The Joe Rogan Experience - #1726 - Chuck Palahniuk

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Chuck Palahniuk is the award-winning author of "Fight Club," "Choke," and other books. His new essay, "People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks," is available now exclusively through Scribd.com

the Joe Rogan experience good to see you man hey welcome back welcome back to you too I was very excited to talk to you because it's been about three years and during those three years it seems like censorship issues and issues of what you can and can't say and what isn't isn't acceptable.

They seem to be ramping up. out there because you tap into these super uncomfortable stories and you're willing to explore areas in writing that I think a lot of people would avoid. We talked about this the last time you were here, some of the more dangerous stories that you had workshopped and people had gotten upset at you for. But I really wanted to talk to you because I wanted to know how this is affecting you, how this weird climate of hypersensitivity and purity tests is sort of affecting your writing. This is the dead air part. Scooch up to the mic.

Okay. You know, and I don't want to kind of shoot my wad with a big term, but have you ever heard of absurdist existentialism? No, I haven't. Okay. Like a piece of two words together. You know, I used to, when I look back at the books that I really loved growing up, I see that they are now under the big umbrella of the very small phenomenon called absurdist existentialism. Do you remember the book Geek Love? Yes. Geek Love. Could Catherine write Geek Love right now? It is about a man and a woman who own a failing circus and they decide the way to save their circus is to have deformed babies. So they take insecticides, they expose themselves to radiation,

and they give birth to ultimately a whole crew of severely deformed children, plus a whole crew of children that don't live, that are in the circus culture, they're called pickled punks, those kind of deformed babies in formaldehyde. Catherine wrote that book. It was the first banner book under the new director at Knopf, Sonny Mehta. It was one of the top-selling books of the 20th century. It was a huge success. And it really is absurdist existentialism. huge success. And it really is absurdist existentialism. And the general idea is that life is so messed up, so unfixable, that we might as well go right to the crazy. And Vonnegut wrote it. Tom Robbins wrote it throughout the 70s. Still Life with Woodpecker and Matches, even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Nathaniel West wrote it. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in the 20s.

These people who had survived the Spanish flu and survived the First World War. And that there is a kind of a tipping point in the culture where things seem so messed up and so unfixable that you just sort of tip into this absurdist existentialism. And there's a fantastic joy and freedom in that. And so my goal is always to try to write the kind of book I want to read. And I want to write Geek Love because I want to read Geek Love, regardless of whether or not Catherine could write it. Because even if she wasn't dead, she could not write that book anymore. There's something about writing and reading that kind of stuff where you really, you can never capture it in any other medium.

And I think in some ways even audiobooks don't do justice to some of the darker ideas because you kind of want to piece them together in your own mind and as you're reading it in silence and the author's ideas are coming to life inside your head you know your own creativity and imagination are intertwined with the work of the artist to try to fill in the visuals of the work it's it's a place where that's the only way you can truly get the most out of those really twisted ideas well and because also to be made literal enough to film or even to be said out loud kind of destroys that intimacy where it only occurs in your mind. It occurs in the kind of sub-vocalization

and in the kind of sympathetic neural phenomenon that's happening when you read a verb. Studies have shown that your body thinks that you are running. Your body thinks that you are doing what the verb is saying. And you lose that when you hear it out loud and you lose it, especially when it has to be made literal enough to be filmed. Another absurdist existentialist book, Confederacy of Dunces. You know, John Goodman, God bless him, he has had that book optioned for decades, and that will never be a movie because it is filled with racist humor. It is filled with misogynistic humor, and it is filled with homophobic humor. It is completely an unfilmable book, but people adore Confederacy of Dunces, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. But it cannot be made literal enough to become a movie.

Yeah, there's books that were made at a different time where even today people don't want you reading them anymore. Right? And that might be one of them. Right? And that might be one of them. If that ever gets under the spotlight and people start examining some of the things in that book, that might be one of those books where people just decide you shouldn't be reading that anymore. Well, I think there's kind of a political aspect, too. I've seen some essays about why Mel Gibson can just get crazier and crazier and he's not canceled and why Roseanne Barr gets crazy one night on Ambien and she's gone. And a lot of these essays, for the most part, say it's because Mel Gibson is making people money

and that people generally like Mel Gibson. They really like Mel Gibson and nobody really wants to cancel him. Where supposedly Roseanne Barr had offended so many people and she was so difficult that people were really gunning for any opportunity to cancel her. And I think with Confederacy of Dunces, with these really beloved books, people like them too much to really put them under that kind of microscope. The people that do like them, right? Yeah. My worry is that people that don't even know about them or haven't read them get a hold of it. You know, I think that the books still have so much traction in the culture that they can't be canceled out. They might be passed hand to hand, but they will always be in print.

They removed Tom Sawyer from some schools. but they will always be in print. They removed Tom Sawyer from some schools, and there was some talk about censoring it and changing the words because the N-word's in it so much. You know, my book, Make Something Up, was the biggest censored book of 2016, and I think the only adult censored book of 2016. But it's still read. It's still out there.

Just because a book is kind of removed from libraries you know doesn't end the book what was so censored about it I didn't read that oh dear God it had it had a do you remember the story of mr. hand the mess yes it had a very touching story about the guy whose daughter ended up buying this horse over the Internet at an auction. And he realized that she was only buying the horse because it had this sordid background. And she intended to exploit this horse, you know, by having her friends take selfies with it. Oh, it was Mr. Hand's horse. It was Mr. Hand with it. Oh, it was Mr. Hans Horse. It was Mr. Hans Horse.

And also he was getting all these bids for tens of hundreds of millions of dollars from people around the world who also wanted Mr. Hans Horse for their own purposes. And this is just one of 23 different stories that were all more or less each offensive in their own way. No. It's not Roland Dahl. The Mr. Hand story was wild. Did you ever see the documentary about it? It's called Zoo.

Yeah. You know, a lot of people hate that documentary, but I have to like it because one of my best friend's brother in law made that documentary. So-in-law made that documentary. So officially, I love that documentary. Officially? Officially.

It wasn't the best, but how do you make a documentary about something that you can't show? You know, it's like they were in a weird position. Well, do you remember Into the Wild, the first big Krakauer book? When you go through that book, it's really fascinating because you know that Krakauer only had so much material about Chris McCandless. It's just a few months out of the kid's life. And so how does he deal with that material? So he starts in kind of after the fact, establishing the bus, the death scene. And then he starts in a very linear, deep flashback, taking Chris McCandless up to a certain point.

And then he expands for several chapters, saying Chris is not the first young guy at that age to sort of throw everything away and hit the road. throw everything away and hit the road. And he profiles maybe a half dozen sort of famous guys who did the exact same thing and kind of disappeared in the culture. And so he expands the theme showing that historically, it's not a one-off, that young men have always taken these kind of pilgrimages to find themselves. And then just before Chris McCandless is killed, he depicts himself climbing that steep mountain in Alaska by himself at the age of 23 and almost dying. And so he illustrates the theme over and over, both with McCandless in the present and with these historical figures doing the exact same thing. And then with himself explaining why this story is so compelling for him, because he did the same thing at that age and he didn't die.

And then we show Chris dying. And so if you're going to do the zoo story, you need to expand it beyond the story itself. You need to look for where it occurs and is sort of illustrated in other aspects of the culture, both historically and in other parts of the world. You need to expand the theme beyond just what actually happened. How would you do that? Oh, my gosh. Talk about the culture of people that are zoophiliacs? Exactly. You would go down that road.

You'd probably pixelate a lot of faces. You'd also talk historically. You'd find some academic to talk about it. It would have been very easy to do. But it would have taken a little more work. Yeah. Well, they had like recreations in that, didn't they? Like these actors or something.

They did. And they were always kind of soft focus, and there were shadows on walls. We should probably tell people what we're talking about. Mr. Hands is a video about a guy getting fucked to death by a horse. It's not necessarily the video that's available that you can watch, and we found it the other day and we watched it, is not the guy actually getting fucked to death by the horse.

It is just him getting fucked by the horse. Apparently they don't have the video of him actually dying or the one time that killed him. It punctured his organs or whatever it did internally that ruptured him. They had to bring him to the emergency room, and then the police were called, and they started questioning him, like, what's going on here? And then they found out that, well, the whole story was that it's legal in Washington State to have sex with animals.

Or it was. It was, yeah. Because of this death, they changed the laws. But these people would meet online. I guess they had like a website that they would go to. And then they would say, you know, hey, my buddy's got a farm. Let's party. And it wasn't even his farm.

He was the caretaker of some wealthy people who had these horses and the wealthy people had no idea that they were running a brothel. Yeah. The thing about Into the Wild is that's a story that many people can sort of relate to. wild is that's a story that many people can sort of relate to you can kind of relate to this idea that society and materialism and there's the the road that everyone's on is fruitless and and filled with angst and no one no one wants to live like that but they just do they do because everyone has before them but really you're better off just being free and just going into the wild like that that appeals to so many people the idea that the path that we're headed down with civilization is it's not healthy

it's not natural and ultimately it's going to be our demise so there's so many people that like the idea of going to the woods is really appealing the idea of getting fucked to death by a horse far more difficult sell like you know to make it relatable you know and i don't think it's ever going to be relatable relatable um but at least in the short story that I wrote, the main character makes the point or he explores the point that we find it funny because it was a white male engineer for like NASA or Boeing. Something like that. White male, heterosexual, middle-aged, successful professional. Yeah. And if it had been anyone else else it would not be a story and it would certainly not be funny but you take somebody who's perceived in the culture as having

all of the power and you show them getting fucked to death by a horse and dying on the floor in an emergency room dumped there by their friends with rutting mare pheromone all over his legs. You know, yeah. That's what makes it funny. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Is that what they did? They put rutting pheromones on his legs to get the horse to mount him? Yeah. Wow, I didn't know that part.

It's the other day at Buy Mart, which is kind of this discount department store in the Northwest. They had this huge table of half-priced things. And they were all, they had all sexy names. And they were little aerosol sprays. They were rutting elk pheromones. And I just had to buy them. You know, it's like the ultimate stocking stuffer.

It's like, who do I know that needs rutting elk pheromones? And they all have these kind of big type on the packaging that says, the bulls will come running. They'll follow you. They'll follow you right to your gun. They'll walk right up to you if you wear this. And so the idea of all these hunters spraying themselves with rutting elk pheromone so they can attract these kind of horny elk is just so appealing. Well, it is kind of fucked that when you hunt elk primarily, especially when you hunt with

a bow, you hunt them when they're fucking. I did not know that. Yeah, you hunt them in the rut. That's the whole idea. I elk hunt. So this is one of the things, this is my main way I get meat is I hunt. And I go bow hunting in the mountains. In Fight Club 3, the graphic novel that I launched last year, the year, the worst year ever to launch a novel,

I needed a backstory for the female character in Fight Club. I wanted her to be an orphan. So in the backstory, Tyler, who is this, you know, Tyler Durden, the eternal character, he seduces Marla's mother. And he says, I want to do furry play. And he seduces her out into the woods. And, uh, ah, no, I got it backwards. Uh, he has her seduce Tyler's, uhuce Marla's father into doing furry play. And so she's running through the woods naked, and Marla's father is dressed up as a cougar chasing her to ravish her. And then Tyler is in a blind with a bow and arrow, and he shoots Marla's father in the back. And he dies while rutting with Marla's mother.

That's how her father dies. And then Tyler, who is the paramour, convinces Marla's mother to basically do the same scenario. And as they're running through the woods, Tyler is dressed up as a grizzly bear, and Marla's mother is trying to be ravished. And then a real grizzly bear shows up, and that's how Marla's mother is trying to be ravished. And then a real grizzly bear shows up. And that's how Marla's mother is killed.

I think that is the best backstory I've ever written for a character. But, yes, I'm so glad that you went there. Yeah, that's what it is. The reason being is that that's when they congregate together in very specific areas and also when the males have their antlers in full display. Because elk antlers are, I'm pretty sure this is true, they are the quickest growing bone in all of nature. And they shed them every year. Did you see the antlers outside?

Do you see them out there? Those are only like six months old. Wow. So they have their antlers shed in the spring and then as the summer rolls around, they regrow them. And then when the fall is there, they lose their velvet. They scrape the velvet off and then they have bone. That's all bone. And they shed them every year. So are they bigger every year or are they the same size? Until they start going downhill. When they get older, when they hit like 13, 14 years old, then the antlers start shrinking

and the tines grow smaller and it's usually because they're starting to die. But that's a rare thing. Most of the time they die. They're killed by mountain lions or by other elk. They stab each other to death with those things. And we find them dead all the time.

Like every year you find one dead. They just stab them through the lungs and they stab them while they're down. It's really crazy. There should be a law, okay? They should make a law against that. Against elk murder? Yeah, against. This is horrible.

That's how they breed. Nature is horrible. It is horrible. That's how they breed. Nature is horrible. It is horrible. That's the least horrible because most of the time they get through it intact. Like when you kill an elk, one of the things that happens is you skin them and quarter them. And when you skin them, you find puncture wounds all over their body from fights. So generally speaking, they're superficial wounds. They're small wounds all over the place. But occasionally, one will hit another elk with such force

that one of the tines goes through the rib cage, and that's when they die. But it's more rare, because more rare than not, we find one dead every year, but they fight all the time. Like, they're establishing dominance,'re establishing dominance almost every day. It's just very, if there's a large herd of elk, maybe you'll find one a season. But the whole idea is you can find them better

when they're congregating like this. And the way you call them in is you either pretend that you're a female or you pretend you're a male. So you either pretend that you're a male that you pretend you're a male. So you either pretend that you're a male that wants to challenge them and steal their women, or you pretend that you're a female and then you've left whatever male used to have control of you. Because it's generally speaking like it's one bull elk that is the herd bull. So the biggest, baddest bull in the mountain. And he'll have 20, 30 cows and he'll be trying to breed them all.

And one of them occasionally will break loose. And the bull will risk his life and leave the circle of, leave the safety of numbers to go find the one that took off to bring her back. And that's, I killed a bull like that in this video that we did for Under Armour. That's the very specific way we killed it. We trailed the elk, and we made noises like a female elk, and this big herd bull thought one of his cows was left behind. So he came back to try to get that cow, and that's how we got him. Now, is that like a little call that you use?

Yeah, it's like meow, meow. It's this thing. It's like a Phelps game call, that's what it's called. Yeah. You blow it like a whistle. A friend was just showing me a video. He just went bow hunting for the first time, and he had one of those, and he was using it,

and he found himself in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by what he thought were wolves because they were barking in the dark around him. And he was terrified, and for a long time, surrounded by what he thought were wolves because they were barking in the dark around him. And he was terrified. And for a long time, he would just keep blowing the call. And he was also trying to retreat and find his pickup truck.

And ultimately, he realized that these barks were the elk themselves, that the male elk will make a barking sound that sounds very much like a wolf. And so it sounded like he was pursued by a pack of wolves, but he taped them and he showed me the video of these elk actually barking. How odd. That's a guy who really shouldn't be in the woods. If he doesn't know the difference between the sound of a wolf and an elk and he's terrified,

it's pretty clear. He's going to listen to this. John, I'm so sorry. I told your story. They have like a barking sound. They have like a barking sound. They make like a weird sound. But it's generally the male's bugle. They make a scream.

Have you heard an elk bugle? Oh, Jamie, you've got to pull this up because it's one of the wildest sounds in nature. And it's one of my favorite things. Like when you're hunting them and you're around them and you're hiding in the woods and you're sneaking up on them and you hear them bugle, your hair's standing up on end because they sound like demons in a fucking Hobbit movie. That sounds like... Do you remember in the 70s that was sold as the Bigfoot noise.

Was it? Yeah, that was the Bigfoot or the Sasquatch noise. I think there was a bunch of noises sold as the Sasquatch noise. But if they tried to say that noise was a Sasquatch noise, any elk hunter would go, shut the fuck up. You can hear that every year. Like you could find them. Bigfoot, you can't find. You can find that noise year. Like you could find them. Bigfoot, you can't find. You can find that noise.

It was the 70s, okay? We didn't have the internet. Have you ever heard the samurai sounds when he's speaking about a Sasquatch? It's one of the most ridiculous noises. There was these folks that were in the mountains of Northern California, and they claimed that they were surrounded by sasquatch and these sasquatch had a language and you hear the language and it it's so preposterous and so stupid sounding you know some things they just you just know you know like

there's no if ands or buts this is And this is one of them. The samurai sounds. It sounds like they're Japanese. So they're knocking on trees. They made recordings of this. So convenient that they had a recording device right when they were experiencing Sasquatch. But you also can hear when the men are talking and describing that these sounds are in the distance. You can tell they're full of shit. Like, you can tell they're full of shit.

Like, you can tell they're bad actors. They're not experiencing what they're saying they're experiencing. They're pretending. You can tell when they're pretending. Let me hear some of that. This is a bad version of it, huh? Not 500,000 views. I tried.

See if we can find where they start. Here it goes. Here. Here. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, right? We would have to sit here and listen for 20 minutes to get some really good versions of it,

but the sound was like... Like, it literally sounds like that. Like, it sounds completely fake. And these folks are trying to pass this off as a sasquatch language so what year 70s right yep 71 yeah back when everybody couldn't get good acid anymore and they were just going off into the woods trying to find things there was so many things that legend of boggy creek made so much money yeah Yeah. I could see everybody wanting to get on board for that. Well, everybody wanted to believe after the 1967 Patterson Gimlet footage.

That was the footage where it's like the dumbest, fakest looking footage of all time. This guy in a monkey suit that's just wandering through. That is a guy named Bob Hieronymus. It's a real guy who put this monkey suit on and confessed and told everybody he did it. What's funny about the Patterson footage is it is the footage that the people who believe in UFOs, or excuse me, Bigfoot, cling to the most. The Patterson footage is their holy grail. But the guy who made that footage was arrested for writing a bad check to pay for the very

camera that he used to film this. He was a fucking con man. And he even told people that he was going to go out there and film Bigfoot and then went out there with this camera that he kind of stole and then filmed his buddy in a monkey suit. They tracked where he bought the suit. It's like this – and there's video footage of side-by-side of Bob Hieronymus walking. Bob Hieronymus was this big cowboy fella, and he had kind of like an awkward gait.

And then you see there's – they did side-by-side footage of Bob Hieronymus walking next to the Bigfoot creature in the suit walking. And it so clearly looks like a guy in a gorilla suit. Like so clearly. And when you see Bob walking, it so clearly looks like Bob in a gorilla suit. Because he was just a big fella. You know, probably 6'3", awkward-looking cowboy guy. It's like you just killed Santa Claus.

Did you have any thoughts that that might be real? You know, when I was little, that whole Thor hired all, you know, cryptozoological world is so fascinating. And you want to believe that spontaneous human combustion, you want a certain amount of magic in your life. Yeah. Well, there's a certain amount of magic that's real. Yeah, meth.

Yeah, meth. Yeah, meth. Well, there's for sure there was a creature that was alive while people were alive that was a little hobbit creature. Do you know about that? Homo floriensis, I believe this is how you say it. They called it from the island of Flores. They found, and this is a creature that lived as recently as 13,000 years ago.

They found bones of these very small humanoids. And what they were essentially was a branch of humans that were wiped out. There was another version of them, I think in Vietnam, called the Orang Pendek. So this is a real animal that lived on the, yeah, Homo floresiensis. Homo floresiensis. And this is like established science. They have multiple skeletons and bones of these creatures. And there was a little bit of dispute initially.

They thought maybe it was like a deformed human that they found. But then they found a bunch of bones. thought maybe it was like a deformed human that they found, but then they found a bunch of bones and they found tools so that they know that these things probably use tools and were hunters and they think they might have been wiped out in the speculation. They might have been wiped out because, you know, they were competing for food and maybe even hunting people like killing children and shit like that. But there were little tiny humanoid people. Because there was a bunch of different kinds of humans.

In the transition between Australopithecus and Homo sapiens, there was a lot of branches of the human tree. And some of them made it to modern times, essentially. I mean, this is like during the ice age these things were alive this is really crazy so while people were all over the world you know building structures and while at the same time they were building um these huge stone monoliths in turkey there was a little three foot tall furry people that were living on an island in Flores. It's wild.

So there was a real Bigfoot at one time. It was a real creature. It's called Gigantopithecus. Have you ever seen that? Now was that the... There was one that a tooth came out of China and I thought, oh, that was debunked. Yes. No.

I thought that was debunked. No, there's jaw bones and everything. It's not just a tooth. It was a jaw bone that indicated a bipedal hominid, which means it stood up on two legs. And it was somewhere between eight and ten feet tall. I'm thinking of the Cardiff giant. Okay. Yeah, that's debunked. Gigantopithecus is established science.

I mean, it's a real animal in the historical record of creatures that died off. But this creature, they found this in an apothecary shop in China. An anthropologist did. I think it was in the 1920s. And then he had the people from the shop take him to wherever they found it. And they found multiple bones and teeth and jaw bones. And then as they pieced these bones together they realized they were dealing with a

forgotten primate and show and that image of the guy standing next to a recreation of Gigantopithecus it was in the orangutan family and it was a fucking enormous you know eight foot plus tall primate. So what happened? Died off. Just died off, you know, like many other things, you know. But it lived alongside humans as recently as 100,000 years ago. And maybe more.

Maybe more recently. The thing is, like, they have so many stories of a large, hairy primate. Like, the Native Americans have, like, 100 different names for them. And the thought is that these things probably lived a lot closer to modern times than 100,000 years ago, like maybe 20,000 years ago. I don't buy the just died off theory, okay? There's always— Well, we probably murdered them, if that's what you want to hear. I think the government...

Because things don't just die off anymore. You think the government killed Bigfoot? I don't think I can say that and still be on Twitter. But that little thing that you're talking about... The Orang Pendek or the Homo Floresiensis. You think they killed it off? I don't know because the Gates Foundation has been really active in that area, I heard.

Yeah. I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying that there are things we don't investigate for a reason. I see what you're saying. Yeah, it could be. I mean, we tried vaccines on them. They used them to experiment. Could be.

But I'm not going to go there. I'm not going to go there. There have been sightings of those little people things within the 20th century in Vietnam. But who knows if it's true. If there was a small population of those things living deep in the jungle, little tiny people like creatures. Well, and cross-culturally pretty much every civilization has got its little people stories. Yeah.

Well, I think they were a real thing. They find animals every now and then that they thought were extinct. Like, they just found a giant owl as recently as like a week ago that they thought was extinct for 170 years. It's a really cool looking owl. They thought it was, I believe it's in Africa. Is that it? Giant owl not seen for 150 years pictured in the wild for the first time. It's hard to tell scale from this picture, but these things are huge yeah the 1870s they thought they thought they were extinct

so they find shit in ghana okay there you go well if it's on youtube it'll live forever the uh you know the white cuckoo same thing there's something in the south called I don't know what it's technically named just pull this thing closer to your face if you just get it like a fist from your face it just sounds better okay there's a rare

white cuckoo that exists in the deep in the bayous of the south I don't know its official name, but supposedly there's a $10,000 reward if you can capture one or kill it. And so I've seen occasional fiction written about this mythical white cuckoo bird. Is a cuckoo bird, is that a wild animal or is it like a domestic thing? Like parakeets are domestic, but they're wild, right? You can find them somewhere. Cuckoos are wild, yeah.

Yeah? Yeah. Because the whole cuckold thing comes from cuckoos. It does? Yeah, because cuckoos reproduce by laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. And the cuckoo egg hatches first and it hatches biggest. And so the cuckoo nestling pushes the other eggs out and destroys them. Or if the other birds hatch, the cuckoo nestling kills them.

And so the parents end up feeding the cuckoo fledgling. And typically the fledgling is three or four times the size of the surrogate parents. is three or four times the size of the surrogate parents. And so it's kind of tragic when you see these pictures of house sparrows feeding a nestling the size of a chicken. And that's where the whole idea of the cuckold comes from, is that you're basically raising someone else's child, and you're being sort of used, and your own children have been neglected or destroyed so that you can care for someone else's child.

Whoa. That's where cuckold comes from? Yeah. Huh. I guess it makes sense. I guess that's a logical origin. Well, I've never heard that before. It's kind of tragic.

It is tragic. Well, birds are never heard that before. It's kind of tragic. It is tragic. Well, birds are tragic, period. It's a weird creature. You know? They get to fly, but they don't live very long. They get eaten by other birds. It's like it's just a fucked up, hardscrabble world, the world of birds. You ever seen videos of owls snatching hawks out of their nests? It's like just a fucked up hardscrabble world, the world of birds.

You ever see videos of owls snatching hawks out of their nests? Because owls hunt at night. And they snatch adult hawks or baby hawks? Owls are pretty fucking big. You know, like smaller hawks. There's a really cool one. It's like a night vision camera that they had set up on this nest because they're observing these hawks in nature. This is one of my favorites. It's a pretty good size.

They kind of look like juveniles, right? But watch the owl. Boom! Oh, ow! Oh, just grooming and then that. Like, hey, fuck. Poor owl. I mean, hawk. Well, now it knows how it feels. Now you know how I feel. The craziest animal I

ever heard of in in the womb is there's a shark I forget which kind of shark it is but they'll the the mother shark will have multiple sharks inside of her body and the baby sharks will start eating the other baby sharks around them and murdering them inside the womb before birth. Okay. Metaphor? Yeah. Basking sharks. Millions of eggs are created, sent to be fertilized.

The hatched embryos begin to eat the surrounding eggs, and in some cases, like the sand tiger shark, they eat other embryos too. So like one embryo will start eating the other embryos there's like images of it too like they did like some sort of like an x-ray or an MRI I don't know if it's real though the images do you do draw from the like when you're thinking about stuff, do you draw from how fucked up nature is in stories like this? You know, not very much because I'd much rather hang out at a party with a bunch of human beings than talk to a bunch of parasitic spiders. I really want to be around people, so I use storytelling as a way to just be in the world. Right, but I mean the cruelty and sadness of nature, does that ever make its way? But the way I do it, there's got to be a lot of laughs on the front end

because nobody wants to spend their time, typically when they're alone, in the waiting room at the hospital or the airport saying, oh, I want some more cruelty and sadness right now. No, they think you've got to sell them that this thing is going to be fun and lighthearted. Yeah. And then, boom, coat hanger abortion. Yeah. Do you remember, and I might have talked about this, but the old Whoopi Goldberg routine where she's the only black surfer chick.

And she does it all in upspeak Valley Girl language. And it's very fast. It's from the very early 80s. And she talks about being the only black beach girl, the only black surfer chick, and how she really has the hots for this one surfer dude. beach girl, the only black surfer chick, and how she really has the hots for this one surfer dude. And the two of them hook up, and she's in love, and she gets pregnant. And the whole thing, people are roaring through the whole thing. And then she brings it to the point where she's in a dirty public bathroom at the beach, pulling open a wire coat hanger, and then stuffing it inside of herself and giving herself a coat hanger abortion on this filthy concrete floor. And at that point, she's still Valley Girl up speak. And the audience is completely silent. The audience is horrified. And the contrast between

this low slangy language telling a traumatic story, the disconnect there makes it even more tragic. And the fact that she's not acknowledging the horror makes it even more tragic and also strangely funny in this completely nihilistic, horrible way. And at the end, you can hear a pin drop. And at the end, she says, so y'all got to come down to the beach and hang out with us. Just hang out with us. And she's still a character in so much denial. And she's

forcing the audience to carry the horror themselves. That is what I want to do. Where you have them laughing and laughing and laughing. And at the moment of the greatest laugh, you break their hearts really badly. And animals can't really do that. Nobody wants to see the cute kitten video where they all get dropped into the wood chipper. Why do you like those deeply uncomfortable moments so much? Because they're the same thing. That laughter is that relief, that ongoing relief of tension. You're creating tension and you're resolving it very quickly. And you're allowing people to sort of build up a greater and greater tension

because they're trusting you more. And you're getting in under their radar because you're gradually assuring them that you're never going to take them too far. And then once they're completely on board, then you take them too far. And you completely break their hearts when they're deepest in the story. And then you offer a kind of pale, lame denouement at the end. Some silly, sad little bit of comfort like Whoopi Goldberg does at the end of that Beach Girl story. What is it about that feeling of discomfort that brings you

joy or what that you enjoy giving to to people that are reading your stuff? Is it just that you don't like the cliche sloppy endings where everything is going to be fine and everything's great and the world is different in literature than it is in real life. What is it about these moments, like these moments of darkness where you do break everybody's heart? Why do you enjoy them so much? I enjoy them because they prove i'm not the only one i'm not the only one that's had these moments of complete humiliation or complete powerlessness um one story i've always loved is my best friend

in college his father was this mining professor and this very super macho guy and my best friend in college, his father was this mining professor and this very super macho guy. And my best friend Franz was like the son that just wasn't turning out right. And in their household, they had a bunch of kids, girls and boys. And one day, Franz's dad had all of his beer drinking football buds over to watch the Super Bowl. And Franz found this old doll that had been around the house for decades. It was called Sissy. And it barely had a hair left on its little doll head. And Franz sat there as maybe a five or six-year-old little boy. And he very carefully untangled Sissy's hair. And he backcombed it. And he teased it. And he dressed it into a big bouffant. And he even got

one of his mother's brooches. And he put that brooch through the front of this beehive hairdo to hold it in place, very Marie Antoinette. And he was so proud that he turned this really decrepit, ugly thing into something passably pretty. He had sort of redeemed it. And then he took it to his father in front of all of his father's friends in the Super Bowl and he said daddy daddy look I made sissy pretty and his father was so humiliated that he beat Franz right there in front of their whole peer group. He just beat Franz. And the story is so painful,

but everybody's had a pain like that. Everybody has done that thing out of innocence and expression that for whatever reason got you slammed. And nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about it because it's so painful and because everyone thinks they're the only one. And so if I can take some of those stories and bring them to light, it creates this opening for everyone to say, oh my God, I once did this thing and my parents reacted badly to it or it destroyed my life and I've never been the same. And my parents reacted badly to it or it destroyed my life.

And I've never been the same. And when Franz told me that story, he was almost weeping. But he was laughing as he was telling the story. Because he had to keep laughing in order to keep telling the story. And that's what I'm always shooting for. Those are the moments, like those kind of stories are the ones that hit people the hardest because you know that the child has no idea that what they're doing is going to be uncomfortable for anybody like they have real pride in it like here's a parallel is the story that you told before uh i guess three years ago when you were talking about the writing workshop that you had done, where

you were talking about someone else's story, about how they were jacking off in a jacuzzi and their anus got prolapsed. And this woman at the writing workshop felt comfortable enough because you told that story to tell her story about being in the Girl Scouts or the Brownies, the Brownies before the Girl Scouts? The heating pad story. The heating pad story. Yeah.

Where she had put this vibrating heating pad on her vagina and had her friends do the same thing. And the mom came home and she was only seven years old. She thought it was cool. Like, look, I found this thing. And then the mom beat her with the wire that was plugged into the wall and called her a dirty whore. And she never orgasmed again. And she said, in summation, that if I could tell the story that I had just told that was so, so self-debasing and so

humiliating, but also make it funny, funny then that would that gave her proof that she could make her own story funny and that maybe she could someday go back to her mother and say remember that heating pad and that maybe ultimately she could have an orgasm because until you can kind of reveal these things and resolve them they run the rest of your life and you're never going to get beyond them. Yeah, especially when you don't see it coming, when you're just a child, and then you do something that you think is totally fine,

and all of a sudden you're getting the fuck beaten out of you, and you don't understand why. All you did was make a doll pretty. Like, what happened? Well, and it occurs in so many different ways. Several years ago, I got a job house sitting a farm that was famous for being haunted. It had all these paranormal studies. So as soon as the owners were gone, I invited a bunch of psychics out to do a seance. I wanted to know. And my father had been murdered about five years before that.

And one of these psychic women that I'd never met before said, there is a man standing with you. He's wearing a white t-shirt and he's holding something wooden. And he is really, really sorry he did what he did but he was in a very very young man at the time he was only 23 or 24 he's holding something wooden and he's about to dismember you does that make any sense whatsoever and I just kind of nodded my head and I said I have no idea what you're talking about but when I was maybe three or four years old, my mother had taken my siblings into town, and I was, you know, in our rural farm. And I put a fender washer around one of my fingers,

and I couldn't get it off. And so I waited until a finger was swollen up and turning sort of purple black. And I went to my father and I said, can you help me with this washer thing? And my father had said, I can help you, but I want you to learn a lesson that you have to, there are consequences to everything you do. And I will help you with a washer if you accept responsibility for your actions for the rest of your life. And he took me and we had to wash the axe that we kill chickens with. We had this hatchet and he took me and we sharpened the hatchet and we washed it really thoroughly so there were no germs on it. And then he had me kneel down by the chopping block and put my hand on the chopping block.

And at the time, there was no drama. It was just complete clarity. My father was helping me to resolve the situation. And at the last moment, he missed my hand with the axe. The axe went into the chopping block. And then we went inside and used dish soap to take the washer off. And I knew that story would just make my mother insane. So I never told anybody my entire life that story. I never told my siblings. I never told anyone. And I had more or less forgotten that story until this woman I had never met said,

there is a man standing over you in a white T-shirt and he's holding something wooden, and he's really sorry, and it's something about dismemberment. But he was very young, and he handled it the way a very young father would. I was so shocked in that moment. And so sometimes the story isn't always a kind of tragedy of the child being punished for doing something good. It can come from so many different directions. And the point is to bring those stories forward. Because when you do, you create the opportunity for everyone else with a similar experience to avoid something that they have suppressed for so long.

How accurate was her depiction? Do you remember what your father was wearing? He always wore a white t-shirt. He was probably wearing Levi's. She said that he was really meticulous about his hair. And that was the age of Vitalis. And my father and Vitalis, he was just, you know, his hair always had to be perfect. She really hit it on a lot of different levels. And then she turned to a good friend of mine and she said, and there is a woman with you and she is sprinkling you with tiny blue flowers. Does this make any sense whatsoever? She's standing over you and she is just raining you with small blue flowers. Does that mean anything to you?

And my friend, Ina, started to sob at that point. She was uncontrollably sobbing because no one knew this. No one in our peer group. But every year, Ina would secretly go to her mother's grave. Her mother died when Ina was a teenager. But every year, she would go there on the anniversary of her mother's death, and she would sprinkle forget-me-not seeds on her mother's grave. And she had never told anyone she did that. And the idea that someone would somehow pick up on this image of tiny blue flowers being in turn sprinkled on Ina was really another one of those uncanny moments.

And we can't put those together. We can't look for a pattern and we can't sort of express them unless someone expresses them first. Is that the only experience you've ever had with psychics? That's the... expresses them first. Is that the only experience you've ever had with psychics? You know, I've had two others, but they were really unpleasant because they were really unresolved. Boy, when I was maybe 19, I knew someone who did numerology. And I provided all these numbers, date and time of your birth, all these numbers.

And weeks later, I asked him what turned up. And he said, it is so unpleasant. It is so horrible that in good conscience, I can't tell you. You don't want to know. You're too young to know what horribleness lies ahead of you. And I can't tell you. And that was the end of that. So great. And then one of the, more or less the night that I started writing Fight Club, I was invited to a New Year's Eve party. And there was a girl there doing tarot cards. And she did a reading. She laid all the cards out. And she looked at the cards, and she seemed kind of stymied. And she said, I have never seen such bad cards in my life. I have never seen such horrible, horrible cards. I can't even tell you. You don't want to know what these cards seem to indicate.

Yeah, I don't want you to have to live with this knowledge, so I'm not going to tell you what the cards predict. So those were my only two kind of psychic friends' experiences, and they were both so unpleasant that I've never really sought out those experiences. And how long ago were they, was the numerology one and the card reading, how long ago was this? The numerology one would have been in like 1981, and the card reading would have been in like 1983, no, 1994 or 1993.

But has there been anything in your life that was so horrific that they couldn't imagine telling you? You know, except for my father's murder, not really. Maybe that was it? Maybe that was it, but, boy, that doesn't seem like it's big enough. I don't know. How was your father murdered? Dad.

Dad was murdered in May of 1999. was murdered in May of 1999. He had answered a personals ad for a woman who was looking for a boyfriend. And the ad was headlined Kismet. I believe that's the Arab word for fate. And dad met with her. Her name was Rita. She was a lawyer. She had worked in the prison system in the Midwest. And dad was really, really taken with her. She was really bright and really smart. And she had an ex-husband who had sexually abused her daughter from a different marriage.

And they were pressing charges against his ex-husband, and he was going to go to prison. And she had met him while he was in prison, and she was doing legal work. And she had helped him get out of prison. So she helped him get out of prison. She'd married him. He had abused her daughter. She divorced him. She was prosecuting him to send him back to prison. Then she met my father. And this ex-husband had said that if he ever caught her with another man, he would kill them both. So my father was going to pick her up, and she was going to stay at his house in the mountains until the time of the trial. And as he was going to pick her up, he was going down this mountain road on his property, and a giant boulder broke free, and it rolled down the hillside, and it blocked the road. He couldn't get out. So he spent the day with this, a lever, forcing this boulder off the road.

And then he took a couple extra hours and he made a sign that said Kismet Rock so that he could label this boulder as a kind of landmark. But when he brought her back to sequester her, and he cleaned the house incredibly. The house was just neat as a pen and stocked with all this food. And, you know, he really planned to have this fantastically sort of idyllic time sequestered with his new girlfriend. And he labeled the rock to surprise her. And then he went to pick her up. And when he went to pick her up, the ex-husband showed up, and he shot my father. And my father and the woman took refuge in her house, and the man set fire to the house. And the house eventually collapsed. And the coroner says that they were both dead before the fire got to them.

And the coroner says that because of the angle of the shot, my father probably took about 20 minutes to die because the bullet ruptured his diaphragm. So with every breath he would have been accumulating air below between the lung and the diaphragm. And so every breath would have been more and more shallow because his lungs would have been more and more constricted by this air above the diaphragm, but that eventually he'd suffocated. And all of this sounds horrible and tragic, but it forms this fantastic pattern in my father's life because my father,

when he was very small, he lived in northern Idaho with this enormous Ukrainian family. And his father went crazy one day. This is all public record. I've talked about this a lot. But his father took a rifle and walked around the house and tried to kill him, my father, and ultimately killed his wife, my father's mother, and then killed himself. But my father's earliest memories are of hiding underneath a bed as his father walked around the house in logging boots with a rifle calling his name, trying to get him to come out so that he could be killed. Jesus Christ. And so my father spent his entire life

sort of looking for his mother because as his father was trying to kill him, he was trying to find his mother who at that point had been killed. And so my father really had this kind of serial pattern with women. He was always looking in a way for the woman, the woman. And ultimately, he was shot by the man with a gun in the way that he would have been shot when he was four years old. And one of the uncanny things is that their bodies were only preserved because a bed on the second floor of this structure, as it was burning, the bed fell over their bodies and insulated their bodies, and my father had escaped his father by hiding underneath a bed when he was a small child. And the fact that the Lonely Hearts ad was headlined Kismet and the fact that this boulder rolled down in front of my father's car just as he was leaving.

That prevented him from getting there in time where he probably would have been able to escape before the ex-boyfriend arrived. Or was, I don't know, there's so many odd, bizarre coincidences and synchronicities. You know, you could sort of, you would have to really dismiss a lot of things in order to make this not something significant.

Not fate, or not some reoccurring theme woven into time. And in a way that, you know, understanding all these different aspects of it, it provides a comfort that it doesn't seem like this random thing.

It seems like something that my father's, some aspect of my father's life that was coming full circle and was finally being completed. And maybe I am clutching at straws, and I'm just a kind of person looking for significance, which is what we all are, but I'll take comfort where I can find it.

Did he ever explain to you why his father was looking to kill him and looking to kill his mother? You know, half the family says we're Polish, and half the family says we're Polish and half the family says we are Ukrainian because we're from Galicia, a contested area between the two countries. And half the family says that Grandpa Nick was a great guy until he went to work in the shipyards in World War II and he was struck in the head by a block and tackle. And after that, Grandpa Nick was crazy. a block and tackle. And after that, Grandpa Nick was crazy. And half the family says that he was always crazy, that he was always narcissistic and violent and not a good person. Narcissistic and violent is pretty common. But narcissistic and violent with a head injury, I think it's probably both. If I had to guess, knowing what I know about head injuries,

I have a lot of experience with people that have had head injuries and because of all the work that I've done with the UFC and just paying attention and reading a lot on brain trauma. You know, bring it back to the Roseanne Barr story. You know, that's what made Roseanne Barr. She was hit by a car when she was 15. Roseanne Barr was sent flying through the air. She was driving or she was walking across the street when she was 15 years old on the way to school.

And a woman had the sun in her face in the windshield that you couldn't see and hit Roseanne Barr. Roseanne Barr was a straight-A student, was a whiz at math, and then spent the next nine months in a mental health institute afterwards. She couldn't count anymore and literally was knocked crazy. So when Roseanne Barr's thing happened and she got canceled, I went out of my way to reach out to her. First of all, because as a comic, I think she's one of the most important comedians in history.

Like if I look at the top great comics, she's in the top 20. People forget, but during her time when she was on top, Roseanne Barr was a monster. She was so funny. She was such a good stand up. And on her show, the original Roseanne show, she was so good.

It was such an important cultural milestone that show the show was created by brain trauma something about brain trauma leaves people impulsive uh it makes them wild they're reckless a lot of times more prone to violence. And these actions are directly created to CTE, which is chronic traumatic encephalopathy. I am so glad you went down that road. And who is it that I can't think about? The guy who did the vision studies that ultimately became motion pictures, Meyerbridge. studies that ultimately became motion pictures. Meyer Bridge. There's so much anecdotal evidence about people with traumatic brain injuries becoming geniuses or having their breakthrough after being struck in the head. And Meyer Bridge was a guy who had failed at everything. He sold

China. He sold encyclopedias. He was a kind of late 19th century failure. He failed at everything. And then he was going across the country in a stagecoach. The stagecoach tumbled. Meyer Bridge was in a coma. And when he came to, he was Meyer Bridge. He was brilliant. He was the man who more or less invented motion pictures. He was a hero. He was kind of the Tesla of his time. And he was nothing before the stagecoach incident. And there's so much anecdotal evidence that shows that when people have been struck in the head, they come out as a kind of savant or really bright in some way. I think they come out with less fear because they come out more impulsive. That's one of the more significant and reoccurring themes

when it comes to traumatic brain injuries. People are impulsive and I think impulsive people are more likely to take chances and I think that ability to take chances sometimes pays dividends like you can you you can become more successful because you're more willing to take risks you're not afraid paralysis by analysis is what haunts so many people because they just constantly think about well what if I do that well what if it fails or what if it this what if that? Whereas wild people are just like, fuck it, let's do it.

Let's try it. Let's see. Let's go. And those people tend to take more chances. And I think if you take more chances, you're more likely to have more breakthroughs and more successes. more successes and to be less insecure would be a pretty positive factor if you consider someone who's doing something risky like with Roseanne stand-up comedy Sam Kinison same story was hit by a car when he was five years old his brother wrote about it his brother his brother Bill uh wrote about it and um he wrote a book called Brother Sam or My Brother Sam, and it was about Kenneson, how there's like Kenneson 1 and Kenneson 2. When Sam was a boy, he was a normal kid. Everything was fine.

Then he was hit by a car when he was five years old. I think he was five, and then became a fucking wild man. Just once he was hit by a car, you just couldn't contain him. He was crazy. He was like, when he was a preacher, he was the wildest, most irreverent preacher. He had just violent tendencies. There was a sign at the comedy store

that for whatever fucking stupid reason they fixed, but it was a sign in the back parking lot where there was a bullet hole in it where Sam had pulled out a revolver. I think it was because he was in some sort of a dispute with one of the other comics and decided to shoot this sign. And we would always go by that sign and touch the bullet hole. Like, this is where fucking Sam Kandis and Sean.

You know how crazy you have to be to bring a gun to the comedy store and just shoot a sign? And you're a performer there. Not just a performer, but the most celebrated performer there at the time. You know, this is in the 80s when he was... I mean, there was a period of time, I think, from like 1986 to 1988,

where Sam Kinison was the greatest comic that ever lived. He couldn't sustain it because he was doing so much coke, and he was partying, and he wasn't really writing because he was just into being a celebrity and just having a lot of sex and doing a lot of drugs. But that wild, chaotic, irreverent, risk-taking behavior is probably directly connected to him getting hit by a car. Just a tiny tangent before we go right back there. but are you aware of the histoplasmosis culture?

Histoplasmosis. Somewhere toxoplasmosis. Toxoplasmosis. Yeah. Toxoplasmosis. The fighter. The parasite. Right.

Fighters going to Mexico to get it? No. You haven't heard? Ah. I didn't know they go to get it. Really? Yeah. Apparently you can go to, there's been this program where you can go down to Mexico and be exposed to toxoplasmosis because they're finding people who carry the parasite are much more reckless and aggressive.

Yes. They have a higher pain threshold. And among boxers and fighters and wrestlers, everybody wants to have toxo. Wow. You did not know that. No. Google that. I did not know that. No, Google that. I need to know that.

Because, you know, I interviewed Sapolsky from Stanford, who's one of the premier experts in Toxoplasmosis. And he's... Is he the Polish guy? Yes. Okay. Sapolsky found that when he was doing his residency, they would find when people had motorcycle crashes

and one of the doctors told him check that check the victim for toxo and it turns out there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims of accidents that are positive for toxoplasmosis because this cat parasite makes them reckless we should probably explain the parasite to people that don't know what we're talking about. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that grows inside cats' digestive systems. And the way it does this, it's one of the most fascinating evolutionary processes. It tricks rats into being sexually attracted to cat urine.

So literally, their testiclesicles swell their dicks get hard and they become fearless it rewires their sexual reward system to make them horny for cat piss and so there's just there's videos of like toxo infected rats just like running up to cats and the cats are like what the fuck the cats are trying to get away from them the cats are like don't understand why this rat is running up against him. The rat is literally trying to get eaten. So this parasite rewires the brains of the rat, gets the rat to go near the cat, gets the cat to eat the rat so that this parasite can grow inside of the cat's gut. And then they tell humans you have to stay away, women in particular,

when they're pregnant, stay away from cat litter. Because if you're near cat shit, you might get this toxoplasmosis and it could severely impair the developmental process of the child when it's inside the womb. And then, before I forget, I've got to do a shout out to Sassy. Okay. Sassy is a Boston Terrier, one of my students' terriers, and it's a very sweet dog. So please don't cut that out. Okay. Shout out to Sassy.

You know, I've never really told this story, and I'm going to tell it in a kind of oblique way. But I was a fantastically shitty, cowardly writer. I wrote, when I see bad student writing, it is never as bad as my student writing. I have never had a student, no matter how miserable a storyteller they were, that was as bad a storyteller as I was. And one day I was coming out of the gym in downtown Portland. It was on a Friday night. It was raining. It was early dark. So it was probably eight o'clock. I was going to a cash machine at 6th and Morrison, no, 6th and Washington. And I was on my Schwinn bicycle.

And as I came around a corner, a whole mob of teenagers slammed me. And they all started beating on me with their fists. And they were all yelling numbers. They were yelling, 10 points, 20 points, 50 points. And because I was on my bike, I was able to brace myself and I didn't fall all the way over, thank God. And as they ran off, I got back up, but I was really beat up and my jaw was broken. And as they're running off, they're laughing and howling. And I called the police. I said, you know, I've just been beat up really bad. The police said, don't take it personally. It's just a game these teenagers do downtown

in big mobs. It wasn't you. And they didn't even take a report. They wouldn't take a report. But after that beating, I started writing really good stuff. No, seriously, I started writing stuff that was off the charts different than what I wrote before that beating. And I'm not saying go out and slam your head against a concrete wall, but it was night and day. I went from writing really shitty, you know, fake Stephen King stuff to writing stuff that my teacher was really shocked by.

And it was, I could still hear those kids just pounding on me. I also had a hoodie up, thank God. And so a lot of the blows got kind of, you know, they fell against the side of the hoodie. So it wasn't knuckles to my face. It was to the woolen hoodie. And I was also very young. But that was night and day in my writing process.

I guarantee you that had a fact. It had a factor, rather. There's... You know, and Jordan Peterson, when he talks about rough play, you know, this is kind of a jump. But I think that is why Fight Club has

resonated so well with so many people. Because they never had that kind of a jump, but I think that is why Fight Club has resonated so well with so many people, because they never had that kind of rough play with, especially maybe their father, because I'm not sure if mothers can really provide that rough play. And so when I think when people see Fight Club, there's an aspect of that unexpressed rough play that resonates with them, is I wish I'd hadressed rough play that resonates with them. I wish I'd had that rough play as a small child. It was very different for me because as a boy growing up, I spent a lot of time doing martial arts. So I was sparring a lot from the time I was 14 to the time I was 21.

I was hitting the head a lot from the time I was 14 to the time I was 21. I was, I was hitting the head a lot. And, um, when I see things like fight club, I enjoyed the movie because I can separate my idea of what would that be like if it was a real person from fiction and enjoying it. But when I see people just willing to get punched and willing to get hit in the head, I know way too much about the consequences of brain trauma. And it's such a roll of the dice. I know people that have been hit in the head

and never been the same. And they live in darkness, meaning they live in a cloud of depression. Their brain doesn't work anymore unless they seek treatment and there's some pretty novel treatments that are available now from a lot of the work that's been done with soldiers with ptsd they've done a lot of work with magnets they use magnets to sort of rewire the brain and stimulate areas of the brain like very very powerful magnets and

there's been some therapy that is really promising in that way i know there's a female mixed martial arts fighter named kat zingano and she had some really good success with that where she was like really uncoordinated from one bad beating that she had up her hormones up her cortisol levels like she couldn't stop gaining weight like her body was all up from one fight that she actually won but it was a against this woman named Amanda Nunez who's one of the greatest if not the greatest female fighters of all time she's a monster and she just knocks everyone senseless and she had cat in real trouble in the first round but cat survived and wound up beating her later in the fight and stopping her

but the consequences of the beating she took in that fight haunted her for years and maybe still do I haven't talked her for years. And maybe still do. I haven't talked to her in a while. Maybe still do. But head trauma is one of the most risky things. For someone like you that maybe got something good out of it, maybe got a danger or an anger or just a little bit of recklessness from it. For every one story like that, I know so many stories of people who are just gone. And I've known guys from the beginning of their career where I've met them when they were like 21, 22 years old.

Maybe I've called their fights and maybe I've seen them in gyms training with them. And then I see them when they're 34, 35 and they're fucked. They're fucked. I could see it in their face. I can see the weirdness in their gait. They lose some of their coordination. And you can see it the way they even move around in training. They take shorter steps.

They look like they're less stable. They just have their brain's ability to communicate with the body has been beaten out. It's confused. The reflexes are gone. It's all just from getting hit in the head. So this is basically a kids don't try this at home kind of moment. I would let my kids fight before I let my kids play football because I think football, there's something about that running into each other that's the worst.

Because I think football, there's something about that running into each other that's the worst. Like, I think you can learn how to fight and learn how to fight really well and avoid most of that shit. I think I got brain damage, for sure. I don't know how much. Like, I think you probably got brain damage from that day. If you got your jaw broken, you got hit pretty hard. You know, I'm not sure whether it's germane, but my father was a boxer. He was a champion boxer in the Navy.

And I knew that my parents' marriage was over the day we came home from school. And all my father's boxing trophies were in the trash. He'd thrown them all away. So, yeah, it was just part of the equation. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of people that got hit in the head that didn't know that it was – it carries lifelong consequences. Too many people thought of it as being frivolous. Like they would spar in the gym and they would spar essentially like a fight.

Like a lot of the sparring that we did when we were kids, it wasn't really sparring. It was fighting. You were fighting. Like you would go full blast all the time. People got knocked out in the gym all the time. And then they would be back in the gym a few days later sparring again, which is literally the worst thing you could ever do when you have significant head trauma.

But there's also people that get hit in the head and they learn Spanish. All of a sudden they can play the piano. The brain is fucking weird, man. It's just the chemistry of the brain is weird, right? Like, how everyone's very so greatly. But the fact that you could have a knock to it, and then all of a sudden you develop new talents.

Well, and also there's the aspect of comfort, because there's that whole Temple Grandin group of people who find comfort in slamming their heads against things. You know, severely autistic children, they slam their head against the wall because there's a kind of comforting chemical thing that happens in doing so. Oh, really? I didn't know that. I just thought it was like a tick or something. Like when they're slamming their head against the wall,

there's comfort in the impact? Yeah, I understood that it was a comforting behavior. Hmm. I don't know, man. That is so interesting about that one incidence when you were assaulted. I wonder if that's it, man. It's like a mini sort of Kinison situation or a Roseanne Barr situation. And the only way people can make these patterns, can identify these patterns, is if people come forward with these anecdotes. Yeah. And anecdotes ultimately will lead to something empirical, but they're a beginning. Yeah, they're a beginning. There's enough of them out there that I think we get a map of the territory. There's something there for sure.

And a lot of times people have forgotten these incidents. They think that they don't, they're just one of, that they didn't change anything. But then later when they can identify them according to a major life change, like the fact that my writing went from garbage to something sellable. Do you think there's a possibility that just the trauma, like the emotional trauma of being assaulted and the anger and the, just the pain that comes with that and the, the fear that comes with that might've just changed the way you view the world enough so that you were willing to express yourself in a more dangerous way?

world enough so that you were willing to express yourself in a more dangerous way? No, you know, I'd had, uh, I'd had very frightening things before that, but they didn't, they didn't have all the physical component. You know, I'd been robbed. I'd been, you know, humiliated, just, you know, different public things like that. Yeah. That was the only time I was ever really physically assaulted, assaulted. Yeah. It's wild. That might have been it. I mean, look, there's a history of it.

I think maybe every MFA program should include boxing. At least one good head shot. Have you ever seen chess boxing? Chess boxing? No. It's really kind of dumb, but also kind of interesting. They would do like a round of boxing, beat the shit out of each other, and then play chess. Ah, okay. Yeah, they combine the two of them together.

It's apparently very popular. See, these guys. So did they play chess before? It looks like they played chess before. Yeah. I'll say, okay. And then they go to their corners. They put gloves on.

And do they play chess afterwards as well? Are they Russian? Is this like the two great Russian passions? Yeah, chess and... They look Russian as fuck, don't they? They do, they do. Look at them. Now that guy looks like he's been hit before.

And he's playing... Yeah, they're sweaty. Yeah, they're breathing super heavy. And their mouths never close. So is it a round of boxing, a round of chess, a round of boxing, a round of chess? Is that it? This is from 2008.

I don't know that it caught on. What are they listening to? Oh, yeah, good know that it caught on. What are they listening to? Oh, yeah, good call. Yeah, right? What are they listening to? And gives up the fight. That he's totally missed. Nikolai withdraws his knight to reveal a double attack on Frank's bishop and queen.

And what do you know? He doesn't see that his queen can be taken. After Nikolai's body shots, this is the killer body blow. The Russian takes Frank. You've been hit in the head. I think that would be the worst thing to do is play chess. If I'm hit in the head, I don't... I haven't done any hard sparring in a long time, but I had a bad skiing accident.

Not a bad skiing accident. I had a skiing accident two years ago where I was going around a corner, and this lady was losing control. She didn't know how to ski very well and she was just sliding right into the trail. And I had two options, hit her or go around her and surely fall. And so I tried to go around her and I wiped out and I banged the back of my head off the ground hard, like bang, like really really hard and I cracked my shin I developed an insufficiency fracture in my shin which is like where the shin bone meets the cartilage cracked it was pretty painful but I could stand on it

but then I got on the ski lift with my daughter who was 10 at the time and I I just fell over and my wife saw me fall over. She goes, you fell over like an old man, like an uncoordinated old man. Like I had a hard time getting up. My coordination was all off. Like everything was off. And for the rest of the day, I was like dizzy and confused. And I recovered.

Like the next day I was okay. But I never got checked out. But I'm pretty sure from all the head trauma that I've had in the past that that was a concussion. Pretty sure. It was hard enough. It was enough. I mean, I went down, man, and my head fucking, I had a helmet on, which helps, but my head

bounced off the hard, you know, packed down ice of the ski slope. But if I had to play a game after that, oh, my God, that would be so fucking stupid. This is going down another, ah, screw it. You know, my philosophy is I can tell the truth because history can do without one person. It doesn't really matter. You know, there have been a lot of people. There will be a lot of people, so it doesn't matter how. You know, there have been a lot of people.

There will be a lot of people. So it doesn't matter how bad I mess up. And if I mess up and I actually say something decent, but sometimes I wish there was somebody around. Do you remember Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find, the short story that she is most famous for? I don't remember this. At the end, the outlaw shoots the old woman. It's a fantastic moment in fiction. And he turns to his sons and he says, she would have been a decent person if there had been someone around to, I think he says, slap her every day of her life. Yeah.

It so doesn't work on every level. But the story is magnificent. Flannery O'Connor gets away with it. And sometimes I just find my idol running so fast that I wish I could call room service and say, would you send somebody up to hit me really hard? that I wish I could call room service and say, would you send somebody up to hit me really hard? Because my friends who are fighters, they say that after you've lost in a fight, your idol is knocked down and you're so at peace and your testosterone levels dive and they stay low for quite a period. And it's all set up so that you don't go back into competition before your body is fully recovered. You're not going to go back into a fight with an injury. And so

sometimes I think that if I could just, you know, have a punching service and just, no, seriously, in the old days, you had a car, you went out and you started your car on a cold day, and it would idle really high. And it would idle until it reached a certain core temperature, and then the carburetor would knock down the idle. Yeah. And sometimes, especially as a much younger man, I would just feel like my idle was set way too high. just feel like my idol was set way too high. And rather than take medication, if I got slammed or I got hurt, I could knock the idol down. And I think sometimes when you're a young, reckless person, you're just looking for something to knock the idol down so that you can live a more sort of profound, examined life. It makes sense.

I think that the better solution is exercise. Just wear yourself out. That'll knock your idol down without the brain trauma. And for the most part, that's what I've always done, is that kind of exhausting. What kind of exercise has been what suits you best? You know, I always thought it was lifting weights. And then last year with the

lockdown and the gyms closed, I went to a stone yard and I ordered six dump trucks of granite and I built a castle. Really? I had this promontory of land. I owned an island property surrounded by National Park. I don't have any neighbors for a mile and a half in any direction. But I had this promontory that looked into a fantastically beautiful gorge. And I always thought I wanted to build a kind of ruin right there. And I just set out and I built a castle. I built one room with tall peaked windows. You built it all by yourself? All by myself. Do you have photos of this online? No, no. You know, it's so big that it's really difficult to photograph.

And for years... Okay, I'm one person. It doesn't matter. For years, I've been collecting concrete skulls that are done by different artists. It started... I met this young woman 30 years ago and she had made like five really beautifully cast concrete skulls.

And I'd bought them all, and I just sent them outside. And so every once in a while, I would meet an artist who would make very realistic concrete skulls, and I'd buy some more. And so as I built the castle, I would chink them into the walls like an ossuary. And so among the rocks, you occasionally find a very green, very sort of grisly looking skull. And I spent the whole year climbing the 16 foot fiberglass ladder with huge rocks in my arms and having the worst leg cramps of my entire life every night. The cramps would keep me walking around the house for hours.

But I got a castle out of it. And that was the funnest physical fitness I've ever had. Well, it's a natural kind of fitness, that kind of work. Well, it's a natural kind of fitness, that kind of work. And it's some of the most difficult in terms of exercise. Like rucking is really difficult. It's sort of boring, but rucking is you take a heavy backpack and you just walk around. Like it's very hard to do.

It's not glamorous by any means. Like people want to do difficult things that are exciting. Like you want to go to CrossFit. Like you're there with a bunch of other people that are pushing each other. Let's go, go, go. But just putting a heavy backpack on and walking sucks. And what you're doing is similar to that, right? You're just carrying stuff.

And it also has the chess game because you're holding three-dimensional Tetris-like objects that weigh 80 pounds, 90 pounds. And you have to carry them up a ladder, maintaining your center of gravity. And then you have to decide how they're going to fit in relation to the preexisting ones already cast. And so you're playing this giant primitive Tetris game that is like playing chess. And that part of it is really fascinating. Do you secure the rocks with anything other than gravity? I put a ton of steel and wire and mesh inside. I do a kind of Roman construction. And my understanding is that when the Romans built,

rather than create forms for the concrete, they used cut stone mortared together, and that was the form. And then they put all the concrete between these two stone forms. So the stone you see on the outside is actually the form that was used to hold the concrete in place until it set. And so I build up the kind of two outer walls of stone, maybe a foot, maybe 18 inches. And then I lay in a lot of steel and then I pour it full of concrete in the center. So it looks like it's a stone wall that's two or three feet thick, but it's really a concrete wall that is just faced with stone. So when you say lay steel, like are you using rebar? Like what are you doing?

What kind of steel and how are you doing it? You know, it's rebar, but it's also galvanized metal fencing. And years ago, masons always told me, if you want to make a porch stoop, if you want to just make a fairly small piece of concrete, dry cleaner hangers. Wire hangers from the dry cleaners, because they are coated with a non-corrosive coating, and because you can tangle them up and bend them up, and you can just smash them in there and pour the concrete on top of them. And they will hold the mass together in a

really magnificent way and they will not corrode because they're covered with that kind of plasticized coating. And better yet, you can get them for free. Go to the gym. Every gym has got a huge box of dry cleaner hangers that people have left behind. And so any gym will give you 500 hangers. And so they're free and they last forever and they make great reinforcing inside of limited amounts of concrete. So you just used a bunch of stuff in there? A bunch of stuff, but it had to be stuff that would not corrode. Right.

And did you take lessons in how to do this? Did you read a book on it or watch a video? You know, that's part of the comfort thing is my dad did concrete. My dad learned concrete work in the Navy. My maternal grandfather was a big stone worker. It's kind of a Ukrainian thing as well. And so I grew up, my poor brother and I, we grew up cleaning old cinder block because my father would get cinder block that would have plaster and stucco on it. My brother and I had

to stand out in the desert with hammers and clean this cinder block under the beating hot sun for hours and hours. So my brother and I grew up mixing concrete, mixing mortar, and I grew up mixing concrete, mixing mortar, hod carrying, where you carry the live mortar around. And so there's something enormously comforting about the work now, because it has got that link to my childhood. And did you have, what kind of design did you put down before you placed it in? Did you just do it by feel and by look or did you have like an actual blueprint of what you were trying to do? Did you render anything?

Really just by, you know, seat on my pants. I knew the windows had to be standardized, so I used a standard form for the windows. But beyond that, no. So is this going to be something you live in or is it just for fun? No, no. We threw a huge Halloween party there for local kids last weekend. And the kids loved it. It was just this fantastic sort of place structure.

Right. How big is it? It's really only about six rooms and a couple of courtyards. Six rooms? Yeah. So you made six rooms this way with just carrying stones around and coat hangers and cement. And rebar and galvanized grid work that you use for flat work. Yeah.

How long did this take you? It took me mostly two years. I had started it actually the year before lockdown. But as soon as they were announcing lockdown and you started to see the first few masks, I went to the Washougal Lumberyard and I said, I need all the bags of mortar that you can get me. And I started out with like 45, 50 bags of mortar mix because I just knew that things might get really tight really fast. And I ordered in all my stone from Metro Landscape. God bless Metro Landscape because I know they listen to you. Yeah, and then I was off.

But the only thing that was missing is that camaraderie that you get at the gym where you're with people. Right. Yeah. And I missed that. Yeah, that is nice. That's a big part of the experience for a lot of people. That's one of the things that people really missed during the pandemic was gym culture where you fellow people agreeing to suffer and exercise and exert themselves. And also, Jim, we overlooked the fact that there's a lot of discourse at the gym

that I think maybe in particular men have to be involved in a task in order to sort of maintain a conversation. And so if you're doing something, you're not just talking yeah and so i think a lot of things get worked out while people work out uh and we overlook that yeah there's a there's a thing that happens too where there's an alleviation of tension from like rigorous exercise we're really getting after it that it makes conversations easier you know like i've had some of the funniest conversations with my friends about their wives or their girlfriends. They'll tell you shit about what's going on in the middle of a set. Like, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do, man.

I can't take this anymore. And they'll drop the weights and be like, fuck. They'll tell you things where they don't feel as vulnerable. They don't feel as whiny either because you're all lifting weights together. Well, and also the lifting weights thing is an activity that is designed in this Sisyphean way to end in failure. Unless you do fail, you haven't gone far enough. Right. And that was the old punk saying. Punk musicians in my salad days, they always said, don't touch the brakes until you hear a glass break.

That unless you go to disaster, you will regret not having gone far enough. Do you know the idea of that, of going to failure, is disputed now by some pretty prominent trainers? Like, have you ever read any of Pavel Tatsulin's stuff? Do you know who he is? read any of Pavel Tatsulin's stuff. Do you know who he is? And people have been having this debate since as long as I've been in weight rooms, since the early 80s. So yeah, I know a lot of people both ways. Yeah, Pavel's idea is that if you can do 10 repetitions, you should do five,

but you should do five many times. So instead of just going to 10 and then exhausting your muscles, and then going to eight and the next one, then going to seven, you just going to ten and then exhausting your muscles and then going to eight in the next one then going to seven you should go to five and then take a long break you should take like five minutes in between sets most people don't have that kind of time five ten minutes he was saying and then ten minutes later do another five put the weights down just have a conversation drink some water hang out relax that You're not there to exhaust your body. You're there to get stronger. And he's like, and strength is a skill, and you need to work on that skill.

And so instead of doing, you know, like say if you go to 10 repetitions and you could do 10 sets of 10 three times, and on the third time you're just absolutely at failure. Instead of that, do six or seven sets of five repetitions. So you're actually doing more work, and it's not as exhausting. And it doesn't blow your muscles out the same way, but it actually makes you stronger in his eyes. This is very disputed.

I don't want to say I train that way, but I'm not the strongest guy in the world. So I don't know who's right or who's wrong. And know uh my friend rob's gonna be here tomorrow he's an actual strong man and they don't train that way they they they lift the heaviest fucking shit they can and almost break themselves every time and when they're like he does those log presses when he gets to this he's like he could barely get it above his head. You know, and another thing that Chuck will regret bringing up. Oh. Oh.

Have you ever done steroids? Yes. When I've done steroids, I find I lose all kind of mental acuity. That I'm completely a physical being. I am just nothing but physicality and endurance and strength and energy. And I don't write a single word. Oh, that's interesting. And, yeah.

So you get just so jacked. Well, what kind of stuff are you doing? Almost always oral Diana Ball. Well, always oral Diana Ball. And I like writing more than I like that. So that's never been very appealing because I have to sacrifice the writing when I go down that road. That's interesting that it kills your creativity. Maybe you're not working out hard enough when you're on them.

And the kind of working out that you're talking about where it is steady and involves rest and camaraderie and talking, I get a lot of writing done during that time because I'm always talking to other people or to trainers, bouncing ideas off of them to see whether they engage with the idea or whether they have a similar experience or whether they'd seen the idea in popular culture already. So I'm constantly testing material on people at the gym. And so that leads to that more sort of subdued training that you described. Yeah. I would feel like maybe the requirements of your body when you're doing steroids, they ramp up so significantly that it takes over your focus. Because when you have hyper levels of

hormones, hyper human levels of hormones, hyper human levels of hormones, your body has stronger requirements. Like your body thinks it has to do more. That's why it has so much in it, you know? And it's interesting, like, you can buy stuff that's legal, or used to be able to buy stuff that's legal.

Some of the most potent shit I ever did, I could buy at GNC. There was this stuff they used to take. It was probably terrible for your liver. It was called Mag-10. And I remember they removed it from the market years ago. But you used to take it, and oh my God, it was incredible. I gained like 10 pounds. I got so fucking strong.

I was like, I can't believe you can just buy this stuff at GNC. But that stuff, whatever that stuff does, like that's not sustainable. Like there's certain things like testosterone replacement is very sustainable because you can keep your body at a natural level, like, you know, a normal level. And it just accounts for the aging process. like, you know, a normal level. And it just accounts for the aging process. But when you do cycles, like heavy things like that stuff, that mag 10 stuff, or Anivar, or there's a lot of other ones that you could do cycles of, like, you can't sustain it. It's just not good for you. You know, and after a certain age, you kind of choose your priorities. You know, do I want to

live in this giant house that needs constant maintenance? And I have to plan every move so that I'm around a gym and clean protein. And how much turkey do I want to eat in one day? You know, I want more. Yeah. My time with performance-enhancing drugs is all about martial arts. It was all about increasing my ability in martial arts and recovering from injuries.

It's a pretty significant factor in recovering from injuries. Like if you have muscle tears or any kind of a knee injury and you're doing rehabilitation, there's some stuff that you could take that significantly speeds up the process of recovery. We're talking like you could take five, six months off of the process. You know, another thing that I've noticed among my friends and my contemporaries is that the people who did a lot of recreational drugs when they were younger, they did acid, they did mescaline, they did everything. They did everything except for steroids. As they've grown older, they've never done steroids. But my friends who didn't do any recreational drugs, now that they're in their 50s, edging into their 60s, they're doing massive amounts of steroids.

Really? Yeah. So people are either in one school where you did tons of acid and then nothing, or you are in the other school where you were completely straight edge, and now you're doing every steroid you can get your hands on. Who do you know in their 60s is doing steroids? A lot of people. Really? Yeah.

The guys at the gym trying to get jacked? Let's just say guys who are not aging well. Really? Yeah. Guys at the gym trying to get jacked? Guys who are not aging well. When you say steroids, you mean hormone replacement from a doctor, like legitimate hormone replacement? You're talking about hardcore stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mexico, dark web.

Trying to be a bodybuilder, that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's not an aging out gracefully thing. It seems to be a kind of not going into the dark night kind of Dylan Thomas thing. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It is fascinating that there are chemicals that can make your body bigger and stronger. It's fascinating that you could take things and your body grows bigger and stronger and more manly. But it's only available for men.

There's not really a thing that a woman can take that makes it more womanly. There's not like a hormone that a woman can take that accentuates the waist-to-hip ratio or grows her breasts or anything along those lines. It's really only a masculine endeavor. That's because we're controlled by the patriarchy. Has this been explained to you? It has. That if this was a matriarchy, there would be a female steroid that would turn women

into Pam Anderson. I don't think it's possible. The problem is biology. It's like the same reason why there's nothing that makes your dick grow. Okay. I would debate that. Please do. Well, years ago, I got to do three autopsies with a medical student. She was preparing corpses, cadavers, for a medical lab the next day. And it was two women and a man. And the man was maybe 80, 85-year-old physician. And she explained that he had been self-medicating with steroids late in life,

maybe for 20 or 30 years even. And when we popped his chest open, his heart was enormous. And she took out this huge heart, and she said, this is steroids. Steroids. Yeah. And when we, we what they call it we freed the testicles which was freed them i like you say that like they're in prison yeah oh god oh but it was called sectioning but we had to cut the penis lengthwise

But it was called sectioning, but we had to cut the penis lengthwise. And he had a huge schlong. And she said it was also steroids. Really? Yeah. That's just what Donna said. Okay. How does Donna know?

Was she there at the beginning? I have no idea. Was she there with a ruler? She told me. She told me. I didn't know that. I've never heard that, that it makes your dick grow. But it does make sense because I was talking to someone who – When female bodybuilders do a –

Yes, there you are. I wasn't going to say that. I was going to say someone who had transitioned, tried to transition to male, like a trans woman or a woman, would become a trans male and then went back. And the dilemma was the size of the clitoris. It changed pretty radically and it couldn't change back. So that seems to be an argument in Donna's favor. It is an argument in Donna's favor, now that I'm thinking about it. You got to get the right balance where your heart doesn't explode, but your dick gets really big. Or you could just find a hobby, okay? Oh, you could.

Come on. We're not going to live forever, Chuck. Yeah, well, there's more to life. Okay. Maybe there is for you. Some people like to ride BMX bikes off the side of a fucking cliff. My buddy Andy, Andy Stumpf, he does those fucking squirrel suits, those flying squirrel suits where you jump off cliffs and soar through the mountains. He held the world record for it.

That seems to me ridiculous. It makes way more sense just growing a bigger dick with steroids than doing that. Boy, you know, oh, boy. This really, it's hard to argue with guys. Okay. As my father would say, when it's so big that it hangs in the water, it's too big. In the water of the toilet? Yeah.

Yeah. I would say that's pretty accurate. Yeah. Yeah. Unless that's your thing, you know? But still, when you think for practical purposes. For practical purposes for normal people. Then I go back to Mr. Hands.

Mr. Hands clearly needed something larger than what a human was capable of providing. But the flip side is if you are that big, then you're basically only dating mares or women who've had a bunch of kids. I'm not going to go there. I would imagine a woman who's had like six, seven kids. I'm not going to go there. That's blown out. I'm not going to go there.

And with that in mind, do you mind if I use your bathroom? Yeah, please do. It's a lot of coffee. Oh, I get it. Yeah, go ahead. It's just the same ones, folks. Yeah, take a left out there. Oh, my God.

We'll be right back. Yeah. The ones out there, you mean? Yeah. What about them? Well, I think it's interesting when I talk to people who have sort of broken through in their profession, they typically buy a really stupid thing really early on. That's the stupid thing I bought early on.

And that's why I want to talk about that phenomenon. Yeah. Because I think it's really sweet. We're still rolling, right? Let's talk about it right now. Yeah, those dragon dog things, what are those things called? Foo dogs.

What? Foo dogs. Foo dogs. Those dogs, I bought those in 1994. I had just gotten on TV and I was making some money. I was like, wow, I bought those in 1994. I had just gotten on TV, and I was making some money. I was like, wow, I got some money. And I had an apartment. And actually, maybe I moved into the house.

Maybe it was 96. I moved into a house in 96. I rented a house. I think it's then. And I went by this place that had imported sculptures and stuff from Bali and Indonesia. It was cool shit. I bought those big dogs. And then the Buddha.

I bought the Buddha when I was on Fear Factor. Big, giant, golden Buddha. I bought a bunch of shit like that. So was it because you had nothing as a kid or did they symbolize a kind of accomplishment? No, they just look cool. I thought they'd be cool in my house. Do you regret it? No, I still have them.

I would have given them away if I didn't like them. I love them. My wife hates them. That's why they're here. I talk to so many people when they get a check, they sell a book. They go out and they buy one big thing that is not the brightest thing, but it is something they never would have considered before. I bought a pair of $6,000 Armani water buffalo pants. Ooh.

Yeah. Water buffalo pants. Water buffalo pants. Water buffalo pants. How are those for breathability? I wore them on Conan O'Brien. Sweated like a pig. And I thought somehow that I was going to maintain the same waist size for the rest of my life. And there's a really small window of time when you can wear water buffalo pants with a 29-inch waist.

Well, you seem pretty slim. I am, but, you know, the sand settles differently over time. So those poor water buffalo pants. They just sit there somewhere? They just sit there. They also shrink, right? If you just, like, get them wet and then let them dry out, don't they contract? I've only worn them twice.

Oh. Yeah. They get really dusty is what they get. That's one thing I don't think I've ever had on is a pair of leather pants. I don't think I've ever had a pair of leather pants. Everybody wants to be Jim Morrison for like 15 minutes. Yeah. Of course. And they're also incredibly heavy. There was a designer that came out with these floor-length leather skirts a few years ago, and they looked terrific on the runway, but they weigh like 45 pounds.

Really? Yeah, and so women would not wear them because, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, they're so thick, like a belt. Exactly. Oh, God, yeah. That would be very heavy the things women wear i mean it's it's quite amazing that they have decided to wear these torturous devices

on their feet that they could barely walk around in and they're so desirable like those weird fucking stiletto heels and the straps that go over your toes and they give you porn feet yeah they give you those those feet are pointed in the air and they're just the arch is a bit like that it's a porn foot that's a porn foot yeah we while the shoes are on you mean yeah yeah oh mimics the leg. It tenses the leg as it's tensed during coitus. And it puts the foot in the shape of the foot as it's in coitus. Is that why they wear them? There was a great book called Survival of the Prettiest. It was about 25 years ago.

And it was all these studies that empirically broke down why we find things attractive and why we stylize our bodies in certain ways. And, you know, it's all basically to mimic different levels of arousal or availability. Right. That's what lipstick's about, right? The idea of accentuating the color of the lips. Lipstick also culturally marked Roman prostitutes who would give oral sex. Right. And so it was a way they badged themselves. But the female body becomes more pale during estrus because so much blood has gone to the menses.

God, I don't even know these words. God, I don't even know these words. And so that's why paler women have traditionally been perceived as more attractive because it's unconsciously associated with ovulation. And so the more pale you are, the more likely you are to be ovulating at that moment. And lipstick also heightens that contrast. I'm shocked by that because I would think that tan would be more attractive because women are always tanning. You know, the ovulation theory is the one I've always heard.

It's that the paleness is a signal of high fertility. Right, paleness with the bright lips. Yeah. Huh. I always thought that the reason why they wore high heels is that it makes their butt look bigger. Like it accentuates the stance. Like when you're on your toes, your butt kind of sticks out. or high heels is that it makes their butt look bigger. Like it accentuates the stance.

Like when you're on your toes, your butt kind of sticks out. And it arches the lower back, and it tenses the leg, and it puts the foot into that toes pointed at the ceiling sort of shape. What a – Also, there's another factor we're not supposed to talk about. People find crippled people enormously appealing. They do? Some people. Because you can run them down.

I know guys. Run them down? Like chase them down. Oh. They're easy to catch. So the idea is that women in high heels can't run. Exactly. It's a kind of hobbling.

Right. That makes them appear more attainable. Oh. And I know people who will only go for people on crutches. What? Or people with canes. What? Because that attainability, that vulnerability, the cheetah looking for the antelope that's-

Got a limp. Yeah. Yeah. I want to fuck the one with a limp, okay? It is very strange, the unnatural aspect of fashion and wardrobe choices and the things people wear and why. You know, and it's so fascinating. Yeah. You know, and also it signals socioeconomic levels, socials.

It signals aspirations. It badges us as to, you know, does she like what I like? Does he like what I like? Do we have anything in common? Is this an invitation to approach the person? So what's the deal with lingerie? Why do we wrap the Christmas presents? Oh, you know, things are so much more attractive

when they got just a little bit of bathing suit. You know, for me, it's language. I cannot watch porn in a foreign language because unless I can understand that layer of erotic messaging, it is wildlife kingdom. It doesn't even occur as anything erotic. Right. You need the conversation. Yeah. I need dirty talk. And that's why lingerie, because it's occluding just enough,

but it's also signaling high availability. And we need that occlusion. We need that sense of mystery. It is funny that a bikini is somehow or another at least as sexy or not more sexy than naked. You know, this is a really coarse thing I tell my writing students. And I'm probably going to get called out for it, and I won't be able to say it anymore. But it's all about withholding, and it's always about a very gradual reveal. Imagine if you're a stripper and you walk out on stage fully naked and you say, this is my vagina.

Any questions? It's not going to work. Right. this is my vagina. Any questions? It's not going to work. And so it's about going out there with as much clothes on as possible and then demonstrating a really desirable physicality and then about very slowly revealing the truth because nobody wants the full truth. A slow reveal. Oh yeah. To build the tension. Because we all know what's going to be ultimately revealed. And it's about maintaining that dopamine, that anticipation,

the reason why the buildup to Christmas is so intense and that Christmas is always a really shitty day. We want that dopamine to last as long as possible before the reveal that it's just another day that's one of the more interesting things about humans when it comes to sex is that we're the only animal that requires that sort of mystery and romance and the the chase and the whole just the the the slow tension of it all that it makes it more exciting for us. Like animals just want to fuck.

Oh, yeah. No, no. You're projecting on animals. Really? No. Animals. I have no experience with animals. But I think you're selling them short.

I bet animals have this enormous history of jabbing each other with antlers in order to have that moment of glory. Yeah, but they're fighting for the opportunity to fuck. Have you ever watched a male elk fuck a female elk? It's hilarious. From your point of view... He jumps on top of her and slams into her like it's a one-shot

pump. She gets flattened to the ground by the enormous weight of his body. And then she kind of bucks up and gets back up to her feet. And that's a wrap. That's it. Oh, I can't believe I know this. Are you familiar? And I know birds do this, but I believe mammals actually do this, that if they are impregnated by a male that is not of their choosing, they can ejaculate the semen very effectively so they don't become impregnated. Really?

I've seen videos of sparrows doing this. Huh. And, oh, dear God, I wrote about it in a book called Snuff. It's been adapted in the porn industry as the interior pop shot where different... Cream pies. What? And they squeeze it out? Exactly, but they can really spray it out.

And sparrows do this very effectively. There's a lot of YouTube footage of sparrows spitting it out. And so, yeah, if you get a lousy elk, I think, you know— I wonder. Well, I don't think the lousy elks get to breed with the females. I think they're pretty picky. That's the whole reason why the males have the giant antlers and fight off the other males. They want the dominant male because they need strong genes to survive wolves and bears and the trips through the mountains.

Boy, I'll take your word for it. What do you think? I think, like, first of all, elk populations are not that high. I don't think they could be frivolous with cum. I think they have to make as many elk babies as they can. I don't know. I think some of the does are just riding the elk carousel. They're cows.

Cows, okay. Yeah, it's cows and bulls. They're riding the bull carousel. You think so? Yeah. This is the 21st century, okay? Yeah, it's cows and bulls. They're riding the bull carousel. You think so? Yeah. This is the 21st century, okay? They're liberated? Yeah.

They're dirty hoes? Yeah. They are not. They are not. They're living life to the fullest, okay? It's interesting that porn is so prevalent but yet so forbidden and so taboo that it's not really – it's sort of thought of as a that it's not really, it's sort of thought of as a bad thing and not really studied.

But when you look at the amount of people that consume it, it's an insane sort of hidden consumption in our culture. And when you go, if you go to Pornhub or one of those places, it's a lot of it is like stepmom stuff now. I don't know why and I don't know what happened, but I don't remember this being a thing in the past. Okay. One thing that has kind of changed the old languaging of fantasy is Michel Foucault, S&M, leather bondage. All of that was kind of based on master-slave relationships. All of that was kind of based on master-slave relationships.

And that whole languaging of master versus slave has been completely displaced in the last five or six years. Because I believe it's seen as racist in the same way that the master bedroom can no longer be called the master bedroom. What do they call it now? They call it the largest bedroom or something like that. There's a big relanguaging of anything that uses the term master. And so I know, I've heard, I'm told, in gay culture, it's no longer master and slave anymore. It is, and it was daddy and boy for a while. So it was going down the incest road. Or it was bull and, no, bear and otter.

So it's going down the animal road. So it's either going down the incest road or the animal road. And now it's going down that weird road where it's owner and puppy. So you got a bunch of puppies on the side and that's the new terminology. Oh God. And so that pet owner and the pet is the new metaphor that people have eroticized. Maybe it's a lockdown thing. It might be a lockdown thing.

A lot of things have broken psychologically during the lockdown. That might be one of them. They changed motherboard technology descriptions. It used to be master-slave, or when you would set motherboards. I don't know what they call it now. Do you know what they call it now, Jamie? I believe they, because that was the thing. I used to make my own computers and used to have to set the jumpers on the motherboard,

and you had to set it to a certain way, and the way you would read the books on descriptions. Source and replica, as opposed to master and slave. What about brake cylinders? Master brake cylinder? Is the term slave? Yeah, there was master and slave for brake cylinders. Wow. The master cylinder is the

main cylinder and each wheel has a slave. How weird. I think it's now bear and otter. Otter cylinders. Boy and puppy. The stepmom How weird. I think it's now bear and otter. Otter cylinders. Boy and puppy. The stepmom thing is strange, though, because it's so prevalent. And the women I know are really proud to be MILFs. Yeah?

Yeah. They'll talk about how their teenage sons, their friends have voted them the biggest MILF. Oh. And they take a real ownership of that. Well, it's a recent category, right? It's like Stacy's mom's got it going on. It's probably the first one. That's where it started.

But the women are just, women that are in the gym all the time, they maintain their hotness like way into their 50s now, where that was not the case when i was a boy when i was a young fellow you go over your friend's house and their mom was 50 that was a wrap that lady was done yeah sunset boulevard norma desmond's character was 50 oh and in retrospect we think of her as being you know 70 years old. Yes, exactly. But meanwhile, there's porn stars that are in their late 40s that are really hot. It's crazy.

And that whole genre, the MILF genre. Because I think, especially for men that are older, if they're watching porn, you don't want to watch porn at someone that's your daughter's age. You want to watch a hot lady that's a little younger than you that's keeping her shit together. Well, and I think that there's something affirming in that is that when you see an older person in any field who has kind of maintained a kind of sense of vitality and attractiveness and healthiness, that they are presenting for you as well. They're proving that at that age you can also be relatively youthful.

Yeah. It's also an impressive display of discipline because we know it's not easy. You know, if you see someone who's 50 years old and she looks incredibly fit, you know, like that's a person who's putting effort in. There's something impressive about that. Like that's an exceptional person who's putting effort in there's something impressive about that like that's an exceptional person most people don't have the willpower they don't have the discipline to keep showing up and keep putting after a while they just quit and start eating donuts you know it is the discipline and there's also almost something spiritual about it because

that sort of self-denial. I think that was a lot of the charm of the nerd is that the nerd was almost like a – the nerd has kind of morphed into the evil of the incel. But previously, nerds were very eroticized because there was that sense of almost like a novitiate or a novice that they didn't have a kind of sexual awakening. Yeah. They were in completely cerebral kind of character. They weren't a corporeal character. Right.

They had no carnal awareness. Right. They were just studying and you could go to them for knowledge. You get information. They knew how to fix things. Yeah. The, yeah, that's a, the incel is a weird one right because it used to be like in the dark like people didn't think about it that much until it became a term and then there

was that one guy that drove into that crowd of people i think it was in canada and he devoted that to elliot rogers oh did he the young man with a gun, yeah. Right, the guy from Santa Barbara, right? Wasn't that? Or Los Angeles, yeah. Yeah, I think it was in Santa Barbara where he shot a bunch of people and that was his complaint too, that women wouldn't fuck him.

Right. That's a conundrum. Like, how do you fix that? Well, you know. Without prostitution. I can't remember the last time. Did we talk about Gunnar Heinzen? I don't know.

I'd love to say. Gunnar Heinzen is a German academic. He wrote a book called Sons and World Power, Sonnen und Weltmacht. His whole theory about Western civilization is that all progress has come because at different points in history where there were too many second sons. Because the first son will inherit status and position automatically. There's going to be a place in society and there's going to be reproductive opportunity for the first son and resources. But for the second, third, fourth sons who get an education and are looking for a place in society, there will not be a place. So it's those sons who go out into the world as explorers or who ferment revolutions because they're not guaranteed a place, they're not

guaranteed a mate. And so they have to go out into the world and cause trouble. And so Gunnar Heinzen really tracked everything from Cortez up to the Arab Spring to this surplus of second and third sons. And only if they're educated, if they come from a class that educates them and leads them to think that someday there'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock gods, and then they realize that's not going to happen. Then they go out and they cause trouble and history changes. That makes sense. And so antifa, incels, you know, that energy goes in a lot of different directions.

Antifa and incels, they're very similar, right? When you think about them. No one's lining up to fuck Antifa guys. And it's usually why they're so angry, right? I'm not going down that road. I live in Portland, Oregon. I know you do. Yeah.

Why? They'll burn my house down. Why don't you get out? It's going to implode. All the cops are going away now. You're losing 40% of your police department, aren't you? It's a dream. It's a dream.

Yeah, like a Biggie song. It was all the dream. No, it's like a Portlandia series. It's like the 90s are alive in Portland. Do you enjoy the chaos of the Antifa in Portland? Okay, we're going right back to absurdist existentialism. And as an absurdist existentialist, I'm kind of okay with everything except for Beagle experiments. Yeah, the Beagle experiments are rough.

Yeah, I draw a line there. Yeah. You know, I watched a movie I was loving the other night with Matt Dillon, a horror movie called The House that Jack Built. I was loving this movie. It was by a Dutch director, and he was cutting together the narrative scenes with a lot of stock footage. So it had a really kind of crazy style to it that I hadn't seen since Run, Lola, Run, the German movie. So I hadn't seen that kind of crazy energy since the 90s. But at one point in a flashback scene, a little boy takes a duckling out of the water and takes a pair of shears and cuts its leg off.

A live duckling. And then puts it back in the water and watches it swim around in a circle because it's only got one leg. And I turn the movie off and I won't watch the rest of that movie. There's just certain roads. Animal torture. I can't go down that of that movie. There's just certain roads. Animal torture. I can't go down that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Is it a real duckling? Did they really do it? They showed the trailer. Yeah? They show it in the trailer? Yeah? Yeah.

I don't want to see this. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, fuck. Oh, yeah. It is real. Yeah. It's real.

And it was a... It was probably... I thought it was a terrific movie until that moment. Up until that moment. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, fuck. Oh, yeah, it is real. Yeah, it's real. And it was a... I thought it was a terrific movie until that moment. Up until that moment. Yeah. And what makes me feel really conflicted is that he's also beating women to death with car jacks in really hyper-realistic, violent ways. And I'm sitting through that and eating popcorn.

But the moment you cut the leg off a duck, I get upset. Is it because you know the duck's not an actor and it's not, it's real? That's got to be it. Either that or I'm a total asshole. I think it's probably it. I think I'm a misogynistic douche.

I think that's it. I hate women. Joe, I hate women.che. I think that's it. No, I think it's... I hate women. Joe, I hate women. Fuck. I think you just... There's a thing we've all come to be accustomed to violence in films with human on human violence because we know that that's not really happening. Whereas if you know a duckling is not a good actor.

So when you cut the foot off of a duckling and you see it happening. Yeah, but then I go to a restaurant and I order a duck and I know it's happening somewhere. Right, right. So I'm a double douche. I hate women and animals. I don't think either of those statements is true,

but they'll get cut into music at some point. You remember the scene in Apocalypse Now where they kill that bull? No. You don't remember that scene? Thereocalypse Now where they kill that bull? No. You don't remember that scene? There's a scene. See if you can find it, Jamie. There's a scene in Apocalypse Now.

No, that wasn't a real duck. Or it wasn't a real leg. PETA defended the scene. Oh! Oh, that's good. So just for context. Feel better. We'll watch the movie again.

There it again. PETA defends Lars von Tiers, the House of Jackbilt, against backlash over graphic animal mutilation scene. PETA assures critics that the serial killer drama that no animal was harmed during the production. Well, that's good. Hot bull. There you go.

So they probably just taped its leg or something and then scooped it up and took the tape off its leg and just, you know just CGI'd the cut. But the bull in Apocalypse Now was real. Oh, okay. And it was a – and that's a weird one, right? Because they definitely kill bulls and they definitely – I mean, we eat steak all the time. But the way they did it, they did it – I think they did it with a sword, right?

Is that what it was? But they killed a real bull in the filming of this movie. Well, El Topo, where they shoot all those rabbits? I don't know that movie. Magic Mountain.

The Mexican director who was supposed to do the original Alien movie but there's a scene where the gunslinger walks through a huge pen filled with white bunnies and then starts to blow them away. And we see each rabbit exploded in a fairly close, you know, a close-up shot. So it's real rabbits dying. Yeah. And the rabbits are screaming and

dying. So probably why one of the most popular movies of the 70s, El Topo, doesn't get played very much. I never even heard of it. Yeah. He was. Yeah. There it is. There it is. Not showing the rabbits, but they're all dead there.

Yeah. What kind of fucking goofy movie is this? I don't know. The movie looks terrible. It was an enormous midnight movie through the 70s. Really? And they put together a huge consortium of really gifted people and this guy was supposed to direct

it and it was going to be called Alien. And at the last moment he bowed out. He couldn't direct it. So that group of really gifted people decided to make their movie anyway. And that's how Alien got put together. So Ridley Scott was second choice?

I thought so. Yeah, that was my understanding. But the whole creative group was put together with Geiger and everybody. Oh, wow. And that's why it's such a fantastic movie because it was put together from the best of the best. That is one of the rare movies from the 1970s that it, well, not the rare movies it holds up, but science fiction movies it holds up.

You know why? I'm going to tell you the magic. Okay. Okay. Take it from an old person. How old are you? 75. Really?

You look great. You know what I find really promising? What? Last week when Margaret Atwood got dumped on for being a TERF, did you see that? No. She made some social media comments about women and trans, and people got very upset about it. But what I found most touching is that when the mass media reported on this whole upset, they reported, they said, middle-aged Canadian novelist blank. Middle-aged.

How old is she? In two weeks, she'll be 82 years old. Wow. That makes me a child again. That's amazing. I love that. They have a lot of faith in science up in Canada. That's what that is.

Yeah, in Canada, they live to like 200. Yeah, you're going to live forever up there. So God bless Margaret Atwood, okay? Anyway, what we loved about Alien, until I was sitting at the Island View Drive-In with Linda Ramos, space travel had been depicted as clean and glamorous and exciting with good haircuts and great fitting clothes. And it was everything, everything. It was the Seattle World's Fair. It was the Jetsons. It was Lost in Space. It was everything.

And for the first time with Alien, we saw what space travel was really going to be. Just an extension of drudgery and shit show. You're working in a factory that goes through space. The end. Right. Right. Because they were smoking cigarettes, sitting around eating, complaining about budgets. Complaining about the food.

The food was crap. The food was crap. And they were talking about bonuses. They were complaining about bonuses. And someday there was going to be a payoff. Yeah. And they were going to do this one noble thing. We've got to answer a distress signal.

And you're fucked. You're fucked forever. And that was 1970s romantic fatalism. And we had seen that in every other form. We'd seen Bonnie and Clyde. We'd seen Midnight Cowboy. We'd seen every horror movie. We'd seen The Omen. We'd seen The Sentinel. We'd seen Rocky, where Rocky loses and the Bad News Bears lose. And we had seen Tony Manero do the dance contest and win and then find out he'd lost. So, you know, everything was rigged. Everything was bullshit. But the one place where we had not seen bullshit was in outer space.

That's a really good point. And then Alien came forward and they gave us 1970s romantic fatalism. You're just going to be a schmo working in a dirty ship, going through space, wasting your life. And then the company is going to flush you down the toilet. Yeah. And we respected, we accepted the face hugger and we accepted the chest burster and we accepted everything because somebody had told us the truth about what future and space travel was actually going to be like. And we felt, we felt so honored that somebody was finally really honest with us, that they weren't feeding us a line of bullshit anymore about space.

It's not much time difference between Star Wars and Alien. It's the same decade. Two years. Is it? Yeah. That's crazy. But Star Wars was marketed to children who were still idealistic. Wars was marketed to children who were still idealistic. And Alien was marketed to kind of boomers who had fallen out of the idealism of the 60s. And they'd seen all that idealism amount to

nothing. And they'd sort of fallen into the me generation of disco by that point. And they were looking for romantic fatalism to give them a takeaway from the death of their idealism it's interesting that sigourney weaver well that first of all sigourney weaver in that film shows you that this idea of uh diversity of casting and of having a woman hero what really matters is that it's good. What really matters is that the story's good and that it resonates and the acting is good. No one cared that she was the star. It had no effect. It was never a token female star. It was never some play at diversity where they could tell everybody, look how woke we are. We have a female star. There

was none of that shit back then. And they actually had more authority when they killed off Tom Skerritt. Yeah. It's like, whoa, the white guy who listens to classical music is gone. The captain. Whoa. We're left with a whiny woman, a bitchy woman, and a black guy. Yeah.

What the hell is this? And she almost dies to save her fucking cat. You know, there's a lot of cat theories out there. But, yeah, you know, I just love the fact that when Linda and I saw that movie, it was like, yeah, the future is not really going to be any better. That really was the first movie like that. You're so right. And there was Outlander with Sean Connery that came a few years after that where people were in space doing shit

jobs, doing drugs on the side. But even Blade Runner was a kind of glamorized future. Well, Blade Runner certainly was like technologically glamorized. And there was also the promise that in the outer world colonies

it was still going to be lost in space and Star Trek. Is that where that took place? Where did Blade Runner, I thought it took place on Earth. It did take place on Earth, but there was always the presence of if you go to the off-world colonies,

life will be glorious. That was supposed to be taking place around now, wasn't it? Right, exactly. Isn't that wild? Boy, they fucking missed that mark. Well, I grew up with Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. And at the time I was reading it, the Martian Chronicles were set in the 70s.

Ray Bradbury wrote it when? He wrote most of it. He wrote most of it, and it was a fascinating kind of novel because he wrote a whole slew of short stories for science fiction magazines in the 40s and 50s. And he thought, you know, if I could just plug some holes, I can sell this as a novel. So he wrote that book over maybe 20 years, and then he just cobbled it all together like a quilt and called it a novel. And some of the best books happen that way. I think Joy Luck Club got put together that way. A bunch of short stories. Yeah. Fight Club is short stories first, and then just kind of quilted them together. What are you up to now? Good question. I got a serialized novel on Substack called Greener Pastures.

That's interesting. It's coming out week to week, which is kind of a, you know, it's a drip for me. So is it a subscription-based thing? Yeah. And then I also post, I'm posting a lot of sort of writing distinctions that are part of the workshop that I teach. I can only have like 20, 25 students at a time. And it's a way of kind of providing these for free to people likewise. Because they're the best things that were taught to me by my best teachers. And I just assume they not die with me.

And what drew you to Substack? Because journalists are flocking to it because they're tired of all the restrictions from editors and just the inability to just get your thoughts clearly without any sort of a filter. That was a big, big attraction. And they also approached me because there were a lot of primarily musicians last year who couldn't tour anymore and so they got some musicians on board it became the platform for them and I missed two tours last year I had three books out one tour and so it seemed like an appealing way to kind of still reach my readership and to have more of a kind of accessibility at any time to be able to go

into that comment stream and interact with somebody. For instance, Sassy. Sassy is the Boston Terrier of a woman named Carrie, who is more or less kind of one of my Substack students. I don't even know if she subscribes, but she seems like a very genuine person, and I wanted to mention her dog. And it's nice to have that voluntary way to interact with people. Yeah, I miss that. I miss that a lot. That's a big part of my creative process.

Do you interact or have you on social media? Do you follow anything, have you on social media? Do you follow anything like you on Facebook? I have a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, but there's a very nice gentleman named Dennis. He manages all of that. So you don't interact with people or read comments or anything? That's probably healthy anyway. The Substack thing, what separates Substack from the rest of social media? Is it that they need to seek you out in particular? And then if they're going to your Substack, they clearly are interested in your writing, and they know who you are, they know what you do, they're fans of your work. They're not just casuals. Right. You're not kind of imposing yourself on people's lives. Right.

They seek you. Right. Right. Yeah. And also Substack is very user friendly, very intuitive. And it doesn't take, it's not a big learning curve to do something that looks decent. And I'd much rather put my time and my thought into the content rather than into how I structure and present the content. And so for somebody like me who would rather be writing than formatting, it's really easy. Yeah, so I didn't know that Substack was reaching out to people. That's very smart of them. And maybe I shouldn't have said that. No, not. It's true.

They're very hand-holding. Yeah. Kind of a concierge. Oh, that's cool. I know a lot of really prominent journalists that have taken their writing and moved over to there. And, you know, it's for people that have run into problems with social media censoring their ideas and censoring their work. And that's a real issue, especially if you're a journalist that covers controversial subjects. Anything that has to do with COVID-19 runs into the possibility of being censored. YouTube censors people, Twitter censors people,

Instagram censors people. Well, the structure of the thing itself censors people because writing fiction or writing in general is almost becoming what painting was when photography came in. Because now as I start to write, the computer is correcting my spelling. The computer is correcting my grammar. The computer is anticipating what my next few words are going to be. And I find myself in a constant battle with this kind of steering, helpful software that is trying to take me down a very standardized road. And it's really hard to sort of thwart all of these sort of controlling devices to try to write something that is

clumsily worded, but more honestly worded, and also goes to a place that the culture doesn't necessarily want to go to. And so there's all these kind of thwarting things that are kind of funneling people in the same direction. And sometimes I want to misspell a word. Sometimes I want to have a really clumsy grammatical construction. And sometimes I want to go to a place that nobody wants to go to. And I can do that. Do you write on paper, just pen to pad? You do a lot of that, right? Look, right in front of you.

Yeah. Say something. I'll write it down. We talked about that last time. You felt like there's a more intimate relationship with, or a clean relationship with just ink, paper, thoughts, go to the ink, to the paper. Oh, yeah, because I've got a mind like a sieve. I can't remember anything.

But if I can write it down, I've got it. But you choose paper rather than like using notes on your phone or something like that? You know, it's already intrusive enough. When somebody sees me pick up the pen, if they saw me take out the phone and break eye contact and put my energy into this little thing, it would be even more off-putting. I can't write that fast.

You know, you develop a shorthand. So, yeah. So you develop your own personal shorthand where you kind of know exactly what you're saying? Yeah, yeah. So the writing process know exactly what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. So the writing process, say if you're writing a book, would you write it out on paper before you would type it out? Always.

Always. That's why I came here. I swear to God. Yeah? I hate airplanes, but God bless you. You put me on these two four-hour flights. And if I ask for seat 1A, I can put that tray table down and I can put my notebook out and I can keyboard for four hours and I have nothing else to do. I have no other choice but to keyboard. And so I will take a trip

just to be trapped in that seat and transcribe my notes and get so much work done. It's so funny that you say that because I too have done some of my best writing trapped on a plane. Isn't that funny? It's like, what is it about the mind that doesn't want you to just completely lock in and focus. When you have zero options, like the internet is shit. The very best you could do is occasionally like check your email, right? You can't watch anything.

I think there's two factors. And one of them, I'm going to kind of plug this thing with the Substack money. I'm funding a program called Study Hall where I just rent a space and anybody who wants to can just show up in this space, but they have to work quietly. And people who can't work at home and people who want to be in the presence of other people doing a similar task, they can find the comfort of other people who are doing writing. of other people who are doing writing. And it seems to be enormous, popular with people like myself, because it's so hard to do this kind of work at home where there's a lot of distractions,

a lot of demands. I used to do my best work at work. I could get my work done in two hours and then spend the rest of my workday making notes. And with this study hall thing, it doesn't cost them anything. I pay all the expenses. And it's so, it validates the task when you're surrounded by people who are also doing it. And that's part of being on the airplane is that you're surrounded by people who are trapped like you are. And for the most part, is that you're surrounded by people who are trapped like you are, and for the most part are making the trip because it's part of their job. And it's very low distraction.

There's very little else to do. And so I think those are the two things, the structured lack of distraction and also the proximity of other people in studious kind of behavior. The study hall thing probably mimics the kind of camaraderie we were talking about at the gym as well. Exactly. And it's not the distraction of Starbucks, which presented itself as the third place for so long. For me, I got a lot more writing done at the gym than at any coffee shop. Yeah, I know what you're saying. I've often gotten off of planes writing something that I was like, wow, there's something real there.

And go, why the fuck can't I do that at home? Why do I struggle to do it at home? And so often with first drafts, you know they're going to be terrible and they're going to be difficult and it's going to be just a grind. So unless you've got a Vicodin, you've got to do it around other people because you've got to find some way to make it bearable. Is Vicodin good to write on? You know, it used to be, but it's been a long, long time. That short story I wrote called Guts that makes people faint. I wrote that on a Vicodin. But to tell the truth, the last time I took Vicodin was when I taped the Anthony Bourdain show, No Reservations. He came to Portland and I kind of was his co-host. And I was so intimidated in this role that I took a couple big fat Vicodin and just

kind of floated through it but that was a long time ago yeah I I think I did Vicodin once when I had my knee surgery it was either Vicodin or Percocet I can't remember but I wound up selling them all to my friend Jeff because I couldn't deal with it it's whatever my brain chemistry was it just didn't jive it made me so stupid I remember sitting on the couch with my mouth open going I am never taking this shit again well and that's another nice thing god I sound like such a junkie um is that if you've got notes and you're just transcribing them you you don't have to be bright. Right.

You are already bright. The bright is on the page already. And you're just the monkey that's typing it into the computer at that point. Right. So do you ever try to just write on a computer or is this not worth it for you? Like the intrusiveness of the software and everything is just too much? No, it's just too boring. It's too static.

But it's quicker, right? Isn't it quicker to type things out than it is to write with your fingers? Yeah, but the problem is it's quicker, but it looks more legitimate. Because it's up there in 12-point New Times Roman. It looks like a book. And it's much tougher to go back to it once it looks like a book. And you're going to be, it's much tougher to go back to it once it looks like a book. And I think that there's a kind of fake authority when young people, you know, they can just type and it looks like a book. So it's much harder to go back and rewrite.

But if it looks like scrolling on a page, I can go back and I can scribble over it. I can rewrite it intensely before it ever starts to look like a book. And do you rewrite on the written page as well? Always. Always. And then I key it with letters and numbers so I can see how it might go together initially. Yeah, always. Do you have specific types of notebooks that you use?

Do you have a... The kinds made of paper? Yeah. I mean, do you use? Do you have a... The kinds made of paper? I mean, do you use like legal pads? Do you use like a large notebook or do you use like that small one that you have right there which is like an 8x6 or something? Yeah, it's like a steno pad.

For a long time... When I... For a long time I just used moleskins. But they seem a little pretentious. They do. So, and also they don't burn. And I always pile my books up and burn them every winter.

Really? Yeah. And so. Why do you do that? Eh, because, yeah, why should the scaffolding be kept around? It's a kind of cleansing thing. I would think that people would want those. Yeah, I don't care what people want.

I'm not about what people want, okay? But you are when it comes to your writing. You were talking about how you want to give people something that they're going to enjoy and that they want. I want to give them the opportunity to express themselves by seeing something that they might relate to. And if I give them a meaning, if I say, okay, what does this picture of a rat look like? That's not a Rorschach test. That's me dictating. And so in a way, by removing the scaffolding, by kind of refusing to dictate my intentions, I think I'm giving them a greater freedom in assigning their own meaning. I would think it'd be cool as fuck to have one of your pads. Like if someone was like a fan and they could see it somewhere long after you're dead.

Like I've got a letter that Hunter S. Thompson wrote. And it's mounted on a frame in my office. It's like, just go buy it. Look at it. Like I wrote this shit with a pen. There it is. There's his handwriting. And that's great. And I love to send those letters.

Yeah, I do way more than that. It's insane how much I send. But that's not my point. That's the extra. You send letters? What do you mean? Oh, dear God. Oh.

During the lockdown, I made a hundred, over a hundred, really elaborate four-foot bookmarks out of semi-precious stones that I picked up around the world on book tours. My dad was a huge rock hound. And I still remember the first days when he'd take my brother and I to this little rock shop and he'd show us hematite or he'd show us goldstone or pyrite. And then we would go look for agates. So my earliest memories of my dad were always around these rocks, finding rocks, finding fossils. You know, and he was a railroad brakeman. He wasn't really a geologist. He just loved rocks.

And so as I travel, I'm always looking for some of my precious stones everything I came back from Germany a couple years ago and I sat next to a gem ologist who told me a great story I don't know it's true but I think it's true and he said, hawk shops, when people would pawn diamond rings, the pawn shops, they didn't really have a way of judging what diamonds were worth what. So typically, they just pry the diamond out of the setting, out of the fitting, and all the diamonds would end up in a cigar box under the counter, and they'd melt down the gold because the gold could be assayed and had a value. And during the 1930s, I believe, there was one small jewelry store, and they more or less knew that every pawn shop in the country had a cigar box full of battered secondhand diamonds that could be recut and graded and set.

And so this jewelry store owner sent his sons around the country with cash and offered every pawn shop 100 bucks cash for the box of diamonds we know you have. And every pawn shop more or less said, take them. They're worthless to us. And so these sons came home with this enormous trove of diamonds that had been pried out of pawned rings. And they were reset and they were polished and they were recut. And that is how the Shane Company came into existence. This is what the gemologist told me. He says it's a famous industry story.

This is what the gemologist told me. He says it's a famous industry story. And I love rocks. I love learning about rocks. I love finding rocks. Every aspect of rocks I love. And so I had made all of these enormous bookmarks and then wrapped them in very elaborate ways. And then for an animal rescue that I really support, anyone who donated $100 or more, I sent them one of these gifts.

And each of these gifts takes me between three and four days to make. Wow. Full time. And I made them all through the lockdown. And they're all gone. But, you know, I'm not going to live forever. And it's going to be really nice that I can provide that moment when people get that unexplained thing. And they're really dazzled by it.

And as part of sort of opening it, they have to destroy it. That's part of the ritual. How so? I'm trying to picture these things. Do you have images of them? I do on my cell phone. Yeah, they are wrapped up in this. Can you airdrop it to Jamie so we can look at it? Yeah, this huge kind of Ukrainian over-the-top fancy way,

like Ukrainian Easter eggs. Send it to Jamie so we can look at it while we're talking about it. My phone's out in the lobby. Oh, okay. My sub stack, I've got some pictures of them. Oh, go to the sub stack. Jamie, he'll go. Let me think.

Because I'm trying to picture rocks and bookmarks. I'm like, I'm not piecing this together in my head right. It's kind of heartbreaking because they're so beautifully wrapped that people have to destroy all this beauty in order to find out what's inside of it. And it makes a really nice metaphor and a really nice kind of discovery process

where something has to be sacrificed in order to have a greater understanding of what it is. Yeah. It is all just kind of a, I use pieces of jewelry that belonged to my mother before she died. So it's got, they're kind of cobbled together from things associated with both of my

parents. And so during this pandemic, you've been doing that. You built a castle. You're writing on Substack. Yeah. I'm teaching. Yeah.

Yeah, the teaching is interesting. You seem to find that very rewarding to workshop with people and teach people. So these are the things? Oh, there it is. So that is a bookmark. There's bookmarks inside. That's two of the presents. There's some of the 100 and plus that I put together.

And what are those flowers made out of? Those are all flowers from the dollar store. So plastic flower? Polysilk, whatever that's called. Huh. Wow. And so they have to open all that jazz up? They have to destroy it.

They have to destroy it? Yeah. What do you mean by destroy it? Because it's all glued together really tightly. Oh, on purpose. Yeah. And it's also really durable so that it makes it through shipping still looking really good. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm a stupid person. You're not a stupid person at all. But the world can live without one more person. The world can certainly live without one more person, but you're not stupid. That's interesting. And it's interesting that I like the fact that you like to burn your notes, despite what I said.

I think it's fun. Did you ever read Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift? No. It is a fascinating book. And it really speaks to the role that gifts play in our culture throughout all of history as a gesture, not as a thing to be gotten, but as a kind of gesture or process. And how the gesture itself is the important part, not the object. And so what I'm trying to do is kind of replicate that Lewis Hyde demonstration of gift as gesture or ritual. Yeah.

Yeah. I like it. i like it all and you know he writes a lot about uh the cultural cross-cultural aspect that each of us in almost every culture is perceived that we're We're each born with a genie or an hideous demon or a genius or a guardian angel. And it's more or less a spirit that has a destiny for us. And if we will sacrifice time and effort to developing this gift, then the spirit will remain with us and keep us safe for our entire life. And in turn, the Spirit will be allowed to transcend it to a higher plane of existence. But if we don't accept our gift, and if we don't kind of live into our destiny, whatever that gift is, then the Spirit becomes malevolent and it becomes something that haunts us and destroys us, destroys our entire household. I think the ancient Greeks called it

the lemur, L-E-M-U-R, like the small monkey. And so I just want to keep that in mind that it's about, you know, sacrificing or dedicating, devoting a certain amount of time and energy to kind of fulfilling that destiny. At some age, you realize you have to sacrifice your life for something. And I decided to sacrifice my life for something. And I decided to sacrifice my life for writing. Because otherwise, you know, my life is going to be kind of scattershot. Yeah. So do you feel like in some ways that you're at the service of this gift that you have?

Always. Always. Yeah. And it's not a negative thing. Right. It's a complete dedication. Let's leave it at that. Okay.

Let's close here. Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much. Bye, everybody. Thank you.