confusion and all the emotional stress and the chaos that this life has. You don't need psychiatric medication. You don't need anything.

You need us. And also they offer the prospect of eternal life. Yeah. Because the idea is that you are not Joe Rogan. You are a Thetan. And you are an eternal being. And you incarnate in different bodies, you know, repeatedly. And so they will help you discover your past lives.

And they'll also help you, you know, save civilization. So you have a noble purpose. And you have the assurance that if you die you'll keep going and that's good news so if you know there's a there's a reluctance to part with the the good news that a lot of religions have to offer that i had this conversation recently with a friend where we're talking about living forever and they were like i wouldn't want to live forever i was like but do you want to die now and they're like no and i said well do you enjoy life yes i enjoy life i'm having a great time why would you want it to end like if you found out that life right now like lawrence right

jamie vernon and i sitting here having a conversation that this is this is life and this just keeps going it keeps going forever you meet You meet new people, you go to dinner, you go to see a concert one day when the COVID's up, but it just keeps going. Would you be okay with that, or do you need an end? Well, actually, Joe, I started a group called the Immortality Working Group, because I'm on the side of living as long as possible.

Now, I don't want to be decrepit. I'm on the side of living as long as possible. Now, I don't want to be decrepit. There are things about the possibilities of the end that are pretty awful, and I don't want to endure them. But one of my associates in my now aging group of immortalists. Is that a word? It is now. He teaches psychology at the University of Texas, and he starts his class by saying, I'm pretty sure that at least one student in this room will never die.

Whoa. Because he's on top of a lot of the research that there are creatures. They tend to be like seaweed and stuff like that, or, you know, well, cancer, you know, is immortal. You know, life can be immortal, but in the current construction that we have with our bodies, we're not. On the other hand, in the 20th century, we extended the lifespan of human beings by 30 years. So that's a significant contribution. So there are a lot of things on the horizon. I'm afraid that for me, it's a little over the horizon.

You think you missed the cut? I'm hoping my children are able to, and my grandchildren now, are able to, but I'd like to be among them. The real question is, what are you missing out on if you don't die? If you're a religious person, you think there's something at the end of the line. But even if you're a quote-unquote spiritual person or someone who's maybe plunged into some psychedelic waters upon occasion and you recognize that there's there might be some things that we don't totally understand about this life that we're living in like maybe there is something that all of these cultures for untold thousands of years have been speculating about about a soul a thing that's not

just your physical tissue and your your eyes ability to see what's in front of you and your ears ability to hear things but there's a something inside of you you know if you've ever seen a dead body it's the weirdest thing they feel like they're empty they feel like empty vessels when you see a dead body it doesn't just seem like the person's not moving it's like whatever was in them is not there anymore now is that a perception is that something you think of because you know you like the person's not moving. It's like whatever was in them is not there anymore. Now, is that a perception? Is that something you think of because you know the person's not going to move and you know they're gone? Or is there a thing inside of a person?

Is there a thing that creates whatever consciousness is, whatever your embodiment is? Is there a soul? We don't know. I mean, it sounds crazy, but life is crazy. Well, you know, I've been assaulted with a lot of mortal thoughts recently. And, you know, sometimes in the morning when I'm just on the edge of waking, you know, those are the dreams that tend to, you know, still be accessible when you wake up in the morning. And the other morning I had a vision of both of my parents in their caskets. And, you know, I agree that there is a sense that,

you know, this is an empty vessel. And, you know, where is the life force vessel and you know where is the life force that was once my mother and my father i i don't know and but if you're weighing the prospect of heaven you know or some assemblage of souls in you know, the cloudy ether somewhere versus the actual pleasure of life itself when it is pleasurable. I mean, you know, as a reporter, I can't help but have experienced many people's misfortune. And, you know, there are a lot of lives that i would not want to have spent but um you know i cling to the joy of being alive and you know the love of my family and my you know my work you know those things are incredibly rewarding to me and i don't want to leave it so you know i'm that's why I'm still looking for the pill or whatever that will keep it going. Yeah, I've had many life extension experts on the podcast. You know, guys like David Sinclair and Aubrey de Grey and a few others.

Those are the top guys. Yeah, and it's an interesting prospect, you know, the idea of living from it. But I really do wonder if one day you get like if a movie's amazing for three hours does it suck when it hits seven you know like well how long would you like to live i've never thought about it well you know narrow the range you know a hundred years a thousand years 250 a million i don't think I've ever put a number on it. I think I enjoy being alive. I really do. I'm just going to keep going.

I'm not going to think about a number because those numbers seem... Like, I'm 53 years old. That seems bizarre to me. When I was a child, I thought of a 53-year-old man as being a fucking dead man. He's dead man walking.

Like, he's not going to make it. 53? Oh my God god you're so old you can't do anything but i can do a lot of things at 53 so i think my perception of what 53 is is based on what i thought of it when i was a child not based on the reality of it maintaining your body being healthy and enjoying your life like do you enjoy it well then keep keep doing it that's my philosophy that's my thought process so i put very little thought into my actual age other than knowing, like, hey, you're 53. Maybe you shouldn't do shit that you did when you were 23 because things break easier now. That's about it.

But other than that, I just think of if it comes to a point where there's a real health crisis, where my starts really failing then i'm sure i'm going to have to confront my mortality in a much more direct way but the way i look at it now it's like i like life i'm enjoying what i'm doing and like you you were talking about like with your life you're a very fortunate person you do a thing that you love doing and that i think is if there's a key to life other than loved ones and family and, and surrounding yourself with nice people and, and really realizing that, Oh,

Oh, you can really enjoy your time if you're around other people that are enjoying their time as well. And friendly, compassionate, just very nice people. It's, that's a better world.

It's a better life. Some people don't have that option. They've never had that option. So they've been fucked from the go. Like from the jump, they've grew up in a terrible environment with terrible people and they've just encountered violence

and crime and hardship and they really haven't met a lot of very generous, warm, friendly people. They haven't had the opportunity to experience humanity at its best. And unfortunately, when over and over again, you've been punished by circumstance, people get hardened. And so their view of life is very different than your view of life or my view of life. They haven't been fortunate. Well, I'm 20 years older than you and so those questions are more acute but uh and sometimes

like when i'm filling out a form you know when they you know you come to the year and they have this drop down menu it goes it's like i'm flying past decades and you know revolutions presidential assassinations wars you know and i finally, presidential assassinations, wars, you know, and I finally come to my birth date, which is one-third of the entire history of the United States. Wow. Maybe it's a fourth. No, it's between a third and a fourth. And, you know, so that's a long time.

That's a crazy thing to think of, isn't it? Yeah. And, you know, a lot of my high school classmates have passed on. And that kind of stuff happens with annoying regularity. But I think about these things a great deal. I do feel, you know, like the Woody Allen line when someone said, you know, but you will live on in your work. And he said, no, I want to live on in my apartment. Yeah. I'd like having some kind of legacy with my family and with my work.

family and with my work but you know it's uh it's not given to us apparently to understand what's what else there might be if there's anything well that's why religion is so attractive right because someone comes along although not all religion like judaism doesn't place much of a interest in an afterlife and i think that's one of the reasons there's a strong sense of civic commitment. A lot of philanthropy among Jews is, you know, cities and our culture is so enriched by that kind of philanthropy. I think it's driven by the absence of an afterlife as a part of their consideration. Also, an incredibly strong community. Yeah. And it's difficult to get in. I mean, they're not proselytizing. You have to

go through a lot. I have an uncle that converted to Judaism when I was a child. And it was one of the first times that I ever really questioned religion. Two things got me. One was that, my uncle converting, because I didn't know what Judaism was. I was like, wait a minute, there's another religion? I remember being like six years old when this was going on. And the other thing was going to Catholic school. I did one year in Catholic school, and that cured me more than anything. I was like, there's no fucking way these ladies are talking to God.

If there's a God out there, there's no way he wants these crazy bitches running the show. Like, this is mad. These are angry, crazy people. They're sad sadists yeah torture little kids and scream at you and tell you're gonna sit on a nail in the closet you're gonna stay here you're never going home and like whoa and uh that my parents got divorced when i was very they split up when i was about five years old so that made me very religious because i felt like i needed something to like some stability. And that stability when I was a small child was God, you know? And so it was the Catholic church.

It was Catholicism. And then going to Catholic school, I was actually excited about it. But then when my uncle was converting, I remember thinking, well, what do they believe? Well, he, is he going to go to heaven? Like, is he still in? Is he still a part of the team? Like, what happens now? Like, this is bizarre

he just opted out yeah well he went to their well did they have their version of the afterlife is very different than ours it's just not pronounced you know and when um i was very pious in my teenage years so i've i was a late blooming. What started that for you? I think there was an organization and it's still around called Young Life. And it's sort of, you know, for it's a Protestant mainly organization that recruits, you know, teenagers in high school and for me

it was a way of finding social acceptance you know I was not much of an athlete I was not popular and but you know you could get into this organization and the way you advance in a religious organization is through piety and I think that's what's really dangerous about religion. It's one thing to, you know, associate in the community and enjoy the fellowship of other people that, you know, are searchers or, you know, part of that environment. But if you want to get ahead, you believe it more strongly than the next person. And that allows you to advance up the ranks.

And when that happens, when those pious people get control, then the rules start to harden. And, you know, that's what, you know, I think Scientology is a great example of that. But there's so many religions that are exactly the same way. And they start enforcing, you know, they become doctrinaire. And doctrinaire, being doctrinaire is their power. That's where they get their, you know, people are afraid of them. They're afraid to contradict them because, you know, they have the Bible on their hand or they have the word of the Lord.

Or it could be you could talk in tongues or something like that. Well, you must be really spiritual. You're deeply into it. Whatever religion there is, there's always a route to power. And I think that's where they often go off the tracks. Yeah, the the levels right like showing someone that you're more pious and that you're you can you can almost compete to get to the top like there's a there's a ladder to climb yeah and you know in scientology had the brilliant idea of ritualizing that and monetizing it so you know each of these steps that you take on the bridge to total freedom, as they call it,

and you pay very dearly for it, but they're all a notch in your belt. And the higher you go, the more you're valued. It's so strange that it doesn't occur to them that it was created by a science fiction author who wrote terrible books. Yeah. I mean, he has the—it may not be true still, but he had the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of titles published. More than a thousand. Maybe many more.

Never had a second draft. You know, he used to type on butcher paper, on rolls. He had an IBM electric typewriter, one of the earliest ones. And he would sit back and close his eyes and start typing. And, you know, and the roll would just go through. And then when he was done, he'd rip it off and then roll in another sheet and start the next story. So he didn't look at what he was typing i i don't know uh i mean he you know the legend is a lot of it is i think automatic writing and it reads like that

uh you know he would he would tell a story yeah well you're being very charitable because automatic writing could be interesting it could be and. He wrote his nonsense. He wrote a lot of really bad fiction. There's no question about it. Horrible. But there's one thing I find very interesting about his writings and his, I guess, theology. And I'm not sure what the right word is for the organization of the church and so on and the organization of his psychology, the whole thing about the Thetans and so on. He, as I said, thousands of books. How many million pages?

No telling how many. There's this uncanny consistency to it. There's a unified vision. inconsistency to it. There's a unified vision. And I think that if you want to go in and start picking it, what he said that was wrong, it's pretty much armored against that. Whatever lunacy was driving his mind, it made sense to him. And was I think that you know the Scientology really is just a journey into the mind of L Ron Hubbard hmm was it was he was very much self-medicating a lot of ways right yeah he early on when he got out of the service and that's where he really you know went inside Dianetics you know the whole idea that he cured

himself of being blind and lame when actually he had conjunctivitis and he wasn't lame at all but he checked himself into a naval hospital and he claimed that they told him he was a hopeless

case and he cured himself with these maxims that became Dianetics. All of that came out of, you know, Dianetics is full of what he says studies show this. There aren't any studies. But they're all things that he imagined sitting in that naval hospital. And it comes up with this scheme of self-help, which is really a way of him trying to treat himself. He had asked for the VA for psychiatric counseling, and they never responded. So he sort of was treating himself.

So he sort of was treating him himself. And I compare it to a shaman, like in an Indian society, where schizophrenics are often the shamans. And they're the people that go out, both actually physically go out on spirit quests, but also they go into hallucinations and they come back and they try to heal their community. And I think basically that's what Hubbard was up to. I know I'm giving him more credit than you think he deserves. No. But I think he should be seen. No, no, I think you're very accurate in that way.

I mean, I think there's also some deception and there's also some fuckery going on oh yeah just but he believes that's all in the service of the great message that he's trying to deliver maybe it's hard to say right yeah hard to say what he really meant and thought but clearly he also recognized that i mean there was one of the great quotes from him was about if you really want to make money religion yeah that's where the money is. Yeah, I mean, he kind of knew. So it wasn't like he was structuring it in this way where you can go from tier to tier and pay. And like I said about my neighbor, whose wife was going clear,

it was $50,000 she was going to have to pay. Yeah. I mean, he was a carpenter. He wasn't making that much money. Yeah, if you want to go up the whole rank, you can think about millions. I wonder if he still lives there. I'd like to go visit him and just see if he's still a part of it. Well, you can ask the church.

They'll tell you where he is. But it's just weird because for him, it was providing some stability it was doing something for him at least the way he's i didn't know him that well just knew him enough to have conversations with him or running into each other outside the house but he seemed like a real nice guy and uh it was giving him some sort of structure something something about it but you know i almost want to sit down with them make them watch battlefield earth oh god nobody can watch that i've watched it like five times no really yeah i love it i get high and watch it it's fucking hilarious i suppose there's one way of

trying to approach it yeah it's like the science fiction version of showgirls like there's movies that you watch just because they suck yeah like. Like you just, you want to watch them just because they're so preposterous. That movie is one of the most preposterous movies of all time. Yeah, it's horrible. And it's better than the novel. Is it really? Yeah. I've read some of his stuff.

And it reads like a 10-year-old writing a story without anyone going, well, Billy, maybe we should edit this down a little. Let's try to consolidate some of these ideas and maybe there's a better way to phrase this. It's just one draft. Yeah. No, he just flies through it. When we were doing,

when I was working on that story for The New Yorker, which is where it started, I think it all, many things you can trace back to his experience in the war. And he had this longing to be a hero. And he wasn't. You know, he was, at some point he was in a subchaser, captaining a subchaser off the coast of California. And he took it out. And one thing, he did artillery practice against these islands off of Mexico.

So he was shelling Mexico, which is probably not a, it was a hostile action. But he thought that he had come upon a Japanese submarine and chased around dropping depth charges everywhere. It turns out it was sunken limbs or something like that. And so he had essentially a he posed as being, you know, having been a spy, you know, that he was on of his career is in the service is marked by some sort of report. So we could find exactly where he was, what he did, you know, and, but the church insisted that, that he really was a hero. And that, you know, there, they gave me a, I've forgotten the form, but when you're discharged, there's a form that gives you, you know, your assignments and stuff like that. And, you know, he had all these, you know, glorious assignments. Then they showed me a picture of all the medals he'd won.

Well, that's interesting. And so we got through the records from St. Louis where they're kept, you know, a huge box of stuff. And I went through and I found the actual discharge thing, which didn't bear any resemblance to the one the church gave me. And then I looked at the medals more closely. And, you know, some of them from foreign countries some of them from wars you know like in the 19th century and so you know he couldn't possibly have won them and so how did they how did they expect me to miss that you know it was and also how what did what was Hubbard thinking because he's the one that came up with these medals.

You know, he awarded them to himself. And he passed on to the church the legacy of his mendaciousness. And they have to defend it because he's the founder. Well, there's a thing that happens in cults where people give in to whatever the doctrine is, right? And whether you want to call it religion or a cult, clearly there was not a lot of research into the veracity of his claims by the people that were a part of the organization. And there's a willingness to give in to the top person.

It's a weird thing. And, you know my background uh originally was in martial arts and i saw it a lot in martial arts it's martial arts are very culty particularly a lot of traditional martial arts even the traditional martial art taekwondo that i was a part of like the instructor was god like they were they were the lord of this dojang or this gymnasium or whatever you wanted to call it where everybody trained. You called them sir and you bowed

to them when you saw them. My traditional martial art background though was legitimate. They were legitimately teaching you a good martial art and they had these tenets that they thought were designed to increase your human potential and they were building up your character and it was really what you wanted from martial arts but i ran into a bunch that were not a bunch where there

was people that were claiming to have special touch and they could use their chi and they could touch you in a way and these people they don't just exist there's hundreds of them hundreds of schools that still exist today and there's a couple of websites one of them as fake black belts and another one it there was Instagram pages McDojo what is it McDojo life I'm sorry I keep forgetting the name I have too many names of site McDojo Life. McDojo Life. I'm sorry. I keep forgetting the name. I have too many names of McDojo Life. And they document these people where someone comes at them and they touch like this. And the person shakes and falls to the ground.

So you have these students who are part of this horseshit. They give into it. And I don't know if they believe it. I've never interviewed them. I don't know what's going on. But they will run at the person. The person will literally, this master will put his hands up like this. And they'll be paralyzed.

And they'll fall to the ground. And it's not one. There's thousands of them. They're all over the world. Yeah. And you've got to wonder, like, what is happening? How is this so successful in so many different places? There's a thing that happens where someone becomes a part of one of these organizations

and it gives them the sense of community and family and you have to give in to whatever the belief system is. And the belief system is that this guy has a magic touch. And you go running at this guy and you almost like you don't want to buck the trend because you want to keep coming back to this place that you call home. So you give in to it. You fall to the ground. But I've seen it all over the country.

It exists everywhere. I mean, it exists in Asian communities, white communities, black communities. It seems universal. It's very similar. The man has magic. He has a magic touch. Right. And he knows some secret techniques.

Especially in martial arts, traditionally, it's very hard to fake because you have to spar. So when you're sparring, people try to test you. So they find out how good you are. They're trying to figure out whether or not they can get through your defenses. But these people have figured out a way to brainwash someone in the weirdest culty way. These people have figured out a way to brainwash someone in the weirdest culty way. And by seeing that and seeing how predominant it was and how it was so, there were so many versions of it. It just makes sense that this would exist in Scientology or Moonies or, you know, fill in the blank. There's a thing with human beings where we want to give in to the chief.

We want to give in to the main alpha for whatever reason. And you see it with people politically as well. You see people give in to a political leader, whether it's Trump or whoever it is. That person can do no wrong. That is their person. And anything that says anything different is lies and disinformation. Well, what you said made me think of one of the hardest stories I ever did. I did an article for The New Yorker about the sons of Jim Jones.

Oh. And not everybody died in Jonestown. He had three sons. Two of them were adopted. And they were playing a basketball tournament in Georgetown, Guyana. And this story took place when I—you remember the Branch Davidians? Yeah. Now that you're a Texan.

Yeah. Just up the road. Waco. Yeah. and just up the road. Waco. Yeah. My editor at the New Yorker at the time was Tina Brown, and she asked me to go write about the Branch Davidians.

And I said, Tina, there are more reporters than Branch Davidians up there right now. I couldn't, you know. But I had been watching the news coverage, and just before the place was called Rancho Apocalypse, which turned out to be really appropriate but they sent before the conflagration they sent out a van with children you know who had grown up in this community and these kids you know as they drove past the ATF and the FBI lines and then the media line,

and you could see these children looking out the windows, they were leaving behind everybody they knew. They were leaving behind the only world they knew. And they were going into what? And I thought, what happened to those kids? This must have happened. You know, what will happen to those? It must have happened you know what will happen to those it must have happened to children elsewhere and so i started doing some investigation and i found out that you know jones had these three kids uh three young boys they were they were young men

and there was jim jr who was black and then there was Stephen and who is the natural son and then there was Tim Jones and for whatever reason they hadn't talked to anybody and they agreed to talk to me and perhaps it had to do with you know the Branch Davidian thing that was going on at that same time. So this was in the early 90s? Yeah, it was 15 years after Jonestown. It was actually almost exactly 15 years. And there's a cemetery in Oakland where many of most of the 900 bodies were buried. many of most of the 900 bodies were buried.

And they took an earth mover and took a hill down, you know, half of a hill. And then they stacked all the caskets up and covered it again. But it still has this distortion. And you can see, you know, what remained of the Jonestown followers. But it was interesting to me that the people who joined the Jones cult were all good people. They were all, you know, it was started in Indianapolis and then it moved to the Bay Area. And it was largely a, you know, largely black. Jones was very, very progressive, you know, on race. But, you know, a lot of good-hearted people involved in it. And he was a big figure in San Francisco at the time politically. You know, his support was sought after. You know, he was admired as a community leader. But he was totally crazy and paranoid

and suddenly decided he had to remove the entire group. And you can't tell your family. You can't tell anybody. He sent his sons down to Guyana to clear the jungle so they could make this village. And then overnight, they moved nearly nearly a thousand people to South America and leaving behind all their friends, their jobs and stuff like that. One day they've been removed.

They've been raptured off to South America. And so I was interested, you know, that, you know, learning more about it. But these, you know, young men were totally haunted. But you would certainly relate to Tim Jones. He was physically one of the very powerful you know he curled you know 100 pounds with either hand you know he but he couldn't he couldn't get on an elevator uh the last time he tried to do an airplane flight i mean this has been years ago i don't know if it's changed for him now but he was he made the airplane turn around and drop him off at the gate which is hard to do but when you're you know as physically overpowering as Tim was you know he's he's kind of a formidable figure and so

he just had all sorts of anxieties so I went to talk to him, and he said, I'll do it on one condition. We have to do it in a public place, you know, a restaurant, someplace where I won't cry. And I want my wife there because I never told her about it. Wow. hard for me to tell this story because we went to a restaurant and within five minutes he was crying you know and pounding the table and the waiter was keeping his distance people in the restaurant were you know frightened and he told the story of going back he's the one who had to identify 900 people. His natural birth parents, his adopted parents, he had a wife and children then too. They were all dead.

Everybody was dead. the power of a religious belief in a personality like Jim Jones, who could persuade all those people to stay with him, train them in this, you know, suicide drills night after night, you know. And then one day it's real. And, you know, the boys felt guilty because they thought if they had been there, they might have been able to stop it. But probably not. Yeah, I mean, there's been so many of them.

It's almost strange that there's not more. That, you know, you have like the Heaven's Gate which is a very small cult you know you have certain sects of the Moonies that are still active right like you've you know to me Aum Shinrikyo that Japanese cult that was

you know remember the blind yoga instructor and they drank his bath water and stuff like that oh you don't remember the blessing you got and they drank his bath water and stuff like that? No. Oh, you don't remember? Well, you've got a lot catching up to do. What year was this? It was in the 90s.

And, you know, Shom Shinrikyo is the name of it. And there were like 50,000 members in Japan. and there were a number of them in Russia as well. But there was a far more dangerous cult than, well, I thought it was more dangerous in prospect than Al-Qaeda. Because a lot of these people were engineers and scientists. They were experimenting with poisons. They poisoned a lot of people on the Tokyo subway with sarin gas. Okay, now I remember this. Now I remember this.

And they were very adept. adept. And if Al Qaeda had had that kind of expertise, then they were also very interested in weapons of mass destruction, as are some of the white supremacist groups right now. But Al Qaeda, I think, and ISIS as being religious cults as well. So I think that as being religious cults as well. So you know I think that they are they continue to prosper and what's alarming is how much more empowered they are now with the the kinds of weaponry that you can get the drones you know when I was writing about the intelligence community I got meet, who is it in the Bond movies that makes the weapon? Q. Q. I got to meet our Q, but he wouldn't show me the good stuff. But I asked him what he was

worried about. And he said the way in which, you know, like high school kids can create computer viruses now. We'll soon see them able to create actual biological viruses because the technology like CRISPR and stuff like that is so accessible. And, you know, that's a terrifying thought. Yeah, it is terrifying. I mean, I don't want to downplay what these people have done and how many of them do exist but it's almost shocking that there's not more yeah because there is this weird there's a you know a small percentage of people that have this strange desire to have a

group of followers that unflinchingly just listen to everything they say there was a guy in australia recently that was saying he was jesus you remember this guy you remember he had a mary like he even kind of looked like he could be like when you think of the stereotypical jesus painting yeah white guy with beard and long hair he looked like this guy and he had this woman that he met hair he looked like this guy and he had this woman that he met and he was convincing this woman that she was Mary that's her but then she found out there was another Mary in the past another woman that he had called Mary too but apparently he said no he had made a

mistake and people like women Jesus makes mistakes like you know yeah how do you know this is Mary's like no like, no, this one's definitely Mary. That other one was just a fake Mary. She tricked me. Have you ever heard of something called the Jerusalem Syndrome? Yes. I don't know how real it is, but I've been in a lot in the Middle East. It's hardcore Christians that go down to Israel, right?

It's not just that. Sometimes you see them saying that they're Jesus, you know, but if it happens to be, you know, a Jewish person who's gone off, then, you know, they are David, you know, they've chosen a suitably appropriate iconic religious figure to be. And there's an asylum. Back in the day when Israel was fighting for its independence in 1948, there was a little Palestinian village called Deir Yassin where Jewish terrorists massacred the townspeople to take it over because it was on a road to the airport. And that village is now this psychiatric institution where people are suffering such delusions. Yeah, I got to visit it one time when I was in Jerusalem. That's almost too much.

Yeah, the psychiatrist I was interviewing, his office was in a little Palestinian house. Whoa. Whoa. Did you bring that up to him? Yeah. What was his reaction? Well, it's unfortunate. to him? Yeah. What was his reaction? Well, it's unfortunate, but, you know.

Unfortunate. Jesus Christ. It's like setting up shop in a gas chamber. You know, it's one of those historical scars that you see the Middle East is covered with such places. Yeah. the middle east is covered with such places yeah it's um what do you i mean what is it about people where this pops up like what what what things have to be in place where someone can create some sort of uh an environment like that where they can decide that they're the main ruler, that they're going to create this bizarre environment, set up these rules, and have all these people follow along with them?

You know, I suppose that there are a lot of people that want to be that person and aren't. You know, they're probably all around us. Yes. You know, they're probably all around us. And, you know, they just don't have the magic charisma to attract the followers. I think, you know, a lot of people that go into, you know, the ministry or into politics or something like that probably have a great deal of that gene, and if they had the opportunity, they would maybe exercise it to a greater degree. But you have to have the consent of the followers.

Yeah. And if you don't get that kind of buy-in, then you're not going to have much of a cult. Like your friends, Jesus and Mary. I think they've got a group. Do they really? Yeah, I think there's a group that followed them. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if they're still active.

But it's just a strange, it's like, you know, there's these natural patterns that you can find in nature, predator and prey and food sources and water and all these things that just reoccur over and over again, despite the terrain, despite the geography, the part of the world. There's like, you can kind of like see the patterns. But that's one of the weirdest patterns with human beings is the obviously fraudulent leader who makes up a bunch of crazy shit and pretends that he has some secret wisdom and that, you know, the gods or a god are on his side

and gets all these people to follow them, and even in the Jonestown case, gets them to commit murder and suicide. It's a strange pattern, whether it's the Heaven Gate guys who all kill themselves because Hale-Bopp Comet was coming and there's people behind it. Are they still around?

What's it saying? There's their website. Welcome to divine truth. Oh boy. At what point in time is this lady going? Mary's still hanging in. Mary 2. The Queen Mary 2. We don't even know. He might have found a new Mary. This one's the real

real Mary. Yeah. Is there a lot going on? Do they have a lot of members? I wonder how many members they have. Divine Truth is hilarious to call it that. Do you think Jesus would be more creative? The real Jesus? Like, just Divine Truth, that's it?

Yeah. I thought we heard that one already. You ever heard him talk? It's not very compelling. It's not that good. You know, there's some of these... There you go. Give me some. Give me some. It's not that good. You know, there's some of these. So Laura had mum. There you go.

Give me some. Give me some. Here he goes. Little Laura. She also has a brother over here. Fuck that accent, by the way. You can't be Jesus with an Australian accent. That's ridiculous.

I don't think it's going grow i have to say you're not gonna be franchising that coming soon to a strip mall i love australian accents don't get me wrong yeah but jesus would be susceptible to accents really jesus would be so easily influenced that he would take on the vernacular in the way people the the accents that they use in the region come on get the fuck out of here yeah well when he shows up as a Palestinian that's gonna be right Jesus has some restructuring to do yeah we've got to rethink this whole thing when when you looked at all these various religions like how do you decide which ones to focus on which ones to write about yeah I said to it if I don't't know. I'm drawn by story.

Have you written much about the Catholic Church? I did write a profile of a defrocked priest named Matthew Fox. He's a really fascinating guy. He was Dominican, and he had a college, spiritual university, but he would invite people from different religious traditions, and he set up shop in this convent in the summer when the nuns go on vacation. I don't know if nuns go on vacation, but for whatever reason, he had it to himself, Nuns go on vacation, but for whatever reason, he had it to himself. Holy Names College in Oakland. And I got to sleep in the convent. I was really, you know, how many times do you get that opportunity?

But Matt made a sort of tactical error when he invited a witch to come talk. A witch? A witch. And Starhawk. She's kind of a famous witch. Her name's Starhawk? Her name's Starhawk, yeah. And so Starhawk got the nuns out, and she built a kettle over a fire, and she had the nuns jumping over the kettle, and this got to the Vatican. Jesus Christ. And so Matt was out on his ear after that.

But I just found him a fascinating guy. He was kind of a spiritual adventurer. He wanted to know every different religious idea and try it out and see what you thought. It was fascinating spending time with him the reason why i brought up the catholic church is obviously the sex abuse like that is one of the strangest religious groups cults whatever you want to call it ever that is uh so connected to priests abusing children i mean you say catholic, people automatically in their mind think child abuse. I can't think of another religion where you can say that of.

But it's not that there's not great Catholics. No, no. The Catholic religion, like, in general, like, I know a lot of Catholics that go to church. They're wonderful people. It's not them. It's specifically these priests and how did this culture of these priests not just doing it but getting away with it, getting shipped to different parishes where they didn't know. Right. Yeah.

Did you have such an experience? No. So the, you know, I was in Boy Scouts, which is now similarly stained by that. And I regret, you know, what's happened to the Boy Scouts because it gave me a lot. I loved it. I mean, I learned a lot of things in the Boy Scouts I would never have learned otherwise. And I like the comradeship of, you know, the other boys. And some of the scout leaders were a little peculiar, you know.

Yeah. You know, they were mostly good guys you know uh i thought about being a scout leader at one point um but i had been a conscientious objector and they wouldn't let me uh so that didn't happen in which war vietnam oh okay yeah i did two years of alternative service in e. Oh. Teaching at the American University. I was in scouts. I was in for one year, and I was in a neighborhood outside of Boston at the time. I think it's kind of gentrified now, but it was shady as fuck back in the 80s.

It was called Jamaica Plain. Actually, I guess it wasn't even the 80s. It was the late 70s because I went to high school in 81 so maybe was 80 maybe 79 80 either way a lot of criminals these kids were sketchy fucking really yeah they were they were tying other kids to their cots and leave them in the middle of the woods and doing creepy shit and they're basically inner-city kids having fun with no real authority and you leave us all in a room together with bunks, and kids start plotting things and doing things.

But fortunately, there was no sexual abuse. There was just a lot of thuggish young kids. But also, there wasn't a lot of structure. I remember I was into fishing, so I'd just go fishing every day. I would just blow off all their activities and go fishing and no one seemed to give a shit yeah so i just basically was in a fishing camp for a couple weeks hanging out with some boys that you had to like keep your eyes on yeah my one of my strongest memories the boy scouts is when we're out camping and uh there was a sunday we go to have this, and we're up on a bluff over a creek. And there's a bunch of logs covered with turtles.

And so we're up on top of this bluff, and we're praying and this sort of thing. And we all have our.22s. And then after the service, we all go stand on the edge of the bluff and shoot the turtles. That's kind of the archetypal Boy Scout experience. Well, we had.22s, too, and I remember I didn't. Maybe I shot one one day, but I remember doing something else, some other activity, and I heard, pew! And I realized it was a ricochet.

These fucking wild-ass kids had got these rifles, and they were shooting rocks and all kinds of different things, and a bullet went ricochet and biased. And I was like, fuck this. And from that point on, I just basically went fishing every day. I was like, all these other activities are quite dangerous. But there was no sexual abuse. I didn't hear of any.

The counselor was a youngish guy. You know, a guy was maybe 20, 21. Really nice guy who had gone through the Boy Scouts himself, became an Eagle Scout, did the whole deal. And, you know, for him, it had helped him avoid a lot of the pitfalls of growing up in a bad neighborhood. That's what I think it can offer. Yeah. I think that's less connected to child abuse, though, than the Catholic Church is. Yeah, it's just really going through a big period of that right now.

And I'm not sure that bringing girls into the Boy Scouts is the right decision. Well, without appropriate security measures being put in place to make sure these boys don't abuse these girls. Yeah. Yeah. Leaving teenage boys alone with teenage girls in the woods just seems like a recipe for disaster. Or a dream come true or fun depending on what the boys are who the girls are and yeah yeah i don't know it's just um

it's just there's something very strange about that these like whether it's the catholic church or any group like that that's connected to abuse of minors it's very strange and the fact that it's the Catholic Church or any group like that that's connected to abuse of minors. It's very strange. And the fact that it's protected and covered up. It's all under this one name, but obviously it's very different. It's very different in different places.

You could have a Catholic Church, it's amazing and everybody's great and it's a great sense of community and everybody genuinely goes there and it's warm and friendly and they have a good time. And then you could go to a hellscape. You could be in the worst kind of environment ever. And I know people that have been abused that were raised as Catholics, and it's scary. It touches on this in an oblique way, which was, you remember the kind of ritual abuse scare in the late 80s and early 90s? Satanic ritual abuse?

Yes, I do. I was interested in, well, another way of starting this story is in therapy. And my therapist, people that I really admired, they knew I was an investigative reporter. And they said, well, you know, we're seeing a lot of patients, especially young women, who've been satanically abused and have multiple personality disorder. You wrote a book about this, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And so, you know, I thought, well, that's interesting. And then one of them said, and Satanists are responsible for 50 murders a year in Austin alone. And I thought, we never had 50 murders in Austin, you know, total. So I didn't say anything. I just thought, wait, this is interesting information. But I discounted it. But I mentioned it to my editor. And I said I was interested in the multiple personality disorder,

and this is Tina again. And she goes, oh, that's interesting. I said, well, you know, a lot of times when they start questioning, they find out that they had been satanically ritually abused. She goes, oh, that's hot, hot, hot. She was very enthusiastic about it. So then I went to a workshop for cops. And there's another cop who was going around the country

telling police and various, and sheriffs, deputies, and stuff around the country about satanic ritual abuse and he said they are responsible for 50,000 murders a year in America and I thought once again that's more murders than there are

in America you know and these are cops telling this story to themselves and so you know and maybe it's true what year was this? i think it was 93 that i did this so pre-internet yeah you can just research before the internet exploded before what we think of as the internet and uh i found this uh there was you know thousands of lawsuits and arrests you know around the country.

But there was only one conviction, and it was for this sheriff's deputy in Olympia, Washington, named Paul Ingram. And his daughters had accused him of raping them repeatedly and bringing the neighbors over, And, you know, they had been cut up. They had, you know, they had children ripped out of their stomachs and sacrificed, you know. And there, you know, other deputies in the Olympia department were involved in it and so on. And all of this was, you know, wild. But he confessed to it. And so I thought if there's anything to it, then, you know.

And I went up to Olympia and I spent a lot of time talking to the cops and, you know, trying to piece together what had actually happened. And because there was confession, there was never really a trial. happened and because there was confession there was never really a trial so they never had the cops who were investigating and who were his colleagues you know they they didn't have to put together a coherent case what did he confess to exactly he confessed to raping his children Jesus Christ well Jesus Christ had something to do with it because they were all members of this four-square gospel church and a very religious family. And the idea of Satan was very real to them.

And Erica, the oldest daughter, had made this outcry. And so it started at a religious camp and then it kind of spread and then her sister made a similar outcry. And then they started implicating their neighbors and all this amazing story of, you know, the abuse that they had suffered and how many people had been killed. Pretty soon there were helicopters flying around the county looking for, you know, satanic fires and digging up their property. And they never found anything. You know, so, you know, I asked one of the one of the cops, well, did you find any

bones? Yeah, we did. It was an elk bone. And well, that's not exactly, you found an elk bone? That's So it turned out one of the cops had taken these girls in for physical inspection. And there weren't any scars. In fact, they were virgins. So there was never any of the things that all the things I had described had never taken place. All the things they had described had never taken place. And yet, Paul Ingram confessed to it because his preacher came in and told him that God would not allow anything other than real memories to come into his mind. And a psychologist came in and hypnotized him. And pretty soon, he was eliciting these fantasies. soon he was eliciting these fantasies. And so Paul began to fantasize about what, and at this point, the girls hadn't gotten so ripe in their storytelling. He began telling what he visualized. I can see myself going into Erica's room, you know, and

the preacher took that back to the church, and the gossip started, and it gets into the ears of the girls, and they start making similar but not exactly the same sort of statements about what happened. So these memories never coalesced. And anyway, Paul, I think he served 13 years in prison for a crime that never actually occurred. And one day I happened to be in L.A. And you remember, since you spent some time there, Amy Semple McPherson. She was an evangelist, a great character in American religious history. She had affairs with Charlie Chaplin and so on. And she was, you know, really a huge figure on the scale of Billy Graham or something like that at the time in the 20s.

And she started this congregation. that at the time in the 20s. And she started this congregation. And I talked to the woman who was the camp counselor at that church. And I said, well, how did Erica make this confession? She said, well, it was a dramatic moment. You know, I had been talking to the girls. moment. You know, I had been talking to the girls and I would say, you know, I know that one of you here has been abused and, you know, I can see you in the closet. I see you hiding and you can hear the footsteps coming towards you. And some girl, oh, it was me, it was me, you know, and so she's eliciting these things. And so at the end of the camp, Erica is on the stage and she's just weeping. And she's not saying anything. And so one of the counselors called over.

Paula was her name. You know, come help us understand what's going on with this young woman. understand what's going on with this young woman. And she put her hand on Erica's head, and she says, she's been abused. And then she said, and it's by her father, and it's happened many times. Oh, my God. So in the mind of this very religious young woman, the message came from God, you know, that she had been abused. And so she made an outcry that it wasn't hers. It was the camp counselors, really, that started this whole folly.

And what happened after that, during that period of time, these kinds of stories took root in daytime talk shows. You know, all over the place, spread to other countries really quickly. Thousands of families were ripped apart by these kinds of accusations. And people like my therapist, brilliant, adorable people, took it as, you know, their mission was to rescue people like that. And what happened is it drove away people who really had been abused. Their abuse was so insignificant by comparison with these elaborate tales, you know, being, elaborate tales, you know, having babies cut up on you. And I finally decided that these were abortion fantasies.

I think, you know, the whole abortion discussion, put yourself in the mind of an 18-year-old virgin and, you know, drawn to sexual ideas and yet haunted by the prospect of, you know, drawn to sexual ideas and yet haunted by the prospect of, you know, abortion and all the stuff that goes in it. The fantasies that they elicited were very similar to abortions. But what caused the father to think that he had done these things? Just because of the hypnotherapy? That was a big part of it. But when he went into his first session, he made two statements.

Well, I don't remember it, but my daughters wouldn't lie. Oh, God. And that's what hung him. Oh, God. There's been a lot of weird cases in the past of people putting memories particularly in children remember there was a very famous case of um a um child care center oh yeah remember that well there have been a bunch of them yeah and there was one here in austin fran and dan uh that was uh actually i i attended one of the days of the trial. It was, there was a daycare center south of town.

Fran and Dan had operated it for years. And people would go drop their kids off and, you know, pick them up after work. And during this period of time when there was this heightened fear of childhood sexual abuse, some of the parents began quizzing their children. And there were psychologists who would come around with a doll and, you know, anatomically correct, you know, and, you know, did anybody touch you you know you know sort of suggestive and so they elicited some stories from these children and the stories were mommy dropped me off and we flew to Mexico and uh we killed a giraffe and buried it and you know childhood fantasies right along that line and the the police couldn't prosecute you know the idea that somehow they had all flown

on a private jet from a daycare center in South Austin and then kill the giraffe they had enough time to come back home so uh you know eventually you know they start as you know they assemble you know of these psychologists who are you know using these dolls and so on to try to elicit did you know like did dan ever touch you any place that made you feel uncomfortable you can tell me it's okay you know you know if you don't feel you know so it eventually a child agrees to one of those things and then other parents hear it and oh my god you know she was abused by dan honey did dan ever, you know, so it began to, it was never any real evidence. But when the day I was there, they put a child on the stand and she had her doll and a lollipop in her mouth.

And she was sitting on the lap of, I forgot, it might have been her mother. I forgot, it might have been her mother. But, you know, the prosecutor is, you know, he says, you know, did Dan ever touch you? No. Did he ever hurt you? No. Your Honor, can we have a recess? And then it was shocking to me that children were manipulated in that fashion. Lives were destroyed.

Eventually, Fran and Dan were exonerated. There's always going to be people that believe, though. Yes, they will. And they attacked me, you know, because I signed a friend of the court brief about, you know, implanting memories, as you suggested. How could anyone not know that if you lead children in a certain way like that, they're going to make things up? Or they're going to, they don't even, I don't even necessarily think children totally understand memory.

Like, think about how humans misconstrue memories. Like, memories are terrible. I've said this before. Like, if you ask me what I did a week ago, I have a blurry slideshow in my head.

I mean, I have a calendar that can tell you oh i had a podcast on that day and a comedy show on that day and i don't i can't recall it like a movie like a a 4k you know film that i could just re-watch like that was the exact moment i knew something was wrong like we don't have that kind of memory. But some people are so fucking sure of their memory. It's crazy. Like, what is happening in your head? What is your memory like? Because my memory is terrible.

I have strategies to try to remember, you know, like why I walked downstairs. You know, what did I want to get? You know, that's just the immediate memory but you know i keep a journal uh in out of defense you know for make sure that i i remembered things correctly you know if there's something happened to me that i want to remember i'll write it down sure uh because i and i when i'm writing when i'm researching know, like when I wrote about the looming tower, about Al-Qaeda, I interviewed 600 people. I don't remember all that. And I read all these books and stuff. I take note cards.

And I had, you know, this elaborate, I had almost as long as your table, you know, boxes of notes. And very scrupulously ordered because I can't remember it. And you know, but putting it on note cards, I can find it. It's just so strange that, I mean, I guess back then they didn't know about memories well. Like that would never fly today. If you tried leading a child that way today the defense

attorneys would intervene and they were saying this wasn't so long ago it was in the 90s yeah but even in the 90s like it seems like not that long ago but you know 30 25 years ago that's a long time ago yeah i guess you're right i we had at that time we had four hospitals in Austin. And by the time I wrote this, they each had a dissociative disorders wing, which is like multiple personalities. We had enough multiple personalities in Austin to stock four different psych wards. psych wards and uh and then when my article when mainly the book when the book came out uh insurance uh companies decided not to fund uh you know to fund psychiatric investigations into you know certain dissociative disorders including multiple personalities and repressed memories like like these and those those wards disappeared once the money dried up there was you know just no support for it the whole architecture of the repressed memory syndrome just vanished the repair the repressed memory thing is very strange to me it's a very strange because there's been so many cases where people have led the person who's particularly under hypnosis, led them into these memories, almost helped them.

And there's real evidence that you can do that, that you can sit someone down and impart or implant a fake memory of an event, particularly under hypnosis. There was a guy named John Mack. It was a Harvard psychologist who he did a lot of work with people that were having hypnotic regression stories of UFO abductions. Right. And that was one of the main criticisms was they thought that he was leading these people into these ideas and suggesting these ideas

and giving these people... I don't know if he did or didn't, but that's the kind of thing that you could do to someone if they were under hypnosis. You could implant some kind of crazy, fantastic memory of you know visitation in the middle of the night i had a i had a story when i was working on the repressed memory story uh i ran across this study that was another thing you wouldn't do now because

of you know the conventions of experimentation have changed but a psychiatrist in Georgia had a patient and he told her in advance what he'd like to do I want to hypnotize you and see if I can elicit you know, a memory that didn't happen. And so she agreed, and he hypnotized her, and he said, Helen, you were late today coming to your session, which wasn't true. What happened? What delayed you? I don't know. I was driving, and I saw a cow on the side of the road. Oh, really? What was the cow doing? It was giving birth, and it was having trouble.

And so I got out of the car, and I tugged on the calf, and I helped. And he said, and there was a light above. And she said, and a spaceship came down. And I got on the spaceship and two things. You were late and there was a light. And she came up with a UFO fantasy. And the cow giving birth. The cow was pretty amazing yeah but uh the uh what was interesting about that is that when she when she awakened he told her what she had imagined and he said this you know this wasn't true you

know this is you know we're on time. You know, I don't think there's going to be any baby calves on the side of the road. And, you know, no spaceship, but this didn't happen. She couldn't shake the memory. It was as real to her as, you know, the actual drive into the office. Have you been put under before? Oh, yeah. I mean, I, when I was in the eighth grade, I discovered the abnormal psychology shelf in the library.

And I used to hypnotize people. Really? Yeah. When you were eight? Well, I was in the eighth grade. Oh, I'm sorry. So I was 12, maybe. Eighth grade.

That should be 13, no? Maybe I was 13. And I hypnotized my sister she she was a synambulist she was easy she was a synambulist there's people who walk in their sleep and so they tend to be very suggestible and so i would she was a good subject for a beginner and i used to hypnotize her and make her rigid and suspend her between chairs and then stick pins in her to make sure that she was really under. And then I would hypnotize my fraternity brothers. I hypnotized my girlfriend. Jesus. I finally gave it up because I thought, this is really irresponsible.

this is really irresponsible. I was probably, by that time, you know, by the time I realized how irresponsible it was, I was probably responsible enough to do it. But I haven't hypnotized anybody in many years. And the, and I, but the only time I tried to, I had a dentist in Dallas when I was a kid. He used to hypnotize people. He's going to drill a cavity for me.

I said, I'd like for you to hypnotize me. So it was, your mouth is feeling like a block of wood. Your mouth is feeling like a block of wood. Nurse, I think he's ready. I said, no, I'm not. Give me the Novocaine. But then the only other time that I had what was kind of success in being hypnotized was in 1983.

It was the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. And I had grown up in Dallas during the assassination. There was a story that was quite widely circulated that schoolchildren in Dallas had laughed when they heard the news. And I wasn't sure that I hadn't been one of them. I remember being astonished. I remember gaping. I remember, you know, did a ha-ha-ha come out of my mouth? I don't know. If it did, you know, but I think I smiled in amazement. I'm not really sure. I mean, you have to go back to what Dallas was like at that time. It was hysterical.

You know, the politics were off the rails. And Kennedy was hated, although not in my family. But, you know, there was this sense of Dallas as being a separate entity from the rest of the country, and that Kennedy was the enemy. And I was anxious that maybe I had been one of those people that laughed. And so I had a friend who was a therapist who did hypnosis, and I asked her to hypnotize me and see if she could take me back to the classroom and help me remember.

And so she put me under, regressed my memories, you know, to the point that I hear the ding, ding, ding, the PA system and the choked voice of our principal coming on and did she tell you you're hearing these things no just she's asking me you know what you could recall yeah what do I recall and I I remember seeing you know the face of my friend Steve Zink one of my classmates in the algebra class and I couldn't get it myself and so she gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion that I would have a dream and it would reveal to me you know what I what I had experienced and so I did have a very vivid dream and it was I was flying in a helicopter over the canopy of what I thought was Vietnam jungle.

And you were looking for a child. And I saw it in the top of a canopy just lying on top of the tree. And as we got closer, I realized it was actually just a doll with these little X eyes. And that was the dream. was actually just a doll with his little X eyes. And that was the dream. And I decided from that that I was, that the me that I thought, you know, might have laughed was just a figment, you know, an effigy of some sort. And that, you know, I really hadn't laughed. You'd have to understand what a scarring experience it was to have been from dallas at that period of time and how everybody in the world hated you such a strange thing to try to

remember what was your reaction how old are you at the time 13 i guess yeah but it's a very strange thing did you feel like uh you felt guilt at the possibility that you had laughed? Yeah, I did. I didn't want to be one of those people. And, you know, I have friends from Dallas who do remember people in their classroom laughing. And my experience that I, you know, the real memory I have of it is that people looked around and just stunned astonishment. And part of the astonishment, I think, was that we just thought nothing would ever happen in Dallas. It was, you know, on the one hand, it was totally crazy.

On the other hand, it was totally paralyzed. You know, there was just a sense, the conformity was so powerful that, you know, you felt imprisoned by the sameness of every day, every thought, just this very, very rigid environment. So some spectacularly unique occurrence, like the president getting assassinated in Dealey Plaza, just seemed impossible. Oddly enough, no. I mean, that was the thing.

You know, if it was going to happen anywhere, it seemed like Dallas would be the right spot. Because they hated Kennedy. And even that morning, I went out to get the newspaper, and there was that famous ad, Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas, you know, just this bleak thing. And then there was, you know, it's just— How was it bleak? Oh, it made all these absurd charges about, you you know his aiding communists and so on and race you know race they had a racist undertone to it uh it was there was yeah there it is

it shows up huh you can see how it can't read can't read all that. Well, it says, welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. You can see that it is saying a city, a city. It's about who we are, and we are not you. And it was almost... And then in the same newspaper, maybe your guy can find it, there is a wanted, oh no, wait a minute, it's separate. It was on top of the newspaper was a wanted poster for Kennedy with full face and profile. Somebody had placed it on top of that. And it was like wanted for treason or something like that. There it is. Wow, wanted for treason.

Yeah, that was on our doorstep that morning. doorstep that morning. So that was the atmosphere of Dallas in 1963. Wow. There was a, there was a, you know, Adlai Stevenson had come to Dallas in October, the month before, to make a speech about the United Nations. And he was the UN ambassador. And he was assaulted. And he went out to greet the crowd. He was booed down. And by the way, I think Lee Harvey Oswald was in the audience that night. But he went out to try to talk to the crowd. And Stanley Marcus was his escort. And he said, don't try that, Adlai. You know, this is crazy. And people were really worked up.

This woman was holding a sign, and she flapped it down on top of Ambassador Stevenson's head. The sign said, if you seek peace, ask Jesus. So that's, I, at some reason that always struck me as the Dallas, and I just want to say, as I'm talking about Dallas in the past, Dallas of today is a totally different place. And I think in some ways, you know, it was so chastened and humbled by that horrible experience. I've said in the past, if Kennedy had to die somewhere, I'm grateful he did in Dallas because it made that city a far better place. And you remember the police killings a few years ago nine cops yeah the way it was a block away from the Dealey Plaza but the way in which that city handled that tragedy by comparison was so magnificent you know I just I have a lot of admiration for the city that Dallas has become

yeah I love Dallas. It's a great city. But that is a crazy slice of history. And it's so fascinating how no matter who the president is, there's always some faction that think that that one person, that figurehead is the enemy of democracy, the enemy of freedom, the champion of whatever, you know, whether it's the communists or Soviets or fill in the blank, whoever it is, China, whoever it is. There's always going to be some faction that think that that person is the real reason why we're all fucked up. Yeah, it's the tension of democracy.

Yeah. Yeah. You were telling me, we were talking before this, uh, podcast started about, and I said, we got to stop talking. Don't say anymore because you wrote a novel about a pandemic and you wrote it and it came out during the pandemic. Right. Which for, I mean, it's almost like great timing and terrible timing. Like George Carlin had a particularly damning special that was going to be released around September 11th.

And they never released it because it was very anti-American. You know, George Carlin, as he got older, was very much a curmudgeon. And he had some great rants. And they just felt like this is just not appropriate. Like post 9-11, you know, it's just right after the tragedy. But your novel that you wrote, like when this was all going down, your novel came out in April, right? Yeah. When this was all going down, we'd already been shut down in March.

I mean, that's when it really hit the United States like what was that like for you did to have this sort of coordinate just it was weird it's still strange to me you know I started a decade ago when Ridley Scott had me write a script he wanted he had read the Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road, which is his post-apocalyptic story, father and son. And so Ridley said, well, what happened? You know, because Cormac didn't bother to explain. And I thought, well, how would civilization end? And so I conceived of a pandemic being more interesting than an atomic bomb, for instance, because nobody is hard to find heroes.

And pandemic, public health, I've always been fascinated by the kinds of people. I did a number of stories out of CDC when I was a young reporter. And, you know, I thought these people are really cool. You know, they're brilliant. They're humble. They're incredibly courageous. They go off to these hot zones. You know, would you want to go to an Ebola zone?

I mean, just horrifying. But, you know, off they go. You know, it really intrigued me. Ridley didn't make it, and he was right to, because I hadn't solved the problems of the story, and I hadn't done enough research. So I stuck it away, and, but I never forgot it,

and I thought, I really wanted to revisit it, because I thought, you know, in a way we're due. You know, I had studied the 1918 pandemic when I was writing a story about the 1976 swine flu fiasco. And it was so awful. You know, 675,000 Americans killed, you know, as many as 100 million people worldwide. And, you know, 675,000 Americans was more than all the soldiers who died in all the American soldiers who died in all the wars of the 20th century. And we have to take into consideration the size of the population back then was so much smaller.

Right. But October 19, 1918, is still the deadliest month in American history. So when I decided I was going to write this, first of all, I went out and interviewed all the people that I would want to talk to, just as if I were doing a nonfiction novel or non-fiction book or a New Yorker story. And I made a calendar on my computer that was based on 1918. And it was, you know, what happened in, you know, March of 1918 corresponds roughly with what happens in my novel, which is set in 2020. So it was meant to be a kind of cautionary tale.

And in January, I began to hear about this unidentified virus in China. And I thought, geez, that could be something. You know, SARS in 2003 happened. The Chinese hit it. There was this virus going around. Nobody knew anything about it. The World Health Authorities went over to investigate. And Chinese authorities took patients out of the hospital and put them in ambulances to hide them until the authorities left. And, you know, this thing went, I think, 37 countries before it was smothered, fortunately, by good health practices. I thought this is, you know, early on, and by February, I was telling my wife to start stocking up on groceries because I had just written this novel. How long did it take you to write it?

A year and a half, I guess. The timing is insane. Yeah, for one thing, this British presenter, when I was promoting the book, said, I don't think anybody paid attention to this book at all, if it weren't for this pandemic. I think you're probably right, but it's not such a smart publishing strategy to bring out a book when the bookstores are closed. I'm going to have to remind myself not to do that again. But it was weird because the story became what I got right and what I got wrong. And it is interesting.

I mean, there were – see, I did the research, and I talked to the experts. Like one of the guys that I talked to, Barney Graham, he works at National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is Dr. Fauci's shop. He helped me design my novel virus, and he helped me cure it. He's the guy that invented the vaccine that is in both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. And I had him to myself. He was one of many people in that category who advised me about how would you make a vaccine and so on.

So I did all the research. And I asked them, my sources, suppose we had another event like 1918. Would we be any better prepared than our ancestors were? And the answer was, this is our biggest nightmare. You know, and there were a lot of reasons for it. But one is, you know, we don't have a vaccine. We don't have any therapeutics. We'd be in exactly the same spot.

And that's what happened. Just the timing of it is impeccable. It's crazy. When did you finish the book? I finished it in August of 2019, I guess. Maybe July. It was in the summer. And I called it the end of October because October was the deadliest month. And October Revolution Island off the Russian coast plays a role in it. So anyway, I enjoyed the know i enjoyed the work i especially you know i love

research and i wouldn't be in this job if i didn't you know but part of the time my hero's on a submarine so i i got to go to kings bay georgia where the we have our nuclear fleet and uh and to get a little tour of the submarines and uh you, you know, not everybody gets to do that sort of thing. So I was able to make, you know, I like to make things as real as possible. And then it gives you a sense of authority when you sit down to write. It had to be a bizarre feeling to have finished that book and have it come out in the middle of the pandemic. I mean, you almost had to feel like maybe the simulation is real.

In the in the going back to what I got wrong, you know, everything unfolded exactly as I had anticipated, unfortunately. But I didn't anticipate how people would self-isolate so willingly, really. I mean, it's frayed now. But, you know, at the cost of so much, you know, it's impoverishing. It's, you know, spiritually, socially, culturally, you know, in so many ways it's damaged us. And yet it's a price that people have, so many people have been willing to pay. But my take on government was totally right. You know, government's fucked up in the novel. And maybe I underestimated how badly the government would behave in this one. You wrote a long piece, you were saying, too, right before we started, about COVID.

Would you write it for, what was it, for New Yorker? Yeah, it's out now. It's called The Plague Year, and it occupies most of the magazine. And, you know, people like Barney Graham are sources of mine now. They're the same sources I use on my novel. Oh, there it is. It's gotten a lot of reaction, and I'm writing it as a book now. But it's heartbreaking.

It's a tragic story. You know, the novel is, you know, tragic, but it's a novel. You know, this chronicling of what happened to us this year has been really hard. And I think what has been missed in a lot of the coverage is just the personal experience of this catastrophe. A lot of the stories I tell in there, they're hard, hard stories.

Well, it's an insane and in our lifetime unprecedented time where there's never been a moment where people have been asked to stop doing everything and it still didn't work no and in fact in a lot of places it was worse where they asked people to lock down than in places like florida or in texas where they don't shut everything down the same well we went through it in texas in a like so many states you you know, for one thing, the governor should never have had to do this on their own. You know, there was never a national plan. And there should have been. But wouldn't the national plan vary depending upon the pandemic, depending upon what the virus was? And, I mean, it's one thing if you're dealing with something that's as contagious as the measles and as deadly as ebola you know that would have been that would have required us to

take extremely drastic measures and that was a lot of what we feared was going to be coming with covid i mean there was there was a an initial thought of what the virus is going to do and this insane reaction to that anticipating that but no correction once we realize what it had begun and also no correction once we realize what the consequences of the lockdowns and this now we're now into nine ten months of this isolation and fear and the economic disaster and despair. It's so much happening, and trying to find the path out of it is the weirdest part. Yeah. In many respects, the economy is correcting itself. It's not dead as it was a few months ago.

You see a lot of activity. as it was, you know, a few months ago, you see a lot of activity. Many, you know, one of the people I talked about in my story was a Goldman Sachs analyst, Steve Strongman. And, you know, at first, you know, we had the biggest plunge, you know, in recorded history. And, you know, one of the analysts at Goldman was saying, usually, if you're trying to do econometrics, I think it's pronounced econometrics, you analyze wage increases and how would that affect spending patterns and, you know, restaurant availability? And then in this case, there were no restaurants. You know, you subtract that from the economy.

Take out airlines. You know, it's more like arithmetic. You know, you just strike them. And, you know, that's just never happened before. That's just never happened before. And yet there's another thing that's going on, which is that the economy is reorganizing around a new reality. And that's one of the things about capitalism that's good is it's nimble and it sees opportunity. initially when when the markets crashed and unemployment went further south

than we've ever seen it go the stock market just froze and then there was a realization according to one of my sources when they learned that this was transmitted asymptomatically, in other words, you can have it and not have any symptoms and infect me, then investors realized the usual treatments, public health approaches, weren't going to work. If you have symptomatic transmission, you get sick, you go to bed.

So you don't transmit so much. If you are sick and walking around the world and greeting everybody and passing it off, that's an entirely different experience. And that's why this disease is so sneaky. And from the Wall Street point of view, it was, oh, fuck. You know, so they wanted, at that point, you know, they had gone from just trying to, you know, get some money to operate their businesses to rushing to safety. So you had five stocks like Amazon and Apple and so on occupying 20% of the S&P. occupying 20% of the S&P.

And, you know, but Strongland said, that's not the, you know, the purpose of Wall Street is to move money from businesses that are no longer useful into the businesses of the future. And that's when you see the rush for opportunity. And that's why the stock market has gone so crazy during this period and gone into historic highs where people are still you know many people are still underwater and you know

there's going to be a lot of economic damage that's going to last for quite a long time yeah i i don't i don't understand how they're going to pull out of it. When you look at Los Angeles has lost 75% of its restaurants. Yeah. It's just insanity. I mean, what percentage of small businesses are still barely hanging on? How many have they lost already? Well, like Austin, your new city, used to be known as the live music capital of America.

Is there a more vulnerable business to be in than a bar that plays music and you know the bar that we patronized Skylark lounge a lot of old musicians play there miss Lavelle white who was born in 1929 was still singing the blues at Skylark 1929 yeah she's a great blues legend but you know a lot of the bars are permanently out of business

but so I think are a lot of the bands musicians typically live on a really small level of comfort as do comedians we lost Cap City Comedy Club I typically live on a really small level of comfort to start with. As do comedians. Yeah, I bet.

We lost Cap City Comedy Club in Austin, which is one of the best clubs in the world. Yeah. An amazing club that had been open for 34 years, I believe. Maybe more. It might be 35. And it went under while I was here. We're hoping to bring some comedy back i want to start a place once it feels like it's responsible and safe to do it but it's uh it's just such a tricky thing to figure out

when and how and what to do and measures to take place i've been doing these uh shows at stubbs amphitheater with uh dave chappelle but we test the whole crowd so they get there early they get tested and they've only had to turn away a couple people over and that was not even the shows that I was a part of I was uh I just did one spot on one of those shows and Dave had done three and out of those three so for 1200 people they turned away two people that tested positive I don't I don't think there was any other ones. The audience for comedy is safer than the average population then because our positivity rate right now in Texas is over 20. Is it 20%?

Yeah. Yeah, in Los Angeles they think it's so crazy that one out of 20 people has gotten the virus, either gotten over it or is currently infected. One out of 80 currently have it, I think. That's the most estimates right now. And this new strain is sweeping through. In California in particular, it's driving out the old strain really quickly, as it did in the U.K.

It was stunning how quickly it overtook the contagion. Yeah, it's more contagious but not more extreme in its symptoms or anything like that, right? That's what they say, but I haven't heard that it's less. I did, but it was from an unreliable source. Yeah, I think there's wishful thinking involved in it. In 1918, there was a mutation that made it more fatal. Well, the weirdest part about this is the asymptomatic people.

There's somewhere in the neighborhood of as much as half the people that get it don't even know they have it. More than half. Maybe as much as 70%. That is so crazy. That's true of polio also, for instance. Only like one out of 200 cases of polio actually ever goes to see a doctor. What?

When I was a kid, you know, I grew up in the polio era. And one morning I woke up, I'm about five or six years old, six maybe, and I couldn't move my legs. And, you know, it was terrifying. And I think it was a reaction to a tetanus shot that I had gotten. You know, there's a syndrome called Guillain-Barre, which is very similar to polio in some ways. In fact, there's a lot of scholarship now that says that Franklin Roosevelt may have had Guillain-Barre rather than polio.

Because onset as an adult was so unusual. And it might have been the horse serum in which the tetanus shot was grown. Or it could have been something else entirely. But I don't know, I don't remember how many days it was before I was able to move, but I was. And, you know, it was a scarring fright. And I've been advised not to take flu shots. And it's one of the reasons I have been so interested in this vaccine.

And I'm going to take it. Because the kinds of possible pollution, like horse serum, or flu shots grown in chicken eggs and stuff like that, it's not a feature of this vaccine, at least not the Moderna and the Pfizer. With any kind of vaccine, there comes a certain level of paranoia, especially a new vaccine. And that's been fascinating and frightening to behold and to read online all of the crazy theories and what people anticipate could happen. And, you know, people that say, I'm not taking that fucking thing. And all the people that are terrified of it

and don't want to try some, what they deem to be an experimental vaccine. I'm hesitant to get into this because I don't want to encourage the anti-vaxxers because I think it's important for the nation to protect itself, protect the health of our communities. But this is a story that is where a lot of the anti-vaxxers come from. is 1976. There was a young recruit at Fort Dix, New Jersey, named David Lewis. He was 19 years old,

healthy, you know, young soldier. And he was on a march. He got sick on the march and died, you know, quickly. And there was flu at the camp, but they sent in his blood sample

to the CDC and couldn't find any modern flus that it corresponded to. So they checked against swine samples. And pigs, after 1918, became a reservoir for the 1918 flu. We gave it to them, and they kept it. And so over the years, there were occasional examples of farmers getting sick from their pigs.

But it was the H1N1 strain, which was 1918. And that's what killed David Lewis. And there were several other soldiers that had gotten it but weren't that ill. So I decided I would write about it, and I went up to Fort Dix. At the time, Gerald Ford was president and the question was should we vaccinate everybody and flu vaccines

were already kind of on board all you had to do was change the formula so it wasn't like what we're going through now and the head of the CDC David Sensor at the time said, you know, we're going to go whole hog. We're going to vaccinate everybody in the country. And so I went up to Fort Dix to find out what was going on. And I talked to the environmental health officer from Macon, Georgia. from Macon, Georgia. And as we were talking, you know, I said that I had talked to David Lewis's mother, who is a nurse. And he said, hey, did she tell you about that pig? And I said,

what pig was that? Oh, some story. David ran into some pig, you know, God knows. And so I called Mrs. Lewis and she thinks, you know, yes, this was where David got sick. So the question was, did he get sick from a pig or was it a human a human disease and his fiancee a very attractive young woman they were going to go in the mission fields and she was a nurse and a pilot she's a lively person peg laugh them she and i they had been driving over christmas from her home in upstate New York to his home in Massachusetts. And the snow had closed the road down to a single lane. And they came upon a pig in the middle of the road, a big 200-pound hog. And David nudged it to see if he could move it but you know so he got out

and grabbed the pig by his ears and pulled him off to the side of the road so the question was did the pig cough in his face oh Jesus because if he got it from a pig and he got a huge viral load and then some other people may have gotten it from him but they didn't get that sick and it died out. Because in 1918, you had 100 million people dead. And so far, you had one, but you're going to vaccinate everybody. So we had to find the pig. So we went house to house on this Route 23, knocking on doors. Did you see a pig out in the road, you know, over Christmas?

And a lot of people had. And finally, it wasn't too hard to find the owner of the pig. He lived in, my memory may be a little wrong, but it seemed like a double-wide trailer. It was a house pig, not evident at the moment, but it was his pet. And he had been in a railroad accident and lost a couple of limbs and was propped up against the refrigerator. And I proposed to him, I'd just like a little blood from your pig.

Take it to the CDC. You know, they'll analyze it. You know, the whole country's waiting in line to get these inoculations and if it happens that your pig is a source of it then you know we might be able to save everybody a lot of trouble and uh so he looked at this girl on the couch and he said i know you i know your family i know where you You fuck with my pig. I'll burn your house down. Wow. Welcome to epidemiology. You know, I said, really, we don't have to go that far. You know, we finally worked a deal where his vet extracted a little blood, sent it to the CDC, and the pig had never been sick a day in his life. Well, millions of Americans, I think it was 26 million Americans were

vaccinated before there were hundreds of cases of Guillain-Barre. And a couple of dozen people died. And Gerald Ford called off the vaccination and lost the election. It was a fiasco. And, you know, I mean, history might have been different if that pig had been sick. But going back to that, you can see a government in disarray, rushing, you know, ill-advised into, you know, the most extreme position, which is vaccinate everybody.

Don't wait to see if it spreads. Of course I understand their hesitancy about waiting. This is a disease that has a history of leveling all of civilization. So you don't want to treat it lightly. But they sped to the finish line. And unfortunately, it caused a lot of damage and left a legacy of distrust that has never really gone away. And yet here we are. Here we are in a very, very similar spot. Yeah.

You know, it was an election year, you know, a novel disease, you know, we haven't seen. Hey, we're going to get through this. With all the misjudgments that have been done, especially by the government, there have been a lot of heroic and brilliant people out there working on this. And I had the privilege of meeting so many of them. And I'm totally confident, even given my own history of having a vaccine reaction, I think this vaccine is a lifesaver. I hope you're right. I do too. Yeah.

Do you take any extraordinary measures to protect your health? Have you done anything different during this pandemic? No, it's been a very isolating experience. And as a reporter, it's hard. You know, I miss to the i miss my friends i miss travel uh i miss playing music uh you know there's a lot of things that i've really really missed but i have not this i don't want to put my family at risk. Yeah. You're in the age group where you can get the vaccine, though, in Texas. You know, there was some real controversy as to whether or not they should vaccinate essential workers first

or older people that are more at risk. And there's been some weird shit written about that that's flavored with social justice and all sorts of, I'm sure you're aware of all that. I'm sure that, you know, I would like to get the vaccine. I've looked for it. You know, I've signed up with our local pharmacy. And I'm not, you know, actually, health care workers are positive at a lower rate than the general population, strictly because they behave themselves.

You know, they wear masks. They wear, you know, PPE. They're careful. And they really know how to wear the mask properly too. Yes, they do. They're sealed to their face. Yes, and they often wear face shields and stuff like that. But on the other hand, they're confronted every day with the possibility.

And I've talked to a lot of these people. You know, some of them are single. They haven't seen their families in 10 months. You know, some, you know, there's nurses living in basements of their own homes so that they don't infect their children. They don't know if they haven't got, every day they don't know if they haven't gotten infected that day. And so, yes, I think they should be at the front of the line. But, you know, I'm going to be competing with Uber drivers. And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of lobbies coming out for where next. And it's a hard judgment to make about who's the most valuable.

You start looking at elderly people where they have less life that, you know, to lose. And so that's an argument against, you know, going out and vaccinating people like me who are so desperate to live forever. Yeah. But it's all made more difficult by the failure uh you know at every stage we've failed but this is the final stage and we're failing at getting the vaccine out and getting it into the arms of the people who need it and what's the issue here with the failure start, you know, overpromising. I was told by Pfizer back in September, I think, when maybe it was August, when they had the results of their first trial and it was really, really positive.

And they were going to have 100 million doses by the end of the year. And Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, predicted that we'd have 100 million vaccinations. And then it was 40, and then it was 20. And now, as it turned out, a little less than 4 million vaccines by the end of 2020. Moderna is now coming online, uh you know that's going to supplement things a lot a lot more but it's it's you know my doctor on there's a sheet that says you know where all the vaccines are going and it said that he's gotten 500 doses. He doesn't have any. He never had any. I don't know what they're saying. But, you know, there are all these different entities

that claim that they have vaccine or it is claimed that they have one. They don't have it. Yeah, it's a mess. And they're also worried about not having enough vials to put the vaccine in. So you may have a huge amount of vaccine that you simply can't bottle. Well, there's also the transportation issue, right?

Because it has to be insanely cold. Other vaccines are going to come online soon. You know, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, you know, Sanofi. There are a bunch of others. But probably the gold standard is the Pfizer and the Moderna, which is the same vaccine that Barney Graham and Jason McClellan invented. When, you know, you wrote a novel about the pandemic, you wrote this piece for The New Yorker about the real state of what happened during COVID-19 as a as a writer you've got to have an

imagination about what could possibly take place or how does this how do we bounce back like there's there's there's pitfalls and there's hope you know there's possible you know bright futures and there's possible dystopian futures like what how do you what do you when you look at the future what do you see joe rogan's comedy club it's a good place to start well i would love to have that here yeah well i mean don't you can't you see it yes all right well there are other people with similar visions and you know this is a this is a reset time you know our culture has been leveled uh there are a lot of things that are going to change you know like office spaces you know skyscrapers that kind of thing you know we going to see, you're going to be living in a city

where a lot of people are moving. They're drawn to, first of all, they're escaping. They're escaping the idea of cities. It's been scarring, I think, to be trapped in a building where you have to ride an elevator every day and push the button, you might die. People long to be outdoors. And so they're moving to places where those things are easier.

A lot of people in the West are leaving because of the fires. Climate change and things like that have made a big difference. So people are moving. You know, climate change and things like that have made a big difference. So people are moving. And if you're in New York or L.A. and you're looking at a map of America and you're thinking, where should I go? There aren't a lot of places that, you know, what is like, there's no place like New York, there's no place like L.A., but there are places that have attributes that make those places congenial. And, you know, so Texas is one of the places where a lot of people wind up because it's got, it's dynamic.

I think that's the, and also there are places inside Texas like Austin that are tolerant and interesting. And, you know, I think a lot of, Austin has had a reputation for being cool long, far beyond what it deserves. And this has gone on for as long as I've been here. You know, ever since I moved to Austin, you know when people would ask me where are you from texas you know you get this kind of look we're in texas austin oh austin you know it's forgivable you know right and it's supposed to oh i hear it's great and you say waco they'll look at you sideways exactly yeah they uh they're it's one of those places that people think about moving if they have to.

I had an opportunity to buy David Koresh's Mustang at one point in time. And you passed it up? I fucked up. I didn't have a place for it. It was for sale, and I had already bought it. I have a bit of a car problem. That's not totally understandable. I think that's a worthy problem.

Yeah. And also, I didn't know if I wanted to have his car. Bad juju? i didn't know if i wanted to have his car because i was like bad juju i don't know like is a 68 camaro which is a nice car i like 69s a little bit more a little wider car that's it right there oh yeah yeah um it was for sale that's's David Koresh's car? Yeah. Well, he should have spent more time working on the car. Why? It looks great. It looks great, but just driving around a little bit would be... Well, he, like most cult leaders, was too busy trying to fuck the wives of all of his...

It always comes up, doesn't it? Yeah, that's the thing they always do. They always want to have access to everyone's wife right it's kind of crazy how these patterns just emerge over and over and over again that's like one of the big ones they want to separate you from your family yeah that's like one of the i've had uh steve hassan on the podcast for who's a uh occult expert i know him yeah who uh was in the moonies himself like he got rescued uh and he sort of outlined the steps they do but one of the things is like remove you from the influence of your family yeah fascinating you know and with koresh they mean literally had a walled compound and brought everybody into the

compound and this one guy with this uh this vision and there's there's it's funny, it's like we have these tolerant people, like we tolerate a certain level, like the Joel Osteen. It's like, eh, seems to be doing more harm than he's doing good, or more good, rather, than he's doing harm. Let it go. No big deal. Yeah, he's making a lot of money, and yeah, he's doing all this, and it doesn't seem right, but at least he's not banging everybody's wife. all this and it doesn't seem right but at least he's not banging everybody's wife well this brings up another memory which in my church in dallas um it was first methodist church uh when i was

growing up and you know dallas had the reputation in the 60s of being like the most religious city in america it had the largest Methodist, largest Baptist churches in the whole country and one of the largest Presbyterians and a large Catholic population as well. And it also had high rates of murder and divorce and all those things that you find in a really turbulent culture that Dallas was. And, you know, my father taught Sunday school for years and years. And then Robert Goodrich was our pastor, and he became a bishop. And, you know, his son was a quarterback on our high school team.

So we knew all these people pretty well. And years later, the church had kind of gone into decline, and downtown Dallas was sort of inner city. They brought in this charismatic young preacher named Walker Raley. And his first action as a preacher and First Methodist was to blow into the microphone and breathe life into the church again. And he was very charismatic. He had great sermons,

and I went to see him several times when we went back to Dallas for holidays and so on. I could see the attraction, and he was very progressive. And then these threats on his life began to appear, apparently because of his racial progressivism. And notes were slipped under his door, and FBI began to investigate.

And then over Easter, there was a really, you know, a very straightforward threat to kill him. And so he wore a bulletproof vest under his vestments. And, you know, everybody, you know, inside the church circle, you know, were all terrified. And then his wife is strangled in the garage and into a coma. And Walker really did it. Yeah, I was about to say, I got suspicious almost immediately.

Well, he was never convicted. Oh. And I interviewed him, and he was, have all these piercing blue eyes and that sincerity. I don't know where you stand on me, Larry, but I just, this all comes as a horrible, horrible shock to me. And I said, I think you did it. I cited all the courage to say that to his face. I didn't think he could strangle me. Although we were in the kitchen where there were a lot of sharp knives. But yeah, there it is.

How about that? You guys can really flush this out. How do you say it? Rayleigh? Rayleigh. Walker Rayleigh. He got off. How did he say it? Rayleigh? Rayleigh, Walker Rayleigh. He got off. How did he get off?

Well, there was no witness. There was talk that his children, he had two kids. One of them may have been partially strangled. That's not clear. At the same time? Yeah. Like one of them might have been a witness? Maybe.

But the kid was never, and it turned out Walker really was having an affair with the daughter of our previous minister, Lucy Goodrich, who called herself Lucy Papillon. Oh, Lucy. And she played the piano in my father's Sunday school class. So I had my own brushes with, I don't know, there's something about religion and sexuality. You know, I wrote about Jimmy Swaggart, for instance. I've seen. Yes, indeed.

I remember that. That was wild. When I went to his church, and man, that church, you would have loved the services. I mean, it started off with this bass drum and then a guitar lick, and then the curtains open, and it's just rocking. It was entertaining. Much better music than the First Methodist Church in Dallas. And Jimmy, he was a real performer. Yeah, there he is.

I remember at the end of the sermon, people would come up and he would embrace them. And he liked to get hookers, right? Very low class. Out on Airport Road, they're sitting in a plastic lawn chair. That kind of thing. That's a bizarre fetish. he um but it i think i think that there's something about when you climb into the spiritual spotlight uh is that her yeah that girl yeah she looks like she got her shit together yeah uh the uh you you're inviting a certain amount of sexual projection because the spotlight yeah

well then there's also the putting yourself in this position of being the uh ambassador of the lord's word right you know and you're you're you're preaching about this pious lifestyle and all the other well also the emotion the emotionality that swagger you know i mean there's one of the his signature things is that he would weep and that wasn't the only time he wept you know he he would weep he would rant he would speak in tongues he would dance he would sing and uh is he dead now no no he's he's old gotta get him in here. I've thought about doing a follow-up because I'm intrigued by disgrace. And so many titanic figures have fallen. This guy that strangled his wife, I'm sorry to interrupt you there.

Walker Raley. Raley. What did he say when he said, I think you did it? If I remember correctly, it's sort of, I'm sorry you feel that way. if I remember correctly, sort of, I'm sorry you feel that way. He's now living in California. He's in L.A.

He married another wealthy woman, I understand, and she set him up and then she passed away. I don't know under what circumstances. Oh, Jesus. I think he's with some... Anyway, he's got a Facebook page. You know, he's— There he is.

There he is, yeah. Wow. What year was this? It's in the 80s. I'm sorry. I'm not good on— No worries. Yeah.

And Peggy, his wife, in a coma. She lived for like 26 years. You can check to see when she passed away. Never regained consciousness, but was, you know, in a coma for that entire. And then it became a homicide. When she died. Yeah. What was the evidence? evidence? It was all circumstantial. He left a telephone message. Honey, I'm

running a little late. I don't know what time it is. He was driving a Honda, which has a little clock right there on the dashboard. And, you know, I've been studying over at SMU, you know. Did you listen to the message? I think it had been published.

I quoted it, so I either listened to it or I read it. But that was one of the things. He lied about not knowing what time it was. He lied about his whereabouts. He went over to visit Lucy. And, you know, there was no... Also, all those notes and stuff were written to him. There was one point where...

Notes? You know, where I told you about the death threats? Mm-hmm. He wrote them himself. Oh, written to him, you said. Yeah. But you meant written by him written by him yeah and uh after peggy was in a coma walker was in the hospital visiting and he overdosed

and left a suicide note about how you know wrong he had been and uh but he never actually admitted uh what he was wrong about yeah so he tried to commit suicide but survived yeah actually admitted what he had done. It was wrong about. Yeah. So he tried to commit suicide, but survived. Yeah. Oh, Jesus. So he was in a coma as she was in a coma. Oh, Jesus Christ. And the wrong person came out of it.

Yeah. I mean, it really goes back to what we were talking about earlier, this desire that people have to be this leader and to be this person with this secret inside knowledge and to be in control of a covenant, to be in control of a parish. Well, in your performing career, for instance, isn't there some element of that? There's want and attention, sure there's wanting acceptance there's wanting uh to be successful to be uh to be recognized by people for your work you know for what you do but you would hope that whatever pathology leads you to stand-up comedy in the first place because there's

not a single person that gets in it that's not fucked up. Like, you have to have something wrong with you to want to be a comic because it's such a brutal, emotional battle. Yeah. You bomb so often, particularly in the beginning, and bombing is devastating. I bet.

It is the worst. It's, uh... I described it as... It's like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother but the thing is I think there's probably a person out there that wants to suck a thousand dicks in front of their mother I doubt there's a person who wants to bomb

it's a devastating but it's also for a person like myself who grew up in martial arts it's a complex challenge it's a complex challenge. It's a complex challenge of managing concepts and emotions and how to get an idea across to people. And in a way, it's kind of a mass hypnosis because you're trying to bring people into a state of mind where they think the way you're thinking and they allow you to think for them. And then you can get them to feel good and laughter it's very rewarding i bet to look at

it as an art form it's a very rewarding art form when it's done well like a show that's done well but i was telling jamie the other day how to fuck up one one line of one joke and then it will haunt me for days sure i won't be able to enjoy dinner i'll be driving in my car by myself and i'll just be like no i'm the same way i i discovered an an error in my novel just the other day it's been published it's out there and it's a terrible error and uh and it's been many eyes who were on it copy editors editors you know me you know, me many times. You know, it all slipped by. But that achievement of getting a laugh is, you know, even just in an ordinary setting, you know, if you come up with something that's funny and you, I remember some of my best lines for decades,

you know, and, you know, I will never tell them again because, but, you know, it's like, that was the moment when I got it right. In that moment. Yeah. No, those are magical moments. And as a comic, it's, like I said, it's a really rewarding art form. But there's no, I don't have a desire to like lead people or to be revered or to have some sort of, I mean, it sounds ironic that I do have this weird platform.

But this is all accidental. This came about from just hanging out with my friends, talking shit. Really? And most of the time we were high. Like almost all the early podcasts, we were blasted out of our head. Because we're living in California, you know, and most of the early ones were all comedians. So we just have an excuse to get baked and to just make each other laugh and to put some stuff out on the internet and then along the way i started

saying man i want i'd like to talk to that guy i like to try to get some guests and then then then all of a sudden i have scientists on and professors and and it just athletes it just got weird and it became what it is now but uh it was never a plan it was just something that sort of happened and now you know over the last few years i've recognized like oh shit there's like i have like a responsibility like i can't just talk shit anymore because now people are listening well there's a whole aftermarket yeah of you know the other other people commenting on your shows yeah oh yeah and taking things out of context and misrepresent misrepresenting what my intention was and then also like just the act of you know what i would call talking shit like when

especially comics around talking shit they don't mean what they're saying they're just being silly they're just trying to say provocative outrageous things to get a reaction from each other to crack each other up or to just to have fun and uh when you take that stuff and you put it in quotes it becomes a totally different animal right you take away all the flavor and the fun and now it's just like a it's a hurtful thing or an ignorant thing or The podcast has become a very different endeavor than what I initially had. But also, because of the higher profile, now it's allowed me to talk to more interesting people and more influential people. Like we were talking about the Elon Musk conversation before the show. Yeah, fabulous conversation.

Fantastic. conversation fabulous conversation fantastic it's just just to have an opportunity to sit down with one of the most interesting people i think that's ever lived and one of the most productive and prolific people i mean just the fact that he's able to juggle all these plates simultaneously he's a really unique guy and uh off air like super friendly, like really, really easy to talk to. Very nice. I mean, I first met him. I was like, I was kind of taken. It took a while during the first conversation I had with him to loosen him up.

It took a while for him to relax because he was one way and then we were on camera. And then all of a sudden he's very aware that he's on camera and he was a little tense. So then the whiskey started flowing and then I pulled out a joint and that became history. But it was all only possible because the podcast had become this thing where it was like, this is here, you have some ideas, go there. And then you can get those ideas out and there's no middleman. There's no one's going to stop you from discussing things. No's going to run in and say this is not appropriate or this is controversial or we'd like to steer away from this subject like i don't want to steer away from

anything you want to talk about it i'm more than willing to talk about it i think any subject can be approached reasonably you know and when a guy like him wants to come on and particularly when i found the most interesting thing i could tell talking to him that it was almost like his like you when you're looking at his eyes and he's discussing these things it's almost like his brain is just wired different yeah and when i said that to him i was like like i have this feeling that like these i like what is it like to be you and he was like you wouldn't want to be me like and that he realized when he was really young that it was different that he thought

everyone's mind worked like that his brain is just like a tornado of ideas and he's just trying to like use his time as wisely as possible to give attention to all these different ideas whether it's the boring company or whether it's a Boring Company or whether it's the Solar Power Company or Tesla or SpaceX. It's like, who the fuck is running that, I mean, companies that are that influential, that powerful, that significant, and four of them simultaneously?

Yeah. How is that even possible? Well, what's interesting about, I was going to say people like Elon Musk and there aren't very many people like him. Ever. They challenge you about what life could be, you know, what you might be. You know, I mean, you know, you say you fell into this, but in a way you created it, you know, organically.

You made it you. you know, organically. You made it you. And Elon Musk, you know, of course he, you know, made a couple of billion dollars to get started, you know, but he just had a, he allowed himself to become himself.

Yeah. You know, there was a role out there in the universe that he could step into. And I think that's true for all of us in many ways. I think we all get handicapped. Oftentimes I'm in countries where, you know, I'm dealing with people who will never be fulfilled. You know, their culture is so confining. They can never be who they might be. Yeah.

But we're not in that culture. be who they might be. But we're not in that culture. And so the potential to become bigger than we are is always there. But there are only a few people that actually become as big as they might be. And sometimes you're limited by money or opportunity you know we talked about some of those neighborhoods in baltimore something like that you're those you know they're tremendous barriers but there are people that come out of those places and take the world on and you know they there's something fascinating to me about accepting the challenge uh you know There's a lot of risk involved. You can be totally deluded.

I'm sure you know people who think that they're so great and everybody knows they're not and it's a huge joke. There are also people like Elon Musk who think they could be greater. They are able to... I don't know. I think that's a very significant point that the people that think they're great, but they're deluded.

That is the most toxic attribute that a person can have if they want to achieve something, because it'll keep you from progressing, because you have this distorted perception of your own worth. There's a lot of people out there that are extremely mediocre, that feel short-sighted. They feel like people have looked past them. They haven't got their just due. And it's weird. It's a weird thing, that sentiment,

that idea that you haven't gotten the attention you deserve. But you get exactly what you deserve. Yeah, that's the sad thing. And is it the case that they're in the wrong calling? Not necessarily. I think a lot of it is just discipline. A lot of people are not willing to work hard enough to grow. Like that feeling that you have when you found that you have an error in your novel and it just fucking rots you, just that feeling. Everybody doesn't get that feeling.

Some people are very satisfied with their work, even if their work is mediocre. Some people think that their stuff is awesome just because it's them. I think that that's one of the advantages of mixed martial arts, I'm sure, is you find out really quickly where you stand. And the truth is laid bare. You can't lie. Yeah. To yourself. Because if you're lying to yourself, if you're pretending, there's physical consequences. And the same thing is true for stand-up.

Yeah. You know, the laugh tell you, you know, are you who you would like to be or think you are or not? And, you know, also I think in writing, you know, people buy your books or they don't. They go see know people buy your books or they don't they go see your play or your movie or they don't you know there's a there's a critics weigh in you know all these things that you get feedback about where you are versus where you want to be right and I'm in a kind of unusual spot. I'm a lot further ahead than I ever thought I'd be. You know, I never thought I would achieve the kind of success that I've had, and I'm really grateful for it, but it makes me wonder,

what if I'd been more ambitious when I was younger? You know, what if I'd, you know, gone to, what if I'd laid in some study time that I didn't have? Doesn't this mirror what we were talking about before the podcast started? We were saying about the differences between our culture and other cultures is that we're at least as a concept

endlessly ambitious. We want to work harder. We want to put in more hours. To the detriment of our personal lives. The detriment of our relaxation and social time. Like if you had been more ambitious, would you have been you? And would you have had the same kind of impact

that you've had? Like isn't part of the reason why you've had the kind of impact that you've had is that you really just have concentrated on the work. You've concentrated on whether it's with Going Clear or your book about the pandemic or whatever these things are. You're, on whether it's with Going Clear or your book about the pandemic or whatever these things are. From my admiration of you, you're a guy who puts incredible focus

on a subject. And you seem to be, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to get absorbed in the work. If you're really ambitious, then you're thinking about end results. Then you're thinking about ultimate goals or you're thinking about numbers. Like, what is, where's the benefit in that? You obviously are wealthy. You obviously are healthy. You obviously are fulfilled in terms of your career. Why would you want to be more ambitious? That's an some point.

And I tend to have these. I've had my two or three in my life where, you know, something came really clear, almost like a voice, you know, in my ear. But the helpful little tidbit that came into my ear was nobody's going to remember you you know even if they you they do remember you they're going to die too yeah well all the people that were all the writers that were famous when i was in college if you go to college now they don't know their names they don't know who Norman Mailer is or Gore Vidal or any of those people yeah those people have all been forgotten a small pool of recondite you know literatures will will know those names but you know those were the people

that were just like I'll never be that yeah And then that subsided into they aren't that either. They just, you know, their reputation is so mighty at one time, you know, have all diminished into the pool of forgetfulness. And that'll happen to everybody except, you know, Shakespeare, a few, you know, a few. And those, you know, those giant names of the past are enshrined in the academy so firmly that it would take a lot to remove them. But I can see a time when, you know, reading and, you know, that sort of thing is going to be overtaken by other pursuits. And, you know, no writers will really be known very well.

I don't know about that. I think there's always going to be a desire to hear the well-formed thoughts of intelligent people and creative people. I think that's always going to be the case because there's something incredibly rewarding about whether it's great fiction or nonfiction about reading someone's really well-thought-out, well-edited work. It's a giant part of what makes us understand each other, is reading other people's writing. Or seeing their work, whether it's music or comedy or anything.

Seeing what happens when someone focuses on a thing and hones it down and puts it into a like a presentable package and this is done here and then you you distribute it to the world and then the world reads it and takes it in and goes oh wow i like how he thought about that and it changes the way people think about things it changes the way people consider things it gives people energy and enthusiasm it gives them motivation and ambition like i think writing is always going to be a thing it's gonna i think it's a very important thing and i know for me personally when i like get less uh focused on things when i i feel like more more maybe less in control of my my thought process is when i'm not writing yeah when i'm when i sit down and i force myself and I discipline myself to write,

I feel like my thoughts are better formed. They're more concise. They're more easily digestible to other people. And I think it's a direct result of focus and discipline. The focus and discipline to sit down and and put the work in yeah and then that when i do that that muscle whatever that thing is it grows it gets stronger it gets uh gets sharper the endurance or whatever it is it becomes more it becomes more applicable and all the other things that i do in life, I think writing is always going to be a thing. I really do. Well, you said that so well. It made me proud of my profession. And then also

because you said it so easily, it undermines your argument. Well, it's something I've thought about a lot, you know. I've also thought about like my own profession, the various stages of it. Like in the beginning, I remember just wanting to work. I just wanted to be a professional. lot you know i've also also thought about like my own profession the various stages of it like in the beginning i remember just wanting to work i just wanted to be a professional i couldn't imagine being able to pay my bills just telling jokes and then it got to a point well god i would love to be like really successful i don't i want to be famous like there's comedians that sell out comedy clubs and then there's oh there's comedians sell out theaters holy shit i can never sell out a theater and then all of a sudden i'm selling out theaters and then it became arenas and that was only over the last few years but that's the most bizarre shit when you walk into

a room and there's 15 000 people all waiting to hear you talk it's the strangest thing on earth but the ambition has changed to now now the the main focus and even while that stuff happened it was like the more impressive things happened the more i just focused on work instead of focusing on getting attention which is what i did when i was really young and starting out i focused on just being better at the thing and the more i was better at the thing, the more I focused on that, then the other kind of success sort of just fell into place. But that's not what I ever think about. I always just think about the work itself.

And the more I think about that, about how to put the bits together and how to make them better and how to edit them, and maybe I should go over that again. Maybe I'm looking at, maybe I'm just settling for this position. Maybe I need to like rewrite it entirely and start from scratch and switch it around and maybe look at it from a totally different angle. That's when it's been the most rewarding for me. But also I feel the least responsible for it, which is the weirdest part about it.

I feel like when something is done, even though I know I put a whole lot of work into it i was like i just showed up and it's almost like uh you know press field writes about the muse and he writes about it like it's like a real thing like treat it like it's a real thing that is show that you show up and you put in the work and then it'll it'll come visit you it almost feels like that sometimes. It almost feels like the more, the better I get at it, the more successful I get at it, the less I feel like I did it and the more I feel like it's just a matter of me forcing myself to show up and then this process takes place.

I look at it a little differently because I think people that are hugely successful are the most true to themselves the Elon Musk is an excellent example you know but something to be somebody else or to correspond to a stereotype of some sort is very limiting and also you can't you don't have the original genius that comes along with being who you really are and so if you it seems to me that what you've done is command all the joe rogan-ness that you can and poured it into a a novel form uh and made it part of you. And, you know, if you were trying to be something else, it might not be, it wouldn't give you the chance to be who you are in the genuine way that this does. Maybe that's true, but maybe the way that I'm able to do that is by just getting out

of my own way and not thinking about me at all. But that's the same thing. Getting out of your own way, when you say that, what's getting in your way is social constructs that are not you. And if you remove those and just allow whatever is your essence to manifest itself, then you may go to prison. I mean, who knows what that essence is? But on the other hand, you become authentically who you are. And I think that that's what people are so hungry for in any field, whether it's comedy or politics or writing.

They want something that feels real. I think you're 100% right about authenticity. I think that's the thing that I value more than anything. Whether someone's right or wrong, if I hear them talk or I hear their take on things, if I know it's genuinely coming from their real thoughts, there's no ideological bend. It's not some predetermined position that they've taken but they're just actually thinking about things and looking through it and trying to trying to formulate their thoughts in an honest way i can appreciate that more than anything

because it's so especially in the broadcast medium it's so rare because there's too many gatekeepers you know the to just to have an idea and to bring it to a television show, like for instance, it's like you have to, you're going through so many people. It's so difficult to get your own actual thoughts and have them unmolested and then distribute them to the world. Yeah, I went through that with, we did an adaptation of The Looming Tower. And it was not hard, honestly.

But the problem was that there were a lot of people along there over the years that wanted to do it, and I didn't want them to, because I thought, you know, 9-11 is kind of sacred. And, you know, go make entertainment of it but on the other hand it needs I mean you know kids now they don't have any experience of you know it was like World War II for me you know my dad was in the war right well you know i wasn't um so i thought it was important to memorialize it um and i so i produced it you know with a couple of friends and you know we we were able to you know the the thing was they couldn't fuck with it you know there had to be this general agreement that, you know, the tone has to be exactly right, because if you get it wrong, it's just, it'll be a sin in some way. And so anyway, it was a good experience. You know, I'd like to do it

again, but I know what you mean. I've pitched things in the past and uh it's it's a the pitching itself is kind of great you know it's such a high feeling nothing comes of it you know everybody calls their agents and stuff like that oh they loved you you know this sort of thing yeah it never goes anywhere one out of 100 yeah just doesn't but i don't know i i like to work in different formats so i i love the movies and i love plays and what are you working on now well i'm finishing a book about covid and i had a you know i told you about my a little bit about my movie background but um I had a play that we had two productions here in Austin. It was called Sonny's Last Shot at the time.

And it was a lot of fun. It was about Texas politics. And it's set in the Texas House of Representatives, my favorite political body. And it never traveled. And I thought, well, a Broadway producer came down and took a look and she said, you know, I thought about it as a musical. And I said, well, yeah, you know, Texas politics does make you want to dance.

So I and a great pal of mine, Marsha Ball, who's a singer-songwriter, piano player, extraordinary and beloved figure in Austin music. She and I started writing music for it. And then Broadway producer bailed on it and said, you know, it shouldn't be a musical. It should be a television series. So we went to HBO and sold it and I wrote a pilot and they fired my executive and trashed all of his projects so I had neither a series nor a musical but and then I started to write it as a novel because I thought it's so you know I got to get the story out somehow but but I'd missed the music. So it's now going to become a podcast.

What? A musical podcast. Really? Yeah. And my son, Gordon, who's also a musician, has joined me and Marsha, and we're writing new songs. I wish I had written songs when I was younger because it's a huge amount of fun.

And the kind of writing I do is usually very solitary. My creative process is, you know, essentially, you know, I spend the whole day alone. And, you know, working with other really creative people is a great joy, especially these people. So we're having fun. And, you know, we just wrote a couple of songs over the holidays that's awesome well I love that you're willing to take on all these different kinds of projects you know it all comes from nobody's gonna remember you you know it's it's like Jerry Lee Lewis. You know, I idolize him. You know, one of the reasons I took up the piano was I wanted to play Great Balls of Fire on my 40th birthday.

So I took up piano when I was 38 and a half. And I even got my feet into it, as is required. But he's always done the same thing and he's Jerry Lee Lewis and he's kind of imprisoned by that and does he ever want to sit down and play a little Dvorak you know or something like that now you know who knows but it's shocking as it might sound nobody's gonna him either. And if you no longer are tied to this idea of becoming really famous and having this enduring legacy, it frees you up to do whatever you want to do. And in a way, that's become my brand. You know, he's the guy who does everything. And everything and uh i'm all right with that but i would rather do this and maybe not have quite a

deep trough in the culture but you know if you just keep trying to write one book after another some of them are not going to be any good you know but if you are diversifying and you're you know i have an idea for a play but but it's not a book. You're supposed to be writing books and that play never gets done. But if it's a really good idea, that's the hardest part in the creative field, I think, is getting the idea. And there's just precious few of them. And so, you know, I have to pay attention to the ideas as they come to me. Well, it's a great freedom to be able to chase different ideas and to pursue different kinds of work.

Yeah. Yeah. And every one of them reinforces the other. You know, when people say, well, you write movies and plays and, you know, nonfiction, you know, there's the are you crazy question that my editors often ask me. But by writing movies and plays, there's no narrative in them. It's all scenes and dialogue. Those are very powerful elements.

And too often ignored by nonfiction writers. And, you know, if you incorporate the kind of scenic construction in a nonfiction story or book, it gives it a tremendous amount of power. And contrarily, you know, if you take your skills of reporting and apply it to fiction, learn how the world really works, make it feel real and authentic, you you know it cross-pollinates and i think i'm a far better writer because i have developed these tools from different kinds of craft that's a great way to end this we just did three hours can you believe it

that's pretty impressive pretty amazing right there's like a time warp in this room yeah thank you very much man my great pleasure as well thank you very much bye everybody